based on George R. R. Martin’s Wild Cards series
Anthology
From George R R Martin - Collected Wild Cards Short Stories (145) (v1.1)(html) on #bookz. Marked headings and authors. Very minor editing.
Original TOC
The Second Coming of Buddy Holley
By Edward Bryant and Leanne C. Harper
The Temptation of Hieronymus Bloat
Appendix. The Science Of The Wild Card Virus:
From The Journal Of Xavier Desmond
Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing
With A Little Help From His Friends
The Long, Dark Night Of Fortunato
Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen
You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You
A Face For The Cutting Room Floor
Thirty Minutes Over Broadway! Jetboy’s Last Adventure!
While Night’s Black Agents to Their Preys Do Rouse
Concerto For Siren And Serotonin
Abraham, Daniel—[Wild Cards]—Father Henry’s Little Miracle
Abraham, Daniel—[Wild Cards]—Jonathan Hive Sells Out
Bryant, Edward—[Wild Cards]—Down In the Dreamtime
Bryant, Edward—[Wild Cards]—The Second Coming Of Buddy Holley
Bryant, Edward and Harper, Leanne C—[Wild Cards]—Down Deep
Cadigan, Pat—[Wild Cards]—Addicted To Love
Cadigan, Pat—[Wild Cards]—By Lost Ways
Cassutt, Michael—[Wild Cards]—Legends
Cassutt, Michael—[Wild Cards]—Storming Space
Claremont, Chris—[Wild Cards]—Luck Be A Lady
Cover, Arthur Byron—[Wild Cards]—Jesus Was An Ace
Gerstner-Miller, Gail—[Wild Cards]—Down By the Nile
Harper, Leanne C.—[Wild Cards]—Blood Rights
Harper, Leanne C.—[Wild Cards]—Breakdown
Harper, Leanne C.—[Wild Cards]—Takedown
Harper, Leanne C.—[Wild Cards]—What Rough Beast
Leigh, Stephen—[Wild Cards]—Promises
Leigh, Stephen—[Wild Cards]—Sixteen Candles
Leigh, Stephen—[Wild Cards]—Strings
Leigh, Stephen—[Wild Cards]—The Hue Of A Mind
Leigh, Stephen—[Wild Cards]—The Temptation Of Hieronymus Bloat 01-11
Leigh, Stephen—[Wild Cards]—The Tint Of Hatred 0-5
Martin, George R. R.—[Wild Cards]—All the King’s Horses 1-7
Martin, George R. R.—[Wild Cards]—Appendix
Martin, George R. R.—[Wild Cards]—From the Journal Of Xavier Desmond 1-11
Martin, George R. R.—[Wild Cards]—Interlude 1-5
Martin, George R. R.—[Wild Cards]—Jube 1-7
Martin, George R. R.—[Wild Cards]—Prologue
Martin, George R. R.—[Wild Cards]—Shell Games
Martin, George R. R.—[Wild Cards]—Winter’s Chill
Milan, Victor—[Wild Cards]—Madman Across the Water
Milan, Victor—[Wild Cards]—Nowdays Clancy Can’t Even Sing
Milan, Victor—[Wild Cards]—Puppets
Milan, Victor—[Wild Cards]—Transfigurations
Milan, Victor—[Wild Cards]—With A Little Help From His Friends
Miller, John J.—[Wild Cards]—And Hope To Die
Miller, John J.—[Wild Cards]—Beasts Of Burden
Miller, John J.—[Wild Cards]—Comes A Hunter
Miller, John J.—[Wild Cards]—Dead Heart Beating
Miller, John J.—[Wild Cards]—Four Days In October
Miller, John J.—[Wild Cards]—Half Past Dead
Miller, John J.—[Wild Cards]—Only the Dead Know Jokertown 1-2
Murphy, Kevin Andrew—[Wild Cards]—Cursum Perficio
Murphy, Kevin Andrew—[Wild Cards]—With A Flourish And A Flair
Shiner, Lewis—[Wild Cards]—Epilogue Third Generation
Shiner, Lewis—[Wild Cards]—Horses
Shiner, Lewis—[Wild Cards]—Pennies From hell
Shiner, Lewis—[Wild Cards]—Riders
Shiner, Lewis—[Wild Cards]—The Long Dark Night Of Fortunato
Shiner, Lewis—[Wild Cards]—Zero Hour
Simons, Walton—[Wild Cards]—If Looks Could Kill
Simons, Walton—[Wild Cards]—Mr Nobody Goes To Town
Simons, Walton—[Wild Cards]—My Name Is Nobody
Simons, Walton—[Wild Cards]—Nobody Does It Alone
Simons, Walton—[Wild Cards]—Nobody Gets Out Alive
Simons, Walton—[Wild Cards]—Nobody Knows Me Like My Baby
Simons, Walton—[Wild Cards]—Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen
Simons, Walton—[Wild Cards]—Nobody’s Girl
Simons, Walton—[Wild Cards]—Nobody’s Home
Simons, Walton—[Wild Cards]—The Teardrop Of India
Simons, Walton—[Wild Cards]—Walking the Floor Over You
Simons, Walton—[Wild Cards]—You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You
Snodgrass, Melinda—[Wild Cards]—A Face For the Cutting Room Floor
Snodgrass, Melinda—[Wild Cards]—Blood Ties 1-6
Snodgrass, Melinda—[Wild Cards]—Degradation Rites
Snodgrass, Melinda—[Wild Cards]—Double Helix An Abomination Of Desolation
Snodgrass, Melinda—[Wild Cards]—Lovers 1-6
Snodgrass, Melinda—[Wild Cards]—Mirrors Of the Soul
Snodgrass, Melinda—[Wild Cards]—Relative Difficulties
Snodgrass, Melinda—[Wild Cards]—The Devil’s Triangle
Waldrop, Howard—[Wild Cards]—Thirty Minutes Over Broadway!
Williams, Walter Jon—[Wild Cards]—Mortality
Williams, Walter Jon—[Wild Cards]—Mr Koyama’s Comet
Williams, Walter Jon—[Wild Cards]—Unto the Sixth Generation 0-3
Williams, Walter Jon—[Wild Cards]—While Night’s Black Agents to Their Preys Do Rouse 1-2
Williams, Walter Jon—[Wild Cards]—Witness
Williams, Walter Jon—[Wild Cards][Lost Archives 01]—Bag Lady
Wu, William F.—[Wild Cards]—Snow Dragon
Zelazny, Roger—[Wild Cards]—Ashes To Ashes
Zelazny, Roger—[Wild Cards]—Concert For Siren and Serotonin 1-8
This being my first time speaking to a genuine Jokertown congregation, I thought I should make something clear. I myself am not a joker. I looked like this before I drew the wild card, my daddy looked more or less like this himself, and his daddy before him. I stand before you now as a testament to the charitable nature of Southern women.
[Pause for laughter]
—From the notebook of Father Henry Obst
James Spector—Demise—surveyed the carnage. The overhead light fixture had been shot during the attack, a bare bulb left shining from a neck of frosted glass with edges sharp as teeth. A low haze of gun smoke filled the apartment. Three jokers lay on the floor or the cheap kitchen table, red and green and florid purple blood spilling out of them. The Gambione men—both nats—lay among them. One joker moaned in pain, another tried to crawl for the kitchen at the back of the apartment—a dead end, but away from Spector’s slow footsteps. He walked among them, turning the bodies over with the toe of his new leather shoes, staring into the eyes of the dying, adding his own constant pain to theirs, pulling death into them a little faster.
“Could you not do that?” Phan Lo snapped from the front room.
“What?”
“Whistle.”
“I was whistling?”
“The song from I Dream of Jeannie. I hated that show.”
“Sorry,” he said and went back to killing people.
The apartment belonged to Zebra, a small time Jokertown drug dealer who’d thought the gang war was his chance to make it big by selling raw heroin to the Gambiones. But the Shadow Fist had found out about the deal, and Danny Mao had arranged a complication. Spector leaned over, peering into the eyes of a young Gambione. Nothing. The guy was already gone.
Zebra lay on the floor by the table, riddled with Phan Lo’s bullets. Demise considered the corpse, the last blood blackening on its breast, and snorted. “Hey Phan. What’s black and white and red all over?”
“Go back to whistling.”
“How many you got up there?”
“Two,” Phan Lo said. “Maybe three. One of them looks like he may be—you know—two. One of those conjoined things.”
“I’ve got a five back here,” Spector said.
“Yeah, but you got shot.”
“A couple times,” Spector allowed. The wounds were already closed, and he’d been careful to wear a suit he didn’t care about much. “They all dead?”
The businesslike crack of a pistol split the air. “Yeah,” Phan Lo said. “Yours?”
“Dead as fish on Friday.”
“Great. Let’s get the shit and get out of here.”
“What’s the rush? It’s not like the cops are going to come to this part of Jokertown.”
“The rush is I’ve got better things to do with my life,” Phan said, stepping into the room. He was young, maybe nineteen, perfect skin and black hair pulled into one of those little ponytails in the back. Spector wondered how he’d look with his hair like that. Phan put his gun back into its shoulder holster. The Uzi was slung across his back, magazine empty. “Where’s the shit?”
“Over by the table. Blue duffel has the money. The little suitcase thing has the horse.”
“Where?”
“Right over ... um. Fuck.”
The patch of floor was empty, just a dead Gambione leg. Phan walked over to the spot, frowning. Spector stood beside him. Two oblong shapes were outlined in blood, but the bags were gone.
They glanced at each other, Phan remembering at the last minute to focus on Spector’s nose. No eye contact if he wanted to live. Spector suppressed a little smile and shrugged. “It was right there.”
“You take it?” Phan asked.
“No.”
“Well I didn’t take it. Check the bodies. See who’s missing.”
“How would I know who’s missing?” Spector said. “I didn’t take roll call. I just got in the door and started killing them, same as you.”
Phan wasn’t listening. He locked his hands behind him and began walking through the corpses, his lips pursed, his eyes shifting, searching like someone working a jigsaw puzzle. Spector scratched his moustache and sighed.
“The whore,” Phan said.
Spector thought back. He’d come in the room, interrupting the meeting. The bags had been there, by Zebra’s chair. Yeah, there had been a nat girl—black hair, pale skin—rubbing up against the joker. Then Phan had started spraying the room with Uzi fire and the whore had ducked under the table.
Spector hunkered down, peering over the dead bodies, hoping for a thin, pale-skinned corpse with a half-open blouse. He looked up at Phan and shook his head.
“I can’t fucking believe this,” Phan said.
“Hey, you were the one in the front room. You were supposed to be watching for people coming out.”
“She didn’t come out the front.”
“Well, there isn’t a back way,” Spector said.
Phan moved back into the little kitchen without a word. Spector followed him. It was small—too small to hide in. But it did have a window; an open one with a thin ledge beyond. Spector poked his head out. It was eight stories down the street, but the ledge—thin as a sidewalk curb—led along the side of the building to a black metalwork fire escape.
“Oh,” Spector said, pulling his head back in the apartment. “Well, that sucks.”
Father Henry Obst watched Quasiman stir the sauce. The steak sizzled on the grill and the scent of the meat and the fried onions in the sauce filled the small kitchen in the church basement. Father Henry’s spiral-bound notebook lay open before him on the table. He tapped the pages impatiently with his pencil.
“I was off my stride is all,” Father Henry said. “I should have come in a day or two earlier, just to get my bearings. It’s long drive from Alabama, and I ain’t the young man I once was. Threw my timing off.”
Quasiman looked thoughtfully over his shoulder as his leg flickered in and out of existence, but didn’t speak. Father Henry took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and thick, pale finger.
“Dammit, though, I have never in my life had anyone boo a homily. It’s rude, sir. It’s just plain rude.”
The hunchback blinked, considered him as if they were meeting for the first time, then smiled ruefully, nodding his head in sympathy. “Jokertown makes for a rough audience, even in church,” Quasiman said.
“I’ll do better next week.”
“No, you won’t.”
“Oh, yes. Yes, I will. I’ve got better material. Y’all are always listening to Father Squid. Now he’s a fine man, but somber, if you see what I mean. No sense of humor. I’m pulling out my Age of Empty Miracles sermon. Usually hold that one off for Easter, but I don’t imagine many of these fella’s will be coming down to Selma.”
“He is a killer, risen from the dead,” Quasiman said, his tone light and conversational. “Before that I think he sold insurance.”
Father Henry put his glasses back on and the hunchback swam into focus. His expression was placid and helpful, like he’d just passed on some interesting piece of Jokertown history. Father Henry closed the notebook and considered for a moment what to say to his caretaker and guide.
“What in Christ’s name are you talking about, boy?”
“I’m sorry,” he said, shaking his head like he was trying to sober up. “I thought you said something.”
With an apologetic shrug, the hunchback vanished. The spoon he had been stirring with slid into the sauce with a low plop. Father Henry looked at the sudden absence, shook his head, and went over to turn off the flame before the steak burned.
When Father Squid had called him with the news—the world tour with Senator Hartmann, the chance to see the fate of jokers in third-world hellholes around the globe—Father Henry had been half-afraid that the tentacled padre was going to ask him along. The request that he come up to New York and perform the Mass for a couple weeks had been such a relief that he’d agreed to it without really thinking. Now he found himself hundreds of miles from home preaching to a bunch of New York jokers and trying to keep a barely-present hunchback from scorching dinner.
He grabbed a fork and trawled the sauce until he pulled out the stirring spoon. It was too hot to hold. He found out by trying and dropped the spoon back under the surface.
The sauce wasn’t quite right. Stirring with the fork with his left hand, he took a glass off the sideboard with his right, reached over for the faucet and started a thin stream of water flowing. He set his mind to the clear ribbon until his wild card surged down his arms, through his fingers, and the water blushed, bloodied, and became a cheap Merlot. He filled the glass and poured half of it into the sauce to let the alcohol cook off. The faucet was running clear again when he closed the faucet down.
He hesitated before emptying the glass, but he did. A thirteen-year-old Alabama boy, finding he can change water to wine, never took it as a sign he should become a priest. Like any right-thinking Southerner in the situation, he became an alcoholic. A thirty-six-year old recovering drunkard and closet deuce, on the other hand, had been known to hear the call of the Lord. Even cooking with wine was actually against the rules, and tempting as it was to scootch a little farther off the wagon, Father Henry held to his resolve and had a pop with his dinner. The steak was good—juicy with just a little blood—and the sauce was tart and sweet, just enough to season the meat without drowning it. He’d give the hunchback that—the man could cook.
He cleaned his dishes when he was done and left the remains in a Tupperware box, in case Quasiman showed back up hungry. He looked over his notes one last time, sighed, and hefted himself up the stairs and out the rear sacristy door into the cool night air. Father Squid had lent him the use of the cottage for the length of his stay, and he strolled through the small herb garden and up to the locked metal door.
Back home in Selma, he would have taken a short constitutional, down to the coffee shop or possibly over to flirt for a few minutes with the Widow Lander, before going home to his own modest apartments, pictures of St. Peter’s and a lovely Roman sunset over his own simple wooden desk. He might read or write letters for an hour or two before packing himself off to bed.
Father Squid’s cottage was gray and close compared to his home, and it did smell like a fish market. His bags were still half-packed. He sat on the bed. It was barely eight at night, and still much earlier than he was used to going to sleep. He had hoped that the caretaker of the church might be put upon to show him around, but that had been before he’d actually set eyes on the man. Which left him with his present options.
Jokertown after dark, a lone yokel braving the meanest streets of New York or Takis or whatever you decided Jokertown was really part of. Sounded stupid. But ministering to the twisted bodies and souls around him without having the courage to meet them face straight on seemed like hypocrisy. With his luck, they’d find him floating in the bay, and Quasiman would have to find some poor Episcopalian to perform next Sunday’s mass.
He snapped his fingers and snatched open his notebook. Flipping to a clean page, he wrote “In this age of empty wonders, a real miracle is something small and precious. Like me walking through Jokertown at night and not getting killed.” He grinned, then frowned and crossed it out. Maybe when he got home. These New York jokers might not think that was funny.
He loaded up all the little presents his sister had sent him when she heard he was going to take the assignment—a hand-held stungun, a canister of pepper spray, and a large gaudy crucifix that mirrored the one above the pulpit with its two-headed joker Christ impaled on a DNA helix. It wasn’t the sort of iconography that went over well with the Archbishop, but here it might mark him as belonging. And, of course, a camera so he could give a slide show when he got home.
“Oh, Mother,” he muttered, “God bless you. You gave birth to a fool and a papist.”
Despite the chill of the night, there was a good bit more foot traffic than he’d expected. Most folks ignored him, hurrying along their own business. Some jokers had their bare faces out, however disfigured. Others wore masks. Father Henry found himself falling into his old habit of smiling and nodding to people as he passed, like he was back home.
He stopped by the Crystal Palace because it was famous and, once he introduced himself as Father Squid’s stand-in, had his picture taken with the eyeless bartender. The twist-spined, grey-skinned clerk at an all-night bookstore along the way home asked him with a genteel grace whether he was out whoring and still treated him respectfully when he said no. Even the thin figures standing around trash fires, rubbing their hands or tentacles seemed more benign than he’d expected. For all the fear and angry talk—joker orgies, gang war, streets it was death for a nat to walk down after dark—Father Henry could name three or four road-houses in Alabama that had felt more threatening to him than this.
There were some moments when he felt like he’d walked into a bad hallucination—once when a section of sidewalk yelped under-foot and shifted off to become part of a wall, another time when something like a giant tongue called to him from a storm-sewer grate and asked the time. Despite all that, by the time he stopped to buy a newspaper from a poor walrus-man, he felt almost at home.
“You’re new around here?” the walrus said, smiling jovially.
“You could say that,” he agreed. “Father Henry Obst. I’m filling in for Father Squid for a couple weeks.”
“Well, welcome to the neighborhood,” the walrus said.
“Thank you. That’s very kind.”
“And don’t worry about it too much. I’m sure next Sunday will go better.”
A true miracle would be a place without small-town gossip and slander, he thought, but kept his smile all the way back to the cottage.
The problem was, of course, how to get through the crust of anger and despair—and self-pity, worst of all self-pity—that came with drawing the joker. He’d spent enough years himself living with scorching self-hatred to know the smell when he was up to his asshole in it, as his sainted mother would have said. It was poison, but he’d seen strong souls overcome it.
The problem with despair, he thought, was that it wasn’t really despair when you could see your way clear of it. If he could only ...
“Father?”
He blinked. The woman was crouched down beside the cottage door. Woman, hell. Girl was closer. Maybe eighteen years old with black hair and eyes and a tiny little skirt. She didn’t seem to be a joker of any stripe.
“Well now, miss,” he said gently, “what can I do for you?”
She stood up. Poor little thing barely came to his chin, and Father Henry had never been called a tall man. Her face, now that it was more in the light, was sharp as a fox’s and her shirt streaked with blood.
“You’re taking over for Father Squid, right?” she demanded, crossing her arms.
“Yes, I’ve agreed to help take up the slack, as it were.”
“So you’re the priest?”
“Yes. But there’s this other fella who’s really taking care of the place. I’ve only been in the city since ...”
“I’ve come to beg for the sanctuary of the church,” she said, the phrase so formal it sounded rehearsed. “I’m in trouble. And I can’t take it to the police because I’m a Jokertown whore, and they wouldn’t help me.”
She stood there, her chin jutting out like she was daring him to send her away—back to her pimp or her family or whoever put her out on these streets. Eighteen might have been guessing high. She could have been younger.
Well, Lord, he thought. I don’t know what you have in mind on this one, but here goes.
“Well now. Let’s see,” Father Henry said. “There’s a room in the church basement you can stay in tonight at least. We’ll talk about this, see what seems like the best thing to do after that. You got a couple bags there? Let me help you with those.”
Joey Piretta knew knocks. The cops, they knocked one way—bang bang bang like there was a pissed-off elephant coming through. Then there was the landlord, old man Fazetti; he knocked hard, but only once, showing his authority, ’cause he was the landlord and all, but still showing respect because if he didn’t Joey might kill him. The one that woke him up, though, wasn’t like either one of those. It was just a quiet double tap. That was Mazzucchelli.
Joey got up from the couch, adrenaline pumping, and didn’t quite knock over the half-empty beer cans on the coffee table. He grabbed the orange prescription bottle off the floor and pushed it down between the rough beige cushions. It rattled like a fucking baby toy. He delivered a quick prayer up the heaven that Mazzucchelli hadn’t heard it and crossed himself. The knock came again, a half a beat less time between the impacts. Joey pulled himself up, ran a hand through his hair, and tried to suck in his gut.
When he opened the door, Chris Mazzucchelli greeted him with a smile and a raised eyebrow.
“Hey,” Joey said, faking pleasure and surprise. “Chris! How you doin’?”
“Fine, Joey. And you?” Mazzuccheli asked, walking into the apartment. “The wrists still bothering you?”
“They still hurt a little sometimes. The scar tissue’s all messed up with the nerves. But you know how it is.”
Mazzucchelli smiled and nodded to the door. Joey closed it, apologizing with a gesture. The apartment looked like hell and smelled like a cheap bar. He wished he’d gotten around to washing the dishes last night. It just didn’t look professional the way they were all stacked up in the sink. Mazzucchelli walked into the living room but didn’t sit. Joey stood respectfully back, crossing his arms and scratching absently at the recent pink flesh the size of a quarter on his right forearm.
“You’re not still on the pain stuff,” Mazzucchelli said.
“Nah. Not for weeks. Just some aspirin sometimes.”
“Good. I have a job for you, Joey.”
Joey tried to pull himself up a little taller and deepened his scowl, just so as Mazzucchelli knew he was taking it seriously.
“Someone interrupted a negotiation last night. They killed some of our men and the jokers we were doing business with. They also took the merchandise we were picking up and the money we’d taken to pay for it. Half a million dollar, untraceable, and suitcase of heroin.”
“Ah,” Joey said, nodding.
“You understand?”
“Sure,” he said shrugging. “Find ’em. Kill ’em. Get the stuff back.”
“How about you start with just looking around. Once we find it, we can worry about killing people.”
“Just look around. Check.”
“You’ve been out of action for a while, Joey. You think you’re up for this?”
“No trouble. None at all.”
“Good. That’s what I wanted to hear. I’ll have Lapierre get in touch with you and ...”
“Ah, c’mon boss. I don’t need some smart-ass college fucker hanging off of me. I got sources. I can do this.”
“You want to take this one by yourself?”
“Yeah. Look, if I find something, I’ll let you know. Don’t worry about before. The thing with Chrysalis and the arrow guy, that was a one-time thing. Never happen again.”
Mazzucchelli paused, then walked over and clapped him on the shoulder. “It’s good to have you back, Joey.”
“Thanks, boss.”
“Show some respect for yourself. Clean the place.”
“I will, boss.”
Mazzucchelli went out, closing the door behind him. Joey lumbered back to the couch and sat down heavily. He dug his hand into the cushions and came out with the rattling bottle of darvon. He popped two of the great big hot pink capsules into his hand even though his arms weren’t really aching much and swallowed them dry.
The pills seemed to lodge about halfway down his throat.
It just wasn’t starting off to be a good day.
The Crystal Palace always looked worse in the daylight. Darkness and neon suited it better. Demise slouched across the empty lot beside it, Phan Lo two steps behind him and to his left. The day was overcast, but Phan wore dark Blues Brothers sunglasses all the same.
“Danny Mao was pretty pissed off, eh?”
“It’s fine,” Demise said. “I told him it was your fault.”
Phan went silent for a moment, only the sound of their footsteps over the constant murmur of the city.
“You’re fucking with me, right?” Phan said.
“Look,” Demise said, sighing, “let’s just get the shit back and then it won’t matter what I said.”
Demise reached the service entrance and pushed his way into the darkness. The storeroom was filled with kegs of beer and crates and boxes of harder liquor. A violet-skinned joker with a wattle like a rooster bent over a wooden crate of wine bottles, counting on his fingers. When he looked up, his eyes met Demise’s briefly and a shock of pain appeared in the joker’s face, the wattle shriveling and turning gray at the edges.
“We need to talk to Chrysalis,” Demise said.
The joker turned and ran back into the building. Phan Lo strode forward and barked his shin on a crate.
“Take the shades off,” Demise said. “You look like an idiot.”
“Nah, man. I like ’em.”
“Look, I promise not to kill you ...”
“What do you want?” a man’s voice demanded. Sascha, eyeless and frowning, walked toward them. Demise grimaced. Sascha always gave him the creeps.
“Where’s Chrysalis?”
“India, I think,” Sascha said.
“Fuck, that’s right. She’s on that thing with Tachyon and the senator, isn’t she.”
“What do you want, Spector?” Sascha asked again.
“What does anyone ever want from Chrysalis? We need some information. And we can pay for it.”
Sascha’s expression seemed to change. He nodded.
“There’s about to be someone trying to unload about twenty-five pounds of uncut white heroin at fire-sale prices.”
“And you’re looking to buy?”
“No. We just need to talk with the seller.”
“Since when are you working with the Fist?”
“Ran into the Sleeper a while back. He pointed out they might be hiring. The seller I’m looking for is an independent, though,” he said. “Anything the Mafia’s going to get pissed about has already happened. You’ll be out of the crossfire.”
“Leave a number,” Sascha said. “I’ll let you know if I hear anything.”
Demise took a card out of his pocket and placed it silently on a wine rack, then nodded to Phan Lo and headed back out. A thin, cold rain misted down, and Demise turned his collar up against it.
“You must really hate that guy,” Phan said. “He’d be a pain in the ass for you to kill. You’d actually have to shoot him.”
“I’d manage.”
“All right now,” Father Henry said. “I just want you to listen here. Let me know what you think.”
The church was empty except for the two of them. Quasiman sat in the first pew, his misshapen back making him look like he was praying. Father Henry, leaning against the altar, cleared his throat, pushed his glasses up to the bridge of his nose, and read from his notebook.
“Jesus could change water to wine, but it didn’t put him in AA meetings the way it did me. These days, somebody walking on water would hardly get them looked at funny, and I know of two or three people who have raised folks from the dead. The virus has changed more than our bodies. It has changed what we mean by ‘miracle’ and ... Now boy, you’re laughing, and I haven’t got to any of the funny parts yet.”
Quasiman’s attention had flickered away, his eyes fixed on a spot in the aisle. Something about the carpet seemed to have given him the giggles.
“Oh,” Quasiman said, pointing to the space and grinning. “That’s sad. I mean that’s just ... sad. I wish I was going to remember it.”
Father Henry closed his notebook and smiled, trying to swallow his annoyance.
“I’m sorry, son. Am I interrupting something here?”
Quasiman flickered rapidly for a moment, reappeared without his left arm, and frowned vacantly at him.
“I don’t know who you are right now,” the hunchback commented. “There was something I was supposed to do.”
Father Henry took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. Talking to the man was like preaching to an electrical problem.
“That’s all right. We can try this another time.”
“Try what?”
“You were showing me how to polka,” Father Henry said and headed back for the sacristy.
He paused at the head of the basement stairs. He’d talked with the girl more in the night—her name was Gina, she was seventeen and running away from her pimp. That wouldn’t have been difficult, except that the pimp was also an informant for the police, and so she wasn’t likely to get help from that quarter. She needed to stay in town for a couple more days until her brother drove in from Seattle to get her.
He believed about half of it. Still, it was clear enough that she needed help. And if the Church wasn’t there to help out whores in trouble, well then it wasn’t the church Mary Magdalene had thought it was. Besides, he had a feeling about the girl ...
Which didn’t mean she’d be a good person to talk his sermon over with, but Lord knew she couldn’t be much worse. He rapped his knuckles on the wall as he went down the stairs.
“Gina?”
“Hey, Father,” she said. She sat on the cot, her legs tucked beneath her, watching a soap opera on the old, grainy television. He’d shown her where the clothing donations were, and she’d picked out a blue wrap-around skirt and an oversize white men’s shirt. The outfit made her look like a normal girl, maybe just about to start college.
“You feeling better today?” he asked.
She nodded and turned down the volume on the set.
“Fine,” she said. “Whatshisface got me a sandwich this morning.”
“Good, good. I was wondering ... well, I had a little trouble with the sermon last week. And I was working on some material, as it were, for Sunday. And while Quasiman is a good hearted fella, he doesn’t listen for spit, and I was thinking, if it wasn’t too much of an imposition ...”
“Cool,” she said and thumbed off the TV. “The show’s boring, anyway. Fire away.”
He smiled, nodded, and opened his notebook, searching for a moment to find the right spot. Gina tilted her head, her expression serious.
“Jesus,” he began, “could change water into wine ...”
She listened patiently as he moved through the homily, cited the passages of the bible that supported him, cracked wise a couple times, then took the tone down to somber at the middle and ended with a bright, hopeful, but also realistic finish.
Gina leaned back, considering. He took off his glasses, polishing the lenses on his shirttail.
“No,” she said. “Sorry, father. You got it wrong. I mean it’s a nice talk, but it’s all about nats and aces. You’re preaching to jokers. Jokers don’t give a shit about miracles—except for miracles that make jokers not jokers anymore, I guess.”
“But faith is a universal. The proof of Christ’s holiness ...”
“No one gives a shit,” she said. “Sorry. I mean I know you’re a priest and all, but really, jokers don’t care. They want to hear about how even though they’re fucking ugly, someone still loves them. Or that they have beautiful souls. Or that the righteous are made to suffer. Like with Job. That kind of shit.”
“Watch your language, young lady,” he admonished, but his mind was already elsewhere. “So you don’t think it’d go over well?”
“You’re not selling what they’re buying,” she said. “They don’t want another challenge. They want comfort. It’s what they come here for.”
“I suppose ...” he said, and sighed. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. I hadn’t looked at it like that. I’ll go see what can be salvaged.”
“Put in someplace how ugly men are better because the world makes them tough,” she said.
“Oh, I don’t know. That seems a little harsh.”
“Always works for me,” she said, shrugging. “We’re kind of in the same business that way. Making jokers feel better.”
She winked and lay back on the cot, turning the TV back on as she descended. Father Henry found himself speechless for a moment, then walked up the stairs laughing.
The revisions took the better part of an hour, but in the end, there was more that could be saved than he’d imagined. With a little work, he had his very first jokers-only sermon, and by God, he was proud of it.
So proud and so excited, in fact, that he forgot to knock on his way down the stairs.
“... unload it now, Randy. Don’t tell me you ... buyer.”
Father Henry stopped, slowly easing his foot back to the step above. Gina’s voice was muffled, but he could still make out some words here and there.
“Hundred thousand ... tomorrow ... would never guess where I ... shit, really? Is she okay? Shit ... No, I’ll call you.”
The plastic clatter of the telephone handset slipping into its cradle ended the conversation, and Father Henry slowly backed up the stairs. That certainly didn’t sound much like her brother calling in from Minnesota.
Well Lord, he thought, if this lesson is not to get took in by a pretty face, I could have sworn we’d covered that already.
He went back down, knocking this time. Gina was all smiles and pleasant company.
Oh yes. This little girl was going to take some watching.
Joey smiled. Not a hey-that-was-funny smile. More like hey-I’m-gonna-take-your-eyes-out-with-a-fucking-spoon. Jerzy didn’t seem to know the difference.
“Human target, get it?” the skinny Jew said again, like repeating it would make it funny. “Like that guy with the arrows.” He pantomimed plinking a bow at Joey.
“That guy with the arrows killed my boys and tried to cripple me,” Joey pointed out coolly.
Jerzy’s shrugged, smile fading, and he sipped his coffee. It was the closest he ever came to apology. The foot traffic going past the café was pretty light for the garment district, but it was still early in the afternoon. Come five o’clock, the overflow from Times Square would fill things up a little more. Joey wanted to be out before then.
“You got the coroner’s reports?”
“Nah,” Jerzy said. “I don’t make copies. What you want to know, I’ll tell you. I got a photographic memory.”
Joey looked around. The whole place was the size of a school bus—the short kind for the dumb kids. The guy behind the counter looked archly back it him. An old lady in a puffy blue ski jacket was sitting right up against the window and muttering to herself. Other than that they were alone.
Joey leaned forward.
“Okay,” he said. “So I’m hearing there’s something about the way they got offed? Something about aces?”
“Everybody’s buying up aces. Mafia, Shadow Fist. Everyone,” Jerzy said. He wasn’t so stupid, thank God, that he didn’t know to keep his voice down.
“Okay, but it’s not like the ones the Mafia hired are gonna queer a Mafia deal, right?”
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” Jerzy said, waggling a bushy eyebrow. “Thing is, a couple of the guys that died? They shouldn’t have. It’s like they were hurt, but not so bad they woulda died. You see what I’m getting at?”
Joey scowled and shook his head. Talking to Jerzy was about as much fun as talking to Lapierre.
“People hiring aces?” Jerzy said, his hand moving in a little circular come-along motion. “Guys dead for no reason?”
“Hey Jerzy. How about you fucking tell me?”
The woman in the ski jacket glanced at them, scowling.
“Shouldn’t yell,” Jerzy said. “We’re in public.”
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to. It’s the wrists thing. Pain makes me jumpy.”
“Demise,” Jerzy said and sighed. “Find whoever hired Demise, you’ll find the shit.”
“Demise,” Joey said, nodding. “Great. And, ah, what about the percidan?”
“I can hook you up next week. You got enough darvon to hold you ’til then?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“What? What is this with the long face?”
“It’s just the darvon pills are all pink,” Joey confided. “They make me look like a faggot, you know?”
Randy McHaley lived in a basement apartment with six other jokers. Two of them were there with him when Demise and Phan Lo got there. They were happy, though, to give the three of them a little privacy.
The place looked like the worst of the 1960s left to rot for a couple decades. Beaded strands substituted for doors, old psychedelic posters of the Lizard King yellowed and cracked on the grimy wall. Sandalwood incense mixed with something close to wet dog. And Randy slumped on the low couch with his hands between his knees.
The wildcard hadn’t been kind to Randy. His greasy brown fedora rested on a forest of spikes like a hedgehog. His pale, fishy skin wept a thin mucous, soaking his clothes. Tiny blind eyes opened and closed along his neck and down behind his shirt, some staring, some rolling wildly. Demise could see the distaste in corners of Phan Lo’s mouth and it made him want to draw the conversation out.
“I don’t know anything about it,” the sad joker said again, wagging his head.
“Okay,” Demise said. “Let me clear this up, fuckhead. A piece of shit like you can’t—cannot—set up a hundred thousand dollar horse deal in this town without us finding out. Okay? Where’s the meet?”
“I swear guys, you’ve got the wrong fuckup. I mean look at me,” the joker smiled desperately. “Look at the place I live. I’m not dealing with that kind of money.”
“You’re a junkie,” Demise said. “You and your buddies could blow that kind of money up your arms in a couple weeks.”
“I swear to Christ, you guys got it wrong. I’m really sorry. I wish I could help, but ...”
“Could we just do this?” Phan asked.
Demise sighed and nodded. It had been fun while it lasted, but business being business ...
Phan Lo stepped forward, drawing a pistol. The little joker squealed and pulled back, but Phan leaned in, pressing the barrel under Randy’s chin, forcing his head up. Demise stood, shot his cuffs, and leaned in close. When their eyes met, Randy was caught like a fish. Demise let the pain of his own death, the sick feeling of spiraling down into darkness, the visceral knowledge of dying flow into the joker for a second, two, three ... and looked away.
Randy drew a long, grating breath like a diver who’s been under too long, then bent over and retched. Phan Lo danced back, disgusted. Demise sat down.
“The meet,” Demise said.
“Bryant Park. Noon tomorrow. She’s supposed to bring a sample. Please don’t kill me.”
“Where is she now?”
“I don’t know. She calls me.”
“You believe him?” Demise asked.
Phan Lo shrugged.
“The buyer’s a Brit. Looking to export. He’s gonna be wearing an Aerosmith t-shirt and reading the Wall Street Journal.”
“Probably won’t be two of those,” Phan said.
“Please,” the joker whined. “That’s all I know. I swear to God that’s all I know.”
“You know, Phan. I think that’s all he knows.”
Phan nodded and crossed his arms.
“You want to kill him, or you want me to?” Demise asked. Randy looked from one to the other, his jaw working silently, then curled up in a ball on the couch and started crying. Phan curled his lip and shook his head. Demise frowned and nodded toward the weeping joker. Phan shook his head again.
“If she’s not there tomorrow, we’ll be back,” Phan said, holstering his pistol. “You understand?”
Randy wailed wordlessly, his shoulders shaking. Demise stood and followed Phan out through the kicked-in front door and up the steps to the midnight-dark street.
“What the fuck was that?” Demise asked.
“It’s better for the mystique if some of them are alive and scared shitless,” Phan said.
“That’s the stupidest shit I’ve ever heard.”
Phan shrugged and walked to the car.
“You felt sorry for him, didn’t you?” Demise accused.
“Fuck you.”
“You did, didn’t you?”
“No. Get in the car.”
The morning was warm for February, and the where the city didn’t stink of car fumes and urine, it smelled like the threat of snow.
He’d called Mazzuccheli with his information about the killer ace, and Mazzuchelli had come up with an address that fit with it. It was teamwork. For the first time since it all got fucked up, he was really working with the team.
He hated it.
For weeks, he’d been down. Even after the wounds in his arms were pretty much healed up, he hadn’t been able to focus or sleep through the night. He kept seeing his boys sprouting arrows, watching them die. And every day he couldn’t pull himself together, he felt the respect of the family dropping. No one said anything—not to his face. But he knew. And now Mazzucchelli was helping him out when what he really needed was to show that he could handle it without. He didn’t need a hand doing his work.
He stopped at the corner bakery for a pick-up breakfast before heading south toward Jokertown—the tastes of greasy, sweet pastry and bitter, hot coffee competing pleasantly, the chill of the morning pulling a little at the skin of his face. Joey pictured what it was going to be like.
He’d walk in to a restaurant, go over to Mazzuchelli’s table. He’d sit down. They’d talk a little, then Joey would pass over the satchel with the drugs and the money. And then, in a separate little bag, he’d have the right hands of all the fuckers he’d killed getting the stuff back. Mazzuchelli would grin and welcome him back. And Lapierre, the little fucker, would be somewhere in the background boasting about how he could have done just as good, only no one’s gonna believe him.
It was a pretty good daydream, and it got him to the flop. He dropped the nearly-empty coffee cup and the wax paper still dusted with powdered sugar into the trash and went down the steps to the basement apartment, flakes of rotten concrete scraping under his feet.
The door was open. Joey took the beretta out of its holster and went in. The place had all the marks of being left in a hurry—empty dressers, a half-eaten sandwich in the bathroom. The big stuff—the television, the old stereo—was still there, but anything portable was stripped and gone. The lights were all burning even though there was more then enough leaking through the windows to see by.
So it looked like Demise knew he’d been spotted. He and his Fist buddies had gotten scared and skipped. Joey smiled. It was nice having someone scared of him again. He put away the gun and took the rattling orange bottle out of his pocket and popped a darvon to celebrate.
The phone was one of those little lozenge-shaped ones. Joey guessed it had started out the usual colorless beige, but someone had painted it black. He scooped it up and dialed.
“What?” Mazzuchelli snapped after the second ring.
“Boss. It’s Joey.”
“What’ve you got?”
“I went to check out the place you told me about. Nothing there. I was thinking, though. You remember how you got those phone records on that guy in Soho?”
“How’d you hear about that?”
“I was there when you braced him, boss,” Joey said, trying to keep his voice from sounding hurt. “I helped you break his knees.”
“Oh. Right. Sorry.”
“I was thinking maybe you could do the same for this joint. See who’s been talking to them, see who they been talking to.”
There was a long silence. Joey shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
“Okay,” Mazzuchelli said. “Where can I get hold of you? You’re not calling me from there are you?”
Fuck, Joey thought.
“Of course not, boss. I’m at a payphone. The number, though. It’s all scratched out.”
“Joey. If you’re lying to me, it’s going to be on the records that I’m just about to go get for you. You know that, right?”
“I’m sorry, boss. I’m at the apartment. I wasn’t thinking.”
Mazzucchelli muttered something that Joey couldn’t make out, but the tone of voice alone was enough to make him wince a little.
“Call me back in an hour. I’ll let you know what I find.”
“Okay. Sorry, boss.”
Mazzucchelli sighed. “You’re a good guy, Joey. Just stop being such a fuck-up, all right?”
Gina snuck out a little before eleven. Father Henry watched from the cottage as she slipped out the sacristy door and started down the street. She’d picked out an old black Navy jacket, but she had the same blue wrap-around skirt and a weathered black purse. With her hair pulled back and no makeup, she looked totally different than the young whore he’d taken in off the street.
He watched as she strode calmly to the street, heading north. Once she was out of sight, he leaned back, took off his glasses and pressed the bridge of his nose. Eyes closed, he waited for a moment, giving the Lord one last chance to come to him with the sign or insight he’d prayed for most of last night and a fair part of the morning. All he saw was the dark back of his eyelids.
He sighed, finished his sandwich in two quick bites, and headed over to the church. A flock of pigeons took wing as he walked past. She’d left the door unlocked, and he closed it carefully before going down the stairs.
The cot was neatly made. A towel hung in the bathroom, still wet from her shower. He felt like a nosey parent sneaking into a child’s room to go through her dresser. And if it seemed like a betrayal of trust, well, she wasn’t playing perfectly straight with him either.
He found her bags stowed under the cot. Now there was a question. She’d been borrowing clothes from the donations, so that couldn’t be what she’d brought with her. With a sinking feeling in his belly, Father Henry pulled out the blue athletic duffel bag, its slick plasticized cloth hissing against the concrete of the floor. He crossed himself and undid the zipper.
The money was in rolls a little bigger than his fist—worn hundred dollar bills wrapped by thick red or beige rubber bands. At a guess, there were maybe seventy or a hundred rolls. He sat on the floor and hefted one, trying to estimate the sum, even just roughly, but his mind rebelled. When he put it back and closed the bag, he noticed the black-red stain on the cloth.
So that’s why they call it blood money, he thought, and had to stifle giggles even though he knew it wasn’t really funny.
The little suitcase had a cheap lock, and Father Henry forced it with a penknife. Inside were nineteen small packages with a space where the twentieth had clearly been. They were white powder in carefully taped cellophane bags. Father Henry had seen enough movies to know that this was where he was supposed to poke his knife into one and taste the contents from the blade, and he even felt a slightly disembodied urge to go through the motions. Not that he had the first damn idea what drugs tasted like, but it was what they always did.
Still, it was pretty clear that Gina wasn’t carrying around baking soda. The rolled up bills were drug money, and these right here were the drugs—cocaine or heroin or something else. He couldn’t see as the exact chemistry mattered all that much. The question was still the same—what to do.
He crossed his legs uncomfortably and considered the packages. The obvious thing to do was call the police. (“I’m a Jokertown whore and the police won’t help me,” she’d said. Well it was clear enough now why that was, and it wasn’t about someone being an informant.) Yes, that was the right thing. There was no call for a simple man like him to go getting involved with this kind of thing. The police would know best what to do.
But it would mean that Gina went to prison, at the very least. Or maybe she’d get killed. It didn’t sit right. She was only seventeen, after all.
When he was her age, he’d been on a permanent drunk, so adept with his wild card talent that he could turn the water to wine when it touched his lips and the backwash wouldn’t even pink what was still in the glass. He’d been kicked out of school for being drunk in class, kicked out of the house to live in the apartment over Uncle Elmore’s garage.
He’d branched out a little after that—a few light narcotics and such, Valium especially being in fashion. If someone had come to him then with cocaine or heroin, Father Henry knew he would never have made it to twenty alive. He’d been at the age when you were supposed to be stupid and self-destructive. And with as low as he’d been, it was hard to say that Gina deserved a tougher break just because she was young and foolish here and now instead of thirty-odd years ago in Alabama.
Hard enough, in fact, that he couldn’t do it. Let he who is without sin, and he’d racked up a lot of mileage sinning when he’d been young and addicted.
His right leg was falling asleep, tingles shooting down his thigh to the foot. He shifted his weight, but it only hurt worse so he stood.
Something had to be done though. Whatever else, nothing right or good would come from the drugs. And so maybe that was why God had sent Gina to him.
He pressed his lips together, leaned down, and closed the suitcase.
“Well, Lord,” he said aloud as he walked to the bathroom. “I hope this was more or less what you were aiming for.”
It took longer than he’d expected to flush all the powder down the toilet, but he managed it.
The west end of the park butted up against the New York Public Library, the north end against 42nd street. Just about where the two met, there was a small building—a walk-in public restroom. They left the corpse of the British guy there, sitting in one of the stalls with a surprised expression and his jeans around his ankles.
The day was cold with low scudding clouds that seemed barely higher than the skyscrapers, but the foot traffic down 42nd was still thick. Demise sat in a chair on the brown, winterkilled grass conspicuously wearing an Aerosmith t-shirt and reading the Wall Street Journal. He had gooseflesh up and down his arms, and the chill would have been uncomfortable if the sick pain of his death hadn’t dwarfed it. The t-shirt, on the other hand, couldn’t be forgiven. He looked like a fucking idiot.
The girl showed up at noon. She cleaned up pretty nice—long black hair pulled back from her sharp features, a blue skirt that swirled a little around her ankles. She looked better without makeup. She was walking across the park toward him with a studied casualness that was about as subtle as blood on a wedding dress. An amateur.
He folded his newspaper and stood just as Phan and his cheap sunglasses sidled up behind her. The shifting emotions on her face were a joy to watch—confusion, recognition, fear, despair, calm all within a half second. Bitch should have been an actress.
“You know who we are,” Demise said as Phan—gun pressed discreetly in the small of her back—steered her toward him.
The girl nodded.
“You know why we’re here.”
She nodded again.
“Good. Let’s go someplace a little more private and talk.”
The whore didn’t fight, didn’t make a break for it. She just walked with them down to 41st where they had a limo with a Shadow Fist driver waiting in a loading zone and climbed in with them. Demise pulled a jacket over the idiot t-shirt as soon as he got in. He sat in the jump seat, facing her. Phan was beside her, gun no longer concealed and not particularly pointing at her. The driver pulled out into traffic.
“Okay,” the girl said. “So you going to kill me or what?”
Phan slammed the butt of the pistol into her face. The scream was short and high.
“We might, we might not. It depends,” Demise said. “You have the sample.”
She pulled a cellophane packet out of her pocket. Phan took it, turned it over in his hand, and nodded. Demise smiled. The girl’s cheek was puffing out where Phan had hit her, and she was sniffing back blood.
“Where’s the rest?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“I tell you that and you don’t need me,” she said. “Here’s the deal. You can have all the shit, but I keep ten percent of that cash as a finder’s fee.”
Demise leaned forward. She knew about him, and she tried not to meet his eyes. He waited. The limo hit a pothole and they all lurched a little. Phan sighed uncomfortably. Demise kept waiting, staring at her dark brown eyes and willing them up toward his. He got her when she glanced over to see whether he was still looking. He took her almost to the point of no return—farther than he’d taken Randy—before he looked away.
The driver looked back and Phan waved the pistol in a keep your eyes on the road gesture. It was almost fifteen blocks before she stopped crying.
“You understand the stakes?” Demise asked.
She nodded. The bravado was gone. She had stopped worrying about the bloody nose Phan had given her. Her mouth and chin were crimson, her eyes wide and empty. When she wiped her mouth on the black sleeve of her jacket, the blood smeared.
“We get all of it back by tomorrow at noon,” Demise said slowly. “The money and the smack both. You do it like a nice girl, and you can live.”
“Tomorrow,” she agreed.
“You can meet us in the same place. Just like today. You bring everything.”
“Everything,” she echoed. Tears ran down her face, but her expression stayed blank. He wasn’t sure she was taking in what they were saying, but then she went on. “I’ll have all of it for you, just don’t kill me, okay? That’s the deal. You don’t kill me.”
Phan smiled and holstered the gun. Demise leaned back and spoke to the driver over his shoulder.
“Jokertown. We’ll drop her there.”
The rest of the ride was in silence. The girl looked out the window, eyes vacant with fear. Phan leaned back. The ponytail really did look pretty sharp on him. Demise tried to picture the guy with a mustache, just thinking how the two would go together. Maybe he’d try it.
At the bleeding edge of Jokertown, the limo pulled over and Demise popped the door open for her.
“Tomorrow. Noon,” he said. “And wash your face. You look like someone beat the shit out of you.”
She scrambled out of the car and strode off down the street her head down. Phan leaned forward, watching her. The first flakes of snow pearled the windshield.
“Go ahead of her about three blocks and turn right,” Demise said to the driver. “You can drop us there.”
“Now what?” Phan asked as the limo forced its way out into traffic.
“Follow her,” Demise said. “She’s not thinking straight. She’ll head straight for the stuff. We get the money, get the drugs, and snuff the bitch.”
“Sounds good,” Phan said. “But I get to kill her.”
Demise raised an eyebrow.
“You enjoy it too much, man,” Phan said. “It’s not healthy.”
Joey stood on the street outside Our Lady of Perpetual Misery shifting his weight from one leg to the other. Mazzucchelli had been pretty clear—the only calls coming into the apartment in the last few days that looked off were from the church. It only made sense to check it out.
Just take a look around, Mazzucchelli had said. If it looks like that’s where they’re working from, call me and we’ll send in a team.
The stone building loomed across the street, grey and impassive. He didn’t see any Shadow Fist operatives walking in or out. Didn’t see any heroin blowing down the street with the snow. It occurred to Joey for the first time that he wasn’t sure exactly what it was he was looking for.
Since when did the Fist work with jokers anyway? Fuck, since when did they work with Catholics? The whole thing didn’t make sense. The confusion nauseated him a little. He should have worked with Lapierre. This was a job for someone smart.
The urge hit him to take another pill like he was hungry and the pills were food. He took the bottle out and considered it. His arms didn’t really hurt—hell, they hadn’t really hurt in weeks—but the pills made him feel better. Some part of him knew that wasn’t good—even felt guilty about it. But that didn’t make him want the stuff any less.
Something huge and bright blue swooped overhead, shrilling like a flock of birds. Joey shrugged deeper into his jacket, pushing the drugs away. He hated Jokertown.
“Just go in and look around,” he muttered to himself. “Like you were just gonna go light a candle for some dead joker motherfucker. That’s the thing.”
Joey squared his shoulders, crossed the street and walked up the steps. He held the door open for a nice little piece of ass—definitely not a joker—who was heading in right after him. Dark eyes, dark hair. She would have been really pretty if someone hadn’t been beating the crap out of her.
Of course he expected her to be upset. He’d have been naïve to think she wouldn’t. But he’d rehearsed what he’d say, some of it standing in front of the bathroom mirror so he could try out the facial expressions too.
He’d planned to start by scaring her. Then he’d take the moral high ground—she’d misled him, lied to him even, betrayed his trust in her. If she didn’t walk out on him right then, he could forgive her and explain why he’d gotten rid of the drugs and that the church would still protect her.
He’d also hidden the money, figuring it made it more likely that Gina’d be in the mind to hear him out.
“You get it back!” she screamed, leaning over him. “You crawl in the fucking sewer and get it back, you fat fucking sonofabitch!”
He lay on his back, his arms up to protect his face. Gina knelt on his chest, her weight making it difficult to take a breath. The cot was on its side where she’d thrown it, and his left ear hurt pretty bad where she’d hit him.
“Now, you ... my trust ...” he tried.
“You shit-sucker! You fuckbrained joker asshole! That was my fucking life!”
She swung at him again, her hands in claws. Then she stood and kicked him in the small of the back—she didn’t quite get his kidney, but it still smarted pretty good—and started pacing the length of the small room, shaking her head, arms crossed. Carefully, Father Henry raised himself up to sitting and picked his glasses back up from the floor.
“Now, Gina,” he said. “I think you need to just calm down a mite.”
“Shut up before I kill you.”
He rose slowly to his feet. That kick was going to leave a bruise. He could already feel it. He straightened his shirt.
“I didn’t do what you’d have wanted, maybe,” he said, “but it was right. You can try beating on me if you want, but that won’t make keeping folks hooked on drugs a good thing. And these people you’re messing with, now, they’re not the sort of folks a girl like you should be ... you know ... messing with.”
Since she didn’t respond, he figured he’d gotten the moral high ground after all. It didn’t seem to have all the weight he’d hoped for. She muttered something, paused at the foot of the stairs, her eyes narrowed and calculating.
“I need the money,” she said. “I’ve got a few hours to make a run for it.”
“You’ve accepted the protection of the church,” he said, feeling a little better for being back on-script. “We’ll take care of you, but that means no more lying and playing fast and loose with the truth. I didn’t go to the police and you should see ...”
“If you’d gone to the cops, I’d be dead already. I need the money, Father.”
She was looking at him now with a deathly calm. Her face was bruised, her mouth thin and bloodless. She’d never looked less like a child.
“Come on, then,” he sighed and walked up the stairs.
Quasiman was sweeping the aisles and between the pews, his hunched back moving irregularly as bits of him vanished and reappeared. Father Henry nodded to him as he walked up the pulpit and took out the duffel bag. Gina snatched it from him and slung it over her shoulder.
“Thanks,” she said and strode for the main doors. Father Henry sat down and watched her go, rubbing his sore ear.
It wasn’t how he’d seen things going. He’d had a scenario in mind where Gina would have been safe, where maybe he’d bring a little light into her life. A little hope. A chance, maybe, for salvation. Instead, the most he could really hope for was the existential appreciation of a city’s worth of drug addicts thanking him for thinning down the supply. He was out of his depths in Jokertown. That was all.
“Father Henry?”
Quasiman stood before him, broom in hand. He wore an expression of concern.
“Yes?”
Quasiman beamed.
“I thought I remembered you,” he said, and vanished. Father Henry shook his head and levered himself back up to his feet just as Gina came back down the aisle. Her face was ashen, her footsteps unsteady.
A blocky man in a black coat walked beside her, carrying the duffel bag full of money. He also had a gun to her neck.
The priest stood up with a wobble, his face going paler. Joey felt something like pleasure and dug the barrel into the girl’s neck. She flinched.
“Well now,” the priest said, tugging at his collar. “And how can I help you, son?”
“Get in the back. Now!”
The priest grinned nervously like Joey’d said something clever, turned and trotted toward the back. Joey pushed the girl ahead of him, enjoying the way she stumbled. Joey really felt like he was getting back his stride.
The priest led the way down a flight of stairs to a little kitchen. Joey kept his back to the wall, his gun trained on the two of them. Without letting the barrel waver, he threw the duffel bag on the table.
“That’s the money,” he said. “So that’s a good start. Now all you gotta do to keep breathing is give me the shit.”
“Well now,” the priest began, “you see that might could pose a bit of ...”
“It’s not here,” the girl snapped.
“Okay. So where is it?” Joey demanded, moving a step toward them. The priest flushed pink and looked away, shaking his head like he was talking to himself. The girl kept her eyes locked on his.
“It’s coming. My partner Jade, she’s supposed to be here with it any minute.”
The priest shot a look at her, eyebrows raised.
“Then I guess we’ll wait for Jade,” Joey said, grinning cruelly. He stepped close to them now. The priest was already flinching away in expectation of a blow. “If there ain’t no one here soon, though, I’m gonna start getting bored. And then I’m gonna start cutting off fingers.”
He walked backward slowly, a deep satisfaction flowing through him. He was back. For the first time since the fucking arrow, he was really back. It was like riding a bicycle. Just get a couple civilians shitting themselves scared, and it was like his body knew what to do. He had the money, it looked like he could maybe get the drugs. That’d show Mazzucchelli. Shit, that’d show all of them.
Close enough to start celebrating, he figured. He took the bottle out from his pocket and opened it one-handed. The priest raised his eyebrows.
“Good trick, opening them child-proof things like that,” the priest said. “Takes some practice.”
“You shut the fuck up,” Joey said.
“No offense. No offense.”
Joey glared as he sidestepped to the sink and tapped out two bright pink pills onto the counter. The priest was watching with an odd expression as he poured a glass of water with his left hand. Joey scowled, radiating menace as he popped the fag-pink pills into his mouth. He had to take his eyes off the pair for a second when he drank.
As the water washed the pills down, a strange warmth spread in his throat. Panic hit him and he was across to the priest, the barrel of the gun pressed between the fat man’s eyes, before he knew he’d moved.
“What the fuck’s wrong with the fucking water?” he demanded.
The priest managed a wan smile and shook his head.
“It’s got something in it. I can feel it. Like taking a drink.”
“Oh,” the priest said. “That’s not the water, son. That’ll happen sometimes with narcotics. Pain killers especially. The capsule cracks a little on the way down. That is darvon, isn’t it? I always though it was a lovely color.”
“Shut the fuck up!” Joey said. The pills were warm in his gut, and the pleasant, loose sensation spreading to his arms and legs. He took another cautious sip of the water. It didn’t taste weird at all, didn’t make his throat feel hot.
“Try it, if you’d like,” the priest said. “You can just crack one open and wash down a touch of the powder. It does the same.”
“If you’re fucking with me ...” Joey said, but he took out another pill, cracking it between his fingertips, and popped it into his mouth. It was viciously bitter, but when he drank the water, the warm feeling came again. It had an aftertaste like grapes. He licked his lips. The priest smiled and seemed to relax.
“Shit,” Joey said. “How’d you know about that?”
“My friends and I were known to sample some narcotics in our younger days. Before I took the cloth. Since then I’ve spent a certain amount of my time ministering to folks who shared my peculiar form of weakness. I’m Father Henry Obst, by the way. I’m filling in for Father Squid for a couple weeks while he’s away. This here’s Gina. She’s accepted the protection of the Church.”
“Yeah,” Joey said, sarcastically. “And how’s that going for her?”
“I recall the first time I took codeine,” Father Henry said. He was leaning back now, the air of fear almost entirely gone. “I was just a young thing back then. Grade school. Before I drew ... well, anyway. My mama gave it to me in cough syrup. That was legal back when I was a pup.”
“Oh yeah?”
“It was a lovely feeling. Now I do have to say that you don’t seem the sort of fella to indulge, though. Not when you’re on the job as it were. I assume it’s for medical needs?”
Joey nodded. His tongue felt a little thick, but the warmth in his gut was relaxing and calm. He was in a perfectly calm place. He was in control. He was good. Hell, he was perfect. “Fucker shot me with an arrow,” he said. “Months ago. Scar tissue’s all messed up with the nerves.”
“Ah,” Father Henry said, nodding sympathetically. “Must be a trial for you.”
“Yeah.”
They were silent for a few minutes—Joey wasn’t sure exactly how many. Time seemed to be doing something weird.
“I recall when I myself was in terrible pain,” the priest said, reflectively. “It wasn’t physical, mostly, but terrible all the same. I could turn ... that is ... well, wine was a staple of my diet as a young man. Anyway, it took me some time before I understood I was an addict. I’d lost a great deal that was very dear to me.”
Joey laughed, and waved his gun languidly at the two of them. His hand seemed oddly far away.
“You were an addict?”
“Still am, son,” the priest said gravely. “Will be until the day I die. It’s just a disease, and no shame in it. You just need to get right with yourself and the Lord. You know, God takes care of his own. If you just let Him.”
“It’s not like I’m hooked or anything,” Joey said. “I just need them, you know? I mean it’s not like I take ’em for fun. It’s just ... if I don’t ... I just gotta get through the day. I just gotta show the guys I’m not ... shit, I’m not making sense.”
“Yes, you are, son. You most certainly are.”
Joey nodded. The priest seemed like he was the center of the world. Everything else was narrowing around the thick, pasty face with its calm, accepting expression. Tears filled Joey’s eyes. The little kitchen was swimming.
All the weeks of being laughed at, the shame of his cravings, the nightmares of watching arrows piercing his guys, of being the only one left while his friends died around him—it all bubbled up at once. He lost track of where he was, where the floor was, whether he was standing up.
“Father,” he choked out as the darkness and sorrow enfolded him, “I think I’ve got a problem.”
Father Henry stood over the collapsed thug who lay snoring gently on the floor. The relief mixed pleasantly with what he imagined was a somewhat prideful smugness at Gina’s open-mouthed wonder.
“Now you let that be a lesson to you,” he said. “Always read the warning labels when you get a prescription. Lot of times you mix alcohol with ’em, it’s a very bad idea.”
“Damn,” Gina said. “I mean that’s ... pathetic.”
“Well now, give him a little benefit. He didn’t know no better. Gina, if ... well now, if you’re going to be going, I think you might best be at it. This fine young man is only going to be asleep for so long.”
The girl looked at him, nodded, and picked the duffel from the table. She hesitated for a moment, then leaned over and kissed him briefly on the lips.
“Thank you,” she said, and was gone up the stairs.
Father Henry sighed and slowly dragged the unconscious thug to the cot, rolled him onto it and covered him with the blanket Gina had been using. It was odd the way God put things together and took them apart. But then he supposed that was what they meant by ineffable. The question of what to do with his new ward, now, was an interesting problem. He didn’t imagine there was a Hired Thugs Anonymous, but given his last few days, he wasn’t going to rule it out either.
When he lumbered up the stairs, he was surprised to find Gina sitting in the front pew, her head in her hands.
“He’s here,” she said. “Out on the street.”
“Who’s here?”
“Demise,” she said, and it came out like she was already dead. “And the other one’s out back. I’m fucked.”
She dropped the duffel bag and sat on the front pew, her head in her hands. She was weeping.
“Now you just tough back up there, miss,” Father Henry said. “It’s like I told you. You accepted the protection of the church, and that means me. I took care of things with that last gentleman, and I’ll take care of his one too.”
“Don’t be a shithead. That guy was some pill-popping dumbfuck. Demise is an ace.”
“Watch your language,” he said, picking up the bag and stowing it back behind the pulpit. “You go downstairs and wash yourself up. I’ll find us a way to settle this thing out.”
She looked up at him with a mixture of hope and disbelief on her face. He only raised his eyebrows—one of the expressions he’d practiced, so he had a pretty clear idea how it looked on him—and pointed to the stairs. She didn’t have much faith in him; that was clear enough from the way she moved. She went, though.
Once she was gone, Father Henry rolled up his sleeves and rubbed his hands together. “Quasi! Come over here, boy. I need to talk with you. Who exactly is this Demise fella?”
Demise stood in a doorway across the street from the Church of Jesus Christ, Joker, where he could watch the front doors and the side. Phan was somewhere on the other side, keeping an eye on the other side and the back. The whore hadn’t come out, though he’d seen her poke her head out the door once. It didn’t seem likely that she’d actually stashed the shit in the church, but the longer she stayed in there, the more he was willing to consider it.
The snow was changing to sleet, freezing where it struck. He checked his watch. Fifteen more minutes, he figured, and they’d have to go in after her. He wondered how Danny Mao and the other bosses of Shadow Fist would feel about killing people in a church.
“Mr. Spector?” a distant voice shouted over the noise of traffic.
He looked up. A short, pear-shaped man with a clerical collar stood before the doors of the cathedral, waving over at him with a goofy grin. Demise tilted his head. “Now what the fuck is this?” he muttered.
“No call to be shy now, sir,” the pear-shaped priest shouted, a thick southern accent drawing out his words. “Come on over and let’s talk this here thing out.”
He hesitated for a minute, but then stepped out across the street, dodging cars, until he reached the opposite sidewalk. “Who the fuck are you?” he called.
“Father Henry Obst,” the priest said, beaming. “Lately of Selma. I’m taking over for Father Squid for a mite while he’s traveling the world. Come along inside now, sir. We’ve got a little matter of business to discuss, I think.”
“Do you know who I am?”
“Rumor has you’re a hired killer for some sort of Asian mob,” the priest said pleasantly.
“Well. Yeah,” Demise said. “Where’s the whore?”
“Oh, she’s in here,” the priest said. “I think we can get this whole thing taken care of to everybody’s satisfaction. Come on along, now sir. No reason to do this out in the weather.”
The priest turned and trundled back into the cathedral. Demise stood looking at the open door, then, shaking his head walked up and entered the church. The space was bigger than he’d remembered, and almost empty. The twisted, two-headed Christ impaled upon a double-helix cross seemed to writhe as Demise walked down the aisle, his footsteps echoing. The scent of car exhaust and snow mixed with ghost-faint incense.
The whore was there, sitting in the first pew with her head bowed. The little priest was still smiling and leaning against the altar rail.
“Now then, sir,” the priest said. “I understand there was something you were looking for.”
“The bitch stole something,” Demise said. “I’ve come to collect it.”
“Well now, you see that’s the issue that we need to look at, you and me. The drugs and the money—I presume that’s what you had in mind? Yes, well, they are no longer in this fine young woman’s care. I’ve taken them myself in the name of the church.”
“Okay,” Demise said. “So I should kill you instead?”
“It’s one of life’s little ironies that you and I should be the ones having this conversation,” the priest said, sticking his hands in his pockets and looking out over the pews. His round, puffy face had taken on a philosophical cast that looked like he’d rehearsed it in the mirror. “The virus has given me the ability to recreate Our Lord’s first miracle from the marriage at Cana, and you his final one in rising from his tomb. We represent the alpha and the omega, you and I. Not that it’s done either of us much good. I have a sermon I’ll be delivering on the subject come Sunday. You should come hear it.”
“Whatever,” Demise said. “How about we get back to business. Give me the shit and I’ll walk out of here. Nobody gets killed.”
“You forget sir that you are in the house of the Lord. You have no power here.”
Demise laughed, a little disbelieving cough, and locked his eyes into the watery blue of the priest’s. Father Henry met his gaze placidly. Demise pressed the pain along where the channel should have been, but nothing happened. He could see the priest considering him, could look into the black of the little man’s eyes, but there was no connection, no lock.
“God is stronger than a virus, sir,” Father Henry intoned, and for almost half a second, Demise got nervous. Then he noticed the red marks on the bridge of Father Henry’s nose.
“You’re fucking nearsighted,” Demise said.
Father Henry’s expression froze and the whore gave out a little moan. “I knew this wouldn’t work,” she said.
“You thought you could fuck with my head by taking off your glasses?” Demise said, almost laughing. “Christ, what a fucking hick.”
“The power ... the power of God protects me. You just stand your ground there.” The priest’s voice was wobbling like his neck fat.
Demise stepped forward, took the little man’s chin in his hand, and lifted. Father Henry, eyes pressed closed, took his hands out of his pockets. Demise didn’t see the little black cylinder until it hissed, a stream of pepper mace already scalding his eyes and nose. The pain was nothing compared to the constant pain of death he carried with him, but the stuff did make his eyes water. The little priest pulled away, falling loudly over the rail, while Demise wiped at the tears and roared.
He never saw the whore coming up behind him.
The first jolt of the stun gun hardly stopped him—the pain was negligible. He spun, reaching out for the bitch, but she danced back and then swung in low, catching him just under the ribs. By the fourth shock, his muscles were going weak, and it was getting hard to breathe. The fifth one—a lucky shot on the back of his neck—made his whole right side go numb.
Demise gave out before the batteries did.
Father Henry sat at the altar, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief. With his glasses back on, the assassin turned from a muddy man-shaped blur into an actual man, hog-tied in the aisle before the altar. Gina, smart girl that she was, had gagged him with a sock and a strip of cloth and covered his head with a pastel pink pillowcase. She’d moved fast, and it was a good thing. The man had never quite lost consciousness.
“So what do we do now?” Gina asked softly.
“Well, we have this gentleman here, the other one back in the kitchen,” he whispered back. “Seems like hitmen are what you might call thick on the ground just now.”
“There’s still the other one out back. The other one from the car.”
“Well that’s all well and good,” Father Henry snapped, “but I don’t think I’m much up for doing this a third time today. A man has limits.”
“I wasn’t saying that,” Gina said. “But we’ve got to do something.”
“All right. Here, you keep an eye on this here miscreant and I’ll see whether I can’t work something out with our friend downstairs.”
Demise shifted, straining against his bonds, and tried to shout something, but Father Henry was damned if could tell what.
“The whole thing was a setup,” Joey said. “I’m telling you, boss. I was lucky I got out of there at all.”
The restaurant was almost exactly the way he’d imagined it, except that he was empty-handed, Mazzucchelli was frowning, and Lapierre was over by the bar chatting up a waitress. Joey shook his head.
“And this priest got you out?”
“He woke me up after those four Fist guys jumped me and got me outta there.”
“Four guys?”
“Maybe five,” Joey said, trying not to wince with the lie. But it wasn’t like he could tell Mazzucchelli he’d passed out.
“The cops were coming, and he was thinking the Fist might try to kill me. They’d went in there and forced him to help them out. I’m telling you, the guy’s a fucking hero going against them like he did.”
Mazzucchelli took a bite of his pasta and shook his head. Joey scratched at the scars on his left hand.
“Sounds like bullshit,” Mazzuchelli said.
“There was a Fist hanging just outside the back door,” Joey said. “And the cops—they picked up Demise there, didn’t they?”
Mazzucchelli took the starched white napkin off his knee and dabbed the corner of his mouth.
“Yeah,” he said with a long, slow, sigh. “Yeah, they did.”
“If I’d have jumped the gun and called in backup, they’d have ambushed us, boss. Demise was just the bait.”
“So how’d this hero priest get the drop on Demise?” Joey grinned.
“Yeah, he told about that too, when he was helping me get my feet. It went like this, see ...”
Demise walked out of the detention center in the late afternoon, pissed off. He still had on the fucking Aerosmith t-shirt. The car waited for him at the curb, Phan Lo at the wheel. Demise climbed in and slammed the door.
“What the fuck took you people so long?” he demanded as Phan pulled out into traffic. “I was in there overnight. How hard is it to post a little bail?”
“Gambiones,” Phan said. “They hit back yesterday.”
“No shit?”
“They torched five of our places. We lost twenty, maybe thirty men. Word on the street is they were trying for Danny Mao.”
“Still doesn’t explain why I had to spend a night in the lockup.”
“You weren’t the top priority,” Phan said.
They drove in silence. The day was clearer, but cold. Phan turned toward Chinatown.
“Did you, ah, mention to anyone ...” Demise began, but the sentence trailed off.
“They know you got your ass kicked by a deuce priest and a Jokertown whore,” Phan said. “They laughed about it a little and got back to business.”
“Shit.”
“The whole thing was a setup. I saw one of the Gambione guys coming out the back right before the cops showed up. So we got suckered. Let it go, man. No one’s going to remember how they did it. You want to get another shirt?”
“Yeah,” Demise said. “You know, that attitude is just like you. It’s just exactly like all of you. It’s not about who’s going to remember what. It’s about principle. If you let people fuck with you, pretty soon everyone’s going to think they can get away with shit.”
When Phan spoke, his voice was measured and careful. “I don’t think that someone who fucking kills people by looking at them is going to have a lot of trouble with people taking him lightly.”
“You don’t get it. The priest has to die. And I know where he’s going to be on Sunday morning. I’ll kill the little shit in the middle of Mass.”
“Hardcore,” Phan said, sounding unimpressed.
Dawn threatened in the east, the light from the snowcovered trees making the kitchen window glow. Father Henry put the telephone handset back in its cradle just as Gina emerged from her room wrapped in a thick wool robe two sizes too big for her.
“Coffee smells great,” she said, then “It’s so quiet out here.”
“That’s what we call the country. Haven’t you ever been out of the city?”
“Nah. I was born in Queens.
“You take cream or anything?”
“No. Black and bitter does just fine.”
Father Henry poured the coffee into a couple of Marriage Encounter cups and took them over to the table.
“The Archbishop says he’ll have tickets to Rome ready for us down in Albuquerque by Monday morning.”
“I thought there was a month wait for passports.”
“Vatican passports,” Father Henry said, blowing on his coffee. “There are certain advantages to being a sovereign nation, after all. And a quarter million dollars is a pretty sizable donation. Exerts a kind of influence.”
“That was my money.”
“It was blood money and only the grace of Christ shall make it clean.”
“And the other quarter million?”
“I’m a man of Christ. It’ll be just fine right where it is. You need any—like maybe for tuition or something?—you just come see your Uncle Henry.”
“Tuition? Give me a break,” she said, laughing. Her face didn’t look so sharp, he thought. “I’ll go down on you for a hundred thousand, though.”
“I was thinking about cooking up some eggs,” he said, ignoring her. “Care for any?”
“Sure,” she said. “Over hard.”
He tried the still-scalding coffee and reached up for a good copper frying pan. Gina stood, her hands deep in the robe’s pockets, went to the window and looked out into the woods. He wondered what it would be like, seeing a pine forest at dawn for the very first time.
Just another little miracle, he figured.
Jonathan went over the release form again, flipping the paper back and forth. The time he’d spent trying to parse memos from senate campaigns just didn’t help much when it came to these west coast entertainment wonks. The whole point of the exercise, after all, was to get something he could write about. If the first thing he did on day one was sign away his rights, he might as well go fill out an application at Starbucks and be done.
He looked up and down the parking lot. Great silver buses and trucks filled the place, sound equipment and shoulder-mounted cameras making their way to the secular cathedral of Ebbets Field on the backs of scrungy-looking technicians. A folding table had been set up with a tarnished coffee service and a few boxes of donuts. Several of the other prospective contestants were milling around, trying to size each other up.
“Is there a question I can help you with?” the flunkie asked through a practiced smile. She was early 20s, hatchet-faced, and mean about the eye. Normal-looking people who lived in the beauty pits of Hollywood too long seemed to get that feral I’m-not-a-supermodel-but-I-might-kill-one look after a while.
“Oh,” Jonathan said, whipping out his own smile, “it’s just ... I’m a journalist. I have this blog, and I don’t quite know what I can and can’t talk about there. If I did get on the show, I couldn’t really afford to take however many months just off.”
“Of course not,” the flunkie said, nodding. “This is just the release for the tryouts. If you’re chosen for the show, there’s a whole other process.”
Which didn’t even sort of answer Jonathan’s question. He smiled wider. They’d just see which of them could nice the other to death.
“That’s great,” he said, shaking his head. “I just had one or two tiny questions about the wording on this one?”
“Sure,” the flunkie said, “Anything I can help with. But it is the standard release.” Meaning move it, loser, I’ve got a hundred more like you to get through.
“I’ll make it quick. I really appreciate this,” Jonathan said. Meaning suck it up, jerk, I can stall you all day if I want to.
The flunkie’s smile set like concrete. Jonathan killed half an hour niggling at details and posing hypothetical situations. It all came down to the same thing, though. If he wanted in, he’d sign. If he refused ... well, the field was full of aces who were there for the express purpose of taking his place. He kept up the tennis match of cheerful falsehood until the flunkie’s smile started to chip at the edges, but in the end, he signed off.
He sidled over to the coffee and donuts just long enough to confirm that he didn’t want anything to do with either, and then a vaguely-familiar blond guy with a clipboard rounded them up and led the way across the tarmac and into the entrance to the ballpark. They were divided into ten groups and then each led to a camera and interview setup where a small bank of lights were ready to make him and all the others glow for the camera. Of his group, he got to be the lucky bastard who went first.
“Don’t worry about the camera,” the interviewer said. “They just want to see how you come across through the lens. Just pretend it’s not there.”
She was much prettier than the flunkie, dressed a little sexy, and willing, it was clear, to flirt a little if that made you say something stupid or embarrassing for the viewing public. Jonathan liked her immediately.
“Right,” Jonathan said. The five-inch black glass eye stared at him. “Just like it’s only you and me.”
“Exactly,” she said. “So. Let’s see. Could you tell me a little bit about why you want to be on American Hero?”
“Well,” he said. “Have you ever heard of Paper Lion?”
A little frown marred the interviewer’s otherwise perfect brow. “Wasn’t that the ace who—”
“It’s a book,” Jonathan said. “By George Plimpton. Old George went into professional football back in the 60s. Wrote a book about it. I want to do something like that. But for one thing, football’s for the football fans. For another thing, it’s been done. And for a third, reality television is for our generation what sports were for our dads. It’s the entertainment that everyone follows.”
“You want to ... report on the show?”
“It’s not that weird. A lot of guys get into office so they can have something to write in their memoirs,” Jonathan said. “I want to see what it’s all about. Understand it. Try to make some sense of the whole experience, and sure, write about it.”
“That’s interesting,” the interviewer said just as if it really had been. Jonathan was just getting warmed up. This was the sound bite fest he’d been practicing for weeks.
“The thing is, all people really see when they see aces are what we can do, you know? What makes us weird. These little tricks we’ve got—flying or turning into a snake or becoming invisible—they define us. It doesn’t matter what we do. It just matters what we are.
“I want to be the journalist and essayist and political commentator who also happens to be an ace. Not the ace who writes. This is the perfect venue for that. Just getting on the show would be a huge step. It gives me the credentials to talk about what being an ace is. And what it isn’t. Does that make sense?”
“It does, actually,” the interviewer said, and now he thought maybe she was just a little bit intrigued by him.
One step closer, he thought. Only about a million to go.
“Okay,” she said. “And Jonathan Hive? Is that right?”
“Tipton-Clarke’s the legal last name. Hive’s a nom de guerre. Or plume. Or whatever.”
“Right. Tipton-Clarke. And what exactly is your ace ability?”
“I turn into bugs.”
#
American Hero was the height of the reality television craze. Real aces were set up to backbite and scheme and show off for the pleasure of the viewing public. And it was hosted, just for that touch of street cred, by a real live ace—Peregrine. The prize: a lot of money, a lot of exposure, the chance to be a hero. The whole thing was fake as caffeine-free diet pop.
And yet.
He’d woken before dawn in his generic little hotel room, surprised by how nervous he felt. He’d eaten breakfast in is room—rubbery eggs and bitter coffee—while he watched the news. Someone tied to Egyptian joker terrorists finally assassinated the Caliph, a Sri Lankan guy with a name no one could pronounce had been named the new UN Secretary General, and a new diet promised to reduce him three dress sizes. He’d switched channels to an earnest young reporter interviewing a German ace named Lohengrin who was making a publicity tour of the United States to support a new BMW motorcycle, and then given up. He’d dropped a quick note to the blog, just to keep his maybe two dozen readers up to speed, and headed out.
The subway ride out to the field had been like going to a job interview; he’d kept thinking his way through what he was going to do, how to present himself, whether his clothes were going to lie too flat to crawl back into when he had to reform. He’d half-convinced himself that his trial was going to end with him stark naked. He could always pause, of course. Leave a band of un-reclaimed bugs just to preserve modesty; like a bright green insect speedo. Because that wouldn’t be creepy.
Now, actually sitting on the benches the Hollywood people had put out for them and watching the lights and cameras and the milling, he was starting to feel a little less intimidated. He and the other contestants were in four rows of benches just inside the first base foul line. The three judges—Topper, Digger Downs, and the Harlem Hammer—sat at a raised table more or less on the pitcher’s mound. The invisible mechanisms of television production—sound crew, cameras, make-up chairs, lousy buffet—kept mostly between home plate and third base. The great expanse of the outfield was set aside for the aces to prove just how telegenic they were.
Which, you could say, varied.
Take, for instance, the poor bastard whose turn it was at present. He had his arms stretched dramatically toward the small puffy clouds and had for several seconds as his determined look edged a little toward desperate.
“What are we waiting for?” Jonathan whispered.
“Big storm,” the guy beside him—a deeply annoying speedster by the name Joe Twitch—muttered back. “Maybe a tornado.”
“Ah.”
They waited. The alleged ace shouted and curled his fingers into claws, projecting his will out to the wide bowl of sky. The other aces who had made it through the interview were sitting on folding chairs far enough away to be safe if anything did happen. The morning air smelled of gasoline and cut grass. Joe Twitch stood up and sat back down about thirty times in a minute and a half.
“Hey,” Jonathan said. “That cloud on there. The long one with the thin bit in the middle?”
“Yeah?” Joe Twitch replied.
“Looks kind of like a fish if you squint a little.”
“Huh,” Twitch said. And then, “Cool.”
The public address system whined. The Harlem Hammer was going to put the poor fucker out of his misery. Jonathan was half sorry to see the guy go. Only half.
“Mr. Stormbringer?” the Harlem Hammer said. “Really, Mr. Stormbringer, thank you very much for coming. If you could just ...”
“The darkness! It comes!” Stormbringer said in sepulchral tones. “The storm shall break!”
An embarrassed silence fell.
“You know,” Jonathan said, “if we wait long enough, it’s bound to rain. You know. Eventually.”
“Mr. Stormbringer,” the Harlem Hammer tired again while behind him Digger Downs pantomimed striking a gong. “If you could ... ah ... John? Could you take Mr. Stormbringer to the green room, please?”
The vaguely familiar blonde guy detached himself from the clot of technicians and walked, clipboard in hand, to escort the man out of the stadium. Jonathan squinted, trying to place him—caf?-au-lait skin, a little epicanthic folding around the eyes, blond hair out of a bottle.
“Aw, man,” he said.
“What?” Twitch demanded.
Jonathan gestured toward the blond with his chin.
“That’s John Fortune,” he said.
“Who?”
“John Fortune. He was on the cover of Time a while back. Pulled the black queen, but everyone thought it was an ace. There was this whole weird religious thing about him being the antichrist or the new messiah or something.”
“The one Fortunato died trying to fix up?”
“Yeah, he’s Fortunato’s kid. And Peregrine’s.”
Joe Twitch was silent for a moment. The only thing that seemed to slow him down was trying to think. Jonathan wondered if he could by the guy a book of sudoku puzzles.
“Peregrine’s producing the show,” Twitch said.
“Yup.”
“So that poor fucker’s working for his mom?”
“How the mighty have fallen,” Jonathan said dismissively. A new ace was taking the field; an older guy, skinny with what appeared to be huge chrome boots, a brown leather jacket, and a 40s era pilot’s helmet with straps that hung at the sides of his face like a beagle’s ears.
“Thank you,” the Harlem Hammer said. “And you are ... ?”
“Jetman!” the new guy announced, rising up on the little cones of fire that appeared at the soles of his boots. He struck a heroic pose. “I am the man Jetboy would have been.”
“Oh good Christ,” Jonathan muttered. “That was sixty years ago. Let the poor fucker die, can’t you?”
Apparently, he couldn’t.
Of the constant stream of wannabes presenting themselves to the world, Mr. Stormbringer had been the worst so far, but the guy who called himself the Crooner hadn’t managed to do much either. And Jonathan’s personal opinion was that Hell’s Cook—a thick-necked man who could heat up skillets by looking at them—was really more deuce than ace, but at least he was a good showman.
And there had been some decent ones too. Jonathan’s benchmate, Joe Twitch, had made a pretty good showing and also managed to be so abrasive it was clear he’d be a good engine of petty social drama. The six foot five bear, Matryoshka, who split into two five foot eight bears when you hit him, and then four five footers and so on, apparently until you stopped hitting him, had been decent. The eleven-year-old girl carrying her stuffed dragon had seemed like a sad joke until she made the toy into a fifty-foot, fire-breathing, scales-as-armor version of itself. She’d also had a bag of other little stuffed toys. Even Digger Downs had dropped his comments about wild card daycare. Jonathan was willing to put even money she’d make the cut.
Jetman finished his presentation to polite applause, and the blond—John Fortune—appeared at Jonathan’s side.
“Jonathan Hive?” Fortune asked.
“That’s me.”
“Okay, you’re up next. We’re going to be filming from camera’s two and three,” he said pointing at a couple of the many setups in the stadium. “The judges all have monitors up there, so if you have the choice, it’s better to play to the cameras than the people.”
“Great,” Jonathan said, mentally re-making his presentation. “Okay, yeah. Thanks.”
“No trouble,” Fortune said. “Any other advice?”
Fortune looked serious for a moment. He was a good looking kid, but maybe a little lost around the eyes.
“You’re the guy who turns into wasps, right? Okay, the guy on camera two is really afraid of bees, so anything you want to do up close to the lens, go for camera three.”
“And that one’s camera three?”
“You got it,” Fortune said. Jonathan redid his routine again.
“Cool. Thanks.”
Jonathan took a deep breath, rose to his feet, and walked forward to the clear area that Jetman had vacated. Jonathan nodded to the judges, flashed a smile at the other aces, and stepped out of his loafers. The grass tickled the soles of his feet.
“Anything you’d like to say? No? Well, then, when you’re ready,” Topper said.
It felt like breathing in—the comfortable swelling of the chest and ribcage—but it didn’t stop. His body widened and became lighter; his field of vision slowly expended. Distantly, he could feel his clothes drop through where his arms and legs had been. A couple bugs were tangled up in them, left behind like nail clippings.
Jonathan rose up above the crowd, seeing them all at once through hundreds of thousands of compound eyes. Hearing their voices even over the hum of his wings. He had no particular form now, and the joy of flying, the freedom of his swarm-shaped body, trilled and vibrated in him; he hadn’t really cut loose in days. He had to focus and think about his routine. He brought his multiform attention to bear on the crowd, picked a woman sitting in clear view of camera three who looked game, and sent a tendril of wasps to her. When they landed on her lap, he could see her stiffen, and then as he moved the tiny bodies to spell out words, relax slightly.
It is ok. Do not be scared. Apostrophes were a real bitch when you were spelling with bugs.
He covered her in a bright green crawling ballgown, then burst back up into the air and sped to the end of the stadium and back, circled around, and then it was time for the grand finale. It was hard to consciously form his body, and his kinesthetic sense was fairly rough, so he sent a couple wasps to sit on top of camera three and concentrated on the view through their eyes.
Slowly, carefully, he adjusted the swarm in to a smaller, tighter, angrily buzzing mass. When the insects were thick enough to block the daylight, he moved. It was like dancing and also like trying to balance a pencil. The swarm that was his flesh took shape—huge, floating, ill-formed letters. EAT AT JOES.
No apostrophe.
He took the swarm back to his fallen clothes, the insects crawling into the spaces within the cloth and pushing gently out to allow another few wasps in and then more and more as the bugs congealed again into flesh. He was tired and exhilarated. He took a bow to the polite clapping. The judges asked a couple of questions—yes, the wasps could sting; there were around a hundred thousand wasps in the swarm; yes, if he flew through insecticide, he would get viciously ill. Digger Downs called him Bugsy, the Harlem Hammer asked about his blog (an extra couple thousand hits if that made it to the final cut), and it was over. He walked back to his seat on the benches.
“Nice,” Joe Twitch said. “But you spelled Joe’s wrong.”
Someone gently tapped Jonathan’s shoulder. The woman he’d volunteered for his demonstration. He looked different now that he could only see her from one angle at a time. “Hey,” Jonathan said, smiling.
“Hey.” She had a nice voice. Sexy. “Jonathan Hive? That’s what you call yourself? Well, Bugsy, if you ever try to feel me up like that again, I’ll kill you. Okay?”
The woman’s hand vanished in a burst of concentrated flame like a blowtorch and then popped back. She smiled, eyes hard, nodded once, and went back to her seat.
Cordelia Chaisson had dreamed about the murder less frequently during the month past. It surprised her she still thought of it even that much; after all, she had seen far worse. Work consumed her; the job with Global Fun & Games sufficiently exhausted her days; laboring on the AIDS/WCV benefit to be held in May at Xavier Desmond’s Jokertown Funhouse took up much of the nights. Most evenings she went to sleep long after the eleven o’clock news. Five in the morning came all too early. There was little time for diversion.
But there were still the occasional bad nights of dreaming:—Coming up out of the Fourteenth Street station, heels clicking smartly on the dirty concrete, traffic muttering down from above. Hearing the voice a few steps up at street level saying, “Just give us the purse, bitch!” Hesitating, then going ahead anyway. Fearing, but—
She heard the second voice, the Aussie accent: “G’day, mates. Some problem here?”
Cordelia emerged from the stairwell into the sweltering night. She saw the instant tableau of two unshaven white punks backing a middle-aged woman into the space between the short row of phone carrels and the plywood butt of a shuttered newsstand. The woman had tight hold of both a yapping black poodle and her handbag.
Sun-burnt and rangy, the man Cordelia assumed was an Aussie faced down the two youths. He wore a sand-colored outfit that looked like a rougher, more authentic version of a Banana Republic ensemble. There was a bright, well-caredfor knife in one hand.
“A problem, sonny?” he repeated.
“No, no problem, dick-head,” said one of the punks. He pulled out a short-barreled pistol from his jacket and shot the Aussie in the face.
It simply happened too quickly for Cordelia to react. As the man fell to the sidewalk, the assailants ran. The woman with the poodle screamed, momentarily harmonizing with the cries of the dog.
Cordelia ran to the man and knelt beside him. She felt for the pulse in his neck. Almost imperceptible. It was probably too late for CPR. She averted her gaze from the blood pooling beneath the man’s head. The hot metallic smell of blood nauseated her. A siren wailed up the scale less than a block away.
“I’ve still got my purse!” the woman cried.
The man’s face twitched. He died. “Shit,” said Cordelia softly, helplessly. There wasn’t a damned thing she could do.
Some kind of trouble now, Cordelia thought, as a darksuited man she didn’t recognize waved her into one of GF&G’s executive offices. Deep shit, maybe. The two women standing by the desk examined a stack of printouts. Red-haired and tough, Polly Rettig was marketing chief for the GF&G satellite service. She was Cordelia’s immediate boss. The other woman was Luz Alcala, vice president for programming and Rettig’s boss. Neither Rettig nor Alcala smiled as they usually did. The man in black stepped back by the door and stood there with his arms folded. Security? Cordelia speculated. “Good morning, Cordelia,” Rettig said. “Please have a seat. We’ll be with you in just a moment.” She turned her attention back to Alcala and pointed out something on the sheet in her hand.
Luz Alcala slowly nodded. “Either we buy it first, or we’re dead in the water. Maybe hire someone good—”
“Don’t even think it,” said Rettig, frowning slightly. “It might become necessary,” Alcala said. “He’s dangerous.” Cordelia tried to keep the bewildered look off her face. “He’s also too powerful.” Folding her hands, Rettig turned toward Cordelia. “Tell me what you know about Australia.”
“I’ve seen everything Peter Weir ever directed,” Cordelia said, momentarily hesitating. What was going on here? “You’ve never been there?”
“New York is the farthest I’ve ever been from home.” Home was Atelier Parish, Louisiana. Home was a place she’d rather not think about. In most respects it didn’t exist.
Rettig was looking at Alcala. “What do you think?”
“I think yes.” The older woman picked up a thick envelope and handed it across the desk to Cordelia. “Open it, please.” She found a passport, a sheaf of airline tickets, an American Express card, and a hefty folder of traveler’s checks. “You’ll need to sign those.” Alcala indicated the checks and the credit card.
Cordelia looked silently up from the smiling image affixed to the first page of the passport. “Nice photo,” she said. “I. don’t remember applying.”
“There was little time,” said Polly Rettig apologetically. “We took liberties.”
“The point is,” said Alcala, “you’re leaving this afternoon for the other side of the world.”
Cordelia felt stunned, then recognized the excitement growing. “All the way to Australia?”
“Commercial flight,” said Alcala. “Brief stops for fuel in L.A., Honolulu, and Auckland. In Sydney you’ll catch an Ansett flight to Melbourne and another plane up to Alice Springs. Then you’ll rent a Land-Rover and drive to Madhi Gap. You’re going to have a full day,” she added dryly.
A thousand things crowded into Cordelia’s mind. “But what about my job here? And I can’t just abandon the benefit-I want to go to New Jersey this weekend to check out Buddy Holley.”
“He can wait till you’re back. The whole benefit can wait,” said Rettig firmly. “PR is fine, but the JADL and the Manhattan AIDS Project don’t pay your salary. This is Global Fun & Games business.”
“But—”
“It is important.” Voice smoothly modulated, Alcala made it sound like a pronouncement.
“But what is it?” She felt as if she were listening to Auntie Alice on Radio Wonderland. “What’s all this about?” Alcala seemed to be picking her words carefully. “You’ve seen the PR flacking GF&G’s plan to inaugurate a worldwide entertainment service via satellite.”
Cordelia nodded. “ I thought that was years down the road.”
“It was. The.only thing holding back the plan was the investment capital.”
“We’ve got the money,” Rettig said. “We have the help of allied investors. Now we need the satellite time and the ground stations to pipe our programming down to the earth.”
“Unfortunately,” said Alcala, “we have sudden competition for securing the services of the commercial facility in the telecommunications complex in Madhi Gap. A man named Leo Barnett.”
“The TV evangelist?” Alcala nodded.
“The ace-baiting, intolerant, psychotic, species-chauvinist son of a bitch,” said Rettig with sudden passion. “That TV evangelist. Fire-breather, some call him.”
“And you’re sending me to Madhi Gap?” said Cordelia excitedly. Incredible, she thought. It was too good to be true. “Thank you! Thank you very much. I’ll do a terrific job.”
Rettig and Alcala glanced at each other. “Hold on,” said Alcala. “You’re going along to assist, but you’re not going to be negotiating.”
It was too good to be true. Shit, she thought. “Meet Mr. Carlucci,” said Alcala.
“Marry,” said a nasal voice from behind Cordelia. “Mr. Carlucci,” Alcala repeated.
Cordelia turned and took another, closer look at the man she had dismissed as some kind of hired help. Medium height, compact build, styled black hair. Carlucci smiled. He looked like a thug. An amiable one, but still a thug. His suit didn’t look as if it had come off the rack. Now that she looked more closely, the coat looked expensively tailored to a T
Carlucci extended his hand. “It’s Marty,” he said. “We got to spend a day and a night on a plane, we might as well be friendly about it, you know?”
Cordelia sensed disapproval from the two older women. She took Carlucci’s hand. She was no jock, but she knew she had a firm grip. Cordelia felt that the man could have squeezed her fingers a lot harder had he wished to. Behind his smile, she sensed a glint of something feral. Not a man to cross.
“Mr. Carlucci,” said Alcala, “represents a large investors’ group that has entered into partnership with us in the matter of acquiring a major share in global satellite entertainment. They are providing a portion of the capital with which we expect to set up the initial satellite net.”
“A lot of bucks,” said Carlucci. “But we’ll all make it back and probably ten times as much in about five years. With our resources and your ability to”—he grinned—“acquire talent, I figure there’s no way we can lose. Everybody makes out.”
“But we do wish to saturate the Australian market,” said Alcala, “and the ground station is already in place. All we need is a signed letter of intent to sell.”
“ I can be very persuasive.” Carlucci grinned again. To Cordelia the expression looked like a barracuda showing its teeth. Or maybe a wolf. Something predatory. And definitely persuasive.
“You’d better go pack, dear,” said Alcala. “Try for one carry-on bag. Enough clothes to last a week. One sophisticated outfit; a more comfortable one for the outback. Anything else you need you can buy there. Alice Springs is isolated, but it is not an uncivilized place.”
“It ain’t Brooklyn,” said Carlucci. “No,” said Alcala. “No, it isn’t.”
“Be at Tomlin,” said Rettig, “by four.”
Cordelia glanced from Carlucci to Rettig to Alcala. “ I meant it before. Thank you. I’ll do a good job.”
“I know you will, dear,” said Alcala, her dark eyes suddenly looking tired.
“I hope so,” Rettig said.
Cordelia knew she was dismissed. She turned and headed for the door.
“See you on the plane,” said Carlucci. “First class all the way. Hope you don’t mind smoking.”
She hesitated only momentarily, then said firmly, “I do.” For the first time Carlucci frowned. Polly Rettig grinned. Even Luz Alcala smiled.
Cordelia lived in an apartment with a single roommate in a high rise on Maiden Lane near the Woolworth Building and Jetboy’s Tomb. Veronica wasn’t home, so Cordelia scrawled a brief note. It took her about ten minutes to pack what she thought she’d need on the trip. Then she called Uncle Jack and asked whether he could meet her before she hopped the Tomlin Express. He could. It was one of his days off.
Jack Robicheaux was waiting for her in the diner when she entered from the avenue. No surprise. He knew the transit system below Manhattan better than anyone else.
Every time Cordelia saw her uncle, she felt as if she were looking into a mirror. True, he was male, twenty-five years older, sixty pounds heavier. But the dark hair and eyes were the same. So were the cheekbones. The family resemblance was undeniable. And then there was the less tangible similarity. Both had despaired of any kind of normal growing up in Louisiana; each in young adulthood had fled Cajun country and run away to New York City.
“Hey, Cordie.” Jack rose to his feet when he saw her, gave her a firm hug and a kiss on the cheek.
“I’m going to Australia, Uncle Jack.” She hadn’t meant to give away the surprise, but it burst out anyway.
“No kidding.” Jack grinned. “When?”
“Today.”
“Yeah?” Jack sat down and leaned back in the green Naugahyde seat. “How come?”
She told him about the meeting.
Jack frowned at the mention of Carlucci. “You know what I think? Suzanne-Bagabond-has been hanging around Rosemary and the DAs office, feeding me a little spare-time work. I don’t hear everything, but I catch enough. I think maybe we’re talking about Gambione cash here.”
“GF&G wouldn’t go for that,” said Cordelia. “They’re legitimate, even if they do funnel money from the skin mags.”
“Desperation breeds a special blindness. Especially if the money’s been laundered through Havana. I know Rosemary’s been trying to steer the Gambiones into legitimate enterprise. I guess satellite TV qualifies.”
“That’s my job you’re talking about,” said Cordelia. “Better than hooking for the big E”
Cordelia knew her cheeks were coloring. Jack looked repentant. “Sorry,” he said. “ I wasn’t trying to be bitchy.”
“Listen, this was really a big day for me. I just wanted to share it.”
“I appreciate that.” Jack leaned across the Formica table. “ I know you’re gonna do just fine down under. But if you need any help, if you need anything at all, just call.”
“Halfway around the world?”
He nodded. “Doesn’t matter how far. If I can’t be there in person, maybe I can suggest something. And if you really need a fourteen-foot ‘gator in the flesh”—he grinned—“give me about eighteen hours. I know you can hold any fort that long.”
She knew he meant it. That was why Jack was the only person in the Robicheaux clan who meant anything at all to her. “I’ll be okay. It’s going to be terrific.” She got up from the booth.
“No coffee?”
“No time.” She hefted the soft leather carry-on case. “I need the next train to Tomlin. Please tell C.C. good-bye for me. Bagabond and the cats too.”
Jack nodded. “Still want the kitten?”
“You better believe it.”
“I’ll walk you to the station.” Jack got up and took her case. She resisted only a moment before smiling and allowing him.
“There’s something I want you to remember,” said Jack. “Don’t talk to strangers? Take my pill? Eat green vegetables?”
“Shut up,” he said fondly. “Your power and mine, they may be related, but they’re still different.”
“I’m not as likely to get turned into a suitcase,” said Cordelia.
He ignored her. “You’ve used the reptile level in your brain to control some pretty violent situations. You killed folks to protect yourself. Don’t forget you can use the power for life too.”
Cordelia felt bewildered. “I don’t know how. It scares me. I just would rather ignore it.”
“But you can’t. Remember what I’m saying.” Braving cabs, they crossed the avenue to the subway entrance. “Ever see much Nicolas Roeg?” Cordelia said. “Everything,” said Jack.
“Maybe this will be my ‘walkabout.”‘ “Just make it back in one piece.”
She smiled. “If I can deal with a bull alligator here, I figure I can handle a bunch of crocodiles in Australia just fine.”
Jack smiled too. It was a warm, friendly expression. But it showed all his teeth. Jack was a shape-shifter and Cordelia wasn’t, but the family resemblance was unmistakable.
When she found Marty Carlucci at the United terminal at Tomlin, Cordelia discovered the man was carrying an expensive alligator overnight bag and a similarly appointed attache case. She was less than pleased, but there wasn’t much she could say.
The woman working the computer at the ticketing counter gave them seats one row apart in first class smoking and nonsmoking. Cordelia suspected it wouldn’t make much of a difference to her lungs, but felt she had won a moral decision. Also she suspected she’d feel more comfortable not having to sit with her shoulder rubbing up against his.
A good deal of the excitement of travel had worn off by the time the 747 set down at LAX. Cordelia spent much of the next two hours looking out at the early evening darkness and wondering if she’d ever get to see the La Brea Tar Pits, Watts Towers, Disneyland, Giant Insect National Monument, the Universal tour. She bought some paperbacks in the gift shop. Finally Carlucci and she were called for the Air New Zealand flight. As with the first leg, they had requested first-class seats on either side of the terminator dividing active smoke from passive.
Carlucci snored much of the way to Honolulu. Cordelia couldn’t sleep at all. She divided her time between the new Jim Thompson mystery and staring out the window at the moonlit Pacific thirty-six thousand feet below.
Both Carlucci and she converted some of their traveler’s checks into Australian dollars on the concourse in Honolulu. “The numbers are good.” Carlucci gestured at the conversion chart taped to the window of the change booth. “ I checked the paper before we left the States.”
“We’re still in the States.” He ignored her.
Just to make conversation, she said, “You know a lot about finance?”
Pride filled his voice. “Wharton School of Finance and Commerce. Full ride. Family paid for it.”
“You’ve got rich parents?” He ignored her.
The Air New Zealand jumbo loaded and took off, and the stewards fed the passengers one last time in preparation for tucking into the long night to Auckland. Cordelia switched on her reading light when the cabin illumination dimmed. Finally she heard Carlucci grumble from the row ahead, “Get some sleep, kiddo. jet lag’s gonna be bad enough. You got a lotta Pacific to cross yet.”
Cordelia realized the man had a valid point. She waited a few more minutes so that it would look more like it was her own idea, then switched off the light. She pulled the blanket tight around her and scrunched into the seat so she could look out the port. The travel excitement was almost all gone now. She realized she was indeed exhausted.
She saw no clouds. Just the shining ocean. She found it astonishing that anything could be so apparently endless. So enigmatic. It occurred to her that the Pacific could swallow up a 747 without more than the tiniest ripple.
Eer-moonans!
The words meant nothing to her. Eer-moonans.
The phrase was so soft it could have been a whisper in her mind.
Cordelia’s eyes clicked open. Something was very wrong. The reassuring vibration of the jumbo’s engines was somehow distorted, blended with the sigh of a rising wind. She tried to throw the suddenly strangling blanket away and clawed her way up the back of the seat ahead, nails biting into the cool leather.
When she looked down the other side, Cordelia sharply drew in her breath. She was staring into the wide, surprised, dead eyes of Marty Carlucci. His body still faced forward.
But his head had been screwed around 180 degrees. Viscid blood slowly dripped from his ears, his mouth. It had pooled at the bottom of his eyes and was oozing down over his cheekbones.
The sound of her scream closed in around Cordelia’s head. It was like crying out in a barrel. She finally struggled free of the blanket and stared unbelievingly down the aisle.
She still stood in the Air New Zealand 747. And she stood in the desert. One was overlaid on the other. She moved her feet and felt the gritty texture of the sand, heard its rasp. The aisle was dotted with scrubby plants moving as the wind continued to rise.
The jumbo’s cabin stretched into a distance her eye couldn’t quite follow, diminishing endlessly into perspective as it approached the tail section. Cordelia saw no one moving.
“Uncle Jack!” she cried out. There was, of course, no answer.
Then she heard the howling. It was a hollow ululation rising and falling, gaining in volume. Far down the cabin, in the tunnel that was also the desert, she saw the shapes leaping toward her. The creatures bounded like wolves, first in the aisle, then scrambling across the tops of the seats. Cordelia smelled a rank, decaying odor. She scrambled into the aisle, recoiling until her spine was flush against the forward bulkhead.
The creatures were indistinct in the half-light. She couldn’t even be sure of their numbers. They were like wolves, claws clicking and tearing on the seats, but their heads were all wrong. The snouts were blunted off, truncated. Ruffs of shining spines ringed their necks. Their eyes were flat black holes deeper than the surrounding night.
Cordelia stared at the teeth. There were just too many long needle fangs to fit comfortably into those mouths. Teeth that champed and clashed, throwing out a spray of dark saliva.
The teeth reached for her.
Move, goddamnit! The voice was in her head. It was her own voice. Move!
—as teeth and claws sought her throat.
Cordelia hurled herself to the side. The lead wolfcreature smashed into the steel bulkhead, howled in pain, staggered upright confusedly as the second leaping monster rammed into its ribs. Cordelia scrambled past the confusion of horrors into the narrow galleyway.
Focus! Cordelia knew what she had to do. She wasn’t Chuck Norris nor did she have an Uzi at hand. In her instant of respite as the wolf-creatures snarled and spat at one another, she wished again that Jack were here. But he wasn’t. Concentrate, she told herself.
One of the blunted muzzles poked around the corner of the galley. Cordelia stared into the pair of deadly matte-black eyes. “Die, you son of a bitch,” she cried aloud. She sensed the power uncoiling from the reptile level of her brain, felt the force flow into the alien mind of the monster, striking directly for the brain stem. She shut off its heart and respiration. The creature struggled toward her, then collapsed forward on its clawed paws.
The next monster appeared around the corner. How many of them were there? She tried to think. Six, eight, she wasn’t sure. Another blunt muzzle protruded. Another set of claws. More gleaming teeth. Die! She felt the power draining from her. This was no feeling she’d known before. It was like trying to jog in quicksand.
The bodies of the wolf-creatures piled up. The surviving monsters scrambled over the barrier, lunging at her. The final one made it all the way into the galley.
Cordelia tried to shut down its brain, felt the power waning as the creature launched itself down the heap of corpses. As the toothy jaws reached for her throat, she swung a double fist and tried to smash them aside. One of the spines from the thing’s ruff slid into the back of her left hand. Steaming spittle spattered her face.
She felt the staccato rhythm of the wolf-creature’s breathing hesitate and cease as its body slumped onto her feet. But now she felt a chill spreading across her hand and up her arm. Cordelia grasped the spine with her right hand and wrenched it free. The shaft came loose and she hurled it from her, but the coldness didn’t abate.
It’ll reach my heart, she thought, and that was the last thing that passed through her mind. Cordelia felt herself collapsing, falling across the crazy-quilt arrangement of monstrous bodies. The wind filled up her ears; the darkness took her eyes.
“Hey! You okay, kid? Whattsa matter?” The accent was all New York. It was Marty Carlucci’s voice. Cordelia struggled to open her eyes. The man bent over her, breath minty with recent toothpaste. He grasped her shoulders and shook her slightly.
“Eer-moonans,” Cordelia said weakly. “Huh?” Carlucci looked baffled. “You’re ... dead.”
“Damn straight,” he said. “I don’t know how many hours I slept, but I feel like shit. How about you?”
Memories of the night slammed back. “What’s going on?” Cordelia said.
“We’re landing. Plane’s about half an hour out of Auckland. You wanna use the can, get cleaned up and all, you better do it quick.” He took his fingers away from her shoulders. “Okay?”
“Okay.” Cordelia sat up shakily. Her head felt as if it were stuffed with sodden cotton. “Everybody’s okay? The plane isn’t full of monsters?”
Carlucci stared at her. “Just tourists. Hey, you have some bad dreams? Want some coffee?”
“Coffee. Thanks.” She grabbed her bag and struggled past him into the aisle. “Right. Nightmares. Bad ones.”
In the restroom she alternated splashing cold and hot water on her face. Brushing her teeth helped. She slugged down three Midol and unsnarled her hair. Cordelia did her best with makeup. Finally she stared at herself in the mirror and shook her head. “Shit,” she told herself, “you look thirty”
Her left hand itched. She raised it in front of her face and stared at the inflamed puncture wound. Maybe she had caught her hand on something when she’d moved in her sleep, and that had translated into the dream. Perhaps it was stigmata. Either story sounded equally implausible. Maybe this was some weird new menstrual side effect. Cordelia shook her head. Nothing made sense. Weakness flooded over her and she had to sit down on the lid of the toilet. The inside of her skull felt scoured. Maybe she had spent much of the night battling monsters.
Cordelia realized someone was knocking on the door of the restroom. Others wanted to get ready for New Zealand. So long as they weren’t wolf-creatures ...
The morning was sunny. The North Island of New Zealand was intensely green. The 747 touched down with scarcely a bump and then sat at the end of the runway for twenty minutes until the agriculture people climbed on board. Cordelia hadn’t expected that. She watched bemusedly as the smiling young men in their crisp uniforms walked down the aisles, an aerosol jet of pest-killer fogging from the can in each hand. Something about this reminded her perversely of what she’d read of the final moments of Jetboy.
Carlucci must have been thinking something similar. Having promised not to smoke, he’d moved into the seat beside her. “Sure hope it’s pesticide,” he said. “Be a really nasty joke if it was the wild card virus.”
After the passengers had murmured, griped, wheezed, and coughed, the jumbo taxied to the terminal and everyone debarked. The pilot told them they had two hours before the plane left on the thousand-mile leg to Sydney.
“Just time to stretch our legs, buy some cards, make some phone calls,” said Carlucci. Cordelia welcomed the thought of getting some exercise.
In the main terminal Carlucci went off to place his trans-Pacific calls. The terminal seemed extraordinarily crowded. Cordelia saw camera crews in the distance. She headed for the doors to the outside.
From behind her she heard, “Cordelia! Ms. Chaisson!” The voice wasn’t Carlucci’s. Who the hell? She turned and saw a vision of flowing red hair framing a face that looked vaguely like Errol Flynn’s in Captain Blood. But Flynn had never worn such bright clothing, not even in the colorized Adventures of Captain Fabian.
Cordelia stopped and smiled. “So,” she said. “Do you like new wave music any better these days?”
“No,” said Dr. Tachyon. “No, I’m afraid I do not.”
“I fear,” said the tall, winged woman standing beside Tachyon, “that our good Tacky will never progress much beyond Tony Bennett.” A simply cut, voluminous blue silk dress whispered softly around her. Cordelia blinked. Peregrine was hard to mistake.
“Unfair, my dear.” Tachyon smiled at his companion. “I have my favorites among contemporary performers. I’m rather fond of Placido Domingo.” He turned back toward Cordelia.
“I’m forgetting my manners. Cordelia, have you formally met Peregrine?”
Cordelia took the proffered hand. “I’ve had a call in to your agent for weeks now. Nice to see you.” Shut up, she said to herself. Don’t be rude.
Peregrine’s dazzling blue eyes regarded her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Is this about the benefit at Dez’s club? I’m afraid I’ve been incredibly busy tidying up other projects in the midst of getting ready for this trip.”
“Peregrine,” said Tachyon, “this young woman is Cordelia Chaisson. We know each other from the clinic. She’s come frequently with friends to visit C.C. Ryder.”
“C.C.’s going to be able to do the Funhouse,” said Cordelia.
“That would be fabulous,” said Peregrine. “I’ve admired her work for a long time.”
“Perhaps we could all sit down over a drink,” said Tachyon. He smiled at Cordelia. “There has been a delay with arranging the senator’s ground transport into Auckland. I’m afraid were stranded at the airport for a bit.” The man glanced back over his shoulder. “As well, I’m afraid we are trying to avoid the rest of the party. The aircraft does get a bit close.”
Cordelia felt the tempting proximity of fresh air starting to drift away. “I’ve got just about two hours,” she said, hesitating. “Okay, let’s have a drink.” As they walked toward the restaurant, Cordelia didn’t see Carlucci. He could get along fine by himself. What she did notice was the number of stares following them. No doubt some of the attention was being paid to Tachyon-his hair and wardrobe always ensured that. But mostly people were looking at Peregrine. Probably the New Zealanders weren’t all that accustomed to seeing a tall, gorgeous woman with functional wings folded against her back. She was spectacular, Cordelia admitted to herself. It would be great to have the looks, the stature, the presence. At once Cordelia felt very young. Almost like a kid. Inadequate. Damn it.
Cordelia ordinarily took her coffee with milk. But if black would help clear her head, then she’d give it a try. She insisted that the three of them wait for a window table. If she wasn’t going to breathe the outside air, at least she could sit within inches of it. The colors of the unfamiliar trees reminded her of photos she’d seen of the Monterey Peninsula.
“So,” she said after they’d given orders to the waitress, “ I guess I should say something about a small world. How’s the junket? I saw some pictures of the Great Ape on the eleven o’clock news before I left.”
Tachyon rambled on about Senator Hartmann’s roundthe-world tour. Cordelia remembered reading about it interminably in the Post on the subway, but had been so busy with the Funhouse benefit, she hadn’t paid much attention. “Sounds like a backbreaker,” she said when Tachyon finished his gloss.
Peregrine smiled wanly. “It hasn’t exactly been a vacation. I think Guatemala was my favorite. Have your people thought of climaxing the benefit with a human sacrifice?”
Cordelia shook her head. “ I think we’re going for a little more festive tone, even considering the occasion.”
“Listen,” Peregrine said. “I’ll do what I can with my agent. In the meantime maybe I can introduce you to a few folks who’ll do you some good. Do you know Radha O’Reilly? Elephant Girl?” At Cordelia’s head shake she continued, “when she turns into a flying elephant, it’s smoother than anything Doug Henning’s dreamed of. You ought to talk to Fantasy too. You could use a dancer like her.”
“That’d be terrific,” Cordelia said. “Thank you.” She felt the frustration of wanting to do everything herself—showing everyone and yet knowing when to accept the aid that was being graciously extended.
“So,” Tachyon said, breaking in on her thoughts. “And what are you doing here so far from home?” His expression looked expectant; his eyes gleamed with honest curiosity. Cordelia knew she couldn’t get away with claiming she’d won the trip for selling Girl Scout cookies. She opted for honesty. “I’m going to Australia with a guy from GF&G to try and buy a. satellite ground station before it gets scarfed up by a TV preacher.” said Tachyon. “Would that evangelist be Leo Barnett, by chance?”
Cordelia nodded.
“I hope you succeed.” Tachyon frowned. “Our friend Fire-breather’s power is growing at a dangerously exponential rate. I, for one, would prefer to see the growth of his media empire retarded.”
“Just yesterday,” said Peregrine, “I heard from Chrysalis that some of Barnett’s youth-group thugs are hanging out in the Village and beating the stuffing out of anybody they think is both a joker and vulnerable.”
“Die Juden,” Tachyon murmured. The two women glanced questioningly at him. “History.” He sighed, then said to Cordelia, “Whatever help you need in competing with Barnett, let us know. I think you’ll find a great deal of support from both aces and jokers.”
“Hey,” said an overly familiar voice from behind Cordelia’s scapula. “What’s happening?”
Without looking around Cordelia said, “Marty Carlucci, meet Dr. Tachyon and Peregrine.” To the latter she said, “Marty’s my chaperon.”
“Hiya.” Carlucci took the fourth chair. “Yeah, I know you,” he said to Tachyon. He stared at Peregrine, frankly surveying her. All of her. “You I’ve seen a lot. I got tapes of every show you’ve done for years.” His eyes narrowed. “Say, you pregnant?”
“Thank you,” said Peregrine. “Yes.” She stared him down.
“Uh, right,” said Carlucci. He turned to Cordelia. “Kid, come on. We gotta get back on the plane.” More firmly, “Now!”
Good-byes were said. Tachyon volunteered to pay for the coffee. “Good luck,” Peregrine said, aimed specifically at Cordelia. Carlucci seemed preoccupied, not noticing.
As the two of them walked toward the boarding gate, he said, “Dumb fuckin’ bitch.”
Cordelia stopped dead still. “What?”
“Not you.” Carlucci took her elbow roughly and propelled her toward the security checkpoint. “That joker who sells info-Chrysalis. I ran into her by the phones. I figured I’d save the price of a call.”
“So?” said Cordelia.
“One of these days she’s gonna get her invisible tits caught in the wringer and there’s going to be real bright blood all over the laundry room wall. I told New York that too.”
Cordelia waited, but he didn’t elaborate. “So?” she said again.
“What did you tell those two geeks?” said Carlucci. His voice sounded dangerous.
“Nothing,” said Cordelia, listening to the internal warning bells. “Nothing at all.”
“Good.” Carlucci grimaced. He mumbled, “She’s gonna be fish food, I swear it.”
Cordelia stared at Carlucci. The sheer conviction in his voice kept him from appearing a comic-opera gangster. She thought he meant what he was saying. He reminded her of the wolf-creatures in last night’s maybe-dream. All that was missing was the dark spittle.
Carlucci’s mood didn’t improve on the flight to Australia. In Sydney they cleared customs and transferred to an A-300 Airbus. In Melbourne, Cordelia finally got to stick her head out of doors for a few minutes. The air smelled fresh. She admired the DC-3 suspended from a cable in front of the terminal. Then her companion fussed at her to get to the proper Ansett gate. This time they were seated on a 727. Cordelia was glad she wasn’t trusting her bag to checked luggage. Part of Marty Carlucci’s gloom involved speculation that his checked bag was going to get missent to Fiji or some other improper destination.
“So why didn’t you carry everything on?” Cordelia had said.
“There’s some stuff you can’t carry on.”
The 727 droned north, away from the coastal greenery. Cordelia had the window seat. She stared down at the apparently unending desert. She squinted, looking for roads, railroad tracks, any other sign of human intervention. Nothing. The flat brownish-tan wasteland was dotted with cloud shadows.
When word crackled over the cabin speakers that the plane was approaching Alice Springs, Cordelia realized only after she’d performed the actions that she had stowed the tray table, cinched her seat belt, and shoved her bag back under the seat ahead. It had all become utterly automatic.
The airport was busier than she’d expected. Somehow she had anticipated a single dusty runway with a galvanized tin shack beside it. A TAA flight had landed minutes before and the terminal was crowded with people who clearly resembled tourists.
“We rent the Land-Rover now?” she asked Carlucci. The man was leaning impatiently over the luggage belt. “Uh-uh. We go into town. I’ve got us reservations at the Stuart Arms. We’re both getting a good night’s sleep. I don’t want to be any nastier than I have to be tomorrow at the meeting. It’s all set up for three o’clock,” he added as an apparent afterthought. “The lag’s gonna catch up with us real fast. I suggest you get a good supper with me when we get to Alice. Then it’s beddy-bye till ten or eleven tomorrow morning. If we pick up the rental and get out of Alice by noon, we should hit the Gap in plenty of time. There, you son of a bitch!” He grabbed his alligator case from the conveyor. “Okay, let’s go.”
They took an Ansett coach into Alice. It was half an hour into town and the air-conditioning labored hard against the baking heat outside. Cordelia stared out the window as the bus approached downtown Alice Springs. At first glance it didn’t look terribly different from a small, arid American city. Certainly Baton Rouge was more alien than this, Cordelia thought. It didn’t look at all as she’d expected from seeing both versions of A Town Like Alice.
The air transit terminal turned out to be across the street from the turn-of-the-century architecture of the Stuart Arms, a fact for which Cordelia was grateful. It was getting dark as the passengers climbed down to the pavement and claimed their bags. Cordelia glanced at her watch. The numbers meant absolutely nothing. She needed to reset to local time. And change the date as well, she reminded herself. She wasn’t even sure what day of the week it was now. Her head had started to throb when she plunged into the heat that lingered even while the dark was falling. She thought longingly of being able to lie straight, stretched out on clean sheets. After she’d had a long bath. She checked that. The bath could wait until she’d slept for twenty or thirty hours. At least.
“Okay, kiddo,” said Carlucci. They were standing in front of the antique registration desk. “Here’s your key.” He paused. “Sure you wouldn’t like to shave expenses for GF&G and stay in my room?” Cordelia didn’t have the energy to smile wanly. “Nope,” she said, taking the key from his hand.
“You wanna know something? You’re not on this picnic just because the Fortunato broads think you’re such hot shit.” What was he talking about? She used enough energy to glance at him.
“I’ve seen you around the GF&G offices. I liked what I saw. I put in the word.”
Cordelia sighed. Aloud.
“Okay,” he said. “Hey, no offense. I’m bushed too.” Carlucci picked up the alligator bag. “Let’s get the stuff stowed and catch supper.” There was a LIFT OUT OF ORDER sign on the elevator. He turned wearily toward the staircase.
“Second floor,” said Carlucci. “At least that’s a goddamn blessing.” They passed a mimeographed poster in the stairwell advertising a band called Gondwanaland. “Maybe after we eat, you wanna go dancing?” Even he didn’t sound all that enthusiastic.
Cordelia didn’t bother to reply.
The landing opened out into a hallway lined with dark wood trim and some unobtrusive glass cases containing aboriginal artifacts. Cordelia glanced at the boomerangs and bull roarers. Doubtless she’d be able to work up a little more interest tomorrow.
Carlucci looked at his key. “The rooms are next to each other. God, I’m looking forward to bagging it. I really am dead.”
A door slammed open behind them. Cordelia caught a quick flash of two dark figures leaping. They were monsters. Later she decided they must have been wearing masks. Ugly masks.
Tired as she was, her reflexes still worked. She’d started to duck to the side when a stiffened forearm caught her across the chest and drove her into one of the glass cases. Glass shattered, shards spraying. Cordelia flailed her arms, trying to keep her equilibrium, as someone or something tried to grapple with her. She thought she heard Marty Carlucci screaming.
Her fingers closed on something hard-the end of a boomerang-as she sensed rather than saw her assailant spin around and spring for her again. She brought the boomerang forward in a whistling arc. Instinct. All instinct. Shit, she thought. I’m going to die.
The sharp edge of the boomerang sliced into the face of her attacker with the sound of a carving knife slicing into a watermelon. Outstretched fingers slapped her neck and dropped away. A body rolled to the floor.
Carlucci! Cordelia turned and saw a dark figure crouched over her colleague. It straightened, stood, started for her, and she realized it was a man. But now she had a little time.
Think! she said to herself. Think think think. Focus. It was as though the power had been blanketed by the smothering layers of fatigue. But it was still there. She concentrated, felt the lowest level of her brain engage and strike out.
Stop, goddamn you!
The figure stopped, staggered, started forward again. And fell. Cordelia knew she’d shut down everything in his autonomic system. The smell as his bowels released made it even worse.
She edged around him and knelt down by Marty Carlucci. He lay on his stomach, looking upward. His head had been screwed around completely, just as it had been in the maybedream. Slightly walleyed, his dead eyes stared past her.
Cordelia rocked back on her heels against the wall, putting her fists to her mouth, feeling her incisors bite into the knuckles. She felt the epinephrine still prickling in her arms and legs. Every nerve seemed raw.
Christ! she thought. What am I gonna do? She looked both ways along the hall. There were no more attackers, no witnesses. She could call Uncle Jack in New York. Or Alcalaor Rettig. She could even try to find Fortunato in Japan. If the number she had was still good. She could attempt to locate Tachyon in Auckland. It came home to her. She was many thousands of miles from anyone she trusted, anyone she even knew.
“What am I gonna do?” This time she muttered it aloud. She scrambled over to Carlucci’s alligator case and clicked the catches open. The man had affected an icy calm at customs. She had no doubt there was a reason. Cordelia tore through the clothing, searching for the weapon she knew had to be there. She opened the case marked “shaver and converter set.” The gun was blued steel and ugly, some kind of snubbed-off, scaled-down automatic weapon. It felt reassuringly heavy in her hand.
Floorboards creaked down in the stairwell. On some level Cordelia caught the scattered words: “... by now he and the bitch should both be dead ...”
She forced herself to get up and step over Marty Carlucci’s corpse. Then she ran.
At the end of the hallway farthest from the main staircase, a window overlooked a fire-stairs. Cordelia slid it open, softly cajoling the window when the pane momentarily stuck in the casement. She skinned through, then turned to shut the window after her. She saw shadows writhing at the other end of the hall. Cordelia ducked and scuttled crabwise to the steps down.
She momentarily wished she’d grabbed her overnight bag. At least she had the passport case with the Amex card and traveler’s checks in the small handbag slung around her shoulder. Cordelia realized she still had the room key clutched in her left hand. She maneuvered it in her fist so that the key thrust out from between her index and middle fingers.
The steps were metal, but they were old and they creaked. Quick and stealthy, Cordelia discovered, were mutually contradictory here.
She saw she was descending into an alley. The noise from the street, about twenty yards distant, was loud and boisterous. At first she thought it sounded like a party. Then she detected undercurrents of anger and pain. The crowd noise rose. Cordelia heard the flat sounds of what she guessed were fists on flesh.
“Terrific,” she muttered. Then it occurred to her that a riot would provide good cover for her escape. She had already started mulling contingency plans. First, stay alive.
Get out of here. Then call Rettig or Alcala and let them know what had happened. They would send someone to replace Carlucci while she stayed out of sight. Wonderful. A brandnew guy in a tailored suit to sign his company’s name on a contract. What was so difficult about that? She could do it. But not if she was dead.
With both key and gun at the ready Cordelia eased down from the bottom step of the fire-stairs and started toward the mouth of the alley. Then she froze. She knew someone was standing directly behind her.
She whirled, driving her left hand forward, aiming the key at a spot she hoped would be right beneath the intruder’s chin. Someone was indeed there. Strong fingers clamped around her wrist, easily soaking up all the forward momentum of her thrust.
The figure pulled her forward into what little light spilled down from the Stuart Arms through the stair gratings. Cordelia brought the gun up and stuck the barrel into her assailant’s belly. It didn’t go far. She pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
She caught a glimpse of dark eyes catching hers. The figure reached forward with its free hand and clicked something on the side of the weapon. A male voice said, “Here, little missy, you left on the safety. Now it will work.”
Cordelia was too astonished to. pull the trigger. “Okay, I get the point. Who are you, and can we get out of here?”
“You can call me Warreen.” Sudden light flooded down from above them, bursting through the gratings, painting quagga stripes of illumination.
Cordelia stared at the bars of light falling across the man’s face. She registered the wild, curly black hair, the hooded eyes as dark as hers, the broad flat nose, the high, sharp cheekbones, the strong lips. He was, her mama would have called him, a man of some color. He was, she also realized, the most striking man she had ever seen. Her daddy would have whipped her for that thought alone.
Footsteps clattered down the fire-stairs.
“Now we get out of here,” Warreen said, steering her toward the alley mouth.
Naturally it wasn’t as easy as that. “There are men there,” said Cordelia. She saw an indeterminate number of men holding what seemed to be sticks. They were waiting, silhouetted against the light from the street.
“So there are.” Warreen grinned and Cordelia caught the flash of white teeth. “Shoot at them, little missy.”
Sounds good to me, Cordelia thought, bringing up the weapon in her right hand. When she pulled the trigger, there was a sound like ripping canvas and bullets screamed off brick. The ragged muzzle flash showed her the men in the alley were now flat in the dirt. She didn’t think she had hit any of them.
“Later we worry about marksmanship,” said Warreen. “Now we go.” He enclosed her left hand in his right, not seeming to notice the key still in place in her fist.
She wondered if they were going to jump from back to back of the prostrate men like Tarzan hopscotching crocodiles in lieu of stepping stones.
They didn’t go anywhere.
Something akin to heat washed over her. It felt like energy flooding through Warreen’s fingers and into her body. The heat seared from the inside out—just like, she thought, a microwave oven.
The world seemed to move sharply two feet to the left and then drop a foot more. The air rotated around her. The night funneled into a blazing speck centered in her chest. Then it was no longer night.
Warreen and she stood on a reddish-brown plain that joined the distant sky in a far, flat horizon. There were occasional hardy-looking plants and a bit of. a breeze. The wind was hot and it eddied the dust.
She realized this was the same plain that had overlaid the cabin of the Air New Zealand jumbo in her nightmare between Honolulu and Auckland.
Cordelia staggered slightly and Warreen caught her arm. “I’ve seen this place before,” she said. “Will the wolf-creatures come?”
“Wolf-creatures?” Warreen looked momentarily puzzled. “Ah, little missy, you mean the Eer-moonans, the longtoothed ones from the shadows.”
“I guess so. Lots of teeth? Run in packs? They’ve got rows of quills around their necks.” Holding the gun loosely, Cordelia massaged the inflamed place on the back of her left hand.
Warreen frowned and examined the wound. “Pierced by a quill? You’re very fortunate. Their venom is usually fatal.”
“Maybe us ‘gator types have natural immunity,” Cordelia said, smiling wanly. Warreen looked politely puzzled. “Never mind. I guess I’m just lucky.”
He nodded. “Indeed so, little missy.”
“What’s this ‘little missy’ crap?” Cordelia said. “ I didn’t want to take time to ask back in the alley.”
Warreen looked startled, then grinned widely. “The European ladies seem to like it. It feeds those delicious colonial impulses, you know? Sometimes I still talk like I’m a guide.”
“I’m not European,” said Cordelia. “I’m a Cajun, an American.”
“Same thing to us.” Warreen continued to grin. “Yank’s same as a European. No difference. You’re all tourists here. So what should I call you?”
“Cordelia.”
His expression became serious as he leaned forward and took the gun from her hand. He examined it closely, gingerly working the action, then clicking the safety back on. “Scaled down H and K full auto. Pretty expensive hardware, Cordelia. Going shooting dingos?” He gave her back the weapon.
She let it dangle from her hand. “It belonged to the guy I came to Alice Springs with. He’s dead.”
“At the hotel?” said Warreen. “The minions of the Murgamuggai? Word was out, she was going to ice the agent of the evangelist.”
“Who?”
“The trap-door spider woman. Not a nice lady. She’s tried to kill me for years. Since I was a kid.” He said it matter-of-factly. Cordelia thought he still looked like a kid.
“Why?” she said, involuntarily shivering. If she had any phobia, it was spiders. She coughed as the wind kicked red dust up into her face.
“Started as clan vengeance. Now it’s something else.” Warreen seemed to reflect, then added, “She and I both have some powers. I think she feels there is space in the outback for only one such. Very shortsighted.”
“What kind of powers?” said Cordelia.
“You are full of questions. So am I. Perhaps we can trade knowledge on our walk.”
“Walk?” said Cordelia a bit stupidly. Once again events threatened to outstrip her ability to comprehend them. “Where?”
“Uluru.”
“Where’s that?”
“There.” Warreen pointed toward the horizon.
The sun was directly overhead. Cordelia had no idea which compass direction was indicated. “There’s nothing there. Just a lot of countryside that looks like where they shot Road Warrior.”
“There will be.” Warreen had started walking. He was already a dozen paces away. His voice drifted back on the wind. “Shake a pretty leg, little missy.”
Deciding she had little choice, Cordelia followed. “Agent of the evangelist?” she muttered. That wasn’t Marty. Somebody had made a bad mistake.
“Where are we?” said Cordelia. The sky was dotted with small cumulus, but none of the cloud-shadows ever seemed to shade her. She wished mightily that they did.
“The world,” said Warreen. “It’s not my world.”
“The desert, then.”
“ I know it’s the desert,” said Cordelia. “I can see it’s the desert. I can feel it. The heat’s a dead giveaway. But what desert is it?”
“It is the land of Baiame,” said Warreen. “This is the great Nullarbor Plain.”
“Are you sure?” Cordelia scrubbed sweat from her forehead with the strip of fabric she had carefully torn away from the hem of her Banana Republic skirt. “ I looked at the map on the plane all the way up from Melbourne. The distances don’t make sense. Shouldn’t this be the Simpson Desert?”
“Distances are different in the Dreamtime,” Warreen said simply.
“The Dreamtime?” What am I in, a Peter Weir movie? she thought. “As in the myth?”
“No myth,” said her companion. “We are now where reality was, is, and will be. We are in the origin of all things.”
“Right.” I am dreaming, Cordelia thought. I’m dreamingor I’m dead and this is the last thing my brain cells are creating before everything flares and goes black.
“:All things in the shadow world were created here first,” said Warreen. “Birds, creatures, grass, the ways of doing things, the taboos that must be observed.”
Cordelia looked around her. There was little to see. “These are the originals?” she said. “I’ve only seen the copies before?”
He nodded vigorously.
“ I don’t see any dune buggies,” she said a bit petulantly, feeling the heat. “ I don’t see any airliners or vending machines full of ice-cold Diet Pepsi.”
He answered her seriously. “Those are only variations. Here is where everything begins.”
I’m dead, she thought glumly. “I’m hot,” she said. “I’m tired. How far do we have to walk?”
“A distance.” Warreen kept striding along effortlessly. Cordelia stopped and set hands to hips. “Why should I go along?”
“If you don’t,” Warreen said back over his shoulder, “then you shall die.”
“Oh.” Cordelia started walking again, having to run a few steps in order to catch up with the man. The image she couldn’t get out of her head was that of cold cans of soda, the moisture beading on the aluminum outsides. She ached to hear the click and hiss as the tabs peeled back. And the bubbles, the taste ...
“Keep walking,” said Warreen.
“How long have we been walking?” said Cordelia. She glanced up and shaded her eyes. The sun was measurably closer to the horizon. Shadows stretched in back of Warreen and her.
“Are you tired?” said her companion. “I’m exhausted.”
“Do you need to test?”
She thought about that. Her own conclusion surprised her. “No. No, I don’t think I do. Not yet, anyway.” Where was the energy coming from? She was exhausted-and yet strength seemed to rise up into her, as though she were a plant taking nourishment from the earth. “This place is magical.”
Warreen nodded matter-of-factly. “Yes, it is.”
“However,” she said, “ I am hungry”
“You don’t need food, but I’ll see to it.”
Cordelia heard a sound apart from the wind and the padding of her own feet on the dusty soil. She turned and saw a brownish-gray kangaroo hopping along, easily pacing them. “I’m hungry enough to eat one of those,” she said.
The kangaroo stared at her from huge chocolate eyes. “I should hope not,” it said.
Cordelia closed her mouth with a click. She stared back. Warreen smiled at the kangaroo and said courteously,
“Good afternoon, Mirram. Will we shortly find shade and water?”
“Yes,” said the kangaroo. “Sadly, the hospitality is being hoarded by a cousin of the Gurangatch.”
“At least,” said Warreen, “it is not a bunyip.”
“That is true,” agreed the kangaroo.
“Will I find weapons?”
“Beneath the tree,” said the kangaroo.
“Good,” Warreen said with relief. “ I wouldn’t relish wrestling a monster with only my hands and teeth.”
“ I wish you well,” said the kangaroo. “And you,” it said to Cordelia, “be at peace.” The creature turned at right angles to their path and bounded into the desert where it soon was lost to sight.
“Talking kangaroos?” said Cordelia. “Bunyips? Gurnagatches?”
“Gurangatch,” Warreen corrected her. “Something of both lizard and fish. It is, of course, a monster.”
She was mentally fitting pieces together. “And it’s hogging an oasis.”
“Spot on.”
“Couldn’t we avoid it?”
“No matter what trail we follow,” Warreen said, “ I think it will encounter us.” He shrugged. “It’s just a monster.”
“Right.” Cordelia was glad she still had tight hold of the H and K mini. The steel was hot and slippery in her hand. “Just a monster,” she mumbled through dry lips.
Cordelia had no idea how Warreen found the pond and the tree. So far as she could tell, they followed a perfectly straight path. A dot appeared in the sunset distance. It grew as they approached it. Cordelia saw a tough-looking desert oak streaked with charcoal stripes. It seemed to have been struck by lightning more than once and looked as if it had occupied this patch of hardscrabble soil for centuries. A belt of grass surrounded the tree. A gentle slope led down to reeds and then the edge of a pool about thirty feet across. “Where’s the monster?” said Cordelia.
“Hush.” Warreen strode up to the tree and began to strip. His muscles were lean and beautifully defined. His skin shimmered with sweat, glowing almost a dark blue in the dusk. When he skinned out of the jeans, Cordelia at first turned away, then decided this was not an occasion for politeness, whether false or otherwise.
God, she thought. He’s gorgeous. Depending on gender, her kin would have been either scandalized or triggered to a lynching impulse. Even though she had been reared to abhor such a thought, she wanted to reach and lightly touch him. This, she abruptly realized, was not like her at all. Although she was surrounded in New York by people of other colors, they still made her nervous. Warreen was engendering that reaction, yet it was vastly different in nature and intensity. She did want to touch him.
Naked, Warreen neatly folded his clothes and set them in a pile beneath the tree. In turn, he picked up a variety of objects from the grass. He inspected a long club, then set it back down. Finally he straightened with a spear in one hand, a boomerang in the other. He looked fiercely at Cordelia. “ I can be no more ready.”
She felt a chill like ice water run through her. It was a sensation both of fear and of excitement. “Now what?” She tried to keep her voice low and steady, but it squeaked slightly. God, she hated that.
Warreen didn’t have a chance to answer. He gestured toward the dark pool. Ripples had appeared on the far side. The center of those ripples seemed to be moving toward them. A few bubbles burst on the surface.
The water was shrugged aside. What surveyed the couple on the bank was a figure out of a nightmare. Looks meaner than any joker I’ve ever seen, Cordelia thought. As it lifted more of its body from the water, she decided the creature must possess at least the mass of Bruce the Shark. The froglike mouth gaped, revealing a multitude of rustcolored teeth. It regarded the humans with slitted, bulging lizard eyes.
“It is equally sired of fish and lizard,” said Warreen conversationally, as though guiding a European tourist through a wild-game park. He stepped forward and raised his spear.
“Cousin Gurangatch!” he called out. “We would drink from the spring and rest beneath the tree. We would do this in peace. If we cannot, then I must treat you in the manner employed by Mirragen the Cat-man against your mighty ancestor.”
Gurangatch hissed like a freight train bleeding its brakes. Without hesitation it lunged forward, slamming down on the wet bank with the slap of a ten-ton eel. Warreen lightly leapt back, and the stained teeth clashed together just in front of his face. He poked Gurangatch’s snout with the spear. The fish-lizard hissed even louder.
“You are not so lithe as Mirragen,” it said with the voice of a steam hose. Gurangatch jerked away as Warreen pulled loose the spear and stabbed again. This time the pointed end jammed under the shining silver scales surrounding the monster’s right eye. The creature twisted, tugging the spear loose from Warreen’s fingers.
The monster reared high, gazing at Warreen from ten feet, fifteen, twenty. The man looked up, expectant, the boomerang cocked in his right hand. The hiss was almost a sigh. “Time to die again, little cousin!” Gurangatch’s bull neck flexed, dipped. Jaws gaped.
This time Cordelia remembered to click off the safety. This time she braced herself by holding the H and K with both hands. This time the bullets went exactly where she wished.
She saw the slugs stitch a line down Gurangatch’s throat. She released the trigger, raised the gun, fired a quick burst at the monster’s face. One of the creature’s eyes burst like a balloon full of dye. It cried out in pain, green jelly sloshing down across its snout. The wounds in the neck were oozing crimson. Christmas colors, Cordelia thought. Get a grip, girl. Don’t go hysterical.
As Gurangatch writhed in the water, Warreen swung his arm in a short, tight arc and set the end of the boomerang into the creature’s remaining eye. At this, the monster bellowed so loudly, Cordelia winced and recoiled back a step. Then Gurangatch doubled over in the water and dove. Cordelia had a quick impression of a thick, gilalike tail disappearing through the spray. Then the pool was quiet, small wavelets still splashing up on the banks. The ripples flattened and were gone.
“He has dived into the earth,” said Warreen, squatting and peering into the water. “He will be gone a long time.” Cordelia put the H and K back on safety.
Hands free of weapons, Warreen turned away from the pool and stood. Cordelia couldn’t help herself. She stared. Warreen glanced down, then met her eyes again. With little apparent embarrassment he said, “It is the excitement of the contest.” Then he smiled and said, “This wouldn’t happen under ordinary circumstances if I were guiding a European lady in the outback.”
It occurred to Cordelia to pick up his folded clothing and hold it out to him.
With dignity Warreen accepted the garments. Before turning away to dress he said, “If you’re ready, it would be a good time for a refreshing drink and some rest. I’m sorry I’m a bit short of tea.”
Cordelia said, “I’ll manage.”
The desert was slow to cool with the sunset. Cordelia continued to feel the heat rise out of the ground beneath her. Warreen and she lay back against the gnarled, semiexposed roots of the tree. The air felt as though it were a quilted comforter pulled up over her face. When she moved, the motion seemed to be at half speed.
“The water was delicious,” she said, “but I’m still hungry”
“Your hunger here is an illusion.”
“Then I’ll fantasize a pizza.”
“Mmph,” Warreen said. “Very well.” With a sigh he raised himself to his knees and ran his fingers over the rough bark of the tree. When he found a loose patch, he tugged it away from the trunk. His right hand darted forward, fingers scrambling to catch something Cordelia couldn’t see. “Here.” He displayed his find to her.
Her first impression was of something snakelike and squirming. She saw the pasty color, the segments and the many legs. “What is that?” she said.
“Witchetty grub.” Warreen smiled. “It’s one of our national cuisines.” He thrust his hand forward like a mischievous little boy. “Does it turn your stomach, little missy?”
“Goddamnit. No,” she said with a flash of anger. “Don’t call me that.” What are you doing? she said to herself as she reached for the creature. “Do I have to eat it live?”
“No. It is not necessary” He turned and cracked the creature against the desert oak. The witchetty grub convulsed once and ceased struggling.
Forcing herself just to do it and not think about the act, she took the witchetty, popped it into her mouth, and started chewing. God, she thought, why do I do these things?
“How do you find it?” said Warreen with a solemn face. “Well,” said Cordelia, swallowing, “it doesn’t taste like chicken.”
The stars came out, spangling a belt across the entire sky. Cordelia lay with fingers plaited behind her head. She realized she had lived in Manhattan for close to a year and never looked for the stars at all.
“Nurunderi is up there,” said Warreen, pointing at the sky, “along with his two young wives, placed there by Nepelle, the ruler of the heavens, after the women ate the forbidden food.”
“Apples?” said Cordelia.
“Fish. Tukkeri-a delicacy given only to the men.” His hand moved, the fingers pointing again. “There, farther on-you can make out the Seven Sisters. And there is Karambal, their pursuer. You call him Aldebaran.”
Cordelia said, “I have a lot of questions.” Warreen paused. “Not about the stars.”
“Not about the stars.”
“What, then?”
“All of this.” She sat up and spread her arms to the night. “How am I here?”
“I brought you.”
“I know. But how?”
Warreen hesitated for a long time. Then he said, “I am of Aranda blood, but was not raised within the tribe. Do you know of the urban aborigines?”
“Like in The Last Wave,” Cordelia said. “I saw The Fringe Dwellers too. There aren’t really tribal aborigines in the cities, right? Just sort of like individuals?”
Warreen laughed. “You compare almost everything to the cinema. That is likening everything to the shadow world. Do you know anything of reality?”
“I think so.” In this place she wasn’t so sure, but she wasn’t about to admit it.
“My parents sought work in Melbourne,” Warreen said. “I was born in the outback, but cannot recall any of that. I was a boy in the city.” He laughed bitterly. “My walkabout seemed destined to lead me only among drunken diggers chundering in the gutter.”
Cordelia, listening raptly, said nothing.
“When I was an infant, I nearly died of a fever. Nothing the wirinun-the medicine man—could do helped. My parents, despairing, were ready to take me to the white doctor. Then the fever broke. The wirinun shook his medicine stick over me, looked into my eyes, and told my parents I would live and do great things.” Warreen paused again. “The other children in the town had taken ill with the same sort of fever. All of them died. My parents told me their bodies shriveled or twisted or turned into unspeakable things. But they all died. Only I survived. The other parents hated me and hated my parents for bearing me. So we left.” He ,fell silent.
It dawned in Cordelia’s mind like a star, rising. “The wild card virus.”
“ I know of it,” said Warreen. “ I think you are right. My childhood was as normal as my parents could make it until I grew the hair of an adult. Then ...” His voice trailed off. “Yes?” Cordelia said eagerly.
“As a man, I found I could enter the Dreamtime at will. I could explore the land of my ancestors. I could even take others with me.”
“Then this truly is the Dreamtime. It isn’t some kind of shared illusion.”
He turned on his side and looked at her. Warreen’s eyes were only about eighteen inches from hers. His gaze was something she could feel in the pit of her stomach. “There is nothing more real.”
“The thing that happened to me on the airplane. The Eer-moonans?”
“There are others from the shadow world who can enter the Dreamtime. One is Murga-muggai, whose totem is the trap-door spider. But there is something ... wrong with her. You would call her psychotic. To me she is an Evil One, even though she claims kinship with the People.”
“Why did she kill Carlucci? Why try to kill me?”
“Murga-muggai hates European holy men, especially the American who comes from the sky. His name is Leo Barnett.”
“Fire-breather,” said Cordelia. “He is a TV preacher.”
“He would save our souls. In doing so he will destroy us all, as kin and as individuals. No more tribes.”
“Barnett ...” Cordelia breathed. “Marry wasn’t one of his people.”
“Europeans look much like one another. It doesn’t matter that he didn’t work for the man from the sky.” Warreen regarded her sharply. “Aren’t you here for the same purpose?”
Cordelia ignored that. “But how did I survive the Eer-moonans?”
“I believe Murga-muggai underestimated your own power.” He hesitated. “And possibly was it your time of the moon? Most monsters will not touch a woman who bleeds.” Cordelia nodded. She began to be very sorry her period had ended in Auckland. “I guess I’ll have to depend on the H and K.” After a time she said, “Warreen, how old are you?”
“Nineteen.” He hesitated. “And you?”
“Going on eighteen.” They both were quiet. A very mature nineteen, Cordelia thought. He wasn’t like any of the boys she remembered at home in Louisiana, or in Manhattan either.
Cordelia felt a chill plummeting both in the desert air and inside her mind. She knew the coldness growing within her was because she now had time to think about her situation. Not just thousands of miles from home and among strangers, but also not even in her own world.
“Warreen, do you have a girlfriend?”
“I am alone here.”
“No, you’re not.” Her voice didn’t squeak. Thank God. “Will you hold me?”
Time stretched out. Then Warreen moved close and clumsily put his arms around her. She accidentally elbowed him in the eye before they both were comfortable. Cordelia greedily absorbed the warmth of his body, her face tucked against his. Her fingers wound through the surprising softness of his hair.
They kissed. Cordelia knew her parents would kill her if they knew what she was doing with this black man. First, of course, They would have lynched Warreen. She surprised herself. It was no different touching him than it had been touching anyone else she’d liked. There hadn’t been many. Warreen felt much better than any of them.
She kissed him many times more. He did the same to her. The night chill deepened and their breathing pulsed faster.
“Warreen ...” she finally said, gasping. “Do you want to make love?”
He seemed to go away from her, even though he was still there in her arms. “I shouldn’t—”
She guessed at something. “Uh, are you a virgin?”
“Yes. And you?”
“I’m from Louisiana.” She covered his mouth with hers. “Warreen is only my boy’s name. My true name is Wyungare.”
“What does that mean?”
“He who returns to the stars.”
The moment came when she raised herself to take him and felt Wyungare driving deep within her. Much later she realized she hadn’t thought of her mama and what her family would think. Not even once.
The giant first appeared as the smallest nub on the horizon.
“That’s where we’re going?” said Cordelia. “Uluru?”
“The place of greatest magic.”
The morning sun rose high as they walked. The heat was no less pressing than it had been the previous day. Cordelia tried to ignore her thirst. Her legs ached, but it was not from trudging. She welcomed the feeling.
Various creatures of the outback sunned themselves by the path and inspected the humans as they passed.
An emu.
A frilled lizard. A tortoise.
A black snake. A wombat.
Wyungare acknowledged the presence of each with a courteous greeting. “Cousin Dinewan” to the emu; “Mungoongarlie” to the lizard; “Good morning, Wayambeh” to the tortoise, and so on.
A bat circled them three times, squeaked a greeting, and flew off. Wyungare waved politely. “Soar in safety, brother Narahdarn.”
His greeting to the wombat was particularly effusive. “He was my boy-totem,” he explained to Cordelia. “Warreen.” They encountered a crocodile sunning itself beside their trail.
“He is your cousin as well,” said Wyungare. He told her what to say.
“Good morning, cousin Kurria,” said Cordelia. The reptile stared back at her, moving not an inch in the baking heat. Then it opened its jaws and hissed. Rows of white teeth flashed in the sun.
“A fortunate sign,” said Wyungare. “The Kurria is your guardian.”
As Uluru grew in the distance, fewer were the creatures that came to the path to look upon the humans.
Cordelia realized with a start that for an hour or more she had been dwelling within her own thoughts. She glanced aside at Wyungare. “How was it that you were in the alley at just the right time to help me?”
“I was guided by Baiame, the Great Spirit.”
“Not good enough.”
“It was a sort of a corroboree that night, a get-together with a purpose.”
“Like a rally?”
He nodded. “My people don’t usually engage in such things. Sometimes we have to use European ways.”
“What was it about?” Cordelia shaded her eyes and squinted into the distance. Uluru had grown to the size of a fist.
Wyungare also narrowed his eyes at Uluru. Somehow he seemed to be gazing much farther. “We are going to drive the Europeans out of our lands. Especially we are not going to allow the men-who-preach to seize further footholds.”
“I don’t think that’s going to be very easy. Aren’t the Aussies pretty well entrenched?”
Wyungare shrugged. “Have you no faith, little missy? Just because we are outnumbered forty or fifty to one, own no tanks or planes, and know that few care about our cause? Just because we are our own worst enemies when it comes to organizing ourselves?” His voice sounded angry. “Our way of life has stretched unbroken for sixty thousand years. How long has your culture existed?”
Cordelia started to say something placating.
The young man rushed on. “We find it hard to organize effectively in the manner of the Maori in New Zealand. They are great clans. We are small tribes.” He smiled humorlessly. “You might say the Maori resemble your aces. We are like the jokers.”
“The jokers can organize. There are people of conscience who help them.”
“We will not need help from Europeans. The winds are rising-all around the world, just as they are here in the outback. Look at the Indian homeland that is being carved with machetes and bayonets from the American jungle. Consider Africa, Asia, every continent where revolution lives.” His voice lifted. “It’s time, Cordelia. Even the white Christ recognizes the turning of the great wheel that will groan and move again in little more than a decade. The fires already burn, even if your people do not yet feel the heat.”
Do I know him? thought Cordelia. She knew she did not. She had suspected none of this. But within her heart she recognized the truth of what he said. And she did not fear him.
“Murga-muggai and I are not the only children of the fever,” said Wyungare. “There are others. There will be many more, I fear. It will cause a difference here. We will make a difference.”
Cordelia nodded slightly.
“The whole world is aflame. All of us are burning. Do your Dr. Tachyon and Senator Hartmann and their entire party of touring Europeans know this?” His black eyes stared directly into hers. “Do they truly know what is happening ,outside their limited sight in America?”
Cordelia said nothing. No, she thought. Probably not. “I expect they don’t.”
“Then that is the message you must bear them,” said Wyungare.
“I’ve seen pictures,” said Cordelia. “This is Ayers Rock.”
“It is Uluru,” said Wyungare.
They stared up at the gigantic reddish sandstone monolith. “It’s the biggest single rock in the world,” said Cordelia. “Thirteen hundred feet up to the top and several miles across.”
“It is the place of magic.”
“The markings on the side,” she said. “They look like the cross section of a brain.”
“Only to you. To me they are the markings on the chest of a warrior.”
Cordelia looked around. “There should be hundreds of tourists here.”
“In the shadow world there are. Here they would be fodder for Murga-muggai.”
Cordelia was incredulous. “She eats people?”
“She eats anyone.”
“God, I hate spiders.” She stopped looking up the cliff. Her neck was getting a crick. “We have to climb this?”
“There is. a slightly gentler trail.” He indicated they should walk farther along the base of Uluru.
Cordelia found the sheer mass of the rock astonishing—and something more. She felt an awe that large stones did not ordinarily kindle. It’s gotta be magic, she thought.
After a twenty-minute hike Wyungare said, “Here.” He reached down. There was another cache of weapons. He picked up a spear, a club-nullanulla, he called it-a flint knife, a boomerang.
“Handy,” Cordelia said.
“Magic.” With a leather strap Wyungare tied the weapons together. He shouldered the packet and pointed toward the summit of Uluru. “Next stop.”
To Cordelia the proposed climb looked no easier than it had at the first site. “You’re sure?”
He gestured at her handbag and the H and K. “You should leave those.”
She shook her head, surveying first his weapons, then hers. “No way.”
Cordelia lay flat on her belly, peering up the rocky slope. Then she looked down. I shouldn’t have done that, she thought. It might only have been a few hundred yards, but it was like leaning over an empty elevator shaft. She scrambled for a purchase. The H and K in her left hand didn’t help. “Just let it go,” said Wyungare, reaching back to secure her free hand.
“We might need it.”
“Its power will be slight against the Murga-muggai.”
“I’ll risk it. When it comes to making magic, I need all the help I can get.” She was out of breath. “You’re sure this is the easiest ascent?”
“It is the only one. In the shadow world there is a heavy chain fixed to the rock for the first third of this journey. It is an affront to Uluru. Tourists use it to pull themselves up.”
“I’d settle for the affront,” said Cordelia. “How much farther?”
“Maybe an hour, maybe less. It depends whether Murgamuggai decides to hurl boulders down upon us.”
“Oh.” She considered that. “Think there’s a good chance?”
“She knows we are coming. It depends on her mood.”
“ I hope she doesn’t have PMS.”
“Monsters don’t bleed,” said Wyungare seriously.
They reached the broad, irregular top of Uluru and sat on a flat stone to rest. “Where is she?” said Cordelia.
“If we don’t find her, she’ll find us. Are you in a hurry?”
“No.” Cordelia looked around apprehensively. “What about the Eer-moonans?”
“You killed them all on the shadow plane. There is not an endless supply of such creatures.”
Oh, God, thought Cordelia. I killed off an endangered species. She wanted to giggle.
“Got your breath?”
She groaned and got up from the slab.
Wyungare was already up, his face angled at the sky, gauging the temperature and the wind. It was a great deal cooler on top of the rock than it had been on the desert floor. “It is a good day to die,” he said.
“You’ve seen too many movies too.” Wyungare grinned.
They trudged along nearly the entire diameter of the top of Uluru before coming to a wide, flat area about a hundred yards across. A sandstone cliff fell away to the desert only a few yards beyond. “This looks promising,” said Wyungare. The surface of scoured sandstone was not completely bare. Football-size bits of rock were littered about like grains of sand. “We are very close.”
The voice seemed to come from everywhere around them. The words grated like two chunks of sandstone rubbing together. “This is my home.”
“It is not your home,” said Wyungare. “Uluru is home to us all.”
“You have intruded ...”
Cordelia looked around apprehensively, seeing nothing other than rock and a few sparse bushes.
“... and will die.”
Across the rocky clearing, a sheet of sandstone about ten feet across flipped over, slamming into the surface of Uluru and shattering. Bits of stone sprayed across the area, and Cordelia reflexively stepped back. Wyungare did not move. Murga-muggai, the trap-door spider woman, heaved herself up out of her hole and scrabbled into the open air.
For Cordelia it was like suddenly leaping into her worst nightmares. There were big spiders at home in the bayous, but nothing of this magnitude. Murga-muggai’s body was dark brown and shaggy, the size of a Volkswagen. The bulbous body balanced swaying on eight articulated legs. All her limbs were tufted with spiky brown hair.
Glittering faceted eyes surveyed the human interlopers.
A mouth opened wide, papillae moving gently, a clear, viscid liquid dripping down to the sandstone. Mandibles twitched apart.
“Oh, my God,” Cordelia said, wanting to take another step backward. Many more steps. She wished to wake up from this dream.
Murga-muggai moved toward them, legs shimmering as they seemed to slip momentarily in and out of phase with reality. To Cordelia it was like watching well-done stopmotion photography.
“Whatever else she is,” said Wyungare, “Murga-muggai is a creature of grace and balance. It is her vanity.” He unslung the packet of weapons, unwinding the leather strap.
“Your flesh will make a fine lunch, cousins,” came the abrasive voice.
“You’re no relation of mine,” said Cordelia.
Wyungare hefted the boomerang as though considering an experiment, then fluidly hurled it toward Murga-muggai. The honed wooden edge caressed the stiff hairs on top of the spider-creature’s abdomen and sighed away into the open sky. The weapon swung around and started to return, but didn’t have sufficient altitude to clear the rock. Cordelia heard the boomerang shatter on the stone below Uluru’s rim.
“Bad fortune,” said Murga-muggai. She laughed, an oily, sticky sound.
“Why, cousin?” said Wyungare. “Why do you do any of this?”
“Silly boy,” said Murga-muggai, “you’ve lost hold of tradition. It will be the death of you, if not the death of our people. You are so wrong. I must remedy this.”
Apparently in no hurry to eat, she slowly closed the distance between them. Her legs continued to strobe. It was dizzying to watch. “My appetite for Europeans is growing,” she said. “I will enjoy today’s varied feast.”
“I will have only one chance,” Wyungare said in a.low voice. “If it doesn’t work—”
“It will,” said Cordelia. She stepped even with him and touched his arm. “Laissez les bon temps rouler.” Wyungare glanced at her.
“Let the good times roll. My daddy’s favorite line.” Murga-muggai leapt.
The spider-creature descended over them like a windtorn umbrella with spare, bent struts flexing.
Wyungare jammed the butt of the—spear into the unyielding sandstone and lifted the fire-hardened head toward the body of the monster. Murga-muggai cried out in rage and triumph.
The spear-head glanced off one mandible and broke. The supple shaft of the spear at first bent, then cracked into splinters like the shattering of a spine. The spider-creature was so close, Cordelia could see the abdomen pulse. She could smell a dark, acrid odor.
Now we’re in trouble, she thought.
Both Wyungare and she scrambled backward, attempting to avoid the seeking legs and clashing mandibles. The nullanulla skittered across the sandstone.
Cordelia scooped up the flint knife. It was suddenly like watching everything in slow motion. One of Murga-muggai’s hairy forelegs lashed out toward Wyungare. The tip fell across the man’s chest, just below his heart. The force of the blow hurled him backward. Wyungare’s body tumbled across the stone clearing like one of the limp rag dolls Cordelia had played with as a girl.
And just as lifeless.
“No!” Cordelia screamed. She ran to Wyungare, knelt beside him, felt for the pulse in his throat. Nothing. He was not breathing. His eyes stared blindly toward the empty sky.
She cradled the man’s body for just a moment, realizing that the spider-creature was patiently regarding them from twenty yards away. “You are next, imperfect cousin,” came the ground-out words. “You are brave, but I don’t think you can help the cause of my people any more than the Wombat.” Murga-muggai started forward.
Cordelia realized she was still clinging to the gun. She aimed the H and K mini at the spider-creature and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. She clicked the safety on, then off again. Pulled the trigger.—Nothing. Damn. It was finally empty.
Focus, she thought. She stared at Murga-muggai’s eyes and willed the creature to die. The power was still there within her. She could feel it. She strained. But nothing happened. She was helpless. Murga-muggai was not even slowed.
Evidently the reptile-level had nothing to say to spiders. The spider-thing rushed toward her like a graceful, eight-legged express train.
Cordelia knew there was nothing left to do. Except the one thing she dreaded most.
She wondered if the image in her mind would be the last thing she would ever know. It was the memory of an old cartoon showing Fay Wray in the fist of King Kong on the side of the Empire State Building. A man in a biplane was calling out to the woman, “Trip, him, Fay! Trip him!” Cordelia summoned all the hysterical strength left within her and hurled the empty H and K at Murga-muggai’s head. The weapon hit one faceted eye and the monster shied slightly. She leapt forward, wrapping arms and legs around one of the pistoning spider-creature’s forelegs.
The monster stumbled, started to recover, but then Cordelia jammed the flint knife into a leg joint. The extremity folded and momentum took over. The spider-thing was a ball of flailing legs rolling along with Cordelia clinging to one hairy limb.
The woman had a chaotic glimpse of the desert floor looming ahead and below her. She let go, hit the stone, rolled, grabbed an outcropping and stopped.
Murga-muggai was propelled out into open space. To Cordelia the monster seemed to hang there for a moment, suspended like the coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons. Then the spider-creature plummeted.
Cordelia watched the flailing, struggling thing diminish. A screech like nails on chalkboard trailed after.
Finally all she could see was what looked like a black stain at the foot of Uluru. She could imagine only too well the shattered remains with the legs splayed out. “You deserved it!” she said aloud. “Bitch.”
Wyungare! She turned and limped back to his body. He was still dead.
For a moment Cordelia allowed herself the luxury of angry tears. Then she realized she had her own magic. “It’s only been a minute,” she said, as if praying. “Not longer. Not long at all. Only a minute.”
She bent close to Wyungare and concentrated. She felt the power draining out of her mind and floating down around the man, insulating the cold flesh. The thought had been a revelation. In the past she had tried only to shut autonomic nervous systems down. She had never tried to start one up. It had never occurred to her.
Jack’s words seemed to echo from eight thousand miles away: “You can use it for life too.”
The energy flowed. The slightest heartbeat. The faintest breath. Another.
Wyungare began to breathe. He groaned.
Thank God, thought Cordelia. Or Baiame. She glanced around self-consciously at the top of Uluru.
Wyungare opened his eyes. “Thank you,” he said faintly but distinctly.
The riot swirled past them. Police clubs swung. Aboriginal heads cracked. “Bloody hell,” said Wyungare. “You’d think this was bloody Queensland.” He seemed restrained from joining the fray only by Cordelia’s presence.
Cordelia reeled back against the alley wall. “You’ve brought me back to Alice?”
Wyungare nodded.
“This is the same night?”
“All the distances are different in the Dreamtime,” said Wyungare. “Time as well as space.”
“I’m grateful.” The noise of angry shouts, screams, sirens, was deafening.
“Now what?” said the young man.
“A night’s sleep. In the morning I’ll rent a Land-Rover. Then I’ll drive to Madhi Gap.” She pondered a question. “Will you stay with me?”
“Tonight?” Wyungare hesitated as well. “Yes, I’ll stay with you. You’re not as bad as the preacher-from-the-sky, but I must find a way to talk you out of what you want to do with the satellite station.”
Cordelia started to relax just a little.
“Of course,” said Wyungare, glancing around, “you’ll have to sneak me into your room.”
Cordelia shook her head. It’s like high school again, she thought. She put her arm around the man beside her. There were so many things she needed to tell people. The road south to Madhi Gap stretched ahead. She still hadn’t decided whether she was going to call New York first. “There is one thing,” said Wyungare.
She glanced at him questioningly.
“It has always been the custom,” he said slowly, “for European men to use their aboriginal mistresses and then abandon them.”
Cordelia looked him in the eye. “I am not a European man,” she said.
Wyungare smiled.
Wednesday
The dead man slammed his fist through the pine door.
No knuckles broke, but his skin tore. Blood streaked the wooden shards of door panel. It hurt, but not enough. No, it didn’t hurt much at all, other things considered. “Other things,”—what a euphemistic code for people and relationships, lovers and kin. The dirty little politics of rejections and betrayals. Jesus god, they hurt.
Real mature, my frien’, Jack Robicheaux thought. Going through the grieving process at Mach 10. Right past denial and directly to self-pity. Real grown-up for a guy into his forties. Fuck it.
He gingerly withdrew his hand from the shattered door. Naturally the long wooden splinters faced the wrong way. It was like trying to extract his flesh from some sort of toothy trap.
Jack turned and walked back into the shambles of his living room. It still looked like Captain Nemo’s stateroom on the Nautilus—after the giant squid had wrestled with the submarine in the middle of the Atlantic’s storm of a century.
He loved this room. “Love.” Funny word to use anymore. Kicking aside a shattered antique sextant, Jack crossed to the outside door-the one opening on a passage leading to the subway maintenance tunnels-and bolted it. As he did so, he caught a last whiff of Michael’s sharp citrus after-shave. The image of Michael’s retreating back, shoulders slightly hunched with denial, flickered in the space the door occupied, vanished, slipped out of existence with not even a whimper.
Jack stepped over the old-fashioned phone crafted as the effigy of Huey Long. Somehow it had miraculously ended on the floor upright with the earpiece still cradled in Huey’s upraised right hand. 01’ Huey had communicated like a son-of-a-bitch. Why couldn’t Jack?
He couldn’t call Bagabond. He wouldn’t call Cordelia.
There was no one else he wanted to talk to. Besides, he thought he’d talked enough. He’d spoken to Tachyon. An apple a day hadn’t worked. And he had talked to Michael. Who was left? A priest? Not a chance. Atelier Parish was too far behind. Too many years. Too much memory.
Jack stepped behind the carved mahogany bar with the brass fittings, smelled the dusty plush velvet hanging as he opened the cabinet. The brandy had cost close to sixty bucks. Expensive on a transit worker’s salary, but what the hell, he’d always read in sea novels about brandy’s being administered to survivors of wrack and storm, and besides, the cut-crystal decanter fit this Victorian room beautifully.
He poured himself a triple, drank it like a double, and filled the glass again. He didn’t usually gulp like this, but—
“There is an interesting fact about Mr. Kaposi,” Tachyon had said. His medical smock shone an immaculate white with almost the albedo of an arctic snowfield. His red hair seemed aflame under the examining-room lights. “Shortly before he discovered and named his sarcoma in 1872, Kaposi had changed his name from Kohn.”
Jack stared at him, unable to form the words he wanted to say. What the fuck was Tachyon talking about?
“There was, of course, a pogrom in Czechoslovakia,” Tachyon said, slender fingers gesturing expressively. “He reacted to the sort of ill-informed prejudice that has cursed both jokers, not to mention aces, of course, and AIDS patients alike. Exotic viruses might as well be the evil eye.”
Jack looked down at his bare chest, gingerly touching the blue-black bruiselike markings above his ribs. “I don’ need no double-barreled curse. One to a customer, no?”
“I’m sorry, Jack.” Tachyon hesitated. “It’s difficult to say when you were infected. The tumors are well-advanced, but the biopsy and the anomalous workup results suggest there’s a synergy going on between the wild card virus and the HIV organism attacking your immunosuppressant system. I suspect some sort of galloping accelerated process.”
Jack shook his head as though only half-hearing. “ I had a negative test a year ago.”
“It’s as I feared then,” said the doctor. “I can’t forecast the progress.”
“I can,” said Jack.
Tachyon shrugged sympathetically. “ I must ask,” he said, “if you habitually use amyl nitrite.”
“Poppers?” said Jack. He shook his head. “No way. I’m not much on drugs.”
Tachyon marked something on Jack’s chart. “Their use is frequently connected with Kaposi’s.”
Jack shook his head again.
“Then there is another matter,” said the doctor.
Jack stared at him. It was like trying to look out from the center of a block of ice. He felt numb all over. He knew the psychic shock would go away soon. And then—“What?”
“I must ask you this. I need to know about contacts.” Jack took a deep breath. “There was one. Is one. Only one. “
“I should talk to him.”
“Are you kidding?” said Jack. “ I will talk to Michael. An’ den I’ll have him come see you. But I’ll talk to him first.” His voice dropped off. “Yeah, I’ll talk to him.”
He proceeded to remind Tachyon of the confidentiality of the doctor-patient relationship. Tachyon seemed affronted. Jack didn’t apologize. Then he left. That was in the morning.
—this was a special occasion. He felt as if he were drinking after his own funeral. “Cajuns do great wakes,” he said aloud, pouring another brandy. Had the decanter been full? He couldn’t remember. Now it was down close to half.
He glanced at the phone again. Why the hell did he want to talk to anyone? After all, no one wanted to talk to him. Now that he thought about it, for the last few months living with Michael had pretty much been like living alone. Now he might as well die alone. Can the self-pity. But it was so easy
“So what’s up?” Michael had said, closing the door after him before giving Jack a squeeze. No other greeting. No preamble. As light as Jack was dark, tall and slender-limbed, Michael had always seemed to bring something of the sunlit street-level spring down with him to Jack’s subterranean dwelling. Not today. Jack couldn’t read him at all.
“Huh?” Michael said. Jack turned his face away and disengaged himself from the other’s arms. He stepped back. “Something wrong?” Jack scrutinized Michael’s face. His lover’s features were the very model of glowing health. Of innocence.
“You might want to sit down,” said Jack.
“No.” Michael stared at him. “Just say what whatever it is you want to say.”
Jack’s mouth was dry. “I went to the clinic today.”
“So?”
“The tests—” He had to start over. “The tests were positive.”
Michael looked at him blankly. “Tests?”
“AIDS.” He said the hateful word. His stomach twisted. “No,” said Michael. He shook his head. “Naw. Not a chance.”
“Yes,” said Jack.
“But who—”. Michael’s eyes widened. “Jack, did you—”
“No.” Jack stared back. “There’s been no one. No one else, mon cher.”
Michael cocked his head. “There has to be. I mean, I wouldn’t—”
“It isn’t like immaculate conception, Michael. No miracle here. It has to be.”
“No,” said Michael. He shook his head vehemently. “It’s impossible.” His eyes flickered and he looked away. Then he turned on his heel, opened the door, and left.
“No,” Jack had heard Michael say one more time.
—to feel the rusty blade twisting in his gut.
The brandy, it occurred to him, as like an emotional tetanus shot. Except it wasn’t working. All it did was make him feel worse because it lessened his ability to control what he was feeling.
He felt suddenly as if he had inhaled all the oxygen there was to breathe in his home. He wanted to get out, to go up to the streets. So he carefully, with what he realized were exaggerated motions, put away the brandy decanter. Then Jack left by the same door Michael had exited. He followed the ghost’s footsteps to the tunnels and ladders that took him up to the streets.
He walked. Jack could have taken the track maintenance car down below but decided he didn’t want to. The night was too chilly, but that was fine. He wanted something astringent to cleanse him, to flense the bruise marks, to clean out his flesh. He realized he was wishing there was now some overt pain.
He walked uptown, not truly comprehending where he was until he saw the sign for Young Man’s Fancy. I shouldn’t be here, of all places, he thought. He’d met Michael here. He shouldn’t be in the West Village at all. And not at this bar. But by now it was too late. Here he was. Shit. He turned to leave.
“Hey, pretty boy, lookin’ to get some tail? Or you the tail?”
The voice was all too familiar. Jack looked up and saw the memorably overmuscled face, not to mention the body, of Bludgeon emerge from the shadowed downstairs entrance to the closed laundry below the bar. Jack turned and started away.
There was the smack of size-eighteen Brogans on the sidewalk. Fingers like German sausages curled around his shoulder and spun Jack around. “The thing about them gorgeous eyes,” said Bludgeon, “is that all I gotta do is dig my thumbs in there and they’ll pop out like the green cherries onna wop cookies.”
Jack shrugged the fingers away. He felt impatient and not terribly cautious. He just didn’t give a damn. “Fuck off,” he said.
“You need one of these too.” Bludgeon put spurned fingers to his own cheek and touched the ragged, inflamed scar that ran all the way from the edge of his right eye to his bulbous chin.
Jack remembered the triumphant shriek of Bagabond’s black cat. The feline was old but agile enough to have dodged Bludgeon’s flailing fists after the claws had raked down the man’s ugly features.
“Cat scratches get infected,” Jack said, continuing to back toward the street. “You ought to see to those. I know a real good doctor.”
“Chickenshit like you’s gonna need an undertaker,” Bludgeon threatened. “Mr. Maz’ll be real pleased if I bring in your cock in a sammich bag. Them Gambiones love to make sausage, specially outta yellow dicks like you.”
“I don’t have time for this,” said Jack.
“Gonna make time.” Bludgeon’s jaws split in the kind of smirk that can deform unborn babies. “You and me-I figure I can handle a little ‘gator rassling.”
The door of Young Man’s Fancy swung open and a gaggle of about a dozen guys spilled out onto the street. Bludgeon stopped uncertainly in midstride.
“Witnesses,” said Jack. “Down, boy.”
“I’ll take ’em all,” said Bludgeon, surveying his prospective victims. He smacked the macelike mutation of his right hand into the palm of his left. It sounded like dropping a beef roast off a stepladder onto a tiled floor.
“A little gay bashing?” said the man apparently leading the others. He grimaced at Bludgeon. “You still hanging around, dork-breath?” His hand dipped inside his jacket and came out filled with blued steel. “Wanna see my Bernie Goetz impression?” He laughed. “It’s a guaranteed killer.”
Bludgeon looked around the semicircle of faces. “I gotta job to protect,” he finally said to Jack. “You,” he said to the man with the gun, “I’m gonna take out your guts with my thumb. Just wait. And you—” he said back to Jack, “you I’m gonna really hurt.”
“But ancther time,” said Jack.
“Fuckin’ A.” Bludgeon couldn’t seem to find a better exit line. He lurched away from the growing crowd of onlookers and stomped down the street.
“Pretty rough trade,” the man with the gun said to Jack. He put the pistol back under his coat. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“Thanks,” said Jack. “I don’t know the guy. He just stopped me for a light.” He turned and headed the opposite direction, ignoring the murmurs.
“So you’re welcome, man,” said the man with the pistol. “Good luck, buddy.”
Jack turned the corner and headed down a darker block. Christ it was cold. He hugged himself. He hadn’t worn a coat. The chill was making him sluggish. Bad sign. He tentatively touched the back of his left hand with the fingers of his right. The skin felt rough, scaly, beginning to transform. No! He started to run. He didn’t need this too. Not tonight. Stress symptoms. He almost giggled.
He looked for a subway entrance. It didn’t matter which. Red globe or green. BMT, IRT, or PATH. Uptown or downtown. Just as long as the stairs led down.
He searched for the telltale steam from a manhole cover. The sewers would do. That would be better. There’d be no people in the sewers. Those tunnels, warm and slimy, would lead toward the bay. Good hunting. Fine with Jack. He thought about his ‘gator teeth ripping into albino gar. That was okay. Bagabond didn’t give much of a shit about mutant fish. Food. Blood. Death. Exhaustion. Blankness.
Jack stumbled toward the deeper darkness, homing in on a warm grating.
I’m losing it, he thought.
He saw Michael’s face. Bagabond’s. Cordelia’s. Yeah, he’d lost it all right. Everything.
Jack plunged into the night.
Thursday
The volume of the bootleg mix of the new George Harrison album was sufficient to shiver the framed pictures on the office wall. But then the size of the office wasn’t enough to provide much challenge to the cassette deck’s amplifier. It wasn’t a large office and didn’t occupy the corner of the office tower, but it was a separate office regardless, with permanent walls, and it did have a window.
Cordelia Chaisson was happy with it.
Her desk was old and wooden and held, besides the computer, stacks of albums, tapes, and press kits. The pictures on the opposite wall were photos of Peregrine, David Bowie, Fantasy, Tim Curry, Lou Reed, and other entertainers, whether aces or not. In the midst of the photographs was a framed cross-stitch sampler reading DAMN, I’M GOOD. Tacked to the wall behind and to Cordelia’s right was a large rectangle of poster board. It held a list of names, copiously emended with cross-outs, question marks, and shorthand notes such as “check film startup,”
“rel. fanatic,” and “won’t perform Brit. hol.”
Her phone beeped to her. It was a few moments before Cordelia noticed. She thumbed down the volume control on the deck and picked up the receiver. Luz Alcala, one of her bosses, said, “My sweet lord, Cordelia, do you think you could perhaps use the headphones?”
“Sorry,” said Cordelia. “ I got carried away. It’s a great album. I’ve already turned down the volume.”
“Thank you,” said Alcala. “Any word yet on who’ll cut the promos for us?”
“I’m going down the list. Jagger, maybe.” The young woman hesitated. “He hasn’t said no.”
“Have you called him in the last week?”
“Well ... no.”
Alcala’s voice took on a mildly reproving tone. “Cordelia, I admire what you’re accomplishing with the benefit. But GF and G has other projects to consider as well.”
“I know,” said Cordelia. “I’m sorry. I’m just trying to juggle a lot of things.” She tried to sound more upbeat-and change the subject. “The clearances came through for China this morning. This means we’ll be beaming to better than half the world.”
“Not to mention Australia.” Alcala chuckled. “Including Australia.”
“Call Jagger’s agent,” said Alcala. “Okay?”
“Okay.” Cordelia hung up the phone. She picked up the small, intricately carved, stone lizard-shape from the desktop where it had nearly been covered over with a heap of glossies. It was actually an Australian crocodile, but she had been assured that it was her cousin and therefore appropriate as a fetish. She preferred to think of it as a ‘gator. Cordelia replaced the figure, setting it in front of the small, framed black-and-white photo of a young aboriginal man. He scowled seriously out of the portrait. “Wyungare,” she whispered. Her lips formed a kiss.
Then she swiveled her chair around to face the poster board on the wall. Taking a thick marker, she began crossing out names. What she ended up with was a list of U2, the Boss, Little Steven, the Coward Brothers, and Girls With Guns. Not bad, she thought. Not damn bad a-tall.
But—she chuckled with satisfaction—there was more. She reached up again with the marker—
The three of them had eaten an early lunch at the Acropolis on Tenth Street, just off Sixth Avenue. Cordelia had offered to take them to a plusher place. After all, she had an expense account now. The Acropolis was a mere cafe, indistinguishable from thousands of others in the city. “The Riviera’s only a few blocks away,” she’d said. “It’s an okay place.”
C.C. Ryder was having none of it. She wanted an anonymous meeting place. She asked that they meet well before the mealtime rush. She wanted Bagabond along.
She got what she wanted because Cordelia needed her. So they ended up in the Naugahyde booth with C.C. and Bagabond on the side facing both Cordelia and the door. Cordelia looked up from the menu and smiled. “ I can recommend the fruit cup.”
C.C. didn’t smile back. Her expression was serious. She took off her nearly shapeless leather porkpie cap and shook out her spiky red hair. Cordelia noticed that C.C.’s brilliant green eyes looked very much like Uncle Jack’s. I’ve got to call him, she thought. She didn’t want to, but she had to.
“See the raccoon rings?” said C.C., pointing to her own eyes. Today she didn’t look much like one of rock’s top lyricists and performers. The effect was deliberate. She wore jeans so old and worn, they looked acid-washed. Her floppy John Hiatt sweatshirt appeared to have endured almost as many washings.
“Nope,” said Cordelia. C.C.’s skin looked smooth and white, almost albino in its lightness.
“Well, there ought to be.” A bare smile ghosted across C.C.’s lips. “I’ve been losing sleep over this whole thing with the benefit.”
Cordelia said nothing; kept looking the singer in the eye. “ I know this is Des’s last hurrah,” C.C. continued. “And I know the cause is a good one. A joint benefit for AIDS patients and the wild card victims is something whose time is long since due.”
Cordelia nodded. This was looking good.
C.C. shrugged. “I guess I gotta come out of the anxiety closet sometime and perform in front of live folks.” She smiled for real. “So the answer is yes.”
“Super!” Cordelia leaned across the table and hugged C.C. fiercely. Startled, Bagabond half-rose from her seat, ready, it seemed to Cordelia, who saw the motion from the corner of her eye, to tear out her throat if she were actually attacking C.C. Cordelia did hear a low snarl, much like one of Bagabond’s cats, as she disentangled herself from C.C. and settled back in her seat.
“That’s wonderful!” said Cordelia. She stopped burbling when she saw C.C.’s face. She could read the expression. “I’m sorry,” Cordelia sobered. “It’s just that I’ve loved your music, loved you as a writer for so long, I’ve wanted to see you perform your songs more than just about anything.”
“It’s not going to be easy,” said C.C. Bagabond looked at her concernedly. “What have we got, ten days?”
Cordelia nodded. “Barely.”
“I’m gonna need every minute.”
“You’ve got it. I’m going to give you someone as a liaison with me who will get you whatever you want, whenever you need it. Somebody I trust, and so do you.”
“Who’s that?” said Bagabond with evident suspicion. The muscles of her gaunt face tightened. Her brown eyes narrowed. Cordelia took a deep breath. “Uncle Jack,” she said. The expression on Bagabond’s face was not pleasant. “Why?” she said. C.C. glanced aside at her. “Why not me?”
“You can help C.C. as much as you want,” said Cordelia hastily. “But I need Uncle Jack to be involved with all this. He’s competent and he’s levelheaded and he’s trustworthy. I’m in over my head,” she said candidly. “I need all the help I can scrounge.”
“Jack know about this?” said Bagabond.
Cordelia hesitated. “Well, I been waitin’ to tell ’im.” She realized the Cajun was starting to creep through more as she got flustered. She took a mental grip on herself. “ I been leavin’ messages on his phone machine. He hasn’t been answering.”
Bagabond leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes. A minute went by. It seemed a long time. The Greek waiter came by to take their orders. C.C. told him to come back shortly.
When she opened her eyes again, Bagabond shook her head as though clearing it. “ I don’t know when the boy’s going to answer your calls.”
“What do you mean?” Cordelia felt a listing feeling as though her plans were papers sliding off a carefully leveled table.
“It’s all broken up,” said Bagabond. “Jack’s a ways offprobably about New York Bay, I’d judge. He’s getting his rocks off duking it out with the kind of critters you don’t see in the Castle Clinton Aquarium. As much raw meat as he’s getting,”—she smiled humorlessly—“I couldn’t say whether he’s going to get home for dinner anytime soon.”
“Quelle damnation,” Cordelia muttered. “In any case,” she said to C.C., “call me at the office tomorrow morning and I’ll have something lined out. Either Uncle Jack or someone else.”
“Make it someone else,” said Bagabond.
Cordelia smiled placatingly. The waiter returned and she ordered the fruit cup.
—and marked C.C. down on the roster of benefit performers in bold, black letters.
“Doggonit,” Cordelia said aloud to herself, “I’m good.” Then she hesitated and glanced back at the copy of the Village Voice lying on the desk. A small events notice in microscopic type was circled in red.
She scrawled one additional name on the board.
Friday
Merde.
No two ways about it. That’s what he felt like as he dragged into his home in the early morning. There was nothing welcome about entering the shambles of his living room. Jack stumbled through the debris. Ahead of him he saw the shattered door to his bedroom. His hand still hurt. But now, so did his teeth. His head, his hands-it seemed to him that every bone in his body ached.
“Enter,”he swore as he saw the blinking red light of his answering machine. He almost managed to ignore the singleeyed demon; then he bent and slapped the playback switch.
Three of the messages were from his supervisor. Jack knew he’d better call back later in the morning, or he’d have no job to return to. He liked living down here, and he enjoyed the privilege of gainful employment down in the darkness.
The other eight messages were from Cordelia. They were not very informative, but neither did they sound like emergencies. Cordelia kept saying it was important for Jack to get back to her, but the tone didn’t indicate mortal peril.
Jack rewound the message tape and turned off the machine, then went into the kitchen. He surveyed the refrigerator and didn’t bother opening it. He knew what was inside. More, he simply wasn’t hungry. He had some idea of what he had devoured over the past day and night and didn’t want to think about it. Blind, albino gar. You wouldn’t find that on the menu at any Cajun restaurant in New York.
He went into the bedroom and flopped down on the bed. There was no question of undressing. Jack only moved sufficiently to wind the antique quilt around himself. He was out.
The phone by the bed awoke him at eight A.M. precisely. He knew this because the red LED numerals on the clock burned themselves into his retinas when he finally opened his eyes and reached over to stop the shrilling that was scraping his inner ear into shreds.
“Mmmppk. Yeah?”
“Uncle Jack?”
“Yeah-uh, Cordie?” He came a good deal more awake. “It’s me, Uncle Jack. I’m sorry if I woke you. I’ve been tryin’ to get you for better den a day.”
He yawned and adjusted the receiver so the pillow would hold it snug. “‘S okay, Cordie. I got to call the boss and tell him I’m down with something and been too sick to phone the last couple days.”
Cordelia sounded alarmed. “You really sick?”
Jack yawned again. Remembered what he could have said. “Pink of health. Just went off on a bender, that’s all.”
“Bagabond said—”
“Bagabond?”
“Yes.” Cordelia seemed to be picking her words carefully. “ I asked her to look for you. She said you were out in the bay, uh, killing things.”
“That about describes it,” said Jack. “Something wrong?”
He waited a few seconds before answering. Took a breath. “Stress, Cordie. That’s all. I needed to unwind.”
She didn’t sound wholly convinced but finally said, “Whatever you say, Uncle Jack. Say, listen, do you mind if I come by tonight after work and bring along a friend?”
“Who?” Jack said guardedly.
“C. C.”
Jack thought about her, remembered visiting her in Tachyon’s clinic. He owned everything she’d ever recorded, albums and tapes both, shelved out in the next room. “I guess so,” he said. “It’ll give me an excuse to clean up the house.”
“No need,” said Cordelia.
He laughed. “Oh, yeah, dere is a need.”
“Five-thirty okay?”
“Should be. By the way,” he said, “what’s this all about?” She was candid. “I need your help, Uncle Jack.” She filled him in on how things were proceeding with logistics for the benefit. “I’m snowed,” she said. “I cannot do everything.”
“I don’ know much about putting on this kind of event.”
“You know rock ‘n’ roll,” she said. “Better, you can handle just about anything that happens.”
Almost anything, he thought. Tachyon’s face floated in front of him. Michael’s. “Flatterer,” he said.
“Verite . “
A few moments went by. “One thing I got to ask,” said Jack. “We haven’t been talkin’ much ...”
“I know,” she said. “I know. For now I’m just not thinking much ‘bout it.”
“No resolution, then?”
“Not yet.”
“Thanks for bein’ honest.”
More seconds went by. It seemed as though Cordelia wanted to say something, but finally all she said was, “Okay, thanks then, Uncle Jack. I’ll be by with C.C. at half past five. ‘Bye.”
Jack listened to the silence until the circuit disconnected. Then he turned over and dialed his supervisor at the Transit Department. He wouldn’t have to concentrate to sound convincingly sick.
When he opened the door to Cordelia and C.C. late in the afternoon, Jack realized that cleaning up his living room probably had been the easier part of the day. Cordelia’s eyes seemed to squint as she looked at him, as though she were actually seeing two images and trying to choose the one she would perceive.
“Uncle Jack,” she said. There was a stiff instant as she appeared to debate whether to give him a hug.
The woman standing beside her defused the moment. “Jack!” said C.C. “It’s good to see you again.” She stepped past Cordelia into the living room, giving Jack a firm hug and a warm kiss on the lips. “You know something?” she said. “Even though I didn’t know what was going on for a long time, it really meant a lot, your coming to visit me in the clinic. Anything ever happens to you, you know I’ll be there every visiting period, okay?” She grinned.
“Okay,” he said.
“Mon Dieu,” said Cordelia, looking around Jack’s home. “What happened here?”
Jack’s restoration efforts had not been totally successful. Some of the smashed antique furniture was stacked to one side of the room. He hadn’t the heart to take it topside to a Dumpster. There was still the chance of careful repair and restoration.
“When I was coming in last night,” he said. “ I slipped.”
“Shot while trying to escape,” said Cordelia ironically. “Whatever happened, Uncle Jack, I’m really sorry. This was such a beautiful place.”
“It still ain’t shabby,” said C.C., plopping down in a claw-footed love seat. She spread her arms as she sank into the overstuffed upholstery. “This is great.” She smiled up at Jack. “Got some coffee?”
“Sure,” he said. “It’s all made.”
“Bagabond was going to come along—” C.C. started to say.
“She had some errands uptown,” said Cordelia. “I think she’d want me to say hello,” said C.C.
“Sure.” Right, he thought. Cordelia offered to help with the coffee, but he shooed her back to the living room. When everyone was settled with a steaming mug and a plate of scones with strawberry preserves, Jack said, “So?”
“So,” said C.C., “your niece is very persuasive. But so’s my own ego. I’m gonna come out of seclusion for the benefit, Jack. Back to public performance. Cold turkey. Nothing half-assed. A couple billion potential viewers. There I’ll be, in front of God and everybody.” She chuckled. “Nothing like hitting acute agoraphobia head on.”
“Pretty gutsy,” said Jack. “I’m glad you’re doing it. New stuff?”
“Some old, some new,” she said. “Some borrowed, some blues. It all depends on what the boss here,”—C.C. gestured at Cordelia—“gives me for time.”
“Twenty minutes,” said Cordelia. “That’s what everybody gets. The Boss, Girls With Guns, you.”
“Equality’s a great thing.” C.C. looked back at Jack. “So you’re gonna help me get ready for the big night?”
“Uh,” said Jack.
“CF and G can persuade the Transit people to give you time off,” said Cordelia quickly. “ I talked to one of their guys in community relations. They think it’d be terrific to have one of their own involved in something like this.”
“Uh huh,” said jack.
“With pay,” Cordelia said. “And GF and G’ll give you a fee too.”
“I’ve got savings,” Jack said quietly. “Uncle Jack, I need you.”
“I’ve heard that before.” Gently, this time.
“So I say it to you again.” It seemed to him Cordelia’s voice, her expression, her eyes, were all one coordinated appeal.
“It would be good to work with you,” said C.C. She winked one emerald eye. “Free backstage pass. Rub shoulders with the stars.”
Jack looked from one woman to the other. “Okay,” he finally said. “It’s a deal.”
“Great,” said Cordelia. “I’ll start feeding you the details. But there’s one more thing I want to mention now.”
“Why do I have the feeling,” said jack, “that I ought to be a ‘gator at this very moment, lookin’ up at the gaff ?”
“You have plans for tomorrow night?” Cordelia said.
Jack spread his hands. “ I thought I’d maybe refinish some chairs.”
“You’re coming with us to New Brunswick.”
“New Jersey?”
Cordelia nodded. “We’re going to the Holidome. We’re going to see Buddy Holley.”
Jack said, “The Buddy Holley? I thought he was dead.”
“He’s been on the lounge circuit for years. I saw a note about his appearance in the Voice.”
“She wants him for the benefit,” said C.C. again.
“A nostalgia act?” said Jack.
Cordelia was actually blushing. “I grew up with his music. I worship the man. I mean, nothing’s set with the benefit and him. I just want us to go see him and find out if he’s anything like he used to be.”
“You may be in for a rude shock,” said C.C. “Guitar of clay and all that.”
“I’ll risk it.”
“‘Not Fade Away,s one my favorite songs ever,” said Jack. “Count me in.”
“Tell him,” C.C. said to Cordelia. “Bagabond’s going too,” she said reluctantly.
“I don’ know bout this,” said Jack. He thought about his first encounter with Bludgeon, when the black cat had saved him from having to tangle with the psychopathic gay-basher. Had the cat been acting on his own, or at Bagabond’s suggestion? He’d never asked the woman. Maybe he would tomorrow night.
“Uncle Jack?” said Cordelia. He smiled at her. “Let’s rock.”
Saturday
“Oh, my god,” C.C. said, sufficiently low that only Jack heard. “He’s covering Prince, goddamned Prince!”
“And not very well,” said Jack.
Cordelia had worried because of glacial traffic in the Holland Tunnel that the four of them would be late for Buddy Holley’s first set. She also fretted that Jersey youth would make off with the Mercedes she’d borrowed from Luz Alcala.
“It’s a Holiday Inn,” said Jack as they pulled into the entrance.
“So?”
“The parking lot’s illuminated,” said Jack.
“There’s an empty space close to the lobby,” said Cordelia with relief.
“You want me to slip ten to the clerk to keep an eye on the car?”
“Would you?” said Cordelia seriously.
So they’d parked and secured the Mercedes and entered the New Brunswick Holidome.
The trip over from the city had been tense enough. Jack had ridden shotgun in front with Cordelia driving. Bagabond sat in back on the opposite side, as far from Jack as she could get. Both C.C. and Cordelia had done their best to keep a conversation going. Jack decided it was an inappropriate time to quiz Bagabond about whether his erstwhile rescuer, the black cat, had been acting autonomously or on his mistress’s orders.
“Dis is god be great,” said Cordelia. She had slotted a cassette of Buddy Holley and the Crickets’ greatest hits into the Blaupunkt player. The speaker system was far, far better than adequate.
“Cordelia,” said Bagabond, “I like Buddy a lot, but maybe so he doesn’t hurt my ears?”
“Oh, sorry,” said Cordelia. She turned the volume knob down to barely endurable.
Then Saturday-evening traffic slowed to a stop-and-go creep within the tunnel, the stench of auto exhaust rose up in visible clouds, and the four in the Mercedes listened to all of Cordelia’s Buddy Holley tapes before they reached New Jersey.
Cordelia had become more nervous the later it got. “Maybe there’ll be a warm-up group,” she’d muttered. There hadn’t been, but it turned out not to matter. When the four walked through the door of the Holidome lounge, they saw there was no need to worry about seats. Perhaps half the booths and tables were vacant. Clearly Saturdaynight bacchanalia in New Brunswick didn’t center here. They took a table about ten feet from the low stage, Jack and Bagabond on opposite sides, buffered by C.C. and Cordelia. And Buddy Holley covered Prince.
Jack recognized Holley from the album portraits. He knew the musician was forty-nine, close enough to Jack’s own age. Holley looked older. His face carried too much flesh; his belly wasn’t completely camouflaged by the silver-lame jacket. He no longer wore the familiar old black horn-rims; his eyes were masked by stylish aviator shades that couldn’t quite hide the dark bags. But he still played the Fender Telecaster like an angel.
The same couldn’t be said for his sidemen. The rhythm guitarist and the bass player both looked about seventeen. Their playing was not inspired. The muddy sound mix didn’t help. The drummer flailed at his snares, the volume coming through at about the right level to completely mask Holley’s vocal delivery.
In rapid order Buddy Holley segued from Prince into a bad Billy idol and then a so-so Bon Jovi.
“I don’t believe it,” said C. C., drinking a healthy dollop of her Campari and tonic. “All he’s doing is covering top-forty shit.”
Cordelia watched silently, her expression of initial enthusiasm visibly fading.
Bagabond shook her head disapprovingly. “We shouldn’t have come.”
Maybe, Jack thought, he’s biding his time. “Give him a little while.”
As the desultory clapping faded after a game attempt at evoking Ted Nugent, a voice from the back of the lounge yelled, “Come on, Buddy-give us some oldies!” A ragged cheer went up. Most of the clapping came from Cordelia’s table.
Buddy Holley took his Telecaster by the neck and leaned toward the audience. “Well,” he said, the West Texas twang still pronounced, “I don’t usually take requests, but since you’ve been such a terrific crowd ...” He settled back and strummed out a rapid-fire sequence of opening chords that his backup group more-or-less followed.
“Oh, lord,” said C.C. She took another drink as Buddy Holley tore into Tommy Roe’s “Hurray for Hazel,” then a quick verse of “Sheila,” finally a lugubrious, almost-bluesy version of Bobby Vinton’s “Red Roses for a Blue Lady”. Holley continued in that vein. He played a lot of music made famous by Bobbys and Tommys in the fifties and sixties.
“I want to hear ‘Cindy Lou or ‘That’ll Be the Day’ or ‘It’s So Easy’ or ‘T town,”‘ said Cordelia, distractedly swirling her gin and tonic. “Not this shit.”
I’ll settle for “Not Fade Away,” Jack thought. He watched Buddy Holley slog through the dismal pop retrospective and started getting real depressed. It was enough to make him maybe wish that Holley had died at the height of his initial popularity and not survived to fall into this ghastly self-mockery.
Inebriated conversation and drunken laughter escalated at the surrounding tables. It appeared that most in the lounge had completely forgotten that Buddy Holley was performing onstage. When Holley came to the end of his set, he introduced the final number very simply. “This is something new,” he said. The sparse crowd was having none of it; they had turned actively hostile.
“Fuck you!” somebody shouted. “Turn on the jukebox!” Holley shrugged. Turned. Walked off the stage.
His backup guitarists quietly put their instruments down; the drummer got up and laid his sticks on an amp.
“Why doesn’t he do his classics?” said Cordelia. “Hang on,” she said to her companions. Then she got up and collared Buddy Holley as he headed toward the bar. They saw her talking earnestly to the man. She led him back to the table, dragged up a vacant chair, appeared to be making him sit through dint of sheer will. Holley looked bemused at the whole affair. Cordelia made introductions. The musician courteously acknowledged each name and shook hands in turn.
Jack found the man’s grip warm and firm, not flabby at all. Cordelia said, “We’re four of your greatest fans.”
“Sort of sorry you’re all here,” said Holley. “I feel like I owe everyone an apology. This isn’t a good show tonight.” He shrugged. “‘Course most nights in lounges are like that.” Holley smiled self-deprecatingly.
“Why don’t you play your own music?” said Bagabond without preamble.
“Your old music,” said Cordelia. “The great stufF” Holley looked around the table. “I’ve got my reasons,” he said. “It ain’t a matter of not wanting to. I just can’t.”
“Well,” said Cordelia, smiling, “maybe I can help change your mind.” She launched into her spiel about the benefit at the Funhouse, about how Holley could go on early in the following Saturday’s performance, that maybe he could do a medley of the music that had propelled him to superstardom in the fifties and early sixties, that perhaps-just maybe—the concert and the telecast could rejuvenate his career. “Just like when the Boss found Gary U.S. Bonds playing in bars like this,” she finished up.
Buddy Holley looked honestly astonished by Cordelia’s outpouring of enthusiasm. He put his elbows on the table, closely studying the club soda and lime the waitress had brought him, finally looking up at her with a slight smile. “Listen,” he said. “ I thank you. I truly do. Hearing something like this makes my night-hell, the whole year.” He looked away. “But I can’t do it.”
“But you can,” said Cordelia. He shook his head.
“Think about it.”
“Won’t do no good,” he said. “It won’t work.” He patted her hand. “But thanks for the thought.” And with that, he nodded to the rest of them, then got up and trudged through the smoke to the stage for his second set.
“Damn,” said Cordelia.
Jack watched the musician’s back as Holley hoisted himself up onto the stage. There was something familiar about how the man carried himself. It was the sense of defeat. Jack thought he’d last seen that slight slumping of shoulders and hanging of head when he’d looked in the mirror. Just this morning.
He wondered how many years and what disasters had beaten Buddy Holley down. I wish—At first the thought didn’t complete itself. Then he said to himself, I wish I could help.
“You want to go or stay?” said C.C. to Cordelia.
“Go,” said Cordelia. Almost too low to be heard, she continued, “But I think I’ll be back.”
“Like MacArthur?” said Bagabond.
“More like Sergeant Preston of the Mounties,” said Cordelia.
Sunday
“So who are you calling a chickie?” said Cordelia, voice colder than the ocean off Jones Beach.
“What I be sayin’,” said the Holiday Inn morning clerk, “is that we can’t be givin’ out guests’ room numbers to just any chickie what comes along.” He smiled at her. “Rules.”
“You want to know how early I had to get up to catch a train out here?” Cordelia demanded. “Do you know how long I waited for a cab at the New Brunswick station?”
The clerk’s easy smile started to fray at the lips. “Sorry.”
“I’m not a goddamned groupie!” Cordelia slapped an expensively embossed business card down on the counter. “I’m trying to make Holley a star.”
“Already was.” The clerk picked up the card and examined it. Below Cordelia’s name it read Associate Producer.’ The escalated job title had been in lieu of a raise. “No shit? You work with GF and G, the folks what do the Robert Townsend show an’ all that Spike Lee stuff?” He sounded halfway impressed.
“No shit,” said Cordelia. She tried smiling. “Honest.”
“And you’re gonna pull Buddy Holley out of this shithole?”
“Gonna try.”
“O-kay,” said the clerk, grinning. He glanced at the registration spinner. “Room eighty-four twenty,” He looked at Cordelia significantly.
“So?”
With a tone of voice that suggested “Don’t you know nothin’?” the clerk said, “The main roads leadin’ out of Lubbock. The highway to Nashville.”
“Oh,” said Cordelia.
Buddy Holley had been asleep when Cordelia knocked on the door of room 8420 at 9:25. That had been obvious when he opened the door. His gray-streaked black hair was in disarray. His glasses were slightly askew as he peered out into the hallway.
“It’s me, Cordelia Chaisson. Remember? From last night?”
“Um, right.” Holley seemed to gather himself. “Can I help you?”
“I’m here to take you to breakfast. I need to talk with you. It’s quite important.”
Buddy Holley shook his head bemusedly. “Are you the irresistible force? Or the immovable object?”
Cordelia shrugged.
“Give me ten,” said Holley. “I’ll meet you down in the lobby.”
“Promise?” said Cordelia.
Holley smiled slightly, nodded, and shut the door.
Buddy Holley came to the breakfast table in crisp denim jeans, a flowered western shirt, and a brown corduroy jacket. He looked somewhat the worse for wear, but comfortable.
He seated himself and said,
“You gonna evangelize me again?”, “If I can. We can talk about dat after we get some coffee.”
“Tea for me,” he said. “Herbal. I brought my own. The tea selection in the kitchen is pretty shabby.”
The waitress came and took their order.
“Around your neck,” said Holley, pointing with his glance. “That a fetish? I saw it last night, but I was preoccupied.” Cordelia unhooked the clasp and passed the fetish over. The tiny silver alligator and the fossil tooth were bound to the delicate oval of sandstone with a tough strand of dried gut. Holley turned the object over and over, examining it closely. “Doesn’t look American southwest-Polynesian? Australia, maybe?”
“Pretty good,” said Cordelia. “Aboriginal.”
“What tribe? I know the Aranda pretty well, even the Wikmunkan and the Murngin, but this just ain’t familiar.”
“It was made by a young urban aborigine,” said Cordelia. She hesitated a moment. It both excited and hurt her to think of Wyungare. And how, she wondered, was the central Australian revolution, such as it was, going? She’d been too busy with the benefit to watch much news. “He gave it to me as a going-away gift.”
“Let me guess,” said Holley. “The sandstone’s from Uluru?” Cordelia nodded. Uluru, true name of what the Europeans called Ayers Rock. “And the reptile’s your totem, of course.” He held the object up to the light before passing it back over. “There’s considerable power here. Not just a token.”
She refastened the chain. “How do you know?”
He grinned crookedly at her. “Just don’t laugh too loud, okay?”
Cordelia felt puzzled. “Okay.”
“Ever since things went to hell-since they fell apart around 1972,” he said hesitantly, “ I been lookin’ around.” He contemplatively sipped his tea.
“For what?” Cordelia finally said.
“For whatever, for anything that meant something. I was just-searching.”
Cordelia thought for a moment. “Spirituality?”
Holley nodded vehemently. “Absolutely. The limos were gone, the homes, the private jet and the high living, the—”
He stopped in midsentence. “All gone. There had to be something else besides hitting the bottle and the bottom.”
“And you’ve found it?”
“I’m still huntin’.” He met her gaze and smiled. “Lotta years and a lotta miles. You know something? I’m a lot more popular in Africa and the rest of the world than I am here. Back in ‘75 my agent gave me a last chance and booked me into this crazy pan-African tour. Things fell apart-well, I fell part. I really got screwed up after I backed out of a gig in Jo’burg. Somehow I stole a Land-Rover and ended up drinkin’ two fifths of Jim Beam ‘way out in the bush. You know how alcohol poisonin’ works? Shoot, I was well on my way.”
Cordelia stared at him, held entranced by the flat, West Texas twang. The man was a storyteller.
“Bushmen found me. Tribesmen from out of the Kalahari. First thing I knew was a !Kung shaman leanin’ down over me and lettin’ out the most ungodly screams you ever heard. Later I found out he was taking the sickness into himself and then gettin’ shed of it into the air.” Holley contemplatively touched the pad of his thumb to his incisors. “That was the beginning.”
“And since?” said Cordelia.
“I keep lookin’. I search everywhere. When I played a string of bars in the Dakotas and the Midwest I learned about Rolling Thunder and the generations of Black Elk. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know,” His voice took on a dreamy quality. “When I was with the Lakota, I cried for a vision. The shaman took me through the inipi ceremony and sent me up the hill to receive the wakan, the holy beings.” Holley smiled ruefully. “The Thunder Beings came, but that was about all. I got wet and cold.” He shrugged. “So it goes.”
“You keep searching,” said Cordelia.
“I do that,” said Holley. “I learn. I been off booze since South Africa. No more drugs either. As for what I’m learnin’, it ain’t easy to work with a hardshell Baptist growin’ up, but that’s what I’ve tried to do.”
It occurred to Cordelia that, for all he’d been saying, Buddy Holley still seemed very anchored in the physical universe. She didn’t have the same sense of ethereal dissociation that she’d gotten from spiritually transformed rock stars such as Cat Stevens or Richie Furay. She nibbled a bite from her neglected English muffin. “Most of what I know about this, I learned from my aboriginal friend, but I’ve thought about it. Sometimes, in my job, I wonder whether rock stars, pop singers, entertainers in the public eye in America, are sort of the contemporary equivalent of shamans.”
Holley nodded seriously. “Men and women of power. Absolutely.”
“They have the magic.”
Buddy Holley laughed. “Fortunately the ones who believe they do, usually have nothing. And the ones who truly possess the power, don’t consciously know it.”
Cordelia finished her muffin. “The performers at the benefit concert next Saturday all have the power.” Holley looked wary. “I’m changing the subject,” Cordelia said lightly.
“I don’t think things have changed since last night. You want me to play all my old standards. I just can’t do that.”
“Is this—” Cordelia hunted for words. “Is this a crisis of confidence?”
“That’s probably part of it.”
“Same thing happened with C.C. Ryder,” said Cordelia. “But she changed her mind. She’s gonna appear.”
“Good for her.” Holley hesitated. “The truth is, I can’t play the songs you want me to do.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t own them anymore. ‘Long about the time things went to hell, a New York outfit called Shrike Music bought up my entire catalog. They’re real sweethearts. Ever see their logo? A quarter-note stuck on a spike. They been keeping my songs on ice. I hate it, but I can’t do spit to get them back.” Holley spread his hands helplessly.
“We’ll see,” said Cordelia without hesitation. “GF and G’s got some pull. Is that the only other catch?”
“You think you can do anything, don’t you?” Holley smiled as he shook his head. This time it was a genuine smile. His teeth were even and white. “Okay, look. You spring some of my music loose and maybe we’ve got a deal. Just for old times’ sake.”
“I don’t—understand,” said Cordelia.
“Well, let me tell you something,” said Buddy Holley. Animation filled his features and his voice. “Back in high school in Lubbock? Back when Bob Montgomery and I were first putting together a band and doin’ some crazy recordings, there was a girl. I thought she was just—well—” He took a deep breath and smiled shyly. “You know the story line. She never noticed me a-tall. Couple years later, she was still in my head when I recorded ‘Girl on My Mind’ in Nashville. That was about the time Decca wanted me to sound like everyone else with a rock ‘n’ roll hit in 1956. I sort of got out of the formula with ‘Girl.”‘ He shook his head. “So anyway, you remind me of her. She knew her own way too.” He leaned back in his seat and regarded her.
“That’s a great story,” said Cordelia. “It’s just like—”
“Rock ‘n’ roll,” Holley finished.
They both laughed. Things, thought Cordelia, were back on track.
Monday
First thing Monday morning, Cordelia sat at her desk and contemplated her sins while she waited on hold with the rights and permissions department at Shrike Music. The background tape for Shrike’s hold circuit was classical, somber and dirgelike. Cordelia suspected it was a deliberate psych-out tactic.
It occurred to her as she examined her nails that she had not yet tried to contact Mick Jagger. Luz Alcala would not be happy. At least she had gotten the Mercedes back to Luz without a scratch or dent. Well, there were priorities. It seemed very important to secure Buddy Holley for the Funhouse benefit.
She riffled through the phone messages that had been stacked on her desk. U2’s manager wanted her to know that The Edge had got his fingers caught in a car door over the weekend. U2 just might be without the services of their guitarist. Maybe, she thought, she could convince Bono to do an acoustic set?
The tech people had left a note alerting her that ShowSat III was acting up over the Indian Ocean. They were working on it. They were somewhat confident that malfunctioning relays could be cleared. Somewhat? she thought. Shit. ‘Somewhat’ had better translate into ‘absolutely’. She knew damn well she didn’t have the clout to get GF&G to commission a shuttle repair flight with five days notice. With any notice. Christ, what was she thinking? Cordelia gulped some coffee and glared down at the phone. How long was Shrike going to hang her up?
Another note was from Tami, the half-Eskimo lead guitarist of Girls With Guns. The world’s greatest all-women neopunker band was stranded in Billings. And could Cordelia wire just enough cash so that all the members of the band could get to New York by Saturday? Probably. Cordelia jotted a note. Talk to Luz.
There was a double beep on the phone and a voice said, “Miss Delveccio, rights and permissions.”
Cordelia introduced herself, sounding as calm, self-assured, and in control as she could manage. She sounded good to her. “I want to talk about Buddy Holley’s catalog,” Cordelia said. “I understand Shrike holds the rights. Here at Global Fun and Games we’re very much looking forward to having Mr. Holley perform a selection of his past hits at this weekend’s global benefit for medical victims.”
There was a brief silence. “What sort of medical victims?” Cordelia didn’t like the sound of her voice. South Bronx, probably. “Um, AIDS and the wild card virus. The live video feed will reach—”
Miss Delveccio interrupted her. “Oh, right, that benefit. I’m sorry, Ms. Chaisson, but it will be quite impossible to cooperate with Global on this project. I am sorry,” She didn’t sound sorry.
“But surely there—”
“Shrike owns Mr. Holley’s music under an exclusive license. We just won’t be able to release the permissions you need.” The tone of her voice said, and that’s final.
“Perhaps if I could speak with your department head—”
“I’m afraid Mr. Lazarus isn’t in today.”
“Well, maybe—”
“Thank you for thinking of us, Ms. Chaisson,” said Miss Delveccio. “Have a nice day.” And she hung up.
Cordelia stared at the phone for a minute or two. Damn it. She hoped Miss Delveccio would have an extremely difficult period. After another minute she switched on the desk terminal and pulled up the on-line Variety. She flipped through a few electronic pages at random and then turned on the modem and dialed up Variety’s index base. While there were quite a few key-word entries for Shrike Music, but not many for Buddy Holley, there was one story that flagged both. It was dated nearly three months before, while she had been in Australia. It seemed that Shrike Music had inked a megabucks deal with America’s second-largest advertising firm. The advertising company was a client of a major evangelical organization that was looking to market its theme amusement parks and other commercial subsidiaries through what the article, quoting Leo Barnett, termed ‘the innocent, but energetic, nostalgia, of Buddy Holley’s music’.
Oh, Cordelia thought. Oh, no. No wonder Shrike wasn’t eager to have Holley’s songs associated with the benefit. This was going to be a problem.
Luz Alcala stuck her head through the office door and said, “Good morning, Cordelia, did you have a good weekend?” Cordelia looked up. “Definitely. You get your keys okay? Thanks again for the car.”
Luz nodded. “You all right? You look a bit distracted.”
“It’s just Monday morning.”
Luz smiled sympathetically. “By the way, did you reach our lycanthropic friend?”
Cordelia shook her head. Thought fast. “Still can’t find him.”
“Let me give you a suggestion. After you try their management, call the presidents of the companies they record for. When you can’t get satisfaction, go upstairs. It almost always works.”
Aha! thought Cordelia. “Thanks,” she said.
After Luz chatted a little more and then left, Cordelia dialed Shrike back and asked for the president’s office. After two layers of secretaries, she finally reached one Anthony Michael Cardwell. Cardwell was more sympathetic than Miss Delveccio, but ultimately no more helpful. “True, Shrike Music has a responsibility to the community-and we participate in nwny projects toward that end-but ultimately we are responsible to our shareholders and our corporate owners,” he said. “I believe you can appreciate the difficulty of our position.”
Bullshit, Cordelia thought, furious. What she said was much the same thing. Definitely too blunt. The president of Shrike Music cut the conversation short.
After setting the phone down, Cordelia drummed her fingers on the desktop. Go upstairs, Luz had said. Cordelia touched the terminal keyboard and called up GF&G’s research list of entertainment industry data bases. As she started to dig out the roots of Shrike’s corporate family tree, she wondered how Jack was doing.
Naturally Jack had believed Cordelia when she had told him Sunday night that things looked good so far as obtaining permission for Holley to play his own music. More, GF&G would take care of Jack’s leave of absence Monday morning. That would free Jack so he could help move Holley into Manhattan. Cordelia had arranged a room downtown at the Hotel California, Manhattan’s premiere hostelry for visiting musicians. “The management,” Cordelia had said, “doesn’t care what happens to a room so long as the damage gets paid for. Platinum Amex cards are welcome.”
By noon Monday, while Cordelia was playing silicon Nancy Drew, Jack had moved Buddy Holley into his eighth-floor room at the Hotel California. “You’ve got an open account,” the desk clerk had said, so they ordered up sumptuous lunches.
Jack watched as Holley unpacked a compact tape deck and a box of cassettes. There was an eclectic selection of new age music—lots of Windham Hill albums, along with starkly packaged relaxation tapes of wind, storm, sea, rain-and a varied lot of early rock, blues, and country. “Got some scarce stuff here,” said Holley, picking up a handful of what were obviously home-dubbed tapes. “Tiny Bradshaw, Lonnie Johnson, Bill Doggett, King Curtis. Got the better-known stuff tooRoy Orbison, Buddy Knox, Doug Sahm.” He chuckled. “A real Texas collection, those last boys. Also have some George Jones-got a soft spot in my heart for that boy too. Me and my first band played behind him back in ‘55 on the Hank Cochran show.”
“What’s that?” Jack pointed at what seemed to be the only vinyl record in the box of tapes.
“I’m real proud of that.” Holley held up the 45. “‘Jole Blon.’ Waylon Jennings’s first record. I produced that for him back when he was playin with the Crickets.”
Jack took the record and examined it gingerly, as though looking at a holy relic. “ I guess maybe I heard this on WSN.”
“Yep,” said Holley. “Just about everybody I respect from that era learned about music first from listenin’ to the Grand Ole Opry.”
Jack set down the 45 of “Joie Blon.” A tremendous lassitude swept across him. He looked at the remains of lunch. Nausea rocked back and forth in his belly. He sat back on the hotel couch and tried to keep his voice steady. “‘Fore I came to New York, I listened to the Opry all the time. Once I was here, I found a station out of Virginia dat carried it.”
“You come from the same place as your niece?” Holley said interestedly.
Jack nodded.
“Alligator your totem too?”
Jack said nothing, trying to control the new pain in his gut.
“‘Gator’s a powerful guardian animal spirit,” said Holley. “ I wouldn’t mess with one.”
Jack doubled up and tried not to whimper.
Holley was at his side. “Somethin’ wrong?” He ran his hands down Jack’s chest and stomach. His fingers fluttered lightly over the man’s belly. He whistled. “Oh, man, I think you’ve got some trouble here.”
“I know,” said Jack. He groaned. Any other year he’d be pretty sure he could avoid the flu-type stomach bugs. But Tachyon had briefed him about opportunistic infections. He’d had the instant image of viruses zeroing in on him from every pesthole in the world. “ I think maybe it’s just the flu.”
Holley shook his head. “It’s a heavy-duty power intrusion I’m pickin’ up here.”
“It’s a bug.”
“And the bug’s gettin’ through to you because your protection, your personal mantle is screwed.”
“Couldn’t have put it better myself,” said Jack.
Holley took his hands away from Jack’s abdomen. “Sorry, nothin’ personal. I don’t know if Cordelia told you, but I-well, I know something about this stuff.” Jack looked back at him bewilderedly. “What you need,” said Holley seriously, “is a traditional treatment. You need to have the intrusion sucked out. I think it’s the only way.”
Jack couldn’t help himself. He started chuckling, then guffawing. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d laughed like this. It hurt to laugh, but it helped as well. Buddy Holley looked on, apparently astonished. Finally Jack straightened a bit and said, “Sorry, I just don’t think, uh, sucking an intrusion out of my body would be a real wise idea right now.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” said Holley. “I’m talkin’ about a psychic thing, pullin’ out the cause of the discomfort usin’ the power of the soul and the mind.”
“I’m not.” Jack started laughing again. But Dieu, he did feel better.
By two in the afternoon Cordelia had accessed both the New York Public Library Reference Base and the Public Records DB in Albany. She covered several notebook pages with scrawled numbers and notes. Her task was akin to one of the thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles she never had the patience to finish.
Shrike Music was a wholly owned subsidiary of Monopoly Holdings, a New York corporation. Cordelia had dialed Monopoly’s central Manhattan number and tried for the president. Whom she eventually got was the executive vice president for corporate affairs. That man told her the Buddy Holley matter was not his to comment upon, but that she should send a detailed letter to Monopoly’s president, one Connel McCray. But couldn’t Cordelia speak to McCray directly? she inquired. The president was indisposed. It was hard to say when he’d be back in the office.
Cordelia ascertained from Public Records that Monopoly Holdings was a division of the Infundibulum Corporation, a consortium controlled by CariBank in Nassau. The call to Infundibulum netted her a frustrating twenty minutes holding for an equally unsatisfactory conversation with the CEO’s executive assistant. The long distance call to Nassau got her a heavily accented Bahamian voice claiming complete confusion about this Holley chap.
After hanging up, Cordelia regarded the frustration the phone represented. “ I think I go home now,” she said to herself. A break was in order. She could come back to the office later and work all night.
Veronica and Cordelia shared a high-rise apartment downtown on Maiden Lane. There wasn’t much of a view-the living room windows looked out on a narrow courtyard with eleventh-floor neighbors only thirty feet away. At first it had been like watching very dull big-screen TV Cordelia quickly learned to ignore the rest of the building. It was pleasant just having her own small room. Veronica could use the rest of the apartment as she pleased.
Cordelia had made the maximum use of her room, engaging a Soho carpenter to build an inexpensive frame of two-byfours to support her bed. Instant sleeping loft. She just had to remember not to roll off the top during the night. The six feet of space beneath the mattress allowed her a closet, book shelves, and space to store her albums. That left her most of the wallspace for prints and posters. One wall was dominated by a color poster of Ayers Rock at dawn. The opposite wall had the common WHEN YOU’RE UP TO YOUR ASS IN ALLIGATORS poster, but with the tired maxim’s payoff amended in black marker to read YOU KNOW YOU’RE HOME.
Cordelia was slotting a Suzanne Vega tape into the deck when her roommate walked in. Veronica was wearing a slinky white gown, along with a platinum wig and violet contacts. “Masquerade?” Cordelia said.
“Just a date.” Veronica rolled her eyes. “It’s a guy from Malta with a crush on both Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor.” She changed the subject. “Listen, any good tickets left for Saturday?”
“At twenty-five hundred dollars a pop, I can’t really comp you,” said Cordelia.
“No problem. These are for management. Miranda and Ichiko can afford them. They just would like a little consideration about table placement. Close to the stage okay?”
“I’ll see what I can do.” Cordelia jotted a note and put her book of Things to Do back in her handbag.
“So how’s work?” said Veronica innocently. Cordelia told her.
“Sounds like you could use a real detective.”
“If I knew one, I’d ask. I’m desperate.”
“Well,” said Veronica. “It just so happens maybe I can help you out.”
“You want to tell me what you’re talking about?” It would be so good, thought Cordelia, to turn this over to someone else.
“Not yet,” Veronica said. “Let me work on it. And you can make sure those seats are good ones.”
“Help me get Buddy Holley in front of the cameras,” said Cordelia, “and I’ll let Miranda and Ichiko sit onstage behind the monitors. They can hold the microphones. Anything their hearts desire.”
“It’s a deal. Now then,” continued Veronica, “before I go uptown, whose turn is it to buy cat food?”
The men sat and listened to music and drank. Buddy Holley drank soda. Jack drank dark beer. Room service was accommodating. They talked. Every once in a while Holley would get up to change the tapes. They went through Jimmie Rodgers and Carl Perkins, Hank Williams and Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley and Conway Twitty. Jack was surprised that the singer had some tapes of newer artists: Lyle Lovett and Dwight Yoakum and Steve Earle. “Like the monkey said,” Holley said simply, “you gotta keep up with evolution.”
They talked about the fifties—about Louisiana bayou country and the dry vastness of West Texas. “Tell you,” said Holley, “it ain’t sayin’ much about Lubbock when about the only place to go on Saturday night is Amarillo. I went back there after the oil boom, and then again after the crash, and nothin’ much had changed either time.”
“No Buddy Holley Day?” said Jack.
“Figure I’ll have to die before that happens.”
They had a lot in common, Jack decided. Except there’d never be a Jack Robicheaux Day in Atelier Parish. Not even after he’d died. He fumbled through the box of cassettes and held up one that was unlabeled except for the word “new.”
“What’s this?”
“Aw, that’s nothin’,” said Holley. “Nothin’ you’d want to hear.”
There was something about the way he’d protested, Jack thought. When Buddy Holley went into the bathroom, Jack set the mysterious cassette in the deck and punched “play.” The music was simple and unadorned. There was no backup, no double-tracking, no layered sound. The singing was reflective in the first song, exuberant in the second. The lyrics were mature. The characteristic hiccup in the vocal line was there. This was Buddy Holley. Jack had never heard either of these songs before.
He heard the bathroom door open behind him. Buddy Holley said, “After the plane went down with my family, and Shrike bought all my music, people seemed to think I just wasn’t gonna write anymore. And for a few years, I guess I didn’t.”
The third song began.
“All dis is new,” said Jack reverently. “Is it not?”
Buddy Holley’s voice was soft and powerful. “Just as fresh as resurrection.”
Tuesday
The Funhouse was no Carnegie Hall, and as with virtually any other Manhattan club, daylight didn’t become it. This morning the mirrors were streaked and dusty. They’d be polished to a high sheen by Saturday. As Jack looked across toward the stage, what he mostly saw were chairs stacked on tables. The few windows and skylights admitted bars of spring sunlight that contained myriad dancing dust motes. The place smelled stale. The other predominating odor was that of machine lubricant.
Jack stood beside Buddy Holley. Holley stood beside C.C. Ryder. On the other side of C.C. was Bagabond. It was an unbreakable protocol. Bagabond had chosen to be C. C.’s constant companion and protector. Jack realized he had consciously picked a similar role with Buddy Holley. He genuinely liked the singer, and it wasn’t merely a matter of nostalgia for the fifties and sixties. He felt he was becoming genuine friends with the Texan, though too bad, whispered the nasty voice in his head, you’re not going to be buddies for very long. Jack had seen Dr. Tachyon earlier in the morning. Tachyon had proposed hospitalizing him. “No way,” he’d said. Tachyon appealed to his reason. “Can you really predict what my version of the virus is going to do?” he’d asked. Tachyon admitted that he didn’t truly know. But there were precautions ... Jack had shrugged ruefully and left.
Xavier Desmond, his elephantine trunk seeming to wilt down his chest, watched over the stage preparations. He moved slowly, in the manner of a man knowing the real proximity of death, yet he seemed proud beyond words. For a night the eyes of most of the world would be on his beloved Funhouse.
The limited space in the club was being further curtailed by the camera tracks laid in front of and to the side of the stage. The tech people had cleverly rigged a superthin Louma boom from the ceiling. “Don’t let it brush the chandelier!” Des said as the remote operator put the mantislike camera mount through its paces.
Even with the shafts of sun glinting off the mirror balls, the club looked drab.
Buddy Holley scratched his head. “Shoot, I’ve seen worse stages.”
C.C. laughed and said, “I’ve played them.”
“Guess there won’t be no chicken wire around the stage, huh?”
C.C. shrugged and affected a deep, deep Texas accent. “Joe Ely used to tell me about places so tough, you had to puke three times and show a knife before they’d let you in. And that was if you was singin’.”
“Des runs a classier dive,” said Jack. “I figure people laying out twenty-five hundred dollars a seat aren’t gonna heave Corona bottles at the band.”
“Be more real if they did.” Holley glanced at C.C. “I gotta tell you, I’m pretty excited about hearing you sing.”
“Same here,” said C.C., “though I’m still edgy as a cat. You decided to go on for sure?”
Holley turned to Jack. “Anything from your niece?”
Jack shook his head. “I talked to her this morning. I guess things are going slow with Shrike, but she said no sweat. Just bureaucratic runaround.”
C.C. poked Holley in the ribs. “Listen, man, I will if you will.”
“A challenge?” Holley slowly grinned. “Think this’ll be as much fun as racin’ for pink slips? What the hell. Okay. I’ll go on first like the Ghost of Charts Past, and if I have to, I’ll cover-oh, Billy Idol.”
“No!” Bagabond spoke up. “No, you won’t.”
Things weren’t going terribly well for Cordelia. She had gotten into the office by seven. It was too bad about being so phased that she forgot about the sequence of time zones west. Little Steven’s road manager wasn’t terribly happy about being awakened in his hotel room at a little past four in the morning.
On the other hand, better news had come in about ten. X rays had determined that The Edge’s fingers were mildly sprained rather than fractured. Even though U2’s performance that night in Seattle was being scrubbed, the guitarist had a good shot at being operational by Saturday.
Then there was the matter of Shrike Music. Cordelia had a terrific flow chart with lines and arrows indicating the tangled skein owning the music publishing firm. She had lists of CEOs, presidents, vice presidents, and heads of promotion departments. And lawyers-lord, hordes of attorneys. But no one would talk to her. How come? she wondered. Is it my breath? She giggled. Fatigue, she thought. Early burn out. Way too soon. There would be time to collapse after Saturday night. She poured another cup of high-caf Columbian and started thinking seriously about Shrike and its masters, and why everyone was evading as if she were a Congressional investigator out birddogging payola charges.
The phone beeped. Good. Maybe it was one of a dozen executives connected with Shrike or its Byzantine ownership returning her calls.
“Hi,” said her roommate. “You got the tickets for me?”
“Have you lined up Spenser, or maybe Sam Spade?”
“Even better,” said Veronica. “Got somebody here I want you to talk to.”
“Veronica—” she started to say. Why was everyone playing cloak-and-dagger?
“This is Croyd,” said an unfamiliar male voice. “You met me. We had a little date, you, me, and Veronica.”
“I remember,” said Cordelia, “but—”
“I’m in investigations.” Flatly.
“I guess I knew that, but I didn’t think—”
“Just listen,” said Croyd. “This is Veronica’s idea, not mine. Maybe I can help. Maybe not. You want to know something about Shrike Music.”
“Right. Buddy Holley and I need to find out who really owns his music, so I can get permission for him to sing it, and I can convince him to appear Saturday—”
“So isn’t Shrike in the phone book?” said Croyd. “They’ve been stonewalling me like they were the Mafia or something.”
She heard a dry chuckle. “Maybe they are.”
“Anything you can do,” Cordelia said, “I’ll be very—” Croyd broke in again. “I’ll see what I can find out. I’ll get back to you.” The connection clicked o$:
Cordelia set the phone down and allowed herself a smile. She crossed her fingers. Both hands. Then she picked up from the desk the next note begging her attention. This one was simpler. Maybe she could find out in less than an hour exactly why Girls With Guns seemed to be hung up in Cleveland.
Wednesday
GF&G had decided that the Funhouse club band would back both C.C. Ryder and Buddy Holley. Actually it was C.C. who approved them; GF&G paid the checks.
“They’re all sound musicians,” said C.C. to Holley. “Good enough for me.” He watched and listened as the two guitarists, drummer, keyboard woman, and sax player tuned.
Jack observed too. Practice would be long and tedious. But if you were an observer, it was show business in action. It was diverting. Glamorous. It was heaven.
C.C. led Holley onto the stage. Bagabond sat down at a front table, though the action looked performed under duress. Jack knew that she really did want to follow C.C. on up there.
“Mind if I sit here?” he said to her, setting his hand on the back of the chair opposite. Bagabond’s dark eyes fixed on him fiercely for just a split second; she shrugged slightly and Jack sat.
“Okay,” C.C. was saying to the musicians on the stage. “Here’s what I’m gonna want to start with. Or maybe end with. Damned if I know yet. All I really know is that it’s new and it’s part of my twenty minutes.” She jacked in her ebony twelve-string and strummed a chord progression. “We got a whole three days to get in tune. So remember the advantage we have over dudes like the Boss or U2.—Everybody grinned. “Okay, let’s do it. This is called “Baby You Been Dealt a Winning Hand.’ One, two, three, and—”
The moment C.C. started to play, she looked stricken. “Nervous,” Jack thought, was too mild a word for it. There was no crowd. There was no audience save the musicians, the technicians working on sound and lights, and the few odd observers such as Jack and Bagabond. C. C.’s lead went hideously flat. She stopped, looked down at the stage while everyone in the club seemed to hold a collective breath. Then C.C. looked up, and to Jack it seemed the motion was executed with enormous effort. Her fingers caressed the strings of her guitar. “Sorry,” she said. That was all. And then she played.
Baby, the cards are out Baby, there is no doubt That when the dealer calls You been dealt a winning hand
The drummer picked up the backbeat. The bass player chugged in. The rhythm guitar softly filled the spaces. Jack saw Buddy Holley’s fingers lightly stroking the strings of his Telecaster even though it wasn’t jacked in.
You played since you were just a kid You played till you got old Baby, you never knew a thing Cause all you ever did was fold
The woman on keyboards ran an eerie, wailing trill out of her Yamaha. Jack blinked. Holley smiled. It sounded like the rinky-tink Farfisas both remembered from the presynthesizer, good old days.
Baby, don’t ever fold Not when you got That winning hand
When it was done, there were a long few moments of absolute silence in the Funhouse. Then the tech people started to clap. So did C. C.’s backup musicians. They cheered. Bagabond get to her feet. Jack saw Xavier Desmond in the back of the room; it looked as if there were tears on his face.
Buddy Holley scratched his head and grinned. A little like Will Rogers, Jack thought. “You know somethin’, darlin’? I think maybe all of us here were privileged this mornin’ to see the high point of the concert.”
C.C. looked pale, but she smiled and said, “Naw, it’s pretty rough. It’s only gonna get better.”
Holley shook his head.
C.C. Ryder marched over to him and tilted her face up toward his. “Your turn in the barrel, boyo.”
The man shook his head, but his fingers were caressing the guitar.
C.C. tapped the side of her head. “I showed you mine.” Holley made a little shrug. “What the heck. Gotta do it sometime, I reckon.”
“No Billy Idol,” Bagabond said.
Holley laughed. “No Billy Idol.” He strummed contemplatively for a moment. Then he said, “This is new,” He glanced over at Jack. “This one ain’t even on the tape you heard.” The strum deepened, picked up strength. “I call this one ‘Rough Beast.’”
Then Buddy Holley played.
“It was incredible, Cordie. It’s the old Buddy Holley with all the maturity laid in.” Jack’s voice was exuberant and uncritical. “Everything he played was new, and it was absolutely great.”
“New, huh?” Cordelia tapped the earpiece with her right index finger. “As good as ‘That’ll Be the Day’ and ‘Oh, Boy’?”
“Is “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ better than ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’?” The excitement crackled in Jack’s voice. “It isn’t even apples and oranges. The new stuff’s as energetic as his early songs-it’s just more,-Jack seemed to be searching for the precise word—“sophisticated.”
Cordelia stared at the photographs across the office but wasn’t seeing them. Click. There might as well be a light bulb switching on above my head, she thought. I’ve gotta slow down. I’m starting to miss a lot. “What I’m guessing,” she said, “is that Shrike doesn’t have any claim on the new stuff. What I can do is put him in the hammock in the middle of the show. Maybe cut him down to ten minutes.”
“Twenty,” said Jack firmly. “It has to be as much as everyone else.”
“Maybe,” said Cordelia. “Anyhow, he’s in the center so the audience warms up before they have to decide whether they’re gon’ be disappointed when Buddy Holley don’ sing ‘Cindy Lou.,”
There was a silence on the line. Jack finally said, “I don’t think he’ll mind.”
“Okay, then. Great. This is really gon’ simplify matters. I can tell the wet-brains at Shrike to screw off.” Cordelia felt the crushing weight start to lift from her head. “You sure he’ll do the show with new material?”
Jack’s words were a verbal shrug. “The ice do seem to be broken. He and C.C. are reinforcing each other. I think it’s all gon’ work out.”
“Great. Thanks, Uncle Jack. Keep me current.” Cordelia’s mood was cheerful after she hung up the phone. So Buddy Holley was in. And now she could call Croyd off the wild-goose chase. But when she phoned the apartment, no one answered. All she reached was the answering machine.
Maybe, she thought cheerfully, it’s all gon’ be downhill from here.
Thursday
Cordelia realized she was humming “Real Wild Child.” The up-tempo rocker perfectly matched her hyper mood this afternoon. She wondered for a moment where she’d heard it as she identified the tune. She knew it was on none of her Buddy Holley albums. The song must just be in the air.
She tapped along with her fingers to the guitar runs in her head as she dialed her postlunch calls. Cordelia had phoned over to the Funhouse just about the time her takeout Vietnamese soup had arrived. Jack was sounding up.
“Practice is going great,” he had said. “C.C. and Buddy ‘ are getting along fine. And Bagabond even nodded to me when I said good morning.”
“How’s the music?”
“They’re both doing mostly new stuff-well, Buddy’s is all new.”
“Can he fill the whole twenty minutes?” Cordelia had said.
“Just like before-when I said he wouldn’t have any problem? He still won’t. You really ought to give him an hour.”
“I’m not sure how U2 or the Boss would like that,” Cordelia said dryly.
“I bet they’d love it.”
“We won’t be finding out.” Cordelia sniffed the fragrance of crab and asparagus wafting out of the styrofoam soup bucket. “I’ve got to go, Uncle Jack. My food’s here.”
“Okay.” Jack’s voice hesitated. “Cordie?”
“Mmmp?” She already had the first spoonful in her mouth.
“Thanks for asking me to do this. It’s a terrific thing. I’m grateful. It’s ... keeping my mind off everything else going on in the world.”
Cordelia swallowed the hot soup. “Just go on keeping C.C. and Buddy Holley happy. And Bagabond, too, if it’s possible.”
“I’ll try.”
About two o’clock Cordelia was dialing the contract firm that was trying to exorcise the demons from ShowSat III when, out of the corner of her eye, she caught an unfamiliar figure silhouetted in the office doorway. Setting down the phone, she saw a distinguished-looking middle-aged man dressed in a cream silk suit that she knew had to be worth two or three months of her salary. Tailored to the final angstrom unit. Knotted foulard precisely positioned. Head cocked, he regarded her with sharp eyes.
“You’re too well-dressed to be Tom Wolfe,” she said. “Indeed I am not. Tom Wolfe, that is.” He didn’t smile. “Do you mind if I come in and chat with you?”
“Did we have an appointment?” Cordelia said puzzledly. She glanced down at her calendar. “I’m afraid I don’t—”
“I was in the neighborhood,” said the man. “We have an appointment. It’s just I’m afraid you were not informed.” He extended one hand. “Forgive the lack of formal introduction. I’m St. John Latham, at your service. I represent Latham, Strauss. I expect you’ve heard of us.”
Cordelia caught a gleam of intensely manicured nails as she grasped his hand. His grip was dry and perfunctory. “The attorneys,” she said. “Uh, yes, please, do sit down.”
He took the guest chair. As a backdrop for Latham’s suit, the Breuer looked a mite shabby. “Let me get to the point, Ms. Chaisson-or may I call you Cordelia?”
“If you wish.” Cordelia tried to gather her thoughts. For the senior partner of one of Manhattan’s priciest and nastiest law firms to be sitting in her office just might not be a good omen.
“Now,” said Latham, his fingers steepled, the index fingers just brushing his thin chin, “ I am informed you have been causing considerable commotion with a number of Latham, Strauss’s client corporations. As you doubtless discovered, we are retained by the CariBank Group, and thus have an interest in their respective subsidiary holdings.”
“I’m not sure I see—”
“You have obviously been rather inventive with your computer and modem, Cordelia. You’ve not been terribly discreet with your calls to a variety of corporate officials.”
It was suddenly coming very clear. “Oh,” said Cordelia, “this is about Shrike Music and Buddy Holley, right?”
Latham’s tone was even-and functioned at about the same temperature as a superconductor. “You seem to have an extreme interest in CariBank’s corporate family.”
Cordelia smiled and held up her hands. “Hey, no problem, Mr. Latham. It’s not my hassle any longer. Holley’s got a whole collection of new music that Shrike can’t touch.”
“Ms. Chaisson-Cordelia-Shrike Music Corporation is the least consequential of your enquiries. We at Latham, Strauss are concerned about your apparent need for information about the rest of CariBank’s family. Such information could be ... a bit troublesome—”
“No, really,” said Cordelia decisively. “This is a nonproblem. Honest, Mr. Latham. No problem.” She smiled at him. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got an incredible amount of work to catch—”
Latham stared at her. “You will desist, Ms. Chaisson. You will pay attention to your own business, or, I assure you, you shall be very, very sorry.”
“But—”
“Very sorry indeed.” Latham looked at her levelly until she finally blinked. “ I hope you understand me.” He turned on his heel and exited with a whisper of expensive tailoring.
It hit her. Hang me with corde a boyau, she thought. I’ve just been threatened by one of Manhattan’s most powerful and predatory attorneys. So sue me.
Cordelia had plenty to do that helped take her mind away from Latham’s visit. She called the tech people in charge of satellite transmissions and discovered the happy fact that ShowSat III was operational again. A healthy chunk of the other side of the world would have a shot at viewing the Funhouse benefit after all. “ I guess the gremlins are on vacation,” said the consulting engineer.
Then GF&G’s switchboard relayed a collect call from Tami in Pittsburg.
“What on earth are you doing there?” Cordelia demanded. “I sent enough cash so all the Girls With Guns could fly into Newark today.”
“You’re not gonna believe this,” said Tami. “Probably not.”
“We bought a lot of feathers.”
“Not coke?”
“Of course not!” Tami sounded scandalized. “We ran into a girl who had an incredible selection. We need ’em for our costumes Saturday night.”
“Feathers don’t cost six hundred bucks.”
“These do. They’re rare.”
“‘Dose feathers gon’ to help you fly?” Cordelia said dangerously.
“Well .. ;no,” said Tami.
“I’ll wire some more money. Just give me an address.” Cordelia sighed. “So. You ladies enjoy riding the bus?”
Friday
Jack and Buddy Holley headed back to the latter’s dressing room after they’d both watched the Boss do his run-through. Holley’s final rehearsal session was scheduled for ten o’clock, later that night. Little Steven, U2, and the Coward Brothers had gotten in their licks early in the afternoon. The Edge had winced a lot, but he’d played. Then came the Boss and the other guys from across the river.
“Not too shabby,” said Holley.
“The Boss?” said Jack. “Damn straight. So how did it feel, him treating you as though you were one of the faces on Mount Rushmore come to life?”
“Shoot.” Holley said nothing more.
“I thought it was pretty impressive when he asked if you’d play ‘Cindy Lou.”‘
Holley chuckled. “Funny thing about that tune. You know it almost wasn’t gonna be ‘Cindy Lou’?”
Jack looked at him quizzically.
They rounded the corner of the hallway behind the stage. The lighting was something less than adequate. “Watch out for the wire on the floor,” said Holley. “Good old ‘Cindy Lou.’ Well, that was the original title all along, but about the time the Crickets and me were gonna record it, our drummer, Jerry Allison, asked if I’d change it.”
“Change the music?” said Jack.
“Change the title. Seems as if Jerry. was marryin’ a gal named Peggy Sue, and he thought she’d be just tickled to death havin’ a song named after her.”
“But you didn’t.”
Holley laughed. “She jilted him, broke the engagement before anything permanent could be done about the song. So ‘Cindy Lou’ it’s stayed.”
“I like it better,” said Jack.
They turned a final corner and came to the small room where Holley was keeping his guitar and the other things he’d brought over from the hotel. Holley went in first. When he flipped the light switch, nothing happened. “Blamed bulb must be out.”
“Not quite,” said a voice from inside.
Both Jack and Holley jumped. “Who’s in dere?” said Jack. Holley started to back out of the doorway.
“Hold it,” said the voice. “Everything’s fine as long as you two’re Buddy Holley and Jack Robicheaux.”
“You got that right,” said Holley. “The name’s Croyd.”
Holley said, “ I don’t know any Croyd.”
“I do,” said Jack. “I mean, I know who you are.”
The voice chuckled. “I’m in a bit of a hurry, and I’m trying to be subtle, so why don’t the two of you come on in and shut the door.”
The two men did so. Croyd snapped on a penlight and let the beam play briefly across their faces. “Okay, you’re who you say.” He set the light down on the makeup table but didn’t turn it off. “I’ve got some information for your niece,” he said to Jack, “but her office doesn’t know where she is, and I don’t have time to wait around on her.”
“Okay,” said Jack. “Tell me. I’ll get it to her. She’s jumping around like a frog in a tub of McIlheney’s, what with about ten thousand things to get done before tomorrow night.”
“She asked me to look into Shrike Music,” said Croyd. “Oh, yeah?” Holley sounded interested.
“I thought it might be one of the Gambione fronts; you know, a Mafia laundering operation.”
“So?” said Jack. “Are Rosemary Muldoon’s hands dirty there too?”
“No,” said Croyd. “‘I don’t think so. Whatever Shrike is-and I think it’s dirty as hell-I really don’t think it’s connected with the Gambiones or the other Families. Tell Cordelia Chaisson that.”
“Anything else?” said Jack.
“Yeah. As far as I could follow the trail back, I got some hints that the brain behind Shrike is Loophole. You know, the lawyer, St. John Latham. If I’m right, you better tell your niece to be real careful. With Loophole, I’m talking one dangerous son-of-a-bitch.”
“Okay,” Jack said. “I’ll tell her.”
“If you find out more—” Holley said.
“I won’t. I’ve got my own problems to deal with.” Croyd’s chuckle was very dry.
“Oh,” said Holley. “Well, thanks anyhow. At least I know my songs aren’t tied up in pasta.”
“Listen,” said Croyd, some animation coming into his voice. “‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’ is one of the best rockers ever recorded. Don’t let anyone ever tell you different. I just wanted to say that before I took off.”
“Well,” said Holley. “Thank you very much.” He strode forward in the darkness, toward the makeup table. “I’ll shake the hand of any man who tells me that.”
“What can I say?” said Croyd. “I’ve liked your work for a long time now. Glad you’re back.”
Jack had the impression of a pale albino face in the dark. Pink eyes flashed as the penlight snapped off.
“Good luck with the concert.” Then Croyd’s indistinct form was out the door and gone.
“Okay,” said Jack, “let’s see if we can round up a fresh light bulb.” He winced. The pain was coming back, the pain and something else. In the darkness he touched his own face. The skin felt scaly. The virus was eroding his control. It was getting harder to remain—He didn’t like filling in the blank. Human was the word he was looking for.
Saturday
The audio ocean combers of U2 crashed over them. The Edge’s picking fingers had healed just fine for tonight. Bono swung into ‘With or Without You’ with his exuberant neversing-the-song-the-same-way-twice voice in great form.
C.C. abruptly stared at Buddy Holley with concern. She reached out to steady him. Jack moved in from the other side. “What’s wrong, babe?” She touched his forehead with the back of her right hand. “You’re burning up.”
Bagabond looked concerned. “You need a doc?”
The four of them stepped back as a cameraman with a SteadiCam double-timed by, heading for the stage.
Holley straightened. “It’s okay. I’m all right. Just a little flop-sweat.”
“You sure?” said C.C. skeptically.
“I guess,” said Holley, “maybe I was feeling some momentary melancholy.” His three companions registered uniform incomprehension. “Waitin’ to go on out there, it’s getting to me in a strang way. I’m looking at all this and I’m thinking about Ritchie and the Bopper and how they both went down with Bobby Fuller in that Beechcraft back in ‘68 when Bobby was tryin’ his comeback tour. Lord, I do miss ’em.”
“You’re alive,” said Bagabond. “They’re not.”
Holley stared at her. Then he slowly smiled. “That’s putting it straight.” He looked past the curtains toward the full house. “Yep, I’m alive.”
“You’re gon’ sit down for a bit,” said Jack. “Rest just a while.”
“Remind me,” said Holley. “When do I go on?”
“The Coward Brothers are on next. Then Little Steven and me,” said C.C. “I’ll warm ’em up for you. You’ll be up before Girls With Guns and the Boss.”
“Comfortable in the hammock, huh? Heavy-hitter company.” Holley shook his head. “You know how the world would change if somebody nuked this club tonight? Not a bit.” He staggered. “Well, maybe just a little bitty bit.”
“You’re gonna sit down,” said C.C. firmly.
Jack looked toward the stage. This was probably the only rock concert he’d been to that wasn’t choked with smoke. But in the confined space of the Funhouse, the management, the Health Department, and some of the performers had begged for abstinence. The tech crew was using a fog machine to get the right lighting. With the lights in his face Jack could see nothing. But he knew who was out there.
Cordelia was sitting next to the small, roped-off space where the floor director was sequestered with her video monitors. Everything looked good. The satellite feeds were webbing the globe satisfactorily, though god only knew if any eyes out there were actually watching.
Every seat was taken. People had paid two grand just for standing room. Cordelia had checked around her chair before U2 had been announced. The table immediately behind her was occupied by New Jersey’s junior U.S. senator, the senator’s wife—Hoboken’s head of cultural development-a hot, teen heartthrob actor, and the actor’s ICM agent. The next table to the left held Senator Hartmann and his party. Tachyon was back there too. A beaming Xavier Desmond was right up front.
Off to her right, Miranda and Ichiko had seen her looking and had waved and smiled. Cordelia had smiled back. Luz Alcala and Polly Rettig, GF&G’s top management, also sat at Cordelia’s table. Now and then they said appropriately laudatory things to her. Obviously they were enjoying how the benefit concert was progressing. Boffo, thought Cordelia. That’s how Variety will describe this. Dey better damn better.
U2 ended its set and the Irish quartet trooped offstage. The applause thundered on, and they came back for a quick encore. That had been budgeted into the schedule. It was assumed.
After the encore the screen dropped down from the Funhouse’s ceiling, barely missing the Louma crane, and the slick, donated media spot for the New York AIDS Project blazed forth. This was the commercial. No one minded. Cordelia wondered if she should go backstage and check that all was in order. No, she decided. She needed to be in place where she was-waiting for hideous crises. No use seeking them out.
The Coward Brothers came out to a storm of applause. T-Bone and Elvis burned the place up with ‘People’s Limousine’ and another sixteen minutes that flashed by like no time at all.
Between sets, when the broadcast had gone to a taped message, the lighting director turned the spots on the Funhouse’s mirror balls and chandelier. The interior of the club exploded in a phantasmagoria of shattered light.
Little Steven and his band came on. The roadies had been fast and accurate. The musicians plugged into the house system and were off. Little Steven had a new scarf for each song in the set. The crowd loved it.
It was C.C. Ryder’s time. She held the neck of her shining black twelve-string with both hands.
“Don’t strangle it,” said Holley. He wrapped his hands loosely around hers.
“Break a leg.” Jack gave her a hug. Bagabond didn’t seem to mind.
The latter hugged C.C. in turn for a few seconds and said, “You’ll be great.”
“If I’m not,” said C.C., “I hope this time I’m an express.”
Jack knew she was referring to her years-ago wild card transformation when trauma had catalyzed her into becoming a more than reasonable facsimile of a local subway car.
C.C. hit the stage running and never stopped. It was as though she was casting a net of power over the audience. There was a moment at first when she faltered. But then she seemed to gather strength. It was as though energy were flowing out into the people in their seats, then being amplified and broadcast back to the singer. The magic, Jack thought, of genuine empathy.
She started with one of her old standards, then quickly segued into her new ballads. Her twenty minutes flashed past for Jack. C.C. ended with the song she had publicly debuted at the first rehearsal.
Baby, you never have to fold
’Cause what you’ve got
Is a winning hand ...
... Is a winning hand, came the refrain. Never forget. C.C. bowed her head. The applause had megatonnage. When she came offstage, she waited until she was past the curtains before collapsing. Jack and Bagabond both caught her. “What’s the matter?” said Bagabond. “Oh, C.C.”
“Nothing,” said C.C. She grinned up at them, her face lined with exhaustion. “Absolutely nothing.”
“Okay,” Cordelia muttered as the Jokertown Clinic spot unspooled above her. “Buddy Holley’s next.” In spite of what Uncle Jack said, she wondered if she should cross her fingers. Maybe toes too.
“Hold on a sec,” said the floor director. She leaned toward Cordelia. “Change in plans.”
Shit, thought Cordelia. “What?”
“Seems .to be a minor rebellion among the musicians. It’s still getting sorted out.”
“Better be quick.” Cordelia glanced at the LED counting down on the director’s console. “Like in about twenty-two seconds.”
“But I’m supposed to go on now,” said Buddy Holley stubbornly.
“The deal is,” said Jack, “both the Boss and Girls With Guns have decided they want to go now and let you be the final act.”
Bagabond glanced beyond them. “The Boss and that girl Tami are arm wrestling. Looks like she’s winning.”
“But it’s my gig,” said Holley.
“Shut the fuck up,” said the Girls With Guns’ leader, Tami, as she strutted up, rubbing her right shoulder. She uttered the words with considerable affection. “Him and I”—she gestured at the Boss, who was ruefully grinning—“we both figure we learned most all we know from you. So you’re gonna be the climax. That’s it, Bud.” She leaned up on tiptoes and kissed him on the lips. Holley looked startled.
The stage director was signaling frantically.
The glass eyes of the SteadiCams implacably zoomed in. Girls With Guns upped the energy ante by tearing out the heart of Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart’s bubblegum standard “I Wonder What She’s Doing Tonight,” stomping it into jam, smearing the residue on their sneering lips, and just generally raising hell. They ended up with “Proud Flesh,” a razor-edged anthem of romance and nihilism.
“So,” said Tami to the Boss as she led her sisters swaggering offstage, “top that.”
The Boss did his best.
Oh, god, thought Cordelia as the echoes finally died. She watched the Boss raise his guitar in one hand and elevate a fist with the other. Let Buddy work out. Please. The Boss gave the audience another bow, then led his band backstage.
Cordelia blinked. She thought she’d seen St. John Latham at a table in the back of the club. Latham, Strauss’s cash is as good as anyone else’s, she thought. The problem was, Latham seemed to be staring directly at her.
She sighed as the penultimate PSA faded to black and the director cued in the Louma. The monitor showed a wide tracking shot sweeping back and up from the stage.
“And ... go!” said the director into her mike. Please, Cordelia again mentally implored.
“Hello, Lubbock!” Buddy Holley said to the immediate audience and their five hundred million electronic shadows. The crowd smiled.
Jack smiled too from his vantage at the edge of the stage. He crouched down to avoid getting in the way of the camera dollying past on its track. The pain was gnawing regularly at his gut, and he didn’t know how long he’d be able to hold this position. He realized that what he wanted now more than anything else was simply to lie down. He wanted to rest. Soon enough, he thought morbidly. I’ll rest all I want. For good.
Holley hit his first note, then brushed his fingers across the chord. The magic Buddy Holley touch. Now it might be a standard technique, but three decades before, it had signaled a revolution.
Rou-ou-ou-ou-ough beast
The characteristic hiccup was still there, though no one in the paying audience had ever heard this Buddy Holley tune before.
When the moon slides low
And lo-ove rubs thin
I’ll be knockin’
Askin’ to be let in
To Jack it seemed a little like vintage Dylan. Maybe a dash of Lou Reed. But most of it was just pure Holley.
Rou-ou-ou-ou-ough beast-almost a wail.
Jack realized he could easily cry.
When my friends
Like my center
Cannot hold
And every feeling I got
Has just been sold
He was crying.
I’m the rough beast’s prey
In the rough beast’s way
Buddy Holley’s Telecaster sobbed. Not in self-pity, but in honest grief.
Without friends without love Forever
Jack loved the music, but the pain was horrendous. When he could no longer withstand it, he got up and quietly left. He missed the encore.
Cordelia was already looking ahead to the final extravagant encore when every performer would come onto the stage and all would stand there with hands and arms linked. She blinked and registered a double take as she realized Buddy Holley looked about ready to fall flat on his face as he stood there taking the applause from his final song. She was close enough that she could see the flush in his face. Holley staggered. Oh, Jesus, she thought, he’s sick. He’s going to collapse.
But he didn’t. It was as though the flush in his skin metamorphosed into a ripple of heat that ran along his body from feet to head.
What the hell? thought Cordelia.
Then it was Buddy Holley’s flesh itself that rippled. A transforming nimbus of energy seemed to glow around his body. He held the Fender Telecaster out in front of him and something astonishing happened. The steel strings became ductile, melting like taffy; flashing away from the frets, stretching out and out like lines of silver sparks. They whipped around camera mounts and lights, anchoring themselves like jungle snakes.
Illusion? Cordelia thought. Maybe it was telekinesis. The guitar strings formed a kind of enormous cat’s cradle. Buddy Holley looked around at this, then at his hands. He slowly raised his head and gazed upward. Holley seemed to be seeing something nobody else could comprehend. He smiled and the smile transformed into a joyous grin.
And then he danced. Slow and deliberate at first, the pace grew more rapid as Holley began to whirl around the stage. The audience stared, gaping.
She had seen this dance before-or something like it. Cordelia recalled the memory. Wyungare. She had seen the young aboriginal man dance in this manner deep within the Dreamtime, far into the desert heartland of Australia. This was a shaman’s dance.
Holley’s grin widened. He leaped and gyrated. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and James Brown could have done no better. Then Holley leaped into the shimmering, almost invisible webwork of silver sparks.
He whirled and his right hand came off, severed at the wrist with a gush of crimson smoke.
Someone in the audience gasped.
Holley continued to dance. The other hand. The right arm, up to the elbow. His left leg at the knee. Scarlet smoke fanned out like the curving trails of fire from a catherine wheel.
Cordelia became aware the director was addressing her. “Should we go to a spot?” The director’s voice was taut.
It was all coming clear to Cordelia. “No,” she said. “No. Leave it. Broadcast everything.”
Buddy Holley whirled within the cradle of sparking tracers. He disassembled himself as the audience murmured and cried out.
From the chair beside her at the table Cordelia heard Polly Rettig say, “God almighty, it’s just like with Kid Dinosaur.”
“No.” Cordelia said aloud. “It’s not. It’s the death and resurrection show. It’s just-a joke. It’s entertainment.”
“Entertainment?” said Rettig. “He’s ... killing himself.”
“I don’t think so,” said Cordelia. “He’s transforming, but he’s not dying. This is a shaman’s trick.”
The last of Buddy Holley, a nearly limbless torso, wavered and tumbled to the stage. The body parts lay stacked in a haphazard heap. Curtains of bright smoke rose up. Sparks shot up in fountaining streamers.
The audience watched, uncertain how to react.
Cordelia felt calm and sure. She trusted Wyungare. She wondered if Holley’s transmogrification was a direct result of the wild card virus. That would explain his apparent illness.
The pile of arms and legs ‘stirred. The bones began to reconnect, joint to joint. The muscles and ligaments wound around them. The skin slithered onto the limbs, and the limbs rejoined the body.
Buddy Holley stood before them, whole again. He wasn’t completely the physical original. This Buddy Holley was fitter, the spare tire around his waist and the bags under the eyes gone. His hair was a glossy black again, with no gray. His skin was smooth and unwrinkled.
The crowd began to clap. The cheering rose as the audience’s collective tension released. Someone behind Cordelia said, “That’s the absolute fucking performance of a lifetime.”
The guitar had also reassembled. Holley picked up the Telecaster and held it loosely.
He got what he wanted, Cordelia thought. “He’s become a shaman,” she said aloud.
“Buddy Holley and the Shamans,” said a voice behind her. “Bitchin’ name. After this, it’d sell like Fawn Hall’s underwear. Man, this Holley could become a presidential candidate.”
Cordelia turned and saw it was the ICM man who had spoken. She gave him a frigid stare and turned back toward the stage. The new being that had been Buddy Holley smiled reassuringly. Then he brought his hand across the guitar strings. The chord throbbed as though resonating with every heart in the audience.
The sound, thought Cordelia. It’s a trigger for states of heightened consciousness. This is the power of rock and roll. Then Buddy Holley, the reborn man of power, stood before the awestruck audience and played the best version of ‘Not Fade Away’ that had ever been performed.
It was, Cordelia suspected, a portent.
As Jack slipped away from the alley door of the Funhouse, he felt sick in heart and body. I should have stayed for Buddy’s encore, he thought. But Buddy would do just fine.
There was the scraping on asphalt of something inhumanly large shifting its weight.
Jack stopped abruptly as a shadow deeper than the darkness in the rest of the alley fell across him.
“I figured a blue-ribbon fag party like this would draw all my little buddies,” said Bludgeon. “But I didn’t even hope the first fucker would be you.” Without warning, his deformed right hand whistled out, catching Jack across the head and slamming him back into the brick side of a building.
Jack felt something give, bone or cartilage he couldn’t tell. All he knew was that he was slipping away from what light there was. He wanted the darkness, but not yet, not this way. He tried to struggle. He was aware that Bludgeon was grasping him tightly and holding him upright. Bludgeon jerked loose Jack’s belt and pulled down his pants.
“Got a little going-away thing for you, Jack. Something I figure you’ll love. I bet your niece Cordelia’ll eat it up when I get around to her too.”
Jack tried to will himself back into full consciousness. Then he felt what Bludgeon was shoving between his buttocks. Into him. Spreading and tearing. Nothing had ever hurt this much. Nothing!
“I’ll save the little girl for later,” said Bludgeon.
Jesus, thought Jack through the agony. Cordelia. “Let her alone you rat-bastard cochon!”
“Sticks and stones,” said Bludgeon, emitting a high-pitched giggle, “but only the Fatman can hurt me ...” He thrust forward and Jack screamed.
Where was the other? Jack thought desperately, his brain seeming to heel over in a grinding haze of pain. I need you. Now. I’ve got to transform. This once. Just to kill the son-of-a-bitch.
And then he felt the change coming. He also knew he was dying.
Good, he thought. Good to both. And a surprise for Bludgeon.
Jack felt the teeth springing up as his jaw elongated. Pestilence or claw, you son-of-a-bitch, you’re gon’ die. The fierce anger carried him a little further.
Bagabond! his thought shouted into the night. Hear me! Save Cordelia.
I’ll save the little girl for later, Bludgeon’s threat echoed. It all rippled into a void. And died.
The dead man plunged into darkness.
As she dodged cabs, crossing Central Park West and entering the park, Rosemary Muldoon knew she was in for a difficult afternoon. She distractedly maneuvered through a late-afternoon mob of dog-walkers gathered on the sidewalk and looked for Bagabond.
As an intern with New York’s Social Services Department, Rosemary got all the interesting cases, the ones no one else would handle. Bagabond, the enigmatic transient she had drawn this afternoon, was about the worst. Bagabond had to be at least sixty, and smelled as if she hadn’t bathed in half that time. That was something Rosemary had never gotten used to. Her family was not what one could call nice, but each person bathed daily. Her father insisted on it. And nobody refused her father.
She had been drawn to the detritus of society precisely because of their alienation. Few had any connection with their pasts or their families. Rosemary recognized this but told herself that it did not matter what the reason was; the result was the important thing. She could help them.
Bagabond was standing beneath a grove of oaks. As Rosemary approached her, she thought she saw Bagabond gesturing and talking to a tree. Shaking her head, Rosemary pulled out Bagabond’s file. It was slim. Real name unknown, age unknown, place of origin unknown, history unknown. According to the sparse information, the woman lived on the streets. The best guess of the previous social worker was that Bagabond had been released from a state institution to provide space. The bag lady was paranoid but probably not dangerous. Because Bagabond had refused to give any information, there had been no way to help her. Rosemary put away the paperwork and marched toward the old woman dressed in layers of ragged clothing.
“Hello, Bagabond. My name is Rosemary and I’m here to help you.” Her gambit failed. Bagabond turned her head and stared at two kids throwing a Frisbee.
“Don’t you want a nice, safe, warm place to sleep? With hot meals and people to talk to?” The only response she received was from the biggest cat she had ever seen outside a zoo. It had walked over to Bagabond and was now staring at Rosemary.
“You could take a bath.” The bag lady’s hair was filthy. “But I need to know your name.” The huge lack cat looked at Bagabond and then glared at Rosemary.
“Why don’t you come with me and we’ll talk?” The cat began to growl.
“Come on ...” As Rosemary reached toward Bagabond, the cat sprang. Rosemary jumped back, tripping over the handbag she’d set on the ground. Lying on her back, she could see eye to eye with the very angry feline.
“Nice kitty. Stay right there.” As she started to get up, the black cat was joined by a slightly smaller calico cat.
“Okay. I’ll see you another time.” Rosemary grabbed her bag and the file and retreated.
Her father never understood why she wanted to deal with the poor of the city, the “filth,” as he called them. Tonight she was going to have to suffer through another chaperoned evening with her parents and her fiance. An arranged marriage, in this day and age. She wished it was easier to stand up to her father and say no. Her family was a creature of tradition. She just did not fit in.
Rosemary had her own apartment which, until recently, she had shared with C.C. Ryder. C.C. was a vocal hippie. Rosemary had made sure that her father and C.C. never met.
The consequences were too horrible to consider. Keeping her two lives separate was essential.
It was a line of thought that took her too close to the pain. C.C. was gone. She had disappeared into the city. Rosemary was frightened for C.C. and for herself, for what it meant about the city.
Rosemary looked up from the park bench where she had collapsed. It was time to get the file back to the office and head for Columbia and class.
“What a terrific night.” Lombardo “Lucky Lummy” Lucchese was feeling great, just great. After two whole years of working numbers and small-time protection, he had at last made it into the foremost of the Five Families. They knew talent and he had plenty. Walking down 81st toward the park with his three friends, he was on top of the world.
He had to go pay his respects to his fiancee, Maria. What a mouse! But a mouse who was the only child of Don Carlo Gambione could be very valuable in the years to come. Later he would celebrate with his buddies. Now he had to get some cash so he could buy mousy Maria some nice flowers to show his devotion. Maybe carnations.
“I’m gonna go downstairs. Pick up some money,” Lummy said.
“Want some company?” Joey “No-Nose” Manzone asked. “Nah. You kiddin’? After next week, I’ll be in the big money. I just wanna do one more job. For old time’s sake. See ya later.”
Splashing through oil-iridescent puddles, Lummy whistled as he swung along toward the illuminated globe marking the stairs to the 81st Street subway station. Nothing could bring him down tonight.
What a perfectly dreadful evening, Sarah Jarvis thought. The sixty-eight-year-old woman had never in her life expected to be invited to an Amway party. The very thought. It had taken hours for her friend and her to leave. Of course, it was raining by that time and, of course, there was not an on-duty cab to be found. Her friend lived in the next building. Sarah had to go all the way uptown to Washington Heights.
Sarah hated the subway. That stale smell always nauseated her. She disliked the noisy parts of the city anyway, and the subway was among the loudest. Tonight, though, everything was quiet. Alone on the platform, Sarah shivered under her twee jacket.
Peering over the edge of the platform and along the tunnel, she thought she saw the light of the uptown AA local. Something was there, but it seemed to move so slowly. Sarah turned away and looked at the advertising placards. She examined the poster calling for the reelection of that nice Mr. Nixon. In the adjacent newspaper vending machines, the headlines told of burglars breaking into a Washington hotel and apartment house. Watergate? What a funny name for a building, she thought. The Daily News led with a story about the so-called Subway Vigilante. The police were attributing five slayings over the past week to the mysterious killer. The victims had all been drug dealers and other criminals. The murders had all taken place in the subways. Sarah shuddered. The city was quite different than it had been in her childhood.
First she heard the steps, clattering down the stairs and past the deserted token booth. Then whistling, a peculiar tuneless drone, as the person entered the station. Despite herself, she was caught between apprehension and relief. Somewhat ashamed of her reaction, she decided she wouldn’t mind a little human company.
As soon as she saw him, she was not so sure. Sarah had never been all that fond of black leather jackets, particularly those worn by slightly greasy, smirking young men. She turned her back firmly and focused on the wall across the tracks.
As the old woman turned her back, Lucky Lummy grinned broadly and touched the tip of his tongue to his upper lip.
“Hey, lady, got a light?”
“No.”
One corner of Lummy’s mouth twitched as he moved toward her back. “Come on, lady, be nice.”
He missed the tension gathering in her shoulders as Sarah remembered that self-defense class she had attended last winter.
“Just give me the purse, lad-aiee!” He screamed as Sarah turned and crushed his instep with her sensible but sophisticated beige pump. Lummy jerked back and aimed a punch at her face. Sarah evaded him by stepping backward and slipping on something slimy. Lummy grinned and started toward her.
Wind rushed past them from the tunnel as the AA train approached the station.
Neither noticed that a dozen people had all managed to get to the subway entrance simultaneously. Most of the crowd had attended a late showing of The Godfather and were continuing an animated discussion of whether or not Coppola had exaggerated the Mafia’s role in modern crime. Someone who hadn’t been at the screening was a transit worker who had had a long and trying day. He just wanted to go home and get dinner, not necessarily in that order. The newspapers had been pushing again; even that joker Rights stuff couldn’t keep them occupied all the time. The transit man had been pulled off his regular track-checking duties to spend eighteen hours searching vainly for alligators in sewers and subway tunnels, conduit shafts, and deep utility holes. He mentally cursed his employers for kowtowing to the sensationalist press, and especially cursed the bird-dogging reporters he’d finally ditched.
The transit worker hung back a little, trying to stay out of the melee as the group fumbled for tokens and started through the gates. The moviegoers chattered as they went.
With a roar and braking screech of metal on metal, the AA local burst out of the tunnel.
On the platform, all manner of people confronted each other. Swearing in Italian, Lummy let go of his victim and looked around for a bolt-hole.
The first two couples had entered and were staring at the scene in front of them. One of the men moved toward Lucky Lummy as the other man grabbed his date and tried to retreat.
The doors of the local hissed open. At this time of night, there were few passengers on the train and no one got of. “There’s never a transit cop when you need one,” said the would-be rescuer. Momentarily, Lummy considered leaping for the punk and punching out his lights. Instead he feinted at the man, then half-limped, half-ran into the last car. The doors snapped closed and the train began to move. It might have been the light, but the bright grafitti on the sides seemed to change.
From inside the car, Lucky Lummy laughed and gestured obscenely at Sarah, who was feeling for bruises and trying to rearrange her soiled clothing. Lummy aimed a second gesture at the woman’s inadvertent rescuers as the entire group converged on Sarah.
Abruptly Lummy’s face contorted with fear and then outright terror as he began beating on the doors. The man who had tried to stop Lummy caught one last glimpse of him clawing at the rear door of the car as the train sped into darkness.
“What a creep!” said the date of the would-be rescuer. “Was he one of those jokers?”
“Naw,” said his friend. “Just a garden-variety asshole.” Everyone froze as they heard the screams from the uptown tunnel. Over the diminishing roar of the local, they could hear Lummy’s hopeless, agonized cries. The train vanished. But the screams lasted until at least 83rd Street. The transit worker moved toward the downtown tunnel as the hero of the hour was congratulated by the mostly unharmed Sarah, as well as by the rest of the onlookers. Another transit employee came down the steps at the other end of the platform.
“Hey!” he yelled. “Sewer Jack! Jack Robicheaux. Don’t you ever sleep?”
The exhausted man ignored him and let himself through a metal access door. As he walked down the tunnel, he began shedding his clothes. A watcher might have thought she had seen a man squatting down and crawling along the damp floor of the tunnel, a man who had grown a long snout filled with sharp, misshapen teeth and a muscular tail capable of smashing the watcher into jam. But no one saw the flash of greenish-gray scales as the erstwhile transit worker joined the darkness and was gone.
Back on the 81st Street platform, the spectators were still so transfixed by the echoes of Lummy’s dying screams that few noted the rumbling, bass roar from the other direction.
Her last class over, Rosemary walked wearily toward the 116th Street subway entrance. One more task completed for today. Now she was on her way to her father’s apartment to see her fiance. She had never had much enthusiasm for that, but these days she had little enthusiasm for anything at all. Rosemary moved through the days wishing that something in her life would be resolved.
She shifted her armload of books to her right arm as, onehanded, she sifted through her purse for a token. Walking through the gate, she paused, standing to one side to stay out of the path of the other students. Judging from the placards carried by a number of the people, the latest antiwar rally must have just ended. Rosemary noted some apparently normal kids carrying signs lettered with the joker Brigade’s informal slogan: LAST TO GO-FIRST TO DIE.
C.C. had always been into that. She had even sung her songs at a few of the less-rowdy gatherings. One day she had even brought home a fellow activist, a guy named Fortunato.
While it was nice that the man was involved with the joker Rights movement, Rosemary didn’t like pimps, geishas or no geishas, in her apartment. It had caused one of the few fights she had ever had with C.C. In the end C.C. had agreed to check with Rosemary more closely about future dinner guests.
C.C. Ryder had tried and tried to convince Rosemary to become active, but Rosemary believed that helping a few people directly could do as much good as standing around shouting condemnations of the “Establishment.” Probably a lot more good. Rosemary knew she came from a conservative family. Her roommate rarely let her forget it.
Rosemary took a deep breath and launched herself into the flood of people. All the late classes had evidently gotten out at the same time.
As Rosemary walked onto the platform, she moved around the rear of the crowd so she could end up at the far side of the waiting area. She didn’t feel like being that close to people right now. Moments later she felt the flood of dank tunnel air and shivered inside her damp sweater. Deafening, depressing, the local swept by her. All the cars had been defaced, but the last car was even more peculiarly decorated. Rosemary was reminded of the tattooed woman in the Ringling Brothers show she had seen in the old Garden. She had often wondered at the psychology of the kids who wrote on the sides of the trains. Sometimes she didn’t like what their words revealed. New York was not always a nice place to live.
I won’t think about it. She thought about it. The image of C.C. lying comatose in the I.C. ward of St. Jude’s glittered in her mind. She saw the shiny life-support machines. Because C.C. had had no relatives to notify, Rosemary had even been there when the nurses changed the dressings. She remembered the bruises, the black and poisonously blue patches that covered most of C.C.’s body. The doctors were unsure exactly how many times the young woman had been raped. Rosemary had wanted to empathize. She couldn’t. She wasn’t even sure how to begin. All she could do was to wait and hope. And then C.C. had vanished from the hospital.
The last car looked to be empty. As Rosemary started toward it, she glanced at the graffito. She stopped dead, her eyes tracking the words written on the dark side of the car:
Parsley, sage, Rosemary? Time .
Time is for others, not for rne.
“C.C.! What?” Disregarding the other people who had spotted the unoccupied car, she pushed her way to the doors. They were closed. Rosemary dropped her books and tried to claw the doors open. She felt a nail break. Failing, she beat on the doors until the train began to pull slowly out of the station.
“Not”
Rosemary’s eyes filled with tears at the final sight of her name and another of C.C.’s lyrics:
You can’t fight the end, But you can take revenge.
Rosemary said nothing else, only stared after the train. She looked down at her fists. The apparently steel door had been soft and yielding, warm. Had someone given her acid?
Was it a coincidence? Was C.C. living underground? Was C.C. alive at all?
It was a long time before the next train came.
He hunted in the near-darkness.
The hunger was upon him; the hunger that seemed never to be fully satisfied. And so he hunted.
Dimly, ever so faintly, he recalled a time and a place when it had been different. He had been someone-what was that?—something else.
He looked, but saw little. In this gloom and especially in the foul water choked with debris, his eyes served little use. More important were the tastes and smells, the tiny particles that told him both what lay in the distance meals to seek patiently-and of the immediate satisfactions that hovered, unsuspecting, just beyond the length of his snout.
He could hear the vibrations: the powerful, slow movements from side to side as his tail muscled through the water; the crushing, but distant waves beating down from the city above; the myriad tiny actions of food scurrying about in the darkness.
The filthy water broke around his wide, flat snout, the current streaming to either side of the raised nostrils. Occasionally the transparent membranes would slide down across the protruding eyes, then slip up again.
As large as he was-barely able to fit through some of the tunnels he had traversed during this time of feeding-he made very little noise. Tonight most of the sounds that accompanied him came from the prey, were cried out during the devouring. His nostrils gave him the first inkling of the feast to come, but was shortly followed by messages from his ears. Although he hated to leave this sanctuary that covered nearly all of his body, he knew he must go where the food was. The mouth of another tunnel loomed to one side. There was barely enough room in the passageway for even so flexible a body as his to turn and enter the new watercourse. The water became shallower and ended altogether within two body-lengths of the entrance.
It didn’t matter. His legs worked well enough, and he could move almost as silently as before. He could still smell the prey waiting for him somewhere ahead. Nearer. Near. Very close. He could hear sounds: squeaks, squeals, the scurrying of feet, the brush of furry bodies against stone.
They wouldn’t expect him; there were few predators in these tunnels deep down. He was upon them in an instant, the first one crushed between his jaws, its death-cry warning the others. The prey scattered in panic. Except for those without escape routes, there was no attempt to fight back. They ran. Most who lived longest scurried away from the monster in their midst-and encountered the bricked-up end of the tunnel. Others tried to s Tint around him-one even daring to leap across his scaly back—but the lashing tail smashed them against the unyielding walls. Still others ran directly into his mouth, cowering only in the split second before the great teeth came together.
The agonized squeals peaked and subsided. The blood flowed deliciously. The meat and hair and bones lay satisfyingly in his stomach. A few among the prey still lived. They crawled away from the slaughter as best they could. The hunter started to follow, but his meal sat heavily. For now he was too sated to follow, or to care. He made it as far as the edge of the water and then stopped. Now he wanted to sleep.
First he would break the silence. It was allowed. This was his territory. It was all his territory. The great jaws opened and he issued a penetrating, rumbling roar that echoed for many seconds through the seemingly endless labyrinth of tunnels and ducts, passageways and stone corridors.
When the echoes finally died, the predator slept. But he was the only one.
Rosemary said hello to Alfredo, who was on security duty tonight. He smiled at her as she signed in, and shook his head when he saw the stack of books she carried.
“I can get you help with that, Miss Maria.”
“No thanks, Alfredo. I can manage just fine.”
“I remember carrying your books for you when you were just a bambina, Miss Maria. You used to say you wanted to marry me when you grew up. No more, eh?”
“Sorry, Alfredo, I’m just fickle.” Rosemary smiled and batted her eyes. It wasn’t easy to joke or even be pleasant. She wanted this evening, this day, to end.
She was alone in the elevator and took the opportunity to rest her head against the side of the car for a moment. She indeed remembered Alfredo carrying her books to school. It had been during one of the wars in her childhood. What a family.
When the elevator doors opened, the two men in front of the entry to the penthouse came to attention. They relaxed as she approached, but each looked unusually solemn.
“Max. What’s happened?” Rosemary looked questioningly at the taller of the two identically black-suited men.
Max shook his head and opened the door for her. Rosemary walked between the oppressive, dark oakpaneled walls toward the library. The ancient oil paintings did nothing to relieve the gloom.
At the door of the library, she started to knock, but the heavy, carved doors swung inward before she struck them. Her father stood in the doorway, his silhouette illuminated by the lamp on his desk.
He took both her hands and held them tightly. “Maria, it’s Lombardo. He’s no longer with us.”
“What happened?” She stared at her father’s face. The areas beneath his eyes were dark. His jowls sagged even more than she remembered.
Her father gestured. “These young men brought the news. “
Frankie, Joey, and Little Renaldo stood clumped together. Joey literally held his hat in his hands.
“We told Don Carlos, Maria. Lucky Lum—er, Lombardo was coming right over here but he stopped for a minute in the subway.”
“He wanted to get some gum, I think.” Frankie volunteered the information as if it had some significance.
“Yeah, anyway. He didn’t come out. We were just hanging around,” said Joey, “so we decided to find out what was going on when we heard about .... disturbance in the station. When we got there, we found out what happened.”
“Yeah, they found him in about two dozen—”
“Frankie!”
“Yes, Don Carlo.”
“That will be all for tonight, boys. I will see you in the morning.”
The three young men nodded and touched their foreheads in Rosemary’s direction as they left.
“I’m sorry, Maria,” said her father.
“I don’t understand. Who would have done this?”
“Maria, you know Lombardo worked with our family business. Others knew that. And they knew he was about to become my son. We think it may have been someone trying to hurt me.” Don Carlo’s voice sounded sad. “There have been other incidents lately. There are those who want to take away what we have worked for a lifetime to achieve.” His voice hardened again. “We won’t let them get away with this. I promise, Maria!”
“Maria, I have some nice lasagna. Your favorite. Please, try to eat.” Rosemary’s mother spoke from out of the shadows. She rose to take Rosemary to the kitchen, escorting her with an arm around her shoulders.
“Mama, you shouldn’t have held supper for me.”
“I didn’t. I knew you would be late and so I saved some for you. “
Rosemary said to her mother, “Mama, I didn’t love him.”
“Ssh. I know.” She touched her daughter’s lips. “But you would have grown to care for him. I could see how well you got along.”
“Mama, you don’t—” Rosemary was interrupted by her father’s voice following them from the library.
“It has to be melanzanes, blacks! Who else would be attacking us now? They have to be coming down from Harlem through the tunnels. They’ve wanted our territories for years.”
“Especially they want a susina like Jokertown. No, jokers would never dare do this on their own, but the blacks could be using them as a distraction.”
Rosemary heard silence, followed by tinny squeaks from the telephone. Her mother tugged at her arm.
Don Carlo said, “They must be stopped now or they will threaten all the Families. They’re savages.”
Another pause.
“I do not exaggerate.”
“Maria ...” said her mother.
“Tomorrow morning, then,” said Don Carlo. “Early. Good.”
“See, Maria. Your father will take care of it.” Her mother led Rosemary into the harvest-gold kitchen with all its bright appliances, the walls lined with framed samplers of old country homilies. She thought of telling her mother about C.C. and the subway, but it seemed impossible now. It had to have been her imagination. She just wanted to sleep. She didn’t want to eat. She couldn’t take anything else tonight.
The bag lady stirred in her sleep and one of the pair of large cats beside her moved out of the way. He raised his head and sniffed at his companion. Leaving the woman with an opossum curled against her stomach, the two cats silently stalked out into the darkness of the abandoned subway tunnel. The neglected 86th Street cutoff took them toward food.
Both cats were hungry themselves, but now they hunted for their woman’s breakfast. Using a drainage tunnel, they exited into the park and out beneath the maples to the street.
When a New York Times delivery truck paused at a light, the black cat looked at the calico and pointed his muzzle at the truck. As the truck pulled away, they leaped aboard. Settled on the back of the truck, the black created the image of mounds of fish and shared it with the calico. Watching the city blocks pass, they waited for the telltale scent of fish. Finally, as the truck slowed, the calico smelled fish and impatiently jumped down from the vehicle. Yowling angrily, the black followed her down an alley. Both stopped when the scent of strange humans overwhelmed the food. Farther down the alley was a crowd of jokers, crude parodies of normal humans. Dressed in rags, they searched through the garbage for food.
A wedge of light spilled into the alley as a door opened. The cats smelled fresh food as a well-dressed man, larger than any of the scavengers, carried boxes into the alley.
“Please.” The fat man spoke to the paralyzed jokers in a soft voice filled with pain. “I have food for you here.”
The frozen scene ended as the jokers rushed together toward the cartons and began ripping them open. They jostled each other and fought for position to get at the rich food.
“Stop!” A tall joker cried out in the midst of the chaos. “Are we not men?”
The jokers paused and withdrew from the boxes, allowing the fat man to dole out the food to each of them. The tall joker was the last to be served. As the host handed him food, he spoke again. “Sir, we thank Aces High.”
In the darkness of the alley, the cats observed the jokers’ meal. Turning to the calico, the black formed the image of a fish’s skeleton and they moved back toward the street. On 6th Avenue, the black sent a picture of Bagabond to the calico. They loped uptown until a slow-moving produce truck provided a ride. Many blocks later, the truck neared a Chinese market and the black recognized the familiar scent. As the truck began to brake, both cats leaped out. They kept to the dark beyond the range of the streetlights until they reached the open-air grocery.
It was still long before dawn and the truckers were unloading the day’s fresh produce. The black cat smelled freshly slaughtered chicken; his tongue extended to touch his upper lip. Then he uttered a short growl to his companion. The calico leapt onto a display of tomatoes and began to claw them to pieces.
The proprietor yelled in Chinese and hurled his clipboard at the marauding cat. He missed. The men unloading the truck stopped and stared at the apparently insane feline.
“Worse’n Jokertown,” one muttered.
“That’s one big sumbitchin’ kitty,” said the other.
As soon as their attention was fixed on the calico cat destroying the tomatoes, the waiting black cat sprang to the back of the truck and seized a chicken in his mouth. The black was a very large cat, at least forty pounds, and he lifted the chicken with ease. Leaping off the tailgate, he ran into the darkness of the alley. At the same time, the calico dodged a broom handle and bounded after.
The black cat waited for the calico halfway down the next block. When the calico reached him, both cats howled in unison. It had been a good hunt. With the calico occasionally aiding the black in lifting the chicken onto curbs, they loped back to the park and the bag lady.
A fellow street dweller had once called her Bagabond in one of his more sober moments and the name had stuck. Her people, the wild creatures of the city, called her by no name, only by their images of her. Those were enough. And she only remembered her name once in a while.
Bagabond pulled around herself the fine green coat that she had found in an apartment-house dumpster. She sat up, careful not to displace the opossum. With the opossum settled in her lap and a squirrel on each shoulder, she greeted the proud black and calico cats with their prize. Moving with an ease that would have amazed the few street denizens who had anything to do with her, the woman reached out and patted the heads of the two feral cats. As she did, she formed the image in her mind of a particularly scrawny chicken, already half-eaten, being dragged out of a restaurant garbage can by the pair.
The black stuck his nose into the air and snorted gently as he obliterated the image in both his head and Bagabond’s. The calico merged a meow with a growl in mock anger and stretched her head toward the woman’s. Catching Bagabond’s eye, the calico replayed the hunt as she had perceived it: the calico at least the size of a lion, surrounded by human legs much like mobile tree trunks. Brave calico spotting the prey, a chicken the size of a house. Fierce calico leaping toward a human throat, fangs bared ...
The scene went blank as Bagabond abruptly focused elsewhere. The calico began to protest until a heavy black paw rolled her over on her back and held her down. The calico stilled her protest, head twisted to the side to watch the woman’s face. The black was stiff with anticipation.
The picture formed in all three minds: dead rats. The image was obliterated by Bagabond’s anger. She rose, shaking off the squirrels and setting the opossum to one side. Without hesitation, she turned and started into one of the tangential, descending tunnels. The black cat bounded silently past and moved ahead to act as a scout. The calico paced the woman. “Something’s eating my rats.”
The tunnels were black; sometimes a little bioluminescence shed the only light. Begabond couldn’t see as well as the cats, but she could use their eyes.
The black picked up a strange scent when the three of them were deep beneath the park. The only connection he could make was with a shifting creature that was equal parts snake and lizard.
A hundred yards farther, they came upon a devastated rats’ nest. None of the rats lived. Some were half-eaten. All the bodies had been mangled.
Bagabond and her companions stumbled on in the wet tunnel. The woman slid off a ledge and found herself hip-deep in disgusting water. Unidentifiable chunks batted against her legs in the moderate current. Her temper was not improved. The black cat bristled and projected the same image as a few minutes before, but now the creature was even larger. The cat suggested they all three back out of this passageway now. Quickly. Quietly.
Bagabond blocked out the suggestion as she sidled along a slimy wall to another ravaged nest. Some of these rats were still alive. Their simple picture of their destroyer was the shadowy image of an impossibly large and ugly snake. She shut off the brains of the mortally injured and moved on.
Five yards down the passage was an alcove that provided drainage for a section of the park above. The entrance was three feet above the floor of the tunnel. The black crouched there, muscles taut, ears laid back, yowling softly. He was scared. The calico disdainfully started for the opening, but the black knocked her aside. The larger cat looked back at Bagabond and sent every negative image he could.
Carried by her anger, Bagabond indicated she would go in first. She took a breath, gasped, and crawled into the alcove.
It was lit by a grating in the roof, some twenty feet above. The gray light fell on the naked body of a man. Heelooked to Bagabond to be in his thirties, muscled but not overly so. No flab. Bagabond noted vaguely that he didn’t look as wasted as most of the derelicts she had seen. For a moment, she thought he was dead, yet another victim of the mysterious killer. But as her mind focused on the man, she realized he was just asleep.
The cats had followed her into the chamber. The black growled in confusion. His senses told him the trail of the lizard-snake thing ended here-it ceased where the man lay.
Bagabond felt something strange about the man. She didn’t usually try to read humans; it was too difficult. Their minds were complex. They plotted, schemed. Slowly she knelt beside him and extended her hand.
The man woke up, caught sight of the dirty street person about to touch him, and jerked away.
“Wha’ you want?” She stared at him.
He realized he was naked and hauled himself to the entry of the cave passage—He heard a deep growl, recoiled, barely evaded a swipe from the claws of the biggest cat he’d ever seen. For a moment, he felt himself sliding into the darkness inside his mind. Then he was into the main tunnel and gone. The cats were crying with questions, but Bagabond had no answers. Almost, she thought. Inside his mind. I almost felt ... what? Gone.
Bagabond, the calico, and the black searched for another hour, but they found no more trace of the strange scent. There was no monster in the tunnel.
The transients, derelicts, bag ladies, and other street people began their day early, when the best cans and bottles were to be found. Rosemary had slipped out of the penthouse early as well. She had barely slept, and that morning, knowing what was almost certainly happening behind the closed doors of the library, she wanted to get out quickly. The dons were declaring war.
Central Park with its trees, bushes, and benches was heaven for a certain portion of the street people. This sunny morning, Rosemary was looking for a few she had undertaken to help . As she reached the second park bench beyond the stone ridge, a man in tattered clothing hid a bottle in a bush beside the bench and jumped to his feet. He wore an olivedrab fatigue jacket with a less-faded place on one shoulder where the joker Brigade “cannon fodder” patch had once been sewn. Rosemary had suggested it was not prudent to wear the patch this far uptown.
“Hello, Crawler,” said the social worker. Somewhere in his late twenties-Rosemary couldn’t tell from the vet’s sunburned face-he had taken his nickname from his Army job in Vietnam: tunnel crawler. He’d re-upped twice. Then Crawler had seen enough.
“Hey, Rosemary. You got my new goggles yet?” Crawler wore a makeshift pair-cheap 14th Street sunglasses, the eyepieces built up with dirty white adhesive tope. Underneath, Rosemary knew his eyes were dark and overlarge, extraordinarily sensitive.
“I’ve requested the funding. It will be a while before we can get them. You know red tape-just like in the service.”
“Shoot.” But the derelict still smiled as he fell in step beside her.
Rosemary hesitated, then said. “You can still check in with the V A., you know. They’ll fix you up.”
“Fuck no,” said Crawler, sounding alarmed. “Guys like me, they go in a VA. and they never come back out.” Rosemary started to say, “That’s nonsense,” but thought better of it. “Crawler, do you know anything about the underground? You know, the subway tunnels and all that?”
“Some. I mean, I need the shelter. I just don’t like bein down there. ‘Sides, there’s creepy stuff goin’ on down there. I hear things about alligators, stuff like that. Maybe it’s all from winos with the d.t.’s, but I don’t wanna find out.”
“I’m looking for someone,” said Rosemary.
Crawler wasn’t listening. “Only the really weird people live down there.” He mumbled something .... even stranger than down on the East Side-you know, the Town.
“She lives down deep.” Crawler pointed at the crone sitting on the ground under a maple tree. She was a hundred yards away, but Rosemary could have sworn there were pigeons sitting on the woman’s head and a squirrel perched on her shoulder. Rosemary cocked her head and looked back at the little man. “That’s just Bagabond,” she said. “No need to worry about her ...” Rosemary realized that Crawler was no longer with her. He was panhandling a well-dressed businessman getting exercise by walking to work. She shook her head in mixed disapproval and resignation.
By the time Rosemary turned back toward Bagabond, the pigeons and squirrel were gone. Rosemary shook her head to clear it. My imagination really is working overtime, she thought, walking toward the bag lady. just another lost soul. “Hello Bagabond.”
The old woman with stringy hair turned her head away and stared across the park.
“My name is Rosemary. I talked to you before. I tried to find you a nice place to live. Do you remember?” Rosemary squatted down on the ground to speak at Bagabond’s level.
The black cat she had seen before came up to Bagabond and began rubbing against her. She stroked its head and murmured incomprehensible sounds.
“Please talk to me. I want to get you food. I want to get you a good place to live.” Rosemary held out her hand. The ring on her third finger glittered in the sun.
The woman on the ground drew her legs up against herself and clutched the plastic trashbag filled with her treasures. She began rocking back and forth and crooning. The black cat turned to look at Rosemary and she flinched against its glare.
“I’ll talk to you later. I’ll come back and see you.” Rosemary rose stiffly. Her face tightened, and for just a moment, she felt like crying to ease the frustration. She only wanted to help. Someone. Anyone. To feel good about something.
She walked away from Bagabond and back toward Central Park West and the subway entrance. Her father’s war council had frightened her. She had never liked what he did, and her entire life seemed to be a search for escape and redemption, atonement. The sins of the fathers. Rosemary wanted peace, but whenever she thought she could get it, it retreated beyond her grasp. C.C. had been a last chance. So was each one of the derelicts she failed to help. There was a key to reaching Bagabond. There had to be.
Rosemary descended the steps, waited, dropped in her token, walked down the second stairway onto the platform in a daze. The blast of cool air entered the station followed by the AA train. Rosemary barely glanced up from the floor and moved stiffly toward the nearest car.
As she was about to step onto the train, her eyes widened and she stepped back into the crowd, drawing glares and a few curses for breaking the flow. That last car. It had more of C. C.’s lyrics painted on the side in a shade of red that reminded her of blood. C.C. had always been something of a manicdepressive and Rosemary had always known her mood by what she wrote or sang. The C. C. who had written these words was depressed beyond even Rosemary’s experience:
Blood and bones Take me home
People there I owe People there gonna go
Down with me to Hell Down with me to Hell
Approaching the car, Rosemary saw words she knew had not been there seconds ago.
Rosie, Rosie, pretty Rosie Leave this place Forget my face Don’t cry Rosie, Rosie, pretty Rosie
“I’m going to find you, C. C. I’m going to save you.” Rosemary again fought to get into the car she now realized was covered with fragments of C.C.’s songs, some that she recognized, others that had to be new. Once more the car rejected her. Breathing hard, eyes wide, Rosemary watched the car move into the tunnel. She gasped as the side of the car was suddenly covered with tears of blood.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God ...” Rosemary absurdly remembered the stories of saints from her childhood. For just a moment, she wondered if the world was ending, if the wars and the deaths, the jokers and the hate, truly prefigured the Apocalypse.
It was noon.
American B-52s were bombing Hanoi and Haiphong. Quang Tri was shaky, as the North Vietnamese were on the march. In Washington, D. C. , politicians exchanged increasingly frantic phone calls about a recent burglary. The question in some quarters was, is Donald Segretti an ace?
The midtown Manhattan rush was ferocious. At Grand Central Station, Rosemary Muldoon looked for raggedy shadows she could follow into the darkness of the under ground. A dozen blocks north, Jack Robicheaux plied his regular trade, clattering through the permanent darkness on his small electric cart, checking track integrity in tunnel after tunnel. And somewhere under the abandoned 86th Street cutoff, just beneath the floor of the south edge of Central Park Lake, Bagabond drifted on the edge of sleep, warmed by the cats and other beasts of her life.
Noon. The war beneath Manhattan was starting.
“Let me quote to you from a speech given once by Don Carlo Gambione himself,” said Frederico “the Butcher” Macellaio. He grimly surveyed the groups of capos and their soldiers gathered around him in the chamber. In the ‘30s, the huge room had been an underground repair facility for midtown transit. Before the Big War, it had been closed and sealed of when the IA. decided to consolidate all maintenance yards across the river. The Gambione Family had soon taken the space over for storage of guns and other contraband, freight transfer, and occasional burials.
The Butcher raised his voice and the words echoed. “‘W’hat will make the difference for us in battle will be two things: discipline and loyalty.”
Little Renaldo was standing off to one side with Frankie and Joey. “Not to mention automatic weapons and H.E.,” he said, smirking.
Joey and Frankie exchanged glances. Frankie shrugged. Joey said, “God, guns, and glory.”
Little Renaldo commented, “I’m bored. I wanna go shoot somethin’. “
Joey said a little louder, so the Butcher could hear, “Hey, are we goin’ to roust some rummies, or what? Who’s fair game? Just the blacks? Jokers too?”
“We don’t know who their allies are,” said the Butcher. “We know they wouldn’t act alone. There are traitors from among our own race helping them for money”
Little Renaldo’s manic grin widened. “Free-fire zone,” he said. “Hoo-boy.” He tugged his boonie hat down snug. “Shit,” said Joey, “you weren’t even there.”
Little Renaldo gave him a thumbs-up. “I saw that John Wane movie.”
“That’s the word from the Man, huh?” said Joey.
The Butcher’s smile was thin and cold. “Anybody gives you problems, just waste ’em.”
The groups began to move out, scouts, squads, and platoons. The men had their M-16s, pump scatterguns, a few M-60 machine guns, grenades and launchers, rockets, riot gas, sidearms, knives, and enough blocks of C-4 to handle any kind of heavy demolition.
“Hey, Joey,” said Little Renaldo. “What you gonna shoot?”
Joey slapped a magazine into the AK-47. This weapon wasn’t from the Gambione armory. It was his own souvenir. He touched the polished wooden stock. “Maybe a ‘gator.”
“Huh?”
“Don’t you read any of them rags that’s been talking about the giant alligators down here?”
Little Renaldo looked at him doubtfully and shivered. “The jungle-jokers are one thing. I don’t want to go up against no big lizards with teeth.”
It was Joey’s turn to grin.
“No such things, right?” said Little Renaldo. “You’re just shittin’ me, right?”
Joey shot him a jaunty thumbs-up.
Jack had lost all track of time. He knew it had been a long while since he’d shunted his track maintenance vehicle off the main line onto a spur. Something was wrong. He decided to check out some of the more obscure routes. It was as though a piece of ice pressed against a spot just north of his tailbone. He’d heard trains, but they had passed at a distance. The tunnels he now traveled were seldom used except for diverted routes during high congestion, track fires, or other problems on the main line. He also heard far-off reports that sounded like gunfire.
Jack sang. He filled the darkness with zydeco, the bluesy Cajun-Black mixture he remembered from his childhood. He started with the Big Bopper’s “Chantilly Lace” and Clifton Chenier’s “Ay-Tete-Fee,” segued into a Jimmy Newman medley and Slim Harpo’s “Rainin’ in My Heart.” He’d just pulled the switch and slid the car onto a spur he knew he hadn’t checked in at least a year, when the world blew apart in a flash of red and yellow flame. He’d had time to sing one line of “L’Haricots sons pas sales” when the darkness fragmented, the pressure waves slammed against his ears, and the car and he took different, spinning, twisting directions through the air.
All he really had time to say was, “Wha’ de hail—” as he fetched up against the stone of the tunnel’s far wall and crumpled to the floor. For the moment, he was stunned by concussion and flash. He blinked and realized he could see smoke swirling, and the hand-held lights that illuminated the smoke.
He heard a voice say, “Jesus Christ, Renaldo! We weren’t going up against a tank.”
Another voice said, “Sorta sorry to do this one. Hate to kill anybody sounded that much like Chuck Berry.”
“Well,” said a third, “at least he had to be a spook.”
“Check it out, Renaldo. Guy probably looks like an open can of Spam, but you better find out for sure.”
“Yo, Joey”
The lights came closer, bobbing in the dissipating smoke. They’re gon’ kill me, Jack thought, reverting to the dialect of his childhood. There was at first no emotion to the realization. Then the anger started. He let the feeling sweep over him. The anger escalated to rage. Adrenaline pricklings agonized his nerves. Jack felt the first brush of what he had used to think was the onset of loup-garou madness.
“Hey, I think I see something! Off to your left, Renaldo.” The one called Renaldo approached. “Yeah, I got him. Now I’ll make sure.” He raised his weapon, taking aim with the light held tight along the stock.
That pushed Jack over the edge. You chill son of a bitch! Pain, welcome pain, wracked him. He ... changed. His brain seemed to spin, his mind folding in on itself endlessly down into the primal reptile level. His body was elongating, thickening; his jaw thrust forward, the teeth springing up in profusion. He felt the length of perfectly toned muscles, the balance of his tail. The utter power of his body ... he felt it completely.
Then he saw the prey in front of him, the menace. “Oh, my God!” Little Renaldo cried. His finger tightened on the trigger of the M-16. The first burst of tracers went wild. He never had the chance for a second.
The creature that had been Jack lunged forward, the jaws closing around Renaldo’s waist, twisting and tearing at his flesh. The man’s light spun, smashed, and went out.
The other men started firing wildly.
The alligator registered the cries, the screams. The smell of terror. Good. The prey was easier when it located itself. He dropped Renaldo’s corpse and moved toward the lights, the bull roar of his challenge filling the tunnel.
“For the love of God, Joey! Help me!”
“Hold on. I can’t see where you went!”
The corridor was narrow, the materials old and decaying. Caught between two equally tempting morsels, the alligator twisted around in the confined space. He saw flashes of light, felt a few stinging impacts, mainly in his tail. He heard the prey screaming.
“Joey, it busted my leg!”
More flashes. An explosion. Acrid smoke choked his nostrils. Irregular chunks of stone fell from the ceiling. Rotten beams splintered. Deteriorated cement collapsed. Part of the floor beneath him gave way and his twelve-foot length tumbled heavily down an incline. Smoke, dust, and solid debris rained from above.
The alligator smashed into a thin metal hatch that had never been engineered for this kind of force. The aluminum tore like ripping canvas and he toppled into an open shaft. He fell for another twenty feet before crashing into a spider’s nest of wooden beams. Bits of debris followed for a little while. Then there was silence, both above and below. The alligator rested in darkness. When he tried to flex his body, nothing much happened. He was thoroughly jammed into a wooden cat’s cradle. A beam was wedged securely across his snout. He couldn’t even open his jaws.
He attempted to roar, but the sound came out more as a muffled growl. He blinked his eyes, seeing nothing. His strength was dwindling, shock taking its toll.
He didn’t want to die here. He wished to end in the water.
Worse, the alligator didn’t want to die hungry. He was starved.
Bagabond felt something she hadn’t experienced for a long time, sympathy, for Rosemary Muldoon. She knew the social worker wanted to help, but how could Bagabond tell her that she didn’t need help? Puzzled by that emotion, Bagabond discovered another one. She could be happy with the caring and companionship of her friends, however nonhuman they might be.
She did have a warm place to sleep. Her home beneath Central Park was close to the steam tunnels. Bagabond had slowly furnished it with the best the street had to offer. A broken red director’s chair was the only furniture, but there were rags and blankets deeply covering the floor. A velvet painting of lions on the veld leaned against one wall and a wooden carving of a leopard stood in one corner. One of the leopard’s legs was missing but it occupied a place of honor.
Drowsing there in the abandoned 86th Street cutoff tunnel, Bagabond even remembered the person she had once been, Suzanne Melot The surge of pain that crashed across her mind interrupted her thoughts. The strength of the cry caused the black cat to moan in pain. As the wave receded, the black sent to Bagabond the same image he had taken from the creature that had attacked the rats. Bagabond agreed mentally. Neither could she quite nail down the image. The creature seemed to be a huge lizard, but it somehow wasn’t entirely animal. And it was hurt.
Bagabond sighed and rose. “We have to find it if we are going to have peace and quiet.” The black was not in favor of this solution until another wave of anguish came. He snarled and ran into the tunnel to Bagabond’s left. The calico felt only the edge of the pain as it passed through Bagabond and the black. Bagabond replayed a little of the cry of pain and the calico flattened to the ground, ears back. The image of the black appeared in Bagabond’s mind and the calico dashed down the tunnel in pursuit. Bagabond told the calico to wait for her, and they began to track both the black and the injured creature.
It took time to find them. The creature really did resemble nothing so much as a giant lizard. It was trapped beneath a fall of timbers in an unfinished tunnel. The black crouched a few feet away, staring at this apparition.
Bagabond looked at the trapped creature and laughed. “So there really are alligators in the sewers.” The alligator twitched its tail, knocking a few bricks across the tunnel. “But that’s not all you are, is it?”
There was no way she and the cats could free the alligator. Bagabond knelt and examined the timbers trapping the beast as she called her friends to help her. She reached out and stroked the alligator’s head, calming him with the images she sent. She sensed the creature drifting in and out of consciousness.
The animals arrived at different times. An uneasy peace held as Bagabond directed each according to its abilities. Rats gnawed, a pair of wild dogs provided muscle, the opossums and raccoons carried off small stones. The black and the calico aided Bagabond in controlling the volatile mix of animals. When the smaller debris had been cleared away and timbers and boards shifted or gnawed through, Bagabond began hauling on the alligator. Between her tugging and his struggles, Jack fought his way free. Bagabond ended up with a very tired and bruised alligator across her lap. The black and the calico told the creatures who had helped to leave. The two cats watched as Bagabond rubbed the underside of the alligator’s jaw, calming the creature. As she stroked it, the snout and tail began to shorten. The scaly hide became smooth, pale skin. The stubby limbs elongated into arms and legs. In a few minutes, Bagabond was holding the naked, bruised body of the man they had found before. As the change took place, Bagabond realized that at some indefinable point, she could no longer control this creature or read his thoughts. Somehow she had missed the critical division between man and beast.
She got up, lifting the man off her, and walked toward the end of the tunnel. The calico accompanied her. The black stayed beside the man.
Why? Bagabond thought.
Why? the black countered. The work they had just done, as seen through the cat’s eyes, played across her mind. The calico looked from one to the other. She had not been invited into this conversation.
Alligator, Bagabond explained, not human. In her mind the alligator became a man.
“Curiosity ...” Bagabond spoke aloud for the first time since the rescue operation had commenced.
The black sent a picture of a black cat on its back with paws in the air.
Bagabond sat down beside the man. In a few minutes he began to move. Painfully he sat up. In the dim light filtering from above, he recognized Bagabond as the old woman he had seen the day before.
“Wha’ happen? I remember running into a bunch of crazies with guns, and then things get fuzzy.” He tried to focus on the crone, who kept splitting into two images. “I think maybe I’ve got a concussion.”
Bagabond shrugged and pointed at the beams from the roof-collapse behind him. By straining his eyes, he could see what looked like hundreds of pawprints on the floor and the walls around the cave-in. In the center of the devastation, Jack also saw the imprint of a monstrous tail.
“Christ, not again.” Jack turned back to Bagabond. “When you got here, what did you see?”
She turned partly away from him, still silent. He saw her mouth quirk in a partial smile beneath the stringy hair. Was she mad?
“Merle. What am I going to do?” Jack was almost bowled over by the pair of black paws that struck his chest. “Easy, boy. You’re the biggest kitty I’ve seen since I left the swamps.” The black cat’s eyes stared into his with an odd intensity. “What is it?”
“He wants to know how you do it.” The old woman’s voice did not match her appearance. It was young and held a touch of humor. “Be careful. You’re spaced, just like you were coming out of Thorazine.” She took his arm as he tried to stand.
When he was upright, she said, “You’re not going to make it far like that.” She began to take off her coat.
“Mon Dieu. Thanks.” Feeling his skin flush, Jack shrugged into her green cloth coat and wrapped it around himself. It covered him from neck to knees, but left his arms bare .. from the elbows down.
“Where do you live?” Bagabond gazed at him without expression. Jack appreciated the kindness.
“Downtown. Down on Broadway near the City Hall station. Are we anywhere close to a train?” Jack was not used to being lost, and found that he disliked the feeling intensely.
In answer, Bagabond picked her way to the tunnel entrance. She didn’t look back to see if he was following when she turned to the right.
“Your mistress, she is a little strange. No ofense,” Jack said to the black cat. It paced him as he trailed the bag lady. The cat looked up at him, sniffed, and twitched his tail. “Who am I to talk, eh?”
Although Jack attempted to keep up with Bagabond, he quickly fell behind. Eventually, at the black’s appeal, she returned and helped support the man, pulling his arm across her shoulders.
Jack finally recognized the tunnels as they came into the 57th Street station. He was amazed at the change in Bagabond as they made their way onto the platform. Even though she was still holding him up, the woman seemed to hang off him. She shuffled now instead of striding, and kept her eyes on the ground. Those waiting on the platform gave them plenty of room.
The subway pulled in, the last car covered with unusually bright graffiti. Bagabond hauled Jack toward the vividly decorated car. Jack had time to read some of the more coherent phrases covering the side.
Are you unusual? Did you feel the fire? Are you burning inside?
The flames devour us all, But never let us die; it never ends, forever in flame.
Jack thought some of the phrases changed as he watched, but that had to be an effect of his concussed brain. Bagabond pulled him inside. The doors closed, leaving some very angry transit customers outside.
“Stop?” Bagabond was nothing if not economical with her words, Jack thought.
“City Hall.” Jack slumped and rested his head against the back of the seat, closing his eyes as the train rolled downtown. He did not notice that the seat molded itself around his body to support it while he slept. He failed to realize that the doors never again opened until they reached his stop.
The cats were not entirely happy with this subway ride. The calico was flatly terrified. Ears laid back, tail straight and fluffed out, she leaned into Bagabond’s side. The black gingerly kneaded the floor of the car. The texture was only partially familiar. He wondered at the heat and the confusing scent all around him.
Bagabond tried to focus on the interior of the dark car. There were no sharp angles here. Dim shapes seemed to change form subtly in her peripheral vision. I’ve felt nothing like this, she thought, since the acid trip. She extended her consciousness beyond the cats and Jack. She couldn’t define the who that she briefly contacted. But she felt the overwhelming comfort, the warmth, and the protectiveness that surrounded them here.
Cautiously she settled back in her seat and stroked the calico.
“This is it,” said Jack.
He had recovered sufficiently to lead their small party through the City Hall station, beyond a bewildering succession of maintenance closets, and into another labyrinth of unused tunnels. He’d rigged sections of the passages with lights which he turned on and off as needed as they proceeded toward his home. When he opened the last door, he stood aside and waved Bagabond and the cats inside. He smiled proudly as they stared around the long room.
“Wow, man.” Bagabond flinched as she took in the opulent furnishings and decor. The immediate impression was of red velvet and claw-footed divans.
“You are younger than you look. That was my reaction too. Reminded me of Captain Nemo’s stateroom ...”
“20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.”
“Yeah, right. You saw it too. One of the first movies I ever saw over to the parish theater.” They walked down the crimson-carpeted stairs flanked by gold stanchions and plush velvet ropes. Both cats ran ahead of them, the calico using the Victorian armchairs as hurdles. The electric light was augmented by flickering gas flames that gave the room an atmosphere out of the last century. The black cat trotted over the Persian carpets to the edge of the platform and looked back at the two humans.
“He wants to know what this is and what’s behind that door.” Bagabond steadied Jack as they moved slowly down the staircase. “You need to lie down.”
“Soon enough. This is my home and behind the door is my bedroom. If we could head in that direction ...” They started across the room. “This was the first subway in New York, built by a man named Alfred Beach back after the War Between the States. It only ran for two blocks. The Boss Tweed didn’t want it so he shut it down, then they forgot about it. I found it a while after I started working for the Transit Authority-one of the benefits of the job. Don’t know why it held up so well, but it’s a good place for me. Just took a little cleaning up, is all.” They had walked to the other end of the room and Jack reached out to turn the handles on the ornate cast-bronze door. The center circle swung open. “This used to be the entrance to the pneumatic tube.”
“I didn’t expect this.” Bagabond was surprised to find that the interior of the tunnel was sparsely furnished. There was a homemade bed constructed out of pine boards, an equally homemade bookcase, and a plank chest.
“All the comforts of home. Even my complete collection of Pogo books.” Jack looked innocently at Bagabond and she laughed, then seemed surprised at it.
“Where’s your iodine?” Bagabond looked around for a first aid kit.
“Don’t use that stuff. Can you get me some of those?” Jack pointed up at the spiderwebs.
“You’re kidding.”
“Best poultice in the world. My grandma taught me that.” When Bagabond turned back to him, he had pulled on a pair of shorts and had a shirt in his hand. She handed over the spiderwebs and helped him bandage the worst abrasions.
“So how did you end up down here?” Jack lay back on the bed, wincing slightly, while Bagabond perched gingerly on the edge.
“You’re sure not like those social workers.” Bagabond watched the cats outside the door as they chased each other around the room. She turned back to him with an appraising look. “And they like you.”
“They let me out a while ago and I ended up back in the city. No place else to go. Met the black, started talking to him, and he talked back. So did a lot of the other animals, the ones that aren’t human, anyway. I get along. I don’t need people, don’t want people around. People always mean bad luck for me. I can talk to you, too, when you’re that other one, you know? Out there they call me Bagabond. I had another name once but I don’t remember it much.”
“They call me Sewer Jack.” Jack said it bitterly, in contrast to Bagabond’s flat recitation. The burst of emotion she caught held screams, bright lights, and fear, and the haven of the swamp.
“It was here-the creature. What are you?” Bagabond was confused; she had never before met this mixture of man and animal, with whom she could only sometimes communicate.
“Both. You saw.”
“Do you control it? Can you make yourself change?”
“Did you ever see Lawrence Talbot as the wolfman? I change when I lose control or when I allow the beast to take over. I’m not cursed by the full moon; I’m cursed all the time. The loup-garou is a legend where I come from. The Cajuns all believe in it. When I was young, I did too. I was afraid I would hurt someone, so I went as far away as I could go. New York was a foreign country; no one would know me or bother me here.”
His eyes focused on her now instead of the past. “Why the act? You can’t be over forty-five.”
“Twenty-six.” She looked down at Jack, wondering why it mattered. “It keeps them from bothering me so much.” Jack glanced through the open door at the railway clock on the opposite wall. “I’m getting hungry. How about you?”
Rescuing C.C. What had seemed to be a wonderful idea had turned into a nightmare. Rosemary had followed some derelicts into the steam tunnels beneath Grand Central Station. At first she tried asking anyone she met about C. C. But as she moved farther into the dank passages, those living there scuttled away. There was only occasional light from gratings in the street above, or from the derelicts’ smoky fires. Her fatigue and fear began taking their toll; she fell again and again into the muck on the tunnel floors.
One horrible moment, she was attacked by a filthy creature who clawed at her, cackling. She fought him off but her purse was gone now. Rosemary was hopelessly lost. She heard occasional sounds that seemed to be gunshots and explosions. I’m in hell.
Ahead were two glowing spots that glared at her through the darkness. They receded as she came nearer. The iridescent green lights mesmerized her.
The spots came into focus and Rosemary saw the cat crouched in the darkness. Retreating a few feet and growling, it watched as Rosemary approached a wounded cat, the comrade it guarded. Chest crushed, one leg nearly severed from its body, the injured cat was dying. The guardian would allow no more pain to be inflicted. When she heard the low crying, she ignored the eyes and knelt beside the injured cat.
Rosemary realized there was nothing she could do, but she held it. The cat began to purr before it choked and died. The guardian lifted its head and howled a eulogy before pivoting and running into the gloom.
Rosemary laid the body on the ground in front of her and placed its head and legs in comfortable positions,. sat back, and began sobbing. It seemed as if she cried forever before she started walking toward the sounds of the guns, gasping from her sobs.
After raiding the refrigerator-Bagabond could understand why Con Ed never noticed the power tap, but how did he ever get the refrigerator down here?-Jack went back into his bedroom to get some sleep. Bagabond and the cats explored Jack’s domain, which included making sure they could get out the door he had locked behind them.
They quickly discovered the limits. Bagabond sat down on an overstuffed horsehair sofa. The black joined her while the calico continued her game of crossing the room without touching the floor. Bagabond pondered and, for the first time in years, the black was not invited to join her. Bagabond was amazed at the way Jack lived. It made her life of moving from one temporary home, a pile of rags, to another, suddenly seem wrong and filled with discomforts she had previously ignored.
She and Jack had discussed the probability that they were both aces. What luck. The virus had ruined both their lives. She would never again be the innocent child she was before the acid and the virus flooded her mind with the alien perceptions of the animal world. She thought she had had a miserable childhood. It was why she left home. But to grow up thinking you were something like a werewolf, a creature cursed by God.
Why had she been so open with him? There was no one still alive in the city who knew as much about her as Jack now did. It was because they were alike; they knew what it was like to be different and to have stopped looking for ways to be like everybody else.
The claws across the back of her hand drew blood before her attention came back to the real world. Her eyes met those of the black cat, and horrifying images filtered through others’ eyes began pouring into her mind: rat nests destroyed by machine-gun fire; yelling men frightening an opossum, her children clinging to her back as she ran, one falling, dying; cats fleeing, being shot, murdered; a cat fighting to protect her kittens before a grenade destroyed the litter, leaving the mother with a leg nearly blown off; a woman who looked like that damn social worker cradling a dying cat. The blood-more and more of it-of those who were her only friends.
“The kittens. They can’t!” Bagabond stood up and found herself shaking.
“What’s goin’ on?” Jack, awakened by Bagabond’s cry, emerged from his room still half-asleep.
“They’re killing them! I’ve got to stop them.” Bagabond clenched her fists, turning away from him. Flanked by the cats, she headed for the stairs.
“Not without me.” Jack ducked back into his room, grabbed Bagabond’s green coat, flashlights, and a pair of sneakers, and followed them up the staircase.
Slowed by tying on the sneakers as he ran, he caught up with them at the first tunnel junction.
“Not that way.” Jack stopped the trio as they entered the righthand tunnel. He thrust Bagabond’s coat at her. He aimed one of the flashlights at the other passage.
“It’s how we came in.” In her panic, Bagabond had lost much of her trust in Jack.
“It’ll just take you to the subway. There’s a faster way to get back to the park. I’ve got a track-car. Follow me?” Jack waited for Bagabond’s nod and plunged into the lefthand tunnel at a trot.
The scenes of carnage in Bagabond’s mind grew sharper as they approached Central Park and abandoned the car. As they came up on the next branching of the tunnels, Jack lifted his head and sniffed. “Whoever they are, they’re using up an army’s worth of gunpowder. What’s the plan?”
“We need to find out who they are so we know how to stop them. Right?” Bagabond wasn’t at all sure what to do.
“I bet they’re mes amis with the guns, but I have no idea who’s the boss.”
An image appeared of the calico walking with Jack, the black with Bagabond.
“Far out.” Bagabond patted the head of the immense black cat. “Good idea. “
“What idea?”
“The black thinks we should split up until we find out what is going on. If one of the cats is with each of us, we can stay, um ...”
“In communication. Yeah. You can at least see what’s going on.” Jack nodded thoughtfully. “I used to love war movies, but I get lousy reception at my place. Let’s go, Sarge.”
He spoke to the calico, who leaped ahead of him. “Bon chance.”
Bagabond nodded and moved in the other direction.
In a profound darkness barely relieved by darting beams from the caving helmets worn by armed men, Don Carlo Gambione surveyed the desolation that was his kingdom.
His lieutenant sounded almost apologetic. “Don Carlo, I fear our troops became too enthusiastic about their task.” Don Carlo looked down at the bodies illuminated in the light from the Butcher’s flash. “Zeal in a matter such as this,” he said, “is no vice.”
“We’ve found their headquarters,” said the Butcher. “Our men discovered it less than an hour ago.” He stabbed a finger at the map. “About 86th Street. Under the park. Close to Central Park Lake. It looked inhabited. That’s when I called you.”
“I am grateful,” said his leader. “I want to be present when the flame of our enemies’ ill-conceived brushfire rebellion is extinguished. I knew there must be a reason why they should rise up now.” Don Carlo’s voice rose as well. The Butcher stared at him.
“I want their heads,” said Don Carlo. “We shall set them on spikes at Amsterdam and 110th Street.” Wide, his eyes shone ferally in the electric lamplight.
The Butcher gently put a hand on the Don’s wrist. “We’d better go uptown now, Padrone. I told the men to wait in place, but they are so-enthusiastic.”
For a moment, Don Carlo’s gaze swung around wildly at the bodies littering the dirty concrete. Rags soaked with blood. “Such tragedy! The pain, the pain ...” He stared directly down at the corpse at his feet. It was a white man, the gangling arms and legs sprawled out like the limbs of a broken marionette. There was no peace in the lined, sun-scorched face. Only agony reflected in the too-wide dark eyes. Smashed makeshift goggles lay in the blood pooled from the man’s head. The don unconsciously nudged the shoulder of the faded fatigue jacket with the toe of one polished boot. “This one was a true jungle joker ...” His voice trailed off.
Don Carlo looked away. He drew himself straight, taking strength from the almost-holy knowledge of what he must do. He leaned closer to the Butcher’s sober face. “These things we do ...” he said. “It is sad, very sad. But sometimes we must attack and even destroy the way of life we love in order to preserve it.”
Despite his bravado-why am I trying to impress that raggedy woman?-Jack took his time moving into the tunnels. The long ride back up to the park had returned to him his limp and considerable pain. Whenever he heard a noise, he froze. The calico showed remarkable patience. She ranged fifty feet or so ahead and then returned if it was clear. Jack wished desperately he could talk to her.
The sounds now were not imaginary. They grew louder. Jack began to hear unintelligible shouts. He jumped at every gunshot or explosion. He stopped using the flashlight because he was afraid someone would see it. The calico stayed a few feet away now. Jack had rubbed dirt on his face to cut down reflection.
Boots scuffed against the concrete floor just ahead of him. He started to back up and ran into one of the hunters, who was as surprised as he was.
“What the hell! Joey! Joey, I got one!”
The man in the hardhat with the attached light swung the butt of his gun at Jack’s head.
“Where is he, Sly?”
The rifle-butt had just grazed Jack’s skull. He managed to sprint out of the light and up an apparent dead-end passage. Jack tried to mold himself to the wall and wished he could change into something useful, like concrete or dirt. As the thought crossed his mind, he recognized the itching that meant he was getting scaly. Jack fought it off by slowing his breathing and exerting control. That’s all he needed now. Where’s the calico? he thought. Bagabond’ll kill me if that cat’s hurt.
“He has to be down here, Joey. There’s nowhere else to go.” The voice sounded as if it were an inch away.
“Toss in a grenade and keep movin’. We’re supposed to be sealing off their base. “
“Aw, Joey, come on.”
“Sly, you’re crazy, man. Move it.”
There was the sound of metal bouncing on rock. Jack caught a glint of light from the grenade before the adrenaline wiped his brain clean. Merde was his last conscious thought. The blast roar was accompanied by some rockfalls, but there hadn’t been as much graft in this section. The roof held. “Check it out, Sly.”
“All right, Joey. Thanks.” Sly was known for being almost as crazy as Little Renaldo.
Why me, Joey wondered.
“Nothing’s left. Just a few rags and a sneaker. The right one, then. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.” Neither man noticed the calico crouched on a rock projecting from the wall near the ceiling. The calico leaped down and nosed through the torn and bloody clothing. She sent the scene to Bagabond and set out to meet her.
Bagabond stood quietly against the far wall of the 86th Street cutoff. She petted the calico gently and did her best imitation of a harmless old woman. The black had warned her the mafiosi were coming, but they were behind her by the time she tried to retreat. Too many to fight, so she came passively. Now she silently gazed at the shambles they had made of her place. Her single guard had his attention fixed on Don Carlo.
“Somehow they must have escaped,” said the Butcher apologetically.
“I want them,” said Don Carlo. He stared around at the large velvet painting in its cheap wooden frame, one corner torn: a pride of lions stalked zebras on the veld. “They were here,” he said. “Savages.”
“Don Carlo, sir,....” It was Joey. “What?”
“It is Maria, Don Carlo. I found her wandering down here.” Joey escorted Rosemary up to her father. She did not appear to see him or register anything else. Her face was vacant, almost peaceful. Rosemary was a docile rag doll, lost somewhere back in the tunnels.
Don Carlo looked at her with astonishment and then concern. “Maria, what is wrong, mia? Joey, what happened to her?”
“I don’t know, Don Carlo. She was like this when I found her.”
Bagabond looked up from under her stringy hair. “Rosemary, couldn’t you stay out of this either? Social workers ... so nosy.” Bagabond spoke under her breath. The guard turned around at her muttering, but shook his head and returned his attention to the excitement.
“Take care of her for me, Joey, until I finish with this.” Turning to the Butcher, Don Carlo said, “Does the old woman know anything?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out.” Light caught the blade of the Butcher’s stiletto as he started toward Bagabond. Then he stopped and listened attentively.
Everyone in the tunnel was listening. The rumbling that had at first seemed to be just another train in the distance got too loud, too quickly. There were yells from the west tunnel, even a scream of pain as the subway car appeared out of the darkness, traveling where no car could possibly be, with no third rail, on ruined tracks. The car glowed with a white phosphorescence, wraithlike. The route sign read CC LOCAL. It came to a stop in the middle of the gathering. The garish designs on its sides changed so rapidly it was impossible to focus on them.
“C.C.!” Rosemary, who had been standing to one side with Joey, eluded his grasp and ran to the phantom car. She stretched out her arms as if to embrace the thing, but as she touched the side, she recoiled. Then Rosemary extended one hand to touch what was not metal. “C.C.?”
Colors radiated from the spot she touched and then vanished. The car became black and almost vanished from the sight of the watchers. Words appeared as they had before: lyrics of songs C.C. had written and only her best friend, Rosemary, had ever heard. The watchers stood, too stunned to move.
You can sing about pain
You can sing about sorrow
But nothing will bring a new tomorrow
Or take away yesterday
Images appeared on the side of the car as if projected there. The first scene was an attack, a rape in a subway station. A hospital bed with the figure of Rosemary recognizable beside it. Someone in a hospital gown walked down fire escapes.
“That’s how you got out of the hospital, C. C. Why did you run away?” Rosemary looked up and spoke to the car as if it were a friend.
The next scene showed another subway station, another attack, but the person in the hospital gown was a witness this time. She tried to stop the attack and was flung aside, hurled onto the tracks. The colors of pain and rage. The trash and just about anything else unsecured on the unoccupied platformvending machines, discarded newspapers, a dead rat, everything-was sucked down onto the tracks as if pulled into the voracious heart of a black hole. A train with six cars shrieked into the station. Suddenly another car joined it. The attacker, escaping, entered the new car and-the scene turned to crimson, as though blood were washing across the phantom car. More subway stations, more crimson. Another attacker in a leather jacket, an old woman.
“Lummy?” Rosemary stepped back from the sight of her fiance caught in mid-mugging. “Lummy?”
“Lombardo!” Don Carlo was livid at seeing his son-to-be enter the car and be slaughtered. “Joey, get Maria away from that ... thing. Ricardo, where is the rocket launcher? You’ll get your chance now. Frederico, move that old woman over by the car. I want them all destroyed. Now!”
Rosemary fought Joey as he hauled her out of range. “Christ,” he said, not to her, not to anyone in particular. “It’s just like it used to be in the villages. Jesus.” Bagabond went quietly, holding the calico cat tightly to her.
Ricardo sighted the rocket launcher carefully. Bagabond straightened.
Forty pounds of angry, wild black cat hit Ricardo squarely in the back. He fell forward as the tube tilted up and the rocket he had just fired headed for the roof. It exploded in a shower of red and gold sparks.
Rosemary pulled away from Joey and ran for the car. Water began spraying into the tunnel. Jagged concrete blocks started to separate along their sealed junctures and then more water poured in.
“Ricardo, you idiot, you blew a hole in Central Park Lake!” Frederico the Butcher yelled at someone who was no longer an interested party. The mafiosi scattered down the tunnels in disarray.
“Get into the car. Come on!” Rosemary grabbed Bagabond.
“Maria, I’m coming for you. Hold on.” Don Carlo struggled against the rising flood to save his only daughter. “Papa, I’m going with C.C.”
“No! You must not. It’s cursed.” Don Carlo tried to move farther and realized his leg was trapped. He thrust both hands into the chilly water in an effort to free it and grasped scaly skin. He looked down and saw rows of ivory teeth. Implacable reptilian eyes looked back at his.
Rosemary had gotten everyone on board, even the black cat. The car began to move back up the west tunnel. “Wait. Jack’s back there. Don’t leave him.” Bagabond tried to open the doors. Rosemary grabbed her shoulders. “Who’s Jack?”
“My friend.”
“We can’t go back,” said Rosemary. “I’m sorry.” Bagabond sat in the rear seat, once more flanked by her two cats, and stared back at the water rushing into the tunnel behind them as they moved toward higher ground.
As the subway car climbed the 86th Street incline, the skirt of dark water followed, lapping at C.C.’s flanged wheels. She eventually reached a rise in the tunnel where the tide behind ceased to follow. C.C. stopped, started to roll back, locked her brakes.
Her passengers crowded against the rear connecting door, straining to see anything of what they had left in the darkness. “Let us out, C.C.,” said Rosemary. “Please.”
The subway car obligingly opened her side doors with a hiss. The four of them, two human and two feline, clambered down to the roadbed and stood at this new beach. The calico sniffed at the water’s edge and turned away. She whined and looked up at Bagabond.
“Wait,” said the bag lady. An unaccustomed smile played for just a moment.
Rosemary strained, concentrating, attempting to peer through the darkness. The last thing she remembered seeing was her father trying to reach her, then just his face, his eyes. Finally nothing.
“There,” said Bagabond flatly.
They all tried to make something out. “I don’t see anything,” said Rosemary.
“There. “
Now they all saw something: a vee of ripples trailing from a wide, shovel-blade of a snout. They saw the pair of armorprotected eyes protruding from the water, inspecting the group on shore.
The cats began to yowl with excitement, the calico leaping back and forth, the black switching his tail like a blacksnake whip.
“That’s Jack,” said Bagabond.
After a time, the dust literally settled, the water receded, wounds were bandaged, bodies buried, and the long-suffering city crews did their best to clean up the mess at union scale. Manhattan returned to normal.
The bottom of Central Park Lake was resealed and the basin refilled. Reports of sea monsters (more properly, lake monsters) were persistent but unverified.
Sixty-eight-year-old Sarah Jarvis finally realized what hidden identity surely must lurk beneath the surface of the President. In November 1972, she voted for George McGovern.
The fortunes of Joey Manzone rose—or at least they changed. He moved to Connecticut and wrote a novel about Vietnam that didn’t sell, and a book about organized crime that did.
Rosa-Maria Gambione legally changed her name to Rosemary Muldoon. She completed her Columbia degree in social work and aids Dr. Tachyon with C.C. Ryder’s therapy. She has entered law school and is contemplating a takeover of the family business.
C. C. Ryder is still one of the doctor’s toughest cases, but there is apparently some progress in bringing both her mind and body back to human form. C.C. continues to create fine, sharp-edged lyrics. Her songs have been recorded by Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, and others.
From time to time-especially during bad weatherBagabond and the black and calico cats move into the Alfred Beach pneumatic subway tube with Sewer Jack Robicheaux. It is a comfortable arrangement, but has necessitated a few changes. Jack no longer hunts rats. A common lament around the Victorian dining room is, “Wha’ dis now, chicken again?”
The view of the city from Aces High was breathtaking, even inspirational. Beached on the shores of the afternoon, Jane stared blindly down at it from the kitchen window, frustration and unhappiness doing their usual waltz in her stomach. Behind her the kitchen staff worked away at winding down the afternoon luncheon service before preparing for the dinner custom, politely ignoring the fact that she’d left the salad they’d made for her untouched. Her appetite was poor these days. Lately she had even abandoned the pretense of wrapping the food up for later and tossing it out on the sly.
She knew there were whispers that she’d gone anorexic, not exactly the best advertisement for a place such as Aces High. It was like a bad joke on Hiram, after he’d increased her responsibilities at the restaurant from hostessing to pinchhit supervising. Hiram was pretty weird himself these days, but he wasn’t shedding any weight. He’d been on a roundthe-world goodwill tour. Hiram Worchester, Goodwill Ambassador. It beat the hell out of Jane Dow, Mafia Dupe.
Memories of the time with Rosemary drove her deeper into depression. She missed her; rather, she missed the person she’d thought Rosemary had been and the work she’d thought she’d been doing for her. It had all sounded so fine and noble trying to counteract the antiace, antijoker hysteria that had been building up, fueled by hysterical extremist politicians and evangelists. Rosemary had been a real hero to her, someone with a shining light around her; she’d needed a hero very badly after all the nastiness with the Masons and the terrible, grotesque murder of Kid Dinosaur. Her own brush with death had not left much of an impression on her, except for the contact with that horrible, evil little creature called the Astronomer. She had seldom thought of it afterward, and Rosemary had been the antidote to the Astronomer’s poison.
Until March, when she began to find herself thinking that it might have been better if Hiram had just let her plummet to the street.
She seemed to have an unerring instinct for getting mixed up with exactly the wrong people. Maybe that was her real ace power, not the water-calling ability. She could hire herself out as a bad-guys detector, she thought sourly, change her name from Water Lily to Dowsing Rod. Yes, I just love these people, I’d follow them anywhere, do anything for them-call the cops, they must be white slavers and kiddie pornographers.
Her mind gave her an image of Rosemary Muldoon, smiling at her, praising her for her hard work, and she felt a pang of disloyalty and guilt. There was no way she could think of Rosemary as a truly bad person. A big part of her still wanted to believe that Rosemary had been sincere about the work, that whatever else she had been involved with as the head of a Mafia family, Rosemary really had wanted to do something for the victims of the wild card virus.
Yes, she thought fiercely, there was plenty of good in Rosemary, she wasn’t like all the others. Maybe something awful had happened to her that had driven her to accept and embrace the Mafia. She could understand that; God, could she understand it.
Her mind shoved aside the memory and came to rest on the man named Croyd. She still had the phone numbers he’d given her. Anytime you want some company, someone to talk to ... I bet I could listen to you for hours. Maybe even all night, but that would be up to you, Bright Eyes. No one had ever showed quite so much panache flirting with her. Mirrorshades Croyd, calling her Bright Eyes; she was unaware of smiling at the memory. There had been no link exposed between him and Rosemary’s organization, Either it was buried too deeply or he’d been another idealist like herself. Since she wanted to believe it was the latter, that most likely meant it was the former-and she was still tempted to take out those phone numbers and surprise him by calling him. There was no way she could ever really bring herself to do it, which could well have been why he’d given her the numbers in the first place.
Her whole life was upside down and backward. Maybe that was what the wild card virus had really done to her, fixed it so she would live as the butt of every practical joke the world could play on her.
Abruptly Sal’s voice seemed to be speaking to her in her head: You’re not being fair with yourself. You never believed the Masons were good, you weren’t blind to what the Astronomer really was. And as for Rosemary, she was just a whole lot smarter than you, street smart-she took advantage of you and that should be her shame, not yours. If she even has the capacity to feel shame.
Yeah, Salvatore Carbone would have said something very like that to her if he’d been alive. The fact that she could come up with it herself must have meant she wasn’t completely hopeless, she thought. But the idea didn’t improve her mood or bring her appetite back.
“Excuse me, Jane,” said a voice behind her. It was Emile, who had started at Aces High not long before she had and was now the new maitre d’. She wiped at her wet face hastily, glad that she had managed to gain more control over her tendency to pull enormous amounts of water out of the air when under stress, and turned around, trying to smile at him politely. “I think you’d better come down to the loading dock.”
She blinked at him in confusion. “Pardon?”
“A situation has developed and we think you’re the only one who could handle it.”
“Mr. Worchester always—”
“Hiram isn’t here and frankly we doubt he’d be much use if he were.”
She stared up at Emile tensely. Emile was one of the most vocal (and unforgiving) critics of Hiram’s behavior, a group that seemed to gain more members every day, all of them disgruntled employees and all of them, to her complete dismay, more in the right than she wanted to admit.
Ever since his return from the tour Hiram had been ... strange. He seemed to have little real interest and no enthusiasm for Aces High these days, acting as if the restaurant were some awful albatross around his neck, a burdensome annoyance that was keeping him from something of greater importance. And he was behaving abominably toward his staff, his almost courtly manners had disappeared, and he ranged from distracted to abusively rude. Except for herself. Hiram was still friendly toward her, though it seemed to be an enormous and obvious effort to control himself and focus his attention. He had always been attracted to her; she’d known that since the night he had saved her life; and she felt guilty for not feeling the same way toward him. Being obligated to someone who cared for her when she couldn’t return the affection was one of the most uncomfortable situations she could imagine. She had repaid him for the expensive clothes, and she had made every effort to be the best employee he could have asked for in exchange for the security of the job (and the generous salary) he’d given her. Lately that meant taking up for him, even against people who had known him far longer than she had and supposedly had many more reasons to be devoted to him. Some of these were the most virulent, maybe because they had so many more better days to remember at Aces High. If only she could get through to Hiram, she thought, looking into Emile’s cold green eyes. If only she could make him understand how badly he was eroding his own authority and credibility and respect, he would be able to halt this terrible decline, turn it around, and become Hiram Worchester, Grand Master Restauranteur, again. Right now, it was as if he were dying.
“What kind of situation?” she asked carefully.
Emile shook his head in a small, tight way that was more shudder than anything. “It’s easier if you just come,” he said. “What we need right now is quick, decisive action from someone who has the authority to take it. Please. Just come down with me.”
Taking a deep breath, she forced composure on herself and went with Emile to the elevator.
The scene on the loading dock was like something out of a Marx Brothers movie, only not quite so funny-like something out of a remake of a Marx Brothers movie, she thought, watching the dock crew work furiously at reloading a truck while two employees of the Brightwater Fish Market kept unloading it (or perhaps re-unloading it, while a third Brightwater employee stood on a box nose to nose with Tomoyuki Shigeta, the new sushi chef. Brightwater’s man was a short, stocky nat who appeared to have high blood pressure; Tomoyuki was a slender seven-foot ace who, during the period of the new moon, lived as a dolphin between the hours of eleven P.M. and three A.M. Together they looked like a comedy team rehearsing an act, although Brightwater’s man was doing all the yelling, with Tomoyuki occasionally putting in a couple of soft words that seemed to provoke the other man to higher volume.
“What’s going on here?” Jane asked in her most businesslike voice. No one heard her. She sighed, glanced at Emile, and then hollered, “Everybody, shut up!”
This time her voice cut through the air, and everyone did shut up, turning toward her almost as one.
“What’s going on?” she asked again, looking up at Tomoyuki. He made a slight bow.
“Brightwater has delivered a shipment of bad fish. The entire load has gone over, and it went over quite some time ago.” Tomoyuki’s cultured, Boston Brahmin tones held no hostility or impatience. Jane thought he was the most professional person she had ever met, and she wished she were more like him. “Some time before it was loaded onto this truck for delivery here. Unless Hiram has another source, we will be unable to offer the twilight sushi bar this evening.”
Jane tried to sniff the air without being obvious about it. All she could smell was overwhelming fish, as though the greater part of the ocean had been caught and dumped in the immediate vicinity. She could not tell whether the odor was good or bad, only that it was offensively strong, and if the load stayed on the dock much longer, it would go bad if it weren’t already.
“Look, lady, this is fish and fish stinks,” said Brightwater’s man, rubbing his upper lip directly under his nose, as though to emphasize the point. “Now, I been deliverin’ loads of stinkin’ fish to Hiram Worchester and a good many other people for a long, long time, and the stuff always smells like this. I don’t like the way it smells, either, but that’s just how it is.” He glanced up at Tomoyuki in disgust. “Fish is supposed to smell bad. Nobody’s gonna tell me different. And nobody’s gonna tell me to take my load back unless it’s Hiram Worchester himself.”
Jane nodded very slightly. “Are you aware that Mr. Worchester has empowered me to act as his agent for all business transactions having to do with the Aces High menu?”
Brightwater’s man-Aaron was the name on his shirt pocket-tilted his wide head and looked at her through half-closed eyes. “Just say it, okay? Don’t try and jack me around with double-talk, just look me in the eye and spit it out.”
“What I meant,” Jane said, slightly embarrassed, “is that any decision I make is a Hiram Worchester decision. He will back it one hundred percent.”
Aaron’s gaze traveled from Jane to Emile to one of the dock crew and came to rest on Tomoyuki, who stared down at him impassively. “Oh, for chrissakes, what am I lookin at you for? You’ll back her up a hundred percent.”
Tomoyuki turned to Jane, raising his eyebrows in a silent question.
“Is the fish bad, Tom,” she said quietly. “Yes. Definitely.”
“Is that what you would tell Mr. Worchester?”
“In a minute.”
She nodded. “Then it goes back to Brightwater. No arguments,” she added as Aaron opened his mouth to protest. “If it isn’t off this loading dock in fifteen minutes, I’ll call the police.”
Aaron’s broad face twisted into an expression of hostile disbelief. “You’ll call the cops? On what charge?”
This time Jane’s sniff was as audible as she could make it. “Littering. Illegal dumping. Air pollution. Any of those would stick. Good day to you.” She turned sharply and fled back into the building with her hand over her mouth and nose. The smell had suddenly become too nauseating to bear.
“Well done, Jane,” Tom said as he and Emile caught up with her at the elevator. “Hiram himself couldn’t have carried it off much better.”
“Hiram couldn’t carry it off, period,” Emile muttered darkly.
“Don’t,Emile,” she said, and felt him staring at her in surprise.
“Don’t what?”
The elevator doors slid open and they all got in.
“Don’t badmouth Hiram. Mr. Worchester, I mean.” She pushed the button for Aces High. “It’s bad for morale.”
“Hiram’s bad for morale, in case you hadn’t noticed. If he’d been on top of things, Brightwater wouldn’t have even thought of trying to pass their rotted stuff off on us. It just shows the word must be out on him, everyone must know he’s no good anymore—”
“Please, Emile.” She put a hand on his slender arm, looking into his face imploringly. “We all know something’s wrong, but every time you or one of the other employees says something like that, it diminishes the chances of his being able to put it right again. He can’t recover from whatever is wearing on him if we’re all against him.”
Emile actually looked mildly ashamed of himself. “God knows if anyone wishes him well, I do, Jane. But the way he is these days, he reminds me of a-well, a junkie,” He shuddered. “I detest junkies. And all addicts.”
“What you say is very true, Jane,” said Tom, from the opposite corner of the elevator where he was standing with his arms folded against his sleek body, “but none of it gets us a twilight sushi bar for this evening, and Hiram never saw fit to let me in on his backup plan for this kind of eventuality. So unless you know what to do, or can find Hiram and get him to tell you, Aces High is actually going to renege on an offering. Which may well be its ruination. A little bird told me Mr. Dining Out has reservations here tonight, specifically to review the sushi bar for New York Gourmet. I don’t have to tell you what it would mean for Aces High to get a bad review.”
Jane rubbed her forehead tiredly. This must be what they call black comedy, she thought. When everything just gets worse and worse and you think you might start laughing and never stop till they take you away.
Casually Tom moved to the other side of the elevator to stand near Emile. Just as casually she turned away so they could touch without her seeing. No one was supposed to know they were lovers, but she wasn’t sure why they were so fanatical about keeping it secret. Something to do with AIDS perhaps, she thought. The perception of all gays as AIDS carriers had brought renewed persecution to homosexuals. She could almost be glad that Sal hadn’t lived to see that.
“I can find Hiram,” she said after a bit. “I’m pretty sure I know where he is. Emile, you keep order until I get back.” She handed Emile the spare key to Hiram’s office. “You won’t need this, but just in case of something. When I come back, we’ll have a sushi bar. The selection might be a little more limited than we’d like, but we can carry it off if we do it with enough ... um ... panache. Can we, Tom?”
“I am panache,” Tomoyuki said, his face completely impassive while Emile suppressed a smile. The sight of the two of them made her feel suddenly and unbearably alone.
“Good,” she said miserably. “I’ll just get my purse and be on my way.” The elevator stopped to let them off at the Aces High dining room. “With any luck you’ll hear from me in about an hour.”
“And without any luck?” said Emile, pressing, but, she could tell, not unkindly.
“Without any luck,” she said thoughtfully, “do you think you could get sick, Tom?”
“I could have done that to begin with,” he said, a little curtly.
“Yes, but then we would not have tried. Would we.” She tried to look up at him as if they were eye to eye. “We’ll continue to try until there’s nothing to try for. Do you understand?”
Both men nodded.
“And one more thing,” she said as they started to turn away. “From now on, refer to him as Mr. Worchester.” Emile frowned slightly. “To everyone, even to me. It will help morale. Even ours.”
Emile bit his lip tensely and then, to her relief, nodded. “Understood, Jane. Or should that be Ms. Dow?”
She let her gaze drop for a moment. “I’m not power mad, Emile. If you really understand, you know that. I’m trying to save him. Mr. Worchester. I owe him that.” She looked up at him again. “We all do, in our own particular ways.”
Tom was staring at her, and for the first time she saw a fondness in his smooth, cold face. Feeling awkward, she excused herself to retrieve her purse from Hiram’s office and call a cab. There was a sense of victory within her as she rode down in the elevator again. The temperamental Tomoyuki liked her, no small achievement, and she had managed to get Emile on her side, at least for a while. He must like her, too, she thought, almost giddy. Perhaps it was a terrible weakness to want to be liked so much, but she certainly was getting a lot accomplished because of it. Or she would if she could just get Hiram to come through on the promises she’d made, or implied.
The cab was waiting in front of the entrance for her; she climbed in and gave the driver an address in Jokertown, ignoring the double-take he gave her. I know, I don’t look like much beyond a bite for the Big Bad Wolf, she thought at him acidly as she settled back in the seat. Wouldn’t you be surprised to know that I’ve killed people-and that I could return you to the dust, too, if you gave me any trouble.
She suppressed the thought, feeling ashamed. She’d lied when she’d said she wasn’t power mad. Of course she was-it was hard not to be when you had an ace ability. It was the dark side of her talent, and she had to struggle against that all the time, or she might become like that awful Astronomer, or poor Fortunato. She wondered briefly where he was now and if he remembered the way she did.
They stopped at a red light and a ragged joker with enormous donkey ears threw himself halfway onto the hood to wash the windshield. Blocking out the sound of the cab driver’s yelling at him, she tried to compose herself for the inevitable confrontation with Hiram. She wasn’t supposed to have this address, and she wasn’t supposed to know whose address it was. Hiram might just fire her and throw her out without letting her get a word in edgewise, while Ezili stood behind him laughing.
Jane dreaded facing Ezili-Ezili Rouge everyone called her. The scuttlebutt around Aces High was that she had been some kind of superprostitute in Haiti whom Hiram had ‘rescued’ from the crushing poverty of the slums-i.e., she was virtually an ace in the sex department and any man (or woman) who had ever had the experience was spoiled for anyone else. And Hiram had supposedly had the experience. There were other rumors-she was the ex-toy of a superdrug kingpin, in hiding; she was a drug kingpin herself; she had blackmailed Hiram or somebody into bringing her to the States; and any number of other things.
Whatever the truth might have been, Jane didn’t like her and the feeling was mutual. The one time Ezili had come to Aces High, it had been hate at first sight for both of them. She’d been completely taken aback by the overbearing heat that seemed to pour out of her, and she was completely intimidated by her strange eyes-what should have been whites were blood red instead. Ezili haughtily addressed her as Ms. Dow, mispronouncing it to rhyme with cow instead of low, with a sneering intonation that produced an instant rise in her. What made it worse was the fact that Hiram really did seem to be under her influence. Whenever he had looked at her or even mentioned her, Jane could read a bizarre mixture of desire, subservience, and helplessness in his face, although occasionally an expression of pure loathing surfaced, making Jane suspect that at heart Hiram really didn’t like Ezili any more than she did.
“Hey, gorgeous!”
She looked up, startled, to see the joker pressing his face against the back window.
“Get on outta that cab, baby, and I’ll take you to heaven! I got more than just the ears of a donkey!”
The light changed and the cab lurched forward, knocking the joker away. In spite of herself Jane found herself almost wanting to laugh. There was no comparison between the joker’s crudeness and the genteel come-ons she politely turned away at Aces High, but for some reason something about it had touched her. Maybe just because it was so funny, or because the joker was a victim refusing to kneel to his affliction, or because he hadn’t actually come out and said what else it was he had. Someone earthier than she would have laughed out loud. I’m just a hothouse flower, she thought, a bit ruefully. A hothouse killer-flower.
The cab turned a corner sharply and went down two blocks before pulling over in the middle of the third. “This’s it,” the driver said sullenly. “You mind hurrying?”
She looked at the meter and pushed several bills through the slot in front of her. “Keep the change.” The door was stuck, but the driver showed no inclination to get out and help her. Disgusted, she kicked it open on the second try and got out. “Just for that, I won’t bother telling you to have a nice day,” she muttered as the cab roared away from the curb, and then she turned to look at the building in front of her.
It had been renovated at least twice, but nothing had helped; it was just plain ugly and shabby though obviously solid. It wasn’t going to fall down unless the Great Ape kicked it down, except, she remembered, the Great Ape didn’t exist anymore. Five stories, and the place she wanted was on the top floor. She’d grown up in an apartment on the top floor of a seven-story tenement building, the kind with no elevators, and she’d sprinted up and down all seven flights without stopping several times every day of her young life. Five floors wouldn’t give her any problem, she thought.
Her sprinting gave out in the middle of the second flight, but she did manage to keep going without pause, albeit more slowly, catching her breath on each landing. The darkness was relieved by the frosted skylight directly over the squaredoff spiral of the stairs, but the light was anemic and depressing.
There was only one apartment on the top floor. Hiram might as well have had his name on it, she thought as she paused at the head of the stairs, panting a little. Instead of the drab, grayish door that all the other apartments had, there was a custom hardwood job with an ornate brass knocker and an old-fashioned handle instead of a doorknob. The lock above it was completely modern and secure but made to look just as refined. Hiram, Hiram, she thought sadly, does it pay to advertise in a place like this?
What would he say when he opened the door and saw her? What would he think? It didn’t matter. She had to make him see what was happening because then it would save him-save his life. It would be a bit different from the way he had saved hers, but Aces High was his life, and if she could save that for him, then she would have repaid him for her own life. The balance between them would be restored after all, whereas before she hadn’t thought there’d be any way to do that.
No way but one, and she couldn’t. The feeling wasn’t there. She knew Hiram would have welcomed her regardless, that he would be considerate and tender and funny and loving and everything a woman could want in a lover. But ultimately it would be horribly unjust to him, and when it came to its inevitable end, it would be painful and scarring to both of them. Hiram deserved better. Such a good man deserved someone whose devotion would match his, someone who would enter fully into every part of his life and give him all the pleasures of attachment. He needed someone who could not live without him.
Instead of someone who would have died without him? her mind whispered nastily, and she felt another hard pang of guilt. All right, all right, I’m a bitch and an ingrate, she scolded herself silently. Maybe it’s some fatal flaw in me that
I don’t love him, as good as he is. Maybe if gratitude could make me fall in love with him, I’d be a better person.
And maybe he wouldn’t be holed up in a Jokertown apartment with poison like Ezili Rouge, either.
God, Jane thought. She had to talk to Hiram. She couldn’t believe he would really want to keep company with such a creature. She had to help him get away from her, find some way to bar her from Aces High. Whatever she had to do to help him, anything, anything at all, she would do it especially if saving Hiram meant she never had to see that woman again.
She forced herself to walk along the landing to the apartment and gave the brass knocker three sharp taps. To her dismay, it was Ezili who answered.
Ezili was dressed, if that was the word for it, in a whisper of transparent gold material over nothing. Jane looked steadily into Ezili’s face, refusing to let her gaze fall below the woman’s chin, and said in her driest, most controlled voice, “I’ve come for Hiram. I know that he’s here, and it’s imperative that I see him.”
A slow hot smile spread across Ezili’s face as if Jane had said the one thing in the world she could possibly have wanted to hear. Swaying a little, as though dancing to some inner music she moved back and gestured gracefully for ane to enter.
The apartment was a surprise. The living room had been carefully decorated in a completely Haitian motif that also reflected Hiram’s high tastes. Jane found herself unable to look at anything except the deep brown carpet, exactly like the one in Hiram’s office. The place was so Hiram, but Hiram changed, Hiram the stranger who had come back from the tour. With Ezili, who was moving leisurely around her like some sort of predatory creature whose favorite dinner had walked obligingly into its claws.
“Hiram’s in the bedroom,” she said. “I guess if it’s imperative that you see him, then you can see him there.” Standing in front of Jane, she lifted her arms to run her hands along the back of her own neck, practically thrusting her large breasts into Jane’s face. Jane maintained her steady, even gaze, refusing to look. Something shiny flashed on Ezili’s right hand as she brought it around.
Blood. Jane’s severe composure almost broke. Blood? What in God’s name could Hiram have gotten himself into? Ezili’s reddened hand undulated through the air in a pointing gesture. “That way. Just walk in and you’ll see him. In bed.”
Jane marched past her to the shadowy doorway and stepped into the bedroom. She cleared her throat, started to speak, and then froze.
He was not in bed but kneeling on the floor next to it in an attitude of prayer. But he was definitely not praying.
At first she thought she had surprised him in the act of giving a piggyback ride to a small child, and it flashed through her mind that it was his child by Ezili, the pregnancy, birth, and growth drastically foreshortened by the wild card infection, which had also made the child a hideously deformed joker.
She took a step toward him, her eyes filling with tears of pity. “Oh, Hiram, I ...”
The look on Hiram’s face went from rage to agonized sorrow, and she saw what it really was on his back. “H-H-Hiram ...”
Her voice died away as a bizarrely alien expression of curiosity spread over Hiram’s face. It was not the expression of a father interrupted while tending to his child, and no child would have been fastened to a father’s neck by the mouth. The wizened creature on Hiram’s back quivered in a way that reminded her of Ezili’s movements. Even as she turned to bolt for the door, she knew it was too late.
She thought she must have weighed at least three hundred pounds when she hit the floor.
Later on, when she thought of it, when she could bring herself to think of it, she knew that it could have been at most half a minute before Hiram moved from the bed to where she was anchored to the floor on her stomach. It was completely silent in the apartment for what seemed to Jane like an excruciating stretch of time before Hiram finally rose and came to stand over her where she lay with water pouring off her, soaking her clothes and the carpet.
She tried to say something to him, but all the breath had been knocked out of her by the fall. In a minute, when she could talk, she would tell him he hadn’t had to do that, that no matter what kind of trouble he was in, she wouldn’t give him away to anyone, and she would try to help him in any way she could—
There was a quiet rustle as Hiram lay down on the carpet next to her, facing her with that same peculiar expression of curiosity. He doesn’t recognize me, she thought with horrified amazement. The creature was still on his back, and she squeezed her eyes shut against the sight.
“In a few moments you won’t find me so hard to look at,” Hiram said. His voice sounded strange, as if someone were doing a creditable imitation of him.
“Hi-Hiram,” she managed in a whisper. “I-I w-wouldn’t—h-hurt—”
Small fingers touched her back, and she realized what was happening. She opened her eyes,
“No, Hiram,” she begged, her voice getting stronger, “don’t let it-don’t let it—”
Hiram’s curious look had vanished. In its place was an expression so griefstricken, she automatically tried to reach out to him, but the weight barely let her move her hand. He looked into her eyes and she had the impression he was struggling with something.
The thing was fully on her back now, nestling in; she could feel something moving along her neck.
Suddenly the weight was gone. Tears glittered in Hiram’s eyes, and she thought she heard him whisper, Run.
And then something stabbed her neck.
She must have blacked out at the first contact; she felt as though she were swimming through the air, or being carried to and fro by air currents. The weight’s gone, she thought, Hiram’s made me weightless and I’m floating through the room. Then her vision cleared and she saw she was still lying on the floor. Hiram was reaching for her, intending to gather her to him in an embrace.
“Stop:” It was her voice, but she had no control over it. Something else was speaking through her. The panic that rose in her at the realization transmuted into a mild pleasure that began to grow more intense.
Hiram hesitated for a moment and then continued to pull her close.
“I said, stop!” The command in her voice stopped Hiram cold. From the last tiny part of her that was still herself, Jane watched as her hand lifted and paused; a small waterfall congealed out of the air and splashed down on the carpet. A wave of pleasure swept through her, overruling that little bit of her that was horrified. It was as though she had been split into two people, one very large one full of irresistible pleasure and energetic appetites, and one very, very small Jane Dow confined in a cage and buried too deeply to surface and regain control, but able to observe-and feel-everything the large one did. The large one, she realized, was the creature on her back.
She got to her feet and stretched, feeling her muscles. Hiram sat up and watched her with hurt, suspicious eyes. “You promised,” he said sulkily, as though he were a little boy deprived of a treat.
“I promised you pleasure beyond anything in your artificial, white world,” the creature said with her voice. “You have that. Please do not disturb me when I am getting the feel of a new mount.” The little tiny Jane gave a surge of outrage but was quickly subdued. Somewhere in her mind she felt the presence of humiliation and panic, but it was so far away, it might as well have been happening to someone else. The pure pleasure coursing through her body in everstrengthening waves, that was the only thing really happening to her.
“Why not?” Hiram said, sounding almost whiny. “Haven’t I been good to you? Don’t I give you everything and everyone you ask for? I even gave you her. I wanted her all to myself, but I didn’t hold out on you.”
The creature used Jane’s laugh. There was another surge of outrage that turned to pleasure even more quickly than before. “You’re in love with this little white flower?”
Hiram dropped his gaze for a moment and muttered something she couldn’t hear. It might have been yes. There was a part of her that was important to, but the rising pleasure displaced everything. Nothing could be important next to that.
“Ah, but you love me more. Don’t you.”
Hiram raised his head. “Yes,” he said tonelessly.
Jane felt the creature move her hand to touch Hiram’s head with the benevolence of superiority, noblesse oblige, and every movement sent new waves of pleasure through her.
She had not thought it possible that just simple movement could suffuse her with pure ecstasy. That was the only word for it: ecstasy. “And I love you, too, of course.” The creature was feeling around in her mind for all her thoughts of Hiram. She had a faint, distant sense of wanting to shut him off, evict him, how dare he-but the pleasure. No. He could take what he wanted, take anything he wanted, take it all if it meant that she could go on feeling like this. “How could I not love such tastes and appetites, such a capacity to enjoy life?” The creature probed more deeply, and Jane thought she must be ringing like a bell, vibrating with heaven. “I’m quite—attached to you. I couldn’t live without you.”
She knelt down beside him and touched his face. Hiram looked as though he were about to cry. “Is it hard for you to hear those words from this mouth?” The creature poured its knowledge into her mind and she wanted to be sorrowful, but it seemed that even the chemical reactions in her brain cells detonated more pleasure within her. How could someone feel so much of this without dying, she wondered. Perhaps she was dying. If so, that was fine, she would die, too, if it felt this good. Whatever, she promised the creature, begging it to like her, love her. Whatever. Always. She was telling it something it already knew, and such a superior form of life could hardly be bothered with her supplications, but she made the offering anyway. It deserved no less.
“We must always do whatever is in our best interests,” the creature told Hiram through her, and she felt herself wiggling inwardly like a delighted puppy because it had chosen to acknowledge her by using her words. “Hiram, my own. This is a mount with everything to discover. Everything.” Yes, everything, anything, she gibbered. Whatever. Always. “This will be a new pleasure for me, the pleasure of discovery, of gratification finally taken.” The creature using her face to smile was a sun shining within her. “Call Ezili to us.”
Hiram went to the doorway. Jane pulled herself up onto the bed, enjoying each separate part of the movement and all of it together. How was it she had never realized what a good body she had, how much feeling it was capable of? Well, she would not waste any more time. The world was full of pleasure.
“Ah. As I thought.”
She turned at the sound of Ezili’s voice and laughed. “Ezili-je-rouge, my own. See this unexpected pleasure.” Jane stood up, rejoicing in the sensation, and smoothed her hands over her hips.
Ezili walked over to her and looked her up and down. “Does it please you, then?”
She was looking into Ezili’s face as though it were the most fascinating thing she had ever seen. How could she have ever thought Ezili’s eyes were evil? The red in those eyes was pleasurable to see; seeing was another act of pleasure, and seeing Ezili was even more pleasure because she pleased him so much. She could only love Ezili helplessly because Ezili made her Master so happy, and her Master’s happiness meant more ecstasy for herself. “It pleases me so much.”
Jane’s hand moved toward Ezili and then paused, shaking a little. Her vision swam and darkened, and for a moment she was thinking. What am I doing, no, stop, STOP!
And then the pleasure was back, bringing with it the anticipation of even greater pleasures, and her hand was moving on Ezili’s breast. Ezili quickly pulled down the front of her dress.
Jane looked over at Hiram with a smile. “Here’s something I bet you never thought you’d see.” Moisture condensed out of the air and fell on herself and Ezili in a gentle mist, moving over them selectively. She bent her head to Ezili’s breast. The wet flesh was soft and firm and very warm. Hiram made a small noise. It registered on her only as the vague noting that hearing, too, could turn the pleasure up higher and higher.
Absolute pleasure, she discovered, could make a person swoon. At least it did her. Sometimes it seemed she was nearly at the point of blacking out, and then she would find herself following a smooth curve of hip, or gazing down at Ezili’s face. The pleasure pulsing through her would grow again until it overwhelmed her.
Once she found herself staring into Hiram’s eyes while Ezili knelt before her, and she felt an almost psychic connection with him. He was hungry for her, for Ezili, for both of them, but even more for the thing on her back. He felt a bit bewildered and abandoned. He knew this pleasure, not just the pleasure of Ezili’s body but of this contact, the ecstasy of the kiss. The kiss. Ezili’s mouth, skilled as it was, paled next to the real kiss.
Absently she pushed Ezili away and gave herself over fully to the creature, obeying its silent commands, reveling in what it could do for her all by itself.
Eventually she found herself languid on the bed, drifting in half-consciousness, still aglow with pleasure. She was aware of the way the covers felt against her skin, of the wetness between her thighs and the water still slowly caressing her body, of the murmur of Hiram and Ezili’s talking. It should have been uncomfortable with her Master on her back (Ti Malice, her mind told her, and she accepted the name), but it felt perfectly natural there, as though it were something that always should have been there and had been missing until now. She sighed with contentment. How had she gone all her life without the comfort of the weight there, the sweet pressure at her neck? She had been incomplete before, pathetically unfinished. Now she was whole, more than whole; perhaps even more than human.
Yes, much more than human. She had been waiting for this all her life without knowing it, to be ridden by this creature of beauty that could bring her spirit to new heights of awareness. This was living a plane above human. All the new thoughts it gave her ... but most of all, the pleasure. She had been made for pleasure, she thought happily; how fortunate that she had been able to find that out.
“Ezili,” her voice said. Somewhere out of the range of her vision she felt Ezili snap to attention.
“I have been waiting,” Ezili said, sounding acquiescent and yet petulant all at once.
“It is not done yet.”
Ezili sighed. A moment later she felt the touch of Ezili’s hand.
“No, not that. Is your traveling cloak here? We wish to ... travel.” Jane heard herself laugh softly.
“What about me?” Hiram said.
“You can help me dress.” Jane’s hand lifted in his direction. “Come, help me up.”
The traveling cloak was a long, flowing cape with a cowl and a large collar in layered rules. The rules hid the hump the creature would have made under the more conventional covering of a sweater or a jacket. The cloak itself was a bit ostentatious, but on the streets of wild card New York, it wouldn’t cause much comment. The shrouded forms of jokers hiding some prominent feature or another had been commonplace for years.
Ezili pulled up the cowl so that it hid Jane’s face completely. Jane gathered the cloak about herself, enjoying the small pleasure of the way it touched her.
“Somewhere interesting,” she told Ezili. “Something in a man this time.”
“And I just stay here and wait for you?” Hiram said. His tone was satisfyingly servile.
“You know I will come back for you later. Be here.”
“Yes,” said Hiram. “Always.” He kept his gaze on the carpet. “I’ll phone for the car.”
Jane was delighted to see that Hiram was traveling by private limo these days, with a driver who left the soundproofed partition up at all times. It gave her the privacy she wanted, with Ezili or anyone else.
It was like being a queen, Jane thought; a queen or an empress. Now she could understand what it must have been like to be the Astronomer, the way he was. She had been calling him poison and resisting certain aspects of her own power-it was to laugh. What she had thought of as evil was just a matter of power. There wasn’t really even such a thing as evil or good-only power and the pleasure that it brought. And anything could be sacrificed for that, anything at all, and everything if necessary. Whatever. Always.
They passed a newsstand and she had a glimpse of a magazine with a picture of Jumpin’ Jack Flash on the cover. Something twanged within her. How nice it would have been to have him now. But there were plenty of good-looking men in the world, red-haired or not. And what did good-looking have to do with it anyway? There were whispers about jokers, about how sometimes the more grotesque the deformity, the more endowed and skilled they were for certain things ....
Hey, baby, I got more than just the ears of a donkey! She gave Ezili an attention-getting pinch, once more generating a burst of pleasure just in the movement, and told her where she wanted to go. Then she sat back while Ezili told the driver, experiencing the ecstasy of just breathing in and out. In and out.
If the joker with the donkey ears recognized her, he gave no sign. He stood gawking with his squirt bottle in one hand and a filthy rag in the other as Jane beckoned through the open door to him. For a moment he looked as though he were going to climb in, but when he saw Ezili, he suddenly bolted. Surprise and anger surged through Jane, and that, too, was great pleasure to feel. From now on she would feel every emotion there was to feel, anything that pleased her Master. Whatever. Always.
Ezili shut the door and told the driver to go on. “Don’t worry,” she purred, to Jane or to Ti Malice, it didn’t matter. Sound was exquisite. “We’ll find another that isn’t all talk.”
The next joker they found was eyeless, but he had no problem climbing into the back of the limo. Jane studied him; his head was elongated, bullet-shaped, with just a blank expanse of skin running from the straight hairline to his nose. Seeing deformity was as delicious as seeing Ezili naked.
The joker sniffed suspiciously and turned his face to her. “How many of you are there?” he said in a ridiculously high voice. Jane reached down between his legs and he jumped. Ezili held him back against the seat.
“Hey, hey,” the joker shrilled. “You don’t have to pin me down, I know what you want.” He began to undo his baggy trousers.
Her Master rode her awe as if it were a wave. “Is that ... standard equipment?” she was allowed to ask.
The joker gave a high laugh. “It is on this model. God bless the wild card, hey, ladies?”
Her Master bent her head for her; even the anticipation of pleasure was a whole pleasure in itself. As was having Ezili watch.
The bar was dark, except for the hot, white spotlight on the small stage where a many-breasted hermaphroditic joker and a normal man did unusual things to each other in time to music. Jane watched through her new eyes, embracing the experience of curiosity and interest. Even more interesting was the way the other patrons cruised her and Ezili. They moved past their corner table, ostensibly on their way to the bar or to the rest room, slowing to make eye contact. It was exhilirating to find she could dismiss someone with a look. They all wanted her; some of them stared at Ezili, but they all looked at her, nestled in her cloak, hiding the spirit of power on her back. They knew, she thought. They all knew that she was the real presence and Ezili wasn’t much more than her servant, if that. Servant to the thing on her back, yes, but it was on her back. No matter what happened later, it was on her back now, and even if it should leave, if she should never have it again, she had been the Queen of Pleasure for a little while and she could not imagine not feeling that way ever again.
There was a young man standing in front of the table expectantly. Her Master told Jane to appraise him-skinny, young, probably not more than seventeen or eighteen. No visible distinguishing characteristics other than his shaggy red hair. A little pretty boy. She leaned forward.
“You’re blocking our view. Why don’t you sit down?” She indicated the chair beside her.
The boy sat down, staring at her intently. Then, without a word, he slid off the chair and knelt in front of her. When she pulled up her dress, she knew it was the creature moving her arms, but she poured all her enthusiasm into it, going with him joyfully, accepting the pleasure of her fingers twisting in the boy’s hair. Red hair, she thought dreamily; I’ll pretend it’s him, Jumpin’ Jack Flash ....
There was a mild ripple in the pleasure running through her, as though something in her had been distracted. Without volition she looked over her shoulder at Ezili.
“It’s starting to bore me,” she heard herself say in a flat voice. “Perhaps it doesn’t fight me enough, or perhaps it just doesn’t have enough ideas of its own. Take the cape, Ezili.” Ezili’s eyes seemed to glow in the darkness.
“Move carefully, my own.”
Ezili whispered something in French and slipped under the side of the cloak, putting one arm around Jane.
Jane held tighter to the boy’s head, feeling something like hurt surprise. It was leaving her? Now? Even as she thought it, she felt it withdraw from her neck. There was a moment of sharp pain, followed by a sudden blankness, as if a switch had been thrown to off. She was aware of the creature’s moving from her back to Ezili’s, and she wanted to turn and grab it back, but she couldn’t move.
And the cloak was resettled around Ezili’s shoulders and she was now the Queen of Pleasure.
Ezili rose from her chair as if she were levitating and looked down at Jane with scornful triumph.
“Why?” Jane pleaded. “I thought-I thought—”
Ezili stroked Jane’s head roughly, as if she were a dog. “Old favorites are not forgotten. New pleasures bring great thrills, yes, but the old favorites such as this mount, it knows how to please me. And the richness of its appetites-you have far to go, little mount, before you can compare with this.” Ezili cupped her hands around her breasts and held them out proudly.
Jane turned away, starting to tremble. Ezili bent down and put her mouth close to her ear. “Goes right to the pleasure place in your brain, did you know that?” she said in her own, hateful Ezili-voice. “Yeah. Maybe you can get hold of some drug does the same. Might get you through the hours without him. You can try that, might help. And maybe you be a lot nicer to me now, white meat. If you want the kiss again.” She thrust her tongue into Jane’s ear, and Jane gave a little screech, slapping at her. Ezili laughed and moved around the table, going toward the exit.
“Wait!” Jane shouted over the music. “Where are you going?”, Ezili paused, sneering at her. “Out for some real action.”
“What about me?” she cried desperately.
Ezili laughed again; the cape swirled gracefully as she headed for the exit.
Jane sat frozen for a moment. Drown her! she thought, but her mind shied away from the necessary concentration. The pleasure that had been thrumming all through her like the vibrations from some smooth-running engine were gone, and in its place was a terrible hollowness as if, when the creature had pulled away from her, it had taken everything inside of her with it.
Then she looked down and saw the boy between her legs, grinning up at her, his mouth and chin shining wetly in the faint light.
“Get away!” she shrieked and beat at him madly, horrified at herself and him and at the way the creature had left her.
“Hey, hey!” the boy yelled, trying to fend off her flailing hands. “Handyman, help! Cunt gone crazy!”
Several arms grabbed her from behind, pinning her arms to her sides.
“Let me go!” She tried to twist away and the arms hugged her tighter, threatening to crush her rib cage. She tried to call water to dash it into her captor’s face, but her ability seemed to have deserted her; there was only hollowness where it had once been. Panic jumped in her. “Help, police, somebody!”
“Shut your fucking mouth, cunt,” said a deep male voice close to her ear, the same ear where Ezili had stuck her tongue. Jane squirmed in revulsion and the arms squeezed again painfully. She forced herself to go limp. After a moment the arms relaxed slightly, ready to tighten again if she started to struggle.
“Now what were you saying about the police? Maybe you seen a crime being committed?”
Jane looked around. They were all staring at her, all the people at the little tables spread through the room, but there was no emotion in most of the faces. On stage the hermaphrodite and the man had paused, sitting on a platform with legs entwined, squinting out at the room in annoyance. The hermaphrodite shielded his/her eyes from the spotlights with one hand, searching for the cause of the disturbance.
“Hey, do you fucking mind?” s/he yelled, his/her face turned in Jane’s direction. “I’m trying to concentrate up here. You think this she-male shit’s easy or something?”
“Go fuck yourself!” someone yelled hoarsely. “That’s the late show, sweetheart!”
“Okay, cunt, let’s go,” said the male voice in Jane’s ear. “You ruined the show,” The arms lifted her and dragged her across the back of the room to a different exit than the one Ezili had taken. The red-haired kid ran to open the door, and Jane was shoved out into a narrow, dirty alley. She hit the ground on hands and knees, crying out in rage and pain.
“Blow, cunt. And don’t bring it around here again.”
She scrambled up, ready to protest, and then jumped back, falling against some garbage cans. The man standing in the doorway was no taller than she was, but his torso was wide and misshapen, to accommodate the three pairs of arms.
Behind him the red-haired boy glowered at her and wiped his mouth showily. “She didn’t pay, Handyman,” he said.
The man glanced at the kid and then came at Jane, moving more quickly than she had thought he would have been able to. “Nobody stiffs one of my boys,” he said, “especially not some skinny fucking cunt who yells for the cops. Give it up, dickhole, and you’re free to go.” Before she could run, he was on her, running all of his hands over her body in a rough search. “Come on, where do you keep your wad?” One hand clamped between her legs. Jane opened her mouth to scream, and another hand clamped over it while four hands continued to pat her down.
“Shut up. You keep it down there, in the safety deposit box? I’ll give you one chance to get it yourself and then I go in after it.”
Jane stared at him pleadingly; he pulled the hand at her mouth away.
“Well?”
“I don’t have anything,” she whispered. “They left me here with nothing.”
The man picked her up and tossed her away. She landed heavily on her side in a spill of garbage.
“Tough stuff, cunt. But I’ll let you off with a warning. This time. Don’t bring it back here, I mean it.”
Jane raised herself slowly to a sitting position, drawing her legs up protectively. The man started to turn away and then feigned a lunge at her. She gave a small yelp and he laughed at her, the red-haired boy joining in from where he stood at the doorway, hanging on the jamb by one arm as though this were some idle, late-summer afternoon and he was being entertained by the antics of his friends. In the light it was obvious that he was younger than she’d thought. Revulsion and pity for him began to well up in her and suddenly cut off as it met the great hollowness of Ti Malice’s absence from her body and mind. She burst into tears and something in her gave. Suddenly she was covered with water.
“What the fuck is that?” the man shouted at her. “What the fuck are you?” He backed away from her. The sight of the six-armed joker flinching from her water-calling power gave her small, bitter amusement; she concentrated and this time found the power, pulling a couple of gallons of water out of the air to fling in his face. Then, while he was still sputtering and roaring with anger, she got up and ran.
She called the water out of her clothing as best she could, but the power was weak and she stayed moderately damp as she wandered aimlessly through Jokertown in the deepening twilight. Aimless? Not quite lifeless, perhaps, lifeless and empty, but on the lookout for Hiram’s car. Perhaps Ezili had gone back to Hiram, or Hiram had gone back to Aces High. If she called Hiram, he might send someone out for her—
The memory of what had happened with Hiram was like a fist in her stomach. She could see his face, the sorrow, the anger, the despair, that alien curiosity, and then Ezili, Ezili and herself ...
She bent over, choking and gagging, unmindful of the stares from people passing by. Oh, God, how could she have, what had made her-with Ezili, Ezili-she must have been mad, crazed, possessed
Someone bumped into her and she staggered against the side of a building, sobbing into her hands. Possessed, yes, but now it was gone, leaving her worse than alone. The hollowness inside of her seemed to swell, and she had an image of herself being sucked down a huge drain. To live without the fullness the creature brought her, to exist with no pleasure at all, was unbearable.
Trembling doubled her over again and she sobbed harder. More. She needed more, she needed to feel herself whole again, nestled in the glow of pleasure that only the creature could give her, and if she had to go to Ezili again, to Ezili and Hiram together, if she had to go to that bar and walk up onstage to the hermaphrodite and the man and the six-armed joker and the red-haired boy all at the same time, it would not have been too much to ask of herself, if the thing asked her to cut her own throat at the end of it—
“Hey. Hey. Easy, now.”
Gentle hands were on her shoulders. She twisted around, desperate hope rising and then plummeting to despair as she looked into the grotesque clown face. “Go away,” she said, pushing at the strange man feebly.
“There, now, I’m just trying to help you. Don’t let the face put you off. I know it’s silly. Just my bad luck to be in makeup when the virus showed, now I can’t get it off. Not the worst thing that could happen, I guess, just looking at you.” The man hauled her to her feet and stood her against the wall, dabbing at her face with a handkerchief. The sadness in his eyes made the clown white and the big red nose even more absurd, but she didn’t feel much like laughing.
“Go away,” she moaned, “you can’t help me, no one can help me, only him. I have to find him.” Weeping, she looked down at her arms. Dry. She touched her face; it, too, was dry. She couldn’t even call her own tears anymore. Had that been the last of it, back there in the alley?
“Water!” she cried. “I want the water!”
“Shh, shh, we’ll get you some water,” said the clown man, trying to hold her still.
“Please! He’s taken the water!” She collapsed against the man, crying weakly, but still without tears.
Curled up on the bed in the fetal position, she heard the clown man talking to one of the clinic nurses without really listening to what he was saying. Every so often her body gave an uncontrollable shudder, but she remained dry. Dried up, she thought; all dried up without him, without the kiss and the pleasure and the fullness.
“ .. something about water,” the clown man was saying. “Hysterical,” said the nurse. “Hysteria seems to be the condition of the moment around here.”
“Nah, it’s more than that. I’ve got a bad feeling. She oughta be watched.”
The nurse sighed. “Maybe, but we just don’t have the people. The new cases are coming in almost faster than we can log them, all jokers and worse. If we don’t find the cause, the whole city could get infected. You’re running a pretty bad risk yourself, Boze.”
The clown man grunted. “What’s a joker got to lose?”
“You’d know the answer to that if you saw the locked ward.”
“That’s just a small locked ward you got here. Out there, it’s a big locked ward, and we’re all locked into it. And when I walk around it, I just see my brother again, turned inside out. Screaming every time his heart beat. Hell, you don’t have the people to stay with her, I’ll stay with her, watch her for signs that she’s been infected.”
A fresh bout of shuddering racked Jane’s body; she tried to quell it and listen to what they were saying.
“That’s big of you, Boze, but just from the quick exam we gave her in the emergency room, I’d say she’s suffering from drug withdrawal, not a new wild card infection.”
The idea seemed to flood Jane’s mind with a bright light. She sat up and turned to the nurse. “Drugs. I need a drug.” The nurse glanced at the clown man. “What’d I tell you, Boze? Just another junkie courting AIDS.”
“I am NOT a junkie, you bitch, I am an ACE and I demand to see Dr. Tachyon AT ONCE!”The scream tore out of Jane’s throat, leaving it raw; she imagined she could hear her words echoing all through the clinic, reaching all the way to Tachyon himself, wherever he was.
And apparently she had imagined it right; a few moments later Tachyon appeared in the doorway, alarm large on his drawn, tired face.
The nurse started to speak to him; he waved away her words and went to the bed, taking Jane’s hand in his. “Water Lily,” he said, his voice full of compassion. “What has happened to you?”
This undid her completely and she clung to him, sobbing dryly. He held her, letting her get it all out, and then gently pushed her back down on the bed.
“Don’t leave me like this!” she cried, grabbing at his hands.
“Shh, Jane, I won’t leave you, not for a few minutes anyway.”
She saw that he was not just weary but near complete exhaustion; then she brushed the fact aside. He was here to help her. He had to help her. It was all his fault to begin with, and if that meant he had to work exhausted once in a while, that was his tough stuff, which was nothing compared to what she was going through.
“I need a drug,” she said shakily. “ I was given somethingit wasn’t my fault, I didn’t want to take it, it was forced on me. I don’t want it anymore but I have to have it. I might die without it. I don’t know—”
“What was it?” he asked quietly, pushing her down as she tried to rise.
“I don’t know!” she snapped impatiently. “Just something, it goes right to the pleasure place, it makes-it does-I had to-but you must have a drug. Something you can make from your world. Something that will cure me, or replace it, like methadone—”
“You need methadone?” His expression was stricken. “No, no, not methadone, something like methadone, but from your world, something that will make me stop craving—” Tachyon wiped a hand over his face. “Please. You’re babbling. Please try to calm down. If you’re addicted to a drug I can send you to another clinic—”
“It’s not a drug!” she screamed, and Tachyon put his hands over his ears. “I’m sorry, oh, I’m so sorry,” she went on in a whisper, “but it’s not a drug, not exactly, but it’s like a drug—”
Tachyon pulled away from her, pressing his palms against his forehead. “Jane, please. I’ve lost count of the number of hours I’ve been up. I can’t even put forth my mind to calm you. The nurse will give you a sedative and we’ll transfer you to another hospital.”
“No, please, don’t send me away!” She grabbed at his arm and he twisted away from her.
“You can’t stay here. We need the beds for the new cases.”
“But ... But ...”
Tachyon pulled away from her firmly. “The nurse can give the name of a clinic not far from here. They can help you. Or just outside, I’m sure there’s someone who can give you the name of a source, if that’s what you’re really after.” He got up and walked wearily to the door, pausing to look back at her. “I had expected you to end up differently, Water Lily. You must be a great disappointment to Hiram Worchester.” He was gone.
Speechless, Jane fell back against the pillow and stared at the ceiling. He was tired, so exhausted that he saw her as just another drug addict. A great disappointment to Hiram Worchester. At the thought of Hiram the craving burst upon her with an intensity that brought her up out of the bed and sent her charging for the doorway.
Just at the threshold she collided with the nurse. “Whoa, wait a minute,” the nurse said, thrusting a piece of paper at her. “Dr. Tachyon told me to give you the name of this clinic—”
Jane snatched the paper from her and stared at it, trying to drown it in a gout of water that would turn it to mush, but the terrible need blocked her again. She looked up at the nurse.
“No drug?” she said belligerently.
The nurse’s eyes were hard. “Not here, lady.”
She could still call a little water, albeit in a rather conventional way. She spat on the paper and flung it in the nurse’s face. Then she turned and ran down the hall to the exit.
On the fourth number she dialed, the answering machine message cut off and a low voice said, “It better be good.” Jane’s voice suddenly deserted her. She hung on the pay phone in the telephone booth, her mouth opening and closing impotently.
“Okay, kid. We had Prince Albert in a can but we let him out last week. Now go call your mommy,” She heard him start to hang up.
“Croyd!” she wailed.
She could actually sense him shifting gears at the sound of a female voice. “Go ahead, I’m listening.”
“It’s-it’s me, Jane. Jane Dow,” she added, trying to force herself to sound calm.
“Jane. Well.” His pleasure-filled laugh grated on her painfully. “So you didn’t throw away the numbers I gave you. You sound a little breathless. Everything okay?”
“No. Yes. I mean—” She slumped against the wall of the phone booth, gripping the receiver with both hands. “Jane? You still there?”
“Yes. Of course.” Slowly she straightened up and tried to compose herself into the Aces High hostess who flirted so easily with the man with the faceted eyes. The overwhelming emptiness inside of her made that woman a stranger to her now. “I’m still here and you’re there. I think that means one of us is definitely in the wrong place.” Her voice broke on the last word, and she jammed her knuckles into her mouth to smother the sound of her crying.
“If you’re saying you’d like to rectify that situation, that’s the best thing I’ve heard today.” He paused. “Are you sure everything’s okay?”
Something in the back of her mind was trying to tell her Croyd sounded as though he were on the thin edge himself, but she ignored it. If there was anyone who could get her a drug, it was Croyd. Whatever she had to do for him in return was not too much to ask.
“Everything will be okay when you give me your address,” she said shakily. When he didn’t answer, she added, “I really want to see you. Please?”
“I never could resist a woman who said please. Tell me where you are and I’ll tell you the best way to get to where I am ....”
The door opened a wide crack to reveal the mirrorshades, gleaming at her with an insectile coldness. Croyd licked his lips and opened the door wider. “Come into my parlor, Bright Eyes. If you’ll pardon the expression. I’m afraid parlor is all there is.” The voice was different; the man was taller and his skin was white all over, but the words were pure Croyd.
She stepped into a shabby one-room apartment lit only with a few small lamps scattered in odd spots. The furniture was negligible-a bureau that might have come from the same flea market as the lamps, an old wooden table and a couple of chairs, a broken-down sofa near the windows. It was not the most reassuring place she had ever come to, but, she reminded herself, she had not come for reassurance.
“This is not the place I usually choose to entertain in,” Croyd was saying as he shut the door and ran down a line of four locks. He turned to her, raisipg a hand to his mirrorshades, and licked his lips again. “So. I’m afraid I don’t have a lot to offer you in the way of refreshment, but I can make any kind of gin and tonic you like.”
She laughed nervously, hugging herself. “How many kinds are there?”
“Well, there’s gin and tonic, of course. Tonic and gin,” he said, moving closer to her. She made a countermove farther into the room, hugging herself tighter. “Gin and not much tonic. Gin and no tonic at all. Gin and an ice cube. Which sounds great to me. You think it over.” He licked his lips for the third time in as many minutes and went to the kitchenette.
Jane turned away, trying to get the shudder building inside of her under control. In the company of this man who wanted her, the void was eating away at her like acid. It would make no difference if Croyd’s latest persona were the god of eros. Just being in the same room with him was an excruciating reminder that pleasure could only be Ti Malice; anything else was a pale, crude substitution to force time to pass.
“Decided?”
She jumped as he touched her shoulder and moved away from him, rubbing the spot as if it were bruised. “No, Inothing for me, I guess.” She gave another nervous laugh and winced. He tilted his head curiously and she saw two Janes in the mirrorshades. The distortion made her look as if she were trying to disappear into herself.
“You sure?” Croyd upended the glass and took a couple of ice cubes into his mouth, crunching them noisily. There were only ice cubes in his glass, she saw. “Nothing at all?”
“Well, not nothing ....” She made a face, giving a long sigh. “God, I’m no good at this.”
“At what?” Croyd had another ice cube. “What is it you’re not good at, Bright Eyes?” He came a little closer and she backed away. “And why is it so important to be good at it?”
Something caught her abruptly behind the knees, and she plumped down hard on the couch. Croyd moved in quickly beside her, rolling another ice cube around in his mouth. His left arm slid along the back of the sofa and she shrank away from him. His knee touched hers just as his hand went from the couch to her shoulder, moving very lightly. He reached over and set the glass on the windowsill behind the couch, disturbing the drawn shade; his hand, she saw, was trembling slightly. Jane looked from the glass to Croyd. His tongue flicked out and ran along his lips every few seconds now. It was more like a tic than an expression of desire.
“Talk to me, Jane,” he said gently as she reached the corner of the couch. He put his other hand on her arm. She flinched at the contact; there was another sensation under the displeasure of a touch that was not Ti Malice’s, a tremor, as if he were running a long distance and going as fast as he could instead of sitting here on the couch trying to take her in his arms. “Come on, talk to me. Tell me.”
The words came to her unbidden. “‘Sleeper speeding, people bleeding.”‘
He froze. Jane looked into the mirrorshades, seeing only her twin reflections. Impulsively she reached for the glasses and he pulled back. “Don’t.” He twisted around, looking for the ice cubes, and Jane nodded at the windowsill. “Thanks. Speed dries you out.”
“Where do you get it?” she asked.
“What, the speed? Why?” He crunched a couple of ice cubes. “You planning to stay up all night?”
“I was just wondering if whoever you got it from might ... well, stock other things.” She took a deep breath. “Other kinds of drugs.”
He looked at her sharply for a moment and then suddenly lunged at her, grabbing her upper arm to pull her close. “Stop, you’re hurting me!” Jane flinched from the mirrorshades thrusting themselves into her face and tried to pry his fingers off her arm.
“Are you strung out? Is that why you came here?” He was almost laughing. She twisted away from him, started to get up, and stumbled, landing on the floor in a heap.
“Get up.” He pulled her back onto the couch roughly. “Talk to me, and this time, tell me something I don’t know. Are you strung out.”
“It’s not what you think,” she said, not looking at him. “It never is, Bright Eyes.” He was licking his lips again. It was beginning to drive her crazy. “So, what kind of drug were you shopping for-horse? Lady? Blue dreamers? Reds? White crossroads? Black bombers, screaming yellow zonkers? What’s your pleasure?” His voice was hard and ugly and she was aware, with no little amazement, that he was as disappointed in what he thought she was as Tachyon had been.
“God, what am I supposed to be, everyone’s idea of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, the Sweet Virgin Ace?” she shouted at him. “Am I supposed to stand up here on my pedestal, playing God’s Good Girl, just so you can all pat me on the head and call me virtuous in between your own debaucheries? Dear little Water Lily, lily white Water Lily, virgin-white Water Lily! It doesn’t work that way! You all had to drag me into this, you had to involve me in your stupid games, in your fucking gang wars, you all had to use me for your own purposes, and now everyone’s so shocked because I’ve turned up with the same filth you wallow in splashed all over me. What did you expect!” .
She realized she was kneeling over him on the couch, screaming into his face. A few flecks of saliva were spattered on the mirrorshades. He stared up at her openmouthed.
“I guess,” he said, pausing to lick his lips, “speed isn’t the only thing that can dry you out.”
Jane doubled over with a sob as the aching emptiness renewed its attack on her. She felt Croyd’s hand lightly on her hair and shouted, “Don’t touch me, it hurts!”
“I thought it was kind of strange that you weren’t, ah, moist, but I wasn’t sure. Everything seems a little strange at this point.” He crunched the last of the ice cubes. “What is it? Plain old heroin, or something more exotic?”
She raised her head from the musty cushion. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Try me. Tell me what you’re looking for.”
With great effort she pulled herself all the way up and sat with her legs tucked under her. “I need something that goes directly to the pleasure center of the brain and stimulates it continuously.”
“Don’t we all,” Croyd said grimly, tapping the last drop of water from his empty glass.
“Well?” she said after a moment. “Well what?”
“Do you know of anyone who has such a drug and will sell it to me?”
He gave a short, humorless laugh. “Hell, no.”
She stared at him, feeling the void consume her hope along with the rest of her, and then, absurdly, she sneezed. “Gesundheit,” he said automatically. “Listen, there’s no such thing, not animal, vegetable, or mineral. Except maybe about five hours of good, dirty sex, and frankly I’m not up to more than an hour at a time. Terrible to have to admit that—”
She was off the couch, heading for the door. “Hey, wait!”
She stopped and turned, looking at him questioningly. “Where are you going?”
“The only place I can go.”
“And where might that be?”
She shook her head. “You’re wrong, Croyd. There is such a thing. It exists. I know it. And I hope you never do. It’s the worst thing in the world.”
He licked his lips again and wiped his mouth with the palm of his hand. “I doubt that, Bright Eyes.”
“Good,” she said. “I hope you always will. Stay where you are. I’ll let myself out.”
But she couldn’t. She had to wait patiently while he undid all four locks before she could rush away from the ’twin reflections of her own hopeless face.
Hiram opened the door to her this time, Hiram all alone in the empty apartment. She didn’t have to ask to be let in. “It left you,” he said quietly.
“Yes.” Her voice was a whisper as she stood with her head bowed.
“Are you ...” his voice failed him for a moment. “Are you ... all right?”
She looked up at him and his eyes reflected the emptiness she felt inside. “You know I’m not, Hiram. And neither are you.”
“No. I suppose we’re not.” He paused. “Can I get you anything? A glass of water or something to eat or ...” His words hung in the air between them, futile absurdities. He was offering a teardrop to a forest fire.
It was too painful to leave at that. Jane raised her head with as much dignity as she could muster. “A cup of hot tea would be nice, thank you.” It would be no such thing, and she almost never drank hot tea anyway, but it would be something they could do besides just stand there and ache together.
He busied himself in the kitchenette while she sat at the small table, staring at nothing. If pleasure was real, then the absence of pleasure was a palpable thing as well; where there had been rapture in every movement there was now the pain of the void he had left. Mg Master, she thought with dull revulsion. I called him Mg Master.
“I couldn’t let you go after you’d seen,” Hiram said abruptly. He didn’t turn around and she didn’t look up. “I’m sure you understand that, now that you know.”
She made a small murmur but said nothing else.
“And he’d seen you in my thoughts many times as well. So when you showed up ...” Pause. “Why did you come here?” The memory made her burst out laughing. Alarmed, Hiram turned around from the counter where the tea was brewing and stared at her. He looked so frightened that she tried to stem her laughter, but she had no control. She only laughed harder, shaking her head and waving him away as he made a move toward her.
“It’s all right,” she gasped after a while. “Really. It’s just just so—” She was off again for nearly a minute while he stood watching her, misery emanating from him in waves she could almost feel.
“It’s just so ... insignificant,” she said when she could finally speak again. “Brightwater delivered a load of rotten fish and I had to send it back. Nobody knew what to do about getting in a replacement shipment for the sushi bar, and Tomoyuki said that Mr. Dining Out was coming from New York Gourmet to review the twilight sushi bar—” She laughed again but weakly this time. “I guess we wont be offering the sushi bar tonight. I told Tom to get sick if I weren’t back in an hour. That was-I don’t know. What time is it?”
Hiram didn’t answer.
“No, I guess it doesn’t matter, does it?” she said, staring at him. “I got the address off the back of your desk blotter, but I wasn’t going to use it unless I really had to, and I felt like I did. They’re all turning against you, Hiram. Emile’s walking around saying he thinks you’re a junkie.”
“I am,” Hiram said bleakly. He checked the teapot and then set it on the table with two cups. “And so are you. And Ezili. And everyone else he’s kissed.”
“Is that what you call it?” she said as he poured the tea. “Do you have a better word for it?”
“No.”
“It’s an instant, permanent addiction,” Hiram went on, almost matter-of-factly. “He connects directly to the pleasure center of your brain. That’s why everything feels so good. Eating. Moving. Making love. Just breathing. And when he leaves you-it’s like death. There’s no cure, no relief. Except the kiss. I’ll do anything for it. And so will you.”
“No.”
Hiram paused in the act of raising his teacup.
“We’ve got to pull ourselves together. There must be some kind of cure we could take, or even a drug that could act as a block or a replacement—”
“No, nothing.” Hiram shook his head with finality. “There must be. We could look for it together, you and I. I went to Tachyon’s clinic—”
Hiram’s cup clattered into the saucer. “You what? You went to Tachyon?” His face had actually gone gray; she thought he might drop dead of horror.
“Don’t worry, I didn’t tell him. And he didn’t find out.”
“He’s swamped with new wild card cases. He didn’t bother reading my mind. But if you went back there with me and talked to him—”
“No!” he roared, and she jumped, spilling tea all over the table. Hiram immediately went for a dish towel and began wiping up the mess. “No,” he said again, much more quietly. “If anyone finds out, they’ll kill him. He can’t survive without a human host. We’d lose him and we still wouldn’t have a cure. We’d have to be like this for the rest of our lives. Could you stand that?”
“God, no,” she whispered, putting her forehead in her hand.
“Then don’t talk crazy.” Hiram tossed the dish towel at the sink and took her hand. “It’ll be all right. Really. It’s not so bad a lot of the time. Not really. I mean, does he demand that much for the pleasure he gives? And he does leave you alone a lot, and it’s not like he’s evil, not really. If you were the only mount, could you deny him his life? If you knew he would die without you, could you let that happen?”
She pulled her hand away, shaking her head. “Hiram, you don’t know what’s happened to me.”
“You don’t know what’s happened to me!” he cried. He knelt down to look into her face, and she was horrified to see tears in his eyes. “Whatever you’ve done is nothing compared to what I’ve done! Don’t you think it’s been horrible for me? The fear of detection, the powerlessness-I’ve considered suicide, don’t think I haven’t, but the awful part is, there might be an afterlife and he wouldn’t be there and that really would be hell! What happened to you-! Know what happened to me? I let him take a friend! I swore I would not, and I did it anyway! I let him take you!”
She pulled away from him. “Oh, Jesus, Hiram, I wish I’d died that night when the Astronomer came to Aces High. I wish you had let me fall!”
“I wish I had, too!” he bellowed at her.
Hiram’s statement seemed to echo in the silence that followed. It was over, she realized wonderingly. Aces High, her obligation to Hiram, her life as an ace if she’d ever really had one, everything. It had all been wiped out, leaving both of them with nothing.
“You’re not wet,” Hiram said, belatedly aware.
Before she could answer him, there was a knock at the door.
Hiram jerked his head at the bedroom and she went without protest, pulling herself into a huddle on the floor next to the bed. Whatever was coming next, she wasn’t ready for it.
Exhaustion suddenly swept over her; she leaned her head against the side of the mattress and let herself fall into a strange half-sleep. She heard the voices in the other room, but they made no impression on her, even when Hiram’s rose angrily. Some uncounted time later she sensed someone’s approaching and she tried to push down into unconsciousness, away from the presence, fantasizing again that Hiram had made her weightless so she could drift off into the sky.
But strong hands pulled her up and flung her down on the bed. She struggled feebly, her eyelids fluttering with—groggy alarm. Then she felt the feather touch of small fingers along her back, and she stretched her neck obligingly for the kiss.
The scene in the living room was troublesome, but she was far above it, riding in a state of transport with her Master. There was Hiram of course, and Ezili, and two men she didn’t recognize and couldn’t be bothered to care about, and Emile, of all people, bound and gagged and lying on the carpet. Her Master forced her attention to him and she acquiesced, all the while reveling in the renewed contact.
“Jane,” Hiram said tensely. She turned to look at him through pleasure-glazed eyes. He seemed to be having some difficulty keeping his gaze on her, or perhaps on her Master. It didn’t matter, though. Everything was all right again.
“jane.”
“Heard you,” she said, completely happy. “What is it?”
“Why did you give Emile the spare key to my office?” Her Master commanded that she answer, and it was exquisite to obey. “ I put him in charge while I was gone. It seemed to be the logical thing to do.”
“When I gave you that key, I told you no one—no one-but you was to have it, for any reason.”
“You gave me that key ages ago, before you left on the trip, and after you came back, I thought you’d forgotten all about it. It just didn’t seem to make any difference because you didn’t seem to care anymore.” She smiled dreamily.
Hiram’s fist was clenched but she wasn’t worried. With Her Master there was nothing to worry about. She marveled at how the surrender could be so much more profound on the second time. On the third time she would probably lose herself to him completely and that would be absolute perfection. She could hardly wait.
“You don’t understand what you’ve done, Water Lily,” Hiram said miserably. “You’ve killed this man.”
Something in her started at the use of her ace name, but she let it go. Her Master liked it. He liked the water that was trickling down her face and running from her hair, saturating her clothes and soaking the carpet around her feet.
“If she was responsible,” her voice said at her Master’s command, “then she can take care of it, yes, Hiram?”
“It will kill her,” Hiram said. “Or drive her mad.”
“She’s already mad.” Her Master had her laugh for him. “And she’s not really so terribly interesting, except for her power.” Her face turned to Emile. His eyes widened, and he made desperate little noises against the gag.
“Get him ready for her, Ezili,” said her Master. “ I am so curious as to what it will be like.”
Ezili struggled to pull down Emile’s trousers while he tried to wiggle away from her. One of the men Jane didn’t know forced Emile over onto his back, crushing his bound hands against the floor, and knelt on his shoulders. Emile began to scream against the gag, but it came out as muffled bleats. His bound legs kicked upward, and the man pressed harder on his shoulders until he was still.
After a while Ezili got up, wiping her mouth delicately. “Show him a good time, little girl.”
Jane moved to Emile and knelt beside him. Her Master had already explained wordlessly what was required of her. It wasn’t too much to ask. He wanted to know how it would feel; her only mission in life was to show him. She pulled up her dress and casually ripped away her underpants.
The horror in Emile’s eyes fed her sensation as she straddled his body and lowered herself onto him. He stiffened and she heard him grunt in pain. Water poured down on him in rhythmic splashes. More sensation. She gave herself over to it, letting her consciousness dissolve so that it, too, was like fluid. Somewhere lost in the pleasure was the little tiny Jane screaming against this atrocity, but little tiny Jane didn’t count for much in the face of this magnificent pleasure-power. What had to be sacrificed for Ti Malice’s enjoyment would be; if Emile could have known, he might have offered himself up willingly. It was more than an honor. It was a blessing; it was a state of grace. It was—
Her eyes met Emile’s. Motionless and stiff beneath her, he was staring at Ti Malice. The waves of pleasure parted suddenly, and for a moment there was a small rift between her and her Master. She opened her mouth to scream, and then the waves crashed together again and she fell forward. Water poured over her and Emile in a small flood.
Ti Malice was talking to her as he rifled through her sensations and thoughts. He laughed at the memory of the clinic and Dr. Tachyon (No, little mount, there is no drug that could go directly to the pleasure place, as you call it) and took special note of the information about the contagious virus (You would never expose me to that, little mount, you will give your life before you allow that to happen to me). Even as her body moved and twisted and reveled, she worshiped the thing at her neck, promising everything to it, offering everything she had. Whatever. Always.
She felt him bring her up to full awareness to concentrate on Emile.
Whatever. Always. He had her bring tears to Emile’s eyes, and together they watched as he struggled, trying to blink them away. Her Master found the calling of the water a wonderful sensation and wanted more. She did more, calling the water only from his body and not out of the air around him, because her Master liked it so much. He made another suggestion, and pleasure surged anew as Emile bucked beneath her, the involuntary action turning quickly to pain for him. If he only knew what his body was serving, she thought.
The power seemed easier to wield now than it ever had before. Because she was whole again, she thought, watching with Ti Malice’s pleasure as the blood swelled from Emile’s pores and he screamed against the gag. She had never realized how good it felt to do that, to call the moisture from a living being instead of the lifeless air. If she really let herself go with it, it was better than anything, even better than the sex Ti Malice enjoyed so much.
And at last the permission was given and she did let herself go with it, all the way to finality. Whatever. Always. It was an explosion that went beyond pleasure, into something that was completely alien, a ripping away of whatever humanity had been left to her and Ti Malice, leaving the hard, bright, burning thing that had thrust itself upon them in an act of irrevocable conquest. For one single eternal instant they were purely the living wild card virus, not just living but sentient.
Then she was herself again, watching through a haze of dying sensation as Ti Malice himself trembled under this new awareness. This had almost been too much even for him. She cold not even raise a protest as he left her for Ezili again.
A little later she realized she had been blinded by the last of the fluids she had called out of Emile’s body, and there were only his clothes and some substance that looked like a spill of powder on the floor where he had been.
She took a long fall into blackness, screaming all the way down.
Faces came out of the darkness at her; she made them fade away. At some point she was looking at Hiram’s face, and try as she would, she couldn’t make him vanish. He seemed to be trying to explain something to her, but none of it made any sense. I quit, she told him at last, and that finally made him go.
Clean her up, get her some clothes, and get her out of here. For now, said Ezili in her own voice. She makes me ... uncomfortable. Laughter.
Then the craving hit her and the lack of Ti Malice was too much to bear. Her mind folded itself up into a tiny little box and flushed itself away.
She was walking through a bizarre, wasted wonderland and Sal was at her side. She was only mildly surprised that he was there with her; she thought it might have been because Ti Malice had left her with so little that she wasn’t completely in existence anymore. But it was nice that of all the ghosts she could have run into, she had somehow met up with Sal. Meeting Emile would have been terribly unpleasant; perhaps he hadn’t been dead long enough to have become a ghost yet. She covered everything that had happened within the first few minutes they were together, all the degradation, the lies, the broken promises.
Sal asked her what broken promises those were.
Why, that I was done leaning on anyone, Sal. Remember? I promised that after the Cloisters. And now look at me. I’m leaning so hard I’m tipped over. Then she realized he’d known and he’d just wanted her to say it, to admit it.
All right. I admit it. I admit it all. I said I’d never kill anyone’ again, no matter how bad they were, even if it meant they’d kill me first. And I killed Emile because he wanted to watch how he’d die. She didn’t have to explain who he was; Sal knew that, too.
And I always promised I’d be ... responsible with my body. Maybe it was easier to lock myself up than finally accept that we would never be together.
Sal thought that was kind of funny. After all, he wasn’t just gay, he was gay and dead; been that way for quite some time, too.
Well, Sal, being dead, you wouldn’t have any idea how easy it can be to remain faithful to someone’s memory. It’s real easy when you’re too scared to face a living person. Live men are real intimidating, Sal.
Sal said he knew what she meant.
Yeah, I guess you would, wouldn’t you. I guess it’s kind of a funny coincidence, then, that the first time I’d be with a woman, and then the first man I ever really had would also be gay.
Sal said he didn’t see what that had to do with anything. Well, it’s like a recurring theme.
Sal said he still couldn’t see it.
Never mind. I’m just glad now that you didn’t live to see what I’ve come to. That’s something you missed by drowning in the bathtub, Sal, that and the big AIDS epidemic. I mean, if you really had to go and die, drowning was the better way. You wouldn’t want to die of AIDS. Or of me.
Sal said he’d never been that paranoid.
Well, there’s plenty to be paranoid about these days. I found out there’s a contagious form of the wild card virus. No one knows how it’s being transmitted. And most people die from it.
Sal said that certainly was a revolting development. Yes, it certainly is. And you know what else, Sal?
Sal asked her what that was.
There’s no way to tell if you’ve been exposed. Till it happens. Maybe I’ve been exposed. Maybe I’ll get it and die. I just hope I can’t give it to anyone else.
“Honey, you’re not the only one.”
Jane was about to answer when she realized she had heard Sal’s voice for real. But it didn’t sound very much like Sal. She turned to him in surprise and found it hadn’t been Sal beside her after all but some stranger, a skinny man with a ratlike face, down to the mangy fur covering his cheeks, the pointed nose, and the whiskers.
“It’s a mouse face, lady, not a rat face,” the man said wearily. “You can tell by the teeth, if you know anything about rodents. I used to be an exterminator, okay? Gimme a hard time about it, why doncha. I tagged along with you to see what a little piece of chicken could want wandering around in Jokertown at this hour of the night. Frankly, lady, you got a lot more problems than I have, and I don’t want none of them.”
He was gone and she was standing in the middle of a sidewalk under a buzzing streetlamp.
“Sal?” she asked the air. There was no answer.
At first she’d been afraid she’d come back to the same bar, but then she saw it was different. No stage set up for a live sex show, for one thing, and the clientele was a lot livelier, more brightly dressed, some of them even in costumes and masks.
When she saw the eyeless man behind the bar, she panicked, and then she realized it couldn’t be the same one she’d taken into the limousine. When had that been? At least a thousand years ago. Like a sleepwalker she moved to the bar and took one of the high stools. The eyeless bartender, working expertly, suddenly straightened up and turned his face in her direction.
“Trouble, Sascha?” A dwarf materialized at her side and clamped one thick hand on her arm.
The bartender backed away. “ I don’t want to be near her. Get her away from me.”
“Come on, honey. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” The dwarf started to pull her off the stool. “No, please,” she said, trying to twist her arm out of his grasp. “ I have to see someone.” She knew where she was now and it was the only place she could have come to find what she needed; Chrysalis or someone around Chrysalis would know where she could get a drug that would fill in the void Ti Malice had eaten away in her. She turned to look at the bartender. “Please, I’m not going to hurt anyone—”
“Get her out,” the bartender said urgently. “I can’t stand the way she feels.”
Jane looked around wildly and then spotted Chrysalis at a corner table. She gave a mighty tug and slipped out of the dwarf’s grip.
“Hey!” he yelled.
Ignoring the stares of the other patrons, she darted between the tables to the corner where Chrysalis was sitting, watching with those strange, floating blue eyes.
“Gotcha!” The dwarf seized her around the waist, and she fell to her knees, crawling the last few feet to Chrysalis’s chair, dragging the man with her.
Chrysalis lifted a finger. The dwarfs arms loosened but he didn’t let go of her completely.
“I need information,Jane said in a low voice. ‘About a drug.”
Chrysalis didn’t answer. Whatever expression might have been on her peculiar face was impossible to read.
“I’ve been addicted to something against my will. I need-I need—” She dug in her pants pocket and miraculously there was money there, a small, flat fold of bills. Hurriedly she unfolded them and held them out. “ I can pay, I can pay for—”
Chrysalis flicked briefly at the bills Jane was thrusting at her. Jane looked; there were three bills, two tens and a twenty. Forty dollars. Bad joke.
Chrysalis shook her head and waved a hand.
“Like I said, honey,” the dwarf said, “you were just leaving.”
She leaned against the side of the building with the bills crumpled in her hand. The void in her widened until she thought the craving had to split her open right there. “Excuse me.”
Kim Toy.
She blinked and then realized it wasn’t Kim Toy after all. This woman was younger and taller and her features were different.
“I saw Chrysalis give you the bum’s rush. Some nerve she’s got, huh. The twerp took you by my table, and I couldn’t help thinking I knew you from somewhere.”
Jane turned away from her. “Leave me alone,” she muttered, but the woman moved closer.
“Like, I think you used to work for Rosemary Muldoon. Didn’t you?”
Jane stumbled away from the woman and then fell to her hands and knees, shaking all over. Underneath the ache she felt something else, a sickness that was more physical. As if she were coming down with the flu or something worse. The idea was so absurd she could almost have laughed.
“Hey, are you sick or something?” The woman bent down, putting concerned hands on her shoulders. “You strung out?” she asked in a low voice.
Jane could feel herself weeping without tears.
“Come on,” said the woman, helping Jane to her feet. “Any friend of Rosemary Muldoon’s is a friend of mine. I think I can help you out.”
In spite of the hollowness eating away at her, Jane was overwhelmed by the luxurious apartment. The sunken living room was as large as a ballroom. The predominant color was a delicate, pearlized pink, even to the silk wallpaper and the enormous crystal chandelier.
The woman led her down the steps and sat her on an overstuffed sofa. “It’s something; isn’t it? Looks like a dump on the outside and heaven on the inside. Had to grease a lot of palms to keep the CONDEMNED sign out front. just finished the place last week, and I’ve been dying to entertain. What are you drinking?”
“Water,” Jane said weakly.
Across the room, at the ornate wet bar, the woman looked over her shoulder with a near smile. “Thought you could get your own.”
Jane stiffened. “You-you know-?”
“Didn’t I say I knew you? You think I’d really bring anyone here I wasn’t sure of?” The woman brought her a cut-glass goblet of ice water and sat down next to her. “Of course, it isn’t all mine. It really belongs to the people I work for. Best job I ever had, needless to say.”
Jane sipped her water. Her hands began to shake uncontrollably, and she handed the goblet to the woman before she could spill it. The physical illness was crawling over her again, like a cramp, except it was all over her body. She held very still until it subsided.
“Whatever you’ve got, I hope it isn’t catching,” the woman said, not unkindly. “What happened-you fall in with one of those sleaze-bags around Rosemary and get turned on to junk?”
Jane shook her head. “Not Rosemary.”
“Oh? That’s too bad. I mean, I was sort of hoping you were still in touch with Rosemary because I’d like to see her again.” She leaned over to open a pink laquered box on the oversize coffee table. “Joint? It’ll take the edge off. It really will. This is like nothing you’ve ever had before.”
“No, it isn’t,” Jane said, looking away from the proffered joint.
“What are you on, anyway?”
“It’s something that goes straight to the pleasure center of the brain. You don’t want to know.” Or perhaps she would, Jane thought suddenly. Her thoughts began to coil toward a plan. What if she could get this woman to go back to the apartment with her and offered her to Ti Malice? He loved new mounts, she knew that ...
“Oh, that’s easy,” the woman said. “What?” Jane looked at her, startled.
The woman tilted her head to one side, eyeing her curiously. “I’ve got an associate who’s developed something that’ll go straight for the pleasure center of the brain.”
“Who is it?” Jane said, grabbing the woman’s shoulder. “Can I meet him? Where can I find him? How—”
“Whoa, whoa now. Slow down.” The woman plucked Jane’s hand off herself and moved away slightly. “This is top secret stuff. Stupid of me to mention it, but you being a friend of Rosemary’s and all, I kind of forgot myself. Come on. Mellow out and let’s talk about Rosemary,” She lit the joint with a crystal table lighter, took a deep drag, and offered it to Jane.
She accepted the joint and tried to do exactly as she’d seen the woman do. The smoke burned in her lungs, and she coughed it out.
“Keep practicing,” the woman said, laughing a little. “It’ll really take the edge off.”
A few drags later she had gotten more than just the hang of it. So this was what they meant by getting a buzz on, she thought. It was a buzz you felt rather than heard, and it would have been pleasant, except that it couldn’t get between herself and the gnawing void. She tried to give the joint back to the woman, but she told Jane to keep at it, she needed it more. Instead she put it out carefully in the cut-glass ashtray on the table.
“Don’t like it?” the woman said in surprise.
“It’s ... okay,” Jane said, and her voice seemed to stretch out and out and out like long, slow elastic. Her head felt ready to float off her shoulders like a helium balloon and rise up to the ceiling. She wondered if Hiram knew about this.
But the woman wanted to talk about Rosemary, and between trying to keep her head on her shoulders and fighting against the need for Ti Malice, it was hard to keep track of what she was saying. If the woman would just shut up, she might achieve some kind of equilibrium, something that would steady her long enough to break the water glass on the table and use one of the shards on her throat. That was the only answer now; the dope was helping her see that. She would never be free of the need for Ti Malice, and if she went back-when she went back-she could only look forward to worse things, more degradation, more killings, all done willingly, just to feel the bliss of his presence within her. All the things she had wished for Hiram, that he would find someone to make his life complete, she had inadvertently gotten for herself, except it was Ti Malice instead of the vague, unidentifiable man she had always dreamed of, who had sometimes resembled Sal and sometimes Jumpin’ Jack Flash and sometimes even Croyd. Another bad joke in an ongoing series. It had to end.
The woman kept on talking and talking. Occasionally there were long periods of silence, and Jane came out of her fog to find that the woman was no longer on the couch with her. She would lie back against the cushion, glad of the silence, and then the woman would magically rematerialize next to her, going on and on and on about Rosemary Muldoon until she thought she might cut her throat just to get away from that voice.
But that was awfully ungrateful. The woman was just trying to help her. She knew that. She should do something in return. Offer her something.
Rosemary’s phone number swam to the surface of her mind and waited for her to pick it up. And after a while she did, and the woman disappeared for the longest time ever.
Someone was shaking her awake. The first thing that hit her was the need, and she doubled over, beating her fist on the couch cushion because it wasn’t Ti Malice there but a slender Oriental man kneeling on the carpet next to her, smiling polite concern at her.
“This is the associate I was telling you about,” the woman said, pulling her to a sitting position. “Roll up your sleeve.”
“What? Why?” Jane looked around, but the room wouldn’t come clear yet. Her head felt heavy and thick.
“Just my way of saying thanks.”
“For what?” She felt her sleeve being pushed up and something cold and wet on the inside of her arm.
“For Rosemary’s phone number.”
“You called her?”
“Oh, no. You’re going to do that for me.” The woman tied a piece of rubber around Jane’s upper arm and pulled it tight. “And in return, you get a trip to heaven.”
The Oriental man held up a syringe and grinned as though he were a game show host showing off a prize. “But—”
The woman was shoving a cordless receiver into her hand. “You’d like to see her again, wouldn’t you?”
Jane let the phone drop to her lap and wiped her face tiredly. “I’m not so sure, really.”
“Then maybe you’d better get sure.” The woman’s voice hardened. Jane looked up at her in surprise. “I mean, I’m sure. I have a lot to talk about with Rosemary. The sooner you contact her, the sooner you go to heaven. You want to go to heaven, don’t you?”
“I don’t know if I can-I don’t know if she’ll even take my call—”
The woman leaned down and spoke directly into her face. “I don’t see where you’ve got a choice. You’re strung out and you’ve got nowhere to go. I can’t let you stay here indefinitely, you know. The company that owns this place might not want me to have a roommate. Of course, they’d feel differently if you did something for me.”
Jane drew back a little. “Who do you work for?”
“Don’t be so nosy. Just make the call. Get her to meet you here, if possible, anywhere else if necessary.”
She was about to say no when the craving gnawed at her again, shutting off the word in her throat. “This drug,” she said, looking at the syringe. “It’s-good?”
“The best.” The woman’s face was expressionless. “You want me to dial?”
“No,” she said, picking up the phone. “I’ll do it.”
The man put the point of the needle to the inside of her elbow and then held it there, waiting, still wearing his wide, game-show-host grin.
She could hardly keep her mind on Rosemary’s voice; there was no way she could keep her own voice steady. At first she tried to sound friendly, but Rosemary got it out of her that she was in trouble. The man and the woman didn’t seem to mind what she said, so she plunged on, begging Rosemary to come to her.
But maddeningly, Rosemary kept telling her she would send someone to pick her up, and she had to insist over and over that that wouldn’t do at all, she didn’t want anyone but Rosemary. Nobody else, especially no men. She would run away if she saw any men. This seemed to please the man and the woman a great deal.
And at last she got Rosemary’s consent and read the address to her off a card the woman held in front of her. Rosemary hesitated, but she pleaded again, and Rosemary gave in. But not there, not at that address. Someplace out in the open. Sheridan Square. A glance told Jane that would be fine with her new friends, and she told Rosemary she would be there.
“Once a social worker, always a social worker,” the woman said, hanging up the phone. She nodded at the man. “Give it to her.”
“Wait,” Jane said weakly. “How can I get there if—”
“Don’t worry about a thing,” said the woman. “You’ll be there.”
The needle went in and the lights went out.
The lights came up dimly and she saw she was leaning against the side of a building. It was the Ridiculous Theatre Company, and she was waiting to get in to see a play. Late performance, very late, but she didn’t care. She loved the Ridiculous Theatre Company best and she’d been to lots of theatres, the small ones in Soho and the Village and the Jokertown Playhouse, which had closed down shortly before she’d gone to work for Rosemary ...
Rosemary. There was something she had to remember about Rosemary. Rosemary had betrayed her trust. But perhaps that was only fair, since she was such a great disappointment to Hiram.
It hit her so powerfully she thought it had to knock her down, but her body didn’t move. Warm maple syrup was running through her veins. But underneath the warmth and the ianguor the void remained, wide open, eating away at her, and whatever this lassitude was only made it possible for the wanting to crunch at her bones without a struggle. Her stomach did a slow forward roll and her head began to pound.
A shadow by her feet chittered softly. She looked down. A squirrel was staring up at her as if it were actually considering her in some way. Squirrels were just rats with fancier tails, she remembered uneasily, and tried to edge away from it, but her body still wasn’t moving. Another squirrel chittered somewhere above her head, and something else ran past, almost brushing her legs.
When was the theatre going to open so she could get away from all this vermin? Sheridan Square had gotten really bad since she’d last been there, to see the late Charles Ludlam in a revival of Bluebeard. Charles Ludlam-she’d loved him, too, and it had been so unfair that he’d had to die of AIDS ....
She sighed and a voice said, “Jane?”
Rosemary’s voice. She perked up. Had she been going to the theatre with Rosemary? Or was this just a happy coincidence? No matter, she’d be so happy to see her.
She tried to look around. It was so dark. Was there really a performance this late? And the squirrels, cbittering and chittering to the point of madness-it would have been exquisite with Ti Malice, but by herself it was only excruciating.
A thin flashlight beam cut through the darkness and she winced.
“Jane?” Rosemary asked again. She was closer now. “Jane, you look awful. What happened? Did someone—”
There was the sound of claws scratching on the side of the building. Jane turned in the direction of the sound and saw Rosemary standing a few yards away. The dim illumination from the streetlamps made her little more than a detailed silhouette. Funny, Jane thought suddenly, that the theatre had no outside security lights to discourage burglars or vandals. A darker shadow was flowing back and forth around Rosemary’s ankles; it eventually resolved itself into a cat. Rosemary looked down at the cat and then up at Jane again.
“What kind of trouble are you in, Jane?” she asked, and her voice had a slight edge to it.
“The worst,” said a man’s voice. “Just like you, Miss Muldoon.”
Jane shook her head, trying to clear it. Something was coming back to her, something about an Oriental woman who was not Kim Toy, and a man with a needle, and dialing the telephone ...
A larger shadow swept up behind Rosemary, and suddenly she was standing with an arm around her throat and the barrel of a gun jammed up against the side of her face.
“It is appropriate we meet in the shadows,” a man’s voice said. Rosemary stood perfectly still, staring past Jane. Jane followed her gaze and saw the other man leaning casually at the opposite end of the building with his own pistol up and ready. Jane felt herself starting to nod out and forced herself to hold her head up. Her face felt itchy and uncomfortable and the craving for Ti Malice burst on her with a strength that made her want to double over. But her body could manage no more than a mild spasm. They lied, she thought miserably. The woman and her friend lied. How can people lie so easily?
There were more people, more men, melting out of the darkness to surround her and Rosemary. Even through the soupy fog that was her mind, Jane could sense the weapons and the malignant intent. The woman who had taken her home had been no friend of Rosemary’s, or hers, either. But it was a little late for clever deductions.
“Aren’t junkies funny, Ms. Muldoon?” said the man holding Rosemary. “That one sold you out for a mere dime of garden-variety heroin.”
No, no, it isn’t true! she wanted to scream, but her voice was stuck in the craving. Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness now, and she could see that Rosemary was staring at her with a stricken expression.
“Jane,” she said, “if there’s anything left of the person you used to be, you could turn this around—”
“N-not ... junkie,” Jane said heavily. Her eyes began to roll up.
“Hopheads don’t make great aces,” the man said with a laugh. “She’s not about to—” There was the sound of wings and something whirred out of the night, fluttering and flapping directly onto his head.
“Hey!” he yelled, letting go of Rosemary, who pushed away from him. She tripped and went down on her hands and knees just as several other things raced past Jane, parted themselves fluidly around Rosemary, and launched themselves at the men.
“Bagabond—” Rosemary said breathlessly, and then there was an explosion of angry cries and wails, both human and not. The man who had been standing so insouciantly at the other end of the building was now batting at a pigeon flapping around his head while he tried to kick something loose from his pant leg. Rat, Jane realized dully. She had never seen a rat so bold.
Rosemary had gotten to her feet and was backing away from the embattled group of men. More shapes of various sizes were streaking out of the night to throw themselves onto the men, hissing, screeching, howling with unmistakable anger. Someone tore himself loose from the group and ran past Rosemary and Jane, screaming as he tried to shake the rat off his arm and pull the squirrel away from his neck. Something clattered at Jane’s feet, and she looked down at it: a gun.
Her legs gave out and she slid down the building onto her knees. She picked the gun up and stared at it for a moment. Then Rosemary was shaking her.
“Come on,” she said, pulling Jane to her feet and forcing her to run along the walk in front of the theatre, out to the sidewalk on the other side of Sheridan Square.
Several large stray dogs were waiting for them in a strange, loose formation. Jane blinked at them groggily, barely aware of Rosemary’s arms around her. After a moment the dogs broke and ran back the way she and Rosemary had come. The shouts of the men turned to screams over the sounds of growling and baying.
Jane staggered along the street, still in Rosemary’s grasp. “Goddamn you, run,” Rosemary said close to her ear. On the edge of consciousness, she stumbled along until the awful noise began to fade behind them. The absence of Ti Malice was gaining on her again, countering the drug in her system, making each step more painful than the last as it brought her back into full awareness.
She gave Rosemary a mighty shove and broke away from her, staggering up .against a lightpole. Catching herself, she looked around; the streets were deserted except for the two of them.
“Jane,” Rosemary said tensely. “I’ll take you somewhere you’ll be safe. And then you can explain—”
“Stay away from me!” she shouted, raising her hand. Rosemary backed off quickly and she saw why; she still had the gun and she was pointing it at the other woman. Her first impulse was to toss it away and tell Rosemary she meant her no harm, she’d been tricked and she hadn’t even realized she’d been holding a gun. But it didn’t matter whether she meant Rosemary any harm or not-anyone around her would be in terrible danger for as long as she lived.
“You get out of here, Rosemary,” she said shakily, keeping the gun on her. “You go someplace you’ll be safe, and you thank God there still is such a place for you. Because there’s no place Like that for me anymore!”
Rosemary opened her mouth to say something, and Jane thrust her gun hand forward.
“Go on!”
Rosemary backed away a few steps, then turned and broke into a run.
Still hanging on the lamppost as if she were some kind of comical, innocent drunk, Jane studied the gun in her hand. She didn’t know anything about guns except for what was generally known. But that would be enough.
You just put it in your mouth. Aim the barrel toward the top of your head and count to three and you’ll be free. Nothing could be easier.
Her hand turned very slowly, as if there was still some reluctance somewhere in her.
Unless, of course, you want to walk around like this for the next forty or so years. The craving flared in her and her hand moved quickly. Barrel in the mouth. Just turn it around so the trigger faces the sky. The metal tasted sour and made her lower teeth ache. She swallowed openmouthed and took a firmer grip on the gun.
Count to three and you’ll be free. She remembered how it felt the first time Ti Malice had climbed onto her back, the way his small hands had touched her, eager, greedy, confident. She must have looked at Hiram the way Rosemary had been looking at her. (A spasm of shuddering swept over her, the strange, physical sickness she’d been feeling, but she managed to keep the gun in place.)
Count to three and you’ll be free. She remembered the feel of Ezili’s skin and the taste of her. Ezili would have enjoyed the sight of her standing on a deserted street with a gun in her mouth. (Now there was a prickly sensation crawling over her shoulders and down her arms, her torso, her legs, as though a small fire had broken out in her skin.)
Count to three and you’ll be free. She remembered Croyd; she remembered walking with Sal only to have him turn into a man with a mouse’s head. It was Sal she was a great disappointment to, not Hiram Worchester. Sal had believed in what she was. Hiram had never really known her. (Her flesh began to simmer.)
Count to three and you’ll be free. She remembered that none of it would matter if someone would bring Ti Malice to her right now, right this very second, and set him on her shoulders. She would toss the gun away and welcome his blissful presence inside of her, and he would make all of it unimportant in the universe of pleasure that he could pour into the void widening in her even as she stood there, feeling the hardness of the pistol against the roof of her mouth. (She was broiling alive now.)
Count to three and you’ll be free. A small movement caught her eye; on the curb a squirrel was staring up at her with bright, curious little eyes. She swallowed openmouthed again and counted without hurrying.
One. Two. Three.
Her fingers squeezed the trigger. Absurdly, Sal’s voice spoke in her mind. Hey, cara mia, now what the hell you doin’?
In the total silence of the street the click was deafening.
Misfire.
She sank down to the pavement, and the warm dark tide of the fever covered her over.
She was in a soft realm of many colors. They came and went, conversing in human voices, sometimes speaking directly to her. She couldn’t answer; this wasn’t her realm, she was just waiting here. Besides, they said such funny things. Things like, The coma is unmistakable, it doesn’t happen that way to all of them, but when it does, we know what it is, and Why don’t we just put her in a bathtub and be done with it. The way the water’s pouring off her, her skin will rot before she has a chance to die, and oddest of all, Jane, why couldn’t I have helped. I should not have let my fatigue cause me to fail you. That was the brightest color, an extraordinary shade of red, sometimes with bright yellow accents.
A little later all the colors went away (Unplug the machines and get them out of here, she’s not going to wake up), and there was only peace for a while. Then, somewhere far away, a phone rang. It’s for you, someone said, and she imagined that meant her.
Jane. It’s time.
She roused to a strange, soft awareness that reminded her of a lucid dream. The voice that had spoken sounded familiar. That you, Sal? I’ve been looking all over for you. Where are you?
Never mind that now. It’s time. Time for what, Sal?
Time for you to get up. There’s something very important you have to do. Come on now, open your eyes and get out of bed.
She sat up, looking around. Tachyon’s clinic; how had she ended up back here? she wondered.
Don’t worry about that. You have to hurry. All right, Sal.
She slipped out of bed and padded across the room to the door barefoot. Just at the doorway she turned to look back at the bed. There was a pale shape on the mattress, slowly fading away like trick photography.
Was that me, Sal?
It was you. It isn’t you anymore. Go down the hall. Quickly now, there’s no time to lose.
She seemed to float down the hall, her bare toes just a few inches above the cold floor. It was a great way to travel, she thought. Being dead had a lot to recommend it in the comfort department.
You’re not dead.
She accepted that with equanimity. It didn’t seem to be worth arguing about.
This door. On your right. Go into that room.
She wafted into the room and hovered next to one of the two beds, looking down at the occupant. Once she might have found his appearance frightening and pitiable. Now she looked down at him with complete and rational calm, taking in the sight of the enormous head on the pillow, cratered like the moon, except each crater was filled with an eye, most of them open. They watched her just as calmly, or so it seemed.
A small hole near one of the craters opened, and she heard a whistle of breath. “Who are you? Are you a doctor?” Listen very carefully, because I have to leave now and you must remember this.
She felt a small pang of fear. Leaving me again? Do you have to?
Yes. But I am leaving you with a gift. It’s a very important gift. It’s a gift that Croyd gave you.
What is it? You’ll find out.
Something in the soft air around her changed, and she knew she was alone with the joker.
Acting without her volition, her hand pulled the sheet back, exposing the rest of the joker’s body, which was cratered with more eyes, almost all over. They seemed to be forming as she watched. She would have to work fast so as not to hurt him.
She climbed onto the mattress next to him and smiled. One area, fortunately, had been spared so far, and it was there that she began, moving with gentleness.
“Lady, what the hell are you doing?”
She couldn’t answer him, but it wasn’t necessary. Certainly he could see very well what she was doing.
“Hammond. Hey, Hammond! Wake up! Tell me this isn’t a dream!”
She ignored the sounds from the next bed, ignored everything except the task at hand, except task was entirely the wrong word for it. Loving someone was not a task. Loving someone could perform miracles.
She felt his hands moving carefully on her, felt him quiver with pain. The eyes. How they all must hurt when anything touches him, she thought, and wondered who had been so thoughtless as to cover him with a sheet. Perhaps they’d just been waiting for him to die; this was the terminal ward, after all.
“Don’t worry,” she told him. “I’ll do it all.”
“Do anything you like!” he said, and groaned with enjoyment as he felt her enfold him.
It was different when it was love, she thought happily. When it was love, there was no pain, no shame; of course. When it was love, you wanted to heal the other person of all hurts. And when it was love, that was really possible.
She smoothed her hands over his chest and laid her head down on it to listen to his heartbeat. His arms went around her, and she could feel the new strength in them as they rocked together. Next to this, Ti Malice was a sad, sorry imitation of a kiss.
And with that thought, she realized that the terrible void within her had vanished and she was free. She rose up and gave a shout of joy.
A roomful of voices answered her.
It was like a switch being thrown-suddenly she was awake, really awake, and she realized she was straddling a man in a hospital bed, a perfectly normal man with two, only two, green eyes, and sandy hair, who was looking up at her with a beatific smile on his young, plain face.
“Lady,” he said, “this is what I call medication!”
She twisted around and saw that the room behind her was filled with jokers of every variety, and among them, forcibly restrained, were two nurses and a doctor.
They broke loose from their captors and rushed the bed, pulling her off and examining the man.
“I saw it, but I don’t believe it!”
“Right before my very eyes—”
“I thought this one was already dead—”
“Who are you? What room are you in?”
She backed away from their questions, into the waiting arms of the jokers. A misshapen man whose features had been scrambled thrust his distorted face into hers and demanded, “Can I be next?”
“No, me!” shouted someone else, and then hands were grabbing at her, pulling her every which way, trying to throw her down on the floor.
“SAL!” she screamed.
The room was suddenly filled with fog, and then a wall of water crashed through the door, slapping them all down. Jane let it carry her across the room, onto the ex joker’s bed. She rolled into the headboard and slipped down to the floor. More fog poured into the room as she crawled around the confused, shouting, drenched mob splashing about in the ankle-deep water, and she fled through the open doorway.
By the time the alarms went off, she had already left the building.
The luncheonette was a far cry from Aces High, and the clientele didn’t tip nearly as well, but they didn’t expect a whole lot. Most of them hardly looked at her-a waitress with a short, punkish haircut and an ill-fitting, baggy white uniform wasn’t especially noteworthy in that part of town. The owner was a big motherly woman named Giselle who called her Lamb and asked nothing more of her help than their being on time and trying to remember any good jokes they overheard from the customers. Giselle collected jokes, and the regulars were always happy to supply them.
Like the two-headed man who came in every Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday morning for a bacon-and-egg sandwich. He/they always had a new one to offer.
“Hey, have you heard the latest?” he/they said as she was setting the dish down in front of him/them. “There’s good news and there’s better news.”
She smiled at each head politely. The two-headed man was one/two of the better tippers.
“The good news is, there’s this woman that can turn you back into a nat by screwing you!”
Her smile froze, but he/they didn’t seem to notice. “You know what the better news is?”
She shook her head, unable to speak.
“She’s really good-looking!” Both heads roared with laughter, accidently bonking into each other. She tried to laugh with them, but she couldn’t manage even a mild ha-ha-ha.
The heads sobered and looked up at her, slightly disappointed in her lack of reaction. “Hey, we guess you gotta be a joker—”
“—to really appreciate it,” finished the other head, and giggled a little more.
“It’s-it’s very good, really,” she said in a too-cheery voice. “I’ll have to remember to tell it to Giselle when she comes in. I don’t think she’s heard it yet.”
“Well, don’t forget—”
“—to tell her where—”
“—you heard it first!”
“I won’t,” she said, still smiling her frozen smile at each head. “I won’t forget. I promise.”
It was unseasonably hot for May, a fast preview of deep summer, and the children gathered at the fire hydrant made a timeless scene. The only thing missing was expertise-no one knew how to release the water from the hydrant. Never mind that such a thing would result in a precipitous drop in the local water pressure, seriously impairing fire fighting, which was why arsonists were always willing to accommodate a gaggle of sweaty kids on a hot day. But there was never an arsonist around when you needed one.
The man in the mom-and-pop convenience store was not watching the kids; he was watching the young woman with the shoulder-length auburn hair and the wide green eyes who was watching the kids. He’d been tracking her since she’d gotten off the bus three days before, usually from the shelter of one of his favorite tabloids, like the one he was holding now. The headline read: WOMAN TURNS INTO JOKER, EATS MATE ON WEDDING NIGHT!! Harry Matthias had always had a taste for the lurid.
The girl across the street, however, was anything but lurid. Girl suited her better than young woman, even though he was reasonably sure she was over twenty-one. Her heart shaped face was unmarked, unlined; unfinished. Unsophisticated, very attractive if you looked twice and he imagined most people did. You’d never think that she was anything other than one more innocent morsel throwing herself into the jaws of the big city. But Harry, more often referred to as Judas, knew differently. The Astronomer would reward him handsomely for this one.
Or rather, the Astronomer’s people would. The Astronomer himself didn’t bother with you, not if you were lucky, and Judas had been very lucky, almost too lucky to live. He’d gone from being a joker groupie, what they’d called a jokee (and laughing at him, too, when they said it) to being an ace himself. A very subtle ace, to be sure, but very useful with his ability to detect another ace and the power involved. His power had come out that night in that crazy cabaret, the jokers Wild. Saved his life; they’d been about to serve him up proper when the spore had turned and he’d exposed that shape-shifter woman. What changes they’d put her through, to coin a phrase. He didn’t like to think about it but better her than him. Better anyone than him, even the girl across the street, though it would have pained him; she was attractive. But he was only delivering her to the Masons, where she wouldn’t be wasted. What a talent she had; they’d probably pin a medal on him when he brought her in. Well, they’d pay him, anyway, enough to take the sting out of being called Judas. If he’d felt any sting, which he didn’t.
The girl smiled and he felt himself smiling in response. He could sense her power gathering itself. Absently, he tossed a few coins at the cashier for the tabloid and stepped out onto the sidewalk with the paper under his arm. Once again he found himself marveling; even though he knew it took a special power all its own to detect an ace, he was still amazed that people never knew when they stood before something greater than themselves, whether it was an ace, TIAMAT, or the One True God. He glanced at the sky. God was on coffee break and TIAMAT had yet to arrive; right now it was just him and the girl, and that was company enough.
He alone felt it when she let fly. The power surged out of her both like a wave and like a fusillade of particles. The magnitude was frightening. This was a power primeval, something that felt old in spite of the relative newness of the wild card virus, as though the virus had activated some ability native but dormant for centuries.
Could be, he thought suddenly-didn’t every primitive people have some kind of rite meant to call down the rain? Without warning, the fire hydrant popped and water gushed out onto the street. The kids waded in cheering and laughing, and she was enjoying them so much, she never noticed his approach.
“Police, miss. Come along quietly.” The complete surprise on her face as she stared at the badge he held under her nose made her seem younger still. “You didn’t really think you were going to get away with this, did you? And don’t play innocent-you’re not the only ace we’ve ever had in this town, you know.”
She nodded meekly and let him lead her away.
The Cloisters were completely wasted on her. She didn’t bother to look up at the soaring French Gothic architecture or even the ornately carved wooden door where he delivered her like so much goods into the waiting hands of Kim Toy O’Toole and Red. He resisted the urge to kiss her. For a guy named Judas, kissing would be pouring it on too thick. Hey, little girl; she hadn’t even noticed the absense of police uniforms.
Red had been mildly florid until the wild card virus had bitten him. Now he was completely red all over and hairless as well. He thought of it as a comparatively tolerable condition.
“Maybe I’ve got some red Indian in me,” he would say from time to time. He didn’t. His wife, Kim Toy, was the offspring of an Irish career Army man and the true love he had met while on R&R in Hong Kong. Sean O’Toole had been a Mason, but he would barely have recognized the organization his daughter had turned to after her own spore had bloomed and she had discovered that the combination of mental power and pheromones could dazzle men far more greatly than was usual for a reasonably attractive woman. Red hadn’t needed that kind of dazzling. Good thing; sometimes she couldn’t help making it fatal.
They took the fresh piece Judas had brought them and stuck her in one of the old downstairs offices where interrogations (interviews, Roman would always correct them) could take place in privacy. Then they sat down outside in the hall for an unscheduled break. Roman would be along at any moment, after which they would have to dispose of the girl however the Astronomer thought best.
“Little creep,” Red muttered, accepting an already-lit cigarette from Kim Toy. Little creep was a term that always referred to the Astronomer. “Sometimes I think we ought to stomp his ass and run.”
“He’s going to own the world,” Kim Toy said mildly. “And give us a piece. I think that’s worth keeping him around for.”
“He says he’s going to give us a piece. Like he was a feudal lord. But we’re not all samurai, wife o’ mine.”
“Neither am I. I’m Chinese, fool. Remember?” Kim Toy looked past her husband. “Here comes Roman. And Kafka.” She and Red sat up and tried to look impassive. Roman was one of the Astronomer’s high-level flunkies, someone who could visit those segments of society that would have been considered above most of the questionable types the Astronomer had recruited. His blond good looks and flawless grooming gave him entree almost anywhere. It was whispered that he was one of the rare ‘reverse jokers,’ someone the spore had made over from a hideously deformed wreck into his present state of masculine beauty. Roman himself wasn’t saying.
Following along behind him was his antithesis, the one they called Kafka or the Roach (though not to his face), for he looked like nothing so much as a roach’s idea of a human. No one made fun of him, however; the Shakti device that the Astronomer had said would be their salvation was mostly Kafka’s doing. He’d figured out the alien instrument that had been in the Masons’ custody for centuries and he had singlehandedly designed and constructed the machine that completed its power. Nobody bothered him; nobody wanted to.
Roman gave Red and Kim Toy a minuscule nod as he headed for the office door and then stopped abruptly, almost causing Kafka to bump into him. Kafka leaped back, clutching his skinny arms to himself, panicked at the prospect of any contact with someone who washed less than twelve or thirteen times a day.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Roman’s smile was flat.
Kafka took a brave step forward. “We’ve found six aliens passing as humans in the last three weeks. I just want to make sure she’s human.”
“You want to make sure she’s human.” Roman gave him an up-and-down. “Judas brought her in. The ones Judas brings us are always human. And the Astronomer doesn’t want us scaring off the good one§, which is why I interview them when they first get here. You’ll pardon me for saying so, Kafka old thing, but I don’t think your appearance will be any too reassuring. “
Kafka’s exoskeleton rasped as he turned away and went back down the hall. Kim Toy and Red watched him go, neither of them caring to break the silence by so much as letting out a breath.
“He was watching the monitors when she came in,” Roman said, straightening his expensive, tasteful tweed jacket. “Pity. I mean, the man obviously wouldn’t mind getting next to such a nice female but the way he is .”
“How’s your wife, Roman?” Red asked suddenly. Roman froze in the middle of brushing an imaginary piece of lint off his sleeve. There was a long pause. One of the incongruous overhead fluorescents began to hum.
“Fine,” Roman said at last, slowly lowering his arm. “I’ll tell her you asked after her.”
Kim Toy elbowed her husband in the ribs as Roman went into the office. “What the hell did you have to do that for? What was the point?”
Red shrugged. “Roman’s a bastard.”
“Kafka’s a bastard! They’re all bastards! And you’re a fool. Next time you want to hit that man, get up and break his nose. Ellie Roman never did anything to you.”
“First you’re telling me how you want to own the worldexcuse me, a piece of it-and then you’re chewing me out for throwing Roman’s wife up to him. Wife o’ mine, you’re a real Chinese puzzle sometimes.”
Kim Toy frowned up at the buzzing light, which was now flickering as well. “It’s a Chinese-puzzle world, husband o’ mine.”
Red groaned. “Samurai bullshit.”
“State your name, please. In full.”
He was arguably the best-looking man she had ever met in person. “Jane Lillian Dow,” she said. 3n the big cities, they had everything, including handsome men to interrogate you. I heart New York, she thought, and suppressed the hysteria that wanted to come bubbling up as laughter.
“And how old are you, Ms. Dow?”
“Twenty-one. Born April first, 19—”
“I can subtract, thank you. Where were you born?” She was terrified. What would Sal have thought? Oh, Sal, I wish you could save me now. It was more a prayer than a thought, cast out into the void with the dim hope that perhaps the wild card virus could have affected the afterlife as well as this one and the late Salvatore Carbone might come trucking back from the hereafter like ectoplasmic cavalry. So far, reality still wasn’t taking requests.
She answered all the man’s questions. The office was not especially furnished-bare walls, a few chairs, and the desk with the computer terminal. The man had her records in under a minute, checking the facts against her answers. He had access to her whole life with that computer, one reason why she’d been so reluctant to register with the police after her wild card spore had turned itself out in high school five years before. The law had been enacted in her hometown long before she’d been born, and never taken off the books when the political climate had changed somewhat. But, then, not much had changed in the small Massachusetts town where she’d grown up. “I’ll be licensed and numbered like a dog,” she’d said to Sal. “Maybe even taken to the pound and gassed like a dog, too.” Sal had talked her into complying, saying she’d draw less attention to herself if she obeyed their laws. When they could account for you, they left you alone. “Yeah,” she’d said. “I’d noticed how well that kind of thing worked in Nazi Germany.” Sal had just shaken his head and promised that things would work out.
But what about this, Sal? They’re not leaving me alone, it’s not working out. New York was the last place she had expected to be picked up by the police as an ace and, when a break came in the questioning, she said so.
“But we’re not the police,” the handsome man told her pleasantly, making her heart sink even lower.
“Y you’re not? But that guy showed me a badge ...”
“Who did? Oh, him.” The man-he’d told her to call him Roman-chuckled. “Judas is a cop. But I’m not. And this is hardly a police station. Couldn’t you tell?”
Jane scowled into his slightly incredulous smile. “I’m not from here. And I saw what happened a few months ago on the news. I figured after that the police would just set up anywhere they needed to or had to.” She looked down at her lap where her hands were twisting together like two separate creatures in silent combat. “I wouldn’t have told you about Sal if I’d known you weren’t the police.”
“What difference does that make, Ms. Dow? Or can I call you Jane, since you don’t like to be called Water Lily?”
“Do what you want,” she said unhappily. “You will anyway. “
He surprised her by getting up and telling the people in the hall to bring in some coffee and something to eat. “It occurs to me we’ve kept you here far too long without refreshment.”
“The police wouldn’t do that for you, Jane. At least, not the New York City police.”
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Sure. Then, I guess I’ll have some coffee and be on my way.”
The man never stopped smiling. “Where have you got to go?”
“I came here-here to New York, I mean-looking for Jumpin’ Jack Flash. I saw him on the news ...”
“Forget it.” The smile was still there but the eyes were cold. “You can’t do anything for each other.”
“But “
“I said, forget it.”
She looked down at her lap again.
“Come on, Jane.” His voice softened. “I’m just trying to protect you. You need it. I can just imagine what a hot dog like that would do to an innocent little morsel like yourself. Whereas the Astronomer has a use for you.”
She lifted her head again. “A use?”
“A use for your power, I should have said. Forgive me.” Jane’s laugh was brief and bitter. “A use for my power is a use for me. Maybe I am innocent next to you but I’m not stupid. Sal used to warn me about that.”
“Yes, but Sal wasn’t an ace, was he? He was just a pathetic little swish, one of that very early kind of joker we’ve always had in the world. One of nature’s mistakes.”
“Don’t you talk that way about him!” she flared, moisture suddenly beading on her face and running down her arms and legs. The man stared at her wonderingly.
“Are you doing that on purpose? Or is it just a stress reaction?”
Before she could answer, the red man and the Oriental woman came in with a platter of small, neatly made sandwiches. Jane subsided and watched as the couple laid everything out on the desk, even pouring the coffee.
“Fresh from the Cloisters’ own kitchens,” Roman said, gesturing at the platter. “An ace has to keep her strength up.”
“No, thanks.”
He jerked his head at the couple, who took positions on either side of the door. More water ran down Jane’s face and dripped from the ends of her hair. Her clothes were becoming saturated.
“It’s water pulled out of the air around me,” she said to Roman, who was beginning to look alarmed. “It happens sometimes when I’m under pressure or-or whatever.”
“Fight or flight,” he said. “Adrenaline produces sweat to make you more slippery, harder to hold onto. Probably the same principle at work.”
She looked at him with new respect. Even Sal hadn’t thought of that and he’d been pretty smart, coming up with all those experiments to test the depth and range of her power. It was only because of Sal that she knew her power was effective on things no more than half a mile away from her. He had also figured out that she could cause atoms to combine to make water as well as call already-existing water out of things, and he’d been the one to calculate it would take her forty-eight hours to recharge after exhausting the power, and coached her on how to stretch her energy out so she wouldn’t spend herself all at once. “No good being completely defenseless,” he’d said. “Don’t ever let it happen.” And since that one time back home in Massachusetts, she hadn’t and never would again. Sal had watched over her for those two days when she’d been half afraid and half hopeful that the power was gone for good. But Sal had been right about its return; she’d been prepared to hand herself over to him completely.
He’d refused her. Once again, she’d offered herself and he’d turned her down. He couldn’t be her lover, he’d said, and he wouldn’t be her father. She would have to be responsible for herself, just like anyone else. And then, as though to drive the point home, he’d gone back to his apartment and drowned in the bathtub.
Like some sadist’s idea of the cruelest joke in the world. Sal Carbone, her one real friend, had fallen and struck his head and breathed soapy water till he died. Only five weeks ago.
“Sal, you’re my soulmate,” she’d told him over and over, and he’d allowed it was true. They had a rare friendship, a meeting of minds, hearts, and spirits. Perfect for each other except for the fact that he’d been gay. The second-cruelest joke in the world.
“Water Lily.”
The name snapped her back to the present. “I told you not to call me that. Only Sal called me Water Lily.”
“Sal’s exclusive option expired with him.” The man suddenly softened again. “Never mind, dear. Tell me, just how how much do you know about what’s been happening over the last few months?”
“As much as anybody else.” She reached forward shyly and picked up the cup of coffee nearest her. “I watch the news. I guess I mentioned that.”
“Well, it isn’t over. In the next month, this town-this country, the entire world-will see something that made what happened a few months ago look like a Bible-class picnic. Only the people we recruit stand a chance of ending up on the right side of the graveyard.”
More water appeared on her face. “If you’re not the police, who are you?”
The man smiled approvingly as she sipped at her coffee. “What do you know about the Masons, Jane?”
“Masons? Masons?” In spite of everything, she burst into laughter. “My father’s a Mason!” She forced her giggles to subside before they became hysterics. “What do Masons have to do with anything?”
“Scottish rite.”
“Pardon?” Jane’s laughter wound down and faded away. The flat cold quality was back in the man’s smile.
“Your father’s affiliation was probably Scottish-rite. We’re Egyptian. Egyptian is quite different.”
Her giggles threatened to come back. “That’s funny, you don’t look Egyptian.”
“Don’t get nervy, it doesn’t become you.”
She glanced at the man and woman by the door. “You’re the one who knows everything. I just got here.” More moisture sprang out on her face and ran down her neck. “And I can’t leave, can I?”
“We need you, Jane.” He sounded almost kind now. She pulled a napkin off the desk and blotted her face with it. “We need you very badly. Your power could make all the difference.”
“My power,” she echoed thoughtfully, remembering the boy in the cafeteria five years before, tears pouring from his eyes while he screamed. He hadn’t cried a bit at the news of Debbie’s suicide (exsanguination from self-inflicted lacerations-medicalese for she slashed her wrists and bled to death-and, oh, yes, victim had been thirteen weeks pregnant). She’d always wondered what Debbie would have thought about what she’d done to her faithless boyfriend. Debbie had been her best friend before Sal but she never prayed to Debbie the way she prayed to Sal, as though Debbie belonged to some other universe. Maybe that was so. And maybe there was still another universe where Debbie hadn’t taken her own life when the father of her baby had rejected her, and so no need for Jane to have forced the tears out of the boy’s eyes, no wild card virus to have shown itself. And then maybe there was even another universe where Sal hadn’t had to drown in his own bathtub, leaving her alone and so in need of someone, anyone, to trust. Maybe ...
She looked at the man sitting in front of her. Maybe if pigs had wings, they could soar like eagles. “We need you,” he’d said. Whoever we were. Egyptian Masons, whatever. How good it would be to give herself over to someone’s care and know that she’d be looked after and protected.
Can you understand that, Sal? she thought at the great void. Can you understand what it’s like to be completely alone with a power too big for you? They need me, Sal, that’s what they say. I don’t like them-and you’d hate them-but they’ll look after me and I need someone to do that right now. I’m all alone, Sal, no matter where I am, and I’ve come here by lost ways and there’s nowhere else to go. You know, Sal?
There was no answer from the great void. She found herself nodding at the handsome man. “All right. I’ll stay. I mean, I know you won’t let me go but I’ll stay willingly.”
His answering smile almost soothed her heart. “We understand the difference. Red and Kim Toy will take you to your room “ He stood up and reached across the desk to take her hand. “Welcome, Jane. You’re one of us now.”
She drew back, putting both hands up as though she were at gunpoint. “No, I’m not,” she said firmly. “I’m staying here of my own will but that’s all. I’m not one of you.”
That frightening coldness returned to his eyes. He let his hand drop. “All right. You’re staying but you’re not one of us. We understand the difference there, too.”
The room they gave her was the corner of some larger area of dismal, cold stone converted into a warren of smaller rooms with prefab, plasterboard walls. Thoughtfully, they fetched her few worldly goods from the tiny efficiency she’d rented and, also thoughtfully, they provided her with a television as well as a bed. She watched the news, looking for more footage of Jumpin’ Jack Flash. Otherwise, she occupied herself by producing small droplets of water from her fingertips and watching them distend and fall.
“Is she pretty?” asked the Astronomer, sitting in his wheelchair by the tomb of Jean d’Alluye. There was still some blood on the stone figure; the Astronomer had lately felt the need to recharge his power.
“Quite pretty.” Roman took a perfunctory sip from the glass of wine and set it aside on the preacher’s table nearby. The Astronomer was always offering him things-booze, drugs, women. He would take a taste out of courtesy and then set whatever it was aside. Exactly how much longer the Astronomer would allow that to go on was anyone’s guess. Sooner or later he was bound to make some bizarre demand involving Roman’s debasement. No one came out of association with the Astronomer unscathed. Roman’s attention wandered to a shadowy area under a brick arch where the skinny blasted ruin called Demise slouched brooding, his bottomless gaze fixed on something no one else could see. In another part of the room, near one of the lantern poles, Kafka was rustling impatiently. He couldn’t help rustling with that damned exoskeleton. It sounded like a multitude of cockroaches going wingcase to wingcase. Roman didn’t bother trying to hide his disgust at Kafka’s appearance. And Demise-well, he was beyond disgusting. Sometimes Roman thought that even the Astronomer was ginger about Demise. But both Demise and Kafka had been through their allotted humiliations courtesy of the wild card virus, while he could only wait and see what the Astronomer had in mind for him. He hoped there’d be enough time to know which way to jump. And then there was Ellie .... The thought of his wife was a fist in his stomach. No, please, no more for Ellie. He looked at the glass of wine and refused for the millionth time to succumb to the desire for anesthesia. If I go down-no, when I go down, I will go down in full possession of my faculties ...
The Astronomer laughed suddenly. “Melodrama becomes you, Roman. It’s your good looks. I could see you in some other life rescuing widows and orphans from blizzards.” The laughter faded, leaving a malicious smile. “Watch yourself around that girl. You could end up a little prematurely as the dust we all are.”
“I could.” Roman’s gaze went to the upper gallery. The Italian wood sculptures were gone now; he couldn’t remember what they’d looked like. “But I won’t.”
“And what makes you so sure?”
“She’s a white-hat. A good guy. She’s a twenty-one-yearold innocent, she doesn’t have murder in her soul.” Belatedly, he looked at Demise, who was staring at him the way you never wanted Demise to stare at you.
Roman braced himself against a broken-off pedestal. It would be horrible but it wouldn’t last long, not really. The eternity of a few seconds. At least it would put him beyond the Astronomer’s reach for all time. But it also meant he wouldn’t be able to help Ellie, either. I’m sorry, darling, he thought, and waited for the darkness.
A quarter of a second later, the Astronomer lifted one finger. Demise sank back into himself and resumed staring at nothing. Roman forced himself not to sigh.
“Twenty-one,” mused the Astronomer, as though one of his people had not just narrowly escaped being killed by his pet murder machine. “Such a fine age. Plenty of life and strength. Not the most level-headed age. An impulsive age. You’re sure you’re not just a little bit afraid of her impulses, Roman?”
Roman couldn’t resist sneaking a glance at Demise, who was no longer paying any attention. “ I don’t mind staking my life on someone whose heart is in the right place.”
“Your life.” The Astronomer chuckled. “How about something of value?”
Roman allowed himself an answering smile. “Excuse me, sir, but if my life didn’t have some value to you, you’d have let Demise do me a long time ago.”
The Astronomer burst into surprisingly hearty laughter. “Brains and good looks. They’re what make you so damned useful to all of us. Must be what attracted your wife to you. You think?”
Roman kept smiling. “Very likely.”
Her dreams were full of strange pictures, things she’d never seen before. They troubled her sleep, passing through her head with an urgency that felt directed and reminded her of Roman’s impassioned pleas for her to join them. Whoever they were. Egyptian Masons. Her dreams told her all about them. And the Astronomer.
The Astronomer. A little man, shorter than she was, bone thin, head too large. What Sal would have called bad-ass eyes while making that sign with his hand, the index and little fingers thrust out like horns, the middle two curled over his palm, some kind of Italian thing. Sal’s face floated through her dreams briefly and was swept away.
She saw the entrance of some kind of church-no, a temple, definitely not a church. She saw it .but she wasn’t there, couldn’t have been there; this was a time before she’d been born. Her disembodied presence scanned a nighttime street and then floated up the temple steps past the man on the door who seemed to be frozen. She had a glimpse of a great room aglow with candles, two columns, and a man on a platform, wearing’some kind of gaudy red and white thing over his front, just before the screams began.
Not just screams but screams, SCREAMS, ripped from the throat of a soul gone forfeit. The sound stabbed into her. There was time for her point of view to swing around cameralike so she could see it was the little man screaming, the Astronomer, staggering into the hall. Then there was a fast jumble of pictures, a jackal face, a hawk’s head, another man, his wide face pale; light glinting off the little man’s glasses and then some kind of a thing, a creature-thing-slime-massdamned-thing-thing-thing.
She found herself sitting up in bed, her arms thrown up in front of her face.
“TIAMAT.” Unbidden, the word came to her, and unwanted it hung there in the darkness. She rubbed her face with both hands and lay down again.
The dream returned immediately, dragging her under with horrible strength. The little man with the enormous head was smiling at her-no, not at her, she wasn’t there and she was glad; she didn’t ever want anyone to smile at her that way. Her point of view drew back and she saw that he was now standing on the platform, and around him she saw several figures-Roman, the red man, and the oriental woman, a thin wreck of a man with the feel of death about him, a woman with regret so etched into her features that it hurt to look at her (somehow she knew the woman was a nurse), a young albino man with a prematurely old face, a creature male, she thought-that might have been an anthropomorphic cockroach. There but for the grace of God, she thought.
God is still out on coffee break, little girl. She was looking into the face of the man who had brought her here, the one they called Judas. He was the only one who could see her. It’s just the luck of the draw, babe, and you were lucky. And so was I. Blackjack!
Everything went dark. There was a sensation of incredibly fast movement. Something was propelling her toward a tiny point of light far ahead in the blackness.
And then suddenly she was there; the light swelled from a pinpoint to a fiery mass and she hit going full-out at the speed of thought. The light shattered and she was tumbling softly on the mossy floor of a forest. She rolled over once and came to rest gently at the base of a large tree.
Well, she thought, this is more like it. I must have missed the White Rabbit, but the Mad Hatter ought to be around here somewhere. She shifted position and found she had to grab hold of a large root to keep from floating away.
Look, whispered a voice very close to her ear. She turned her head, her hair floating around her as though she were underwater, but she saw no one. Look. Look! Look and you’ll see them!
A puff of mist blew between two larches in front of her and disintegrated, leaving behind a man dressed in the height of eighteenth-century finery. His face was aristocratic, his eyes so piercing that she caught her breath as his gaze rested on her. But she had nothing to fear. He turned; the air beside him shimmered and a strange machine melted into existence. She blinked several times, trying to see it clearly, but the angles refused to resolve themselves. Try as she would, she couldn’t tell whether it was large and sharp-cornered or small and molded, sculpted in marble or nailed together with wood and rags. Something glimmered and detached itself from the machine. She marveled; a part of it had just gotten up and walked away.
No. What she thought was part of the machine was a living being. She wanted to pull her gaze away just for a moment but she couldn’t. It wouldn’t let her. Alien. Reminiscent of certain other aliens she’d seen on the news in the attack. Jumpin’ Jack Flash. The thought was neatly shoved aside.
The alien turned to the man and stretched out an arm, or some appendage. Now it began to look more like living matter than part of a machine. The alien smoothed into something roughly bipedal though it seemed to be holding the form only by sheer will-the ergotic hypothesis (where had that come from?). The appendage touched the machine and melted into it. A moment later something protruded from the side near the man. He took hold of it and very carefully removed it. The alien sank a little, diminished. She realized it had expended a great deal of its life-force to give the man-what?
The man held the thing to his lips, his forehead, and then lifted it high overhead. Briefly, it took on the form of a human bone, a club, a gun, then something else.
Shakti, whispered the voice. Remember this. The Shakti device.
I’ll never forget it, she thought. The floating feeling was starting to leave her and she grew afraid.
Now, look. Look up.
Unwillingly, she raised her head and looked up at the sky. Her vision shot up, racing through the sunlight, through the blue, through clouds, until it left the Earth entirely and she was looking at the naked stars. The stars dispersed before her until she was staring into the blackness of space, and still her vision was traveling.
Something was there ahead of her, invisible in the blackness. Something ... it was so far away she could not begin to conceive of the distance. It was on its way to Earth. It had been this far away in 1777, when that man (Cagliostro, said her mind and she didn’t wonder how she knew) had accepted the thing-Shakti-from the alien and then-and then-went on to perform many feats seen as miraculous including mind reading, levitation, transubstantiation, amazing all those in the courts of Europe while passionately recruiting for the Egyptian Freemasons ..
She struggled to absorb the information pouring into her from the dream. Not that it mattered, because when she woke up she wouldn’t remember any of it. That was the way it was with dreams. Wasn’t it?
... because he wanted an organization that would keep the Shakti device safe and hand it down from generation to generation, to only the most trusted people, until its mysteries could be unlocked and completed, when it would be needed for the arrival on Earth of—
Something writhed in the darkness ahead of her. Or perhaps the darkness itself was writhing in agony at having to contain this thing, this—
for the arrival on Earth of—
It burst upon her without warning or mercy, far worse than it had been when she touched it in the Astronomer’s mind. It was the gathering, the congealing, of the highest, lowest, most developed, polished, and refined forms of evil in the universe, evil that made the greatest human atrocities seem petty by comparison, evil she could not understand except with her gut, evil that had been rushing toward this world for thousands of years, swallowing anything in its path, evil that would be arriving any day now, any day.
TIAMAT.
She woke up screaming. Hands were on her and she fought them, twisting, striking out. Water poured over her, thickening the air, soaking the bed and the rug.
“Sh, sh, it’s all right,” said a voice. Not the voice from her dream but a female voice. The oriental woman Kim Toy was there, trying to soothe her as though she were a delirious child. A light went on; Kim Toy enfolded her in a calming embrace. She let herself be held and willed the water flowing over both of them to stop.
“I’m okay,” she said when she could speak. Her wet hair dripped into her eyes, mixing with her tears. The whole bed was drenched, but she saw with a little relief that she had spared the rest of the room.
“You were screaming,” Kim Toy said. “I thought someone was killing you.”
TIAMAT “I had a nightmare.”
Kim Toy stroked her wet hair gently. “A nightmare?”
“I dreamt someone threw a bucket of worms in my face.”
The Astronomer roared with laughter. “Oh, she’s excellent, she really is excellent!”
The albino sitting on the floor next to the wheelchair looked up at him imploringly.
“Was it a good dream, then?”
“Oh, yes, the dream was excellent, too.” The Astronomer petted the white hair. “You did it just right, Revenant.” The man smiled, the prematurely aged skin around his pink eyes crinkling with pathetic joy.
“Roman.”
Across the shadowy room, Roman looked up from the computer display terminal.
“We’ll give her just a little more time for the horror to sink in before you introduce her to the rest of our little confederation. And keep Kim Toy mothering her.”
Roman nodded, glancing surreptitiously at the computer terminal.
“Tomorrow night again, Revenant,” the Astronomer said to the albino. “You’ll do it once more. I want her to wake up screaming for the next two nights.”
The pink eyes lowered with shame.
“Now, now. You know you’re better off than before, when you were selling perverts wet dreams at ten bucks a crack. If you’ll pardon the expression.” The Astronomer chuckled.
“You’re one of my most useful aces. Now, go get some rest yourself. “
As soon as the albino disappeared down a darkened gallery, the Astronomer sagged in his wheelchair. “Demise.” Demise was at his side instantly.
“Yes, Demise. We both need it now, don’t we? Call for the car. “
Roman remained at the computer terminal as Demise wheeled the Astronomer out. Going out to find some poor streetwalking scumbag who didn’t know this would be her last date. He refused to think about it. He would not feel sorry for any of them, he would not. All of them-Revenant, Kim Toy, Red, Judas, John F X. Black, Coleman Hubbard (oh, hadn’t that been a piece of work, the Astronomer’s big ace in the hole, one-zero-zero-one), even that little piece of innocence Jane Water Lily-they were all the same, every one of them. Pawns in the Astronomer’s game. Himself, too, but only for Ellie’s sake, to try to protect her.
ELLIE, he typed, the letters glowing on the monitor. I LOVE YOU.
The words I LOVE YOU, Too flashed briefly on the screen before they were replaced by INVALID ENTRY, NULL PROGRAM.
Somewhere else in town, Fortunato woke, shuddering, his face covered with cold sweat.
“Easy. Easy, baby.” Michelle’s voice was gentle, her hands soft and warm. “Michelle’s got you. I’m here, honey, I’m here.” Fortunato allowed her to gather him into her arms and press his face to her perfect breasts.
“It’s those dreams again, isn’t it? Don’t worry. I’m here.” He nuzzled her, stroking the warm flesh and willing her to sleep. Then he slipped out of her embrace and locked himself in the elegant bathroom.
Once you were in, you were in. What was learned could not be unlearned. Knowledge was power, and power could trap.
He would have to call Tachyon; better, go down to the Village and wake him up.
Eileen.
Fortunato clenched his eyes shut until the thought of her had passed. He should have let Tachyon give him something for that, some kind of forgetfulness drug so he wouldn’t keep stumbling over her in his mind, but somehow he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Because then she really would be gone. He splashed water on his face and paused in the act of blotting it with a towel, staring at himself in the mirror. For half a second, he had seen another face covered with water; young, female, wide green eyes, dark reddish hair, very pretty, a stranger to him, calling for help. Not calling to him, specifically, but calling without a hope in hell of answer. Praying. Then the face was gone and he was alone with his reflection.
He pressed his face into the towel. One of a soft, luxurious set that Michelle had bought. When she’d brought them home, they had rubbed them all over each other and made love.
Kundalini. Feel the power.
(Lenore. Erika. Eileen. All lost to him.) He went out to Michelle.
Jane accepted the steaming cup of green tea from Kim Toy and sipped at it delicately. “Here’s to the second night in a row of no nightmares,” she said with a weak smile. “I hope.”
Kim Toy’s answering smile was less than hearty. The girl should have been a quivering mound of jelly after the dreams the Astronomer had sent her, and that was barely a taste of TIAMAT Real contact would have driven her permanently mad. But here she was, the fragile little innocent, drinking tea and getting her color back. She was made of sterner stuff than any of them had given her credit for. It was always the innocent ones you had to watch, Kim Toy thought wryly. Their strength was as the strength of ten because their hearts were pure and their sincerity made them lethal. She wondered if twisted-up old pervos like the Astronomer had any inkling or whether he was so far removed from anything even remotely resembling innocence that he couldn’t even conceive of such a thing. When she thought about the way the Astronomer recharged his power, yeah, she could allow that was entirely possible. What would a sick old fuck like that know about innocence?
And he was going to own the world. Sure.
But she did believe that. She was unshakable on that. Had been unshakable on that. No, still was. Wasn’t she? And who was she calling a sick old fuck, anyway? What was it when you scrambled a man’s brains to make him fall in love with you, and then, when he’d served his purpose, you turned it up from scramble to liquify, and the same people who dumped the bodies for the Astronomer dumped that one, too. She looked at Jane. It was no wonder she preferred the company of women if she couldn’t be with Red.
Jane reached over and pressed the On button of the remote control. The TV screen flickered to life. “I watched Peregrine’s Perch last night and I didn’t have the dreams,” she said, a bit sheepishly. “Now it’s made me superstitious. I feel like I have to watch it to keep the nightmares away. Even if its a re-run.”
Kim Toy nodded. “You and about a billion other people.”
“Sal adored talk shows. Especially Peregrine’s Perch. He said he watched because he was dying to see how they’d work around those wings each night.” She paused as a commercial gave way to the stunning features of Peregrine herself. “Sal said they never disappointed him.” ,
“Who?”
“Her wardrobe department.”
“Oh.” Kim Toy fell silent and dutifully watched the program with the girl. Half an hour into the show, a picture of a handsome red-haired man with russet eyes and a lean, sculpted face appeared on the screen, causing Jane to leap out of her chair.
“There he is!” She knelt down close to the TV “Jumpin’ Jack Flash. I followed all the news stories about him. He’s one of my heroes.”
Kim Toy turned up the sound. The man’s face vanished and was replaced by the talk-show set where Peregrine was interviewing an expensively dressed woman holding an even more-expensive-looking camera.
“I think you’ve captured the spirit of Jumpin’ Jack Flash exactly,” Peregrine was saying. “That couldn’t have been easy.”
“Well, it was all the more difficult because it was a candid shot,” the other woman said. “Believe it or not, I was just lucky, being in the right place at the right time. J. J. didn’t know I was taking that picture, although he later gave permission for its use.”
“J. J. ?” said Peregrine.
The photographer looked down demurely. “That’s what his intimates call him.”
“I’ll bet,” Kim Toy muttered. “What?” said Jane.
“His ‘intimates.’ Gimme a break. He probably tells all the women he sleeps with to call him J.J., just so he can keep track. It’s easier than remembering their names, and far less trouble than notching their ears, or having them all rounded up and branded.”
Jane looked a little hurt. One of her heroes, right. Kim Toy shook her head. At her age, the girl was overdue to learn that certain heroes had-well, not dicks of clay, but certainly hyperactive ones.
Like your heroes, madam? Like the Astronomer, maybe? Kim Toy shoved the thought away and forced herself to concentrate on the interview. The photographer apparently specialized in photographing aces. More pictures flashed on the screen; to Jane’s delight, Jumpin’ Jack Flash reappeared several times in between shots of Modular Man, Dr. Tachyon, the shell of the Great and Powerful Turtle, Starshine, and Peregrine herself.
“Too bad she can’t take your picture,” Kim Toy said as the segment ended and the show went to another commercial. Jane shrugged. “I’m a joker.”
“You’re starting to get on my nerves.”
“But the joke’s on me. One of the two people who meant the most to me drowned; the other bled to death.” She turned away from the TV “Yeah, the joke’s definitely on me and it isn’t a bit funny.”
Kim Toy was about to answer when something shimmered in the air to the right of the TV set. Both women were very still as the image of the Astronomer congealed out of the shadows. “Kim Toy. Jane. I wish to see you.”
There was no need to answer. Kim Toy remained at a sort of attention, hoping her annoyance didn’t show. Cheap theatrics for Jane’s benefit. The Astronomer must have thought she was one hell of a hot ticket to go this far to impress her. He could have conserved his energy and sent Red to fetch them.
Dr. Tachyon still looked his stylish best, even on the downside of midnight. “I knew he had some aces up there. But the machine you describe from the dreams-well, it does exist and it’s very old by your standards.” His eyes narrowed as he studied Fortunato’s swollen forehead. “Rather unusual for you to have an out-of-body experience spontaneously, isn’t it?”
Fortunato turned away from Tachyon (goddamn faggot, just what we need, faggots from space) and stared out the window in the direction of the Cloisters. “I just came here to tell you. There’s a hell of a lot of power massing up there. It called me. Power calls to power.”
“Indeed,” murmured Tachyon. Faggots from space. Fortunato would never love him, but he had never seen the tall, exotic Earthman in such an openly emotional state before.
“They’re calling to that thing out there. TIAMAT The whole organization has existed for centuries just for the purpose of bringing that horror down on us.”
Tachyon’s sigh was heavy. Suddenly he felt very tired. Forty years of one horror and another, he was entitled to feel fatigued. He knew Fortunato, standing in his elegant living room with his bulging forehead and the power practically crackling in the air, wouldn’t have agreed with him. Power calls to power? Oh, what he could have told them about that, Tachyon thought. And if he could have stepped back far enough to see the grand design of the universe, what he might have learned himself about his own people and the Wild Card Day and the approach of TIAMAT or the Swarm or whatever it was. Maybe there was a true grand design to the universe; or maybe it was just the wild card powers calling the Swarm. Of course, that would mean the virus had called the Swarm before the virus had even existed, but Tachyon was accustomed to dealing with the absurdities of space and time. Not that any of it mattered anyway. He looked at Fortunato, who was energized with kundalini and impatience. The time for agonizing was long, long past; now was the time for doing, for doing as much as he could and not a bit less. To atone, perhaps, for a time when he might have done more, but had failed.
When he had failed Blythe.
After so many years, the sense of loss had not abated. It wouldn’t stay hidden at the bottom of a bottle, it couldn’t be obscured by an unending parade of the finest lovers. Only the work he did at the clinic ever seemed to give him some kind of comfort, inadequate but better than nothing at all.
His gaze met Fortunato’s and he recognized the look in the other man’s eyes. “Power calls to power and sorrow to sorrow.” He gave Fortunato the barest of smiles. “We have all lost something precious to us in this battle against horror. But still we must go on, go on and turn back the darkness. If we can.”
Fortunato didn’t return the smile. Everything seemed to call for one of his goddamn fucking faggot speeches. “Yeah, sure,” he said roughly, turning away. “Go up there and kick some ass, you and me and what army?”
Tachyon reached for the telephone. “We’ll have to call them out.”
The cop actually threw a net over him. It was so startling that he reverted to human form, bruising elbows and knees and scraping his flesh as he rolled over and over on the sidewalk. The cop was laughing even as he pulled his gun out and stuck it through the net.
“Don’t get any ideas about changing back,” said the cop, “or I’ll have to put you out of your misery. Jesus, wait till they check your action up to the Cloisters. I can hardly believe it myself.”
He shivered in the net, unable to take his eyes of the barrel of the pistol. The cop really would shoot him, he didn’t doubt it. Silently, he cursed himself for not being content with simply sailing over the city enjoying the lights and scaring the piss out of the occasional rooftop couple. How many people could say they’d been buzzed by a pterodactyl-lately?
The cop bundled him into the back of his car and drove through town, still snickering. “I don’t know what the Astronomer’ll want to do about you, but you’ll probably amuse the hell out of him. You make the smallest tyrannosaurus that ever was.”
“Ornithosuchus,” he murmured, swallowing hard. Another dinosaur-illiterate with a gun. He wasn’t sure what to be more afraid of-the gun, this Astronomer guy, or his own father, who would shortly discover he wasn’t up in his room asleep. He was only thirteen and he wasn’t supposed to be out this late on a school night, especially in the form of a fastrunning flesh-eater of the Triassic period.
“Come here, my dear. So I can see you better.”
Jane hesitated. The aura of evil that her dreams had hinted at was too definitely present around the old man in the wheelchair. Moisture began to bead lightly on her face and neck. She looked to Kim Toy but the woman’s attention was on the Astronomer, just like everyone else’s in the great hall. Whoever they all were. Masons. She recognized the man who’d brought her in-Judas, Roman had called him. Roman was seated at a computer terminal off to one side, near a low brick wall that seemed to have been attacked with a pickax. Spray-painted on it in metallic gold was the legend EAT ME.
“You have a great power, my dear,” the old man said. “One that would be greatly useful for the visitor bearing down on us from the stars. TIAMAT” He paused, waiting for her reaction. She stood uncomfortably under his gaze. The extra illumination they had brought in and tacked up so carelessly had only made the shadows at the far corners that much darker. She had a sense of horrible things waiting there for a signal from this Astronomer to crawl out and devour her. EAT ME. She put one elbow in her fist, pressing the other hand against her mouth so she wouldn’t start laughing and never stop.
“Are you familiar with that name? TIAMAT?” prodded the Astronomer. Jane pressed her hand tighter against her mouth and shrugged awkwardly.
“Well.” The old man leaned forward slightly. “It would be helpful if we could have a demonstration of your power. Aside from what you did on the street with the fire hydrant.” He squinted at her. “Or are you doing it now, my dear?”
“Oh, really subtle,” said the bleakly thin man standing at the Astronomer’s right. His eyes made Jane think of tombstones. “Just what we need, an ace whose big power is heavy sweating. World domination, here we come.”
The Astronomer chuckled and Jane thought it was the most evil sound she’d ever heard. “Now, now. We all know she’s capable of much greater feats. Aren’t you. Yes. For instance, you could conceivably remove all the water from a body, leaving-well, not much.” He gestured at the rest of the people and chuckled again at the look on her face. “No, I thought not. The only one you might care to use it on right now is myself, and I’m immune.” He nodded to Red, who vanished under one of the brick arches. A few moments later, he reappeared, guiding two men who were pushing a cage on wheels into the middle of the room. Jane blinked several times, unable to believe her eyes in the bad light.
There was a dinosaur in the cage. A Tyrannosaurus rex, all of three feet high.
As she watched, it bared its ferocious-looking teeth and ran back and forth behind the bars’ its little forearms cuddled up close to its scaly body. One dark reptilian eye regarded Jane with a glitter of intelligence.
“Vicious creature,” said the Astronomer. “If I were to let it out, it could snap your leg off in one bite. Kill it. Withdraw all the water from its body.”
Jane lowered her arms, her hands still curled into fists. “Oh, come now.” Another of those evil chuckles. “Don’t tell me your heart is touched by every stray dinosaur that comes along.”
“There’s someone in there,” she said. “You want a sample of my power? Here’s a close-up!”
Something almost happened. She had focused on an area just in front of the Astronomer’s face, intending to dash a gallon of water into his eyes. The air blurred momentarily and then cleared. The old man threw back his head and roared with laughter. “You were right, Roman, she breaks out with bravado at the oddest moments! I told you, my excellent dear, that your power won’t work if I don’t want it to. No matter how much power you have, I have more. Isn’t that right, Demise?”
The skinny man stepped forward, ready to obey some order. The Astronomer shook his head. “There’s another waiting for us, much more receptive. She won’t try to throw a bucket of water in our faces.”
Jane wiped her own face without effect. Water was beginning to pool around her feet. The Astronomer watched her, unmoved. “To have real power is to be able to use it, to be able to do certain things, no matter how awful you may find them. There is more power than you can imagine in being able to do such things, or in being able to make someone do them.” He gestured at the cage. Jane followed the movement and then had to clap both hands over her mouth to keep from crying out.
The tyrannosaur had been replaced by a boy no more than twelve or thirteen years old, with sandy brown hair, gray-blue eyes, and a small pink birthmark on his forehead. He would have been startling enough, except that he was also completely naked. He crouched at the bars, doing his best to cover himself.
“There is no more time to try to court you, my dear,” said the Astronomer, and all pretense of kindliness was gone from his voice. “TIAMAT is very close now and I cannot waste even a moment trying to lure you in with us. It’s too bad; your killing a child even in the guise of a dangerous dinosaur would have bound you over to us, traumatically but completely. If I had but a few more weeks, you would have been ours painlessly. Now it’s a matter of choosing between your life and your brave little ethics. You have as much time to decide as it takes for me to cross this room. I have no doubt which you’ll choose. May your ethics sustain you in the next life. If there is one.” He gestured at the skinny man. “Demise—”
Several things happened at once. The cockroach-man stepped forward with a loud rustling sound and shouted “No!” just as water splashed into Demise’s face forcefully enough to knock him over and then another voice, incredibly loud, bellowed, “THIS IS THE GREAT AND POWERFUL TURTLE! YOU WILL ALL COME OUT PEACEFULLY, WE HAVE THIS PLACE SURROUNDED AND NO ONE NEEDS TO GET HURT!” And then, impossibly, Jane thought she heard something that sounded like the old theme from the Mighty Mouse cartoons: Here I come to save the daaaaaaaay! This was followed by an ungodly caterwauling that went from extreme bass to an earsplitting high, shaking the entire building. There was a crash as the cage topped to the floor, spilling the boy out. Jane fought to keep her balance and reach the boy in the general chaos of people trying to run in every direction. He turned into another dinosaur barely two feet high, this one very slender and agile-looking, with slim, clawed fingers. She forced herself to grab the fingers as it scuttled over to her.
“We’ve got to get out of here!” she said breathlessly and more than a little unnecessarily, and looked around. Demise and the Astronomer had vanished. The little dinosaur pulled her across the room and into a shadowy gallery under the archways. Holding hands with a dinosaur, she thought as they fled down the gallery. Only in New York.
She didn’t notice Kafka struggling after them.
It was really a hell of a beautiful sight, the Great and Powerful Turtle said later. Aces of every variety rising up out of the trees around the Cloisters, swooping down on the Masons that spilled out of the building onto the brick paths and into the ruined gardens. He had seen just about everything during the battle. One of the things he missed, however, was Jane and the boy-dinosaur creeping along part of a columned arcade surrounding an outdoor area now overgrown with weeds. They saw the Turtle sailing overhead with several colorfully costumed aces clinging to his shell. One of the aces pointed down at something; in the next moment, he was floating gently to earth, lowered by the Turtle’s power. Jane heard the little dinosaur hiss alarmingly. When she turned to see what was the matter, he had changed back into a boy, his nudity covered by shadows.
“That’s the Turtle!” he whispered to Jane. “If we could just get his attention, he could get you out of here!”
“What about you?”
For answer, he reverted to dinosaur again, this one wellmuscled and almost as ferocious-looking as the tyrannosaur. It looked vaguely familiar to Jane, who couldn’t tell a crocodile from an alligator. She tried to remember the name. An Alicesomething-or-other. Alice or perhaps alas, for as mean-looking as it was, it was also no bigger than a German shepherd. It growled and pushed her along with its three-clawed hands, hustling her onto the stone path surrounding the weed-choked garden. There was another one of those grotesque howls; Jane felt it shudder clear through her and the little dinosaurallosaurus, she remembered suddenly, for no reason-roared in response, clawing at its head painfully. She bent, meaning to embrace it or comfort it, when there was a flurry of feathers, a glint of metal, and then an extraordinarily beautiful woman lit on a low marble wall.
“Peregrine!” Jane breathed.
The allosaurus made a small, excited sound, looking the winged woman over with wild eyes.
“Better get out,” Peregrine said good-naturedly. “The Howler is going to shout this place down. Can you manage, you and your, uh, pet lizard there?”
“It’s a boy. I mean, he’s really a little boy, an ace—” The allosaurus bellowed, either in agreement or in protest at being called a little boy.
“Vicious, really vicious.” Peregrine smiled at Jane as she launched herself upward, her great wings beating the air.
“Best you get out now. I mean it,” she called and soared away, the famed titanium talons up and ready.
Jane and the allosaurus ran around the ruined garden and tore down another arcade. She heard the little dinosaur fall behind, and paused, squinting in the darkness. “What’s wrong?”
She could just make out a human silhouette. “Gotta change. Need a fast runner, I’m getting tired. Hypsilophodon’s better than an allosaurus for running.”
A moment later she felt long claws grab her gently and tug her along. This one was about the size of a large kangaroo. “I don’t think we’re going the right way to get out of here,” she huffed as they came to a dimly lit area and a staircase leading down. The dinosaur melted into boy briefly before he reshaped as a pterodactyl and glided down the stairs. IJane could only gallop after him. At the foot of the stairs, the pterodactyl suddenly swooped around and came back toward her. Reflexively, she ducked, stumbled, and hit the bottom just in time to come face to face with a man even handsomer than Roman. He wore a navy-blue jumpsuit and a tight-fitting skullcap and there were guns seemingly attached directly to his shoulders.
“Hi,” he said. “Didn’t I see you at the ape-escape?” Jane blinked, shaking her head dazedly. “What-I don’t—” And then, as the man’s guns swung up to track the pterodactyl circling around them, “No! He’s just a little boy, he’s a good guy!”
“Oh, all right, then,” said the man, smiling at her. “You two better get going.” Jane ran past him, the pterodactyl gliding over her head. “Are you sure I didn’t see you at the ape-escape?” he called after her.
She wouldn’t have had the breath to answer him even if she’d wanted to. The pterodactyl sailed ahead of her as she felt her legs beginning to weaken. Panting, she stumbled along, watching as the gap between herself and the pterodactyl began to widen.
The pterodactyl banked sharply to round a corner in the hall and disappeared. Half a moment later there was a flash of blue light, a screech, and .a thump. Jane thudded to a stop, hanging onto the stone wall. Please, she prayed. Not the little boy. Don’t let them hurt the little boy and they can do anything they want with me. She forced herself to move forward, holding the wall for support, and peeked around the corner.
He had changed-back into a boy again when he’d hit the floor, but she could see his bare chest rising and falling as he breathed. The roach-man was standing over him with a nastylooking weapon that looked like a stinger.
“I had to stop him,” the roach-man said, looking up at her. “He’s not really hurt, though. He’ll come out of it in a few minutes. Honest. I need your help.” He held out his free hand to Jane. She took a step forward. The face was inhuman but the eyes were not. Just before she would have taken his hand, he snatched it back.
“I meant that just as a gesture. Don’t touch me. Rouse him and come with me.”
Jane knelt beside the unconscious boy.
Judas stood by the tomb with his hands over his ears, unable to clear his head long enough to decide what he should do. Every time he tried to think, another one of those awful howls would shiver through him. He swore his ears were bleeding.
The chaos was beyond believable. The Astronomer’s people had been running in and out of the large room like the bunch of chickenshit losers they all really were. He’d known they were all chickenshits in the beginning, he’d been a cop long enough to recognize the breed. It was enough to make a person want to change sides and start wiping them out himself, and maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea, what with aces storming the place; sure, he had his badge, he had his gun, he could claim he’d been undercover, who would bother checking, at least for tonight. Sure.
He looked around and saw Red and Kim Toy making their way toward one of the darkened galleries, searching for a way out. Might as well start with them as anyone else, he thought, and drew his gun.
“Halt! Halt or I’ll shoot!”
Kim Toy’s head snapped around, her long straight dark hair flying with the movement.
Judas switched his aim from her face to Red’s. “I told you not to move!”
Red threw a hand up in front of his head as Judas was about to pull the trigger and then, suddenly, he was in love. Birds were singing, making nests in his brain, and the whole world was beautiful, especially Kim Toy, most exciting and exotic of women. He flung his gun away and staggered toward her, loving her too much to feel hurt when she fled from him with Red.
His ears really were bleeding now but he no longer cared enough to notice.
Like all the rooms in this place, this one reminded her of a chapel. She could see where an altar or a baptismal font might have stood; that place was now occupied by a machine.
“You’ve seen this in a dream,” Kafka said to Jane, putting a hand on one of the machine’s impossible angles. Jane had to look away-the craziness of the outline was threatening to tie her vision in knots. She stared at the more-prosaic form of a nearby computer housing with a large monitor sitting dark and silent on top of it.
“The Shakti device,” she said.
“Yes. The Shakti device.” He winced as another one of those awful howls tore through the building. “Tonight we may all die, but this must be protected.”
Jane’s mouth twisted with distaste. “That TIAMAT creature—”
“Our only chance ...”
There was a rustle as the dinosaur-boy—Kid Dinosaur, he’d told her-wrapped a sheet from Kafka’s cot more tightly around himself. She’d asked him to stay in human form so she could talk with him and reluctantly he’d agreed, provided the roach-man would give him something to cover himself with. “I don’t know how much you think you can trust this guy,” the boy said, “but I sure wouldn’t.”
Steps thudded in the hall outside and Roman raced in, wild-eyed. “The computer housing-is it all right?” Without waiting for an answer, he shoved Kafka aside, scrambling madly for the computer. “Ellie! I’m here, Ellie, I’m here!” Kafka went to him. “Where’s the Astronomer?”
“Fuck him,” Roman said and pushed Kafka away. “Fuck him and fuck all of you!” Another howl shook the building and they both fell against the computer together. One of the panels came off in Roman’s hands, exposing part of the computer’s circuitry.
“Holy shit!” said the boy. “Gross me out!”
Even in the bad light, Jane could see the circuitry pulsing, could see the texture of the boards and the moistness there, the living flesh mixed with the hard, dead machinery.
Or had the flesh itself hardened?-Jane put a hand over her eyes, feeling sick.
“Water Lily!”
Kafka’s warning came just as she felt the hands on her from behind. They spun her around and she was staring into the tombstone gaze of Demise. She put her hands on his shoulders, and for one absurd moment it was as though they were embracing.
“Are you afraid to die?” he asked her.
In such extremity, she did not find his question out of place. “Yes,” she said simply.
Something in his face changed and his grip loosened slowly.
“Water Lily!” Kafka cried again, his voice filled with despair. But she remained standing, remained alive, putting one hand on Demise’s gaunt face. He recoiled from her touch. “It hurts, doesn’t it?”
“Everything hurts,” he said roughly and shoved her away from him. She sprawled on the floor near Kafka’s machine and started to get up again just as a thick, stained-glass window exploded inward, spraying the room with multicolored shards. She covered her head with both arms, diving for the floor; a long flame roared across the room, scorching wood and stone. She heard someone scream. There was a rustling sound as Kafka crawled across the floor to her and tried to urge her closer to the machine.
“The only thing,” he panted. Another howl shook them like an earthquake. “... TIAMAT ... protect ... need your help for TIAMAT’s—”
He was torn away from her; she heard him shriek at the contact. Then someone pulled her to her feet and she saw Kafka fall backward from a kick to the head.
“Nooooo!” she screamed. “Don’t hurt him, don’t!—” She had seen those russet eyes a thousand times, most recently tonight. Her mouth worked but she couldn’t make a sound. The russet eyes crinkled with a quick smile before they thrust her to one side.
“Stand back, honey, I don’t want to mix you up with the french fries.” He turned and began to point at Kafka and the Shakti device and the boy, who had turned back into a dinosaur, a stegosaurus this time, and was all too obviously in the line of fire. Jane fought for her voice and the right words and came up with possibly the only thing that could have stopped him from making one big cinder of them all.
“J.J., don’t!”
Jumpin’ Jack Flash turned back to her, his mouth dropping open with surprise.
A moment later, he was even more surprised to see that she was covered with water.
Fortunato had been running in and out of every room and gallery and alcove he could find, searching for aces or anyone else, the faggot from space hot on his heels. So far, they’d only found some clown crawling around on a stone floor with blood running out his ears. The space faggot had wanted to stop and examine him but Fortunato had fixed that. This wasn’t the clinic at noon, he’d said, and had dragged the space faggot away by the fancy collar of his faggot coat-faggot, yeah, sure, man, let’s talk faggot, call your man Crowley a faggot, and while we’re at it, how was it you raised that boy from the dead, speaking of faggots-he shut the flow of thoughts off firmly as he ran down a narrow hall.
“Fortunato-where-what are you-trying to do?” huffed Tachyon.
“I feel him,” Fortunato said over his shoulder. “Feel who?”
“He did Eileen. And Balsam. And a lot of others—” he staggered as the Howler gave another one of those long, horrible screams. Tachyon stumbled into him and the two of them nearly fell. “Shit, I wish he’d shut the fuck up,” Fortunato muttered. He stopped suddenly and grabbed Tachyon by his faggot coat-front. “Listen, you stand back. He’s all mine, understand that?”
Tachyon looked up at Fortunato’s swollen forehead, his dark, angry eyes. Then he pried Fortunato’s hands off himself. “I’ve never seen you like this before.”
“Yeah, well, you ain’t seen shit yet,” Fortunato growled, and kept going, with the space faggot tagging after him.
For several long moments, it seemed as though nobody knew what to do. Roman had gotten to his feet and was shielding the exposed computer with his body. Kafka had scuttled over to the Shakti machine; the little stegosaurus was looking from side to side. Even Jumpin’ Jack Flash seemed to be frozen, looking from Jane to the strange machine and Kafka, to Roman and back to Jane.
Then he turned away from her and time started again and he was stretching an arm out toward Kafka’s machine. “Not him,” Jane said desperately, and reached for him just as Demise said, almost too soft to hear, “Hey. You.” Before Jumpin’ Jack Flash could react, the stegosaurus twinkled to the form of a naked boy and then to a tyrannosaur, and launched himself across the room to bury his teeth in Demise’s thigh. Demise screamed and fell backward, wrestling with the tyrannosaur. Kafka started to shout; there was a swirl of light, a glimmering, and the Astronomer was standing in the middle of the room. His head was something out of a nightmare now-he had a strange curved snout, rectangular ears, and slanting eyes, but Jane knew it was the Astronomer. She heard Kafka say “The god Setekh!” with either fear or relief. The Astronomer smiled at Jane and she saw blood smeared on his teeth and lips. No wheelchair now; he seemed to be filled with vitality and strength. As though to confirm her thoughts, he suddenly rose five feet in the air.
Jumpin’ Jack Flash took a step back, lifted both hands, and then looked puzzled. The Astronomer wagged a finger at him as though he were a naughty child, and turned his attention to Demise, who was still rolling around on the floor with the tyrannosaur. A moment later, the tyrannosaur was a naked boy again.
“Aw, shit!” the boy yelled, and squirmed out of Demise’s grasp, fighting to get to the door. Just as he reached it, a tall black man with a bulging forehead appeared at the threshold. Jane gasped, not at his appearance but at the sense of power around him; she could feel the unreleased forces charging the air.
“I’ve sensed you,” said the Astronomer, “stirring around the edges, here and there.”
“More than stirring, motherfucker.” The man drew himself up so that he seemed even taller, and reached out toward the Astronomer as though to embrace him. The Astronomer descended slightly, still smiling.
“I would enjoy putting you through your paces ...” said the Astronomer, and suddenly drew back, floating across the room to Kafka’s machine. He twisted his fists sharply upward. The tall man staggered forward several steps, stopped, and braced himself with his feet wide apart.
“Don’t be coy, Fortunato. Come closer.” The pull on Fortunato seemed to grow stronger. Jumpin’ Jack Flash looked at Jane.:
“If you know any other tricks besides drowning yourself, honey,” he said in a low voice, “you better use them.” Another man suddenly appeared in the doorway. Jane had just enough time to notice the improbable red hair and the flashy clothing before there was even more red, a whole body’s worth of red, knocking the man over. The two forms rolled over and over on the floor, Red fighting to pin the smaller man. Then Kim Toy was there, pulling at her husband, telling him to forget it, just forget it and let’s get out of here.
Near Kafka’s machine, the Astronomer and Fortunato were still balanced against each other. Jane had the feeling the Astronomer was gaining slightly. The strain on Fortunato’s face intensified with the strange glow around him and now horns projected from his bulging forehead. In response, the Astronomer’s body was assuming an animal shape, like a greyhound, with a huge forked tail rising up like something poisonous. Her fear began to crescendo and there was no one to hold onto, no one who offered shelter or comfort or escape.
The boy-dinosaur, thin and long-tailed now, whipped back into the room and landed on Red, knocking him off the man in fancy dress. Kim Toy jumped back and then a fourth person was confusing things, throwing himself on Kim Toy. With a shock, Jane saw it was Judas. Blood was trickling from his ears but he seemed not to notice as he knelt on Kim Toy’s legs, pinned her chest with one hand, and then, absurdly, began to undo his pants.
Jane shook her head incredulously. It was some weird vision of hell, the Astronomer, Roman, that obscene computer, Kafka, the Shakti machine, the dinosaur and Red and the black man and his horns and the other man-Tachyon, she recognized him now, he seemed to be dazed-and Jumpin’ Jack Flash, unable to do a thing, and that sleazy scumbag who had brought her here-whom she had allowed to bring her here, she corrected herself, like somebody’s dog on a short leashthe scumbag trying to rape Kim Toy in the middle of a fight for all their lives.
All this ran through her mind in a second and the power gathered itself effortlessly and poured out of her.
This time Judas was the only one who was oblivious to what she was doing. He never knew, even when it hit him, that all she had meant to do was blind him by drawing a flood of tears to his eyes, but the power had been building up without proper release for too long and she was too scared and too strong in her fear. He never knew, even as he raised up. Then he was not, and in his place was a form made of powder that hung briefly in the air for an impossible moment before it disintegrated. Wetness splattered the walls, the floor, and Kim Toy.
Jane tried to scream but only a faint sighing came out. Everything stopped; even the struggle between the Astronomer and Fortunato seemed to diminish slightly. Then Jumpin’
Jack Flash yelled, “Don’t anybody move or she’ll do it again!” Jane burst into tears.
The whole room burst into tears; suddenly there was a rainstorm in the room, water spraying from every direction. Jumpin’ Jack Flash flung himself out the window and hung suspended in midair. “Drown ’em or turn it off!” he shouted. And then it was turned off, with a gesture from the Astronomer. He favored Jane with another hideous smile. “Do it again. For me.”
She felt herself being turned by an invisible hand and power gathered itself within her again, aiming itself-for the black man, Fortunato—Who was no longer there but behind the Astronomer, standing over Kafka’s Shakti machine with both arms raisedAnd Kafka hollered, “NO!” and the word echoed in Jane’s mind as the power flew from her against her will, deflected at the final moment with her last shred of strength, so that it bypassed everyone, even the Astronomer, and hit the computer just as the Shakti machine collapsed with a sound too much like a human scream.
The force from Fortunato struck the machine again and there was another scream, this time very human, as the computer’s awful living circuitry crumpled to powder that flowed over Roman’s arms and chest.
Fortunato turned to the Astronomer, reaching out for him. The animal form melted away, leaving the Astronomer human again and very small. He wavered in the air for a moment and the light around him began to dim.
“Fool,” he whispered, but the whisper penetrated the whole room and everyone in it. “Stupid blind nigger fool.” He looked around at all of them. “You will all die screaming.” And then, like smoke, he vanished.
“Wait! Wait, goddamn you!” Demise struggled to his feet, clutching his already-healing leg. “You promised me, goddamn you, you promised me!” Underneath his enraged shrieks, Roman’s sobs made a bizarre counterpoint.
Jane felt her knees start to give. She had nothing left. Even with her power, she had no more strength. Tachyon was beside her, holding her up. “Come,” he said gently, pulling her toward the door. She felt something flow over the incipient hysteria in her mind, as comforting as a warm blanket. Half in trance, she let him take her out of the room. With another part of her mind, she heard Kafka call to her, and distantly, she was sad that she could not answer him.
From the shelter of a stand of trees, she watched the last of what became known as the Great Cloisters Raid. Occasionally she caught a glimpse of Peregrine swooping around the tower or flying rings around the Turtle’s shell, sometimes accompanied by a graceful, if rather small (to her eyes), pteranodon. Columns of fire shot up into the night, exploding through rooftops, scorching stone. Vainly, she searched for a glimpse of Kafka or Demise in the groups of people Masons, she thought, shaking her head at the absurdity, Masonsgathered neatly up and removed from harm by the Turtle’s power.
“In the end, I tried to take care of someone. I tried to take care of the little boy,” she murmured, uncaring if Tachyon beside her knew what she was talking about or not. But he did.
She could feel his presence sorting through her thoughts, touching her memories of Debbie and Sal and how Judas had found her. And wherever he touched, he left the warmth of comfort and understanding.
The Howler let loose with another one of those awful wails, but it was a short one.
She might have cried, except she seemed to have no tears left for the time being.
A little later, familiar voices brought her back to awareness. Jumpin’ Jack Flash was there with the boy-dinosaur, who had chosen another odd form she didn’t know. (“Iguanodon,”
Tachyon whispered to her. “Look appreciative.” And, somehow, she did.) Fortunato emerged from an entrance that flickered with dying fire; he stepped over glowing fragments and found his way to them, looking even more tired than Jane felt.
“Lost them,” he said to Tachyon. “The cockroach, the death freak, the other one. That red guy and his woman. Got away, unless the Turtle’s picked them up.” He jerked his chin at Jane. “What’s her story?”
She looked past him to the burning Cloisters, pulled herself together, felt for the power. There was a surprising amount still left, enough for what she wanted to do.
Water splashed down on the worst of the flames, helping a little, not much. There was an arsonist around when you needed one after all, she thought, glancing at Jumpin’ Jack Flash.
“Don’t waste your energy,” he said, and as though to back him up, she heard the sound of fire engines approaching. “I was born in a fire station,” she said. “My mother didn’t get to the hospital in time.”
“Fascinating,” he said “but I’ve got to leave pretty soon.” He looked at Tachyon. “I, uh, I would like to know how you knew-uh, why you called me J.J.”
She shrugged. “J.J. Jumpin’ Jack. It was faster to say.” She managed a tiny smile. “That’s all. We’ve never met before. Honest.”
Relief was large on his face. “Ah. Well, listen, sometime soon we could get acquainted and—”
“ Sixty minutes,” Tachyon said. “I’d say you’re just about out of time. What we could call the Cinderella factor. When someone trips.”
Jumpin’ Jack Flash gave him a dirty look before he lifted into the air. A halo of flame ignited itself around him as he roared off into the darkness.
Jane stared after him for a moment and then looked down sadly. “I almost hurt him back there. I did hurt someone—I ... “
Tachyon put his arms around her. “Lean on me. It’s all right.”
Gently, she removed his arms from her. “Thank you. But I’m done leaning.” Okay, Sal?
She turned back to the burning Cloisters and continued to pour water on the worst of the flames.
Curled up in an alleyway, Demise shuddered. His leg was bad enough that it wasn’t completely healed yet, but it would heal; he knew it the way he knew how much he hated the Astronomer for abandoning him, for ever pulling him in with his promises and favors in the first place. TIAMAT, hell. He’d get that twisted-up old fuck before TIAMAT ever got here and that was a promise. He’d put that old fuck through a dance he’d take to hell with him.
He drifted in semidelirium. Not far away, but unknown to him, Kafka watched the destruction of the Cloisters. When the water poured down into the flames from thin air he turned away, willing the cold deadness of hatred to stay in him.
The month of April brought little in the way of relief to Muscovites staggered by an unusually cold winter. Following a brief flurry of southern breezes, which sent boys into the newly green football fields and encouraged pretty girls to discard their overcoats, the skies had darkened again, and a dreary, uninspired rain had begun to fall. To Polyakov the scene was autumnal and therefore entirely, appropriate. His masters, bending in the new breeze from the Kremlin, had decreed that this would be Polyakov’s last Moscow spring. The younger, less-tainted Yurchenko would move up, and Polyakov would retire to a dacha far from Moscow.
Just as well, Polyakov thought, since scientists were saying that weather patterns had changed because of the Siberian airbursts. There might never be a decent Moscow spring again.
Nevertheless, even in its autumn clothes Moscow had the ability to inspire him: From this window he could see the cluster of trees where the Moscow River skirted Gorky Park, and beyond that, looking appropriately medieval in the mist, were the domes of St. Basil’s and the Kremlin. In Polyakov’s mind age equalled power, but then he was old.
“You wanted to see me?” The voice interrupted his musings. A young major in the uniform of the Chief Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff—uncommonly known as the GRU-had entered. He was perhaps thirty-five, a bit old to still hold the rank of major, Polyakov thought, especially with the Hero of the Soviet Union medal. With his classic White Russian features and sandy hair, the man looked like one of those unlikely officers whose pictures appeared on the cover of Red Star every day.
“Molniya.” Polyakov elected to use the young officer’s code name rather than Christian name and patronymic. Initial formality was one of the interrogator’s tricks. He held out his hand. The major hesitated, then shook it. Polyakov was pleased to note that Molniya wore black rubber gloves. So far his information was correct. “Let’s sit down.”
They faced each other across the polished wood of the conference table. Someone had thoughtfully provided water, which Polyakov indicated. “You have a very pleasant conference room here.”
“I’m sure it hardly compares with those at Dzerzhinsky Square,” Molniya shot back with just the proper amount of insolence. Dzerzhinsky Square was the location of KGB headquarters.
Polyakov laughed. “As a matter of fact it’s identical, thanks to central planning. Gorbachev is doing away with that, I understand.”
“We’ve been known to read the Politburo’s mail too,”
“Good. Then you know exactly why I’m here and who sent me.”
Molniya and the GRU had been ordered to cooperate with the KGB, and the orders came from the very highest places. That was the slim advantage Polyakov brought to this meeting ... an advantage that, as the saying went, had all the weight of words written on water ... since he was an old man and Molniya was the great Soviet ace.
“Do you know the name Huntington Sheldon?” Molniya knew he was being tested and said tiredly, “He was CIA director from 1966 to 1972.”
“Yes, a thoroughly dangerous man ... and last week’s issue of Time magazine has a picture of him standing right in front of the Lubiyanka-pointing up at the statue of Dzerzhinsky!”
“Maybe there’s a lesson in that ... cousin.” Worry about your own security and leave our operations alone!
“I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t had such a spectacular failure.”
“Unlike the KGB’s perfect record.” Mdlniya didn’t try to hide his contempt.
“Oh, we’ve had our failures, cousin. What’s different about our operations is that they’ve been approved by the Intelligence Council. Now, you’re a Party member. You couldn’t have graduated from the Kharkov Higher Engineering School without being at least slightly familiar with the principles of collective thought. Successes are shared. So are failures. This operation you and Dolgov cooked up-what were you doing, taking lessons from Oliver North?”
Molniya flinched at the mention of Dolgov’s name, a state secret and, more importantly, a GRU secret. Polyakov continued, “Are you worried about what we say, Major? Don’t be. This is the cleanest room in the Soviet Union.” He smiled. “My housekeepers swept it. What we say here is between us.”
“So, now, tell me,” Polyakov said, “what the hell went wrong in Berlin?”
The aftermath of the Hartmann kidnapping had been horrible. Though only a few right-wing German and American newspapers mentioned possible Soviet involvement, the CIA and other Western agencies made the connections. Finding the bodies, even mutilated as they were, of those Red Army Faction punks had allowed the CIA to backtrack through their residences, cover names, bank accounts, and contacts, destroying in a matter of days a network that had been in place for twenty years. Two military attaches, in Vienna and Berlin, had been expelled, and more were to follow—
The involvement of the lawyer Prahler in such a brutal and inept affair would make it impossible for other deepcover agents of his stature to act ... and make it difficult to recruit new ones.
And who knew what else the American senator was telling.
“You know, Molniya, for years my service ran moles at the very heart of the British intelligence service ... we even had one who acted as liaison with the CIA.”
“Philby, Burgess, Maclean, and Blount. And old man Churchill, too, if you believe the Western spy novels. Is there a point to this anecdote?”
“I’m just trying to give you some idea of the damage you’ve done. Those moles paralyzed the British for over twenty years. That’s what could happen to us ... to both of us. Your GRU bosses will never admit it; if they do, they certainly won’t discuss it with you. But that’s the mess I’ve got to clean up.”
“Now ... if you know anything at all about me”—Polyakov was certain that Molniya knew as much about him as the KGB, which meant that Molniya did not know one very important thing—“you know that I’m fair. I’m old, I’m fat, I’m faceless ... but I’m objective. I’m retiring in four months. I have nothing to gain from causing a new war between our two services.”
Molniya merely returned his gaze. Well, Polyakov expected as much. The rivalry between the GRU and KGB had been bloody. At various times in the past each service had managed to have the leaders of its rival shot. There is nothing longer than institutional memory.
“ I see.” Polyakov stood up. “Sorry to have troubled you, Major. Obviously the General Secretary was mistaken ... you have nothing to say to me—”
“Ask your questions!”
Forty minutes later Polyakov sighed and sat back in his chair. Turning slightly, he could see out the window. GRU headquarters was called the Aquarium because of its glass walls. It fit. Polyakov had noticed, as he was driven by another GRU officer past the Institute of Space Biology, which, together with the little-used Frunze Central Airport, surrounded the Aquarium, that this building-perhaps the most inaccessible, indeed even invisible place in the city of Moscow-appeared to be almost transparent. A fifteen-story building with nothing but floor-to-ceiling windows!
To find it inviting was a mistake. Polyakov pitied the theoretical casual visitor. Before even reaching the inner circle, one had to penetrate an outer one consisting of three secret aircraft design bureaus, the even more secret Chelomei spacecraft design bureau, or the Red Banner Air Force Academy.
At the far end of the courtyard below, nestled against the impenetrable concrete wall that surrounded the Aquarium, was a crematorium. The story was that, in the final interview before acceptance into the GRU, every candidate was shown this squat green building and a special film.
The film was of the 1959 execution of GRU Colonel Popov, who had been caught spying for the CIA. Popov was strapped to a stretcher with unbreakable wire and simply fed-alive-into the flames. The process was interrupted so that the coffin of another, substantially more honored GRU employee could be consigned first.
The message was clear: You leave the GRU only through the crematorium. We are more important than family, than
country. A man such as Molniya, trained by such an organization, was not vulnerable to any of Polyakov’s interrogator’s tricks. In almost an hour all Polyakov had pried out of him were operational details ... names, dates, places, events. Material that Polyakov already possessed. There was something more to be learned-a secret of some kind-Polyakov was sure of it. A secret no one else had been able to get out of Molniya. A secret that, perhaps, no one but Polyakov knew existed. How could he get Molniya to talk?
What could be more important to this man than that crematorium?
“It must be difficult being a Soviet ace.”
If Molniya was surprised by Polyakov’s sudden statement, he didn’t show it. “My power is just another tool to be used against the imperialists.”
“I’m sure that’s what your superiors would like to think. God forbid you should use it for yourself.” Polyakov sat down again. This time he poured himself a glass of water. He held out the bottle to Molniya, who shook his head. “You must be tired of the jokes by now. Water and electricity.”
“Yes,” Molniya said tiredly. “ I have to be careful when it rains. I can’t take baths. The only water I like is snow ... Given the number of people who know about me, it’s amazing how many jokes I’ve heard.”
“They have your family, don’t they? Don’t answer. It’s not something I know. It’s just ... the only way to control you.”
The wild card virus was relatively dissipated by the time it reached the Soviet Union, but it was still strong enough to create jokers and aces, and to cause the creation of a secret state commission to deal with the problem. In typical Stalinist fashion aces were segregated from the population and “educated” in special camps. Jokers simply disappeared. In many ways it was worse than the Purge, which Polyakov had seen as a teenager. In the Thirties the knock on the door came for Party members ... those with incorrect ambitions. But everyone was at risk during the Wild Card Purge.
Even those in the Kremlin. Even those at the very highest levels.
“I knew someone like you, Molniya. I used to work for him, not far from here as a matter of fact.”
For the first time Molniya dropped his guard. He was genuinely curious. “Is the legend true?”
“Which legend? That Comrade Stalin was a joker and died with a stake driven through his heart? Or that it was Lysenko who had been affected?” Polyakov could tell that Molniya knew them all. “ I must say I’m shocked to think that such fabrications are circulated by officers of military intelligence!”
“I was thinking of the legend that there was nothing left of Stalin to bury ... that the corpse displayed at the funeral was made up by the same geniuses who maintain Lenin’s.”
Very close, Polyakov thought. What did Molniya know? “You’re a war hero, Molniya. Yet you ran from that building in Berlin like a raw recruit. Why?”
This was another one of the old tricks, the sudden segue back to more immediate business.
As Molniya replied that he didn’t honestly remember running, Polyakov went around the table and, sliding a chair closer, sat down right next to him. They were so close that Polyakov could smell the soap and, under that, the sweat ... and something that might have been ozone. “Can you tell when someone is an ace?”
Finally Molniya was getting nervous. “Not without some demonstration ... no.”
Polyakov lowered his voice and jabbed a finger at the Hero’s medal on Molniya’s chest. “What do you think now?” Molniya’s face flushed and tears formed in his eyes. One gloved hand slapped Polyakov’s away. It only lasted an instant. “I was burning up!”
“Within seconds, yes. Burnt meat.”
“You’re the one.” There was as much fascination-after all, they had a lot in common-as fear in Molniya’s face. “That was another one of the legends, that there was a second ace. But you were supposed to be in the Party hierarchy, one of Brezhnev’s people.”
Polyakov shrugged. “The second ace belongs to no one. He’s very careful about that. His loyalty is to the Soviet Union. To Soviet ideals and potential, not the pitiful reality.” He remained close to Molniya. “And now you know my secret. One ace to another ... what do you have to tell me?”
It was good to leave the Aquarium. Years of institutional hatred had imbued the place with an almost physical barrier-like an electrical charge-that repelled all enemies, especially the KGB.
Polyakov should have been feeling elated: he had gotten some very important information out of Molniya. Even Molniya himself did not know how important. No one knew why the Hartmann kidnapping had fallen apart, but what had happened to Molniya could best be explained by the presence of a secret ace, one with the power to control men’s actions. Molniya could not know, of course, that something much like this had happened in Syria. But Polyakov had seen that report. Polyakov was afraid he knew the answer.
The man who might very well be the next president of the United States was an ace.
“The chairman will see you now.”
To Polyakov’s surprise the receptionist was a young woman of striking beauty, a blonde straight out of an American movie. Gone was Seregin, Andropov’s old gatekeeper, a man with the physical appearance of a hatchet-appropriately enough-and a personality to match. Seregin was perfectly capable of letting a Politburo member cool his heels for eternity in this outer office, or if necessary, physically ejecting anyone foolish enough to make an unexpected call on the chairman of the Committee for State Security, the chief of the KGB.
Polyakov imagined that this lissome woman was potentially just as lethal as Seregin; nevertheless, the whole idea struck him as ludricrous. An attempt to put a smile on the face of the tiger. Meet your new, caring.Kremlin. Today’s friendly KGB!
Seregin was gone. But then, so was Andropov. And Polyakov himself was no longer welcome on the top floor ... not without the chairman’s invitation.
The chairman rose from his desk to kiss him, interrupting Polyakov’s salute. “Georgy Vladimirovich, how nice to see you.” He was directed to a couch-another new addition, some kind of conversational nook in the formerly Spartan office. “You’re not often seen in these parts.” By your choice, Polyakov wanted to say ..
“My duties have kept me away.”
“Of course. The rigors of field work.” The chairman, who like most KGB chiefs since Stalin’s day was essentially a Party political appointee, had served the KGB as a snitch-a stukachnot an operative or analyst. In this he was the perfect leader of an organization consisting of a million stukachi. “Tell me about your visit to the Aquarium.”
Quickly to business. Another sign of the Gorbachev style. Polyakov was thorough to the point of tedium in his replay of the interrogation, with one significant omission. He counted on the chairman’s famous impatience and wasn’t disappointed.
“These operational details are all well and good, Georgy Vladimirovich, but wasted on poor bureaucrats, hmm?” A self-deprecating smile. “Did the GRU give you full and complete cooperation, as directed by the General Secretary”
“Yes ... alas,” Polyakov said, earning the chairman’s equally famous laugh.
“Do you have enough information to salvage our European operations?”
“Yes.”
““How will you proceed? I understand that the German networks are being rolled up. Every day Aeroflot brings our agents back to us.’
“Those not held for trial in the West, yes,” Polyakov said. “Berlin is a wasteland for us now. Most of Germany is barren and will be for years.”
“Carthage.”
“But we have other assets. Deep-cover assets that have not been utilized in years. I propose to activate one known as the Dancer.”
The chairman drew out pen and made a note to have the Dancer file brought up from the registry. He nodded. “How much time will this ... recovery take, in your honest estimation?”
“At least two years.”
The chairman’s gaze drifted off. “Which brings me to a question of my own,” Polyakov persisted. “My retirement.”
“Yes, your retirement.” The chairman sighed. “I think the only course is to bring Yurchenko in on this as soon as possible, since he’ll be the one who has to finish the job.”
“Unless I postpone my retirement.” Polyakov had said the unspeakable. He watched the chairman make an unaccustomed search for an unprogrammed response. “Well. That would be a problem, wouldn’t it? All the papers have been signed. Yurchenko’s promotion is already approved. You will be promoted to general and will receive your third Hero’s medal. We’re prepared to announce it at the plenum next month.” The chairman leaned forward. “Is it money, Georgy Vladimirovich? I shouldn’t mention this, but there is often a pension bonus for extremely ... valuable service.”
It wasn’t going to work. The chairman might be a political hack, but he was not without his skills. He had been ordered to clean house at the KGB and clean house he would. Right now he feared Gorbachev more than he feared an old spy.
Polyakov sighed. “I only want to finish my job. If that is not the ... desire of the Party, I will retire as agreed.”
The chairman had been anticipating a fight and was relieved to have won so quickly. “I understand the difficulty of your situation, Georgy Vladimirovich. We all know your tenacity. We don’t have enough like you. But Yurchenko is capable. After all ... you trained him.”
“I’ll brief him.”
“I tell you what,” the chairman said. “Your retirement doesn’t take effect until the end of August.”
“My sixty-third birthday.”
“I see no reason why we should deprive ourselves of your talents until that date.” The chairman was writing notes to himself again. “This is highly unusual, as you well know, but why don’t you go with Yurchenko? Hmm? Where is this Dancer?”
“France, at the moment, or England.”
The chairman was pleased. “I’m sure we can think of worse places for a business trip.” He wrote another note with his pen. “ I will authorize you to accompany Yurchenko ... to assist in the transition. Charming bureaucratic phrase.”
“Thank you.”
“Nonsense, you’ve earned it.” The chairman got up and went to the sideboard. That, at least, had not changed. He drew out a bottle of vodka that was almost empty, pouring two glasses full, which finished it. “A forbidden toast-the end of an era!” They drank.
The chairman sat down again. “What will happen to Molniya? No matter how badly he bungled Berlin, he’s too valuable to waste in that horrible furnace of theirs.”
“He’s teaching tactics now, here in Moscow In time, if he’s good, they may let him return to fieldwork.”
The chairman shuddered visibly. “What a mess.” His tight smile—showed a pair of steel teeth. “Having a wild card working for you! I wonder, would one ever sleep?”
Polyakov drained his glass. “I wouldn’t.”
Polyakov loved the English newspapers. The Sun ... The Mirror ... The Globe ... with their screaming three-inch headlines about the latest royal rows and their naked women, they were bread and circus rolled into one. At the moment some M P was on trial, accused of hiring a prostitute for fifty pounds and then, in The Sun’s typically restrained words, “Not getting his money’s worth!” (“’it was over so fast,’ tart claims!”) Which was the greater sin? Polyakov wondered.
A tiny deck on that same front page mentioned that the Aces Tour had arrived in London.
Perhaps Polyakov’s affection for the papers derived from professional appreciation. Whenever he was in the West, his legend or cover was that of a Tass correspondent, which had required him to master enough rudimentary journalistic skills to pass, though most Western reporters he met assumed he was a spy. He had never learned to write well—certainly not with the drunken eloquence of his Fleet Street colleaguesbut he could hold his liquor and he could find a story.
At that level, at least, journalism and intelligence were not mutually exclusive.
Alas, Polyakov’s old haunts were unsuitable for a rendezvous with the Dancer. Recognition of either of them would be disastrous for both. They could not, in fact, use a public house of any kind.
To make matters worse, the Dancer was an uncontrolled agent—a “cooperative asset” to use Moscow Center’s increasingly bland jargon. Polyakov had not even seen him in over twenty years, and that had been an accidental encounter following even more years of separation. There were no prearranged signals, no message drops, no intermediaries, no channels to let the Dancer know that Polyakov had come to collect.
Though the Dancer’s notoriety made certain kinds of contacts impossible, it made Polyakov’s job easier in one respect: If he wanted to know how to find this particular asset—all he had to do was pick up a paper.
His assistant, and future successor, Yurchenko, was busy ingratiating himself with the London rezident; both men showed only a passing interest in Polyakov’s comings and goings, joking that their soon-to-be—retired friend was spending his time with King’s Cross whores—“Just be sure you don’t wind up in the newspapers, Georgy Vladimirovich,” Yurchenko had teased. “If you do ... at least get your money’s worth!”—since such behavior by Polyakov was not unprecedented. Well ... he had never married. And years in Germany, particularly in Hamburg, had given him a taste for pretty young mouths at affordable prices. It was also quite true that the KGB did not trust an agent who possessed no notable weakness. One vice was tolerated, so long as it was one of the controllable ones-alcohol, money, or women-rather than, say, religion. A dinosaur such as Polyakov-who had worked for Beria, for God’s sake!-having a taste for honey ... well, that was considered rakish, even charming.
From the Tass office near Fleet, Polyakov went alone to the Grosvenor House Hotel, riding in one of the famous English black cabs this one actually belonged to the Embassy down Park Lane to Knightsbridge to Kensington Road. It was early on a work day and the cab crawled through a sea of vehicles and humanity. The sun was up, burning off the morning haze. It was going to be a beautiful London spring day.
At Grosvenor House, Polyakov had to talk his way past several very obvious guards while noting the presence of several discreet ones. He was allowed as far as the concierge station, where he found, to his annoyance, another young woman in place of the usual old scout. This one even looked like the chairman’s new gatekeeper. “Will the house telephone put me through to the floors where the Aces Tour is staying?”
The concierge frowned and framed a reply. Clearly the tour’s presence here was not common knowledge, but Polyakov preempted her questions, as he had gotten past the guards, by presenting his press credentials. She examined them-they were genuine in any case-then guided him to the telephones. “They might not be answering at this hour, but these lines are direct.”
“Thank you.” He waited until she had withdrawn, then asked the operator to ring through to the room number one of the Embassy’s footmen had already provided.
“Yes?” Polyakov had not expected the voice to change, yet he was surprised that it had not.
“It’s been a long time ... Dancer.”
Polyakov was not surprised by the long silence at the other end. “It’s you, isn’t it?”
He was pleased. The Dancer retained enough tradecraft to keep the telephone conversations bland. “Didn’t I promise that I would give-you a visit someday?”
“What do you want?”
“To meet, what else? To see you.”
“This is hardly the place—”
“There’s a cab waiting out front. It’ll be easy to spot. It’s the only one at the moment.”
“I’ll be down in a few minutes.”
Polyakov hung up and hurried out to the cab, not forgetting to nod to the concierge again.
“Any luck?”
“Enough. Thank you.”
He slipped into the cab and closed the door. His heart was pounding. My God, he thought, I’m like a teenager waiting for a girl!
Before long the door opened. Immediately Polyakov was awash in .the Dancer’s scent. He extended his hand in the Western fashion. “Dr. Tachyon, I presume.”
The driver was a young Uzbek from the Embassy whose professional specialty was economic analysis, but whose greatest virtue was his ability to keep his mouth shut. His total lack of interest in Polyakov’s activities and the challenge of navigating London’s busy streets allowed Polyakov and Tachyon some privacy.
Polyakov’s wild card had no face, so he had never been suspected of being an ace or joker. That, and the fact that he had only used his powers twice:
The first time was in the long, brutal winter of 1946-47, the winter following the release of the virus. Polyakov was a senior lieutenant then, having spent the Great Patriotic War as a zampolit, or political officer, at the munitions factories in the Urals. When the Nazis surrendered, Moscow Center assigned him to the counterinsurgency forces fighting Ukrainian nationalists-the “men from the forests” who had fought with the Nazis and had no intentions of giving up. (In fact they continued fighting until 1952.)
Polyakov’s boss there was a thug named Suvin, who confessed drunkenly one night that he had been an executioner in the Lubiyanka during the Purge. Suvin had developed a real taste for torture; Polyakov wondered if that was the only possible response to a job that daily required one to shoot a fellow Party member in the back of the neck. One evening Polyakov brought in a Ukrainian teenager, a boy, for questioning. Suvin had been drinking and began to beat a confession out of the kid, which was a waste of time: the boy had already confessed to stealing food. But Suvin wanted to link him to the rebels.
Polyakov remembered, mostly, that he had been tired. Like everyone in the Soviet Union in that year, including those at the very highest levels, he was often hungry. It was the fatigue, he thought shamefully now, not human compassion, that made him leap at Suvin and shove him aside. Suvin turned on him and they fought. From underneath the other man, Polyakov managed to get his hands on his throat. There was no chance he could choke him ... yet Suvin suddenly turned red-dangerously red-and literally burst into flames.
The young prisoner was unconscious and knew nothing. Since fatalities in the war zone were routinely ascribed to enemy action, the bully Suvin was officially reported to have died “heroically” of “extreme thoracic trauma” and “burns,” euphemisms for being fried to a cinder. The incident terrified Polyakov. At first he didn’t even realize what had happened; information on the wild card virus was restricted. But eventually he realized that he had a power ... that he was an ace. And he swore never to use the power again.
He had only broken that promise once.
By the autumn of 1955, Georgy Vladimirovich Polyakov, now a captain in the “organs,” was using the legend of a junior Tass reporter in West Berlin. Aces and jokers were much in the news in those days. The Tass men monitored the Washington hearings with horror-it reminded some of them of the Purge-and delight. The mighty American aces were being neutralized by their own countrymen!
It was known that some aces and their Takisian puppet master (as Pravda described him) had fled the U.S. following the first HUAC hearings. They became high-priority targets for the Eighth Directorate, the KGB department responsible for Western Europe. Tachyon in particular was a personal target for Polyakov. Perhaps the Takisian held some clue to the secret of the wild card virus ... something to explain it ... something to make it go away. When he heard that the Takisian was on the skids in Hamburg, he was off.
Since Polyakov had made prior “research” trips to Hamburg’s red-light district, he knew which brothels were likely to cater to an unusual client such as Tachyon. He found the alien in the third establishment he tried. It was near dawn; the Takisian was drunk, passed out, and out of money. Tachyon should have been grateful: the Germans as a race had little liking for drunken indigents; masters of Hamburg whorehouses had even less. Tachyon would have been lucky to have been dumped in the canal ... alive.
Polyakov had him taken to a safe house in East Berlin, where, after a prolonged argument among the rezidenti, he was supplied with controlled amounts of alcohol and women while he slowly regained his health ... and while Polyakov and at least a dozen others questioned him. Even Shelepin himself took time out from his plotting back in Moscow to visit.
Within three weeks it was clear that Tachyon had nothing left to give. More likely, Polyakov suspected, the Takisian had—regained sufficient strength to withstand any further interrogation. Nevertheless, he had supplied them with so much data on the American aces, on Takisian history and science, and on the wild card virus itself, that Polyakov halfexpected his superiors to give the alien a medal and a pension.
They did almost as much. Like the German rocket engineers captured after the war, Tachyon’s ultimate fate was to be quietly repatriated ... in this case to West Berlin. They transferred Polyakov to the illegals residence there at the same time, hoping for residual contacts, and allowing both men a simultaneous introduction to the city. Because of East Berlin, they would never be friends. Because of their time in the western sector, they could never be total enemies.
“In forty years on this world I’ve learned to alter my expectations every day,” Tachyon told him. “ I honestly thought you were dead.”
“Soon enough I will be,” Polyakov said. “But you look better now that you did in Berlin. The years truly pass slowly for your kind.”
“Too slowly at times.” They rode in silence for a while, each pretending to enjoy the scenery while each ordered his memories of the other.
“Why are you here?” Tachyon asked. “To collect on a debt.”
Tachyon nodded slightly, a gesture that showed how thoroughly assimilated he had become. “That’s what I thought.”
“You knew it would happen one day.”
“Of course! Please don’t misunderstand! My people honor their commitments. You saved my life. You have a right to anything I can give you.” Then he smiled tightly. “This one time.”
“How close are you to Senator Gregg Hartmann?”
“He’s a senior member of this tour, so I’ve had some contact with him. Obviously not much lately, following that terrible business in Berlin.”
“What do you think of him ... as a man?”
“I don’t know him well enough to judge. He’s a politician, and as a rule I despise politicians. In that sense he strikes me as the best of a bad lot. He seems to be genuine in his support for jokers, for example. This is probably not an issue in your country, but it’s a very emotional one in America, comparable to abortion rights.” He paused. “I doubt very much he would be susceptible to any kind of ... arrangement, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I see you’ve taken up reading spy novels,” Polyakov said. “I’m more interested in ... let’s call it a political analysis. Is it possible that he will become president of the United States?”
“Very possible. Reagan has been crippled by his current crisis and is not, in my judgment, a well man. He has no obvious successor, and the American economy is likely to worsen before the election.”
The first piece of the puzzle: There is one American politician who has left in his wake a series of mysterious deaths worthy of Beria or Stalin .... The second:, The same politician is kidnapped-twice. And escapes under mysterious circumstances-twice.
“The Democrats have several candidates, none without major weaknesses. Hart is sure to eliminate himself. Biden, Dukakis, any of the others could disappear tomorrow. If Hartmann can put together a strong organization, and if the right opening occurs, he could win.”
A recent Moscow Center briefing had predicted that Dole would be the next U.S. president. Strategists at the American Institute were already creating an expert psychological model of the senator from Kansas. But these were the same analysts who predicted Ford over Carter and Carter over Reagan. On the principle that events never turn out the way experts say, Polyakov was inclined to believe Tachyon.
Even the theoretical possibility of a Hartmann presidency was important ... if he was an ace! He needed to be watched, stopped if necessary, but Moscow Center would never authorize such a move, especially if it contradicted its expensive little studies.
The driver, by prearrangement, headed back toward Grosvenor House. The rest of the trip was spent in reminiscence of the two Berlins, even of Hamburg. “You aren’t satisfied, are you?” Tachyon said finally. “You want more from me than a superficial political analysis, surely.”
“You know the answer to that.”
“I have no secret documents to give you. I’m hardly inconspicuous enough to work as a spy.”
“You have your powers, Tachyon—”
“And my limitations! You know what I will and will not do.”
“I’m not your enemy, Tachyon! I’m the only one who even remembers your debt, and in August I’ll be retired. At this point I’m just an old man trying to put together the pieces of a puzzle.”
“Then tell me about your puzzle—”
“You know better than that.”
“Then how can I possibly help you?” Polyakov didn’t answer. “You’re afraid that by even asking me a direct question, I’ll learn too much. Russians!”
For a moment Polyakov wished for a wild card power that would let him read minds. Tachyon had many human characteristics, but he was Takisian ... all of Polyakov’s years of training did not help him decide whether or not he was lying. Must he depend on Takisian honor?
The cab pulled up to the curb and the driver opened the door. But Tachyon didn’t get out. “What’s going to happen to you?”
What, indeed? Polyakov thought. “I’m going to become an honored pensioner, like Khrushchev, able to go to the front of a queue, spending my days reading and reliving my exploits over a bottle of vodka for men who will not believe them.”
Tachyon hesitated. “For years I hated you ... not for exploiting my weakness, but for saving my life. I was in Hamburg because I wanted to die. But now, finally, I have something to live for ... it’s only been very recent. So I am grateful, you know”
Then he got out of the cab and slammed the door. “I’ll see you again,” he said, hoping for a denial.
“Yes,” Polyakov said, “you will.” The driver pulled away. In the rearview mirror Polyakov saw that the Takisian watched them drive off before going into his hotel.
No doubt he wondered where and when Polyakov would turn up again. Polyakov wondered too. He was all alone now ... mocked by his colleagues, discarded by the Party, loyal to some ideal that he only barely remembered. Like poor Molniya in a way, sent out on some misguided mission and then abandoned.
The fate of a Soviet ace is to be betrayed.
He was scheduled to remain in London for several weeks yet, but if he could no longer extract useful information from a relatively cooperative source such as the Dancer, there was no point in staying. That night he packed for the return to Moscow and his retirement. After a dinner in which he was joined only by a bottle of Stolichnaya, Polyakov left the hotel and took a walk, down Sloane, past the fashionable boutiques. What did they call the young women who shopped here? Yes, Sloane Rangers. The Rangers, to judge from the stray samples still hurrying home at this hour, or from the bizarre mannequins in the windows, were thin, wraithlike creatures. Too fragile for Polyakov.
In any case, his ultimate destination ... his farewell to London and the West ... was King’s Cross, where the women were more substantial.
On reaching Pont Street, however, he noticed an off-duty black cab following him. In moments he considered possible assailants, ranging from renegade American agents to Light of Allah terrorists to English hoodlums ... until he read, in the reflection from a shop window, the license number of a vehicle belonging to the Soviet Embassy. Further examination revealed that the driver was Yurchenko.
Polyakov dropped his evasions and simply met the car.
In the back was a man he didn’t know. “Georgy Vladimirovich,” Yurchenko shouted. “Get in!”
“There’s no need to yell,” Polyakov said. “You’ll draw attention.” Yurchenko was one of those polished young men for whom tradecraft came so easily that, unless reminded, he often neglected to use it.
As soon as Polyakov was aboard in the front seat, the car jumped into traffic. They were quite obviously going for a ride.
“We thought we were losing you,” Yurchenko said pleasantly.
“What’s this all about?” Polyakov said. He indicated the silent man in the backseat. “Who’s your friend?”
“This is Dolgov of the GRU. He’s presented me with some very disturbing news.”
For the first time in years Polyakov felt real fear. Was this to be his retirement? An “accidental” death in a foreign country?
“Don’t keep me in suspense, Yurchenko. The last time I checked, I was still your boss.”
Yurchenko couldn’t look at him. “The Takisian is a double agent. He’s working for the Americans and has for thirty years.”
Polyakov turned toward the GRU man. “So now the GRU is sharing its precious intelligence. What a great day for the Soviet Union. I suppose I’m suspected of being an agent.”
The GRU man spoke for the first time. “What did the Takisian give you?”
“I’m not talking to you. What my agents give me is KGB business—”
“The GRU will share with you, then. Tachyon has a grandson named Blaise, whom he found in Paris last month. Blaise is a new kind of ace ... potentially the most powerful and dangerous in the world. And he was snatched right out of our hands to be taken to America.”
The car was crossing Lambeth Bridge, heading toward a gray and depressing industrial district, a perfect location for a safe house ... the perfect setting for an execution.
Tachyon had a grandson with powers! Suppose this child came into contact with Hartmann-the potential was horrifying. Life in a world threatened by nuclear destruction was safe compared to one dominated by a wild card Ronald Reagan. How could he have been so stupid?
“ I didn’t know,” he said finally. “Dancer was not an active agent. There was no reason to place him under surveillance.”
“But there was,” Dolgov persisted. “He’s a goddamned alien, for one thing! And if his presence on the tour itself wasn’t enough, there was the situation in Paris!”
It was easy for the GRU to spy on someone in Paris: the embassy there was full of its operatives. Of course the sister service hadn’t bothered to pass its vital information along to the KGB. Polyakov would have acted differently with Molniya had he known about Blaise!
Now he needed time to think. He realized he had been holding his breath. A bad habit. “This is serious. We should obviously be working together. I’m ready to do whatever I can—”
“Then why are you packed?” Yurchenko interrupted, sounding genuinely anguished.
“You’ve been watching me?” He looked from Yurchenko to Dolgov. My God, they actually thought he was going to defect!
Polyakov turned slightly, his hand brushing Yurchenko, who recoiled as if slapped. But Polyakov didn’t let go. The cab sideswiped a parked car and skidded back into traffic just as Polyakov saw Yurchenko’s eyes roll up ... the heat had already boiled his brain.
Dolgov threw himself into the front seat, grabbing for the wheel, and managed to steer right into another parked car, where they stopped. Polyakov had braced for the impact, which threw Yurchenko’s smoking body off him ... freeing him to reach out for Dolgov, who made the mistake of grabbing back.
For an instant Dolgov’s face was the face of the Great Leader ... the Benevolent Father of the Soviet People ... himself turned into a murderous joker. Polyakov was just a young courier who carried messages between the Kremlin and Stalin’s dacha—sufficiently trusted that he was allowed to know the secret of Great Stalin’s curse-not an assassin. He had never intended to be an assassin. But Stalin had already ordered the execution of all wild cards ....
If it was his destiny to carry this power, it must also be his destiny to use it. As he had eliminated Stalin, so he eliminated Dolgov. He didn’t allow the man to say a word, not even the final gesture of defiance, as he burned the life out of him.
The impact had jammed the two front doors, so Polyakov would have to crawl out the back. Before he did, he removed the silencer and the heavy service revolver Dolgov carried ... the weapon he was to have pressed to the back of Polyakov’s neck. Polyakov fired a round into the air, then put the revolver back where Dolgov carried it. Scotland Yard and the GRU could think what they liked ... another unsolved murder with the murderers themselves the victims of an unlucky accident.
The fire from the two bodies reached the tiny trickle of gasoline spilled in the crash .... The crematorium would not get Dolgov.
The explosion and flames would attract attention. Polyakov knew he should go ... yet there was something attractive in the flames. As if an aged, dutiful KGB colonel were dying, too, to be reborn as a superhero, the one true Soviet ace .... This would be a legend of his own creation.
There were many signs in Russian at the British Airways terminal at Robert Tomlin International Airport, placed there by members of Jewish Relief, headquartered in nearby Brighton Beach. For Jews who managed to emigrate from the Eastern bloc, even those who dreamed of eventually settling in Palestine, this was their Ellis Island.
Among those debarking this day in May was a stocky man in his early sixties, dressed like a typical middle-class emigre, in brown shirt buttoned to the neck and well-worn gray jacket. A woman from Relief stepped forward to help him. “Strasvitye s Soyuzom Statom,” she said in Russian, “Welcome to the United States.”
“Thank you,” the man replied in English.
The woman was pleased. “If you already speak the language, you will find things very easy here. May I help you?”
“No, I know what I’m doing.”
Out there, in the city, waited Dr. Tachyon, living in fear of their next encounter, wondering what it would mean to his very special grandson. To the south, Washington, and Senator Hartmann, a formidable target. But Polyakov would not work alone. No sooner had he gone underground in England than he had managed to contact the shattered remains of Molniya’s network. Next week Gimli would be joining him in America ....
As he waited for customs to clear his meager luggage, Polyakov could see through the windows that it was a beautiful American summer day.
W ould that be Mr. Cash?” the voice behind me said, surprising the hell out of me.
I was in Haugen’s Bakery on Highway 14 getting my morning cup of coffee, though that’s not why I stopped there. I didn’t even like coffee much; it made me jittery, and made my heavy lifting, tricky at best, almost impossible. The owner, a joker of indeterminate gender named “Fran”, was hard on the eyes and nerves.
But Haugen’s had this waitress named Evelyn. Well, her name was pronounced Evelyn: on her nametag it was written, no fooling, “Eva-Lynne”. She was tall and slim and blond and about 25 years old, and my purpose in life, that unseasonably hot day in October 1968, was to find out what mistake she made in a past life that dumped her into a bakery in Mojave, California. Until then I, like the truckers passing through, continued to come by for some really bad coffee, questionable pastries, and just a whiff of her perfume. Perhaps a throaty, “Thanks for coming in. Good to see you again.” (She always seemed on the verge of remembering my name.)
You certainly didn’t come to Haugen’s to have strange foreign men loom up behind you without warning.
“Hmm?” I said, or something equally articulate.
“Mr. Cash Mitchell?” The speaker was a man about forty, thin, dark. Indian, I judged, from the lilt to his voice. Not a joker, either.
“Speaking,” I said, foolishly, as if we were on the telephone. (I was moving closer to my encounter with Eva-Lynne.)
“Ah, good. I am Tominbang. I wish to speak with you on a matter of great urgency.” He shook my hand a bit too enthusiastically.
And I took another step forward. The customer in front of the customer in front of me—a busy-looking woman of 35, almost certainly a real estate professional—suddenly launched a complicated series of orders at Eva-Lynne, no doubt nosh for some morning meeting. I was trapped.
“I’m listening,” I said to Tominbang. If you saw me, medium height, overweight, glasses, you would not be intimidated. But I had had a good couple of months lifting various items for Mr. Warren Skalko of Lancaster, Las Vegas, and other municipalities, so I felt smug. I could not imagine why this foreign man would be talking to me; more precisely, I suspected that any association between us was not going to make me rich. (This turned out to be painfully true.)
“Mr. Warren Skalko recommends you to me,” Tominbang said.
I lost probably a third of my attitude at the mention of my mentor. “I’m always happy to meet a friend of Mr. Skalko’s,” I said, summoning as much enthusiasm as I could. Just to be safe. “Where do you know him from?” Mr. Skalko had several sorts of associates, some from his noted (and legitimate) charity work, others from his country club, and a few from being what that same popular press called “the crime lord of the southwest.”
“We were introduced on the first tee at Riviera,” Tominbang said, naming Mr. Skalko’s Los Angeles country club, and nicely slipping into the second category of Skalko associates. “He mentioned your specific abilities as a mass transporter—”
He was interrupted by a commotion not five feet away. Real Estate Woman was giving my beloved Eva-Lynne a hard time. “What the hell do you expect me to do? Carry it all by myself?”
The customer in front of me, sensing a longer-than-usual wait for bad coffee, shook his head and departed. At that moment I caught Eva-Lynne’s eye—and was struck by something I’d never seen there before.
Panic.
She was trying to maneuver a heavy, unbalanced load of hot coffees and pastry—enough food for a group of a dozen longshoreman, I judged—while behind her a coffee machine somehow managed to boil over and one of the bakers chattered in her ear. Big bad Fran was busy elsewhere. “I’m sorry,” she was saying, “Just give me a—”
“Let me help,” I said, surprising myself as I edged past the annoying Real Estate Woman and placed a hand on Eva-Lynne’s shoulder. This is how my lifting works: physical touch, with mass-to-be-moved proportional to the strength of my grip. The trigger is emotion, and anger or even general annoyance (my usual state), is the most reliable.
You can bet I was gentle. I didn’t want hot coffee spewing all over us. Sure enough, the load lightened just enough so that Eva-Lynne didn’t have to worry about it. One lovely eyebrow arched in surprise. “Out to your car?” I said to the Annoying Real Estate Woman.
“No, why don’t you just carry it over to Joshua Street for me.” Ordinarily I have little patience for sarcasm, but being in actual physical contact with Eva-Lynne had a mellowing effect.
“Let me help,” I whispered to Eva-Lynne, since I had to remain in physical contact to keep lifting. And we glided outside into the gravel parking like a Kern County version of Fred and Ginger.
“Thank you,” Eva-Lynne told me, once the order was safely deposited on the front seat of a new 1969 Ford LTD, and Annoying Real Estate Woman had departed. “I really appreciate it.” Her nose sort of crinkled, and she smiled. “Your name is Cash, isn’t it?”
At last! I’d made it across the barrier, from vaguely familiar five-day-a-week morning customer to friend-with-a-name! Who knew where this could lead! I was just about to extend my hand when Fran appeared in the doorway. “Eva-Lynne, we have customers!”
“Back to the grind,” she said, heading back inside. I followed.
In those brief-but-glorious moments of personal contact, I had forgotten about Tominbang. “You are a gentleman, Mr. Mitchell.”
“Not really,” I said, and I wasn’t just being modest. “What was it you wanted to talk to me about?”
“Ah, my project,” he said, lighting up like a Mojave dawn. “I am thinking of making a flight to the Moon.”
Nothing less could have torn me away from Eva-Lynne. (And even then, it was close.)
Mr. Tominbang’s late model El Dorado was parked outside, right next to my ‘66 Mustang (the fruit of my first lifting jobs for Mr. Skalko, a shipment of color televisions that somehow fell off their truck). There was some discussion as to whether I would ride with Tominbang (“Where are we going, exactly?”) or he with me, until we compromised on having me follow him. That was a relief: if I’d left the Mustang for, say, two hours, the next place I would have seen it would have been as pieces in one of the Mr. Skalko’s other subsidiaries, the Palmdale chop shop.
Tominbang headed north, then west on Highway 58, toward the nether reaches of greater Mojave. This was strange territory for me: I live south of Palmdale, which is itself south of Mojave, in my little rat shack on the slope above Pearblossom Highway. I only found myself frequenting Haugen’s Bakery on Highway 14 thanks to visits to one of Mr. Skalko’s hideouts—excuse me, residences.
No sooner had we cleared the collection of shacks, trailers and used auto parts lots that is Mojave than I developed second thoughts. Maybe it was the wind, which was blowing hard enough to nudge the Mustang off the centerline. (Did you know that Tehachapi is the windiest municipality in the continental US?) Maybe it was hearing Scott McKenzie singing, “If You’re Going to Jokertown” for the hundredth time in a week, with its lyrics about taking that longshot when you see it. (A guy like me doesn’t have many opportunities with a girl like Eva-Lynne.)
Maybe it was thinking about what Mr. Tominbang said. A flight to the Moon?
I was seven years old when the wild card turned, so aliens from another planet were as real to me as Rin Tin Tin or my Fourth grade teacher. My older brother, Brad, used to force me to play Buck Rogers with him—the times we weren’t playing Wake Island, that is. We fought marsh creatures on Venus, dust dragons on Mars, and even some weird rock beings on the Moon.
Brad wanted to explore space when he grew up. Who cared that the Takisians had been there first? Human beings would go further, faster! He read all the Tak World novels, which he then passed down to me. (I read them, too, but under duress.)
More practically, he went to college at Purdue, got his engineering degree in ‘61, then joined the Air Force. This was not long after the X-11A fiasco; I remember him telling me that the US was edging back into the space business—but in secret. He had heard rumors of new students being recruited out of Purdue.
Brad went off to Vietnam and disappeared over Haiphong in January 1964. He was still listed as Missing in Action. And America’s “secret” space program? For all I knew that day, we could have had a fleet of flying saucers bombing Haiphong, maybe, or spying on all the freaks in Berkeley.
They sure weren’t flying to the Moon.
We were now so far into the wilderness that my radio reception was fading: there was mention of a riot at some rock concert in California. There were always riots in the news that year. I wouldn’t have bothered to pay attention, but it said the Hell’s Angels were involved. I knew the local Angels: they also did some jobs for Mr. Skalko. When I changed channels, all I got was country and western crap, or preachers, so I switched it off.
Besides, Tominbang’s car was turning onto a dirt road leading to a pair of distant hangars at Tehachapi-Kern Regional Airport. We had passed up a perfectly good asphalt road that led to a perfectly good administration building and tower. I made a note to send Tominbang a bill for any damage to the Mustang’s undercarriage.
The wind was still blowing when we got out. Tominbang’s tie flapped noisily. I wedged dust out of the corner of my eye as my guide fumbled a key out of his pocket and spent an unnecessary amount of time trying to open a padlock.
I looked at the two big hangars and what I couldn’t see from the road—a set of fuel tanks and other mechanical structures behind them, along with a much better road that led back to the airport proper. No other cars present, except one battered blue Scout. “Here we are,” Tominbang said proudly, wrenching the door open.
We had to pass through an anteroom of sorts to enter the hangar itself. Actually, a room and a hallway, with Tominbang flipping on lights as we went. “Please excuse,” he said. “I have just acquired this property and have yet to staff it completely.”
“How many, uh, staff, are you going to have?” I asked, smelling mildew and seeing rust and dirt wherever I looked.
“Perhaps three dozen. Perhaps more.”
Were forty people enough to build a spaceship that could fly to the Moon? I doubted that.
“Before we proceed, I must ask ...” His voice trailed off as he pulled a two-paged typed document out of the drawer of a battered metal desk. “This is a non-disclosure agreement certifying that you will keep what you are about to see confidential, until such time as it becomes public.”
I looked around at the cold, unused office with its peeling paint, and tried not to laugh. And signed. “How much is this all costing?” I said, handing the document back to Tominbang.
“The final price tag will be close to ten million dollars US,” he said casually, as if he were disclosing the price of a new suit of clothes.
He opened one last door, and we emerged into a rather different space: a huge space probably three stories tall. Bing, bing, bing, on went the lights.
And sitting in the middle of this space was a strange vehicle I can only describe as stubby-winged and shaped like a pumpkin-seed. “This is Quicksilver,” Tominbang said, proudly waving me toward it. “A prototype space plane developed at Tomlin four years ago.”
Not the X-11A. “Never heard of it.”
“It was secret.”
“Then what’s it doing here?” And in the hands of a shady foreign national?
“The Quicksilver program was cancelled last year. It proved to be technically feasible to fly it from the surface of the earth into orbit and return, but at a much higher cost than the Pentagon was willing to pay. Especially with a war going on. This Quicksilver is supposedly being stored until the day it can be displayed in the Air Force Museum.”
“How the hell did you even hear about it?”
“Ah,” Tominbang said, very pleased with himself, “my business is computers and telecommunications. One of my subsidiaries had the contract for the Quicksilver ground stations.”
So he knew about it legitimately. Well, semi-legitimately.
Up close Quicksilver looked used: the paint was faded. There were what appeared to be scorch marks on its skin. Of course, those were just the superficial details. “It was flown into orbit,” Tominbang said.
“Earth orbit is a long way from the Moon.”
“That’s where you come in,” a new voice said.
Out of the shadows lurched a slim, weathered man of sixty. Or, once he stepped into the light, a hard forty. His hair was gray and ragged, like a military crewcut gone to weed. His eyes were pale blue. It was the web of lines around them that made him seem old.
“Ah!” Tominbang said, with the sort of enthusiasm I used to have for Christmas morning, “Commander Al Dearborn, I have found Mr. Cash Mitchell.” Tominbang turned to me. “Commander Dearborn is a Quicksilver pilot.”
We shook hands. His grip was surprisingly limp. “Call me Al. All my ex wives do.” He smiled. “Though they usually add ‘that cheating son of a bitch’.”
“I’ll skip that part until I know you better.”
Dearborn laughed, perhaps a bit too hard. “That’s good. You’re gonna need a sense of humor on this thing.”
That statement alarmed me, and Tominbang noted my reaction. “Commander Dearborn is a noted humorist,” he said. And drunkard, I wanted to add. “He was the primary test pilot for Quicksilver.”
“Actually, I was a Navy exchange test pilot for the bird at Tomlin. The Air Force project pilot was a buddy of mine, Mike Sampson.”
I didn’t like Dearborn’s smell and boozy appearance, so my normal sociability was strained. “So why don’t we have Sampson here?”
“Major Sampson is still on active duty at Tomlin,” Tominbang said, quickly, and with a nervous glance at Dearborn. Obviously this was a delicate subject.
Dearborn peered at me as if we had not just been introduced. “I can’t decide whether I’m gonna like you or want to kill you.”
Ultimately, he did neither. What he did was throw up on my feet.
I’m not a fastidious man; I generally wear T-shirts and jeans, to the annoyance of Mr. Skalko, who clings to the sport coat look and seems to want a “team uniform” for his associates. I also wear sandals, generally a wise choice in the desert heat.
It was not wise on that day. Having my bare feet splashed with vomit violated even my loose standards of hygiene. I practically screamed in disgust. Then, with Tominbang’s help, I found a men’s room and managed to rinse off. Repeatedly. The sickening odor, combined with the ancient fetor of the men’s room, almost made me pass out.
Tominbang was more upset than I was. He kept apologizing for Dearborn. “He has a drinking problem. But he is very capable. He has been logged two hundred hours of Quicksilver test time, and made three orbital flights.”
“Can he stay sober long enough to do the job?”
“It was my impression that he only drinks when he doesn’t have a mission.”
“You’d better get him to work faster,” I said. “If he throws up on me again, I’m walking out.”
If I expected an apology from Dearborn, it would have to wait. He was passed out—let’s say sleeping—on a pile of canvas formerly used to protect the Quicksilver vehicle. This gave me my chance to pin Tominbang down. “So, what exactly is the plan here? Can you really fly a spaceplane to the Moon?”
“Oh, yes. With your assistance, Mr. Mitchell.”
“You’re losing me.”
“Since Quicksilver is capable of orbital flight, it only requires minor modifications for landing on the Moon. A landing gear must be added. Communications gear has to be beefed up. We need to obtain suitable space suits. And the life support fittings need to be changed to accommodate a crew of three.”
Everything was making sense up to the last point. “Why do you need three people? Isn’t this a one-man vehicle?”
Tominbang looked at the floor, as if he were embarrassed. “We will need the pilot—Dearborn. We will need a spacecraft specialist. And I wish to go along.”
That was alarming. “You’re spending all this money just so you can fly to the Moon?”
“No, Mr. Mitchell, that would be crazy,” he said, meaning nothing of the sort. “I have a practical reason. I have made a fortune in allowing certain electronic financial transactions to pass through the off-shore offices of my communications firm. But governments have been making that sort of work more difficult, and it will soon be impossible. I hope to set up the ultimate offshore data recording and retransmitting station.”
I was about to say that that idea sounded crazier than simply spending $10 million for a ride to the Moon. But Tominbang leaned close again. “This is the information you must keep confidential.”
“No problem,” I said, wondering just what subject I could bring up that would lead to my immediate departure from the hangar. I might even be able to stop at Haugen’s and resume that interrupted flirtation with Eva-Lynne. “You were about to explain why you needed me.”
“Because of your unique lifting ability, Mr. Mitchell. Quicksilver’s power plant can’t blast it out of earth orbit, or off the surface of the Moon. Unless, at a key moment, we can somehow reduce its mass to a fraction.”
I opened my mouth to laugh, then closed it. The biggest object I had ever lifted was a semi-trailer full of Johnny Walker and other fine beverages. (Mr. Skalko was unhappy with certain tariffs due him from the passage of this truck through his territory.) That semi dwarfed Quicksilver.
So the gig seemed possible, in theory. Which is all I’ve ever had. (As my father used to say, “Cash, you violate the laws of gravitation.” To which I usually answered: “I never studied law.”) Nevertheless, the very idea of performing a lift while in space and sitting on a rocket—well, it made me feel as faint as when I was washing Dearborn’s vomit off my flesh.
“I don’t know about this,” I said, perhaps more than once. It was one thing to fantasize about kicking up the dust of Mars with your boots. It was quite another to entrust your life to a crazy foreign man with more money than sense, and a drunken pilot. Oh, yes, on a flight to the Moon!
“The compensation would be of the highest degree,” Tominbang was saying, perhaps more than once and in different ways.
I have many faults, among them slovenliness and laziness, but the greatest of these is greed. So I said, “How much?”
And then he mentioned a figure that would not only buy my cooperation, but my silence and enthusiasm and that of everyone I know for at least a year. “Mr. Tominbang,” I said. “You’ve got a deal.”
(If you’re thinking that I thought I would find Eva-Lynne easier to impress if were a moderately richer man, you would be correct.)
Dearborn uttered a snort at this point, forcing me to look his way. “And what about him?”
“He has already agreed to the terms.” He shook his head. “He really just wants to fly Quicksilver again.”
I said “Oh,” or something equally helpful, then added, “Are we going to dry him out? Seeing as how we’ll be a quarter of a million miles from home and depending on his sobriety?”
“I am searching for a way. I would take him into my own residence, but my travel schedule does not permit it.”
“What about Dearborn’s situation? Does he have a wife?”
“Sadly, Commander Dearborn needs a place to stay.”
I don’t want to recount the rest of the conversation. I must have been weakened by dollar signs, because I agreed to take him in.
Temporarily.
“Doreen threw me out when I told her I had spent the weekend with Tominbang.” Dearborn and I were headed back down Highway 14 toward Palmdale. It was mid-afternoon, but he had awakened from his nap as fresh and perky as a teenager on a Sunday morning. If he had any reservations about going off to live with a man he had just met, not to mention vomited on, he hid them. “She thought that was some kind of code name for a Thai hooker, and that was it.”
“Doreen sounds as though she’s a bit suspicious.”
“Well,” Shoe said. “I may have given her reason to be. On other occasions.” And he laughed. “Hey, does this thing go faster than 55?”
“Not when I’m driving it,” I said. That was one of the hard lessons I had learned in my association with Mr. Skalko: keep a low profile and avoid even the appearance of breaking the law.
Dearborn laughed and sat back, his feet up on the dash. “You know, they’ve got this new invention called ‘air conditioning’.”
“Never saw the need,” I said. The high desert gets hot at mid-day, but one of the side effects of my wild card is a lower body temperature. Except when I’m lifting. And I generally don’t lift when driving.
“You’re a deuce, huh?”
“Yeah. Want to get out and walk?”
He pointed to himself. “I’ve got a touch of it myself,” he said, surprising me for the second time that day. I wondered what his power was? But he offered nothing. “Besides, I’ve worked with many a joker in my day.” He pointed to the south and east, the general direction of Tomlin Air Force Base. “Right over there.”
“I didn’t know we were allowed in the Air Force.”
“Well, Crash, there’s allowed, and then there’s ‘allowed’. The policy was certainly against it. But some got in. Stranger things have happened.”
“Like Tominbang getting hold of Quicksilver.”
Dearborn started laughing. “Yeah, ain’t that unusual? It’s not as though we have a lot of them sitting around. They built two, and broke one. There was also some kind of ground spare, but that’s it.”
“So right now, nobody’s missing the Quicksilver.”
“Nope. She’s all ours, Crash.” He slapped me on the back so hard I almost drove off the road. “Hey,” he said, suddenly serious, “what the hell kind of name is Crash? For a flight project, that is.”
“Don’t tell me you’re superstitious.”
“Son, there isn’t a pilot alive who isn’t superstitious.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “The name is ‘Cash,’ not ‘Crash’.”
I was spared the indignity of adding “cook” to my new role as “host” when Dearborn suggested we make a stop in Lancaster for an early dinner. Naturally, he knew a little place just off the Sierra Highway on Avenue I. I was reluctant, at first, until Dearborn offered to pay. “Just because I’m homeless don’t mean I’m broke.”
Well, given the fee Tominbang offered, I was far from broke, too, though my riches were still theoretical—which is to say, non-existent. “Besides,” Dearborn added, “I owe you.”
The restaurant was called Casa Carlos; it was a cinder block structure surrounded by a pitted gravel parking lot. (Actually, that description fits almost any structure in the area.) The jumble of cars spilling beyond the nominal border of the lot testified to the joint’s reputation for fine Mexican cuisine, or possibly the lack of other dining options.
It was dark, smoky and loud when we walked in. The floor was sawdust. The clientele a mixture of agro workers in stained shirts and cowboy hats, and the local gentry in short-sleeved white shirts and undone ties.
At first I expected one of those tiresome displays of familiarity, in which Dearborn, the Anglo regular, would embrace Carlos, the Latino owner, exchanging a few laughs and phrases in Spanish. At which point Carlos would snap his fingers at a waitress and order her to bring “Senior Al” the chimichanga special or whatever. It was the sort of arrival staged by Mr. Skalko across the width of the LA basin.
Nothing of the kind occurred. We slunk into the restaurant like two tourists from Wisconsin, quietly finding a table off in one corner.
Dearborn did take the seat that would keep his back to the wall, and his eyes on the entrance. I’d seen that maneuver with Mr. Skalko, too. “Expecting someone?”
“As a matter of fact, I am. An old buddy who eats here about four times a week.”
I let the subject drop as a waiter arrived. We ordered a beer each, then, when the plates arrived almost instantaneously, started in on the food. I should say, I ate; Dearborn devoured a double combination that seemed to consist of a heap of refried beans and cheese the size of a football. At one point he slowed down long enough to say, “Don’t watch too close now, Cash. I only had one meal in the past twenty-four hours, and, as you will recall, I was unable to retain that for long.”
The beer had mellowed me to the point where I was able to smile at the memory. I got Dearborn talking about himself, partly to avoid having to talk about myself, but also to hear the standard military shit-kicker war story bio. I was surprised, then, when Dearborn told me he was from Chicago and had grown up in a privileged North Shore family. His father had been a senior executive at Sears prior to the wild card, at which point he had been turned, losing his job and his money. Dearborn was lucky enough to win an appointment to the naval academy at Annapolis. After graduating in 1951, he became a naval aviator.
He won his wings of gold too late to shoot it out over Korea, but served with the fleet in the Mediterranean, then did a year of graduate work in nuclear engineering, before coming to Tomlin in 1958 to attend the test pilot school as a navy exchange pilot. “I had just graduated and joined the project when they had the accident.”
He meant the X-11A disaster, the spectacular mid-air collision between a prototype space plane and its mother ship that killed pilots Enloe and Guinan, and sparked a wild card hunt that destroyed the home-grown American space program. Or so I’d heard.
“That was a bad scene, for a long time after. I stayed at Tomlin flying chase and pace on a few other programs. They sure weren’t eager to let the X-11 guys get their hands on new aircraft. We were jinxed.” He smiled. “I missed out on three other accidents. There was quite a bad string there around 1961, ‘62.
“But when General Schriever became head of Systems Command, he rammed through the Quicksilver program. I was the only X-11 pilot around, and being in the right place at the right time, got in on the ground floor.” He smiled. “Ruined my navy career, of course.”
“Ruined? Being one of the first Americans to fly into orbit? Even if it was secret, you should have had it made!”
“You don’t know much about the military, do you, Cash? When I joined Quicksilver, I had already spent four years here at Tomlin, which meant I was working for the Air Force, not the Navy. I needed to do a tour at the Pentagon and in ‘Nam, then command a ship. If I ever wanted to command a carrier, which is the whole reason you become a navy aviator.
“I stayed at Tomlin through the first year of test flights. Me and the prime Air Force guy, my old buddy, Mike Sampson. Then the program got cut back, and both of us were left twisting in the wind. Sampson made out better than me: he went off to drive 105s out of Cam Ranh Bay, and wound up getting a Purple Heart.
“I was too old to go back to the fleet. Why waste time re-qualifying me for carrier ops? I’d be eligible for retirement before I finished a tour like that. So they assigned me to a missile test squadron at China Lake.” He smiled bitterly. “That’s when I started drinking. And drank myself right out of the cockpit, right out of the Navy, and out of marriage number two.”
In spite of that, he had ordered a beer, though, to be fair, he had barely sipped it. “I’m guessing Doreen is number three?”
“Correct. I came back to southern California to work for Lock-heed as a civilian, since they had the support contract for Quicksilver. She was my first secretary ...” He laughed at the memory. “Guess I wasn’t cut out to work in an office. Too much opportunity for mischief.”
I must have been feeling brave. I pointed at the beer on the table. “Are you cut out for Tominbang’s project?”
Dearborn smiled, picked up the beer and poured it on the saw-dust floor. “Being the first human on the Moon? I can give up drinking for that, no problem!”
His voice trailed off and his expression grew tense. I realized he was looking over my shoulder. “Well, well, well,” he said, softly.
I turned and looked: all I could see was another man about Dearborn’s age, though smaller and less weathered, smiling and chatting with the hostess. “Is that the guy you were expecting?”
“Yes. Major Mike Sampson! Hey, ‘Wrong Way’!” He started his phrase in a conversational tone, but by the time he reached “Wrong Way” he was shouting.
“Wrong Way” Sampson—the compact man at the entrance—turned with the deliberation of a gunfighter being challenged. Then he recognized Dearborn, and his face lit up like a harvest moon. Working his way to your table, he knocked over other patrons like tenpins, stopping short of actually hugging Dearborn. Instead, he punched him the shoulder. “You lucky son of a bitch!” he said.
“How much luck can I have, if you found me!” They exchanged similar sentiments for several minutes. Eventually I was introduced; Sampson wound up joining us.
It turned out that he had recently returned to Tomlin after recovering from wounds received in combat. He was now head of something called a “joint test force” at the flight test center. “Why didn’t you just take disability?” Dearborn said.
“Because I wasn’t disabled,” Sampson snapped. “Yeager fought his way back into the cockpit after getting burned in that crash, and he was much worse off than me.” He hesitated, glancing in my direction, but some invisible gesture from Dearborn cleared him for further revelation. “Besides, the Air Force has some very interesting stuff cooking. I want to be part of it.”
“Nothing as interesting as what we’re doing,” Dearborn said, shooting me an all-too-visible shit-eating grin. He then proceeded to violate every clause in Tominbang’s confidentiality agreement, telling Sampson every detail of the project!
Sampson absorbed the information silently, but appreciatively, nodding with growing enthusiasm. “I should have known,” he said. “Everybody was saying, ‘Poor Al, he really screwed the pooch at China Lake.’ But I knew better. I said, ‘It only means there’s something great coming along for him.’”
Sampson would go far in politics, because he almost had me believing him. Dearborn chose to do the same. “Thanks, buddy. But I really pushed the envelope on luck this time, let me tell you.”
“We’re older, Al. Like pro athletes, the power isn’t what it was.”
“We’ve both got enough juice for one last caper, especially something like this. Are you in?”
“Hell, yes!” They shook on it. “Obviously, it will all be on the Q.T. Vacation time or evenings.”
“You already know the vehicle, so you shouldn’t need more than that.”
After confirming various phone numbers and some personal catchup—there was fond mention of a woman named Peggy, a name which meant nothing to me—Sampson went off to meet his original dinner companions, who must have been furious by that time.
I was a little furious myself. “What do you think you’re doing? You told him about the project and signed him up as what? Your alternate?”
“Look, Tominbang’s putting out a lot of his own money in this. And, let’s face it, Cash, I’m not the most reliable individual. I’m thinking of the program at large: Sampson’s good. Weird, but good. He’ll be there only if we need him.”
“Do you think we will?”
“The one thing I learned from flight test is this: nothing ever goes as planned. I don’t care if you’re a nat, a joker or a deuce. Always, always, always have a backup.”
My apartment had two bedrooms, and came already furnished, so I was easily able to make up a place for Dearborn to sleep. Or, to be more precise, to live.
Before turning in, he said, “Days on the flight line start early, Co-pilot.” Somehow, between the pouring of the beer on the floor, and my announcement that I had made up his bed, “Co-pilot” had become Dearborn’s name for me. “I usually wanted to be at ops by six A.M. Since we aren’t flying yet, I want to be back at Tehachapi by seven.”
Which is why Haugen’s Bakery appeared to be closed when we pulled in the next morning. It was six-twenty—mid-morning by bakery hours. Seeing lights and activity within, I got out of the car and rapped on the front door. Dearborn got out to stand looking across the high desert to where the sun was already up, shining down on the vastness that was Tomlin.
As I waited for Eva-Lynne, I wondered idly where she lived—a trailer out back, perhaps? Or one of the grim little brick bungalows scattered in half-assed developments among the Joshua trees?
And did she live with anyone? She wore no ring. And in all the hours I had spent in her company, however remotely, I had never seen her with a boyfriend, or seen her give any sign of having one.
A key rattled in the door: Eva-Lynne, brushing a stray wisp of blond hair away from her face. “Oh, hi!” A pause. “Cash!” She lowered her voice ... flirtatiously? “My hero. We’re just opening. The usual?”
“Yes, thank you.”
I followed her in. “You’re early today,” she said, slipping behind the counter, though not without giving me a memorable retreating vision. “New job?”
“How did you know?” The door opened and closed behind me.
“Just a guess. You’ve always looked a little—at odds,” she said, handing me a cup and my bag of Danish, and waving away my money. “My treat, as a thanks for yesterday.”
I was so pleased by the mere knowledge that Eva-Lynne had actually given me some thought that I almost missed what happened next:
Dearborn stepped up to the counter. He made no overt sign that he found Eva-Lynne attractive. In fact, he was painfully polite, as he asked for a large cup of black coffee.
She spilled it. “Oh, God,” she said, reddening, “what’s the matter with me?”
Dearborn quickly righted the cup and sopped up the pool of coffee with a napkin before Eva-Lynne could deploy her counter rag.
It was only a moment, but it made me sick. Dearborn’s mere presence had unnerved Eva-Lynne.
I had to keep him away from her.
We said nothing about the events at the bakery as we drove the last few miles up to Tehachapi-Kern Airport. What, indeed, could I have said? Commander Dearborn, please don’t have any contact with a woman I worship from afar?
He would have laughed at me. I would have laughed at me.
Then we reached Tominbang’s hangar, and the subject no longer seemed as critical.
In the hours since Dearborn and I had driven off, the Quicksilver team had gained a number of new members. First off, a pair of steely-eyed security guards in khaki and sunglasses quizzed us before we could get close.
There were at least thirty cars of varying age and make in the lot. The lights were on in the hangar. People were scurrying around, apparently to great purpose. Tominbang was the center of attention, introducing people to each other, signing various pieces of paper, smiling and nodding the whole time.
Many of the new hires, I realized, were deuces. Possibly all of them. “I guess Tominbang’s the only nat in the place,” I said to Dearborn.
“Think again, Co-pilot.”
I hadn’t spotted Tominbang as a deuce, but, then, I often fail to detect them. It made all the sense in the world, though. Who else would have come up with the idea of a flight to the Moon as a solution to a financial problem?
Sure enough, spotting us, Tominbang broke away from the fluid horde. “Greetings, crew mates!” He was smiling so broadly that he seemed deranged, an unfortunate image. Certainly he was, now that I had been alerted to it, clearly a deuce. “We are really rolling now!”
Paralyzed by the troubling sight of Tominbang’s smile, I could not respond. Fortunately, Dearborn was more resilient. “Where the hell did all these people come from, T?”
“I have been hiring them in Los Angeles for the past three weeks. Today was the day they were to report.”
I finally found my voice. “What are they supposed to be doing?”
Tominbang was like a car salesman showing off the features of a new model Buick. “That group,” he said, indicating a group of five examining the undercarriage of Quicksilver, “will perform mechanical modifications to the exterior of the vehicle.”
“Landing gear,” Dearborn added, helpfully. Obviously he had had more extensive conversations with Tominbang than I.
A smaller clump was busy looking into the open cockpit. “That team will modify the life support systems, and also the space suits.” I hadn’t thought about space suits. Obviously we couldn’t walk on the Moon in our street clothes!
There were other groups in discussion—legal, security and public relations, Tominbang said. I gave those issues zero thought at that time.
The smallest group—a pair of jokers, one an honest-to-God human-sized cockroach, the other apparently related, since he looked like a giant bee—stood nearby, watching us with what I took to be unnecessary interest. “And what do they want?”
“Ah,” Tominbang said, as Dearborn chuckled, “our trajectory team. These are specialists from Cal Tech who will program the maneuvers Commander Dearborn will make with the Quicksilver.”
“The nav system is primitive, but workable. Propulsion is the big question mark.”
“I thought propulsion was my responsibility,” I said, foolishly.
“Absolutely!” Tominbang said. “These two are your instructors!”
I have never done well in school. I have done spectacularly poorly with nat tutors. I could not imagine myself working happily with teachers who were jokers.
Before I could protest, however, Dearborn slapped me on the back. “You better get started, Co-pilot. We launch in sixty days.”
Before that day was out, I was introduced to Bacchus, the bee-like joker, who claimed to have been a professor at Cal Tech in an earlier life. The roach was named Kafka, and he made sure I knew he had no degrees of any kind. “I’m just a homegrown genius,” he said, without a trace of humility.
Bacchus took the lead in my education, hissing and wheezing his way through my first my first lessons in astro-navigation, making it clear that I, who could barely find the North Pole in the night sky, would need to learn the locations of twenty “guide” stars. (Navigation and propulsion—which is to say, my lifting—were linked, since the lifts had to occur at precise locations in space.)
It just got worse from that point on.
The only bright spot in that first two weeks was that I was able to keep Dearborn away from Eva-Lynne. Well, it was not so much a deliberate action on my part as deliberate inaction. Even though I hated being locked in a room with Bacchus and Kafka I began to prolong my lessons as late as I dared, and within the first week Dearborn was so frustrated that he went to Tominbang and said he needed a car of his own.
Tominbang obtained a 1959 Cadillac convertible with fins more suited to an airliner. It was painted pink. Dearborn, ever practical and obviously secure in his image, took it happily. He even went so far as to apologize to me. “Sorry, Co-pilot, but for the next few weeks, I’m flying solo. You’ve won your wings.” Sure enough, I saw less and less of him at my apartment, though he did actually make it home every night—sober. Now all I had to do was be sure to arrive at Haugen’s by six-thirty every morning, and linger there until I saw Dearborn’s pink beast flash past.
While the extra time spent at the bakery caused me to gain weight (I was now averaging two pieces of Danish per morning), it also allowed me to approach Eva-Lynne.
It was slow going; she had to work the counter, and she was, it seemed, immensely popular. But over the course of a week I learned the following: she was 24. She lived with a cousin in Rosamond, the tiny community to the south of Mojave, at the entrance to Tomlin. Her favorite musician was not, as I had feared, one of the Monkees or possibly Simon and/or Garfunkel, but “all those Motown singers”.
And, a big surprise, she was not a refugee from a bad experience in Hollywood. She had, in fact, never been to Hollywood, and didn’t know if she wanted to go. “Everybody keeps asking me about it, so maybe I should.”
While she was beautiful enough to compete in that brutal environment, I could not, in good conscience, advise her to try. “You’re the only reason people come to Mojave.”
“Stop!” she said, blushing with what I hoped was pleasure.
What I didn’t learn was whether or not she would go out with me. Part of it was due to my own inability to utter an invitation. The sheer amount of foot traffic also made such a delicate conversation difficult.
It was on a Friday morning in early June, however, less than three weeks after Mr. Tominbang first approached me, that I felt I had my opening. I had arrived, as usual, at six-twenty, only to find Eva-Lynne with her eyes red-rimmed. I immediately asked if she was all right, but got no answer, because Fran was already yelling at her, a more frequent occurrence. “Hey, beauty queen, get your ass over here!”
I got my coffee and Danish and sat down at one of the small tables by the window, and witnessed no further outbursts. Imagine my surprise when, during a quiet moment, Eva-Lynne suddenly sat down with me. “Cash, do you mind if I ask you a question?”
Only if I can ask you one in return. The words appeared in my brain, but stayed there, stuck amidst the numbers. “Sure,” I said, pathetically.
“This new job you got—could they use a secretary or something? A girl to answer the phones, maybe?”
I had no idea of Tominbang’s staffing requirements. But at that moment, in a fit of arrogance, I decided I would pay Eva-Lynne’s salary, if necessary. He was paying me enough. “We sure do,” I heard myself say. “It’s only a temporary job, though.”
“Anything to get me out of here now.”
“What time do you get off work?” I was able to ask her a question like that as long as the next phrase had nothing to do with a date.
“Two.”
“Can you get a ride to the airport in Tehachapi?”
She got a look on her face that suggested a hidden power, one having more ancient roots than the wild card. “That won’t be a problem.”
I described Tominbang’s hangar, then told her I would alert our guards to be looking for her around 2:30.
She leaned forward, kissed me on the forehead, and said, “You’re a doll.”
I drove to Tehachapi wrapped in a golden cloud.
It wasn’t until that afternoon, after Eva-Lynne, eyes alive and happy, arrived for her appointment, after I had spent the day in a tedious session with Kafka concerning retrograde impulses of the Quicksilver propulsion system, that I realized I had made a terrible mistake:
I had brought Eva-Lynne into daily contact with Al Dearborn.
It was only a gradual realization. Tominbang would have hired Eva-Lynne on sight (as my father used to say, he seemed to have an eye for the ladies), though he was not too proud to accept my offer to underwrite her salary. “I think she will prove to be an excellent addition to the team,” he said. “If you find any more like her, please bring them to me.” For a variety of reasons, I was not tempted. (Besides, there was only one Eva-Lynne.)
She was immediately assigned to general office help, with special duty as my part-time assistant. (Bacchus and Kafka were burying me in technical documents that required filing and organizing.)
Only then, once she had signed the now-familiar non-disclosure agreement, did she learn what we were doing. “To the what?”
“The Moon,” I said, the first time I had ever actually said such a thing aloud.
“Who? How?” She was genuinely astonished and, I think, a little frightened. (As if this were nothing but a cover story for some much more mundane, but very illegal activity.)
I showed her our Quicksilver, then introduced her to several members of the team. She soon came to be comfortable with the idea of flying to the Moon. More comfortable, I noted, than she seemed with the number and variety of jokers and deuces.
It wasn’t until the end of the workday, as I was preparing to offer Eva-Lynne a ride back to Rosamond (after all, it was on my way), that Dearborn appeared.
Three weeks without drink—three weeks with the job of a lifetime—had improved his looks and his energy, not to mention his manner. (No more vomiting on feet.) He gave Eva-Lynne a wave, as if she had worked there all along, and turned to me. “We’re going to take our bird out for a test hop tonight. What do you say, Co-pilot?”
“Would a simple, ‘No, thank you’, be sufficient?”
“We’re not going into space, Cash. Just a little proficiency run around the neighborhood. Uh, no ‘heavy lifting’.” He laughed at his own joke, and turned to Eva-Lynne. “Will we have the honor of your presence?”
“What time do you want me?” she said, forthrightly, eyes blazing, using exactly those words, and breaking my heart.
Our small group moved into the hangar proper, where Tominbang and the rest of the team gathered, and I lost track of Eva-Lynne. I confess I got angry—at Tominbang, for disrupting my life and dragging me into this stupid project; at Dearborn, for being everything I was not.
Even, I must admit, at Eva-Lynne.
Darkness fell, and a huge orange Moon rose in the east—like a giant jack o’lantern rising from the desert. I had barely begun to study lunar geography, but I could already recognize the dark smear that was the Sea of Storms—Quicksilver’s landing site.
Our landing site, if I had the stomach to turn around and face my fears. (And I don’t mean fears of death.)
So I did.
Quicksilver was towed to the runway apron by a tractor with a sputtering motor.
“You’d think they could afford a new tractor,” Eva-Lynne said behind me.
I was feeling mildly heroic, proud of a chance to show off for Eva-Lynne, when Bacchus appeared suddenly out of the shadows, handing me two ring binders filled with paper. I glanced at the pages. “I had to pencil in some figures, position of the Moon at launch time, stuff like that. But it should give you a good sense of when to do your mass transfer.”
“To what end?” I wasn’t worried about doing the lifts. All I had to do was glance at the orientation of Quicksilver, its velocity, its reported position in three axes, and wait for Dearborn to tap me on the shoulder.
“For a proper simulation,” he said, clearly disgusted with my lack of professionalism.
I turned, hoping to re-connect with Eva-Lynne, but Commander Dearborn chose this moment to emerge from the hangar.
He was wearing a heavy, silvery garment like a diving suit, complete with a neck ring. Under one arm he carried white helmet. He seemed completely focused on the task ahead of him, like a bullfighter I had once seen in Tijuana.
Tominbang was a step behind him, but compared to Dearborn’s glittering presence, might as well have been invisible.
(I noticed one strange face in the crowd, not far behind Dear-born: Sampson, his backup pilot.)
Dearborn stopped and looked up at Quicksilver, which had now been towed to a distance of fifty yards from the hangar door. He raised his helmet, lowered it over his head, locked it into place.
Some of the team members applauded. I felt an unfamiliar surge of pride. From what I could see of Tominbang’s face, so did he.
And, for a moment, so did I. I was part of that crew!
The next half hour raced past. Dressed in street clothes (but carrying a crash helmet handed to me by Kafka), I joined Dearborn and Tominbang aboard Quicksilver. I had never been inside the vehicle before, and had to be helped down through the top hatch into the newly-installed airlock by Sampson. (“This is where the weapons bay used to be.”) Then I crawled forward into the cabin and wrenched myself to the left-hand seat. (There were three, one forward, and two behind.
“I hope I don’t have to get out of this thing in a hurry,” I said, half-joking.
“The pilot can blow the canopy for emergency egress,” Sampson said, his eyes bland and almost sleepy. I decided right then that I didn’t much like him. Maybe it was the air of truly unpredictable strangeness he radiated—his “wrong way” wild card, no doubt.
As the team cleared out, my helmet radio squawked. “Pilot to Co-pilot,” Dearborn said, “that pistol grip tiller close to your right hand is your lifting mechanism. It is finely calibrated to connect with the center of mass of this vehicle. Touch it only when you do your lifting.”
“Uh, roger,” I said, trying to sound astronautical.
There was some chatter on the radio that did not directly concern me. Next to me, Tominbang practically bounced up and down like a restless child.
Dearborn counted down to ignition, and pressed the start button. Flame shot out of the back of Quicksilver. In a cloud of debris, the pumpkin-seed vehicle started rolling down the runway. It rotated almost immediately, then headed straight up into the night sky ...
I felt some pressure, but not much more than on an airplane. For the first few moments, that is. The pressure kept building and building, and to my extreme discomfort, we rolled to our left and over on our backs. “Why are we doing this?” I said between clenched teeth.
“Aerodynamics don’t apply here,” Dearborn said, almost cackling with glee. “It just lets our radio antennas communicate with the ground.”
Then he said, “First waypoint, Co-pilot. Give her a little lift.”
As I’ve said, annoyance is my perpetual state, and it quickly transitions to anger.
We made a good test lift.
Twenty minutes late we were back on the ground, hatch opened. As I walked away, weak in the knees, I looked back to see Quicksilver glowing like a campfire coal on the runway.
A crowd surged toward us. Dearborn removed his helmet, he handed it to me. “Flies great, doesn’t she, Co-Pilot?”
I couldn’t help agreeing.
My elation was so profound that it wasn’t until an hour later, as the crowd finally thinned, as Quicksilver was towed back into the hangar, that I realized Dearborn was gone.
And so was Eva-Lynne.
He didn’t come home that night. I know, because I sat up until three.
Maybe that’s why, when the phone rang at six A.M., I was willing to face—no, to welcome—my next challenge. “Yes, Mr. Skalko.”
Mr. Warren Skalko gave no over sign of his power or his wealth. No flashy car. No expensive suits. No gold pinkie rings or necklaces. No thick-necked sideboys. (They were around, but you never saw them, unless you happened to realize that the occasional passing motorcyclist was probably one of them.) His golf game was average, and his bets were small—five-dollar Nassaus. Even his physical person was nondescript: at 50 he was of medium height, a little overweight, balding, his eyes swimming behind thick glasses. If you met him without knowing who he was, you would have thought yourself in the company of an accountant, and not one who handled large accounts.
At one point, early in our relationship, I was silly enough to ask him why he did what he did, when he seemed to live so modestly.
“I can’t help myself,” was his reply.
He always made his own calls, too. “Cash, Warren Skalko here,” he chirped. “Sorry about the early hour. Wondering if you’d have time to get together later this morning, around eight, at the usual place.”
Eight it was, at the driving range of a ratty municipal par-three in Lancaster. It was October now, and the desert nights were cold enough to leave frost on the fairways and greens. So the crowd at the driving range was sparse.
Only Mr. Warren Skalko taking some swings with a seven-iron. “Tominbang tested his plane last night,” he announced the instant I was within earshot. (That was another Skalko trait: getting directly to the point.)
I think my heart stopped for a good five seconds. Obviously Tominbang had a distant connection to Mr. Skalko. Less obvious was why Mr. Skalko would have any interest in his activities. Equally less obvious, but of much greater concern to me was whether Mr. Skalko was angry about my involvement. “Yes.”
“Think it’s gonna work? This flying to the Moon?”
I couldn’t help a reflexive smile. “I hope so.” It was, after all, my life.
“Oh, you’d be all right. That Dearborn fella, he’s got the luck.” Swish. Mr. Skalko launched a shot down the range. “But I’m not sure I like this deal,” he said.
This was not code for a stronger emotion. Mr. Skalko was a direct man: if he really hated Tominbang’s project, he would have said exactly that.
“I’m not sure of the value, either,” I said.
“Why are you doing it? The money?” Mr. Skalko knew everything he needed to know about my money problems.
“Yes,” I said, then adding, because he would know, anyway. “And a girl.”
“Ah. That’s even worse.” Swish went the club. “When is the big day?”
“We’re scheduled to take off in two weeks.”
Mr. Skalko examined the seven iron, and then, apparently deciding, he had had enough fun at the driving range, slid it back into his golf bag. “Tell you what,” he said, “give me a call when it looks as though you’re ready to go. No later than the day before, at the usual number.” He sighed and looked around at the country-side. “I need to think about what this means.”
There was never any doubt that I would agree to do whatever Mr. Skalko wanted.
It was only after putting miles between my car and Mr. Skalko that I began to feel troubled by my new status as a spy inside Tominbang’s project. My heart began to beat faster, my breathing grew ragged. It was as if I had just run a mile.
I would have been alarmed, but I had learned to expect this reaction. All I could do was pull off at the first auto salvage yard I came to.
Here were hundreds of Fords, Chevys, Buicks, complete with tailfins and chrome, all suitable for my brand of lifting.
I started at the end of one row and lifted seven in a row, flipping each car onto its hood with a loud bang!. Not only was it noisy, it was dusty. But by the time I had reached the end of the row, my heart rate had returned to normal. And my emotions were spent.
I drove past Haugen’s Bakery (I no longer had reason to stop), then directly to the hangar, where I almost welcomed the sight of Eva-Lynne tottering in, giggling, wearing yesterday’s dress, and on Dearborn’s arm.
My father used to tell me I had no spine, an unfortunate phrase, given that it literally applied to at least two of my joker playmates. Perhaps that’s why I gave his judgment so little credence for so long.
But various mistakes in my life, beginning with flunking out of Harvey Mudd followed closely by a disastrous marriage, which led to excessive gambling and debts, and thence an unsolicited association with Mr. Warren Skalko, had convinced me of the truth of my father’s evaluation.
I had been a coward. Or, if you find that too harsh, I had never faced a challenge, either professionally or personally. Case number one, Eva-Lynne, now lost to a man who embraced challenges, or, if necessary, created them.
Case number two—the flight to the Moon. Some time between Dearborn’s walkout in his silver suit, and my “workout” at the auto salvage yard, I decided that this was the one challenge I had to face.
When I reached Tehachapi-Kern, I avoided any chance of contact with Eva-Lynne, and immediately searched out a technician named Sobel, who had left messages for me for at least a week.
He turned out to be some sort of aquatic joker who actually had to wear a bowl-like helmet filled with water, as well as a bubbling device which regularly uttered a disturbing noise like a baby’s cry. “Wouldn’t you be happier in the sea?” I asked him.
“Never learned to swim,” he said, completely deadpan. (Well, they do call them jokers.) “Actually, I signed up when Tominbang hired a friend of mine. Who wouldn’t want to be part of the first flight to the Moon?”
Which made me feel bad that I had ignored his messages. When I learned that he was the specialist in charge of space suits, that he had wanted me to come in for fit checks for a suit of my own, I felt even worse.
Fortunately, we got to work, and within two hours I learned more about the operational aspects of the flight to the Moon than I had in three weeks. The silver suit, made mostly of heavy rubber, was one of half a dozen originally developed for the X-11A program a decade past, acquired, no doubt, through some shady contact of Tominbang’s. “We’re adding special boots, a white coverall and a special helmet visor for use on the lunar surface.”
“I’ll be out on the surface?”
“At the moment, only Dearborn and Tominbang are scheduled to walk on the Moon. They will erect the relay station. But if they have trouble, you will have to help them.” Somewhat ashamedly, I found myself hoping they would: why go all the way to the Moon and not walk on it?
I bent myself into various shapes in order to get my head through the helmet ring. Then I was zipped tight, and immediately began to perspire. I could not stand up straight, either. “You’ll be sitting most of the time,” Sobel said, taking some measurements, like a tailor, then helping me out of the garment. “You’ll either be hooked up to Quicksilver’s cooling system, or to a backpack.”
Then a more practical question arose. “What about sanitary facilities?”
Sobel smiled and held up a metal bottle and tube. “Standard USAF catheter.”
“And what about ... other functions?”
“You’ll be on a low residue diet for the last few days prior to the flight.”
“How long will I be in this thing?”
“Two days, tops.”
That was some relief.
When I returned to my office, I found Bacchus leering all over an alarmed Eva-Lynne. (I couldn’t help noticing that she had, indeed, changed clothes from the previous night.) “I’ll be with you in a minute, Doctor,” I told this sex-crazed joker. “Eva-Lynne, I need to talk to you in private.”
As I closed the door, she said, “Thank God. I’ve met some aggressive men in my life—” I could only imagine. “—but he is by far the worst. I don’t even like having him breathe on me.”
“Sorry. I should have warned you.”
“I’m not sure a warning would have done much good. I probably wouldn’t have believed you.” She favored me with the same smile that had so bewitched me that first time I saw her. “But it’s very sweet of you to protect me.”
Seeing that she was about to leave, I cleared my throat and prepared to subject myself to bad news. “Speaking of protection, did you get home all right last night?”
She whirled to face me, and I saw a look on her lovely face that I had never seen before. One lovely golden eyebrow rose slightly. The effect was far more womanly, if that’s the word. Knowing. “Let’s just say, I got where I was supposed to get.”
I must have blushed. I certainly had no idea what to say. And I never, in fact, got the chance to respond, because Eva-Lynne prevented it. She took me by the hand and said, “You know, Cash, I think you and I need to have a picnic.”
My protest was truly feeble. “There’s nowhere to eat.” Most of Tominbang’s team packed lunches, or ate the offerings of the tiny cafeteria over at the airport.
“Don’t be silly, Cash. It’s not about food.”
“I hope you weren’t under the impression I was a virgin,” she said, once we’d reached our picnic grounds, a flat area halfway up the hill a hundred yards beyond the fence which ringed Tominbang’s hangar complex. In one last stab at being a masculine provider, I had bought two bottles of Dr. Pepper from the building’s vending machine as we walked out.
“No,” I said, telling the truth. This was, after all, 1968. Virginity had ceased to be in fashion about the time of my sophomore year at Harvey Mudd some years earlier. I had been married, and had been in several shorter sexual relationships myself, so I should have been beyond the adolescent fear that my sexual skills would not measure up, so to speak.
“But you were hoping I wasn’t a slut,” Eva-Lynne said, articulating my next thought before I could. My blush confirmed her statement.
She exhaled. “Have you ever heard of Diamond Butte, Arizona?” she said.
“Should I?”
“No reason. When I get through telling you about it, you’ll probably wish you still hadn’t heard it.” Diamond Butte, she explained, was a tiny town in the northwestern corner of Arizona a few miles south of Utah. “It’s cut off from the rest of Arizona by the Grand Canyon, but technically not in Utah. It’s kind of like—what’s that television show? The Twilight Zone. Nobody knows which set of laws to apply, because no one’s there to enforce them.
“Let me guess,” I said. “Nobody enforces either set.”
“Right.” She grimaced. “Which is why, for years, most of the people in the area were polygamists. My family, for example. My mother was my father’s seventh wife. I had twenty brothers and sisters. And I was literally sold to a man—my future husband—when I was fourteen. I became his eleventh wife when I was sixteen.”
“And that’s what you ran away from?” I said, hoping that was the end of the story.
Eva-Lynne ignored me. “It was bad. Polygamy may work for some. I think my family generally got along. But Roderick, my husband, was a bastard. I think he would rather have beaten us rather than slept with us.
“All of us tried to run off at one time or another. We all got caught and taken back, and it would be even worse.
“Finally one of the other men in the town heard what was going on, and challenged Roderick. But Roderick killed him and took his wives for his own.
“Which left him free to get rid of us. He sold us to the Gambiones, Cash. They dragged us off to New York, Jokertown, where they had a brothel just for jokers.” Her voice had grown quieter as she spoke. By this time there were tears rolling down her cheeks. For her sake and mine, I wanted to her to stop. But no. “I spent three years there.” Now her smile was savage. “I was very popular with the clientele.
“Eventually one of the girls died; a joker killed her. The Gambiones had to lie low for a few weeks; they shipped most of to San Francisco.
“I’d saved a little money.” She hesitated for a moment, then said, in the smallest possible voice, “I used my charms. And I got out. You wanted to know how someone who looks like me winds up in Mojave? That’s why.”
“I had no idea.”
“I’m glad. But now you know. And now you have good reason not to fall in love with me.”
I mumbled something. “What was that?” she said.
“My mother used to say, even after the wild card: ‘love trumps all’.”
Eva-Lynne gave a short, sharp laugh. “I’ll tell you what—
She was interrupted by the blare of a warning siren, the same one used the night of the flight test. We both jumped at the sound, and she said, “We’d better get back.”
As we started down the hill, I let Eva-Lynne lead the way, thrilling to her every step and sway. In spite of the revelation of her sordid or, at least, troubling past, I loved her more hopelessly than ever.
As we reached the hangar, we saw that Quicksilver had been rolled into the open. Eva-Lynne took my hand and said, “I can’t believe you’re going to ride that thing all the way to the Moon.”
“And, hopefully, back again,” I said. She laughed. For a moment, everything seemed possible.
Then Kakfa scuttled up to us. “Need to talk,” he hissed. Or perhaps spat would be a better word. He looked directly at Eva-Lynne. “Alone.”
She took her dismissal with grace, and headed back to the office.
“We’re launching tonight,” Kafka said.
“Tonight? Since when?”
When Kafka got agitated, he began to scuttle back and forth, like a roach in a jar. “Tominbang’s orders. He says there are ‘problems’.”
“What kind of problems?”
“I don’t know,” Kafka hissed. “But we go tonight!”
I had prepared myself to make the call to Mr. Skalko. I had not expected to do it so soon.
“Tominbang’s in a lot of trouble,” Al Dearborn told me a few moments later. Tominbang had failed to appear for a lunch meeting. Instead he had telephoned, and wound up telling Dearborn his sad story: he had not been using his own money for the Quicksilver-to-the-Moon program. Instead, he had dipped into funds belonging to others, apparently in the hopes that profits from the first Moon flight would allow him to pay back his unwitting “investors” before they realized they’d been robbed.
But one of the parties found out. “Some guy named Warren Skalko. Ever heard of him?”
“Yes,” I said. In order to keep Dearborn from pressing further (since I doubted I could lie to him), I added, “he’s the local godfather. Bad news.”
The bad news explained the flurry of activity in the hangar. Jokers and deuces were shredding papers; a burn barrel out back was a-flame. Every few moments, a car would launch itself out of the parking lot in a spray of gravel. “You’d think we were about to be bombed,” I said to Dearborn.
“From what Tominbang said, that’s a distinct possibility.”
“How can we launch tonight if he’s not here?”
“He’s not making the trip.”
“Given the situation, I’m not sure I’m making the trip.” In fact, I was, at that moment, quite and sure I wasn’t. I was two minutes away from making a hasty departure from Tehachapi-Kern.
“Well, Cash, as you know: without you, there is no flight to the Moon.” He smiled to take the edge off what was clearly a threat: “I’d hate to have to kidnap you.”
“In that case,” I said, “when do we leave?”
Dearborn clapped me on the shoulder. “That’s the spirit!”
Seeing one last opportunity to put an end to this madness, I said, “Can we operate Quicksilver with a crew of two?”
“Operate, yes. But the mass properties have been very finely calibrated to your talents, Co-pilot. We’ve got to have a certain amount of mass in that right-hand seat. And, given that we can probably use the extra hands on the Moon, I’d rather not just fill it with a sack of cement.”
Just then, Bacchus walked in, brought by Eva-Lynne. “You wanted to see me?” the joker physicist said.
“Yeah, how much do you weigh?”
“In the mornings I mass 185 pounds,” Bacchus said, his voice like a hiccup. “By evening that decreases to around 182, depending on my fluid intake—”
Dearborn held up his hand. I could have told him that with Bacchus, there was no such thing as a short answer to a direct question. “Sorry. That puts us over our weight limit—”
Before I could even think it, much less say it, Eva-Lynne announced, “One hundred and twenty pounds.”
“What’s that?” Dearborn said.
“How much I weigh.”
Bacchus snorted. Dearborn and I looked at each other.
“Do you know what we’re talking about?” I said.
“Going to the Moon, Cash.” As if she were talking about a drive to Barstow, or possibly as far as Las Vegas.
“Can we take a girl to the Moon?” I asked.
“I don’t know about you, Co-pilot, but I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have along.” He grinned at me and Eva-Lynne. “Let’s kick the tires and light this candle.”
It was the evening of Friday, December 20. I realized that Christmas was only a few days away, and I had bought nothing for anyone—not even Eva-Lynne.
Dearborn and I struggled into our pressure suits. Eva-Lynne, after spending several precious moments wrapping her blond tresses into some kind of braid, wore hers as if she were born to it. I said as much as we walked toward Quicksilver. “This suit is nothing, compared to a girdle.”
Thinking of women’s undergarments triggered another worry: “Uh, what are you doing to do about ... sanitary matters?”
Eva-Lynne stifled a laugh, and motioned me close. “I helped raise a dozen babies, Cash. I know how to make a diaper!” My curiosity more than satisfied, I was about to climb into Quicksilver’s cockpit when she added, too loudly for my taste, “What are you guys using? Can-o-pees?”
Dearborn was already in the forward seat as I strapped into the left rear position. Then Eva-Lynne wedged herself into the one to my right—Tominbang’s former seat.
Sobel was about to close the airlock hatch when he leaned in, agitated. “Bikers are storming the gates!” he said. “What should I do?”
“Lock the damned door and take cover,” Dearborn growled. He had already started the engine.
Sobel froze with indecision for a long moment. Then, apparently deciding that Dearborn’s order made sense, gave me his hand. “Good luck! Bring back some green cheese!”
He wiggled out of sight and closed the hatch behind him. We heard several clicks as the latches fired, and we were sealed in.
“One minute,” Dearborn said. “Hold on, people. You’re going to take the ride of your lives!”
Eva-Lynne reached back to take my hand. I felt no fear: I was too convinced of Dearborn’s luck to think I could be killed in his presence. But I felt trapped in the pressure suit, my movements hampered.
Spang! Something struck Quicksilver! “What was that?” Eva-Lynn said.
“I think the SOBs are shooting at us,” Dearborn said. “Hang on, we’re go.” And go we were—
For perhaps a hundred yards down the runway. Even with my limited visibility, I could see the flashes of bullets striking the pavement in front of us. Then one of them struck home, making the cockpit ring. Then I heard hissing.
Red warning lights erupted on Dearborn’s console. A bell sounded. “Goddammit,” he snapped. With inhuman—or joker—calm, he tried to stop our rollout. The whole vehicle shook as we skidded off the runway. Only then did I realize just how fast we’d been going.
Quicksilver slewed to the left and slammed into something immobile. Eva-Lynne and I were thrown to the left; I hit the bulk-head, though my harness and suit protected me from injury. Eva-Lynne seemed to be fine.
Not so Dearborn. Perhaps his harness had been loose. In any case, he had hit the instrument panel. He was breathing hard, waving weakly at the two of his with a free hand, “Get out!”
I obeyed, hitting the emergency egress switch on the canopy. It flew off with a muffled thump! The next few moments were chaotic as I unstrapped, helped Eva-Lynne, and got both of us out of Quicksilver.
Lights blinded us. Shadowy figures boiled out of the darkness, swarming over Quicksilver and Dearborn like insects.
Eva-Lynne and I were hustled to our feet, and half-dragged to the hangar building. I still had my helmet on, so sounds were muffled and vision was impaired. I saw some of the Quicksilver team members lined up against the wall, hands (or, in the case of Kafka, pincers) in the air, as beefy nats and jokers in the black leathers of Hell’s Angels held them at gunpoint.
I saw Sobel lying face-down on the ground just outside the hangar, a trail of blood marking the path of his death crawl.
We were shoved into the same equipment room where poor Sobel had helped us into our suits not an hour earlier. We barely had time to catch our breath when Mr. Skalko entered, accompanied by several of his thugs. “You,” he said, pointing to me. “Out.”
I was hauled to my feet and essentially stripped of my suit. Then, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and shorts, I was marched out of the hangar. Dearborn and Eva-Lynne remained behind.
“You cut it a little close,” Mr. Skalko said.
“Tominbang moved up the launch.” I’m sure I sounded angry, because I was. I had assumed that Skalko would take action once he knew the Quicksilver launch was imminent. I hadn’t expected that action to be a mob shootout.
“I know that now. Good thing for you.” I’m sure Skalko knew all about Tominbang’s plans. For one thing, he had surely interrogated the poor man. For another, I doubt I was his only spy inside the program. “Kind of a shame,” he said. He actually sighed. “I was still thinking about it when you called.”
“Why did you stop it? The money?”
Mr. Skalko looked at me with amusement. “You mean, what he stole?”
“Yes.”
“I deal with stuff like that all the time. No, I had to kill this whole idea. Going to the Moon.”
Now I was as intrigued as I was angry. “Why would you care?”
“One flight means nothing. It’s what happens after the flight.” He looked at me as if weighing my worthiness. Apparently I was found worthy. “Once you’ve proven you can do this, other people will follow. They’ll build a little outpost up there. Then a bigger one. Then a whole damn city.
“And to service that city, they will have a regular system of transportation that I can’t control.” He stood there, in the darkness of a desert night, looking at the stars. “Things will come into this country that I can’t stop. That would be bad for my business.”
I saw the point. Not that I cared. “What’s going to happen to them?” I said, meaning Dearborn and Eva-Lynne.
“I don’t know yet.” He saw that I was ready to go back into the hangar. “I want you to go home.”
He tossed me my car keys. I don’t know if he found them with my clothes, or whether he had his own set, which would have been a typical Skalko touch. “Oh, by the way,” he said, “we’re ending our association.”
In spite of the fact that I wanted our association to end—better yet, to have ended some time prior to this—I started to protest. Mr. Skalko held up his hand. “You’ve done good work. You’ve been paid well. But I know people, and this one is going to haunt you. Keep your mouth shut and you don’t need to see me again.”
I had just stepped out of the shower, having taken inventory of a new set of bruises, when I heard wheels crunching on the gravel drive. By the time I was dressed, there was a knock at my door.
Dearborn and Eva-Lynne. He was limping, and Eva-Lynne was supporting him.
Skalko’s men had let them go. After all, the purpose of the attack had been to stop the flight to the Moon. Tominbang had already been punished.
I wanted both to spend the night, but Dearborn shook his head. “Co-pilot, we’re not out of the game yet. We need your car.”
The drive to Los Angeles took two hours, perhaps because it was Friday night, with the holidays approaching. South from my place in Lancaster, through the Antelope Valley into the San Fernando Valley. Then down the new freeway into western Los Angeles. I asked Dearborn several times where I was heading, but he just smiled (or grimaced; he was clearly in pain). All he would tell me was my next turn.
Eva-Lynne dozed in the back seat.
Eventually we arrived at Douglas Field, a small airport in Santa Monica bordering the plant where so many aircraft had been built over the decades. The Douglas Company had moved its manufacturing elsewhere, leaving behind a number of huge, empty buildings. I was directed to drive up to one of them.
Eva-Lynne woke as the car stopped. “What are we doing here?” she said.
Dearborn postponed his answer until he had unlocked a side door.
We walked into a hangar much like the one at Tehachapi-Kern. Even more strangely, a Quicksilver vehicle sat in this middle of this one, too. And my old friend, Kafka, was busy in the cockpit!
“Here is where we’re going to launch the first flight to the Moon,” Dearborn said, looking pale but satisfied. As Eva-Lynne and I stared in wonder—and began to recognize other members of the team from Tehachapi-Kern—he explained that Tominbang had always felt that Mr. Skalko would eventually learn of his plans, and strike at him. So he had paid for modifications to a second Quicksilver vehicle, the “ground spare” originally ticketed for the museum!
That was astounding enough. But then Eva-Lynne asked another question: “You’ve got another vehicle. Great. But you can’t possibly fly it.”
“I know,” Dearborn said. “Mike!” he called.
A vaguely familiar figured emerged from the other side of Quicksilver. Major Sampson, Dearborn’s old X-11A colleague, his alternate.
“Remember what I told you, Cash. Always, always, always have a backup.”
The preparations resumed, almost as if the horrifying incident at Tehachapi-Kern had been nothing more than a fouled-up dress rehearsal for some high school drama. Dearborn assured Eva-Lynne and me that Sampson was perfectly capable of flying the mission. Better yet, that he knew all about my lifting power and just how that integrated into the flight plans.
As the sun rose over the mountains to the east, on the cold morning of Saturday, December 21, 1968, Sampson, Eva-Lynne and I once again donned our suits (brought here from Tehachapi-Kern by Kafka) and boarded Quicksilver.
We were much more business-like this time, due, I think, to our improved realization of the seriousness of what we were attempting, and also to Sampson’s more disciplined methods.
At 6:51 a.m., the main rocket kicked in, and we started down the runway. On Sampson’s order, I grasped the tiller, and we lifted.
Even though the test hop had prepared me for the experience of flying into orbit upside down, I was startled by the sight of Douglas Field, then downtown Santa Monica and the Pacific, all of Southern California and finally the blue earth itself growing smaller while rising to the top of the window.
We were feeling heavy, of course. Kafka had told me we would endure at least 6 Gs. But we were strapped in so tightly that it was merely a mildly unpleasant feeling, not something truly stressful.
What was unnerving was being able feel every burp and pop of our rocket motor. “A little instability there,” Sampson said, far too casually, following one particularly wrenching example.
Our flight on the rocket lasted less than three minutes, and ended with an abrupt shutdown which flung us forward in our harnesses. (This was, for me, the single most disquieting sensation of the whole voyage. I felt as though I would fly right through the forward windows.)
“Everybody okay back there?” Sampson asked, in that peculiar, fatherly tone of his.
“Fine!” Eva-Lynne answered brightly. I glanced over at her, and was rewarded with her best smile.
“We’re going to loop around the earth once,” Sampson explained, for Eva-Lynne’s benefit, “then let Cash do his thing. That will send us toward the Moon. In the meantime, enjoy the view. I plan to.”
Of course, being forward, Sampson actually had a view. Though shortly even he didn’t have much to see, as we flew over the nightside of the earth. Below us was darkness punctuated by a surprising number of lightning flashes. Hundreds, in fact.
Eva-Lynne and I removed our helmets and watched this display with enthusiasm, as Sampson tended to the business of orienting Quicksilver. Rolling the vehicle tended to change our view, and, ultimately, made me ill.
In fact, as we neared the completion of our first orbit, and Sampson gave me warning that I would be lifting in ten minutes, I realized I was too sick to do anything. I opened my mouth to say so, and promptly repeated Al Dearborn’s greeting to met that first day at Tehachapi-Kern—I threw up.
“Oh, dear,” Eva-Lynne said. Fortunately, she had noticed that I was turning green, and had a paper towel and airsickness bag ready. The mess was blessedly minor, and within minutes I was feeling better.
Better—but nowhere near capable of doing a lift. “Two minutes,” Sampson said. “Are you ready back there?”
“I don’t know.”
He twisted and faced me. “Eva-Lynne, seal your helmet.”
With a speed that astonished me, Eva-Lynne did as she was ordered. Then Sampson turned halfway toward me and began speaking in a voice so low I could barely hear him without my helmet open. “I know all about your phone call and your friend, Skalko. But she doesn’t. Want to see the look on her face when she hears you sold us all out?”
I felt a sudden, and all-too familiar, surge of anger.
“Now!” Sampson said.
My hand found the tiller, and we lifted.
Because we had taken off earlier than planned, we sailed toward a Moon we couldn’t see. With his telescope, Sampson claimed to be able to see a dull sliver limning the nightside, but I couldn’t. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s out there.”
“I’ll just have to take your word for it,” I told him.
The day-long flight would have been intolerable if we’d had to stay strapped in. Fortunately, the airlock behind the two rear seats provided a certain amount of room—and privacy.
We all needed it, especially Eva-Lynne. But I also crawled inside the lock, primarily to get away from Sampson. I understood the rationale for his nastiness in forcing me to lift. He must have known that I needed a strong emotional charge, however brief, to channel. But I didn’t like him for it. Perhaps it was his general air of smug superiority; perhaps it was just knowing he had a tool he could use against me again.
Perhaps it was the nagging feeling that we were doomed because the lucky Commander Dearborn had somehow managed to miss the trip, and we were left with the man who would always be in the right place at the wrong time. I spent the entire flight from the Earth to the Moon feeling like a man who has just been told he has months to live.
I dozed for a fitful couple of hours, and woke to find the Moon not only visible, but growing in size.
“Looks like we’re here,” Eva-Lynne said.
I had no difficulty getting in the proper mood to make the braking lift: the sheer spectacle of seeing the lunar landscape provided all the adrenaline I needed. To my mind, we were falling lower and lower, going faster and faster, about to crash into a bleak world of mountains, craters and rocks. The craters themselves were filled with smaller craters as well as giant boulders—
I made the braking lift; Sampson followed with a series of bursts from the main engine, and we began our descent.
I wish I could say I saw it, but with Quicksilver in a wings-level, nose forward position, only Sampson could see the lunar surface. Eva-Lynne and I saw nothing but the black sky of lunar night, until, at that last instant, the sunlit peaks of the dark gray mountains appeared. “Thirty seconds,” Sampson told us. (He was giving us—not to mention Dearborn and the rest of poor Tominbang’s team back on Earth—a terse commentary the whole way down.)
At the last moment, it seemed that we were traveling far too fast. Sampson announced, “Contact!”
And we scraped to a stop, rocking for a moment, as if on the edge of a cliff, then settling gently.
We had reached the Sea of Storms. “Please be advised,” Sampson radioed, “we have arrived.” I realized that Eva-Lynne had been clutching my hand the entire time.
No warning lights glared on Sampson’s console. We heard no unusual sounds. So we stayed, our time on the lunar surface necessarily limited. After all, in Tominbang’s vision, we were merely pathfinders demonstrating that it was possible to reach the Moon—and return safely. Sampson had the simple task of erecting Tominbang’s communications array, whether or not our unfortunate backer ever used it.
In the original plans, Dearborn would have done the work, with Tominbang’s assistance. Now it was up to Sampson and me.
Within an hour, Sampson emerged from the airlock, stepping onto the surface and uttering one simple word: “Wow”.
He went for a short scout while, with Eva-Lynne’s help, I repressurized the airlock and moved inside with the array package. “Sure you don’t want to come out?” I said.
“Very sure. This is close enough for me.”
Mission rules dictated that one of us had to remain inside Quicksilver. Eva-Lynne had volunteered: I don’t believe she had a great deal of faith in her hastily-modified pressure suit. (In fact, once she landed, she unzipped it, and eventually shed the whole thing.)
She gave me a kiss, then closed the inner hatch.
Once the air pressure had bled down, I opened the outer hatch and hauled myself out. Moving was incredibly difficult, not because of lunar gravity (which, thanks to the heavy suit, felt the same as Earth gravity to me). I slid rather than climbed down the side of Quicksilver, and fell to my knees in the lunar soil. I saw the slightest puff of gray dust, which settled instantly.
“Oh, beautiful,” Sampson said, sarcastically.
I thought at first he was referring to my inelegant first steps, but instead he was looking at the undercarriage of Quicksilver:
A shiny gash ran from back to front. The cause was obvious ... a small, rounded rock that rose about a foot higher than the otherwise flat, soft lunar soil around it. “Did that do any damage?”
“Hard to tell,” Sampson said, getting on his hands and knees and trying to look under the vehicle. “There’s a stain on the skin of the ship, but that could have been there before landing, or even before we took off.”
Sampson’s attitude suggested a man who was confronted with, at worst, a flat tire. I envied that, as I stared at what could only be a fuel leak, knowing we needed to fire the main engine before I could perform a lift that would send us flying back to Earth. “What do we do?” I said, trying not to sound as terrified as I felt.
He was back on his feet, bouncing toward the array package I had dropped. “Complete the mission. We’ll deal with the other problem in its turn.”
“It’s too bad this had to happen,” Sampson said abruptly, about halfway through the construction of Tominbang’s array. Just when I thought he was going to address our problem, he continued: “If the damn Takisians hadn’t arrived, this would be the biggest story on the planet! ‘Man on the Moon’! Can you imagine? Thousands of people would be listening on the radio. We might even have television here.
“And we would just be the first. There would be other landings, too. Scientists would come up here. Even tourists. Once the human race proved it could do something like this, it would never turn back!”
I could have argued with him: I wasn’t too sure that the human race “would never turn back”. We’d “turned back” every chance we got.
Or I could have told Sampson that a certain mobster in southern California agreed with him completely. But all I said was, “If the Takisians hadn’t come, neither of us would be here.”
So we completed our mission, performing an hour of pointless work under the glare of a naked sun. Only when we were starting back toward Quicksilver did I pause to attempt to appreciate the fact that I could die in a place no humans had ever visited. I remember thinking it was an honor I would rather have done without.
Eva-Lynne would die, too, which made it even worse.
As Sampson loped ahead of me, I stopped and, using my boot, wrote the following in the soil: “Cash + Eva-Lynne”. I wondered how long it would be before human eyes saw it. If they ever saw it.
Sampson was already back at his controls when I emerged from the airlock. He acted as if everything were fine. “Strap in, gang. No sense hanging around longer than we have to.”
As I finished removing my suit (it was covered with dust, and my oxygen tanks were empty), I put my head close to Eva-Lynne’s. “Did he—?”
“I was listening,” she said, finishing my question. We had no time for further conversation, because Sampson snapped, “Let’s go back there!”
I was angry, but I strapped in. In fact, I tried to reassure Eva-Lynne. “It might be nothing,” I said, whispering.
Sampson finished his checklist, and with twenty seconds’ warning, punched the engine start button. With a dull drone, it started up—
Then died. Now the warning lights flashed. “Dammit.” It was the first time I had heard Sampson use profanity. “We’ve got fuel, but we’ve got a leak in the line that runs to the main engine.” Which meant we didn’t have enough energy to get off the surface of the Moon.
I looked at Eva-Lynne; it was her turn to see panic in my face. For a moment she seemed lost. Then that disturbing, yet attractive knowing look appeared on her face, and she leaned close to me. Her hair, stirred by small breezes from the ventilation fans, surrounded me, caressing me. I forgot about the stale odor of the Quicksilver interior as I inhaled perfume.
And felt her warm breath on my neck and her hand on my chest. Her lips brushed my ear. I think I mumbled a syllable of protest. “Sshh,” she said. Then: “Colonel, why don’t you step inside the airlock.”
Sampson didn’t hesitate. With a look on his face that combined disgust and hope, he crawled past us and into the chamber, dogging the hatch.
My straps seemed to unbuckle themselves. Eva-Lynne’s under-garment removed itself, as did mine. I took her in my arms, feeling her breasts against me, her mouth on mine.
Moments later, I fumbled for the tiller, and faster than any rocket, we fired off the Sea of Storms.
That is the inside story of the first human flight to another world. This is, as far as I know, the only record of it. None of the support team talked. I don’t believe many of them knew what our true destination was.
I never saw or heard from Tominbang again, though the relay station was fully operational. Did he survive to make his transactions?
Sampson is now a major general, first chief of the new Space Command. He’ll never talk, at least not until he’s safely retired. He was mortified at witnessing my love-making with Eva-Lynne. (He wouldn’t meet our eyes on the flight home.) An association with our highly-illegal operation would also be bad for his military career, which is going great. He took the lessons he learned from Quicksilver and applied them to a revamped vehicle called the Hornet, which flies into orbit without the need of an assist from a horny deuce.
Nor will you find Eva-Lynne or Cash Mitchell on Paregrine’s Perch telling tales of that first flight to the Moon. Not as long as Warren Skalko lives. Skalko never forgets.
Nevertheless, I am forever grateful for my small role in a secret history. I not only found Eva-Lynne, I learned the truth of her life-long lesson, the one she almost imparted to me on the hillside above Tehachapi-Kern Airport:
Sex trumps all.
Luck Be a Lady
by Chris Claremont
Once they heard where she was going, nobody would take her. Some cabbies were apologetic, others curtly dismissive, a couple offered rude gestures and ruder words.
If the plane had arrived on time, when the dispatchers were on duty, she might have fared better-but mechanical delays and rotten weather en route had delayed the flight so long it was well past midnight before she finally landed, and there was nobody official to turn to.
One asked point-blank why Cody was going there and, hoping it might persuade him to change his mind, she told him: “A job interview”
“Where fo’?” he asked, “ain’t nobody hirin’ down there.”
“The clinic,” she said.
“Shit, missy, you got better places to go an’ better things to do wit’chu life than waste it down ’at shithole, trust me.”
“Absolutely,” a friend chimed in, his accent so thick Cody barely understood the word.
“Decent lady got no bizness goin’ there,” the driver continued, hands weaving a fascinating pattern in the air before him as he spoke, took a sip of coffee, spoke, took a drag on a Marlboro, without ever missing a beat. “Shit, nobody human got any bizness there. Unless ...” Suspicion dawned and he looked narrowly toward her. “Maybe you’re one of ’em.”
The way he asked, far too deliberately casual, trying to mask the sudden burr of fear and hostility barely hidden underneath, caught Cody’s attention and she tilted her head to give her one eye a better view of him.
“One of what?” she asked, genuinely confused. “Them,” as if that was the most obvious reference in the world. “Jokers, aces-whole fuckin’ crowd.”
“I’m a doctor.”
“Cops got a name for their precinct down there, ‘Fort Freak.’ Fuckin’ fits, y’know. Ain’t there enough sick people needful amongst your own, why you gotta go take care o’ them? Pardon me for sayin’, lady, but you ain’t got the look o’ no Mutha Teresa, know what I mean?”
“Absolutely,” his friend chimed in.
“Look ...” She sighed, fatigue from her trip combining with apprehension to put steel in her voice, an edge that made the cabbie stiffen ever so slightly and take a reflexive half step backward. “All I’m looking for is a way into the city. If none of you will take me, can you at least point out some other way?”
“Sure,” the other cabbie said, striking out with some humor of his own, “walk.” Nobody laughed, and when Cody turned her eye on him, with a look she’d learned within forty-eight hours of landing in Vietnam and perfected over twenty years as a surgeon, he promptly wished he’d resisted the impulse.
“Hey, life’s a bitch. Only other option’s, you take the Q33 transit bus over to Roosevelt Avenue/Jackson Heights, then catch the F take you right into Jokertown.”
“F what,” she asked.
“F you,” muttered the jokester, but she ignored him. “Subway,” said the first man. “Sixth Avenue line, that’s what the letter stands for, take it downtown.”
“Thank you,” she told him, hefting shoulder bag and briefcase and following his pointed direction along the sidewalk to the bus stop.
“Better watch your step, Doc,” he called after her, “they’re animals down there, you got no idea.” (And you do, she thought.) “They see a nice piece like you, sonsabitch freaks’ll prob’ly eat ‘chu!” And on cue, came his friend’s stolid “Absolutely!”
Cody didn’t argue. For all she knew he might be right.
At the station she scrambled into the next-to-the-last car, surprised to find it crowded. Where’d all these people come from? she wondered. The bus driver said this station’s supposed to be one of the main ones on the line and there couldn’t have been more than a half dozen of us waiting. She shrugged. Isn’t my city, this could be the only train they run this time of night. The thing was, as it had rumbled past her into the station, the other cars hadn’t registered as being so full.
It was standing room only-there was room to move, but not much else-the passengers about as wide and wild a mix as could be imagined, the night people of this city that loved boasting to the world that it never slept, everyone locked tight in their own miserable little private worlds, not caring a damn about what was outside and praying with all their hearts to be left alone. No one looked her way. No one knew she existed, or cared. Good. Right now, anonymity was a most valued friend.
She twisted a little sideways to get more comfortable and caught a glimpse of herself in the door glass, turned black by the dark tunnel roaring by outside. Tall, too tall for a woman, her height and the power of her rangy frame working against the clothes she was wearing, the only thing in her wardrobe that qualified as a power suit. First time she’d worn anything like it in years. Christ, she wondered, sifting back through the years, was it when Ben died, has it really been that long? In-country, she’d gotten into the habit of fatigues and T-shirts, of dressing for comfort rather than fashion-if for no other reason than what sweat didn’t ruin, the blood surely would-and one of the things she’d loved about Wyoming was the casual nature of the people. They took her as she was-at least, she thought with sudden bitterness, when it came to how I looked. And here she stood, trading that in for a world where the package was at least as important as what was inside. Wha’ fuck, she shrugged, a small smile twisting the corner of her mouth at how easily she adopted the cadence of the taxi driver, maybe the change’ll do me good. Except, perhaps, for the effing heels. Too long in hiking boots and sneaks; dress shoes were going to take some getting used to. And she eased one foot free to rub-massage the arch on the opposite shin.
Automatically, she continued her inventory, hoping her brief visit to an airport washroom had repaired most of the damage done by the seemingly endless flight. The hair was black, except for a smattering of silver splashed above her right eye, unruly as ever despite her best efforts with hairspray and comb. The years had taken the harshest edge off her scars, but to Cody they still stood out in stark contrast to her tanned skin, one running across the crest of the right cheekbone and up beneath the patch, where it branched to three that continued up into her hairline. The round should have taken her head of-f-but she’d flinched a split second before it hit, without knowing why, the firefight had been total chaos, shells and shrapnel tearing the night to shreds, coming from every direction, things so crazy you didn’t know where to duck. So instead of her life, she’d only lost the eye. Lucky, they’d told her in Da Nang-and later, in the big Pacific Hospital at Pearlfantastically fucking lucky. She hadn’t thought so then, she wasn’t convinced now.
That side of her head throbbed like the devil-always happened when she was stressed, no matter that the cause was, probably psychosomatic-rubbing it didn’t help, but it was better than nothing. She curled her hand into a half fist and pressed the heel gently against patch and empty socket. She’d never been beautiful and the wound had made sure she’d never get the chance.
The brakes came on too hard at Queens Plaza-there was a cry of pain as someone’s body wouldn’t give, a curse as someone else got stepped on-she heard a smattering of apologies, saw a lot more rueful grimaces, this was no surprise to these people, the grief came with the ride. Then, the doors popped wide and Cody struggled out of the way, to let passengers pass.
Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the people waiting by the last car suddenly rush toward the front of the train. A few who’d stepped inside quickly retreated, faces twisting in embarrassment and disgust. As the tide of passengers turned and those waiting on the platform bulled their way aboard, Cody twisted, snaked, finally shoved her way back to the rear connecting door. To her amazement, the car was empty-except for a gray, shapeless mass plopped on the bench seats, halfway along the right-hand side. At first, she thought it was a derelict.
As the train pulled out of the station, it bounced across some switches, sashay-swaying from side to side and a tentacle dropped out from under the rags.
Without thinking, Cody yanked open her door and stepped across the tiny platform into the rear car. The smell was like a wall, blocking her way. She remembered Firebase Shiloh, that last morning, waiting for the dust-off choppers, the air filled with blood and rot, gasoline-soaked smoke and charred flesh. She’d taken a twelve-gauge and one of the walking wounded and searched the compound, making as sure as she could they wouldn’t leave any breathers behind. She’d been fine until they reached divisional headquarters. She’d spent a month in a charnel house but it wasn’t until she walked into the mess hall and smelled fresh food that it finally struck home how unutterably awful it had been. Two steps in the door, one decent breath, and she’d doubled over onto her knees, puking her guts bloody.
This was worse.
The joker made a gargly hiss with each breath, and when it rolled over in its sleep, she saw that it was naked and male. The legs were more like stumps, ending in viciously twisted scar tissue, and she realized that they were really flippers, worn down by years of trudging across concrete and asphalt. The skin was mottled gray and blue black, gleaming with oily secretions, with two sets of tentacles attached to the shoulders. The primary was thick as a human arm, but half again as long, broadening at the end into a flat pad whose inner surface was covered with cephalopod suckers. Nestled in each armpit was a secondary nest of limbs, a half dozen each side, shorter and much thinner than the main tentacle, constantly in motion, writhing among themselves, picking at whatever came in reach, almost as if they had minds of their own. Its head was little more than a bump growing out of the top of the torso, but the jagged teeth she saw when it snored convinced her this was as close as she wanted to get. The eyes were closed, and for that she was thankful. Maliciously, after twisting so much else, Tachyon’s virus had spared the genitalia; the joker had a very human penis.
Without realizing it, Cody had slumped down on her heels, unconsciously making herself as small and inconsequential as possible, afraid without knowing why when her rational self told her that all she should be feeling for this poor creature was pity. Over the rumble of the train, she heard rude voices-passengers in the car ahead, looking through the window as she’d done, making fun, demanding action.
As the train trundled down into the tunnel beneath the East River, the joker stirred. Perhaps, Cody thought, he senses the presence of the water? What’s he doing still on land, anyway-unless, my God, to give him a body designed for an aquatic environment without the gills that would enable him to live there! Not the cruelest joker deal by far, she knew, but it still provoked a silent snarl. Hell, even if he is amphibian-if he was an adult when the virus activated, who’s to say he could hack abandoning the world he knew, friends, family, job, everything that’s familiar, that gives his existence purpose and meaning, for a new world. As unknown and alien as another planet, where he’d be all alone. Could I go, if he was me?
And her thoughts turned to Dr. Tachyon, the man—and she laughed softly, bitterly at that, because Tachyon was less of a ‘man’ in any human sense than she-responsible for the wild card. Whose people had sent it to Earth and turned humanity inside out. She wondered if she should hate the little geek for what he’d done? And yet, hadn’t he spent the forty-odd years since trying to make up for that, fighting for the health and welfare of the ‘people’ his virus had created? There were probably worse fates than working by his side.
It helped, of course, that she needed the job.
His eyes were open. Black eyes, a shark’s eyes, no depth, no emotion, flat, opaque plates, bright as gleaming lacquer except that they absorbed everything they gazed upon. Looking at Cody. She shifted on her feet, figuring to stand and slip back the way she came, into the comparative safety of the next car. But when she moved, so did he. Not much, just enough to let her know he was aware of her intention. Shit. She had a gun-a service .45 she’d carried ever since the ‘Nam-but it was locked in its case at the bottom of her carryall. Useless. Her shoulder blades contracted, as if she had an itch down her spine, and she crossed her wrists beneath her breasts, huddling close about herself. A vague glitter drew her eyes downward and her breath caught ever so slightly as she saw her skin glisten like the joker’s. For the briefest moment, flesh and bone seemed to flow together, twisting and curling where it once was straight, tentacle instead of arm. When she looked back at the joker, he was showing teeth.
“Stop it,” she hissed. “Leave me alone!”
Something wriggled beneath her blouse, an itching, tickling sensation under the armpits that set her to looking frantically about the car for a weapon.
“Damn you,” she snarled, “leave me alone!”
A bounce and a jerk and a screech heralded their arrival at Lexington Avenue, the first stop in Manhattan, and the brakes snagged again, as they had in Queens, pitching Cody forward on hands and knees, sending her sprawling full length. The joker had anchored himself with one tentacle, was reaching for her with the others. Baring her teeth, she groped for her foot, coming up with a shoe-thankful now it had a heel-swinging as hard as she could toward the creature’s face. It was like hitting sponge rubber, the flesh simply gave beneath the impact. But the joker howl-yowled in surprise and pain and rage, flinching away from her, gathering one set of tentacles protectively around its face while the other reached again for her, snagging hold even as Cody spasmed reflexively backward against the doors, which miraculously-a split second too late-opened. She heard a cry of rage and alarm, sensed rather than saw a pair of dark blue trousers step over her into the car, heard a sharp thwack as a nightstick connected with the creature’s arm. There was no outcry this time, but he let her go. A black, oily liquid spread across the seat beneath it, filling the car with a smell beyond anything Cody had ever imagined. A breath, she knew, would kill her and her savior both. Hands helped her up-she registered a woman’s features and thought, absurdly, So young, almost a baby-a uniform as well, Transit Police, thank God, and a pair of neck chains, the one a crucifix, the other a St. Christopher medal hooked to a miniature representation of her shield. An electronic chime announced the imminent closing of the subway doors, and the woman shouldered Cody outside onto the platform, handing out her bags to her.
“You all right?” she asked, continuing after a fractional pause. “You look pretty shaken, I’ll radio for some help, you just wait here or, if you can manage, head upstairs to the token booth.”
She’d blocked the door with her leg so it couldn’t fully close.
“What,” Cody stammered, “you?”
“I’m the only cop on the train,” the woman said matter-of-factly.
And she stepped back aboard.
“No,” Cody yelled, lunging forward to the door even as the train started moving. “No!” She was screaming, staggering along the platform, trying to hold on, keep pace, as the train gathered speed; she had no chance, less strength, tripped and fell crashing to the platform, her final cry-as the taillights disappeared into the darknessmore of a sob. “No!”
A flight of filthy stairs led up from the platform. She collapsed before she’d gone halfway, back against the banister, teeth chattering, good eye staring straight ahead at the long empty station as though it was the jungle and, any second now, she expected a VC attack to come boiling her way, the classic “thousand-yard stare” that one of the paramedics-another vet-who eventually came in answer to the policewoman’s radio call, instantly recognized. He asked if she was okay and she nodded, not really hearing, or caring what he said, mostly ignoring what was happening around her, hands tucked tight under her armpits, making sure the flesh beneath was still her flesh and not some changeling nightmare, while she rocked panting back and forth, back and forth, thinking of nothing save those awful doll-face lacquer eyes and what they’d almost done to her. No joker, she realized, but an ace. A monster. And, whoever he was, whatever he was, he was still loose, and still hunting. And the next woman he found might not be as lucky. And she thought of the policewoman-and her low, keening wail built up into a cry of feral rage that filled the station and turned heads and made people step smartly away from her. Madness, she thought, not even noticing the sting of the needle as the medic shot a dose of sedative into her arm, madness!
I’ve become Dante, was her last awareness as oblivion claimed her ...
... and my world, my home, is Malabolge.
She knew where she was without opening her eye, hospitals have that kind of smell and emergency rooms most of all. Problem was, when she opened her eye, she didn’t believe it. Two men stood over her.
“You okay, miss?” asked the one to her left. “Everybody’s favorite question,” she managed to croak, thankful the rawness of her throat masked the sheer amazement that she felt.
He was a centaur, a glorious palomino who looked like he’d just leapt out of the “Pastorale” sequence of Disney’s Fantasia. The golden coloring carried over to his human skin, which gave the impression that he had the most magnificent tan, complemented by ash-blond hair and tail. There was a boyish exuberance to his face and manner only slightly countered by his concerned expression and the surgical scrub shirt and physician’s lab coat. Stitched onto the left breast pocket was the seal of the Blythe van Renssaeler Memorial Clinic, and pinned over it was his ID card.
“Dr. Finn,” she finished, reading the name off his tag. “And who are you?” was his reply.
“Cody Havero.”
“D’you know what day it is?”
“Wouldn’t that depend on how long I’ve been unconscious? It was Thursday-no.” She rubbed an aching forehead. “That’s wrong, isn’t it? The plane landed after midnight, so I suppose it must be Friday.”
“Still is,” Finn said cheerfully, making a note on his chart. “No evident impairment of cognitive faculties.”
“Why should there be?” she muttered, with an undertone of asperity. “I’m suffering, if anything, from shock, not a concussion.”
“Now, miss ...” he began. “Doctor,” she corrected. “Yes,” Finn replied, thinking she’d addressed him. “No,” she continued patiently, “I’m a doctor.”
“Hiya, Major,” the other man said from her blind side, and she rolled her head to get a better view. At first glance the joker looked normal. Most people, surprisingly, never noticed his affliction right off-even though, in a very real sense, it was as plain—as the nose on his face. He had no eyes. Not simply eyeless sockets, but no sockets at all, a smooth curve of solid bone from the crown of his head to the nasal cavity. But there’d been a compensation, a nose that Jimmy Durante would have been proud of, possessing a sensitivity that would put a bloodhound to shame.
“Been an age, Sergeant,” Cody acknowledged, levering herself up as he bent over to give her a rough embrace. “Too fuckin’ long, an’ that’s a fact.”
“You two know each other, Scent?”
“Goin’ on twenty, Doc,” the blind joker replied. “Meet the only woman combat cutter in U.S. Army history.”
“You were in Vietnam?” Finn asked her. “The Joker Brigade,” he added with disgust.
“Gotta understand, Doc,” Scent said to the young centaur, “there was a lotta rationalization back then. Nobody gave a rat fuck about us. Attitude was, we get killed, that’s one less freak fouling the gene pool. Usual pattern, if a joker got medivac’d to an aid station, he’d hardly be there more’n a day before some REMF in razor-creased tiger stripes’d slick up from Saigon to collect him. Standard excuse was to evac him to a special joker medical facility. Made sense actually-at least, most bought it since our regular quarters were in quarantine zone. Problem was, this ‘facility’ seemed to be located an hour’s flight out across the South China Sea. No muss, no fuss, just a thousand-foot-high dive into a telegram home to Momma. ‘Cept Cody, she didn’t buy it. Man showed up on her doorstep, she told him to fuck off. Man brought some Saigon khakis to back him up ...” Finn looked confused.
“Upper-echelon staff officers from MACV headquarters,” Cody told him.
“... damn if she didn’t have a couple of network camera crews on hand doing interviews. Made sure they got pictures of the Man, made sure they had her records of the casualties. Any funny business, no way could it be kept quiet. Man backed down, did a rabbit. After that, you were a joker and you got hit, you moved heaven and earth to get to Cody’s doorstep. It was like she was magic—nobody ever died on her table.”
“I’m afraid, Scent, that string’s gone down the drain.” Along, she thought, with a lot of other things. “I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but why am I here? Maybe I’m confused about my New York geography but from what I remember of the subway map, isn’t Blythe klicks from that station I was in? Aren’t there closer hospitals?”_
Finn spoke: “All 911 was sure of was some sort of wild-card activity at the Lex-Third Avenue station. And, I’m afraid, your reactions to the medics sort of spooked them. They figured they had a manifestation on their hands. Procedure in those cases is, everything comes to Blythe.”
“You were on your way here anyway, right?” Scent chimed in.,
“Lucky me,” Cody agreed, but with a bite to her words. Scent chose not to take the hint.
“That’s right, Major. If there was ever a right move to make, you made it. That’s luck in my book.”
“The train, Finn.” He looked quizzically at her. “There was a transit officer,” she explained, “a woman, who helped me ...”
“Haven’t heard any reports, but there’s no reason why we should. I can run a check, though.”
“Please, do. There was a ... creature on the train. Looked like a joker, but ...” She paused, shuddering at the memory. “I don’t know, I keep thinking there was a sense of something ....” Her voice trailed off and for a moment she felt lost, trying to sort images and memories that refused to stay still, conscious only of a need to run that bordered on panic.
“Can I get out of here, please?” she asked. “And if possible, is there someplace I can tidy up before I see Dr. Tachyon?”
“Residents have a crash pad, upstairs,” Scent said, not giving Finn a chance to answer, “where they grab some stray z’s when they’re tannin’ long shifts-I’ll take you.”
“There really is trouble, Scent,” she told him as they rode the elevator up two flights.
“Ain’t that the Lord’s gospel—careful,” he cautioned suddenly, but Cody was already in the process of a quick and nimble two-step over a body that looked made from limp spaghetti, spilling out of its chair and partially across the hallway. ‘Nice move.
“That touch, at least, I haven’t lost.”
“If you’d been a guy, the NFL woulda been your fame an’ fortune.”
There was no air-conditioning-the system had been overwhelmed by the summer’s murderous heat, Scent told her, and there simply wasn’t money in the budget for repairs-and the atmosphere was rotten. The sky outside the windows was only beginning to hint at the approaching dawn, heaven help them once the sun actually came up. New York, she knew, didn’t suffer summer gladly, and this August appeared worse than most.
“Scent, something is out there.”
“A lotta shit’s out there, Cody. An’ it’s all startin’ to come down-hard.”
“Shiloh.”
“That’s right, you were there. Yup”—he sighed”Shiloh. Or worse. Here’s the hooch. It’s a mess, but that’s the way you docs seem to like, I guess ....”
“When were young and broke and working ninety-six hours at a stretch.”
“Break my heart. Anyway, you hungry after, I know a nice diner, coupla blocks’ walk, serves finest-kind breakfast.”
“I’ll let you know”
“Take care, Major.”
“Thanks, Sergeant. This is one I owe you.”
Tachyon’s office, surprisingly, was nothing special, standard bureaucratic box with a view of the river and the Brooklyn waterfront. One wall of bookshelves full of medical texts, a pair of computer terminals on a table underneath littered with disks. Tachyon’s desk angled so he could look out the windows without turning his back on any visitor. It was an antique; she didn’t know enough to name the period or style, only that it was as magnificent as the small sideboard tucked into the corner behind it. The window was wide open, covered with a screen, with piles of documents stacked haphazardly on the sill. The sky was dark and a whisper of wind stirred the papersstorm signs, a nasty one, and she reacted instinctively, stepping behind the desk to shift the material to the floor below and lever the window partially closed. Made the room that much warmer, by cutting down the admittedly minimal circulation, but at least everything in it wouldn’t end up drenched. She hoped the rain would mean the end of the heat wave, but doubted it. Drought had scarred most of the country this summer, days of three-figure temperatures everywhere you went-there was talk up and down the Midwest of a return to the Depression dust bowl-and she knew firsthand what the weather had done to her beloved mountains. There’d been another report on NPR’s Morning Edition about the Yellowstone fires, memory filling her nostrils with the acrid tang of pine smoke.
“I hope, Dr. Havero, this interview suits you as much as my office clearly does.”
She jumped, taken by surprise, realizing that she’d sunk down into the chair behind the desk-automatically making herself at home-and cursing the fact that the door was to her right, her blind side. Began to stammer an apology, vetoed the thought, tried instead to pass the faux pas off with a shrug and a smile.
The voice had the natural elegance of a classic noble vampire-which made her smile easier-and the man himself was everything his office was not, cut from a mold uniquely his own. She found herself looking down at him as they sidled past each other, exchanging positions. He was a head shorter. Her left hand went out in greetingwhich was when her conscious mind twigged to what her unconscious had already registered, that Tachyon’s right arm ended at the wrist.
He responded with a soft left-handed handshake, the slightest of smiles acknowledging and appreciating her courtesy.
“A meeting I’ve been looking forward to, actually, for quite some time. Scent—I don’t know if you’re aware, but he’s the director of our Vietnam Veterans Outreach Program has been singing your praises to these many years.” He motioned her to take a chair. She’d seen pictures of him, of course, but on paper-and especially,—the tube-it was easy to dismiss his eccentric costumes as just that, costumes, the man himself trivialized into a character from some tacky teleplay.
“But I suspect,” he continued, “the anticipation is not quite mutual.”
“Is it that obvious,” she replied, thinking deliberately loudly, or did you read my mind to discover it?
In person, his appearance was no less outrageous, but far more effective. Living embodiment of an eighteenthcentury aristo. Plum trousers tucked into gray suede buccaneer boots, ruled green shirt beneath orange, doublebreasted waistcoat, the effect actually enhanced by its contrast with the white hospital-issue lab coat that stood in for the burgundy frock coat hung on a corner rack.
He motioned toward the papers she’d moved. “Much appreciated,” he told her, ignoring her inner and outer response. “It’s often far too easy to be overwhelmed by the clutter here. As you might have guessed, I am far from the most organized of souls. And good secretaries, especially in Jokertown, are damnably hard to find.”
The pieces of his face didn’t fit together in any manner that might be considered classically handsome, yet the sum of the parts was undeniably attractive. The same description had often been applied to Cody. Though the end result in his case is, she thought, somewhat more delicate. A sling cradled his right arm, the stump swathed in fresh bandages, a recent wound. There’d been no hint of this in the letter he’d sent inviting her to New York. Wonder what I’ve missed fighting fires in the boonies? she thought. It also helped explain the fragility in his manner, she’d seen it herself too often in casualty wards. And she remembered her own reactions, coming out of anesthetic to discover her right eye gone.
“That what you want from me?”
“Hardly, given your resume.” He looked quizzically at her. “Are you always this direct?”
“Yes,” she said simply.
A sudden shadow crossed the inside of his eyes and she knew somehow she’d slipped through his barriers, touched a memory as painful as her own. Her face flushed, with anger and resentment, and she didn’t bother masking her exultation at this small, trivial score. Who the fuck do you think you are, cock? she snarled silently, hoping he was listening. What the hell right do you, does anyone, have to pick someone else’s brain, goddammit, isn’t anything private anymore?
“Truthfully,” he continued, as though nothing untoward had happened, and Cody found herself admiring his damnable alien poise as much as she was infuriated by it,
“I’d forgotten all about my letter in the press of recent events. I never expected an answer.”
“Desperation has a way of overcoming even the most primal terrors.”
“How clever. I only caught the one news broadcast. What exactly happened?”
She shrugged. “I shot my mouth off, got my ass shot off in return.”
“Uncomfortable.”
“I should introduce you to my kid, he has exactly the same opinion.”
“I’d like to meet him. I have a grandson myself.”
“Congratulations.”
“Thank you. A true blessing, actually.”. From the way he spoke, the faintest coloration to his tone, she wondered if that was as true as he obviously wanted it to be.
“I’m glad for you.”
“And I am still curious.”
“Well”—she sighed—“after Chris was born, I packed in city life and headed for the high country. My folks left me their ranch-not really much as spreads go, nowhere near big enough to support itself, but heaven to live on-so I based myself there and hung out my shingle. Small-town GP, doing emergency surgery on the side. Figured there’d be the end of things. Until the fires.”
“They’re still burning. Last spring, hardly anyone knew what we were in for. Forest Service followed policy and let the lightning strikes burn uncontested. But the weather turned vicious-no rain, sun baking the woods tinder dry, winds whipping the flame front into firestorms. Alarm went out to damn near every fire-fighting outfit in the country. Indians handled the brunt of the work, about the best there are at this business.”
“You ever wonder, Doc, if your virus affects the inanimate substance of the earth itself? Some of those Indians do. You value your hide, steer well clear of Apaches and the Cheyenne. They view the world as a living being, as much so as humanity itself. They see what the wild card does to people, they wonder if it can twist-even murder-the planet the same way.”
“That’s preposterous.” He was genuinely shocked. She barely noticed. She was in the center of a broad mountain meadow with a beaten crew-most so tired they couldn’t stand, much less run for their lives-staring in horror at a wall of flame two hundred meters away, where five minutes before there’d been a stand of magnificent timber.
“Maybe. Fires sure seemed alive to us. Sneaky and intelligent, and vicious as a bear trap. Forest Service brought in some joker crews to handle the scutwork cleanup in the low-intensity areas. They should have been fine. Probably, in any other fire, any other summer, they would have. I’m sure you can guess the rest.”
“How bad was it?”
She met Tachyon’s gaze. “Backfire caught a joker team, tore ’em up pretty badly. I was running the aid station inside Yellowstone. Seven came in still alive. All critical, badly burned, but they had a chance. We bundled ’em all into a Huey and sent it to our main receiving hospital. They turned ’em away. Said they had no bed space. Bullshit, of course, we’d transferred half their patients precisely so there would be room for our casualties. But they were adamant, no admittance. Three other hospitals on our list, got the same response from each. Pilot had to bring ’em back. I was running an aid station-the whole point of our existence was to get our injured into the air and out to a proper full-care facility as fast as humanly possible. I didn’t have the staff, I didn’t have the equipment, to cope with anything more. Took ’em two days to die. For one, in the end, drugs didn’t help. He was screaming, like a baby-this high-pitched shriek, somehow he made himself heard even over the roar of the fire-I found myself once looking around for an ax or shovel, cursing myself for not having my gun handy. I wanted to smash that poor creature’s head in, just to shut him up. I lost it, totally, I think by then I was more than a little crazy myself. I found a network crew, gave ’em a live interview on morning television.”
“I saw that. You were quite impassioned.”
“Lot of good it did me. Hospitals had covered themselves perfectly. They hit back with loads of righteous indignation. By the time they were through, they’d made a plausible case it was my fault. All things considered, it wasn’t the best of times to take a stand for joker rights. I’d grown up there.” A softness had crept into her voice, an eerie echo of what she’d heard earlier in Tachyon’s, as though neither could still quite believe what had happened to them. “I’d made that place my home, it was where I raised my son-and five minutes on the Today show burned it up as completely as the North Fork fire did the Gallatin Range. Forest Service”—she made a face—“shipped me out on the next chopper. Got home, discovered my attending privileges at the local hospitals had been revoked. Within a week, I started losing patients. Within a month ...”
“Sent out job applications, word got passed back that I’d been blackballed. I was a troublemaker, nobody wanted a thing to do with me.”
“No one stood by you?”
“You don’t know how afraid people are” of your damned virus, she finished silently.
There was a twist to his eyes, a small, sad smile, a flash of pain desperately masked that told Cody he knew far more than he dared let on.
“So,” he said softly, finally, “you’re here ...” She filled in the rest: because you have no choice.
“I’m a doctor, this is a hospital. And I need the job.”
“I have doctors, Cody, I don’t need a doctor. I need my right arm.” He made a small gesture with it, and didn’t bother hiding the flash of pain in his eyes. There was a tentativeness now to his voice and manner that seemed to Cody like nothing so much as shame.
“We Takisians are so proud a species. We promote an ideal, in thought and deed and self. Deformity is cast out. Yet now, as you see, I am deformed. As unworthy in flesh to hold my name and rank as I’ve proved myself so eloquently in deed. Perhaps my ultimate penance for bringing the wild card to Earth.”
She said nothing.
“I need someone I can trust to help me run this clinic.”
“Why me?” she asked.
“Mostly ...” He paused a moment, and she wondered whose thoughts he was collecting, his own or hers. That was what made this so damnably infuriating-not knowing whether he was inside her head or not. And then she thought of what he might see-advertently or otherwise hard as it was for her to deal with the nasty nooks and crannies of her psyche, how much worse for him? And she had just herself to worry about; he was privy to everyone’s secret selves. Might be a bit much, for even the most hardened voyeur. Then twisted herself back into focus, to catch what Tachyon was saying.
“It was Scent who told me about you,” he said. “I am a proud man, Cody, but even I can’t deny anymore my need for help. Or theirs.”
She sighed, taking refuge in the view out the window. The sky was more black than blue; the storm was about to break.
“I don’t know,” she said finally. “Then why did you come?”
“I thought ...” What? she asked herself. A wayward gust filled the room, carrying a stale salt sea smell off the river, and before she was even aware she’d moved, she was on her feet, two steps toward the door, hand grabbing instinctively for the .45 tucked in the bottom of her purse.
She couldn’t move. Stood like a dumbfounded statue, while Tachyon came out from behind his desk, violet eyes mixing shock and concern as he gently took the Colt from her hand, her purse from her shoulder. They went on the desk. Still frozen, she watched him pour a stiff cognac into a cut crystal snifter. Then, he released the mind lock.
She didn’t fall—though she dearly wanted to-but didn’t hit him, either.
She took a cautious sip, the cognac burned deliciously. “That encounter this morning must have made quite an impression,” he said quietly.
“Seems so,” she agreed, trying to will her hands to stop shaking. “I gave as complete a description as I could to Dr. Finn.”
“I saw. The joker you encountered isn’t in our files, but that’s hardly surprising.” It isn’t a joker, she screamed silently, don’t you understand?
And said instead, as she set down the glass, “This was a mistake, Doctor, I think we both know that. I shouldn’t have come here. I’m sorry.”
“Actually, I think you’re right. They’re lepers-aces as much as jokers, though too many think their powers make them somehow immune. More and more, it seems as though every hand is turning against them. People you know suddenly become total strangers, people you trust betray you-or, worse, believe you’ve betrayed them. The work we do here is as much psychological as physical; we can’t afford such ambivalence-and latent hostility-even on a member of the regular staff, much less my alter ego.”
She started to say, “I know you’ll find someone,” but left the words silent in her throat, because she and he both knew they’d be a lie.
She was almost out the clinic’s main foyer-painfully conscious that aside from the occasional staff member, she was the only person she saw with anything approaching a normal appearance, every so often catching a whispered curse and not-so-whispered taunt when Scent caught up with her.
“Sorry to see you didi maul Major,” he said.
“Win some, lose some, Scent. We should be used to that.”
“This summer—after that fuckin’ convention—I feel like we’re bein’ fuckin’ overrun. Prob’ly makin’ the smart play, buggin’ out while you can.”
“Yeah.”
“Look, that ain’t why I’m here. The joker you ran into—I can’t say for sure since I can’t see to make sure, but I think they just brought it in, DOA.”
“Where?”
“Morgue.”
“Can you show me?”
No attendants in the body shop, only a single pathologist on duty, a nat, more than willing to give full vent to his anger at the city medical bureaucracy for sending him to this gulag. He knew of Cody, figured that made them kindred spirits; they both stood up to the system and got royally screwed. She figured him for a jerk, but wasn’t about to let on with him in a mood to help.
The corpse lay on the examining table and Cody was surprised to discover it no less disturbing dead than alive. “Pretty fucking gross,” the pathologist agreed.
She didn’t reply at first as she continued her examination, mentally comparing the body before her with the one imprinted in her mind’s eye. “Ever see anything like it?” she asked, at last.
“You kiddin’? Jeez, I hope not. B’sides, I thought each manifestation of the virus was unique.”
“That’s the theory,” she agreed. “Any chance of a positive identification?”
“Not a fucking prayer, pardon my French. Other than the fact it’s female.”
“Female?” she asked sharply.
“Yeah.” He shrugged. “Take a look. No tits to speak of, but what appear to be appropriate genitalia. I suppose, during the post, I can check to see if the internal plumbing matches.”
“Do it.” She spoke with such an automatic, offhand voice of command that he responded by writing the order down in his workbook, assuming she was senior staff. “About the ID?”
“No hands, which means no fingerprints; no way we’ll get retinagrams from those eyes; and dental records ... ?” He pointed to the sawtooth fangs filling the partially open mouth. “This is a complete physical metamorphosis—‘cept, of course, bein’ a joker, nothing works like it’s supposed to. So you got an aquatically configured creature who can’t live in water. Flippers for swimming, but no gills.”
Cody looked at the thickly massive, almost elephantine flippers that were the creature’s “feet.”
“What can you tell me about these?” she asked. “Whaddya mean”—he stifled a yawn—“other than what I already said?”
“Any wear and tear?”
“You can see that for yourself. Same kinda shit you’d have on your feet, you walked around barefoot. Especially in this town.”
“Hasn’t been doing it long, then?”
“Doubtful. Any real amount of time, they’d develop rough, horny calluses, scar tissue from the constant pounding and abrasion. Probably compression of the legbones, as well-y’see, these really aren’t feet in any sense that we mean it, they aren’t designed for walking. Nah, y’ask me, Doc, this baby’s right outta the box.”
“And somebody sure as shit wasn’t happy to see her.” He pulled aside the sheet that covered the joker’s torso, revealing a pair of fearful wounds. “You ever see jaws,” he asked, and as Cody nodded, “when I was in med school, we got some poor sumbitch, did a dance with a tiger shark. Same kinda bite structure. ‘S funny.” He stepped away from the table, gave the corpse a long look-and Cody revised her opinion of the man; for all his annoying behavior, he appeared to be good at his job. “If I didn’t know better, I’d almost say the joker did this to herselfsimilar bite radius, actually a little larger, same kind of teeth structure. But no way could her mouth reach around to make those wounds.”
“Maybe-twins?”
“You serious? Jeez, I hope not.”
She looked at the creature’s shoulder. The bite there had splintered bone and savaged the network of vessels leading out from the heart. “Cause of death?”
“Cardiac arrest, due to loss of blood, directly resultant from extreme, violent physical trauma.”
“Who found her?”
“Work crew, I think. Transit. Scared ’em outta two lifetimes’ growth, I hear. Shit. I do not understand how they get anyone to work down in those holes.”
“Where?” Cody asked as he paused for breath.
“Got me there.” He looked at his notes. “We don’t have the full sheet yet, prob’ly at the precinct or en route, I only know the who ’cause the EMS crew was griping about coming here while the other ambulance got to transport the live ones to Bellevue. I guess that at least places it in Manhattan. What you got, Doc, something?”
“Not sure. Pair of tweezers.”
“Here go. Looks shiny. Piece of chain, maybe, wedged into the wound. Holy shit,” he exclaimed as Cody worried free both the chain and the medal it was attached to. There was almost nothing left of the miniature shield, but the St. Christopher medal was pretty much intact. Pity it hadn’t protected the wearer.
“Doc, you all right? You look awful gray, want some water?”
She waved him back, one hand clenched tight into a fist, supporting her weight on the table while the other held the tweezers. Poor woman, she thought, completed the transformation barely begun with me. Not just an ace, the son of a bitch is a predator.
“Draw a blood sample. I want a test for the presence of the wild card.”
“Why waste the time? Open your eyes an’ take a look. She’s a joker, that much is obvious.”
“Humor me.” She gave him a look, for additional inspiration; he got the message. “Quick as you can, please,” she told him, “and send the results to Tachyon.”
She sat at Tachyon’s desk, trying to push thoughts onto paper, mostly staring at the blank legal pad in front of her, twirling the fountain pen she’d found. Fine point, with a clear, elegant line-got the job done but with a special little flourish if you wished. Like Tachyon. She hoped Tachyon was a southpaw, or possibly ambidextrous; it would be hell retraining to use the lesser side, the writing technique would never be as fluid, each word a reminder of-how had he put it?-his “deformity.”
She thought of her own loss and wondered why it hadn’t crippled her. By rights, she should have been finished as a surgeon-there was no depth perception with one eye, no way to tell precisely how far away things were, yet she never had a problem. She always seemed to know where to reach, was always a split second ahead of the people around her, somehow sensing what they were going to do, where they’d be. Folks always interpreted it as luck-and so did she, to an extent, on the rare occasions when she actually thought about it.
She made a rude face and ruder noise-if it were truly luck, she should be a lot better off than she was-and started scribbling notes. According to Brad Finn, Tachyon had been summoned to the local precinct “Fort Freak.” Cody wondered if that had anything to do with the policewoman, wondered further what kind of effect her own news would have. A predator ace was bad enough, but one who went around transforming nats into jokers was everyone’s worst nightmare, a return to the panicked days of last spring, when Typhoid Croyd roamed the city, and Manhattan had been placed temporarily under martial law. She’d thought of confiding in Finn-she liked the centaur-but didn’t know him anywhere near well enough to trust him. The memory of what happened in Wyoming was still too raw; people she’d known had lied, those she’d trusted had turned away from her. She was determined never to be that vulnerable again. Scent, whom she’d trust with her life, was long gone home.
She considered sticking around till Tachyon’s return, but found she couldn’t stay still. Rain was sheeting downbad sign, since the long breaks between lightning flash and thunder indicated the heart of the storm had yet to arrive-but the violent weather did nothing to ease the oppressive atmosphere. Quite the opposite. She prowled the office, without a clue as to why she was on edge, wary in ways she hadn’t been since the ‘Nam. Easy to be confused, hot rain and steamy air more common to the Mekong Delta than Manhattan. It was like this at Shiloh, in the evening twilight, when everyone knew Charley was in the jungle beyond the wire, waiting for full night before he came visiting.
She sealed her report and the evidence in a manila envelope, left it on Tachyon’s desk, decided to call it quits while she hopefully was ahead.
The illusion lasted as far as the clinic’s main entrance, where a laugh of genuine amusement greeted her query about the possibility of getting a taxi. The guard let her use his phone to try to call a radio cab. Most of the numbers got her a busy signal and the few companies she actually reached—after what seemed like an age on holdhung up the moment she gave the address. A local gypsy cab pulled up, dropping off a joker. The driver was another one. But when Cody dashed to the curb, and he saw she was a nat, he gave her the finger with a hand shaped like a bird’s claw and sped away, plowing though the biggest puddle at hand in the bargain, to add insult to injury.
“Fuck this,” she muttered wearily, as furious with the growing joker prejudice as she was with its nat counterpart. Maybe she’d do better back in Chinatown or Little Italy. At least there she could get herself a meal; she hadn’t eaten since the pathetic excuse for supper served by the ‘airline on her flight in.
Streets were deserted, everyone with sense taking refuge under cover till the brunt of the storm passed. It was a true monsoon, water descending in an almost solid mass, overwhelming the capacity of the drains and turning most corners into ankle-deep ponds. The streets here dated back to the nineteenth century, like the buildings, cobblestone supposedly covered with asphalt. But no repairs had been made this summer, which meant that in a lot of places the asphalt had been worn down to the original pavement, which made the footing treacherous.
She thought she was going the right way, following the directions the guard had given her, but the streets didn’t make sense. Most of Manhattan was laid out on a grid system, with streets running east west and northsouth. It took real effort to get lost. Not so down here. Some of the streets were more like alleys and they canted off in wild directions from the main avenues, which themselves followed the natural curve of the island. The buildings were old and looked it, mostly constructed in the last half of the last century, walk-up tenements that had never seen better days and probably weren’t likely to. She smiled to herself-but only half in jest, another part of her took this perfectly seriously-and imagined the wild-card virus turning these old tenements into living beings, who played musical chairs with each other to confuse any visitors. Were the windows eyes, watching her every move, the doorways mouths? If she ducked into one to get out of the rain, would she be eaten? She scoffed, but edged out toward the middle of the street, rationalizing it by telling herself that this was the best place to flag down any cruising cab. Sumbitch would have to run her down to get by. Assuming, of course, one ever came. She’d walked more than far enough, she should have reached the periphery of Jokertown, but there wasn’t a Chinese store sign in sight.
Then, on the corner, she saw a bright green globe set on a dirty green railing-she remembered that meant a subway station. What the fuck, she thought, and was down the steps in a flash, shaking herself like a half-drowned pup to get the worst of the wet off her before fumbling in her bag-which she’d had sense enough to wear under her slicker-for a dollar for a token. When she asked the clerk for directions, she found she was on the wrong platform. This was the downtown side, the trains here would take her under the East River to Brooklyn.
“Is there an underpass?” she asked, not terribly enthusiastic about the prospect of going back out into the storm, even if only to cross the street.
“Wouldn’t matter if there was,” the clerk-to Cody’s surprise, another joker-replied, passing a copper token through the tiny slot. “Platform’s closed, Us doing work on those tracks.”
“Wonderful.”
“They’re s’posed to be finished by now, that’s why the work’s done mostly at night so the lines and stations are open for day traffic, ‘specially at rush hour, but the storm’s probably got ’em backed up some. Some serious rain,” he added sympathetically.
“And then some,” she agreed. “So could you tell me, at least, which line am I on, I didn’t see the sign outside.”
“This is the F ma’am. IND Sixth Avenue local.” Cody didn’t really hear the last line, she was making a slow, careful turn toward the station, sweeping the platform the same as she would a hostile tree line. She shook her head violently, chiding herself for reacting like a baby. Jokertown may well be strange country, but she was no cherry; she knew how to handle herself, and it wasn’t like this.
“How do I go uptown, then?” she asked, satisfied that so far as she could eyeball-she was alone outside the booth.
“Take the F to Jay Street Borough Hall, then hoof it up the stairs, over to the uptown platform. Got your choice there, miss, between the F and the A.F.’ll take you straight up the middle of the island, but the A makes better connections. You want a map?”
She’d mislaid the last one. “Thanks,” with a smile. “What we’re here for. Got a rash or somethin’?” And when she responded with a confused look, wondering what he was talking about: “Been scratching your hand pretty hard, must itch awful bad.”
She looked down, she hadn’t been aware she was doing it-was the skin numb? and she went cold, inside and out. The back of her hand glittered impossibly in the fluorescent light, with the faintest silvery cast.
She looked toward the stairs. Water was pouring down-an impressive cascade, as good as many fountainsthe stream flowing past her down the slightly angled platform, through the gates, toward the tracks. She could hear other waterfalls inside, from the ventilation and maintenance grids set into the sidewalk above.
She’d been saved last time. And the policewoman had paid the price. Is that my fault? she asked herself. How could I have known? But what’s the link now? And comprehension narrowed her eye. Perhaps that was the keyshe was the one that got away. An ace that looks like a joker, with the power to transform people into beings like himself. No, she realized, with a flash of inspiration, not people-women! The wild-card deck deals only one of a kind, each victim is forced to live their life unique and alone. And someone as awful as that ace, he wouldn’t have even a hope of normal companionship. But if his power is to make a companion ... ? Fair enough-the lady cop was proof of that. Cody didn’t have to imagine how the ace’s victims felt-some awful instinct told her that she and the policewoman hadn’t been the first. But if so, she thought, why hasn’t anyone noticed; if there are others, what happened to them?
As she worked through all this, she began walking forward, head tracking slowly back and forth, giving her eye a clear field of everything in front of her. The turnstile sounded surprisingly loud as she passed through—everything did, her senses were operating at a peak they hadn’t achieved since the war. So far as she could see, the platform was empty.
Keep putting the pieces together, she told herself, see what you build. Okay, the ace transforms women-perfectly understandable, he’s alone and lonely, he wants a mateonly they don’t like it. And she remembered the bite marks on the dead policewoman, and let her head loll back against the tiIe wall behind her. Is that it, has to be, explains why there’ve been no sightings-he kills them. She held up her hand, trying to tell herself the silver sparkles weren’t flashing a fraction more brightly. She was unfinished business. Moby Dick, perhaps, to his Ahab.
Tachyon had broken down the gun when he took it away from her; she checked the clip to make sure it was full, then shoved it into the butt of her .45. She pulled the slide to chamber a round, snapped on the safety, and tucked the heavy automatic behind the small of her back, under her belt. Not the most comfortable of improvised holsters—especially given the guns weight—but she wanted to be able to get at it in a hurry without having to fumble with her bag. The bag, though, was another problem, an encumbrance she could do without.
There was a rush of air from the tunnel, two spots of light off in the distance that slowly rocked toward her for what seemed like the longest time before suddenly exploding out of the darkness, revealing the sleek, graymetal box shape of the subway train. As the train slowed, she peered through each window, hoping for a sight of the ace-but all the cars that passed had people in them. She dashed for the next one in line, the conductor-not wanting to spend any more time than necessary at this particular stop-closing the doors just as she snaked through. A few passengers gave her the eye, probably wonderinglike the cabbie this morning, seemed to Cody like another age, another world-what she was, whether she was one of them. She met their gazes, same as she had after returning from the ‘Nam, while moving the length of the car, automatically checking every seat. She tried the connecting door, but unlike on the train she’d ridden that morning, these were kept locked. Damn, she snarled silently, a complication she didn’t need. At least, she could see through the grimy window that the next car had people in it, she could bypass it and go on to the one beyond.
She got that chance at York Street, on the fringe of Brooklyn Heights, ducking out the doors the moment they opened and sprinting fast as she could to the ones she wanted. There was the normal flow of passengers here, she had time to reach them. Problem was, her shoesperfectly adequate for job interviews-were not cut out for this kind of work. No support, less traction. Couldn’t be helped, she had to manage with what she had, wouldn’t be the first time.
This car was fine, too, and the one beyond, and the ones beyond that, as the train trundled through Jay Street and then Bergen. She was beginning to feel more than a little silly, dashing about like a madwoman, armed to the teeth, chasing a creature that could be anywhere along the subway systems hundreds of miles of tracks. There were no odds for her catching up with him-what made her think he’d be on this train, or even this line?-and if she did, she wondered wryly, would that be the best of luck, or the worst? And yet this was where he’d made his last attack, better than nothing to go on. Why her, though? Wasn’t her job, or her nature—she was neither cop nor hero. Just stubborn.
The fiery numbness had spread up her forearm. Is that a function of proximity, she asked herself, does it mean we’re coming closer? Sign on the wall read CARROLL STREET. She made her move, as usual, as the doors opened, but she slipped on the rain-slick platform, bags unbalancing her enough so she couldn’t recover, went down hard on one knee, pain splintering her concentration for a moment. She tried to lever herself up as she heard the door chime, called hoarsely to the conductor to wait as she tried for the nearest door, but he had his schedule to keep and they closed in her face. “Damn,” she said over and over again as the train rumbled on its way, “damn damn damn damn damn!”
Nothing for it, she knew, but to wait for another one. There was some blood on her knee, small firebursts of pain as she gingerly put her weight on it-and a nasty tear in the already ruined panty hose-but as she lifted up to her full height, she found it would bear her weight, no problem. Thank heaven for small favors, she thought. And then she breathed the smell of a marshy shore at low tide.
Oh shit, she thought, reacting simultaneously, faster than she ever dreamed possible, starting a twisting dive that would buy her some distance and allow her to bring her gun to bear. The move was just enough to save her-the blow that should have knocked her senseless clipping the back of her skull, showering her thoughts with stars-but there was no grace to her landing, an awkward belly flop that left her sprawled on the slimy concrete. She rolled desperately sideways, managing to get off a shot her bullet spyanging uselessly off the ceiling-before a massive tentacle slapped the gun from her hand, the force of the blow tumbling her off the platform and onto the track bed. As she landed, she heard a sharp clatter, her gun falling to the tracks a level below, where another line ran parallel to this one.
She pushed herself out of the muck, her mouth full of the oceanic garbage-dump stench of the ace, so thick each breath made her gag; she knew it was her he wanted, had no illusions as to what would happen then. Even if she survived, that prospect was too horrible to contemplate. So she ran.
The track bed seemed to angle upward as it left the station, and not far away she thought she saw a glow that perhaps meant open air. Sure enough, the tunnel rose out of the ground. The rain hadn’t let up, it was like running into the ultimate bathroom shower, the drops striking with such force they actually hurt. There was a wind here as well, blowing off the harbor, trying to shove her back underground. She staggered to the wall that flanked the tracks, tried to clamber over, couldn’t get a decent grip, yelped as her scrabbling hand snagged one of the strands of barbed wire hung along the top.
A rumble-felt as much as heard-heralded the passage of a Manhattan-bound F on the opposite track. Her brain was totally fogged, as though she’d been drugged; the reality of the train didn’t even register until it was too late for her to try to get the driver’s attention. And though she waved, called, none of the passengers appeared to notice. But following the tracks as they curved along the viaduct, she dimly made out the lights of a station at its crest, the next one on the line. Not so far away, she thought, I can make it, easy. Tossed her remaining shoe, ignored the pain as stones and worse poked at her feet.
Did all right at first, no worse than a morning jog up a mountain road, wasted no effort looking over her shoulderthe ace was either there or he wasn’t-better to assume the one than confirm the other. Rain tasted surprisingly sweet, for all its elemental fury, but that was the only sensation it sparked in her. She couldn’t feel it strike her skin, it was as though she’d been wrapped in some impermeable membrane, mind suddenly disassociated from her body. A bellowed cry-rage and futile protest, the animal in her snared by an unbreakable trap-erupted from her gut as that awful, remembered tickling danced against the underside of her skin. The flesh she could see wasn’t tanned anymore, the silver’d turned gray and oily, the arms (Illusion, she gabbled silently, dear Christ let this be my imagination) no longer quite as firm as once they’d been, seeming to flex and curve with a horrible, boneless grace. Her teeth didn’t fit and every part of her body felt ready to explode, skin stretched, shrink-wrapped impossibly, unbearably taut over bones that had turned to razor blades. Each step became an efort. Her legs hadn’t changedexcept to acquire the same opalescent sheen as her armsbut they felt petrified. The joints wouldn’t bend-at knees or hips-she had to swing her entire body to shift them. She was near the crest of the viaduct, better than six stories up, no buildings close enough to risk a jump-even if she was capable of trying. The station was her only hope.
He caught her.
With the casual roughness of someone supremely confident of his strength, he wrapped a tentacle around her neck and yanked her flat; the impact shocked her breathless, she couldn’t move. He dropped heavily on her, main tentacles pinning each arm, while the secondary nests scrabbled at her blouse, popping the buttons, shredding it and the bra underneath. There was a broad concrete median separating the tracks, that’s where they’d fallen-easily spotted from the station on any sort of decent day, impossible in this gale. His penis lay like a bar across her belly as he shifted position, releasing one arm so he could tear her skirt and panties out of the way. She hit him, hard as she could; all she did now was hurt her hand. She tried for his eyes but the ace was ready for her, caught her arm, forced it back down.
New voice, making itself heard inside her head, through the shrieking berserker rage, calling her name. “Tachyon,” she screamed, without knowing if she used her voice or mind or both.
Where are you? Were the words really his, or was this some psychotic trick her own mind was playing, giving her one last imaginary reed to hold on to?
There’s no time, was her reply. She was boiling inside, all the elements of her self seething, bubbling, losing cohesion. He had her, the transformation was approaching critical mass; she knew that in a matter of minutes, it would be done.
Help me, then, Tachyon told her. Open your mind, Cody, of I’m to do anything, I have to see him!
Come, she thought. And nothing happened. No sense of trespass, or of another presence. None of the imagery she’d read of in a thousand books and comics.
But there was a glaze to the ace’s eyes, and his body had gone rigid.
He’s frozen, Cody, Tachyon said, but I’m not sure how long I can hold him.
She wriggled arms free of his tentacles, tucked her legs up as best she could, refusing this last time any of her body’s protests as she forced it to move, then heaved as hard as she could. He shifted, started to stir in response she didn’t need Tachyon’s frantic mental cry to know what that meant-bellowed like a weight lifter for a final effort, arms starting the ace on his way, legs doing the bulk of the work, shunting him back and sideways, he rolled sort of like a Humpty-Dumpty toy, so much weight so low on his body that he couldn’t get a decent balance until he came to rest. The scene was splashed by blinding light—a train pulling out of the station, headlamps illuminating the scene-and then there was a brighter flash, sparks and flame and a shriek of agony as a flailing limb slapped the third rail. The ace bounced and spasmed and roared as electricity ripped through him-and for a moment Cody thought he might pull free and somehow escape. But she’d reckoned without the train. The engineer applied his brakes the moment he saw them, but he had too much momentum on the slope and the rain had made the rails slick, and even as it shrieked to a stop, the lead bogies crushed the creature to bloody pulp.
As the train crew scrambled to her aid, she heard the electronic whoop of police sirens, converging faintly from all sides-before long, the viaduct was thick with blue rain slickers, the distant platform spotlit by TV minicam news crews. She hadn’t moved-didn’t have the strength-she just lay in a half sprawl, on her side, staring at the smoking remains, ignoring the shocked, scandalized, fascinated stares of the passengers.
Now, there was a presence in her mind-Tachyon’s thoughts with hers even as he pounded up the flights of stairs from Smith Street far below. He drew a psychic setting from the places she loved best, and was kind enough not to react when that turned out to be Firebase Shiloh, in Vietnam’s central highlands. Her physical appearance was the same here as in objective reality-no idealization to her mental image of herself-but there was a relaxed, confident strength to her that gave the feeling she was a rock, to which anyone could anchor and be protected. Tachyon allowed himself to be blended into the psiscape-muttering with characteristic dismay at the ultimate lack of style embodied in military combat fatigues (the color scheme was utterly awful-and then, slowly, gently, began to integrate Cody’s mental imagery back into the real world outside. So that by the time he slipped free of Cody’s awareness, she was over the shock of the moment, centered once more in mind, if not body-which, pushed far beyond its brink, promptly collapsed.
She awoke in a top-floor single at Blythe-she figured that out from the view-and at first luxuriated in the simple ecstasy of being human. She flexed her fingers, watching the glow of the morning sun on her arms, and marveled that the only sheen was due to honest, human sweat.
“Sleep well?” Tachyon asked from a chair against the wall, stretching with a small groan to ease the stiffness in his back.
She answered with a smile and marveled a little at how relaxed it felt. Didn’t think she had that in her anymore, shocking in retrospect to discover how deeply the tension of the past few months had left its mark. How delicious she felt to be free of it.
She started to form a question, but he answered before the thoughts had even coalesced.
“Yes, I’ve been here all night.”
She wondered if she should be angry-obviously the mind link had left its own mark, a duality of being that might well make both their lives miserable-decided it was a pointless exercise. What was, was; what mattered was dealing with it and moving on.
“Admirable philosophy,” Tachyon agreed, laughing at her sharp sigh of asperity. “Actually, though, things aren’t as bad as all that. I’ve been monitoring you while you slept.”
She couldn’t help a giggle at the thought of him walking sentry, marching back and forth across the gateway to her consciousness. The image was strong enough to bring a chuckle to his lips as well.
“Making sure,” he finished, “there was no residue from your encounter with Sludge.”
“How’d you learn his name?”
“Any psychic contact involves entering into a degree of rapport. I can’t help learning some things. In Sludge’s case”—he shrugged, mixing dismissal and disgust “the thoughts were relatively simple, desire-oriented. He was not an intellect, by any stretch of the imagination. Cunning more than intelligence. ‘Sludge’ was the name he chose for himself.”
“He was an ace?”
“Autopsy confirmed that analysis of his blood just as it revealed the body in our morgue to be a nat. As near as we’ve been able to determine, he’s been roaming the subways and other tunnels beneath the city for quite some time, preying mostly on runaways and the homeless, the underclass who’d never be missed. And none of us realized—”
“How many?”
“Victims?” He sniffed, gazing out the window-but she knew he was looking back through the ace’s memories. “Impossible to know. Sludge had very little cognitive capacity. Quite a few, I suspect.”
“He killed them all.”
“He ate them.”
They were silent a long while. Faintly, Cody heard a page over the hospital’s PA system. Gritting her teeth against the possibility of pain or weakness, she levered herself to her feet. There was an IV running in her left arm; she pinched off the junction and popped the tube, then hobbled the half-dozen small and gingerly steps to Tachyon. He seemed so small before her, yet the image she remembered from her mind was as strong and resilient as she imagined herself to be. She pressed her body against his back, wrapping her arms around his shoulders, resisting the temptation to set her chin atop his head. He reached up to take her wrists in his good hand and rest his chin on them. She didn’t need to see his eyes to recognize the sober, haunted expression in them. She’d seen the same in hers, too often, when she’d lost a patient that she believed could have been saved.
“A new twist,” he said, allowing a faint edge of bitterness to the words, “on the old expression ‘you always kill the one you love.’”
“Not to mention,” Cody couldn’t help responding, “‘you are what you eat.’”
He laughed, a spontaneously explosive snort that caught them both by surprise, then turned somber again: “Why did you go haring off like that?”
“Impetuous broad, that’s me. I gather you got my message.”
“Brad Finn came over to the precinct in person. I just missed you, evidently. Captain Ellis had squad cars cruising Jokertown looking for you. We heard the report of a shot fired at Carroll Street ...”
“ ... and then I heard your outcry.”
“Thanks for listening.”
He turned to face her. “You don’t understand. In a city this size, a telepath has to maintain. fairly strong shields simply to keep from being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of psychic ‘noise.’ I have to be attuned to a person to ‘hear’ them; that almost never happens after a single, casual encounter.”
“Perhaps it wasn’t so casual, then.”
“Apparently not.”
“Tachyon, whatever the reason, I’m grateful for it.”
“In time-fairly short order, actually-we won’t resonate on quite so common a frequency. I’ll still be unusually sensitive to you, but it will take a conscious effort to scan your thoughts.”
“Over what range?”
“To be honest, I’ve no idea. This has never happened with anyone, in quite the same way. I’m sorry.”
“For what, saving my life?”
“I created that monster. Those poor women Sludge slaughtered, their deaths are on my conscience.”
“Welcome to the club.”
“You don’t understand.”
“I’m a surgeon. I spent three years as a combat cutter. I do understand. So what?”
“It’s my responsibility.”
“Fine.” She deliberately took him by his maimed right arm. “Be responsible. You can’t change the past, any more than I can resurrect the patients I’ve lost—or the people I’ve actually killed. Yeah”—she nodded—“there’s blood on my hands, too, it was a war, it came with the territory. And if there’s a hereafter, maybe I’ll get to deal with it then. Who cares? It’s done. But at least I’ve come to terms with it. Taken my terror out of the closet, where I’ve been denying it even existed, and hung it out in the open with the other nightmares, where I can get a good look at it, see it for what it is-and me for what I am. Doesn’t mean that doesn’t hurt, and won’t for a long time yet to come. But it’s there. I can deal with it. Try that yourself, might be in for a surprise.”
“You’re needed, Cody,” he said simply. “I’m a doctor, Tachyon, not a crutch.”
He half raised his stump in its sling, then let it fall, his shoulders slump. “So you’ll be going, then,” he said. “Gotta find someone to look after the ranch—couple o’ guys I know in Colorado, vets, could do a fair job, give ’em a call before I fly out spring the news on Chris, pack up the place, find a decent rack here in town.” He looked at her in amazement, not altogether sure he was hearing right. “Assuming, of course”—the deliberate seriousness in her voice belied by the lop-sided smile at the edge of her mouth—“we can agree on a salary”
Tachyon had the decency to cough. “I’m, ah, sure we can work something out,” he hazarded.
“Let’s not presume too much, shall we?” Cody said, giving the smile full rein.
She held out her hand.
And Tachyon, his own smile a match for hers, took it.
In these times of trouble and dark travail; in this fertile land where the handiwork of Satan is on the verge of bearing fruit: you don’t need to pussyfoot with Marx; or stick your nose in Freud; you don’t need the help of liberals like Tachyon; you don’t need to open yourself up to anyone but Jesus—because he was the first and the greatest ace of them all!
—REVEREND LEO BARNETT
There are a few blocks or so between Jokertown and the Lower East Side that nats and virus victims alike call the Edge. No one knows which group originated the term, but it applies equally to either side. A joker might think of the place as the edge of New York, a nat as the edge of Jokertown.
People come to the Edge for the same reasons why some people watch a slasher movie, or see a good speed metal rock concert, or get wasted on the designer drug in fashion at the moment. They come to the Edge drawn by the illusion of danger, a safe, fleeting illusion that gives them something to talk about at parties attended by people too timid to go to the Edge themselves.
The young preacher thought about that as he watched the television news team wandering the street below through the bathroom window of the cheap hotel room he had rented for the night, though he had intended to use it for only a few hours. The team consisted of a male reporter in a coat and tie, a Minicam operator, and a sound man; the reporter was stopping pedestrians, nats and jokers alike, jabbing his microphone into their faces and trying to get them to say something. For a long, torturous moment the young preacher was afraid his tryst with Belinda May was the story the news team was searching for, but he comforted himself with the notion that the news team no doubt prowled this vicinity routinely. After all, where else did they have a better chance of finding a strong visual lead-in for the eleven o’clock news? The young preacher didn’t like to think sinful thoughts, but under the circumstances he relished the hope the news team would be distracted by a spectacular auto accident a few blocks away, with lots of visual flair in the form of fire and crumpled hoods-but with no fatalities, of course.
The young preacher let the flimsy white curtain drop. He finished his business and while washing his hands with quick, efficient motions, stared at his cadaverous reflection in the mirror over the rust-stained sink. Was he really that unhealthy, or was his pale, yellowish complexion only the result of the unshielded glare of the two naked light bulbs above the mirror? The young preacher was a blond, blue-eyed man just turned thirty-five, with handsome features dominated by high cheekbones and a dimpled, square chin. Right now he was stripped down to a white T-shirt, light-blue boxer shorts, and socks. He perspired profusely. It was definitely hot in here, but he hoped to make it a lot hotter real soon now.
Even so, he couldn’t help but feel out of place in this tacky little hotel room, with this particular woman who just happened to be one of the key staff members of his new Jokertown mission. Not that he was inexperienced. He had done it many times before, with many kinds of women, in rooms like this one. The women had done it because he was famous, or had felt good listening to his sermons, or wanted to feel closer to God. Occasionally, when he himself was having a little difficulty feeling close to God, they’d done it for money, the payments having been arranged by a trustworthy member of his most intimate circle. A few women had foolishly believed they were in love with him, a delusion he generally shattered without much trouble, but only after satiating their carnal desires.
But nothing in the young preacher’s experience had quite prepared him for a woman such as Belinda May, who apparently was here for the sheer joy of it. He wondered if Belinda May’s attitude was typical of unmarried big-city Christian women. Where in the world is Jesus going to come from, he thought, when the time arrives for him to return again? He opened the door to the bedroom and, before he had taken a single step outside, received the shock of his life. Belinda May sat cross-legged on the bed, smoking a cigarette, as pretty as you please but as naked as a jaybird. He’d expected to see her naked, of course, but not right away. And even then, he’d thought she’d be discreetly under the sheets. “About time you showed up,” she said. She stubbed out her cigarette and stepped into his arms before he could take a breath. Now he knew how a frying pan felt on a hot stove. She clung to him as if she wanted to pull herself into his body. He was unbelievably aroused by the sensation of her breasts pressed against his chest, and by the way she had mounted his thigh rubbing against it as if she were trying to sit on the bone. Her tongue was like an eel exploring his mouth. One hand was under his T-shirt, the other down his shorts, caressing his buttocks.
“Hmmm, you taste good,” Belinda May whispered in his ear after what seemed like an eternity in a place that was an eerie combination of the stratospheres of heaven and the lower levels of hell. No doubt about it, Belinda May was more sexually aggressive than the kind of woman he was used to. “Come on, let’s go to bed,” she whispered, taking him by the hands and pulling him along. She climbed on the bed, got on her knees, and directing him to stand beside the bed, gently placed his right hand smack onto her pussy.
Though the young preacher experienced a deep and abiding satisfaction every time his foreplay brought her to orgasm, he felt strangely disjointed from the entire affair, as if he was watching the scene through a one-way mirror in the wall. Very self-consciously he wondered anew what he was doing in this dive, with its paint peeling off its badly plastered walls, those tacky lamps, the bed with creaky springs, and that television set staring at him with an unsleeping eye. He regretted going along with Belinda May’s request that they pick a room here, at the Edge, to engage in their encounter. It disturbed him to think that in some part of his soul he so closely resembled the people who routinely came to the Edge in search of a safe chance to take. The young preacher wanted to believe God had already filled the important voids in his heart.
However, Belinda May’s accessible beauty disturbed him on a deeper level than did his instrusive self-doubts. Gently he pushed her down, and with a strange thrill, not unlike the one he had experienced as a youth the first time he’d knelt alone before an altar, he noted how her blond hair was spread out over the pillow like the wings of an angel. She squirmed beguilingly as he kissed her ear and moved down to lick her neck. He moved down further to kiss her breasts and felt a renewed surge of heat in his scalp as she signaled the measure of her passion by running her hands through his hair and groaning softly. Then he was down at her stomach; running his tongue around the edges of her belly button-an outie-with what he hoped was a delicate, masterful touch. He was gratified beyond his capacity to understand when she at last spread her legs wide apart, an invitation he accepted almost instantly, burying his face and licking her with pagan ferocity. Never had he known a woman to taste so good. Never had he desired so fervently to serve another, instead of being served. Never had he worshiped so humbly, so eagerly at the altar of love. Never had he so gladly debased himself, or so wantonly ....
“Leo?” said Belinda May, moving back on her elbows. “Is something the matter?”
The young preacher rose onto his elbows and looked down between his legs, where his male member hung as limp as a man on a noose. O Lord, why have you forsaken me? He thought forlornly, reining in a childish urge to panic. He smiled sheepishly, looked past the altar with its still wideopen invitation, past her sweat-drenched body and those glistening breasts, to her sweetly smiling face. “I don’t know. I guess I’m just not with it tonight.”
Belinda May pouted and stretched as innocenty and as naturally as if she’d been alone. “Too bad. Is there anything I can do to help?”
For the next few seconds the young preacher weighed several factors in his mind, most of them having to do with the proper balance between frankness and delicate diplomacy. In the end he decided she would respond well to frankness, but he wasn’t sure how much he could get away with. He smiled wolfishly. “Think you’d like to something to eat?”
His life passed before his eyes as she swung her left leg over his head, climbed off the bed, and exclaimed, “What a great idea! There’s a sushi bar across the street! You can buy me dinner!” Her buttocks bounced enticingly as she disappeared into the bathroom, closing the door behind her. She turned on the water faucet and then, apparently before commencing her business, opened the door and stuck out her head just long enough to say,
“Then we can come back here and try again.”
The young preacher was speechless. He rolled over and stared at the ceiling, the random pattern of the intersecting cracks there enigmatically symbolic of his entire existence at this juncture. He sighed heavily. At least the possibility that the roving news team outside would discover his tryst was no longer the worst thing that could happen to him.
Now, the worst thing would be if they discovered he hadn’t been able to get it up.
In that case, the damage done to his political ambitions would be incalculable. The American people were willing to forgive any number of sins in a presidential candidate, but at the very least they expected their sinners to be good at it.
“You really have a good pair of hands, you know that?” called out Belinda May from the bathroom.
Terrific, thought Leo Barnett, clinging to the precipice of despair with progressively weaker force. Bye-bye, White House; hello, Heaven.
Tonight he felt the city inside him, and he was inside it. He felt its steel and mortar and brick and stone and marble and glass, felt his organs touching the various buildings and places of Jokertown as their atoms phased in (and out) on their way (and back again) across the planes of reality. His molecules grazed the clouds swirling toward the city like an incoming black cotton tide; they mingled with air pregnant with moisture and the promise of more moisture to come, they trembled with the vibrations of distant thunder. Tonight he felt inexorably linked with Jokertown’s past and future; the coming rainstorm would differ in no way from the last one, and would be exactly the same as the next. Just as the steel and the mortar were constant, the brick and stone forever, and the marble and glass immortal. So long as the city remained so, however tenuously, would he.
His name was Quasiman. Once he had had another name, but all he could remember about his previrus self was that he had been an explosives expert. Currently he was a caretaker of the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Misery, and of him Father Squid relished saying, time and time again, “The bomb squad’s loss has been the God squad’s gain.”
Usually it was all Quasiman could do to remember those bare facts, because the atoms of his brain, like those in the rest of his body, constantly, randomly, phased in and out of reality, soaring to extradimensional realms and snapping back again. This had the dual effect of making him more than a genius, and less than an idiot. Most days Quasiman considered it a victory to keep himself in one piece.
Tonight maintaining even that modest goal was going to prove more difficult than usual. Blood and thunder were in the air. Tonight Quasiman was going to the Edge.
As he reached the door at the top of the stairs leading to the roof of the cheapjack apartment building where he lived, portions of his brain glanced off the immediate future. Already he felt cool night air, saw distant flashes of lightning, felt rooftop gravel crunch beneath the soles of his tennis shoes, and saw an old bag lady, a joker, sleeping beside a warm-air duct, her belongings beside her in a cart she had pulled up the fire escape.
The intersection between present and future became stronger and more vivid the instant he actually touched the doorknob, and becoming stronger still once he turned it. Quasiman was used to this sort of minor precognition by now. For him the different levels of time constantly clashed together like discordant cymbals. Long ago he had accepted the only conclusion possible from living in such a mindworld: Reality was just the fragments of a dream shattered before the dawn of being.
Future and present merged seamlessly as he steped through the doorway. The lightning flashes and the gravel underfoot and the sleeping old woman were there, as he had known they would be. What he hadn’t envisioned was the creaking of the door’s rusty hinges, screeching like a buzz saw cutting through nails over the steady hum of the automobile traffic below, startling the old woman from her uneasy sleep. She had brown scaly skin, and the face of a furless rat. Her lips drew back and exposed sharp white fangs. “Who the fuck are you?” she demanded with false bravado.
He ignored her. A hunchbacked man with an unbending left hip, he shuffled to the building’s ledge with the efficient grace of a dancer permanently engrossed in a sick, satirical joke.
Without the slightest hesitation he stepped off the ledge.
The old woman, mistakeningly believing he was committing suicide, screamed. Quasiman didn’t care.
He was too busy doing what he always did after stepping off a bulding: he willed himself to where he wished to be. Time and space folded about him. In the following instant his rapidly fading intellect fought hard to hold on to his own self-image. For an enduring nanosecond he almost became lost in the fluidity of the cosmos. But he maintained, and when that moment ended, he was in an alley in the Edge. He was one second closer to the thunder, one step closer to the blood, one event closer to the final blackout.
Tonight was the night of Vito’s big break. The Man never would have instructed him to come along on this little excursion to the Edge if he hadn’t already indicated his ability to handle responsibility. Of course that also meant Vito was a mite expendable, but that was okay, it came with the territory. You had to take risks if you wanted to move up in the Calvino Family.
And lately there had been a lot of openings in the Family hierarchy. Vito, an ambitious youngster, hoped to survive long enough to rise a few notches, just high enough to get somebody else to take the more obvious risks.
Unfortunately a truce of some sort seemed likely, if there was any truth to the scuttlebutt he had picked up from a few of the boys while he was busy waxing the Man’s limo. Evidently the Man planned to hash over some important business with one of the high mucky-muck jokers pulling the strings on all the hits that had decimated the Five Families recently.
Some joker named Wyrm, yeah, that’s his name, thought Vito tensely as he walked down a sidewalk in the middle of the Edge, weaving through a flood of tourists and jokers and maybe even a few aces. He checked out the street scene for potential trouble. It wasn’t his job-that was to walk into the lobby of the cheap dive just ahead and pick up the key to the room where the Man and the joker had agreed to meet-but he couldn’t help hoping he’d notice something significant in the security area anyway, so the Man and the boys would maybe consider him a little less expendable.
Stepping into the lobby, however, Vito felt like a blind bear walking into a campsite full of hunters. Trying to keep his posture straight* and his jaw tightly set, the way he’d seen the boys do while rousting some welsher, he strode up to the registry counter and slammed his palm on it with what he hoped was an authoritative air. “I’m here for one of your, ah, most important customers,” he said with an unfortunate crack in his voice.
Theclerk, a seedy old man with white hair and a black eyepatch, probably some joker passing for nat, barely looked up from the girly magazine he was reading. The back of the cover heralded some joker fetish article, and in the blurry photo some beefy dude straddled a creature with gorgeous, lusty eyes, but who otherwise resembled a giant scoop of vanilla ice cream with skinny arms and legs and tiny hands and feet. The clerk nonchalantly turned a page.
Vito cleared his throat.
The clerk cleared his. After a long pause he finally looked up and said, “We’ve got a lot of important customers, young man. Which one do you represent?”
“The one you owe so many favors to.”
The words were barely out of Vito’s mouth when the old man jumped up and picked up a key from the rack and dashed to the counter and held it out for Vito, saying, “Everything’s been taken care of, sir. Hope you find the facilities to your liking.”
“It’s not my opinion that counts,” Vito said, plucking the key from the clerk’s hand. “Watch it or else those pages will stick together,” he added, turning toward the exit. Briefly he wondered if he should check out the room, but then he remembered that his instructions had been very succinct and to the point. Go to the lobby and bring back the key. Vito had already learned from watching a few fellas learn the hard way, that the boys often didn’t appreciate initiative.
So he went outside into the cool air and put his head down as if walking into a strong wind, although it was barely blowing and his posture allowed his greasy black hair to fall into his eyes. His confidence that things would go his way tonight, based on how things had gone so far, was almost immediately negated by the presence everywhere of men he recognized-on both sides of the street, standing around, i sitting at the tables of junk food venues or in parked cars. Usually the only time that many family members and grunts were together in the same area was during a funeral. Now though, rather than being conspicuous in their clothing of mourning, they were trying to blend into their surroundings. Vito didn’t recognize a few of the people accompanying the boys, but something about their cool confidence exuded an air of restrained cruelty that made even the roughest, toughest boys appear a little uneasy.
His mind racing with a hundred questions, Vito walked with a quickened pace to the streetcorner where Ralphy was waiting for him. Ralphy was one of the Man’s most trusted assistants. Rumor had it he had been a hit man of such talent that he once shot a mayoral candidate from two hundred yards and disappeared into a crowd right in front of the television cameras. Vito didn’t doubt it was possible. For him, Ralphy was more of a force than a human being. So when Vito halted a few respectful yards away from Ralphy, he looked up into those cold brown eyes above those pockmarked cheeks and saw a man who would snuff him out as casually as he would step on a bug. Vito held out the key. “Here it is!” he proclaimed, perhaps a trifle too loudly.
“Good,” said Ralphy in his gravelly voice, pointedly not taking the key. “You check out the room?”
“No. I wasn’t told to.”
“Right. Check it out now.”
“What’s going on?” Vito blurted out. “ I heard this was supposed to be a peace conference.”
“You ain’t heard nothing. We’re just taking precautions, and you’ve been volunteered.”
“What am I looking for?”
“You’ll know if you find it. Now get.”
Vito got. He didn’t know if he should be elated or worried that he was being trusted with this part of the operation. His musings were interrupted as he accidentally bumped into a hunchbacked joker with a stiff hip shuffling from an alleyway. “Hey-watch it!” he barked, pushing the joker away.
The joker stopped and drooled, nodding fearfully at Vito. Something flickered on in his dull eyes, lasting for only a second, as the joker clenched and unclenched his fist. During that second the joker straightened and Vito got the distinct impression he could crush granite in that massive fist.
Then the joker deflated, another stream of spittle drooled from his mouth, and he shuffled backward into the alley until he bumped into a garbage can. The joker ignored Vito and rummaged about in the garbage. He found a dried, half-eaten chicken and took a big chomp of it with his white, straight teeth, masticating it furiously.
Disgusted, Vito turned away and hastened back to the hotel. Only as he pushed his way through the rotating doors that led into the lobby did Vito note that the joker’s clothing-a lumberjack shirt and blue jeans-had been very clean and tidy. He couldn’t remember having seen before a street person, reduced to scrounging in garbage cans for food, with fresh patches on his jeans at the knees.
Vito put the picture of the man from his mind with a shrug. He walked past the counter where the clerk still had his nose buried in the magazine, and thinking he might be trapped in the elevator with an unsavory sort who could reduce his probability of surviving the peace conference to zero, he instead took the six flights of stairs to the third floor. The hallway was depressingly dark, the dim fluorescents casting as much haze as actual light, light that barely reflected off the grimy tan walls, infusing them with an unpleasant glare.
He found the room. He looked up and down the hall. No one was there. He could hear the muffled sounds of a few TV sets coming through the doors, as well as what seemed to be the sounds of the plumbing working in the room across the hall. All this was pretty normal hotel activity in Vito’s opinion, but he nevertheless felt prickly and uneasy inside, the way he always felt when he beleieved he was being watched by unseen eyes. He inserted the key with trembling fingers and opened the door.
And found himself staring into the face of one ugly motherfucker. The dude had virtually no jaw, two nostril pits instead of a nose, and a forked tongue that flicked in and out of his mouth. The way the joker grinned and looked at Vito with those predatory yellow eyes was definitely evil. Vito was used to a more banal, businesslike version. This joker savored the knowledge that he had already frightened Vito to the core.
The joker sneered. “I sssee the Calvinos are sending boysss to do their work now. Tell your boss it’sss all right for him to come in. I am quite alone.”
“Maybe you should try taking off your socks next time,” said Belinda May mischievously as the young preacher pulled the door closed. He winced at the playful sting of her words as he twisted the knob to make sure the room was locked. Belinda May giggled and put her arm around him. “Lighten up, Reverend. You take yourself too seriously.” She gave him a squeeze that started his heart pounding, and he attempted a smile. “Just remember what Norman Mailer said,” she whispered seductively into his ear. “‘Sometimes desire just isn’t enough.’ It doesn’t make you any less of a man.”
“I don’t read Mailer,” he replied as they walked toward the elevator.
“His books too dirty for you?”
“That’s what I’ve heard.”
“It’s only life that he writes about. Life is what’s happening to us now.”
“The Bible tells me everything I need to know about life.”
“Bullshit.”
Shocked by her casual profanity, he opened his mouth to reply—but she continued before he could get a word in: “It’s a little late to protest your innocence. Leo.”
The young preacher supressed his anger. Normally he only became angry before his congregations, and he wasn’t used to being talked back to. Furthermore he wasn’t used to being in the company of a female who implied his understanding of the moral dilemmas of love, life, and the pursuit of happiness wasn’t beyond questioning. But in this case he was forced to admit, though not aloud to Belinda May, he was in the wrong, because he had indeed read the works of Norman Mailer-in particular The Executioner’s Song, the exhaustive case-study of the tormented young ace who had been executed for turning nine innocent people into pillars of salt. The young preacher still had a copy of the paperback edition, hidden away in a cabinet drawer in his study in his southwestern Virginia home, where it was unlikely to be seen by anybody else. Many other books of dubious moral content were hidden away in the same drawer, and in many others, concealed from the curiosity of his closest associates the way other evangelical preachers might conceal the contents of their liquor cabinets.
So what else could he do except let Belinda May get the better of him? He was satisfied with the prospect of getting the better part of her body later. Besides, he wasn’t all that interested in her mind anyway.
She gave him another squeeze as they stood and waited for the elevator to arrive. The thrill was twice as great as before, because this time she squeeed a buttock. “You have such a cute ass for a possible presidential candidate,” she said. “Most of the current crop looks like a bunch of hound dogs.”
His eyes darted back and forth suspiciously.
“Don’t worry,” she said, giving him a pinch. “There’s nobody here.”
Then the elevator doors opened and they found themselves staring at four men with impassive faces and eyes of steel. The young preacher felt his knees quake, and Belinda May’s squeeze this time conveyed her fear and need for protection, a signal direct and primal.
The two men in the middle were the focus of the young preacher’s attention. One was short and corpulent, red-faced and thick-lipped, with a long patch of white hair combed over the top of his head in a failed attempt to conceal the bald dome glistening beneath the fluorescents. His big eyes looked as if they would pop out of his head if someone slapped him on the back too hard. His fingers were thick and meaty. Despite a well-tailored black suit, with a red carnation in the lapel, and a neat white shirt and a gray vest, his taste in clothing was questionable at best, thanks to a red tie whose shade practically sent it into the Day-Glo category. The man serenely puffed at a big Havana cigar. The tobacco at the end had been darkened by his spittle, making it resemble nothing so much as a dried turd.
The man blew cigar smoke into the young preacher’s face. The act was deliberately inconsiderate, and the young preacher might have responded had it not been for the cold brown eyes of the tall, pockmarked man beside the fat one. This man had thin, pale lips that looked like scars. His brown hair was pressed so flat against his skull the young preacher imagined he slept with a stocking over his head. He wore a beige trench coat with a decided bulge in the right pocket. Two beefy men flanked them. They wore the brims of their hats tilted down so that most of their faces were concealed in shadow. One had his arms crossed, while the other, the young preacher belatedly noted, was waving the couple aside.
The couple obeyed. The four men left the elevator and walked down the hall without a backward glance. The young preacher couldn’t help pausing to stare at them, even as Belinda May dashed inside. “Come on, Leo!” she whispered, holding open the closing doors with her body.
The young preacher hastened inside. “Who was that?”
“Not now!” Only when the elevator had begun its downward descent did Belinda May add, “That was the head of the Calvino Family. I saw him on the news once!”
“Who’s the Calvino Family?”
“The mob.”
“Oh, I see. We don’t have the mob where I come from.”
“The mob’s wherever it wants to be. There are five Families in the city, though right now there’re only three heads. Or maybe two. There’ve been a lot of gang murders lately.”
“If that guy’s such a bigwig, what’s he doing here?”
“You can bet it was business. Calvino numero uno will probably incinerate his shoes when he gets out of here.” The elevator doors opened at the lobby. Completely oblivious to the fact that several people, including a beefy joker with a rhino face, were standing at the entrance. Belinda May put her hands around the young preacher’s elbow and said, “Did you bring a box of prophylactics, by any chance?”
He felt his face blaze red. But if any of these people recognized him, he got no indication of it. At least he did not hear his name being spoken or the click of a camera. As they made their way through the rotating doors, he realized that his relief at having gotten out without being recognized could be illusionary. If he was being staked out by a muckraker, the young preacher would never know until he saw the proof on the evening news or read it on the front pages of the supermarket rags. “Belinda-why did you say that-?” he demanded.
“What? Do you mean about the prophylactics?” she asked innocently, reaching for a cigarette and lighter from her pocketbook. “It seems like a reasonable question. I think it’s very important for sexually active people to practice safe sex, don’t you?”
“Yes, but in front of all those people!”
She stopped at the edge of the sidewalk, turned away from him, cupped her hand over the cigarette in her mouth, and lit it. When she turned back to him, puffing smoke, she said,
“What do they care? Besides,” she added with a mischievous smile, “ I should think you’d approve my inherent optimism.”
The young preacher covered his face. He clenched his other hand into a fist. He felt as if the eyes of every individual on the street were upon him, even though the most casual appraisal of the situation demonstrated he was simply being paranoid. “Where do you want to eat?” he asked.
Belinda May playfully jabbed his ribs. “Brace up. Reverend! I was only kidding. You worry too much. Keep on worrying and we’ll be in that room for weeks. I’m not sure I’ve got that much credit on my plastic.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. I’ll see that the church reimburses you somehow. Now, where do you want to eat?”
“That place looks good,” she said, pointing across the street. “Rudy’s Kosher Sushi.”
“It’s a deal.” He took her by the elbow and walked her to the corner of the intersection. He looked both ways as the light at the crosswalk turned green, not just to make sure all the automobiles were stopping-something no big-city denizen took for granted-but to see if anyone was around whose presence he should be concerned with. The television crew was accosting a young woman at the end of the next block, but that was it. He felt reasonably certain they would be safely seated at a restaurant table in the back if the crew came this way again.
Before they had stepped off the curb, someone coming from his blind side bumped into him. On a usual night the young preacher would have turned the other cheek, but normally he wasn’t so frustrated. He yelled, “Hey! Watch where you’re going!” and then realized with a shock of horror that his harsh words had been spoken to a joker:
An obviously retarded joker with a hunchback and dim eyes. The man had curly red hair and wore a freshly pressed lumberjack shirt and denim jeans. “Sorry,” said the joker, sticking the tip of his forefinger in his nostril, and then, as if thinking better of it, merely wiping his wrist across his nose.
The young preacher for some reason suspected the gesture as an affectation and became certain of it when the joker bowed stiffly and said, “I was just a tad preoccupied-lost in my own world, I suppose. You do forgive me-don’t you?”
Then the joker stepped away from the curb as if he had completely changed his mind about which direction he was headed in. A trickle of drool dropped down his chin almost as an afterthought.
Wide-eyed and confused, the young preacher took a few steps after the man. Belinda May detained him, demanding, “Leo, where do you think you’re going?”
“Uh, after him, of course.”
“Why?”
The young preacher thought about it during a particularly uncomfortable moment. “I thought I would tell him about the mission. See if he couldn’t use a little help. He looked like he could.”
“Nice sentiments, but you can’t. You’re incognito, remember?”
“I am. All right.” He couldn’t see the hunchback anymore anyway. The pitiful creature had already disappeared into the crowd.
“Come on, let’s feed our faces,” she said, again taking him by the elbow. They weaved through a slew of automobiles gridlocked at the intersection.
The young preacher was still looking back, searching for a glimpse of the hunchback, when they came to an abrupt stop. He turned to see a microphone poised before his face. The television news team blocked their path.
“Reverend Leo Barnett,” said the reporter, a clean-cut man with curly black hair, wearing glasses and a three-piece blue suit, “what in the world are you, with your well-known stance on jokers’ rights, doing here in the Edge?”
The young preacher felt his life passing before his eyes. He managed a weak smile. “Ah, my date and I are simply having a bite to eat.”
“Do you have an announcement for the society pages?” the reporter asked slyly.
The corners of the young preacher’s mouth turned. “ I make it a policy never to answer questions of a personal nature. This young lady is my companion for the evening. She works at the new mission my church has opened in Jokertown, and she suggested we sample some of the fine cuisine the Edge has to offer.”
“Some commentators think it strange, peculiar even, that a man who has opposed jokers’ rights so stridently at his pulpit would be so concerned with the day-to-day plight of jokers. Just why did you open the Mission?”
The young preacher decided he didn’t like the reporter’s attitude. “I had a promise to keep, that’s why I did it,” he said curtly, trying to imply the interview was over. That was precisely the opposite of his true intention.
“And what was that promise? Who did you make it to? Your congregation?”
The reporter had taken the bait. Now the young preacher’s major difficulty was in keeping a straight face. The information on his mind hadn’t been made public before, and his instincts guessed these were the right circumstances to do so. “Well, if you insist.”
“There’s been a great deal of speculation on the matter, sir, and I think the people have a right to know.”
“Well, I met a young man once. He had been infected by the wild card virus and had gotten himself in a great deal of trouble as a result. He asked to see me, and I came. We prayed together and he told me he knew I couldn’t do anything for him, but he wanted me to promise to help as many jokers as I could, so maybe they wouldn’t get into the same type of trouble as he did. I was very moved and so I promised. A few hours later he was executed by electrocution. I watched as twenty thousand volts of current shot him in a hot flash and fried him like a piece of bacon, and I knew I would have to keep that promise no matter what anyone else thought.”
“He was executed?” the reporter asked stupidly.
“Yes, he was a first-degree murderer. He had turned some people into pillars of salt.”
“You made that promise to Gary Gilmore?” the reporter asked incredulously, his face ashen.
“Absolutely. Though maybe he wasn’t a joker, maybe some people would call him an ace, or an individual with some of the powers you’d expect from an ace. I don’t really know. I’m only finding some of these things out.”
“I see. And has your opening of the Jokertown mission had any effect on your position toward jokers’ rights?”
“Not at all. The common man still must be protected, but I have always emphasized that we must deal with the victims of the virus compassionately.”
“I see.” The reporter’s face remained ashen, while the sound man and the Minicam operator smiled smugly. Evidently they realized, as the young preacher realized, that the reporter lacked the quick wit necessary to ask a logical follow-up question.
But since the young preacher was feeling fairly mercifulas well as confident that he had just achieved his sixty-second bite, on the news-he felt like giving the reporter a break.
A slight break. “My companion and I must get something to eat, but I think we have time for one more question.”
“Yes, there is something else I’m sure our viewers would like to know. You’ve made no secret of your presidential ambitions.”
“That is true, but I really have nothing further to add on the subject right now.”
“Just answer this, sir. You’ve just turned thirty-five, the minimum age for that office, but some of your potential opponents have stated that a man of thirty-five can’t possibly have the experience in life that’s necessary for the job. How do you respond to that?”
“Jesus was only thirty-three when he changed the world for all time. Surely a man who’s reached the grand old age of thirty-five can have some positive effect. Now if you’d excuse me ...” Taking Belinda May by the arm, he brushed past the reporter and the crew and walked into the restaurant.
“I’m sorry, Leo, I didn’t know ...” she said.
“That’s all right. I think I handled them well enough, and besides, I’ve—been meaning to tell that story for some time.”
“Did you really meet Gary Gilmore?”
“Yes. It’s been a fairly well kept secret. There really hadn’t been the need to publicize it before now, though it might do the mission some good in the public relations arena.”
“Then maybe you have met Mailer? He said he hadn’t been able to confirm all the identities of the people who saw Gilmore toward the end.”
“Please, we have to have keep secrets from one another. Otherwise what would we discover about each other tomorrow?”
“Would you like a table for two?” asked the maitre d’, a tuxedoed, fish-faced man weaing a water helmet for breathing purposes. The words from the speaker grill on the helmet gurgled eeriely.
“Yes, in the back, please,” said the young preacher. When they were alone at the booth, Belinda May lit yet another cigarette and said, “If those reporters find out about us, would it help if we assure them we’re only going to use the missionary position?”
Quasiman did not fear death, and death certainly did not fear him. Quasiman lived with a little piece of death in his soul every day, a little bit of terror and beauty, of blood and thunder. Fragments of his forthcoming demise perpetually crashed together with fleeting images of his previral past inside his brain.
How distant were those fragments? Quasiman had the distinct sensation the future might be closer than he had hoped.
He shuffled up to a newsstand and stood before the rows of girlie magazines. He thought how there had been something tantalizingly familiar about the face of the man he had bumped into, something that eluded him as parts of his brain twisted into another dimension. Quasiman would have dropped everything until enough of his brain had reassembled in one plane for him to remember, but right now he figured it was more important to remember why he had come to the Edge tonight in the first place.
Suddenly his hand became very cold. He looked down at it. It had gone somewhere else, and his wrist tapered off into a stub as if the hand had become transparent. He knew it was still attached because otherwise he would be feeling intense pain, as he had when an extradimensional creature had eaten a stray toe. The extreme cold numbed his arm all the way to his shoulder, but there was nothing he could do about that, except suffer until the hand returned. Which would be soon enough. Probably.
Even so, he couldn’t help thinking about how Christ had visited a synagogue and cured a man who had a withered hand.
Something in his heart like faith told him Father Squid had sent him to the Edge tonight on a mission. Whether or not the idea for the mission had originated in Father Squid’s fevered mind was a moot point-many from all walks of life requested assistance from the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Misery, and Father Squid was only too happy to provide it, if he saw that only good could result.
Quasiman shuffled up and down the street, casing out the scene. His suspicions were aroused by a few of the men sitting at some tables on the sidewalk. The rumpled clothing of a man at the newsstand, come to think of it, had indicated he probably wasn’t the type who’d spend so much time looking at investors’ magazines. Finally, an unusual number of alert, grim-faced men just sat in their cars, watching, waiting. Several little pieces of death manifested themselves in Quasiman’s brain, death that pointed, thank God, at these grim-faced men.
For a moment Quasiman saw the streets running red with blood. But a closer inspection of the environment indicated the vision had just been an optical illusion, caused by reflecting red neon lights off water collecting in a few large, shallow potholes.
The revelation could not, however, explain the smell of blood and fear, permeating the air like a memory that hadn’t happened yet.
As important parts of the muscle group in his right thigh phased into another plane of existence, where the air had a slightly acidic quality, Quasiman shuffled to a street corner.
There, pretending to be a beggar, he would wait for the blood and the fear to become real.
The memory of thunder echoed in his ears.
“War is a bad thing for business,” said the Man philosophically. He sat, legs crossed, in a chair in the corner of the room, beside a table and the other chair. He absently rolled his half-smoked cigar in his fingers.
“It’sss especially bad for the losssers,” said Wyrm with a grin, sitting in the other chair.
Vito stood at the door with his arms folded across his chest and felt something inside turn to ice. He had assumed, as presumably the Man and the boys had assumed, that this joker was just another businessman whose interests lay outside the law, just as their own did. Vito couldn’t help feeling, however, this Wyrm character had a hidden agenda.
If the head of the Calvino clan was as disturbed as Vito, though, he gave no indication of it. He conducted himself forcefully, secure in his position as the person who pulled the strings on the other four men in the room. Of these, Mike and Frank were simple enforcers; Vito wasn’t particularly afraid of them, but he wouldn’t want to be on their bad side either. It was always prudent to be a little afraid to Ralphy, even when he was in a good mood.
Even so, Vito couldn’t help but notice that the Man was deliberately acting defferentially to this joker who couldn’t keep his forked tongue in his mouth. Thus far in the course of their conference, whenever Wyrm had raised his voice, the Man had soothed his feelings. When Wyrm made demands, the Man had said he would see what he and the boys could do to strike a balance. And whenever Wyrm dared the Man to step over a line, the Man politely declined. Vito had to admit to nursing some concern for the future of the Five Families, if they’d have to kowtow to the jokers to survive.
“Besidesss, a man diesss a little every day,” said Wyrm with a cryptic smile. “What difference doesss it make if he diesss all at once?”
The Man laughed. His smile was condescending. If Wyrm noticed the implied insult, he gave no indication. “Once I believed as you,” said the Man. “ I took delight in times of trouble and took great relish at seeing my enemies fall. But that was before I got married and began raising a family. I began to yearn for a more orderly way of resolving differences. That is why we are meeting now, so that we can resolve our differences like civilized human beings.”
“I’m not particularly human.”
The Man’s face reddened. He nodded. “Forgive me. I did not mean to offend.”
Vito glanced at Ralphy, leaning against the wall beside a desk. Ralphy’s cheek was twitching, a sign he was getting suspicious. The fingers of his right hand twitched too. Ralphy and the Man exchanged glances, and then as the Man turned back to Wyrm, Ralphy looked meaningfully at Mike and Frank, who sat on the bed, carefully watching the proceedings. Mike and Frank nodded.
Vito wasn’t exactly sure of the meaning of all those signals, but he definitely wasn’t going to ask.
“There has been much killing, much bloodshed,” said the Man. “And for what? I do not understand. This is a big town. It is a gateway to the rest of the country. Surely there is enough business for all.”
Wyrm shrugged. “You don’t underssstand. My asssociates strive for sssomething more than just lining their pocketsss.”
“That is what I am trying to say,” replied the Man, “though please don’t get me wrong. Greed is a great and noble thing. It makes the world go round. It makes for the bull market.”
Wyrm shrugged. “Bull or bear, it isss all the same to the man who ownsss the building where the market standsss. My asssociates claim our fair share of every businesss operating in thisss market. What you get out of it isss your own affair, but you will have to bargain with usss first.”
Ralphy stood straight up. Mike and Frank both reached toward the guns in the holsters beneath their jackets, but they were restrained by a signal the Man made with his forefinger. The silence filled the room like the scent of a crisp pizza in a microwave, and Wyrm ran his forked tongue over his face as if anticipating the tasty morsels to come.
Vito debated which way he should duck.
The Man stared at Wyrm for several moments. He thoughtfully rubbed his double chin. He put his cigar in his mouth, took a lighter from his pocket, and in a few seconds had filled the room with the pungent odor of burning Cuban tobacco. “Vito, I am hungry,” He reached for his wallet, which Ralphy took and gave to Vito. “Take my credit cards,” said the Man, “and go to that sushi bar across the street. Order a generous selection. For six! Who knows? By the time you return, our business might be concluded and well be comfortably watching a hockey game. Isn’t that right, Mr. Wyrm?”
Wyrm hissed in agreement.
“It’s amazing how the game becomes much more exciting every year,” said the Man, settling back comfortably in his chair. “Tonight’s Ranger game should be a good one, shouldn’t it, Mr. Wyrm?”
This time Wyrm merely nodded.
Hustling down the hall toward the elevator, Vito realized how relieved he was to be out of Wyrm’s company. he imagined the Man would feel the same way, and Vito admired the manner in which his boss hid his discomfort. Wyrm seemed not to notice.
Of course you could never really be sure what a joker noticed, and what he simply chose to ignore.
“What is it you people want?” the Man asked Wyrm angrily after Vito had left. “We’re both businessmen. What is it that we can reasonably do to help us live together?”
Wyrm hissed. “Yesss, that isss the question. The organization I represssent, like the organization you represssent, isss very large. It already hasss consssiderable influence. Ssso naturally it wantsss more.”
The Man puffed his cigar. “Your ambition has not escaped me,” he said sarcastically.
Wyrm grinned. “I didn’t think it would. I am merely emphasssizing that, like yourself, I can’t make promisesss for othersss.”
“Oh, but I can,” said the Man, making a subtle gesture that restrained Ralphy from giving the signal, to Mike and Frank. “And I gather you can too, otherwise you wouldn’t have taken the trouble to have this meeting with us-alone. We’re not naive, Mr. Wyrm. You must have some bargaining leeway, otherwise there’d be no point in you being so very, very alone.”
“You are alone, aren’t you?” said Ralphy, completely ignoring the irate glare the Man shot at him as he walked past Wyrm to the window and peeked out the curtain, looking to the streets below.
“Of courssse,” Wyrm replied.
Suddenly they heard the sounds of two men arguing in the hall. The tone quickly became violent. They heard the sound of a fist striking a jaw. Someone grunted and thumped hard against a wall. The impact made the floor shake. One of the men snarled a curse and then went thump! against the other wall, twice as loud as before.
Ralphy turned from the window and said to Mike and Frank,
“Check it out.” The noise of the altercation in the hallway continued unabated.
Mike and Frank walked from the room. Ralphy followed them to the door to make certain it was locked. They heard Mike say something, then the hallway quieted down.
“You still haven’t answered my question,” the Man said. “What quessstion isss that?” asked Wyrm, glancing up at Ralphy as the enforcer returned to his position at the window. “What can we do to help us live together?”
“Oh, I think I can come up with a reasssonable anssswer.” Then there was a knock at the door.
“What is it?” Ralphy called out.
“You better’d come here.” It was Frank.
“Good,” said the Man, responding to Wyrm’s remark. “The Calvino interests want to be reasonable.”
Wyrm hissed, his tongue darting in and out.
Ralphy opened the door and barked, “What, for Christ’s sake?”
His answer was a gunshot. The bullet ripped a hole the size of a silver dollar in Ralphy’s back and sprayed the room with bright red blood. Ralphy was dead before he hit the floor. He twitched, his eyes staring blankly at the ceiling.
Standing in the doorway were two toughs wearing Mackintosh coats. Their faces were concealed by plastic masks that, even in his state of surprise and shock, the Man found to be strangely, disturbingly familiar. Between them was Frank, a gun held to his head.
There was another shot, and an eruption of blood and brains sprayed from Frank’s temple and splattered the door. Frank slumped to the floor.
“Mike?” said the Man softly. It had been many years since he had personally witnessed violence. He hadn’t refrained because he was afraid, or gotten soft in his old age, but because his lawyers had advised him to conduct his affairs in this manner. So he was a little slow to react, a little slow to realize he was one hundred percent alone.
By the time he stood up, with the intention of calling to his men on the street, Wyrm had already grabbed him. The Man struggled, but Wyrm was too strong. The Man was like a rag doll in his grip.
The last thing the Man saw was Wyrm’s open mouth, coming closer to his face. The Man closed his eyes in panic and kept them closed as Wyrm kissed him. The Man tried to scream, then unconsciousness claimed him as Wyrm bit off his lips and spat them across the floor.
“Where is our food?” the young preacher asked, half-impatiently, half-rhetorically. He saw the waitress coming their way, carrying an array of trays on suspiciously wide arms.
She stopped at a foursome two booths down and served two plates of steamed seafood in kelp boats, plus one of chilled noodles with peanut-miso sauce and another of a variety of meats and vegetables deep-fried tempura style. A large bowl of rice and replenishment of refreshments were quickly added for the entire table.
The air conditioner carried a fresh whiff of the tempura to the young preacher, and his mouth watered in anticipation. The worm of envy gnawed in his soul as he made a quick inspection of the lucky ones whose food had already arrived. They were a team of double-daters. Three, including an Oriental man, seemed normal enough, but he found himself unable to pry his eyes away from the scarlet-skinned victim of the virus, a beautiful woman with soft pink compound eyes like a butterfly’s, and two large blood-red antennae protruding from her forehead. She wore a low-cut gown that revealed her shape to be enticingly, even staggeringly normal. He deduced that the scintillating silver cape hung up on a nearby coatrack belonged to her.
The dining area of the sushi bar itself was L-shaped, with the front door and the cash register in the middle corner. The young preacher and Belinda May sat in the row of booths at the discreet furthermost edge of the shorter corridor, which was hidden from the storefront window that ran along most of the longer corridor. The young preacher distracted himself from the beautiful ace by watching the fish-faced maitre d’ seat a couple who laughed and made jokes between themselves. At the register booth was a somber young man whose slick black hair made him resemble some juvie or punk from a gangster movie.
“Leo, you’re staring at that woman,” said Belinda May, a mischievous light appearing in her eyes.
“I was not. I was looking at that boy.”
“Hmmm. I bet he’s some kind of fledgling gangster. They’re all over the streets tonight, for some reason. Did you notice?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Anyway, you were looking at that ace earlier.”
“Well, yes. Who is she?”
“Her name is Pesticide. She’s becoming quite well-known, thanks to that society column she writes for the Jokertown Cry. Anyway, if you’re going to stare at any woman tonight, it’s going to be me.”
The young preacher raised his cup of coffee as if to make a toast. “It’s a deal.”
Then the worm of envy finally knew defeat, as the waitress brought their meal. In a few moments all thoughts of small talk were erased as the young preacher reached out for a piece of hirame flounder, its tender white color, like glistening ivory, beckoning him like a white, cool light. The cold rice was scrumptious, the taste of the flounder delectable.
Belinda May’s fingers flittered over the selection of sushi and tempura on her tray. Quickly she settled on a piece of dark red maguro. She bit the tuna in half and chewed with an expression of ecstasy he remembered all too well.
He picked up a fantailed shrimp and bit off all but the tip. The shrimp was nudging its way down his throat like a pebble in a narrow water pipe when a sudden chilly blast of air whipped through the sushi bar. He glanced up to see the patrons in the other booths, including Pesticide, looking toward the door. A gang of young toughs had entered, dressed in mackintosh coats to a man. It was evident they had some sinister purpose in mind.
The fish-faced joker gurgled something to them via his helmet speaker, probably urging them to vacate the premises at once. The short tough who appeared to be their leader responded threateningly with a hammer, directed at the joker’s water helmet.
Their faces, Leo thought, the muscles in his gut tightening. He barely noticed the young juvie, if that’s what he was, slipping out the door. Something about their faces ...
The toughs’ faces were all the same, immobile, strangely devoid of life. The young preacher realized with a start the toughs were wearing plastic masks. The familiar, grinning likeness-an exaggerated pug nose and a lick of blond hair falling across the broad forehead-was distorted with a tone that would have been satirical if the toughs hadn’t exuded such dark menace.
With a bolt of horror he recognized the face as his own. The toughs were wearing Leo Barnett masks!
He barely felt the restraining touch of Belinda May on his arm as he stepped from the booth. “Don’t go, don’t draw any attention to yourself!” she hissed. “They’re Werewolves! A joker streetgang! And they know who you are!”
Her words reminded him that many jokers had publicly spoken of their hatred of him for the political and the moral stands he had taken in the past. Their overreaction had only hardened his followers in the belief that something had to be done to end the problem of the wild card virus. This in turn had hardened victims in their belief that something had to be done to end political repression. The young preacher trembled. What would he do if the Werewolves recognized him?
Wild, fearful thoughts that made him ashamed flashed through his brain. A moment ago he had been a semi-anonymous patron of a sushi bar; now he was a lightning rod that anyone in danger could point to in order to distract the Werewolves.
“For God’s sake, sit down!” hissed Belinda May, yanking him down beside her. He landed with a thump.
And a hollow chill tore through his being as he saw the nearest of the masked faces turn toward him. That thump had been just loud enough. He instinctively put his hand over his mouth, as if to hide a belch or an untimely remark. And for the next few moments he dared to hope his ploy had worked, for the tough seemed content to use his tentacle to scratch the folds of skin hanging below his mask.
The maitre d’, meanwhile, was held motionless by the threat of the hammer above his helmet. One tough withdrew a gun from beneath his mackintosh. There was a commotion at the far end of the sushi bar, as the other patrons reacted to the situation.
Another tough withdrew a machete from his coat and tossed it into the air. He tapped the forehead of his mask-a gesture evidently indicating his telekinetic power over the weapon, which spun out of sight down the far corridor like a giant version of those deadly ninja stars Leo had seen thrown in kung fu movies.
There was a loud ssshhhick!
People screamed. Drawing their knives, two other toughs moved out of sight. The machete returned to the hand of the thrower like a boomerang. The tentacled tough, meanwhile, nodded at two comrades, pointed at someone, then at someone else, and then at Leo. The trio walked up the corridor. The young preacher barely noted the screams from the other corridor.
Sweet Jesus, not me, don’t let them be heading for me, he thought. Now very much afraid that even the slightest motion would make the Werewolves notice him, he refrained from wiping the beads of sweat on his brow. Regardless of what happened next, the spotlight of the nation would be thrown on him. He prayed to the Lord, asking for guidance.
But none came. He could only wait, and hope. The ensuing seconds seemed like eons, endless stretches of time punctuated by the sounds of gunfire from outside, or screeching tires, and of people screaming. The Edge had erupted into a war zone.
The toughs with the knives, now bloody, returned. Their leader shouted to the ones approaching the young preacher, “What are you assholes doing? Let’s get out of here!”
The tentacled tough looked back just long enough to say, “In a minute, man. We’ve got some business to take care of.” An obese tough with lobster’s claws instead of hands stopped by the booth where Pesticide sat, put one claw under her chin, and lifted her face to his. One of the men with her almost made a move but was detained by a look from the third tough, who signaled very clearly with his handgun. “Pretty, pretty,” said the clawed tough. “You wouldn’t be so proud to show your face in public if it was anything like mine.”
The tentacled tough turned toward the young preacher and motioned as if to say, “Be right with you.”
The tough menacing Pesticide became distracted by staccato machine gun fire from outside, and Pesticide took advantage of the oppotunity to bat his claw from her face with a tiny hand and stand up defiantly. Compared to the man she saw facing, she seemed fragile, helpless, and small.
Meanwhile the young preacher’s sense of outrage grew, overpowering both fear and common sense.
The sushi bar alarm began to clang deafeningly, with no sign of abating.
The leader of the toughs said, “That was a stupid thing to do, fishface!” and smashed his hammer down on the maitre d’s water helmet.
The joker immediately began coughing, unable to draw oxygen from the air. He cut his hands on the shards of his helmet as he brought them to his throat, as if warding off an invisible strangler.
While everyone was preoccupied with the maitre d’s death throes, a strange yellow light began to glow from within Pesticide. It became so bright that her clothing resembled gossamer thrown over a spotlight. Her entire skeleton became visible, sheathed by the outlines of her skin and the dim silhouettes of her inner organs.
A black force gathering inside her became evident.
She opened her mouth, as if to scream. Instead an intense light like that of a laser stabbed from her mouth and struck the lobster-handed tough.
The black force rushed up her throat. And came out of her mouth.
And followed the path of the light.
It was a horde of scarlet insects, wing-backed and hideous, chirping like the incessant chorus of a nightmare. They covered the tough like a swarm of locusts before he could react. They began chewing immediately, chewing through his coat, through his mask, through the shells of his clawsburrowing inside him in a matter of seconds.
The tough screamed and fell backward onto the table of an empty booth. He rolled into the seat and beat what was left of his claws frantically on his body, futilely attempting to stop the horde of insects from continuing their grisly meal. Through it all Pesticide stood motionless, shining, staring at him with lifeless eyes that in the wake of her inner glow resembled ebony jewels.
She did not notice the tough with the gun point the barrel at her head. The shot that rang out was only dimly muffled by the clanging of the alarm. Pesticide’s brains splattered against the wall and onto the friend beside her. She fell, dead instantly, into his arms. The tough backed away, pointing his gun at her other two companions to hold them off.
The leader called out, “Come on! Let’s get the fuck out of here!”
Belinda May shouted, “No, Leo, no!”
For the young preacher had already given in to his rage and charged the two remaining toughs in the corridor. He had no idea exactly what he planned to do. He only knew Pesticide’s only crime had been defending herself, however strangely, against their aggression.
His ill-defined plans were quickly aborted when he was stopped by a tentacled tough-the Werewolf’s arm was elongating from his sleeve! It wrapped around the young preacher’s neck and lifted him from the floor like a doll caught in a hangman’s noose. The young preacher kicked and waved his arms about; he attempted to scream in defiance, but the hold of the tentacle was too tight. All he could really do was choke. He had just enough air to breathe, no more. Still he continued to fight and kick.
Something hard struck him at the back of the head. It was the ceiling. He felt the world swirl around him as the tough partially retracted his tentacle.
The touch drew him close. He stared into the weird gray eyes behind the mask. “Look what I’ve got,” the tough said. “How does it feel to be staring into your own face, preacher? It isn’t pretty to live in fear, is it?”
The young preacher half-screamed, half-choked.
The tough laughed unpleasantly. “ I have to thank you for providing us with something to play with after the evening’s entertainment is over. Don’t worry. She’ll be returned to you unharmed. Only her pride will be a little damaged.”
The young preacher turned into an animal at that moment, a trapped, frenzied animal. His weak fists beat furiously but vainly at the tentacle. He heard Belinda May scream but didn’t catch exactly what was happening to her because he felt himself rising. His last coherent vision was that of the dead tough still being eaten by the insects, who were slowing down, now that their host had died. Even so, half the tough’s torso had already been consumed, as well as most of his arms and thighs. Chirping insects listlessly poked through the joker’s eyes and crawled out on what remained of the mask, to breathe their last.
The young preacher’s last coherent thought was, Oh, well. At least no one can fault me for fainting-not under these circumstances.
Then his head struck a beam, and the lights went out.
Mother of mercy, is this the end of Vito? thought the young hood as he ran from the sushi bar into the street. For a moment he hoped he had been imagining everything, that the Werewolves were just out on an insignificant robbing spree, and that he would return to the hotel room to find the Man incredibly incensed that he had left the sushi bar before even placing an order. Then the shooting started.
Vito hit the sidewalk and rolled beneath an automobile. He bruised his knee against the concrete and scraped his forehead against the metal, but except for being inconvenienced by the trickle of blood flowing into his left eye, he was way beyond caring about minor injuries. Judging from how things were going so far, he would be lucky to survive the night.
Across the street two of the boys were being attacked by more members of the Werewolves street gang. One of the boys managed to stab a Werewolf in the chest, but as the blood spurted high in the air, the Werewolf behind him cut his throat from ear to ear. It became difficult to tell who’s blood was whose. The other boy pulled out his gun but only managed to get a single shot off—getting a Werewolf smack between the eyes of his plastic mask-before he was sliced to ribbons by a slew of attackers. Indeed the Werewolves, apparently unimpressed by the fact that their victims were decidedly dead, continued to cut them both up with such frenzy that Vito feared they might throw the ensuing pieces of meat to the rest of the gang.
Of course the rest of the Werewolves were a little too busy at the moment to notice. Chaos had erupted on the streets of the Edge. Nats and jokers alike ran in every direction, taking cover wherever they could find it, which was nowhere to be found. There were simply too many bullets flying about for anybody to be safe for long. Those Werewolves not engaged in personal combat with the members of the Calvino Family indiscriminately fired machine guns in every direction, sometimes cutting down their fellow gang members in their efforts to get everyone who even looked like they might be a Calvino. The members of the Calvino Family reacted pretty much in kind, except for those trying to get away in their cars.
Vito covered his head with his hands and watched as a Werewolf stood before an oncoming automobile and sprayed the front windshield with bullets. Vito couldn’t tell if the driver bought it or if he merely ducked. In any case the guy in the passenger seat lost the majority of his brains. The car plowed into the attacking Werewolf and then carried along several pedestrians until it crushed them against a parked car. A few survived long enough to know their last few seconds would be spent waiting for the cars to erupt into flame. The plume of fire was spectacular. Pieces of flaming metal and scorched meat flew high in the air, and they landed on the ground in the sort of slow-motion ballet of violence Vito had thought only happened in the movies.
Vito scrambled to the rear of the car he was under, figuring he’d be safer if he was as far away as possible from all that hot debris. He saw a fight happening right next to him. He could only see the legs of the people involved, but he gathered a panic-stricken tourist was trying to wrestle a gun away from a Werewolf. The guy’s girlfriend was trying to stop him. Vito was still trying to decide whom he should root for when the Werewolf succeeded in knocking the guy down. The guy landed on his butt, doubled over with the wind knocked out of him. His girl-a black chick in a tight green dress-knelt beside him and said something. Vito couldn’t hear what because of all the noise going down, but whatever it was, it didn’t do either any good, because two seconds later the pair was riddled with bullets and lying in a pool of blood. Vito’s stomach tightened into a slab as he watched the Werewolf walk away. Vito resolved to stay where he was until one side was wiped out or the cops arrived, whichever came first. He wasn’t going to be like some fool showing off to his girlfriend, and he wasn’t going to have any stories to brag about to whoever was left in the Calvino clan tomorrow. He was going to survive, and nothing more. That would be enough.
Across the street a couple of fool Werewolves threw Molotov cocktails. Vito imagined he was a bug, lying low in a pile of leaves, hoping if he imagined hard enough, then maybe on some level he would become one. Even then, he thought, being a bug might still be too big.
Vito turned around to see a familiar pair of legs kneeling beside the dead couple. The person was low enough so Vito could see his face. It was the hunchback, making the sign of the cross. Vito couldn’t help wondering just how intelligent this nut-case really was.
Suddenly the hunchback turned his head, and Vito found himself staring directly into the nut-case’s eyes.
He believed he saw many things happening there. The eyes quickly misted as if they were peering into some far-off place just around the corner. Fear manifested itself in the hunchback’s eyes. His face lost all color, and he opened his mouth to say something.
But whatever he had on his mind, it was already too late to say it. In that brief second before Vito was engulfed in the flames of the Molotov cocktail that smashed under the car, he was curiously aware that the hunchback recoiled from something that hadn’t happened yet.
The young preacher woke up on the floor of the sushi bar. The bar was packed with folks attempting to escape the chaos outside, which, from what he could hear, resembled one of the more horrendous visions from the Book of Revelations.
The place where the young preacher lay, however, was nearly empty. It contained just a few corpses and a lot of dead insects.
Belinda May was nowhere to be found.
The young preacher rose, brushed off a few dead insects clinging to his jacket and trousers, and then sat down in the nearest booth to nurse his aching head. He touched the spot where the throbbing was the greatest. When he took his fingers away, they were flecked with dried blood.
From outside he heard the shrill sound of approaching sirens. The police were coming. He hoped they were bringing with them a full complement of paramedics. Of course there was still all that shooting and screaming going on outside too, so the scene from the good book wasn’t over yet.
Suddenly the sushi bar was racked from the shock waves of a nearby explosion. The young preacher dived under the booth and struck his head against the pedestal. He didn’t mind. After what he had already been through, a tad more excruciating pain wasn’t going to make that much difference.
He crawled on the floor through a pile of dead bugs, under the limp legs of the dead Pesticide, and wondered where Belinda May was. He couldn’t think straight, but he knew he couldn’t let his mental fog prevent him from finding her. What would the people say? What would the Lord say, or the reporters? Worse, what would she say if he tried to have her again and discovered he didn’t have the courage to brave fire and brimstone for the honor of parting her like the Red Sea?
He was vaguely aware of people trying to stop him as he got up and staggered into the street where the ruins of a car burned. There weren’t nearly as many panic-stricken people running about as he had expected. Bodies, bloody or burned to a crisp, were strewn all over the sidewalks. The young preacher hoped the television crew was picking all this up.
Where’s Belinda May? he wondered.
Then he saw the tentacled tough in the middle of the street. The tough held a limp Belinda May high, daring others to make her a target.
The tough approached some hoods with machine guns. The hoods were beaten and battered, but they were still alive. And they were lifting their guns.
The tough lowered Belinda May. He was going to use her as a shield!
Now that it was too late to make a difference, Quasiman remembered that Father Squid had sent him to the Edge to prevent Wyrm from making a hit on a Mafia don.
Of course neither Quasiman, Squid, or the individual who had provided the information about the hit had guessed that Wyrm would cover his tracks with a sea of blood. It was proving to be an effective, if brutal, idea. And although Quasiman knew no one would blame him for being unable to prevent the bloodshed of the evening, he hated himself for not having done anything to prevent all this suffering.
He had seen so many people die. A few details were lost as portions of his brain phased in and out of reality, but nothing could diminish the profound sense of desolation that assailed him. The worst death he had seen was that of the kid hiding beneath that car. He’d watched the flames engulf the kid before the event had actually happened. Maybe that was why it had been so unnerving.
But the night wasn’t over yet. Quasiman had seen the blood, but the thunder was still to come.
Quasiman belatedly noticed the sounds of the approaching sirens as he decided he might as well split with the rest of the survivors. A few hoods and Werewolves still battled on the street, but Wyrm had doubtlessly made himself scarce long ago. Quasiman was still visualizing where he wanted to be when he saw the Werewolf, an unconscious woman in his tentacle above his head, walking down the middle of the street toward a couple of hoods. The hoods lifted their weapons.
Quasiman didn’t need precognitive senses to guess what might happen next. He knew he had to help the woman, somehow.
He was about to make a turn through space when he saw the man with the familiar face rushing toward the Werewolf and the woman. The blasting reverberating in Quasiman’s head wasn’t exactly thunder.
If the young preacher had given the matter a serious thought, he would have gotten down on his knees and prayed. Instead he ran as fast as he could toward the Werewolf and knocked him down. The hood’s tentacle snapped like a whip, flinging Belinda May to safety. She landed on the hood of an automobile. At the same time the Werewolf and the young preacher struck the ground, the two members of the Calvino clan pulled the triggers of their machine guns.
Surprisingly the young preacher felt no anticipation for the next life to come. Instead he felt a curious sense of regret, along with a particular, only slightly contradictory sense of relief. He drew his mind in upon itself and tightening it up into a psychic ball, hurled it to a place where he had once dared not look.
The gunshots were like thunderclaps magnified to an infinite power, and he almost visualized the bullets speeding through the barrels. If this was to be the last nanosecond of his life, well }hen, he would live it gladly. It was still a long time.
Enveloped by cold, he felt himself going down. Going down, down, down into a hell colder than any polar nightmare. He felt his soul dissipating. Was this what death was like? Would he soon envision himself lying on the street, surrounded by the others who had died before him? Would he then be inexorably pulled toward a beckoning white light, where the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ stood side by side with his own mother, awaiting him with outstretched arms? Would he know at last what Heaven was like?
Why then did he feel as if his mind were being ripped apart in a thousand directions? A hundred flashes of intense heat alternated with a hundred flashes of absolute zero. He suddenly believed all his concepts of eternity were just timepieces glimpsed in a dream, his concepts of infinity motes in a sandbox. The young preacher couldn’t escape the notion that he had merged, somehow, with all conceivable times and places-a prelude to merging with the inconceivable times and places that lay just beyond the confines of reality.
Death was turning out to be a more complicated experience than he had ever imagined. He wondered if the bullets had already penetrated his body, if his skull was being shattered, and his heart and lungs perforated.
Thankfully there was no pain. Yet. Perhaps he would be spared that one unpleasant aspect of his death.
It was strange, though, to feel so whole and complete when he was actually coming apart.
It was strange still that the nothingness, at first incomprehensible and indescribable, suddenly became just an expanse of concrete, lined at varying intervals, just like a sidewalk.
It was strangest of all to think that instead of lying in the street beside the dead tentacled Werewolf, he found himself still alive. The sidewalk was drenched with blood, none of it, thankfully, his.
But what was that weight on top of him? How had it gotten there?
The weight slid to the sidewalk beside him. It was the hunchbacked joker he had spoken harshly to earlier. Only this time the hunchback lay face up, as haggard as a corpse, and was sinking half an inch into the concrete. The young preacher could only guess how, but he was certain the hunchback was paying the price for saving him.
Suddenly someone jammed a microphone in his face. He looked up to see the television reporter, flanked by his remote team, leaning down. The sound man had a bloody, makeshift bandage over his wirst, and the reporter a fresh wound across his forehead. The camera was on. The sound was on. And the reporter said, “Hey, Reverend Barnett, how are you feeling? Do you have any words for your—”
But before the young preacher could answer, a policeman yanked the reporter away. Another policeman grabbed the young preacher and tried to pull him away from the hunchback. The wail of sirens blasted the air with shrill vibrations, and a horde of rotating red and blue lights added an entirely new level of surreality to the scene.
“Get the fuck away from me!” the young preacher shouted, breaking away from the policeman.
He was vaguely aware of the newsman saying softly into his mike, “You heard it on Channel Four first, folks-a minister using an expletive in public. I’m sure a lot of Reverend Barnett’s constituents are wondering what this world’s coming to ....”
The young preacher felt a flash of anger at the impertinent bozo, but he decided to be patient and beg God to curse him later. Right now all he was concerned about was the ace, or joker, or whatever, who had saved him. He knelt beside the man, who was already sinking deeper into the sidewalk. A paramedic with a confused expression knelt beside the pair.
“Save him!” the young preacher implored. “You’ve got to save this man!”
“How?” asked the paramedic helplessly. “I don’t know what the matter is-and besides, I can’t even touch him!” It was true. The paramedic’s hands had penetrated into the hunchback’s body. The paramedic yelped and jerked them out and stuck them beneath his armpits. He shivered as if he had been immersed in a deep freeze. The young preacher remembered feeling cold while he thought he was dying. A small, dark part of that cold still resided in his soul like an unwanted friend.
He realized nothing the paramedic or anyone could do would help the hunchback. The hunchback was gradually becoming just an outline of his former self. Even as he watched, the hunchback sank another half inch into the concrete. The poor man’s glazed eyes stared at the sky, and his breathing was tortured, as if whatever kind of air he was gasping at was unsuitable for the job at hand.
“Who are you?” Leo asked. “How can we help you?”
The man blinked his eyes. It was hard to tell just how lucid he was. “My name is ... Quasiman,” he whispered. I’ve never jaunted with so much weight before ... so hard ... so hard even now to hold myself together ....” He coughed. The young preacher looked up to see Belinda May kneeling down beside him. “Are you all right?” he asked curtly but not without feeling.
“Yes,” she replied. “What happened to you?”
“I’m not sure, but I think this man was responsible.”
“My God-I remember him! Leo, you’ve got to help him.”
“How? I can’t even touch him.”
That old mischievous light returned to Belinda May’s eyes. “You’re a preacher,” she said in a tone greatly resembling the one she had used when she’d said she wanted to go to bed with him. “Heal the poor bastard!”
It had been many years since the young preacher had performed an act of faith healing. He had refrained from the activity, having been advised that it didn’t look good on videotape, especially for a man planning a presidential bid.
Even so, he coudn’t let this noble spirit be snuffed out. Not if it was somehow in his ... in God’s power. He looked up to the sky. The clouds, pregnant with rain, were occasionally illuminated by flashes of lightning; their thunder was only a soft rumble. He breathed deeply. He reached out to those clouds, to the earth beneath the concrete of this city, to the dark forces of creation. He gathered it all into his spirit, and into a single ball of energy.
Then he reached inside Quasiman. The spectrum of sensations in his fingers clearly originated someplace he would never know-at least during this lifetime.
He forced himself to be calm, to ignore the cold, to disassociate himself from the itching of his hands, and the overwhelming numbness of his fingertips. And when he believed he had succeeded, he said with all the passion he could muster, “Heal, you goddamn son-of-a-bitch! Heal!”
Finally it began to rain. The thunder erupted directly overhead as if a nuclear device were ripping the sky apart.
That night over fifty people died at the Edge. A hundred more were seriously injured. The carnage, however, wasn’t the lead-in story on the news that night, nor was it the biggest headline on most of the front pages across the country. After all, the gang war had been going on for some time, and the fact that scores of innocent people had been caught in that grisly crossfire was unfortunate, but not really of much consequence so far as the day-to-day development of the news was concerned.
There’s a big place between New York and Los Angeles. It’s known as the American Heartland, and for the people who live there, the story of the hour was the one about the Reverend Leo Barnett proclaiming his candidacy for president of the United States. He had laid his hands on the outline of some poor joker and had brought him back from an involuntary trip to parts unknown. He had done something no one had ever done before-using only the power of his faith, he had healed a joker. He had proved that the grandest power on earth was the love of the Lord and of Jesus Christ, and he had put some of that love in the body of a creature whose body had been polluted by that obscene alien virus. Even the liberal news media, which had captured that event for all the world to see on videotape, had to admit that the Reverend Leo Barnett had done an amazing thing. Maybe it didn’t qualify him to be president, but it certainly set him apart from the pack as someone to watch.
It also helped that immediately after healing the joker and watching the paramedics carry him off on a stretcher, the Reverend Leo Barnett didn’t consult with his advisers or wait to see how the incident played on the news or how it sat with the public, he simply walked up to the array of cameras and microphones and announced that God had said the time had come for him to declare his candidacy. He demonstrated, clearly and forcefully, that he could make a decision and act on it.
Reverend Leo Barnett’s standing in the polls became very high, very respectable, almost immediately. Of course a few of the voters were a little concerned about what he was doing in the Edge in the first place, especially with regard to that hotel room he and the young mission worker had checked into, but it wasn’t as if either one was married or anything. And there had been talk, which neither would confirm or deny, of an impending engagement announcement. Women in the Democratic party, as it turned out, were particularly impressed that the Reverend Leo Barnett might have found his true love and his political destiny on the same night. If true, then perhaps all that carnage hadn’t been in vain.
If God doesn’t judge America, he’ll have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah.
—REVEREND LEO BARNETT presidential candidate
The torches in the temple burned slowly, steadily, occasionally flickering when someone passed by. Their light illuminated the faces of the people gathered in a small antechamber off the main hall. They were all present, those who looked like ordinary people, and the others who were extraordinary: the cat woman, the jackal-headed man, those with wings, crocodile skin, and bird heads.
Osiris the far-seer spoke. “The winged one comes.”
“Is she one of us?”
“Will she help us?”
“Not directly,” Osiris answered. “But within her is that which will have the power to do great things. For now we must wait.”
“We have waited a very long time,” said Anubis the jackal. “A little longer will not make a difference.”
The others murmured in agreement. The living gods settled back to patiently wait.
The room in Luxor’s Winter Palace Hotel was sweltering, and it was still only morning. The ceiling fan stirred the sluggish air tiredly and sweat ran in tickling rivulets over Peregrine’s rib cage and breasts as she lay propped up in bed, watching josh McCoy slip a new film cassette into his camera. He looked at her and smiled.
“We’d better get going,” he said.
She’ smiled back lazily from the bed, her wings moving gently, bringing more coolness into the room than the slowmoving fan.
“If you say so.” She stood, stretched lithely, and watched McCoy watch her. She walked by him, dancing out of his way as he reached for her. “Haven’t you had enough yet?” she asked teasingly as she took a clean pair of jeans from her suitcase. She wiggled into them, batting her wings to keep her balance. “The hotel laundry must have washed these in boiling water.” She took a deep breath and pulled on the stubborn zipper. “There.”
“They look great, though,” McCoy said. He put his arms around her from behind, and Peregrine shivered as he kissed the back of her neck and caressed her breasts, still sensitive from their morning lovemaking.
“I thought you said we had to get going.” She settled back against him.
McCoy sighed and pulled away reluctantly. “We do. We have to meet the others in”—he checked his wristwatch”three minutes.”
“Too bad,” Peregrine said, smiling mischievously. “ I think I could be coaxed into spending all day in bed.”
“Work awaits,” McCoy said, rummaging for his clothes as Peregrine put on a tank top. “And I’m anxious to see if these self-proclaimed living gods can do all they claim.”
She watched him as he dressed, admiring his lean, muscular body. He was blond and fit, a documentary filmmaker and cameraman, and a wonderful lover.
“Got everything? Don’t forget your hat. The sun’s fierce, even if it is winter.”
“I’ve got everything I need,” Peregrine said with a sidelong glance. “Let’s go.”
McCoy turned the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging on the door handle to the other side, then closed and locked the door. The hotel corridor was quiet and deserted. Tachyon must have heard their muffled footsteps, because he poked his head out as they passed his room.
“Morning, Tachy,” Peregrine said. “Josh, Father Squid, Hiram, and I are going to catch the afternoon ceremony at the Temple of the Living Gods. Want to come along?”
“Good morning, my dear.” Tachyon, looking resplendent in a white brocade dressing gown, nodded distantly to McCoy. “No, thank you. IT see everything I need to see at the meeting tonight. Right now it’s much too hot to venture out.” Tachyon looked closely at her. “Are you feeling all right? You look pale.”
“ I think the heat’s getting to me too,” Peregrine replied. “That and the food and water. Or rather the microbes that live in them.”
“We don’t need you getting sick,” Tachyon said seriously. “Come in and let me do a quick examination.” He fanned his face. “We’ll find out what’s bothering you, and it will give me something useful to do with my day.”
“We don’t have the time right now. The others are waiting for us—”
“Peri,” McCoy interrupted, a concerned look on his face, “it’ll only take a few minutes. I’ll go downstairs and tell Hiram and Father Squid you’ve been delayed.” She hesitated. “Please,” he added.
“Oh, all right.” She smiled at him. “I’ll see you downstairs. “ McCoy nodded and continued down the hallway as Peregrine followed Tachyon into his ornately appointed suite. The sitting room was spacious, and much cooler than the room she shared with McCoy. Of course, she reflected, they had generated a lot of heat themselves that morning.
“Wow,” she commented, glancing around the luxuriously decorated room. “I must have gotten the servants’ quarters.”
“It’s really something, isn’t it? I especially like the bed.” Tachyon pointed to a large four-poster draped with white netting that was visible through the bedroom’s open door. “You have to climb steps to get into it.”
“What fun!”
He glanced at her mischievously. “Want to try it out?”
“No, thanks. I’ve already had my morning sex.”
“Peri,” Tachyon complained in a teasing tone, “I don’t understand why you’re attracted to that man.” He retrieved his red leather medical bag from the closet. “Sit there,” he said, indicating a plush velvet wingback chair, “and open your mouth. Say ahhh.”
“Ahh,” Peregrine repeated obediently after seating herself. Tachyon peered down her throat. “Well, that looks nice and healthy.” He swiftly examined her ears and looked into her eyes. “Seems okay. Tell me about your symptoms.” He removed his stethoscope from his bag. “Nausea, vomiting, dizziness?”
“Some nausea and vomiting.”
“When? After you eat?”
“No, not really. Anytime.”
“Do you get sick every day?”
“No. Maybe a couple times a week.”
“Hmmmm.” He lifted her shirt up and held his stethoscope against her left breast. She jumped at the touch of cold steel against her warm flesh. “Sorry ... heartbeat is strong and regular. How long has this vomiting been occurring?”
“A couple of months, I guess. Since before the tour started. I thought it was stress related.”
He frowned. “You’ve been vomiting for a couple of months, and you didn’t see fit to consult me? I am your doctor.”
She squirmed uncomfortably. “Tachy, you’ve been so busy. I didn’t want to bother you. I think it’s all the traveling, the food, different water, different standards of hygiene.”
“Allow me to make the diagnosis, if you please, young lady. Are you getting enough sleep, or is your new boyfriend keeping you up all hours?”
“I’m getting to bed early every night,” she assured him. “I’m certain you are,” he said drily. “But that wasn’t what I asked. Are you getting enough sleep?”
Peregrine blushed. “Of course I am.”
Tachyon replaced his equipment in his bag. “How’s your menstrual cycle? Any problems?”
“Well, I haven’t had a period in a while, but that’s not unusual, even though I’m on the pill.”
“Peri, please try to be a little more precise. How long is ‘a while’?”
She bit her lip and waved her wings gently. “ I don’t know, a couple of months, I guess.”
“Hmmmmm. Come here.” He led her into his bedroom, and her wings instinctively curled over her body. The air conditioner was going full blast and it felt about twenty degrees cooler. Tachyon gestured at the bed. “Take off your jeans and lie down.”
“Are you sure this is a medical examination?” she asked him teasingly.
“Do you want me to call a chaperon?”
“Don’t be silly. I trust you!”
“You shouldn’t,” Tachyon leered. He raised an eyebrow as Peregrine kicked off her Nikes and peeled off her jeans. “Don’t you wear underwear?”
“Never. It gets in the way. Do you want me to take off my shirt too?”
“If you do, you may never leave this room!” Tachyon threatened.
She laughed and kissed his cheek. “What’s the big deal? You’ve examined me a million times.”
“In the proper surroundings, with you in a medical gown and a nurse in the room,” he retorted. “Never with you naked, almost naked,” he corrected, “in my bedroom.” He tossed her a towel. “Here, cover yourself.”
Tachyon admired her long, tanned legs and shapely buttocks as she arranged herself on his bed, draping the towel discreetly over her hips. The blast of refrigerated air coming from the laboring air conditioner raised goosebumps all over her, but Tachyon ignored them.
“Your hands better be warm,” Peregrine warned as he knelt next to her.
“Just like my heart,” Tachyon said, palpating her stomach. “Does this hurt?”
“No.”
“Here? Here?”
She shook her head.
“Don’t move,” he ordered. “I need my stethoscope.” This time he warmed the metal head with his hand before placing it on her stomach. “Have you had much indigestion?”
“Some.”
A strange expression crossed Tachyon’s foxy face as he assisted her off the bed. “Get your jeans on. I’ll take a blood sample, and then you can go play tourist with the others.”
He got the syringe ready while she finished tying her track shoes. Peregrine held out her arm, winced as he expertly raised the vein, swabbed the skin above it, inserted the syringe, and withdrew the blood. She watched in fascination and suddenly realized that the sight of blood was making her ill.
“Shit.” She ran into the bedroom, leaving behind a flurry of feathers, and leaned over the toilet vomiting up her room service breakfast and what was left of last night’s dinner and champagne.
Tachyon held her shoulders while she was sick, and as she sagged against the tub, exhausted, wiped her face with a warm, wet washcloth.
“Are you all right?”
“I think so.” He helped her to her feet. “It was the blood. Although the sight of blood has never bothered me before.”
“Peregrine, I don’t think that you should go sight-seeing this morning. The place for you is bed, alone, with a cup of hot tea.”
“No,” she protested. “I’m fine. It’s just all this traveling. If I feel sick, josh will bring me back here.”
“I’ll never understand women.” He shook his head sadly. “To prefer a mere human when you could have me. Come here and I’ll bandage that hole I put in your arm.” He busied himself with sterile gauze and tape.
Peregrine smiled gently. “You’re sweet, Doctor, but your heart is buried in the past. I’m getting to the point now that I’m ready for a permanent relationship, and I don’t think you would give me that.”
“And he can?”
She shrugged, her wings moving with her shoulders. “I hope so. We’ll see, won’t we?”
She picked up her bag and hat from the chair and walked to the door.
“Peri, I wish you would reconsider.”
“What? Sleeping with you or sight-seeing?”
“Sight-seeing, wicked one.”
“I’m fine now. Please stop worrying. Honestly, I’ve never had so many people worrying about me as on this trip.”
“That’s because, my dear, under your New York glamour, you’re incredibly vulnerable. You make people want to protect you.” He opened the door for her. “Be careful with McCoy, Peri. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
She kissed him as she left the room. Her wings brushed the doorway and a flurry of fine feathers fell to the floor. “Damn,” she said, stooping and picking one up. “I seem to be losing a lot of these lately.”
“Indeed?” Tachyon looked curious. “No, don’t bother with them. The maid will clean them up.”
“Okay. Good-bye. Have fun with your tests.”
Tachyon’s eyes were worried as they followed Peregrine’s graceful body down the hallway. He closed the door, one of her feathers in his hand.
“This doesn’t look good,” he said aloud as he tickled his chin with her feather. “Not good at all.”
Peregrine spotted McCoy in the lobby talking to a stocky, dark man in a white uniform. Her two other companions were lounging nearby. Hiram Worchester, she reflected, was looking a little haggard. Hiram, one of Peregrine’s oldest and dearest friends, was dressed in one of his custom-made tropical-weight suits, but it hung loosely on him, almost as if he had lost some of his three hundred plus pounds. Perhaps he was feeling the strain of constant traveling as much as she was. Father Squid, the kindly pastor of the Church of Jesus Christ, joker, made Hiram look almost svelte. He was as tall as a normal man and twice as broad. His face was round and gray, his eyes were covered by nictitating membranes, and a cluster of tentacles hung down over his mouth like a constantly twitching mustache. He always reminded her of one of Lovecraft’s fictional Deep Ones, but he was actually much nicer.
“Peri,” said McCoy. “This is Mr. Ahmed. He’s with the Tourist Police. Mr. Ahmed, this is Peregrine.”
“This is a pleasure,” said the guide, bending to kiss her hand.
Peregrine responded with a smile and then greeted Hiram and the priest. She turned to josh, who was watching her closely. “You okay?” Josh asked. “You look awful. What did Tachyon do, take a quart of blood?”
“Of course not. I’m fine,” she said, following Ahmed and the others to the waiting limo. And if I keep saying that, she said to herself, maybe I’ll even believe it.
“What on earth?” exclaimed Peregrine as they stopped in front of a metal-and-glass guard station. There were two heavily armed men inside the box, which stood next to a high wall that surrounded several acres of desert that was the Temple of the Living Gods. The whitewashed wall was topped with strands of barbed wire and patrolled by men dressed in blue and armed with machine guns .. Video cameras tirelessly surveyed the perimeter. The effect of the pure white wall against the shining sand and bright blue Egyptian sky was dazzling.
“Because of the Nur,” explained Ahmed, pointing to the line of tourists waiting to enter the temple grounds, “everyone has to pass through two detectors, one for metal and the other for nitrates. These fanatics are determined to destroy the temple and the gods. They have already made several attacks against the temple, but so far they’ve been stopped before doing much damage.”
“Who are the Nur?” Father Squid asked.
“They are the followers of Nur al-Allah, a false prophet determined to unite all Islamic sects under himself,” Ahmed said. “He has decided that Allah desires the destruction of all those deformed by the wild card virus, and so the Temple of the Living Gods has become one of his sect’s targets.”
“Do we have to wait in line with the tourists?” Hiram broke in peevishly. “After all, we are here by special invitation.”
“Oh, no, Mr. Worchester,” Ahmed hurriedly answered. “The VIP gate is this way. You will go right through. If you please ...”
As they lined up behind Ahmed, McCoy whispered to Peregrine, “I’ve never been through a VIP gate, only press gates.”
“Stick with me,” she promised. “I’ll take you lots of places you’ve never been before.”
“You already have.”
The VIP gate had its own metal and nitrate detectors. They passed through, watched closely by security guards dressed in the blue robes worn by adherents of the living gods, who thoroughly examined Peregrine’s bag and McCoy’s camera. An elderly man approached as McCoy’s equipment was being returned. He was short, deeply tanned and healthy looking, with gray eyes, white hair, and a magnificant white beard that contrasted nicely with his flowing blue robes.
“I am Opet Kemel,” he announced. His voice was deep, mellifluous, and he knew how to use it to demand attention and respect. “ I am the head priest of the Temple of the Living Gods. We are gratifed that you could grace us with your presence.” He looked from Father Squid to Peregrine, Hiram, and McCoy, and then back to Peregrine. “Yes, my children will be glad that you have come.”
“Do you mind if we film the ceremony?” asked Peregrine. “Not at all.” He gestured expansively. “Come this way and I’ll show you the best seats in the house.”
“Can you give us some background on the temple?” Peregrine asked.
“Certainly,” Kemel replied as they followed him. “The Port Said wild card epidemic of 1948 caused many ‘mutations,’ I believe they’re called, among them of course, the celebrated Nasr-Al Haziz, Khof and other great heroes of past years. Many men of Luxor were working on the Said docks at the time and were also affected by the virus. Some passed it on to their children and grandchildren.”
“The true meaning of these mutations struck me over a decade ago when I saw a young boy make clouds drop much-needed rain over his father’s fields. I realized that he was an incarnation of Min, the ancient god of crops, and that his presence was a harbinger of the old religion.”
“I was an archaeologist then and had just discovered an intact temple complex”—he pointed at their feet “beneath the ground right where we stand. I convinced Min of his destiny and found others to join us: Osiris, a man pronounced dead who returned to life with visions of the future; Anubis, Taurt, Thoth ... Through the years they have all come to the Temple of the Living Gods to listen to the prayers of their petitioners and perform miracles.”
“Exactly what kind of miracles?” Peregrine asked. “Many kinds. For example, if a woman with child is having a difficult time, she will pray to Taurt, goddess of pregnancy and childbirth. Taurt will assure that all will be fine. And it will be. Thoth settles disputes, knowing who tells the truth and who lies. Min, as I have said, can make it rain. Osiris sees bits of the future. It’s all quite simple.”
“I see.” Kernel’s claims seemed reasonable, given the abilities that Peregrine knew the virus could waken in people. “How many gods are there?”
“Perhaps twenty-five. Some cannot really do anything, Kemel said in confiding tones. “They are what you call jokers. However, they look like the old gods—Bast, for example, is covered with fur and has claws-and they give great comfort to the people who come to pray to them. But see for yourselves. The ceremony is almost ready to begin. He led them past groups of tourists posing next to statues of the gods, booths that sold everything from Kodak film, key rings, and Coca-Cola to replicas of antique jewelry and little statuettes of the gods themselves. They went past the booths, through a narrow doorway into a sandstone block wall set flush against a cliff face, and then down worn stone steps. Goosebumps rose on Peregrine’s skin. It was cool inside the structure, which was lit by electric lights that resembled flickering torches. The stairwell was beautifully decorated with bas-relief carvings of everyday life in ancient Egypt, intricately detailed hieroglyphic inscriptions, and representations of animals, birds, gods, and goddesses.
“What a wonderful job of restoration!” Peregrine exclaimed, enchanted by the beautiful freshness of the reliefs they passed.
“Actually,” Kernel explained, “everything here is just as it was when I discovered it twenty years ago. We added some modern conveniences, like the electricity, of course.” He smiled.
They entered a large chamber, an amphitheater with a stage faced by banked stone benches. The walls of the chamber were lined with glass cases displaying artifacts that, Kemel said, had been discovered in the temple.
McCoy meticulously recorded them, shooting several minutes of footage of painted wooden statues that looked as fresh as if they had been painted the day before, necklaces, collars, and pectorals of lapis lazuli, emerald, and gold, chalices carved of translucent alabaster, unguent jars of jade intricately carved in the shapes of animals, elaborately inlaid tiny chests, and gaming boards, and chairs ... The exquisite treasures of a dead civilization were displayed before them, a civilization that, Peregrine reflected, Opet Kemel seemed, with his Temple of the Living Gods, to restore.
“Here we are.” Kemel indicated a group of benches at the front of the amphitheater close to the stage, bowed slightly, and departed.
It didn’t take long for the amphitheater to fill. The lights dimmed and the theater became silent. A spotlight shone on the stage, strange music that sounded as old and eerie as the temple itself softly played, and the procession of the living gods began. There was Osiris, the god of death and resurrection, and his consort Isis. Behind him came Hapi, carrying a golden standard. Thoth, the ibis-headed judge, followed with his pet baboon. Shu and Tefnut, brother and sister, god and goddess of the air, floated above the floor. Sobek followed them with his dark, cracked crocodile skin and snoutlike mouth. Hathor, the great mother, had the horns of a cow. Bast, the cat-goddess, moved delicately, her face and body covered with tawny fur, claws protruding from her fingers. Min looked like an ordinary man, but a small cloud hovered above him, following him like an obedient puppy wherever he went. Bes, the handsome dwarf, did cartwheels and walked on his hands. Anubis, the god of the underworld, had the head of a jackal. Horus had falconlike wings ....
On and on they came, crossing the stage slowly and then seating themselves on gilded thrones as they were presented to the audience in English, French, and Arabic.
After the introductions the gods began to demonstrate their abilities. Shu and Tefnut were gliding in the air, playing tag with Min’s cloud, when the unexpected, deafening sound of gunfire shattered the peaceful scene, evoking screams of terror from the spectators trapped in the amphitheater. Hundreds of tourists leapt up and milled about like terrified cattle. Some bolted for the doors at the back, and the stairways soon became clogged by panicked, shrieking people. McCoy, who had pushed Peregrine to the ground and covered her with his body at the first sound of gunfire, dragged her behind one of the large, elaborately carved stone pillars flanking the stage.
“You okay?” he gasped, peering around the column at the sounds of madness and destruction, his camera whirring. “Uh-huh. What is it?”
“Three guys with machine guns.” His hands were steady and there was an edge of excitement in his voice. “They don t seem to be shooting at the people, just the walls.”
A bullet whined off the pillar. The sound of shattering glass filled the air as the terrorists destroyed the cases filled with the priceless artifacts and raked the beautifully carved walls with machine-gun fire.
The living gods had fled when the first shot sounded. Only one remained behind, the man who had been introduced as Min. As Peregrine peeked around the pillar, a cloud appeared from nowhere to hang over the terrorists’ heads. It started to rain torrents upon them, and slipping and sliding on the wet stone floor, they scattered, trying to find cover from the blinding cloudburst. Peregrine, digging in her bag for her metal talons, noticed Hiram Worchester standing alone, a look of fierce concentration on his face. One of the attackers gave a distressed shout as his gun slipped from his hands and landed on his foot. He collapsed, screaming, blood spattering from his shattered limb. Hiram turned his gaze to the second terrorist as Peregrine pulled on her guantlets.
“I’m going to try to get above them,” she told McCoy. “Be careful,” he said, intent on filming the action.
She flexed her fingers, now encased in leather gauntlets tipped with razor-edged titanium claws. Her wings quivered in anticipation as she took a half-dozen running steps, then beat thunderously as she hurled herself forward and launched herself into the air—and fell jarringly to the floor.
She caught herself on her hands and knees, skinning her palms on the rough stones and banging her left knee so hard that it went numb after an initial stab of excruciatingly sharp pain.
For a long second Peregrine refused to believe what had happened. She crouched on the floor, bullets whining around her, then sood and beat her wings again, hard. But nothing happpened. She couldn’t fly. She stood in the middle of the floor, ignoring the gunfire around her, trying to figure out what was happening, what she was doing wrong.
“Peregrine,” McCoy shouted, “get down!” The third terrorist aimed at her, screaming incoherently. A look of horror suddenly contorted his face and he swooped toward the ceiling. His gun slipped out of his hand and smashed to the floor. Hiram casually let the man drop thirty feet as the other terrorists were clubbed to the floor by temple security guards. Kemel bustled up, a look of incredulous horror on his face.
“Thank the Merciful Ones you weren’t injured!” he cried, rushing to Peregrine, who was still dazed and confused at what had hapened to her.
“Yeah,” she said distantly, then her eyes focused on the walls of the chamber. “But look at all the damage!”
A small wooden statue, gilded and inlaid with faience and precious stones, lay in fragments at Peregrine’s feet. She stopped and picked it up gently, but the fragile wood turned to dust at her touch, leaving behind a twisted shell of gold and jewels. “It survived for so long, only to be destroyed by this madness ....” she murmured softly.
“Ah, yes.” Kemel shrugged. “Well, the walls can be restored, and we have more artifacts to put into display cases.”
“Who were those people?” Father Squid asked, imperturbably brushing dust off of his cassock.
“The Nor,” Kemel said. He spat on the floor. “Fanatics!” McCoy rushed up to them, his camera slung over his shoulder. “I thought I told you to be careful,” he reproached Peregrine. “Standing in the middle of a room with idiots blazing away with machine guns is not my idea of careful! Thank God that Hiram was watching that guy.”
“I know,” Peregrine said, “but it shouldn’t have happened that way. I was trying to get airborne, but I couldn’t. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. It’s strange:” She pushed her long hair out of her eyes, looking troubled. “I don’t know what it is.”
The chamber was still in turmoil. The terrorists could have slaughtered hundreds if they had chosen to shoot people rather than the symbols of the old religion, but as it was, several score of tourists had been hit by stray bullets or injured themselves trying to escape. Temple security guards were trying to help those who were hurt, but there were so many of them lying crumpled on the stone benches, wailing, crying, screaming, bleeding ...
Peregrine turned from McCoy and the others, nauseated to the point of vomiting, but there was nothing in her stomach to throw up. McCoy held her as she was racked by dry heaves. When she stopped shuddering, she leaned against him gratefully.
He took her hand gently. “We’d better get you to Dr. Tachyon.”
On the way back to the Winter Palace Hotel, McCoy put his arm around her and drew her to him. “Everything is going to be okay,” he soothed. “You’re probably just tired.”
“What if it isn’t that? What if something is really wrong with me? What,” she asked in a horror-striken whisper, “if I’ll never fly again?” She buried her face against McCoy’s shoulder as the others looked on in mute sympathy. Her tears soaked through his shirt as he stroked her long brown hair. “Everything will be all right, Peri. I promise.”
“Hmmm, I should have expected that,” Tachyon said as Peregrine tearfully told him her story.
“What do you mean?” asked McCoy. “What’s wrong with her?”
Tachyon eyed josh McCoy coldly. “It’s rather private. Between a woman and her physician. So ...”
“Anything that concerns Peri concerns me.”
“It’s that way, is it?” Tachyon looked at McCoy hostilely. “It’s all right, josh,” said Peregrine. She hugged him. “If that’s the way you want it.” McCoy turned to go. “I’ll wait for you in the bar.”
Tachyon closed the door behind him. “Now, sit down and wipe your eyes. It’s nothing serious, really. You’re losing your feathers because of hormonal changes. Your mind has recognized your condition and has blocked your power as a means of protection.”
“Condition? Protection? What’s wrong with me?” Peregrine perched on the edge of the sofa. Tachyon sat next to her and took her cold hands in his.
“It’s nothing that won’t be cleared up in a few months.”
His lilac eyes looked straight into her blue ones. “You’re pregnant.”
“What!” Peregrine sank back against the sofa cushions. “That’s impossible! How can I be pregnant? I’ve been on the pill forever!” She sat up again. “What will NBC say? I wonder if this is covered in my contract?”
“I suggest you stop taking the pill and all other drugs, including alcohol. After all, you want a happy, healthy baby.”
“Tachy, this is ridiculous! I can’t be pregnant! Are you sure?”
“Quite. And judging from your symptoms, I’d say you were about four months along.” He nodded at the door. “How will your lover feel about being a father?”
“Josh isn’t the father. We’ve only been together for a couple of weeks.” Her mouth dropped open. “Oh, my God!”
“What is it?” Tachyon asked, concern in his voice and on his face.
She got off the sofa and began walking around the room, her wings fluttering absently. “Doctor, what would happen to the baby if both parents carried the wild card? Joker mother, ace father, that sort of thing?” She stopped by the marble mantel and fiddled with the dusty knickknacks set on it. “Why?” Tachyon asked suspiciously. “If McCoy isn’t the father, who is? An ace?”
“Yeah.”
“Who?”
She sighed and put aside the figurine she was playing with. “ I don’t think it really matters. I’ll never see him again. It was just one night.” She smiled in recollection. “What a night!”
Tachyon suddenly remembered the dinner at Aces High on Wild Card Day. Peregrine had left the restaurant with”Fortunato?” he shouted. “Fortunato’s the father? You went to bed with that, that pimp? Have you no taste? You won’t sleep with me, but you’ll lay with him!” He stopped shouting and took several deep breaths. He walked to the room’s bar and poured himself a brandy. Peregrine looked at him in amazement.
“I cannot believe it,” Tachyon repeated, swallowing most of the glass. “ I have so much more to offer.”
Right, she thought. Another notch on your bedpost. But then maybe I was just that for Fortunato too.
“Let’s face it, Doctor,” Peregrine said flippantly, angered by his self-centeredness. “He’s the only man I’ve ever screwed that made me glow. It was absolutely incredible.” She smiled inside at the furious look on Tachyon’s face. “But that’s not important now. What about the baby?”
A multitude of thoughts dashed through her mind. I’ll have to redo my apartment, she thought. I hope they’ve fixed the roof. A baby can’t live in a house without a roof. Maybe I should move upstate. That would probably be better for a child. She smiled to herself. A big house with a large lawn, trees, and a garden. And dogs. I never thought about having a baby. Will I be a good mother? This is a good time to find out. I’m thirty-two and the old biological clock is ticking away.
But how did it happen? The pill had always worked before. Fortunato’s powers, she realized, are based on his potent sexuality. Perhaps they somehow circumvented the contraceptives. Fortunato ... and josh! How would he react to the news? What would he think?
Tachyon’s voice broke into her reverie. “Have you heard a word I’ve said?” he demanded.
Peregrine blushed. “I’m sorry. I was thinking about being a mother.”
He groaned. “Peri, it’s not that simple,” he said gently. “Why not?”
“Both you and that man have the wild card. Therefore the child will have a ninety percent chance of dying before or at birth. A nine percent chance of being a joker, and one percent, one percent,” he emphasized, “of being an ace.” He drank more brandy. “The odds are terrible, terrible. The child has no chance. None at all.”
Peregrine began pacing back and forth. “Is there something you can do, some sort of test, that can tell if the baby is all right now?”
“Well, yes, I can do an ultrasound: It’s abysmally primitive, but it’ll tell if the child is developing normally or not. If the baby is not, I suggest-no, I urge you, very strongly, to have an abortion. There are already enough jokers in this world,” he said bitterly.
“And if the baby is normal?”
Tachyon—sighed. “The virus often doesn’t express itself until birth. If the child survives the birth trauma without the virus manifesting, then you wait. Wait and wonder what will happen, and when it will happen. Peregrine, if you allow the child to be born, you will spend your whole life in agony, worrying and trying to protect it from everything. Consider the stresses of childhood and adolescence, any one of which might trigger the virus. Is that fair to you? To your child? To the man waiting for you downstairs? Providing,” Tachyon added coldly, “he still wants to be a part of your life when he learns of this.”
“I’ll have to take my chances with josh,” she said swiftly, coming again to the thought that dominated her mind. “Can you do the ultrasound soon?”
“I’ll see if I can make arrangements at the hospital. If we can’t do it in Luxor, then you’ll have to wait until we get back to Cairo. If the child is abnormal, you must consider an abortion. Actually you should have an abortion, regardless.” She stared at him. “Destroy what may be a healthy human being? It might be like me,” she argued. “Or Fortunato.”
“Peri, you don’t know how good the virus was to you. You’ve parlayed your wings into fame and financial success. You are one of the fortunate few.”
“Of course I am. I mean, I’m pretty, but nothing special. Pretty girls are a dime a dozen. Actually I have you to thank for my success.”
“This is the first time anyone has thanked me for helping to destroy the lives of millions of people,” Tachyon said grimly.
“You tried to stop it,” she said reassuringly. “It’s not your fault Jetboy screwed up.”
“Peri, Tachyon said grimly, changing the subject as if the failures of the past were too painful to dwell upon, “if you don’t terminate the pregnancy, you’ll be showing very shortly.
“You’d better start thinking about what you’re going to tell people.”
“Why, the truth of course. That I’m going to have a baby.”
“What if they ask about the father?”
“That’s nobody’s business but mine!”
“And, I would submit,” Tachyon said, “McCoy’s.”
“I guess you’re right. But the world doesn’t have to know about Fortunato. Please don’t tell anyone. I’d hate for him to read it in the papers. I’d rather tell him myself.” If I ever see him again, she added silently. “Please?”
“It is not my place to inform him,” Tachyon said coldly. “But he must be told. It is his right.” He frowned. “ I don’t know what you saw in that man. If it had been me, this would have never happened.”
“You’ve said that before,” Peregrine said, annoyance showing on her face. “But it’s a little too late for might-havebeens. Eventually everything will be fine.”
“Everything is not going to be fine,” said Tachyon firmly. “The odds are the child will die or be a joker, and I don t think that you’re strong enough to deal with either of those possibilities.”
“I’ll have to wait and see,” Peregrine said pragmatically. She turned to leave. “I guess I’d better break the news to josh. He’ll be glad it’s nothing serious.”
“And that you’re carrying the child of another man?” asked Tachyon. “If you can maintain your relationship through this, then McCoy is a very unusual man.”
“He is, Doctor,” she assured him, and herself. “He is.”
Peregrine walked slowly to the bar, remembering the day she and McCoy had met. He had made his interest in her evident from the very first when they were introduced at the NBC offices in November. A talented cameraman and freelance documentary maker, he had jumped at the chance to film the tour, and as he later confessed to Peregrine, the opportunity to meet her up close and personal. Peregrine was almost over her obsession with Fortunato and McCoy’s attentions had helped. They had teased and tantalized each other until they finally ended up in bed together in Argentina. They’d shared a room ever since.
But McCoy couldn’t arouse in her the sexual passion that Fortunato had. She doubted if any man could. Peregrine had wanted him again after that wild night they’d had together. He was like a drug she craved. Every time the phone had rung or there was a knock at the door, she’d hoped it was Fortunato. But he’d never come back. With Chrysalis’s help she had found his mother and learned that the ace had left New York and was somewhere in the Orient, probably Japan.
The realization that he had left her so casually helped her get over him, but now he rushed back into her mind. She wondered how he would feel about her pregnancy, about being a father. Would he ever even know? She sighed.
Josh McCoy, she told herself sternly, is a wonderful man, and you love him. Don’t blow it over a man you’ll probably never see again. But if I did see him again, what would it be like? For the millionth time she relived her hours with Fortunato. Just thinking about it made her want him. Or McCoy.
Josh was drinking a Stella beer. As he saw her, he signaled the waiter and they arrived at his table together. “I’ll have another beer,” McCoy told the waiter. “Some wine, Peri?”
“Uh, no thanks. Do you have any bottled water?” she asked the waiter.
“Certainly, madam. We have Perrier.”
“That’ll be fine.”
“Well?” McCoy asked. “What did Tachyon have to say? Are you okay?”
I’m not as brave about telling him this as I thought I’d be, Peregrine said to herself. What if he can’t deal with it? It was best, she decided, to simply tell him the truth.
“There’s nothing wrong with me. Nothing that time won’t cure.” She took a sip of the drink the waiter placed in front of her and murmured, “I’m going to have a baby.”
“What?” McCoy almost dropped his beer. “A baby?” She nodded, looking at him directly for the first time since she had sat down. I really love you, she said silently. Please don’t make this any harder on me than it already is. “Mine?” he inquired calmly.
This was going to be the hard part. “No,” she admitted. Josh downed the rest of his beer and picked up the second bottle. “If I’m not the father, who is? Bruce Willis?” Peregrine made a face. “Keith Hernandez? Bob Weir? Senator Hartmann? Who?”
She arched an eyebrow at him. “Regardless of what the supermarket tabloids, and apparently you, think, I do not sleep with every man my name is linked with.” She drank some Perrier. “In fact, I happen to be rather particular about choosing bedmates.” She grinned mischievously. “I picked you, after all.”
“Don’t try to change the subject,” he warned. “Who’s the father?”
“Do you really want to know?” Josh nodded curtly.
“Why?”
“Because,” he sighed, “I happen to love you and I think it’s important that I know who is the father of your baby. Does he know yet?”
“How can he? I just found out myself.”
“Do you love him?” McCoy asked, frowning. “Why did you break off your relationship? Was it him?”
“Josh,” Peregrine explained patiently. “There was no relationship. It was one night. I met this man, we went to bed. I never saw him again.” Although not, she silently added, for lack of trying.
McCoy’s frown deepened. “Are you in the habit of going to bed with anybody who catches your fancy?”
Peregrine flushed. “No. I just told you I’m not.” She laid her hand on his. “Please understand. I had no idea you were in my future when I met him. You knew you weren’t my first the first time we made love, and after all,” she challenged, “I’m surely not the first woman you’ve slept with, am I?”
“No, but I was hoping you’d be the last.” McCoy ran his hand through his hair. “This really puts a cramp into my plans.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, what about the father? Is he going to just stand quietly by while I marry the mother of his kid?”
“You want to marry me?” For the first time Peregrine felt that everything would work out right.
“Yeah, I do! What’s so strange about that? Is this guy going to be a problem? Who is it anyhow?”
“It’s an ace,” she said slowly. “Who?” McCoy insisted.
Oh, hell, she thought. Josh knows a lot about the New York scene. He’s sure to have heard of Fortunato. What if he has the same attitude Tachyon has? Maybe I shouldn’t tell him, but maybe he has the right to know. “His name’s Fortunato—”
“Fortunato!” exploded McCoy. “That guy with all the hookers? Geishas, he calls them! You slept with him!” He gulped down more beer.
“I really don’t see that it matters now. It happened. And if you must know, he’s very charming.”
“Okay, okay.” McCoy glowered.
“If you’re going to be jealous of every man I ever slept with, then I don’t give us very much of a chance. And marriage is out of the question.”
“Come on, Peri, give me a break. This is kind of unexpected.”
“Well, it’s a shock to me too. This morning I thought I was tired. This afternoon I find out I’m pregnant.”
A shadow fell over their table. It was Tachyon in a lilac silk suit that matched his eyes. “Do you mind if I join you?” He pulled out a chair without awaiting a reply. “Brandy,” he snapped to the waiter, who was hovering nearby. They all stared at each other until the waiter made a precise little bow and left. “I’ve spoken to the local hospital,” Tachyon said finally. “We can do the test tomorrow morning.”
“What test?” McCoy asked, looking from Peregrine to Tachyon.
“Did you tell him?” Tachyon asked.
“I didn’t have a chance to tell him about the virus,” Peregrine said in a barely audible whisper.
“Virus?”
“Because both Peregrine and For—the father, that is—carry the wild card, the child will have it,” Tachyon said crisply. “An ultrasound must be performed as soon as possible to determine the status of the fetus. If the child is developing abnormally, Peregrine must have an abortion. If the child is growing normally, I still advise termination, but that will, of course, be her decision.”
McCoy stared at Peregrine. “You didn’t tell me that!”
“I didn’t have a chance,” she said defensively.
“There is a one in one hundred chance that the child will be an ace, but a nine in one hundred chance that it will be a joker,” added Tachyon relentlessly.
“A joker! You mean like one of those awful things that lives in Jokertown, something horrible, an atrocity?”
“My dear young man,” began Tachyon angrily, “not all jokers—”
“Josh,” Peregrine interrupted softly, “I’m a joker.”
Both men turned to her. “I am,” she insisted. “Jokers have physical deformities.” Her wings fluttered. “Like these. I’m a joker.”
“This discussion is getting us nowhere,” said Tachyon after a long silence. “Peri, I’ll see you tonight.” He walked away without touching his brandy.
“Well,” said McCoy. “Tachyon’s little piece of news certainly puts a different light on the subject.”
“What do you mean,” she asked, a chill seizing her.
“I hate jokers,” McCoy burst out. “They give me the creeps!” His knuckles were white on the beer bottle. “Look, I can’t go on with this. I’ll call New York and tell them to send you another cameraman. I’ll get my gear out of your room.”
“You’re leaving?” Peregrine asked, stunned.
“Yeah. Look, it’s been a lot of fun,” he said deliberately, “and I’ve really enjoyed you. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend my life raising some pimp’s bastard! Especially,” he added as an afterthought, “one that’s going to develop into some kind of monster!”
Peregrine winced as if she’d been slapped. “I thought you loved me,” she said, her voice and wings quivering. “You just asked me to marry you!”
“I guess I was wrong.” He finished his beer and stood up. “Bye, Peri.”
Peregrine couldn’t face him as he left. She stared down at the table, cold and shaken, and didn’t notice the intense, lingering look McCoy gave her as he left the bar.
“Ahem.”
Hiram Worchester seated himself across from her in the chair McCoy had just vacated. Peregrine shuddered. It’s true, he’s gone, she thought. I will never, never, she told herself fiercely, get involved with another man. Never!
“Where’s McCoy? Father Squid and I want to know if the two of you will join us for dinner. Of course,” he added when she didn’t respond, “if you have other plans ... “
“No,” she said dully, “no other plans. It will be just me, I’m afraid. Josh is, ahhh, out filming some local color.” She wondered why she lied to one of her oldest friends.
“Of course.” Hiram beamed. “Let’s get Father Squid and retire to the dining room. Using my power always makes me hungry” He stood and pulled out her chair.
Dinner was excellent, but she hardly tasted it. Hiram wolfed down huge portions and waxed poetical about the batarikh-Egyptian caviar-and lamb shish kebab served with a wine called rubis d’Egypte. He loudly urged Tachyon to try some when he joined them, but Tachyon declined with a shake of his head.
“Are you ready for the meeting?” he asked Peregrine. “Where’s McCoy?”
“Out filming,” answered Hiram. “I suggest we go without him.”
Peregrine murmured her agreement.
“He wasn’t invited anyway,” Tachyon sniped.
Dr. Tachyon, Hiram Worchester, Father Squid, and Peregrine met with Opet Kemel in a small antechamber off the amphitheater that had been so severely damaged in the terrorist attack earlier that day.
“There must be Nur spies among us,” Kernel exclaimed, glancing around the room. “That is the only way those dogs could have gotten through security. Or else they bribed one of my people. We are trying to ferret out the traitor now. The three assassins killed themselves after they were captured,” Kernel said, the hatred in his voice making Peregrine doubt the strict truth of his words. “They are now Shahid, martyrs for Allah at the instigation of that madman, Nur al-Allah, may he die a most painful and lingering death.” Kernel turned to Tachyon. “You see, Doctor, that is why we need your assistance to protect ourselves ....”
His voice dragged on and on. Occasionally Peregrine heard Hiram or Father Squid or Tachyon chime in, but she wasn’t really listening. She knew the expression on her face was polite and inquisitive. It was the face she wore when she had boring guests on her show who blathered on and on about nothing. She wondered how Letterman was doing with Peregrine’s Perch. Probably fine. Her mind refused to stay on unimportant topics and wandered back to josh McCoy. What could she have done to make him stay? Nothing. Perhaps it was better that he left if that was his real attitude toward those stricken with the wild card. She thought back to Argentina, their first night together. She had summoned up her courage, put on her sexiest dress, and gone to his room with a bottle of champagne. McCoy had been occupied with a woman he’d picked up in the hotel bar. Peregrine, extremely embarrassed, had slunk back to her room and begun drinking the champagne. Fifteen minutes later McCoy had appeared. It had taken so long, he explained, because he had to get rid of the woman.
Peregrine was impressed by his supreme confidence. He was the first man she’d been with since Fortunato, and his touch was wonderful. They’d spent every night since then together, making love at least once a day. Tonight she’d be alone. He hates you, she told herself, because you’re a joker. She placed her left hand across her abdomen. We don’t need him, Peregrine told the baby. We don’t need anyone.
Tachyon’s voice broke through her reverie. “I’ll report this to Senator Hartmann, the Red Cross, and the UN. I’m sure we can assist you somehow”
“Thank you, thank you!” Kernel reached across the table to take Tachyon’s hands in gratitude. “Now,” he said, smiling at the others, “perhaps you would like to meet my children?”
“They have expressed a desire to talk to you all, especially you.” He directed his penetrating stare at Peregrine. “Me?”
Kemel nodded and stood. “Come this way.”
They passed between the long golden curtains that separated the antechamber from the auditorium, and Kernel led them to another room where the living gods were waiting for them.
Min was there, and bearded Osiris, bird-headed Thoth, and the floating brother and sister, as were Anubis and Isis and a dozen others whose names Peregrine couldn’t remember. They immediately surrounded the Americans and Dr. Tachyon, everyone talking at once. Peregrine found herself face-to-face with a large woman who smiled and spoke to her in Arabic.
“I’m sorry,” Peregrine said, smiling back. “I don’t understand.”
The woman gestured to the bird-headed man standing close by, who immediately joined them.
“I am Thoth,” he said in English, his beak giving him a strange clacking accent. “Taurt has asked me to tell you that the son you bear will be born strong and healthy.”
Peregrine looked from one to the other, incredulity on her face. “How did you know I’m pregnant?” she demanded. “Ah, we have known since we heard you were coming to the temple.”
“But this trip was decided upon months ago!”
“Yes. Osiris is cursed by knowing pieces of the future. Your future, your child, was in one of those pieces.”
Taurt said something and Thoth smiled. “She says not to worry. You will be a very good mother.”
“I will?”
Taurt handed her a small linen pouch with hieroglyphs embroidered on it. Peregrine opened it and found a small amulet made of red stone. She examined it curiously.
“It is an achet,” Thoth clacked. “It represents the sun rising in the east. It will give you the strength and power of Ra the Great. It is for the child. Keep it until the boy is old enough to wear it.”
“Thank you. I will.” She impulsively hugged Taurt, who returned the gesture and then disappeared into the crowded room.
“Come now,” said Thoth, “the others wish to meet you.” As Peregrine and Thoth circulated among the gods, she was greeted with great affection by each.
“Why are they acting like this?” she asked after a particularly bone-crushing embrace from Hapi, the bull.
“They are happy for you,” Thoth told her. “The birth of a child is a wonderous thing. Especially to one with wings.”
“ I see,” she said, though she didn’t. She had the feeling that Thoth was holding something back, but the bird-headed man slipped back into the crowd before she could question him.
Amid the greetings and extemporaneous speeches she suddenly realized that she was exhausted. Peregrine caught Tachyon’s eye where he stood conversing with Anubis. She pointed to her watch and Tachyon beckoned to her. As she joined them, she heard him ask Anubis about the threat of the Nur. Father Squid was close by, discussing theology with Osiris.
“The gods will protect us,” replied Anubis, lifting his eyes upward. “And from what I understand, security around the temple has been strengthened.”
“Excuse me for interrupting,” Peregrine apologized, addressing Tachyon, “but don’t we have that appointment early tomorrow morning?”
“Burning sky, I’d almost forgotten. What time is it?” He lifted his eyebrows when he saw it was after one. “We’d best go. It will take us an hour to get back to Luxor, and you, young lady, need your sleep.”
Peregrine entered her room at the Winter Palace Hotel with apprehension. McCoy’s things were gone. She sank into a large armchair, and the tears that had been threatening all night came. She cried until she had no more tears left and her head ached with the strain. Go to bed, she told herself. It’s been a long day. Someone tries to shoot you, you find out you’re pregnant, and the man you love leaves you. Next you’ll find out that NBC’s canceled Peregrine’s Perch. At least you know your baby is going to be all right, she thought as she undressed. She turned off the light and slipped into the lonely double bed.
But her brain woundn’t turn off. What if Taurt is wrong? What if the ultrasound reveals a deformity? I’ll have to have an abortion. I don’t want one, but I can’t bring another joker into the world. Abortion is against everything I was brought up to believe.
But do you want to spend the rest of your life taking care of a monster? Can you take the life of a baby, even if it’s a joker?
Back and forth she went, until she finally dropped off to sleep. Her last coherent thought was of Fortunato. What would he want, she wondered?
She was awakened by Tachyon banging at her door. “Peregrine,” she foggily heard him call. “Are you there? It’s seven-thirty.”
She rolled out of bed, wrapped herself in the sheet, and opened the locked door. Tachyon stood there, annoyance written all over his face.
He glared at her. “Do you know what time it is? You were supposed to meet me downstairs a half hour ago.”
“I know, I know. Yell at me while I get dressed.”
She picked up her clothes and headed toward the bathroom. Tachyon closed the door behind him and eyed her sheet-clad body appreciatively.
“What happened here?” he asked. “Where’s your paramour?”
Peregrine poked her head around the bathroom door and spoke around her toothbrush. “Gone.”
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
“No!” She glanced in the mirror as she quickly brushed her hair and frowned at her exhausted face and swollen, red eyes. You look like hell, she told herself. She pulled on her clothes, pushed her feet into a pair of sandals, grabbed her bag, and joined Tachyon, who was waiting by the door. “I’m sorry I overslept,” she apologized as they hurried through the lobby and to the waiting cab. “It took me forever to fall asleep.”
Tachyon watched her intently as he helped her into the cab. They rode in silence, her mind full of the baby, McCoy, Fortunato, motherhood, her career. Suddenly she asked, “If the baby ... if the test ...” She took a deep breath and began again. “If the test shows that there is some abnormality, will they be able to do the abortion today?”
Tachyon took her cold hands in his. “Yes.”
Please, she prayed, please don’t let anything be wrong with my baby. Tachyon’s voice broke into her thoughts. “What?”
“Peri, what happened with McCoy?”
She stared out the window and withdrew her hand from Tachyon’s. “He’s gone,” she said dully, twisting her fingers together. “ I guess he went back to New York.” She blinked away tears. “Everything seemed okay, I mean, about my being pregnant and Fortunato and all. But after he heard that if the baby lived, it would probably be a joker, well ...” Her tears began again. Tachyon handed her his lace-trimmed silk handkerchief. Peregrine took it and wiped her eyes. “Well,” she said, continuing her story, “when Josh heard that, he decided he didn’t want to have anything to do with me or the baby. So he left.” She rolled Tachyon’s handkerchief into a small, damp ball.
“You truly love him, don’t you?” Tachyon asked gently. Peregrine nodded and pushed away more tears.
“If you have an abortion, will he come back?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” she flared. “If he can’t accept me the way I am, then I don’t want him.”
Tachyon shook his head. “Poor Peri,” he said softly. “McCoy is a jackass.”
It seemed like an eternity before the cab rolled up in front of the hospital. As Tachyon went to consult with the receptionist, Peregrine leaned against the cool, white wall of the waiting room and shut her eyes. She tried to make her mind go blank, but she couldn’t stop thinking about McCoy. If he did come to you, you’d take him back, she accused herself. You know you would. He won’t, though, not with me carrying Fortunato’s child. She opened her eyes as someone touched her arm.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Tachyon asked. “Just tired.” She tried to smile.
“Scared?” he asked.
“Yes,” she admitted. “I’d never really thought about having children, but now that I’m pregnant, I want to have a baby more than anything.” Peregrine sighed and folded her arms protectively over her abdomen. “But I hope that the baby is all right.”
“They’re paging the doctor who’ll perform the procedure,” Tachyon said. “I hope you’re thirsty. You have to drink several quarts of water.” He removed a pitcher and a glass from a tray held by the nurse standing beside him. “You can start now.” Peregrine began drinking. She’d finished six glasses before a short man in a white coat hurried up to them.
“Dr. Tachyon?” he asked, grasping Tachyon’s hand. “I am Dr. Ali. It is a great pleasure to meet you and welcome you to my hospital.” He turned to Peregrine. “Is this the patient?” Tachyon performed the introductions.
Dr. Ali rubbed his hands together. “Let’s get on with it,” he said, and they followed him to the OB-GYN section of the hospital.
“You, young lady, into that room.” He pointed. “Remove all your clothing and put on the gown you’ll find there. Keep drinking water. When you’ve changed, come back here and we’ll perform the sonography.”
When Peregrine rejoined Tachyon, now wearing a white coat over his silken finery, and Dr. Ali, she was told to lie on an examining table. She followed their directions, clutching Taurt’s amulet in her hand. A nurse raised the robe up and rubbed a clear gel on Peregrine’s stomach.
“Conductive jelly,” Tachyon explained. “It helps carry the sound waves.”
The nurse began to move a small instrument that looked like a microphone over Peregrine’s belly.
“The transducer,” said Tachyon as he and Ali studied the image on the video screen in front of them.
“Well, what do you see?” Peregrine demanded. “A moment, Peri.”
Tachyon and Ali conferred in low tones.
“Can you print that?” Peregrine heard Tachyon ask. Dr. Ali gave the nurse instructions in Arabic, and very shortly a computer printout of the image appeared.
“You can climb down now,” said Tachyon. “We’ve seen everything there is to see.”
“Well?” Peregrine asked anxiously.
“Everything looks fine ... so far,” said Tachyon slowly. “The child appears to be developing normally.”
“That’s wonderful!” She hugged him as he helped her down from the table.
“If you intend to go through with this pregnancy, I insist on an ultrasound every four to five weeks to monitor the baby’s growth.”
Peregrine nodded. “These sound waves won’t hurt the baby, will they?”
“No,” said Tachyon. “The only thing that can injure the child already exists within it.”
Peregrine looked at Tachyon. “I know you feel you have to keep telling me that; but the baby is going to be just fine, I know it.”
“Peregrine, this is not a fairy tale! You are not going to live happily ever after! This could ruin your life!”
“Growing wings when I was thirteen could have ruined my life, but it didn’t. This isn’t going to either.”
Tachyon sighed. “There is no reasoning with you. Go put your clothes on. It’s time we got back to Cairo.”
Tachyon was waiting for her outside the dressing room. “Where’s Dr. Ali?” she asked, looking around. “I wanted to thank him.”
“He had other patients to attend to.” Tachyon steered her down the corridor with his arm around her shoulders. “Let’s get back ...” his voice broke off. Coming down the hallway toward them was josh McCoy. Peregrine was pleased to see that he looked as awful as she felt. He must not have gotten much sleep eitheir. He stopped in front of them.
“Peri,” he began, “I’ve been thinking—”
“Good for you,” Peregrine said crisply. “Now if you will excuse us—”
McCoy reached out and grabbed her upper arm. “No. I want to talk to you and I intend to do it now” He pulled her away from Tachyon.
She had to talk to him, she told herself. Maybe everything could be straightened out. She hoped.
“It’s all right,” she said shakily to Tachyon. “Let’s get this over with.”
Tachyon’s voice followed them. “McCoy. You are undoubtedly a fool. And I warn you, if you harm her-in any way-you will regret it for a very long time.”
McCoy ignored him and continued to pull Peregrine down the hall, opening doors until he found an empty room. He dragged her in and slammed the door behind them. He let go of her arm and began pacing back and forth.
Peregrine stood against the wall, rubbing her arm where the marks of his fingers were visible.
McCoy stopped pacing and stared at her. “I’m sorry if I hurt you.”
“I think it’s going to bruise,” she said, inspecting her arm.
“We can’t have that,” McCoy said mockingly. “Bruises on America’s sex symbol!”
“That’s pretty rotten,” she said, her voice dangerously quiet.
“True, though,” he shot back. “You are a sex symbol. There’s your Playboy centerfold, that nude ice sculpture of you at Aces High. And what about that naked poster, ‘Fallen Angel,’ that Warhol did?”
“There’s nothing wrong with posing nude! I’m not ashamed to show my body or to have other people look at it.”
“No kidding! You strip for anyone who asks you!”
She went white with fury. “Yes, I do! Including you!” She slapped McCoy’s face and turned to the door, her wings quivering. “ I don’t have to stand here and take any more abuse from you.”
She reached for the door handle, but McCoy shoved in front of her and held it closed. “No. I need to talk to you.”
“You’re not talking, you’re being abusive,” Peregrine retorted, “and I don’t like it one bit.”
“You don’t know what abuse is,” he told her, brown eyes glittering angrily. “Why don’t you scream? Tachyon’s probably right outside. He’d love to rush in and rescue you. You could fuck him in gratitude.”
“How dare you?” Peregrine shouted. “I don’t need him to protect me! Him or you or anyone! Let me go!” she demanded angrily.
“No.” He pressed her body to the wall. She felt like a butterfly pinned on velvet. She could feel his heavy warmth against her. “Is this what it’s going to be like,” he raged,
“men always wanting to protect you? Men wanting to fuck you just because you’re Peregrine? I don’t want anyone else touching you. No one but me.”
“Peri, “ he said more gently. “Look at me.” When she refused, he forced her chin up until she looked him in the eyes, tears rolling down her cheeks. “Peri, I’m sorry for everything I said yesterday. And for everything I said just now. I didn’t intend to lose my temper, but when I saw that overdressed quiche-eater with his hands on you, I just lost it. The thought of anyone but me touching you makes me furious.” The fingers on her chin tightened. “Yesterday when you said that Fortunato was the baby’s father, all I could see was him in bed with you, holding you, loving you.” He let her go and walked to the window of the small room, staring out unseeing, his hands clenching and unclenching. “It was then,” he continued, “that I realized exactly what I was up against. You’re famous and beautiful and sexy and everyone wants you. I don’t want to be Mr. Peregrine. I don’t want to compete with your past. I want your future.”
“What I said yesterday about jokers wasn’t true. It was the first excuse that I could think of. I wanted to hurt you as bad as I was hurting.” He ran a hand through his blond hair.
“It really hurt me when you told me about the baby, because it’s not mine. I don’t hate jokers. I like kids and I’ll love yours and try to be a good father. If Fortunato shows up, well, I’ll deal with it the best I can. Hell, Peri, I love you. Last night without you was terrible. It showed me what the future would be like if I let you go. I love you,” he repeated, “and I want you to be my life.”
Peregrine put her arms around him and leaned against his back. “I love you too. Last night was about the worst night of my life. I realized what you meant to me, and also what this baby means. If I can only have one of you, I want my baby. I’m sorry to say that, but I had to tell you. But I want you too.”
McCoy turned and took her hands. He kissed them. “You sound awfully determined.”
“I am.”
McCoy laughed. “No matter what happens when the baby is born, we’ll do the best we can.” He smiled down at her. “I have a bunch of nieces and nephews, so I even know how to change diapers.”
“Good. You can teach me.”
“I will,” he promised, his lips touching hers as he pulled her closer.
The door opened. A white-clad figure looked at them disapprovingly. After a moment Doctor Tachyon peered in. “Are you quite finished?” he asked icily. “They need this room.”
“We’re done with the room, but we’re not finished. We’re just starting,” Peregrine said, smiling radiantly.
“Well, as long as you’re happy,” Tachyon said slowly. “ I am,” she assured him.
They left the hospital with Tachyon. He got into a cab by himself, while McCoy and Peregrine settled into the horsedrawn carriage waiting at the curb behind the taxi.
“We have to get back to the hotel,” Peregrine said. “Are you propositioning me?”
“Of course not. I have to pack so we can rejoin the tour in Cairo.”
“Today?”
“Yes.”
“Then we’d better hurry”
“Why?”
“Why?” McCoy trailed kisses over her face and neck. “We have to make up for last night, of course.”
“Oh.” Peregrine spoke to the driver and the carriage picked up speed. “We don’t want to waste any more time.”
“Enough has already been wasted,” McCoy agreed. “Are you happy?” he asked softly as she settled in his arms, her head on his chest.
“Happier than I’ve ever been!” But a little voice in the back of her mind kept reminding her of Fortunato.
His arms tightened around her. “I love you.”
The young Lacandon Maya coughed as the smoke followed him across the newly cleared field. Someone had to stay and watch the brush they had cut reduce to the ashes they would use to feed the ground of the milpa. The fire was burning evenly so he moved back out of range of the smoke. Everyone else was at home asleep in the afternoon, and the humid warmth made him drowsy too. Smoothing down his long white robe over his bare legs, he ate the cold tamales that were his dinner.
Lying in the shade, he began to blink and fall under his dreams spell once more. His dreams had taken him to the realm of the gods ever since he had been a boy, but it was rare that he remembered what the gods had said or done. Jose, the old shaman, became so angry when all he could recall were feelings or useless details from his latest vision. The only hope in it all was that the dream became more and more clear each time he had it. He had been denying to Jose that the dream had returned, waiting for the time when he could remember enough to impress even Jose, but the shaman knew he lied.
The dream took him to Xibalba, the domain of Ah Puch, the Lord of Death. Xibalba always smelled of smoke and blood. He coughed as the atmosphere of death entered his lungs. The coughing awakened him, and it took him a moment to realize that he was no longer in the underworld. Eyes watering, he backed away from the fire, out of range of the smoke that the wind had sent to follow him. Maybe his ancestors were angry with him too.
He stared at the flames, now slowly dying down, and moved a little closer to the bonfire in the center of the milpa. Wild-eyed, he slid into a crouch before the fire and watched it closely. Jose had told him again and again to trust what he felt and go where his intuition led him. This time, frightened but glad there was no one to see him, he would do it.
With both hands he pushed his black hair back behind his ears and reached forward to pull a short leafy branch from the edge of the brush pile and put it on the ground before him. Slowly, left hand trembling slightly, he drew the machete from its stained leather scabbard at his side. Flexing—his right hand, he held it chest-high in front of him. He clenched his jaws and turned his head slightly up and away from looking at his hand. The sweat from his forehead fell into his eyes and dripped off his aristocratic nose as he brought the machete down across the palm of his right hand.
He made no sound. Nor did he move as the bright blood ran down his fingers to fall on the deep green of the leaves. Only his eyes narrowed and his chin lifted. When the branch was covered with his blood, he picked it up with his left hand and threw it into the flames. The air smelled of Xibalba again and of his ancestors’ ancient rituals, and he returned to the underworld once more.
As always, a rabbit scribe greeted him, speaking in the ancient language of his people. Clutching the bark paper and brush to its furry chest, it told him in an odd, low voice to follow. Ahau Ah Puch awaited him.
The air was scented by burning blood.
The man and the rabbit had walked through a village of abandoned thatch huts, much like those of his own village. But here patches of thatch were missing from the roofs. The uncovered doorways gaped like the mouths of skulls, while the mud and grass of the walls fell away like the flesh from a decaying body.
The rabbit led him between the high, stone walls of a ball court with carved stone rings set on the walls above his head. He did not remember ever having been in a ball court before, but he knew he could play here, had played here, had scored here. He felt again the hard rubber ball strike the cotton padding on his elbow and arc toward the serpent’s coils carved into the stone ring.
He drew his eyes back from the serpent to the face of the Lord of Death, seated on a reed mat on the dais in front of him at the end of the ball court. Ah Puch’s eyes were black pits set in the white band across his skull. The Ahau’s mouth and nose opened on eternity, and the smells of blood and rotting flesh were strong upon him.
“Hunapu. Ballplayer. You have returned to me.”
The man knelt and put his forehead to the floor before Ah Puch, but he felt no fear. He felt nothing in this dream.
“Hunapu. Son.” The man raised his head at the sound of the old woman’s voice to his left. Ix Chel and her even older husband, Itzamna, sat cross-legged on reed mats attended by the rabbit scribe. Their dais was supported by twin, huge turtles whose intermittently blinking eyes were all that showed they lived.
“The cycle ends.” The grandmother continued to speak. “Change comes for the hach winik. The white stickmen have created their own downfall. You, Hunapu, brother to Xbalanque, are the messenger. Go to Kaminaljuyu and meet your brother. Your path will become clear, ballplayer.”
“Do not forget us, ballplayer.” Ah Puch spoke and his voice was vicious and hollow as if he spoke through a mask. “Your blood is ours. Your enemies’ blood is ours.”
For the first time real fear broke through Hunapu’s numbness. His hand throbbed in pain to the rhythm of Ah Puch’s words, but despite his fear he rose from his kneeling position. His eyes met the endless black of Ah Puch’s.
Before he could speak, a ball whose every edge was a razor-sharp blade cut through the air toward him. Then Xibalba was gone and he was back at the dead fire, hearing the old god speak but one word.
“Remember.”
The stocky Mayan worker stood in the shadows of one of the work tents as he watched the last group of archaeological students and professors break up. As they wandered into their sleeping tents, he withdrew even farther into the protection of the tent. His classic Maya profile marked him as a pure-blood Indian, the lowest class in Guatemala’s social hierarchy; but here among the blonde students, it marked him as a conquest. It was rare that a student of the past got to sleep with a living example of a race of priest-kings. The worker, dressed in overlarge blue jeans and a filthy University of Pennsylvania T-shirt, saw no reason to discourage this impression. But he made himself as unattractive as possible to watch their simultaneous desire and repulsion. He walked carefully down the short passage between the tents to the sheet-metal storage shed.
The Indian once again assured himself that there were no observers before grasping the padlock and thrusting his pick into the keyhole. Squinting against the flickering firelight, he probed a few times and the lock was open. He flashed bright teeth in a contemptuous look back at the professors’ tent. Slipping the lock into a pocket of his jeans, he opened the door and eased himself sideways into the shed. Unlike the archaeologists, he didn’t need to stoop.
He waited a moment for his eyes to adjust before tugging a flashlight from his back pocket. The end of the light was covered by a torn piece of cloth secured by a rubber band.
The dim circle of light roamed around the room almost at random until it froze on a shelf crowded with objects taken from the tombs and trenches dug around the city. The thief moved sideways along the narrow center aisle, careful not to disturb the pots, statues, and other partially cleaned artifacts on the shelves to either side. The small man pulled half a dozen small pots and miniature . statutes off the shelves. None were located at the front of a shelf nor were they the finest examples, but all were intact, if somewhat the worse for their long burial. He put them into a cotton drawstring sack.
Sneering at the rows of ceramics and jade carvings, he wondered why the norteamericanos could curse the graverobbers of the past when they were so efficient at the same thing. He sidled back up the aisle, catching a red-and-blackpainted pot as his movement caused it to rock dangerously near the edge. Quick hands picked up a battered jade earplug and he paused, running the flashlight beam around the narrow room once more. Two things caught his eyes, a stingray spine and a bottle of Tanqueray gin kept locked up away from the workers.
Clutching the bottle and the spine against his chest, he listened, head leaned against the door, for any stray noises. All he heard was the muffled sound of lovemaking from a nearby tent. It sounded like the tall redhead. Satisfied that no one would observe him, he slid outside and replaced the lock.
He waited to open the gin until he had climbed up one of the larger hills. The professors said the hills were all temples. He had seen their drawings of what this place had once been. He didn’t believe what he had been shown: plazas and tall temples with roof combs, all painted in yellow and red. He especially didn’t believe the tall, thin men who presided over the temples. They didn’t look like him, anyone he knew, or even much like the murals painted on some of the temple walls, but the professors said that they were his ancestors. It was typical of the norteamericanos. But it meant that he was only stealing his inheritance.
Something poked his side as he leaned over to open the bottle. He pulled the stingray spine out of his pocket. One of the blondes, no, the redhead, had told him what the old kings had done. Guh-ross, she had said. He had privately agreed. The norteamericano women with whom he slept always asked lots of questions about the ways of the old ones. They seemed to think that he should have the knowledge of a brujo just because he was an Indian. Gringas. He learned more from them than anyone in his family. They had taught him what was valuable, and more important, what would be immediately missed. He had a nice little collection now. He would be rich after he sold them in Guatemala.
The gin was good. He leaned back against a convenient tree trunk and watched the moon. Ix Chel, the Old Woman, was the moon goddess. The old ones’ gods were ugly, not like the Virgin Mary or Jesus or even God in the Church where he had been raised. He picked up the stingray spine. Someone had brought it long ago up to this city in the Highlands. It was carved with intricate designs along its entire length. He held it beside his leg, measuring it against his thigh. It ran the full length. All those stories. He.reached out for the gin bottle, but he missed and fell forward, catching himself with his free hand. He was drunk.
The moonlight shone off his sweating torso as he pulled off his T-shirt and folded it none too neatly into a pad. He put the shirt on his right shoulder. Closing his eyes, he weaved to the left and reopened them, blinking rapidly. He tried to pull his legs up into the position he had seen in so many paintings. It took maneuvering. He had to brace himself against the rock and hold his legs in place with his right hand. He secured the shirt with his jaw and his raised shoulder.
With a sureness that belied his intoxication, he brought up the spine and pierced his right ear.
He gasped and swore at the pain. It swept through him, driving out the alcohol and bringing on a euphoria as the blood flowed from his shredded earlobe and was absorbed by the T-shirt. The high made him tremble. It was better than the gin, better than the marijuana the graduate students had, better than the professor’s cocaine he had once stolen and snorted.
Penetrating his shadowed mind was the impression that he was no longer alone on the temple. He opened his eyes, not realizing that he had closed them. For just a moment the temple as it had once stood glowed in the moonlight. The bright reds were muted by the dim light. His wife knelt before him with a rope o€ thorns drawn through her tongue. Attendants surrounded them. His heavy ornamental headdress covered his eyes. He blinked.
The temple was a pile of stone covered by the jungle. There was no wife wearing jade, no attendants. He was wearing dirty jeans again. He shook his head sharply to clear away the last of the vision. That hurt, aiee, did it hurt. It must have been the gin and listening to those women. According to what they had said, he’d messed up the old rites anyway. The power was supposed to be in the burning blood.
The shirt had fallen from his shoulder. It was bright red and sodden with his blood. He thought about it a moment, then pulled out a cigarette lighter he had stolen from one of the professors and tried to burn the shirt. It was too wet; the flames kept going out. Instead he made a fire with some sticks he picked up off the ground. When he finally had a small fire going, he threw on the shirt. The burning blood gave off smoke and a stench that nearly made him sick. Mostly in jest he sat in front of the blaze and aped the cross-legged position he had seen on so many pots, one hand extended toward the flames. He was starting to get very tired and staring at the fire mesmerized him.
What little he knew of Xibalba led him to believe that it was a place of darkness and flames, like the hell the fathers warned him about as a child. It wasn’t. It most resembled a remote village where they still lived by the old ways. No television antennas, no radios blaring the latest in rock and roll from Guatemala. All was silent. He saw no one as he walked about the small group of huts. The only movement he saw was a bat flying out of the low doorway of one of the thatch-roofed houses. The roofs were pitched like the ceilings of the temple rooms, high and narrow, rising almost to a point. He felt as if he were walking through a mural on a temple wall. It was all so familiar. He remembered that none of his usual drunken dreams had this clarity.
A rhythmic ga-pow, ga-pow brought him through the quiet to a ball court. Three human figures sat on the platform on top of the walls. He recognized them as Ah Puch, Itzamna, and Ix Chel-the Death God, the Old Man, and the Old Woman, supreme in the Mayan pantheon, or as supreme as any of the many deities were. The three were surrounded by animals who assisted them as scribes and servants. Drawing his gaze back down the stone walls to the packed-dirt court itself, he saw the source of the noise. Not deigning to notice him, a creature that was half-human, half-jaguar repeatedly attempted to knock a ball through one of the intricately carved stone hoops high on the walls of the court. The creature never used its paws. Instead it used head, hips, elbows, and knees to send the ball bouncing up the wall toward the ring. The jaguar-man and its fangs frightened him. Since the dream had begun, it was the first thing he had felt besides curiosity and wondering how he could steal those stone rings. He watched the muscles beneath the black spots bunch and release as he considered why none of this seemed strange in the least. He lifted his head and stared up at the watchers.
From one corner of his eye he saw the ball coming toward him. Moving in patterns that seemed as familiar as the village, he swung away from it before bringing his elbow up and under the ball and launching it toward the nearest ring. It arched through the goal without touching the stone. The watchers gasped and murmured to each other. He was just as surprised, but he decided that discretion was the best course here.
“Ai! Not bad!” He yelled up at them in Spanish. Lord Death shook his head and glared at the old couple. Itzamna spoke to him in pure Maya. Although he had never spoken the language before in his life, he recognized it and understood it.
“Welcome, Xbalanque, to Xibalba. You are as fine a ballplayer as your namesake.”
“My name’s not Xbalanque.”
“From this time, it is.” The black death-mask of Ah Puch glared down at him and he swallowed his next comment. “Si, this is a dream and I am Xbalanque.” He spread his hands and nodded. “Whatever you say.”
Ah Puch looked away.
“You are different; you have always known this.” Ix Chel smiled down at him. It was the smile of a crocodile, not a grandmother. He grinned up at her, wishing he’d wake up. Now.
“You are a thief.”
He began thinking about how he was going to get out of this dream. He had remembered the more troublesome parts of the ancient myths-the decapitations, the houses of multiple horrors ...
“You should use your abilities to gain power. “
“Hey, I’ll do that. You’re right. No problem. Just as soon as I get back.” One of the rabbits who was attending the three gods watched him intently with head canted to one side and nostrils twitching. Occasionally it wrote frantically on an odd, folded piece of paper with a brushlike pen. He was reminded of a comic book he had once read, Alice in Wonderland. There had been rabbits in her dream too. And he was getting hungry.
“Go to the city, Xbalanque.” Itzamna’s voice was squeaky, pitched even higher than his wife’s.
“Hey, isn’t there a brother in this somewhere?” He was remembering even more of the myth.
“You’ll find him. Go.” The ball court began to quiver in front of his eyes, and the jaguar’s paw struck him in the back of the head.
Xbalanque grunted in pain as his head slid off the rock he had apparently been using as a pillow. He pulled himself upright, shoving his bare back against the rough limestone.
The dream was still with him, and he couldn’t seem to focus on anything. The moon had gone down while he’d been passed out. It was very dark. The uncovered stones of the ruin glowed with their own light, like bones disturbed in a grave. The bones of his people’s past glory.
He bent over to pick up his stolen treasures and fell to one knee. Unable to stop himself, he vomited the gin and tortillas he had eaten. Madre de Dios, he felt bad. Body empty and shaking, he staggered up again to begin the descent from the pyramid. Maybe that dream was right. He should leave, go to Guatemala City now. Take what he had. It was enough to let him live comfortably for a while.
Christ, his head hurt. Hungover and still drunk. It wasn’t fair. The last thing he picked up was the stingray spine. Its barbs were still coated with his blood. Xbalanque reached up to touch his ear gingerly. He fingered the hole in the lobe with pain and disgust. His hand came away bloody. That was definitely not part of the dream. Swaying, he searched through his pockets until he found the earplug. He tried to insert it into his earlobe, but it hurt too much and the torn flesh would not support it. He was almost sick again.
Xbalanque tried to remember the strange dream. It was fading. For the moment all he recalled was that the dream recommended a retreat to the city. It still sounded like a good idea. As he alternately tripped and slid down the side of the hill, he decided to steal a jeep and go in style. Maybe they wouldn’t miss it. He couldn’t walk all the way with this headache anyway.
Inside the dark, smoke-filled thatch house Jose listened gravely to Hunapu’s tale of his vision. The shaman nodded when Hunapu spoke of his audience with the gods. When he finished, he looked to the old man for interpretation and guidance.
“Your vision is a true one, Hunapu.” He straightened up and slid from his hammock to the dirt floor. Standing before the crouching Hunapu, he threw copal incense on his fire. “You must do as the gods tell you or bring us all misfortune.”
“But where am I to go? What is Kaminaljuyu?” Hunapu shrugged in his confusion. “I do not understand. I have no brother, only sisters. I do not play this ball game. Why me?”
“You have been chosen and touched by the gods. They see what we do not.” Jose put his hand on the young man’s shoulder. “It is very dangerous to question them. They anger easily.”
“Kaminaljuyu is Guatemala City. That is where you must go. But first we must prepare you.” The shaman looked past him. “Sleep tonight. Tomorrow you will go.”
When he returned to the shaman’s home in the morning, most of the village was there to share in the magical thing that had happened. When he left them, Jose walked with him into the rain forest, carrying a package. Out of sight of the village, the shaman wrapped Hunapu’s elbows and knees with the cotton padding he had brought with him. The old man told him that this was how he had been dressed in Jose’s dream the night before. It too was a sign that Hunapu’s vision was true. Jose warned him to tell those he met of his quest only if they could be trusted and were Lacandones like himself. The Ladinos would try to stop him if they knew.
Xepon was small. Perhaps thirty multicolored houses clustered around the church on the square. Their pink, blue, and yellow paint was faded, and they looked as though they crouched with their backs to the rain that had begun earlier. As Xbalanque bounced down the mountain road into the village, he was happy to see the cantina. He had decided to take the most isolated roads he could find on the worn road map under the driver’s seat to get into the city.
He started to park in front of the cantina, but instead decided to park around the side, away from curious eyes. He thought it was strange that he had seen no one since entering town, but the weather was fit for no one, especially him and his hangover. His Reeboks, another gift from the norteamericanos, flopped against the wet wood walkway that ran in front of the cantina before he entered the open doorway. It was a disconcerting sound amid a silence broken only by dripping water and the rain on the tin roofs. Even the dimness outside had not prepared him for the darkness within, or the years of tobacco smoke still trapped between the narrow walls. A few tattered and faded Feliz Navidad banners hung down from the gray ceiling.
“What do you want?” He was assaulted in Spanish from behind the long bar that lined the wall to his left. The force and hostility behind the question hurt his head. A stooped old Indian woman glared at him from behind the bar.
“Cerveza. “
Unconcerned for his preferences; she removed a bottle from the cooler behind the bar and flipped off the cap as he walked toward her. She set it on the stained and pitted wood of the bar. When Xbalanque reached for it, she put a small gnarled hand around the bottle and nodded her chin at him. He pulled some crumpled quetzals from his pocket and laid them on the bar. There was a crash of nearby thunder and they both tensed. He realized for the first time that the reason she was so hostile might not have anything to do with an early customer. She snatched the money off the bar as if to deny her fear and put it into the sash around her stained huipil.
“What do you have to eat?” Whatever was going on certainly had nothing to do with him. The beer tasted good, but it was not what he really needed.
“Black bean soup.” The woman’s answer was a statement, definitely not an invitation. It was accompanied by more thunder rolling up the valley.
“What else?” Looking around, Xbalanque belatedly realized that something was extremely wrong. Every cantina he had ever been in, no matter where or how large, had some old drunks sitting around waiting to try to pick up a free drink. And women, even old women such as this one, rarely worked in bars in these small villages.
“Nothing.” Her face was closed to him as he looked for a clue to what was happening.
Another peal of thunder turned into the low growling of truck engines. Both their heads swung toward the door. Xbalanque stepped back from the bar and looked for a back way out. There was none. When he turned again to the old woman, she had her back to him. He ran for the door.
Green-clad soldiers piled off the backs of the two army transports parked in the middle of the square. The paths of the trucks were marked by the broken benches and shrubs they had run over on their way across the tiny park. As the soldiers hit the ground, they pulled their machine guns into firing position. Two-man teams immediately left the central area to search the houses lining the square. Other armed men moved out of the square through the rest of the village.
Palms spread against the plaster, Xbalanque slid along the outside wall of the cantina for the safety of the side street.
If he could get to the jeep, he had a chance to escape. He had made it to the corner of the building when one of the soldiers spotted him. At the soldier’s order to halt, he jumped for the street, sliding in the mud, and dashed for the jeep.
Shots into the ground in front of him splashed him with mud. Xbalanque threw his hand up to protect his eyes and fell to his knees. Before he could get back up, a sullen-faced soldier grabbed his arm and hauled Xbalanque back to the square, his feet slipping in the thick mud as he scrambled to stand up and walk.
One of the young Ladino soldiers stood with his Uzi pointed at Xbalanque’s head while he was shoved facedown in the mud and searched. Xbalanque had hidden the artifacts in the jeep, but the soldiers found the stash of quetzals in his Reeboks. One of them held the wad of money up to the army lieutenant in charge. The lieutenant looked disgusted at the condition of the bills, but he put them in his own pocket anyway. Xbalanque did not protest. Through the excruciating pain in his head that had begun when he fled the soldiers, he was trying to decide what he could say to get out of this. If they knew the jeep was stolen, he was dead.
The sound of more gunfire made him wince into the mud. He raised his head slightly, knocking it into the barrel of the gun above him. The soldier holding it pulled back enough for him to see another man being dragged from inside the dilapidated yellow school on the west side of the square. He heard children crying inside the small building. The second prisoner was also an Indian, tall with eyeglasses knocked askew on his narrow face. The two soldiers escorting him allowed him to regain his feet before presenting him to the lieutenant.
The schoolteacher straightened his glasses before staring directly into the lieutenant’s mirrored sunglasses. Xbalanque knew he was in trouble; the schoolteacher was deliberately trying to anger the army officer. It could only result in worse consequences than they already faced.
The lieutenant brought up his swagger stick and knocked the teacher’s glasses off his face. When the teacher bent down to pick them up, the officer struck him across the side of the head. With blood dripping down his face onto his white European shirt, the teacher replaced his glasses. The right lens was shattered. Xbalanque began looking for an escape route. He hoped that his guard might be sufficiently distracted. Looking sideways up at the young man with the Uzi, he saw that the boy had not taken his eyes off him.
“You are a communist.” The lieutenant made it a statement, not a question, directed to the teacher. Before the teacher could reply, the officer glanced toward the school house with annoyance. The children inside were still crying. He swung his swagger stick toward the school and nodded at a soldier to his left. Without aiming, the soldier panned his machine gun across the building, breaking windows and pocking the plaster. A few screams erupted from inside, then silence.
“You are a traitor and an enemy to Guatemala.” He brought the stick up across the other side of the teacher’s head. There was more blood, and Xbalanque began to feel sick and somehow wrong.
“Where are the other traitors?”
“There are no other traitors.” The teacher shrugged and smiled.
“Fernandez, the church.” The lieutenant spoke to a soldier smoking a cigarette leaning against one of the trucks. Fernandez tossed away the cigarette and picked up the thick tube propped beside him against the truck. While he aimed, another of the men around the trucks shoved a rocket into the launcher.
Turning toward the old colonial church, Xbalanque saw, for the first time, the village priest standing outside arguing with one of the search teams as the soldiers stood there holding silver candlesticks. There was an explosion from the rocket launcher, followed a split second later by the blast as the church fell in on itself. The soldiers standing outside had seen it coming and fallen to the ground. The priest collapsed, from shock or injuries, Xbalanque could not tell. By now he was feeling the pain in every joint and muscle.
The rain mixed with the blood on the teacher’s face and, as it dripped down, stained his shirt pink. Xbalanque didn’t see any more. The pain had grown until he curled up in the mud, clutching his knees to his chest. Something was happening. It must be because he had never felt such fear before. He knew that he was going to die. The damned old gods had led him to this.
He barely heard the order given to move him up against the school wall with the teacher. The lieutenant didn’t even care who he was. For some reason the fact that the officer hadn’t even bothered to question him seemed the worst indignity of all.
Xbalanque shook as he stood with his back against the already bullet-marked wall. The soldiers left them there alone and backed off, out of the line of fire. The pain had begun to come in waves, driving out his fear, driving out everything except the enormous weight of the agony in his body. He stared through the soldiers gathering for the firing squad at the rainbow forming between the bright, jade green mountains as the sun finally came out. The teacher patted him on the shoulder.
“Are you all right?” His companion actually looked concerned. Xbalanque was silent as he gathered sufficient energy not to collapse to the ground.
“See, God has a sense of humor.” The madman smiled at him as if at a crying child. Xbalanque cursed him in the language of his Quiche grandmother, a tongue he had not spoken before his dream of Xibalba.
“We die for the lives of our people.” The schoolteacher lifted his head proudly and faced the soldiers’ guns as they were raised to aim.
“No. Not again!” Xbalanque rushed the guns as they fired. His force knocked the other man to his knees. As he moved, Xbalanque realized in one small part of his brain that the exquisite agony had gone. As the bullets sped to meet his charge, he felt only stronger, more powerful than he ever had before. The bullets reached him.
Xbalanque hesitated as they struck. He waited an instant for the inevitable pain and final darkness. They didn’t come. He looked at the soldiers; they stared back wide-eyed. Some ran for the trucks. Others dropped their guns and simply ran. A few held their ground and kept firing, looking to the lieutenant, who was backing up slowly toward the trucks and calling for Fernandez.
The warrior scooped up a brick from the street and, crying out his name in a mixture of fear and exhilaration, threw it with all his strength at one of the trucks. As it flew, it struck a soldier, crushing his head and splattering blood and brains across his fleeing companions before flying on toward the vehicle. The soldier had slowed its momentum. It was dropping as it streaked toward the truck. The brick struck the gas tank and the transport exploded.
Xbalanque stopped his rush toward the soldiers and stared at the fiery scene. Men in flames-soldiers who had made the shelter of the troop carrier-screamed. The scene was right out of one of the American movies he had watched in the city. But the movies hadn’t had the smell of petrol, burning canvas and rubber, and underneath everything else the stench of burning flesh. He began backing away.
Remotely, as if through heavy padding, he felt someone grab his arm. Xbalanque turned to strike his enemy. The teacher was staring down at him through the shattered glasses.
“Se habla espanol?” The taller man was guiding him away from the square up a side street.
“St, si. “ Xbalanque was beginning to have time to wonder what was happening. He knew he had never before been able to do anything such as this. Something was not right. What had that vision done to him? He was involuntarily relaxing and he felt the strength draining from him. He began to lean against the wall of a peeling pale-red house.
“Madre de Dios-we have to keep moving.” The teacher hauled at him. “They’ll bring up the artillery. You’re good with bullets, but can you fend off rockets?”
“I don’t know ...” Xbalanque stopped to think about this for a moment.
“We’ll figure it out later. Come on.”
Xbalanque realized that the man was right, but it was so difficult. With the fear of death gone, he felt as though he had lost not only the new power but also his regular strength. He looked up the street toward the forested mountainside so far away above the houses. The trees were safety. The soldiers would never follow them into the forest where guerrillas could be waiting to ambush them. The—flat sound of a shot brought him back.
The teacher pulled him away from the house and, keeping his hand underneath Xbalanque’s arm, steered him toward the green refuge ahead. They cut left between two small houses and moved sideways along the narrow, muddy alley that divided the clapboard and plaster buildings. Xbalanque was moving now, sliding and skidding in the slippery brown mud. Past rear gardens, the alley turned to a path leading up the steep hillside into the trees. The open ground was at least fifteen meters of utter exposure.
He ran into his compatriot as the other man stopped and peered around the corner of the house on the left.
“Clear.” The teacher had not relinquished his grip on Xbalanque’s arm. “Can you run?”
“St.”
After a frightened dash Xbalanque collapsed a few yards into the forest. The rain forest was thick enough to prevent their being spotted if they stayed still and quiet. They heard the soldiers arguing below until a sergeant came by and ordered them back to the square. Someone in the village would die in their place. The teacher was sweating and nervous. Xbalanque wondered if it was for their unwitting victim or his own unexpected survival. A bullet in the back was not as romantic as a firing squad.
As they trudged deeper into the wet mountains seeking to avoid the soldiers, Xbalanque’s companion introduced himself. The teacher was Esteban Akabal, a devoted communist and freedom fighter. Xbalanque listened without comment to a long lecture on the evils of the existing government and the coming revolution. He only wondered at where Akabal found the energy to go on. When Akabal at last slowed down, panting as they worked their way up a difficult trail, Xbalanque asked him why he worked with Ladinos.
“It is necessary to work together for the greater good. The divisions between Quiche and Ladino are created and encouraged by the repressive regime under which we labor. They are false and, once removed, will no longer hamper the worker’s natural desire to join with his fellow worker.” At a level section of the path both men paused to rest.
“The Ladinos will use us, but nothing will change their feelings or mine.” Xbalanque shook his head. “I have no desire to join your workers army. How do I get a road to the city?”
“You can’t take a main road. The soldiers will shoot you on sight.” Akabal looked at the cuts and bruises Xbalanque had incurred on’ their climb. “Your talent seems very selective.”
“I don’t think it’s a talent.” Xbalanque wiped off some of the dried blood on his jeans. “I had a dream about the gods.”
They gave me my name and my powers. After the dream I could do-what I did ‘in Xepon.
“The norteamericanos gave you your powers. You are what they call an ace.” Akabal examined him closely. “I know of few others this far south of the United States.”
“It’s a disease actually. A red-haired alien from outer space brought it to Earth. Or so they claim, since biological warfare has been outlawed. Most of those who caught it died. Some were changed.”
“ I have seen them begging in the city. It was bad sometimes.” Xbalanque shrugged. “But I’m not like that.”
“A very few become something more than they were. The norteamericanos worship these aces.” Akabal shook his head. “Typical exploitation of the masses by fascist media masters.”
“You know, you could be very important to our fight.” The schoolteacher leaned forward. “The mythic element, a tie to our people’s past. It would be good, very good, for us.”
“I don’t think so. I’m going to the city.” Chagrined, Xbalanque remembered the treasure he had left in the jeep. “After I return to Xepon.”
“The people need you. You could be a great leader.”
“I’ve heard this before.” Xbalanque was uncertain. The offer was attractive, but he wanted to be more than the people’s-army figurehead. With his power he wanted to do something, something with money in it. But first he had to get to Guatemala City.
“Let me help you.” Akabal had that intense look of desire that the graduate students had when they wanted to sleep with the Mayan priest-king; or as one of them had said, a reasonable facsimile thereof. Combined with the blood now caked on his face, it made Akabal appear to be the devil himself. Xbalanque backed off a couple steps.
“No, thank you. I’m just going to go back to Xepon in the morning, get my jeep, and leave.” He started back down the trail. Over his shoulder he spoke to Akabal. “Thanks for your help.”
“Wait. It’s getting dark. You’ll never make it back down at night.” The teacher sat back down on a rock beside the trail. “We’re far enough in that, even with more men, they would not dare follow us. We’ll stay here tonight, and tomorrow morning we’ll start back for the village. It will be safe. It will take the lieutenant at least a day to explain the loss of his truck and get reinforcements.”
Xbalanque stopped and turned back. “No more talk about armies?”
“No, I promise.” Akabal smiled and gestured for Xbalanque to take another rock.
“Do you have anything to eat? I’m very hungry.” Xbalanque could not remember ever having been this hungry, even in the worst parts of his childhood.
“No. But if we were in New York, you could go to a restaurant called Aces High. It is just for people like you .... “ As Akabal told him about life in the United States for the aces, Xbalanque gathered some branches to protect against the wet ground and lay down on them. He was asleep long before Akabal ended his speech.
In the morning before dawn they were on the trail back down. Akabal had found some nuts and edible plants for food, but Xbalanque remained ravenous and in pain. Still, they made it back to the village in much less time than it had taken them to toil up the trail the day before.
Hunapu found that wearing the heavy cotton padding while he was walking was clumsy and hot, so he wrapped it up and tied it to his back. He had walked a day and a night without sleep when he came to a small Indian village only slightly larger than his own. Hunapu stopped and wrapped the padding around himself as Jose had done it. The dress of a warrior and a ballplayer, he thought proudly, and held his head high. The people here were not Lacandones and they looked at him suspiciously as he entered with the sunrise.
An old man walked out into the main path that led between the thatched houses. He called out a greeting to Hunapu in a tongue that was similar but not quite the same as that of his people. Hunapu introduced himself to the t’o’ohil as he walked up to him. The village guardian stared at the young man for a full minute of contemplation before inviting him into his home, the largest house Hunapu had ever entered.
While most of the village waited outside for the guardian to tell them about this morning apparition, the two men spoke and drank coffee. It was a difficult conversation at first, but Hunapu soon understood the old man’s pronunciations and was able to make himself and his mission known. When Hunapu was finished, the t’o’ohil sat back and called his three sons to him. They stood behind him and waited while he spoke to Hunapu.
“I believe that you are Hunapu returned to us. The end of the world comes soon, and the gods have sent messengers to us.” The t’o’ohil gestured to one of his sons, a dwarf, to come forward. “Chan Vin will go with you. As you see, the gods touched him and he speaks to them directly for us. If you are hach, true, he will know it. If you are not, he will know that also.”
The dwarf went to stand by Hunapu and looked back at his father and nodded.
“Bol will also go with you.” At this, the youngest son started and glared down at his father. “He dislikes the old ways and he will not believe you. But he honors me and he will protect his brother in your travels. Boll get your gun and pack whatever you need. Chan Vin, I will speak to you. Stay.” The old man put down his coffee and stood. “ I will tell the village of your vision and your journey. There may be those who wish to accompany you.”
Hunapu joined him outside and. stood silently while the t’o’ohil told his people that the young man followed a vision and was to be respected. Most of the people left after that, but a few remained and Hunapu spoke to them of his quest. Although they were Indian, he felt uncomfortable speaking to them because they wore pants and shirts like the Ladinos, not the long tunics of the Lacandones.
When Chan K’in and Boll dressed for travel in the village’s traditional clothing and carrying supplies, came for him, only three men were left to hear him. Hunapu rose and the other men walked away, talking among themselves. Chan Vin was calm. His composed face showed nothing of what he felt or if he was reluctant to embark on a journey that would undoubtedly bring his twisted body pain. Boll though, showed his anger at his father’s order. Hunapu wondered if the tall brother would simply shoot him in the back of the head at the first opportunity and return to his life. It did not matter. He had no choice; he had to continue on the path that the gods had chosen for him. He did feel a certain misgiving that the gods would have chosen him to have the company of such garishly dressed men. Used to the simple shifts of his people, he considered the bright red-and-purple embroidery and sashes of these men to be more like the clothing of the Ladinos than to be proper dress for real men. No doubt he would see much that he had not seen before on his travels to meet his brother. He hoped that his brother knew how to dress.
It took much less time to get out of the mountains than it had to climb up into them. A few hours walking that began at dawn brought Xbalanque and Akabal back into Xepon. This time the town was crowded with people. Looking at the remains of the truck in the square where most of the activity was centered made Xbalanque proud. Too late he began thinking about the price the town had paid for his escape. Perhaps these people would not be as impressed with him as Akabal. Akabal led him past the angry stares of some of the townsmen and the tearstained hate of many of the women. With so many people and Akabal’s firm grip on his arm, he had no chance to make a break for the jeep and escape. They ended up back at the cantina, today the site of a town meeting.
Their entry caused an uproar as some of the men called for his death and others proclaimed him a hero. Xbalanque said nothing. He was afraid to open his mouth. He stood to one side, back against the hard wooden edge of the bar, as Akabal climbed up and began speaking to the groups of men circulating beneath him. It took several moments of mutual shouts and insults in Quiche and Spanish to gain the attention of all the men.
He was so busy watching the men watching him for signs of violence that it took a while for what Akabal was saying to make sense to him. Akabal was again mixing Maya and Spanish in a speech that centered on Xbalanque and his “mission.” Akabal had taken what Xbalanque had said to him and linked it to a Christian second coming and the end of the world as prophesied by the ancient priests.
Xbalanque, the morning star, was the herald of a new age in which the Indians would take back their lands and become the rulers of their land as they had been centuries before. The coming doom was that of the Ladinos and norteamericanos, not the Maya, who would inherit the Earth. No longer should the Quiche follow the lead of outsiders, socialist, communist, or democratic. They had to follow their own or lose themselves forever. And Xbalanque was the sign.
He had been given his powers by the gods. Confused, Xbalanque remembered Akabal’s explanation of his powers as the result of a disease. But even this son of a god could not win alone against the fascist invaders. He was sent here to gain followers, warriors who would fight at his side until they had taken back all that the Ladinos and the centuries had stolen from them.
When he had finished, Akabal hauled Xbalanque up onto the bar and jumped down, leaving the stocky man in filthy T-shirt and blue jeans alone above the packed room. Turning to face Xbalanque, Akabal raised his fist into the air. and began chanting Xbalanque’s name over and over again. Slowly, and then with increasing fervor, every man in the room followed the teacher’s lead, many raising their rifles in their fists.
Faced with a chant of his name that shook the room, Xbalanque swallowed nervously, his hunger forgotten. He almost wished that he had only the army to worry about. He was not yet ready to become the leader about which the gods had spoken to him. This was not at all how he had imagined it. He wasn’t wearing the splendid uniform he had designed in his mind, and this was not the well trained and directed army that would bring him to power and the presidential palace. They were all staring at him with an expression in their faces that he had never seen before. It was worship and trust. Slowly, trembling, he raised his own fist and saluted them and the gods. He silently prayed to those gods that he would not screw the whole thing up.
A dirty little man, the nightmare of the Ladinos come to life, he knew that he was not what these people had seen in their dreams either. But he also knew that he was their only hope now. And whether he was the accidental creation of the norteamericanos’ sickness or the child of the gods, he swore to all the deities he recognized, Mayan and European, Jesus, Mary, and Itzamna, that he would do everything he could for his people.
But his brother Hunapu had to be having an easier time than he was.
Just outside the village, as Hunapu had been removing his cotton armor, one of the men he had spoken to had joined them. Silently they walked on through the Peten forests, each man with his own thoughts. They moved slowly because of Chan K’in, but not as slowly as Hunapu had expected. The dwarf was clearly used to making his own way with little help from others. There had been no dwarves in Hunapu’s village, but they were known to bring good luck and to be the voice of the gods. The little men were revered. Jose had often said that Hunapu was meant to be a dwarf since he had been touched by the gods. Hunapu looked forward to learning from Chan Vin.
At the height of the sun they took a break. Hunapu was staring at the sun, his namesake, at the center of the sky when Chan Vin hobbled over to him. The dwarf’s face still showed nothing. They sat together in silence for some minutes before Chan Vin spoke.
“Tomorrow, at dawn, a sacrifice. The gods wish to make sure that you are worthy.” Chan Vin’s huge black eyes were turned on Hunapu, who nodded in agreement. Chan Vin stood up and walked back to sit by his brother. Bol still looked as if he wanted Hunapu dead.
It was a long, hot afternoon for walking. The insects were bad and nothing worked to keep them away. It was nearly dark by the time they had trudged to Yalpina. Chan Vin entered first and spoke to the village elders. When he had gained permission for them to enter, he sent a child out to the waiting party in the forest. Wearing his armor, Hunapu strode into the tiny town square. Everyone had gathered to hear Chan K’in and Hunapu speak. It was plain that they knew Chan Vin, and his reputation gave weight to Hunapu s claims. Until they were hushed by their mothers, the children giggled and made fun of Hunapu’s cotton armor and bare legs. But when Hunapu began speaking of his quest to find his brother and join him in a revival of their . own Indian culture, the people fell under the spell of his dream. They had their own portents.
Fifteen years earlier a child had been born who had the brilliant feathers of a jungle bird. The girl was thrust forward through the crowd. She was beautiful, and the feathers that replaced her hair only made her more so. She said that she had been waiting for one to come and that Hunapu was surely the one. Hunapu took her hand and she stood at his side.
That night many of the people from the town came to the home of the girl’s parents, where Hunapu and Chan K’in were staying, and spoke to them about the future. The girl, Maria, never left Hunapu. When the last villager had left and they curled up by the fire, Maria watched them sleep.
Before dawn Chan K’in woke Hunapu and they trekked out to the forest, leaving Maria behind to get ready to leave. Hunapu had only his machete, but Chan K’in had a slim European knife. Taking the dwarf’s knife, Hunapu knelt, holding his hands out in front of him palm up. In the left was the knife. The right, already healed from the machete cut three days before, trembled in anticipation. Without flinching or hesitating Hunapu drove the knife through the palm of his right hand, holding it there while his head dropped back and his body quivered in ecstasy.
With no movement except for a momentary widening of his huge eyes, Chan Vin watched the other man gasping, blood dripping from his hand. He roused himself from his revery to put a piece of hand-loomed cotton cloth on the ground beneath Hunapu’s hands. He moved to Hunapu’s side and pulled his head over toward him, staring into Hunapu’s open, blind eyes as if seeking to peer into his mind itself.
After several minutes Hunapu collapsed to the ground and Chan Vin snatched up the blood-drenched cloth. Using flint and steel, he lit a small fire. As Hunapu returned to consciousness, he threw the offering onto the fire. Hunapu crawled over and both men watched the smoke rise to heaven to meet the rising sun.
“What did you see?” Chan K’in spoke first, his immobile face giving no clue to his own thoughts.
“The gods are pleased with me, but we must move faster and gather more people. I think ... I saw Xbalanque leading an army of people.” Hunapu nodded to himself and clasped his hands. “That is what they want.”
“It is beginning now. But we still have far to go and much to do before we succeed.” Hunapu looked over at Chan Vin.
The dwarf sat with his’ stunted legs spread out before him with his chin propped up on his hand.
“For now, we will go back to Yalpina and eat.” He struggled to his feet. “I saw some trucks. We will take one and travel on the roads from now on.”
Their discussion was interrupted by Maria, who ran into the clearing, panting.
“The cacique, he wants to speak to you now. A runner has come in from another village. The army is sweeping the area looking for rebels. You must leave at once.” Her feathers shown in the early morning light as she looked at him in entreaty.
Hunapu nodded to her.
“I will meet you in the village. Prepare to go with us. You will be a sign to others.” Hunapu turned back toward Chan K’in and closed his eyes in concentration. The trees in the background of the clearing began turning into the houses of Yalpina. The village seemed to grow toward him. The last thing he saw was Chan Vin’s surprise and Maria falling to her knees.
By the time Chan Vin and Maria got back to Yalpina, transportation had been arranged. They had time for a quick breakfast, then Hunapu and his companions left in an old Ford pickup truck that carried them south on the road that connected with the capital. Maria joined them as well as half a dozen men from Yalpina. Others who had joined their cause were on their way to the other Indian villages in the Peten and north to Chiapas in Mexico, where tens of thousands of Indians driven from their homes by the Ladinos waited.
Xbalanque’s army grew larger as he traveled down toward Guatemala City. So did the tales of his feats in Xepon. When he wanted to stop the stories, Akabal explained to him how important, it was for his people to believe the fantastic rumors. Reluctantly Xbalanque accepted Akabal’s judgment. It seemed to him now that he was constantly accepting Akabal’s decisions. Being a leader of his people was not what he had expected.
His jeep and his cache had been intact. He and Akabal rode at the front of the column of old and creaking vehicles of all kinds. By now they had collected several hundred followers, all of whom were armed and ready to fight. In Xepon they had given him the pants and shirt of their village, but each town they rode into had another style and design. When they gave him their own clothes along with their husbands and sons, he felt obligated to wear them.
There were women now. Most had come to follow their men and take care of them, but there were many who had come to fight. Xbalanque was not comfortable with this, but Akabal welcomed them. Most of Xbalanque’s time was spent trying to feed his army or worrying about when the government would strike them. Both Xbalanque and Akabal agreed that they had come too far too easily.
Akabal had become obsessed with attempting to get television, radio, and newspaper reporters to join the march. Whenever they entered a town that had a telephone, Akabal began placing calls. As a result, the opposition press was sending out as many people as they could without arousing undue suspicion from the secret police. They counted on a few making it to Xbalanque without being arrested.
Outside Zacualpa that word came. A young boy told them that the army had set up a roadblock with two tanks and five armored troop carriers. Two hundred heavily armed soldiers stood ready to stop their advance with light artillery and rockets.
Xbalanque and Akabal called a meeting with the guerrilla leaders who had had combat experience. Their weapons, old rifles and shotguns, could not compete with the army’s M-16’s and rockets. Their only chance was to use the guerrilla experience they had to their advantage. Their troops were split up into teams and sent into the hills around Zacualpa. Messengers were sent to the town beyond Zacualpa in an effort to bring fighters in from behind the government army, but that would take time for the runners to take remote paths and circle back. Xbalanque would be the main defense and their inspiration. This would be his true test. If he won, he was suitable to be their leader. If he lost, he had led them only to death.
Xbalanque went back to his jeep and got the stingray spine out of the compartment under the driver’s seat. Akabal tried to go with him into the jungle, but Xbalanque told him to stay. The soldiers could have snipers and both of them should not be at risk.
It was mainly an excuse. Xbalanque was terrified that the power would not return. He needed the time to sacrifice again, anything that might help him focus on the strength he had had before and had not felt since. He knew that Akabal would almost certainly have him followed, but he had to be alone.
Xbalanque found a tiny clearing formed by a circle of trees and sat down on the ground. He tried to regain the feeling he had had just before the other dream. He could not find a way to get even a bottle of beer out of the camp. What if being drunk was the key? It had to be the way the graduate students had explained it to him or everyone with him was dead. He had brought with him one of the white cotton shirts he had been given on the way. The intricate designs on it were done solely in bright red thread. It seemed appropriate. He put it on the dirt between his legs.
His ear had healed very quickly and he had been wearing the earplug for a couple of days. Where could he get blood this time? He mentally went through a list of the sacred sites on his body that were traditionally used. Yes, that would do well. He cleaned off the carved spine with the shirt and then pulled out his lower lip. Praying to every sacred name he could remember, he thrust the stingray spine down through his lip, brought it up part way, barbs tearing his flesh, and plunged it through again. Then he leaned over the shirt and let the blood course down the black spine onto the white shirt, making new designs as it flowed.
When only drops of his blood were falling onto the shirt, he pushed the spine all the way through and out of his body. The sickening, copper taste of the blood flooded into his mouth and he gagged. Closing his eyes and clenching his fists, he controlled himself and tried to close his throat to the blood in his mouth. Using the same lighter, he set fire to the shirt, starting flames from the four sides of the stained cloth packet.
There weren’t any dreams of Xibalba this time. Or any dreams at all that he remembered. But the smoke and the loss of blood made him pass out again. When he awoke, the moon was high above and the night was more than half gone. This time he had no hangover, no pain as his muscles adjusted to forces they were not used to carrying. He felt good, he felt wonderful.
He got up and crossed the clearing to the largest tree and struck the trunk with his bare fist. It exploded, showering the ground with splinters and branches as it fell. He lifted his face to the stars and thanked the gods.
Xbalanque stopped on the trail back to the camp as a man stepped out from behind a tree onto the bare earth. For a moment he was afraid the army had found him, but the man bowed to him. Gun held high, the guard led Xbalanque back down to the others.
For the rest of the night the sounds of the soldiers’ preparations kept all but the most experienced of his people awake. Akabal paced beside the jeep, listening to the roaring engines of the tanks as they shifted position or swung their guns to bear on another phantom target. The sounds echoed up into the mountains. Xbalanque watched him in silence for a while.
“I can take them. I feel it.” Xbalanque tried to encourage Akabal. “All I have to do is hit them with the stones.”
“You can’t protect everyone. You probably can’t even protect yourself. They’ve got rockets, lots of them. They have tanks. What are you going to do against a tank?”
“I am told that the treads are the point of weakness. So I will first destroy the treads.” Xbalanque nodded at the teacher.
“Akabal, the gods are with us. I am with you.”
“You are with us. Since when are you a god?” Akabal glared at the man leaning on the jeep’s steering wheel.
“I think I always have known it. It’s just taken some time for others to recognize my power.” Xbalanque looked dreamily up at the sky. “The morning star. That’s me, you know.”
“Mary, Mother of God! You’ve gone mad!” Akabal stopped pacing long enough to shake his head at Xbalanque.
“I don’t think any of us should say that anymore. It’s not ... proper. All things considered.”
“All things considered? You—” They were interrupted by a runner coming in from the town and the sounds of more activity from below.
There was another quick consultation among the guerrilla leaders. Akabal went over Xbalanque’s part in the plan.
“You’re going to be followed up to the bridge by the empty trucks. They’ll draw the army fire.” The former schoolteacher stared down into the impassive and calm face before him. Xbalanque felt no fear. There was only a euphoria that masked any other emotion. “But after the first few moments they will need more active opposition. That’s you. Your fire will protect our snipers in the hills.”
His stones had been loaded onto rough sledges that he tied to the back of the jeep and the next truck back in line. As the campsite grew lighter, everyone went into position. The guerrilla drivers started their engines. Akabal walked up to the jeep.
“Try not to get yourself killed. We need you.” He put out his hand in farewell.
“Stop worrying. I’ll be fine.” Xbalanque touched Akabal’s shoulder. “Get into the hills.”
Xbalanque’s move forward was the signal for the column, single-wide on the narrow road, to begin its short journey. Rounding the corner, Xbalanque could see the bridge ahead and the tanks on either side with their guns pointed at him. As they fired, he jumped from the jeep, the increased weight of his body pounding dents into the pavement as he rolled away. The fragments of the jeep exploded toward him. He felt the power in every part of his body and the metal shrapnel bounced off. Still, he kept his head down as he scrambled for the sledge with his ammunition. Grabbing the first stone, he threw it into the air and batted it with his empty hand, sending it screaming through the air and into the hillside above the army. It threw dirt on the soldiers, but that was all. Better aim. The next rock was painstakingly aimed and it broke the tread on the left-hand tank. The one after jammed the turret so that it could not turn. The Indian fighters had started firing now, and the soldiers were beginning to fall. He threw more stones into the ranks of the army and saw men go down. There was blood, more blood thap he could ever give by himself. They brought up a rocket and he saw the man shot by an Indian sniper before the soldier could fire. He was throwing as fast and as hard as he could.
Bullets occasionally struck him, but they were stopped by his skin. Xbalanque grew more reckless and stood facing his enemy without taking cover. His missiles were causing some damage, but most of the deaths were from the Indians on the slopes above the soldiers. The men in charge had seen this and were directing most of their fire up the hillsides. Great holes were appearing in the forest where the tanks and rockets had reached. Despite his strength, Xbalanque could not stop the second tank. The angle was wrong. Nothing he threw could reach it.
A new sound entered the battle. A helicopter was coming. Xbalanque realized that it could give the army the aerial spotting advantage that could get his people killed. It came in low and fast above the battle. Xbalanque reached for a stone and found that only a few small pieces of rock were left. He searched the ground frantically for something to throw. Giving up, he tugged a piece of twisted metal from the wreckage of the jeep and sent it flying toward the chopper. The helicopter met the chunk of metal in midair and exploded. Both sides were hit with debris. The fireball that had been a machine fell into the ravine and flames shot up higher than the bridge.
The engine on the remaining tank revved up and it started to back up. Soldiers moved out of the way and began retreating as well. Xbalanque could now get clear aim at the troop carriers. Using more pieces of metal he tore from the jeep, he destroyed two of them. Then he saw something that stopped all his fantasies of being a great warrior. A boy leapt down off the mountain onto the retreating tank. He swung open the hatch from the outside, and before he was shot, dropped a grenade within. There was an instant before the tank blew when the boy’s body was draped across the hatch’s opening like a flag across a coffin. Then the flames engulfed them both.
As the fighting at the bridge died down with the soldiers’ retreat, the Indians began coming down out of the forest and moving toward the bridge. It became quiet. The moaning of the wounded broke the silence and was joined by the sounds of the birds who returned to their nests with the peace.
Akabal leapt down the road cut to join Xbalanque. He was laughing.
“We won! It worked! You were magnificent.” Akabal grabbed Xbalanque and tried to shake him, only to find that the smaller man was immovable.
“Too much blood.” With the boy’s death Xbalanque had lost his desire to celebrate their victory.
“But it was Ladino blood. That is what matters.” One of their lieutenants had come up to join them.
“Not all of it.”
“But enough of it.” The lieutenant looked more closely at Xbalanque. “You have not seen anything like this before, have you? You must not let our people see you this way. You are a hero. That is your duty”
“The old gods will feed well today.” Xbalanque stared across the expanse of the bridge to the bodies on the other side. “Perhaps that is all they were after.”
Xbalanque was caught up in the rush across the bridge. He didn’t have time to stop for the body of the boy who really had destroyed a tank. This time his people were taking him along.
The press found them before the army did. Hunapu, Chan Vin, and Bol stood outside their tent in the early morning chill and watched the two helicopters come in over the hills to the south. One landed in the open area where, last night, the dances and speeches had been held. The other set down near the horses. Hunapu had seen the occasional Ladino airplane, but never these strange machines. Another Ladino perversion of nature in an attempt to gain the level of gods.
Crowds began to gather around the two helicopters. The camp consisted of a few tents and some old and decrepit trucks, but there were now hundreds of people living there.
Most slept on the ground. Many of his people were godtouched and had to be helped to the groups by others. It was sad to see so much pain, but it was clear that the gods had begun taking a greater role in the people’s lives even before he had been chosen. With so many who were so close to the gods accompanying him, he felt strong and determined. He had to be following the gods’ ways.
Maria came up to him and laid her hand on his arm, the tiny feathers covering her brushing lightly against his skin.
“What do they want with us?” Maria was uneasy. She had seen the Ladino reaction to the god-touched before.
“They want to make us into one of their circuses, a show for their amusement,” Chan K’in angrily replied. This intrusion into their march toward Kaminaljuyu was unwanted.
“We will find out what they want, Maria. Do not fear them. They are stickmen without strength or true souls.” Hunapu stroked the woman’s shoulder. “Stay here and help keep the people calm.”
Hunapu and Chan Vin began walking toward the helicopter at the center of the encampment. Bol followed, as silent as usual, carrying his rifle and watching the men with cameras as they piled out of the helicopter and stood staring at the quiet mass of people who faced them. When the helicopter’s blades swung to a halt, there was almost no noise.
The three men made their way through the crowd slowly. They were careful not to move forward more quickly than someone could get out of their way. Hands, paws, wings, twisted limbs reached out to Hunapu as he passed. He tried to touch them all, but he could not pause to speak or he knew he would never get to the helicopter.
When they reached the machine, painted with a large, hand-lettered PRESS on each side and the bottom, the reporters were huddled, against the helicopter. There was fear and revulsion in their eyes. When one of the godtouched moved forward, they all drew back. They did not understand that the god-touched were truer men than themselves. It was typical of the Ladinos to be so blind to the truth.
“I am Hunapu. Who are you and why have you come here?” Hunapu spoke first in Maya, then repeated his question in Spanish. He wore the cotton armor as he stood before the reporters and cameramen. The cameras had begun filming as soon as they could pick him out of the crowd.
“Christ, he really does think he’s one of those Hero Twins.” The comment in bad Spanish had come from one of the men in front of him. He looked across the huddled group.
Not even having the man they wanted in front of them lessened their uneasiness.
“ I am Hunapu,” he repeated.
“I’m Tom Peterson from NBC, Central American bureau. We’ve heard that you have a joker crusade out here. Well, jokers and Indians. That’s obviously true.” The tall, blond man looked over Hunapu’s shoulder at the crowd. His Spanish had an odd accent. He spoke slowly and drawled in a way Hunapu had never heard before. “I take it you’re in charge. We’d like to talk to you about your plans. Maybe there’s someplace where it would be more quiet?”
“We will speak to you here.” Chan K’in stared up at the man dressed in a white cotton European suit. Peterson had ignored the dwarf at Hunapu’s side. Their eyes met and it was the blond man who backed down.
“Right. Here is just fine. Joe, make sure you get good sound on this.” Another man moved between Peterson and Hunapu and held a microphone pointed at Peterson, waiting for his next words. But Hunapu s attention had been drawn away.
The reporters from the second helicopter had caught on to what was happening in the center and had begun shoving their way through the people to get to Hunapu.
He turned to the men and women holding their equipment up out of the reach of his people as if they were crossing a river.
“Stop.” He spoke in Maya, but his voice caught the attention of the reporters as well as his own people. Everything halted and all eyes turned toward him. “Bol, bring them here.”
Bol glanced down at his brother before starting for the reporters. The crowd parted for him as he moved forward and again as he brought the journalists to join their fellows. He motioned them to stay put with his rifle before returning to Hunapu and Chan Vin.
Peterson began his questions again. “What is your destination?”
“We go to Kaminaljuyu.”
“That’s right outside Guatemala City, isn’t it? Why there?”
“ I will meet my brother there.”
“Well, what are you going to do when you meet your brother?”
Before Hunapu could answer the question, one of the women from the second helicopter interrupted.
“Maxine Chen, CBS. What are your feelings about your brother Xbalanque’s victory over the soldiers sent to stop him?”
“Xbalanque is fighting the army?”
“You hadn’t heard? He’s coming through the Highlands and pulling in every Indian revolutionary group that exists. His army has defeated the government every time they’ve clashed. The Highlands are in a state of emergency and that hasn’t even slowed Xbalanque down.” The Oriental woman was no taller than Hunapu. She looked around at his followers.
“There’s a rebel behind every tree in the Highlands, has been for years. Down here in the Peten, it’s always been quiet. Before now. What’s your goal?” Her attention shot back to him.
“When I see my brother Xbalanque, we will decide what we want.”
“In the meantime, what do you plan to do about the army unit sent to stop you?”
Hunapu exchanged a glance with Chan K’in.
“Don’t you know about that either? Jesus, they’re just hours away. Why do you think all of us were so hot to get to you? You may not be here by sundown.”
The dwarf began questioning Maxine Chen.
“How many and how far away?” Chan K’in fixed his impassive black eyes on hers.
“Maybe sixty men, a few more; they don’t keep any real forces down here—”
“Maxine!” Peterson had lost his journalistic detachment. “Stay out of this, for God’s sake. You’ll get us all arrested.”
“Stuff it, Peterson. You know as well as I do that they’ve been committing genocide here for years. These people are finally fighting back. Good for them.” She knelt in the dirt and began drawing a map on the ground for Hunapu and Chan K’in.
“I’m getting out of here.” Peterson waved his hand in the air and the helicopter’s rotors began turning. The reporters and cameramen climbed back into the helicopter or began running for the one in the horse paddock.
Maxine looked up from the map toward her cameraman. “Robert, stay with me and we’ll have an exclusive.” The cameraman grabbed sound equipment off a technician ready to bolt and strapped it on.
“Maxine, you’re gonna get me killed one day, and I’m gonna come back and haunt you.”
Maxine was already back at the map.
“But not yet, Robert. Did you see any heavy artillery with the government troops?”
It had taken only a little while to get their people organized and to find out what weapons they had. There were some rifles and shotguns, nothing heavier. Most people had machetes. Hunapu called Chan K’in and Bol to him. Together they determined the best course of action. Bol led the discussion, and Hunapu was surprised at his expertise. Although they were facing only a few soldiers, they were at a disadvantage in weapons and experience. Bol recommended attacking the army troops when they came down from the canyons into the savanna. By splitting up their people into two groups, they could best use the terrain. Hunapu had begun to wonder where Bol had gained his knowledge. He suspected the tall, quiet man of having been a rebel.
After instructing his people in the planned defense, Hunapu left the drilling to Bol and made another blood sacrifice. He hoped the sincerity of his prayers would give him the strength he needed to use his god-given power and save his people. The gods would have to be on their side or they would all be destroyed.
When he returned to the camp, Hunapu found it broken down and the half of his warriors who would face the army already mounted. After he climbed up on his own horse, he swung Chan K’in up behind him. He spoke briefly to waiting Indian warriors, encouraging them and enjoining them to fight well for the gods.
Seeing the men on horseback riding toward them, the soldiers had stopped their trucks just outside the mouth of the canyon and unloaded. As the soldiers piled off the troop carrier and the jeeps preceding and following it, they were picked off by the snipers Bol had sent into the bush. Only a ragged line of men faced Hunapu’s charge. They were distracted by their fellow soldiers falling to the left and right at the mercy of the snipers. A few of the older men ignored the deaths and stood their ground against the screaming men bearing down on them. The sergeant swore at them to hold ranks and fire at the filthy Indians.
Hunapu’s horsemen were unused to firing from the moving animals and were barely able to hold on and shoot. They couldn’t aim at the same time. Once the army men realized this, they began taking the horsemen down, one at a time. By now Hunapu was close enough to the soldiers to see the fear and confusion start to evaporate and discipline take over. One man stood up and followed Hunapu with his Uzi aimed squarely at the Lacandon’s head. Chan K’in cried out a warning and Hunapu was gone. Chan K’in was alone on the horse, now uncontrolled, and facing the soldier’s bullet. As the shot split Chan K’in’s skull, Hunapu reappeared behind the soldier and slashed his throat with the obsidian blade, splashing blood over the soldier’s companions before vanishing again.
Hunapu brought his rifle butt down on the helmet of a man with a rocket launcher before he could fire into the bush where the snipers hid. Before any of the other soldiers reacted, he reversed the rifle and shot him. Grabbing the rocket launcher, he disappeared and came back almost immediately, without the launcher. This time he killed the sergeant.
Covered with blood and vanishing almost as soon as he appeared, Hunapu was the devil to the soldiers. They could not fight this apparition. No matter where they aimed, he would be somewhere else. They turned their backs on Hunapu’s warriors to try to kill Hunapu himself. It was useless. Praying to the Virgin Mary and the saints that they would not be next, the men threw down their guns and knelt on the ground. Not all the kicks and threats of the lieutenant could get them to keep fighting.
Hunapu took thirty-six prisoners, including the lieutenant. Twenty soldiers had been killed. He had lost seventeen men and Chan K’in. The Ladinos had been defeated. They were not invincible.
That night while his people celebrated their victory, Hunapu mourned Chan K’in. He was dressed again in the long white tunic of his Lacandon people. Bol had come to him to claim the body of his brother. The tall Indian told him that Chan K’in had seen his death in a vision and knew his fate. Chan K’in’s body had been wrapped in white cloth that was now stained by the dwarf’s blood. Bol stood holding the small bundle and stared at Hunapu’s tired, saddened face across the fire.
“I will see you at Kaminaljuyu.” Hunapu looked up in surprise. “My brother saw me there, but even if he had not, I would go. May both our journeys go their way in peace, or in death to our enemies.”
Despite the early victories both brothers suffered many losses during the rest of the march to Guatemala City. Xbalanque had been wounded in an assassination attempt, but he had healed with supernatural speed. The attempt had killed two of the guerrilla leaders who had followed and taught him. Word had come down from the north that Guatemalan air force planes were strafing and bombing the lines of Indians who were leaving the refugee camps of Chiapas in Mexico to join their fellows in Guatemala City. Hundreds were reported killed, but thousands kept coming.
The elite, highly trained police and military squads took a constant toll. Xbalanque was slowed, but the mass of people who followed him would not be stopped. At every firefight they took weapons from dead soldiers and armed themselves. Now they had rockets and even a tank, deserted by its frightened crew.
Hunapu fared less well. His people from the Peten had less experience. Many died in each clash with the army. After a battle in which neither side could actually claim a victory and ended only when he finally located the commander and could teleport in to kill him, Hunapu decided that it had become foolish to oppose the army and police directly. He dispersed his followers. They were to make their way singly or in small groups to Kaminaljuyu. Otherwise it seemed inevitable that the government would be able to muster sufficient forces to stop them.
Xbalanque arrived first. A truce had been declared as his army closed in on Guatemala City. Akabal had given interviews over and over again that declared their purpose was not to topple the Guatemalan government. Faced with questioning by the press and the imminent visit from the UN Wild Card tour, the general in charge ordered the army to escort Xbalanque and his followers but not to fire on them unless attacked. Xbalanque and Akabal made sure that the army had no excuses. The country’s leader allowed Xbalanque access to Kaminaljuyu.
The ruins of Kaminaljuyu were filled with the followers of the brothers. They had put tents and rough shelters up on the low mounds. Looking over the soldiers, trucks, and tanks that guarded the perimeter of Kaminaljuyu, they could look down on the Guatemala City suburbs that surrounded them. The camp already held five thousand, and more were coming all the time. Besides the Guatemalan Mayas and the refugees from Mexico, others were traveling up from Honduras’and El Salvador.
The world was watching to see what would happen in Guatemala City this Christmas. Maxine Chen’s coverage of the battle between Hunapu’s Indian and joker followers and the Guatemalan army had been an hour-long special report on 60 Minutes. The meeting between the Hero Twins themselves was to be covered by all the major U.S. networks, cable, and European channels.
Hunapu had never before seen so many people together in one place. As he walked into the camp past the soldiers guarding the perimeter and then past the Maya sentries, he was amazed at the size of the gathering. He and Bol had taken a long and circuitous route to avoid trouble, and it had been a long walk. Unlike the people of the Peten, these followers of Xbalanque dressed in hundreds of different ways, all bright and festive. The atmosphere of celebration didn’t seem proper to Hunapu. These people did not appear to be worshiping the gods who had prepared their way and led them here. They looked as though they were at a carnival-some of them looked as though they were the carnival.
Hunapu walked through a third of the crowded camp without being recognized. Sunlight glinting off opalescent feathers caught his eye just as Maria turned and saw him. She called out his name and ran to meet him. At the sound of the name of the other Hero Twin, people began to gather around him.
Maria took his hand and held it for a moment, smiling at him happily.
“I was so worried. I was afraid ...” Maria looked down and away from Hunapu.
“The gods are not finished with us yet.” Hunapu reached out to stroke the down on the side of her face. “And Bol came most of the way with me after getting back from his village.”
Maria looked down at the hand she was clutching and released it in embarrassment.
“You will wish to see your brother. He has a house at the center of Kaminaljuyu. I would be honored to lead you there.” She stepped back and gestured through the crowd down the rows of tents. Hunapu followed her as she parted the gathered people before him. As he passed, the Indians murmured his name and fell in behind him.
Within a few steps they were accosted by reporters. TV camera lights blazed on, and questions were shouted in English and Spanish. Hunapu glanced up at Bol, who began fending off those who came too close to his charge. They ignored the questions, and the camera crews withdrew after a few minutes of what Maxine called stock shots of Hunapu walking and occasionally greeting someone he recognized.
While most of the structures in Kaminaljuyu were tents or houses built out of whatever scrap material people could find, the large, twin wooden huts built on a plaza at the center of the ruins were impressive, permanent buildings. Their roofs were adorned with vertical roof combs like those on temple ruins, and banners and charms hung from these.
After they reached the open area of the plaza, the crowd stopped following him. Hunapu could hear the cameras and sense the shoving for position as he, Bol, and Maria walked alone to the house on the left. Before they reached it, a man dressed in a mix of red and purple Highland clothing stepped out. He was followed by a tall, thin Highland Maya wearing glasses and dressed in European clothing, except for the sash at his waist.
Hunapu recognized Xbalanque from his dreams of Xibalba, but he had looked younger in them. This man appeared more serious, but he noticed the expensive European watch on his wrist and the Ladino leather “running” shoes on his feet. It seemed a sharp contrast with the jade earplug he wore. Hunapu wondered about the earplug. Had the gods given it to him? Hunapu was caught in his examination of his brother by Xbalanque’s companion. The other man took Hunapu by the shoulders and turned him toward the bank of cameras. Xbalanque rested his hand on Hunapu’s left shoulder. In the Highland Maya that Hunapu loosely understood, Xbalanque spoke to him softly.
“The first thing we’re going to do is get you some real clothes. Wave to the cameras.” Xbalanque followed his own suggestion. “Then we have to work on ways to get more food into the camp.”
Xbalanque turned him so that they faced each other and then clasped his hand.
“Hold that so they can get our profiles. You know, sun, I was beginning to get worried about you.”
Hunapu looked into the eyes of the man across from him. For the first time since meeting this stranger who was his brother, he saw in Xbalanque’s eyes the same shadows of Xibalba that he knew existed in his own. It was obvious that Xbalanque had much to learn about the proper worship of the gods, but it was also clear that he was chosen, like Hunapu, to speak for them.
“Come inside. Akabal will make his statement that our statement will be issued later. Ko’ox:” The last words Xbalanque spoke were in Lacandon Maya. Hunapu began to think that this Highland quetzal might be a worthy partner. Remembering Maria and Bol, he caught a glimpse of them melting into the crowd as he walked into Xbalanque’s house. His brother seemed to catch his thought.
“She’s beautiful and very devoted to you, isn’t she? She’ll take care of your bodyguard and keep the press away until he can get some rest. We’ve got plans to discuss. Akabal has some wonderful ideas for helping our people.”
For the next several days the brothers held private conferences, lasting long after dark. But on the morning of the third day Esteban Akabal stepped outside to announce that a statement would be read at noon outside the compound where their prisoners were being held.
With the sun directly overhead, Xbalanque, Hunapu, and Akabal walked out of Xbalanque’s but toward the prisoners’ compound. As they moved, surrounded by their followers and the reporters, Hunapu’s shoulders tensed when he heard the midday army flyover. The sound of the helicopters always made him nervous. Once there, they waited until the sound equipment was tested. Several of the technicians were wearing Hero Twin T-shirts. Akabal explained that the statement would be read in two parts, the first by Hunapu and the second by Xbalanque. They would speak in Maya and he, Akabal, would translate them into Spanish and English. Hunapu clutched his piece of paper nervously. Akabal had been aghast to learn that he couldn’t read, so he had had to memorize the speech the teacher had written. He thanked the gods for Jose’s training in remembering rituals and spells.
Hunapu stepped closer to his microphone and saw Maxine wave in encouragement. Mentally he asked the gods not to make him look foolish. When he began to speak, his nervousness vanished, drowned in his anger.
“Since the time of your first coming to our lands, you have murdered our children. You have sought to destroy our beliefs. You stole our land and our sacred objects. You enslaved us. You have allowed us no voice in the destruction of our homes. If we spoke out, you kidnapped us, tortured us, and killed us for being men and not the malleable children you wanted.”
“It is now that the cycle ends. We hack winik, true men, will be free again to live as we wish to live. From the ice of the far north to the fire-lands of the south, we will see the coming of a new world in which all our people can be free.”
“The gods are watching us now and they wish to be worshiped in the old, proper ways. In return they will give us the strength we need to overcome those who will try to defeat us again. My brother and I are the signs of this new world to come.”
As he stepped back, Hunapu heard his name being cried out by the thousands of Maya in Kaminaljuyu. He looked over the ruined city in pride, soaking in the strength that his people’s worship gave him. Maria had made it to the front of the gathered followers. She raised her arms to him in praise and hundreds of people around her did the same. The gesture spread through the crowd. When it seemed that everyone had lifted their hands to implore his help, Hunapu lifted his face and his arms toward heaven. The noise swelled until he dropped his hands and gazed over the people. Silence fell.
Xbalanque stepped forward.
“We are not Ladino. We do not want a war or more death. We seek only what is ours by right: a land, a country, that is ours. This land will be the homeland of any American Indian, no matter where in the Americas he was born. It is our intent to meet the WHO Wild Card delegation while it is in Guatemala City. We will ask for their aid and support in founding a hach winik homeland. The god-touched among our people are especially in need of immediate help.”
“We do not ask now. We are telling you. Ko’ox! Let us go!”
Xbalanque raised his fist in the air and chanted the Lacandon phrase over and over until every Indian in the camp joined him. Hunapu joined the chant and felt the rush of power once again. Watching Xbalanque, he knew his brother felt it as well. It felt right. It was clear that the gods were with them.
Hunapu and Xbalanque flanked Akabal as he translated what they had said. The Hero Twins stood immobile and silent as the teacher refused to answer any other questions. Their people faced them, as silent and stoic now as themselves. When Akabal led the way back to their houses, where they would wait for word from the WHO delegation, their followers parted without a sound to allow them to pass, but closed in before the press could get through.
“Well, one can’t accuse them of lacking political savvy.” Senator Gregg Hartmann uncrossed his legs and got up out of the colonial reproduction chair to turn off the hotel room television set.
“A little chutzpah never hurts, Gregg.” Hiram Worchester leaned his head on his hand and looked over at Hartmann. “But what do you think our response should be?”
“Response! What response can we possibly make?” Senator Lyons interrupted Hartmann’s answer. “We are here to help the victims of the wild card virus. I see no connection whatsoever. These ... revolutionaries or whatever they are are simply trying to use us. We have a responsibility to ignore them. We can hardly afford to become involved in some petty nationalistic squabble!”
Lyons crossed his arms and walked over to the window. Unobtrusively a young Indian maid was let into the room to pick up the remains of their room-service lunch. Head down, she glanced at each of them before silently carrying her heavily loaded tray out the door. Hartmann shook his head at Senator Lyons.
“ I understand your point, but did you look at the people out there? A lot of the people who are following these ‘Hero Twins’ are jokers. Don’t we have a responsibility toward them?” Hartmann relaxed back into his chair and rolled his back in an attempt to get comfortable. “Besides, we can’t afford to ignore them. It would compromise our own mission if we pretended they, and their problems, didn’t exist. The world here is very different from what you’re used to seeing, even on the reservations. There are different attitudes. The Indians have been suffering since the Conquest. They take the long view. To them the wild card virus is just another cross to bear.”
“‘Sides, Senator, you think those boys are aces, like the reporters say?” Mordecai Jones looked across the hotel room at the Wyoming senator. “Got to say, I’ve got some sympathy for what they’re tryin’ to do. Slavery, whatever they call it down here, ain’t right.”
“It’s obvious that we are involved because of the wild card victims, if nothing else. If meeting with them will help them to get aid, we have a responsibility to do what we can.” Tachyon spoke from his chair. “On the other hand, I hear lots of talk about homelands and I see very little commitment to working on practical problems. Problems such as the subsistence level of the victims here. You can see that they need medical help. What do you think, Hiram?”
“Gregg’s right. We can’t avoid a meeting. There’s been too much publicity. Beyond that, we are here to see how jokers are treated in other countries. Judging by what we’ve seen, we could help out down here by leaning on the government a little. This would appear to be a good way to do it. We don’t have to endorse their actions, just express our concern.”
“That sounds reasonable. I’ll let you deal with the politics. I need to get to that hospital tour.” Tachyon massaged one temple. “I’m tired of talking to the government. I want to see what’s going on.”
The door to the sitting room opened and Billy Ray peered in. “The phones are ringing off the hooks, and we’ve got reporters coming up the fire stairs. What are we supposed to tell them?”
Hartmann nodded to Tachyon before answering. “Those of us who can spare the time from carefully timed schedules will see these ‘Hero Twins.’ make it clear that we are doing this in the interests of the wild card victims, not for political reasons.”
“Great. The Father, Chrysalis, and Xavier ought to be back soon They went out to see the camp and talk to the jokers there.” Anticipating Tachyon’s next question, he smiled at the doctor. “Your car’s waiting downstairs. But the sooner you can give me an official statement for the press, the better.”
“I’ll have my people start drafting one immediately, Billy.” Hartmann was obviously on familiar ground. “You’ll have it within the hour.”
In the morning everyone gathered, hungover and bleary from the previous night’s celebrations, but ready to march off to see the United Nations tour. When Hunapu and Xbalanque came out of their houses, the crowd became quiet. Xbalanque looked out over the people and wished that it were possible to have them follow him into the city. It would look great on film, but Akabal was convinced that it might just be the excuse the government was looking for to open fire. He jumped up onto the hood of the bus that had been chosen to take them into the city. He spoke for almost half an hour before the people appeared to agree that they would stay in Kaminaljuyu.
They arrived at the Camino Real without incident. The only surprise had come from the crowds of Indians lining the streets as they passed. The watchers were silent and impassive, but both Hunapu and Xbalanque were strengthened by their presence. At the Camino Real they jumped down from the truck and were escorted within the building by two of their own guards and almost a score of UN security people.
Xbalanque and Hunapu wore their closest approximation of the dress of the ancient kings. Hair tied up in warrior’s knots on top of their heads, they were dressed in cotton tunics and dyed-cotton wrapped skirts. Hunapu was used to wearing only his xikul, a knee-length tunic. He felt at home in the ancient style. Xbalanque had spent the early morning tugging on his skirt and feeling self-conscious about his exposed legs. As he looked curiously around the hotel, he saw himself in a wall mirror. He almost stopped in wonder at the vision of a Mayan warrior looking back at him. Xbalanque straightened and raised his head, showing off his jade earplug.
Hunapu’s eyes darted from one side of the lobby to the other. He had never seen a building this big with so many strange decorations and oddly dressed people. A fat man in a shiny white shirt and brightly colored, flowered short pants stared at them. The tourist grabbed his wife, who wore a dress that was made on the same loom as the man’s pants, by the arm and pointed at them. Catching a glimpse of Xbalanque walking proudly alongside steadied Hunapu.
But it was all he could do not to cry out prayers to the gods when they walked into a room slightly smaller than his family’s house and the doors slid shut without a human touch. The room moved under him, and only Xbalanque’s calm face kept him from believing he was about to die. He slid his glance toward Akabal. The Maya in Western dress was clenching and releasing his fists rhythmically. Hunapu wondered if he was praying too.
Despite his outward impassivity Xbalanque was the first one out the opening doors when the elevator reached its destination. The entire group walked down the carpeted hall to a door flanked by two more UN soldiers. There were a few moments of discussion before it was agreed that, once the Indian guards had inspected the meeting room, they would retire outside the door until the conference was over. The Hero Twins would be allowed to keep their ceremonial stone knives, however. During this, Xbalanque and Hunapu said nothing, allowing Akabal to make the arrangements. Hunapu watched everything while he attempted to look like a warrior-king. Being in these enclosed spaces made him nervous. He repeatedly looked to his brother for guidance.
Inside the hotel room, the WHO delegates waited for them. Akabal immediately noticed Peregrine’s cameraman. “Out. No cameras, no tapes.” The tall Indian turned to Hartmann. “It was agreed. At your insistence.”
“Peregrine, the lady with the wings, is one of us. She is only interested in making a historical record—”
“Which you can edit to suit your own purposes. No.” Hartmann smiled and shrugged at Peregrine. “Perhaps it would be better if ...”
“Sure, no problem.” She flapped her wings lazily and directed her cameraman to leave.
Xbalanque noted that Akabal seemed to be thrown off by the ease at which he had gotten his wish. He turned to look at his brother. Hunapu appeared to be communing directly with the gods. It was clear from looking at him that nothing here was of interest. Xbalanque tried to capture the same assurance.
“Good. Now, we are here to discuss—” Akabal began his prepared introduction, but was interrupted by Hartmann. “Let’s be informal here. Everyone please have a seat. Mr. Akabal, why don’t you sit beside me since I believe you’ll be doing the translating here?” Hartmann sat down at the head of a table apparently brought into the room for the meeting since the furniture around it had been moved against the walls. “Do the other gentlemen speak English?” Xbalanque was about to reply when he caught Akabal’s warning glance. Instead he guided Hunapu to a chair.
“No, I’ll be translating for them as well.”
Hunapu stared earnestly at the tentacled priest and the man with the nose like Chac, the long-nosed rain god. He was pleased that the god-touched would travel with this group. It was an auspicious sign. But he was also surprised to see a Father who was so blessed by the gods. Perhaps there was more to what the priests had tried to teach him than he had previously believed. He mentioned his thoughts to Akabal, who spoke in English to Hartmann.
“Among our people, the victims of the wild card virus are regarded as being favored by the gods. They are revered, not persecuted.”
“And that’s what we’re here to talk about, isn’t it? Your people.”. Hartmann had not stopped smiling since they’d entered the room. Xbalanque did not trust a man who showed his teeth so much.
The man with the elephant’s trunk spoke next. “This new country of yours, would it be open to all jokers?” Xbalanque pretended to listen to Akabal’s translation. He replied in Maya, knowing that Akabal would change his words anyway.
“This homeland takes back only a tiny part of what has been stolen from us. It is for our people, whether godtouched or not. The god-touched of the Ladinos have other places to go for help.”
“But why do you feel a separate nation is necessary? It seems to me that your show of political power would impress the Guatemalan government with your strength. They’re bound to introduce the reforms you want.” Hartmann brought the conversation back to Akabal, which didn’t displease Hunapu. He could feel hostility in this room and a lack of understanding. Whatever else they were, they were also Ladinos. He looked over at Akabal as the man replied to one of the norteamericano’s questions.
“You aren’t listening. We don’t want reforms. We want our land back. But only a small part of it, at that. Reforms have come and gone for four hundred years. We are tired of waiting.” Akabal was vehement. “Do you know that to most Indians this wild card virus is just another smallpox? Another white disease brought to us to kill as many as possible.”
“That’s ridiculous!” Senator Lyons was enraged at the accusation. “Humans had nothing to do with the wild card virus.”
“We came here to help you. That is our only purpose. In order to help we feel we have to have the cooperation of the government.” Senator Lyons seemed to be on the defensive.
“We spoke to the general. He’s planning to put clinics in the outlying provinces and to bring serious cases of the wild card outbreak here to the city for treatment.”
The brothers exchanged glances. It was clear to each man that these strangers from the north were not about to do anything for them. Hunapu was getting impatient. There were too many things they could be doing in Kaminaljuyu. He wanted to start teaching the uninformed about the old gods and the means of worshiping them.
“We can’t change the past. We both know that. So what’s the point? Why are you here?” Hartmann had stopped smiling.
“We are going to form an Indian nation. But we will need help.” Akabal spoke firmly. Xbalanque approved of his lack of tolerance for distraction, even though he wasn’t altogether sure about Akabal’s plans for a socialist government.
“Do you have no idea of what the United Nations is? Surely you cannot expect us to provide weapons for your war.” Senator Lyons’s mouth was ringed with white from his anger.
“No, no weapons. But if you had come out to see our followers, you would have seen how many have been untreated by the Ladino doctors in the hope that they would not survive. And yes, I know what the general told you. We will need much medical aid, initially, to care for these people. After that we will need aid for schools, roads, transportation, agriculture. All the things a real country must provide.”
“You understand we’re only on a fact-finding tour? We don’t have any real authority with the UN or even with the U.S. government, for that matter.” Hartmann leaned back in his seat and spread his hands. “Sympathy is about all we can offer at this time.”
“We are not about to jeopardize our standing in the international community for your military adventures!” Senator Lyons’s eyes swept the three Indians. Hunapu was not impressed. Women should stay out of serious decisions.
“This is a peaceful mission. There is nothing political about suffering, and I don’t intend to see you try to make the wild card virus a pawn in your bid for attention,” Lyons said.
“I doubt if the European Jews of the Holocaust would agree that suffering is apolitical, Senator.” Akabal watched Lyons’s expression change to chagrin. “The wild card virus has affected my people. That is a truth. My people face active genocide. That too is truth. If you don’t want the wild card virus involved, that’s nice, but it’s not really possible, is it?”
“What do we want from you? Just two things. Humanitarian aid and recognition.” For the first time Akabal looked a little unsure of himself. “Soon the Guatemalan government is going to try to destroy us. They’ll wait until you are gone, you and the reporters following you. We don’t intend to allow them to succeed. We have certain ... advantages.”
“They’re aces, then?” Hartmann had grown suddenly quiet and introspective.
Some of the reporters had used that term and Akabal had mentioned it, but this was the first time Xbalanque felt that it would fit. He felt like an ace. He and his brother, the little Lacandon, could take anyone. They were the incarnations of the priest-kings of their fathers, favored by the gods or an alien disease. It didn’t matter. They would lead their people to victory. He turned to Hunapu and saw that it was as if his brother shared his thoughts.
“To them, they have been called to serve the old gods and be the heralds of the new age, the beginning of the next cycle. By our calendar that will be in your year 2008. They are here to prepare the way over the next katun.” Akabal looked back at the norteamericanos. “But yes, I believe that they are aces. The evidence fits. It is hardly unusual for an ace to exhibit powers that appear to be drawn from his cultural heritage, is it?”
There were three short raps on the door. Xbalanque saw the security chief, the one they called Carnifex, look in. He wondered for a moment if this was all an elaborate trap.
“The plane’s ready and we need to leave within the next hour.”
“Thanks.” Hartmann put his hand under his chin in thought. “Speaking simply as a U.S. senator here, I’d like to see what we could work out, Mr. Akabal. Why don’t we speak privately for a moment?”
Akabal nodded. “Perhaps the Father would like to talk to Xbalanque and Hunapu? The brothers speak Spanish, if there is a translator available.”
When Hartmann and Akabal ended their huddle and rejoined them, Xbalanque was ready to leave. Listening to Hunapu, he was becoming afraid that his brother was going to demonstrate calling on the gods right then and there. He knew that wasn’t a good idea.
Xbalanque was trying to explain this as Hartmann shook Akabal’s hand in farewell. To Xbalanque it seemed as though he held onto the teacher’s hand too long. North American customs. He went back to dissuading Hunapu from pulling his obsidian knife and began leading his brother out.
When they were back in the elevator, escorted again by the UN security people, Xbalanque asked Akabal in Maya what Hartmann had said.
“Nothing. He will ‘attempt’ to set up a ‘committee’ to ‘study’ the matter. He talks like all the Yankees. At least they saw us. It gives us legitimacy in the eyes of the world. That much was useful.”
“They do not believe that we serve the will of the gods, do they?” Hunapu was much more angry than he had allowed himself to show. Xbalanque watched him warily. He looked his brother in the eyes. “We will show them the power of the gods. They will learn.”
Over the following twenty-four hours they lost half the journalists covering them as the reporters went on with the UN tour. And the army moved more units into place and, more ominously, began to evacuate the surrounding suburbs. Finally all travel into the camp was cut off. The peace from the anthropologists was welcome, but the intent was clear to everyone in Kaminaljuyu. No noncombatants in the camp.
At sunrise and noon for each of the three days since the visit to Hartmann and the tour, Hunapu had sacrificed his own blood on the highest of the temple mounds of the city.
Xbalanque had joined him at the last two sunrises. Akabal’s pleas for common sense were ignored. As the tension within Kaminaljuyu increased, the brothers grew more insular. Discussing their plans only with each other, they ignored most of the planning sessions held by Akabal and the rebel leaders. Maria spent all her time at Hunapu’s side when she was not preparing an altar for a sacrifice. Bol constantly drilled the warriors.
Xbalanque and Hunapu stood atop the ruined temple surrounded by their followers. It was nearly dawn on the fourth day. An ornate decorated bowl was held between them by Maria. Each man held his obsidian blade to the palm of his hand. At the rising of the sun they would cut their flesh and let the blood pour down and mix together in the bowl before they burned it on the altar Maria had arranged with effigies and flowers. The sun was still behind the eastern volcano that loomed over Guatemala City and puffed smoke into the air as if constantly offering sacred tobacco to the gods.
First light. Knives flashed black, shining. Blood flowed, mingled, filled the bowl. Hands, covered with red, lifted to the sun. Thousands of voices raised in a chant welcoming the day with a plea for mercy from the gods. Two thatched huts exploded as the rays of the sun touched them.
The dirt and debris rained down on the people. Those closest to the huts were the first to see that a government rocket had blown the shelters apart. The fighters ran for the perimeter to try to stop the invasion, while those who were unable to defend the camp drew together in a great mass at its center. The government rockets targeted the central plaza where several thousand people knelt and prayed or screamed as the rockets arced overhead to fall nearby.
Maxine Chen was one of the few top journalists left to cover the Hero Twins’ crusade. She and her crew had taken shelter behind one of the temple mounds where Maxine taped an introduction to the attack. An Indian girl, seven—or eight-years-old, ran around the side of the mound and in front of Maxine’s camera. Her face and her embroidered white huipil were covered with blood, and she was crying out in fear as she ran. Maxine tried to grab her but missed, and the girl was gone.
“Robert ...” Maxine looked across at her cameraman. He ducked out from under his camera and shoved it at the sound man, who barely caught it. Then they were both running into the crowd, getting them up and moving toward the small shelter of the mounds.
On the edge of the ruins the Hero Twins’ people were firing down into the soldiers, causing some confusion but not enough damage. The rockets were coming from well behind the front lines of the army. The tank engines rumbled, but they held their ground and fired into the defenders, killing some and destroying the ruins that were their protection.
Struggling against the flow of people into the center of Kaminaljuyu, Xbalanque and Hunapu managed to make their way to the front lines. They were cheered as their people spotted them. Standing out in the open, Xbalanque began throwing whatever he could get his hands on at the army. It had effect. The troops in front of his attack tried to move back, only to be stopped and ordered forward. Bullets ricocheted off his skin. The defending Indians saw this and drew strength from it. Aiming more carefully, they began to take a toll. But the rockets kept coming, and they could always hear the screams of the people trapped in the center of the camp.
Hunapu flipped back and forth, using his knife to slit the throats of the nearest soldiers before returning to his own place. He targeted officers, as Akabal had warned him to do. But with the press of men behind them, the frontline troops could not flee even when they wanted to escape the demon.
Xbalanque ran out of missiles and retired behind one of the mounds. He was joined by two of the experienced guerrilla leaders. They were frightened by the mass carnage.
It was different from a jungle war. When they saw Hunapu shift back, Xbalanque caught him before he could return. Hunapu’s cotton armor was soaked with the soldiers’ blood. The smell gagged even the rebels. The blood and the smoke from the guns took Xbalanque back to the first time he had experienced it.
“Xibalba.” He spoke only to his brother.
“Yes.” Hunapu nodded. “The gods have grown hungry. Our blood was not enough. They want more blood, blood with power. A king’s blood.”
“Do you think they would accept a general’s blood? A war captain’s?” Xbalanque looked over his shoulder at the army on the other side of the dirt mound.
The guerrillas were following the exchange closely, looking for a reason to hope for victory. Both nodded at the thought.
“If you can take the general, things will fall apart down the line. They’re draftees out there, not volunteers.” The man wiped dusty black hair out of his eyes and shrugged. “It’s the best idea I’ve heard.”
“Where is the war captain?” Hunapu’s eyes fixed on a distant goal. “I will bring him back. It must be done correctly or the gods will not be pleased.”
“He’ll be in the rear. I saw a truck back there with lots of antennas, a communications center. Over to the east.” Xbalanque looked at his brother uneasily. Something felt wrong about him. “Are you all right?”
“I serve my people and my gods.” Hunapu walked a few steps away and vanished with a soft clok.
“I’m not so sure that this was a good idea.” Xbalanque wondered what Hunapu had in mind.
“Got a better one? He’ll be okay.” The rebel started to shrug but was stopped with shoulders lifted by the sound of helicopters.
“Xbalanque, you’ve got to take them. If they can attack from the air, we’re dead.” Before the other man had finished, Xbalanque was running back toward the helicopters and the middle of Kaminaljuyu. As the brace of Hueys came into sight, he picked up a rock the size of his head and launched it. The helicopter to the left exploded in flames. Its companion pulled up and away from the camp. But Xbalanque hadn’t realized the position of the helicopter he had destroyed. Burning debris fell on his huddled followers, causing as much death and pain as a government rocket.
Xbalanque turned away, cursing himself for being oblivious to his people, and saw Hunapu atop the tallest mound. His brother held a limp figure, half-sprawled on the ground, beside Maria’s altar. Xbalanque ran toward the temple.
From the other side Akabal had seen Hunapu appear with his captive. Akabal had been separated from the Twins in the melee following the first mortar strike. Now he turned his back to the mass of followers jammed together around the central dirt mounds. Maxine Chen’s tug on his arm stopped him. She joined him, her face filthy and sweating and her two-man crew looking haggard. Robert had reclaimed his camera and filmed everything he could get as he moved around Kaminaljuyu.
“What’s going on?” She had to shout to be heard over the crowd and the guns. “Who’s that with Hunapu? Is it Xbalanque?”
Akabal shook his head and kept moving, followed by Chen. When she saw that Akabal intended to climb the mound in the open, she and Robert hesitated and followed him. The sound man shook his head and crouched at the base of the temple. Xbalanque had been met by Maria, and they scrambled up the other side. The cameraman stepped back and began filming as soon as all six had made it to the top. Seeing Xbalanque, Hunapu lifted his face and began to chant to the sky. He no longer had his knife, and the dried blood that covered much of his face looked like ceremonial paint. Xbalanque listened for a moment and then shook his head. In an archaic Maya he argued with Hunapu, who continued his chant, oblivious to Xbalanque’s interruption. Maxine asked Akabal what was happening, but he shook his head in confusion. Maria had hauled the Guatemalan general onto the earthen altar and began to strip off his uniform.
The guns ceased firing at the same moment Hunapu ended his chant and held out his hand to Xbalanque. In the silence Maxine put her hands to her ears. Maria knelt beside the general, holding the offering bowl in front of her. Xbalanque backed away, shaking his head. Hunapu sharply thrust his arm out at Xbalanque. Looking over Hunapu’s shoulder, Xbalanque saw the government tanks roll forward, tearing apart the fence and crushing the Indians under their treads.
As Xbalanque hesitated, the general woke up. Finding himself stretched out on an altar, he cursed and tried to roll off. Maria shoved him back onto it. Noting her feathers, he held himself away from her as if he could be contaminated. He began haranguing Hunapu and Xbalanque in Spanish. “What the hell do you think you are doing? The Geneva convention clearly states that officer prisoners of war are to be treated with dignity and respect. Give me back my clothes!”
Xbalanque heard the tanks and screams behind him as the Guatemalan army officer cursed him. He tossed his obsidian knife to Hunapu and grabbed the general’s flailing arms.
“Let me go. What do you savages think you’re doing?” As Hunapu raised the knife, the man’s eyes widened. “You can’t do this! Please, this is 1986. You’re all mad. Listen, I’ll stop them; I’ll call them off. Let me up. Please, Jesus, let me up!”
Xbalanque pinned the general back against the altar and looked up as Hunapu brought the knife down.
“Hail, Mary, full of g—”
The obsidian blade cut through flesh and cartilage, spraying the brothers and Maria with blood. Xbalanque watched in horrified fascination as Hunapu decapitated the general, bearing down with the knife against the spine and severing the final connections before lifting the Ladino’s head to the sky.
Xbalanque released the dead man’s arms and trembling, took the bowl filled with blood from Maria. Shoving the body off the altar, he set fire to the blood as Maria lit copal incense.
He threw back his head and called the names of his gods to the sky. His voice was echoed by his people, gathered below with arms thrust into the air toward the temple. Hunapu placed the head, its eyes open and staring into Xibalba, on the altar.
The tanks stopped their advance and began a lumbering retreat. The foot soldiers dropped their guns and ran. A few shot officers that tried to stop them, and the officers joined the flight. The government forces disbanded in chaos, scattering into the city, abandoning their equipment and weapons. Maxine had vomited at the sight of the sacrifice, but her cameraman had it all on tape. Shaking and pale, she asked Akabal what was happening. He looked down at her with wide eyes.
“It is the time of the Fourth Creation. The birth of Huracan, the heart of heaven, our home. The gods have returned to us! Death to the enemies of our people!” Akabal knelt and stretched his hands toward the Hero Twins. “Lead us to glory, favored of the gods.”
In room 502 of the Camino Real a tourist in flowered shorts and a pale blue polyester shirt stuffed the last souvenir weaving into his suitcase. He looked around the room for his wife and saw her at the window.
“Next time, Martha, don’t buy anything that won’t fit into your suitcase.” He leaned his considerable weight on the bag and slid the catches closed. “Where is that boy? We must have called half an hour ago. What’s so interesting out there?”
“The people, Simon. It’s some kind of procession. I wonder if it’s a religious occasion.”
“Is it a riot? With all this unrest we’ve been hearing about, the sooner we get out of here the better I’m going to feel.”
“No, they just seem to be going somewhere.” His wife continued to peer down at the streets filled with men, women, and children. “They’re all Indians too. You can tell by the costumes.”
“My god, we’re going to miss our plane if they don’t get a move on.” He glared at his watch as if it was responsible. “Call again, will you? Where the hell can he be?”
The pair of bodyguards left Giovanni’s first. Behind their dark glasses they immediately began scanning the street, looking for trouble. At a wave from the man on the right, another bodyguard preceded Don Tomasso, head of the Anselmi Family, onto the street. The don had to be assisted in walking. He was an old man, bent and in obvious pain, but his old-fashioned black suit had been hand-tailored and pressed into sharp creases. He surveyed the street as well, swiveling his shaking head from between his hunched shoulders like an aging turtle. The red and green neon of the restaurant’s sign alternately revealed and hid his weathered face.
Don Tomasso’s black Mercedes limousine was doubleparked directly in front of Giovanni’s entrance. Surrounded by his men, the don approached his car with his head held as high as possible in defiance to any unseen observers. A dark BMW pulled up behind Tomasso s Mercedes. He nodded in recognition at the driver before ducking his head and climbing into the limousine. One of the bodyguards followed him. The others moved back to the BMW Both cars were in motion before the doors of the BMW were shut.
Lit by a dull orange streetlight, two children played on the sidewalk in front of a brownstone half a block down the street from the restaurant. The boy had just tossed the baseball to the younger girl when the Mercedes exploded, followed instantly by the BMW’s destruction. The fireballs bloomed and met as pieces of the cars and bricks from the nearby buildings crashed back to earth.
Rosemary Muldoon continued to watch the flames on the oversize video screen in front of her. She said nothing until the tape ran down into static. She sat immobile in the carved black walnut chair at the head of the long table, but her hands clutched the chair’s arms until her knuckles were white.
Chris Mazzucchelli got up from the chair beside her to pull the tape from the VCR. Rosemary glanced around her father’s library, where strategy meetings for his Family, the Gambiones, had always taken place. She had left almost everything in the penthouse the same, only bringing in some high-tech equipment such as the video and her computer to help her run the empire she had inherited. Right now, the room felt very empty, as if even her father had abandoned her.
When Chris came back to the conference table, he laid the tape down and stroked her dark brown hair. As his hand cupped her face, Rosemary roused herself.
“Only two of us left now. Don Calvino and I. Three dons dead in a matter of weeks, and we don’t even know who’s destroying us. All we know is who they are using.” Rosemary shook her head. “The Five Families have never faced a threat like this. We’re not prepared to fight on this scale. We’ve lost most of the drugs in Jokertown. Harlem has stopped paying our portion of the numbers. We’re getting hit from the top and the bottom. They took over our biggest drug factory in Brooklyn.”
“We’ve got to get prepared. You’re the only active don left. I talked to Tomasso’s capos; they’re all with us just like the others. I only wish I could point them in the right direction. Right now, I’m just trying to keep business going so we have the money to survive and fight back. Calvino tried his hand at negotiating. So far, it doesn’t seem to have worked. We had both of the remaining dons covered at all times. That’s how we got this tape.” Chris picked it up and tossed it into the air. “Remotely controlled explosives, EE., we assume. They were probably within sight of the cars to make sure they got Don Tomasso.”
“So they knew about the kids.” Rosemary glanced up at “Probably.” Chris shrugged. “So far they haven’t been particularly careful about civilian casualties. They’re terrorists.”
“They’re bastards.” Chris nodded and Rosemary knew he was already working out the details of backtracking the explosives. One of the things she had learned in the last few months of working with him was that he was superb at taking her objectives and desires and accomplishing them through his position as her front man to the Families. She had known she would never be accepted as the head of the Gambiones by the capos. They required a masculine figurehead. So Chris ran things in public, and she, Maria Gambione, pulled the strings. Except that it had not worked out quite like that. Chris could almost read her mind. He had the practical experience she lacked. They made a great team. Without him she would never have pulled it off.
“The Shadow Fist is causing us trouble, but I didn’t think that it had the organization to accomplish all of this. On the other hand, we know they are working with the Immaculate Egrets and the Werewolves from Jokertown. Together, they’re giving us a lot of trouble. But a bunch of gangs ...”
“With the right leader ...” Rosemary spread her hands. “With the right leader anything’s possible. But we would have heard something about him. How could they keep him under that sort of deep cover?” Chris shrugged. “I’ll check it out, but I won’t hold my breath. I had another idea. Think about Tomasso’s murder. Those cars would have been under twenty-four hour guard by teams of his most trusted men. How the hell did they plant those bombs?”
Chris pulled a chair out and sat down backward. “How?” Rosemary had learned not to get too impatient with Chris’s occasional use of Socratic method. As in law school, it taught her much.
“Aces, again. Just like Don Picchietti. Who else could pop in and out without being seen? Nobody really knows how many there are or who they are or what they can do. What if some of them decided that wearing funky costumes and being altruistic was silly? Jokers, too. Look at the Werewolves. Get back at the nats. That’s a pretty fierce army we’re talking here. Look at where the action is going on most of the time. Jokertown. Maybe it’s because we control it and they’re trying to get us, or maybe it’s because the jokers have decided that they want their own piece of the action.” Chris had leaned forward to emphasize his point. “If these guys aren’t all aces, they’ve got some working for them. And I think that’s the way to go. If we don’t get our own aces, we’re going to get slaughtered. We can’t compete.”
“I like that. I could use the district attorney’s office to get volunteers. A little steering of their efforts and a number of our troubles could get solved. We’ll get higher-quality aces that way too. Pity a lot of the big names are still on that WHO tour.” Rosemary nodded, more enthusiastic about this plan than she had been about anything in some time. “Good. Can you pull in anyone?”
“To be honest, I already have. We’ve got a detective named Croyd doing some checking for us and a heavy name of Bludgeon who’ll come in handy in a fight. ‘Course they won’t be as ‘high quality’ coming from the criminal element like me.” Chris straightened and looked down his nose at her, trying to hide his grin.
“They’ll do. The criminal element isn’t all bad.” Rosemary reached up and pulled him down to her to kiss him.
Bagabond walked down the crowded East Village street trying not to be impatient with C.C. Ryder’s window-shopping. It seemed as though every ten feet the spike-haired redhead saw something she just had to have-as long as she didn’t actually have to go in and talk to anyone about it. Bagabond was about to suggest going back to the songwriter’s loft when she heard a bayou-accented voice behind her.
“Hey, y’all, que pasa?” The teenage hyperactive body encased in a tiger-striped leotard with gold-lame sneakers belonged to Jack’s niece Cordelia. She bounced out of the restaurant she had been about to enter and grabbed both Bagabond and C.C. Ryder by the elbows to guide them into the Riviera with her before either could muster a protest. C.C. quickly shrugged her off when they were inside, but neither woman put up a struggle when Cordelia immediately got them a table. Bagabond had learned it was useless to resist unless one wanted an excessively hurt teenager on her hands.
“So, y’all seen Rosemary’s television appeal to aces yet?” Cordelia opened and shut her menu with the same movement. “Gonna join up, Bagabond?”
“Haven’t been asked.” Bagabond chose to take her time with the menu. “What about you?”
Glancing up over the top of her oversize menu, Bagabond was surprised to catch the expression of revulsion on Cordelia’s face. For possibly the first time she had stopped Cordelia cold in her tracks.
“I, uh, don’t do that anymore.” Cordelia opened her menu again and stared at it fixedly. “I could hurt somebody y’know. I’m never going to do that again. It’s not right.”
“I’m not sure it’s a good idea. Ace vigilantes are not what we need in this city,” C.C. looked from Cordelia to Bagabond before excusing herself.
“So, you seen Jack lately?” Cordelia followed C.C.’s progress to the rear of the restaurant intently before turning to Bagabond with wide, innocent eyes.
“Yeah. He asked if I’d seen you. Ever think of calling your uncle once in a while?” Bagabond’s irritation was evident in her rough voice.
“I’ve been so busy, what with working for Global Fun and Games an’ all—”
“And you haven’t wanted to talk to him anyway, right?”
“I don’t know what to say ...” Crodelia blushed. “I mean, it’s like I don’ know him anymore. You don’ understand. I was raised in the Church. I was taught that bein’ a homo-what Jack is, is one of the worst sins.”
“It’s not catching and he’s your uncle. He’s risked his life for you and you wont even give him a call. I’m glad you’re so strong on right and wrong.” Bagabond looked disgusted and unconsciously flicked her wrist at the girl. “Michael’s good for him. I’ve never seen Jack so happy.”
“Yeah, well, Michael’s a son of a bitch! I saw him in a club in the Village last week. He was with someone and it wasn’t Uncle Jack.” Cordelia was furious.
“Everything okay here?” C.C. seated herself and looked at each woman in turn.
“Hey, no prob.” Cordelia waved the waitress over. “You goin’ to do my benefit or what?”
“You keep asking and I keep saying no.” C.C. shook her head in affectionate exasperation. “I just want to write my songs, do some recording at home. I don’t need a live audience and I certainly don’t want one.”
“C.C., de audience needs you. It’s a benefit for wild card victims as well as AIDS. You of all people should have sympathy for the cause.”
Bagabond watched C.C.’s face tighten at the mention of the wild card virus. It had taken years of drugs, therapy, and God knew what else to bring her back to humanity. C.C.’s very real nightmare was that she would again become a living subway car formed from nothing save hate. Or something much worse. C.C. had spoken of a little of this to Bagabond.
C.C. Ryder controlled her emotions rigidly, never allowing them to exceed a certain low level. If she continued taking the downs and antidepressants prescribed for her, she couldn’t write. Not being able to create her songs was even worse than the prospect of changing back. So she avoided any situation that might be more than she could handle. Not even Tachyon could tell her what might set off the series of internal changes that could result in another transformation. Bagabond did not understand how C.C. could live in that state of constant fear and still create the songs, but she did understand why she wanted to stay away from most humans. She approved.
“No.” C.C.’s voice had become as tense as her muscles, although it was equally clear that she was controlling the effect the discussion was having on her.
“It could be your big comeback—”
“Cordelia, you can’t have a comeback if you were never there in the first place.” C.C. forced a smile. “I’m sure there are many more likely candidates out there.”
“Your songs have been recorded by the best: Peter Gabriel—” Cordelia barely paused in her diatribe at the arrival of their burgers. “Simple Minds, U2 ... It’s time for you to show them all what you can do.”
Bored by the argument and reasured that C.C. was holding her own, Bagabond reached out across the city, flashing through the tangle of feral intelligences. Darkness, bright light; hunger, fulfillment; the tense anticipation of the hunter, the cold, shivering fear of the stalked; death, birth; pain. So much pain in living each minute-why did these human fools insist on creating even more for themselves by their little games? Playing at living. She touched a squirrel with a broken back. It had been struck by a passing car near Washington Park, and she stopped its heart and brain simultaneously. In Central Park the gray son of the black and the calico dashed into a copse of oaks and sheltered by the underbrush, spun and raked the nose of the Doberman that had chased it. Bagabond felt the cat’s triumph for an instant before it recognized her touch and hissed in anger. Feeling no need to force the contact, she moved on. She allowed herself another instant to ascertain that the black and the calico’s most recent litter of kittens was well in the warm service tunnels beneath Forty-second Street.
As her eyes rolled back down, Bagabond realized that Cordelia’s conversation with C.C. had stopped.
“Suzanne, are you okay?” C.C. ran her gaze across Bagabond’s face then nodded slowly.
“She’s fine, Cordelia.” C.C. brought the young woman’s attention back to herself, giving Bagahond time to return. Sometimes it had become difficult to come back to the slow, jabbering world of the humans. Someday, she thought, looking at C.C. Ryder, she would not come back. C.C. was the only person she had ever met who understood that. One day she would ask what C.C. had felt as the Other. C.C. mentioned it rarely, but when she did, Bagabond had seen a haunted need still there behind her eyes.
“Um, okay. Anyway, GF & g, you know, would love to back you on your reintroduction. The Funhouse is an intimate venue. Perfect for you and your music.” Cordelia leaned toward C.C.” hand extended. ‘And you know Xavier Desmond’s one of your biggest fans.”
“Christ, girl, you’re turning into a freaking agent.” C.C. leaned back in the fifties plastic-covered chair. “And I’ve already got one agent. That’s bad enough.”
“Well, hey, I’ve got to get home. It’s late. Good to see you guys.” Cordelia dropped a few bills onto the table and got up. She swung the armadillo shoulder bag off her chair. Catching Bagabond’s eyes on the dead animal, she elbowed it behind her and backed toward the door, still working on C.C. “You’ve got a few weeks to make your final decision. The show’s not until late May. Bono said he was looking forward to meeting you. So’d Little Steven.”
“Good night, Cordelia.” C.C. Ryder had clearly reached the end of her patience. “I’m too old for this, Suzanne.”
Wriggling underneath the padded shoulders of the business suit Rosemary had bought her, Bagabond stepped out of the elevator onto Rosemary’s floor. The receptionist recognized her instantly.
“Good morning, Ms. Melotti. Let me buzz Ms. Muldoon.”
“Thank you, Donnis.” Bagabond sat down uncomfortably in one of the chairs scattered around the waiting area.
“I’m afraid you just missed Mr. Goldberg. He left a few minutes ago for his court appearances today.” The older woman behind the word processor smiled at Bagabond indulgently while she punched Rosemary’s intercom number and announced her.
“For once everything’s running on time. Go right on in.” Bagabond nodded and got back up onto her high heels. With her back to the receptionist, she blinked at the pain in her feet. She hated these days when she played dress-up to talk to Rosemary. At Rosemary’s closed door she knocked twice and walked in to see the assistant DA with a phone resting on one shoulder. As usual, Bagabond sat on Rosemary’s big oak desk. She listened to the conversation.
“Wonderful, Lieutenant. I’m so glad that tip on the designer drug factory panned out.” Rosemary rolled her eyes at Bagabond as she signed papers and balanced the receiver.
“So it wasn’t a Mafia operation after all. Any clues as to the ownership? If we could just find out who’s behind this senseless crime war with the Mafia, we could go a long way toward stopping it.” Rosemary nodded to her unseen caller and almost dropped the phone. “True, but as long as they’re wiping each other out, they’re hurting innocent people.”
“Well, you can rest assured that I’ll be forwarding any other aces who volunteer over to you immediately. You’re right-uncoordinated activity is dangerous for all concerned. I’m just glad to help. Right. I’ll be in touch. ‘Bye.” Rosemary hung up the phone.
“We took out a drug plant last night.” Rosemary leaned her chin on her hand and smiled up at Bagabond. “I’m pleased.”
Bagabond nodded, looking across the office toward the dark wooden door.
“And I’m curious.” Rosemary got up and checked to make sure that the door was securely closed. “Why haven’t you volunteered?”
Bagabond noticed for the hundredth time that Rosemary had no trouble walking in her spike heels. She looked up to see Rosemary staring at her, a muscle jumping along her jaw.
“You never asked.” Bagabond was uncomfortable. She hated it. Guilt was for humans. Or pets.
“I didn’t think I had to. I thought we were friends.” They glared at each other like two cats in a territorial battle. Rosemary broke the impasse.
“And of course we are.” The DA sat down and leaned back in her chair. “I should have asked. I’m asking now. I need your help.”
Rosemary’s smile reminded Bagabond of a tiger’s yawn. Teeth, lots of teeth. Bagabond felt cold.
“What can I do? I talk to pigeons.” Bagabond examined Rosemary’s face for duplicity.
“Well, pigeons see things. Sometimes I’m sure they see interesting things. I’d just like to hear about those things.”
“Which one of you? The DA or the Mafia don?” Rosemary’s eyes flashed up to the door and back to Bagabond. After an instant of hesitation she smiled at the woman sitting on her desk.
“You’d be amazed to discover how much their interests are intertwined.”
“Yes. I would.” Bagabond shook her head. “No, I don’t think I can help.”
“Come on, Suzanne. People are getting hurt out there. We can stop that.” Rosemary reached toward her window. “People killing other people.” Bagabond nodded. “Good. The fewer of them, the better I’ll like it.”
“Being a hard case today, I see.” Rosemary relaxed back into her chair. “I’ve heard this one.”
“I mean it.” Bagabond looked down at her old friend.
“I know. But I do need you. I need your connections. I need your information. And it’s not just humans getting hurt.” Rosemary stretched her hands out on top of the papers on her desk. They both watched the fingers shake until they were clenched into fists. “Don Picchietti and Don Covello are already dead. They just took out Don Tomasso. He was my godfather. Please, Bagabond. Help me.” Rosemary looked up at Bagabond, pleading her case with both her voice and her face.
“Picchietti was hit with an ice pick in his ear. Nobody around him saw anything.” Rosemary smiled at her with a twisted and unamused grin. “And for once they weren’t lying.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing. But my help won’t hurt anything either.” Bagabond tasted bitterness at her surrender and felt anger at herself, but she could not abandon her friend.
“Thank you.” Rosemary relaxed and picked up her pen, flipping it through her fingers. “Talk to Jack lately?”
“Almost never.” Bagabond slid a part of her consciousness to the rat whom she had set to watch Jack as he worked his way through the subway tunnels. She smelled him first. Then, turning the rat’s head toward Jack Robicheaux, she saw him in the rat’s dim, black-and-white vision.
“Maybe you could pass on that I’d like to see him?” Rosemary had obviously tired of sparring with Bagabond.
“I can tell him.” Bagabond nodded. “No promises. Who’s the lieutenant I report to?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Suzanne. You’ll give anything you come up with directly to me.” When Rosemary met her eyes, Bagabond found no friendship at all.
Hands clenched atop a stack of case briefs, Rosemary stared out the window of her office. She was afraid for Chris. Until they found out who was behind the war on the Families, he was in extreme danger as the public chief of the Gambiones. And they still had few clues, although every day there was another Mafia loss. They’d hit all the numbers runners, dealers, small-timers, and extortionists they could find to try to get a lead to the top. It hadn’t worked. The cells of lower-level criminals had no information about the cells above them. It was brilliant organization on someone’s part, and it was destroying her people. She shook her head unconsciously, one part of her preoccupied with the Families while the other was trying to keep on top of her office’s caseload. More and more she had come to depend on her assistants for aid in prosecuting the cases she would have dealt with personally a few months ago. She wondered if anyone had noticed and made a mental note to be more careful. But it was so hard to balance everything, so much more difficult than she had ever imagined.
“There’s someone here to see you, Ms. Muldoon.” Donnis’s quiet voice broke into her thoughts so abruptly that she jumped.
“Who is it, Donnis? I’ve got a desk full of cases.”
“Well, Ms. Muldoon, she says her name is Jane Dow.” The name was familiar although Rosemary failed to place it for a moment. Then she had it: Water Lily. What did the girl want?
“I’ll see her.”
Entering, the auburn-haired girl, no, young woman, Rosemary corrected herself, carefully closed the door after herself “Thank you for seeing me, Ms. Muldoon.”
“Please have a seat, Ms. Dow. What can I do for you?” Water Lily looked down at her twisting hands, and Rosemary saw droplets of liquid forming on her forehead. Rosemary wondered if sweating was the extent of her ace, power. Just what she needed.
“Well, I thought maybe I could do something for you. I heard that you were looking for aces and-I know I’m not much of one, but I thought I could work for you. Help out.” For the first time Water Lily met Rosemary’s eyes and shrugged. “If you have anything that I could do.”
“Possibly.” Rosemary sighed. She couldn’t imagine what, but she was not about to turn down any help at this point. “Tell me what, precisely, is the extent of your power?”
“Well, I control water. I’m really good at floods.” Water Lily turned pink and the water on her face shone. She seemed very young. Rosemary heard dripping but chose to ignore it.
“All water, everywhere? I mean, do you have a range? Do you generate it, or can you use the water around you?” Rosemary stopped and smiled apologetically. “Sorry about the third degree. I’m just trying to see where you’ll fit in.”
“It has to be fairly close, but I can use any water in my vicinity and control the force of its flow. And I can change the electrolyte balance in someone and knock them out.” Water Lily was looking fractionally less embarrassed now that she was being taken seriously. Rosemary no longer heard the dripping. “ I was thinking that I would be good with crowd control, sweeping people off their feet without really hurting them with a small flood, or causing distractions if you needed it.”
“What about other forms of water, high-pressure steam, for example?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never tried it.” Water Lily appeared to be interested in the idea.
“Okay, that sounds as if it could be quite helpful. Welcome aboard, Water Lily. Or do you prefer Jane?” Rosemary thought about the raids she was trying to organize on some of the Shadow Fist drug operations. A few burst pipes could do an amazing amount of damage. She smiled broadly at the younger woman without seeing her.
“Jane, please. You can reach me at Aces High. I brought a card. Just let me know what I can do.” Jane looked pleased by her acceptance.
Rosemary stole half an hour to familiarize herself with the cases stacked in front of her before she called in Paul Goldberg. His experience had made him an obvious choice to be her immediate aide, and Rosemary had taken advantage of it.
Paul came in and sat down uninvited. He held a fat sheaf of reports that he dropped on her desk with a thud.
“The latest info on our caseload. We won the case against Malerucci.” Rosemary glanced up from the paperwork at the mention of the name. “I know you didn’t think much of the case we had, but I decided to go ahead with it. It worked out. Maybe you’re not aware of this, but we’ve been taking some heat about the number of Mafia cases we’re prosecuting, or rather not prosecuting. The cops have come to me several times complaining about doing all the work and getting no support from this office.”
“The cops are always complaining. You know that, Paul. They don’t understand that we have this Constitution thing we have to pay attention to when we haul someone into court. Good work on the Malerucci case, but you took a chance there. The jury could have gone either way based on that evidence.”
“Especially after somebody got to the Police Evidence Lab and destroyed most of the coke.” Paul crossed his legs on Rosemary’s desk and leaned back in the chair. “We haven’t been able to trace that leak yet.”
“In the future, please stick to my instructions on which cases to go after. I’d appreciate it, speaking strictly as your boss.” Rosemary smiled at him and leaned back in her own chair.
“Boss, I’ve noticed a trend in the cases you okay, and I’m not the only one. Why aren’t we going after the Mafia? With this war going on, we could put a lot of nasty people away. Their resources are stretched too thin to protect all of their people.” He reached out and tapped the stack of papers with a rigid forefinger. “It’s all right here. I’ve even got a possible tax evasion on Chris Mazzucchelli. What do you say? Let me at ’im.”
“No.” Rosemary put on her best inscrutable madonna look. “I want to wait until the war has shaken out some more.”
“The Mafia appears to be self-destructing anyway. We can just save ourselves the trouble.”
“You know that if we put some of these people behind bars we might just be saving their lives.” Paul was watching her closely. His scrutiny made Rosemary uncomfortable.
“I make the decisions here.” The tone in her voice was meant to shut Paul up and it worked, but she still didn’t like the stare she got after she said it.
After working out strategy for the twenty most urgent cases they had, Rosemary had relaxed and so had Paul. In many ways it reminded her of working with Chris. She came up with the plan and he carried it out. Only with Paul, everything was on the right side of the law. It was after six and she was leading Paul and his stack of cases to her door when he turned around to speak to her once more.
“You ever go to Holy Innocents?” Paul asked about her Catholic elementary school in offhand tones.
“Me, are you kidding? That’s for rich Italian kids. I went to good old ES. one ninety-two in Brooklyn.” Rosemary studied his face.
“I didn’t think so. Friend of mind went there. He said the craziest thing the other night. Thought you looked just like Rosa Maria Gambione grown up. What a crock, huh? She died back in the early seventies. See you in the morning.” Paul nodded his farewell and Rosemary wondered if she had seen a warning in his eyes-or an indictment.
Bagabond moved quickly through the subway maintenance tunnels, accompanied by the black and one of his kittens. The kitten, a mottled ginger, was even bigger than he was. She had watched Jack return to his old home in the nineteenthcentury abandoned station through the eyes of a succession of rats. Bagabond waited to catch him when he was still underground. It always felt more natural talking to him here, When she met him above, he was different. They both were. She pulled the ragged blue coat farther up above her knees and hurried to cut him off before he could go. The black paced her while his daughter loped ahead to spot trouble.
Bagabond reached the door and opened it onto Jack reaching for the knob. The compact, pale man smiled in surprise. “‘Allo dere.” He set down the box he had been cradling and knelt to let the black sniff the back of his hand. The other cat kept her distance, standing in front of Bagabond to protect her.
“I haven’t seen you for a long time. I’ve been a little worried.” Jack stood up to face the woman in tattered clothing. “Come on in and sit down.”
“You’ve been busy.” Bagabond had swung her snarled hair back down across her face and hunched within the pile of ill-fitting dresses and pants she wore. She knew that with her rough voice and trembling manner she now looked at least sixty years old.
“So have you.” Jack looked at her hesitantly making her way down the carpeted stairs. He grinned broadly. “You could win a Tony for that, you know. I met this Broadway producer, he’s looking for an actress.”
“Friend of Michael’s?” Bagabond straightened as she sat on the edge of the Victorian horsehair sofa. The ginger sat tensely at her feet. The black leaned against Jack’s leg and looked up at him.
“Yes, a friend of Michael’s. Why won’t you come over and spend some time with us? Get to know Michael. You’d like him.”
“Why don’t you get to know Paul?” Bagabond drew her feet up under her and looked at Jack sitting on the equally antique chair opposite her.
“I don’t think a yuppie would see much in a blue-collar transit worker.”
“I don’t think Michael would approve of my style sense.” Bagabond spread out her layers of mismatched clothing along the couch.
“So there we are, hmm? I don’t like it and neither do you, but we’ve become trapped in our undercover lives as normal people.” Jack looked sad. “Have you seen Cordelia?”
Yeah.” Bagabond shrugged. Another shrug, another avoidance of responsibility. She straightened her shoulders. “I tried. I don t know,
“When you see her again, tell her ... tell her I understand. I grew up there too, after all.” Jack ran the palms of his hands down his sharply creased black denim jeans. “So, you tracked me down. What can I do for you?”
Jack reached down to scratch behind the black’s ears, and they both listened to the loud purring for a few moments. “Rosemary wants to see you.” Bagabond had pulled her knees up and drawn her armor back around her. She refused to meet Jack’s eyes.
“No.”
“Jack, she’s just trying to keep everything cool. She could use some help.”
“For Christ sake, Bagabond, she’s on the side of the bad guys. She’s the head of the frigging Mafia.” Jack got up and began pacing on the Oriental carpets. The black got up to join him,then looked at Bagabond and lay back down. Bagabond got a flash of warning from the cat. She didn’t know if it was for her or for Jack. “What the hell does she need me for anyway?”
“Well, you could help with surveillance. You could keep your ears open for anything strange going on.”
“Oh, right. Am I supposed to be her lead into the gay community? No, maybe she thinks the reptiles are against her too. Or maybe she just wants me to bite off a strategic foot or two.” Jack turned to face Bagabond. “No fucking way.”
“Jack, she just needs someone on her side—”
“Someone on her side! She’s got the whole Mafia. I find it a little hard to believe that one were-alligator would make all that much difference.” Jack walked over to the sofa and looked down on Bagabond. She refused to look up to meet his eyes. “Suzanne, you stay out of this. She doesn’t care about you anymore. She’ll use you too. Get you killed. And not even blink.”
The black stood up and moved between Jack and Bagabond. The ginger began growling deep in her throat, the hair on her back standing up. Jack retreated a few steps.
Bagabond slid off the sofa onto her feet and stared back into Jack’s green eyes.
“She’s my friend. I guess she’s my only friend.”
She stalked to the stairs. The cats followed her. The ginger never took her eyes off Jack as she backed across the narrow room. The black walked a few steps, then stopped and looked back at Jack before leaping up the stairway to catch up with the others.
“Well, whoever they are, you’re keeping them busy.” Chris helped himself to a bite of Rosemary’s grilled tuna. “You said you weren’t hungry,” Rosemary swatted away his fork.
“I lied. It’s definitely not the Yakuza. They’re taking hits too. Lost one of their top men here in the city. It seems our friends are not above going after anybody if they can’t have their Mafia for breakfast. Your program of authorized trouble is taking its toll. They may not be out, but they’re definitely down. You having any trouble with that?”
“No. Now that the capos are all following our instructions I know everything that’s happening anywhere among the Families. It makes it easy.”
“I hate to say this, but you may need to arrange a hit on us. Nothing too severe, just something to ease off any suspicions.” Chris glanced around the bright kitchen. It was the only cheery space in the otherwise dark and gloomy penthouse. “Got any cookies?”
“Afraid not. Do you know something I don’t?” Rosemary examined Chris’s face.
“No, I just believe in prevention. I don’t want anyone to see a pattern in what your aces are doing.”
“I’ll be fine. Who’d connect me, assistant DA, with the Gambione Family? I’m more concerned with you.” Rosemary pushed away her plate. She was not about to mention Paul’s suspicions to Chris. She already knew what he would say. “What kind of security are you carrying?”
“Beretta, of course.” Chris swung open his black leather jacket.
“That’s not what I mean.”
“All right, okay. You got no sense of humor sometimes, ya know. I’ve got some guys I know I can trust. They’re with me twenty-four hours a day. One’s outside right now. Three more are downstairs. I’m covered, babe. These guys owe me; their souls are mine.”
“Tell me what’s happening with our regular operations.” Rosemary was annoyed at his possessiveness of his cadre of her men but decided it was only her native paranoia.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve got it all taken care of. Each of the other Families has a representative who reports to me directly. Any problems I take care of them. You need to come up with a way to find out who we’re up against and how to take them out.” Chris smiled happily at the ceiling. “You know, I think those boys still don’t like my rattail.”
“I’m still working on it. Have you investigated the Vietnamese? The Shadow Fist gang in Jokertown is involved in this somehow. That much has become clear.” Rosemary decided not to press the issue of her normal briefing. Chris was right; she had more important things to think about.
“Well, I’m trying to get somebody to infiltrate them. You got any idea how hard it is to find an Oriental in the Mafia?” Chris sighed elaborately. “I’m trying to borrow somebody from the Yakuza.”
“Good idea. Listen, Chris, I need some time by myself tonight, okay?” Rosemary hesitated. “To make plans.”
“I can find something to keep myself busy.” Chris smirked in a way that worried Rosemary.
“Stay out of trouble. I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you.”
“Me either.” Chris got up and kised the top of Rosemary’s head. “I may not be around for a few days. Don’t worry about me. I’m just taking care of business.”
When Chris had gone, Rosemary went to the library. She kept trying to keep her two lives straight, but it was getting more and more difficult. She had promised herself that she would get the Mafia out of drugs and prostitution. But now that the war was going on there was no way that she could do that. They needed the money desperately. Protecting her people was causing her trouble at the office. Paul Goldberg had openly asked her if her informants couldn’t get more dirt on the Mafia. And that comment about Maria Gambione. Christ. There had to be something she could do about him. Kill him, before he passed on his suspicions? But he was Suzanne’s boyfriend. What could she do?
She had thought it would be easy to run things from behind Chris. Instead it seemed that he was more and more in control of what was happening in the streets. Nothing was going the way she had planned. Rosemary rested her forehead on the table between her outstretched arms.
She knew that she was not doing her job in the DA’s office. But it was only a matter of time until this damned war was over and she could get back to doing what she was supposed to be doing. Then she could get rid of the drugs, prostitution, and corruption. Just as soon as they had won the war.
She woke up from the nightmare with a small cry, quickly stifled by the heavy atmosphere of the library. She had been in a religious painting she had seen as a child, the Crucifixion. But it was her broken body on the center cross, with Chris hanging on her right and her father on her left. Rosemary put her arms around herself to stop the trembling.
Bagabond woke instantly, the warning of danger as insistent as a cat’s claws set in her skin. She separated the thought-streams entering her own mind and found the sending carrying the cry for help. There was still a shock when she recognized Jack Robicheaux down the alley. The strength and clarity of the sending told her that the creature observing the scene in the alley was the black. So that’s where he had been for the last few days. When he vanished, she had not followed him mentally except to make sure he was alive and well.
Silently she told him to return home. He snarled at the suggestion. He and Jack had been close since they had first met. The black’s curiosity about the man/big-lizard had created a bond. The black focused on the tableau at the end of the streetlight-spotted alley. Jack was trapped by a much larger man who taunted him. Despite herself, Bagabond allowed the black to transmit more and draw her into the situation.
“Hey, fucking faggot! Guess taking off down this alley wasn’t so smart, huh?” The hulk looming over Jack was ugly, with close-set eyes and a sloping forehead. Bagabond suddenly recognized him. Bludgeon. She’d seen him once before in the Tombs with Rosemary. He was just as mean and just as stupid as he looked. Jack was in trouble, but Jack could handle himself.
“All I wanted to do was play wit’cha a little. An’ I know you faggots jus’ love rough trade.”
“You don’t want to mess with me, man.” Jack was plastered against the fence cutting off the alley. “I’m a lot more trouble than I look.”
“Oh, I wanna mess wit’ chou, pretty-boy. I’m gonna start wit’ your face and work down, pervert. Ain’t nobody gonna want you when I get through.” Bludgeon reached out for Jack, but the smaller man ducked under the paw.
“Please, I don’t want to hurt you. Just leave me alone.” Jack’s voice shook. Bagabond wondered why he was so afraid. “You won’t like what you see.”
“You think you know that gook chop-sockey stuff, huh?” Bludgeon laughed, and even Bagabond winced at the sound like gears stripping. “It’s okay. I’m part of the Family now. I got me an insurance plan.”
The black was more insistent as he sensed Bagabond’s reluctance to help his other human friend. It transferred to pain in Bagabond’s own mind. She sent Jack’s refusal to help her and Rosemary back out to the black, but the cat would not turn away. Tiring of watching the two men spar, Bagabond called the black to return and showed him Jack’s transformation to alligator. If he didn’t want her help, fine. She wouldn’t force it on him. He thought he didn’t need her around, okay.
The black’s wild anger at her stand surged back at her and she cut off contact. It wasn’t her problem anymore. She lifted her hands to probe gently at the pain in her temples. The black had overridden her defenses because she had not expected his response. Christ, what was wrong with everyone? Why did everybody hate her now?
Curled upon a pile of rags in a steam tunnel yards below the surface, Bagabond had slept for hours. Despite her best efforts, the headache clung on. She couldn’t reach the black either, although she knew he wasn’t dead. She searched through her layers of clothing until she found the strapless wristwatch she used when she needed to keep track of time. Less than an hour until she was supposed to meet Paul. She’d be late. It would take half an hour to get to C.C.’s, where she had taken to keeping dresses and suits that had to be hung up. Stupid game. With a little luck C.C. would be working in the studio and never know she had been there.
The only luck she’d had all week actually happened. The red light was on over the door to C.C.’s studio, so Bagabond got in and out without distraction. Still, the always-late Paul was standing in the bar waiting at West Fourth Street where they were meeting for dinner before a movie. Dinner was pleasant, but Bagabond knew that Paul was not entirely there even as he regaled her with tales of the latest escapades and defenses he had encountered during the last week.
“So then this guy starts claiming that his what-do-you-callit, his ancient Persian contact, told him that this other poor guy was really an ancient Greek and a personal enemy. And he starts channeling, right there in the courtroom. Lots of grunts, rolling around on the floor, speaking in tongues-who knows if it’s Persian. The judge breaks two gavels screaming for order while the schmuck’s defense attorney is alternately calling for a doctor for his client and trying to build a defense based on this fit. He did get a continuance. Which means I have to go back in there with those idiots next week. Oy vay, as my sainted mother used to say.” Paul Goldberg grinned over the cheesecake at her. “So, how was your week?”
“The animals are all okay. No major problems.”
“What a city to be a veterinarian in. Between poodles and rottweilers, I don’t know how you manage.”
“That’s why I try to stick to cats, with the occasional exotic rat or raccoon.” Bagabond smiled across the table, wondering why she had ever come up with this story. Paul’s mood changed abruptly.
“Listen, I need to talk to you. Can we skip the movie tonight?” Paul stared into his coffee cup as if the swirls of cream would reveal his future.
“Sounds serious.”
“It is. At least I think it is. You’re the sensible sort. You’ll tell me if you think I’m crazy.”
“Just don’t start speaking in Persian.”
“Right.” He picked up the check. “This one’s mine. Don’t argue.”
They took a cab over to Paul’s huge two-level apartment on the upper East Side. He said almost nothing, just examined her hands with their short, blunt nails and joked about her lack of claws. Once up in the apartment he made coffee and put on Paul Simon. When he finally sat down, it was in a chair he pulled to face her rather than on the couch beside her.
“There are some things happening down at the office. Weird stuff. I need a second opinion. You’re probably not the best person to ask, for a number of reasons, but you’re a friend and that’s what I need right now.” He rolled the coffee cup between his palms.
“I’m here.” Bagabond knew she wasn’t going to like what he was about to say.
“I think somebody’s gone bad. I’ve got people out on the street, snitches, we all do. Rumors are springing up about the DAs office. Rumors about Mafia connections.”
“What sort of Mafia connections?” Bagabond got up and walked around the white-on-white living room.
“Nothing specific. But I do know that the last three raids on Mafia operations have netted us nothing, just a few minor soldiers, virtually no drugs or guns. We’re being given enough to keep us happy, but not enough to do actual damage.” Paul looked up at Bagabond. “We’re being used. The raids on the Mafia’s enemies are always well-informed and almost always effective in hurting the opposition. And I think I know why.”
“What are you going to do about it?” Bagabond sipped her coffee and pondered her options. If she killed him here, she had been seen and would be a suspect. Rosemary might or might not protect her.
“I can’t trust anyone in the DAs office. And I’m not so sure about the mayor’s office either.” Paul put down his cup and paced across his living room in front of the fireplace. “I want to go to the press. The Times.”
“Are you absolutely certain about your information?” Bagabond stared past Paul into the flames. Rosemary had left herself open to this. She had not been careful enough.
“Absolutely. I can corroborate everything I’ve said.” Paul turned his back to her and warmed his hands over the fire. Bagabond stared into the back of his head. “But I’m hoping that the situation can be salvaged. If the person in question comes to their senses-maybe all this can be avoided. There are some other strange things going on here too. Some of this information that I have appears to have come directly from the Mafia. That I don’t understand.”
Bagabond remembered Chris Mazzucchelli. She had never trusted the man regardless of Rosemary’s attachment to him. Was he betraying Rosemary?
“You have to do what your conscience tells you. But if these people are really mafiosi, isn’t that a little dangerous?” Bagabond remembered Rosemary’s telling her how everything was going to be different now that she was in charge. Rosemary had made her decision.
“True. That’s one of the reasons I’m telling you. I’ve told some other people, given them the evidence. I didn’t want to endanger you with it.” Paul seemed relieved that she had not openly recognized Rosemary from the description. Bagabond wondered if this conversation had been a trap of some sort. Had she failed or won?
Paul put his arms around her and pulled her close. Bagabond did not resist, but she did not encourage him. She awkwardly embraced him in return.
“You could stay over tonight.” Paul kissed her forehead. “No. Paul, I’m just not ready to get involved that way. I’m old-fashioned, I guess.” Bagabond pushed him away. “I need time.”
“We’ve been seeing each other for months. I still don’t know where you live. What is it about me that you don’t trust?” Paul stood in front of her with his hands dangling at his sides.
“It’s not you. It’s me.” Bagabond avoided his eyes. “Give me time. Or don’t. It’s your choice.”
“My choice?” Paul shook his head in resignation. “This woud be easier if you weren’t so damned intriguing. Next Friday, dinner and, I promise, a movie next time. Meet me here?”
“Okay. Good luck. At work.” Bagabond didn’t know whether she meant it for Paul or for Rosemary.
Bagabond watched the muzzle-flashes and heard the sound of pistols, rifles, and shotguns going off and destroying the night as she circled the building. With a small army of rats, cats, and a few wild dogs, she was patrolling the perimeter, as Rosemary had put it in their meeting two days ago. Whenever anyone tried to break and run, she and the animals drove them back to the waiting police.
She almost tripped over a body, face blown off by a shotgun blast. As she retreated, she ran into a black cop. He caught her gently and steadied her.
“Ma’am, it’d be better if you found someplace else to sleep tonight.” His big hands turned her away from the battle toward the quiet surrounding streets. Those hands reminded her of Bludgeon’s reaching for Jack. She twisted free, leaving a dirty leather coat in his hands, and limped swiftly away.
When she found herself hidden in the darkness again, she made contact with her animals. The ginger remained with her at all times, but the others ranged around the building. With the eyes of a rat crouched on a pile of garbage, she followed the slow progress of a young Oriental man who was attempting to flee the fight. A trail of blood followed him, dripping down the right leg of his pants. She smelled it and so did the escaped rottweiler that suddenly filled the mouth of the alley. The Vietnamese gasped and began to back slowly down the alley. Holding the dog back, Bagabond pulled the rottweiler onto her haunches, and the dog howled a summons to the sky.
There was water everywhere. Rosemary had said that a new ace named Water Lily would be there that night. Bagabond had grown tired of splashing through puddles. The bottom six inches of her coats and skirts were soaked through and so were her boots. Where was all the water coming from? She hoped there weren’t any fires in Jokertown tonight.
Even though it revealed her presence, Bagabond had set up a fireline of feral cats to prevent any jokers from coning closer than a couple of blocks away from the fighting. The Jokertown warehouse at the center of the ring of protection was, according to Rosemary, one of the major Shadow Fist weapons storage areas. Bagabond’s concentration was flagging. Rosemary had given little thought to how long her pet ace could continue to scan through animals’ minds and control hundreds of them in coordinated action.
The ginger cat snarled and woke Bagabond from her reverie. She straightened up from the wall she had leaned against to conserve her strength. Holding an Uzi in firing position, another Vietnamese was making his way down the dark street, moving from shadow to shadow without a sound .. Bagabond fixed on him, then called the rats. Within seconds a hundred rats attacked the man, driving him back. They leaped up his pants and ran up his flailing arms, biting his face and neck. Their sheer numbers tripped him as they covered the ground beneath his feet. He screamed. The Uzi began firing and did not stop, its pulsing fire echoing between the walls in an eerie rhythm to the mans screams. Both climbed the scale until the Uzi ran out of ammunition and the man’s throat was too raw to make another sound. It was a silence broken only by the scrabbling rats. Bagabond sent them scurrying away to a new position. The sight of the man in his pool of blood disturbed her. He should not have struggled.
Lasers arced through the sky above the building, surgically cutting it apart. When the beams hit Water Lily’s puddles, clouds of steam rose. The intermittently lit scene reminded Bagabond of a Ken Russell staging of hell.
Using the kitten Bagabond had left with her, Rosemary called her. Bagabond turned and left the body. He had done nothing to her. He would not feed her or the animals. What right did she have to kill him?
When Bagabond arrived, Rosemary had stepped back into a deep, shadowed doorway to wait for her. The bag lady slipped along the wall, remembering the Vietnamese maneuvering in the same way minutes before. No one saw her.
“What do you see?” Rosemary had no time for preliminaries. “We got everyone. Nobody escaped through my eyes.”
“Good, good. The bastards wont forget this one soon.”
Rosemary was pleased, but her thoughts were elsewhere. “You see, I knew you could do a lot for me.”
Rosemary stepped out into the street as a policeman stepped up to greet her.
“Great job! Those aces of yours really made the difference, much as I hate to admit it. That black guy-the Hammer?-something else. Gave me a chill just being around him and that cloak of his.” The captain thrust out his hand in congratulations.
“Glad we could help, Captain. But the Harlem Hammer is still out of the country. Sure it wasn’t one of your undercover people?” Rosemary smiled and shook his hand. “By the way, could you have one of your officers help this lady out of the area?” Rosemary nodded toward Bagabond, who waited next to the doorway. “She got herself a little lost.”
Before the cop could catch her, Bagabond moved down the sidewalk and ducked into an alley. She took a moment to scatter her gathered animals before following the ginger into a manhole she had left open earlier. In the wet night below the streets she considered what she had accomplished. To what end? So that Rosemary’s Mafia could carry on? At least a score of rats, a cat, and one of the dogs had been lost tonight. Not again, Rosemary. Your games aren’t worth it to me. Catching the gleam of the ginger’s eyes, she followed her home through the tunnels.
When Rosemary got to the Gambione penthouse, Chris was already there. He was sitting in the chair at the head of the conference table in her father’s library. He said nothing while she took a seat next to him.
“We’ve got trouble.” Chris reached out and took her hand. “Paul Goldberg knows who you are.”
“How?” Rosemary simultaneously felt fear and a strange, small relief that the masquerade was over.
“That we don’t know, but it doesn’t matter much now, does it? We’ve been watching your office on general principles and found this stuff in his apartment.” Chris shoved an envelope across the table at her. When she opened it, she discovered pictures of herself and her father, records, everything they needed to pin her to a wall.
“We’ve got to get rid of him.” Chris drummed his fingers on the oak tabletop. “But I wanted to get your okay first. He is one of your employees after all.”
“Of course, immediately.” Rosemary kept staring at the photographs and moving them around. “Did he give it to anyone? Who else knows?”
“I think we got him in time.” Chris picked one of the pictures and looked at it almost idly. “I’d suggest you check with your great, good friend Suzanne, however. They’ve been seen together.”
“Jesus, she and Paul have been dating. I don’t know what she’ll do if he’s hit. She’s not very stable sometimes.”
“So you want us to wait on the hit? Come on, you know it’s either him or you.” Chris tipped the heavy chair back on its rear legs.
“No, take him out. Take him now. If he hasn’t had time to tell anybody, I’ll still be safe.” Rosemary turned her head from side to side as if seeking an escape route.
“It’s the only good choice. I’ll take care of it. Unless ...” Chris set the chair down with a small crash that was quickly dampened by the heavy rug.
“No. You do it.” Rosemary looked up at him gratefully. “Thank you.”
Smiling broadly, he leaned over and kissed her. “No problem. That’s what I’m here for.”
Walking around the corner of Paul’s high rise, Bagabond simultaneously’ tugged her skirt down and tried to avoid the puddles left by the afternoon rain. The doorman held open the heavy glass door for her with a badly hidden smirk that told her he had seen her adjustments. She considered making his life a little more miserable by perching a pigeon directly above him, but he was not worth it. She had more important things on her mind. It would depend, she had decided, but she might stay with Paul tonight. She still felt a little queasy about the decision.
She waved at Marry, who nodded and checked her off on his guest register. As always, the echoes of her heels tapping across the marble made her self-conscious. The elevator took forever. She had determined that everyone who had seen her come in knew what she was thinking about Paul by the time it showed up. This was ridiculous. She was an adult for Christ’s sake. One deep breath and she was in the car headed for Paul’s thirty-second-floor apartment.
Mercifully there was no one in the hall when she got out of the elevator. Up here the carpet felt three inches thick, and she made no noise at all as she stepped up to Paul’s front door and rang the bell. When several minutes had passed, she rang again and began paying attention to any sound from inside. She heard nothing. She mentally scanned for any creatures inside, a mouse or a rat, but Paul’s building was much too classy for that. Failing to locate an animal inside, she pulled a pigeon across the windows. A couple of lights were on, but she didn’t see Paul.
Great. What a night to stand her up. Good timing, Paul. Bagabond started back for the elevator with a certain lurking sense of relief that she kept shoving to the back of her mind.
Riding down, she realized that she must have been expected or the security guard would not have let her up. For the first time she felt concern about Paul.
Marty, the guard, had seen Paul come in several hours earlier. They had chatted about the fact he had actually won a case for once and had left early to relax before Bagabond came over. Marry blushed as he mentioned that Mr. Goldberg had told him to look out for her. Paul had said they would be celebrating together. There was no record of Paul’s going back out, and none of the doormen had seen him leave. Marry called another guard to take over his station and got the skeleton key for Paul’s apartment.
As soon as the door opened, Bagabond knew that something was wrong. Following her sense of dread, she led Marty straight to the bathroom. Paul was naked in the black marble Jacuzzi. Blood swirled around him in the bubbling water. He had been shot in the eye at close range. She stared at him while Marty frantically dialed the police.
The police took her down to the station and questioned her for hours. At first they were determined to get her to confess to the crime. When the initial coroner’s report finally came in, they gave up and began asking her about her knowledge of Paul’s activities. Who might have wanted him dead? She thought about Rosemary, over and over, but denied knowing anything.
Could Rosemary have had him killed? Rosemary knew that she cared about Paul. Rosemary had encouraged them. Was she capable of murdering someone she had worked with and respected? Bagabond did not allow herself to answer the questions.
It was almost six in the morning when C.C. finally got permission to take Bagabond home. Bagabond said nothing on the taxi ride back to C.C.’s loft. She reached out for the cats and mentally pulled them close to her, shivering. C.C. scooped her morning paper up off the sidewalk in front of her building and tucked it under her arm as she guided Bagabond into the lift. In the loft Bagabond stared blindly at the opposite wall while C.C. made tea.
Bagabond realized that C.C. was repeatedly calling her name. It had brought her back to herself. She preferred spreading her consciousness across the city. It spread her pain as well. Only the urgency in C.C.’s voice made her focus on the paper in front of her.
Rosemary Gambione Muldoon’s picture took up a quarter of the front page.
Rosemary was icily calm. The warning had come from an obit writer who just happened to owe a lot of money in Vegas. She had bought his marker some time ago. Today had been the payoff. He had heard the excitement in the newsroom and checked it out. Seeing her picture on the front-page mock-up had been enough. He placed the call to his Family contact. Chris had pounded on her door at two A.M. and together they had thrown clothes into a suitcase.
Chris had brought four of his best men to guard her twenty-four hours a day. The six of them sat in the black limousine that took them to one of the Gambione safehouses. Rosemary said nothing. What was there to say? Part of her life had been destroyed. Only the Family was left. As she had begun, she was going to finish.
Rosemary sat alone in the house. Her bodyguards patrolled the exterior and kept watch on the windows and doors. Chris had left her to organize a safer retreat from which she could lead the Gambiones. She felt free and more alive than she had since she had taken over the task of living two lives. Her head swam with plans for keeping the Families alive and viable. Now that she could concentrate on the problems at hand, everything would be different. Paul had done her a favor. Pity he had had to die for it, but one couldn’t show weakness, after all. She wondered when Chris would come back. She had so much to discuss with him.
Rosemary stared out into the spring rain. Gray and dirty, outside it looked more like winter. Chris Mazzucchelli droned on in the background. Christ, how had she ever gotten involved with a jerk like him? Living underground with him had shown her the difference between dealing with Chris on an occasional basis and being together nearly twenty-four hours a day. He was no longer a romantic rebel in her eyes; he was a vicious punk. The problem was he was her vicious punk.
She returned her attention to the crisis at hand, but her eyes were immediately caught by the sight of Chris’s rattail bouncing up and down on his back as he paced the dingy little Alphabet City hotel room they were using as a safe house.
“We lost eight capos to this double cross. Fiore, Baldacci, Schiaparelli, Hancock, and my brother. Dead. Vince Schiaparelli looked like he had been turned inside out. Fiore’s skin turned into stone and he choked to death. Hancock and Baldacci weren’t there anymore-just puddles with bones sticking out. My brother—” Here even he gagged and hesitated. “Three more, worse than dead. Matriona and Cheng walked away. They’re fine, just fine. Since then we’ve been able to do nothing more than stay even, if that.”
“And what did we get? Siu Ma. We already knew about her. We’ve tried to kidnap her twice, for Christ’s sake. We know who’s behind the Immaculate Egrets. But we still don’t know who the ultimate leader is.” Rosemary Gambione shook her head. “Even if Croyd knew something truly useful, they didn’t get it out of him. Great. The Shadow Fists must have gotten to him. We hit a few more Shadow Fist operations, lose some more of our people, and we’re just as far away as ever. Even worse, they’ve started using some kind of biological warfare against us. I wonder whose side this Croyd is really on.”
“Well, O fearless leader, any ideas? I’ve done everything I can think of,” Chris spun on her, anger and fear mixed evenly on his face. “And do me a favor, don’t bring up your fucking father again. I’ve had about all I can take of that, too.”
“Find your informer, this Croyd. Maybe he does have something more. Let’s try to find out how the Shadow Fists got hold of this wild card virus they used. If they have it, we need it.” Rosemary thought but did not voice’ her apprehension that if the Families were this far behind, they had already lost the war. She was the sole surviving don. The Shadow Fists had gotten all the others. This war had begun to feel like Vietnam, and they weren’t on the right side.
“I’ll do what I can. By this time he’s probably in Outer fucking Mongolia.” Chris looked unimpressed by her request. “Chris. Get him.” Rosemary used the drill sergeant tone deliberately. She suspected that he did not always follow her orders. She wondered at the speed with which the papers had gotten hold of her true background and whether the source could have been within the Family. Mazzucchelli looked back at her with swiftly concealed loathing.
“Anything you say. Dear.” Chris stalked across the room before turning back at the door. “By the way, you might find it amusing that our boy Bludgeon apparently beat the shit out of Sewer Jack Robicheaux a few nights ago. He found out that Jack turned us down, I guess, and took it upon himself to teach the dirty little Cajun a lesson in manners. I gave him a little bonus for the job, in your name, of course.”
Rosemary sat on the bed. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. She was completely isolated from her people. Chris told her it was the only way to guarantee her security, but the situation was getting to her. She looked across the room to the door. She didn’t feel like an all-powerful Mafia don. She felt like a prisoner.
Bagabond let herself into C.C. Ryder’s loft expecting that C.C. would be in the studio. Instead, Cordelia was bothering C.C. again. She wondered what Cordelia wanted this time. Bagabond had had to dodge around even more people wearing the useless surgical masks. She had no sympathy for those panicked by this new outbreak of the wild card virus. Maybe it would do them some good. Paced by the ginger cat, Bagabond walked over to the couch and sat down on the floor beside C. C. The ginger put her head in Bagabond’s lap. Both women nodded to her before continuing their discussion.
“There’s something weird about that Shrike. I can feel it.” Cordelia leaned forward to make her point. “And what they’re doin’ to Buddy just isn’t right. He wrote those songs!”
“Cordelia, Shrike Music is a perfectly legitimate business. I know people who record for them. They’re good business people. If Holley gave up the rights to his songs, that was his decision to make.” C.C. shook her head wearily. “This business is full of trade-offs. That’s the way it works. You know that by now. Buddy’s got his new songs. They’re good. Let it be.”
“But I can tell by talking to Buddy that it wasn’t his decision. He jus’ won’t tell me what happened.” Cordelia got that look on her face that told Bagabond that she was not about to give up. Bagabond got up and went into the kitchen. Cordelia’s obsession with saving the world reminded her uncomfortably of some of the younger nuns she’d met as a child. They had all wanted to be saints, real ones.
“The old-timers got ripped off. Look at Little Richard. It wasn’t right; it wasn’t fair. But it was legal. You can’t do anything about that. Buddy has other preoccupations now. The concert went fine. Leave it.”
“But you saw him a few weeks ago. Playing in a Holiday Inn in New Jersey! Somebody has to help him, and I’m going to do it.” Cordelia’s eyes shone with the fervor of the converted.
“Let Buddy get on with his life.”
“Hey, it’s not even my idea dis time. They want to see me.” Cordelia waved her hands innocently in the air.
C.C. shook her head in resignation. “So what’s this great plan of yours?”
Bagabond hacked off a chunk of cheddar cheese for herself and another for the cat. Nibbling at hers, she walked back into the living room.
“I have an appointment to meet a Shrike exec tomorrow. I put him off until well after the concert.” Cordelia scooted down on the couch and put her arms around her knees. “And I need to know what to ask him.”
“Me.” C.C. sighed and reached down for a bite of Bagabond’s cheese.
“Right. You. My expert on recording contracts.” Cordelia bounced once in triumph and grinned over at C.C. “I want to see the original contracts, right?”
“I guarantee you that they are not going to let you see Holley’s contract.”
“I’ll find a way.” Cordelia grinned unself-consciously. “Woo, hey, I gotta go.”
Cordelia was up and headed for the door. “I see you two later. Bye, y’all.”
Chris Mazzucchelli burst into the room to face Rosemary’s drawn Walther. He waved both hands in the air languidly, then dropped them and threw himself down on the bed.
“Put that silly thing away before you shoot yourself. Jesus Christ, woman.”
“I haven’t seen you for days. Where the hell have you been?” Rosemary lowered the pistol but did not holster it.
“I’ve been a good little boy. I’ve been out finding Croyd just like you wanted.” Chris rolled over onto his elbows. “I’ve got an address all ready for you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Chris. I’m not leaving this room.” Rosemary sat down on a chair across the narrow room from Chris. “It’s too dangerous.”
“Maybe if you exposed yourself to a little ‘danger,’ you’d get some idea what we’re up against. You sure as hell don’t know anything now.” Chris sat all the way up on the bed. “Or is that more than your heart would take? Your father would never be caught dead hiding his face like this.”
“All right.” Rosemary knew she was being baited, but the question was whether Chris had the guts to kill her. “Where?”
“In jokertown, in a hotel near the docks.” Chris smiled openly in triumph. “Fitting, don’t you think?”
Chris got up and walked over to her. He stroked her cheek. She tensed but did not pull away.
“C’mon, baby, we’ve got until tomorrow.”
It took hours to get rid of him. When he finally left-to make final preparations for her security, or so he said-she went to the bathroom and pried open the window. With one foot on the sink and the other on the water tank, she levered herself outside onto the fire escape.
Rosemary climbed the fire escape to the roof, silently cursing at the least rusty squeak it gave. On the roof she walked as quietly as possible to a small flock of pigeons cooing on the edge of the building. When they did not fly off at her approach, she scattered some crumbs from the sandwiches she had been eating for weeks.
“Bagabond, help me.” She tried to catch the eyes of each pigeon, wondering how long it could carry her image in its tiny brain. There was no other chance. “Bagabond, I need you. Chris is going to kill me.”
Bagabond was her last hope. Chris wouldn’t dare just shoot her. It would be too obvious to the few mafiosi still loyal to her father and the Gambione name. He had had to find another way. This was it, she could feel it.
Bagabond pulled off her headphones. Something, like a fading echo within her mind, had broken her concentration on C.C.’s newest tapes. She tracked it back through the lines of consciousness that intersected in her mind, identified the medium as a bird’s mind, then found the pigeon who carried the vision. Rosemary called to her again out of the pigeon’s memory.
Rosemary had given her address. Bagabond knew the area. She sat stroking the ginger’s back as she debated meeting Rosemary. She couldn’t trust the woman anymore. In the message she had left among the pigeons, Rosemary promised to tell Bagabond who really killed Paul. The Mafia leader sounded sincere, but Bagabond had seen her in action before. She was a lawyer. She was trained to say whatever would best serve her purposes at that moment.
But even Rosemary’s training could not hide the fear that was carried by every pigeon she had reached. Rosemary was terrified. Bagabond remembered the first time they had met.
The social worker, frightened then but frightened of not being able to help, had done everything she could for the street people. Bagabond remembered Rosemary’s teasing questions about her dates with Paul and going shopping together for just the right outfit to impress him. Rosemary had given her back part of her life.
But she had paid that debt. She’d already saved Rosemary’s life once when Water Lily had betrayed her. Betrayal. What about Paul? Wasn’t helping Rosemary betraying Paul? Bagabond still suspected that Rosemary was more involved in his death than she would admit.
Bagabond stood up and dumped the cat onto the floor. She picked up her old coats and wrapped them around her. If she decided that Rosemary was lying about Paul’s death, she had meant too much to her for too long to abandon her now. She turned off the tape deck and amplifier. The green telltales that had illuminated the room dimly faded to black. Bagabond’s eyes adjusted almost instantly as she walked unhesitatingly across the loft toward the door and the New York City night.
Down on the street she began gathering her forces. Bagabond contacted the pigeons, the cats and the dogs, and the rarer ones: the pair of peregrine falcons, the wolf who had escaped from his would-be owners, and the ocelot who spent her time prowling the parks for stray dogs. The wild ones listened to her call and were ready to follow her.
Rosemary was north near Jokertown. It would be a long walk to this hotel where she would be meeting someone who planned to harm her. Bagabond slipped into a subway entrance and began working her way through the tunnels toward Jokertown. She had gone almost a mile underground when Jack called.
Jack had been missing since the night of the concert. Cordelia had been concerned, but she had assumed that he was doing what he wanted and had not tried to find him. He and Bagabond continued to avoid each other, and she had not tracked him down either. The strength of his sending was incredible. Bagabond fell to one knee, then collapsed under the weight of it.
She caught snatches of images. It was enough to tell her she was in a hospital. But that was not the message. Jack was cycling through the human-alligator as fast as he could, using the alligator-persona to contact her and the human to communicate. It was Cordelia. She was in trouble. Filtered through Jack’s perceptions, Bagabond understood that Cordelia had called for Jack but he was physically unable to help her.
Not only was he switching between alligator and human, he was alternating between consciousness and coma. Jack was expending all the energy he could muster to ask her for help.
Bagabond concentrated. Cordelia’s fear resonated through everything Jack sent. Images cascaded through Bagabond’s mind. A needle, the pain of an injection. A street empty of pedestrians or traffic. Anonymous buildings. They looked like apartments, but Bagabond did not recognize the neighborhood.
“Where, Jack? Where?” Somewhere else rough concrete cut into her hands and knees. It was to the north, it had to be. She could tell that much from what she had seen of the apartment houses crowded onto hills. With part of her fragmented mind she tried to match what she had seen with the views of the birds and the animals in the north end of Manhattan. Abruptly she lost Jack.
“Jack!” For long seconds he was gone entirely. He was dead to her and she feared that his efforts had been fatal. Then abruptly she was seeing the numbers over the building’s front door through Cordelia’s eyes. “The street, Cordelia, the street?”
She did not know if Cordelia had heard her or not, but corner street signs appeared. Washington Heights. She also felt the rough hands on her arms and the gun at her head. There was a haze across the images that she recognized. Cordelia had been drugged with something psychoactive and disorienting that would prevent Cordelia from concentrating enough to harm her attackers even if she would betray her principles.
Cordelia’s face floated in her mind shaded by both her own memories and Jack’s. Cordelia’s young enthusiasms and energy, her devotion to life and helping others, pulled Bagabond north toward her. But Cordelia’s face was overlaid by Rosemary’s. The ginger screamed her empathy with the turmoil in Bagabond’s brain.
She had promised to help Rosemary. Cordelia had the ability to help herself, if she would use it. But could she, drugged, and would using it destroy the girl, as Bagabond had been destroyed. Rosemary had killed Paul, or caused his death. Bagabond knew that as well as she knew anything. She had been blinding herself to it because of her overwhelming desire to keep Rosemary as her friend. Rosemary had chosen her path. Cordelia had not had time to choose hers.
The falcons wheeled in midflight and headed north, and the ocelot bounded after them.
Her bodyguards followed Rosemary down the filthy hallway of the flophouse where Croyd was hiding. If Croyd was there at all. Rosemary remembered the men she had seen in prison movies being escorted to their deaths. The two big mafiosi said nothing to her. She didn’t even know their names. Chris had told her he would wait outside to keep watch. The walls were mildewed and stained, and the hallway smelled of cigarette smoke and urine. Abruptly the two men stopped. The dark-haired man on her right motioned her forward.
She couldn’t tell if Bagabond was there, watching and waiting. Rosemary had come up with a plan to take care of two of her problems. She knew she could convince Bagabond that Paul’s death had all been Chris’s doing. Bagabond would kill Chris in revenge. With Chris out of the way maybe she could make some kind of deal with the shadow Fists. Get out alive. Maybe.
Please, God, Bagabond, be here.
Bagabond found one of Jack’s underground motorized carts. He had made her memorize the tunnel system underlying the entire island. She silently thanked him as she switched from one passage to another, risking a crash by pushing the cart as fast as it would go. The markings on the walls passed as she sped north. Above her and through the tunnels paralleling her route, her animals kept pace as best they could.
The hawks arrived first and circled the building. Through their eyes Bagabond could see the motions of the men inside. Cordelia was huddled in a corner but still alive. Bagabond tried to send that information to Jack, but she got no response. Ignoring Jack’s silence with difficulty, she began setting up her warriors before she arrived.
There was a broken window at the top of the 1940s apartment building. She sent the hawks through it to wait at the top of the stairwell. The ocelot was almost there. She had used roofs as well as streets and had outpaced the others. The wolf was blocks back, trying to avoid being seen. The black and calico she kept with her, but she sent the ginger into the building to be two of her eyes. For the others she called rats from the surrounding buildings. Many waited to be renovated and housed her creatures. As her animals converged, she felt the warmth of her strength build.
By the time she climbed up the stairs of the subway station at Two hundredth, she was in place. She cycled through the consciousnesses of her animals, controlling them and holding them ready, and as she did, she tried to touch Cordelia. The girl was a blank without Jack to amplify her mind. With the part of herself that remained human and aware of why she was here, Bagabond urged Cordelia to use what she had been given to protect herself.
The black she had left to guard her car. He had been unhappy but she refused to risk him. The younger calico she took along but left up the block from the building. A combination of points of view told her that two men loitered at the main entrance of the partially renovated red-brick apartment house. The ocelot paced restlessly back and forth in the darkness of an alley beside the apartments. At the touch of a thought she sprang out and raced for the men, running silently for the hunt. She leaped for the closest guard and tore out his throat before he realized that he was being attacked. The other human was fast enough to pull his pistol, but his first shot was wild. He never got a chance for another. As she slunk into the five-story building, Bagabond made sure that no one was taking any notice of the noise or the bag lady. She jerked her head as the rhythmic wail of a car alarm began a few blocks away, but no one else reacted to it except the nervous ocelot.
Still trying vainly to get something from Cordelia, Bagabond sent the ocelot and the ginger ahead of her up the fire stairs. Moving quietly, she followed while tracking the presence of her creatures within and without the building. She spread a living net centered on Cordelia and a well-dressed Oriental man, confronting each other in a fourth-floor apartment. The rats scuttling through the walls and across the floors told her that the teenager was still alive.
As she climbed the fourth flight of stairs, she heard the voices echoing through the open door. The Oriental was interrogating Cordelia. She could not understand the words. Disrupting her concentration, Rosemary’s face flashed across her mind. She mentally thrust it and the accompanying guilt away from her down into the submerged, fully human part of herself.
Rats broke from side rooms and ran down the hallway. Three guards stood outside in the bright light cast by the bare light bulbs in the ceiling. Heavy hitters in expensive tailored suits that normally hid the guns they had drawn. Bagabond wondered what these people feared from Cordelia.
The wolf was making his way up the stairs at the far end of the hall. The ocelot strained at her side. The sight of the rats had made the well-dressed killers nervous. She used her other eyes to look into the room where Cordelia still lay curled up on the floor as she was questioned. Damn her Catholic-martyr syndrome. Bagabond could not sense even stirrings of Cordelia’s power. The girl was keeping her promise to herself or she was incapable of acting. A huge man who looked like a sumo wrestler and wore a Man Mountain Gentian T-shirt stood silently in the corner, but even through the rat’s dim vision Bagabond could see the bloodlust in the way he moved constantly, clenching and unclenching his fists as he looked at Cordelia.
Abruptly Bagabond sent the ginger cat yowling down the hall. As she had hoped, the three men pulled their guns but held their shots when they saw it was just a cat.
“Goin’ after the rats. Great!,” One of the men voiced his hope as he reholstered his weapon. The other two were agreeing when the ocelot sprang away from Bagabond’s side. One swipe of the ocelot’s paw tore away most of a face and ripped the jugular before she used the shoulder of the dead man as a platform for her leap to the next. On the opposite side, one of the guards shot at the gray shape lunging across the scarred wooden floor, claws scrabbling for purchase. Only one shot creased the wolf’s hindquarter before he was on his enemy, jaws closing on the mans throat. The last man had managed to wedge his forearm into the ocelot’s mouth and was beating her with the butt of his gun when the wolf caught his free arm.
Bagabond knew the noise would alert the men inside. She could only hope that Cordelia would use the distraction to advantage in the short time before she could get there. The sumo was too close to Cordelia to stop.
When she slid behind the remains of the guards and into the apartment where they had been interrogating Cordelia,
Bagabond saw only a sharply tailored pants leg and an Italian shoe disappear into a connecting room. She didn’t see the wrestler. Cordelia was wavering to her feet, saying something as Bagabond started forward to free her. The huge hand around her throat stopped her.
“Forget about me, you crazy bitch?” The sumo spoke with an English accent. Stepping completely out of a closet, he spun her toward him. Bagabond’s breath was cut off and she felt her windpipe closing underneath his inhuman strength. She attacked him directly but her telepathy did not affect him. He was too human, she realized, in a part of her darkening mind that could still perceive irony. The ginger had already fastened her claws into his leg, but it had no effect. Bagabond called for the ocelot and the wolf, but her mental power was fading with her physical. She could not seem to override their desire to feast on their kills. As she considered all the deaths she had felt, she wondered how her own would be received by the wild ones. Would they remember her? She kicked at her tormentor, but she couldn’t seem to get her legs untangled from her skirts and coat.
The wind of the hawks’ passing brought her back to consciousness long enough to hear their hunting screams. She felt blood drip onto her face before she was flung away. She was blind, but through the eyes of the ginger lying across the room, she saw her attacker driven back toward the window. The shattering glass showered her as he crashed through to plunge forty feet to the ground. Bagabond thought she felt the building rock when he hit, but she decided that it had to be a hallucination from the oxygen deprivation.
The ocelot and the wolf crawled contritely over to her and leaned against her to give her strength. She could feel the rats running rampant throughout the building as the cats ran among them, scattering but not killing the vermin. As far as she could reach, her wild animals were going crazy. She did her best to bring them back to normal and sent those she could touch to their homes before returning to the bare apartment. Opening her eyes, she saw Cordelia, arms still tied behind her back, leaning over her.
“Girl, you got to take responsibility for yourself and what you are. I ain’t goin’ through this again. Not even for Jack. Either learn to use what you have or go live in a convent.” Bagabond started to slide into the warm darkness again. She was not sure whether she had actually spoken to Cordelia or whether she had imagined it.
Rosemary was feeling increasingly afraid of the entire situation. Chris was up to something; she could feel it. She did not have to be a telepath like Bagabond to sense that she was in trouble. She had not seen any animals around her, not even a rat. It was not a good sign. Where the hell was Bagabond?
She deliberately slowed as she walked down the hallway. She tried to focus on her danger and use it. What was waiting for her in the filthy little room she was about to enter? Rosemary drew her own gun.
She tried the knob. The door was unlocked. She pushed it open onto the room and its occupant. The man who had been described to her as Croyd stood there, about to leave.
“Who the hell are you?” He was obviously surprised to see a woman. With the gun Rosemary gestured for him to sit back down on the iron-framed bed. She kept her back against the wall beside the door. “Christ, you’re Maria Gambione!”
“I need to know what you actually found out.” Rosemary leveled the gun on the man across the tiny room, holding it firmly just as she had always practiced. “You’re not going anywhere.”
Outside on the fire escape Chris waited for Rosemary to go down with the virus. Mentally he urged her to get closer to Croyd. He could not hear what they were saying. It did not matter as long as Croyd did to her what he had done to the capos. Chris knew Croyd had to have access to the virus somehow. Nothing else could have done that. Why didn’t she close in?
He saw her gun go up. Croyd moved faster. Before Chris could get out of the way, Croyd had thrown the bedside lamp through the window and followed it out onto the fire escape. Chris scrambled backward, but in his haste to get away from Rosemary, Croyd was across the iron grating of the landing. Seeing Chris at last, Croyd tackled him and threw him down the next flight of steps. Chris gagged and tried to crawl away down the steps. A shot narrowly missed Croyd, and he clambered up the ladder two steps at a time.
Rosemary had frozen when Croyd went through the window. As the echoes of the crash rang through the flophouse, she heard her bodyguards coming for her. She followed Croyd out the broken window and saw him start up the fire escape. She fired at him more to keep him moving than to kill him. The only way out was down the escape. Chris was coughing and convulsing on the landing below her. As she heard her men break down the door behind her, she was running down the steps and jumping over her lover. She did not stop.
“Bastard!” she hissed at him as she left him behind. She was headed for the ground. She knew now that Chris’s men would kill her on sight. It would take luck and fast moves, but there was just a chance she could lose the bodyguards and the men out front. It was her only chance.
Bagabond looked down at her friend Jack Robicheaux. The transformations were coming more slowly now and lasting longer. Right now he was human, and he would probably remain human for the next several days. She had spent some time wondering if she was partially to blame for his continuous transformations. Jack had known he could only communicate with her as an alligator. Even in his coma it was possible that he had realized that he had to change to tell her about Cordelia.
She looked up to catch C.C.’s gaze and shrugged. “I know I promised to stop feeling guilty. I’m going to miss him.” Both women looked up as Cordelia entered the hospital room.
“Good news, guys. Dr. Tacky says that Jack may be getting a little better. He’s not sure, but he thinks that the time that Jack has been spending as a ‘gator may be killing the virus.” Cordelia crossed the hospital room to Jack’s bed and leaned down to kiss him on the lips. “So there, Oncle. Don’t you give up on me now.”
C.C. Ryder and Bagabond exchanged surprised glances over Cordelia’s head. Bagabond allowed a smile to sneak onto her face, camouflaged by the tangled hair.
The red-haired singer took Bagabond’s hand. “Told ya so.”
“What? Never mind. Y’all speak in shorthand anyway. Worse’n Cajuns. When are y’all leaving?” Cordelia stood by Jack’s head, looking down as if she could see inside him.
“Plane leaves tomorrow. I dropped the itinerary off at your office this morning. So, if there’s any change, you can get in touch immediately.” C.C. looked up at her friend. “Suzanne will want to know right away.”
“Do they have phones in Guatemala?”
“Yes, Cordelia.” C.C. sighed.
“Bring me back an Indian?” Cordelia held her uncle’s hand, but she grinned up disarmingly at Bagabond and C.C. “We’re going to help them, not arrange American wives.”
“Who said anyt’ing about marriage?” Cordelia’s quicksilver emotions turned serious. “Bagabond, I’ll take care of him. I promise. I know you don’t think much of me sometimes, but—”
“Just need to grow up. Don’t make promises to yourself or ‘ anybody else that you can’t keep. The world doesn’t need any more saints.” Cordelia blushed. Bagabond looked straight into the eyes of the younger woman. “‘Sides, you don’t think I’m going to leave Jack unguarded, do you?”
Bagabond swept open her coat and the black leaped out and shook himself before sitting down to begin preening his disturbed fur back into place. Cordelia knelt beside him and tried to scratch behind his ears. The cat backed away and leaped up onto Jack’s bed and put his head beside Jack’s on the pillow.
“Phones or no phones, tell the black if you need me. It’s a long way, but I don’t think that distance could stop us anymore. I feel bad going, though.” Bagabond looked down at the floor.
“Dr. Tachyon will take care of Uncle Jack, with appropriate help from me and the black. He’d want you to go.” Cordelia looked back at her uncle, lying pale and silent under the tubes and connections that kept him alive.
“I know. He’d say it would be good for me.” Bagabond glanced at C.C., standing beside her. “I’m not used to all these people knowing what’s good for me. But I always wanted to talk to a black jaguar, and no rock star should be without her bodyguard.”
“Rock star.” C.C. rolled her eyes toward heaven. “She keeps telling me that one jungle’s like another. I don’t know who’s going to have the greatest culture shock: us or them. Poor guys are trying to build a new country. Just what they need, an aging ‘rock star’ and a bag lady.”
Cordelia reached over and bugged C.C. “They could do a lot worse.”
Bagabond watched her appraisingly, then held out her hand. Cordelia hesitated, then took it tightly between both of her own.
“You know how to take care of yourself. Don’t cut off something that’s part of you.” Bagabond raised her head to stare at Jack. “We both did, one way or another. He’d tell you the same. Don’t become a cripple. It’s not worth the effort.”
“I think I figured that out, one night a while back.” Cordelia released Bagabond’s hand self-consciously. Bagabond walked up to Jack and gazed down on his peaceful face. She rested her hand on his cheek. With her hair hanging down around her face, no one else could see the words she made. She could only hope that Jack heard them, wherever he was. “ I love you.”
As they left the room, a man walked up to the door. It took Bagabond a moment to recognize him. “Michael.”
He clutched a huge fruit basket that almost completely hid his face. What they could see was frightened. No one spoke.
“He’s my friend, too.” Michael lowered the basket a few inches. “Can I see him?”
Bagabond and Cordelia looked at each other, passing judgment on the man who had abandoned Jack months before. It was Cordelia who nodded their assent.
“We all love him.”
Rocking back and forth, Rosemary Gambione wrung her hands as she sat on the bed waiting for the Shadow Fists’ lawyer to make it official. It was all over. The Mafia had lost.
The faces of the dead dons, the capos, even the soldiers, were with her now even in the daytime. The nightmare had become her reality.
She was sweating. Her little room sweltered in the August humidity of New York. On the bed her suitcase was packed and ready to go. Anywhere, as long as it was out of the city.
At the knock on her door she ran her hands down her jeans and grabbed her Walther. She had used it often in the last few months. It felt secure and heavy in her hands.
“Who?” She pulled the gun up to shove the damp hair out of her eyes.
“Swordfish. Or is there some other password you’d prefer?” The voice was elegant and a touch effete. Rosemary recognized it immediately from the phone calls that had set up this meeting. Holding the pistol in her right hand, she awkwardly opened the door with her left. Dressed in a custom-tailored white suit, the man she knew as Loophole sauntered into her room.
“Goodness.” He looked at her gun for a moment before surveying the room. “Ah, well, these are troubled times in which we live, aren’t they? Not even a desk, I see.”
“Use the suitcase, Latham.” Rosemary saw his head jerk slightly at the sound of his own name. She had seen him at every bar association dinner for years. She was surprised now that she had not recognized his voice.
“Quite. Much better than that ‘Loophole’ appellation with which I appear to be permanently associated. Please be seated, Ms. Gambione. Or is it Muldoon?”
“Gambione. Let’s get this over with.” Rosemary sat down across her suitcase from the lawyer, but she kept her Walther in her lap.
“By the way, my ... associates are stationed throughout the building and on the street. To provide us with the privacy we need for our transaction.”
Rosemary sighed and shook her head. “Loophole, I’m not going to take you hostage or kill you. What’s the point? I just want to get this taken care of so I can leave. I don’t want any more of my people dead. Let’s see the contract.”
Latham handed it over and studied her as she read it. Rosemary wondered if he was curious as to how low one of his own could sink. But then he had never seen her as a peer. If she hadn’t wanted to keep those of her people who were left alive, killing Latham would be a particularly pleasurable form of suicide.
“It appears to be in order. The interests you represent take over my operations throughout the city, retaining my personnel—”
“Those who are left and still capable.”
Rosemary’s hand tightened on the gun. “Yeah, right. I’ll sign it. Got a pen?”
“Of course.” Latham extracted a Mont Blanc from his briefcase and carefully uncapped it for her. “Please ...” Rosemary laid the contract on her suitcase and in her last act as a Gambione, signed it. She saw her father’s face in the background of the paper and her hand trembled. The signature was shaky, but it would keep her people safe.
Latham held up the contract and examined her signature. Rosemary couldn’t tell if he was sneering at the wet imprints her hand had made or if it was simply his habitual expression. He was not sweating, she noticed. “I want the money and the ticket.”
“It has all been arranged, my dear.” Latham opened his briefcase again to stow away the contract and to remove two envelopes. The larger manila envelope was stuffed almost beyond its capacity. “Two hundred thousand and your passage to Cuba. I understand it is quite nice this time of year. I do hope you’ll enjoy the voyage.”
Latham stood and walked to the door. As he put his hand on the knob, he spoke again. “By the way, I had understood that you were looking for Mr. Mazzucchelli. My sources inform me that he can be found at the address in the envelope. Good luck.”
Rosemary stared at the white envelope iying on her suitcase. She did not touch it. After a moment she looked up at Latham.
“Lagniappe.” He shrugged. “The interests I represent are not without sympathy, my dear.”
The door had been shut behind him for ten minutes before Rosemary picked up the white envelope. Turning it over, she saw the blood-red wax of the seal and smiled in pain.
One of the deals she had made was that the men who were entering the warehouse in front of her would be cared for in the best fashion possible. Most were not men anymore. They were the jokers that had survived the meeting with Croyd. She still wondered how Chris had arranged it.
When she had phoned their relatives to tell them about Chris, she had expected joy at this chance for revenge. She had received dull acceptance instead. Vengeance would be taken, but it would be taken because it was the proper thing to do, not because anyone, victim or guardian, could take any pleasure in it. She had been surprised, but now that she was here she understood. She was not pleased at what was about to happen. She felt nothing a all.
Earlier in the day she had found a side entrance and a route to the mezzanine of the abandoned Jokertown warehouse. If Chris had been there, she hadn’t seen him. This time, as she took her vantage point, she heard the victims moving through the warehouse searching for him. The noises they made came close to nauseating her, but she forced herself to watch. It was her fault, after all.
The noises grew in volume. She spotted their prey and gasped. She had not expected this. What had been a thirtyyear-old man was now a fur-covered, shambling thing. Its claws scrabbled on the concrete floor for purchase as it recognized that it was being pursued. As it turned its head to spot its enemies, the sharp teeth in the pointed muzzle glinted in the moonlight shining down through the shattered skylights. The only thing she recognized was the tangled rattail that still fell down his back.
His victims, her victims, shambled and oozed through the aisles of the warehouse toward the author of their pain. Did any of them still know what they had been or how they had become the warped creatures that closed in on the erstwhile Chris Mazzucchelli? An excited twittering erupted when Chris was spotted for the first time. He hissed at his pursuers, slashing the air with his outstretched claws. They were implacable. Even after he had drawn blood they came on, surrounding him carefully outside his reach.
Chris was backed into an area of the warehouse piled high with rusted machinery. He could not scale it, and his tormentors closed in for the kill. Rosemary tried to watch, but instead of remembering the man who had tried to kill her, she recalled the caring man she had taken as a lover. She stared down at the execution for only a moment before gagging and turning her back on the high-pitched screams that were followed by liquid gurgles.
Even the sounds were more than she could bear. Rosemary fled, but the noises pursued her long after she boarded the ship and curled up on the bed with her hands pressed against her ears.
T he squall roared and threw horizontal rain, coming in from the northeast off the North Channel and the Waters of Moyle. The storm had developed unexpectedly an hour ago. The fierce wind rattled the shutters, howled through the cracks in the stone walls and stretched wispy, persistent fingers down the chimney. Rain hissed and beat on the stones, and streams of cold water fell from the ends of the roof’s thatching.
“Shite!” Caitlyn cursed as a gust blew out the match she’d placed to the newspaper under the peat in the hearth. There were only two matches left in the pack, and she’d been trying to get the damned fire going for the last fifteen minutes, since they’d gotten back from Church Bay.
“Máthair?” Moira, Caitlyn’s daughter, shivered in the chair, her knees up to her chest and a woolen blanket wrapped around herself. They’d both been soaked just running the dozen steps from the car to the cottage. The storm had blown down the lines somewhere on the island, which made the electric heaters useless, and the small, three room house had seemed as icy and damp as the sleet outside. Moira’s face was illuminated in the orange-gold light of the oil lamps, her round features emerging from darkness like a Vermeer painting. “I’m awful cold.”
“I know, darling. It’s just that the peat’s gotten soaked, and this damned wind ...” Caitlyn struck another match. Her movements were clumsy and stiff, but she managed to light a corner of the paper. The crumpled sheet blackened and curled, the flame leaping blue and yellow as it crackled, but the flame hissed wetly and guttered out once it reached the sod, and Caitlyn cursed again. The shutters banged in a renewed gust, and a rivulet of water trickled down the inside of the chimney.
The noise of the storm lifted to a wild roar: the door to the cottage opened. A man’s form filled the doorway. Moira screamed at the dark apparition, like a banshee in the midst of a tempest, startling enough that Caitlyn wouldn’t have been surprised to hear a keening death-wail. Caitlyn rose—slowly, the only way she could move—to Moira’s side. She patted her daughter’s shoulder with an unbending hand. “Hush,” she told her, though her eyes were on the stranger. “There’s nothing to be frightened about.”
She hoped she was right.
He hadn’t moved. He swayed from side to side, as if it were only an effort of will that kept him standing. With just under two hundred people on the island, Caitlyn knew them all by face and name, and this man was a stranger: tall, with skin the color of dark chocolate. He wore a leather jacket and there were straps and harness about him that looked as if he’d cut something from around him with a knife. He was drenched, the short, wiry black hair beaded with the rain; he steamed, wisps of vapor rising from him. She supposed he might have come over on the Calmac Ferry, maybe one of the rare visitors that came over from Belfast or Dublin to see one of the island’s archeological sites and who had been surprised by the storm. Strange, though, that no one down in Church Bay had mentioned a visitor.
“I saw you through the window,” he said, and the accent was decidedly American. His eyes closed, then he opened them again with an effort. “I can help ...” He took a step into the room, almost falling, then another and another, walking past them toward the fireplace as Caitlyn hugged Moira to her, watching and wondering what she would do. I haven’t checked the phones; they may be down too, and besides it would take Constable MacEnnis forever to get here in this weather ...
The stranger crouched in front of the fireplace. He reached out a hand toward the small stack of peat. Caitlyn cried out with mingled wonder and fear.
Flame surged around his fingers, the peat hissing in the blazing heat of it and finally catching fire. He left his hand there, in the dancing blue flames, and Caitlyn saw the flesh blistering and charred to gray-white.
He collapsed.
Caitlyn saw his eyelids flutter. She waited, and when the man’s gaze found her, she brought the glass of water to his cracked, dry lips. He drank gratefully, muscles moving in his long throat. “Better?” Caitlyn asked. He nodded. “What’s your name?” she asked then.
He hesitated, and she saw his eyes narrow. “John,” he said. “John Green.” His head lifted up, looking around the small room. His hand brushed the bed underneath him with a metallic rattle.
“Sheet metal,” Caitlyn told. “I doubt it’s very comfortable for you, but you scorched my best sheets, and I was afraid you’d actually set the bedding on fire, as impossible as that seems. But maybe not for you, eh?” She kept her voice carefully neutral. “When I first felt your skin, I thought you were burning up with the worst fever I’d ever seen. You were sweating terribly. I was sure you’d die. But then I saw your hand healing as I watched, and your breathing was quiet. You slept easily, yet the fever never left you. And you’re still sweating, though there’s a chill in the air. So you’re an ace, are you, John Green?”
“I’m nothing like an ace. That’s for damn sure.” The man gave a hoarse chuckle, grimacing as he pushed himself up. The blanket—actually an old horse blanket Caitlyn kept in the car; she wasn’t about to risk her good comforter on the man—fell around his waist. He seemed to realize for the first time that he was naked under the blanket, and he pulled the edge of it back up around himself. “My clothes?”
“Washed and ready for you.” She cocked her head at him with a faint smile. “Soaked through and muddy, they were. You didn’t want me to leave them on, did you?” He was staring at her, and she knew what he saw. The face that looked back at her every morning from the mirror was striking: flawless milky skin under curls of bright red hair, wide and round eyes that were the green of rich summer grass, full lips that seemed to easily smile. “You’re a rare beauty, Caitlyn Farrell, that you are,” her father had told her, years ago, and she’d blushed at the words even as she’d hoped desperately that they were true. “The image of your máthair, when she was young ...” Her father had died during the ‘62 Infection, or at least that’s what they’d been told—one of the thousands who had drawn the black queen. He’d been at work and neither he nor his body had ever returned home. And her mother ... she’d been with her mother the night the virus spread over Belfast, and she’d watched in terror as the virus tore her mother’s body apart, as the woman screamed in terror and pain. Her mother had always loved knitting and sewing; the virus had drawn needle-sharp spines from her bones, lancing through her flesh at all angles, tearing and ripping, leaving her snared everywhere in a nest of hundreds of ivory porcupine quills that stabbed at her own flesh and that of those who would try to care for her. For twenty more agonizing years, she would live that way.
Caitlyn had first thought that the virus had somehow left her unaffected. She’d been wrong ...
“Máthair!” Moira called from the other room, and she heard her daughter’s running footsteps. “Is the burning man awake yet?”
Caitlyn rose from her chair as her daughter burst into the bedroom. She could feel his gaze on her: the way her head would not turn without the entire body moving with it, the creaking protest of her knees, the slow-motion change of the expression in that perfect face, the awkward way she hugged her daughter, bending from the waist with her back impossibly straight: a doll with frozen joints. “You can see him in a little bit. Go on with you, now.” Moira stared at the man in the bed for a moment, then laughed and ran from the room.
“She’s cute. Looks like you. Your sister?”
Caitlyn turned—slowly, carefully, her whole body making the motion—to find Green regarding her curiously. “Her máthair. Mother.”
She saw him blink in genuine astonishment. “I’m not just saying this, but you sure don’t look old enough to have a child that age. What is she? Nine? Ten?”
“Ten in another month.” She couldn’t keep the sadness from coloring her voice. Whatever the man might be thinking, looking at her, he kept it to himself.
“Where the hell am I?” he asked.
“You don’t know?” Green shook his head slowly. Caitlyn waited to see if he would say more; he didn’t. “You’re on Rathlin Island,” she told him finally, “just off the coast of Northern Ireland. And I’m curious how ’tis that you came to be on Rathlin, seeing as you don’t know where you are. I take it you didn’t come over on the ferry. You don’t know about Rathlin, do you?”
She saw his hesitation again. “No, I don’t. I ... I was on a ship, a pleasure craft, just me and a few friends I was visiting, coming out from Scotland. The storm ... I guess it was too much for the boat ...”
“And your friends? What happened to them?”
“Gone,” Green answered. “Lost.”
Caitlyn gave him slow nod. “I have soup on. You look strong enough to dress yourself. There’s a chamberpot under the bed if you would be needing it, or you can use the bathroom just off the kitchen. I’ll let you get yourself ready while I put the bowls on the table. You can come on in and eat with the two of us, or I can bring it in here.”
“I’ll be out,” he said. “Just give me a few moments.”
Another nod. Caitlyn left the bedroom, feeling his gaze on her as she walked out with the stiff-legged gait of a marionette.
The man emerged from the bedroom by the time Caitlyn, with Moira’s help, got the soup to the trestle table. He sat, wearily, and she ladled out a bowl for him, passing it across. She could feel the heat radiating from him. “Would you be wanting some milk with that, Gary?” she asked.
“Sure. Sounds good. I—” He stopped. At the end of the table, Moira giggled.
“’Tis Gary, not John, isn’t it?” Caitlyn asked.
Muscles clenching in his jaw, he nodded. The spoon in his hand reddened like the glowing filament on an electric stove. “You knew all along?”
“The radio,” she told him. “I was listening to the BBC. There was a news reports about a plane fleeing from the authorities in the States that had come over Ireland and gone down not a dozen miles out from here. The man said the passengers might have parachuted out of the plane, and were dangerous folk: a man who claimed to be former U.S. Senator Gregg Hartmann, who looked like a great yellow caterpillar, and a nat woman with blond hair named Hannah Davis. The pilot, they said, was a black man.” Caitlyn paused. “They gave his name, too, and you don’t look to be a yellow caterpillar or a woman.” She glanced at the bowl in front of him. “I’d tell you your soup’s getting cold, but I doubt that’s a problem for you.”
“What are you going to do now?”
Caitlyn would have shrugged, but it wasn’t something her body could do. “I’m going to eat my soup, and make certain my daughter eats hers. Then I’m going to wash the dishes.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know. But that’s all that’s going to happen.” She paused. “You’re not a danger to me or my daughter, Gary. I can see that, just looking at you. And you are on Rathlin.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I know enough.” A faint smile touched the corners of her lips and vanished. “Eat your soup,” she said.
“You really should,” Moira interjected, her voice serious and earnest as only a child’s can be. “Máthair makes very good soup.”
The man nodded.
“You’re sweating,” Moira told him.
He touched his sleeve to his forehead. “It’s a bit warm in here for me,” he said. The spoon sizzled as it touched the broth.
After lunch, Caitlyn went outside and stood in the sunlight, her eyes half-closed. She could hear the sea pounding relentlessly against the cliffs; to the northwest where the ruins of Robert the Bruce’s Castle were hung in moss and vines. Gulls swung over-heard in the rare blue sky, calling in the harsh voices. A few minutes later, she heard the door to the cottage open and shut again, and footsteps crunching over the gravel walk. “What did you mean, that I was on Rathlin?”
Caitlyn swiveled her entire body to turn to him. “You don’t know about Rathlin? The Belfast Infection of ‘62?”
He lifted his shoulders. “I heard something about Belfast, I think. Not a lot.”
Caitlyn nodded. “I suppose it wasn’t much compared to what happened in New York the first time. Still, the outbreak was a nasty one. No one knows where it started or why, only that most of Belfast was affected. Five thousand or more people drew the black queen and died in the first day; people fled the city in droves during the panic. Afterward, the government decided that they if they wanted to bring the people back to the city, they had to show Belfast was clean and safe. They didn’t want the jokers staying around to create yet another Jokertown—that wouldn’t look good. One of the politicians got the bright idea that maybe they should just move the jokers out. Relocate the resulting Jokertown to an island. And, oh yes, make sure that they were sterile and couldn’t produce more monsters. So they moved the hundred or so inhabitants who once lived here on Rathlin and brought in the jokers, and of course the relocation and sterilizations were all ‘voluntary’ ...”
Caitlyn tried to give her smile a sardonic twist. “They brought maybe three or four hundred of us in before they were stopped—too many protests from the United Nations, Jokers Amnesty International, the JJS, and nearly every human rights organization. But they also didn’t move us back. To make it look better, they gave us some limited self-government.” She laughed, a sound with an edge of bitterness. “You Yanks did the same thing with your Native Americans, putting them on reservations. Officially, we’re part of the UK. Unofficially, they leave us alone and try to forget us. Eventually, Belfast got its Jokertown anyway. Most of us already here on Rathlin—the Relocated—stayed. Why not? This is our island now. There are less than two hundred of us left; we’ve gained a few people over the years who came here, but we’ve lost far more.” She paused. “Not many left. Most just died.”
“You must have come here later.”
She shook her head. “I was with the initial group. I was sixteen, then.”
The man was staring at her, and she could see him doing the calculations behind his eyes. “Thirty-three years ago ... You can’t possibly be forty-nine.”
“Touch me,” she said to him. When his eyes widened, she laughed. “Go on: my face, or my arms.”
His hand reached out to her cheek. She nearly flinched, expecting his skin to be hot, but it felt nearly cool. He stroked her cheek, pressing once. She knew what he saw, what he felt: a slickness like hard rubber that would not easily yield to the press of his finger-tip. Like touching a doll’s face.
The touch, though, was nice, and his hands were gentle and his chocolate eyes sad, and the baritone of his voice was rich and deep like a cello. Almost ten years, it’s been. An entire decade since you’ve been held and kissed and loved ... She tore the thought away as Gary’s fingers dropped from her face. You can’t think that way. You can’t.
“That’s what the virus did to me. It left me a permanent sixteen. I suppose I’ll always look this way. My body’s slowly hardening, calcifying. I came here because my mother was one of the Relocated; they knew I might have been infected, but no one was quite sure at first. I know now—and I don’t need the blood test to tell me. It’s moving through the rest of me now, faster and faster. I can’t turn my neck, can’t bend over easily, can’t bend my knees or my elbows all the way. And it’s spreading inside, or so the doctors tell me. Sometime soon ...” She continued to smile; she had no choice. But twin tears trickled down the ceramic gloss of her cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” he told her. It was the same thing he had told her, the man who’d been Moira’s father.
“Don’t be sorry for me,” she said. “Be sorry for her.”
The man glanced back at the cottage. His gaze moved across drystone walls, erected over a century ago. Stones that would still be there long after she was gone. “Your daughter carries the virus too.” There was no question in his voice. Caitlyn nodded in reply.
“Aye. She does. When they came out with the blood test, I had her checked.”
“You said they sterilized the Relocated ...”
“They did. Maybe they botched my surgery. Maybe my tubes grew back. Maybe the virus wouldn’t allow it. Who knows? Maybe I should never have left the island.” She took a deep breath, feeling the pain in her chest as muscles resisted expanding. “And maybe I should never have come back here after I did.” Caitlyn lifted her arm and daubed at the tears with the sleeve of her cotton sweater. Her arm moved like a clumsy stick. “Have you ever done something you felt was right, but you knew at the same time was incredibly stupid, something you knew would end up possibly hurting you more than you could bear?”
“Yeah,” Gary answered, his voice no more than a whisper. “I know that feeling real well. Real fucking well.”
Inside the cottage, Moira turned on one of the cassette tapes Caitlyn had bought her at the store in Churchill Bay. Her high, little-girl voice sang along with a bright, cheery children’s tune. “She carries the virus, aye,” Caitlyn said, smiling at the sound. “It’s in her blood, from me and from her father who had a minor ace, and if she’s like almost all who carry it as a latent, it will manifest itself when she hits puberty. When that time comes, I have a 99% chance of watching her either die in agony or becoming horribly disfigured for the rest of her life.” She turned back to Gary, feeling her face still trapped in the eerie smile. “I could have had an abortion. But I was scared, and I was still in love, and I was stupid. I should have had an abortion. Instead, I listened to him, the father who said he’d love me forever and who told me that after all the chance that the virus would get passed on to her was just one in four and that I should have the baby. I promised him I would. I kept my promise. And I found out that for him ‘forever’ was only until he fell in lust with some nat woman he met in the pub. By then I was so big with Moira that it was too late to do anything but carry her to term. Now I have to look at her every day and know that I’ll lose her soon ... or worse. I have to look at the eyes of the people here on Rathlin with me, who stare at me and wonder what kind of monster would condemn her child to that.”
Caitlyn took a deep, sobbing breath. “That’s something I wonder myself, every day.”
Someone was pounding on the door. “Caitlyn!” a man’s voice called. “Aye ye in there?”
“I’m here, Duncan,” Caitlyn called back. She saw Moira sitting up her bed alongside. The clock on the nightstand said 7:00 AM and the sun was barely up. “Go on, girl, and let Constable MacEnnis in. Start the coffeemaker going. I’ll be right there.”
“What about the black man, mama?” she asked, a bit wide-eyed.
“He’ll have heard Constable MacEnnis, I’m sure. If he’s still here ...”
Moira jumped from the bed and padded away. It took Moira several seconds to roll stiffly from the bed and get to her feet. Pulling her nightgown close around her, she walked lock-jointed into the front room. The couch where the stranger had lain the night before was empty, the blanket on the floor. Moira was at the door, holding it open just a crack. “Constable MacEnnis says for you to come outside, man,” Moira said, with a tone of awe in her voice. “There’s another man with him.”
“I’m coming, Duncan,” Caitlyn called. She patted Moira on the head as she reached her. “Why don’t you stay here, darling? Get yourself some cereal ...”
The sunrise had left a damp and heavy morning fog in its wake. Two figures stood in the mist. Duncan MacEnnis was, like all the residents of Rathlin except Moira, a joker. Caitlyn knew his story—everyone on Rathlin knew everyone else’s story. MacEnnis had been a constable with the garda, the police force in Belfast. He’d been called to investigate the report of a man acting strangely in an alley between dreary brownstones. As MacEnnis approached the suspect, who was gibbering madly and pounding at the brick wall of the nearest house as if he could smash his way through it, the man exploded in a gory fountain of flesh and blood. The virus wasn’t carried in the blood and gore that spattered MacEnnis, but it was in the air that night, carried on the breeze moving down the valley of the River Lagan. Nothing had happened then, not until after MacEnnis had cleaned up after his shift and stopped in at Crown Liqour Saloon on Great Victoria Street. There, he’d lifted a glass of stout and watched as his hand melted around the glass, the flesh running like hot wax down his arm, his shoulder, his chest, his face, puddling then hardening again as he screamed in agony and terror, as patrons shouted and scurried away from him ...
The Melted Man, with runneled flesh and eyes popping garishly from a hairless, pitted skull.
The man behind MacEnnis was a giant. He stood head and shoulder above the garda, and his face and hands seemed to be carved of gray and shiny stone, all the edges hard and sharp. She knew him—she’d seen his pictures many times in the papers: Brigadier Kenneth Foxworthy; the man they called ‘Captain Flint,’ whose hands were razor-edged knives, whose voice was as soft as his body was hard. An ace, not a joker.
“I see that you know who I am,” the man said, the voice so low a whisper that Caitlyn had to lean forward to hear it at all. “You don’t seem too surprised. Would that mean you know why I’m here?”
Caitlyn glanced at MacEnnis; the skull-face was impressive, teeth gritted behind a lipless mouth, but the constable gave a nearly imperceptible shrug. “I assume you’re going to tell me—” Caitlyn began, when two other people came from behind the cottage: a man with a bulging, domed forehead holding a blue steel revolver as he herded Gary toward the group. A sheen of perspiration covered Gary’s face and hands.
“He was halfway across the field, Brigadier,” the man called. “Must’ve slid out the back when he heard us coming. A bit of a hard run, the way he’s sweating, but he stopped when I showed him the gun.”
“Excellent work, Radar,” Flint whispered. He turned back to Caitlyn. One eyebrow raised slowly in question; otherwise, the face remained entirely impassive.
“He’s a friend of mine,” she told the stone giant. “He’s been here a few days now. He told me he was going for a walk around the island. I don’t believe we have a law on Rathlin against that.”
MacEnnis was staring at her with his bulging eyes, though he said nothing. Flint merely snorted. “Odd, then, that he doesn’t appear in the ferry’s register or in the Ballycastle visitor’s log. How did he get here? Fly?” He turned to the black man. “That is how you came here, isn’t it, Mr Bushorn?”
Gary shrugged. “You tell me.”
The expression—or rather, the lack of one—on Flint’s face remained undisturbed. “Where are your friends?”
“They weren’t friends.”
“You expect me to believe that blatant falsehood about being ‘kidnapped’ and forced to fly Senator Hartmann and Ms. Davis here?”
“I expect you’ll believe whatever you want.”
“Tell me where they are.”
“I don’t know. They parachuted out of the plane near Dublin.”
“Then why didn’t you broadcast that immediately and land there or in Belfast?”
“Hartmann had already shot out the radio so I couldn’t call. It was night, I didn’t know the area, and I was flying by sight on a stormy night. I figured by the time I got to Scotland, it would be dawn and I could see better. I didn’t make it.”
“You’ve been here a day and half and have made no attempt to contact the authorities. Hardly a ‘victim’s’ response.”
“I wanted to avoid being your victim, too. Do you blame me?”
Flint seemed to sigh. “Handcuff him and put him in the car,” he said to Radar. “He’s under arrest. There are agents from the States coming over for him.”
“No.” Caitlyn moved toward Gary as Radar pulled the cuffs from a back pocket. “Duncan, he’s asked to stay here. He’s one of us.”
“Shite.” The curse was audible to everyone, and MacEnnis’s face became even more skull-like with the rictus of a grimace. “Is that true? You’re a joker?” MacEnnis glanced at Gary, who looked first at Caitlyn.
“Yeah,” Gary said finally. “I guess it is. Or maybe a deuce.” He lifted his hand, his eyes tightening in concentration. A moment later, a small blue flame flickered from his fingertip and swept down the entire index finger. Gary grimaced in pain as the flame licked at his flesh. “That’s it. That’s the extent of my great powers. Get a Bic lighter, and you can do the same. Otherwise, I have a body that runs way too hot, and it fucking hurts. I’m good at scorching bedsheets, too.” They could all see the finger’s skin bubbling as the flame guttered out. The dark flesh had gone an ugly white as great blisters rose. Gary cradled the damaged hand to his belly. Perspiration was rolling down the side of his face. “I ain’t no goddamn ace. Right now, asylum sounds good.”
“Got any other skills?”
“I’m a fair mechanic.”
“You’re in luck, then. Things break here, all too often.” With a sigh, MacEnnis turned back to Flint. “Sorry,” he told the Brigadier. “I can’t let you to take this man.”
Flint almost, almost laughed. “I don’t think you understand, Constable,” he husked. “I’m taking him back to Scotland. He aided two extremely dangerous fugitives in escaping from the authorities in New York City, and this is now an international matter. Rathlin is still part of the UK, the last time I checked. He comes with me.”
“Rathlin might be UK, but odd how I don’t see nats here at all. Odd how we get almost no money from Belfast or London. Strange how the only businesses here are those we’ve made ourselves,” MacEnnis answered. He waddled forward until he was standing in front of Flint, his horrible face tipped back to stare up at the man. “This isn’t Northern Ireland, this isn’t the Scotland or Wales or England. ’Tis Rathlin, and you can squawk all you like about the law, but ’tis me that’s the law here, and I’m thinking that I’d rather have me a mechanic on the island than an arrest on my books.”
Flint leaned over the much smaller man. One of his fingertips, almost casually, touched the tip of the nightstick in its loop on MacEnnis’s uniform belt. A sliver of ash curled away, falling to the ground. “You are interfering,” he said, “in a greater matter than you can realize.”
“Ace matters?” MacEnnis asked. “That has nothing to do with Rathlin. Rathlin is for nasty jokers.” He glanced at Gary. “You, mister. You want to go with Cap’n Flint here?”
Gary shook his head. MacEnnis turned back to Flint. “You see, he already likes it here, and he’s a mechanic. I say he can stay. If you take him by force, you’ll do so without my cooperation. We’ll protest to every authority and every human rights organization, including the UN.”
Flint hissed, a sound like steam. “You are making a mistake here, Constable, one that may harm everyone infected by the virus. And you are subject to UK law, despite the lax and indulgent attitude Rathlin has enjoyed in the past.”
“The mistake, Brigadier, is the arrogance of you aces. This is Rathlin. I wonder how it will look when taking this man results in an extremely visible demonstration down in Church Bay, with every joker here putting themselves between you and your ship. Sure, you’re stronger than us and you have the law on your side, and you can demonstrate that, all in full view of the cameras.” MacEnnis tapped the radio on his belt with a hand of bubbled flesh. “You want me to make that call to the Mayor? You said you came here looking for a dangerous ace. I say I don’t see one.”
Flint glared at MacEnnis, who stared placidly back. Finally, Flint’s searing gaze moved to Gary. “I now know where you are,” he said. “Consider yourself already in custody, because the instant you leave this miserable little flea speck in the ocean, you will be arrested and prosecuted. There is nowhere you can hide. You’ve just given yourself a life sentence to Rathlin.”
With that, Flint gave a nod to Radar and stalked back toward the constable’s open jeep. MacEnnis gave an audible exhalation. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said to Caitlyn, “because your track record so far isn’t very good.” Appraising eyes stared at Gary below the rim of his garda’s cap. “Welcome to Rathlin, Mister Mechanic. I hope you like your new home.”
She asked him no questions. She simply let him stay with her.
It had been a week. There’d been no other visitors. No new word at all, not from MacEnnis or the embassy, or anyone. It certainly didn’t surprise Caitlyn that no one came up to the house, that they’d been left entirely alone after the first flurry of activity. She wondered what Gary thought.
Caitlyn was standing at the cliffs at the northeast curve of the island, a painful three-quarter mile walk from the cottage, but she forced herself to do it, not wanting to give in to the encroaching slow paralysis of her body. Her small herd of black-faced sheep grazed in the heather nearby, with Moira cavorting through the field with the one lamb that had been dropped that spring, her high-pitched giggle making Caitlyn’s smile genuine. She didn’t hear Gary come up behind her, only felt the touch of his warm hand on her shoulder. She would have jumped, startled, had her body been capable of it, but she simply stood there, gazing down at the waves pounding the cliffs two hundred feet below like a statue erected there.
“That’s pretty,” he said.
“Aye.” His hand left her, but the sense of the touch remained. She enjoyed the sensation. She could hear him coming around to her left, then saw him. He was looking down curiously.
“See the cave there?” she asked. She pointed, her arm slowly raising; he nodded. “That’s Bruce’s Cave. The tale is that Robert the Bruce stayed there in 1306 after he was defeated in the Battle of Methven and fled Scotland. ’Tis said that while he was hiding in the cave, he watched a spider trying to build its web by leaping from one rock to another. The spider tried and failed dozen of times, but every time it climbed back up and made the attempt again, until finally it succeeded. The Bruce was so inspired by the spider’s courage and perseverance that he resolved to go back to Scotland and continue his fight against the English.”
“I guess I should have studied my history more back in school. I kinda remember the name, I think, but not much else.”
“There’s lots of history here on Rathlin. There were stone age axe factories here 3000–2500BC. The island’s been ruled by Firbolgs, Celts, English, Scots, and Irish. There have been battles and massacres. Out there—” she pointed to the gray ranks of waves stretching to the misted horizon, “there’s Sloghnamorra, the swallow hole of the sea, a maelstrom. Under Church Bay, there’s the hulk of HMS Drake, torpedoed in 1917 by a German submarine; there are a dozen more shipwrecks in and around the island. And the views: you should see the sea stacks by the West Lighthouse, or the cliffs by Slieveacarn.”
“You’d make a fine tour guide, I’m sure.”
“I’m just saying that for eight square miles or so of land, there’s much to see and learn here, if you must stay.”
“You left.”
Caitlyn could feel the color rise in her hard cheeks. “Aye, I did. I thought it would be better out there.” She turned to face him. He was watching her: soft brown eyes, a slow smile that crinkled the his face. “I was wrong,” she said. “I belong here.”
He nodded, and she was relieved he asked no more questions. “Yeah. Sometimes you find that place.”
“And New York City is that place for you.”
He shrugged, then nodded. “Yeah. That’s where my family is.” Caitlyn waited, and he continued after a moment. “God, I need to get back there. My family ... My mom’s getting up there and isn’t well, my little brother Arnie and his wife own half the business with me, and without a plane or a pilot ...” Another pause.
“No wife yourself? No family?”
A shake of his head. “I had myself fixed when I was in the army; you know, snip-snip.” His fingers made a scissoring motion, and he gave her a rueful, almost angry smile. “Didn’t want to father no wild card babies. Guess we ain’t so different, the people here and me.”
He drew a long breath, his nostrils flaring. A wave splashed spray on the rocks below. Gary bent down. She watched him pick up a gray, limestone rock and heave it over the cliff edge. They both listened; there was no sound against the crash of the surf and soughing of the salt wind. “I appreciate everything you’ve done for me,” he said.
“’Twas nothing,” she said automatically.
Moira bounced over toward them, laughing.
“To me, it was. You didn’t have to go out of your way, and you did.” Moira put her arm around Caitlyn’s waist. “I just hope—”
“What?”
He shook his head. “I was returning a favor, that’s all. That’s what got me into this mess. I believe you have to pay back what’s given to you, and that’s how I got into this. I owed Hartmann for what he did for me. I promised him I’d do him a favor, any favor. All he had to do was ask. So when he did ...”
“You’re saying that Captain Flint was right?”
A nod. “Yeah. I don’t know why Hartmann and that woman wanted to come to Ireland, but I brought them. Now”—he picked up another rock and threw it—“it looks like I stay.” There was pain in his eyes, and Caitlyn would have frowned. Instead, the smile lessened.
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I.” Another grimace. “If I’m going to be a mechanic, then I need to set up a place of my own. You said the population was down to a few hundred from five? Bet that means there’s lots of vacant houses around. Guess I can find one that’ll do.”
“Stay with us,” Moira interrupted. “I like you. You’re the Burning Man. Do you know math?”
“I used to be pretty good at it.”
“Then you can help me. School starts next week.” Her voice dropped to a conspiratorial stage whisper. “Máthair’s just awful with math.”
Gary’s eyes drifted upward from Moira to Caitlyn’s face. “I think your mother’s smarter than you think.”
She didn’t know what she saw in his face then. MacEnnis’s words came back to her: “... your track record so far isn’t very good.” She hadn’t felt the impact of a person’s gaze since ... How much of it is because he looks so normal, compared to the others on the island? Are you still that shallow, girl?
She said it anyway.
“You can stay with us. If you like.”
She expected him to balk and refuse. At the very least, she expected him to question what that meant even though she wasn’t sure herself.
He didn’t. He stared at Caitlyn for long seconds, then looked down again at Moira, smiling at her. “I’d like that,” he said to Moira rather than Caitlyn. “And we’ll work on that math.”
“... right, I understand, Arnie, but I’ve given the accountant permission to liquidate my 401k—use that to get through the next few months, at least, even though taxes are gonna chew up a lot of it ... No, the plane’s a total loss. I had to ditch in the ocean ... You need to hire another plane and pilot ... I know, man. I know. But I called the embassy in Belfast, and they told me that there are indictments out for me for attempted murder, assault, illegal flight and dozen other things down to littering, and that if I leave this island, not only will the UK have my ass but the good ole USA will be filing immediate extradition papers ... All right, man. I’ll keep trying ... Right. Hartmann’s office gave me the name of a lawyer, some guy named Dr. Praetorius; he’s supposed to start working on that end ... Give my love to Mom and tell her not to worry. I’m fine at the moment, but I miss everyone. Tell Serena the two of you will make it through this, and kiss little Keisha for me too, and let her know that her uncle loves her ... Make sure you take care of Mom. Call her every day and check on her; you know how she is about taking her pills ... Yeah, goodbye.”
Caitlyn heard the click of the receiver in its cradle, and when she glanced up, Gary was staring at her. “I’ll find a way to pay you back. I know all these calls have been expensive. Arnie doesn’t think the business is going to make it, and they found a blood clot in Mom’s leg ...” Gary ran a hand over tight-curled black hair.
“What did Mayor Carrick say when you spoke with him?”
Gary nodded. “There’s nothing he can do either—he was the one who suggested calling the U.S. Embassy. I’ve tried to get hold of Senator Hartmann’s offices, too; no one will talk to me there; all they could suggest was some J-Town lawyer—Hartmann’s the one guy who might be able to get me out of this, and no one knows where the hell he is. No one else seems to be able to do anything. If I leave, I’ll be tossed in jail. That’s the bottom line.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Not as fucking sorry as I am,” he answered, then grimaced, looking in the direction of Moira’s room. “Sorry,” he apologized, pacing the length of the room and back.
“She’s asleep. You must be tired, too.”
He responded as if he hadn’t heard her. “I need to get back. Everything and everyone I know is back in New York.” He looked at her with stricken eyes. “I should never have done what I did, but I promised the man. I promised.”
“Promises are important.” She managed to say it without bitterness.
“Yeah. And this is one I wish I hadn’t kept.” He blinked. Walking over to the chair where she sat, he crouched down, touching her arm. His fingers radiated heat. “Sorry. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. You’ve taken huge chances with me, someone you don’t know at all—all of you here have. It’s just ...”
“I know,” she said. “You want to go home.”
He laughed, bitterly. “You got that right.”
Gary sat with Moira at the desk near the front door. He huddled with her over her open textbook. Caitlyn watched the two of them, wondering.
He’d already become more a part of her life than she’d ever expected. He and Moira ... her daughter had bonded immediately and unquestioningly to her ‘Burning Man,’ and he responded to her with a teasing seriousness that made Caitlyn sometimes feel clumsy in her own relations with Moira.
And yet .... He kept his distance with Caitlyn, careful not to say or do anything that might be construed as an advance. At first, she’d found that comforting ...
“Look,” he said to Moira, his baritone voice warm in the cool air of the room. “Remember when you introduced me to Codman Cody at the West Lighthouse? How many fingers does he have?”
Caitlyn could see Moira squeeze her eyes shut in concentration. “Six,” she said at last. “Four on his right hand, two on his left.”
“OK. And if he held his left hand over his right, that’d be two over four—like a fraction. What if he took away half the fingers on each hand? What would that look like? Think about Codman Cody’s hands ...”
Again, the eyes closed, then opened. “That would be one on one hand and two on the other,” she said.
“Would he look silly then, with only three fingers?”
Moira giggled. “Aye, he would.” They both laughed, then Gary drew a two-fingered hand and a four-fingered hand on the paper in front of them. “So you can divide the number of fingers on both hands by two, right? Which means two over four can be reduced to what fraction? Look at the hands.”
“One over two!” Moira roared. “One half.”
Gary applauded softly. “Hey, you got it! What if he had six fingers on his right? Could you reduce two over six?”
A pause. Then: “One over three.” Moira giggled. “I understand. Thanks, Gary.”
“You’re welcome. Now ... why don’t you get to bed? Your mom and I gotta talk ...” He kissed her forehead and Moira flung her arms around his neck. She ran over to Caitlyn and did the same, then scurried off to her room. Caitlyn watched Gary straighten the desk and put Moira’s notebooks in her backpack.
“You’re good with her,” she said into the silence, and his deep brown eyes glanced back at her ..
“She’s a great kid. I like her a lot.” His gaze turned away as he tucked Moira’s math book in and closed the flap. His dark, long fingers tapped the blue cloth. He pushed back the chair. “I’m going for a walk. Wanna come?”
She hesitated. “I don’t know ... Moira ...”
“Just tell her we’re going. She’ll be fine.”
“All right,” she said finally. “Let me get my shawl ...”
The night was cool but dry, a strong, high wind draping shreds of cloud over a half-moon and ripping them away again, though only a faint breeze stirred the dry leaves of the hawthorn in the yard. She envied the ease with which Gary moved in the darkness, contrasting with her own clumsy, stiff-legged gait. He slowed his own pace to hers, walking alongside her down the narrow asphalt road winding westward. He was careful not to touch her, always keeping a distance between them. They said nothing, listening to the night birds, the soughing of the wind, and the faint sound of the water. They passed Abigail Scanlon’s cottage, a quarter mile down the road—‘Wide Abby,’ they called her. The old woman was out on her porch: Caitlyn could see the outline of the misshapen body, like someone laying on their side, the legs at either end of the stretched frame, the head a bump in the middle of a log, the hand waving at either end, unable to reach each other across the huge girth between them. Caitlyn remembered how they’d had to alter her cottage, the door hinged sideways, all the furniture low and wide. Caitlyn waved to her. “A beautiful night, ’tis it not, Abby?” she called out. There was no answer, only a faint wave from one of the hands.
They walked on. She could feel Gary glancing from her to Abigail. “Moira goes to ‘school’ every day, but she’s the only one there,” he said finally. “She seems to know everyone on the island, and half the time she’s over at someone’s house. But y’know, in two months I’ve never seen anyone at all ever come to your house. I notice that you don’t go to the grocery yourself, that the person who delivers them leaves the box on the stoop and never knocks or rings the bell to say hello. I notice that your neighbors don’t say much to you.” He stopped, and she knew he was waiting for an answer. When she remained silent, walking on, he continued. “Is it me? Is it because I’m there?”
She smiled, because she must. “No,” she answered. “It’s not you. It’s ... complicated.”
“I’m listening.”
“I don’t know if I can explain it to you. This isn’t your home; you weren’t sent here. You didn’t have to make the choice we made.” He said nothing; after a moment, she continued. “I came here with a mother who looked as deformed and disfigured as anyone here, who was in the same kind of pain. She lived for two decades that way, in daily pain and torment, and I took care of her. I took care of some of the others, too. That was nothing special. That was something we all did, those of us who could. And then ... she died. And I left—because I could; because as far as I knew then, all the wild card had done to me was keep me forever young; because—unlike the rest of them here on Rathlin—I could get by in the normal society out there. I wasn’t ugly or horribly changed. I didn’t ooze slime or have spines or drag myself around like a slug. I was pretty and normal. Back then, when you looked at me or saw, you wouldn’t notice anything unless you watched me very carefully. I left. I left them behind. At the time, I didn’t think I’d ever come back.”
They’d reached the point where the road curved away north to Church Bay. The west side of the island around Church Bay slid gently into the water, unlike the steep cliffs that lined most of the island’s perimeter. They stood on a rise, the bay glittering below, while away over the channel, the lights of Ballycastle in Northern Ireland gleamed six miles away, tantalizingly close and impossibly far away.
“They’re jealous of you,” Gary said, “because you look like a nat, because you could blend in.”
“That’s part of it, aye. Then there’s Moira. They love her, Gary, they do. She’s Rathlin’s only child, and they all feel like they’re her aunt or uncle. But at the same time, she ... She’s a slap in their faces. All of them made the decision to stay here. They made the decision that they wouldn’t bring any more children into the world to be like them, to suffer the way they’ve suffered. I left them, and I came back with Moira ...”
“So they hate you.”
Caitlyn tried to shake her head. It would turn only slowly. “Hate’s an awfully strong word, and too simple. It’s ... it’s more that they’re terribly disappointed in me. I’ve shamed them, and along with that they can’t quite ever forget that I selfishly abandoned them, and they can’t forget that I’ve almost certainly condemned Moira to die young and in horrible pain because of the virus she carries. What I did was selfish and it was abandonment, and it was cruel. I did it purely for me.”
“Sometimes you have to think about yourself first.”
“Maybe,” she answered. “But then you have to live with everybody else afterward.”
He gave her a contemplative hmm, leaning on the stone fence that bordered the roadway. She saw his gaze catch on the Ballycastle lights and remain there. “You really want to go home, don’t you?” she asked him.
A nod. “Yeah. I do. Arnie called earlier today, while you were bringing back the sheep. Mom’s getting worse, and their finances ... My savings are gone; I can’t afford that lawyer any more. I done everything I can think of to do. I even talked to Codman Cody about trying to sneak off the island at night in his boat, have him land me somewhere on the coast and see what happens ...” She saw his hand form a fist and slowly loosen again. “I left without saying goodbye to anyone. I miss my family, I miss my friends, I miss walking around the city, all the people and the sights and the food ... But I ain’t going back as a prisoner.” He looked at her over his shoulder with a wry smile. “I guess there are all kinds of prisons, aren’t there?”
There was such gentle sympathy in his face, such compassion in his eyes ... She wanted more than anything to lean toward that mouth, to kiss him and to feel him respond. She stared back at him, the eternal smile on her face, holding her breath. She could not move.
But he did. His head turned, he bent toward her so close that she could feel his warmth. He stopped. Pulled back, his expression stricken and guilty. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have ... I’m really sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” she told him.
He shook his head. “It ain’t right, not when I’d leave here tomorrow if I could. Not after you took me in, let me stay with you. I’m really sorry, Caitlyn. I don’t want to make you feel threatened or bothered or—”
“Stop it,” she told him. “It’s fine. It’s ...” ... what I want too. I’m just so afraid of it and I don’t know if I can anymore, and .... There were a dozen other things to say, but she couldn’t say any of them. “... forgotten,” she finished.
But she didn’t forget it. She remembered. It haunted her dreams for a long time.
“I hope you find your way home,” she told him.
Rathlin’s lone lawyer was also Rathlin’s Mayor, an elderly gentleman with long white hair that covered most of his body. His snouted face and prominent front teeth made him look like a large rodent; the delicate eyeglasses perched there, the wire rims tucked behind his ear flaps, magnified the tiny black eyes, and the suit he wore made him look like a cartoon character .. His hand were pink and wrinkled and folded on top of the newspaper that covered his desk.
Joseph Carrick: ‘The Rat of Rathlin,’ as he’d been dubbed by the Sun and other tabloids.
DISASTER AVERTED! the headline trumpeted. Then, in smaller type: BLACK TRUMP DESTROYED IN JERUSALEM. SENATOR GREGG HARTMANN AMONG DEAD.
“I thought ... I thought that since Senator Hartmann was dead that the charges against me might be dropped,” Gary told Carrick.
Carrick’s whiskered nose twitched. “I’m afraid they haven’t. I’ve made the inquiries you requested: the charges against you stand, and I’ve been told by the authorities in Northern Ireland, Great Britain and your own country that nothing has changed—you will be arrested the moment you step foot off Rathlin.” Carrick traced the headlines with a slow forefinger. “I am sorry, Mr. Bushorn. There’s nothing I can do.”
“Mayor,” Gary said, a tone of desperation in his voice, “Look, Hartmann was just about my last hope. I gotta get back—you don’t understand.”
“Joseph, surely there’s something else you can do?” Caitlyn’s voice drew Carrick’s attention away from the paper. His tiny lips, in the shadow of the snout, pursed in a tight moue of annoyance. Joseph Carrick had once openly courted Caitlyn, in the months after her mother’s death and before her flight from Rathlin. Caitlyn knew he’d considered her departure a personal insult—she’d heard him say it to others: “She think she’s too perfect to be touched by the likes of a joker ... “
“I’ve done all I can,” he answered tartly. “Surely you’re not totally disappointed in the news, Miss Farrell, since that means your ‘house guest’ will be staying.” Caitlyn’s cheeks went hot—she started to answer, but Gary had already risen from his chair. His forefinger stabbed the paper in front of Carrick.
Around the finger, white smoke curled away. “You,” Gary said, “will apologize to Caitlyn. I don’t care if you’re the fucking Mayor, I don’t care if you call Constable McEnnis and have him drag me off the island as a result.” His hand went down flat on the newspaper. The smell of ash and burning paper rose. Tiny flames leapt around his hand. “You know nothing about her, or you would have kept your mouth shut just now.” Fire crackled around his wrist. “Do I make myself clear?”
Carrick’s tiny eyes widened more than Caitlyn thought possible. He nearly squeaked as he pushed his chair back from his desk. “Aye, I understand,” he said hurriedly. “Caitlyn, I’m apologize. I certainly didn’t mean to imply ...”
Gary swept the paper onto the wooden floor and stamped out the fire. The photo of the crater in the midst of Jerusalem was now a smoking hole. “I believe Caitlyn asked you a question just now.”
Carrick was staring at the ruins of the newspaper alongside his desk. His head jerked back to Gary, then Caitlyn. “I suppose I could contact a few people I know in your state department. Perhaps some sort of amnesty could be arranged now that the Senator is dead and the crisis over. Why don’t you come back in a few weeks or so ...”
He did come back. Every week. And every time the answer was the same.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Bushorn ...”
There was wrapping paper strewn over the front room of the cottage, and Moira was sitting happily near the fire playing with a rag doll and a chess set. Caitlyn had given Gary a short-sleeved shirt woven from the wool of their sheep. “You don’t exactly seem to need a sweater,” she told him. “So I thought ...”
“It’s lovely,” he told her, and the way he looked at her made the smile widen on her face. “Here,” he said, handing her a package. “This is for you.”
He set the small box on her lap. Awkwardly, she opened it—her elbows had tightened severely since the onset of winter, and she could barely move them. She stripped away the bow and the paper, and opened the lid. She could feel him watching her.
Inside, in a nest of tissue paper, was a pocket watch. She could hear it ticking. She stared at the watch, shimmering through sudden mist in her eyes. “Where did you get this?” she asked. It was all she dared to say.
“I found it, out in the back shed when I was looking for some tools. I cleaned it up, took it apart. I traded Motormouth down in Church Bay some work on his cycle in exchange for ordering the parts I needed from a repair shop in Dublin. They said it was an expensive watch, an old one. Gold over silver on the casing, and well worth the time and money to fix it. The inscription said ‘To Patrick, Love Shannon.’ I showed it to Moira; she said she’d never seen the watch before, but that you’d told her that Shannon and Patrick were the names of her grandparents. So I thought ...” He paused. His head cocked inquiringly toward her. “Do I do something wrong?”
Caitlyn tried to shake her head. It moved slowly left, then right. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s ..” She stopped. She still hadn’t touched the watch. She didn’t dare. “It’s a long story.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” He sat cross-legged on the floor in front of her. “Is it your watch?”
Another slow nod. “Aye. Patrick was my da; he drew the black queen and died in ‘62; Máthair gave him the watch on their first anniversary. The watch came with us to Rathlin after ... after the Relocation. Funny, it worked fine in Belfast, but once we got here, it never did. Something broke inside it, I guess, jostled loose.”
“The mainspring,” Gary said. “It snapped. Probably wound too tight, or it had gotten rusty over the years.”
Caitlyn reached down and touched the face of the watch. “I took the watch with me when I left Rathlin, after she died. He ... Moira’s father, that is—”
“Does this man have a name?”
“Robert,” Caitlyn answered. It had been ten years since she’d spoken that name. It still hurt. The word was an incantation, summoning up all the pain and anger she’d felt, and she could feel muscles pulling uselessly at the smooth expanse of her face. She let out a breath, trying to exhale the poison within the memories. “The watch ...” Another exhalation. “It was another broken promise in a long string of promises: the promise that he loved me, the promise that he’d stay faithful, the promise he wouldn’t drink, the promise that he wouldn’t hit me, the promise that he’d take care of our child, the promise she wouldn’t have the virus ...” She stopped, hearing the bitterness rising in her voice and hating the sound of it. “He had an ace, the ability to enchant with song, and when you heard his voice, you couldn’t move or leave and he could twist your emotions about, make you cry or laugh or shout or fall in love. But the talent was wasted on him, lost in the drink, the temper, the skirt-chasing and the ego. He knew what the watch meant to me. I gave it to him, not long after we became lovers. He said ‘Sure, Caitlyn, I’ll be getting it fixed for you.’ I kept asking him about it afterward, for weeks that turned into months, and he’d always tell me that, aye, he’d taken it to the jewelers, but that some part or another was on backorder and that he’d be going to check on it tomorrow ...”
She laughed, a sound as bitter as her words. “After he left us for his pub floozy, I found the watch when I was packing to come back here. It was in one of his dresser drawers, still in the cardboard box in which I’d given it to him. He’d probably forgotten to take it with him that first time—it wasn’t really important to him, just as I wasn’t really important to him. And rather than tell me the truth, it was easier for him to make up the lies. Maybe he didn’t even remember where the watch was anymore. When I came back here, I couldn’t stand to look at it. It didn’t remind me of my parents anymore; it reminded me of him.” She wrapped the chain of the watch around one finger. She held it up to her ear, listening to the steady metronome of the mechanism inside.
“Thank you,” she said. “Now it will remind me of my parents again.”
She reached toward him; he leaned forward so that her hand touched his cheek, and he pressed it tight between head and shoulder, holding her. “You’re welcome,” he said. She was crying; she could feel the tears rolling hot down her cheeks, and he reached forward and blotted them away with a thumb. “Hey, it wasn’t that much,” he said.
“You can kiss her.” That was Moira, bounding across the room and wrapping her arms around Gary’s neck from behind as he sat in front of the couch. “She’d like that.”
“Do you really think so?” Gary asked her, though his eyes were on Caitlyn. “I wouldn’t want to do anything that you or your mom would regret.”
“Oh, no,” Moira answered. “You can. She likes you.”
“Moira,” Caitlyn said reflexively. Gary was still watching her, his hands on the cushions of the couch on either side of her. She could feel their heat on her legs.
“Well, you do,” Moira answered. “I can tell. I’m not stupid.”
“Moira, I think that the decision to whether or not to kiss should be your mom’s, not mine.” He reached behind and pulled Moira around until she was sitting on his lap. “But I will kiss you,” he told her, and gave her a comically sloppy kiss on the forehead as she squirmed and giggled on his lap.
“She’s asleep?” Gary asked.
“Aye,” Caitlyn said softly. He was standing near the fireplace. She’d placed the watch there on the mantel, where she could see it and hear it ticking. She limped over to stand in front of him. “She says what she thinks, I’m afraid.”
“I never thought that was a bad thing. Keisha, my niece, she’s the same way. Adults should do it more often.” One corner of his mouth lifted. “I’d never make you a promise I wouldn’t keep,” he said. His head leaned down toward hers. His lips were soft fire against the slick ice of her skin, and she opened her mouth to him, the embrace suddenly urgent as his fingers tangled in her hair. His touch was a flame along her breast, a heat between her legs. “I don’t know,” she said, suddenly frightened. “It’s been so long, and my body ...”
“Hush,” he’d told her. “I’m scared, too. Sometimes, the women I’m with, they say it’s too hot, that they don’t ... and I ...”
This time it was her touch that stopped his words. “We’ll go slow. We’ll help each other. We’ll figure out what works. If you want.”
“Caitlyn, the one promise I can’t make to you is that I’ll stay. I need you to understand that before anything happens. I’ll be your friend and lover, I’ll help you with Moira, I’ll never try to deceive you. But if and when they let me go home, I’m gone that same day. If that changes things, then let’s stop now. I don’t want to ever hurt you.”
“That’s not a promise I’d ask you to make,” she told him.
“Then this is what I want,” he answered. “I want it very much.”
“Oh, God ... Arnie, no, no ...”
The sudden catch in Gary’s voice made Caitlyn hold her breath. “Yeah, yeah, I understand ... When did it happen? How? ... Uhhuh ... Wasn’t there anything they could do, something ... ? How’s Serena and Keisha taking this? You called Uncle Carl yet? Is there anything I can do ... Yeah ... No, let me see if I can arrange ... No, not a lot of hope for it ... I’ll call you back, and Arnie—I love you. Be strong, man ... Yeah, see ‘ya.”
Gary stood there after he put the receiver down, staring vacantly. Moira, reading a book by the fireplace, looked over at him also. “Gary?” Caitlyn asked. “What’s wrong?”
“My mom,” he said. “She died.” He blinked, and tears rolled from his eyes. They steamed and sizzled as they reached his cheeks. “She died and I wasn’t there, and they’re burying her on Saturday, and I’m here. I’m fucking here.”
Moira’s eyes widened at the profanity—Gary was always so careful around her, but he didn’t seem to have noticed. “Oh, Gary ...” Caitlyn started to rise—slowly, the only way she could—from the chair to go to him, but he waved her away.
“Just ... just leave me alone. I need to take a walk.” He strode out of the house, then, without looking at either of them, steam wreathing his face.
“Máthair,” Moira said as the sound of the closing door seemed to echo through the room. “You should go with him. He needs you.”
“I walk so slow, Moira,” she protested.
“He needs you,” Moira repeated, but Caitlyn was already rising, moving as quickly as she could to the door, taking her shawl from the peg as she left. The sun was setting in the west, obscured by driving gray clouds, and fine mist dampened Caitlyn’s face. For a moment, she didn’t see Gary, then she caught sight of a dark figure, walking over the rolling hills toward the cliffs. She hurried after him. “Gary!”
He turned. She saw him wave at her, gesturing her back. Then he turned again and continued to walk on. She hesitated, then followed.
He was standing near the edge of the cliffs above Bruce’s Cave, staring out over the water. The sun had set, the edges of the clouds behind them tinted the color of blood, though ahead the sky was unrelenting black and dark gray, streaked with squall lines out over the water. Waves broke a startling phosphorescent white on the rocks far below. He hadn’t turned as she approached, though she knew he had to have heard her. She put her arms around his waist from behind, pulling him into her; it was like embracing a woodstove, but she continued to hold him. “Gary, I’m so sorry ...”
“Arnie said that she must have had the stroke some time in the morning. He came to check on her when he couldn’t get hold of her on the phone, and found her unconscious. By the time they got her to the hospital, she was in arrest, and they couldn’t bring her back.” He spoke without looking at her; she felt more than heard his voice, her head on his back. “She wasn’t real good about taking her meds. I used to call her every morning just to remind her.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Maybe not. Or maybe it was.” He turned in her arms. “I’ll never know, will I?” His eyes were narrowed, eyebrows lowering above like thunderheads. He pushed himself away from her. “I won’t be there for the funeral, won’t be able to grieve with the rest of my family. The business I spent most of my life trying to build is gone along with my savings, and what little I had left I’ve spent trying to get out of here. I’ve written or talked to every damn representative, to every paper from the Times to the goddamn Jokertown Cry, and I’m still on Rathlin!” The name was a shout as he flung his arms wide. “This isn’t fucking jail; it’s worse.”
The words cut, lancing deep into Caitlyn’s core. She was crying, unable to stop the tears, cold against her cheeks, salt mingling with the fresh water of the mist. “Gary ...” She could say nothing, only stand there stricken and numb like the lifeless statue she was inevitably becoming, her arms still spread in the end of the embrace.
He was steaming in the mist, like a living cloud, and she couldn’t tell whether he were also crying or not, his features half-obscured. The droplets hissed on his skin like water spilled on a hot griddle. “I have to get out of here,” he said. “I’ve lost so much, and there’s no way I can ever, ever get it back again ...” He stopped then, looking at her. “Caitlyn,” Her name was a sob. “Oh God, Caitlyn ...”
His hands were on his head, his face lifted to the sky. She saw his chest swell in a long, ragged breath, then slowly relax again as he sighed. “It hurts,” he said, simply.
“I know.” Caitlyn took his hand, ignoring the heat. “Gary, I see you in pain and it makes me hurt, too. I wish there was something I could say or do to help. I’m so sorry for your loss, for the way you’re trapped here ...” She stopped. His fingers pressed hers.
“You’re all that makes it bearable,” he told her. “You, and Moira, too.” His hand cooled; the rain no longer steamed as it touched him. “I never had the chance to tell her goodbye. Now I never will.”
“I know. It’s not fair.”
He nodded. He pulled her to him. For a long time, they stood that way, until the light had left the sky and the hard rain began in earnest.
The boat and the pier smelled of fish and Codman Cody.
“You shouldn’t be going, Caitlyn,” Gary told her. “If you fell in somehow ...”
He didn’t say the rest. He didn’t need to. Caitlyn knew it all too well. In the last few months, the rigidity of her body had become worse. She couldn’t sit at all anymore, and getting in and out of bed was difficult because she could barely bend from the waist. She could walk, albeit slowly and with a strange, lock-kneed gait like someone pretending they were a doll. Her shoulder and elbow joints still worked, but detail work with the hands was now impossible; she would never knit or sew again. She smiled at Gary—it hurt too much to frown. “I’ll be fine. Codman has life jackets, and I can stand near the cabin, away from the side. Gary, I need to be there. Please don’t argue.”
His face softened. “All right,” he told her. “But you wear a life jacket. Moira, you want to help your mom?”
Moira nodded. Cody blinked his round, wide-set fishy eyes, the scales on his skin glinting in the light from the lantern hung on the piling of the tiny pier at the western end of Church Bay. He tossed a life jacket to Moira with the shorter, two-fingered hand, webbing stretched between the wide-spread digits. “Hurry,” he told them. “The tide’s running out strong now.”
Moira fastened the straps of the life jacket around Caitlyn, and then hugged her. “Be careful, Máthair,” she said.
“I will. I’ll see you soon. Remember, you’re to go right over to Alice’s house; I’ll pick you up there.” Moira nodded solemnly. She was blinking back tears, Caitlyn noticed, and she patted the girl’s head. “Go tell Gary goodbye.”
Caitlyn watched her run over to Gary, watched him effortlessly pick her up as Caitlyn once had and embrace her as Moira wrapped arms around his neck. “I wish you didn’t have to go,” Caitlyn heard her say to him.
“Part of me wants very much to stay,” Gary told her, still hugging her. His gaze was on Caitlyn. “But I want to go home. You understand that, don’t you? I want to go home.”
“Máthair says they’ll arrest you if they catch you. They’ll put you in jail.”
“Then I have to make sure they don’t catch me, don’t I?” He put her down. “I’ll miss you so much, Moira. Give me a kiss?”
She kissed Gary, hugging him fiercely, and then turned and ran down the pier to the shore. Caitlyn could hear her crying as she ran, turning toward Codman Cody’s small house, where his wife Alice waited.
“’Tis nothing,” Caitlyn told Gary, who stood watching Moira’s sudden flight. “She’s just upset, but she’ll be fine. Help me into the boat ...”
A few minutes later, the Áilteoir (“That’s ‘joker’ in Irish Gaelic,” Caitlyn had told Gary when he asked) was grumbling its way toward the entrance to the harbor and out into the open waters of Church Bay. The night was moonless, the waves gentle as the small fishing vessel moved out into the open water, rolling sofly. The light of Ballycastle shown directly ahead, and the line of the Irish coast was a blackness against the star-dappled sky. Cody steered the Áilteoir due south, following the line of Rathlin’s southern arm. Once past the Rue Point and the South Lighthouse at the tip of Rathlin, he turned southeast, intending to land east of Ballycastle in the less-settled land between Fair Head and Torr Head. From there, Gary would try to make his way south to Belfast, where he could determine the best way to the States.
Caitlyn felt worry settle in her stomach. She’d helped him plan this escape, keeping to herself all the doubts and fears. She’d judiciously enlisted Duncan MacEnnis’s help, and the Constable had recommended a local joker who could create the false IDs and passport Gary was now carrying, under the name he’d first given her: John Green. It can’t work, she wanted to tell him. A black man walking about in Ireland—how more conspicuous could you be? The first garda you come across will figure out who you are and place you under arrest.
She clamped her lips shut, and concentrated on keeping her balance with the motion of the boat in the long swells. If he were going to leave, she wanted to be with him as long as she could. She wanted to see him on the shore. She wanted to watch him walk away into the night. She didn’t think she could bear the pain of the loss if something went wrong and she hadn’t been there.
“We’re coming up on the two-mile mark,” Cody said from his seat at the controls. He grinned at Gary and Caitlyn, exposing the twin rows of tiny triangular teeth that lined his mouth. “Another few minutes and you’re technically off the island.”
Gary nodded. He was standing alongside Caitlyn, his body a welcome warmth against the stiff sea breeze. He put his arm around her. Neither one of them said anything—it had all been said earlier that day, along with the tears, the kisses, a final few stolen moments of intimacy. His arm brought her close; she tried to bring her head down to lay against his chest and halfway succeeded. “Promise you’ll be careful,” she said, no more than a whisper. She wondered whether he would hear her, but she felt his lips on her hair and a kiss.
“I will,” he answered.
“Shite!” The curse came from Cody, and Caitlyn felt Gary’s body jerk and then move quickly away.
“What’s the matter?”
“I have a blip on the sonar. Out there.” He pointed to starboard, close to where Ballycastle glittered. Red and white lights blinked closer to them, sending wavering reflections chasing themselves over the water. They all heard the noise at the same time: the full-throttled roar of powerful engines. “Bleeding patrol boat. You’d best get in the cabin, Gary. Don’t want them seeing you out on the deck ...”
Gary ducked into the small cabin and closed the door behind him. A few moments later, the blue-white glare of a spotlight stabbed across the waves and settled on them. The patrol boats, a fast cruiser, pulled within hailing distance and shut its engines. “Hey, Cody!” someone yelled. “What the hell are you about in that rusting tub of yours, now?”
Cody blinked into the spotlight, shielding his eyes. “Cap’n Blane, is it? What’s the problem? I’m still in Rathlin waters.”
“You’re a good half-mile outside, man.”
“Not according to my instruments.”
“Then your instruments are off or you’ve forgotten how to read them. And since when do you do your fishing at night? You know the regs, Cody—prepare to be boarded for inspection.”
“Ah, now, Cap’n, you don’t be needing to waste your time with that,” Cody protested hurriedly. He clambered down from the top of the cabin to stand next to Caitlyn. The spotlight widened as he moved, then narrowed again. Caitlyn lifted her arm, squinting into the light. “The truth be, Cap’n, I’m not exactly fishing. I was taking Caitlyn here for a bit of a ride, and I suppose I wasn’t paying as much attention to the instruments as I might be, if you take my drift. You’re a married man too, are you not, Cap’n? So I expect you understand. Do you think I’d be trying to smuggle something over in this puttering slow thing?”
Cody’s arm was around her, and she could smell the odor of rotting fish. But it was easy to smile ... “I’d hate for something like this to get back to my missus,” Cody said.
Caitlyn could hear conversation, then a burst of rough laughter and someone’s voice saying audibly, “She’s missing a nose if she’s shagging the Codman ...” The spotlight snapped off. Afterimages danced purple and yellow in Caitlyn’s vision. “Turn that rustbucket around, then,” Blane’s voice called loudly. “And next time, keep it closer to home.”
Cody waved; the patrol boat’s engines coughed and then roared as the prow lifted and the props churned the water to white froth. The lights receded, heading back toward Ballycastle. Cody went back to the wheel; Gary emerged from the cabin.
Cody spun the wheel, and the Áilteoir turned. The South Lighthouse gleamed ahead of them. “They’ll be watching now,” Cody said. “I don’t have a choice.”
“I know,” Gary said. “Maybe next time, eh?”
Cody sniffed. “Don’t know about this ‘next time,’ either,” he said. “The Áilteoir ain’t much but she’s all I have. I come out again like this, and Blane or whoever’s out there waiting isn’t going to be so accommodating. I lose the boat, and I lose everything. Doing this once is one thing, doing it again ...” Codman gave a massive blink, his bulbous eyes seeming to vanish into his skull and them pop out again. “I’m sorry. I hope you understand.”
Caitlyn thought Gary might be angry or upset. Instead, strangely, he shrugged and sighed. “I know, Codman. I have a plane rusting on the bottom north of Rathlin that was my life, that I’d scraped and saved and borrowed to buy. And I threw it away for ...” He shook his head. “I don’t even know for what, but it sure as hell wasn’t for me. So yeah, I understand.”
He said nothing else on the way back. He held Caitlyn’s hand, and he stared over the stern of the boat toward the lights of Ireland.
Each word was a separate, labored breath of air. “Tell ... them ... to ... come ... in.”
The doctor’s eyestalks blinked, and he scuttled away crab-like, his brilliant orange and blue carapace leaving her vision. Caitlyn heard him talking softly with the two of them, and a few moments later, she heard Gary and Moira enter the bedroom. Their faces swam above her as they stood over the bed. Gary was trying to smile; Moira was openly crying.
Dying was suffocation by inches. Dying was slowly being turned to painted stone. Dying was forcing the muscles of lungs and heart to pump and knowing that it was a battle she had already lost, that she could continue fighting for only a few more minutes.
At least she would be a beautiful, smiling corpse.
“I ... love ... you,” she told them. “I’m ... sorry.”
“You can just be quiet,” Gary told her. “There’s nothing to be sorry about.” His hand stroked her face; she felt nothing of the caress—not the touch, not the heat. “We love you, too. I wish—” He stopped.
She would have nodded, would have smiled. She could only cry. “Moira?” she said.
“What do you want, Máthair?” She sniffed and scrubbed at her eyes with her sleeve. It hurt most to see her, to see how her face had lost its baby fat over the last few years. To see her shape changing to that of a young woman. To see the glimmer of the adult that she might become—and to know that because of the virus, she would never be that person.
Caitlyn had thought that the worst thing would be there to witness what the wild card virus would do to her daughter. Now she knew it was worse to leave and not know. “You ... be ... careful,” she told Moira. “Every ... one ... will ... watch ... out ... for ... you.”
“I know, Máthair.” Then the tears came, and Moira hugged her desperately as Caitlyn strained uselessly to hug her in return, to move the arms frozen at her sides.
“Go ... on ... now,” she told her. “Please.”
Gary slowly, gently, pulled Moira away from Caitlyn. They started to walk away, but Caitlyn called out to him. “Gary ...”
“Go on, Moira,” she heard him tell her. “I’ll be right out.” Then his face returned, hovering over her. “Hey,” he said. “Are you in pain, love? Maybe Doc Crab can—”
“No,” she told him. “No ... pain.” She forced another breath through her lungs. She would have closed her eyes, but those muscles were no longer working, either. “You ... kept ... your ... promises.”
“It was easy. You made it easy.”
“One ... more.”
“What?” She saw his face, his eyes narrowing. “Ah,” he said, and the exhalation said more than words.
“No ... you ... don’t ... understand ... Promise ... that ... if ... you ... get ... the ... chance ... to ... go ... home ... you’ll ... still ... go. Don’t ... worry ... about ... Moira. They ... will ... take ... care ... of ... her ... here.”
“Caitlyn—”
“No!” The shout, though hardly more than a hoarse whisper, cost her. She had to struggle for the next breath and was afraid it wouldn’t come. He waited, his hand stroking her hair. “Promise ... it. That’s ... all ... I ... can ... give ... you ... now. It’s ... what ... you ... want.”
“I know,” he said. “But it’s not going to happen.”
“... promise ...”
Gary sighed. “All right. I promise. I’ll go home.”
JANUARY, 1998
“... it’s not simple, I know, but you can get it. First you have to isolate ‘x’ on one side of the equation, so ...”
A knock on the door interrupted the algebra lesson. Moira shrugged at Gary and went to answer it. “Good evening to you, Moira,” Constable MacEnnis said. The garda stood outside the door in a misting drizzle, beads of water running down his cap, the impossibly round, white eyes bright in the murky day. “This just came for Gary. I think he’ll want to read it.” He handed Moira an envelope. The ivory paper felt thick and heavy in his hand, spotted a bit with the rain. “It’s from Mayor Carrick,” MacEnnis added.
She could feel Gary behind her at the door. She handed him the envelope and stepped back. “Come on in,” she said to MacEnnis. “No sense in standing out in the rain.”
MacEnnis touched the crown of the cap with knobbed, scarred fingers. “I don’t think so, Moira. I should get back ...” He nodded to them and walked back to the Fiat parked at the side of the road. Moira shut the door, turning to find Gary still staring at the envelope in his hands. She knew then.
“Go on,” she told him. “Open it.”
He seemed to start, as if she’d shaken him from some reverie, then slipped his forefinger under the flap and slid it along the seal. He pulled out the paper—cream-colored legal bond—and unfolded it. She could see him reading the words, saw the tremble start in his hands and the eyes widen. Without a word, he handed it to her.
... granted a presidential pardon, effective immediately. Any and all charges pending against you have been dropped by the governments of the United States, the Republic of Ireland, and the United Kingdom ...
She handed the paper back to him, then flung her arms around his neck, giggling as if she were nine again. “Oh, Gary! I’m so happy for you!”
He hugged her, but the embrace was half-hearted and he released her almost immediately. “Moira, I can’t ...”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she went to the mantle, standing there for a moment as the heat from the peat fire warmed the front of her body, then turned, serious. “The night Máthair died, I listened to her talking to you.”
He rattled the paper in his hand. “Moira, this doesn’t mean that I have to go now. Or ... we can both go. Would you like that? Would you like to go to New York City?”
She shook her head. “No. I wouldn’t like that at all. I’m staying here. I’ll be thirteen this year, Gary, and there’s plenty of people here to look out for me. I’m Rathlin’s only child, remember? They all know me.”
“I should stay until—” He stopped. They both knew what he meant.
“I know my odds, Gary,” she said. “I’ve known them for a long time. I also know that almost all latents express either at puberty or during some great emotional crisis. Well, the virus didn’t show itself when Máthair died, and I doubt anything will be more traumatic than that, so ...” She shrugged. “I don’t want you to see me die, Gary. I don’t want your last memory of me to be something awful. I’d rather stay that little girl you helped to learn her math.”
“God, you sound like her.”
Moira laughed at that, pleased, and with the laugh was a trace of the childish giggle. She came toward him. The paper with its words of release was smoldering in his grasp, and she took it from him. “This is what you always wanted, and Máthair knew that. I heard you make her a promise,” Moira told him. “Now keep it.”
He said nothing for a time, and she saw steam rise from the corners of his eyes. She went to the mantle and took Caitlyn’s pocket watch from where is sat, bringing it over to him and pressing the round form into his hand. “Remember us,” she said. “Remember us as we were.”
“I will,” he said finally.
The sound from the television set was tinny and the picture half lost in static. “Do you have any statement to make?” a reporter asked, shoving a microphone toward Gary, a darkness in a blizzard of transmitted snow and teeming rain from the storm flailing the island. She could see the curve of Church Bay behind him, gray in the downpour and besieged by a small invading squadron of press with cameras.
“I’m going home,” he said simply. “That’s all. I don’t have anything else to say, and I’d like you all to just leave me alone.” The press of reporters shouted a torrent of questions, but he ignored them, pushing through them. She heard some faint cries: “Damn, look out! He’ll burn you if you touch him!” The cameras pursued him, but Gary pushed his way up the ramp and onto the ferry. The reporter who’d asked the question turned to face the camera. “This is the scene, live on Rathlin Island—”
Moira touched the remote and the television went dark. She stared at the glass tube for several minutes before getting up. She pulled on a sweater and her slicker and went outside to check on the sheep and open the gate to the pasture.
She had moved in with Wide Abby Scanlon, who’d agreed to be her guardian, but Moira told Mayor Carrick that she wanted to keep the old house and move into it herself when she was older. The man had wriggled his rat nose and she knew what he was thinking. “Chances are that you won’t be needing the house, dearie. Chances are you’ll be dead ...” But he’d agreed, and every day she walked back to the old place. Every day she did the chores and pretended for a time that she was an adult and this was her house now, and that she was living here for the rest of her life.
That she would die here, as Máthair had, as her Gramma had.
She swept out the barn and laid down new straw, then walked out across the field to the cliffs and just stood there as the sheep grazed, watching the waves thunder into the rocks in cascades of white foam. After a few hours, she went back to the cottage to fix supper—she should get back to Abby’s house, but she didn’t want to. Not yet.
She crumbled newspaper and placed it on the grate, then put a few turves of peat on top. She reached up to the mantlepiece for the book of matches and crouched back down.
The pack was empty. She tossed the empty cardboard into the fireplace. The stillness of the house struck her then, the silence lurking inside even as the storm softly lashed the structure. She wanted to cry, hunkered there in front of the cold, dead fireplace, listening to the rain patter and splash against the windows and roof while the house itself was consumed with somber quiet.
She heard the door open, heard footsteps cross quickly toward her. A dark hand reached past her shoulder and touched the paper. A flame curled away, yellow fire spreading as the paper began to crackle and smoke curl away toward the flue. She could hear the ticking of a watch. “I knew I could find you here when you weren’t at Abby’s,” he said.
He was smiling at her, uncertainly. She tried to frown sternly at him. “You broke your promise,” Moira began, but Gary shook his head.
“I promised Caitlyn that if I could, I’d go home,” he said. “I got as far the train for Belfast before I realized that I was going the wrong way.”
“Gary ..” She stopped. Took a breath and let it out again. She wasn’t going to hug him, wasn’t going to smile at him, because if she did either of those things, she’d be lost. “It’s going to happen soon. I can feel it. You should have gone. I want you to go.”
“Is that what you really want? To be alone? To be with Wide Abby when it happens and not me? If it is, tell me now and I’ll go.”
“He cupped his large, dark hands around her cheeks, warm and soft and loving. He kissed her forehead, and she sank into his embrace, pulling herself tightly to him, a child again, sobbing into his chest. He simply held her, rocking back and forth as they sat on the floor in front of the fire. “I don’t want to die, Gary,” she said. “I’m so scared ... so scared ...”
“I know, I know,” he crooned, whispering. “I’m scared, too. But whatever happens, I’ll be with you. I promise you that. I’ll be with you.”
Three blocks away from the Dime Museum, the clock tower of the Church of Christ the joker tolled midnight. “Happy birthday to us, happy birthday to us. Happy birthday, dear Oddity, happy birthday to us.”
The voice was off-key and cracked. “Look at the present I brought us,” it said.
A fencing mask lent a shimmering distance to the heavy .38 cupped in Oddity’s hand. Flecks of reflected light from the Jetboy diorama ran along the barrel and glimmered wildly from the mask’s steel mesh. The interference shattered the harsh brilliance like a cheap spectroscope into pale, weak colors.
Evan could look at the gun and pretend the weapon was just a fantasy, something seen on television. He could almost imagine someone else was lifting it.
[Sixteen years. Sixteen years of pain in this monstrosity of a body, ] Evan said in his interior voice.
[Evan, please don’t do this.] Patty’s voice. She was Sub-Dominant at the moment, Oddity’s eternal pain dampened slightly for her. [I’m asking you to please just let it go. I’ll take Oddity for you until John’s ready. You can be Passive and rest.]
Evan ignored her. Far below, she could hear John the third of the trio of personalities who were Oddity. John was Passive at the moment, down in the depths of the strangely-woven mind where Oddity’s agony was a faint tidal wash. The passive personality could hear but couldn’t intrude. Passive could open the torrent of his thoughts to the others or shield them; the others could listen or not as they wished. The fact that John made no effort to conceal his feelings now spoke more than the thoughts themselves.
[ ... goddamn asshole can’t stand the pain like me no courage at all fucking artistic sensibilities Patty may like it but I’m damned tired of the complaining it hurts all of us not just him can’t he see the power we wield ... ]
[No, John,] Evan sent down to him. [I don’t see power, and I don’t care. I want to be alone. Alone. I love you both, but being locked in here-]
Evan stopped. Oddity was sobbing with the emotional undercurrents. Evan raised Oddity’s left hand. It was mostly John’s, though past the lumpy interface the little finger looked to be Patty’s and the thumb had Evan’s coffee-and-cream coloring. The hand resisted him-Patty, trying to shove him from Dominant and take the body. Evan concentrated his will. The hand came up and slipped back the heavy cowl of Oddity’s hood. As Oddity moaned, the fingers curled painfully with tendons crossed and overstretched, and lifted off the fencing mask.
The feathery touch of air-conditioning on Oddity’s cheeks hurt, like everything else. The chill felt like ice water on a broken tooth. Without the mask, the gun in Oddity’s other hand was very present, sinister and compelling all at once. It smelled of oil and cordite and violence.
Three hours past closing, the Jokertown Dime Museum was silent except in Oddity’s head, and dark except in front of the Jetboy diorama, pinned in bright Fresnels with colored gels. Jetboy was caught in midstruggle. Evan had done most of the waxwork sculpture for that exhibit, working in those few hours when he was Dominant and both hands were mostly his own. Though Patty and John insisted it was all psychological, Evan couldn’t work with Patty’s hands or John’s. They didn’t have the touch.
Rare moments, those, when Evan could almost ignore Oddity’s slow, continuous transformation as bits and pieces of their three merged bodies came and went, when he could almost believe he was one person again.
[Alone,] Patty echoed sympathetically. [I know, Evan. We’d all like that, but it can’t be.]
Evan opened Oddity’s mouth. The lips were thin and harsh: John’s. Evan placed the barrel of the .38 there and closed John’s mouth around it. The burnished metal was a sharp tang against the tongue.
Evan wondered what it would feel like to pull the trigger.
“Oddity-Evan ...”
The voice was soft and came from behind Oddity. Evan ignored it and struggled to curl Oddity’s finger around the forefinger. It wouldn’t require but a fraction of Oddity’s enhanced strength. Just the smallest tithe of it. Just the tiniest movement and Evan could find oblivion. Solitude.
[Evan, I love you. No matter what, remember that. I love you; John loves you, too.
“Evan, I think that’s my gun you have. I bought it for protection, not this.”
[ ... can’t even pull the trigger, can’t even do the one thing he really wants to do ... ]
Evan gave a heaving inner sob. Oddity’s mouth opened. The hand holding the gun dropped to the side of the massive body.
Oddity turned to face Charles Dutton, who stood in the archway of the Jetboy room. Evan knew what the joker was seeing: the melted-wax cheeks, the patchwork,
lumpy face that was part Evan, part Patty, part John. The skin would be moving like a veil of cheesecloth laid over a mass of seething maggots. The face would be changing even as he watched, features collapsing and melting back into the pasty sagging flesh. The only unity to it at all would be that each and every one of those mismatched, overlaid parts would be twisted and taut with the torture of the slow, restless transformation.
Dutton didn’t even blink. But then Dutton had to face his own living death’s-head face in the mirror every single day.
“Dutton,” Oddity gated out. Even the voice was harsh and shattered, like some B-movie creature. “It just hurts so much ...”
Evan could feel moisture on the ruined cheeks. The left hand (Patty’s entirely, now), came up and brushed at it.
“I know it does,” the owner of the Dime Museum said. “I know and I sympathize. But I don’t think you really believe this is the way. May I have my weapon back, please.” The cadaverous joker held out his hand.
Oddity looked at the gun once more. Evan hesitated, playing with the control of the shifting, powerful muscles. He could still bring the gun up, place the muzzle against Oddity’s horrific, deformed temple, and do it. He could. Patty tried to force him to give the gun to Dutton. Evan continued to hold it, though it remained at Oddity’s side. Dutton shrugged.
“I saw the Atlanta diorama this evening,” he said. “It’s excellent work, especially what you did with the Hartmann figure. I like the hands even more than the face, the way the fingers grip the podium even though Hartmann’s ignoring the carnage behind him. They lend a tension to the entire scene.”
The hand that was Patty’s twitched involuntarily. An elbow tore from Oddity’s chest, ripping muscles and prodding the front of the cloak before subsiding again. “They broke him,” Oddity’s grating, slow voice declared. “They conspired against him. It wasn’t the senator’s fault. He wanted to help. He cared, he was just ... fragile, and they knew it. They did what they had to do to break him.”
“Who, Evan?”
“I don’t know!” Oddity’s muscular arm swung wide. Dutton took a half step backward. A blow from that hand could kill. “Barnett, maybe. That Judas Tachyon, certainly.”
“Maybe some conspiracy of the right-wing joker haters. I don’t know. But they brought the senator down.”
The gun beat against Oddity’s thigh again. Dutton watched it. “There’s nothing but pain, Dutton,” Evan continued. “Every damn joker’s life is nothing but unrelieved, bitter blackness. Jokertown bleeds and there’s nothing and no one to bind the wounds. I-we-hate it.”
“You’re one of the few who have done any good, Evan-you and Patty and John.”
Oddity gave a short, ironic laugh. “Yeah. We’ve done a lot of good.” The weapon’s barrel glinted as Oddity started to bring it up again, then let it drop once more. “Is this what Patty wants, or John?”
Oddity snorted. A glob of mucus spat from one nostril onto its cheek. “John’s a martyr. He’s almost delighted that Oddity suffers, since it makes us such a fucking noble figure. And Patty”—Oddity’s voice softened, and the mouth almost seemed to smile for a moment “Patty holds on to hope. Maybe Tachyon will find a cure in between his sabotage of the jokers he claims to love. Maybe the virus will go into remission. Maybe there’ll be another secondary outbreak like Croyd’s to pull us apart again.”
Oddity seemed to laugh, but there was no amusement in the sound at all. The gun beat against the heavy cloth of Oddity’s thigh.
“It’s all bullshit, Dutton. You know what the trouble is? There aren’t any happy endings in Jokertown. No happy endings at all.”
Oddity shuddered. The huge, misshapen figure brought the cowl up over the face before bending down to retrieve the fencing mask. Oddity placed the mask over its face and stared at the Jetboy diorama.
“It all started here. The hero’s supposed to win. What a shame. What a horrible, awful shame.”
Oddity seemed to notice the gun once more. The hand came up, held the weapon before the fencing mask. “I didn’t finish Hartmann’s figure,” Evan said.
“He can wait. I’ve been contacted by a source who claims to have Carnifex’s actual fighting suit from that night. If I can buy it ...” Dutton shrugged.
“You’re ghoulish, Dutton.”
Dutton almost smiled. “So is the public.”
“A ghoul and a cynic,” Oddity said, and its voice was higher and less raspy.
The hand holding the gun trembled, then reversed its grip. “Charles ...”
Dutton reached with a thin, bony hand and placed the gun in his suit pocket.
“Thanks, Patty,” he said. “Where’s Evan?”
“Passive,” Oddity replied. “We’ll keep him down there for a few days if we can. He’s tired, Charles, very tired.” Shapes humped along Oddity’s back and a soft moan came from behind the mask. Then Oddity sighed. “All of us are tired. But thank you for listening and for helping.”
“I didn’t want to lose my artist.”
Oddity gave a dry, rasping chuckle. “I know better. And I think it’s time to go. Evan probably won’t be back for a while.”
Shadows flowed over the black cloak as Oddity turned to leave.
“Patty?”
Steel mesh glinted; the head looked back to Dutton but they didn’t speak. Oddity lurched heavily away. Dutton watched until she/it/they (Dutton was never sure which pronoun was appropriate) closed the door of the rear entrance. The joker looked back at the Jetboy exhibit, brilliant in the darkness.
“They’re right, you know,” he told Jetboy. “You were supposed to win and you fucked up.”
Dutton turned off the exhibit’s lights with a savage swipe of his hand and went back to his office.
He locked the gun in the museum safe.
It was a cool night for May. Oddity’s heavy, black ankle-length velvet cloak was comfortable. A cold front had swept the late-spring humidity and smog out to sea.
The air was crisp and crystalline. Patty could see the light of the Manhattan towers between the older, lower, and far grubbier buildings of Jokertown.
May 14, 1973, had been a gorgeous night as well, in its own way.
Patty sighed with the orgasm, her eyes closed. “Yes ...” Evan whispered in her ear, and John laughed in satisfaction, lower down. When the long, shuddering climax had passed, Patty hugged both of them to her.
“God, you two are lovely.” Then, giggling, she flung
Evan aside and bounded from the bed. Naked, she padded across the room and flung open the doors to the balcony. A breeze lifted her hair, fragrant with a warm, sweet-tasting rain that was scrubbing the city clean. Twenty floors below, New York spread out in noisy brilliance. Patty opened her arms wide and let the night and the elements take her, joyous. Droplets shimmered like crystal in her hair, on her skin.
“Jesus, Patty, anyone could see us ...” John came up behind her, also naked, hugging her. Evan stroked the two of them in passing and went to the railing. “It’s wonder ful,” he said. “Who cares what they see, John. We’re happy.”
Evan smiled at them all. They melded into a long triple embrace, kissing and touching as the rain slicked their bodies. When it seemed to be time, they went back inside and made love again ....
They’d gone to sleep that night, but they’d never awakened. Not really. It was Oddity who had opened its eyes on the fifteenth. Oddity, the horror. Oddity, the wild card’s mockery of their relationship. Oddity, the torturer. Gone forever were a social worker named Patty, a rising black artist named Evan, and an angry young lawyer named John. Like a thousand jokers before them, they disappeared into the warrens of Jokertown.
Oddity looked at the brilliant concrete spires of Manhattan and moaned, as much from the memory as the physical pain.
[At least in Jokertown it’s harder to feel sorry for yourself, when every day we see the other horrors, the ones who are helpless. Oddity’s body has strength to match that of the aces.] John.
[Bull shit, it’s all bullshit rationalization .... ] Evan screamed back, down below. [It hurts, it hurts .... ] [Rest,] Patty told Evan. [Rest for a few days while you can. We’ll be needing you to take over again soon enough.] John scoffed. [I’m not rationalizing. It’s the truth-in Jokertown Oddity can do some good.] John especially seemed to enjoy the role of vigilante. Oddity: protector of jokers, the strong right arm of Hartmann.
Hartmann’s defeat still hurt. John especially throbbed with bitterness. But John was strong; Evan wasn’t. Patty sent her thoughts down to him.
[I understand, Evan. John does, too, when he takes the time to think about it. We understand. We do. We love you, Evan.]
[Thank you, I love you, too, Patty .... ] Evan could have said it only to Patty, but he left himself open to both of them, deliberately.
John was surly; Patty knew he’d noted Evan’s intentional snub. [He has a hell of a way of showing his affection, doesn’t he?]
[John, please ... Evan needs the rest more than us. Have some compassion.]
[Compassion, hell. He almost killed us. I’m not ready to die, Patty. I don’t give a shit how much it hurts.] [Evan doesn’t really want to die either, or he would have gone ahead. I couldn’t have stopped him, John. This was a gesture, a plea. He wants to be free of it. Sixteen years is a long time to be in a room you can’t leave. I can’t blame him for feeling that way.]
[He’s come to hate me, Patty.]
[No.] But that was all she said. John scoffed at her. “Y’know, if you ignore the fact that there’s three of us, we’re almost staid,” John said one night as they lay on the couch, sipping at glasses of cabernet. “We don’t swing, we don’t sleep with other people. Within the triangle, we’re as monogamous and conservative as some married couple in Podunk, Iowa.”
“You complaining, John?” Patty teased him, running a finger along his upper thigh and watching what that did to his face. “You getting tired of us?”
John groaned, and they all three laughed. “No,” he said. “I don’t think that’s ever going to happen.”
[Okay, maybe “hate” is a little strong,] John said. [But he doesn’t love me or like me anymore. Not for a long time. Do you, Evan?]
[Damn egoist, no, I want out, I just want to be alone .... ] Then, the barest echo: [John I’m sorry I’m sorry .... ] [This might have happened anyway,] Patty said to both of them. [Even without Oddity. Those were different times. Different moralities than now.]
[Sure. But there’s no divorce from Oddity, is there?] [Which is all the more reason we all need empathy and understanding-all of us.]
[You always were the goddamn saint, Patty] [Fuck you, John.]
[I wish I could, Patty. God, I wish I could.]
Jokertown had always been a night town.
A little past midnight, the main Jokertown streets were still busy. Darkness hid or amplified deformities as needed. Night was the best mask of all.
Not many nats traveled to J-town in the last several months. Tourism was something done in daytime, if at all. The streets had become too unfashionably dangerous.
At night, Jokertown was left alone like a bad dream. Still, the locals were out and Oddity decided to keep to the plentiful back alleys. John might find some small enjoyment in being public, in the respect and sometimes outright adulation of the jokers, but Patty didn’t. Patty could forgive John’s egotism-it was little enough balm for the pain-but she didn’t need it or want it herself, especially not tonight.
They were a few blocks from the ruins of the Crystal Palace, in the back alley where Gimli’s inexplicably empty skin had been found. The Oddity stared at the stained concrete where Tom Miller’s body had lain: another death, another nameless violence. Patty was certain Gimli had been assassinated by a rogue ace, Evan thought that maybe Gimli had been an early victim of the Croyd outbreak, John (always the skeptic) thought maybe Hartmann had arranged it. [And good riddance, too,] John added in counterpoint to Patty’s thought.
The Oddity shuffled on, limping because one leg seemed to be mostly Patty’s and was attached at a decided angle to the hip. Moving it hurt like hell. The Oddity moaned and moved on.
“Shit, man. She’s just a toy. Ain’t worth wasting time on taking.”
“Yeah, but that cunt’d be nice and tight, wouldn’t it?” Voices stopped suddenly as the Oddity turned a corner into another alley. There were three of them, all male, none of them looking more than sixteen or seventeen and dressed in grimy leathers. One was prepubescent and childlike; another had a blotchy face peppered with angry blackhead acne. But it was the kid in the_ middle that made Oddity hesitate for a moment. He was tall and fair-skinned. Under the torn leathers and dirty Levi’s he had a fighter’s body, lean and hard-muscled. The youth was handsome in a feral way, with intense light eyes half-hidden behind straggling blond bangs. He was almost pretty, until they noticed the bloodshot eyes and the fidgety restlessness. The kid was pumped up, high and dangerous.
The joker Oddity knew as Barbie was sobbing on the ground between the three-a perfectly formed woman with adult features but barely two feet tall. Her face was caught in a perpetual smile. She saw Oddity; her mouth grinned incongruously, but the blue china eyes were pleading.
A quick anger raged through John; Patty could feel its red heat. “Hey!” Oddity shouted, their huge fists knotting. “Leave her the hell alone!”
“Shit,” Pimpleface said. “You gonna let a fucking joker talk to us like that, David? Maybe it’d be fun, too. Big enough, ain’t it? Maybe it’s strong, too.”
The leader-David-regarded the Oddity, hands on hips. Patty felt John trying to take control. [Just charge the bastards. Beat the kid’s head in before he decides to move. ]
Patty didn’t need much encouragement. Oddity moved, roaring and lumbering toward the trio like a banshee. The gang suddenly flashed steel. Seeing the knives, Oddity screamed and tore a No PARKING sign from the asphalt. They swung the pole like a flail, it made a deep rumble as it whipped through the air.
There was nothing subtle about their attack. The massive body plowed into the gang like a careening truck. The sign caught Pimpleface and slammed him back against a wall; whipping it around again, they held the other two back. “Get out of here! Now!” Oddity barked at Barbie. The doll-like joker struggled to her feet. She ran, taking staggering, tiny baby steps.
Oddity spun to find David, figuring that if they took out the leader, the others would crumple. They launched themselves at the leering kid.
They were far too late. David’s body slumped as if struck. Blackhead caught him before he fell.
[Patty ... ?]
At the same moment John and Evan felt Patty’s presence ripped away from the Oddity. In place of her was someone cool, sinister, and smug: David. For just a second he was Dominant, crowing his triumph inwardly. Then the pain hit him.
Oddity screamed, loud and long and tormented. The sign and the twisted pole dropped from their hands, clanging on the pavement like an alarm.
John and Evan had had sixteen years to learn the neural mazes of Oddity’s odd group mind. They knew all too well the searing agony that assaulted this intruder. Their shared response was almost instinctive: John sent his will surging to the high place they thought of as Dominant, pushing aside the screaming, frightened ego of David.
(Hands grasped at Oddity and a blade ripped cloth: Blackhead, attacking again after shaking off the first blow. Intent on the interior struggle, Oddity simply howled and flung the punk aside once more. The voices of reality seemed to be distant. “Goddamn, something’s happened, man. David’s screaming. Shit!”
“Fuck, it’s gone wrong, it’s gone wrong ..”
Blackhead grabbed at their sleeve. Oddity roared and whirled; he heard a body fall hard on the concrete. (“The fucker’s too strong! Grab David’s body. Let’s get back to the Rox.”)
They knew it was wrong, John and Evan. “Patty!” they cried together, and the fury gave John enough mental strength to snatch the screaming David from control of Oddity’s mind.
As John threw the jumper from the mental ramparts, Evan attempted to slide from Passive to Sub-Dominant. That was more difficult. David could feel himself losing control, and as Oddity’s pain became more distant, his will began to assert itself once more.
For a moment both Evan’s and David’s minds were entirely open to each other as they moved, caught somewhere in the limbo between Passive and Sub-Dominant. Evan knew David in that instant, and he hated the mind he encountered. He could feel the jumper snatching at his emotions, his thoughts, his memories, and the feeling of violation gave Evan the power to throw David down again.
Evan screamed with David, thrusting himself past until the jumper tumbled down to helpless Passive. [John?]
[I’ve got Oddity, Evan. Just keep that bastard down in Passive. ]
Oddity looked around. “Shit. Shit!”
The kids were gone. They couldn’t even hear the sound of their retreating footsteps. The interior battle might have taken minutes-it was impossible to tell.
[Patty?] Evan queried softly, hopefully, into the matrix of Oddity.
There was no answer but soft, mocking laughter from Passive.
Oddity howled in the darkness of the alley.
She didn’t hurt. That was the first thing she noticed. For sixteen years there had been constant pain. For sixteen years there had been tearing agony as ligaments shifted, muscles were stretched to their limit, and bones scraped against each other in the cage of Oddity’s flesh. She didn’t hurt. And she was alone.
There were the six or seven kids-nats, as far as she could tell-in the filthy room with her, but she was alone in a single body.
The others were arguing, but she paid little attention to the words.
“Hey, man, what you’re describing is the Oddity. So the Oddity took David. He’s gone, man.”
“You don’t mean that, Molly.”
“ I don’t? Well, he sure couldn’t control the fucker, could he?”
“If David’s gone, everything’s up for grabs. And there’s gonna be some people who like that idea. You remember that, Molly. In fact, I’ll bet you’re thinking the same, too.” There was rough laughter, footsteps, a slamming door.
The voices were outside. There were no voices in Patty’s head.
[Evan? John?] No answer-only silence and her own thoughts.
Patty brought her hands up to her face and marveled. “Shit, she ain’t supposed to be able to do that.” Blackhead stared at her with an expression caught somewhere between fear and hatred on his pimply face. Patty ignored him, concentrating on the hands and wiggling the fingers, turning them around to see the calluses.
These weren’t the hands she dimly remembered from the early seventies. But neither were they the patchwork, marbled, knobbed things at the end of Oddity’s arms. The fingers were long, with dirt snagged under the chewed nails and callused hard tips on the left hand that told her the jumper played guitar, for Patty had once had similar calluses.
She could smell the body’s own rank sweat, and the dirty, knee-torn Levi’s were tight at her crotch. She looked down and saw the bulge of a penis. She could feel the cock, part of her. She could make it twitch.
She laughed because that startled her, and her voice was deep and very male. “What’s the matter, assholes?” she said with a bravado she didn’t feel. “Weren’t expecting me to wake up?”
She’d heard the news reports. Everything that had happened tonight added up to the same conclusion: The kids were jumpers. The jumpers’ victims had all said the same thing: For the duration of the jump, they’d been in a coma. Patty assumed the jumper’s companions had guarded the body until the jumper returned and transferred back. Certainly the transfer was a horrible shock to the victim; it was undoubtedly what drove them into unconciousness.
Patty had felt very little of it. Patty was used to existing in a strange body; she was familiar with the sensation of her awareness shifting place. She’d recovered quickly and she knew exactly where she was. Even though the journey here had seemed fantasy (was there really a living, gelatinous globe in which they rode?), she knew where they’d taken her.
Ellis Island. The Rox.
The remembrance sobered her quickly. Depending on who you listened to, the Rox was a refuge where jokers helped one another, or it was a gaping sore, a dangerous seeping wound where the worst of those touched by the wild card had gathered.
YOU HAVE TO DIE TO GO TO THE Box. Patty had seen that spray-painted in garish colors on the walls of J-town. SEND US YOUR HUDDLED MASSES-WE NEED THE FOOD. Slogans of the Rox had appeared by the hundreds in the past few months. From what she’d heard, death was common and varied here. The bodies floated ashore in. Jersey or were found out in the bay.
Patty no longer felt pleased. Refuge or hell, the air of the Rox smelled of garbage and shit and corruption. [My loves ... ] And she was alone. That was worst of all.
The room itself was a hovel, as bad or worse than anything she’d seen in her years with Welfare Services: corrugated aluminum sides that looked like they’d been pieced together from old awnings, a stained concrete floor, the only light a bare bulb hanging from a frayed extension cord. The door was a piece of warped plywood with a rope handle. Patty was sitting in the one piece of furniture in the room: a Laz-E-Boy recliner, the black Naugahyde hopelessly shredded and soiled with nameless stains.
Patty tried standing. Despite the dirt, despite the neglect, despite the halitosis and the crud in the lungs and the leftover crack buzz, this was a gorgeous body: sleek and powerful and lean. Still, it was an effort. Her knees wobbled and she sat again quickly. Patty forced herself to smile, to look as smug and arrogant as this guy had appeared to be.
The punks stood on either side of the exit, scowling. There were three now; the others seemed to have left. She recognized the one who had been with David. Blackhead had a huge welt on his leg and a bloody nose; a remnant of the fight with Oddity. His face and upper arms were scraped raw and the left side of his head was puffy and discolored. Standing next to him was a slight and pretty girl who looked to be at the most thirteen, with breasts just budding under the tank top she wore. The girl stared wide-eyed at Patty. Her face was round, with a fragile attractiveness. Blackhead had his arm around her; his fingers stroked her right nipple. She scowled at him and moved out from under his arm. She continued to gaze strangely at Patty.
The last of the group was a young woman with a scowl on her face, her arms akimbo over a dirty T-shirt. The way Blackhead looked at her, it was obvious he deferred to her. “Who the fuck are you?” she said.
Patty found that she didn’t want them to know she was a woman. “Part of Oddity” she said at last. “You can call me ... Pat.” She laughed mockingly again at that, hearing the strain in the sound. [Ah, Evan, too bad it wasn’t you who was Dominant. You’d have to put up with being a honky, but at least you’d be the right sex. You’d be out. ]
She was almost startled that there was no answer in her head.
[Alone. God, it feels so strange.]
“Molly, we gotta tell Bloat,” Blackhead said.
“Not yet. Not yet, man. Maybe David’ll be back.” She didn’t look that pleased at the prospect, but she shrugged. “He knows where we went, huh? He’ll come here.”
Patty stood again, and this time stayed up. Blackhead blinked hard, scowling at Patty with his right hand fisted around a piece of iron pipe. “We shoulda fuckin’ tied him up, Mol’. David’s gonna be pissed if we have’ta fuck up his body.”
“What makes you think David’s coming back?” Patty asked. [God, such a rich voice. A politician would die for it. What do you think, John?] Then: [I have to stop this. There’s no one there.] “Hey, I have two other friends in Oddity, assholes: Looked to me like they were in charge when you punks ran, not David.”
It was a bluff. Patty had seen the battle for control raging in Oddity after the jump. There hadn’t been anyone
Dominant; Oddity had simply been flailing wildly, out of control. The kids had grabbed her and run before the fight had been won one way or the other. Patty had no doubt John was strong enough to be Dominant quickly, but poor Evan—
She didn’t know what might have happened. If David had won, then Oddity could be in J-town at the moment, doing things she’d rather not think about.
[There’s nothing you can do about it. Just stay alive. Try to get out of here. ]
“He’ll be back, and you’re strain’ till he does,” Blackhead said nervously, licking his lips and looking at Molly for confirmation. The girl beside him was still staring, silent. “You don’t know David. He gets what he wants. He’s strong. He’s got ways. And you-you’re in the Rox. You’re meat.”
“David doesn’t know what he hit in Oddity,” Patty bluffed. “He may never get out. I rather like this body.” Blackhead glanced at Molly. The other girl stared. “What?” Patty asked. “What’s the problem?”
Molly just shrugged, but Blackhead snorted. “He’s never been away for more’n a few hours. No one’s sure what happens when you stay in someone else’s body too long.”
“Maybe Bloat’d know,” Blackhead said.
Molly scoffed. “And why the hell would you think that? You think Bloat jumps?”
“He reads minds, don’t he?”
Molly just scowled harder. “This ain’t got nothin’ to do with Bloat.”
“Everything in the Rox has to do with Bloat,” Blackhead insisted. The kid sniffed and wiped his arm, across the back of his nose. Snot mixed with the blood on his cheek.
Molly sighed. “All right. Maybe we should let Bloat know what’s going on. Hell, he probably knows already. Can you handle this?”
Blackhead scowled. “Shit,” he said. “Sure. Me’n Kelly’ll stay here and take care a’things.”
Kelly’s intense gaze had never left Patty. Her eyes were somewhere between blue and gray, and very open.
“You see how she’s watching you?” she whispered teasingly to Evan, giggling with the wine. John’s fundraising party for Gregg Hartmann’s first senatorial campaign was a noisy swirl around them. “The willowy one with too much makeup, over in the corner by your sculpture. She hasn’t taken her eyes off you since she came in :”
“Jesus, Patty, you have a filthy mind. That’s the Salchows’ daughter. She’s still in high school. I sold her father two paintings last month.”
“I was her age once, too. That’s a teenage crush if I ever saw one. I’ve been there, too. The hormones just run away with your mind. How about it, Evan? She’s young, rich, probably willing if a bit inexperienced. White and curious about how it’d be with a big black stud like you. “
“Patty—”
Patty laughed and kissed Evan. The girl’s face had gone almost angry as she turned away ....
Patty gave Runt a half smile. The girl seemed startled; then slowly, behind Blackhead, she smiled back, almost shyly.
[Have to get out of here. Have to find John and Evan. ]
Patty knew in that moment how to escape. She hated herself for the knowledge, but she knew.
[You want out I know you do I can feel it and I can do it for you I have the key but it has to be soon I can take you to the Rox but SOON .... ]
They were standing in front of the Dime Museum. A poster was stapled inside a case next to the door, a garish drawing of the Syrian exhibit. A waxen Senator Hartmann was gesturing for the others to retreat, his jacket bloody from the gunshot wound. Guards with Uzis gazed at the dais where the Kahina slit the throat of her brother the Nur al-Allah. Braun glowed in a golden spotlight; Carnifex gleamed in his white fighting suit; Tachyon clutched his head and crumpled on the ground.
John wasn’t sure how they’d ended up there. For most of the last hour, they’d reeled through the streets of J-town blindly, trying to find the punks and slowly realizing that the quest was useless.
Their fists clenched and unclenched-the right hand Evan’s and the left John’s. There wasn’t much of Patty surfaced in Oddity at all. It seemed that her body had become sluggish since the loss of her presence.
[We’ve got to go get her, John. David says they’d’ve taken her to the Rox. He says we have to find Patty quickly. He’s afraid. I can feel it. He’s scared of what might happen if he’s out of his own body for too long. Patty might be trapped.]
[I don’t hear him, Evan. We smashed him down to Passive. Stuck him in the basement and locked the door. We can’t hear the fucker at all.]
[Don’t tell him Evan I can get you out I can give you the release you want just help me out of here quick I know you I know you .... ]
David broadcast the plea desperately, constantly. Evan knew the truth. John was tiring already; Evan knew that his own will could not hold David down alone if John fell from Dominant. The jumper knew that, too. Since then, Evan had heard David’s voice. Constantly. At Sub-Dominant, Oddity’s eternal purgatory sluiced over Evan’s soul, and he could hear the words promising a salvation.
[You want out I know you .... ] Yes, David knew Evan’s weaknesses. He knew too well how Evan kept listening and wondering.
A violent shudder racked their body; they could see the right arm shorten and change color as they watched. The torment was worse than either John or Evan remembered, as if they had also taken Patty’s share of the agony. The fingers curled with pain, the nails digging into the palm. When the fists opened again, the hand was a piebald mixture of John and Evan.
[How long can you stay Dominant?] Evan gasped with the transformation. [John, the only thing that’s kept any of us sane was being able to go down to Passive and rest. Even Sub-Dominant hurts too much. John ... please ... ]
[I’ll jump someone else someone you’ll loathe some—one neither you or John can stomach at all and you’ll be left in the body with them without Patty without any chance of ever getting out at all unless you help me NOW ...]
[Patty’s in the Rox,] Evan said. [In the Rox. My God-]
[We haven’t any plan. We don’t know what we’re running into or how to handle it once we do find her.] [Let’s just get there. Now, John. Before it’s too late.] Oddity moaned. The pain redoubled as the body shifted again. Oddity screamed this time, grasping the fire hydrant in front of the museum and wrenching upward as if they could drive away the torture with violence. The top of the hydrant gave way under their assault with a metallic shriek. Water cannoned in a gushing, two-story-high fountain, soaking their black cloak and turning the gutters into dark, trash-filled rapids. Water cascaded over the front of the Dime Museum.
Underneath, David laughed and whispered to Evan. [When we get there I can do it I can give you the body you want whatever you want just help me .... ]
“What’s it feel like to be a man?”
“Huh?”
Patty kissed Evan and pulled him deeper into her with her hands, wrapping her legs around his back. Next to them, John snored, asleep.
“You know,” she insisted, giggling. “To penetrate instead of being penetrated. To feel a woman’s heat around your cock. To ejaculate. To have one short blinding spasm instead of a long extended one!”
“Is that what you’re thinking about?” Evan pretended to be offended and Patty slapped his buttocks, rolling him over until she straddled him. She traced the tight black curls of hair on his dark chest. “So you want to be a man, eh, virile and masterful.”
“To surrender my brain to a penis,” she retorted. “C’mon, Evan, haven’t you ever wondered what it feels like to be a woman?” Evan tried to shrug and she shook her head at him. “Come on now. Admit it!”
“Okay,” he said. “Maybe a little. But there’s no way to ever know, is there?”
But there was, now.
Moving an arm was ecstasy. Feeling the stubble on her cheek was glory The touch of jeans along her legs was a caress. The tepid beer that Blackhead gave her was a gastronomical delight. Despite all her worries about John and Evan, despite her fear of the Rox, Patty couldn’t help but marvel at the wonder of being in this body. She’d forgotten how good it was. It didn’t matter that she was male or that she very likely had a crack addiction or worse-she was free, able to walk alone and talk alone and not feel anyone else inside her.
[This body’s wanted for questioning in New York, and that may not be the worst of it. What if he’s got AIDS, what if the wild card has done other hidden things to him or if he’s syphilitic or has cancer? What about sex? What if after a few experiments you find that you’re still attracted only to males? What about John and Evan, trapped in Oddity with that punk?]
But the objections didn’t totally convince. She was here, in David’s teenage body, and Patty had to admit that she enjoyed the sensation. She drank again, savoring the coolness, the odor of the hops, the yeasty taste.
Kelly watched her, always, while Blackhead worried near the door.
“Why do you keep staring?” Patty asked, and the rich, deep voice was a joy.
Blackhead answered for her. “Kelly? She’s new. She’s got the hots for David but he ain’t laid her. She’d love to go down on him, to have him spread her legs—”
Kelly whirled around, stabbing a forefinger at Blackhead. “You shut up, hear? You’re just mad ’cause I won’t do you.”
Blackhead laughed. “Shit,” he told Kelly. “That’s crap. You’d sure lay down and spread ’em with a smile to get initiated. You ain’t really part of us until you can jump, and you can’t jump until you get laid by Prime, and that might not be for a while, since he don’t get out here that often. So don’t give me that shy virgin shit. Maybe it don’t have to be Prime, Kelly. And you’re wasting your time waiting for David. He can fuck anyone he wants. He don’t need you. I’d do just fine.”
“I want more than a pencil,” Kelly spat. She huddled on the floor near Patty, arms around knees while Blackhead chortled near the entrance to the ramshackle room. “Son of a bitch,” she muttered. Her face was flushed from anger and embarrassment.
“I was her age once .... I’ve been there too .”
“I’m sorry” Patty said softly to Kelly, and meant it. The girl thanked Patty with her eyes, and Patty had to smile again. But Blackhead’s words had caused other reactions, too. “What’s it feel like to be a man?” she’d asked Evan long ago. Now she knew part of it. There was a heat, and her jeans were suddenly tighter in the crotch. “You’re very pretty” she said softly so that only Kelly could hear. Though the words sounded strange and awkward, Kelly gave a half smile at them.
Patty hated the rest of what she was going to do. “Kelly, I can give you David, if that’s what you want.” She whispered it so that Blackhead couldn’t hear the words.
“You ain’t David,” she answered, but without anger. “No,” Patty admitted. “But maybe when David comes back, his body will remember ....”
“You were ugly. I saw the Oddity once in Jokertown. No one would go to bed with you the way you were.”
“You’re a gorgeous woman, Patricia,” John said. It was the anniversary of the first time they’d made love as a trio. Their ‘birthday,’ they’d jokingly called it. Evan had made a cake. John decorated the apartment with balloons and crepe paper. They’d stuck a silly hat on her head and a champagne glass in her hand when she walked in. “A wonderful person. I can’t imagine loving anyone else, and I know Evan feels the same way. We’re both very lucky.” Patty nodded, feeling the tears in her eyes and fighting them back. She could feel Kelly’s gaze on her. “No,” Patty said. “Not for a long time. A long time.” Kelly’s hand reached out and touched Patty/David’s. There was a softness in her gaze, a sympathy that made Patty like Kelly despite the hard exterior she tried to maintain. She smiled at Patty and Patty smiled back, feeling the strangeness of David’s face.
“Okay,” Kelly whispered. “Maybe ...”
Kelly rose to her feet and went over to the makeshift door of the hut. She spoke to Blackhead in an intense whisper. “I ain’t leavin’,” Blackhead said loudly.
“Where the hell is he gonna go? This is the Rox, asshole. You can stay outside if you want.”
“Maybe I’ll stay and watch, huh?”
“You can diddle yourself outside.” Kelly shoved Blackhead, opening the door.
Blackhead snorted. He gestured with the pipe toward Patty. “I’ll be right there. You stick your head out and I’ll take it off.” He looked from Patty to Kelly, laughed again, and left.
Kelly didn’t look at her for a long time. She stayed by the piece of plywood that was the door, facing away. Then she seemed to sigh.
It was Patty who came to her, by the door. She opened her arms and hugged Kelly. It felt strange to be so much taller. Patty was very aware of Kelly, of the breasts pressing against David’s chest, of the smell of her hair, of the way her hips pressed against her body. Kelly’s hands came around Patty’s head and brought it down to her.
They kissed, softly and tentatively, then Kelly’s mouth opened. [Very strange ... ] Patty felt her [his] body responding. She leaned into Kelly, pulling her tight. Close. She could feel the unbidden erection aching to be loosed. [Ah, Evan, so very, very strange ... ]
“So urgent,” she breathed. “Impatient.”
“What?” Kelly asked.
“Nothing.” She hugged Runt again.
There was an insistence to her arousal that differed from anything she’d known before. Maybe it was the years since she’d experienced desire, maybe she’d just forgotten, but this seemed more volatile and dangerous. It wasn’t Kelly-Patty had never been particularly sexually attracted to women despite some minor experimentation. Patty shuddered as she ended the embrace, as she raised her head from Kelly’s lips and held the girl at arm’s length. She slipped the shirt over Kelly’s head, unbuckled the jeans. Kelly was attractive, Patty thought clinically. Very pretty in a young way. Patty stroked her tentatively, then with more passion, her hands going from Kelly’s breasts to the fleece between her legs as Kelly closed her eyes.
They sank together to the floor. Kelly’s legs wrapped around Patty, her hands sought to unzip her jeans and pull out that odd hardness throbbing there.
Holding back was far, far more difficult than Patty had imagined it would be. Runt’s lips and hand were insistent; she seemed to feel the heat coming from both of them. Patty wanted to do this, wanted to plunge her erection into Kelly’s moist heat ....
“I’m sorry” she whispered. Rising up, Patty drove David’s fist in a vicious cut across her chin. There was a lot of wiry strength in her new body. Her fist snapped against Kelly’s jaw.
Kelly grunted; her eyes closed as blood drooled over cut lips. Her legs and arms went limp around Patty. Patty got to her feet. She called to Blackhead, outside the door. “Hey, man! How about joining us?”
The door opened; Blackhead stuck his head in and saw Kelly’s naked body spread-eagled on the floor. He gaped.
Patty hit the kid in the back of the head with doubled, fisted hands. Blackhead staggered and doubled over, and Patty brought her knee up into his face. She heard the nose break.
As Blackhead fell, Patty pulled on the rope handle and flung open the door.
Patty darted through the opening and into the darkness of the Rox.
Ellis Island was a quarter mile from the shipyards of the Jersey shore and a little over a mile from Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan Island.
But you couldn’t get to Ellis from either of those places. Certainly some could (and had) tried, but they were invariably curious nats, and nats who went to the Rox were treated rudely, violently, and sometimes fatally. The authorities had passed control of Ellis like a legal hot potato from the National Park Service, to the New Jersey authorities, to the New York City police, who had given up any pretext of actual control of the island months ago.
Still, patrol boats vigilantly intercepted anyone trying to swim or boat to the Rox. The authorities might not be able to shut down the Rox itself, but they could and would control traffic to and from the island.
Those who went to the Rox knew that to get there safely you had to see Charon, and Charon could only be found on the East River, where the edge of Jokertown touched water.
Oddity could hear the waves slapping the pilings under the rotting wharf. They’d placed a kerosene lantern at the end of the dock-it hissed at their feet, the mesh filament gleaming erratically in the breeze off the river.
Inside, David yammered at Evan, shielding his mindvoice from John.
[Any fuckin’ body you want man any fuckin’ one just point at it and it’s yours free at last just help me when we get to the Rox fast fast fast .... ]
[I don’t see anything, ] John’s usually powerful Dominant voice was weak, but it still drowned out the jumper’s constant wheedling. [Maybe Dutton was wrong, Evan.]
[No not wrong Charon will come take us to the Rox that’s where they’d’ve taken her .... ] David whispered it to Evan alone.
[Charon will be here,] Evan told John. [Be patient.] Even as he said it, he knew how impossible it was. One way or another, this had to be resolved soon. Being Dominant was exhausting and John had only gone down to Passive the day before. It had been hard enough for Evan to move to Sub-Dominant with no rest. John wouldn’t be able to hold on much longer. When that time came, Evan would have to take Dominant; if he couldn’t or wouldn’t hold it, David would. If that happened, they’d lost everything.
John knew it, too. His anger lashed at Evan.
[How can we be patient? God knows what’s happened to Patty. If they’ve hurt her, I swear I’ll kill every last one of them. ]
[They haven’t hurt her, John. She’s in David’s bodythey’ll be careful with it.] Then: [John, what if she wants to STAY?]
John wouldn’t even consider that. Evan could hear mental doors slamming. [No. Patty wouldn’t want that.] A boot scraped wood, a breath hushed in darkness. Oddity turned sharply, their heavy cloak swirling. Four youths came from behind a stack of crates. Jumpers. One, with a shock of orange-red hair, held an aluminum baseball bat. Another swung a chain softly at his side. The other two had knives-switchblades. “What the hell do you want?” Oddity growled.
“David?” Chains asked.
Oddity gave a laugh that was mostly grunt. “Dave’s not here,” the harsh voice said. The bitter laugh sounded again. “So fuck off before you get hurt.”
Chains looked at Red, who shrugged. “David’s been in there three, four hours,” Chains said.
“Hell, that’s a long time, ain’t it?” Red grinned. He was missing teeth. “Almost as bad as jumping a bar of soap, huh?” He laughed.
Down in Passive, David struggled. [I wonder if Molly sent them or if they came on their own she might like me gone forever I’ll fucking kill her if she did .... ]
“Hey, man, can David hear me?” Red asked Oddity. He slapped the end of the bat against his open palm. ““y?
“’Cause I thought I should tell him a few things. Things he’d like to know”
“So talk.”
Red grinned. “Tell David there ain’t no reason to go to the Rox, man. We’re gonna take care of his body.” The words sent a shock through Oddity, stunning them all. For a moment they felt nothing. “Now we came to take care of the rest, huh? Just to make sure.”
With that, Red took a leaping step forward, swinging the bat like an outfielder swinging for the fences.
He hit the Oddity square in the side of the head. Oddity staggered and nearly fell. The pain was a burning lance. Oddity screamed, their throat tearing with the sound. John’s control tottered, but neither Evan nor David could take advantage. Then John’s fury took hold fully. As Red brought the bat back for the next blow and the other three closed in, Oddity forced himself up. A hand caught the bat as it began the downswing; a savage, powerful twist wrenched it from Red’s hands-Red’s wrist snapped and the kid howled.
Oddity swung now, the bat making an audible and sinister whuff through air. Only the fact that Red had crumpled to the ground saved the kid. Chains whipped his steel links in a dangerous arc; Oddity caught them and pulled, catapulting Chains into the pile of crates. The jumper didn’t move again.
The remaining two had already fled. Red, cradling his hand to his waist, was limping after them. Oddity screamed again and flung the bat after Red. It clattered into darkness.
[They’ve killed her! They’ve killed Pattty!] John shouted inside, raving.
[No!] Evan shouted back. [No! I don’t believe that. It had to be a bluff, a deception. John, please!]
A soft splash cut off any further discussion. A glowing apparition came up from the filthy water around the dock, garlanded with a bald tire, two green Hefty bags, and a used Pamper. Except for the garbage snagged around the body, it was almost pretty. The thing was a gelatinous hollow sphere eight feet in diameter, nearly transparent except for translucent bands of muscle. Ribbons of light rippled along jellyfish flesh, sparking soft green, yellow, and blue. Near the top of it were two very human eyes and a mouth. It bobbed in the slight swell.
Charon.
“Fee?” it croaked.
[Evan?] John’s rage had not abated. It had merely gone cold and dangerous.
[Must find out ... ] David seemed stunned, bewildered. Frightened.
[All right, John,] Evan told him. [We won’t know anything unless we go.]
Oddity picked up two shopping bags next to the lantern. Approaching Charon, they showed the joker that they were full of groceries and canned goods. “Fine,” Charon said. “Put them inside.”
Oddity shoved the bags into the slimy flesh between the muscle. The flesh was cold and wet; it yielded under their pressure, stretching until suddenly the skin parted and they could place the bags on the gellid “floor” of Charon. Underneath the flattened bottom of the joker, they could see hundreds of wriggling cilia.
“You want to go to the Rox? You’re certain?” Charon asked.
“Yes.”
“Then get in. “ Charon paused. It snorted air from a blowhole atop the sphere and it bobbed lower in the water. “You’ve got David with you.”
“How did you know that?” Oddity grunted.
“I can feel the child’s black, wretched soul. Get in.” Charon would say nothing else.
Oddity stepped forward, pushing their way into Charon’s body and hating the feel of the clinging, damp flesh. They sat down inside the joker as it began to sink into the waters of the East River. On the muddy, garbage-strewn bottom, in the dim light of the creature, they could see the cilia stirring dark clouds as Charon began the long crawl.
Hidden and silent, they moved south and west into the bay toward Ellis Island and the Rox.
Movement was exhilaration. The running ... Ah, the running ...
The wind, the pounding in the lungs and chest, the racing heartbeat the joy was almost enough to make her forget a groggy Blackhead shouting alarm behind her and to erase the sight of the hovels of the Rox.
Almost.
In the days before Oddity, Patty had devoured Victorian novels with their London slums, the poor waifs, and the quirky, grimy sense of realism. The Rox had the same Dickensian sense of gloom, the same chiaroscuro shades, but here the reality was harsher-edged. Makeshift dwellings clung like fungus to and between the decaying buildings of Ellis island; the lanes between them were muddy, rutted, and filthy under Patty’s feet.
Dickens in hell.
In the early morning the lanes were mostly empty. The few inhabitants she glimpsed told her that the Rox was Jokertown distilled, Jokertown boiled down to the raw, bitter dregs. The jokers Patty saw here were the most deformed, the ones just hanging on the edge of what might be called human.
“Where you gonna go, Pat? There ain’t no place to hide.” Blackhead and Kelly shouted behind her, their voices echoing between the shacks. They hadn’t stayed down very long at all. [Your own fault. They’re just kids; you didn’t want to hurt them too badly .... ] Patty could hear the jumpers’ pursuit. She turned left blindly, seeing the lights of Manhattan and the gleam of water through two drunken-angled buildings. A few lights were coming on around Patty as Blackhead and Kelly continued to fling taunts and warnings at her.
Turning the corner, she blundered into someone whose skin felt like soaked velvet. She caught a glimpse of yellow, faceted eyes. “Sorry” she said, and thrust herself away, her hands dripping with whatever oozed from that skin. Two heads leaned curiously from a nearby window, joined at the throat into one bull neck. Something without legs slithered across the lane in front of her, leaving behind a scent of lavender that suddenly turned sour and bitter. A voice roared from the darkness between two buildings, but the words were incomprehensible, hopelessly slurred.
A hand caught at her from behind and Patty screamed. The arm to which the hand was attached stretched like taffy, the hand-clawed like a dog’s, but undeniably human still clutching her biceps. The arm stretched taut and as thin as a pencil, turning her; then the hand let go and she spun and almost fell from the shock of release.
Patty didn’t look back to see what or who had tried to stop her. She kept running.
She’d been to Ellis, years ago. She remembered a U-shaped, tiny island, with docks along the central waterway. The administration building dominated one side of the island; the buildings used for holding detained aliens filled the other. Patty could see the administration building on the far side. She could smell the bay. David’s body was beginning to pant from the exertion now, but she seemed to have outdistanced the others.
She broke into the open, looking for a rowboat, a dinghy, anything. If she had to, she’d try swimming-she could swim, and this body was stronger than her own had been. Manhattan and New Jersey loomed achingly close.
“Bloat says to ask what good it will do you to be captured by the police patrols, Patty”
Patty stopped. A figure had stepped out between her and the bay. She squinted at it. It looked like a walking, man-sized roach. There were two others with him; jokers, armed with what looked like a shotgun and a small-caliber hunting rifle. The roach-man held up a cheap plastic walkie-talkie. “Bloat sent me to get you.”
From the shadows of the buildings, Blackhead and Kelly came panting out. “Hey—” Blackhead shouted. Patty started to run. There was room. Maybe the insectlike joker would be unable to move quickly. Maybe the jokers with the guns might miss. Maybe she could dive into the water and be gone.
Maybe.
The roach’s radio crackled. “Bloat says that the water’s still very cold this time of year. You’ll cramp up and drown before you get halfway there. He says he has a solution for you.”
Blackhead and Kelly were very close. She had to move now.
“Bloat doesn’t hurt jokers, Patty. He says to remember that you asked Evan not to waste his life.” The roach’s voice was almost a sigh, laced with a strange sadness.
The words were a slash, a mortal wound. Patty’s intake of breath was half sob at the memory. And then it was too late. Blackhead grabbed her arm roughly; Kelly, dressed only in her jeans, blocked Patty’s path, her eyes accusing, hurt, and cold.
“This is a jumper problem, Kafka,” Blackhead said gruffly to the roach-man. The two jokers with Kafka stepped forward threateningly, but Kafka waved them back.
“Not anymore,” Kafka answered, softly and almost shyly. “Bloat’s seeing her. You want to continue to live on the Rox? Then think about what you want to do here. You’re renters; you’re here only because you pay Bloat for the privilege.”
“We don’t take orders from Bloat,” the jumper blustered.
Kafka just waited. Blackhead’s hand dropped to his side.
What looked like a smile went across the inhuman face under the carapace. “Good. We really don’t need this unpleasantness. Please ... follow me,” Kafka said. The joker guards took up escort positions around Patty and the others. Kafka nodded. Scuttling ahead of them with a rustling sound, he led them to the administration building. And Bloat.
THE ROX CAN’T SINK; BLOAT FLOATS. THE GREAT WALL OF BLOAT. Patty’d seen those graffiti, too.
Patty’s first thought was that Bloat resembled nothing more than a mountain of filthy, uncooked bread dough into which some irreverent child had stuck toothpicks. Bloat filled the vast foyer of the administration building. Juryrigged steel supports jutted through the sagging floor alongside him; concrete pipes stabbed into that monstrous pile of flesh like gigantic IVs. The size of him was almost too much to comprehend; his shapeless flanks receded into darkness and back corridors. His head was a wart nearly lost on the massive body. The shoulder and arms were almost vestigial, stick thin and too short, overwhelmed in the rolling hills of flesh. Bloat could not move, could not be moved.
And the stench. It was as if Patty had fallen headfirst into a midden. She gagged.
Bloat’s eyes were black and amused.
“A mountain of uncooked dough ...” he said. His voice was a thin, prepubescent squeak and the words tumbled out in a rush. His statement startled her. “I suppose that’s kinder than most, Patty. But then you always considered yourself an understanding woman.”
“You mean this one’s a fuckin’ cunt?” Blackhead guffawed behind her. “Hey, Kelly, you almost lost your cherry to a chick.” Kafka motioned. One of the joker guards hit Blackhead swiftly and casually in the stomach with the butt of his shotgun. Blackhead groaned and threw up noisily on the tiIe floor.
“You should be quiet when the Governor’s talking,” Kafka said gently.
Blackhead spat. “Hey, fuck you, Roach.”
Kafka looked at Bloat, who gestured. The guard hit Blackhead again. The youth went to his knees in the puddle of his vomit.
Bloat watched the violence greedily. His ludicrously small hands clenched and twitched and he smiled.
“Yes, I know he’s just a child, but he’s a vicious, dangerous one,” Bloat said, and Patty’s intake of breath was audible, for Bloat had once again spoken her thoughts. “For that matter, he’s not much younger than me.”
Bloat didn’t stop talking, didn’t stop to take a breath. His monologue rolled on like a freight train without brakes. “There are those who need reminding who controls things here. The Rox is still too anarchic. There’s too little direction, too little real leadership. We have potential here, nearly unlimited potential and real power. David’s group is just one example, even if they’re wild and untamed. Still, I’ve been here less than a year.”
The lecture spewed nonstop in Bloat’s high voice. He spoke quickly, loudly, giving Patty almost no chance to interrupt the torrent of words.
“What—”
“Do I want from you?” Bloat interrupted, finishing the thought for her. “That’s very simple. Oddity. I want the Oddity.”
“I don’t know where Oddity is.”
Bloat’s eyes closed. “I do. They’re very close. They’re coming here now” The eyes opened again and he smiled at Patty. “Such a childish image that puts in your head,” he said, the words rushing past pasty lips. “The Noble Rescue. The Happy Ending. But you haven’t thought past that, have you? You haven’t thought about what happens then. I have. A strength like the Oddity’s could be useful. Not essential, mind you, but I could utilize it. The Oddity has been a friend to Jokertown for years. I appreciate that; it makes us siblings.”
“I doubt it.”
He nodded, more to her thoughts than her words. “In the Rox, jokers try to help jokers. We do what’s best for those the wild card has nearly destroyed.”
“No matter who it hurts.”
Bloat grimaced. “If nats or aces get hurt, I don’t care. Fuck them. If that’s what it takes, I’ll even encourage it. I have my own dreams, dreams of the Rox expanding. We’ve only this little island, twenty-seven lousy acres built on abandoned ship ballast that’s filling up quickly. There’s a bigger island I’d like to claim.”
Bloat took a breath, and Patty plunged into the brief space. “New York? That’s impossible.”
“Not impossible. Not at all. And spilling nat blood now will save a lot of joker blood later.”
Patty saw the attendants listening attentively. Alongside her, Kafka was rapt.
Bloat continued. “The reprisals will be brutal, in any case. I have my dream every night, Patty. The dream tells me that the nats are destined to taste the fruits of their own hatred and bigotry. To fulfill that dream, I need more than the jokers and ragtag gangs. We already have a few renegade aces and jokers with useful powers in residence. We can use more. You have some sympathy with our cause, even if you don’t agree with my tactics.”
He wouldn’t let her speak. The diatribe poured out from him, gasping. “Oh, yes, Patty, I hear your thoughts. ‘The Oddity is different.’ You’re essentially lawful-you helped Hartmann, after all. You think that no one would want to endure the pain of being the Oddity”
Bloat grinned humorlessly. “They don’t have to. David, the one whose body you’re holding at the moment, our David and his jumpers can transfer people in and out, can’t he?”
“Then why haven’t you done it? Why haven’t you left that.” Patty gestured at the helpless, endless bulk behind him.
The head, so tiny against the body, wrinkled in a grimace. He didn’t have to speak for Patty to know that he’d tried it, that it hadn’t been successful. Bloat’s face suffused with remembered anger. When he spoke, his voice was sharp-edged. “I already know that one new person can be in Oddity and the body still functions. Perhaps two can be gone, or even all three. Perhaps not. Perhaps at least one of the original components must always be in Oddity’s mind. I don’t know. But I will find out. I’ll find out in any way I have to.”
[John, Evan, what do I do now?] The silence inside her head was mocking and Patty felt frightened and very alone. The isolation hurt more than anything she remembered from Oddity.
Bloat had paused. In the silence, a soft and prolonged squilching sound reverberated across the lobby, like someone rolling across a half-filled water bed. Gelid, dark masses erupted from pores all along Bloat’s body, which rippled around the large pipes impaling him. The black goo rolled, thickened, and then dropped from the slope of Bloat’s flanks, leaving behind umber smears. The clumps piled around Bloat, and Patty saw that the tiles around the huge joker were hopelessly stained.
The horrid stench hit her a second later: the odor of concentrated raw sewage. Patty nearly gagged; around her, Kafka and the others struggled to remain stoic. Joker attendants wearing masks came from an alcove and scurried about removing the filth, shoveling it up and placing it in carts. Others toweled Bloat’s side.
“They call it bloatblack,” he told Patty, answering the question in her mind. “A body this large requires a corresponding amount of intake. The wild card has made it easier-I can digest anything organic. Anything at all. Kafka has made it simple; these pipes connect directly to the Rox’s sewer system. But every body, no matter how efficient, has to excrete waste material.”
Patty could not keep her thoughts hidden.
“You’re disgusted,” he said in his choirboy’s tenor. “Don’t be. It’s what the wild card gave me. Is it my fault that this body needs so much, that I must take in everyone else’s shit and spew it out again?” The voice had gone strident. He looked at Patty. “Yes. I’m trapped, trapped the way you were trapped in the Oddity. And I don’t need your fucking sympathy, you hear! I’ll stuff it back down your fucking throat!”
Patty choked and forced the bile back down. She lifted her chin defiantly to the joker. “We won’t run Oddity for you. Not me, not John or Evan. Not for what you want it for.”
“We’ll see, won’t we? Maybe we don’t need any of you. Serve, or be served,” Bloat commented, and suddenly giggled.
“ I won’t do it,” Patty said flatly. “None of us would.” Again Bloat’s lids flickered down over the satin pupils. “David’s the key, not you. He’s only interested in his own ego, but I can convince him. From what I sense of John, he might enjoy life on top for once and kicking some nat ass. Evan ... Well, maybe your friends will be interested. After all, David and his people supply rapture.”
“I don’t know ....”
“Show her,” Bloat said, gesturing to one of the joker guards. He came forward; on the doglike face, Patty could see that the lips, gums, and nostrils were stained blue. The joker took out a small penknife. He snapped open the blade and Patty took an involuntary step backward. The joker ignored her, however. Holding out his left arm, he plunged the blade into his forearm to the hilt and as quickly wrenched it out again. Blood pulsed sluggishly from the deep wound.
The joker grinned. He leaned his head back and laughed.
Patty gasped.
“Rapture makes everything feel good,” Bloat was saying as she stared at the joker. “You could cut your own hand off and it would feel like the most wonderful orgasm. Every sensation is transmuted into bliss, at least for a while. With long-term use, unfortunately, it finally dulls the senses completely, until it is hard to feel anything at all, but that’s hardly a problem for a joker, is it? Imagine Oddity’s pain transformed into a nearly sexual pleasure, and then, slowly, slowly, deadened so you can’t feel it at all. Would that be something you might like, or if not you, John or Evan?”
Bloat laughed and smiled grimly at the expression on Patty’s face. “Yes, you’re thinking it, too. Evan wants out, and I can offer him freedom one way or the other. Are you so sure now, Patty? No, I thought not.”
[Evan ... ]
“You’re terrified, aren’t you, Patty? You hate the separation from your lovers. You listen and there’s no one there. But you enjoy being alone, don’t you? You wonder if you could stand being in Oddity once again. You wonder if you shouldn’t do all you can to stay in David’s body. Well, I tell you, you cant. I need David. But I’m not evil, Patty. I don’t intend you harm at all. In fact, I’ve a gift for you. Kafka?”
Kafka nodded. Rustling, he scurried into an adjoining room and came back pushing a wheelchair. Seated in the chair was a teenager, dark-haired and rather pretty: Her eyes were open, but when Patty looked at her, it was like looking into the face of a dead girl. There was nothing behind her eyes, nothing at all. The body breathed, but whoever had once inhabited that shell was gone. Blackhead sniffed behind Patty; Runt gave a cry of recognition.
“I’ve been saving this,” Bloat said. “The girl jumped a polar bear, which turned out to be an animated bar of soap. Unfortunate. But it has left us with an empty body.”
Patty glanced at the body, at Bloat. She tried again to blank her thoughts, to make her mind as empty as the girl in front of her so Bloat couldn’t steal her thoughts, but Bloat chuckled. [Evan, John ... I’m sorry, but ... ]
“It is tempting, isn’t it? Our jumpers could do it for you. Presto! There you are, a woman again. By yourself. And young, too. You wouldn’t be so old.”
“I’m not old. I’m only forty.”
Bloat chuckled. “So easily offended. Think about it, Patty. We can do it right now. I help you; you help me. Think about it.”
Outside the milky, translucent body of Charon, the green depths of the bay were revealed. [John, those are bones out there! Dead people ... ] Down below, David only laughed. John didn’t answer.
Oddity moaned. John had paid scant attention to Charon or the ride to Ellis, too intent on the interior struggle and the pain.
Evan could feel John tiring rapidly. Nothing of Oddity seemed to be Patty anymore. Her body was submerged and what remained seemed to hurt them more than ever before, as if they were both taking on the portion of the suffering that once was allotted to her. The boundaries between Dominant, Sub-Dominant, and Passive were growing weak and tenuous. Worse, like some residue of the transfer process, parts of David’s memory were drifting loose.
[The killing was a kick better than crack man all the nats running and screaming through Times Square .... ] [Evan, this is what he’d do to us. We can’t let him take Oddity. ]
Evan wasn’t listening to John but to David. [I can let you out Evan let you out and and free of Oddity I can do it .... ]
[What’s he saying to you, Evan? He’s trying to block me, but the shields are falling apart, too. I can almost hear him.]
Mockingly, more of David’s reverie intruded. [With the priest I took the gun he had in his desk and made one of the nuns get down on her knees and suck his cock until he shot his holy wad in her mouth then I made the other one take the barrel in her mouth like it was a dick “make it come, too” I said and when it did it blew the whole fucking back of her head away and then I jumped when the cops broke the door down .... ]
[Just more of the same garbage. John, you have to listen to me. What if Patty doesn’t want to come back in? What then, John? We can’t keep David down forever. When he’s Dominant, he’ll make us do something, something awful, and then he’ll jump. He’ll jump and leave us with someone else, someone who’ll hate Oddity, someone we don’t know or love or even like.]
With the thought, their attention was brought back to the outside world. Charon was moving through the sunken graveyard. Many of the bodies still had ribbons of clothing, shreds of flesh. Fish swarmed around the cages of ribs, nibbling and biting; eels swarmed in eye sockets and wriggled from open jaws like obscene tongues.
And something, someone was pushing at them, pressing Oddity’s back against the cold, clammy wall of Charon’s interior, the flesh beginning to stretch around their back as Charon continued its slow passage. An invisible hand was thrusting at their chest, refusing to let them go any farther even though Charon plodded on. Oddity struggled weakly, but it would not let them loose. [Bloat’s Wall Bloat’s Wall ... ] David yammered from Passive. [It’s you Evan, it’s you. ]
With the physical pressure, Evan could also feel a mental lassitude. He no longer wanted to go to the Rox. This quest was useless. Even if Patty were alive, it was futile. They could do no good there. John tried to force Oddity through the unseen barrier as they felt the cold waters through Charon’s back, but Evan only watched from Sub-Dominant.
“Stop!” Oddity’s broken voice shouted. Charon paid no attention.
[Dammit, Evan. Help me!] Charon’s flesh was beginning to thin dangerously. The skeletons outside grinned mindlessly at them, waiting.
[This might be better, John. It would be over. Finished.] [No no no please Evan I’ll get you out I will .... ] [You still want us dead. That’s it, isn’t it, Evan? That’s what you’re really saying.] Oddity struggled, took a step forward, but that barely made a difference. The back of their cloak was chill and damp. Charon’s flesh bulged dangerously around them.
[You’re just barely holding us together, John. I can’t keep David back when you fall. He’s strong and this time he’ll be expecting the pain. He’ll know that when it’s too much for him, he can just jump. ]
[If we’re on the Rox, he’ll jump back to his own body, Evan. Which puts Patty back with us.]
[I’ll have Oddity initiated make you all jumpers so you can get out .... ]
[Is that fair, John? Are you so possessive of her that you’d punish her like that when she’s free? What’s betterto let this bastard loose again or to make the sacrifice? We can keep Patty free and take the SOB out with us. What’s better, John?]
[I’m Dominant] And with that there was a flailing resurgence of will. Oddity managed two lurching steps back toward the center of Charon. The chill receded. [I’ll stay Dominant until we find Patty.]
[And what then, John? What then? It’s been sixteen years, John. Long enough.]
[John I’ll help you too just don’t let him kill us .... ] David’s panic loosed adrenaline. Oddity screamed as John forced them forward once more, trying to keep pace with Charon’s slow movement. Fish swirled away from their grisly feast, disturbed by the movement inside Charon’s body.
Suddenly they were through. Oddity stumbled and fell as the resistance vanished. Outside, the skeletons were behind them; ahead there were weedy mud flats and the beginnings of a rise. Charon moved between piles of discarded ship ballast as Oddity’s lungs heaved and the agony of change lanced through them all. David tried to rise from Passive once more; John only barely managed to keep him down.
He said nothing to Evan. Evan said nothing to him. Charon hissed. Bubbles rose around them and the body began to rise alongside a rust-stained concrete pier. John forced Oddity to its feet and pushed his way through the body angrily, hating the feel of the wet, cold flesh. There were corroded steel rungs set in the concrete seawall. Oddity swung out of Charon and climbed to the top.
They were waiting for him, a ring of jokers armed with a ragged assortment of weapons. Oddity howled in frustration.
“What an interesting mind,” Bloat commented, but his tiny face was pained and drawn. “The pain makes it unpleasant even for me. Still, the complexity of a shared consciousness is fascinating.”
“Where’s Patty?” Oddity grated out. Their voice was barely more than a whisper. Most of John’s concentration was utilized in staying Dominant against David’s mental pushing. They looked from the guards-standing well back from Oddity-to Bloat, gauging distances as the cloak humped and folded over their madly changing body. Bloat chuckled.
“Oh, by the time you got halfway to me, they’d have shot you dead, but then you’ve already figured that out, haven’t you, John? It is John, isn’t it?” Bloat shook his head. “You should lay down the burden for now, John. It’s David I want to speak with.”
“No!” Oddity tried to shout; it came out more grunt. “Not until we see Patty.”
“ I don’t think that’s a good idea.” [It’s a stalemate, John. You see?]
[You give up too easily.] John’s ego weakened with each moment, his hold on Dominant crumbling. Desperation colored his thoughts. Oddity gave a tremulous sigh.
Underneath both of them but rising, rising, David whispered only to Evan. [Look at all the bodies here you can have any one of them no need to play goddamn hero just let me past let me take Oddity and I’ll set you free I promise don’t let us die .... ]
“We’ll see her,” Oddity said, “or we’ll see how close we get to you. You kill us or you die. It really doesn’t matter. One way we get what I want, the other way what Evan wants. Either way, you lose.”
Bloat sighed. “Such a waste.” He sighed, then gestured with one tiny hand. “ I didn’t care to show my hole card so quickly, but I suppose it can’t be helped. Bring her in,” he said, then nodded to Oddity. “You need to understand the situation. Can David hear me?”
The fencing mask nodded under the hood.
“Good. It’s important he does. David, even if you can, don’t jump back yet. Ah, here she is ...” Somehow, thinking of Patty alone in one body had given them a vision of her as she once had been: dark brown hair swirling around her shoulders and wearing the denim skirt she liked so well with a blouse of unbleached cotton. But the person who stepped from the side doorway was in soiled Levi’s and a leather jacket. The body was distinctly male, a youthful, handsome face topped with blond and unruly hair.
“John? Evan?” he [she?] said, and the voice was deep. “ I love you both. I miss you.”
Patty said the words, and felt the truth of them with the tears they set off in her eyes. Behind her, rubber wheels squeaked against tile. She glanced back at the joker pushing the wheelchair with a young jumper’s body. The bait. The temptation.
[Yours. It can be yours.] The knowledge tore at her, and she looked back at Oddity, remembering the pain and the hurt and the feeling of being imprisoned.
“Patty?” Bloat said, and her gaze went grudgingly to the joker. “I need to know. Now. Will you cooperate with me? Do it for yourself. Do it for all jokers. Do it for the rapture. Help me.”
Patty looked again at the young woman, at the empty, wonderful body. She also saw Oddity watching and she knew that John and Evan could guess her thoughts as well. Faintly, she saw the fencing mask that was Oddity’s face nod, as if in forgiveness. [Go on,] she could almost hear John and Evan saying. [We understand.]
Patty reached out and stroked the girl’s face with a yearning wistfulness. The skin felt soft and smooth. She knew she would remember that softness forever.
She turned, trying to remember it all. Trying to pack into these few seconds all the sensations of being alone, of being one.
She shook her head.
“No,” she told Bloat, not caring that David’s body was weeping openly now. “I hate Oddity, but I love Evan and John. You only want Oddity as a weapon, and I won’t be a part of that. I’d rather be with my lovers again, as we were.”
“I’d rather be with my lovers again, as we were.” Patty’s words startled all of them. Evan could feel the surprise loosen what little hold he had.
Oddity screamed.
All at once, everything inside the Oddity had become fluid. The mind barriers crumpled and went to dust. [John?]
[I’ve lost Oddity, Evan. You have to-]
The person in David’s body was running to them, and his [her?] arms were around them, hugging them and not caring that the body was changing underneath the embrace. Oddity stood there, the arms half up as if unsure whether or not to return the embrace ....
[Evan, hold David back .... ] [I’m trying, John.]
For a moment, Evan was in control of Oddity as Patty [David?] stared up into the bowl of the fencing mask. “My God, Patty ...” he moaned. “We love you so much ....”
“Evan? It’s so lonely out here. I miss you, Evan, John. Please ... I want back in.” She was crying, clutching tighter to Oddity as the powerful, piebald arms went around her at last.
“But you’re free,” Oddity said, and the voice was slurred, confused. “I don’t understand—”
[Hold him, Evan, hold him .... ]
[Now, Evan. Let me have Oddity] David insisted. David’s will shoved at Evan’s weak resistance. Laughing, David shoved past Evan and into the Dominant position. Immediately the Oddity groaned as the full impact of the pain hammered at the youth. Yet this time, prepared for the torture, David clung to Dominant.
Evan did nothing. Nothing.
He let David have Oddity without a struggle.
[You promised me,] he said to David. [Remember what you promised me.]
[Goddamn son of a bitch, Evan ... ] “Fucking Christ, Bloat, this hurts!”
“Davvd!” Bloat sounded pleased. “Good. Now that you control Oddity, I can say more.” He looked down at Patty, who struggled in Oddity’s grasp. “I’d continue to hold on to your body. I’d hate to see Patty damage it, which is what she’s considering at the moment.”
Patty cursed, glaring at Bloat.
Oddity’s grip on Patty tightened. “Say it quick, Bloat. I know it ain’t your style, but I ain’t staying here long.” Bloat smiled. “In a nutshell, then. It’s time for us to organize. It’s time for the jumpers to help the Rox.” Oddity chuckled, then groaned as another shift in the mutable body racked them. “That’s what you were telling Patty. So what? You upping the rent?”
Bloat shrugged, the tiny shoulders lifting helplessly in the immense body. “I imagine there are any number of jokers who would like to be aces, especially here in the Rox. A few judicious triple jumps ... Imagine what a dozen or so jokers-turned-aces might be able to accomplish.”
“Especially with Bloat telling us what to do.”
“Especially.” Bloat smiled.
[Evan, you can’t allow this .... ]
Evan ignored John’s pleading. [David, you promised me. Right?]
[Hey, man. I keep promises. Don’t worry.] [Then go ahead and jump. I’ll take Dominant.] Patty struggled in their arms, biting and clawing uselessly against Oddity’s compelling strength. “We’ll talk, Bloat,” Oddity said. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s time to organize a little. But in a second, when I’m back in my own skin.”
“What about Oddity?” Kafka interjected, looking worried.
“I agree with my counselor, David,” Bloat said. “I thought Patty would help us control it. Perhaps Oddity’s simply too dangerous.”
[Evan?]
[Just give me a body, David. Like you promised.] “It’ll be cool,” David told them. “Don’t worry about Oddity.”
Inside Oddity, there was a moment of chilling vacancy [ ... Evan! ... ] and then Patty was back, stunned and falling almost immediately to Passive as John made a last desperate attempt to take Dominant.
Evan shoved him back contemptuously. David’s eyes had closed. Now they opened again and looked up at Oddity and the hidden face behind the mesh. “Hey, man. You can let me go now.”
[John? Patty? I love you both. I’m sorry.] [Evan-]
[We understand we do .... ]
Oddity’s hands came up. One was Patty’s now, one John’s. In a swift movement they grasped either side of David’s head.
With all of Oddity’s power they twisted savagely. The snap of the neck breaking was very loud. Oddity let the body crumple to the floor. They spread their hands wide, closing their eyes for the last time and waiting for Bloat to give the order, waiting for the bullets to shred their shared body.
[Good-bye Patty, John. I do love you.] It never happened.
Bloat was staring at David’s body. Kafka watched Bloat. The joker guards’ weapons were pointing at them, ready.
Bloat only gave a brief sigh.
“David was my key. He was willing to listen to me, to share in my dream. If you were Golden Boy or Peregrine or just another ace, I wouldn’t hesitate,” he told them, still looking at David’s body. “But not the Oddity. Not people who know the pain of being a joker.”
The tiny head on the mounded body closed its eyes. The body rippled and more bloatblack oozed from the body. The smell of corruption was strong in the room.
“Get out,” Bloat told them savagely. “Get out before I change my mind.”
Dutton finally opened the back fire door and stood blinking into the Jokertown dawn. The noseless, living skull face yawned. He tugged the cord of his silk bathrobe tightly around his waist.
“ Oddity.” He sounded relieved. “I was worried. I’d called some people I knew—”
“We came to work.”
“Evan?” Dutton glanced at the hands-for the most part, they were chocolate brown and long-fingered. Dutton stepped away from the door and let the cloaked figure enter, then shut and locked the door behind them. The museum seemed gloomy after the sunshine. “It’s six in the morning. What happened? Where’s Patty?”
“Here. Passive for the moment. John’s with us, too. It’s over, Charles. We—I-was wrong. We wanted to tell you.”
“Wrong?”
“About endings. Maybe things do occasionally work out. The leader of the jumper gang’s dead, Charles.” Behind the mask, Oddity laughed, full and loud. The gaiety sounded very strange to Dutton. “It doesn’t solve everything,” Oddity continued. “Probably not much at all.”
“But it’s one little change for the good. A few less atrocities the nats will be able to blame on us, one less excuse they can use to oppress people affected by the wild card.”
“And you? What about Oddity?”
“It still hurts. But one of us got out, at least for a bit. We can think of that and hope that maybe-someday-the rest will change.”
Oddity sighed.
Under the heavy cloak, shapes came and went.
“You got any cake, Charles?” they said. “It’s our birthday.”
The death of Andrea Whitman was entirely Puppetman ‘s doing. Without his powers, the sullen lust that a retarded boy of fourteen felt for a younger neighbor girl would never have been fired into a molten white fury. By himself, Roger Pellman would never have lured Andrea into the woods behind Sacred Heart School in the suburbs of Cincinnati, and there ripped the clothing from the terrified girl. He would never have thrust that strange hardness into Andrea until he felt a sagging, powerful release. He would never have looked down at the child and the trickle of dark blood between her thighs and felt a compelling disgust that made him grasp the large flat rock alongside them. He would never have used that stone to bludgeon Andrea’s blond head into an unrecognizable pulp of torn flesh and splintered bone. He would never have gone home with her gore splattered over his naked body.
Roger Pellman would have done none of that if Puppetman had not been hiding in the recesses of poor Roger’s damaged mind, feeding on the emotions he found there, manipulating the boy and amplifying the adolescent fever that wracked the body. Roger’s mind was weak and malleable and open; Puppetman’s rape of it was no less brutal than what Roger did to Andrea.
Puppetman was eleven. He hated Andrea, hated her with the horrible anger of a spoiled child, hated her for having betrayed and humiliated him. Puppetman was the revenge fantasy of a boy infected with the wild card virus, a boy who’d made the mistake of confessing to Andrea his affection for her. Perhaps, he’d told the older girl, they might one day marry. Andrea’s eyes had gone wide at that and she’d run away from him giggling. He’d begun to hear the mocking whispers the very next day at school, and he knew even as the flush burned in his cheeks that she’d told all her friends. Told everyone.
When Roger Pellman tore away Andrea’s virginity, Puppetman had felt the faint stirring of that heat himself. He’d shuddered with Roger’s orgasm; when the boy slammed the rock into the girl’s weeping face, when he’d heard the dull crack of bone, Puppetman had gasped. He staggered with the pleasure that coursed through him.
Safe in his own room, a quarter-mile away.
His overwhelming response to that first murder frightened him at the same time that it drew him. For months afterward, he was slow to utilize that power, afraid to be so rapturously out of control again. But like all forbidden things, the urge coerced him. In the next five years, for various reasons, Puppetman would emerge and kill seven times more.
He thought of that power as an entity apart from himself. Hidden, he was Puppetman-a lacing of strings dangling from his invisible fingers, his collection of grotesque dolls capering at the ends.
TEDDY, JIMMY STILL SCRAMBLING HARTMANN, JACKSON, UDALL WAIT FOR COMPROMISE
New York Daily News, July 14, 1976
HARTMANN PROMISES FLOOR FIGHT JOKERS’ RIGHTS ISSUE ON PLATFORM
The New York Times, July 14, 1976
Senator Gregg Hartmann stepped from the elevator cage into the foyer of the Aces High. His entourage filed into the restaurant behind him: two secret service men; his aides John Werthen and Amy Sorenson; and four reporters whose names he’d managed to forget on the way up. It had been a crowded elevator ride. The two men in the dark glasses had grumbled when Gregg had insisted that they could all make the trip together.
Hiram Worchester was there to meet the group. Hiram was an impressive sight himself, a man of remarkable girth who moved with a surprising lightness and agility. He strode easily across the carpeted reception area, his hand extended and a smile lurking in his full beard. Light from the falling sun poured through the large windows of the restaurant and gleamed from his bald head. “Senator,” he said jovially. “Good to see you again.”
“And you, Hiram.” Then Gregg smiled ruefully, nodding at the crowd behind him. “You know John and Amy, I think. The rest of this zoo will have to introduce themselves. They seem to be permanent retainers anymore.” The reporters chuckled; the bodyguards allowed themselves thin, fleeting smiles.
Hiram grinned. “I’m afraid that’s the price you pay for being a candidate, Senator. But you’re looking well, as usual. The cut of that jacket is perfect.” The huge man took a step back from Gregg and looked him up and down appraisingly. Then he leaned closer and lowered his voice conspiratorially. “You should give Tachyon a few hints concerning his attire. Really, what the good doctor wore here this evening ...” Chestnut eyes rolled heavenward in mock horror, and then Hiram laughed. “But you don’t need to hear me prattling on; your table’s ready.”
“I understand that my guests have already arrived.” That sent the corners of Hiram’s mouth down in a frown. “Yes. The woman is fine, even though she drinks too much for my taste, but if the dwarf were not here under your aegis, I’d have him thrown out. It isn’t so much that he’s created a scene, but he’s dreadfully rude to the help.”
“I’ll make sure that he behaves, Hiram.” Gregg shook his head, running fingers through ash-blond hair. Gregg Hartmann was a man of plain and undistinguished appearance. He was neither one of the well-groomed and handsome politicians that seemed to be the new breed of the 70s, nor was he of the other type, the pudgy and self-satisfied Old Boys. Hiram knew Gregg as a friendly, natural person, one who genuinely cared for his constituents and their problems. As chairman of SCARE, Gregg had demonstrated a compassion for all those affected by the wild card virus. Under the senator’s leadership, various restrictive laws concerning those infected by the virus had been relaxed, stricken from the books, or judiciously ignored. The Exotic Powers Control Act and the Special Conscription were still legally in effect, but Senator Hartmann forbade any of his agents to enforce them. Hiram often marveled at Gregg’s deft handling of sensitive relations between the public and the jokers. “Friend of Jokertown” was what Tune had dubbed him in one article (accompanied by a photograph of Gregg shaking the hand of Randall, the doorman at the Funhouse—Randall’s hand was an insect’s claw, and at the center of the palm was a grouping of wet, ugly eyes). For Hiram, the senator was that rare Good Man, an anomaly among the politicians.
Gregg sighed, and Hiram saw a deep weariness behind the senator’s good-natured facade. “How’s the convention going, Senator?” he asked. “What chance does the jokers’ Rights plank have?”
“I’m fighting for it as hard as I can,” Gregg answered, and he glanced back at the reporters; they watched the exchange with unfeigned interest. “We’ll find out in a few days when we have the floor vote.”
Hiram saw the resignation in Hartmann’s eyes; that gave him all the information he needed-it would fail, like all the rest. “Senator,” he said, “when this convention’s over, I expect you to stop by here again. I’ll prepare something special just for you; to let you know that your work’s appreciated.” Gregg clapped Hiram lightly on the back. “On one condition,” he replied. “You have to make sure that I can get a corner booth. By myself. Alone.” The senator chuckled. Hiram grinned in return.
“It’s yours. Now, tonight, I’d recommend the beef in red wine its very delicate. The asparagus is extremely fresh and I made the sauce myself. As for dessert, you must taste the white chocolate mousse.”
Elevator doors opened behind them. The secret service men glanced warily back as two women stepped out. Gregg nodded to them and shook Hiram’s hand again. “You need to take care of your other guests, my friend. Give me a call when this madness is over.”
“You’ll be needing a White House chef, too.”
Gregg laughed heartily at that. “You’ll need to speak to Carter or Kennedy about that, Hiram. I’m just one of the dark horses in this one.”
“Then they’re passing by the best man,” Hiram retorted. He strode off.
The Aces High occupied the observation tower of the Empire State Building. From the expansive windows, the diners could gaze out to a view of Manhattan Island. The sun touched the horizon beyond the city harbor; the golden dome of the Empire State Building tossed reflections into the dining room. In the gold-green sunset, Dr. Tachyon was not difficult to spot, seated at his customary table with a woman Gregg did not recognize. Hiram had been right, Gregg saw immediately-Tachyon wore a dinner jacket of blazing scarlet trimmed with a collar of emerald-green satin. Purple sequins traced bold patterns on the sleeves and shoulders; mercifully, his pants were hidden, though a band of iridescent orange could be glimpsed under the jacket. Gregg waved, Tachyon nodded. “John, please take our guests over to the table and make introductions for me. I’ll be over in a second. Amy, would you come with me?” Gregg threaded his way through the tables.
Tachyon’s shoulder-length hair was the same improbable red as his jacket. He ran a dainty hand through the tangled locks as he rose to greet Gregg. “Senator Hartmann,” he said. “May I present Angela Fascetti? Angela, this is Senator Gregg Hartmann and his aide Amy Sorenson; the senator’s the man responsible for much of the funding of my clinic.”
After a few pleasantries, Amy excused herself. Gregg was pleased when Tachyon’s companion took the hint without any prompting from Amy and left the table with her. Gregg waited until the two women were a few tables away and then turned to Tachyon. “I thought you’d like to know that we’ve confirmed the plant in your clinic, Doctor. Your suspicions were right.”
Tachyon frowned, deep lines creasing his forehead. “KGB?”
“Probably,” Gregg answered. “But as long as we know who he is, he’s relatively harmless.”
“I still want him out of there, Senator,” Tachyon insisted politely. He steepled his hands before his face, and when he glanced at Gregg, his lilac eyes were full of an old hurt. “I’ve had enough difficulty with your government and their previous witch-hunts. I want nothing to do with another. I mean no offense by that, Senator; you’ve been a good man with whom to work and very helpful to me, but I’d rather keep the clinic entirely away from politics. My desire is to help the jokers, nothing more.”
Gregg could only nod at that. He resisted an impulse to remind the doctor that the politics he claimed he wished to avoid also paid some of the clinic’s bills. His voice was laden with sympathy. “That’s my interest as well, Doctor. But if we simply fire the man, the KGB will have a new plant in place within a few months. There’s a new ace working with us; I’ll talk with him.”
“Do whatever you wish, Senator. I’m not interested in your methods so long as the clinic remains unaffected.”
“I’ll see that it is.”
Across the room, Gregg saw Amy and Angela making their way toward them.
“You’re here to meet with Tom Miller?” Tachyon inred, one one eyebrow arching. He nodded his head slightly in the direction of Gregg’s table, where John was still making introductions.
“The dwarf? Yes. He’s—”
“I know him, Senator. I suspect he’s responsible for quite a lot of death and violence in Jokertown in recent months. He’s a bitter and dangerous man, Senator.”
“That’s exactly why I want to forestall him.”
“I wish you luck,” Tachyon commented dryly.
JJS PROMISES VIOLENCE IF PLANK DEFEATED
The New York Times, July 14, 1976
Sondra Falin felt mixed emotions as Gregg Hartmann approached the table. She’d known that she was going to face this difficulty tonight and perhaps had drunk more than she should have. The liquor burned in her stomach. Tom Miller “Gimli,” as he preferred to be called in the JJS-fidgeted next to her, and she laid an unsteady hand on the thick muscles of his forearm.
“Keep your fucking paws off me,” the dwarf growled. “You ain’t my goddamn grandmother, Sondra.”
The remark stung her more than it otherwise might have; she could only look down at her hand; at the dry, liverspotted skin hanging loose over thin bones; at the swollen and arthritic knuckles. He’ll look at me and smile like a stranger and I can’t tell him. Tears stung her eyes; she wiped at them savagely with the back of her hand, then drained the glass that sat before her. Glenlivet: it seared her throat all the way down.
The senator beamed at them. His grin was more than just the professional tool of a politician-Hartmann’s face was natural and open, inviting confidence. “Excuse my rudeness in not coming right over,” he said. “I’d like to say that I’m very glad that the two of you agreed to meet with me tonight. You’re Tom Miller?” Gregg said, turning to the bearded visage of the dwarf, his hand extended.
“No, I’m Warren Beatty and this here’s Cinderella,” Miller replied sourly. His voice had the twang of the Midwest. “Show him your slipper, Sondra.” The dwarf cocked his head belligerently at Hartmann, pointedly ignoring the hand.
Most people would have ignored the insult, Sondra knew. They would have drawn back their hand and pretended that it had never been offered. “I met Mr. Beatty last night at the Rolling Stone party,” the senator said. He smiled, his hand the focus of attention around the table. “I even managed to shake his hand.”
Hartmann waited. In the silence, Miller grumbled. At last the dwarf took Hartmann’s fingers in his own ham-fisted grip. With the touch, Sondra seemed to see Hartmann’s smile go cold for a moment, as if the contact had pained him slightly. He quickly let go of Miller’s hand. Then his composure returned. “Good to meet you,” Hartmann said. There was no trace of sarcasm in his voice, only a genuine warmth, a relief.
Sondra understood how she had come to love this man. It’s not you who loves him; it’s only Succubus. She’s the one Gregg knows. To him, you’re just an old, shriveled woman whose politics are in question. He’ll never know that Succubus is the same person, not if you want to keep him. All he’ll ever see is the fantasy Succubus makes for him. That’s what Miller said we have to do, and you’ll obey him, won’t you?
No matter how much it hurts you.
Now it was her turn to shake Gregg’s hand. She felt her fingers trembling as they touched; Gregg noticed it as well, for a faint sympathy seemed to tug at the corners of his mouth. Still, there was only curiosity and interest in his gray-blue eyes; no recognition beyond that. Sondra’s mood darkened again. He’s wondering what horrible things afflict this old woman. He wonders what ugliness is sitting inside me, what horrors I might reveal if he knew me.
She reached for the glass of scotch.
Her mood continued to deepen throughout the meal. The pattern of conversation seemed set. Hartmann would introduce a topic, and Miller would respond with unjustified sarcasm and scorn, which in turn the senator smoothed over. Sondra listened to the interplay without joining in. The others around the table evidently felt the same tension, for the stage remained open for the two chief players, with the others inserting their lines as if on cue. The dinner, despite the hovering solicitude of Hiram, tasted like ashes in her mouth.
Sondra drank more, watching Gregg. When the mousse was set aside and the conversation turned serious, Sondra was quite well drunk. She had to shake her head to clear the fog.
.”.. need you to promise that there will be no public displays,” Hartmann was saying.
“Shit,” Miller replied. For a moment, Sondra thought that he might actually spit. The sallow, pitted cheeks under Gimli’s ruddy beard swelled and his maniacal eyes narrowed.
Then he banged a fist on the table, rattling dishes. The bodyguards tensed in their seats, the others around the table jumped at the sound. “That’s the same crap all you politicians hand out,” the dwarf growled. “The JJS has heard it for years now. Be good and roll over like a good dog and we’ll throw you a few table scraps. It’s time we were let in on the feast, Hartmann. The jokers are tired of leftovers.”
Hartmann’s voice, in contrast to Miller’s, was soft and reasonable. “That’s something I agree with, Mr. Miller, Ms. Falin.” Gregg nodded to Sondra, and she could only frown in return, feeling the drag of the wrinkles around her mouth. “That’s exactly why I’ve proposed that the Democratic party add the jokers’ Rights plank to our presidential platform. That’s why I’ve been out trying to collar every last vote I can get for it.” Gregg spread his hands wide. In another person his speech might have had a hollow sound, a falseness. But Gregg’s words were full of the long, tired hours he’d spent at the convention, and that lent them truth. “That’s why I’m asking you to try to keep your organization calm. Demonstrations, especially anything of a violent nature, are going to prejudice the middle-of-the-road delegates against you. I’m asking you to give me a chance, to give yourselves a chance. Abandon your plan to march to Jetboys Tomb. You don’t have a permit; the police are already on edge from the crowds in the city, and they’ll move in on you if you try. “
“Then, stop them,” Sondra said. The scotch slurred her words, and she shook her head. “No one questions the fact that you care. So stop ’em.”
Hartmann grimaced. “I can’t. I’ve already advised the mayor against such actions, but he’s adamant. March, and you invite confrontation. I can’t condone your breaking the law”
“Roll over, doggie,” Miller drawled, and then he howled loudly, throwing his head back. Around the dining room, patrons began to glance toward them. Tachyon peered at them with frank anger and Hiram’s worried face emerged from the kitchen doors. One of the secret service men began to rise but Gregg waved him down. “Mr. Miller, please. I’m trying to talk realities with you. There’s only so much money and help available, and if you persist in antagonizing those who control them, you’ll only hurt yourselves. And I’m telling you that fucking ‘reality’ is in the streets of Jokertown. C’mon down and rub your nose in the shit, Senator. Take a look at the poor creatures wandering the streets, the ones the virus wasn’t kind enough to kill, the ones that drag themselves down the sidewalk on stumps, the blind ones, or the ones with two heads or four arms. The ones who drool as they talk, the ones who hide in darkness because the sun burns them, the ones for whom the slightest touch is agony.” Miller’s voice rose, the tone vibrant and deep. Around the table, jaws had dropped; the reporters scribbled notes. Sondra could feel it as well, the throbbing power in that voice, compelling. She’d seen Miller stand before a jeering crowd in Jokertown and in fifteen minutes have them listening quietly, nodding to his words. Even Gregg was leaning forward, caught.
Listen to him, but be careful. His voice is that of the snake, mesmerizing, and when he’s snared you, he’ll pounce. “That’s your reality,’” Miller purred. “Your goddamn convention’s just an act. And I tell you now, Senator”—his voice was suddenly a shout “the JJS will take our protests into the streets.”
“Mr. Miller—” Gregg began.
“Gimli!” Miller shouted, and his voice went strident all wer gone, as if Miller had used up some inner store. “My fucking name’s Gimli!” He was on his feet, standing on his E In another, the posture would have seemed ludicrous, but none of them could laugh at him. “I’m a fucking dwarf, not one of your ‘misters’!”
Sondra tugged at Miller’s arm; he shrugged her away. “Let me alone. I want them to see how much I hate them.”
“Hate’s useless,” Gregg insisted. “None of us here hate you. If you knew the hours I’ve put in for the jokers, all the drudge work that Amy and John have gone through ...”
“You don’t fucking live it!” Miller screamed it. Spittle flew from his mouth, dappling the front of Gregg’s jacket. Everyone in the room stared now, and the bodyguards lurched from their seats. Only Gregg’s hand held them back.
“Can’t you see that we’re your allies, not enemies?”
“No ally of mine would have a face like yours, Senator. You’re too damn normal. You want to feel like one of the jokers? Then let me help you learn what it’s like to be pitied.” Before any of them could react, Miller crouched. His thick, powerful legs hurled him toward the senator. His fingers curled like claws as he reached for Gregg’s face. Gregg recoiled, his hands coming up. Sondra’s mouth was open in the beginning of a useless protest.
And the dwarf suddenly collapsed onto the table as if a gigantic hand had struck him out of the air. The table bowed and splintered under him, glasses and china cascading to the floor. Miller gave a high, pitiful squeal like a wounded animal as Hiram, a molten fury on his red face, half-ran across the dining room toward them, as the secret service men vainly tugged at Miller’s arms to get him off the floor. “Damn, the little shit’s heavy,” one of them muttered.
“Out of my restaurant!” Hiram thundered. He bulled his way between the bodyguards and bent over the dwarf. He plucked up the man as if he were a feather-Gimli seemed to bob in the air, buoyant, his mouth working soundlessly, his face bleeding from several small scratches. “You are never to set foot in here again!” Hiram roared, a plump finger wagging before the dwarf’s startled eyes. Hiram began to march toward the exit, towing the dwarf as if pulling a balloon and scolding him the entire time. “You insult my people, you behave abominably, you even threaten the senator, who’s only trying to help ...” Hiram’s voice trailed off as the foyer doors swung shut behind him, as Hartmann brushed china shards from his suit and shook his head to the bodyguards. “Let him go. The man has a right to be upset-you’d be too if you had to live in Jokertown.”
Gregg sighed and shook his head at Sondra, who gaped after the dwarf. “Ms. Falin, I beg you-if you’ve any control over the JJS and Miller, please hold him back. I meant what I said. You only endanger your own cause. Truly.” He seemed more sad than angry. He looked at the destruction around his feet and sighed. “Poor Hiram,” he said. “And I promised him.”
The alcohol she’d consumed made Sondra dizzy and slow. She nodded to Gregg and realized that they were all looking at her, waiting for her to say something. She shook her gray, wizened head to them. “I’ll try,” was all she could mutter. Then: “Excuse me, please.” Sondra turned and fled the room, her arthritic knees protesting.
She could feel Gregg’s stare on her hunched back.
FLOOR VOTE ON JOKERS’ RIGHTS TONIGHT The New York Times, July 15, 1976
JJS VOWS MARCH ON TOMB
New York Daily News, July 15, 1976
The high-pressure cell had squatted over New York for the past two days like an enormous tired beast, turning the city unseasonably hot and muggy. The heat was thick and foul with fumes; it moved in the lungs like the Jack Daniels Sondra poured down her throat-a burning, sour glow. She stood in front of a small electric fan perched on her dresser, staring into the mirror. Her face sagged in a cross-hatching of wrinkles; dry, gray hair was matted with sweat against a brown-spotted scalp; the breasts were empty sacks hanging flat against the bony rib cage. Her frayed housecoat gaped open, and perspiration trickled down the slopes of her ribs. She hated the sight. Despairing, she turned back into the room.
Outside, on Pitt Street, Jokertown was coming fully awake in the darkness. From her window, Sondra could see them, the ones that Gimli always ranted about. There was Lambent, far too visible with the eternal glow of his skin; Marigold, a cluster of bright pustules bursting on her skin like slow blossoms; Flicker, sliding from sight in the darkness as if illuminated by a slow strobe light. All of them seeking their small comforts. The sight made Sondra melancholy. As she leaned against the wall, her shoulder bumped a photograph in a cheap frame. The picture was that of a young girl perhaps twelve years old, dressed only in a lacy camisole that slipped over one shoulder to reveal the upper swell of pubescent breasts. The shot was overtly sexual-there was a haunting wistfulness in the child’s expression and a certain affinity to the eroded features of the old woman. Sondra reached over to straighten the frame, sighing. The paint covered by the photograph was darker than that on the walls, testifying to how long it had been in place.
Sondra took another pull on the Jack Daniels.
Twenty years. In that time, Sonya’s body had aged twoand-a-half times as much. The child in the photo was Sondra, the picture taken by her father in 1956. He’d raped her a year before, her body already showing the signs of puberty though she’d been born five years earlier in ‘51.
Careful footsteps sounded on the stairway outside her apartment and halted. Sondra frowned. Time to whore again. Damn you, Sondra, for ever letting Miller talk you into this.
Damn you for ever coming to care for the man you’re supposed to be using. Even through the door she could feel the faint prickling of the man’s pheromonal anticipation, amplified by her own feelings for him. She felt her body yearning to respond sympathetically and she relaxed her control. She closed her eyes.
At least enjoy the feel of it. At least be glad that for a little while you’ll be young again. She could feel the quick changes moving in her body, straining at the muscles and tendons, pulling her into a new shape. The spine straightened, oils lathed the skin so that it lost its dry brittleness. Her breasts rose as a sexual heat began to throb in her loins. She stroked her neck and found the sagging folds gone. Sondra let the housecoat fall from her shoulders.
Already. So fast tonight. They’d been lovers for six months now; she knew what she’d find when she opened her eyes. Yes-her body was sleek and young with a fleecing of blond hair at the joining of her legs, her breasts small as they had been in her photo. This apparition, this mind-image of her lover: it was childlike, but not innocent. Always the same. Always young, always fair; some vision of his past, perhaps. A waif, a virgin-whore. Her fingertip brushed a nipple. It lengthened, thickening as she gasped at the touch, aroused. There was a wetness between her thighs already.
He knocked. She could hear his breath, a little too fast after the climb up the three flights, and found that his rhythm matched her own. Already she was lost in him. She unlocked the door, slid the deadbolt over. When she saw that there was no one in the hallway with him, she opened the door fully and let him stare at her nakedness. He wore a mask-blue satin over the eyes and nose, the thin mouth below it lifted in a smile. She knew him-she needed only the response of her body. “Gregg,” she said, and the voice was that of the child she had become. “... as afraid that you weren’t going to be able to be here tonight.”
He slid into the room, shutting the door behind him. Without saying anything, he kissed her long and deep, his tongue finding hers, his hands stroking the flank of her body.
When he finally sighed and pulled away, she laid her head against his chest.
“I had a difficult time getting away,” Gregg whispered. “Sneaking down the back stairs of my hotel like some thief ... wearing this mask ...” He laughed, a sad sound.
“The voting took forever. God, woman, did you think I’d desert you?”
She smiled at that and took a mincing step away from him. Taking his hand in her own, she guided him between her legs, sighing as his finger entered her warmth. “I’ve been waiting for you, love.”
“Succubus,” he breathed. She chuckled softly, a child’s giggle.
“Come to bed,” she whispered.
Standing beside the rumpled mattress, she loosened his tie and unbuttoned his shirt, biting gently at his nipples. Then she knelt before him, unlacing his shoes, taking off his socks before unfastening his belt and slipping his pants down. She smiled up at him as she stroked the rising curve of his penis. Gregg’s eyes were closed. She licked him once, and he groaned. He started to remove the mask and she stopped him. “No, leave it on,” she told him, knowing that it was what he wanted her to say. “Be mysterious.” Her tongue ran along his length again and she took him in her mouth until he gasped. Pushing him back on the mattress and cupping him gently, she teased him into heat, following the path of his needs, his lust amplifying her own until she was lost in the spiraling, bright feedback. He growled deep in his throat and pulled her away, rolling her over and spreading her legs roughly. He thrust into her; pounding, moving, his eyes bright behind the mask; his fingers digging into her buttocks until she cried out. He was not gentle; his excitement was a maelstrom in her mind, a swirling storm of color, a gasping heat that flailed both of them. She could feel his climax building; instinctively, she went with that welling of scarlet, her teeth clenched as his nails cratered her flesh and he slammed himself into her again and again and again ...
He groaned.
She could feel him voiding inside her, and she continued to move under him, finding her own climax a moment later. The whirling began to subside, the colors faded. Sondra clung to the memory of it, hoarding the energy so that she could keep this shape for a time.
He was staring down at her behind the mask. His gaze traveled her body-the marks on her breasts, the red, inflamed gouges of his nails. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Succubus, I’m very sorry.”
She pulled him down beside her on the bed, smiling as she knew he wanted her to smile, forgiving him as she knew he needed to be forgiven. She kept the thread of arousal in him so that she could remain Succubus. “It’s all right,” she soothed him. She bent to kiss his shoulder, his neck, his ear. “You didn’t mean to hurt me.”
She glanced at his face, reached behind his head, and loosed the strings of his mask. His mouth sagged in a frown, his eyes were bright with his apology. Touch him, feel the fire in him. Comfort him.
Whore.
This was the part of it that Sondra despised, the part that reminded her of the years when her parents had sold her body to the rich of New York. She’d been Succubus, the best-known and most expensive prostitute in the city from ‘56 to ‘64. Nobody had known that she was only five when it started, that a joker had been attached to the ace she’d drawn from the wild card deck. No, they’d only cared that as Succubus she would become the object of their fantasies-male or female, young or old, submissive or dominant. Any body or any shape: a Pygmalion of masturbatory dreams. A vessel. No one knew or cared that Succubus would inevitably collapse into Sondra, that her body aged far too rapidly, that Sondra hated Succubus.
She’d sworn when she fled her parental captivity twelve years before that she’d never let Succubus be used againSuccubus would only give pleasure to those who had little chance for pleasure otherwise.
Damn Miller. Damn the dwarf for talking me into this. Damn him for sending me to this man. Damn me for finding that I like Gregg too much. And most of all damn the virus for forcing me to remain hidden from him. God, that dinner at the Aces High yesterday .
Sondra knew that the affection Hartmann claimed to have for her was genuine, and she hated the realization. Yet her concern for the jokers was genuine as well, and her involvement with the JJS was a deep commitment. Knowing the government and, especially, SCARE was crucial. Hartmann influenced the aces that were beginning to side with the authorities after long, hidden years: Black Shadow, the Shaker,
Oddity, the Howler. Through Hartmann, the JJS had been able to channel government monies to the jokers-Sondra had discovered the lowest bids on several government contracts; they’d been able to leak the information to joker-owned companies. Most importantly, it was because she controlled Hartmann that she was able to keep Miller from finally turning the JJS into the violent radical group that the dwarf wanted. While she could dangle the senator from Succubus’s hands, she could limit Gimli’s ambition. At least, that was her hope-after the Aces High fiasco, she was no longer certain. Gimli had been grim and sullen at their meeting this evening.
“You’re tired, love,” she said to Gregg, tracing the line where his light hair dipped into a widow’s peak.
“You wear me out,” he replied. The smile returned, tentative, and she brushed his lips with her own.
“You seem distracted, that’s all. The convention?” Her hand slid down his body, over the stomach that age was beginning to soften. She caressed his inner thighs, using Succubus’s energies to relax him, to put him at ease. Gregg was always tense, and there was also that wall in his mind that he would never open, a weak mindblock that would be useless against most of the aces she knew. She doubted that Gregg even realized that the block was there, that he too had been touched, however mildly, by the virus.
She felt the first resurgence of his passion.
“It wasn’t very good there,” he admitted, cuddling her to him. “The vote didn’t have a chance, not with all the moderates against it-they’re all afraid of a conservative groundswell. If Reagan can knock Ford out of the nomination, then the whole show’s up in the air. Carter and Kennedy were both dead set against the plank-neither one of them wanted to be stuck supporting causes they weren’t sure about. As the front-runners, their nonsupport was too much.” Gregg sighed. “It wasn’t even close, Succubus.”
The words seemed to coat her mind with ice and she had to fight to hold her form as Succubus. By now the word would be spreading through Jokertown. By now Gimli would know; he’d be organizing the march for tomorrow. “You can’t reintroduce the plank?”
“Not now.” He stroked her breasts, circling her aureola with a forefinger. “Succubus, you don’t know how I looked forward to seeing you after all this. It’s been a very long and frustrating night.” Gregg turned to her and she snuggled against him comfortably, though her mind raced.
Musing, she nearly missed his words. “.... f the JJS insists, it’s going to be very bad.”
Her hand stopped moving on him. “Yes?” she prompted.
But it was already too late. Already, she could feel the tug of his lust. His hand closed on hers. “Feel,” he said. His hardness throbbed on her thigh. Again, she began to sink into him, helpless. Her concentration left her. He kissed her and her mouth burned; she straddled his body, guiding him into her once more. Inside, trapped, Sondra railed at Succubus. Damn you, he was talking about the JJS.
Afterward, exhausted, Gregg would say very little. It was all she could do to convince him to leave the apartment before her form collapsed and she became an old woman again.
SENATOR WARNS OF CONSEQUENCES AS MAYOR VOWS ACTION
The New York Times, July 16, 1976
CONVENTION MAY TURN TO DARK HORSE
New York Daily News, July 16, 1976
“OKAY, DAMMIT! MOVE IT OVER THERE. IF YOU CAN’T MANAGE TO WALK, GO OVER TO GARGANTUA’S CART. LOOK, I KNOW HE’S STUPID, BUT HE CAN PULL A FUCKING CART, FOR CRISSAKES.”
Gimli exhorted the milling jokers from the tailgate of a rusty Chevy pickup truck, waving his short arms frantically, his face flushed with the effort of screaming, sweat dripping from his beard. They were gathered in Roosevelt Park near Grand, the sun baking New York from a cloudless sky, the early morning temperature already in the high eighties and heading for a possible three figures. The shade of the few trees did nothing to ease the sweltering-Sondra could barely manage to breathe. She felt her age with every step as she approached the pickup and Gimii, dark circles of perspiration under the arms of her calico sundress.
“Gimii?” she said, and her voice was a cracked and broken thing.
“NO, ASSHOLE! MOVE IT OVER THERE BY MARIGOLD! Hello, Sondra. You ready to walk?-I could use you to keep the back of the group organized. I’ll give you Gargantua’s cart and the cripples-that’ll give you a place to ride that’s away from the crowds and you can keep the ones in front moving. I need someone to make sure Gargantua doesn’t do anything too fucking dumb. You got the route? We’ll go down Grand to Broadway, then across to the Tomb at Fulton—”
“Gimli,” Sondra said insistently.
“What, goddammit?” Miller put his hand on his hip. He wore only a pair of paisley shorts, exposing the massive barrel chest and the stubby, powerful legs and arms, all liberally covered with reddish-brown curly hair. His bass voice was a growl. “They say the police are gathering around the park gates and putting up barricades.” Sondra glared at Miller accusingly. “I told you that we were going to have trouble getting out of here.”
“Yeah. Piss. Fuck ’em, we’ll go anyway.”
“They won’t let us. Remember what Hartmann said at the Aces High? Remember what I told you he mentioned last night?” The old woman folded her bony arms over the tattered front of the sundress. “You’ll destroy the JJS if you get into a fight here ...”
“What’s the matter, Sondra? You suck the guy’s cock and take in all his political crap as well?” Miller laughed and hopped down from the pickup to the parched grass. Around them, two hundred to three hundred jokers milled about near the Grand Street entrance to the park. Miller frowned into Sondra’s glare and dug bare toes into the dirt. “All right,” he said. “I’ll go fucking look at this, since it bothers you so much.”
At the wrought-iron gate, they could see the police putting up wooden barricades across their intended path. Several of the jokers came up to Sondra and Miller as they approached. “You gonna go ahead, Gimli?” one of them asked. The joker wore no clothes-his body was hard, chitinous, and he moved with a lurching, rolling gait, his limbs stiff.
“I’ll tell you in a minute, huh, Peanut?” Gimli answered. He squinted into the distance, their bodies throwing long shadows down the street. “Clubs, riot gear, tear gas, water cannon. The whole fucking works.”
“Exactly what we wanted, Gimli,” Peanut answered. “We’ll lose people. They’ll get hurt, maybe killed. Some of them can’t take clubs, you know. Some of them might react to the tear gas,” Sondra commented.
“Some of them might trip over their own goddamn feet, too.” Gimli’s voice boomed. Down the street, several of the cops looked toward them, pointing. “Since when did you decide that the revolution was too dangerous, Sondra?”
“When did you decide that we had to hurt our own people to get what you want?”
Gimli stared back at her, one hand shielding his eyes from the sun. “It ain’t what I want,” he said slowly. “It’s what fair. It’s what’s just. Even you said that.”
Sondra set her mouth, wrinkles folding around her chin. She brushed back a wisp of gray hair. “I never wanted us to do it this way.”
“But we are.” Gimli took a deep breath and then bellowed toward the waiting jokers. “ALL RIGHT YOU KNOW THE ORDER-JUST KEEP GOING NO MATTER WHAT SOAK YOUR HANDKERCHIEFS. STAY IN THE RANKS UNTIL WE REACH THE TOMB. HELP YOUR NEIGHBOR IF HE NEEDS IT OKAY, LET’S GO!” The power was in his voice again. Sondra heard it and saw the reaction of the others; the sudden eagerness, the shouted responses. Even her own breath quickened to hear him. Gimli cocked his head toward Sondra, a mocking gleam in his eyes. “You coming or are you going to go fuck someone?”
“It’s a mistake,” Sondra insisted. She sighed, pulling at the collar of the dress and looking at the others, who stared at her. There was no support from them, not from Peanut, not from Tinhorn, not from Zona or Calvin or File-none of those who sometimes backed her during the meetings. She knew that if she stayed behind now, any hope she had of holding Miller in check would be gone. She glanced back at the park, at the groups of jokers huddling together and forming a rough line; the faces were apprehensive, but nonetheless resolute. Sondra shrugged her shoulders. “I’m going,” she said.
“I’m so happy,” Gimli drawled. He snorted his derision.
THREE DEAD, SCORES INJURED IN JOKER RIOT
The New York Times, July 17, 1976
It was not pretty, it was not easy. The planning commission of the NYPD had made copious notes that supposedly covered most of the eventualities if the jokers did decide to march. Those who were in charge of the operation quickly found that such advance planning was useless.
The jokers spilled out of Roosevelt Park and onto the wide pavement of Grand Street. That in itself was not a problemthe police had blocked traffic on all through-streets near the park as soon as the reports of the gathering had come in. The barricades were across the street not fifty yards from the entrance. It was hoped that the march organizers would simply fail to get the protest together or, coming upon the ranks of uniformed cops in riot gear, they would turn back into the park where officers on horseback could disperse them. The police held their clubs in ready hands, but most expected not to use them-these were jokers, after all, not aces. These were the crippled, the infirm, the ones who’d been twisted and deformed: the useless dregs of the virus.
They came down the street toward the barricades, and a few of the men in the front ranks of the police openly shook their heads. A dwarf led them-that would be Tom Miller, the JJS activist. The others would have been laughable if they were not so piteous. The garbage heap of Jokertown had opened up and emptied itself into the streets. These were not the better-known denizens of Jokertown: Tachyon, Chrysalis, or others like them. These were the sad ones who moved in darkness, who hid their faces and never emerged from the dirty streets of that district. They’d come out at the urging of Miller, with the hope that they could, in their very hideousness, cause the Democratic Convention to support their cause.
It was a parade that would have been the joy of a carnival freak show.
Late:; the officers indicated that none of them had actually wanted the confrontation to turn violent. They were prepared to use the least amount of force possible while still keeping the marchers off the downtown Manhattan streets. When the front ranks of the jokers reached the barricades, they were to uickly arrest Miller and then turn the others back. No one ought that would be difficult.
In retrospect, they wondered how they could have been so damned stupid.
As the marchers approached the barrier of wooden sawhorses behind which the police waited, they slowed. For long seconds, nothing happened at all, the jokers coming to a ragged, silent halt in the middle of the street. The heat reflecting off the pavement sheened the faces with sweat; the uniforms of the police were damp. Miller glowered in indecision, then motioned forward those behind him. Miller pushed aside the first sawhorse himself; the rest followed.
The riot squad formed a phalanx, linking their plastic shields, braced. The marchers hit the shields; the officers shoved back, and the line of marchers began to bow, buckling in on itself. Those behind pushed, crushing the front ranks of jokers against the police. Even then the situation might have been manageable-a tear-gas shell might have been able to confuse the jokers enough to send them running back to the relative safety of the park. The captain in charge nodded; one of the cops knelt to fire the canister.
Someone screamed in the crush. Then, like tenpins scattering, the first row of the riot squad went down as if some miniature tornado had blown them away. “Jesus!” one of the police screamed. “Who the fuck ...” The police clubs were out now; as the jokers hit the lines, they began to use them. A low roar dinned between the high buildings lining Grand Street, the sound of chaos let loose. The cops swung the clubs in earnest as frightened jokers began to fight back, striking out with fists or whatever was at hand. The joker with the wild TK power was throwing it everywhere with no control whatsoever: jokers and police and bystanders all were flung at random to roll in the streets or crash up against buildings. Tear-gas pellets dropped and exploded like a growing fog, adding to the confusion. Gargantua, a monstrous joker with a comically small head set on his massive body, moaned as the stinging gas blinded him. Hauling a wooden cart with several of the less ambulatory jokers set in it, the childlike giant went berserk, the cart careening after him with his riders clinging to the sides desperately. Gargantua had no idea which way to run; he ran because he could think of nothing else to do. When he encountered the re-formed police line, he pummeled wildly at the clubs that struck him. A blow from that clumsy, huge fist was responsible for one of the deaths.
For an hour the formless battle swirled within a few blocks of the park entrance. The injured lay in the streets, and the sound of sirens wailed, echoing. It was not until midafternoon that any semblance of normalcy could be restored. The march had been broken, but at a great cost to all involved. That long and hot night, the police patrolling Jokertown found their cruisers pelted with rocks and garbage, and the ghostly shades of jokers moved in the back streets and alleys with them: glimpses of rage-distorted faces and raised fists; futile, frustrated curses. In the humid darkness, the residents of Jokertown leaned down from fire escapes and open windows in the tenements to throw empty bottles, flowerpots, trash: they thudded against the roofs of the police vehicles or starred the windshields. The cops stayed judiciously inside their cruisers, the windows up and the doors locked. Fires were set in a few of the deserted buildings, and the fire-fighting crews that came to the calls were assaulted from the shadows of nearby houses.
Morning came in a pall of smoke, a veil of heat.
In 1962, Puppetman had come to New York City and there found his nirvana in the streets of Jokertown. There was all the hatred and anger and sorrow that he could ever wish to see, there were minds twisted and sickened by the virus, there were emotions already ripened and waiting to be shaped by his intrusions. The narrow streets, the shadowed alleys, the decaying buildings swarming with the deformed, the innumerable bars and clubs catering to all manner of warped, vile tastes: Jokertown was thick with potential for him, and he began to feast, slowly at first, and then more often. Jokertown was his. Puppetman perceived of himself as the sinister, hidden lord of the district. Puppetman could not force any of his puppets to do anything that went against their will; his power was not that strong. No, he needed a seed already planted in the mind: a tendency toward violence, a hatred, a lust-then he could place his mental hand on that emotion and nurture it, until the passion shattered all controls and surged out. They were bright and red-hued, those feelings. Puppetman could see them; even as he fed on them; even as he took them into his own head and felt the slow building of a heat that was sexual in intensity; as the pounding, shimmering flare of orgasm came while the puppet raped or killed or maimed. Pain was pleasure. Power was pleasure.
Jokertown was where pleasure could always be found.
HARTMANN PLEADS FOR CALM MAYOR SAYS RIOTERS WILL BE PUNISHED
New York Daily News, July 17, 1976
John Werthen came into Hartmann’s hotel room from the connecting door of the suite. “You’re not going to like this, Gregg,” he said.
Gregg had been lying on his bed, his suit jacket thrown carelessly over the headboard, his hands behind his head as he watched Cronkite talk about the deadlocked convention. Gregg turned his head toward his aide. “What now, John?”
Amy called from the Washington office. As you suggested, we gave the problem of Tachyon’s Soviet plant to Black Shadow. We just heard that the plant was found in Jokertown.
“He’d been strung up to a streetlamp with a note pinned to his chest-pinned through his chest, Gregg; he wasn’t wearing any clothes. The note outlined the Soviet program, how they’re infecting ‘volunteers’ with the virus in an effort to get their own aces, and how they’re simply killing the resulting jokers. The note went on to identify the poor schmuck as an agent. That’s all: the coroner doesn’t think that he was conscious through most of what the jokers did to him, but they found parts of the guy up to three blocks away.”
“Christ,” Gregg muttered. He let out a long breath. For a long minute, he lay there as Cronkite’s cultured voice droned on about the final vote on the platform and the obvious deadlock between Carter and Kennedy for the nomination. “Has anyone talked to Black Shadow since?”
John shrugged. He loosened his tie and opened the collar of his Brooks Brothers shirt. “Not yet. He’ll say that he didn’t do anything, you know, and in his own way, he’s right.”
“Come on, John,” Gregg replied. “He knew damn well what would happen if he tied the guy up with that note on him. He’s one of those aces who think they can do things their way without worrying about the laws. Call him in; I need to talk with him. If he can’t work our way, then he can’t work for us at all-he’s too dangerous.” Gregg sighed and swung his legs over the side of the bed, rubbing at his neck. “Anything else? What about the JJS? Have you managed to reach Miller for me?”
John shook his head. “Nothing yet. There’s talk that the jokers will march again today-same route and all, right past city hall. I hope he’s not that stupid.”
“He’ll march,” Gregg predicted. “The man’s hungry to be in the limelight. He thinks he’s powerful. He’ll march.” The senator stood and bent over the television set. Cronkite went silent in midsentence. Gregg stared out the windows. From his vantage point in the Marriott’s Essex House, he could look down at the green swath of Central Park caught between the towers of the city. The air was stagnant, unmoving, and the blue haze of pollution hid the further reaches of the park. Gregg could feel the heat even with the air-conditioning in the room. Outside, it would be sweltering once more. In the warrens of Jokertown, the day would be unbearable, rendering already quick-fused tempers even shorter.
“Yes, he’ll march,” Gregg said again, softly enough that John did’ not hear it. “Let’s go to Jokertown,” he said, turning back into the room.
“The convention?” John inquired.
“They won’t settle anything for days yet. That doesn’t matter at the moment. Let’s collect my shadows and get going. “
JOKERS! YOU’RE BEING DEALT A BAD HAND!—from a pamphlet handed out by JJS workers at the July 18th rally Gimli exhorted the crowds under the brilliant noon sun. After the night of chaos in Jokertown, the mayor had put the city’s police force on double shifts and canceled all leaves. The governor had placed the National Guard on standby. Patrols stalked the borders of the Jokertown district, and a curfew was imposed for the following night. The word that the JJS would attempt another march to Jetboy’s Tomb had spread quickly through Jokertown the previous evening, and by morning, Roosevelt Park was swirling with activity. The police stayed away after two unsuccessful attempts to sweep the jokers out of the park resulted in broken heads and five injured officers. There were simply more of the jokers willing to march with the JJS than the authorities had predicted. The barricades were set in place on Grand Street once more, and the mayor harangued the assembled jokers via bullhorn. He was roundly jeered by those at the gates.
From the rickety dais they’d erected, Sondra listened to Gimli as the dwarf’s strong voice swept the jokers up in its ferocity. “YOU’VE BEEN TRAMPLED, SPAT UPON, REVILED LIKE NO OTHER PEOPLE IN HISTORY!” he exclaimed, and they screamed their agreement. Gimli’s face was rapt, shiny with sweat, the coarse strands of his beard dark with the heat. “YOU’RE THE NEW NIGGERS, JOKERS. YOU’RE THE NEW SLAVES, THE ONES BEGGING FOR RELEASE FROM A CAPTIVITY NO WORSE THAN THAT OF THE BLACKS. NIGGERS. JEWS. COMMUNISTS. YOU’RE ALL THOSE THINGS TO THIS CITY, THIS COUNTRY!” Gimli flung an arm toward the ramparts of New York. “THEY WOULD HAVE YOU STAY IN YOUR GHETTO; THEY WOULD HAVE YOU STARVE. THEY WANT YOU TO BE KEPT IN YOUR PLACE SO THEY CAN PITY YOU, SO THEY CAN DRIVE DOWN THE STREETS OF JOKERTOWN IN THEIR CADILLACS AND THEIR LIMOUSINES AND LOOK OUT THE WINDOWS, SAYING ‘GOD, HOW CAN PEOPLE LIKE THAT STAND TO LIVEl’” The last word was a roar and it echoed through the park, all of the jokers rising to shout with Gimli. Sondra looked out on the mass of people, speckling the lawn under the glaring sun.
They’d all come out, the jokers, pouring from the streets of Jokertown. Gargantua was there, his immense body bandaged; Marigold, Flicker, Carmen, five thousand or more like them all behind. Sondra could feel the excitement pulsing as Gimli lectured them, his own bitterness snaking out like a poison into the air, infecting them all. No, she wanted to say. No, you can’t listen to him. Please. Yes, his words are full of energy and brilliance; yes, he makes you want to raise your fists and pump them skyward as you march with him. Still, can’t you see that this is not the way? This is not the revolution. This is only the madness of a man. The words echoed in her mind, but she could not speak them. Gimli had caught her in his spell with the others. She could feel the are of a smile on her chapped lips, and around her the other members of the cadre were yelling. Gimli stood at the front of the dais, his arms wide as the shouts became louder and louder, as a chant began to rise from the massed throat of the crowd.
“Jokers’ Rights! Jokers’ Rights!”
The beat hammered at the waiting ranks of police, at the inevitable crowd of bystanders and reporters.
“Jokers’ Rights! Jokers’ Rights!”
Sondra heard herself saying it along with the others. Gimli jumped down from the dais, and the burly dwarf began to lead them toward the gates. The crowd began to move, a mob with no pretense of order. They spilled out of Roosevelt Park from the gates into the side streets. Taunts were shouted toward the waiting line of police. Sondra could see the flashing lights of the cruisers, could hear the drone of the trucks with the water cannon. That strange, undefinable roar she’d heard the day before was rising again, louder even than the continuing chant. Sondra hesitated, not knowing what to do. Then she ran toward Gimli, her legs aching. “Gimli,” she began, but she knew the complaint was hopeless. His face was a leer of satisfaction as the protesters spilled from the park into the street. Sondra looked down toward the barricade, toward the line where the police waited.
Gregg was there.
He stood in front of the barricades, several officers and the secret service men with him. His shirtsleeves rolled up, his collar open and his tie loosened, he looked weary. For a moment, Sondra thought that Miller would march past the senator, but the dwarf stopped a few yards from the man-the marchers came to a ragged, uneasy halt behind him. “Get the fuck out of the way, Senator,” Gimli insisted. “Get out of the way or we’ll just trample you underneath with all your goddamn guards and reporters.”
“Miller, this isn’t the way.”
“There is no other way, and I’m tired of talking about it.”
“Please, let me talk just a few minutes more.” Gregg waited, glancing from Gimli to Sondra, to the others of the JJS in the crowd. “I know you’re bitter about what happened to the jokers’ Rights plank. I know that the way the jokers have been treated in the past is disgraceful. But dammit, things are changing. I hate to counsel you to have patience, but that’s what this needs.”
“Time has run out, Senator,” Miller said. His mouth gaped open with a grin; the crowns of his teeth were dark and pitted.
“If you go forward, you’ll guarantee a riot. If you’ll go back to the park, I can keep the police from interfering any further.”
“And just what the hell good does that do us, Senator? We’d like to rally at Jetboy’s Tomb. That’s our right. We’d like to stand on the steps and talk about thirty years of pain and torment for our people. We’d like to pray for the ones who died and let everyone see by looking at us just how goddamn lucky the ones who died were. That’s all-we ask for the rights that any other normal person has.”
“You can do all of that in Roosevelt Park. Every one of the national papers, all the networks will cover it-that’s a guarantee, as well.”
“That’s all you have to bargain with, Senator? It ain’t much.”
Gregg nodded. “I know it, and I apologize for it. All I can say is that if you’ll turn your people back into the park, I’ll do what I can for you, for all of you.” Gregg spread his hands wide. “That’s all I can offer. Please, tell me that it’s enough.” Sondra watched Miller’s face. The shouting, the chanting continued behind their backs. She thought that the dwarf would laugh, would jeer at Gregg and push his way on past to the barricades. The dwarf shuffled bare feet on the concrete, scratched at the thatch of hair on his wide chest. He stared at Gregg with a scowl, rage in his deep-set eyes.
And then, somehow, he took a step back. Miller’s gaze dropped, and the tension in the street seemed to dissolve. “All right,” he said. Sondra almost laughed. There were amazed protests from the others, but Gimli swung around to them like an angry bear. “Dammit, you fucking heard me. Let’s give the man a chance—one day, no more. It ain’t gonna hurt us to wait one more day.”
With a curse, Gimli pushed his way back into the crowd, heading toward the park gates once more. Slowly, the others turned to follow. The chant began again, halfheartedly, and then died.
Sondra stared at Gregg for a long time, and he smiled at her. “Thank you,” Gregg said in a quiet, tired voice. “Thank you for giving me a chance.”
Sondra nodded. She could not speak to him; she was afraid that she would try to hug him, to kiss him. You’re just an old crone to the man, Sondra. A joker like the rest.
How did you do it? she wanted to ask him. How did you make him listen when he’d never listen to me?
She could not frame the questions-not with that old woman’s mouth, not with that old woman’s voice.
Sighing, limping on swollen knees, she made her way back.
HARTMANN DEFUSES RIOT TALK WITH JJS LEADER GAINS REPRIEVE
The New York Times, July 18, 1976, special edition.
JOKERTOWN IN CHAOS
New York Daily News, July 19, 1976
The JJS rally returned to Roosevelt Park. Through the rest of the sultry day, Gimli, Sondra, and the others gave speeches. Tachyon himself appeared to address the crowd in the afternoon, and there was a strange festival atmosphere to the gathering. The jokers sat on the grassy knolls of the park, singing or talking. Picnic lunches were shared with those nearest; drinks were poured and offered. Joints could be seen making the rounds. In a sense, the rally became a spontaneous celebration of jokerhood. Even the most deformed jokers walked about openly. The celebrated masks of Jokertown, the anonymous facades behind which many of the Jokertown residents were accustomed to hide, were dropped for the time.
For most, it was a good afternoon, something to take their minds off the heat, off the paucity of their existence-you shared life with your fellows, and if your troubles seemed overwhelming, there was always someone else to look at or talk to who might make you feel that things were not quite so awful after all.
After a morning that had seemed doomed to violence and destruction, the day had turned gentle and optimistic. The mood was one of hilarity, as if some corner had been turned and the darkness was left behind. The sun no longer seemed quite so oppressive. Sondra found that her own mood was elevated. She smiled, she joked with Gimli, she hugged and sang and laughed with the rest.
Evening brought reality.
The deep shadows of Manhattan’s skyscrapers slid over the park and merged. The sky went ultramarine and then stabilized as the skyglow of the city’s lights held back full darkness, leaving the park in a hazy murk. The city radiated the day’s heat back into twilight; there was no relief from the heat, and the air was deathly still. If anything, night seemed more oppressive than day.
Later, the police chief would point to the mayor. The mayor in turn would point to the governor, whose office would claim that no orders originated there. No one seemed certain just who had ordered the action. And later, it simply didn’t matter-the night of the 18th exploded into violence. With a shout and a blare of bullhorns, the insanity began. Mounted police, followed by club-wielding lines, began to sweep the park from south to north, intending to drive the jokers onto Delancey and then back into Jokertown. The jokers, disoriented and confused at the unexpected attack and urged on by the frantic Gimli, resisted. A club-swinging melee ensued, hampered by the darkness of the park. For the police, anyone without a uniform was fair game. They ranged through the park striking anyone they could touch. Screams and cries punctuated the night. Gimli’s attempt at organizing the resistance broke down quickly, and small groups of the jokers were herded toward the streets, any who turned beaten or maced. Those who fell were trampled. Sondra found herself in one of those crowds. Panting, trying to keep her balance in the jostling flight, her hands over her head to protect herself from the clubs, she managed to find temporary safety in an alley off Stanton. There, she watched as the violence spread out of the park and into the streets.
Small scenes drifted past her.
A CBS cameraman was filming as a dozen policemen on motorcycles pushed a group of jokers toward a railing that shielded the ramp of an underground parking garage across the street from Sondra. The jokers were running; some of them jumped over the railing. Lambent was among them, illuminating the scene with the phophorescent glow of his skin, a pitiful target unable to hide from the oncoming police. He vaulted the railing in desperation, plunging into the eightfoot drop beyond it. The police saw the cameraman then-one of them yelled “Get the fucking camera!”—and the cycles wheeled around with a throaty rumble, the headlights arcing across the buildings. The cameraman began to run backward away from them, still filming. A club lashed out as the police went past; the man rolled in the street, moaning as the camera tumbled to the pavement, its lens shattered.
A joker stumbled by the mouth of the alley, obviously dazed, holding a blood-soaked handkerchief to his temple though the cut gaped open down past his ear, soaking the collar of his shirt. It was obvious how he had been caught’-his legs and arms were canted at all the wrong angles, as if they’d been pasted on his trunk by a drunken sculptor. The man hobbled and lurched, the joints bending backward and sideways. Three cops came walking quickly alongside him. “... eed a doctor,” the joker said to one of them. When the officer ignored him, he tugged at the sleeve of the uniform. “Hey,” he said. The cop pulled a can of mace from its holster on his belt and sprayed the contents directly into the joker’s face.
Sondra gasped and sank deeper into the alley. When the police kept walking, she fled the other way.
Through the night, the violence spread out in the Jokertown streets. A running battle raged between the authorities and the jokers. It was a spree of destruction, a celebration of hate. No one slept that night. Masked jokers confronted the lurking cruisers, overturning some of them; burning cars illuminated intersections. Near the waterfront, Tachyon’s clinic looked like a castle under siege, ringed by armed guards with the distinctive figure of the doctor himself running about trying to keep some semblance of sanity in the night. Tachyon, along with a few trusted aides, made forays into the streets to pick up the injured, both jokers and policemen.
Jokertown began to come apart, dying in fire and blood. Tear-gas fumes drifted through the streets, acrid. By midnight, the National Guard had been called in and issued live ammunition. The SCARE offices of Senator Hartmann issued a call for those aces working for the government to aid in calming the situation.
The Great and Powerful Turtle hovered over the streets like one of the war machines in George Pal’s War of the Worlds, sweeping the combatants away from each other. Like many of the other aces, he seemed to take no side in the confrontation, using his abilities to break up the running battles without subduing either jokers or police. Outside Tachyon’s clinic (where by one A. M. the wards were nearly full and the doctor was beginning to bed down the injured in the corridors) the Turtle picked up a wrecked, burning Mustang and hurled the car into the East River like a flaming meteorite, trailing sparks and smoke. He prowled South Street, shoving rioters and Guardsmen in front of him as if he wielded an invisible, giant plow.
On Third Street, the Guardsmen had rigged jeeps with wire-mesh covers and attached large frames of barbed wire to the fronts of the vehicles. They used these to move crowds of jokers out of the main avenue and into the side streets. Spontaneous fires triggered by a hidden joker exploded the gas tanks of the jeeps, and Guardsmen ran screaming, their uniforms aflame. Rifle fire began to chatter.
Near Chatham Square, the sound of the rioting began to swell to immense, ear-shattering proportions as the Howler, dressed all in yellow, stalked the chaotic streets, his mouth open in a wail that contained all he had heard, amplified and redoubled. Where Howler walked, jokers flung hands over ears, fleeing from this torrent of noise. Windows shattered when Howler raised the frequencies, walls shivered as he sobbed in the bass range. “STOP THIS!” he raged. “GO INSIDE, ALL OF YOU!”
Black Shadow, who had revealed himself as an ace only a few months before, indicated his sympathies quickly. He watched the conflicts silently for a time. On Pitt Street, where a band of beleaguered jokers fought with taunts, thrown bottles, and the garbage at hand against a water cannon and a squad of Guardsmen with bayonets fixed to their rifles, Black Shadow stepped into the fray. The street went instantly black for perhaps twenty feet around the ace with the navy-blue uniform and orange-red domino mask. The impenetrable night persisted for ten minutes or more. Screams came from inside the well of dark, and jokers fled. When the darkness moved off and the lights of the city again reflected from the wet pavement, the Guardsmen lay in the street unconscious, the water cannon pouring a harsh stream into the gutters, unattended.
Sondra saw that last confrontation from the window of her apartment. The violence of the night frightened her. To escape the fright, she twisted the cap from the bottle of Jack Daniels on her dresser, pouring a long, harsh slug down her throat. She gasped, wiping at the back of her mouth with her hand. Every muscle in her body protested. Her arthritic legs and hands shot agony when she moved. She went to bed and lay down. She could not sleep-the sounds of rioting drifted in from the open window, she could smell smoke from nearby fires and see the shuddering flames dancing on her walls. She was afraid that she would have to leave the building; she wondered what she would try to save if it came to that.
There was a soft knock at her apartment door. At first, she was not certain that she heard it. It was repeated, quiet and persistent, and she groaned to her feet.
As she approached the door, she knew who it was. Her body felt it. Succubus felt it. “No,” Sondra whispered to herself. No, not now. He rapped on the door again.
“Go away, please, Gregg,” she said, leaning against the door, keeping her voice quiet so he could not hear the old woman’s tones in it.
“Succubus?” His voice was insistent. His arousal tugged at her, and she wondered at it. Why now? Why here? God, I can’t let him see me like this, and he won’t go away. “Just a minute,” she said, and she let down the barriers that caged Succubus. Her body began its change, and she felt the swirling of his passion inciting her own. She stripped away Sondra’s clothes, flinging them away into a corner. She opened the door. Gregg was masked, his entire head covered with a grotesque smiling clown’s face. It leered at her as he pushed his way inside. He said nothing; his hands were already unzipping his pants, pulling out his stiffening cock. He did not bother to undress, engaged in no foreplay at all. He pushed her down onto the hardwood floor and jammed himself into her, thrusting with gasping breaths as Succubus moved under him, matching his ferocity and cooperating with this loveless rape. He was brutal: his fingers dug into her small, firm breasts, the nails tearing small, bleeding crescents of skin. He crushed her nipples between thumb and forefinger until she cried out-he desired pain from her tonight; he needed her to cringe and cry and yet to be the willing victim. He slapped her face; when she brought her hands up to stop him from doing it again, her nostrils drooling blood, he twisted her wrist viciously.
And when he was done with her, he stood over her looking down, the clown’s head laughing at her, his own face unreadable behind the mask. She could see only his eyes, glistening as he stared at her.
“It had to be that way,” he said. There was no apology in his voice. Succubus nodded; she had known that and accepted it. Sondra wailed inside her.
Hartmann zipped up his pants. The front of his shirt was soiled with blood and their fluids. “Do you understand at all?” he asked her. His voice was gentle, calm; it begged her to listen, to sympathize. “You’re one person who accepts me without my having to do anything. You don’t care that I’m a senator. I don’t have to—” He stopped and brushed at his suit. “You love me. I can feel that. You care for me, and I don’t have to make you care. I wish ..” He shrugged. “I need you.”
Perhaps it was because she could not see his face. Perhaps it was because his roughness, when before he had always been so tender, had driven Succubus’s empathy deeper into him than in the past. But she could feel his thoughts for a moment as he left her sprawled on the floor, and what she sensed made her shiver despite the awful heat. He was thinking of the rioting outside, and in the senator’s mind was no loathing, no distaste; there was only a glow of pleasure, a sense of proprietorial accomplishment. She glanced at him in astonishment.
It’s been him. All along, it’s been him using us, not the other way around.
At the door, Gregg turned and spoke to her. “Succubus, I do love you. I don’t think you can understand that, but it’s true. Please, believe that. I need you more than I need all the rest.”
Behind the mask, she could see the brightness of his pupils. She was astonished to see that he was crying. Somehow, with all the strangeness Sondra had witnessed during this night, that did not seem so strange at all.
Puppetman found that his safety lay in anonymity, in the appearance of innocence. After all, none of the puppets ever knew that he had touched them, none of them could tell anyone what had happened inside their minds. They had simply ... snapped. Puppetman had only let them act out their own feelings; there was always ample motivation for whatever crimes his puppets might commit. If they were caught, no matter.
In 1961, graduating from Harvard Law School, he had joined a prestigious New York law firm. In five years, after a successful career as a criminal lawyer, he moved into politics.
In 1965, he was elected New York city councilman. He was mayor from ‘68 to ‘72, when he became New York senator. In 1976, he saw his chance to become President. In the past, he’d always thought in terms of ‘80, of ‘84. But the Democratic National Convention went to New York in the Bicentennial year, and Puppetman knew that here was his moment. The groundwork had all been laid.
He had fed many times from the deep cup of bitterness inside Tom Miller.
Now he would drink fully.
FIFTEEN DEAD AS JOKERTOWN BURNS
The New York Times, July 19, 1976
The morning sun was misted by dark smoke. The city broiled under the renewed heat, worse than the days before. The violence had not ended with the morning. The streets of Jokertown were awash in destruction, littered with the detritus of the night’s turmoil. The rioters fought guerilla battles with the police and Guardsmen, hampering their movements through the streets, overturning cars to block intersections, setting fires, taunting the authorities from balconies and windows. Jokertown itself was ringed with squad cars, jeeps, and fire equipment. Guardsmen in full gear were stationed every few yards on Second Avenue. Along Chrystie, the guards massed around Roosevelt Park, where once again the jokers were gathering. Gimli’s voice could be heard deep in the crowd, haranguing them, telling them that today they would march no matter what the consequences. All of the Democratic candidates made an appearance near the stricken area, to be photographed with concerned, stern expressions as they gazed at the burnt-out shell of a building or spoke with a not-too-misshapen joker. Kennedy, Carter, Udall, Jacksonthey all made certain they were seen and then took their limos back to the Garden, where the delegates had cast two inconclusive rounds of votes for the candidacy. Only Hartmann came and stayed near Jokertown, chatting with the newsmen and trying unsuccessfully to coax Miller out from the depths of the crowd to negotiate.
At noon, with the temperature touching three figures and a breeze from the East River bringing the smell of burning to the city, the jokers came out of the park.
Gregg had never handled so many puppets before. Gimli was still the key, and he could feel the dwarf’s raging presence maybe a hundred yards back into the crowd of jokers that filled Grand. In this swirling mess, Miller alone would not be enough to turn the jokers back at the right time. Gregg had made certain that he’d been able to shake the hands of the JJS leaders over the past few weeks; every time, he’d used that contact to plunge into the mind before him and open the pathways that would allow him access from a distance. A mob was like any herd of animals-turn enough of the leaders and the rest would inevitably follow. Gregg had most of them: Gargantua, Peanut, Tinhorn, File, perhaps twenty others. A few of them such as Sondra Falin he’d ignored-the old woman reminded him of someone’s decrepit grandmother and he doubted her ability to sway the mob. Most of the puppets already had a fear in them-it would be easy to use that, to expand that fright until they turned and fled. Most of them were reasonable people; they wanted confrontation no more than anyone else. They had been goaded into it-Hartmann’s doing. Now he would undo it, and in the process make himself the candidate of choice. Already the tide of the convention had turned away from Kennedy and Carter. With the delegates now absolved of their first vote commitment, they were free to elect the candidate of their choice-in the last ballot, Hartmann had placed a rising third. Gregg smiled despite the cameras aimed toward him: the rioting of the night before had given him a pleasure that he had not thought he would ever feel-so much passion had nearly overwhelmed him, a strange melding of lusts.
The line of Guardsmen began to shift as the jokers approached. They spilled out all along the length of Chrystie, shouting slogans and brandishing signs. Bullhorns blared orders and curses back and forth; Gregg could hear the taunts of the jokers as the Guardsmen formed a line of bayonets. At the intersection of Delancey Street, Gregg saw the hovering shell of the Turtle above the Guardsmen; there, at least, the protesters were kept back without harm. Farther south toward the main gates, where Hartmann stood in a circle of guards, it was not so easy.
The jokers came on, pushing and shoving, the mass of those behind propelling those who might have otherwise turned back into the park. The Guardsmen were forced to make a decision-use the bayonets or try to push the jokers back with linked arms. They chose the latter. For a moment, it looked as if some balance had been reached, then the ranks of Guardsmen began to slowly bend. With a cry, a knot of jokers broke through the line and reached the street. Shouting, the rest poured through. Once again, a running battle ensued, disorganized and confused. Hartmann, well back from the fighting for the moment, sighed. He closed his eyes as the impressions of his puppets began to reach him. If he wished, he could have lost himself then, could have plunged into that roiling sea of emotion and fed until satiated.
But he could not wait that long. He had to move while there was still some form to the conflict. Gesturing to the guards, he began to move forward toward the gates, toward the presence of Gimli.
Sondra was with the rest of the main cadre of the JJS. As they marched through the main gate, she tried again to tell Gimli about that strangeness she d sensed in Hartmann last night. “He thought he was controlling all of this. I swear it, Gimli. “
“Just like any other fucking politician, old woman. Besides, I thought you liked him.”
“I do, but—”
“Look, why the hell are you here?”
“Because I’m a joker. Because the JJS is my group too, whether I agree with what you’re doing or not.”
“Then shut up, dammit. I’ve got a lot to handle here.” The dwarf glared at her and moved away. They were walking at a slow, funereal pace toward the waiting Guardsmen. Sondra could see them through those in front of her. Then the vision was gone as the jokers crowded into the constriction of the gates; hobbling, limping, making their way as best they could. Many of them bore signs of the struggle of the day before; heads wrapped in bandages, slings-they proffered them to the Guardsmen like badges of honor. The bodies in front of Sondra suddenly halted as they hit the line of Guardsmen; someone shoved her from behind and she almost fell. She hugged the person before her, feeling leathery skin under her hands, seeing lizardlike scales covering a massive back. Sondra cried out as she was crushed, pushing away with feeble arms, muscles wobbling inside loose bags of skin. She thought she would fall, when suddenly the pressure was released. She staggered. Her eyes caught the sun then; she was momentarily blinded. In the confusion, she could see fists swinging in front of her, accompanied by shouts and cries. Sondra began to retreat, trying to find a way past the conflict. She was shoved, and when she struck back, a club slammed against the side of her head.
Sondra screamed. Succubus screamed.
Her vision was lost in swirls of color. She could not think. She held her hands over the cut and the hands felt odd. Blinking away blood from the cut on her temple, she tried to look at them. They were young, those hands, and even as she gaped at them in confusion, she felt the sudden intrusion of other passions.
No! Go back inside, damn you! Not here, not in the streets, not with all these people around! Desperately, Sondra tried to place the controls back on Succubus, but her head rang with the concussion and she could not think. Her body was in torment, shifting fluidly in response to everyone about her. Succubus touched each of the minds and took the shape of its sexual desires. She was first female, then male; young and old, thin and fat. Succubus wailed in confusion. Sondra ran, her shape altering with each step, pushing against the hands that reached out for her in sudden odd lust. Succubus responded as she had to; she took the thread of desire and wove it into passion. In an ever-widening circle, the rioting ended as jokers and Guardsmen alike turned to pursue the quick tug of desire. Succubus could feel him as well, and she tried to make her way toward Gregg. She didn’t know what else to do. He controlled this; she knew that from last night. He could save her. He loved her-he had said so.
The cameras followed Senator Hartmann’s progress toward the gate where a few scuffles were just beginning. When his bodyguards tried to hold the senator back, he shrugged their hands aside. “Dammit, someone has to try” he was heard to say.
“Oh, good stuff,” one of the reporters muttered. Hartmann pushed forward. The bodyguards looked at one another, shrugged, and followed.
Gregg could feel the presence of most of his puppets in the area near the gate. With the Turtle holding back the jokers at the other end of the park, Gregg realized that this would be his best opportunity. Getting Gimli and the others to retreat now would turn everyone back. If the rioting continued into the night again, no matter-Gregg would have quite amply demonstrated his calm sureheadedness in a crisis. The papers would be full of the account the next morning and all the networks would feature his face and name prominently. That would be enough to ensure the nomination with a grand momentum into the campaign itself. Ford or Reagan; it wouldn’t matter who the Republicans chose.
Keeping his face grim, Gregg strode toward the center of the conflict. “Miller!” he shouted, knowing the dwarf was close enough to hear him. “Miller, this is Hartmann!” As he shouted, he gave a tug at Miller’s mind and closed down that molten heat of rage, laving it with cool azure. He felt the sudden release, felt the beginning of the dwarfs disgust at the vision around him. Hartmann twisted the mind again, touching the core of fright in the man and willing it to grow, a cold whiteness.
It’s out of control, Gregg whispered to the man. You’ve lost it now and you can’t get it back unless you go to the senator. Listen: he’s calling for you. Be reasonable.
“Miller!” Gregg called again. He felt the dwarf begin to turn, and Gregg pushed the Guardsmen in front of him aside so that he could see.
Gimli was to his left. But even as Hartmann began to call to him, he saw the joker’s attention shift away toward the gate. There, pursued by a crowd of jokers and Guardsmen, Gregg saw her.
Succubus.
Her form was erratic, a hundred faces and bodies flickering on her as she ran. She saw Gregg in that same instant. She cried out to him, her arms outstretched. “Succubus!” he shouted back. He began to shoulder his way toward her.
Someone caught her from behind. Succubus twisted away, but other hands had her now. With a shrill scream, she fell. Gregg could see nothing of her then. There were bodies all around her; shoving, striking each other in their fury to be near her. Gregg heard the grotesque, dry crack of bones snapping. “No!” Gregg began to run. Gimli was forgotten, the riot was forgotten. As he came nearer to her, he could sense her presence, could feel the pull of her attraction.
They piled on top of her, the swarming, snarling mob pummeling her, tearing at Succubus and each other in an attempt to find release. They were like maggots wriggling over a piece of meat, their faces strained and fierce, their hands clawed as they pawed at Succubus, thrusting. Blood fountained suddenly from somewhere below the writhing pack. Succubus screamed; a wordless, shrill agony that was suddenly, eerily, cut off.
He felt her die.
Those around her began to pull back, a horror on their faces. Gregg could see the body huddled on the ground. A thick smear of blood spilled around it. One of the arms had been ripped completely from its socket, her legs were twisted at strange angles. Gregg saw none of that. He stared only at her face: he saw the reflection of Andrea Whitman lying there.
A rage grew in him. The intensity of it swept everything else aside. He could see nothing around him-not the cameras, not his bodyguards, not the reporters. Gregg could only see her.
She had been his. She had been his without having to be a puppet, and they had taken her from him. They had mocked him; as Andrea had mocked him years ago, as others had mocked him who had also died. He had loved her as much as he could love anyone. Gregg grasped the shoulder of a Guardsman who stood over the body, his cock hanging down from unzipped pants. Gregg jerked him around. “You asshole!” As he shouted, he struck the man in the face repeatedly. “You goddamn assholel”
His fury spilled out from his mind unrestricted. It flowed to his puppets. Gimli bellowed, his voice as compelling as ever. “You seel See how they kill?” The jokers took up the cry and attacked. Hartmann’s bodyguards, suddenly fearful as the violence was renewed, dragged the senator away from the combat. He cursed them, resisting, fighting to be loose, but this time they were adamant. They pulled him back to the car and his hotel room.
HARTMANN ENRAGED AT KILLING, ATTACKS DEMONSTRATORS CARTER APPEARS TO BE WINNER
The New York Times, July 20, 1976
HARTMANN “LOSES HEAD” MUST SOMETIMES FIGHT BACK, HE SAYS
New York Daily News, July 20, 1976
He salvaged what he could from the fiasco. He told the waiting reporters that he’d simply been appalled by what he’d witnessed, by the unnecessary violence done to the poor Succubus. He’d shrugged his shoulders, smiled sadly, and asked them if they, too, might not have been moved by such a scene.
When they finally left him, Puppetman retired to his room. There, in the solitude of his room, he watched the proceedings on television as the convention elected Carter as his party’s next presidential candidate. He told himself that he didn’t care. He told himself that next time it would be his. After all, Puppetman was still safe, still hidden. No one knew his secret.
In his mind, Puppetman lifted a hand and spread his fingers. The strings pulled; his puppets’ heads jerked up. Puppetman felt their emotions, tasting the spice of their lives. For that night, at least, the feast was bitter and galling.
For seven days, since Misha had arrived in New York, she had met nightly with the joker Gimli and the abominations he had gathered around him.
For seven days she had lived in a festering sore called Jokertown, waiting.
For seven days there had been no visions. And that was most important.
Visions had always ruled Misha’s life. She was Kahina, the Seeress: Allah’s dreams had shown her Hartmann, the Satan who danced puppets from his clawed hands. The visions had shown her Gimli and Sara Morgenstern. Allah’s visions had led her back to the desert mosque the day after she’d slit her brother’s throat, there to be given by one of the faithful the thing that would give her revenge and bring Hartmann down: Allah’s gift.
Today was the day of the new moon. Misha took that as an omen that there would be a vision. She had prayed to Allah for well over an hour this morning, the gift He had bestowed upon her cradled in her arms.
He had granted her nothing.
When she rose from the floor at last, she opened the lacquered clothes trunk sitting beside the rickety bed. Misha took off her chador and veils, changing into a long skirt and blouse again. She hated the light, brightly colored cloth and the sinful nakedness she felt. The bared arms and face made her feel vulnerable.
Misha covered Allah’s gift with the folds of the chador she didn’t dare wear here. She had just hidden it under the black cotton when she heard the scrape of a footstep behind her.
Mingled fear and anger made her gasp. She slammed down the lid of the clothes trunk and straightened.
“What are you doing in here?” She whirled around, not even realizing she was shouting in Arabic. “Get out of my room—”
She’d never felt safe in Jokertown, not once in the week she’d been here. Always before there had been her husband, Sayyid, her brother, the Nur. There had been servants and bodyguards.
Now Misha was in a country illegally, living alone in a city full of violence, and the only people she knew were jokers. Only two nights before, someone had been shot and killed in the street outside these ramshackle sleeping rooms near the East River. She told herself that it had only been a joker, that the death didn’t matter.
Jokers were cursed. The abominations of Allah.
It was a joker standing at the door of her dingy room, staring at her. “Get out,” she said in shaky, accented English. “ I have a gun.”
“It’s my room,” the joker said. “It’s my room and I’m taking it back. You’re just a nat. You shouldn’t be here.” The thin, scrawny shape took a step forward into the light from the room’s one window. Misha recognized the joker immediately.
Gray-white rags of torn cloth were wrapped around his forehead, and the grimy bandages were clotted and brown with old blood. His hair was stiff with it. His hands were similarly covered, and thick red drops oozed through the soaked wrappings to fall on the floor. The clothing he wore over his emaciated body bunched here and there with hidden knots, and she knew that there were other seeping, unclosing wounds on the rest of his body.
She’d seen him every day, staring at her, watching. He would be in the hallways outside her door, on the street outside the tenement, walking behind her. He’d never spoken, but his rancor was obvious. “Stigmata,” Gimli had told her when she’d confessed his fear of him the first day. “That’s his name. Bleeds all the fucking time. Have some goddamn compassion. Stig’s no trouble to anyone.”
Yet Stigmata’s sallow, drawn stare frightened her. He was always there, always scowling when she met his gaze. He was a joker, that was enough. One of Satan’s children, devilmarked by the wild card. “Get out,” Misha told him again.
“It’s my room,” he insisted like a petulant child. He shuffled his feet nervously.
“You are mistaken. I paid for it.”
“It was mine first. I’ve always lived here, ever since—” His lips tightened. He drew his right hand into a fist; the sopping bandages rained scarlet as he brandished it before her. His voice was a thin screech. “Ever since this. Came here the night I got the wild card. Nine years ago, and they kick me out ’cause I don’t pay the last couple months. I told em I was gonna pay, but they wouldn’t wait. They’ll take nat money instead.”
“The room’s mine,” Misha repeated.
“You got my things. I left everything here.”
“The owner took them, not me they’re locked in the basement.”
Stigmata’s face twisted. He spat out the words as if they burned his tongue, almost screaming them. “He’s a nat. You’re a nat. You’re not wanted here. We hate you.”
His accusations caused Misha’s masked frustrations to boil over. A cold fury claimed her, and she drew herself up, pointing at the joker. “You’re the outcasts,” she shouted back at Stigmata, at Jokertown itself. She might have been back in Syria, lecturing the jokers begging at the gates of Damascus. “God hates you. Repent of your sins and maybe you’ll be forgiven. But don’t waste your poison on me.”
In the midst of her tirade there was suddenly a whirling, familiar disorientation. “No,” Misha cried against the onslaught of the vision, and then, because she knew there was no escape from hikma, divine wisdom: “In sha’Allah.” Allah would come as He wished, when He wished.
The room and Stigmata wavered in her sight. Allah’s hand touched her. Her eyes became His. A waking nightmare burst upon her, melting away the gritty reality of Jokertown, her filthy room, and Stigmata’s threats.
She was in Badiyat Ash-sham again, the desert. She stood in her brother’s mosque.
The Nur al-Allah stood in front of her, the emerald glow of his skin lost beneath impossibly thick streams of blood that trailed down the front of his djellaba. His trembling hand pointed at her accusingly; his chin lifted to show the gaping, puckered, bone-white edges of the wound across his throat. He tried to speak, and his voice, which had once been compelling and resonant, was now all gravel and dust, choked. She could understand nothing but the hatred in his eyes. Misha gasped under that baleful, accusing gaze.
“It wasn’t me!” she sobbed, falling to her knees before him in supplication. “Satan’s hand moved mine. He used my hatred and my jealousy. Please ...”
She tried to explain her innocence to her brother, but when she looked up, it was no longer Nur al-Allah standing before her but Hartmann.
And he laughed.
“I’m the beast who rips away the veils of the mind,” he said. His hand lashed out, clawing for her as she recoiled belatedly. Like talons his nails dug into her eyesockets, slashed the soft skin of her face. Blinded, she screamed, her head arced back in torment, writhing but unable to get away from Hartmann as his fingers tore and gouged.
“We don’t wear veils here. We don’t wear masks. Let me show the truth underneath. Let me show you the color of the joker below,” He clenched harder, ripping and tearing. Ribbons of flesh peeled away as he clawed at her, and she felt hot blood pouring down her ruined features. She moaned, sobbing, her hands trying to beat him away as he raked again and again, shearing flesh from muscle and muscle from bone.
“Your face will be naked,” Hartmann said. “And they will run in horror from you. Look, look at the colors inside your head-you’re just a joker, a sinner like the rest. I car, see your mind, I can taste it. You’re the same as the rest. You’re the same.”
Through the streaming blood she looked up. Though the apparition was still Hartmann, he now had the face of a young man, and the whine of a thousand angry wasps seemed to surround him. Yet in the midst of her torment, Misha felt a comforting hand on her shoulder and turned to see Sara Morgenstern beside her. “I’m sorry,” Sara told her. “It’s my fault. Let me send him away.”
And then Allah’s vision withdrew, leaving her gasping on the floor. Trembling, sweating, she raised her hands to her face. Marveling, she touched the unbroken flesh there.
Stigmata stared at the woman sobbing on the splintery pine boards.
“You ain’t no damn nat,” he said, and his voice was touched with a gruding sympathy. “You’re just one of us.” He sighed. Slow droplets of blood welled, fell. “It’s still my room and I want it,” he added, but the bitter edge was gone from his voice. “I’ll wait. I’ll wait.”
He walked softly to the door. “One of us,” he said again, shaking his gory, swaddled head, and went out.
“So all the rumors are true. You are back again.”
The voice came from behind him, in the shadow of an overflowing trash container. Gimli whirled, scowling. His feet kicked up oil-filmed water pooled in the alleyway, the remnants of the afternoon’s showers. “Who the fuck are you?” The dwarfs left hand was fisted at his side; his right stayed very close to the open flap of the windbreaker he wore despite the warm night, where the weight of a silenced .38 hung. “You’ve got about two seconds before you become gossip yourself.”
“Well, and as temperamental as ever, aren’t we?” It was a young man’s voice, Gimli decided. Streetlight flowed over a figure beside the trash. “It’s me, Gimli,” the man said. “Croyd. Move that damn hand from the gun. I ain’t no cop.”
“Croyd?” Gimli squinted. He relaxed slightly, though his squat, muscular body stayed low. “Your ace sure screwed up this time. I’ve never seen you look like that.”
The man chuckled without mirth. His face and arms were a shocking porcelain white, his pupils dull pink; the tousled dark brown hair only accentuated the pallor of the skin. “Shit, yeah. Gotta stay out of the sun, but then I’ve always been a night person. Dyed the hair and started wearing sunglasses, but I lost the shades. Still got the strength this time, though. It’s a damn good thing too,” he added reflectively.
Gimli waited. If this guy was Croyd, fine; if he wasn’t, Gimli didn’t intend to give him a chance to do anything. Being in New York again made him edgy. Polyakov wouldn’t meet with them until Monday, when Hartmann was rumored to be making his bid; the fucking Arab woman was a jokerhater who spouted religious nonsense half the time and had ‘visions’ the other; his old JJS people had lost their fire while he’d been in Europe and Russia; and with the Shadow Fist/Mafia wars and Barnett’s rabble-rousing, no one felt safe.
Yet staying cooped up in the warehouse made him edgy.
He had told himself that taking a brief night walk would take some of the edge off.
Another fucking bad idea.
“Gimli was seeing enemies in every shadow-that was the only way to stay alive and free. It was bad enough that Hartmann had the federal and state authorities digging up the old JJS network and hassling everyone. With the jokernat underground skirmishes, it seemed like every fucking cop in New York was in Jokertown and Gimli was too recognizable to feel comfortable on the streets, no matter what precautions he took. He wasn’t going to pretend that Hartmann wouldn’t prefer Gimli was shot “resisting arrest, than jailed-he wasn’t that damned stupid.
Better to be cautious. Better to be furtive. Better to make a mistake and leave someone else dead than to be noticed. “Look, Croyd, I’m just a little paranoid at the moment. I’m real uneasy about people I don’t know seeing me ...”
Croyd took a step closer. Crooked teeth snagged his lower lip-the albino’s gums were a startling bright red. Gimli was reminded of a B-movie zombie. “You got any speed, Gimli? Your connections were always good.”
“I’ve been away. Things change.”
“No speed? Shit.”
Gimli shook his head. That, at least, sounded like Croyd. The man frowned, shuffling from foot to foot.
“So it goes,” he said. “I’ve got other sources, though they’re drying up or dying on me. Listen, the talk on the streets is that the JJS is reforming. Let me give you some free advice. After Berlin, you should give up on Hartmann; he’s a good guy, anyway, no matter what you think. Take out that s.o.b. Barnett instead. I might have considered it myself, if I’d woken up with the right power. Everyone in Jokertown’d thank you for it.”
“I’ll think about it.”
The albino laughed again, the same dry cackle. “You don’t believe it’s me, do you?”
Gimli shrugged. His hand moved significantly back toward the windbreaker; he saw the man watching the movement carefully. “You’re still alive, aren’t you? That’s something.”
The albino who might or might not be Croyd sidled closer until Gimli could smell his breath. “Yeah,” he said. “And maybe next time around I’ll just pound you a lot closer to the pavement than you already are. Croyd remembers things, Miller.”
Croyd coughed, sniffed, and wiped his nose on his sleeve. With a bloodshot, overdone leer, he moved off. Gimli watched him, wondering if he was making a mistake. If he wasn’t Croyd ...
He let him go. Gimli waited in the alley until he’d turned the corner back onto the street and then headed off again, taking a few extra turns just to see if he was being followed.
In time he came to the back door of a dilapidated warehouse near the East River.
Gimli could see Video on the roof. He waved to her and nodded to Shroud, who materialized from the shadows of the entrance. Gimli grimaced. He could hear the argument inside the frame building-twined voices snarling like a rumbling thunderstorm heard just over the horizon. “Fuck, not again,” he muttered.
Shroud adjusted the strap of his machine pistol and shrugged. “We need some entertainment,” he said. “It’s almost as good as Berlin.”
Gimli shoved open the door. Muffled words coalesced into intelligibility.
File was shouting at Misha, who stood with arms folded and a righteous expression on her face as Peanut tried to hold back the rasp-skinned joker. File waved a fist at Misha, shoving at Peanut. “... your self-centered, blind fanaticism! You and the Nur are just Barnetts in Arabian drag. You have the identical hatred in your pompous souls. Let me show you hatred, bitch! Let me show you what it feels like.”
As the rusty hinges of the door screeched, Peanut glanced over, his arms still wrapped around File. Peanut was scraped from the effort of holding the joker, his forearms scored with long, bloody scratches. A nat’s skin would have been scoured entirely off, but Peanut’s chitinous flesh was more durable. “Gimli,” he said pleadingly.
File spun in Peanut’s grip, tearing a pained screech from Peanut. He pointed at Misha as he glanced at the dwarf. “Get rid of her!” he shouted. “ I won’t put up with this crap much longer.” Twisting, he tore himself away from Peanut, who let him go this time.
“Just what the fuck’s going on?” Gimli slammed the door shut behind him and glared. “I could hear you people halfway down the alley.”
“I won’t tolerate any more insults.” File stalked toward Misha threateningly, and Gimli planted himself between the two.
“She said Father Squid’s going to hell when he dies,” Peanut added, dabbing at his cuts with a handkerchief. “ I told File she just don’t understand, but—”
“I told the truth.” Misha sounded bewildered, as if she failed to believe their lack of comprehension. Her head shook, her hands were spread wide as if to absolve herself of guilt. “God showed His displeasure with the priest when He made him a joker. Yes, this Father Squid might be sent to hell, but Allah is infinitely merciful.”
“See?” Peanut smiled at File tentatively. “It’s okay, huh?”
“Yeah, and I’m a joker and Gimli and you are jokers and we’re all being punished too. Right? Well, that’s bullshit and I’m not gonna listen to it. Screw you, cunt.” File flipped a finger in Misha’s direction and spun on the balls of his feet. The slamming of the door reverberated for several seconds after his exit.
Gimli looked over his shoulder at Misha. To him she was quite remarkably good-looking out of the frigging black funeral dress, but she never seemed at ease in Western clothing. Her mysticism and bluntness unsettled his people. File, Shroud, Marigold, and Video absolutely loathed her, while Peanut—oddly enough-seemed utterly infatuated even though she gave the half-witted joker nothing but scorn.
Gimli had already decided he hated her. He regretted the impulse that had led him to meet with her after the Berlin fiasco; he wished he’d never steered her toward Polyakov. If it weren’t for the evidence she claimed to have against Hartmann and the fact that they were still waiting for the Russian’s information, the justice Department would have received an anonymous tip. He’d like to see what fucking Hartmann would have them do with her.
She was a damn ace. Aces only cared about themselves. Aces were worse than nats.
“You got remarkable tact, you know that?” he said.
“He asked. I only told him what Allah told me. How can truth be wrong?”
“You want to live very much longer in Jokertown, you’d better learn when to keep your fucking mouth shut. And that is the truth.”
“I’m not afraid to be a martyr for Allah,” she answered haughtily, her accent blurring the hard consonants. “ I would welcome it. I’m tired of this waiting; I would rather attack the beast Hartmann openly.”
“Hartmann’s done a lot for the jokers ...” Peanut began, but Gimli cut him off.
“It’ll be soon enough. I talked to Jube tonight, and the word is Hartmann’s going to speak at the rally in Roosevelt Park on Monday. Everyone thinks he’ll make his announcement then. Polyakov said he’d contact us as soon as Hartmann made things official. We’ll move then.”
“We must contact Sara Morgenstern. The visions—”
“—don’t mean anything,” Gimli interrupted. “We’ll make plans when Polyakov’s finally here.”
“I will go to this park, then. I want to see Hartmann again. I want to hear him.” Her face was dark and savage, almost comically fierce.
“You’ll stay away, goddammit,” Gimli said loudly. “With all the shit going down in this city, the place’ll be crawling with security.”
She stared at him, and her gaze was more intense then he had thought it could be. He blinked. “You are not my father or my brother,” she told him as if speaking to a slow child. “You are not my husband, you are not the Nur. You can’t order me as you do the others.”
Gimli could feel a blind, useless rage coming. He forced it down. Not much longer. Only a few more days. He stared back at her, each reading the other’s dislike.
“Hartmann might make a good president ...” Peanut’s voice was almost a whisper as he glanced from one to the other. They ignored him. The scratches on his arms oozed blood.
“I hate this place,” Misha said. “ I look forward to leaving.” She shuddered, breaking eye contact with Gimli. “Yeah, there’s a lot of fucking people about here who feel the same way.” Misha’s eyes narrowed at that; Gimli smiled innocently.
“A few more days. Be patient,” Gimli continued. And after that, all bets are off. I’ll let File and the rest do whatever they damn well please with you.
“Until then, keep your goddamn opinions to yourself,” he added.
Misha, who had once been known as Kahina, remembered the sermons. Her brother, Nur al-Allah, had been at his most eloquent describing the torment of the afterlife. His compelling, resonant voice hammered the faithful from the minbar while noontime heat swirled in the mosque of Badiyat Ashsham, and it had seemed that the pits of hell gaped open before them.
Nur al-Allah’s hell had been full of capering, loathsome jokers, those sinners Allah had cursed with the affliction of the wild card virus. They were an earthly image of the eternal torment that awaited all sinners: the vile underworld was slathered with twisted bodies that were a mockery of the human form; slick with puss oozing from scabrous faces; full of the stench of hatred and revulsion and sin.
The Nur had not known, but Misha did: Hell was New York. Hell was Jokertown. Hell was Roosevelt Park on a June afternoon. And the Great Satan himself capered there, before all his adoring followers: Hartmann, the devil with strings lacing his fingertips, the phantom who haunted her waking dreams. The one who had with Misha’s own hands destroyed her brother’s voice.
She’d seen the papers, the headlines praising Hartmann and extolling his coolness in crisis, his compassion, his work to end the sufferings of jokers. She knew that the thousands in the park were there to see him, and she knew what they hoped he would say. She knew that most considered Hartmann to be the one voice of sanity against the pious, hate-filled ravings of Leo Barnett and the others like him.
Yet Allah’s dreams had shown her the real Hartmann, and Allah had placed in her very hands the gift that would bring him down. For just a moment the reality of the gathering in the park shimmered and threatened to give way to the nightmare again, and Misha nearly cried out.
“You okay? You shivered.”
Peanut touched her on the arm, and Misha felt herself draw away involuntarily from contact with his hornlike, inflexible fingers. She saw hurt in his eyes, nearly lost in the scaly shell of his face.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” she told him. “Gimli said—”
“It’s all right, Misha,” he whispered. The joker could barely move his lips; the voice was a poor ventriloquist’s rasp. “ I hate the way I look too. A lot of us do-like Stigmata, y’know. I understand.”
Misha turned from the guilty pain that the sympathy in his ruined voice gave her. Her hands ached to pull the veils over her face and hide herself from Peanut. But the chador and veils were locked away in the trunk in her room. Her hair was unbound and loose around her shoulders.
“When you are in New York, you can’t wear black, not on a summer day. They’ll already suspect that you’re there. If you must go out, at least take care that you blend in if you intend to stay free. Be glad you can at least go walking in daylight; Gimli won’t dare show his face at all.” Polyakov had told her that before she’d left Europe. It seemed small consolation.
Here in Roosevelt Park, despite what Gimli had said the night before, there was no chance she would be conspicuous. The place was packed and chaotic. Jokertown had spilled its vibrant, strange life onto the grass. It was ‘76 again, the masks of Jokertown placed gleefully aside. They walked unashamed of Allah’s curse, flaunting the visible signs of their sins, mixing unchecked with the one they called nats. They stood shoulder to misshapen shoulder around the stage set at the north end of the park closest to Jokertown, cheering the speakers who preached solidarity and friendship. Misha listened, she watched, and she shivered again, as if the afternoon heat was a chimera, a dream-phantom like the rest.
“You really hate jokers, don’t you?” Peanut whispered as they moved closer to the stage. The grass was torn and muddy under their feet, littered with newspapers and political tracts. It was another thing she detested about this hell; it was always crowded, always filthy. “Shroud, he told me what your brother preached. The Nur don’t sound awful different from Barnett.”
“We ... the Qur’an teaches that God directly affects the world. He rewards the good and punishes the wicked. I don’t find that horrible. Do you believe in God?”
“Sure. But God don’t punish people by giving them no damn virus.”
Kahina nodded, her dark eyes solemn. “Then yours is either an incredibly cruel God, who would inflict a life of pain and suffering on so many innocents; or a poor, weak one who cannot stop such a thing from happening. Either way, how can you worship such a deity?”
The sharp rebuttal confused Peanut-in the days since she’d been here, Misha had found the joker to be friendly but extraordinarily simple. He tried to shrug, his whole upper body lifting, and tears welled in his eyes. “It ain’t our fault—” he began.
His pain touched Misha, stopping her even as she started to interrupt. Again she wished for the veil to hide her empathy. Haven’t you listened to what Tachyon and the others have hinted at between the lines? she wanted to rage at him. Don’t you see what they don’t dare say, that the virus amplifies your own foibles and weaknesses, that it only takes what it finds inside the infected person? “I’m sorry,” she breathed. “I’m very sorry, Peanut.” She reached out and brushed her shoulder with her hand; she hoped he didn’t notice how the fingers trembled, how fleeting the touch was. “Forget what I said. My brother was cruel and harsh; sometimes I’m too much like him.”
Peanut sniffed. A smile dawned on his sharp-edged face. “S’okay, Misha,” he said, and the instant forgiveness in his voice hurt more than the rest. He glanced at the stage, and the valleys deepened in his craggy skin. “Look, there’s Hartmann. I don’t know why you and Gimli got such a beef against him. He’s the only one who helps ...”
Peanut’s observation trailed off at that moment the packed masses around them shoved fists toward the sky and cheered. And Satan strode onto the stage.
Misha recognized some of those around him: Dr. Tachyon, dressed in outrageous colors; Hiram Worchester, rotund and bloated; the one called Carnifex, staring at the crowd so that she wanted to hide herself. A woman stood beside the senator, but it wasn’t Sara, who had also been in her dreams so often, with whom she’d talked in Damascus-Ellen, his wife, then.
Hartmann shook his head, grinning helplessly at the adulation that swept through the crowd. He raised his hands, and the cheering redoubled, a roaring crowd-voice echoing from the skyscrapers to the west. A chant began somewhere near the stage, rippling back until the entire park resonated. “Hartmann! Hartmann!” they shouted to the stage. “Hartmann! Hartmann!”
He smiled then, his head still shaking as if in disbelief, and then he stepped to the battery of microphones. His voice was deep and plain and full of caring for those before him. That voice reminded Misha of her brother’s; when he spoke, the very sound was truth. “You people are wonderful,” he said.
They howled then, a hurricane of sound that nearly deafened Misha. The jokers pressed around the stage, Misha and Peanut thrust forward helplessly in the tidal flow. The cheering and chanting went on for a long minute before Hartmann raised his hands again and a restless, anticipatory hush came over the crowd.
“I’m not going to stand up here and feed you the lines you’ve come to expect of politicians like me,” he said at last. “I’ve been a long time away and what I’ve seen of the world has, frankly, made me feel very frightened. I’m especially frightened when I return and find that same bigotry, that same intolerance, that same inhumanity here. It’s time to quit playing politics and taking a safe, polite course. These aren’t safe, polite times; these are dangerous times.”
He paused, taking a breath that shuddered in the sound system. Almost exactly eleven years ago, I stood in the grass of Roosevelt Park and made a “political mistake.’ I’ve thought about that day many times in the past years, and I swear to God that I’ve yet to understand why I should feel sorry for it. What I saw before me on that day was senseless, raw violence. I saw hatred and prejudice boiling over, and I lost my temper. I. Got. Mad:”
Hartmann shouted the last words, and the jokers shouted back to him in affirmation. He waited until they had settled into silence again, and this time his voice was dark and sad. “There are other masks than those which Jokertown has made famous. There is a mask which hides a greater ugliness than anything the wild card might produce. Behind that mask is an infection that’s all too human, and I have heard its voice in the tenements of Rio, in the kraals of South Africa, in the deserts of Syria, in Asia and Europe and America. Its voice is rich and confident and soothing, and it tells those who hate that they are right to hate. It preaches that anyone who is different is also less. Maybe they’re black, maybe they’re Jewish or Hindu, or maybe they’re just jokers.”
With the emphasis on the last word the crowd-beast howled again, a wall of anguish that made Misha shiver. His words echoed the visions uncomfortably. She could almost feel his fingernails clawing at her face. Misha looked to her right and saw that Peanut was craning forward with the rest, his mouth open in a cry of agreement.
“I can’t let that happen,” Hartmann continued, and now his voice was louder, faster, rising with the emotions of the audience. “ I can’t simply watch, not when I see that there’s more I can do. I’ve seen too much. I’ve listened to that insidious hatred, and I can no longer abide its voice. I find myself becoming angry all over again. I want to rip the mask off and expose the true ugliness behind, the ugliness of hatred. The state of this nation and the world frightens me, and there’s only one way that I can do something to ease that feeling.” He paused again, and this time waited until the entire park seemed to be holding its collective breath. Misha shuddered. Allah’s dream. He speaks Allah’s dream.
“Effective today, I have resigned my seat in the Senate and my position as chairman of SCARE. I’ve done that to give full attention to a new task, one that will need your help as well. I am now announcing my intention to be the Democratic candidate for president in 1988.”
His last words were lost, buried under the titanic clamor of screaming applause. Misha could no longer see Hartmann, lost in the rippling sea of arms and banners. She had not thought that anything could be so loud. The acclamation deafened her, made her clap hands to ears. The chant of Hartmann! Hartmann! began once more, joker fists pumping in time with the beat.
Hartmann! Hartmann!
Hell was noisy and chaotic, and her own hatred was lost in the joyous celebration. Beside her, Peanut chanted with the rest, and she looked at him with revulsion and despair.
He is so strong, Allah, stronger than the Nur. Show me that this is the right path. Tell me that my faith is to be rewarded.
But there was no answering dream. There was only the beast-voice of the jokers and Satan basking in their praise. At least now it would begin. Tonight. Tonight they would meet and decide how to best destroy the devil.
Polyakov was the last one to arrive at the warehouse.
That pissed Gimli off. It was bad enough that he wasn’t sure he could trust any of the old New York JJS organization. It was enough that he’d been dealing with Misha for nearly two weeks now, putting up with her contempt for jokers. It was enough that Hartmann’s Justice Department aces were prowling all over Jokertown after him; that Barnett’s rabblerousing had made any joker fair game for the nat gangs; that the continuing battles between the underworld organizations had made the streets a gamble for all.
On top of everything else, he could feel a cold coming on. Gimli sneezed and blew his nose into a large red handkerchief.
It was shit time in Jokertown.
Polyakov’s arrival only made Gimli’s temper more vile. The Russian stamped into the place without a knock, throwing the door back loudly. “The joker on the roof is standing against streetlight,” he proclaimed loudly. “Any fool can see her. What if I’d been police? You would all be under arrest or dead. Amateurs!” Dilettante!
Gimli wiped his bulbous, tender nostrils and glanced at the handkerchief. “The joker on the roofs Video. She threw an image of you in the room to let us know you were on the way-she needs the light to project. Peanut and File would have taken you out at the door if I hadn’t recognized you.” Gimli stuffed the damp handkerchief back in his pocket and pounded on the wall twice with his fist. “Video,” he shouted to the ceiling. “Give our guest a replay, huh?”
In the center of the warehouse the air shimmered and went dark. For a moment they were all looking at the alleyway outside the warehouse, where a portly man stood in shadow. The darkness coalesced, pulsed, and they were seeing a head-and-shoulders view of the man: Polyakov, grimacing as he looked toward Video. Then the image faded to Gimli’s laughter.
“And you never fucking saw Shroud behind you, did you?” he said.
A slender figure materialized out of the shadow behind Polyakov. He poked a forefinger in Polyakov’s back. “Bang,” Shroud whispered. “You’re dead. Just like a Russian joker.” Alongside the door Peanut and File grinned.
Gimli had to admit that Polyakov took it gracefully enough for a nat. The burly man just nodded without looking at Shroud at all. “My apologies. You obviously know your people better than L”
“Yeah. Don’t I.” Gimli sniffed; his sinuses were dripping like an old faucet. He waved to Shroud. “Make sure nobody else gets in-there’s no more invitations.” The thin, dark joker nodded. “Dead meat time,” Shroud said-another whisper. A grin came from the vaporous form, and then he dissolved into shadow.
“We have aces with us, then,” Polyakov said.
Gimli laughed without amusement. “Get Video near an electrical device and her nervous system overloads. Put her in front of a damn television and her heart will go into arrhythmia. Too close and she’ll die. And Shroud loses substance every day, like he’s evaporating. Another year and he’ll be dead or permanently immaterial. Aces, shit, Polyakovthey’re jokers, just like the rest. You know, the ones you cull out in the Russian labs.”
Polyakov merely grunted at the insult; Gimli felt disappointed. The man brushed his fingers through stubbly gray hair and nodded. “Russia had made her mistakes, as has America. There are many things I wish had never happened, but we’re here to change what we can, are we not?” He fixed Gimli with an unblinking stare. “The Syrian ace has arrived?”
“I’m here.” Misha came from the rear of the warehouse. Gimli saw her glance sharply at Peanut and File. Her attitude was sour and condescending. She walked as if she expected to be catered to. Gimli might find her Arabian darkness extremely attractive, but-except in late-night fantasies-he didn’t delude himself that anything might come of it. He knew what he looked like: “a warty, noxious little toadstool feeding on the decaying log of ego,-Wilde’s phrase.”
Gimli was a—joker; that was the bottom line for the bitch. Misha had made certain that Gimli knew he was tolerated only to gain revenge on Hartmann. She didn’t see him as a person at all; he was just a tool, something to use because nothing else would do. The realization gigged him every time he looked at her. Just seeing the woman was enough to make him want to shout at her.
I’ll make you a fucking tool of my own one day.
“I’m ready to begin. The visions,”—she smiled, making Gimli scowl in response “have been optimistic today.” Gimli scoffed. “Your goddamn dreams ain’t gonna worry the senator, are they?”
Misha whirled around, eyes flaring. “You mock Allah’s gift. Maybe your scorn is why He made you a squashed mockery of a man.”
That was enough to shatter what little restraint he had. A quick, molten rage filled Gimli. “You fucking bitch!” he screeched. The dwarfs stance widened on muscular legs, his barrel chest expanded. A finger stabbed from the fist he cocked at her. “I won’t take that shit, not from you, not from anyone!”
“STOP THIS!” The shout came from Polyakov as Gimli took a step toward Misha. The roar brought Gimli’s head around; the movement made his stuffy head throb. “Amateurs!” Polyakov spat out. “This is the stupidity that Molniya said destroyed you in Berlin, Tom Miller. I believe him now. This petty bickering must end. We have a common purpose; focus your anger on that.”
“Pretty speeches don’t mean shit,” Gimli scoffed, but he stopped. The fist lowered, the fingers loosened. “We’re a damn unlikely conspiracy, ain’t we?-a joker, an ace, and a nat. Maybe this was a mistake, huh? I’m not so certain anymore that we share much of a common purpose.” He glared at Misha.
Polyakov shrugged. “None of us want Hartmann to gain political power. We have our separate reasons, but on this we agree. I would not care to see an ace with unknown powers as president of the nation that opposes my own. I know the Kahina would like to exact revenge for her brother. You have a long-standing grudge of your own against the senator. And as little as you may care for this woman, she has brought hard evidence against Hartmann.”
“So she claims. We ain’t seen it yet, have we?” Polyakov grunted. “Everything else is circumstantial: hearsay and speculations. So let us begin. I, for one, would like to see Misha’s ‘gift.”‘
“Let’s talk reality first. Then we can indulge in religious fantasies,” Gimli argued. He could feel control of the meeting slipping from him; the Russian had presence, charisma. Already the others were watching Polyakov as if he were the head of the group. Forget how lousy you’re feeling. You’ve got to watch him or he’ll take over.
“Nevertheless,” the Russian insisted.
Gimli cocked his head at Polyakov. Polyakov stared back at him blandly. Finally Gimli cleared his throat noisily and sniffed. “All right,” he grumbled. “The stage is yours, Kahina.”
When Gimli glanced at her, she gave a quick, triumphant smile. That decided Gimli. When this was over, the bill would come due for Misha’s arrogance. He’d exact the payment himself if he had to.
Misha went to the rear of the warehouse again and came back with a rolled bundle of cloth. “When the aces attacked us in the mosque, Hartmann was wounded,” she said. “His people examined him there, quickly, but they retreated immediately afterward. I”—she stopped, and a look of remembered pain darkened her face “I had already fled. My brother and Sayyid, both horribly wounded, gathered their followers and went deep in the desert. The next day a vision told me to return to the mosque. There, I was given this: It is the jacket Hartmann was wearing when he was shot.”
She unrolled her package on the cement floor.
The jacket wasn’t all that impressive-a gray-checked sports coat, dusty and bedraggled. The cloth held a faint stench of mildew. At the right shoulder a frayed hole was surrounded by an irregular splotch of brown-red, spreading as it crept down the chest. Packed inside were a sheaf of papers in a manila envelope. Misha riffled through them.
“I went to four doctors in Damascus with the jacket,” she continued. “I had them examine the bloodstains independently, and each gave me a report that said the blood had definitely come from someone infected with the wild card virus. The blood type matches Hartmann-A positive. I have verification from the man who gave it to me that this is Hartmann’s jacket-he picked it up after the fighting, thinking to keep it as a relic of the Nur.”
“A verification letter from a terrorist, and blood that could have come from fucking anyone.” Gimli snorted. “Look, all of us here might believe it’s Hartmann’s blood, but alone it’s nothing. The bastard’s got his blood test on record. You think he can’t produce another negative one with the people he knows?”
Polyakov nodded ponderously. “He can. He would.”
“Then attack him physically,” Misha said, wondering at these people. “If you don’t want my gift, kill him. I will help.” The look on her face made Gimli laugh and the laughter brought on a hacking, phlegm-filled cough. “Christ, all I need is a cold,” he muttered, then: “Awfully fucking bloodthirsty, ain’t we?”
Misha folded her arms beneath her breasts, defiant. “I’m not afraid. Are you?”
“No, goddammit. Just realistic. Look, your brother had him surrounded by guards with Uzis and he got away, didn’t he? I had the fucker tied to a chair, all of us armed, and one by one most of us left, a decision we can’t believe we made an hour later. Then Mackie Messer-who was a loaded gun with no safety anyway-goes fucking berserk and slices up everyone that’s left, yet somehow doesn’t hurt the good senator at all.” Gimli spat. “He can make people do things-that’s got to be his power. He’s got aces all around him. We ain’t gonna get to the man, not that way.”
Polyakov nodded. “Unfortunately, I must agree. Misha, you don’t know Molniya, the ace who was with Gimli in Berlin,” he said. “He could have killed Hartmann with a simple touch. I spoke to him at length. He did things there that were sloppy and senseless for a man of his loyalty and experience. His performance was utterly inconsistent with his past record. He was manipulated: part of the evidence I have is his deposition.”
File elbowed Peanut. “‘Seventy-six,” he said to Gimli. “ I remember. You talked to Hartmann when we were all ready to march. Suddenly, you were telling us to turn around and go back into the park.”
The memory was as sour now as it had been eleven years ago. Gimli had brooded on it many times. In ‘76 the JJS had been on the verge of becoming a legitimate joker voice, yet somehow he’d lost it all. The JjS and Gimli’s power had fallen apart in the aftermath of the rioting. Since Berlin, since his meeting with Misha, that brooding had taken a different turn.
Now he knew who was to blame for his failure.
“Damn right. The son-of-a-bitch. That’s why I want him taken down. With Barnett or any of the other nat politicians we know what we’re dealing with. They’re all known quantities. Hartmann’s not. And that’s why he’s more dangerous than any of the rest. You remember Aardvark, Peanut? Aardvark died in Berlin, along with a lot of others-his death and all the fucking rest are ultimately Hartmann’s fault.”
Peanut’s entire body moved as he tried to shake his head. “That ain’t right, Gimli. Really. Hartmann does work for the jokers. He got rid of the Acts, he talks nice to us, he comes to Jokertown ...”
“Yeah. And I’d do the same damn thing if I wanted to lull everyone’s suspicions. I tell you, we know where Barnett stands. We can deal with him anytime. I’m more afraid of Hartmann.”
“Then do something about him,” Misha interjected. “We have his jacket. We have your story and Polyakov’s. Take it to your press and let them remove Hartmann.”
“Because we still ain’t got shit. He’ll deny it. He’ll produce another blood test. He’ll point out that the ‘evidence’ was produced by a joker who kidnapped him in Berlin, a Russian who has connections with the KGB, and you-who says that her dreams tell her Hartmann’s an ace and who’s suffering under the lunatic delusion that she was made to attack her terrorist brother. A fucking classic example of guilt transference.”
Gimli enjoyed the flush that climbed Misha’s neck. Yeah, that one hit home, didn’t it, bitch? “We’ve circumstantial evidence, sure,” Gimli continued, “but if we bring it forward, he’ll just laugh it off and so will the press. We have to link with someone else. Let them be the front.”
“I take it you have someone in mind?” Polyakov commented. Gimli thought he heard a faint challenge in the man’s voice. “Yeah, I do,” he told Polyakov. “ I say we take what we have to Chrysalis. From what I hear, she’s awfully damn interested in Hartmann herself, and she doesn’t have any grudges. No one knows more about anything in Jokertown than Chrysalis.”
“Know one knows more about Hartmann than Sara Morgenstern.” Misha waved away Gimli’s suggestion. “Allah’s dreams have shown me her face. She is the one who will destroy Hartmann, not Chrysalis.”
“Right. She’s Hartmann’s lover. We think Hartmann’s got mind powers-so who’s he most likely to control?” The headache was slamming at Gimli’s temples now, and his head felt packed full of mucus. “We have to go to Chrysalis.”
“We don’t know that Chrysalis would have any interest in helping us. Maybe Hartmann controls her as well. My visions—”
“Your visions are crap, lady, and I’m getting fucking tired of hearing about them.”
“They are Allah’s gift.”
“They’re a gift from the wild card, and every last joker knows what’s in that package.” Gimli heard the door to the warehouse open. His gaze spun away from Misha to see Polyakov standing there. “Where the hell are you going?”
Polyakov exhaled sharply. “I’ve heard enough. I won’t be caught with fools. Go to Chrysalis or go to Morgenstern-I don’t care which. I even wish you luck; it may work. But I won’t be associated with it.”
“You’re walking?” Gimli said in disbelief.
“We have a common interest, as I’ve said. That seems to be all. You do as you like; you don’t need me for that. I will pursue this my own way. If I uncover anything of interest, I will contact you.”
“You try something on your own and you’re more likely to get caught. You’ll alert Hartmann that people are after him.” Polyakov shrugged. “If Hartmann is the threat you think he is, he already knows that.” He nodded to Gimli, to Misha, to File and Peanut. He stepped outside and closed the door softly behind himself.
Gimli could feel the gazes of the others on him. He gestured obscenely at the door. “To hell with him,” he said loudly. “We don’t need him.”
“Then I go to Sara,” Misha insisted. “She will help.” You don’t have a choice. Not now.
Gimli nodded reluctantly. “All right,” he sighed. “Peanut will get you a plane ticket to Washington. And I’ll see Chrysalis.” He touched his hand to his forehead; it felt suspiciously warm. “In the meantime, I’m going to bed.”
Gimli had told her that she must be careful that no one was watching Sara’s apartment. Misha thought the dwarf paranoid, but she waited several moments before crossing the street, watching. There was never a way to be sure Sayyid, her husband, who had been in charge of all aspects of the Nur sect’s security, would have agreed.
“No amateur will ever see a professional unless he wants to be seen,” she remembered his saying once. Thoughts of Sayyid brought back painful memories: his scornful voice, his overbearing manner, his monstrous body. She’d felt relief mingled with horror when he’d been struck down in front of her, his bones snapping like dry twigs, a low animal moaning coming from his crumpled body ....
Misha shuddered and crossed the street.
She pressed the intercom button at the front door, marveling again at the American obsession with ineffectual securitythe door was beveled glass. It would hardly stop anyone desperate to enter. The voice that answered sounded tired and cautious. “Yes? Who’s there?”
“This is Misha. Kahina. Please, I must talk with you ....” There was a long silence. Misha thought that perhaps Sara wasn’t going to answer when the intercom’s speaker gave a dry click. “You may come up,” the voice said. “Second floor. Straight ahead.”
The door buzzer shrilled. For a moment Misha hesitated, not certain what to do, then pushed the door open. She entered the air-conditioned foyer and went up the stairs. The door was cracked open; in the space between the door and jamb, an eye stared at her as she approached. It withdrew, and Misha heard a chain rattling. The door opened wider, but only enough to let her pass. “Come in,” Sara said.
Sara was thinner than Misha remembered, almost gaunt. Her face was sallow and drawn; there were pouchy dark bags under the eyes. Her hair looked as if it hadn’t been washed in days, lying limp and lusterless around her shoulders. She locked the door behind Misha, then leaned back against it.
“You look different, Kahina,” Sara said. “No chador, no veils, no bodyguards. But I remembered the voice, and your eyes.”
“We’ve both been changed,” Misha said softly, and saw pain flicker in Sara’s dark-rimmed pupils.
“I guess we have. Life’s a bitch, huh?” Sara pushed away from the door, knuckling at her eyes.
“You wrote about me, after ... after the desert. I read it. You understood me. You have a kind soul, Sara.”
“I don’t write much lately.” She went to the center of the living room. Only one lamp was on; Sara turned in dim shadow. “Listen, why don’t you sit down? I’ll get something to drink. What would you like?”
“Water.”
Sara shrugged. She went into the kitchen, came out a few minutes later with two tumblers. She handed one to Misha; Misha could smell alcohol in the other. Sara sat on the couch across from Misha and took a long swallow. “I’ve never been more frightened than the day in the desert,” she said. “ I thought your brother—” She hesitated, glancing at Misha over the rim of the glass. “ I thought he was utterly mad. I knew we were all going to die. And then ...” She took a long sip.
“Then I cut his throat,” Misha finished. The words hurt; they always did. Neither one of them looked at the other. Misha put her tumbler on the table beside the couch. The chiming of ice against glass seemed impossibly loud.
“That must have been a very hard decision.”
“Harder than you could believe,” Misha answered. “The Nur was-and still is-Allah’s prophet. He is my brother. He is the person my husband followed. I love him for Allah, for my family, for my husband. You’ve never been a woman in my society; you don’t know the culture. You can’t see the centuries of conditioning. What I did was impossible. I would rather have cut off my hand than allow it to do that.”
“Yet you did.”
“I don’t think so,” Misha said softly. “I don’t think you believe it, either.”
Sara’s face was in darkness, haloed by backlit hair. Misha could see only the gleam of her eyes, the shimmer of water on her lips as she raised her glass again. “Kahina’s dreams again?” Sara mocked, but Misha could hear the words tremble. “ I came to you in Damascus because of Allah’s visions.”
“I remember.”
“Then you remember that in that vision Allah told me you and the senator were lovers. You remember that I saw a knife, and Sayyid struggling to take it from me. You remember that I saw how Hartmann had taken your distrust and transformed it, and how he would take my feelings and use them against me.”
“You said lots of things,” Sara protested. She huddled back deeper in the couch, hugging her knees to her chest. “It was all symbols and odd images. It could have meant anything.”
“The dwarf was in that vision, too,” Misha insisted. “You must remember-I told you. The dwarf was Gimli, in Berlin. Hartmann did the same thing there.”
Sara’s breath was harsh. “Berlin—” she breathed.’ Then: “It’s all coincidence. Gregg’s a compassionate and warm man. I know that, better than you or anyone. I’ve seen him. I’ve been with him.”
“Is it coincidence? We both know what he is. He is an ace, a hidden one.”
“And I tell you that’s impossible. There’s a blood test. And even if it were true, how does that change things? He’s still working for the rights and dignity of all people unlike Barnett or your brother or terrorists like the JJS. You’ve given me nothing but innuendo against Gregg.”
“Allah’s dreams—”
“They’re not Allah’s dreams,” Sara interrupted angrily. “It’s just the damned wild card. Flashes of precognition. There are half a dozen aces with the same ability. You see glimpses of the possible futures, that’s all: useless little previews that have nothing to do with any god.”
Sara’s voice had risen. Misha could see her hand trembling as she took another drink. “What did you think he’d done, Sara?” she asked. “Why did you once hate him?”
Misha had thought that Sara might deny it; she didn’t. “I was wrong. I thought ... I thought he might have killed my sister. There were coincidences, yes, but I was wrong, Misha.”
“Yet I can see that you’re frightened because you might have been right, because what I’m saying might be the truth. My dreams tell me-they tell me you’ve been wondering since Berlin. They tell me you’re frightened because you remember one other thing I told you in Damascus: that what he did to me, he would also do to you. Don’t you notice how your feelings for him change when he’s with you, and doesn’t that also make you wonder?”
“Damn you!” Sara shouted. She flung the tumbler aside.
It thudded against the wall as she rose to her feet. “You have no right!”
“I have proof.” Misha spoke softly into Sara’s rage. She looked calmly upward into the woman’s glare.
“Dreams,” Sara spat.
“More than dreams. At the mosque, during the fighting, the senator was shot. I have his jacket. I had the blood analyzed. The infection is thereyour wild card virus.”
Sara shook her head wildly. “No. That’s what you want the tests to show.”
“Or Hartmann had his own blood test falsified. That would be easy for him, wouldn’t it?” Misha persisted. The wild agony in Sara tore at Misha, yet she persisted. Sara was the key-the visions all said that she was. “And it would mean that perhaps you were right about your sister. It would explain what happened with me. It would explain what happened in Berlin. It would explain everything, all the questions you’ve had.”
“Then go to the press with this proof.”
“I am. Right now.”
Sara’s head swayed back and forth in dogged refusal. “It’s not enough.”
“Maybe not by itself. We need all that you can tell us. You must know more—other strange incidents, other deaths ...” Sara was still shaking her head, but her shoulders slumped and the anger had drained away. She turned from Misha. “I can’t trust you,” she said. “Please. Just go away.”
“Look at me, Sara. We’re sisters in this. We’ve both been hurt, and I want justice for that, as you want justice for your sister. We cry and bleed and there’s no healing for us until we know. Sara, I know how we can mix love and hate. We’re related in that strange, awful way. We’ve both allowed love to blind us. I love my brother, but I also hate what he’s done. You love Hartmann, and yet here’s a darker Hartmann underneath. You can’t move against him because to do so would prove that giving yourself was a mistake, because when he’s here all you can think about is the Hartmann you love. You’d have to admit that you were wrong. You’d have to admit that you let yourself love someone who was using you. So you wait.”
There was no answer. Misha sighed and nodded. She couldn’t say any more, not when each word tore a visible wound in Sara. She moved toward the door, touching Sara gently on the back as she passed. Misha could feel Sara’s shoulders moving with silent tears. Misha’s hand was on the knob when Sara spoke behind her, her voice choked.
“You swear it’s his jacket? You have it?”
Misha kept her hand on the knob, not daring to turn, not allowing herself to feel hope. “Yes.”
“Do you trust Tachyon?”
“The alien? I don’t know him. Gimli doesn’t seem to like him. But I will trust him if you do.”
“I have to be in New York later this week. Meet me in front of the Jokertown Clinic Thursday evening at six-thirty. Bring the jacket. We’ll have Tachyon examine it, and then we’ll see. We’ll see, that’s all. Is it enough?”
Misha almost gasped with the relief. She wanted to laugh, wanted to hug Sara and cry with her. But she only nodded. “I’ll be there. I promise you, Sara. I want the truth, that’s all.”
“And if Tachyon says it proves nothing?”
“Then I’ll learn to accept the guilt for what I did myself,” Misha started to turn the knob, stopped. “If I’m not there, know that it’s because he stopped me. You’ll have to decide what to do then.”
“Which gives you a convenient out,” Sara said derisively. “All you have to do is not show.”
“You don’t believe that. Do you?” Silence.
Misha turned the knob and went out.
Chrysalis swung open the door to her office. She paid very little attention to the dwarf who sat in her chair, his bare feet propped up on her desk. She shut the door-the sounds of another busy night at the Crystal Palace dropped to a distant tidal soughing. “Good evening, Gimli.”
Gimli was feeling rotten. The lack of surprise in Chrysalis’s startling eyes only made him feel worse. “ I should learn that you’re never caught off guard.”
She gave him a tight-lipped smile that floated over a webbing of muscles and tendons. “I’ve known you were back for weeks. That’s old news. So how’s your cold?”
Gimli sniffed, a long, wet inhalation. Another chill rattled down his spine like a tray of ice cubes. “Shitty. I feel like hell. I’ve had a fever I haven t been able to kick for two days now. And I’ve evidently got somebody in my. organization who can’t keep his or her mouth shut.” He gave her a rueful grimace.
“You wouldn’t get colds if you’d wear shoes. You brought me a package, too.”
“Fuck,” Gimli spat out. He swung his legs down and hopped from the chair with a grimace. The sudden movement made him dizzy, and he steadied himself against the desk with a hand. “I might as well have come in the front door. Why don’t we just skip the conversation entirely and you just give me an answer?”
“I really don’t know the question yet, for certain.” Her laugh was short and dry. “There are some limits after all, and I’ve been concerned about more immediate things than politics recently. It’s not safe out there for any joker, not just you. But I can make an educated guess,” Chrysalis continued. “I’d say that your visit concerns Senator Hartmann.”
Gimli snorted. “Shit, after the fuckup in Berlin that doesn’t take much of a guess.”
“You’re the one who’s impressed by what I know, not me. You’re the one who has to hole up near the East River so the feds don’t snatch him.”
“I’ve got a big goddamn leak.” He shook his head. Gimli lurched around the side of the desk and hauled himself into her chair again. He closed his eyes for a second. When you get back, you can go to bed again. Maybe this time when you wake up it’ll be gone. “God, I do feel like crap.”
“Nothing infectious, I hope.”
“We’ve both already had the worst fucking infection we’re ever like to get.” Gimli glanced at Chrysalis with a sidelong, bloodshot stare. “And speaking of which, I suppose you already know that our Senator Hartmann’s a goddamn ace?”
“Really?”
Gimli scoffed. “There are things I know too, lady. One of them is that Downs has been asking odd questions, and that you’ve been seeing a lot of each other. My guess is that you’re thinking the same thing.”
“And if I am? Even granting that you’re correct-and I’m not-why should you care about it? Maybe an ace president would be good. A lot of people feel Hartmann’s done more for the jokers than the JJS.”
Gimli shot to his feet at that, his illness forgotten. Rage eroded deep canyons in his pudgy face. “The goddamn JJS was the only organization that told the fucking nats that they can’t jerk us jokers around. We didn’t stand there holding our hats in our trunks like old kiss-ass Des. The JJS made ’em pay attention, even if we had to do it by beating them in the face. I’m not going to listen to crap about Hartmann being better than the JJS.”
“Then I suggest you leave.”
“If I do, then you don’t see the fucking package.”
He could see Chrysalis considering that, and he smiled, the anger quickly forgotten. Yeah, you’re hungry for that. Old Chrysalis’s just playing it cool. I knew she’d want to see it. And fuck Misha if she doesn’t like it.
“You’ve never been one to be free with things, Gimli. What’s the payment for the package?”
“You go public with this. You spill it with the rest of what I’ve got for you, along with anything you and Downs have dug up. We take Hartmann out of the race.”
“Why? Because he’s an ace? Or because it’s Gimli’s personal little vendetta?”
Gimli gritted his teeth and then destroyed the image with a sneeze. “Because he’s a power-hungry bastard. He’s just like the rest of the money-grubbing, self-centered bureaucrats in government, only he’s got his ace to help him. He’s dangerous.”
“You get rid of Hartmann, and the next president might be Leo Barnett.”
“Shit.” Gimli spat; Chrysalis looked at the globule on her rug in dismay. “He might get the nomination, but that’s not the presidency. Barnett’s just a nat; he can be removed if he has to be. With Barnett we at least know what to expect. Hartmann’s a fucking unknown. You don’t know what he’s got or what he’s going to do with it.”
“Like maybe make a few things right.”
“Like maybe make things worse. This ain’t for me; this is for the jokers. Look at the damn facts you prize so much. What Hartmann touches gets destroyed. He uses people. Chews ’em up and spits out the carcass when the flavor’s gone. He used me, he used the Nur’s sister, he fucked with the minds of the people around me in Berlin. He’s a goddamn bottle of nitro. God knows what else he’s done.”
He paused, waiting for her to object, but she didn’t. Gimli pulled a wad of tissues from his pocket, blew his nose, and grinned at her. “And ‘you suspect the same thing,” he continued. “I fucking know it, ’cause you wouldn’t have stood there and listened to me for this long if you thought otherwise. You want my little package because it might prove it true.”
“Proof is a nebulous thing. Look at Gary Hart. No one needed ‘proof’ with him, just a lack of denial.”
“There is proof with the wild card. In the blood. And I’ve got Hartmann’s blood.” Gimli brought out Misha’s jacket. As he spread the bloodstained cloth on Chrysalis’s desk, he gave her the story. When he’d finished, a faint flush had appeared in Chrysalis’s transparent skin, the lacework of blood vessels spreading and widening in excitement. Gimli laughed even though his head pounded from the fever.
“It’s yours, free,” he told her. A coughing fit took him, deep hacking spasms, and he waited until they’d passed, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “You know me, Chrysalis. I might do a lot of things, but I don’t lie. When I tell you that’s Hartmann’s blood, it’s the truth. But it ain’t enough, not without more. You just have to do something with it. Interested?”
She took the cloth between her fingers, touching the bloodstains tentatively. “Let me keep it,” she said. “I want a friend to run the tests-it might take a few days. If the stains are from an ace, then yes, we might have a deal.”
“I thought so,” Gimli. said. “Which means you have more on Hartmann, don’t you? Take good care of the jacket. I’ll check with you later. Right now, I’m going to go home and fucking die.”
Gimli was shaking with fever by the time he left Chrysalis. He’d ridden over in the back of File’s van but had told the joker that he’d get back himself. Fuck the risk, he’d said. I’m tired of playing the fugitive. I’ll be careful.
He let himself out the back door of the Crystal Palace into an alleyway that reeked of stale beer and rotting food. Quick nausea slammed him in the gut; leaning with one hand against the Dumpster, he heaved violently, emptying his stomach with the first wave and then retching uselessly. Afterward he felt no better. His stomach was still knotted, his muscles felt as if he had been beaten, and the fever was getting worse. “Oh, fuck,” he gasped. He spat dry-mouthed.
He wished he’d listened to File and let him wait. He pushed off the Dumpster and holding his stomach, began to walk toward the warehouse. Six damn blocks. It ain’t so far.
He’d made it four when his stomach rebelled again. This time it was far worse. There was nothing in his stomach. Gimli tried to ignore it, shuffling forward.
“Christ!” he shouted, his face twisting with surprised agony. The pain drove him to his knees; he knelt behind a row of trash cans, desperately trying to breathe between the waves of helpless retching. His insides were on fire, his head pounded, sweat soaked his clothing. He pummeled the concrete with his fists until they were torn and bloodied, trying to block the inner torment with outside pain.
It got worse. Every muscle in his body seemed to go into spasm at that moment, and Gimli bellowed, a shrill inhuman screeching. He rolled on the gound, twitching, the muscles of his body in uncontrolled rebellion-legs flailing, hands clenched, spine arched in torment. His arm snapped under the pressure of wildly contracting biceps and triceps, the jagged end tearing through skin. The bone wriggled before his eyes like a live thing, tearing the wound wider. His intestines felt as if acid had been poured on them, but somehow the pain seemed to be receding, and that scared him worst of all. He was going into shock.
The spasms ended abruptly, leaving him in a curled fetal position. Gimli couldn’t move. He tried, willing himself to blink his eyes, bend a finger; he had no control of his body at all. For a moment Gimli thought that at least it was over. Someone would find him; someone would have heard his screams. The denizens of Jokertown knew what to do-they’d take him to Tachyon.
But it wasn’t over. His broken arm was sitting in front of his open, staring eyes, and as he watched, the spear of bone from his arm was melting like a candle in an oven. He could feel his body sagging, shifting inside, liquefying. His skin bulged, spread like a huge balloon filled to bursting with scalding water. He tried to scream and could not even open his mouth. His eyes, too-the trash cans, the wall, his broken arm in front of him all dissolved in his sight, distorting as the world turned dim and then was gone. He could not draw a breath. He felt himself suffocating, unable to take in air.
At least Chrysalis has the fucking jacket. The thought had a finality that surprised him.
There was a sound like tearing paper, startling a curious rat that had crept closer to the strange mound. Gimli couldn’t see it or hear it, but the feeling was there, like a white-hot poker rammed into his spine. A small rent appeared in the middle of his back. Slowly the fissure grew, his flesh tearing open in long, jagged strips.
In his soundless, anguished void, Gimli wondered if he hadn’t already died, if this wasn’t the eternal hell Misha had promised him waited for all jokers. He mind-screamed, cursing Misha, cursing Hartmann, cursing the wild card and the world.
And then, blessedly, he lost consciousness.
The waking dream hit her just as she pushed open the door to the warehouse. The graffiti-scrawled paint became fluid; the door sagged like a lead figurine thrown into a fire.
In the darkness beyond she could hear laughter-Hartmann’s laughter, and the strings of a puppet danced in the air before her. As Misha recoiled, the strings tightened and rose, and she could see a hunchbacked figure lolling on the ends. The malevolence of that face staggered her-a pimply boy’s face, but one so infused with evil that its very breath seemed a poison. She remembered that face from her visions. The smile was twisted and cruel, and the bright eyes held the promise of pain. The creature stared at her, twisting in the strings, silent and unmoving as Hartmann’s laughter boomed.
And then it was gone. There was the door, and her hand ready to twist the key. “Allah,” she breathed, and shook her head. The motion did nothing to dispel the lingering feeling of dread. The images of the dream stayed with her, and she could hear her heart pounding. The lock clicked open and she pushed the door wide. “Gimli?” she called “Hello?”
The warehouse was as dark as her dream, and empty.
Misha’s pulse roared in her head and the dream-demon threatened to reappear; in the dim reaches of the warehouse, whirling splotches of light moved with her momentary dizziness.
The door to the office swung wide, the glare from beind the lamps inside nearly blinding her. A shadow loomedMisha cried out.
“Sorry, Misha,” Peanut’s voice said. “ I didn’t mean to scare you.”
His hand reached out as if he was going to pat her shoulder, and Misha drew back, leaving his hand extended awkwardly. She frowned as she regained her composure. “Where’s Miller?” she asked sharply.
Peanut’s hand dropped, his sad gaze regarding the stained concrete floor. Heavy, clumsy shoulders lifted. “Dunno. He should’da been here hours ago, but I ain’t heard from him. File and Video and Shroud was here, said they’d be back later. They wouldn’t stay with me.”
“What’s the matter, Peanut? You’ve been here alone before.”
“Polyakov-he phoned. Said to tell Gimli that Mackie was here, in the States. Said that the paper trail was all official stuff. government. He told me to tell Gimli that he was afraid Hartmann knew it all—everything.”
“Does Gimli know?”
“Not yet. I gotta tell him. You wait with me?”
“No.” She said it too quickly, too harshly, but she didn’t try to soften the word with an explanation. “ I talked to Sara; I need the jacket-we’re going to take it to Tachyon.”
“You can’t have the jacket. Gimli took it with him. You’ll have to wait.”
Misha only shrugged at that, surprising Peanut, who had expected her to fly into a rage. “I’m going to my place. I’ll come back here later.”
She turned to leave.
“I don’t hate you,” Peanut’s childlike voice said behind her. “I don’t hate you ’cause you got lucky with the wild card and I didn’t. And I don’t even hate you for what you and the Nur did to people like me. I think I got a lot more reason to hate than you, but I don’t, ’cause I think maybe the damn virus has hurt you more than me, after all.”
Misha had kept her back turned, stiffly, from his first words. “I don’t hate you, Peanut,” she answered. She was tired from the long day, from the flight, from the meeting with Sara and the inchoate feeling of dread that still enveloped her. There was no energy in her to argue or explain.
“The Nur hates jokers. Barnett hates jokers. Sometimes jokers hate jokers. And you and Gimli and the Russian want to hurt the one guy who looks like he might care. I don’t understand.” Peanut sighed. “So what if he’s an ace? Maybe that explains why he works so hard for the jokers. I might keep it secret, too, if I could. I know how people treat you different and stare at you and try to pretend it doesn’t matter when it does.”
“Haven’t you listened to us, Peanut?” Misha swung around, sighing. “Hartmann’s a manipulator. He plays with his power. He uses it for his own ends. He hurts and kills people with it.”
“I’m still not sure I believe that,” Peanut insisted. “Even if I did, didn’t what you and the Nur preached kill? Didn’t you cause hundreds of jokers to die?”
His mild voice only made the truth of the accusation sting more. Blood on my hands, too. “Peanut—” she began, then stopped. She wanted to bring the veils over her eyes and hide her feelings behind black cloth. But she couldn’t. She could only stand there, unable to look away from his sad, puckered face. “How can you not hate me?” she asked him.
He almost seemed to smile. “I did, once. Till I met you, anyways. Hey, your society fouled you up. Does that to everyone, huh? I see you fight against it, and I know you care, underneath. Gimli says you didn’t like a lot of what the Nur said, either.” Now he did smile, a tentative grin that heightened the ridges in his thick flesh. “Maybe I could come with you and protect you from Stigmata.”
She could only smile in return. “Well, ain’t this touching?”
The voice, so utterly unexpected, caused them both to whirl—the words had a strong Germanic accent. A hunchbacked, anemic young man in black stepped through the wall of the warehouse as if it were a mist. Misha knew that cruel, lean face instantly, knew the sickness that lurked behind the eyes. The hammering of fear in her body was reminder enough, and he had the same feral casualness of the figure hanging in Hartmann’s strings.
“Kahina,” he said in a jittery, quick voice, and with the use of that honorific she knew it was over. The youth was breathing like a nervous thoroughbred, smiling lopsidedly. Hartmann knows. He’s found us. “It’s time.”
She could only shake her head.
Peanut moved to put himself between the intruder and Misha. The boy-man’s sardonic gaze flicked toward the joker. “Ain’t Gimli told you about Mackie? Man, everyone’s scared shitless of Mackie. You should have seen the Fraction bitch’s eyes when I offed her. I’ve got an ace better than anything ....” There was an eager satisfaction in Mackie’s rambling voice. He reached for Misha. Peanut tried to strike Mackie’s hand aside, but suddenly the hand shivered and began to vibrate with a fierce thrumming.
Blood fountained impossibly. Peanut’s severed forearm dropped to the floor.
Peanut stood for a moment, staring in disbelief as pulsing red jetted from the stump. Then he screamed. His legs buckled; he collapsed. Mackie raised his hand again, a deep buzz-saw whine coming from the blur.
“No!” Misha shouted. Mackie hesitated, looking at her. The pleasure she saw in the boy made her sick-it was a look she’d seen in her brother, it was a look she’d seen on Hartmann’s face in Allah’s dreams. “Don’t,” she pleaded. “Please. I’ll go with you. Whatever you want.”
Mackie’s breath was harsh and loud; emotions crossed his pinched face like quick cloud-shadows. Peanut moaned beneath him. “He’s a damn joker. I thought you wanted them all dead. I can do it for you. It’d be quick; it’d be good.” His face had gone serious now, and the sickness was like a lust in him.
“Please.” Mackie didn’t answer. Misha stopped and ripped a strip of cloth from the hem of her dress. She knelt beside the stricken joker, who writhed on the floor. “I’m sorry, Peanut,” she said. She wrapped the cloth around his arm above the stump, pulled it tight until the blood flow eased, and knotted it. “I didn’t hate you. I just couldn’t manage to say it.”
Mackie’s hand touched her arm, and Misha flinched. Though the horrible vibration was gone, his fingers gripped her until she cried out in pain. “Now,” Mackie said. He glanced down at Peanut. His tone was almost conversational. “Next time you see Gimli, tell him Mackie said Auf Wiedersehen’”
And then he was grinning again as he pulled Misha up.
“Don’t be frightened,” he told her. “This is going to be fun. Lots of fun.” His manic laughter cut into her like a thousand glass shards.
In the alley behind the Crystal Palce a bulky figure in a black cloak approached a man wearing a clown’s mask. The cloaked figure’s hooded face was hidden behind what looked to be a fencing mask.
“Okay, Senator, we were the last ones out,” the apparition said. “The rest of the customers are gone. The staff just left; the place is empty. Chrysalis is in her office with Downs.”
The quiet voice sounded female, which meant that the Patti persona was in charge of Oddity tonight. Gregg’s understanding was that the joker had once been three people, two men and a woman involved in a long-standing love relationship. The wild card had joined them into one being, though the fusion had been incomplete and fluid. Shapes humped and shifted under Oddity’s cloak. Oddity’s body was never at rest-Gregg had once seen it without the concealing fabric, and the sight had been disturbing. It (or perhaps “they,” since Oddity always referred to itself in the plural) was constantly undergoing metamorphosis. Patti, John, Evan: never entirely any one of them, never stabilizing, always struggling against itself. Bones creaked, the flesh bulged and twisted, the features came and went.
The endless process was agonizing-Puppetman knew that best of all. Oddity gave him the emotional nourishment he craved simply by existing. Oddity’s world was a wash of pain, and the trebled matrices of its mind were quick to shift into black, sullen depression.
The only constant of Oddity was the strength of its malleable form. In that, Oddity surpassed Carnifex and perhaps rivaled Mordecai Jones or Braun. Oddity also had a great loyalty to Senator Hartmann.
After all, Oddity knew that Gregg was compassionate. Gregg cared about the jokers. Gregg was the voice of reason against fanatics such as Leo Barnett. Why, he was one of the few who ever asked Oddity about itself, and he listened sympathetically to the long tale of the joker’s like. Gregg might be a nat, but he came among the jokers and talked to them and shook their hands and then kept his political promises.
Oddity would have done anything Senator Hartmann asked it to do. The thought made Puppetman wriggle with delight inside Gregg. Tonight ... tonight held the promise of being delicious.
Puppetman was tired of playing it safe, even if Gregg was not.
Gregg forced that hidden personality into the recesses of his mind. “Thanks, Patti,” he said. Through Puppetman he could feel a tinge of pleasure at that-the individual psyches in Oddity liked to be recognized. “You know the rest?”
Oddity nodded. What might have been a breast pushed sluggishly at the left side of the cloak. “I’ll watch the place. No one gets in or out but the two you told me about. Simple enough.” The words were slurring as the shape of the mouth altered behind the fencing mask.
“Good. I appreciate this.”
“No problem for you, Senator. All you ever have to do is ask.”
Gregg smiled and forced himself to clap Oddity on the shoulder. There were sliding things underneath. He suppressed a shudder as he squeezed slightly. “Thanks again, then. I’ll be out in twenty minutes or so.”
The gratitude and loyalty radiating from Oddity made Puppetman laugh, inside. Gregg adjusted the clown’s mask as Oddity leaned against the back doors. They groaned; a metal chain snapped inside. Gregg strode through the sagging doors and into the club.
“We’re closed.” Chrysalis was standing at the door to her office with a nasty-looking gun in her hand; behind her, Gregg could see Downs.
“You were expecting me,” Gregg said softly. “You sent me a message.” He took off the clowns mask. Even without a puppet’s link to the woman, he could sense the mingled fear and defiance in her, a bitter metallic tang that roused Puppetman. Gregg chuckled, letting a little of his own nervousness into the sound.
Why so uncertain?
That should be obvious. Even with the information Video fed us we don’t know everything. Gimli didn’t trust video
enough; he didn’t let her see everything. They have whatever it was Kahina and Gimli had.
And you have me.
Gregg had planned it well: Video had been a wonderful, pliant puppet for years. Yet even with what she’d managed to funnel to him, even with what he’d garnered from government intelligence agencies and other sources, he was still grasping in twilight. A misstep here, and it might all be over.
Gregg had always been cautious, had always sought the safe path. Recklessness was not something with which he was comfortable, and this was reckless. But since Syria, since Berlin, it seems he’d been forced to choose this path. “Sorry I couldn’t make it during your business hours,” he continued, his voice nearly apologetic. “ I felt your meeting might be too private for that.”
Good. Let them think they’re negotiating from strength, at least for a bit. You need to know what they know. Chrysalis lowered the gun; muscles expanded under her transparent arm and across her chest-the dress she wore did little to conceal her body. Red lips that seemed to float on glassy flesh pursed. “Senator,” she said with that breathy fake accent that Gregg disliked, “ I assume you know what Mr. Downs and myself would like to discuss.”
Gregg took a breath. He smiled. “You want to talk about aces,” he said. “Especially ones who are-so to speak-up the sleeve and who intend to stay that way. You want to see what I might be able to do for you. I think it’s usually called blackmail.”
“AA, that’s such an ugly word.” She stepped back into the office. Her lips tightened, the horror-show skull eyes blinked. “Please come in.”
Chrysalis’s office was luxurious. A polished oak desk, plush leather chairs, an expensive rug over the center of the hardwood floor, wooden bookcases on which gold-leaf spines were lined neatly in sets. Downs was sitting nervously. He smiled tentatively at Gregg as the senator entered.
“Hey, Senator. What’s shakin’?”
Gregg didn’t bother to answer. He stared hard at Downs. The little man sniffed and sat back in the chair. Chrysalis brushed past him in a wave of perfume and took her seat behind the desk. She waved at one of the empty chairs.
“Have a seat, Senator. I don’t believe our business will take that long.”
“Exactly what are we talking about?”
“We’re talking about the fact that I’m considering telling the public that you’re an ace. I’m sure you’d be very unhappy with that.”
Gregg had expected Chrysalis to threaten; she was no doubt used to getting results from that tactic, and he didn’t doubt that she considered herself safe from physical violence here. Gregg watched Downs from the corners of his eyes. The reporter had shown himself to be the nervous type on the wild card tour, and he couldn’t control his agitation now. Sweat beaded on his forehead; he rubbed his hands and squirmed in his seat. If Chrysalis was at ease with this, Downs was not. Good. Puppetman came alert. We made a mistake not taking him. Let me have him now.
No. Not yet. Wait.
“You are an ace, aren’t you, Senator?” Chrysalis asked the question coolly, pretending nonchalance.
He knew they expected him to deny it. So he simply smiled. “Yes,” he answered just as calmly.
“Your blood test were faked?”
“As they can be faked again. But I don’t think I’ll have to do that.”
“You’re rather overconfident in your ability, then.” Gregg, looking at Downs rather than Chrysalis, could see the uncertainty. He knew what the man was thinking: A projecting telepath? A mental power like Tachyon’s? What if we can’t control him?
Gregg smiled calmly to lend credence to that misconception. “Your friend Downs isn’t so certain,” he told Chrysalis. “Everyone in Jokertown knows about Gimli’s empty skin being found last night in an alleyway, and he wonders about whether I had anything to do with that.” It was a bluffGregg had been as surprised (and delighted) as anyone else at the news-but Gregg saw the color drain from Downs’s face. “He wonders if I might not be able to coerce your cooperation through my ace.”
“You can’t. And whatever happened to Gimli had nothing to do with you, not directly,” Chrysalis answered forcefully. “No matter what he thinks. My best guess is that you’ve a mind power, but with a rather limited range. So even if you can make us say yes now, you can’t enforce it.”
She knows! Puppetman s wail echoed in Gregg’s head. You’ve got to kill her. Please. It will taste good. We could make Oddity do it ....
She suspects, that’s all, he answered.
What’s the difference? Have them killed; we have puppets who would find pleasure in it. Have them killed and we don’t have to worry.
Kill them now and we have more trails to cover up. Misha wouldn’t talk; we still don’t know what evidence Chrysalis was given. Gimli’s taken himself out of the picture, but there’s still the other man in Video’s memory-the Russian. And Sara. Puppetman’s scorn was a barb.
Shut up. Sara we can control. Chrysalis will have plans made against her own death. We can’t risk that.
The inner debate took only a moment. “I’m a politician. This isn’t France, where the wild card is chic. I’m in a fight where Leo Barnett will use joker hatred as a tool. I’ve already seen Gary Hart’s career wiped out by innuendo. I’m not going to let that happen to me. Still, people might look at whatever evidence you have and wonder. I might lose votes. People will say that blood tests can be faked, they’ll look at Syria and Berlin with suspicion. I can’t afford to lose ground to speculation.”
“Which means we can come to an accommodation,” Chrysalis smiled.
“Maybe not. I think you still have a problem.”
“Senator, the press has its obligations ...” Downs began, then fell silent with the withering gaze Hartmann gave him. “Aces magazine is hardly the legitimate press. Let me put it this way-your problem is that you don’t know what I’m capable of. I will tell you that Berlin and Syria weren’t accidents. I’ll tell you that even now Gimli’s little cadre is being arrested. I’ll tell you that there’s no way you can escape me if I want to find you.” He turned his head slightly toward the door. “Mackie!” he called.
The door opened. Grinning, Mackie entered, supporting a stumbling woman wrapped in a long cloak. Mackie jerked the cloak from the woman’s shoulders, revealing her naked and streaked with blood. He shoved the woman from behind, and she sprawled on the carpet in front of the horrified Chrysalis.
“I’m a reasonable man,” Gregg said as Chrysalis and Downs stared at the figure moaning on the floor—“All I ask is that you think about this. Remember that I will contest any evidence. Remember that I can and will produce that negative blood test. Think about the fact that I don’t even want to hear the faintest whisper of a rumor. And realize that I leave the two of you alive because you’re the best sources of information I know-you hear everything, or so you’d have me believe. Good. Use those sources. Because if I hear any rumors, if I see a piece in the papers or Aces, if I notice that people are asking strange questions, if I’m attacked or hurt or even feel vaguely threatened, I’ll know where to come.”
Downs was staring slack-jawed at Misha; Chrysalis had sunk back against her desk. She tried to meet Gregg’s eyes and failed. “You see, I intend to use you, not the reverse,” Gregg continued. “I hold the two of you responsible for silence and safety. You’re both so damned good at what you do. So start learning who my enemies are and work at stopping them. I’m vindictive, and I’m dangerous. I’m everything Gimli and Misha were afraid I might be.”
“And if anyone else ever learns that, I’ll consider it your fault. You might damage my presidential campaign by being heroes, but that’s all. You cant prove anything else. After all, I’ve never actually killed or hurt anyone myself. I’d still be on the streets, afterward. And I’d find you without any trouble at all. And then I’d do to you what I’d do to any enemy.”
Puppetman was chuckling in his mind, anticipating. Gregg smiled at Chrysalis, at Downs. He hugged Mackie, who was watching him eagerly. “Enjoy yourself,” Gregg told him. He gave Chrysalis a small nod that was chilling in its nonchalance and left the office. He shut the door behind him, leaning against it until he heard the whine of Mackie’s ace.
He let Puppetman loose to ride with the youth’s strange, brightly colored madness. He hardly had to nudge Mackie at all.
Inside, Mackie knelt and cradled Misha’s head in his arms. Neither Chrysalis nor Downs moved. “Misha,” he crooned. The woman opened her eyes, and the pain he saw behind them made him sigh. “Such a good little martyr,” he told her. “She wouldn’t talk no matter what I did, you know,” he said to the others admiringly, his eyes skittering, bright. His hands roamed over her lacerated body. “She could be a saint. Such silence in suffering. So frigging noble.” The smile he gave Misha was almost tender. “I took her like a boy first, before I cut her at all. Anything to say now, Misha?”
Her head rolled side to side, slowly.
Mackie was smiling fitfully, breathing hard and fast. “You couldn’t really have hated the jokers,” he said, looking down at her face. “You couldn’t, or you would have talked.” There was a strange sadness in the way he said it.
“Shahid.” The word was a whisper from swollen; bloodcaked lips. Mackie leaned close to hear it.
“Arabic,” he told them. “I don’t understand Arabic.” His hands were buzzing now, screaming. He ran his fingers around her breasts like a caress, and blood followed. Misha shrieked hoarsely; Downs gagged and threw up. Chrysalis remained stoic until Mackie slid his hand down Misha’s stomach and let the coils of intestines spill wetly out over the carpet.
When he was done, he stood up and brushed away the gore covering the front of him. “The senator said you’d know how to take care of the mess,” he told them. “He said you knew everything and everybody.” Mackie chuckled, high and manic. He began to whistle: Brecht, the Threepenny Opera.
With a casual wave he strolled through the wall and away.
Sara stood on the corner of South across from the Jokertown Clinic. A cool front had moved in from Canada; low, scudding clouds spat wet circles on the pavement.
Sara glanced again at her watch. Misha was over an hour late. “I’ll be there. I promise you, Sara. If I’m not there, know it’s because he stopped me.”
Sara cursed under her breath, wishing she knew what to think, what to feel.
“You’ll have to decide what to do then.”
“Can I help you, Ms. Morgenstern?” Tachyon’s deep voice made her start. The scarlet-haired alien peered down at her with a look of intense concern on his face that she might have found comical at another time; during the recent junket, he’d more than once indicated he found her attractive. She laughed, hating the hysteria she heard in the sound.
“No. No, Doctor, I’m all right. I was ... I was waiting for someone. We were supposed to meet here ....”
Tachyon nodded solemnly, his startling eyes refusing to let her go. “You seemed nervous. I watched you from the clinic. I thought perhaps there was something I could do. Are you sure there’s nothing I can help you with?”
“No.” Her denial was too sharp, too loud. Sara was forced to smile to soften the effect. “Really. Thank you for asking. I was just about to leave, anyway. It doesn’t look like she’s going to show.”
He nodded. He stared. At last he shrugged. “Aah,” he said. “Well, it was good seeing you again. We don’t need to be strangers now that the trip is over, Sara. Perhaps dinner one night?”
“Thank you, but ...” Sara bit her lower lip in agitation, just wanting Tachyon to leave. She needed to think, needed to get away from here. “Maybe next time I’m in the city?”
“I’ll hold you to that.” Tachyon inclined his head like a Victorian lord, staring at her—strangely, then turned. Sara watched Tachyon make his way across the street to the clinic. The sky was beginning to let down a steady drizzle. Streetlights were flickering in the early dusk. Sara looked again up and down the street. A joker with oddly twisted legs and a carapace scuttled from the sidewalk to the cover of a porch. Rain began to pool in the trash-clogged glutters.
“We’re sisters in this.”
Sara stepped from the curb and hailed a cab parked down the street. The nat driver stared at her through the rear-view mirror. His gaze was rude and direct; Sara turned her face away. “Where you going?” he asked with a distinct Slavic accent.
“Head uptown,” she said. “Just get me out of here.”
“What he did to me, he would also do to you. Don’t you notice how your feelings for him change when he’s with you, and doesn’t that also make you wonder?”
Aah, Andrea. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.
Sara sat back and watched the rain smear the towers of Manhattan through the windows.
I don’t know why I’m starting this or what I’m going to do with it or just who it is I’m talking to. I guess ... I guess the reason is that I want someone to remember what happened here when it’s over. Lately I’ve been thinking that the Rox won’t last long.
It can’t; THEY won’t let it.
Do I need to explain who “THEY” is? I didn’t think so. I can tell you this, man-whoever you are-if you need to ask, then you ain’t a joker, are you?
There’s one question to answer, I suppose. No one ever really asks me directly, but I always hear it, like a little tinkling chime in the clamor of thoughts. I hear it whenever someone looks at me or even thinks about me: What’s it like to be so fucking gross? What’s it like to be a head and shoulders sitting like a wart on a body that takes up an acre of ground and feeds on sewage?
What’s it like? God ... Okay. Let me try.
Find a room. A huge, empty space. Don’t make it to( goddamn comfortable-be certain that the floor’s cracked and damp, the air’s too cold or too hot, the overall—atmosphere., tottering on the edge of gloom.
Then find a chair. A hard and unyielding and splintery one that makes you want to get up and walk around after sitting in it for even a few minutes. Bolt it to the floor in the middle of your room.
Get five hundred television sets. Bank them all around the chair, a Great Wall of blank screens. Now wire each of the sets to a different channel, turn up the sound, and switch on every one of the mothers.
Sit buck naked in your splintery chair in the middle of that ugly room before all the televisions. Have someone chain you to that nasty chair, and then stack a couple hundred lead ingots in your lap. Make sure the binding’s tight so you can’t move, can’t scratch yourself, can’t hold your hands up to your ears to blot out that terrible din, so you’re utterly dependent on others to feed you or clean you or talk to you.
Hey, now you’re beginning to feel like Bloat. Now you have some idea of what it’s like.
I hear you. (I always hear you.) C’mon, you’re saying. You have the ability to read minds. Ain’t that a gift, a little kiss from the wild card deck?
Okay, I can read your mind. I have Bloat’s Wall, which keeps the nats and aces away from the Rox unless they really want to be here. I have my own army of jokers who protect me and care for me.
I make the Rox possible. I’m the governor. I have power. There’s no Rox without me. Bliss, right?
Yeah? Well, that’s bullshit. Crap. A load of bloatblack. You think I really rule this place? You gotta be kidding. Look, I used to play D&D. Most of the time, I ran a character who controlled a little kingdom in the scenario our Dungeon Master had dreamed up. Y’know what? That fantasy’s about as real as the “kingdom” I have here.
You can’t hear what they’re thinking when they talk to me: Prime, Blaise, Molly, K. C., the other jumpers. Even the jokers, even the ones the wild card cursed. “God, I’m glad I’m not like him” or “ I don’t care how much he knows or what kind of powers he has, he’s just a fuckin’ kid ....”
I know. I know what they think of me. I know what they think of the Rox too. My Rox is a convenient refuge, but if Ellis Island sank into New York Bay tomorrow, they’d find another place. The jumpers would melt into the city’s back alleys; the jokers ... the jokers would do what jokers have always done: Shrug their shoulders-if they got ’em-and head for Jokertown.
So just what am I going to do? Threaten to take my basketball and go home, huh? You think I’m likely to go anywhere at all? Man, I was lucky I managed to get here three years ago when I was only the size of a school bus. Now ... hell, the blue whale’s no longer the world’s biggest mammal. I’m bigger than a whole pod of fucking whales. What’s it like?
You can’t visualize Bloat. You can’t empathize with me. It’s not possible.
Every goddamn joker’s hell is individual and private. So just leave it that way.
I hate being judge and jury. I even know why.
My parents were weak-willed. Hey, sure ... most kids blame it on their folks.
But why not? Mine were spineless, accommodating people who let the neighbors, store clerks, and anyone in a position of authority push them around. They were two nice people who would gladly change their opinions and back down at any hint of opposition. They were two charming people, really, who let the neighborhood scum intimidate and harass their son, the high school poet; their son, the “oh, what a talented artist”; their son, the-one-with-his-head-inthe-comic-books.
They kept telling me (when I came home with bloody noses and black eyes and torn clothes): “Well, if they’re bothering you, why didn’t you just walk away? Maybe it’s something you’re doing. Concentrate on your drawing or your writing or your schoolwork, Teddy. Play that strange fantasy dice game of yours or read a comic book. When you grow up a little, they’ll stop.”
They were two compassionate people who, when Ted slammed into puberty by turning into a slug the size of a subway car, didn’t just abandon me. No. First they called the Jokertown Clinic, and then they disappeared.
Gone. Vanished.
Well, Mom and Dad, Teddy sure as hell grew up, didn’t he? I wish I were less your son now, because just getting big didn’t help and I’m still carrying all your emotional baggage with me.
So how do I do what I want to do? How do you find a way to mix power with a little compassion? How do you make the other players on the stage of the Rox see that they’re too damn shortsighted and selfish? How do you stay an idealist in a world of greedy pragmatists?
They brought in a case for me to judge today. “The gov’s court,” they call it, mockingly. Still, they bring in these cases because I insist on it. Okay, let’s be honest-the usual “justice” on the Rox is violent and final. Actually, they come only when the antagonists aren’t already dead or maimed.
I knew who was guilty before they dragged either one of them in front of me. I always do.
Blaise escorted them, but Kelly was with the groupKelly whom I find so achingly attractive, who is still so innocent in her way. I like to watch her; I like to fantasize about how it might be if I were normal or if I were one of them. I could read vague, contradictory feelings as Kelly approached. Darker, more violent thoughts eddied from Blaise and K. C. Strange, another one of the jumpers, while fright mingled with relief from Slimeball, the joker they were hauling toward the Administration Building.
I told everyone around me that company was coming, and chuckled. My joker guards came to attention around the lobby. Kafka came scuttling in from his workroom, his mind still snared in the maze of blueprints he’d been studying. Around me, jokers turned to watch: the ever-loyal Peanut, Mothmouth, Video, Shroud, Chickenhawk, Elmo, Andiron-a dozen others around the floor or looking over the lobby’s high balcony.
Eddies in the currents of thoughts. I could feel the rest of the Rox too: File, lost in rapture-ecstasy in some hovel in the north end of the island; Charon, heading out from the Rox toward the siren call of some joker in New York. My guards had tightened their grips on their weapons.
Blaise’s little group entered the lobby noisily, throwing a blast of cold air into the building. Slimeball was being dragged by main force between K. C. and Kelly. Blaise was shouting before they were even halfway to me, ranting.
Kafka cleared his throat. His carapace rattled like a pair of cheap castanets. At the same time, Shroud slammed the bolt home on his .22 Remington single-shot rifle. I caught amusement from Blaise (fucking popgun). Blaise isn’t the psi lord his grandfather is; his mindshields leak, dribbling thoughts like an incontinent child.
Kafka began scolding Blaise. “Show a little decorum, please.” Like a parent lecturing his son—it went over about that well too. “We’ve discussed this before. The governor deserves your respect. That’s as much a part of your rent as anything else.”
Blaise glared at Kafka. I caught an image of a roach being squashed beneath a huge foot. Little fucking insect. I laughed again. Then the thought drifted away as he looked up at me. He titters like a goddamn schoolgirl. So fucking gross. The smell’s worse than usual.
Almost in response, a rippling went through me, along with a sense of release and relief. I could feel the thick sludge of bloatblack rolling down my sides. There was a sound: soft, squelching, nasty, like thick mud being squashed between two hands.
“Governor,” Blaise said then, and he gave the title a big mocking lilt. I ignored him, paying more attention to Kelly than Blaise; she was trying, unsuccessfully, to ignore my continuing defecation. Kelly’s hands went to her hips—a pose of defiance and arrogance that was totally at odds with her thoughts. Poor ugly big thing ...
I smiled at her, a waif in torn jeans, her tits rounding under the Free Snotman T-shirt, her eyes huge and the color of the deep sea under her soft hair. “Governor,” she said, echoing Blaise, but her voice was soft and pleasant, and she smiled back at me.
A prom princess in rags. I found her much more attractive than, say, K.C. Kelly wasn’t a jumper, not yet. Prime hadn’t initiated her-but then, Prime wasn’t into much except blond young boys in recent months, not since the Oddity killed David. Kelly was one of the hangers-on, one of the jumper wannabees, a runaway teenager from the city. There’s a lot more of them than actual jumpers. Given Prime’s obsession with David look alikes, Kelly and most of them would stay wannabees too.
I like to watch her. I stare when she walks by my building, and I dream about Kelly, sometimes ...
But Blaise glared at her now, and she went sullenly quiet. “If I may beg an audience with Your Fucking Excellence,” Blaise began.
Such defiance: a symptom of my difficulties. I had to laugh again, even though the whole problem is that none of them take anything seriously. They play at creating a new society; I can’t get them to understand how important all this is.
Kafka rattled in outrage. I felt my joker guards’ minds become suddenly more focused and intent. For a moment, I toyed with the idea of just sending Blaise, Kelly, and K.C. away. The laughter had come, but I wasn’t amused. Not really.
I could hear most of Blaise’s thoughts. I knew that like Kelly and K. C. too-at least part of Blaise’s insolence was show, put on from simple peer pressure. He didn’t want to be weak in front of the others. No, not Blaise. In fact, he didn’t want to be here at all.
“I’m listening, Blaise. I always listen when a joker’s in trouble. And Slimeball’s certainly a joker, isn’t he?” I finished, and tittered, as he’d call it. I paused, looking right at K. C. “I’m always listening. Always. Even though some people are thinking I sound like some stupid fucking twoyear-old when I laugh.”
K.C.’s face reddened-I’d quoted her thoughts, you see. For a moment I felt a little ashamed of myself. No matter how many times I demonstrate my ability, I always get that reaction. People aren’t used to having their precious private thoughts stolen. They don’t feel anything, they don’t see me doing anything unusual, so they forget.
Kelly’s thoughts, at least, are usually kind.
Blaise was pissed. “Well, I stopped K.C. here from offing your precious joker. I should have gone ahead and offed the mother, though. This is the second time Slimeball’s been in our food stores.”
I knew that. I’d long ago caught the thoughts from Slimeball and K.C.
“K.C. and Kelly caught him, and the little fucker sliced at them with a knife. What you gonna do about it?”
I knew what Blaise wanted me to do. The image was very clear. His justice is very black and white. Simple.
I glanced at Slimeball. He’d been radiating wordless chattering fear since the incident, all shot through with unresolved hatred toward Blaise. His salamanderlike skin was gleaming with sticky oil, the flat pads on the ends of his fingers crushed into his palms. His bulbous eyes, vertically slit and golden, were momentarily lost under thick translucent lids as he blinked. His mouth opened; a forked snake’s tongue wriggled out briefly from between snaggled incisors, and then retreated.
“You lied to me,” I said to Slimeball. “That’s very, very bad.” I tsked and shook my head. “You promised you’d leave the food alone. I ordered you to stay away, and I warned you about bothering them again. Remember? We’re all one big happy family on the Rox.”
K.C. guffawed at that, but no one else laughed. “What happened, Slimeball?”
That’s a mind reader’s trick: just ask a direct question. It jars them away from the stream-of-consciousness images and forces them to focus. I hardly listened to Slimeball’s words; I was watching his mind. I could sense his hunger all the while he was talking. The words didn’t matter-he’d gotten hungry, a common enough thing on the Rox. A simple thing. He’d thought he could get away with stealing from the jumpers. He’d been wrong. That’s all.
Blaise broke in then. “Bloat, I want the problem taken care of. Permanently. You do it, or I will,” he said. “Make the fucker an example to everyone else.”
He stared at me. I’ll kill him, Blaise told me then in his mind, deliberately and consciously pushing the words forward. Like he thought I might be hard of hearing in my mind. You make sure Slimeball gets fed to the sewerage system, or I’ll do it myself. Either way, you eventually eat the mother. Your choicé “Governor.”
“I don’t kill jokers,” I answered him aloud.
He snorted at that. “The whole goddamn world kills jokers. What makes you so special?”
I could’ve told him. I could’ve told him how it’s a curse to always know. Hey, I know everything. I know that the jumpers have stolen more food from the jokers than the reverse. I know that hunger’s a problem for both sides here on the Rox. I know that Slimeball has about as much intelligence and moral sense as a six-year-old, and while he was genuinely sorry now, he’d forget all this and probably do it again.
It’s easier not to know. But I always know the truth. I know all the facts.
It’s hard to hurt someone whose most intimate thoughts you’ve experienced. It’s hard when you know that their pain is going to be broadcast back to you and you’ll have to listen to it. It’s hard when you see that there’s never—NEVER—just black and white.
Wrong or right. Evil or good.
Not for me, certainly. ‘There are things I’ve done ... Just by being here and creating the Rox, I’m responsible for a lot of deaths. My Wall isn’t kind, and Charon doesn’t stop for passengers who change their minds. Kafka tells me that the waters of the bay under the Wall are full of skeletons. My victims, directly. There’s a lot of the violence in New York done by people who live here. People I protect.
I tell myself that’s only justice.
I stared down at Slimeball over the slope of my body. Filling your belly shouldn’t be a capital offense, no matter what the circumstances.
“What’re you gonna do, Governor?” Blaise is as impatient as Kelly is lovely. Glitteringly dangerous. As close to amoral as any mind I’d ever experienced. He wanted me to kill over a few damn Twinkies.
Hell, I didn’t know what I was going to do. Nothing felt good—there wasn’t any right or wrong here. When you know all the facts, that’s what you always find out. Every decision is unfair. Yet if I just shrugged this off, I’d undermine any progress I’ve made in that last several months toward actually being the governor. But I don’t kill jokers either, and if I came down on the jumpers, I could lose their support they’re as essential to the Rox as I am.
Look, it was all fucking fun and games at first. Big kid Bloat takes the Rox and keeps the bad of nats away. But it kept getting more serious. It stopped being some comic-book plot and started being real. The thoughts kept coming louder and louder, and I couldn’t shut them out anymore, and suddenly nothing was quite so funny. David died under the Oddity’s hands, everyone started grabbing for control of things instead of cooperating, and the conditions for jokers in the world outside just kept going into the fucking toilet. Blaise wouldn’t let me think. “Bloat? Hey, Bloat!”
I glowered down at them all, angry now. “Slimeball’s at fault,” I barked at them finally. “I warned him about the food. But I’m not going to kill him for that, Blaise. Slimeball, you’re one of the bloatblackers now. You’ll haul my shit until I’m sure that you’ll stay away from the jumpers. If you’re found in their part of the Rox again, they have my permission to do whatever the hell they please with you. Understood?” Relief was coiled around disgust in Slimeball. K. C. shrugged her shoulders. Kelly looked at me with her small smile.
Blaise scowled. “I will kill him if I see his oily face again,” Blaise proclaimed loudly. “I don’t need your permission for that, Bloat.”
“Blaise,” Kelly began placatingly. “The governor’s—” Blaise rounded on her, his fist raised. I could feel the violence in his mind leaking out like molten lava.
“Stop!” I shouted, and the fury in my voice caused gunbolts to click back. Blaise radiated a sudden fear. I could feel the heat on my face as I continued to shout. “You damn well do need permission. I am the Rox. Me. Without my Wall, the nats’ll be swarming on this place like maggots on roadkill. They’ll bury you here. I hear your thoughts. You think I’m weak. ‘Bloat doesn’t kill, he can be pushed around.’ I hear you.”
I looked at the jokers watching the confrontation. I listened to their thoughts. They were as violent as the jumpers. I knew I had to end this now or someone would do something really stupid.
“Kafka,” I said. “Blaise needs to bow to me before he leaves. I want to hear him thank me for taking the time to judge this case.” I paused. “And if he won’t do it, blow him away.”
Blaise was confused. His mouth gaped. He thought for a minute of mind-controlling my jokers, but there were a lot of us around, and he suddenly wasn’t sure he could handle us all. He sputtered. “You’re bluffing. You ain’t gonna do that. That ain’t your way.” It was just mind static.
I giggled at him. “Try me. Go ahead. Hey, if you die here, the only thing that’s going to happen is that K. C. or someone else will take over for the jumpers. Why, I’ll bet K.C. might even be happy to have the competition thinned out.” K.C. gave me a dangerous look; I ignored it. “You’d be no loss to me at all, Blaise. None at all.”
Blaise hesitated, his thoughts all jumbled. I really wasn’t sure what he’d do. My jokers waited, patient and a little too eager. I think it was their faces that decided him more than anything else.
He took a step back toward me and ducked his head stiffly.
I giggled. “You do that very nicely. And what else?” Scowl. Frown. Pucker. “Thank you.” The words were almost understandable. Inside, he was fuming: Fuck you, you bastard.
“I’m not really into boys,” I told him. “Not like Prime. Now if you were as good-looking as Kelly ...”
Blaise’s face colored nicely; so did Kelly’s. Blaise spun angrily on his toes and stamped away to the laughter of the joker onlookers. K. C. followed with a last look back at me;
Kelly gave me a long stare (poor thing) and went after them. Slimeball was laughing, too, until Peanut took him by the arm and pointed him toward the mounds of bloatblack. “Start shoveling,” Peanut said.
And then we all laughed at Slimeball. Jokers are allowed to laugh at jokers.
Kafka looked up at me. Children. You all argue like such children. The insectlike man sighed. He told me something that sounded like wisdom. Maybe it was.
“Bluffing is a very dangerous game,” he said. “Especially with Blaise.”
I would remember those words, later.
The Temptation of Hieronymus Bloat
I have a dream.
I have several dreams, in fact. I suppose that makes this teenage governor marginally better than old King, right? They’re very odd, my dreams-a lot more hard-edged and surreal than I remember them being before the wild card hit me. But then, I always did like the painters who could twist reality and make it their own: Dali, Bosch, Brueghel, Chagall ....
Last night I had a dream too.
I was in the Administration Building. (Where else would I be, huh?) But the old place had changed. The stone and brick had changed to glass. It was a wondrous, clear crystal line palace from which I could see out into the world again. The sunlight shattered on it and bled rainbows.
I’d changed too. I was someone else, not Bloat. I stood on my own legs, and my body was a gorgeous, muscular wonder. Kelly, as resplendent and alluring as a fairy-tale princess, stood alongside me. Her thoughts were no longer pitying but full of love and trust for me. Together, we strode up and down inside my palace, marveling at its beauty.
Kafka was kneeling in the lobby as we approached, hooking up that generator he keeps insisting we need. A snarl of wires went all around him.
Then I noticed that the brilliant sunlight had tricked me. These weren’t wires. The lobby was filled to overflowing with jokers, their bodies all pressed together. They were screaming at me, waving hands and tentacles and filaments and antennae, and shouting, “There’s no more room! No more room!”
I looked out and saw that-omigod!-they were right. Through the windows I could see that all the Rox was the same way—a living, writhing carpet of jokers from end to end, right into the greasy waves of the bay.
I shouted to them all. My voice was the voice of a King, deep and charismatic. Not at all the adolescent boy’s screech it really is. “ I will make you a new home!” I told them. “ I will do that for you!”
Kelly applauded. The jokers cheered.
But Kafka glanced up at me from the generator. “They won’t let you,” he said softly.
The massed jokers all howled agreement. I knew that Kafka spoke of every joker’s eternal “they”: the nats who hate us, the turncoat aces who are weapons against their own kind.
“My Wall keeps them out,” I insisted, shaking my head. Kafka sighed.
I suddenly felt a chill. I looked up to see that the entire roof of the building was gone. Above, a winter wind flung dirty wet snow from massed, hurtling clouds. The snow piled in drifts around and over the mountain of my body—I was Bloat again. Kelly, disgust on her face, fled the lobby. I was frightened. I felt more helpless than I’d ever felt, for I knew that the wall couldn’t keep out the snow.
“The wall isn’t enough,” Kafka told me. “Not enough.”
“The jumpers. My joker army.”
“Not enough.”
The wind howled, a mad laughter. Sleet hissed around the columns of the lobby, between the supports that held the floor against my weight ...
And I woke. My enormous body was trembling so that the whole building was shaking in sympathy. All the guards were looking at me, and the smell of the bloatblack ... Well, you get the idea.
Hell, dreams are supposed to be escapes. I should be dreaming of being in a normal body or having some postpubescent wet dreams about Kelly.
Every joker needs a refuge. I can’t even find one in my dreams.
I talked to Molly Bolt rather than Blaise because I could hear through the mindvoices that Blaise was busy.
All right, I’ll be honest here. That was a lousy excuse. I talked to Molly because I really don’t like Blaise.
But even Molly doesn’t listen very well to me. She spoke her thoughts, and I heard them twice. You’re a softy, Bloat. Weak. “Power is information.” C’mon, that’s crap. You know what power is? It’s taking the body of some rich snot and humiliating him. Making him run naked down Wall Street jacking off. Having him fire his staff with a goddamn AK-47. Walking him to J-town and having him suck some joker’s dick. Making him feel helpless and used. That’s power, Governor.
Molly flung one jean-clad leg over the other as she slouched in the chair in front of me. Details: the knees were out of the jeans. Despite the three inches of snow on the ground outside, she was wearing sneakers without socks and a cutoff T under her leather jacket. She ran a hand through spiked multicolored hair. Her lower lip was out, pouting.
I notice things like that. It’s the artist in me.
“Molly, your kind of power is just kicks. You do it because you’re a sick, twisted little child. Because you enjoy it.” She smiled at that; I chuckled.
“But you’re worried too,” I told her. “All of you are. I hear the thoughts. You’re worried because if an assassin can take out a man as well protected as Kien-a man I know Blaise and his friends were supposed to be protecting-then Prime can be killed, even with Zelda watching him. For that matter, so can Blaise or you. The fact you can jump ain’t enough.”
As I said it, I caught the thought she tried to hide. So I laughed again. “Oh, you wouldn’t mind if Blaise were offed, would you? Excuse me, that’s ‘that fucking son-of-a-bitch cocksucking alien prickhead Blaise,’ to be exact. You really need to work on your cursing, Molly. You show a lack of inventiveness. All those cliches ...”
“Stop your fucking giggling and get on with it, Bloat.”
“Information is power. For instance, what if I told Blaise what you were thinking just now. Or what if I mentioned your and Blackhead’s half-assed plan to get rid of Blaise—” Molly angrily filled her mind with other images. I chuckled. “You’ve stirred up a hornet’s nest, Molly,” I said. “I can hear them buzzing around. So can you. I notice these things. I notice that since Kien died, since Prime’s been acting strange, you jumpers have been, well, stupid. You’re terrorizing the city like you’re in some bad teenage biker movie.” She wasn’t impressed. “We’re just showing the fuckers we ain’t afraid of them.”
“Right. What you’re doing is playing right into the nats’ hands. All you’re doing is making them angry, and only blind fools would think that a hundred jumpers and a thousand or so jokers on a little island can really stand against ‘them.’ If they want to just clean us out, they can.”
Molly sniffed, though I knew that inside she had listened. “So talk to Blaise or Prime. Since when did you get so fucking political? You ain’t no older than me, or any smarter.”
“It’s because I like you.”
I had to laugh at the strange image that put in her head. “Oh, I still have the right equipment for it,” I told her. “I think so, at least. It’s buried inside. I doubt if it’s in proportion to my current body, though. Besides, Kelly’s really more my type. Look, I’ve been studying a lot, Molly-there are minds on this island ...” I shook my head. The mindvoices intruded even as I tried to talk about them.
“You want power?” I said. “Then you gotta be rich. You gotta play the economic game too. I’ve been learning all the time, and I’ve come to certain conclusions. One is that the Rox is too small and too run-down. Kafka’s already finding it impossible to keep the place going. ‘Infrastructure-that’s the word he uses. The infrastructure is old and antiquated; it keeps falling apart. Yet the jokers keep coming. You keep recruiting more wannabee jumpers. The Rox is crowded now and getting worse.”
“You gonna tell me that your idea of taking New York isn’t a fucking pipe dream?”
I answered her patiently. “I’m telling you that soon there won’t be any choice. They won’t let us stay here, not forever. Our own success is going to drive us out, even if they do nothing.”
Molly just laughed, and I could see absurd images in her mind. She knew I was watching them and exaggerated them even more for my benefit. “Bloat on a float?” she snorted. “How the fuck are you going to get to the city? Your jokers gonna build a goddamn ark? You gonna swim? Jesus, the first whale sighted in New York Bay.” She laughed again, throwing her head back and exposing that long muscular neck.
“There are ways, Molly Bolt,” I told her. “With enough money, with enough power, there’s very little you can’t solve.”
She wasn’t convinced. “Sure. And your fucking wall’s gonna go all around Manhattan too.”
“Hey, I’m still a growing boy. My powers are expanding with me. The Wall’s already a hundred yards farther out than it was six months ago, and it’s stronger than ever. That’s part of the equation, too. What’s going to happen when ships can’t get up or down the Hudson from the bay? What will they do when the Rox begins to hit housing in Jersey? They’re already changing the air-traffic patterns for Tomlin and La Guardia. Power is economics, Molly my dear.”
She didn’t believe me and said so. I thought of the dreams.
It won’t be enough ...
I became lost for a minute in the memory of my dreams, in the mindvoices. When I came back to reality, Molly was staring at me. “Look, Gov,” she said. “I know you. You got some plan, don’t you? That’s why you’re boring me to death with all your yapping.”
I grinned. “I want to use you, Molly, you and the rest of the jumpers. I want to use your abilities to make us fucking rich. If you want to really humiliate someone, you have to know where it will hurt them most when you hit them. And I also know what would scare them the most. I’ll organize it; you jumpers be the muscle. I tell you, I’ll make us rich, rich, rich. Let me tell you how we do it ....”
The Temptation of Hieronymus Bloat
There are times when life is good ....
Sometimes the pleasure even comes from odd sources. I’ve had only a few conversations with Prime. He isn’t on the Rox much; when he is, he tends to avoid me. It’s because he knows that I can see through his iceman facade. It’s because he knows that I see all the deepening cracks behind the smooth cold exterior. He knows that I see the obsession that torments him and titillates him all at the same time.
All the pressure, pent up for years and years and years behind his emotionless wall (not as good a wall as mine), and David-poor David-cracked it with just his presence. David’s death was a jackhammer blow. Walls: I have mine; Prime has his; and his is crumbling as the Berlin Wall crumbled last month.
Or ... I’ve thought of it another way, too, sometimes. Prime, if you watch him, is like a dormant volcano all covered with snow, but steaming through fumaroles that hint at the turmoil underneath.
That’s a better image, overall. And I wonder when he’s going to explode. I worry, too, because Prime holds Blaise in check. Without Prime ...
I was about to witness the unveiling when Kafka came rattling into the lobby, all excited. He hardly glanced at the huge draped package set before me. All out of breath, he just asked where it came from.
“It’s a present from Nelson Dixon.” Latham-Prime-stood next to the drapes. He sniffed, still playing iceman. Blaise wasn’t there, though Molly Bolt and K.C. were. The laughter of my jokers drifted down from the balcony and around the lobby. Peanut beat his one arm against my side, guffawing. I beamed down at the dimwitted joker in affection. Shroud, Marigold, Vomitus, Video, Elmomaybe a half a hundred all told in the lobby area, and all their thoughts crowded into my mind.
No wonder I’m so big. I have to hold so many people. Kafka looked as bewildered as a roach can look. He repeated what I’d just said, obviously confused.
“Well, Dixon signed the check,” I told him. “Nice of him, wasn’t it?”
Kafka blinked several times. “Well, I don’t know where he got it, and I certainly don’t have the foggiest notion of why it works, but it’s humming right along. I hooked it up.”
Sometimes even mind readers are confused. Belatedly, I looked at the images in Kafka’s head and realized we weren’t talking about the same thing at all. He was talking about a generator. I told him that I was glad he’d finally managed to get his hands on one to bring over to the Rox.
Kafka just shook his head (well, his whole body, actually). “You didn’t buy it, Governor?” More confusion radiated from the joker. He looked at me, at Prime, at Peanut and the rest of the jokers gathered around. “It was sitting there in the subbasement, and it wasn’t there two days ago. It doesn’t look like any generator I’ve ever seen.”
The picture in his mind looked exactly like a generator to me, but Kafka sighed. “I have no idea what’s fueling it or why it’s running, either,” he continued. “I checked out the readings, and it’s pumping out the amps, nice and steady. I ran the west wing’s circuits to it. We have lights, heat, and power ...”
About then, he stopped, noticing Prime’s present to me for the first time.
Prime waved his hand toward the drapes. “A little gift to the governor from us,” Prime told him. “The first royalty statement. Bloat’s suggestion to myself and the other jumpers has worked out well.” He yanked at the covering, and dirty canvas rippled to the floor. All the jokers gasped.
It was beautiful. More stunning than any of the plates I’d seen in the high school art history texts or in the poster I used to have taped to my bedroom wall. The painting-the triptych-stood five feet high, maybe four wide, in an ornate wooden case. On the front were scenes of the Taking of Christ and the Carrying of the Cross, but what I really wanted to see was on the interior panels. I gestured to Peanut and Elmo, telling them to hurry up and open it.
They opened the outer panels, revealing the brilliant fantastic landscape inside. Around the room I felt waves of admiration and surprise rippling out.
“The Temptation of St. Anthony. Hieronymous Bosch,” I said for the benefit of those who didn’t know the work. “Previously at the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon and now appearing exclusively in the Rox.”
I chuckled, loud and long. It was indeed glorious. Bosch didn’t know it, but he was painting the post-wild card world before it ever existed. I’ve often wondered if it wasn’t a flash of prescience-no one else in his time was doing anything like this. I can imagine it as my Rox. It would be a wondrous place, a glorious vision.
You know Bosch, don’t you? In his head grotesqueries abounded; his brush gave forth a torrent of human forms misshapen, altered, and tormented; his imagination overflowed with all the demons of hell and the icons of a superstitious age-at least that’s what my teachers said.
In the midst of a twisted medieval landscape, the characters of Bosch were playing. Jokers. They cavorted everywhere you looked. The triptych is a celebration of jokerhood: fox-headed demons, a merman riding a flying fish, another fish crawling down a road with a castle on its back, a skating penguin, a stag-headed man in a red cloak, another with grass growing on his back, a half-naked woman with a lizard’s tail, a toad-man, a monkey-man-hundreds of them, roiling in a dark, stormy world.
Like my Rox. Very much like the Rox I see in my dreams.
The Rox I might build if they’d let me.
Kafka was staring at the Bosch like all the others, captivated. The joker we call Headlamp had turned bright, bright eyes on the triptych, so that it stood bathed in crystalline illumination. Jokers cavorted in egg tempura brilliance.
I laughed gaily. “We’ve found the way to make the Combine pay us back.” The jumpers laughed at that, hearing K.C.’s phrase for the nat authorities. “They’ll pay quite well to be allowed to stay in their own little bodies. Quite well.” For that instant, looking at the Temptation, I forgot the tragedies in New York. I forgot the scorn of Prime and Blaise toward the jokers and my dreams. I forgot the nagging torture of all the jokers within my wall.
I forgot it all.
“The Rox has benefactors now. People in high places. People with money. Lots of money. No one will ever be hungry here again.”
I laughed again. The voices of the jokers laughed with me. The jokers in Bosch’s painting danced in sympathy.
There are times when life is shit ....
The day after Prime delivered the Bosch, Blaise did something I still can’t believe even he would do.
In one horrible stroke, he has taken Kelly away and wounded the one man who has always helped the jokers. It isn’t fair what Blaise has done to Kelly. It isn’t fair to her or to Tachyon. I listened as Blaise brought Tachyon to the Rox. I listened, and I couldn’t do anything, for most of the jokers here no longer trust Tachyon, not since he betrayed Hartmann. Still ...
It makes my stomach-all of it turn to listen to Tachy’s pain. Worse, I can’t shut it off like I can someone else’s voice. I felt it as soon as they pierced the wall. Maybe it’s because of my infatuation with Kelly, maybe its some remnant of Tachyon s telepathy, but we are linked.
He’s so loud in my head. He hurts so much .... Burning Sky, please help me ....
She hurts so much. She makes me hurt.
I was outraged, even though several of the jokers laughed when they heard about it. I sent Peanut to Blaise with a message that I wanted Tachyon returned to his own body. I told him that I understood Blaise had his own reasons for wanting to hurt Tachyon but that the doctor had done more to help the jokers than anyone else. For that, I said, I wanted Tachyon released now. Blaise had had his vengeance; he’d proved how strong he was. Now let Tachyon go.
I’m the governor, right?
Blaise sent Peanut back with Polaroids: Kelly’s—Tachyon’s—body, naked and spread-eagled, her eyes wide, haunted and hopelessly defiant. Tachyon exposed helplessly, the picture snapped between her spread legs. Tachyon covered by Blaise’s body. Tachyon afterward, weeping.
I ... well, I didn’t do anything.
I mean, what could I do, really? Was I going to send a squad of armed jokers to the jumper side of the Rox? I could’ve done that, but Blaise’d just mind-control them, or his followers would jump them. It’d start a civil war here. There are things I have to consider, after all. It’s not just a simple thing.
The jumpers bring in money, they bring in the rapture and other drugs that half the jokers here are addicted to. The fear of them is at least part of what keeps the authorities away. I need the jumpers as much as they need me.
There are things I can’t do. Really. I just ... I just wish I didn’t feel so bad about it. So dirty. I keep hearing myself, and I sound like fucking George Bush making excuses about how all his promises about ‘no new exotic laws’ have had to be forgotten.
Do you understand?
... please help rne ... I still hear her, and she’s calling for me.
It hurts. It really does.
I had Peanut burn the pictures, but I kept seeing them. Kelly, poor Kelly. My Kelly. This isn’t the way a romance is supposed to go.
The Temptation of Hieronymous Bloat
Two weeks later, and I have tried to get her out. I knew it wouldn’t do any good to talk to Blaise, so I didn’t. But I knew Blaise’s thoughts. I knew that he had a grudging respect for Prime, even possessed a fear of the man who could create a jumper and couldn’t be jumped himself, and so I tried that way.
I had to. It was bad enough that I had to hear Tachyon’s mindvoice. But now ... now she is in all my dreams too. I have them every night. She waits for me in my sleep, patiently.
It hurts. It makes me want to take Blaise and throttle the bastard.
I did try. Really. I talked to Prime-Latham.
Latham folded his hands on the new pair of Dockers he was wearing. Zelda made muscle-magazine poses behind him. He waited, filling his mind with old contracts and legal briefs, so that I had a difficult time knowing what he was really thinking. “I’m a busy man, Governor, and I really can’t stay here very long,” he said. “What is it you want?”
“I want your assistance,” I told him. “Blaise has done something stupid and dangerous. I assume you know what I’m talking about, or do I have to draw you a picture of a certain red-haired alien who has had an involuntary sexchange operation?” I grinned down at him. “I used to be able to draw pretty well. I could have drawn a picture.”
Latham only blinked. The dense contract language in his mind parted just long enough for him to speak-he really was very good at hiding his thoughts. “What Blaise does is his own business, not mine,” he said.
He gave me a smile that belonged on a codfish. The events of the last month had taken their toll on Latham, but he still had the cold act down well, if a little cracked around the edges.
“Kidnapping Tachyon was dumb,” I continued. “Even if Blaise hadn’t brought his grandfather here, I would’ve said that. I supposed Blaise gets the stupidity naturally. Tachyon’s certainly done some idiotic things himself-backing out on Hartmann comes to mind-but overall, we jokers owe Tachyon a hell of a lot. I don’t want him hurt.”
Zelda just snorted. “Why,” Latham asked, “should I do anything at all?”
“Because,” I said, a little bewildered that he could even ask, “a man like Tachyon doesn’t deserve what Blaise is doing to him.” That seemed clear enough to me.
Latham just pursed his lips and nodded. He sniffed, delicately. “Sympathy,” he said at last, “is more foolish than revenge as a motive for doing something.” He waited. “In my opinion.”
I gave him all the rest then. “Look, you don’t have to do it out of common decency if that offends you. Do it because Blaise has made the situation for the jokers a hundred times worse. You’ve heard the news reports. Bush has told Congress he’ll consider a revival of the exotic laws if they’ll put the legislation on his desk. The courts are playing hardball with any joker accused of any crime. Two states have already passed bills for mandatory sterilization of wild card carriers. The editorials in the papers are full of hatred and venom. Jokertown is a police state, and Koch’s making noises about ‘no more tolerance of scofflaws and squatters who take over public property’-he always did have a way with words. The jumpers have the entire city paranoid and armed. Kelly isn’t going to be able to masquerade as Tachyon for long. Taking someone with his high visibility will force the authorities to look at my Rox.”
Zelda pursed her lips in sarcastic sympathy. Latham just sat there, hands steepled under his chin.
“I know you, Prime,” I continued. “You hide your thoughts well enough when you’re sitting here in front of me, but not always. I know everything you know. All I have to do is whisper the right things to the Egrets, or maybe just tell the authorities what a certain prominent city attorney is up to ...” I left the sentence unfinished.
Zelda had gone alert and tense. The legal script in Latham’s mind shredded like tissue paper. In Latham’s mind, everything was cold. So cold. “Let me give you some advice, Governor,” he said as softly as ever. “Never bluff with blackmail. It is always a very weak hand. “
“It’s not a bluff. I’ll do it. I will.”
Latham almost smiled as guards came to attention all around us. He glanced at them slowly, calmly, then looked back at me. His hands didn’t move. Not a muscle twitched in his face, and his mind stayed blank.
That frightened me more than anything he could have said.
I couldn’t follow through. He was right. Kafka was right too-bluffing really is a dangerous game.
So I’m sorry, sorry because the Rox needs the jumpers. We need Prime and Blaise and all the rest.
Latham knew it. I knew it.
But I promise you. I will find another way.
The Temptation of Hieronymus Bloat
He was a lacuna in the fabric of the mindvoices. A vacuum. A null.
I’d never encountered a mindshield like this one. It was a hard round shell that I couldn’t quite grasp. Tachyon’s mind might have been that way once, but her mind powers were now weak and diffuse. Blaise’s shields, as I knew, were erratic and poor, emotions dribbling around and underneath them. But this one ... He had to be an ace, and I don’t like aces. I had Kafka send Shroud, File, and Video to meet Charon at the docks.
Video came back a little ahead of the others with images that disturbed me: Our intruder was a man about five feet tall and oddly wide, moving too fast for a mere human and lifting the front end of a jeep as easily as someone picking up a pencil. “He says his name’s Doug Morkle. Says he’s a Takisian, being hunted by the Combine. The demo’s supposed to prove to you that he is who he says he is. He wants refuge. He also wants to meet Blaise.”
A little stab of fright shuddered through me, setting off an avalanche of bloatblack. They were walking in the front door now, the Takisian between Shroud and File, neither of whom looked to be so much guarding Morkle as hoping that if he made a move, he’d go for the other. Looking at Morkle, I had no doubt that he could disable both of them before they could move to stop him.
But what I couldn’t do was read his thoughts. Their absence roared in my head. I didn’t realized just how much I depended on that hearing-I felt like someone suddenly deaf. The Takisian, already a threat from a simple physical standpoint, was more frightening because of that.
“Why is he here, Governor?” Kafka whispered to me as Morkle came across the lobby. The man didn’t glance at the lush tapestries, the gorgeous expanse of the Temptation, the new paint and gilt, or the stained-glass windows that were slowly transforming this place into a palace. None of that seemed to matter to him. He stared up at me. Pale eyes. Lavender eyes.
“I don’t know,” I answered Kafka.
His carapace rattled as he looked up at me, startled. “You don’t know?...”
“It is not your concern, in any case,” said Morkle, telling us that his hearing was as enhanced as his strength and agility. His words, coupled with the frustration of not being able to eavesdrop on his thoughts, made me angry.
“You’re on the Rox now,” I snapped back. “Everything on the Rox is my business.”
Morkle only gazed at me flatly, like a snake. His nose wrinkled. I thought maybe that was disgust, the smell of the bloatblack, but I didn’t know. “It you want to stay on the Rox, Morkle,” I continued, “you’d better learn—” I stopped. Another, less complete hole was moving through the mindvoices, very close by. “Damn it.”
“Governor?” Kafka asked.
“Blaise. He’s here. This might be trouble.”
Tachyon’s grandson threw back the lobby doors. Molly Bolt and Red came in with him, all three armed with automatic weapons. They fanned out as they entered, making distance between them. Their weapons were aimed at Morkle, who made no move at all.
Blaise was radiating a curious mixture of fear and pleasure. “Durg at-Morakh,” he said. “Why are you here? I hope you didn’t come here to finish what was started with Meadows. I’d hate to have to kill you.”
“Blaise—” I began, but he didn’t even glance at me. The Takisian spoke in a flat, emotionless voice. “Morakh serve,” he said. “You have Takisian blood; you lived when I tried to kill you. I came to see if you would have need of me.”
He did something then I hadn’t expected. He went to his knees, prostrating himself before Blaise.
Blaise’s mind gleamed with sudden triumph. The look he shot at me then was terrifying in its contempt. Mine. My beautiful weapon ..., I caught, and then Blaise’s paranoia made him pay attention to his mindshields, and the thoughts were cut off. “Let’s go, Durg at-Morakh bo Zabb Vayawandsa,” he said, and gestured to the other jumpers.
“Blaise.” He turned. “I wasn’t done,” I told him.
He just looked at me. I didn’t want to know his thoughts at all. I could see it all, there in his eyes. You are done. Half of your jokers are hooked on rapture; more and more are coming here every day, and all the supplies that feed and house them are bought with the money Prime gives you. We have the rapture, we can give the jokers the nat bodies they want. We can jump the rich or not. Jokers like you are eating at the jumpers’ trough. You remember how the Rox used to be? Do you remember jokers starving and living in tumbledown shacks? Is that the kingdom you want to govern, Bloat?
I knew. I knew when Blaise walked from the lobby with Durg that any chance I had to rescue Tachyon had just dwindled to almost nothing. I knew that Blaise’s grip on the Rox would become stronger and more harsh. I knew that my own influence would be damaged, maybe fatally.
I also knew that if I ordered my people to fire, to mow them down in cold blood and take control back again, they might not do it. I could hear their thoughts. The blue tinge of rapture would make them hesitate, the remembrance of hunger and overcrowding, the hope for a new, normal body ... Hell, we were rich now. Everyone had food. Everyone had all the toys jumper money could buy. No one wanted to give that up.
I didn’t know what they’d do or what would happen. I don’t hurt jokers. I won’t hurt jokers.
“You may leave,” I told Blaise. “I’m done with you now” It was a poor exit line. It was also the only one I had.
The pond outside the Administration Building-which was again the Crystal Castle in my dream-was frozen over with a late hard freeze. From the castle’s glass expanse, from all the sparkling spires and flying buttresses, long icicles hung.
A penguin wearing a funnel hat was skating on the pond.
“Bosch was just like you, y’know,” it said, and its voice was just like Robert Wanda’s, the art teacher at my high school. I was outside, too, though I was still Bloat. The morning snowfall had blanketed me in thick damp snow. Jokers were sledding down my slopes in sleds made from everything from garbage-can lids to sheet metal. One joker was shaped just like an American Flyer and was carrying Elmo, Peanut, and Kafka down my sides. They laughed and shouted so that I could hardly hear the penguin.
“What do you mean?” I asked it.
The penguin did a triple axel in front of me and came to a dead stop, showering me with ice flakes. “Well,” it said. “Bosch’s world was also marked by huge, terrible upheavals. The years of his life were marked by pestilence and unrest: economic, social, political, religious. The writers and artists of his time reflected a nearly universal pessimism. A sour lot, all of them, obsessed with death and violence and decay.” The penguin began skating backward, effortlessly. “Like you, big guy,” it said.
The penguin turned and glided away under a low bridge. Above it, crossing the pond on the bridge, Tachyon was being beaten by a large toad creature with the face of Blaise who brandished a hugh wooden penis. Durg, looking like a thing of shadow, walked behind them.
Tachyon was wearing a dress but otherwise looked like the Tachyon of old, not Kelly. I could hear the wailing torment in his mind and regretted once more that I hadn’t told Meadows about her. Maybe, maybe he could have gotten her out.
Not now.
“That’s right, flagellate yourself with the guilt. It’s good for you.”
“You can read my mind?” I asked the penguin. “What there is of it.” It cackled loudly.
I could not read the penguin’s thoughts at all. The penguin was a vacuum in the world, an emptiness. Like Durg.
“‘All that happens can be performed by demons,”‘ the penguin quoted. It winked. “Thomas Aquinas.”
“Is that supposed to be significant?”
“Could be. Could mean that if you want to rule in a place most of the nats think of as hell, you’d better get ruthless, asshole.” The penguin pointed across the bay. There I could see Manhattan, but there were no skyscrapers, just millions upon millions of people like maggots on a piece of rotting meat in July. They were fighting, quarreling, killing. Above them, demons with disfigured hateful faces spat fire on them, pissed great floods of acid, or shat streams of boiling pitch. I could hear the faint screams and smell the stench of burning flesh on the wind.’ The sky was blood-red above them.
“Alchemy and witchcraft were real stuff then,” the penguin intoned. I could feel the agony of the people washing over me now, a relentless, thundering, screaming tide of it. I wanted to hold my hands over my ears to shut it out.
“Devils pranced, incubi and succubi prowled the night,” the penguin continued. “Monsters lurked in the dark forests.”
“Like jokers in the city,” I murmured as if answering some damn refrain in church. With the words, I could see a vision of my people in Jokertown, flitting like angry ghosts from shadow to shadow, many of their lips tinted with the blue of rapture. The nats turned their faces away in fear and loathing.
“Bosch’s world was a world for youth. Old age began at thirty. By the time you were twelve, you were already doing your life’s work.” The penguin was spinning in front of me on one foot. “Only the young can be innocently cruel or unintentionally evil. Like a child, Bosch viewed the world through symbols and icons-so did everyone else. When you put on a priest’s vestments, you were the church. A king was not just the ruler-he was the country.”
“I am the Rox.”
“So you say,” the penguin replied. “Is that why so many of your jokers are looking to Blaise and Prime as the Rox’s leaders? Is that why so many jokers are offering to pay the jumpers to transfer them to a nat body? You’re losing it, fatboy. It’s all dripping through your useless little fingers.” The penguin’s tone was so mocking that I reared up like a giant cobra, ready to slam my entire weight down on the fucking bird. Sledding jokers screamed as I tossed them aside like fragile toys. “I am the ruler here!” I shouted. “There is no Rox without me!”
“The human condition in Bosch’s world was caught up in pessimism, folly, and evil,” the penguin shrugged. “Bosch snared the visions in his fevered imagination and made them real. Can you make your dreams real, fatso?”
I “Yes!” I was shouting, but the heat from the Manhattan fires was stifling now and very close; the flames seemed to mule my roar. The snow was melting everywhere; the ice thinned underneath the penguin as it laughed at me. The toad-Blaise had stopped his torment of Tachyon to look at me with evil, calculating eyes.
Suddenly, the ice of the pond cracked with a sound like breaking glass. The penguin silently disappeared into deep black water. It waved at me as it did so, unperturbed.
I woke. I was where I’d always been since I’d come here, in the lobby. The building was dark and silent. In front of me, I could just make out the larger darkness that was the Temptation. The room was cold on my face, though I felt nothing past there.
I wondered if it was snowing outside.
After the penguin dream, I slept, and woke again a few hours later. I’m not sure what time it was, but it was still pitch black in the lobby. I knew something was wrong, though I thought it was just another dream. But it’s not like I could pinch myself to see if I was awake ....
I guess I’m joking because I don’t know how to say any of this. It’s all still so unreal ... as strange as the nightmares I’d had the last two weeks. But it was real. I can’t fucking deny that. Every damn bit of it was real ....
I felt faint proddings against Bloat’s Wall and the first whisper of unknown minds. A massed hatred. A group fear. A common abhorrence. Nats, all of them.
I turned my attention to the Wall. I couldn’t tell exactly how many there were-maybe fifty or sixty, from the reports in the Times later. Most of the minds I sensed were scared, too, frightened of what they were about to face, shivering because they’d heard about my Wall and the jumpers and the rogue aces and jokers. They’d heard that the Rox was hell given life. Individually, none of them would have made it through. My Wall would have taken their paranoia and used it as a weapon against them. The Wall would have turned their bowels to ice water, set their teeth chattering loose in their jaws, and scattered them back to the city in a panic.
I was hearing all kinds of voices jumbled together:
the kids know some—I hear that the bay’s—they’re just kids. Man,
thing’s up with Daddy full of skeletons, all I got a teenager no
even the little one. around Ellis. People older than them. The
God, I hope Nancy’s who didn’t make it past lieutenant can say
not having a bad night the wall. They kill “shoot to kill” all he
with them them, the jokers do, wants, but I don’t
send ’em down for fish know if I can turn a
food gun on some pimplefaced
kid like my Kevin—
Yes. I laughed. All of them I could have turned if they’d hit the Wall one by one.
But they weren’t alone. That was the problem. That’s what made me doubt myself, really it was. They were a big group, all coming at once, maybe in nine or ten boats and two, three choppers, hitting my Wall from all sides simultaneously.
They’d taken one other precaution too. In each boat, in each chopper, there was at least one mind so angry, so dedicated, so goddamn determined to kick some joker ass that I could feel the Wall stretching and thinning like a rubber band.
Amy’s fucking son no goddam joker’s you want to stop the
was there in that gonna stop me. I’ll whole wild card problem
bank when they show them my forty—just wipe ’em out.
jumped the woman. five caliber wild card. Real simple. Just take
They gunned down Shove it right—down the whole frigging
my own nephew. Man, their slimy joker useless lot of them and
it’s gonna give me throats bury ’em
pleasure to pay that
back
I grated out Kafka’s name. I felt the joker’s mind shaking off his own dreams. He asked me if I was having a nightmare again. I told him one thing only. “They’re coming.”
Kafka didn’t answer, but I knew he understood. He snapped his fingers at my guards, making sure they were alert, then scuttled away. A few moments later, I heard the low growling of a siren from the roof of the building. The wail throbbed along the girders and walls; I could feel it shivering everywhere in my body, like a howling banshee.
In the darkness, I tried to push back with my Wall, tried to bring it under conscious control and focus its strength where it was being penetrated. I think it almost worked too.
But I’d already made my mistake. I just didn’t know it. It sounds like something Latham would throw back at me, but, man, I’d never had to run a battle before except when I played D&D. Maybe I should have known better.
But I am just a kid.
I could have handled it myself. I still think that. Hey, they were just a bunch of cops and park rangers. They weren’t really trained for this; they’d never worked together.
They didn’t even really hate us-they were just doing what they’d been told to do: Go get the joker squatters and teenage delinquents off Ellis.
I could’ve_ sent them back. Yes. Hell, they were just plain people, like my dad or Uncle George or Mr. Niemann next door back in Brooklyn.
I know from the news reports that two of the boats and one of the choppers did turn tail. I did that much at least. But whoever was in charge had been at least a little smart. They’d made some plans to get through the Wall. The pilots were those with a strong sense of duty and a violent antijoker prejudice, the ones already boiling mad at the way the Rox thumbed its collective nose at the “normal” world. The pilots were all guarded by like souls, so that even if the cops and rangers panicked, they couldn’t overpower those in charge. None of the weapons, from what I understand, were to be given out until the Wall had been breached.
Even so ... Even so, I don’t think more than one or two boats would have made it. The papers said several cops jumped overboard. Three rangers leapt from their copters into the bay. If only one or two made it past the Wall, they would’ve had to turn back simply ’cause there wouldn’t have been enough of them.
It would have been a bloodless rout. Except that I’d already been stupid.
Kafka’s alarm had roused the island. Lights snapped on in the Administration Building; I found myself staring full at the Bosch triptych. Jokers were rushing all over the lobby floor and along the high balcony. There was lots of yelling, internal and external, and all of us could hear the sullen thut-thut-thut of the helicopters.
The nats were still circling, though, still hitting the Wall and retreating again, like wasps butting against a glass door. They weren’t moving in toward the Rox anymore. They couldn’t get past my Wall. I could feel the paranoia and fear rising among them, like some infection. A few more minutes, and they would have turned tail and run back to New York or Jersey or wherever they’d come from.
I wasn’t paying too much attention to the voices of the Rox. Look, no one can make sense of hundreds of people all yammering at you at once. No, you have to shut some of it out, or you just go crazy. I’d let the Rox fade to a background static while my powers stalked the Wall.
Another mistake.
I felt it happen behind my mental back, sorta.
“No!” I screamed, startling everyone around me. Someone jumped back at my shout and nearly knocked over the Temptation. It wobbled and finally steadied. “No!”
The mindvoice of the park ranger guarding the pilot was suddenly gone. There was only a silence where it had been, and then a new voice was there, one I knew: the jumper called Red. I could hear his thoughts as he spoke to them .... safety off “Welcome” magazine in “to the” and let ’er rip “Rox, assholes!”
The mindvoices in the copter came at me all overdubbed and confused.
Christ just let me get turn this damn chop—hate leaving Angie any
back to my family. per around, if you ask way. God, it’d be
You can HAVE this me. Let ’em have stink—good to just be back
crap. I—what the ing Ellis if they want home with her, snug
hell’s with Johnson? it. Hey, what’s with gling. Huh? “Welcome—”
“Welcome to the Johnson? He’s looking Lord Jesus, he just took
Rox”? Oh God, John—pretty damn weird the safety off
son! NO! Please God
don’t
I screamed again. Screamed with the sudden death of the mindvoices and their wailing pain, screamed with the nats I knew were dying. Screamed because it was all so useless and unnecessary.
Outside, the jumped chopper lost control in a wail of shrieking metal. It exploded before it hit the water. I saw the glare wash over the buildings of the Rox.
I’ve never heard so many people die at once.
I heard the other nat squads slowly realize that some thing was wrong. I felt their outrage and horror as the carnage echoed over their headsets and radios. I felt their fury.
Their sudden surge of will.
My Wall fell in tatters, shredded by nat hatred. They poured through.
I was staring at the Temptation again, sightlessly. Everyone in the building was gaping at me. I knew they were waiting for Governor Bloat to do something, but I couldn’t think.
I could hear them. I could hear everything-as the two choppers touched down in cold tornadoes of dust and vomited their loads, as a boat full of rangers and cops hit the shores of my Rox and scrambled out. I heard screaming and the percussive bark of gunfire. I witnessed the assault through their minds.
It didn’t last long. I’d like to claim that it was something I did or that the jokers did, but it really wasn’t. I’d already told Kafka to take one of the walkie-talkies, thinking I’d direct him where the nats were. But even as the squad of jokers ran to the compound where the choppers had landed, the jumpers, directed by Blaise, continued to attack. They were taking the cops, making them turn and fire on their own. The nats quickly found that they couldn’t trust their friends. It wasn’t the damn kids or the ugly jokers who were the enemy here in the Rox. It was themselves.
They died.
I felt them die. I watched the scenes through their minds, through their thoughts.
Leo caught a glimpse of himself in his buddy’s visor. He was thinking that they looked like a bunch of damn robots behind the helmets. He even thought it was funny. He was starting to say so to Tom, his partner, when Tom shuddered. He looks so strange .... Then Tom whipped around his weapon before Leo could move. Tom was shooting at anything and everything, just holding the trigger down and spraying. Leo saw a line of slugs rip open his stomach and spill purple guts into his cupped hands.
He was dying. Cold mud pressed against his face, but in his mind was another image. He was holding a baby wrapped in a Muppet Babies blanket. In his thoughts, I could see him holding the kid up to his stubbled cheek. He kissed her.
“Good night, darling. Daddy’ll be back in the morning, I promise. You be good.” He replayed that kiss again and again, crying as his life pumped out from the hole in his chest and the vision spiraled away into the darkness of unconsciousness. “Daddy loves you. Hell be back. I promise. I love you.”
A park ranger stood on open ground near the docks. I could sense the hot suppressor of the CAR-15 he cradled against his chest. He looked down at the girl he’d just killed.
Just a kid, just a fucking kid, Jesus, not much older than me ... Then his thoughts moved away as he sensed someone coming up behind him. it’s Captain McGinnis. Only I could hear this captain’s thoughts, too, and I knew that it wasn’t McGinnis but Molly Bolt, and the only thing in her mind was a bloodlust.
Blaise’s mind was loud in the turmoil, his mindshields carelessly down. He thought it was funny. He thought it was hilarious how Durg could kill them so easily.
The battle was a rout. I could hear it. The nats realized that their strategy had been blown to hell and that they were likely to die here. Their retreat was short and bloody and complete. They fled the Rox, not even dragging away the dead and wounded they found in their path. They piled back into the choppers and the boat.
Blaise didn’t want to let them go. He wanted to kill them all. I shouted to Kafka through the walkie-talkie, knowing Blaise would be listening. I told him to let them go.
Let them go.
Blaise didn’t like it. But ... Durg said something to him that I could not hear, and Blaise just watched as the choppers wheeled into the gray sky, as the boat cast lines from the dock and careened away from the Rox.
I don’t know what I would have done if Blaise had defied me. Nothing, probably.
I could hear the wounded and the dying. Ahh, those I heard very well. Even though jumpers and jokers were shouting and dancing in an impromptu victory celebration all around, I didn’t share any of their happiness.
I just stared straight ahead, at the Temptation and its bizarre images. I looked at the burning city in the deep background of the painting and the soldiers spilling over the landscape.
I had felt nats die for the first time. A helpless voyeur, I watched them, and it hurt. It hurt just as if they were jokers. They had families and friends, and they weren’t any better or worse than my own people. Not really. Maybe, maybe they could have opened fire on the jokers here. Jokers are ugly and misshapen and not even human, if you know what I mean. But they would’ve had trouble with the jumpers, with the teenagers who look, after all, just like their own kids or nieces and nephews or maybe even themselves a few years back.
Worse, I knew I could’ve taken care of this myself without any bloodshed if I’d been a little smarter, if I’d just shut up and let the Wall do its work.
I looked at the Temptation and begged it to give some solution. So tell me, is this what victory’s supposed to feel like? Is it always such a sour, rotten fruit? Does it always leave you feeling so guilty?
St. Anthony, tormented by his own demons, didn’t give me an answer.
The Temptation of Hieronymus Bloat
I dreamed. I knew I dreamed, but I couldn’t wake myself.
I could hear the Princess sobbing, echoing in my head. The eerie sound of her pain reverberated from the depths of the place I somehow knew was called the Catacombs, and I couldn’t bear the sound of it. Even though I knew that this was the Pretender’s domain, this time I had to go to her physically.
With the thought, I found myself-the tall, lithe, and muscular Outcast-standing at the yawning, broken archway to the Catacombs, deep under the Crystal Castle where jokers walked. A rapier hung at my wide leather belt; I was dressed in fine supple leather and wore a wide-brimmed hat of stiff black cloth. With one last glance back at the sunlit world, I took the torch guttering in the wall sconce and entered the cold, empty darkness.
There were stairs, leading always down. I could hear the brush of the leather pants against my legs and the weeping of the Princess. Her anguish drew me and led me through the labyrinthine stairwells, among the multitude of corridors leading away right and left. This was a maze, like the dusty tombs I’d followed in my imagination in role-playing games.
Yet this felt like no game in my mind. I was the Outcast, the Hidden One, and I followed the distress of my distant imprisoned love. I moved cautiously, as silently as possible, since I knew I couldn’t risk being seen here by the Pretender or any of his companions. He couldn’t know that I plotted against him. It was only because I could never shut out the voice of the Princess that I came here-because I had always loved her from afar and now she was in pain. Because we talked with our minds and she knew me.
It seemed hours later that I came at last to a deep landing. It was cold here. A chill foulness emanated from a crevice in the wall to my left, though the passageway led straight ahead. Still, some compulsion drew me to the crevice first. It was a thin jagged crack from floor to ceiling, too small for me to fit through easily. From it issued that strange coldness and a bitter stench. I was glad the Princess wasn’t down there; I didn’t know if I could have gone to her. I tried to see into that darkness. Beyond there were series of caverns. The torchlight glittered from frozen falls of crystals; shimmering stalactites and stalagmites formed columns leading into the unknown depths. For a moment, I thought I caught a glimpse of a large dark bird lurking there, a penguin who looked at me with human, amused eyes.
Then it was gone.
The Princess cried out again, and I turned from the opening. I followed her compelling sobs until I came to a thick oaken door banded with great steel straps. A small hole, stoutly barred, was set in it. I let the light of my torch fall inside and peered in.
She lay in a pile of filthy straw in one corner of the bare stone cell. her golden hair spread out around her. She was more beautiful than my memory of her when I would watch her walking outside.
“Princess,” I called softly.
She turned, gasping at the sound of my voice. “Yes,” I said. “I am the Outcast.”
She rose to her feet. Her plain cotton dress was torn, her face, arms, and legs bruised with the Pretender’s abuse, but she was still enchanting.
She limped to the door and gazed at my face in wonderment. “So handsome,” she breathed, as if voicing her thoughts. “I’ve heard your voice in my mind ....” She touched my face with soft warm fingers, wonderingly. The tears began again, bright crystalline spheres tracking down her cheeks. “Please. I want out of here, Outcast. I can’t stand this anymore. Please.”
Her pleading tore at me in my helplessness. “Princess, this door’s too strong; I don’t have the keys.” I didn’t know what to say to her or how to explain. I couldn’t help her, not that way.
“I understand,” she said, and I knew she did. “You will find a way. You will.”
“I’ll try. That I promise you. I give you my oath, because I love you.”
From somewhere nearby there was the sound of bolts rasping and hinges groaning. We could hear rough male voices, laughing, and what sounded to me like the low grumbling of some monstrous toad. “Quickly,” the Princess said. “Go now.”
“I’ll send someone to help you,” I promised her, twining her fingers in mine one more time. “I have friends. They’ll help me. I’ll be back.”
“I know. But now you must go.” The Princess kissed my fingers.
I moved back into the dark maze of stairs, returning to the sunlight above. Long before I reached it, though, I heard her scream.
And the scream woke me.
It was Tachyon, crying in Kelly’s voice in my head, over and over again.
Prime looked around the lobby, nodding faintly. Zelda stood behind Prime and my guards, her muscular forearms folded in front of her and the thought Fuck you if you’re listening rattling through her head like a mantra.
“It’s nice to have money, isn’t it,” Prime commented at last. “Wide-screen projection TV, expensive sound equipment, fine art, tapestries on the wall-you have quite the modern castle here. Very nice, Governor.” Prime looked at me with a cold gaze and colder thoughts. “I suppose you know why I’m here,” he said.
I did. I didn’t like it either. “No is the answer,” I told him. “But I suppose you’re not going to just take that and leave.”
Prime smiled slightly. He pulled one of the Chippendale chairs toward him and sat. Zelda moved alongside him.
“I didn’t think so,” I said. “But eighty percent of the take is out of the question.”
If he was offended by my blatant theft of his thoughts, he didn’t react-but then, Prime never reacts. He just crossed his legs, folded his hands on top of the immaculate and neatly creased pants, and shrugged. “My jumpers are doing most of the work in this little scheme,” he said.
“The jumpers are the engine, yes,” I admitted, “but it’s jokers who are the body. Your little gang of juvenile delinquents doesn’t like the drudge work of guarding the bodies and keeping the records straight so that we can pull off the blackmail. And you’re making a lot of money from the jokers themselves, the ones who want new bodies. I expect you to give some of that back to us. Fifty-fifty was the deal. It was my idea, my setup, and my jokers administer it.” I was getting angry. (I knew this was coming; Kafka had warned me that it would happen. “They’ll get greedy,” he’d said. “You just watch.”)
“You can’t do it without us, Governor.”
“And you can’t do it without me,” I shouted back at him. “You’re forgetting that I’m the Rox. Blaise and the rest of your hoodlums need this place.”
Latham didn’t say anything. But he thought a lot. I am going to do you a favor and not say this aloud. Don’t threaten me, Governor, especially not with a weak argument like that.
Look at the facts. Fact: While you do make the Rox possible, we all know it’s not a power you can turn on and off. Fact: The wall is as much for you as the jumpers, and the only way to get rid of it is to kill yourself, which you’re not stupid enough to try. Fact: No one is starving here anymore because of the money your jump-the-rich scheme has brought in, which is good, but it also means that no one particularly wants to go back to the old way, which is what will happen if my people pull out of the deal. Fact: A lot of jokers want to keep this going because they want to buy a new body for themselves. Fact: You have a severe population problem. Our success is bringing more and more jokers here, and even with the money and rapture, you’re already having problems finding places to put them.
And the last fact: If I pull out, you not only have lost the jump-the-rich scheme, you’ve lost your rapture connection. Tell me, Bloat, what would happen to the Rox if there was no rapture?
We don’t need you at all, Governor. You had the idea; we’re paying you for that. I have plenty of contacts to keep this going myself, and enough jokers in Jokertown who are hungry for a new body and willing to pay for it that I can pull in as much cash as I’d want. If I were you, I’d be happy with the twenty percent I’m offering. I’d be happy to get anything at all. After all, twenty percent will keep the Rox in food and rapture.
The fact is, Governor, that unless you have something else to bargain with, you have nothing to say about this at all. Latham smiled at me. “So, Governor,” he said aloud, “what do you have to say?”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. I looked at Prime, at the grinning Zelda, and the quizzical glances of my guards. “Get out of here, Prime,” I said. “Just get out and leave me alone.”
He smiled. He smoothed the crease in his pants and languidly uncrossed his legs. “ I thought so,” he said. “Good doing business with you, Governor.”
“Prime,” I called as he and Zelda started to leave. He stopped and turned back to me. “I’ll find something,” I told him. “I’ll find some leverage somewhere. Then we’ll talk again. You understand?”
“Of course I understand,” he said. “It’s exactly what I would do, after all. You see, Governor, we’re not so different, are we? We just have different agendas.”
They’d had to move the Bosch painting since I seemed to be undergoing some new growth spurt. My body was pushing forward into the lobby. Kafka told me that I’d filled two more of the offices in back and that new floor struts needed to be added. I was hungry all the time too. The Rox’s sewage system only took the edge off. The bloatblack that rolled off me was lighter in color and less solid, but stank worse.
I guess it was a corollary that the Wall was a quarter mile farther out into the bay now. It was stronger, too; I could push back almost anyone who didn’t really want to be here. A nice power, if it were under my control, but it wasn’t. The Wall just was, as always.
Too bad the Wall can’t do anything to the people inside it.
Blaise was in the lobby, with his tagalong assassin, Durg. Tachyon’s grandson didn’t do much more than glance at the work in progress. Around the lobby and behind the Temptation, jokers were busily taking out walls and replacing them with enormous panes of glass. Already the lobby was brighter, and I could see more of the Rox. When the renovation was finished, when all around me there would be nothing but windows and my body was raised even higher, I’d be able to look out and see the entire panorama of the island and bay. I’d have transformed the building into the turreted, glittering Crystal Castle I’d seen in my dreams.
All it would take was money. Money we had plenty of now.
My body rumbled. Sphincters dilated, pulsed, and more bloatblack sloughed off down my stained sides. The blackers moved in to shovel away the waste. Blaise stared at them, refusing to show on his face the disgust that was in his mind, though Durg openly scowled. The hypocrisy was enough to make me laugh.
So I did.
“You and your stupid giggling,” Blaise muttered, then more loudly: “Tell me, Governor, are you going to still be laughing when we start fighting over land on the Rox? ’Cause that’s what’s gonna happen, real soon. There ain’t room here, Bloat. There’s too many people coming out here now. Christ, you’re going to want to move the fucking Statue of Liberty over here next. ‘Give us your twisted, your disfigured, your huddled masses yearning to be normal ....’ Damn it, be realistic. There’s only so much room here, and we’re full. No fucking vacancy.”
Kafka was glaring at Blaise, but in his mind there was some grudging agreement. That was a first. Kafka nodded. “Governor, Blaise is at least partially right. I don’t know that we can keep up with the demand on services. If we get too many immigrants, we won’t be able to feed them, no matter how much money we have. We won’t be able to clean up the garbage, won’t be able to give them water and sewage and power. We’ll have fights and arguments over space and facilities. It’ll be worse than Jokertown. That’s not what you want. Things are good here now”
“What do you want me to do, Kafka? Say to those who get past the wall, ‘Sorry, you can’t come in’? You want me to shoot them?”
“Sounds like a fucking good idea to me,” Blaise said. Kafka snarled at him.
“Hey,” Blaise retorted. “I’m not asking, I’m telling. There’s no more room. You want rapture, you want money, then close the fucking borders. That’s my feeling, that’s Prime’s feeling. So do it, huh? I don’t care how, just keep the new jokers out, or maybe we’ll stop playing ball with you at all. Then where you gonna be?” He challenged me with a stare. “Ain’t that what Prime told you too?”
All the time Blaise was yapping, I was feeling something else. I don’t know when I first noticed it not long after the argument began. I could sense an extension of myself, some psychic limb like the wall that was just beginning to bud and grow. I could feel this thing pushing, pushing against something hard and solid.
Inside ... I don’t know how to describe it ... there was a sense of stretching, of growing ... Like I was experiencing a dream at the same time I was talking to them.
I was so tired of feeling powerless, you see-with Tachyon, with the growing pains of the Rox, with what had happened during the cops’ attack, with Blaise’s goddamn superiority complex, with Prime’s cold manipulations. I was so deadly tired of it.
Nobody was agreeing with me. They were all saying the same thing: There’s no room anymore. We don’t have the resources to waste on new people or new buildings. You gotta send some of ’em back. You gotta stop them from coming here.
And I kept thinking of my dreams, of what I wanted the Rox to be.
“Look, the Wall’s the only immigration policy the Rox needs,” I answered.
“Yeah, it sure fucking kept out the cops, didn’t it?”
“Hey,” I shouted back, “if one of your stupid jumpers hadn’t barged in and wrecked things, yeah, the Wall would’ve kept them out.”
“You’re full of shit, Governor.”
Durg, next to Blaise, suddenly became very alert. I knew he expected me to do something in response to Blaise’s blatant rudeness.
But I was full. I was full of a vision. A vision of space, a dream of dark places and echoing rooms. The dreams inside me were stretching ....
A deep rumble cut off our argument. Blaise was shouting; Kafka was chattering; they were all shouting, inside and out. I was scared myself.
The whole Administration Building was shaking. I heard glass breaking and saw the ramshackle buildings across the court swaying. A curtain of dust rippled across the courtyard, even though there was no wind. My feeling of extension hardened, became full.
Then it was over. The quiet was very loud.
I knew. I knew even as the tremors died and the plaster dust drifted down like snow from the ceilings, as Blaise and Kafka and the rest picked themselves off the floor.
“What was that?” Their thoughts were all confused and panicked. Blaise was thinking it was another attack.
I just looked at them calmly and told them what it was. “It was a dream.”
They just looked at me. “Go to the west wing,” I told them. “The basement. You’ll see. Go on-all of you. Leave me alone. I’m tired and I’m hungry”
They stared at me. Blaise was thinking that I’d finally gone mad; Kafka was puzzling; Peanut was gazing at me trustingly.
“Go on,” I told them again. “Then come back and tell me what you’ve seen.”
They were gone for an hour. I followed them, riding with their minds. When they returned, they were quiet, all of them. Blaise was regarding me with a grudging wonder and a touch just a touch-of fear. God knows what Durg was thinking.
I gazed at the remembered images in their heads, chuckling now. They were gorgeous, my caves. Walls of fluted smooth stone rippling from vast ceilings to distant floors; glittering, snowy patches of calcite crystals; deep pits where water roared in the darkness; hidden places where beasts of dreams walked.
Another world. A joker’s land. I laughed.
Tachyon’s grandson had wrapped his thoughts so I could hear very little of them. Only the barest tinge of his emotions leaked out. He asked me-knowing the answer-if I’d seen the caverns through their minds.
I told him that I had.
Then he asked me the question he didn’t really want to ask because he was afraid that he already knew the answer. “Did you make them?”
I was too exhausted for anything but honesty. “I think so, Blaise,” I admitted. “I’m not sure, but I’ve dreamed of them. Still ... there’s a lot more there than what I dreamed. I don’t control it. I don’t know what-all is down there.”
Blaise gave a brief nod of his head, almost a salute. Confusion radiated from behind his mindshields. He turned and left the lobby without another word.
“You don’t think big enough,” the penguin had told me. Well, was this the right size?
“It’s not possible,” Kafka whispered. “I saw it, but it’s not possible. Ellis is just old ship ballast. It’s not even a real island.”
“Then it’s the perfect place for a fantasy, isn’t it,” I told him. I wanted to laugh, but I couldn’t.
The Temptation of Hieronymus Bloat
Blaise had torn down the Administration Building around me, replacing it with a gigantic cage of steel. I stared out forlornly through the bars as Blaise and Prime rounded up all the jokers from their houses and the caves below, herding them into a great mass before me. Tachyon-Kelly was there, too, standing beside Blaise and cradling the great mound of her belly. Blaise kissed her savagely, his eyes open and staring at me, not her. Prime applauded the gesture-Latham had taken all the money from the jokers; the bills in an enormous green pile before him.
“Now, Durg,” Blaise said, and I heard a rumbling. An enormous bulldozer the size of a house came into view, and instead of grillwork, the front of it was Durg’s face. DozerDurg churned the earth of the Rox, driving inexorably toward the jokers, who screamed with rapture-blue lips, cowering and backing away from the mechanical horror until the water of New York Bay lapped at their heels.
“Stop!” I yelled to Blaise from my case. “This is the joker homeland! This isn’t your place; this is the Rox!”
Blaise only laughed. Prime smiled coldly, sorting the stacks of bills before him. A cold wind was blowing, a dark wind, and it scattered the money. Latham ran after the flying bills, shouting and grasping, but the wind took them all out into the bay. Prime-Latham jumped up and down on the shore, cursing.
“Prime!” I shouted to him. “You have to help me! I’m the governor!”
Blaise was laughing at Prime, laughing at me. DozerDurg herded the jokers, forcing them deeper into the water. “Well, Fatboy, they’ve got you trapped, but then you already know that.”
I looked down to see the penguin grinning up at me. A huge key ring was hung over the funnel hat; an ornate ancient key dangled from the ring. “Shut up. Go away,” I told it.
“Whassamatta, Gov? You afraid?” The penguin tsked softly, shaking its head. The key rang against the ring with a dull chiming. “You have so much potential, so much power.”
“I don’t have any power,” I raged. “Nothing. The caves just came; I don’t know how I did it or how to do it again. It’s all a sham. Damn it, I could make this place something wonderful if they’d just let me.”
“You certainly could,” the penguin agreed. “If you’d get off your big ass and use that power. But you won’t. You don’t really believe in it.”
I began pacing the perimeter of my cage. I was the Outcast now, with an empty scabbard banging against my hip as a reminder of my impotence. I shook the bars; I raged.
None of it did any good. Blaise laughed, Latham ignored me. Dozer-Durg drove the jokers out until the waters of the bay closed over them with black finality.
Blaise’s arm snaked around Tachyon’s swelling waist and walked her over to my prison. “You see,” he said to her. “He’s nothing. He’s powerless to help you. He’s lost everything.” He pointed at me, low, and chuckled.
I looked down. Blaise was right. I was naked, and where my genitals should have been there was nothing but smooth unbroken skin. I began to scream ....
I was still screaming when I woke up.
“You’ll take the message to Latham?” I asked Croyd. “Is it safe for you?”
Croyd shrugged. I could tell he was wired, red-eyed and ready to sleep. He looked like a pink-skinned bat on growth hormones-not a pretty sight. He’d come to the Rox since he didn’t feel that Manhattan was safe for any joker any longer. It’s a bitch, man. If I’d known Shad was gonna cause this kinda ruckus ... “I can do that much, sure. I still think it’d be a lot easier to just get a whole bunch of us together and bust Tachyon.”
“It’s not that simple,” I said. “You don’t know the situation here. I have to be honest, Croyd. I’ve got a tower room all set up for you-hell, you’re one of the joker heroesbut I can’t say you’re safer here than Manhattan.”
“I’ll take my chances,” Croyd shrugged. Wing membrane rustled. “And I’ll pay the rent, too. I make a hell of delivery boy; don’t have to fool with traffic. What’s in the package?”
“Blackmail.”
Croyd grinned. He flew off.
I hadn’t been kidding. Whoever this ace was who’d wrecked our jump-the-rich scheme had left me one silver lining. There was now a lot of pressure on the authorities to hang someone for this. I was only reminding Latham that I had a lot of information regarding that scheme that would make his life very, very uncomfortable. Sure, he’d shrugged that aside once before, but there was a lot more heat now. I also let him know that none of that information would ever reach them if he could do me just one little favor-convince Blaise to let Tachyon go, or simply spring Tachyon himself. I knew Latham’s thoughts, after all; I knew he detested Blaise as much as anyone. I knew that he feared Blaise as well. In my letter, I asked him what might happen to Blaise once they heard from Tachyon what had happened. Blaise, after all, was the visible head of the jumpers.
Croyd came back several hours later. “It’s done,” Croyd said. “Latham said that he’d take care of it.”
I laughed, happily. Yes! I exulted. Soon, my love! Soon you will be free. It’s done!
I’d done it. It had taken far longer than my worst fears, but at last this injustice would be over. The realization felt so good, so damned good. Even the colors of the Bosch seemed more vibrant.
Croyd looked at the painting, too, sighed, and rustled his wings, folding them around his wrinkled, wizened body. “Now, where can I sleep, Governor?” he asked.
The Temptation of Hieronymus Bloat
“My army is gathering to me, Princess,” I told her. “Every day since we battled the invaders from the great city and won, more and more people have come to me. They’re jokers, most of them, but a few are aces ...”
“You have too many,” she whispered in the darkness. “There are too many people here now. That is what the Pretender has told me. He says there wasn’t room in your shared kingdom before the battle and the new caves aren’t safe for his people. He says there isn’t proper housing for those who deserve it. He says the jokers have too much money, too much room. He hates you, all of you, and the situation is making him angry. He says horrible things about you.”
“The Pretender is a fool,” I spat out, though I had worried about the same thing. “His words don’t scare me.”
“If his words don’t scare you, then why have you not rescued me, my love?” Her soft, sad smile took some-but not all, not all-sting from her words. “I am in your hands entirely, Outcast. You have the power; I have nothing. I believe you. I ... I love you. Please, please take me out of here.”
My soul ached. My breath caught in my throat. I stroked the smooth skin of the Princess’s hands, glaring at the crude bars and stones that held her as if I could break them by the force of my will and desire. The ground underneath my feet rumbled and groaned in concert with my rage. “You know I will do that when I can, Princess,” I told her. “You know that I have pursued several avenues to have you set free. I thought I’d found the way twice now. Both times I’ve been thwarted. This isn’t easy. I must be able to guarantee that you will be safe and that my people will be safe as well.”
“When, then?”
“Soon. Trust me. I will find a way. I must be careful. You know how powerful the Pretender is. If he knew I was here now, he might send the Silent Guardian.” I felt a shiver,of fear go through her; the same chill touched me.
But she was right. I couldn’t tolerate her torment much longer. The soft swell of her belly under the dress was an accusation. I told myself that I would find a way, no matter what obstacles the Pretender placed in my way.
The strength is within you, she had told me. I wish that I felt it were really true.
“I won’t let them hurt you anymore,” I whispered to her, the Princess with Kelly’s face. I said the words, and they became a vow, a resolution. “I will make you a way out. Believe me.”
Before she could answer, there was the sound of nearby bolts being loosed. I felt a rush of panic. I kissed the tips of her fingers before I hurried away from her into the darkness of the Catacombs and the long stairs under the Ruined Castle. I began the long climb back to the sun.
The ascent was becoming more difficult every time. The hallways of the Catacombs had shrunk, pressing inward. I seemed heavier and much larger. My body barely fit in the passageway. The stones tore at my leather clothing, holding me back and making it difficult to maneuver through the twisting turns of the labyrinth.
Exhausted and bloody, I paused at the landing where the crevice led to the caverns. The crevice had widened as the Catacombs had diminished. The opening was now easily large enough for me to fit through. I looked into the caverns beyond-there was a figure there. I thought for a moment that it was the toadlike presence of the Pretender, and my heart hammered against my ribs while my breath came harsh and quick. I held my torch high, letting the light shatter on the crystalline walls. I pulled the rapier from my belt.
The penguin laughed at me. “You don’t need that here, Fatboy. What a fucking scaredy-cat.”
“I’m not scared,” I told him. “The Outcast is never scared.”
“Yeah. Right. That’s why you’ve let your Princess sit in her cell for so long. That’s why she’s knocked up. That’s why you’ve always tried to get someone else to do your dirty work. You’re scared, all right, or you’d’ve done something.” The penguin cocked its head at me. “You gonna stay out there, or are you afraid of the dark?”
The penguin’s scorn made me scowl. I scrambled through the rocky opening into the cool air of the caverns. Shadows fled the light of my torch. This place was vast: I could not see the roof or the far walls. Blackness hinted of openings leading out into secret ways and further caverns.
“What is this place?” I asked.
“It’s your dream. You fucking tell me. All I know is that it’s big and there’re places here I wouldn’t care to stay, and other places so damn beautiful, it makes me cry. It’s a place. That’s all. Big enough for everyone and all the horrors and beauty that the Rox can dream.”
The penguin looked at me strangely. “So, when you gonna do something?”
“When the time is right.”
The penguin hawked and spat an enormous glob of spittle at its feet. Centipedes crawled from the rocks and lapped at the moisture. “Bullshit again. The time is now”
“The Pretender’s still too strong, even with the death of the Overlord.”
“Nope. You’re too weak. It’s time for you to grow up, Fatboy.”
With those words, the penguin sounded exactly like my father. “Just shut up!” I shouted back at him. Shadows moved in the darkness, as if my words had stirred unseen creatures to life. “What the hell do you know?”
“I know that you’re acting like a kid afraid of the neighborhood bully,” the penguin told me. “I also know that for as big as you are, you just don’t think big enough.”
“And what is that supposed to mean?”
“You really love her? Then get her out. Do something.”
“I don’t know how!” I told the penguin in anguish, and my voice was a wail.,
“I’ll help you, Governor. Let me help you.”
My whole body shuddered. The dream had dissolved. I found myself in the lobby, and Peanut was looking up at me with trust and loyalty and sadness in his mind. His wide sympathetic eyes, caught in their eternal hard folds of skin, gazed at me.
“Peanut—”
“It’d be best that way. Really. I know the way through the caves to her better than anyone. All you have to do is make an opening into her cell. You can do that, can’t you?”
He looked up at me with those trusting eyes. “I can lead her through the caves, get into a boat, and take her to where she’d be safe. No one would know, Governor.”
“No,” I said. I couldn’t send a whole contingent of jokers-that would start a civil war here, and the jokers would inevitably lose. I couldn’t afford to oppose Blaise directly, and with Latham gone, I had no more leverage within the jumper camp. So many people gone: K. C., Latham, Zelda ...
I smiled at Peanut. So simple and confident and faithfulhe believed that there was always a way. He believed that Good always had to win in the last reel.
And so, I guess, did I.
I felt the same stirrings of something that I’d felt when I’d made the caves, and I knew that, yes, I could make the door into her cell. I could do that much, I was certain.
“Let me think about it,” I told Peanut.
The Temptation of Hieronymus Bloat
There are things that a person shouldn’t have to remember. Peanut’s martyrdom was still reverberating in my head, driving out everything else. Governor, I won’t talk. I won’t. Don’t worry ...
I could feel the knifepoint against his throat, could feel it through his mind. And then Peanut shoved it home. Drove it into his own body to save me.
When I heard Peanut’s pain, when I felt it rake my mind like clawed fingers, I screamed for Kafka and told him to bring Blaise to me as soon as he came out of the caverns.
I suppose it was a measure of Blaise’s arrogance and his contempt for me that he came alone except for the two jumpers carrying Peanut’s body. He’d sent Durg back with Tachyon.
They just dumped him on the lobby floor. The poor joker’s eyes were still open. Peanut stared at me, but his mind was utterly still and empty. I blinked. Tears blurred the bloody corpse.
Can’t let them know who sent me. Can’t let Blaise hurt the governor. Those were the last thoughts I’d heard from Peanut.
Damn you, Peanut. Did you have to be so goddamn noble? Maybe if you hadn’t, I wouldn’t feel so guilty. I didn’t know he’d be there. I didn’t. I thought it would be simple.
Blaise glanced at the Temptation, at Kafka, and at the jokers who had gathered.
Can’t let them know ..’.
Simple, brave Peanut. I wondered how in the hell I’d come to deserve that kind of loyalty. The only legacy of my efforts was that Peanut was dead. I’d killed a friend, ruined my dream fantasy, and Tachyon was still a prisoner.
Fucking effective.
“He killed himself, Bloat,” Blaise crowed. He was mocking me in his head, daring me to object. “He was helping my old granpere to escape. He interfered with me, but I didn’t touch him. Of course, you know all this, don’t you. You were listening, right? Governor Bloat knows everything.”
Inside, he taunted: I know it was you, Bloat. I know. That fuck Peanut didn’t have two brain cells to rub together. He didn’t think of this on his own, did he. He let the thoughts drift out of the veils hiding his mind.
“Get out of here, Blaise,” I said. “You did what you wanted to do. It’s over. Now get the hell out of here.”
But Blaise wanted to brag, wanted to strut. He was laughing, talking about how this was a lesson to anyone who thought they could interfere with him, that he’d do the same to anyone else who got in his way. Anyone. He was looking at me when he said it.
“You got Tachyon back,” I told him. I looked at Peanut, at the gory vision of his sacrifice for me. The tears threatened again, and my voice was breaking. “Peanut’s dead. Drop it.” Blaise just snorted and kept going.
“Blaise, I’ve warned you—” Even to myself, my blustering sounded like bad empty movie dialogue, and Peanut’s body was a symbol of just how empty my words were. I wasn’t surprised when Blaise just laughed. Guards brought their guns up, swinging them to bear on the red-haired kid, but he just waved his arms at them.
He just kept blathering. “You gonna tell ’em to shoot, Gov? You think that’s going to stop me? Maybe I should just jump one of them and start firing away.”
“Put your guns down,” I told my people.
Blaise laughed louder. “Ain’t that just like you, Gov? You never kill anyone. Prime had you pegged-you’re a whimp. The fucking caves are you, too-they mean you don’t have to worry about making a move to New York. You didn’t want to do that anyway, did you? Not really. You might have had to hurt someone if you did. You wimped out with my grandfather, too. You could’ve sent a whole squadron of jokers or used some of the renegade aces on the Rox. But no, you tried to do it hidden and bloodless. You sent Peanut—I know it was you, Governor. That was a wimp’s rescue; it had ‘Bloat’ engraved all fucking over it. Bloat doesn’t hurt jokers or jumpers or anyone. Bloat wants to make a fairyland where everyone kisses and hugs and loves each other, all encircled in Bloat’s sturdy little wall. Well, you know what? That’s fucking stupid.”
My jokers were watching me. I didn’t have anything to say. Peanut looked up at me, and I thought I could see that damn idiotic trust still in his eyes. “Somebody cover that body,” I husked out.
Blaise howled with. laughter.
He is scared of you. Underneath it all, he’s not confident. I know it. Blaise fears anything he can’t control; you can’t be jumped and the screens around your mind are too strong for him. He’s afraid of your unconscious power, toothe dreamstuff. He’s seen the caverns; they worry him. The scope of the power that created them ... Tachyon tried to soothe me.
I raged back at her.
I don’t control the ability. It’s like the wall-things just happen. You think I would’ve let Peanut die if I could do it on my own? I don’t have power. Not really. You know that now, don’t you? You detest me.
No. Bloat, I’m so ... I’m so sorry. I didn’t want to hurt you. Neither one of us wanted Peanut to die, but he died because he loved you, because he believed in you. I believe in you, too. I still do.
I can’t do anything for you. I failed.
You can, Bloat. You can. Please ... Promise me one thing. Promise that you won’t give up. Promise me that. Why’
Because the Outcast loved the Princess, and the Princess loved the Outcast, too. Because what you’re trying to do here is good. Because if you don’t, then Peanut wasted his life. We were both crying.
I’ll still get you out, I promised her. I will. I’ll do ... I don’t know what. But I’ll find some way, someone to help me. But the contact had faded, as it always did. I don’t know if she heard me or not. I caught only the faintest whisper of her voice:... you have the power, Bloat. Use it.
I raged. I sobbed.
“She’s right. She’s telling you just what I’ve been telling you.” The penguin. It stood in the lobby before me. Not a hallucination, not a dream-I could see the guards looking at it curiously and wondering. “Right,” the penguin said. “You made me, like you made the rest.”
“How?” I shouted. “Tell me how I can control this.” But it didn’t answer. It waddled away down the corridor to the west wing, toward the caves. “I’ll be back,” it said. “When you need me.”
“Governor?” Andiron, one of the guards, asked. “Should we stop him?”
“You see it? You really do?”
Andiron looked at me strangely. “Yes. Of course.”
I sighed. I looked at the Temptation and tried to think. “Let it go,” I told him. “Let it go.”
I guess that after Peanut’s death I felt that I had to do something. I needed to gain some (however grudging) respect from the jumpers, not to mention the jokers. And despite Tachyon’s entreaties, the only thing I seemed to have accomplished with my dreams had been to make the penguin real. Several jokers reported seeing it moving through the caves.
A parlor trick. Bloat can pull a penguin from his hat. Great. Boy, will that scare the nats. Gosh, is that going to make Blaise tremble.
I needed action. I needed a symbol. I needed to feel that I was doing something.
I thought it time to make official what was already true in fact.
Kafka punched home the switch on the power strips. Arc lights flared with an audible snarling, and I was bathed in incandescent splendor. I watched the monitor as Kafka ticked off the seconds with his fingers. He jabbed a finger at me as the red light blinked on the video camera. In the monitor, the Temptation appeared in a slow pan.
I started talking. I had the script memorized. I’d practiced it for two days straight, making little changes here and there.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” I said, and heard my high voice reverberate through the sound system we’d bought back when we’d had money to play with. Across the monitor, St. Anthony was bedeviled by strange hordes,, beaten by demons flying in the sky, tantalized by a seductress with her surreal following. “It’s The Temptation of St. Anthony, if you’re not familiar with the painting. Bosch is giving us the tale of Anthony of Egypt and how he was unable to function in his own society. He couldn’t exist there, not unless he was the same as they were. So Anthony decided to retreat. He fled the worldly life and went into the desert. He made a place where he could be as he needed to be.”
The camera pulled back from the painting and focused on my face, my plump-cheeked, pimply, fatboy face nearly lost in the folds of pasty flesh. The camera continued to zoom back, farther and farther, showing the gravid landscape of my body crammed into the lobby.
“Ain’t it funny how your world always views evil as something misshapen or twisted or ugly? Like a joker, y’know. Funny. But to us, being that way is normal.”
Panning now, the camera moving over the solemn joker faces in front of me and around the balcony ...
“Your world treats jokers badly. That statement doesn’t exactly surprise you, does it? Then it shouldn’t surprise you that, hey, sometimes a joker will kick back one way or another. The only trouble is, whenever that happens, the violence ante just gets upped one more notch. The joker gets stomped again, only harder this time. We’re tired of that game. Hey, it’s one we can’t win-you’ve got the power and there’s nowhere for a joker to hide. You don’t even have to brand us or legislate our movements to keep track of us; we wear our identification all the time. All you have to do is look.”
Back to me: half a teenager glued onto a slug thing from a bad Japanese monster movie ...
“I’m Bloat. This is the Rox, what most of you still call Ellis Island. I’m the governor of the Rox. I’m the one who keeps all of you out and lets the jokers in. What I have to say is pretty simple, really.”
I licked my lips, which were suddenly dry. Bloatblack rippled down my sides; I tried to ignore the smell.
Now that it had come to it, I was scared. Reading about revolutions in history books never made me feel the experience-I always knew how it would end. Doing the same thing in role-playing games was simple: If my character died, I’d roll another and keep playing.
But here, now, I didn’t know what would happen afterward. I’d already learned that-in this world-you only get one death.
“I’m the governor of the Rox,” I repeated. Kafka winced at my blunder and pointed out my place in the cue cards alongside the camera. I stumbled over the next few lines, stuttering. “The ... the Rox has become a joker’s haven. A place away from the nats and hostile authorities. Here, we’re normal. Here, we can be as we need to be. So what I’m saying now is just legitimizing something that’s already a fact.”
Tight in ...
“I hereby declare the Rox to be a separate political entity. We declare ourselves independent of the state of New York and the United States. You have no authority over us. We’re the joker homeland.”
Around me, jokers burst into prolonged cheering. The camera swung around to show the celebration. I gestured to Kafka. The lights kicked off, and the video feed went dead.
The loud jubilation of the jokers, my people, continued unabated. I could hear it here, could feel it going on all over the Rox. I looked down at Kafka, characteristically somber. He was thinking of the Astronomer again, of another stronghold that had been destroyed.
“How do you think that went over?” I asked him. “We’ll find out,” he answered. “Won’t we?”
The Temptation of Hieronymus Bloat
It began very much like the last time.
I woke from a dream. For a moment I was confused, wondering where I was. Kafka’s crews had finished the lobby’s remodeling a few days ago. My body now rested on a ramp, jutting up in the center of the space as high as the balconies, my head another full story above that. The walls of the building were triple-paned glass all around. I could see the Rox slumbering in a thick predawn fog. My land looked peaceful enough, and the mindvoices were mostly quiet, filled with their own dream images-though there were exceptions: Croyd pacing in his tower and trying to decide whether to try to sleep or not, Chickenhawk (who was supposed to be watching the city from his perch on the northern tower) sleeping and dreaming of dead Kien, a few couples making love or talking.
I looked down at the Temptation, set on the balcony in a blaze of lamps, and I wondered what had awakened me.
Then I felt it again-two dozen or more pricklings at my Wall. The probings came from all around me. The thoughts I sensed now at the edges of my inner hearing were frightening.
They’d learned. These weren’t green park rangers and city cops. No-these were seasoned military troops, people with a horrifyingly simple sense of duty. People who followed orders blindly without worrying about what they meant. People who had been in combat before and would gladly hate anything their superiors named The Enemy.
“Oh shit,” I muttered.
“Governor?” Kafka, slumbering nearby, woke. My guards looked suddenly wary.
“Just be quiet,” I told them.
And I could hear it again: the rhythmic, insistent beat of blades chopping the air not too far away; the throbbing of powerful engines frothing the water of the bay.
They were coming.
The last time, I’d mucked up by alarming the Rox too quickly. I wasn’t about to make that mistake again.
So I made another.
I tried to use this “power” that everyone says I have. I focused on my Wall. I imagined it stiffening, becoming rubbery and pushing back the intruding boats and choppers. I thought ... I thought it was working at first. I felt this sense of “hardness” to the Wall, and the faint pricklings disappeared entirely. I clenched my fist: victory.
“Yes,” I hissed.
I really thought I’d done it. I believed, for an instant, that it had been that simple.
Then they hit the Wall again-from every direction, at once, and fast. This was a concerted, simultaneous, organized assault. I summoned all the psychic strength I had. At least I hoped that’s what I was doing. I tried to visualize energy gathering around me, flowing through my mind and then hurtling out to the Wall, but maybe it was just imagination or comic-book fantasy, because it didn’t do any good.
The Wall bulged and cracked, making me moan. I mean, I could feel it. It fucking hurt. Then the Wall was lanced open entirely, like some great raw pus-filled boil. The troops (that’s who it was-the goddamn U. S Army or National Guard or something) poured through while I lay there, gasping in pain.
Through. Coming. I could hear them.
going in, yeah! Gonna drugdealers, murderers, C’mon, c’mon,
kick some ass. Show them rapists, they all Come on! Damn it!
wimp rangers how it’s deserve this, deserve Get through this damn
really done. This time what we’re gonna give wall before they have
we don’t hold back ’em a chance to be ready
Actinic flaring blue light threw crazed, weaving shadows across the Rox and the Administration Building: flares. Out across the water I could see the bright legs of spotlights striding across the bay toward us. A chopper with flaring running lights wheeled past the glassed-in lobby like an angry bat, and I could see faces staring at us as it passed.
And I heard thoughts:
What the hell is that Jesus Christ in a is that Bloat?
thing bottle!
Belatedly, the sirens were wailing over the Rox. Kafka was yelling below me. “Bloat! Can’t you hold them back?”
“Uh-uh,” I told him, slowly and wearily. It took a lot more effort to talk than I would have thought. “I can’t. I’m tired.” I sounded like a kid too late for bed. Carry me in, Daddy; I’m so sleepy.
A pair of choppers danced thunderously around the building, then banked away to land. Automatic gunfire crackled, sounding almost too thin to be real, except that I could hear the mindvoices wailing in panic and fear.
A wave of terror rang through the headvoices of the Rox. Then there were just too many thoughts and too much going on, and the images overwhelmed me, buried me.
Chaos. Just chaos. I don’t remember much of it, only individual scenes plucked from the general carnage. Images piled one on top of another, experienced almost simultaneously ...
... I could sense the ghost of Chrysalis haunting Elmo’s dreams. There was an urgency to her voice as she stroked his cheek. “Get out!” she said, her voice at odds with her soft caress. “Get out!”
In Elmo’s head, there was a sound like running footsteps. Under their impact, the dream walls of the Crystal Palace dissolved. Chrysalis disappeared, but I could feel him holding to that sweet dream touch.
Another ghost. Another memory.
Elmo must have opened his eyes, for he was thinking, Shit, are they here again? while a half-remembered sound of rotors echoed in his mind. Gotta get up! She said so!
Then I caught a brief stolen image of a gun butt arcing toward his face and then a fusillade of pain that cut out everything. The anguish was excruciating, instant, and blinding. Just before Elmo blacked out entirely, I heard him thinking, Jesus, they’re going to fucking kill me.
... the noise of the helicopters had awakened Blaise, for I caught his thoughts spilling from the windshield. There was an image: the blue beam of a searchlight throwing crazed shadows on a wall. Erotic dream images mingled with shabby reality for a moment before his mindwalls came up and shut him away ...
Croyd was jittery. Thoughts wheeled like bats in his head. Choppers went right by the tower, two of ’em, and more lights out in the bay coming in ... this is crap, just crap ... gotta move, gotta be goddamn careful ... can’t get caught here.
I followed Croyd’s stream of thoughts down from his tower and into the building proper. He was near Elmo’s room when the stream of consciousness suddenly halted. From what any of us had seen, Croyd’s new body-he looked like an armadillo mated with a man-was fast and strong, as well as pretty well armored. His eyesight sucked, but his hearing was good; scent was even better.
Smell machine oil, sweat. Something else. Look around the corner; goddamn this lousy eyesight ... That has to be Elmo ... shit, those are troopers .
Through Croyd’s ears, I could hear the distinct deadly clicking of a weapon being readied, and then Croyd-with a psychic yell that rang in my own head-charged them ....
I could tell that the one named Danny was pissed because Ray wanted to waste time with the damn dwarf, but then, Ray was the squad leader, a by-God new sergeant ... and it was Ray’s call. just get it over with ... this place gives me the creeps ... fulla jokers and God knows what around that fucking blob in the lobby. Danny was listening to Ray laughing. He didn’t really want to see the dwarf’s head turn into strawberry jam. Just wanna get outta here ...
Danny heard Ray’s CAR-15 fire, but at the same time something like a big fast armadillo crashed into them-from the snatches of vision I caught, I knew it was Croyd. No! ... shit, kill the damn thing ... Danny was firing, and-a brief headflash-Ray was rolling on the ground grabbing at his throat, ... shit,the joker crushed his windpipe ... and Croyd was clawing at Jerry who screamed too, and Danny let go with a burst that tore into Jerry, and Jerry went down, no, no! and a ricochet hit Danny, Jesus, I’m hit! Fuck, it hurts, it hurts, and the armadillo had snatched up the dwarf and scooted down the hall, limping but alive ...
Molly Bolt had jumped a Huey pilot .... wonder how the fuck you’re really supposed to fly one of these things P ... not that it really matters, just turn the stick over this way and that way ... kinda fun ... I could feel the vertigo tug at her as the craft began to buck and cant over. The troops crouched in the open rear were shouting (I heard their thoughts, too, of course). Shit ... who’s that? I caught a glimpse through Molly’s eyes as she glanced over her shoulder. A military pistol was pointed at her. A GI, a young black man, looked at her with strange sad eyes. “Goddamn, Chuck, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.” Shit!! ... and then there was a pinwheeling shock of disorientation as Molly jumped away.
I could feel her for long seconds afterward, gasping, waiting to feel the shattering impact of the bullet, before she realized that she was in her own body again.
Captain Hayes was thinking that it was hell to have a fight with your old lady just before a mission. Marge, damn it, they kill people. You understand? They’d carve you up on the street because you looked wrong at them. They’re vicious and
mean. They’re animals. He kept replaying the argument in his head. Marge argued that they were just kids, just kids, and she didn’t understand. Shouldn’t have told her in the first place. She’s just worrying, that’s all. Just worried about me.
Hayes was worried too. I could feel it and see it in the quick headflashes between thoughts. He clung to the throbbing, shaking walls of the Huey, staring at the packed troops in the craft’s belly. Good men, all. None of them deserve to die, but some will. The bastard kids here will see to that, no matter what Marge says. Hayes cleared his throat; the forming words interfered with his thoughts. “Thirty seconds,” he shouted over the din of the rotors.
... can see the place now, flares lighting the place like it’s Nam all over again ... choppers wheeling around that fucking toy palace like big angry vultures ...
“We’re landing in jumper territory.” ... of course they know that, but if I talk, they can’t think about what’s going to happen ... “So make sure you watch your partner.” ... big fucking ball of of flame, JESUS! was that a Huey? ...”Remember that your guns are rigged.” ... can’t see it now, but that was one of ours going down, shit ... “So you’re the only ones who know the trick.” ... had better work had better damn work ... “You see one of our guys pulling the trigger and nothing’s happening, they may-may-have been jumped. So don t shoot ’em; use the tranks.” Or just shoot quick anyway ... “Policy is fire only when fired on,” ( ... which may get us dead ... ) “but I want you to do whatever it takes. Don’t worry about policy. Stay alive however you gotta do it. Understand?”
His men shouted affirmation back to him.
The Huey jerked (man, those shacks across the way are going up like crazy), dropped. I saw an image of dirt swirling crazily in sudden floodlights.
“Go, GO, GO!” Hayes was shouting, and his people were spilling out the door toward the jumper buildings. Like a ghetto, a slum. Like what I remember of Saigon, just before we left ... Hayes was lagging behind, his people already in the buildings as he crossed the open ground in front.
A burst of small arms fire caught him then. He screamed and went down. The horror of what he saw drove out all the words for an instant. I saw the remnants of his body as he did. We both knew, even as the pain hit and the vision started to go.
... let it end, God, just let it end please ... can’t believe they actually shot me, all that time in Nam and not a scratch ... still see my hands all slick and warm ... there was so much blood, so much, too much and all mine ... cold and black ... they always said that there’d be light and voices and family, but there’s only blackness ... blackness ... Marge? ...
Video was screaming, an endless sobbing agony. I don’t want to see it anymore, I don’t want to see it ...
But nothing could erase the sight in her mind. She projected it helplessly. In her mind, it overlaid everything, the reality of the mud in which she was sitting, the cold fog that wrapped around her, the ugly chunks of raw meat covered with tattered olive cloth that she very carefully avoided looking at but that kept intruding into her thoughts.
Video cried. She wailed. It did no good. There was no way to block out the scene.
Like a movie stuck in a pathetic, awful loop, Video replayed the scene she’d witnessed:
The sound came first, a loud erratic whine, then as she turned to look, the chopper came careening across the foggy bay. The craft was obviously in trouble, tilted way over and out of control. She thought for a moment it was going to make it, but even as she glimpsed the frightened dark face in the cockpit, one of the rotor blades tore into the earth, and the chopper slammed itself into the Rox. It disintegrated and exploded, transforming itself into a rolling blazing hell that left a trail of burning fuel and scattered broken corpses like gory seeds. Then the entire glowing incandescent ball slammed into the makeshift homes near the docks. They went up like tinder, roaring and throwing sparks.
There was no way to tell the nat screams from those of the jumpers, and the burning bodies all looked alike.
... Eavesdropping on Chickenhawk, I could hear him giving Kien the tale about the Egrets’ last shipment of rapture, but every time Kien opened his mouth to reply, strange discordant sounds came out: sirens, explosions, an insistent rhythmic pounding. Kien kept talking through the din, waving his hands as if he were really saying something, only now they weren’t in Kien’s office at all but out in a field somewhere, and helicopters were circling ...
Hell! Those are real choppers! Damn, I’ve been asleep ...
Chickenhawk, in his tower perch high above the Rox, rose cautiously to his feet and looked down at the Rox.
Omigod
The shock seared the images into his mind so that I saw them as well. Thunder roared from the jumper side of the docks. An impossible gout of orange and yellow flame tumbled into the dwellings there. The Rox was the set of a war movie, a night battle scene. Two helicopters had landed near the west wing, another in the front court; more were sweeping in from the bay. Flares dripped in the sky, searchlights tore bright holes in the darkness. Chickenhawk could see muzzle flashes and hear the chattering gunfire.
Choppers were landing on the jumper side of the island too .... full-scale assault ... makes sense. They’d’ve been told how the jumpers chewed up the cops. Best tactic would be to hit them fast, hard, and with lots of people ... fuck, two more choppers coming in from the east ... gotta see Bloat, see what he needs me to do ...
Chickenhawk launched himself from his roost, but somebody below must have seen the motion and shot at him, for suddenly his thoughts were panicked and strange, ... can’t move the wing ... falling ... oh dear God, it hurts ... all the wingbones snapped ...
He fell most of the way.
Panic leaked like bitter syrup from Blaise’s mind. There are too many of them. I can’t control them all. It was a spoken thought, and I knew that he was talking to Durg, for I also sensed that odd emptiness that was the Takisian’s mind. Blaise’s shields had collapsed. His mind was spewing out glimpses of death, of soldiers firing on soldiers, of jumpers lying on a bloody floor, of Durg (my God, could the man really move like that?) flashing through combat like a well-oiled killing machine. Another troopship was landing by the medical building, more soldiers running crouched toward them. What do we do? What do we do?
Blaise was terrified.
Only a bit of Durg’s reply filtered through the clamor in Blaise’s mind. “... leave while we can ... not safe here any longer” Durg was saying.
“To where?” Blaise replied, but then a thought interrupted his question. The image of a seashell flamed in his mind.
Suddenly I could sense resolution. “Kelly!” he shouted at Durg. “Find the bitch. Now!”
For several moments, I caught nothing else from Blaise. Then there was another brief flash ... make you fucking fly this thing, asshole ... And then the image of one of the grounded troopships and its terrified pilot, his mind snared in Blaise’s. Kelly was with them, stumbling along in Dung’s grasp, half blind with fear.
Out of here. I’m out of here now, Blaise thought. The last image I caught from any of them was the sound of rotors screaming ....
Kafka’s voice brought me back. “You’re the only one who can tell us what’s going on, Governor!” he was screaming. “Where do we need to go? What do you want us to do?”
Kafka was gesticulating furiously in front of the Temptation, his carapace rattling like a bunch of tin cans. He was scared, and thinking that this was too much like the Cloisters when everyone ganged up on the Astronomer. Jokers crowded around him, armed with everything from baseball bats to Uzis.
Kafka kept shouting. “Bloat, come onl It sounds like the fighting’s heading our way.”
Kafka was right. I could feel it, like a dull scarlet tide rolling toward the building. “ I didn’t want to know them,” I said. No, let’s be fair-I was babbling. “ I shouldn’t have to know them.”
“Bloat, man, jokers are dying out there!”
“They’re just people. All of us.” I was trying to blot out all the voices of the Rox. I couldn’t. Behind Kafka, St. Anthony wrestled with demons and other fantastic creatures. They swarmed over him, biting and clawing.
“Bloat!”
I sighed. “There are three squads in the west wing already, coming up the side stairs. There’s another group approaching fast from the east, near the water. In a few seconds, they’ll be stuck in open ground. Forget the jumper side of the island; marines are everywhere over there. All the squads have orders to make for the Administration Building after they’ve secured their first objective. They’ll all be coming soon.”
Kafka was snapping orders as I relayed positions. Jokers scattered, howling like mad things. Guards fanned out to protect the lobby and the rooms behind where my body lay helpless.
I heard the gunfire rise and swell in volume. I felt the deaths continue.
I was staring, immobile, as my mind roamed my poor Rox, my embattled island. No one had ever told me it was like this. Nobody could have, I guess. I just wanted it to stop.
Chickenhawk half fell, half glided through an open window in the balcony. Blood splattered his feathers, and one wing was crumpled and torn. “Bloat—” he began.
“ I know,” I said as one of the jokers ran to tend to him. “You’ll be all right, man. It’ll be okay.” One of those cliches that tumble out when you’re not thinking. Frankly, I wasn’t sure anyone was going to be “all right.” I wasn’t sure any of us were really going to live through this.
“It’s hell, ain’t it?” someone said, and I looked down to see the penguin. It looked worried.
Then hell came to pay a small personal visit.
There were screams from behind the doors leading into the lobby. Gunfire stuttered its lethal percussive speech. I felt Vomitus and Mothmouth die just outside. The doors kicked open, glass scattering across the tiles. Soldiers in riot helmets, fatigues, and Kevlar armor were spilling out: from the doors, from the balcony.
Theirs were not nice thoughts. Not at all. These people had seen their companions hurt or killed already in the fighting. They were only thinking of staying alive.
Well, that isn’t quite accurate. Let me qualify the statement. The way they intended to stay alive was to make sure that The Enemy was dead.
“Move and you’ve had it!” one of them shouted, waving an assault rifle. I thought people only talked like that in the movies. It was almost enough to make me giggle ... almost. He had a lieutenant’s bar on his shoulder and a badge on his Kevlar chest that proclaimed him to be I. SHER.
The penguin moved. It looked at me. “Sometimes ya just gotta do something, Gov’nor,” it told me.
The creature made a mocking sound halfway between razzberry and caw, and launched itself at the lieutenant. The officer—a boy really, not much older than me-didn’t even hesitate.
The stream of bullets nearly ripped the penguin in half. Bright arterial blood splattered everywhere-over me, over Kafka and the other jokers, over the Bosch painting. Bits of feathered flesh stuck to the glass walls, trailing rivulets of scarlet. The carcass, most of it, lay half on, half off my dais, and the kid was still firing wildly; I know that some of the bullets hit me, though I didn’t feel much besides a distant dull ache. Ricocheting slugs tore more glass from the huge panes. I couldn’t even hear the sound of the glass hitting the floor over the gun. The noise was deafening, the smell of cordite and oil and blood overpowering.
The silence when the burst had finished was long.
The kid laughed-like I might. His eyes were wild and strange. He’d enjoyed that; it made him feel powerful. When he looked around the lobby, he was looking for a new target. Just let one of them twitch, even a little bit ...
The hatred in the room was damn near thick enough to touch, like a red-tinged fog in my mind. I felt helpless. There was nothing I could do, and these SOBs were waiting for an excuse to let loose.
Sher barked “You Bloat?”
A couple dozen sarcastic answers came to mind; none of them seemed particularly smart. “Yes.”
“Call off your goddamn dogs. Do it now.”
I listened to the continuing carnage outside the building. I looked at the jokers nearest me: Kaflca, video, Shroud, Chickenhawk, maybe a dozen others. They were all watching, like they expected me to do something, and I’ll be damned if I could see anything to do. I’d failed, all around. My incompetence had killed them as surely as if I’d pulled the fucking triggers myself. Penguin blood dripped from my sides like an accusation.
“We’re not dogs,” I told Sher. “We’re people.”
“Fuck that shit. it’s all over, asshole.”
“I—I” I stuttered. They were all still looking at me, jokers and soldiers both. “I can’t call them off “
“I thought you were in charge,” Sher spat.
I laughed, bitterly. “Yeah. That’s right. Of course I’m in charge. I’m the governor.” I lashed myself with the word. The kid snarled. He whipped his rifle around.
He fired.
St. Anthony flew apart in a spray of paint-flecked chips. The surreal landscape of Bosch’s dreams ripped into long splinters, gouged and broken. A menagerie of deformities expired as the kid’s weapon bucked and roared and shredded the triptych. The entire frame of the Temptation canted and slammed to the floor in pieces.
Ruined.
“Not” I screamed, loud in the silence after the gunfire. “Now you listen, Governor,” Sher was saying, thou the din of the gun had made us all half deaf. “Make them stop. Or this time it’s the roach here.”
The muzzle pointed at Kafka.
“I can’t, damn youl Listen to mé“
He didn’t give me a chance to finish. “Bye, roach.” I heard Sher’s resolve. I watched the finger slowly tighten, and I knew he’d do it.
I knew.
“Not” I screeched again.
Bloatblack was falling like thick lava from my sides. I was sick-sick of death, sick of destruction, sick of my own inability to do anything. The rage and hatred had built up in me past endurance. With that ... well, with that was the same feeling I’d had once before, when the caves had been created. Only this time the surging power was a darker and deeper sensation. Bigger than last time, but more a part of me, if you know what I mean. It was like ... I don’t know, like imagining something in my head and then “thinking” it outside.
And there it was. Abracadabra. Poof.
Everything happened in that instant I shouted “No!”. It happened when I knew that if I didn’t do something now, I was going to watch Kafka die as Peanut had, as the penguin had, as I’d heard and seen jokers die throughout the Rox tonight.
“No!” I screamed, and something within me leapt out like a savage creature. I knew what I wanted, and I shaped it. I’m not sorry for it. I’m really not.
I wanted death. I wanted revenge. I wanted to make widows of these soldiers’ wives and orphans of their children. I wanted them to fucking suffer.
The fragments of the Temptation stirred on the floor. A thick greenish fog swirled at ankle level, coiling and rising. Groans and screams echoed, as if coming from some vast subterranean well. The sights and sounds made Sher swing his muzzle away from Kafka. The kid’s eyes widened at what was coming from that fog, rising with it as if striding up from the depths.
The kid screamed.
He held the trigger down, a long and noisy burst.
A hand reached from the fog and snatched at the barrel even as Sher was firing. The hand flipped the rifle, reversing it, and then the weapon fired again.
Sher’s body danced backward in a ballet of death, moving to the jittery music of the bullets slamming into his body. He screamed wordlessly, but I could hear his thoughts, and I didn’t care. It was my hand that had taken the weapon from the kid, even though the hand that had come from the fog had been clawed and green and scaly. It had been my hand—because I’d made it move. I’d ordered its actions, and it had responded.
Sher was dead long before the body stopped twitching and fell to the floor. His squad was staring, momentarily stunned.
It took only that instant of hesitation for them to die as well. A tropical hurricane wind roaring from below shredded the fog, and I took each tendril and made it a thing, a creature of Bosch.
A joker. A demon.
They poured out, shrieking and vengeful: the stag-headed man; a merman in full medieval armor riding a flying, metalscaled fish; a featherless bird with teeth stolen from a Tyrannosaurus; a claw-legged, man-size toad; a cat-demon; a ferocious winged fish bearing a unicorn’s horn; flying devils of all descriptions ...
Tey tore the guns away from the soldiers and threw them back to us. The soldiers went down under a clot of swarming attackers.
My demons tore the limbs from their living, writhing victims. They died slowly and horribly, and I ...
I relished every last instant of their pain. The floor literally ran red with blood.
I laughed. I howled. I chuckled.
My jokers celebrated with me. “Out!” I cried to them, and my fantasy multitude echoed the word with their shrill inhuman voices. “Drive them all away! Kill any of them you can!”
Flowing like a massive black cloud, . my troops were gone. My will went with them. I sent them hurtling against the intruders. With their power, I ripped the choppers from the sky and tore the hulls open on their boats. They killed, they maimed, they destroyed.
More of my cavalry swooped down from the sky. Some were jokers riding armored flying fish and armed with (if I could believe the eyes of the Rox) swordfish lances. At their flanks, hags and beasts and creatures of all descriptions plummeted down from the false dawn glow, ablaze in their own infernal light. The apparitions were incandescent, painful to look upon.
The demons landed and tore the guns from the hands of the nats even as the soldiers fired on them. The joker riders flushed out the hidden troops and drove them into the open. The shining, awful hordes whooped and howled and dove at them; the riders impaled them on their strange lances. The soldiers fled before them. In a very few minutes, the attack was broken. The troops were fleeing the Rox any way they could, and my army-my dream army-pursued them. Briefly, anyway.
I was tiring rapidly. With my exhaustion, the summoned creatures of my mind lost strength as well. Those soldiers who made it to their boats or to their choppers I let go as the images of Bosch turned again to wisps of fog and faded away. That night, I’m told, less than half the troops returned to their bases. The rest the bodies-were thrown into the Rox sewage system to rot. There was no place on the Rox to bury them, even if we’d wanted to.
So in essence, I suppose, I eventually ate them.
You know what? I didn’t care. In fact, I rather enjoyed the thought.
It wasn’t until hours later that I started shaking.
The Temptation of Hieronymus Bloat
The walls were still pocked with bullet holes. Most of the glass had yet to be repaired. I hadn’t let them clean up the remnants of the Temptation; brightly painted bits of wood still littered the top of my pedestal. What I could see of the Rox from my vantage point looked like a battlefield.
It was a dream or it was real, one or the other. It didn’t much matter, really; dream or reality, it was starting to look the same. I was sobbing. I wept for Kelly-Tachyon; I wept for Peanut; I wept for the jokers who had died defending this place; I wept for myself and what I’d become.
Far off over the bay, the city stared back at me. Sunlight glittered from the Manhattan towers. New York seemed to laugh at me.
“I hate you!” I screeched to the city. “I hate what you’ve done and what you’ve made me do.”
A voice interrupted my tirade. “Hey, you just grew up, Fatboy. That’s all.”
I glanced down. The penguin stood at the top of the stairs in front of me. It scuffed at bits of the painting with its webbed feet.
“You’re dead,” I told it. “I saw you die.”
It shrugged. “So what? Now I’m alive again. Birth, rebirth. You know-the never-ending cycle.”
“Did I bring you back to life?” I asked. The question seemed important somehow.
“You tell me.”
Such a strange thing, to see the creature standing there and not be able to hear its thoughts. “Okay, yes I did,” I told it. I was certain of it in that instant, then in the next not so sure at all. “Maybe. Somehow,” I hedged. I laughed, bitterly. “If I did, it’s another useless talent I can’t control, like everything else. If I were going to bring someone back, it’d be Peanut. I can’t even do that in my dreams, can I? None of this is real.”
The penguin looked smug and amused. “Hey, you have a thousand jokers living in your damn caves, so you’d better hope your dreams are ‘real,’ huh?” Then it squinted its eyes under the funnel and cocked its head. It looked at me very seriously. “God knows what the Rox could be ... if you put your mind to it,” it said.
That made me laugh. “I did put my mind to it. I made the Rox a charnel house.”
“Right. Wallow in guilt. But consider this-wouldn’t you do it again if you had to?”
I thought about it. I was still angry.
“I can read your thoughts,” the penguin said to me. “Yes, you’d do it. You laughed, Bloat. You chuckled while the nats died. You enjoyed the feeling revenge gave you.”
Yes, I remembered. In those moments, I’d felt strong. They deserved what they’d gotten, the nats. They all deserved it. I’d only given them justice.
The penguin cocked its head at me; the funnel hat tilted and almost fell off. “You still feel it, don’t you,” it said.
“Feel what?” I almost asked, but then I knew. I knew.
I could sense the same thundering underneath all the chatter and noise in my head, the same bass pounding I’d felt when I’d called forth Anthony’s demons to kill. That powermy power-was still there, still fueled by all the bile and anger in the Rox. That vigor, that energy, was mine, as much mine as my horrible slug-mountain body.
“Yes,” the penguin hissed contentedly, as if it were reading my thoughts again. “That’s it. Go ahead. Do it!” So I did.
I looked at New York and the glittering, mocking expanse of skyscrapers again. “You hate us,” I said to the city.
“Fine. Well, this is my dream. Inside the Wall, I can sculpt my world whatever way I want.”
I touched the seething mass of energy with my mind and let it flow out, out across the Rox to my Wall. As the energy coursed along the periphery, I let it shape the boundary. An artist, I drew a new wall.
The penguin started to laugh. All around me, jokers were pointing out to the bay.
Far out in the water, under the false green and stormy sky of my dreams, the Wall was becoming solid. It flickered with dark lightnings and then slowly hardened. Where my thoughts flowed through and past, they left behind what was indeed a Wall, a massive thing of stone and brick a hundred feet high-an edifice that giants would have built. I played with it, using the power like a fine chisel. My whim gave the Wall great oaken gates banded with steel and barred with portcullises that a Titan couldn’t have shaken loose. Towers sprouted along its length, barbicanned and tall.
Now I imagined a great arc of a bridge, and the power flashed outward visibly with the thought, painting a delicate structure as thin as a hair that spanned the wall. Unsupported, it touched the ground by the Administration Building and then again in the bay just outside the wall, pointing toward Battery Park. The bridge was wide enough for only two people to walk abreast. There were no handrails, and the span glittered as if it were made of glass.
I looked at my handiwork, liked it, and made a second bridge coming over the wall from the Jersey shore. I solidified the Wall all around, and when I’d done that, turned my attention to the Administration Building itself.
The power was still snarling and arcing, still powerful. I turned it loose again.
I remembered how the building had looked in the other dreams I’d had: a fairyland, a crystalline castle pricking the sky with impossibly high and thin turrets, ramparted and moated, an architectural fantasy born equally of Disney, Bosch, and Escher.
A place where all manner of oddities might walk.
I molded the energy in my mind, shaped it, and placed the image over my drab reality. And, oh yes, added two more things: the Temptation, whole again, and me, shaped as the Outcast.
I shut my eyes. There was a flash that made everyone gasp. The Rox shuddered as it had when the caverns had been formed. When all was still again, my jokers were gasping in amazement. I kept my eyes closed. I didn’t have to look. I didn’t want to look.
“Bloat?”
That was Kafka’s voice, all too real. I shook my head, not wanting to come out of my dream.
“Bloat, please!” he insisted.
I opened my eyes resentfully. Kafka was gaping at me, at the penguin who stood alongside him, at the landscape around us. The penguin chuckled. It sounded remarkably like me.
It was the dream. Or rather, I might never have been dreaming at all. I began to laugh uproariously.
The Wall of stone circled us out in the bay. The faerie bridges arced into the sky. I could see the crystal castle all around me.
Everything was still here. All of it. I’d created this vision of the Rox; I’d made it as surely and deliberately as if I’d shaped it from clay with my own hands.
Except ... the Temptation was yet shattered, utterly destroyed. And me-I wasn’t the Outcast, but Bloat. But I found that my two failures didn’t matter to me, not against the wonder of all the rest.
“Bloat,” Kafka whispered, wonderingly. He couldn’t keep his gaze still. It went from me to the penguin to the dazzling landscape around us. “Did you—”
“Yes,” I told him. “Yes, I did.”
I sniggered and guffawed, giddy and faint from the exertion.
“I did,” I repeated. “It’s mine.”
I couldn’t stop giggling. This was actually hilarious, you know. All that time I’d spent listening to the thoughts of Blaise and the jumpers and how they liked stomping nat ass and humiliating them, and I never really understood why. I thought they were stupid and juvenile. I didn’t think they were right.
But now ... now I’d experienced some of their blood-fed emotion too. I’d felt it when I’d let loose the demons; I felt it now, looking at the Rox’s new landscape.
Hey, there’s a definite kick in knowing you can hit back. That you can hurt them as well as being hurt.
And in the payback department, the nats have handed us jokers a world-class IOU.
“Oh, you’re going to hate me, all right,” I told the tips of the skyscrapers sticking over my wall like burrs. The power in my head buzzed like a hornet’s nest inside me, angry. “Now you’re really going to learn to hate me.”
And I chuckled again.
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 1986, WASHINGTON, DC:
The Sony threw flickering light over Sara’s Thanksgiving feast: a Swanson turkey dinner steaming in foil on the coffee table. On the television screen a mob of misshapen jokers marched through a sweltering New York summer afternoon, their mouths moving in silent screams and curses. The grainy scene had the jerky look of an old newsreel, and suddenly the picture swung about to show a handsome man in his mid-thirties, his sleeves rolled up, his suit coat slung over a shoulder and his tie loose on his neck-Senator Gregg Hartmann, as he had been in 1976. Hartmann strode through the police lines blockading the jokers, shrugging away the security men who tried to hold him, shouting at the police himself. Alone, he stood between the authorities and the oncoming crowd of jokers, motioning them back.
Then the camera panned toward a disturbance within the ranks of jokers. The images were jumbled and out of focus: at the center was the ace/prostitute known as Succubus, her body seemingly made of quicksilver flesh, her appearance constantly shifting. The wild card had cursed her with sexual empathy. Succubus could take on whatever shape and form most pleased her clients, but that ability was now out of control. Around her, people responded to her power, grasping out for her with a strange lust on their faces. Her mouth was open in an imploring scream as the pursuing crowd, police and jokers both, bore her down. Her arms were stretched out in supplication, and as the camera panned back, there was Hartmann again, his jaw open in surprise as he gaped at Succubus. Her arms were reaching for him, her plea was for him. Then she was gone under the mob. For several seconds she was buried, lost. But then the crowd drew back in horror. The camera followed Hartmann closer: he shoved through those around Succubus, angrily pushed them away.
Sara reached for the VCR’s remote switch. She touched the pause button, freezing the scene, a moment of time that had shaped her life. She could feel the hot tears streaking her face.
Succubus lay twisted in a pool of blood, her body mangled, her face turned upward as Hartmann stared at her, mirroring Sara’s horror.
Sara knew the face that Succubus, whoever she might have really been, had found just before death. Those young features had haunted Sara since childhood-Succubus had taken on Andrea Whitman’s face.
Sara’s older sister’s face. Andrea who, at thirteen, had been brutally murdered in 1950.
Sara knew who had kept that pubescent image of Andrea locked away in his mind for so many years. She knew who had placed Andrea’s features on the infinitely malleable body of Succubus. She could imagine that face on Succubus as he lay with her, and that thought hurt Sara most of all.
“You bastard,” Sara whispered to Senator Hartmann, her voice choking. “You goddamn bastard. You killed my sister and you couldn’t even let her stay dead.”
Tom found the latest issue of Aces in the outer office, while the loan officer kept him waiting.
The cover showed the Turtle flying over the Hudson against a spectacular autumn sunset. The first time he’d seen that photograph, in Life, Tom had been tempted to have it framed. But that had been a long time ago. Even the shell in the picture was gone now, jettisoned somewhere in space by the aliens who’d captured him last spring.
Underneath, letters black against the scarlet-tinged clouds, the blurb asked, “The Turtle—Dead or Alive?”
“Fuck,” Tom said aloud, annoyed. The secretary gave him a disapproving look. He ignored her and thumbed through the magazine to find the story. How the hell could they possibly say he was dead? So he got napalmed and crashed into the Hudson in full view of half the city, so what? He’d come back, hadn’t he? He’d taken an old shell and crossed the river, flown over Jokertown near dawn the day after Wild Card Day, thousands of people must have seen him. What more did he have to do?
He found the article. The writer made a big deal of the fact that no one had seen the Turtle for months. Perhaps he died after all, the magazine suggested, and the dawn sighting was only some kind of mass hallucination. Wish fulfillment, one expert suggested. A weather balloon, said a second. Or maybe Venus.
“Venus!” Tom said with some indignation. The old shell he’d used that morning was a goddamn VW Beetle covered with armor plate. How the hell could they say it was Venus? He flipped a page, and came face-to-face with a grainy photograph of a shell fragment pulled out of the river. The metal was bent outward, twisted by some awful explosion, its edges jagged and sharp. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put the Turtle together again, said the caption.
Tom hated it when they tried to be clever.
“Miss Trent will see you now,” the secretary announced. Miss Trent did nothing to improve his disposition. She was a slender young woman in oversize horn-rimmed glasses, her short brown hair frosted with streaks of blond. Quite pretty, and at least ten years younger than Tom. “Mr. Tudbury,” she said, from behind a spotless steel-and-chrome desk, when he entered. “The loan committee has gone over your application. You have an excellent credit record.”
“Yeah,” Tom said. He sat down, for a moment allowing himself to hope. “Does that mean I get the money?”
Miss Trent smiled sadly. “I’m afraid not.”
Somehow he’d expected that. He tried to act as though it didn’t matter; banks never lent you money if they thought you needed it. “What about my credit rating?” he asked.
“You have an excellent record of timely payment on your loans, and we did take that into account. But the committee felt your total indebtedness was already too high, given your present income. We couldn’t justify extending you any further unsecured credit at this time. I’m sorry. Perhaps another lending institution would feel differently.”
“Another lending institution,” Tom said wearily. Fat chance. This bank was the fourth one he’d tried. They all said the same thing. “Yeah. Sure.” He was on his way out when he saw the framed diploma on her wall and turned back. “Rutgers,” he said to her. “I dropped out of Rutgers. I had better things to do than finish college. More important things.”
She regarded him silently, a puzzled expression on her pretty young face. For a moment Tom wanted to go back, to sit down and tell her everything. She had an understanding face, at least for a banker.
“Never mind,” he said.
It was a long walk back to his car.
It was just shy of midnight when Joey found him, leaning against a rusted rail and watching the moonlit waters of the Kill Van Kull. The park was across the street from his house, and from the projects where he’d grown up. Even as a kid, he’d found solace there, in the black oily waters, the lights of Staten Island across the way, the big tankers passing in the night. Joey knew that; they’d been friends since grade school, different as night and day, but brothers in all but name.
Tom heard the footsteps behind him, glanced over his shoulder, saw it was only Joey, and turned back to the Kill. Joey came up and stood beside him, arms folded on the railing.
“You didn’t get the loan,” Joey said. “No,” Tom said. “Same old story.”
“Fuck ’em.”
“No,” Tom said. “They’re right. I owe too much.”
“You okay, Tuds?” Joey asked. “How long you been out here?”
“A while,” Tom said. “I had some thinking to do.”
“I hate it when you think.”
Tom smiled. “Yeah, I know.” He turned away from the water. “I’m cashing in my chips, Joey.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
Tom ignored the question. “I was getting nostalgic about that last shell. It had infrared, zoom lenses, four big monitors and twenty little ones, tape deck, graphic equalizer, fridge, everything on fingertip remote, computerized, state-of-theart, Four years I worked on that mother, weekends, nights, vacations, you name it. Every spare cent I had went into it. So what happens? I have the damn thing in service for five months, and Tachyon’s asshole relatives just toss it into space.”
“Big fucking deal,” Joey said. “You still got the old shells out in the junkyard, use one of them.”
Tom tried to be patient. “The shell the Takisians jettisoned was my fifth,” he said. “After I lost it, I went back to number four. That was the one that got napalmed. You want to look at the pieces, go buy a copy of Aces-there’s a swell picture in there. We cannibalized all the useful parts from two and three years ago. The only one that’s still more-or-less intact is the first.”
“So?” Joey said.
“So? It’s got wires, Joey, not circuit boards, twenty-yearold wires. Obsolete cameras with limited tracking capabilities, blind spots, black-and-white sets, vacuum tubes, a fucking gas heater, the worst ventilation system you’ve ever seen.”
“How I got it over to Jokertown back in September I still don’t know, but I was in shock from the crash or I never could have tried such a fucking moronic thing. So many of the tubes burned out that I was flying half-blind before I got back.”
“We can fix all that stuff.”
“Forget it,” Tom said with more vehemence than he knew was in him. “Those shells of mine, they’re like some kind of symbol for my whole fucking life. I’m standing here thinking about it, and it makes me sick. All the money I’ve put into them, all the hours, the work. If I’d put that kind of effort into my real life, I could be somebody. Look at me, Joey. I’m forty-three years old, I live alone, I own a house and an abandoned junkyard, both of them mortgaged up to the hilt. I work a forty-hour week selling VCRs and computers, and I’ve managed to buy a third of the business, only now the business isn’t doing so great, ha ha, big joke on me. That woman in the bank today was ten years younger than me, and she probably makes three times my salary. Cute too, no wedding ring, the secretary said Miss Trent, maybe I would’ve liked to ask her out, but you know what? I looked into her eyes, and I could see her feeling sorry for me.”
“Some dumb cunt looks down at you, that’s no reason to get bent out of shape,” Joey said.
“No,” Tom said. “She’s right. I’m better than I looked to her, but there’s no way she could have known that. I’ve put the best part of myself into being the Turtle. The Astronomer and his goons almost killed me. Fuck it, Joey, they dropped napalm on my shell, and one of them made me so sick I’ blacked out. I could have died.”
“You didn’t.”
“I was lucky,” Tom said with fervor. “Damn lucky. I was strapped into that motherfucker, every one of my instruments dead, with the whole fucking thing, all umpteen tons of it, headed straight for the bottom of the river. Even if I’d been conscious, which I wasn’t, there would have been no way to get to the hatch and open it manually before I drowned. That’s assuming I could even find the hatch with all the fucking lights out and the shell filling up with water!”
“I thought you didn’t remember this shit,” Joey said.
“I don t,” said Tom. He massaged his temples. “Not consciously. Sometimes I have these dreams ... fuck it, never mind about that, the point is, I was a dead man. Only I got lucky, incredibly lucky, something blew the goddamned shell apart, blew me right out without killing me, and I managed to make it to the surface. Otherwise I’d be down in a steel tomb on the bottom of the Hudson, with eels slithering in and out of my eyes.”
“So?” Joey said. “You’re not, are you?”
“What about next time?” Tom demanded. “ I been breaking my back trying to figure some way to finance a new shell. Sell my share of the business, I thought, or maybe sell the house and move into some apartment. And then I thought, well, great. I sell my fucking house, build a new shell, and then the goddamned Takisians show up again, or it turns out the Astronomer had a brother and he’s pissed, or some other shit goes down, the details don’t matter, but something happens, and I wind up dead. Or maybe I survive, only the new shell gets trashed just like the last two, and I’m right back where I started, except now I don’t have a house either. What’s the fucking point?”
Joey was looking into his eyes, Joey who had grown up with him, who knew Tom better than anybody. “Yeah, maybe,” he said. “So why do I think there’s something you’re not saying?”
“I used to be a pretty smart kid,” Tom insisted, turning away sharply, “but somehow I got pretty dumb as I grew up. This double life shit is a crock. One life is hard enough for most people to manage, what the hell made me think I could juggle two?” He shook his head. “The hell with it. It’s over. I’m wising up, Joey. They think the Turtle is dead? Fine. Let him rest in peace.”
“Your call, Tuds,” Joey said. He put a rough hand on Toms shoulder. “It’s a damn shame, though. You’re going to make my kid cry. The Turtle’s his hero.”
“Jetboy was my hero,” Tom said. “He died too. That’s part of growing up. Sooner or later, all your heroes die.”
All the King’s Horses
The water made a sullen gurgling sound somewhere in the close, hot blackness. The world twisted and turned, sinking. He was too weak and dizzy to move. He felt icy fingers on his legs, creeping up higher and higher, and then sudden shock as the water reached his crotch, jolting him awake. He tore away his seat harness with numb fingers, but too late. The cold caressed his chest, he lurched up and the floor tumbled and he lost his footing, and then the water was over his head and he couldn’t breathe and everything was black, utterly black, as black as the grave, and he had to get out, he had to get out ...
Tom woke gasping for breath, a scream clawing at the inside of his throat.
In his first groggy waking moment he heard the faint tinkle of broken glass falling from the window frame to shatter on the bedroom floor. He closed his eyes, tried to steady himself. His heart was trip-hammering away in his chest, his undershirt plastered to his skin. Only a dream, he told himself, but he could still feel himself falling, blind and helpless, locked in a coffin of burning steel as the river closed in around him. Only a dream, he repeated. He’d lucked out, something had exploded the shell and he’d gotten out, it was over, he was alive and safe. He took a deep breath and counted to ten, and by the time he hit seven he’d stopped trembling. He opened his eyes.
His bed was a mattress on the floor of an empty room. He sat up, the bedclothes tangled around him. Feathers from a torn pillow floated in the shafts of sunlight that came through the broken window, drifting lazily toward the floor. The alarm clock he’d bought last week had been flung halfway across the room and had bounced off a wall. A series of random numbers blinked red on its digital LED display for an instant before it went dark entirely. The walls were pale green, utterly bare, and spiderwebbed with a growing network of cracks. A chunk of plaster dropped from the ceiling. Tom winced, untangled himself from the sheets, and stood up.
One of these nights his fucking subconscious was going to bring down the whole house on top of him. He wondered what his neighbors would make of that. He’d already reduced most of his bedroom furniture to kindling, and the plasterboard walls weren’t holding up real well either. Then again, neither was be.
In the bathroom Tom dropped his sweat-soaked underwear into the hamper and stared at himself in the mirror over the sink. He thought he looked ten years older than he was. A couple of months of recurring nightmares will do that to you, he supposed.
He climbed into the shower, closed the curtain. A halfmelted bar of Safeguard sat in a film of water in the soap dish. Tom concentrated. The soap rose straight up and floated into his hand. It felt slimy. Frowning, he gave the cold faucet a good hard twist with his mind, and he winced as the stream of icy water hit him. Very quickly he grabbed for the hot faucet with his hand-turned it, and shuddered with relief as the water warmed.
It was getting better, Tom reflected as he lathered up. Twenty-odd years as the Turtle had atrophied his telekinetic abilities almost to nothing, except when he was locked inside his shell, but Dr. Tachyon had helped him understand that the block was psychological, not physical. He’d been working on it ever since, and it had gotten to the point where bars of soap and cold-water faucets were candy.
Tom stuck his head under the showerhead and smiled as the warm water cascaded down around him, washing away the last residue of nightmare. Too bad his subconscious didn’t realize his limits; he’d feel a fuck of a lot safer going to sleep, and maybe his bedroom wouldn’t be such a mess when he woke up. But when the nightmare came, he was the Turtle. Weak, dizzy, falling, and about to drown, but still the Great and Powerful Turtle, who could juggle locomotives and crush tanks with his mind.
The late great Turtle. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, Tom thought.
He turned off the spray, shivered in the sudden chill, and climbed out of the tub to towel off.
In the kitchen he fixed himself a cup of coffee and a bowl of bran cereal. He’d always thought bran cereal tasted like wet cardboard, and these new extrahealthy bran cereals tasted like wood shavings, but his doctor said he had to get more fiber and less fat in his diet. He was also supposed to cut down on his coffee, but that was a hopeless case-he was an addict by now.
He turned on the small TV next to the microwave and watched CNN as he sat at the kitchen table. The city was launching a full-fledged investigation of corruption in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which seemed like the least they could do now that one of their assistant DAs had been exposed as a Mafia don. Indictments were promised. Rosa Maria Gambione, alias Rosemary Muldoon, was still being sought for questioning, but she’d vanished, gone underground somewhere. Tom didn’t figure she’d be turning up anytime soon.
He’d felt guilty about ignoring Muldoon’s appeal for ace volunteers when the gang war had begun raging in the streets of Jokertown. It wasn’t like the Turtle to ignore a plea for help, and if he’d had a working shell or the money to build one, his resolve might have softened enough to bring the Turtle back from the dead. But he hadn’t so he didn’t and now he was glad of it. Pulse and Water Lily and Mister Magnet and the other aces who had responded had put their lives and reputations on the line, and now they had hack politicians going on the evening news demanding that all of them be investigated for ties to organized crime.
It was times like this that made Tom glad that the Turtle was dead.
On the tube, they moved to the international desk for an update on the aces tour. Peregrine’s pregnancy was already old news, and there had been no new violence like the incident in Syria, thank god. Tom watched footage of the Stacked Deck landing in Japan with a certain dull resentment. He’d always wanted to travel, to see distant exotic lands, visit all the fabulous cities he’d read of as a child, but he’d never had the money. Once the store had sent him to a trade show in Chicago, but a weekend in the Conrad Hilton with three thousand electronics salesmen hadn’t fulfilled any of his childhood dreams.
They should have asked the Turtle to be on the tour. Of course transporting the shell might have been a problem, and he couldn’t get a passport without giving them his real name, which he wasn’t prepared to do, but those problems could have been handled if anyone had cared enough to bother. Maybe they really did think he was dead, though Dr. Tachyon at least ought to have known better.
So here he was, still in Bayonne wth a mouth full of high-fiber bran, while the likes of Mistral and Fatman and Peregrine were sitting under a pagoda somewhere, eating whatever the hell the Japanese ate for breakfast. It pissed him off. He had nothing against Peri or Mistral, but none of them had paid the dues he had. Jesus Christ, they’d even invited that scumbag Jack Braun. But not him, oh no, that would have been too much fucking trouble; they would have had to make special arrangements, and besides, they had so many seats allocated for aces and so many for jokers and nobody knew quite where the Turtle fit.
Tom drank a mouthful of coffee, got up from the table, and shut off the TV Fuck it all, he thought. Now that he’d decided that the Turtle was going to stay dead, maybe it was time that he buried the remains. He had a notion or two about that. If he handled it right, maybe by this time next year he could afford to take a trip around the world too.
All the King’s Horses
The junkyard sat hard by the oily green waters of New York Bay, way at the end of Hook Road. Tom got there early, undid the padlock, and swung open the gates in the high chain-link fence. He parked his Honda beside the sagging tin-roofed shack where Joey DiAngelis had once lived with his father, Dom, back in the days when the junkyard had been a going concern, and sat for a moment with his arms folded across the top of the steering wheel, remembering.
He’d spent endless Saturday afternoons inside that shack, back when it had still been habitable, reading old issues of Jetboy to Joey after they’d heisted their comic book collections back from a PTA bonfire.
Over there, back behind the shed, was where Joey used to work on his cars, long before he turned into Junkyard Joey DiAngelis, king of the demolition derby circuit.
And way in back where no one ever went, behind that mountain of rusted junkers, that was where he and Joey had welded armor plate over the frame of a VW Beetle to make the first shell. Later, much later, after Dom had died and Tom had bought the junkyard from Joey and shut it down, they’d dug the bunker under the junkyard, but they hadn’t been that sophisticated at the start. A greasy tarp was about all the concealment they had.
Tom climbed out of the car and stood with his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his shapeless old brown suede jacket, breathing the salt air off the bay. It was a chilly day. Out across the water a garbage barge passed slowly, flocks of seagulls circling around it like feathered flies. You could see the vague outline of the Statue of Liberty, but Manhattan had vanished in the morning haze.
Vanished or not, it was out there, and on a clear night you could see the lights shining off the towers. A hell of a view. In Hoboken and Jersey City run-down houses and cramped condos that offered views like this went for six figures. Constable Hook was zoned for industrial use, and Tom’s land was surrounded by an import-export warehouse, a railroad siding, a sewage treatment plant, and an abandoned oil refinery, but Steve Bruder said that none of that mattered.
That big a chunk of land, right on the waterfront, it was just prime for development, Bruder had said when Tom told him he was thinking of selling the old junkyard. He should know; he’d already made himself a millionaire with real estate speculation in Hoboken and Weehawken, rehabilitating old tenements into expansive condos for yuppies from Manhattan. Bayonne was next, Steve said. In ten years all this rust-belt industry would be gone, replaced by new housing developments, but they could be first and make the biggest killing.
Tom had known Steve Bruder since childhood and cordially loathed him most of that time, but for once Bruder’s words were music to his ears. When Bruder offered to buy the junkyard outright, the price made Tom’s head spin, but he resisted the temptation. He’d thought this all out beforehand. “No,” he said. “I’m not selling. I want to be a full partner in the development. I provide the land, you provide the money and know-how, we split the profits fifty-fifty.”
Bruder had given him a shark’s slow smile. “You’re not as dumb as you look, Tudbury. Someone been coaching you, or is this all your own idea?”
“Maybe I’ve finally gotten smart,” Tom said. “Now what is it, yes or no? Shit or get off the pot, asshole.”
“It’s not nice to call your partner an asshole, wimp,” Bruder said, extending his hand. He had a very firm handshake, but Tom was careful not to wince.
Tom looked at his watch. Steve would be bringing the bankers by in about an hour. Just a formality, he said. The loan would be candy; the property screamed with potential. Once they had the line of credit, they could get the zoning changed. By spring they’d have the junk cleared out and the land subdivided into building lots.
Tom wasn’t sure why he’d come so early ... unless it was just to remember.
It was funny that so many of his important memories were rooted in this junkyard ... but somehow appropriate, considering the way his life had gone.
But all of that was about to change. Forever. Thomas Tudbury was about to become a rich man.
Tom walked slowly around the shack, kicked at a threadbare tire in his path, then lifted it with his mind. He held it five feet off the ground, gave it a brisk telekinetic shove that set it spinning, and counted. At eight the tire began to wobble; at eleven it fell. Not bad. Back in his teens, before he’d crawled into a shell, he could have held that tire up all day ... but that was when the power had been Tom’s, before he’d given it away to the Turtle. Like he’d given so much else.
“Sell the junkyard?”Joey had said when Tom told him the plan. “You’re serious about this, aren’t you? That’s one hell of a bridge to burn. What if they find the bunker?”
“They’ll find a fucking hole in the ground. Maybe they’ll worry about it for five, ten minutes. Then they’ll push some dirt into it and it’ll be over.”
“What about the shells?”
“There are no shells,” Tom said. “Just some junk that used to be shells. ‘All the king’s horses and all the king’s men,’ remember? I’ll go out there one night and turn Turtle just long enough to drop them into the bay.”
“Hell of a waste,” Joey said. “Weren’t you the one telling me how much money and sweat you put into those fucking things?” He took a long swig of beer and shook his head. Joey looked more like his father Dom every year. The same skinny arms, the same rock-hard beer-belly, the same salt-and-pepper hair. Tom remembered when it had been pure black, always falling down into his eyes. In those days before pull-tabs, Joey used to wear a church key around his neck on a leather thong, even when he’d donned a cheap frog mask and gone to Jokertown with the Turtle to help roust Dr. Tachyon from an alcoholic pout.
That was twenty-three years ago. Tachyon hadn’t aged, but Joey had, and so had Tom. He’d grown old without growing up, but all that was changing now. The Turtle was dead, but Tom Tudbury’s life had just begun.
He strolled away from the shoreline. Broken headlights stared at him like so many blind eyes from mountains of dead cars, and once he felt live eyes and turned to see a huge gray rat peering out of the damp, rotten interior of a legless Victorian sofa. In the depths of the junkyard he passed between two long rows of vintage refrigerators, all the doors carefully removed. On the far side was a flat, bare patch of earth where a square metal plate was set into the ground. It was heavy, Tom knew from past experience. He stared at the big ring set into the metal, concentrated, and on the third try managed to shift it enough to reveal the dark tunnel mouth below.
Tom sat on the edge of the hole and dropped down carefully into darkness. At the bottom he fumbled against the wall and found the flashlight he’d hung there, then walked down the cold, damp tunnel until he emerged in the bunker. The old shells waited for him in silence.
He’d have to get rid of them soon, he knew. But not today. The bankers wouldn’t go poking around back here. They just wanted to eyeball the property, see the view, maybe sign a few papers. There was plenty of time to dump this junk in the bay; it wasn’t going anywhere.
Painted daisies and peace symbols covered shell two, the once-bright paint now faded and chipped. Just looking at it was enough to bring back memories of old songs, old causes, old certainties. The March on Washington, folk-rock blaring from his speakers, MAKE LOVE NOT WAR scrawled across his armor. Gene McCarthy had stood on that shell and spoken with his customary wry eloquence for a solid twenty minutes. Pretty girls in halter tops and jeans would fight for the chance to ride on top. Tom remembered one in particular, with cornflower-blue eyes beneath an Indian headband and straight blond hair that fell past her ass. She loved him, she’d whispered as she lay across the shell. She wanted him to open the hatch, let her in; she wanted to see his face and look into his eyes; she didn’t care if he was a joker like they said, she loved him and she wanted him to ball her, right then, right there.
She’d given him a hard-on that felt like a crowbar in his jeans, but he hadn’t opened the shell. Not then, not ever. She wanted the Turtle, but inside the armor was only Tom Tudbury. He wondered where she was now, what she looked like, what she remembered. By now she might have a daughter as old as she’d been the night she’d tried to crawl inside his shell.
Tom ran his hand over the cold metal and traced another peace symbol in the dust that lay thick on the armor. He’d really felt as though he was making a difference in those days. He was a part of a movement, stopping a war, protecting the weak. The day the Turtle had made Nixon’s enemy list had been one of the proudest of his life.
All the king’s horses and afl the king’s men ...
Beyond the painted shell was another hulk, larger, plainer, more recent. That one had seen some hard service too. He paused by the dent where some lunatic had bounced a cannonball off him. His head was ringing for weeks afterward. Underneath, Tom knew, if you looked in the right place, you could find the imprint of a small human hand sunk four inches deep into the armor plate, a souvenir left him by a rogue ace the press called the Sculptress. She was a cute bit of business; metal and stone flowed like water under her hands. She was a media darling until she started using those hands to shape doorways into bank vaults. The Turtle delivered her to the cops, wondering how they were going to stop her from just walking out again, but she never tried it. Instead she’d accepted a pardon and gone to work for the justice Department. Sometimes it was a very strange world.
There wasn’t much left of either shells two or three except for the frame and armor plate. The interiors had long since been gutted for parts. Cameras, electronics, heaters, fans, you name it; all that stuff cost money, of which Tom had never had an overabundance. So you borrowed from the old shells to build the new, where you could. It didn’t help much, it still cost a fortune. By his rough figuring, he’d had about fifty grand tied up in the shell the goddamned Takisians had so casually spit out the airlock, most of it borrowed. He was still making payments.
In the darkest corner of the bunker he found the oldest shell of all. Even the layers of badly welded armor plate couldn’t quite obliterate the familiar lines of the VW Beetle they’d started with back in the winter of 1963. Inside, he knew, it was dark and stuffy, with barely enough room to turn around, and none of the amenities of the later shells. Shining the flashlight over the exterior, he sighed at his naivete. Black-and-white TV sets, a Volkswagen body, twenty-year-old electrical wire, vacuum tubes. It was more or less intact, if only because it was so hopelessly obsolete. The very idea that he’d crossed the bay in it just a few months prior made him want to shudder.
Still ... it was the first shell, with the strongest memories of all. He looked at it for a long time, remembering how it had been. Building it, testing it, flying it. He remembered the first time he’d crossed over to New York. He’d been scared shitless. Then he’d found the fire, teked that woman to safety-even now, all these years later, he could see the dress she’d been wearing vividly in his mind’s eye, the flames licking up the fabric as he’d floated her down to the street.
“I tried,” he said aloud. His voice echoed strangely in the dimness of the bunker. “I did some good.” He heard scrabbling noises behind him. Rats probably. It had gotten so bad that he was talking to rats. Who was he trying to convince? He looked at the shells, three of them in a crooked row, so much scrap metal, destined for the bottom of the bay. It made him sad. He remembered what Joey had said, about what a waste it was, and that gave him the beginnings of an idea. Tom pulled a pad out of his back pocket and jotted a quick note to himself, smiling. He’d been playing shell games for twenty years, and he never did find the pea beneath any of them. Well, maybe he could turn the old shells into a whole can of peas.
Steve Bruder arrived forty-five minutes later, wearing leather driving gloves and a Burberry coat, with two bankers in his long brown Lincoln Town Car. Tom let him do all the talking as they walked around the property. The bankers admired the view and politely deigned not to notice the junkyard rats.
They signed the papers that afternoon and celebrated with dinner at Hendrickson’s.
All the King’s Horses
“I need a mask,” he said.
The clerk towered above him, grotesquely tall and thin, with a manner as imperious as the pharaoh whose death mask he wore. “Of course.” His eyes were gold, like the skin of his mask. “Perhaps you had something specific in mind, sir?”
“Something impressive,” Tom said. You could buy a cheap plastic mask for under two bucks in any Jokertown candy store, good enough to hide your face, but in Jokertown a cheap mask was like a cheap suit. Tom wanted to be taken seriously today, and Holbrook’s was the most exclusive mask shop in the city, according to New York magazine.
“If you’ll permit me, sir?” the clerk said, producing a tape measure. Tom nodded and studied the display of elaborate tribal masks on the far wall as his head was measured. “I’ll be just a minute,” the man said as he vanished through a dark velvet curtain into a back room.
It was more than a minute. Tom was the only customer in the shop. It was a small place, dimly lit, richly appointed. Tom felt acutely uncomfortable. When the clerk returned, he was carrying a half dozen mask boxes under his arm. He set them on the counter and opened one for Tom’s inspection.
A lion’s head rested on a bed of black tissue paper. The face was done in some soft, pale leather, as buttery to the touch as the finest suede. A nimbus of long golden hair surrounded the features. “Surely nothing is as impressive as the king of beasts,” the clerk told him. “The hair is authentic, every strand taken from a lion’s mane. I couldn’t help but notice your glasses, sir. If you’ll provide us with your prescription, Holbrook’s will be pleased to have custom eyepieces made to fit.”
“It’s very nice,” Tom said, fingering the hair. “How much?”
The clerk looked at him coolly. “Twelve hundred dollars, sir. Without the prescription eyepieces.”
Tom pulled back his hand abruptly. The golden eyes in the pharaoh’s face regarded him with condescending courtesy and just a hint of amusement. Without a word Tom turned on his heel and walked out of Holbrook’s.
He bought a rubber frogface for $6.97 in a Bowery storefront with a newspaper rack by the door and a soda fountain in the back. The mask was a little too big when he pulled it down over his head, and he had to wear his glasses balanced on the oversized green ears, but the design had a certain sentimental value. To hell with being impressive.
Jokertown made him very nervous. As many times as he had flown over its streets, walking those same streets was another proposition entirely. Thankfully the Funhouse was right on the Bowery. The cops avoided the darker alleys of Jokertown as much as any other sane person, even more so since the start of this gang war, but nats still frequented the joker cabarets along the Bowery, and where the tourists went the prowl cars went as well. Nat money was the lifeblood of the Jokertown economy, and that blood ran thin enough as it was.
Even at this hour the sidewalks were still busy, and no one took much notice of Tom in his ill-fitting frogface. By the second block he was almost comfortable. In the last twenty years he’d seen all the ugliness Jokertown had to offer on his TV monitors; this was just a different angle on things.
In the old days the sidewalk in front of the Funhouse would have been crowded by cabs dropping off fares and limousines waiting at the curb for the end of the second show. But the sidewalk was empty tonight, not even a doorman, and when Tom entered, he found the checkroom unattended as well. He pushed through the double doors; a hundred different frogs stared at him from the silvered depths of the famous Funhouse mirrors. The man up on stage had a head the size of a baseball, and huge pebbled bags of skin drooping all over his bare torso, swelling and emptying like bellows or bagpipes, filling the room with a strange sad music as air sighed from a dozen unlikely orifices. Tom stared at him with a sick fascination until the maitre d’ appeared at his side. “A table, sir?” He was squat and round as a penguin, features hidden by a Beethoven mask.
“I’d like to see Xavier Desmond,” Tom said. His voice, partially muffled by the frog mask, sounded strange in his ears.
“Mr. Desmond only returned from abroad a few days ago,” the maitre d’ said. “He was a delegate on Senator Hartmann’s world tour,” he added proudly. “I’m afraid he’s quite busy.”
“It’s important,” Tom said.
The maitre d’ nodded. “Whom shall I say is calling?” Tom hesitated. “Tell him it’s ... an old friend.”
When the maitre d’ had left them alone, Des got up and came around the desk. He moved slowly, thin lips pressed together tightly beneath a long pink trunk that grew from his face where a normal man would have a nose. Standing in the same room with him, you saw things you could not see in a face on a TV screen: how old he was, and how sick. His skin hung on him as loosely as his clothes, and his eyes were filmed with pain.
“How was the tour?” Tom asked him.
“Exhausting,” Des said. “We saw all the misery of the world, all the suffering and hatred, and we tasted its violence firsthand. But I’m sure you know all that. It was in the papers.” He lifted his trunk, and the fingers that fringed its end lightly touched Tom’s mask. “Pardon, old friend, but I cannot seem to place your face.”
“My face is hidden,” Tom pointed out.
Des smiled wanly. “One of the first things a joker learns is how to see beneath a mask. I’m an old joker, and yours is a very bad mask.”
“A long time ago you bought a mask just as cheap as this.” Des frowned. “You’re mistaken, I’m afraid. I’ve never felt the need to hide my features.”
“You bought it for Dr. Tachyon. A chicken mask.” Desmond’s eyes met his, startled and curious, but still wary. “Who are you?”
“I think you know,” Tom said.
The old joker was silent for a long moment. Then he nodded slowly and sagged into the nearest chair. “There was talk that you were dead. I’m glad you’re not.”
The simple statement, and the sincerity with which Desmond delivered it, made Tom feel awkward, ashamed. For a moment he thought he should leave without another word.
“Please, sit down,” Des said.
Tom sat down, cleared his throat, tried to think how to begin. The silence stretched out awkwardly.
“I know,” Desmond said. “It is as strange for me as it must be for you, to have you sitting here in my office. Pleasant, but strange. But something brought you here, something more than the desire for my company. Jokertown owes you a great deal. Tell me what I can do for you.”
Tom told him. He left out the why of it, but he told him his decision, and what he hoped to do with the shells. As he spoke, he looked away from Des, his eyes wandering everywhere but on the old joker’s face. But he got the words out.
Xavier Desmond listened politely. When Tom had finished, Des looked older somehow, and more weary. He nodded slowly but said nothing. The fingers of his trunk clenched and unclenched. “You’re sure?” Des finally asked. Tom nodded. “Are you all right?”
Des gave him a thin, tired smile. “No,” he replied. “ I am too old, and not in the best of health, and the world persists in disappointing me. In the final days of the tour I yearned for our homecoming, for Jokertown and the Funhouse. Well, now I am home, and what do I find? Business is as bad as ever, the mobs are fighting a war in the streets of Jokertown, our next president may be a religious charlatan who loves my people so much he wants to quarantine them, and our oldest hero has decided to walk away from the fight.” Des ran his trunk fingers through thinning gray hair, then looked up at Tom, abashed. “Forgive me. That was unfair. You have risked much, and for twenty years you have been there for us. No one has the right to ask more. Certainly, if you want my help, you’ll have it.”
“Do you know who the owner is?” Tom asked.
“A joker,” Desmond said. “Does that surprise you? The original owners were nats, but he bought them out, oh, some time ago. He’s quite a wealthy man, but he prefers to keep a low profile. A rich joker is, well, something of a target. I would be glad to help set up a meeting.”
“Yeah,” Tom said. “Good.”
After they had finished talking, Xavier Desmond walked him out. Tom promised to phone in a week for the details of the meeting. Out front, on the sidewalk, Des stood beside him as Tom tried to hail a taxi. One passed, slowed, then sped up again when the cabbie saw the two of them standing there.
“I used to hope you were a joker,” Desmond said quietly. Tom looked at him sharply. “How do you know I’m not?” Des smiled, as if that question hardly deserved an answer.
“I suppose I wanted to believe, like so many other jokers. Hidden in your shell, you could be anything. With all the prestige and fame the aces enjoy, why would you possibly hide your face and keep your name a secret if you were not one of us?”
“I had my reasons,” Tom told him.
“Well, it doesn’t matter: I suppose the lesson to be learned is that aces are aces, even you, and we jokers need to learn to take care of ourselves. Good luck to you, old friend.” Des shook his hand and turned and walked away.
Another cab passed. Tom hailed it, but it shot right past. “They think you’re a joker,” Des said from the door of the Funhouse. “It’s the mask,” he added, not unkindly. “Take it off, let them see your face, and you’ll have no problem.” The door closed softly behind him.
Tom looked up and down the street. There was no one in sight, no one to see his real face. Carefully, nervously, he reached up and pulled off the frog mask.
The next cab screeched to a stop right in front of him.
All the King’s Horses
ADMISSION ONLY $2.50 said the sign over the darkened ticket booth in front of the Famous Bowery Wild Card Dime Museum.
The booth was empty, the museum doors locked. Tom rang the bell by the ticket window. After a minute he rang it again. There were shuffling noises from within, and a door in the back of the booth opened. An eye appeared, a rheumy pale-blue eye on a long fleshy stalk that curled around the doorframe. It fixed on Tom, blinked twice.
A joker stepped into the booth. He had a dozen eyes on long prehensile stalks that sprouted from his forehead and moved constantly, like snakes. Otherwise he was unremarkable. “Cancha read?” he said in a thin, nasal voice. “We’re closed.” In one hand he had a small sign, which he slid in front of the ticket window. It said CLOSED.
The way the joker’s eyes kept moving gave Tom a queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. “Are you Dutton?”
One by one the eyes turned, stilled, until every last one of them was fixed on him, studying him. “Dutton expecting you?” the joker asked. Tom nodded. “All right, c’mon round the side.” He turned and left the booth, but two or three of his eyes stared back at Tom, curious and unblinking, until the door shut.
The side entrance was a heavy metal fire door opening on an alley. Tom waited nervously while locks were unlocked and bolts lifted inside. You heard stories about Jokertown alleys, and this one seemed to him especially dark and gloomy. “This way,” eye-stalks said when the door finally opened.
The museum was windowless, its interior hallways even gloomier than the alley. Tom looked around curiously as they passed down several long corridors, with dusty brass railings and waxwork dioramas to either side of them. He had floated over the Dime Museum thousands of time as the Turtle, but he’d never set foot inside.
With the lights out, the figures in the shadows seemed remarkably lifelike. Dr. Tachyon stood on a mound of white sand, his spaceship painted on the backdrop behind him, while nervous soldiers climbed from a jeep. Jetboy clutched his chest as steel-faced Dr. Tod pumped bullets into him. A blond in a torn teddy struggled in the grasp of the Great Ape as he scaled a model of the Empire State Building. A dozen jokers, each more twisted than the last, writhed suggestively in some dank basement, clothing strewn all around them.
His guide vanished around a corner. Tom followed, and found himself face-to-face with a roomful of monsters. Drenched in shadow, the creatures looked so real that they brought him up short. Spiders the size of minivans, flying things that dripped acid, gigantic worms with rings of serrated teeth, humanoid monstrosities whose skin quivered like gelatin; they filled the room behind the curving glass, surrounding him on three sides, crowding each other, slavering to break out.
“Our newest diorama,” a quiet voice said behind him. “Earth versus the Swarm. Try the buttons.”
Tom looked down. A half dozen large red buttons were set into a panel by the railing. He pressed one. Inside the diorama a spotlight picked out a wax simulacrum of Modular Man suspended from the ceiling, as twin beams of scarlet light flashed down from his shoulder-mounted guns. The lasers struck one of the swarmlings; thin tendrils of smoke rose, and a long hiss of pain issued from unseen speakers.
Tom pushed a second button. Modular Man vanished back into the shadows, and the lights found the Howler in his yellow fighting togs, outlined against a plume of smoke from a burning tank. The simulacrum opened its mouth; the speakers shrieked. A swarmling quivered in agony.
“The children love it,” the voice said. “This is a generation raised on special effects. I’m afraid they demand more than simple waxworks. One must adapt to one’s times.”
A tall man in a dark suit of old-fashioned cut stood in a doorway to one side of the diorama, the joker with the eyestalks hunched over beside him. “I’m Charles Dutton,” he said, offering a gloved hand. A heavy black cape was thrown over his shoulders. He looked as though he’d just stepped from a hansom cab in Victorian London, except for the cowl drawn up over his head that kept his face in shadow. “We’ll be more comfortable in the office,” Dutton said. “If you’ll step this way.”
Tom was suddenly very uneasy. He found himself wondering, once again, what the hell he was doing here. It was one thing to float over Jokertown as the Turtle, secure in a steel shell, and quite another to venture into its streets in his own all-too-vulnerable flesh. But he’d come this far. There was no backing out now. He followed his host through a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY and down a narrow flight of steps. They passed through a second door, through a cavernous basement workshop, into a small but comfortably furnished office.
“Can I get you a drink?” the cowled man asked. He went to a wet bar in the corner of the office and poured himself a brandy.
“No,” Tom said. He was—a cheap drunk, too easily affected by booze, and he needed all his wits about him today. Besides, drinking through the damned frog mask would be a bitch.
“Let me know if you change your mind.” Cradling the snifter, Dutton crossed the room and seated himself behind an antique clawfoot desk. “Please, sit down. You look terribly uncomfortable standing there like that.”
Tom wasn’t listening. Something else had caught his eye. There was a head on the desk.
Dutton noticed his interest and turned the head around. The face was remarkably handsome, but the oh-so-perfect features were frozen in a rictus of surprise. Instead of hair, the top of the skull was a plastic dome with a radar dish beneath. The plastic was cracked. Severed cables, blackened and half-melted, dangled from the jagged stump of its neck.
“That’s Modular Man,” Tom said, shocked. Numbly he eased himself down onto the edge of a ladderback chair. “Only his head,” Dutton said.
It had to be a wax replica, Tom told himself. He reached out and touched it. “It’s not wax.”
“Of course not,” Dutton said. “This is authentic. We bought it from one of the busboys at Aces High. I don’t mind telling you, it cost us quite a tidy sum. Our new diorama will dramatize the Astronomer’s attack on Aces High. You’ll recall that Modular Man was destroyed during that fracas. His head will give a certain verisimilitude to the display, don’t you think?”
The whole notion made Tom ill. “You planning to put Kid Dinosaur’s body on display too?” he said testily.
“The boy was cremated,” Dutton replied in a matter-offact tone. “We have it on good authority that the mortuary substituted a John Doe, cleaned his bones with carpet beetles, and sold the skeleton to Michael Jackson.”
Tom found himself at a loss for words.
“You’re shocked,” Dutton said. “You wouldn’t be, if you were a joker beneath that mask. This is Jokertown.” He reached up, pulled back the cowl that covered his face. A death’s head grinned at Tom across the desk; dark eyes sunk deep beneath a heavy brow ridge, leathery yellow skin stretched taut across a noseless, lipless, hairless face, teeth bared in a rictus of a smile. “When you’ve lived here long enough, nothing shocks you,” Dutton said. Mercifully he yanked up the cowl again to conceal the living skullface, but Tom could feel the weight of his eyes. “Now,” he said. “Xavier Desmond gave me to understand that you have a proposition for me. A major new exhibit.”
Tom had seen thousands of jokers in his long years as the Turtle, but always at a distance, on his TV screens, with layers of armor plate between them. Sitting alone in a gloomy basement with a cowled man whose face was a yellowed skull was a little different. “Yeah,” he said uncertainly.
“We are always in the market for new exhibits, the more spectacular the better. Des is not normally given to hyperbole, so when he tells me you’re offering us something truly unique, I’m interested. Exactly what—is the nature of this exhibit?”
“The Turtle’s shells,” said Tom.
Dutton was silent for a moment. “Not a replica?”
“The real thing,” Tom told him.
“The Turtle’s shell was destroyed last Wild Card Day,” Dutton said. “They dredged up pieces of it from the bottom of the Hudson.”
“That was one shell. There were earlier models. I’ve got three of them, including the very first. Armor plate over a Volkswagen frame. It’s got some burned-out tubes, but otherwise it’s pretty much intact. You could clean it up, rig the TV screens for closed circuit, make a real ride out of it. Charge extra for people to crawl inside. The other two shells are just empty hulls, but they’d still make quite a draw. If you have a big enough hall, you could hang ’em from the ceiling, like the airplanes in the Smithsonian.” Tom leaned forward. “If you want to make this place into a real museum instead of just a tacky freak show for nat tourists, you need real exhibits.”
Dutton nodded. “Intriguing. I’ll admit I’m tempted. But anyone could build a shell. We’d need some kind of authentication. If you don’t mind my asking, how did they chance to come into your possession?”
Tom hesitated. Xavier Desmond said Dutton could be trusted, but it was not easy to set aside twenty-four years of caution. “They’re mine,” he said. “I’m the Turtle.”
This time Dutton’s silence was even longer. “There are those who say the Turtle is dead.”
“They’re wrong.”
“I see. I don’t suppose you’d care to give me proof.” Tom took a deep breath. His hands curled around the armrests of his chair. He stared across the desk, concentrated. Modular Man’s head rose a foot into the air and turned slowly until its eyes were fixed on Dutton.
“Telekinesis is a relatively common power,” Dutton said, unimpressed. “The Turtle is distinguished not by the mere fact of his teke, but by its strength. Lift the desk and you’ll convince me.”
Tom hesitated. He didn’t want to queer the deal by admitting that he couldn’t lift the desk, not when he was out of his shell. All of a sudden, without thinking, he heard himself say, “Buy the shells, and I’ll fly them here. All three of them.” The words slipped out glib and easy; it wasn’t until they were there hanging in the air that Tom realized what he’d said.
Dutton paused thoughtfully. “We could videotape the arrival, run the loop as part of the exhibit. Yes, I’d think that would be all the authentication we’d need. How much are you asking?”
Tom felt a moment of blind panic. Modular Man’s head thumped back onto Dutton’s desk. “One hundred thousand dollars,” he blurted. It was twice what he’d intended to ask. “Too much. I’ll offer you forty thousand.”
“Fuck that,” Tom said. “This is a one-of-a-kind exhibit.”
“Three-of-a-kind, actually,” Dutton pointed out. “I might be able to go to fifty thousand.”
“The historical value alone is more than that. This is going to give this fucking place respectability. You’ll have lines going around the block.”
“Sixty-five thousand,” Dutton said. “I’m afraid that’s my final offer.”
Tom stood up, relieved but somehow disappointed as well. “Okay. Thanks for your time. You don’t happen to have a number for Michael Jackson, do you?” When Dutton didn’t answer, he started for the door.
“Eighty thousand,” Dutton said behind him. Tom turned. Dutton coughed apologetically. “That’s it. Really. I couldn’t do better if I wanted to. Not without liquidating some of my other investments, which I’m not prepared to do.”
Tom paused in the doorway. He’d almost escaped. Now he was stuck again. He didn’t see any way out that wouldn’t make him look like a fool. “I’ll need cash.”
Dutton chuckled. “I don’t imagine a check made out to the Great and Powerful Turtle would be very easy to negotiate. It will take me a few weeks to raise that much cash, but I imagine I can work it out.” The cowled man unfolded from his chair and came around the desk. “Are we agreed, then?”
“Yeah,” Tom said. “If you’ll throw in the head.”
“The head?” Dutton sounded surprised, and a little amused. “Sentimental, aren’t we?” He picked up Modular Man’s head and stared into the blind, unfocused eyes. “It’s just a machine, you know. A broken machine.”
“He was one of us,” Tom said with a passion that surprised even him. “It doesn’t feel right, leaving him here.”
“Aces,” Dutton sighed. “Well, I suppose we can do up a wax replica for the Aces High diorama. It’s yours, as soon as we can take delivery on the shells.”
“You get the shells when I get my money,” Tom said. “Fair enough,” Dutton replied.
Jesus, Tom thought, what the fuck have I gone and done? Then he got a grip on himself. Eighty thousand dollars was one hell of a lot of money.
Enough money to make it worth turning turtle one last time.
All the King’s Horses
The big corrugated metal garage door rattled overhead as it slid back in its tracks. The opener was old and noisy, but it still did its job. Dust and daylight filtered into the underground bunker. Tom turned off the flashlight and hung it on a hook in the wooden beam supporting the hard—packed dirt wall. His palms were sweaty. He wiped them on his jeans and stood regarding the metal hulks before him.
The hatch gaped open on his oldest shell, the armored Beetle. He’d spent the last week replacing vacuum tubes, oiling the camera tracks, and checking the wiring. It was as ready as it would ever be.
“Me and my big fucking mouth,” Tom said to himself. His words echoed through the bunker.
He could have rented a truck, a big semi maybe. Joey would have helped. Back it up to the edge of the bunker, load the shells, get them over to Jokertown the easy way. But no, he had to go and tell Dutton he’d fly them over. No way the joker would ever believe him now if the damn things got delivered by UPS.
He looked at the open hatch, tried to imagine crawling into that blackness and sealing the door behind him, locking himself into that metal coffin, and he could feel the bile rise in the back of his throat. He couldn’t.
Only he had no choice, did he? The junkyard wasn’t his anymore. A crew would be arriving in less than three weeks to start clearing away all the shit that had accumulated here in the last forty years. If the shells were still lying around when they showed up with their bulldozers, the jig was seriously up.
Tom forced himself to walk forward. No big deal, he told himself. The shell was okay, he could get it across the bay, he’d done it a thousand times. So he had to do it one more time, that’s all. One more time and he was free.
All the kings horses and all the king’s men ...
Tom bent at the knees, grasped the top edge of the hatch, and took a long, slow breath. The metal was cold between his fingers. He ducked his head and pulled himself inside, swinging the hatch closed behind him. The clang rang in his ears. It was pitch-dark inside the shell, and chilly. His mouth had gone dry, and he could feel his heart shuddering away in his chest.
He fumbled in the darkness for the seat, felt torn vinyl upholstery, squirmed toward it. He might as well be in a cave at the center of the earth, or dead and buried, it was so black. Faint lines of light leaked in around the outside of the hatch, but not enough to see by. Where the fuck was the power switch? The newer shells all had fingertip controls built into the armrests of the seat, but not this old bucket, oh, no. Tom groped in the darkness over his head and jammed his fingers painfully on something metal. Panic stirred inside him like a frightened animal. It was so fucking black, where were the lights?
Then, suddenly, he was falling.
The vertigo crashed over him like a wave. Tom grabbed the armrests hard, tried to tell himself it wasn’t happening, but he could feel it. The darkness tumbled end over end. His stomach roiled, and he bent forward, cracking his forehead sharply against the curving wall of the shell. “I’m not falling!” he screamed loudly. The words rang in his ears as he fell, helpless, locked in his armored casket. His hands thrashed madly, fumbling against the wall, sliding over glass and vinyl, throwing switches everywhere as he gasped for breath.
All around him the TV screens woke to dim life.
The world steadied. Tom’s breathing slowed. He wasn’t falling, no, look out there, that was the bunker, he was sitting in the shell, safe on the ground at the bottom of a hole, that was all, he wasn’t falling.
Fuzzy black-and-white images crowded the screens. The sets were a mismatch of sizes and brand names, there were obvious blind spots, one picture was locked into a slow vertical roll. Tom didn’t care. He could see. He wasn’t falling.
He found the tracking controls and set his external cameras to moving. The images on the screen shifted slowly as he scanned all around him. The other two shells, the empty husks, squatted a few feet away. He turned on the ventilation system, heard a fan begin to whir, felt fresh air wash over his face. Blood was dripping into his eyes. He’d cut himself in his panic. He wiped it away with the back of his hand, sagged back in the seat.
“Okay,” he announced loudly. He’d gotten this far. The rest was candy. Up, up, and away. Out of the bunker, across New York Bay, one last flight, nothing simpler. He pushed up.
The shell rocked slowly from side to side, lifted maybe an inch off the ground, then settled back with a thump.
Tom grunted. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, he thought. He summoned all his concentration, tried again to lift off. Nothing happened.
He sat there, grim-faced, staring unseeing at the washedout black-and-white shapes on his television screens, and finally he admitted the truth. The truth he’d hidden from Joey DiAngelis, Xavier Desmond, and even from himself.
His shell wasn’t the only thing that was broken.
For twenty-odd years he’d thought himself invulnerable once behind his armor. Tom Tudbury might have his doubts, his fears, his insecurities, but not the Turtle. His teke, nurtured by that sense of invincibility, had grown steadily greater, year after year after year, so long as he was inside his shell.
Until Wild Card Day.
They’d taken him out before he even knew what was happening.
He’d been high over the Hudson, answering a distress call, when some ace power had reached through his armor as if it didn’t exist. Suddenly he’d felt sick, weak. He had to fight to keep from blacking out, and he could feel the massive shell stagger in midflight as his concentration wavered. A moment before his vision blurred, he’d glimpsed the boy in the hang glider slicing down from above. Then there’d been a tremendous loud pop that hurt his eardrums, and the shell had died.
Everything went. Cameras, computers, tape deck, ventilation system, all of it burned out or seized up in the same split second. An electromagnetic pulse, he’d read later in the papers, but all he’d known then was that he’d gone blind and helpless. For a moment he was too shocked to be afraid, punching wildly at his fingertip controls in the darkness, frantic to get the power back on.
He’d never even realized that they’d napalmed him. But with the napalm the weakness came again. He lost it then; the shell began to tumble, plunging toward the river below. This time he did black out.
Tom pushed the memories away and ran his fingers through his hair. His breathing had gone ragged again, and he was covered with a fine sheen of sweat that made his shirt cling to his chest. Face it, he told himself, you’re terrified.
It was no use. The Turtle was dead, and Tom Tudbury, he could juggle bars of soap and robot heads with the best of them, but no way was he going to lift a couple of tons of armor plate into the air. Give it up. Call Joey, dump the old shells into the bay, write it off. Forget the money, what’s eighty thousand dollars? Not worth his life, that’s for sure, Steve Bruder was going to make him rich anyway. The waters of New York Bay were wide and dark and cold, and it was a long way to Manhattan. He’d lucked out once, the goddamned shell had exploded as it fell to the bottom of the river, must have been the napalm or the water pressure or something, a freak accident, and the shock of the cold water had somehow revived him, and he’d struggled to the surface and let the current take him, and somehow, somehow, he’d made it to the shore in Jersey City. He should have died.
His breakfast moved in the pit of his stomach, and for a moment Tom thought he would gag. Beaten, he unbuckled his seat belt. His hand was shaking. He turned off the fans, the tracking motors, the cameras. The darkness closed in around him.
The shell was supposed to make him invulnerable, but they’d turned it into a death trap. He couldn’t take it up again. Not even for one last trip. He couldn’t.
The blackness trembled around him. He felt as though he were going to fall again. He had to get out of here, now, he was suffocating. He could have died.
Only he hadn’t.
The thought came out of nowhere, defiant. He could have died, but he hadn’t died. He couldn’t take the shell up again, but he had, that very night.
This very shell. When he’d finally made his way back to the junkyard, he’d been half-drowned and exhausted and drunk with shock, but also strangely alive, exhilarated, high on the mere fact of his survival. He’d taken the shell out and crossed the bay and done loops over Jokertown, climbed right back on the horse that had thrown him, he’d showed them all, the Turtle was still alive, the Turtle had taken everything they could throw at him, they’d knocked him out and napalmed him and dropped him like a rock to the bottom of the fucking Hudson River, and he was still alive.
They’d cheered him in the streets.
Tom’s hands reached out, flicked a switch, a second. The screens lit up again. The fans began to whir.
Don’t do it, his fear whispered within him. You can’t. You’d be dead now if the shell hadn’t blown—
“It did blow,” Tom said. The napalm, the water pressure, something ...
The walls of his bedroom. Broken glass everywhere, his pillows ripped and torn, feathers floating in the air.
The water made a sullen gurgling sound somewhere in the close, hot blackness. The world twisted and turned, sinking. He was too weak and dizzy to move. He felt icy fingers on his legs, creeping up higher and higher, and then sudden shock as the water reached his crotch, jolting him awake. He tore away his seat harness with numb fingers, but too late, the cold caressed his chest, he lurched up and the floor tumbled and he lost his footing, and then the water was over his head and he couldn’t breathe and everything was black, utterly black, as black as the grave, and he had to get out, he had to get out ...
Cracks on the wall of his bedroom, more every time the nightmare came. And pictures in a magazine, fragments of armor plate torn and twisted, welds shattered, bolts torn loose, the whole shell shattered like an egg. The armor bent outward. Fuck it all, he thought. It was me. I did it.
He looked into the nearest screen, gripped the armrests, and pushed down with his mind.
The shell rose smoothly. up, through the bunker, through the garage door overhead, into the morning sky. Sunlight kissed the flaking green paint of its armor.
He came out of the eastern sky, out of Brooklyn, with the sun behind him. The trip was longer that way, when he circled over Staten Island and the Narrows, but it disguised the angle of his approach, and twenty years of turtling had taught him all the tricks. He came in over the great stone ramparts of the Brooklyn Bridge, low and fast, and on his screens he saw the morning strollers below look up in astonishment as his shadows washed across them. It was a sight the city had never seen before and would never see again: three Turtles sweeping across the East River, three iron specters from yesterday’s headlines and the land of the dead, moving in tight formation, banking and turning as one, and sliding into a flamboyant double loop over the rooftops of Jokertown.
For Tom, in the center shell, the reactions down in the streets made it all worthwhile. At least he was going out in style; he’d like to see the magazines blame this one on Venus.
It’d been hell getting the other shells out of the bunker; gutted or not, their armor still lent them plenty of weight, and for a moment, hovering above the junkyard in Bayonne, he didn’t think he’d be able to juggle all three. Then he had a better idea. Instead of trying to take them individually, he pictured them welded to the points of a giant invisible triangle, and he lifted the triangle into the air. After that it was candy.
Dutton had one camera crew on the Brooklyn Bridge, a second on the roof of the Famous Bowery Wild Card Dime Museum. With all the film they shot, there would be precious little question of authenticating the shells.
“All right,” Tom announced through his loudspeakers after he had set the shells down on the wide, flat roof. “Show’s over. Cut.” Filming his approach and landing was one thing, but he wasn’t going to have any footage of him climbing out of the hatch. Mask or no mask, that was a risk he didn’t care to take.
Dutton, tall and dark with his cowl drawn up over his features, made a peremptory gesture with a gloved hand, and the camera crew-all jokers-loaded up their equipment and left the roof. When the last of them vanished down the stairs, Tom took a deep breath, slipped on his rubber frogface, killed the power, and crawled out into the morning sun.
After he’d emerged, he turned for one last look at what he was leaving behind. Out here, in daylight, they looked different than they had in the dimness of his bunker. Smaller, somehow. Shabbier. “Hard to walk away, isn’t it?” Dutton asked him.
Tom turned. “Yes,” he said. Beneath the cowl Dutton was wearing a leather lion mask with long golden hair. “You bought that mask at Holbrook’s,” Tom said.
“I own Holbrook’s,” Dutton replied. He studied the shells. “ I wonder how we’re going to get these inside.” Tom shrugged. “They got a fucking whale into the Museum of Natural History; a few turtles ought to be easy.” He was not feeling nearly as nonchalant as he tried to sound. The Turtle had pissed off quite a few people over the years, everyone from street punks to Richard Millions Nixon. If Dutton hadn’t been discreet, any or all of them could be out there waiting for him, and even if they weren’t, there was still the small matter of getting home with eighty thousand dollars in cash. “Let’s do it,” he said. “You got the money?”
“In my office,” Dutton replied.
They went downstairs, Dutton leading, Tom following, looking around cautiously at every landing. It was cool and dim inside the building. “Closed again?” Tom asked.
“Business is off badly,” Dutton admitted. “The city is afraid. This new wild card outbreak has driven the tourists away, and even the jokers are beginning to avoid crowds and public places.”
When they reached the basement and entered the gloomy, stone-walled workshop, Tom saw that the museum was not entirely deserted. “We’re preparing a number of new exhibits,” Dutton explained as Tom paused to admire a slender, boyish young woman who was dressing a wax replica of Senator Hartmann. She had just finished knotting his tie with long, deft fingers. “This is for our Syrian diorama,” Dutton said as the woman adjusted the senator’s gray-checked sports coat. There was a ragged tear at one shoulder where a bullet had ripped through, and the surrounding fabric was carefully stained with fake blood.
“It looks very real,” Tom said.
“Thank you,” the young woman replied. She turned, smiling and extending her hand. Something was wrong with her eyes. They were all iris, a deep shiny red-black, half again the size of normal eyes. Yet she did not move like a blind person. “I’m Cathy, and I’d love to do you in wax,” she said as Tom shook her hand. “Seated in one of your shells, maybe?” She tilted her head and pushed a strand of hair out of her strange dark eyes.
“Uh,” said Tom, “I’d rather not.”
“That’s wise of you,” Dutton said. “If Leo Barnett becomes president, some of your fellow aces may wish they’d kept a lower profile too. It doesn’t pay to be too flamboyant these days.”
“Barnett won’t be elected,” Tom said with some heat. He nodded at the wax figure. “Hartmann will stop him.” ‘Another vote for Senator Gregg,” Cathy said, smiling. “If you ever change your mind about the statue, let me know,
“You’ll be the first,” Dutton told her. He took Tom by the arm. “Come,” he urged. They passed other elements of the Syrian diorama in various states of assembly: Dr. Tachyon in full Arabian regalia, curled slippers on his feet; the giant Sayyid done in wax ten feet high; Carnifex in his blindingwhite fighting togs. In another part of the room a technician labored over the mechanical ears on a huge elephant head that sat on a wooden table. Dutton passed him with a curt nod.
Then Tom saw something that stopped him dead. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he said loudly. “That’s ...”
“Tom Miller,” Dutton said. “But I believe he preferred to be called Gimli. Bound for our Hall of Infamy, I’m afraid.” The dwarf snarled up at them, one fist raised above his head as he harangued some crowd. His glass eyes, boiling with hate, seemed to follow them wherever they went. He wasn’t wax.
“A brilliant piece of taxidermy,” Dutton said. “We had to move quickly before decay set in. The skin was cracked in a dozen places, and everything inside had just dissolved-bones, muscles, internal organs, everything. This new wild card can be as merciless as the old.”
“His skin,” Tom said with revulsion.
“They have John Dillinger’s penis in the Smithsonian,” Dutton said calmly. “This way, please.”
This time, when they reached Dutton’s office, Tom accepted the offer of a drink.
Dutton had the money carefully banded and packed in a nondescript, rather shabby, green suitcase. “Tens, twenties, and fifties, a few hundreds,” he said. “Would you like to count it?”
Tom just stared at all the crisp green bills, his drink forgotten in his hand. “No,” he said softly after a long pause. “If it’s not all there, I know where you live.”
Dutton chuckled politely, went behind his desk, and produced a brown paper shopping bag with the museum logo on the side.
“What’s that?” Tom asked.
“Why, the head. I was sure you’d want a bag.”
Actually Tom had almost forgotten about Modular Man’s head. “Oh, yeah,” he said, taking the bag. “Sure.” He looked inside. Modular Man stared back up at him. Quickly he closed the bag. “This will be fine,” he said.
It was almost noon when he emerged from the museum, the green suitcase in his right hand and the shopping bag in his left. He stood blinking in the sunlight, then set off up the Bowery at a brisk pace, keeping a careful eye out to make certain he wasn’t being followed. The streets were almost deserted, so he didn’t think it would be too difficult to spot a tail.
By the third block Tom was pretty sure he was alone. What few people he’d seen were jokers wearing surgical masks or more elaborate face coverings, and they gave him, and each other, as wide a berth as possible. Still, he kept walking, just to be sure. The money was heavier than he had figured, and Modular Man surprisingly light, so he stopped twice to change hands.
When he reached the Funhouse, he set the suitcase and bag down, looked around carefully, saw no one. He peeled off his frog mask and jammed it in the pocket of his windbreaker.
The Funhouse was dark and padlocked. CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE said the sign on the door. They’d shut their doors shortly after Xavier Desmond had been hospitalized, Tom knew. He’d read about it in the papers. It had saddened him immensely and made him feel even older than he felt already.
Bare-faced and nervous, shifting from foot to foot, Tom waited for a cab.
Traffic was very light, and the longer he waited, the more uneasy he grew. He gave fifty cents to a wino who stumbled up just to get rid of the man. Three punks in Demon Prince colors gave Tom and his suitcase a long, hard, speculative look. But his clothes were as shabby as the suitcase, and they must have decided that he wasn’t worth the sweat.
Finally he got his cab.
He slid into the backseat of the big yellow Checker with a sigh of relief, the shopping bag on the seat beside him, the suitcase across his lap. “I’m going to journal Square,” he said. From there he could get another cab to take him back to Bayonne.
“Oh no, oh no,” the cabbie said. He was dark-eyed, swarthy. Tom glanced at his hack’s license. Pakistani. “No Jersey,” the man said. “Oh no, do not go to Jersey.”
Tom took a crumpled hundred from the pocket of his jeans. “Here,” he said. “Keep the change.”
The cabbie looked at the bill and broke into a broad smile. “Very good,” he said. “Very good, New Jersey, oh yes, I am most pleasant.” He put the cab in gear.
Tom was home free. He cranked down a window and settled back into his seat, enjoying the wind on his face and the pleasant heft of the suitcase on his lap.
A distant wail floated across the rooftops outside; high, thin, urgent.
“Oh, what is that?” the cabbie said, sounding puzzled. “An air raid siren,” Tom said. He leaned forward, alarmed. A second siren began to sound, nearer, loud and piercing. Cars were pulling over to the sidewalk. People in the streets stopped and looked up into bright, empty skies. Far off, Tom could hear other sirens joining the first two. The noise built and built. “Fuck,” Tom said. He was remembering history. They’d sounded the air raid sirens the day that Jetboy had died, when the wild card had been played on an unsuspecting city. “Turn on the radio,” he said.
“Oh, pardon, sir, does not work, oh no.”
“Damn it,” Tom swore. “Okay. Faster then. Get me to the Holland Tunnel.”
The driver gunned it and ran a red light.
They were on Canal Street, four blocks from the Holland Tunnel, when the traffic came to a standstill.
The cab stopped behind a silver-gray Jaguar with its temporary license taped to the rear window. Nothing was moving. The cabbie hit his horn. Other horns sounded far up the street, mingling with the sound of the air raid sirens. Behind them a rust-eaten Chevy van screeched to a halt and began to honk impatiently, over and over. The cabbie stuck his head out the window and screamed something in a language Tom did not know, but his meaning was clear. More traffic was piling up behind the van.
The cabdriver hit his horn again, then turned around long enough to tell Tom that it warn t his fault. Tom had already figured out that much for himself. “Wait here,” he said unnecessarily, since the traffic was locked bumper-to-bumper, none of it moving, and there wasn’t room for the cabbie to pull out even if he’d wanted to.
Tom left the door open and stood on the center line, looking down Canal Street. Traffic was tied up as far as he could see, and the jam was growing rapidly behind them. Tom walked to the corner for a better look. The intersection was gridlocked, traffic lights cycling from red to green to yellow and back to red without anyone’s moving an inch. Music blared from open car windows, a cacophony of stations and songs, all of it counterpointed by the horns and air raid sirens, but none of the radios were getting any news.
The driver of the Chevy van came up behind Tom. “Where the fuck are the cops?” he demanded. He was grossly fat with a jowly, pockmarked face. He looked as if he wanted to hit something, but he had a point. The police were nowhere to be seen. Somewhere up ahead a child began to cry, her voice as high and shrill as the sirens, wordless. It gave Tom a shiver of fear. This wasn’t just a traffic jam, he thought. Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong.
He went back to his cab. The driver was slamming his fist into the steering wheel, but he was the only one this side of Broadway who wasn’t honking. “Horn broke,” he explained.
“I’m getting out here,” Tom said. “No refund.”
“Fuck you.” Tom had been going to let the man keep the hundred anyway, but his tone pissed him off. He pulled the suitcase and shopping bag out of the backseat and gave the cabbie a finger as he headed up Canal on foot.
A well-dressed fiftyish woman sat behind the wheel of the silver Jaguar. “Do you know what’s going on?” she asked.
Tom shrugged.
A lot of people were out of their cars now. A man in a Mercedes 450 SL stood with one foot in his car and one on the street, his cellular phone in his hand. “Nine-one-one’s still busy,” he told the people gathered around him.
“Fuckin’ cops,” someone complained.
Tom had reached the intersection when he saw the helicopter sweeping down Canal just above rooftop level. Dust whirled and old newspapers shivered in the gutters. The rotors were so loud, even at a distance. I never made so much fucking noise, Tom thought; something about the helicopter reminded him weirdly of the Turtle. He heard the crackle of a loudspeaker, the words lost in the street noise.
A pimpled teenager leaned out of a white Ford pickup with Jersey plates. “The Guard,” he shouted. “That’s a Guard chopper!” He waved at the helicopter.
The whap-whap-whap of the rotors mingled with the horns and sirens and shouting to drown out the loudspeakers. Horns began to fall silent. “... your homes ...”
Someone began shouting obscenities.
The chopper dipped lower, came on. Even Tom saw the military markings now, the National Guard insignia. The loudspeakers boomed. “... closed ... repeat: Holland Tunnel is closed. Return to your homes peacefully.”
Huge gusts of wind kicked up all around him as the helicopter passed directly overhead. Tom dropped to one knee and covered his face against the dust and dirt.
“The tunnel is closed,” he heard as the chopper receded. “Do not attempt to leave Manhattan. Holland Tunnel is closed. Return to your homes peacefully:”
When the copter reached the end of stalled traffic, two blocks farther back, it peeled off and rose high in the air, a small black shape in the sky, then circled back for another loop. The people in the streets looked at each other.
“They can’t mean me, I’m from Iowa,” a fat woman announced, as if it made a difference. Tom knew how she felt.
The cops had finally arrived. Two patrol cars edged down the sidewalk carefully, bypassing the worst of the congestion. A black policeman got out and started snapping orders. One or two people got back into their cars obediently. The rest surrounded the cop, all of them talking at once. Others, lots of them, had abandoned their vehicles. A stream of people headed up Canal Street, toward the entrance to the Holland Tunnel.
Tom went with them, moving along slower than most, struggling with the weight of his bags. He was sweating. A woman passed him at a dead run, looking ragged and near hysteria. The helicopter flew over again, loudspeakers blaring, warning the crowd to turn back.
“Martial law!” a truck driver shouted down from the cab of his semi. A wall of people formed around the truck, trapping Tom in their midst. He was shoved up against the tractor’s rear wheel as the crowd pressed closer for news. “It just came over the CB,” the trucker said. “The motherfuckers have declared martial law. Not just the Holland Tunnel. They shut down everything, all the bridges, the tunnels, even the Staten Island ferry. No one’s getting off the island.”
“Oh, god,” someone said behind Tom, a man’s voice, husky but raw with fear. “Oh, god, it’s the wild card.”
“We’re all going to die,” an old woman said. “ I seen it in ‘46. They’re just gonna keep us here.”
“It’s those jokers,” suggested a man in a three-piece suit. “Barnett is right, they shouldn’t be living with normal people, they spread disease.”
“No,” Tom said. “The wild card isn’t contagious.”
“Sez you. Oh, god, we probably all got it already.”
“There’s a carrier,” the trucker shouted down. Tom could hear the crackle of his CB radio. “Some fucking joker. He’s spreading it wherever he goes.”
“That’s not possible,” Tom said.
“Goddamn joker-lover,” someone shouted at him.
“I got to get home to my babies,” a young woman wailed. “Take it easy,” Tom started to say, but it was too late, way too late. He heard crying, screaming, shouted obscenities. The crowd seemed to explode as people ran off in a dozen directions. Somebody slammed into him hard. Tom staggered back, then fell as he was buffeted from the side. He almost lost his grip on the suitcase, but he hung on grimly, even when a boot stomped painfully on his calf. He rolled under the truck. Feet rushed past him. He crawled between the wheels of the semi, dragging his bags behind him, and got to his feet on the sidewalk, half-dazed. This is fucking crazy, he thought.
Way down Canal, the helicopter began another pass. Tom watched it come, the crowd surging hysterically around him. The chopper will calm them down, he thought, it has to.
When the first tear gas canisters began to rain down into the street, trailing yellow smoke, he turned and dodged into the nearest alley and began to run.
The noise dwindled behind as Tom fled through alleys and side streets. He’d gone three blocks and was breathing hard when he noticed a cellar door ajar under a bookstore. He hesitated a moment, but when he heard the sound of running feet on the cross street, his mind was made up for him.
It was cool and quiet inside. Tom gratefully dropped the suitcase and sat cross-legged on the cement floor. He leaned back against the wall and listened. The air raid sirens had finally quieted, but he heard horns and an ambulance and the distant, angry rumble of shouts.
Off to his right he heard the scrape of a footstep. Tom’s head snapped around. “Who’s there?”
There was only silence. The cellar was dark and gloomy. Tom got to his feet. He could swear he’d heard something. He took a step forward, froze, cocked his head. Then he was sure. Someone was back there, behind those boxes. He could hear the short, ragged sound of their breathing.
Tom wasn’t going any closer. He backed toward the door and gave the boxes a hard telekinetic shove. The whole stack went over,. cardboard ripping, and dozens of glossy paperback copies of More Disgusting joker jokes cascaded from a torn carton. There was a grunt of surprise and pain from behind the boxes.
Tom edged forward and pushed the top boxes in the feebly moving pile off to the side, using his hands this time. “Don’t hurt me!” a voice pleaded from under the books. “No one’s going to hurt you,” Tom said. He shifted a torn box, spilling more paperbacks onto the floor. Half-buried underneath, a man curled in a fetal ball, arms locked protectively around his head. “Come on out of there.”
“I wasn’t doing nothing,” the man on the floor said in a thin, whispery voice. “ I just come in to hide.”
“I was hiding, too,” Tom said. “It’s okay. Come on out.” The man stirred, unfolded, got warily to his feet. There was something dreadfully wrong with the way he moved. “I ain’t so good to look at,” he warned in that thin, rustling voice.
“I don’t care,” said Tom.
Walking in a painful crabbed sideways motion, the man edged forward into the light, and Tom got a good look at him. An instant of revulsion gave way to sudden, overwhelming pity. Even in the dim light in the back of the cellar, Tom could see how cruelly the joker’s body had been twisted. One of his legs was much longer than the other, triple-jointed, and attached backward, so the knee bent in the wrong direction. The other leg, the ‘normal’ one, ended in a clubfoot. A cluster of tiny vestigial hands grew from the swollen flesh of his right forearm. His skin was glossy black, bone-white, chocolate-brown, and copper-red in patches all over his body; there was no way to tell what race he’d belonged to originally. Only his face was normal. It was a beautiful face; blue-eyed, blond, strong. A movie star’s face.
“I’m Mishmash,” the joker whispered timidly.
But the movie star lips hadn’t moved, and there was no life in those deep, clear blue eyes. Then Tom saw the second head, the hideous little monkey-face peeping cautiously out of the unbuttoned shirt. It sprouted crookedly from the joker’s ample gut, as purple as an old bruise.
Tom felt nauseated. It must have showed on his face because Mishmash turned away. “Sorry,” he muttered, “sorry.”
“What happened?” Tom forced himself to ask. “Why are you hiding here?”
“I saw them,” the joker told him, his back to Tom. “These guys. Nats. They had this joker; they were beating the hell out of him. They would of done me, too, only I snuck away. They said it was all our fault. I got to get home.”
“Where do you live?” Tom asked.
Mishmash made a wet, muffled sound that might have been a laugh and half-turned. The little head twisted up to look at Tom. “Jokertown,” he said.
“Yeah,” Tom said, feeling very stupid. Of course he lived in Jokertown, where the fuck else could he live? “That’s only a few blocks away. I’ll take you there.”
“You got a car?”
“No,” Tom said. “We’ll have to walk.”
“I don’t walk so good.”
“We’ll go slow,” Tom said.
They went slow.
Dusk was falling when Tom finally emerged, cautiously, from the cellar refuge. The street had been quiet for hours, but Mishmash was too frightened to venture out until dark. “They’ll hurt me,” he kept saying.
Even when twilight began to gather, the joker was still reluctant to move. Tom went first to scout the block. There were lights in a few apartments, and he heard the sound of a television blaring from a third-story window, and more police sirens, far off in the distance. Otherwise the city seemed deathly quiet. He walked around the block slowly, moving from doorway to doorway like a GI in a war movie. There were no cars, no pedestrians, nothing. All the storefronts were dark, secured by accordion grills and steel shutters. Even the neighborhood bars were closed. Tom saw a few broken windows, and just around the corner the overturned, burned-out hulk of a police car sat square in the middle of the intersection. A huge Marlboro billboard had been defaced with red paint; KILL ALL JOKERS, it said. He decided not to take Mishmash down that street.
When he returned, the joker was waiting. He’d moved the suitcase and shopping bag to the doorway. “ I told you not to touch those,” Tom snapped in annoyance, and felt immediately guilty when he saw how Mishmash quailed under his voice.
He picked up the bags. “C’mon,” he said, stepping back outside. Mishmash followed, his every step a hideous twisting dance. They went slowly. They went very slowly.
They stayed mostly to alleys and side streets south of Canal, resting frequently. The damned suitcase seemed to get heavier with each passing block.
They were catching their breath by a Dumpster just off Church Street when a tank rolled past the mouth of the alley, followed by a half dozen National Guardsmen on foot. One of them glanced to his left, saw Mishmash, and began to raise his rifle. Tom stood up, stepped in front of the joker. For an instant his eyes met the Guardsman’s. He was only a kid, Tom saw, no more than nineteen or twenty. The boy looked at Tom for a long moment, then lowered his gun, nodded, and walked on.
Broadway was eerily deserted. A lone police paddy wagon wove its way through an obstacle course of abandoned cars. Tom watched it pass while Mishmash cringed back behind some garbage cans. “Let’s go,” Tom said.
“They’ll see us,” Mishmash said. “They’ll hurt me.”
“No they won’t,” Tom promised. “Look at how dark it is.” They were halfway across Broadway, moving from car to car, when the streetlights came on, sudden and silent. The shadows were gone. Mishmash gave a single sharp bark of fear. “Move it,” Tom told him urgently. They scrambled for the far side of the street.
“Hold it right there!”
The shout stopped them at the edge of the sidewalk. Almost, Tom thought, but almost only counts in horseshoes and grenades. He turned slowly.
The cop wore a white gauze surgical mask that muffled his voice, but his tone was still all business. His holster was unbuttoned, his gun already in hand.
“You don’t have to—” Tom started nervously.
“Shut the fuck up,” the cop said. “You’re in violation of the curfew.”
“Curfew?” Tom said.
“You heard me. Don’t you listen to the radio?” He didn’t wait for the answer. “Lemme see some ID.”
Tom carefully lowered his bags to the ground. “I’m from Jersey,” he said. “ I was trying to get home, but they closed the tunnels.” He fished out his wallet and handed it to the cop.
“Jersey,” the cop said, studying the driver’s license. He handed it back. “Why aren’t you at Port Authority?”
“Port Authority?” Tom said, confused.
“The clearance center.” The cop’s tone was still gruff and impatient, but he’d evidently decided they weren’t a threat. He holstered his gun. “Out-of-towners are supposed to report to Port Authority. You pass the medical, they’ll give you a blue card and send you home. If I was you, I’d head up there.”
Port Authority Bus Terminal was a zoo under the best of circumstances. Tom tried to imagine what it would be like now. Every tourist, commuter, and visitor in the city would be there, alongwith a lot offrightened Manhattanites pretending to be from out of town, all of them waiting their turn for a medical or fighting for a seat on one of the buses leaving the city, with the police and National Guard trying to keep order. You didn’t need a lot of imagination to picture the kind of nightmare going on up at Forty-second Street. “I didn’t know. I’ll get right up there,” Tom lied, “as soon as I get my friend home.”
The cop gave Mishmash a hard look. “You’re taking a big risk, buddy. The carrier’s supposed to be some kind of albino, and nobody said anything about any extra heads, but all jokers look alike in the dark, right? Those Guard boys are real jumpy, too. They see a pair like you, they might decide to shoot first and check your IDs later.”
“What the fuck is going on?” Tom said. It sounded worse than he could have imagined. “What is all this?”
“Do you good to turn on a radio once in a while,” the cop said. “Might stop you getting your head shot off.”
“Who are you looking for?”
“Some joker fuck, been spreading a new kind of wild card all over the city. He’s freaky strong, and crazy. Dangerous. And he’s got a friend with him, some new ace, looks normal but bullets bounce right off him. If I was you, I’d dump the geek and haul ass for Port Authority.”
“I didn’t do nothing,” Mishmash whispered.
His voice was low, barely audible, but it was the first time he’d dared to speak, and the cop heard him well enough. “Shut the fuck up. I’m not in the mood for any joker lip. I want to hear you talk, I’ll ask you a question.”
Mishmash quailed. Tom was shocked by the loathing in the policeman’s voice. “You got no call to talk to him that way.”
It was a mistake, a big mistake. Above the surgical mask the policeman’s eyes narrowed. “That so? What are you, one of those queers who likes to hump jokers?”
No, you asshole, Tom thought furiously, I’m the Great and Powerful Turtle, and if I were in my shell right now, I’d pick you up and drop you in the garbage where you belong. But what he said was, “Sorry, Officer. I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s been a rough day for everyone, right? Maybe we should just get going?” He tried to smile as he picked up the suitcase and shopping bag. “C’mon, Mishmash,” he said.
“What’s in those bags?” the cop said suddenly.
Modular Man’s head and eighty thousand dollars in cash, Tom thought, but he didn’t say it. He didn’t think he’d broken any laws, but the truth would raise questions he wasn’t prepared to answer. “Nothing,” he told the cop. “Some clothes.” But he’d hesitated too long.
“Why don’t we have a look,” the policeman replied.
“No,” Tom blurted. “You can’t. I mean, don’t you need a search warrant or probable cause or something?”
“I got your fucking probable cause right here,” the cop said, drawing his gun. “This is martial law, and we got authority to shoot looters on sight. Now lower the bags to the ground slowly and back off, asshole.”
The moment seemed to last a long, long time. Then Tom did as he was told.
“Further back,” the cop said. Tom retreated to the sidewalk. “You too, geek.” Mishmash moved back next to Tom. The policeman edged forward, bent over, and pulled one of the handles of the shopping bag to peer inside.
Modular Man’s head flew up and smashed him in the face. Blood squirted from the cop’s nose with a sickening crunch to stain the white gauze of his mask. He gave a muffled screech and staggered back. The head bowled squarely into his gut, tumbling like a cannonball. The cop grunted as his feet went out from under him. He landed on his ass in the street.
The head swooped around him. The cop brought up his pistol with both hands and squeezed off a round. Glass shattered in a second-story window as the head came crashing into his temple. The cop swatted at it with the barrel of his pistol; then something jerked the gun right out his hand and sent it skittering off down a sewer.
“Son-of-a-bitch,” the cop managed. He tried to struggle back to his feet, his eyes as glassy as Mod Man’s. His nose was still bleeding; the surgical mask had turned a vivid red.
The head came at him again. This time he managed to grab it and hold it at bay, just inches from his face. The long cable dangling from the jagged neck took on a life of its own and snaked up into a bloody nostril. The cop screamed and grabbed for the cable. The head jumped forward; two foreheads cracked together hard. The cop went down. The head circled over him. The cop groaned and rolled over. He made no attempt to rise.
Tom started breathing again.
“Is he dead?” Mishmash asked in an eager whisper.
Tom’s heart was still on adrenaline overdrive; it took a moment for the words to register. “Fuck,” he said. What the hell had he done? It had all gone down so quickly.
Mod Man’s head fell out of the air, hit the gutter, and rolled. Tom knelt over the fallen cop and felt for a pulse. “He’s alive,” Tom said. “Breathing is shallow, though. He might have a concussion, maybe even a cracked skull.”
Mishmash crowded close. “Kill him.”
Tom’s head snapped back around and he stared at the joker in horror. “Are you crazy?”
The hideous little purple monkey-face was straining forward through his shirtfront. Moisture glistened on the hard, thin lips. “He was going to kill us. You heard him, you heard what he called us. He had no right. Kill him.”
“No way,” Tom said. He stood up, wiping his hands on his jeans compulsively. His high was gone now; he felt more than a little sick.
“He knows who you are,” Mishmash whispered.
Tom had somehow managed to forget that. “Fuck fuck fuck,” he swore. The cop had seen his driver’s license. “They’ll come for you,” Mishmash suggested. “They’ll know you did it, and they’ll come. Kill him. Go on, I won’t tell.”
Tom backed away, shaking his head. “No.”
“Then I’ll do it,” Mishmash said. His lips peeled back over a mouthful of yellowed incisors, and the wrinkled face shot out and down, into the cop’s throat. Mishmash’s shirt sagged where his gut had been. The head worked at the soft flesh under the cop’s chin, bobbing at the end of three feet of glistening transparent tube connecting it to the joker’s torso. Tom heard wet, greedy sucking sounds. The cops feet began to thrash feebly. Blood spurted, Mishmash swallowed and sucked, and a thick red wash began to travel up through the thick glassy flesh of his neck.
“No!” Tom screamed. “Stop it!”
The monkey-face continued to feed, but on top of the joker’s body his second head, the movie-star head, turned to stare at Tom from clear blue eyes and smiled beatifically.
Tom reached out for Mishmash with his teke, or tried to, but there was nothing there. The fury that had filled him when the cop threatened them was gone; now there was only horror and fear, and his power had always deserted him when he was afraid. He stood helplessly, hands clenching and unclenching as Mishmash gnawed away with teeth as cruel and sharp as needles.
Then he leapt forward and grabbed the joker from behind, wrapping his arms around that twisted torso, pulling him back. For a moment they grappled. Tom was overweight and out of shape and had never been especially strong, but the joker’s body was as weak as it was misshapen. They stumbled backward, Mishmash thrashing feebly in Tom’s arms, until the head pulled free of the cop’s torn throat with a soft pop. The joker hissed in fury. His long glistening neck coiled around, snakelike, over his left shoulder, as pale eyes glared down, insane with frustration. Blood was smeared all over the shrunken purplish face. Wet red teeth snapped wildly, but his neck wasn’t long enough.
Tom spun him around and shoved him away. The joker’s mismatched legs tangled under him, and he tripped and fell heavily into the gutter. “Get out of here!” Tom screamed. “Get out of here now or I’ll give you the same thing I gave him.”
Mishmash hissed, his head weaving back and forth. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the bloodlust was gone, and once more the joker cringed in fear. “Don’t,” he whispered, “please don’t. I only wanted to help. Don’t hurt me, mister.” His neck shrunk slowly back into his shirt, a long, thick glass eel returning to its lair, until there was only the small scared face shivering between his buttons. By then Mishmash was back on his feet. He gave Tom one last pleading look, and then whirled and began to run, arms and legs working grotesquely.
Tom stopped the policeman’s bleeding with a handkerchief. There was still a pulse, but it felt weak to him, and the man had obviously lost a lot of blood. He hoped it wasn’t too late.
He looked around at the abandoned cars and headed toward a likely one. Joey had once shown him how to hot-wire an ignition; he sure as hell hoped he still remembered.
It was standing room only in the waiting room of the Jokertown Clinic. Tom pushed his suitcase up against a wall and sat on top of it. The shopping bag, with Modular Man’s bloodied head stuck inside it, he shoved between his legs. The room was hot and noisy. He ignored the frightened people all around him, the screams of pain from the next room, and stared dully at the tiles on the floor, trying not to think. Perspiration covered his face under the clinging frog mask.
He’d been waiting a half hour when a fat, tusked newsboy in a porkpie hat and Hawaiian shirt entered the waiting room with an armful of papers. Tom bought a copy of tomorrow’s Jokertown Cry, sat back on his suitcase, and began to read. He read every word in every story on every page, and then started all over again.
The headlines were full of martial law and the citywide manhunt for Croyd Crenson. Typhoid Croyd, the Cry called him; anyone coming in contact with the carrier risked drawing the wild card. No wonder everyone was so scared. Dr. Tachyon had told the authorities it was a mutant form, capable of reinfecting even stable aces and jokers.
The Turtle could bring him in, Tom thought. Anyone else, police or Guardsman or ace, risked infection and death if they tried to apprehend him, but the Turtle could take him in perfect safety, easy as candy. He didn’t have to get real close to teke someone, and his shell gave him plenty of protection. Only there was no shell, and the Turtle was dead.
Sixty-three people had required medical treatment after the rioting around the Holland Tunnel, and property damage was estimated at more than a million dollars, he read.
The Turtle could have dissipated that crowd without anyone’s getting hurt. Just talk to them, dammit, take the time to quell their fears, and if things got out of hand, pry them apart with teke. You didn’t need guns or tear gas.
Sporadic outbreaks of anti joker violence had been reported throughout the city. Two jokers were dead, a dozen more had been hospitalized after beatings or stonings.
There was widespread looting in Harlem.
Arson had destroyed the storefront headquarters of jokers for Jesus, and firemen responding to the alarm had been pelted with bricks and dogshit.
Leo Barnett was praying for the souls of the afflicted and calling for quarantine in the name of public health.
A twenty-year-old coed from Columbia had been gangraped on a pool table in Squisher’s Basement. More than a dozen jokers had watched from their barstools, and half of those had lined up to take their turns after the original rapists were done. Someone had told them they’d be cured of their deformities if they had sex with this woman.
The Turtle was dead, and Tom Tudbury sat on a battered old suitcase stuffed with eighty thousand dollars in cash as the world grew more and more insane.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, he thought. He’d just finished his third pass through the newspaper when a shadow fell across him. Tom looked up and saw the hefty black nurse who had helped him carry the policeman in from the car. “Dr. Tachyon will see you now,” she said.
Tom followed her back to a small cubicle off the emergency room, where Tachyon sat wearily behind a steel desk. “Well?” Tom asked after the nurse had left.
“He’ll live,” Tach said. Lilac eyes lingered on the green, rubbery features of Tom’s mask. “We are required by law to file a report on this sort of thing. The police will want to question you once the emergency has passed. We need a name.”
“Thomas Tudbury,” he said. He pulled off the mask and let it drop to the floor.
“Turtle,” Tach blurted, surprised. He stood up.
The Turtle is dead, Tom thought, but he didn’t say it. Dr. Tachyon frowned. “Tom, what happened out there?”
“It’s a long, ugly story. You want it, go into my fucking brain and take it. I don’t want to talk about it.”
Tach looked at him thoughtfully. Then the alien winced and sat down again.
“At least with the fucking Astronomer I could tell the good guys from the bad guys,” Tom said.
“He has your name,” Tach said.
“One of my names,” Tom said. “Fuck it. I need your help.”
Tach was still linked with his mind; the alien looked up sharply. “I will not do that.”
Tom leaned forward across the desk, looming over the smaller man. “You will,” he said. “You owe me, Tachyon. And there’s no way I can kill myself without your help.”
All the King’s Horses
“This is ridiculous.” Bruder was in a fury. He had a pair of leather driving gloves in one hand, and he slapped them against his legs compulsively as he spoke. “Do you realize what you’re doing? You’re throwing away a fortune. Millions of dollars. Moreover, you’re opening yourself up for a lawsuit. Tudbury and I were partners; this land ought to belong to me.”
“That’s not what the will says,” Joey DiAngelis said. He was sitting on the rust-eaten hood of a 1957 Edsel Citation, a can of Schaefer in his hand, as Bruder paced back and forth in front of him.
“I’ll contest the goddamned will,” Bruder threatened. “Damn it, we took out loans together.”
“The loans will be paid,” Joey said. “Tuds was insured for a hundred grand. There’s a lot left even after the funeral expenses. You’ll be covered, Bruder. But you ain’t getting the junkyard, that’s mine.”
Bruder pointed ’at him, gloves dangling from his hand. “If you think I won’t take you to court, you better think again. I’m going to take everything you own, you asshole, including this shit-eating junkyard.”
“Fuck you,” Joey DiAngelis said. “So sue me, I don’t give a shit. I can afford lawyers, too, Bruder. Tuds left me all the rest of his stuff, the house, the comic collection, his share of the business. I’ll sell it all if I have to, but I’m keeping this junkyard.”
Bruder scowled. “DiAngelis,” he said, trying to sound a little more conciliatory, “listen to reason. Tudbury wanted to sell this place. What good is an abandoned junkyard? Think of all the people who need housing. This development will be an enormous boon to the whole city.”
DiAngelis took a swig of beer. “You think I’m a moron or what? You’re not building no shelter for the homeless. Tom showed me the plans. We’re talking quarter-million-dollar townhouses, right?” He looked around at the acres of trash and rusted cars. “Well, fuck that shit. I grew up in this junkyard, Stevie boy. I like it just the way it is.”
“Then you’re an idiot,” Bruder snapped.
“And you’re on my property,” Joey said. “You better get the fuck off, or I might get the urge to jam a tailpipe up that tight ass of yours.” He crushed the beer can in his hand, tossed it aside, and slid off the hood of the Edsel. The two men stood toe to toe.
“You can’t intimidate me, DiAngelis,” Bruder said. “We’re not kids in a schoolyard anymore. I’m bigger than you, and I work out three times a week. I’ve studied martial arts.”
“Yeah,” Joey said, “but I fight dirty.” He grinned. Bruder hesitated, then turned angrily on his heels and stalked back to his car. “You haven’t heard the last of this!” he shouted, backing out.
Joey smiled as he watched him drive off.
After Bruder had gone, he went to his own car and pulled another Schaefer off the six-pack on the passenger seat. He drank the first swallow by the shore as the tide came in off the bay. It was a wet, windy, overcast day, and in an hour or so it was going to turn into a wet, windy, overcast night. Joey sat on a rock and watched the fading light paint rainbows in the oil slicks on the water, thinking of Tuds.
The wake and the funeral had both been closed casket, but Joey had gone into the back room after everyone else had left and told a junior mortician that he wanted to see the body. The wild card hadn’t left much that looked like Tom. The corpse had skin like an armadillo, scaly and hard, and a faint greenish glow, like it was radioactive or some fucking thing. Its eyes were huge sacs of glistening pink gelatin, but it was wearing Tom’s aviator frames, and he’d recognized the high school ring on the pinky of one webbed hand.
Not that there was any room for doubt. The body had been found in a Jokertown alley, wearing Tom’s clothes and carrying all of Tom’s ID, and Dr. Tachyon himself had done the autopsy and signed the death certificate, after comparing dental records.
Joey DiAngelis sighed, crushed another beer can in his hand, and tossed it to the side. He remembered when he and Tom had built the first shell together. Back then they made beer cans out of steel, and you had to be strong to crush the motherfuckers. Now any old wimp could do it.
He grabbed the rest of his six-pack by an empty ring in the plastic holder and walked on back to the bunker.
The big door was open, and down inside the hole Joey saw the flare of an acetylene torch. He sat down with his legs over the edge and dangled the six-pack out in front of him. “Hey, Tuds,” he shouted down, “you ready for a break?”
The blowtorch went out. Tom walked out from behind the framework of the huge new half-built shell. What a fucking monster, Joey thought again as he looked down at its skeleton; it was going to be almost twice as big as any previous shell, airtight, watertight, self-contained, computerized, armored to hell and gone, a hundred and fifty fucking thousand dollars’ worth of shell, all the suitcase loot and most of the insurance settlement, too. Tuds was even making noises about cannibalizing that fucking head he’d brought back to see if he could figure out some way to fix the radar set and hook it into his hardware.
Tom pulled off his goggles. They left big pale circles around his eyes. “Asshole,” he shouted up, “how many times I got to tell you, Tudbury is dead. There’s no one home but us turtles.”
“Fuck it then,” Joey said. “Turtles don’t drink beer.”
“This one does. Give it here-that goddamn torch is hot.” Joey dropped what was left of the six-pack.
Tom caught it, tore off a can, and opened it. Beer sprayed all over his face and hair. Joey laughed.
Excerpts from the Literature
... fearful beyond imagining, worse in many ways than what we saw in Belsen. Nine out of ten affected by this unknown pathogen die horribly. No treatment helps. The survivors aren’t a lot more lucky Nine out of ten of them are somehow
transformed, by a process I can’t even begin to understand, into something the—sometimes not even remotely human. I’ve seen men turn into effigies of galvanized rubber, children sprouting extra heads ... I can’t go on. And what’s worst is, they’re still alive. Still alive, Mac. Strangest of all, maybe, are the ten percent of survivors, the one-in-a-hundred of those who actually contract the sickness. They don’t show any outward signs of change, mostly.
But they have—I have to call them powers. They can do things a normal human can’t. I’ve seen a man soaring into the sky like a V-2, looping the loop and returning to land lightly on his feet. A berserk patient tearing a heavy steel gurney apart as if it were tissue paper. Not ten minutes ago a woman walked
through the wall of the little office of this onetime warehouse where I’ve shut myself away for a few minutes’ respite. A naked woman, gorgeous, a real pinup type, glowing with a rosy light that seemed to come from inside her body, smiling a fixed glassy smile. I’m not cracking up, Mac. I haven’t gone round the bend into madness or morphine. Not yet. Even if I’m lucky to get an hour or two of sleep a night—and then the horror fills my dreams, so I’m almost glad to crawl out of my cot and face the reality of what’s happened here. These things are happening, they’re real. You may read about it yourself someday, if the brass don’t succeed in clamping the lid down. I don’t see how they can—this is Manhattan, for Christ’s sake, and the victims number tens of thousands.
Thank God it’s not catching. Thank God for that. As far as we can see, it only develops in those directly exposed to the dust or whatever it was—and not in all of them, or we’d have a million more. As it is, quarantine is impossible, even adequate sanitation. We’ve had an outbreak of influenza in our wards, expecting typhus any hour ...
They say some kind of aliens are behind it all, men from outer space. Given what we’ve all seen, that doesn’t sound farfetched. I’ve heard it noised around at the highest levels that they’ve even caught one. I hope it’s true. Then they can stick the bastard in the docket with the Nazi bosses at Nuremberg, and hang him like the animal he is ....
—personal letter from Captain Kevin McCarthy,
United States Army Medical Corps,
September 21, 1946
Accounts of the incident make it clear that the vessel containing xenovirus Takis-A exploded at an altitude of 30,000 feet, well within the so-called jet stream. In its dormant state the virus is encased in a durable protein sheath, the “spores” so often and incorrectly referred to in the lay press, which experiment has shown to be resistant to extremes of temperature and pressure such as to permit its survival under natural conditions from several hundred feet beneath the ocean to the upper limits of the stratosphere. Vira! particles were borne eastward across the Atlantic on the jet stream, washing out at random intervals by droplets of rain, or settling naturally; the precise mechanisms still await demonstration or observation. This accounts for the mid-Atlantic Queen Mary tragedy (September 17, 1946), as well as the subsequent outbreaks in England and on the Continent. (Note: Rumors persist of a large-scale outbreak in the U.S.S.R., but Premier Khrushchev’s regime continues to maintain a silence as absolute as its predecessors on the matter).
Wind and ocean currents provided short-term dispersal ofAppendix 401
the virus over a substantial area of the eastern United States (map 1). More alarming by far have been subsequent irruptions of the virus, in spite of the fact that it does not appear to be infectious, widely distributed across both time and geographic distance. In 1946 alone there were over a score of outbreaks reported, and almost a hundred isolated eases, extending clear across the United States and southern Canada (map 2).
The location of the majority of major international outbreaks provides a clue as to a possible pattern: Rio de Janeiro (1947), Mombasa (1948), Port Said (1948), Hong Kong (1949), Auckland (1950), to name a few of the most notorious—all major seaports. The problem was how to account for appearances of the virus, generally in isolated incidents, in locations as far from the sea as the Peruvian Andes and the remote uplands of Nepal.
As our investigation reveals, the answer clearly lies in the durability of the protein coat. The virus can be carried by any means, human, mechanical, animal, or natural, and survives indefinitely unless exposed to destructive agents such as fire or corrosive chemicals. The majority of North American outbreaks, and the relatively large occurrences in seaports have been persuasively traced (McCarthy, Report to the Surgeon General, 1951) to items awaiting shipment in the docks and warehouses of the affected district of Manhattan. Others have been attributed to the precipitation of viral particles onto vessels and vehicles in transit. Individuals, even birds and animals (who are never affected), can carry the particles on their person without knowing it. The Nepalese outbreak referred to above, for example, was traced to a naik of the Gurung clan, whose regiment, the King’s Gurkha Rifles, was involved in attempting to contain the ghastly communal violence of August 10-13 in Calcutta, India, in which the Hindu and Muslim communities blamed one another for an outbreak of the virus, with a resulting loss of life estimated at twenty-five thousand; the Gurkha corporal himself never developed the disease.
... how many deposits of dormant virus remain, dusted across rooftops, gathered in sediment in rivers and sewers, lying in deposits in the soil, still borne aloft on the jet stream, cannot be determined. How serious a threat it still poses to the public health is still equally inascertainable. In this context the
inability of the virus to affect the vast majority of the populace should be borne in mind ....
—Goldberg and Hoyne, “The Wild Card Virus: Persistence and Dispersal,” Problems in Modern Biochemistry, Schinner, Paek, and Ozawa, eds.
The ability of the wild card virus to alter its host’s genetic programming resembles that of terrestrial herpesviruses. It is however much more comprehensive, altering DNA throughout the host’s body, rather than affecting and being expressed in a certain location—e.g., the lips or genitalia—as are the herpes family.
We know now that xenovirus Takis-A affects a larger percentage of an exposed population than originally assumed—perhaps as much as one-half of one percent. In many cases the virus merely appends its own code to the host DNA; this is the dormant form, in which the virus has no objective existence, but exists only in the form of information—another trait it shares with the herpesform viruses. It may remain passive and undetected indefinitely, or some trauma or stress to the host may cause it to express itself, generally with shattering results. Amounting as it does to “reprogramming” of the host’s genetic code, the virus (in either active or passive form) is truly inheritable, like blue eyes or curly hair.
Apparently anticipating its predominantly lethal effects, the Takisian scientists who created the virus designed it to perpetuate itself as, in effect, a recessive “wild card gene.” Recessive, because a dominant gene that produced lethal mutations in ninety percent of offspring and rendered another nine percent either unable or unlikely to reproduce would survive only a few generations, even if, as is estimated, thirty percent of all those with xenovirus-modified DNA carry the dormant form.
The wild card therefore follows the conventional rules of inheritance for recessive traits. Only in cases where both parents carry the viral code does any possibility of producing an affected offspring exist; even then the chance is only one in four, versus a fifty percent chance of producing a carrier with
no chance of expressing the virus, and another one-in-four chance of an offspring who does not carry the code ...
—Marcus A. Meadows, Genetics, January 1974, pp. 231-244
Despite the Red-baiting paranoia of the late 1940s and early 1950s and the “findings” of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, aces fared no better behind the Iron Curtain than in this country, and in fact considerably worse. The party line was laid down by Trofim D. Lysenko, semiliterate maven of Stalinist science, that the supposedly alien “wild card” was merely a mask for diabolica! bourgeois capitalist-imperialist experimentation. In Korea, captured Americans were made to sign confessions of germ warfare in an apparent attempt to account for the outbreak of the virus that swept that nation, North and South, in 1951. Meanwhile, anyone showing signs of metahuman talents within the Soviet sphere simply disappeared, some to forced-labor camps, others to labs—and no few to shallow graves.
With Stalin’s death in 1953 came a minor relaxation. Khrushchev acknowledged the existence of aces, and they began to “enjoy” the status they had in the U.S.—i.e., they had the privilege of serving in the military or GPU (later KGB), or vanishing into the Gulag Archipelago. As the 1960s passed, strictures against them relaxed, if not to the extent that they did in the United States, and state-sponsored superheroes were permitted to become media personalities, like cosmonauts and Olympic stars.
Why the initial rejection of blatant reality? The Brezhnev/ Kosygin regime admitted in 1971 that Lysenko was a joker, in whom the virus was expressed as hideous disfigurement; the existence of aces was a persona! affront to the former farmer. As to why Stalin went along with the anti-ace campaign, the rampant paranoia of the dictator’s later years in particular is generally considered sufficient explanation. However, several highly placed defectors of the late 1960s and early 1970s repeated the rumor that Comrade Nikita sometimes, late at night in his cups with boon companions, boasted that he himself had slain the former dictator with his own hand in the cellar of the Lubyanka Prison—driving a stake through his heart ....
—J. Neil Wilson, “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” Reason, March 1977
Xenovirus Takis-A, colloquially called wild card, was an experimental organic device developed by the Ilkazam, a leading family among the Psi Lords of Takis. Written into its DNA is a program that reads the genetic code of the host organism and modifies that code in order to enhance the host’s innate propensities and characteristics. Such an optimization gratifies as never before the great Takisian drive to cultivate personal (and by extension familial) virtu. Takisians already possess potent mental powers; by means of wild card the Ilkazam sought to bring forth a multiplicity of wild talents in its members, ensuring its preeminence for many years to come.
The challenge the Ilkazam researchers faced was to produce a program that would identify and enhance desirable characteristics; no one wants to be a better hemophiliac. Biochemical individuality among Takisians, however, is even more marked than in humans, who are one of the most biochemically diverse species on Terra. To develop software capable of discerning favorable characteristics—an “intelligent” program—and enhancing them, and which could be implemented in the viral DNA, required experimentation on an extravagant scale. Given the nature of Takisian society there were always plenty of subjects available for even the most drastic experimentation, Takisians as a whole not having many hangups about insisting the subjects volunteer. However, even Takis lacked a sufficiently large supply of criminals and vanquished political enemies—not a distinction commonly drawn in that culture—to provide the sort of experimental base needed to fully develop such a complex tool. Fortunately, from the Takisian point of view, a pool of creatures of astonishingly similar genetic makeup presented itself ... earth.
... Most wild card enhancements aren’t favorable to survival, or are survival traits taken to lethal lengths, such as keying the adrenaline fight-or-flight system so high that the slightest stress forces the victim into overdrive, burning him out in a single burst of terminal speed-trip frenzy. Nine out of ten survivors had undesirable characteristics enhanced, or desirable ones enhanced in undesirable ways. The “joker” takes forms ranging from the hideous through the painful to the pathetic or merely inconvenient. A victim might be reduced to a formless blob of mucus like the familiar Joker-town resident Snotman, or might be transformed into a partia! animal likeness like tavern-keeper Ernie the Lizard. He might acquire a power that in other circumstances would make him an ace, such as the limited but uncontrollable levitation of the Floater. The manifestation may be quite minor, like the mass of tentacles that form the right hand of Joker’s Wilde, Jokertown’s decadent poet laureate.
In certain cases the distinction between classifications is blurred, as in the aforementioned Ernie, whose slightly greater-than-human strength and the protection offered by his scaly hide are insufficient to make him a true ace. Another, more horrific example is the tragic Burning Woman incident of the late 1970s, in which the virus affected a young woman by causing her body to burn with an inextinguishable flame, but to regenerate itself even as her flesh was consumed. The victim begged passersby to kil! her, and finally died in Jokertown’s Blythe van Renssaeler Memoria! Clinic, apparently as a result of euthanasia—a resulting indictment against Dr. Tachyon was quashed. Whether her card qualified as joker or black queen cannot be determined.
Because it is designed to interact with its host’s individual code, no two expressions of wild card are alike. Moreover, its behavior differs from subject to subject ....
... That as many as ten percent of those who contracted the virus survived its effects is a tribute to the skill of Takisian genetic software and hardware artistes. For a first large-scale test, among a subject population different from that for which it was originally designed, the release of the virus on Terra was a tremendous success which would greatly have pleased its creators, had they learned of its outcome.
Earth, on the other hand, had a different point of view.
—Sara Morgenstern, “Blues for Jokertown: Forty Years of Wild Cards,” Rolling Stone, September 16, 1986
Excerpts from the Minutes of the American Metabiological Society Conference on Metahuman Abilities
(Clarion Hotel, Albuquerque, New Mexico, March 14-17, 1987)
Talk presented March 16, 1987, by Dr. Sharon Pao K’ang-sh’i of the Harvard University Department of Metabiophysics.
Gentlepersons of the Society I thank you. I shall come directly to the point. Research by our team at Harvard indicates that metahuman abilities, the colloquially called “superpowers” engendered by the Takisian wild card virus, are exclusively of psychic origin, and in all but rare cases are exercised through the instrumentality of psi.
(Session called to order by Chairperson Ozawa.)
I understand that my preceding statement might be considered a rhetorical excess of the kind perpetrated by certain of my predecessors, which caused the still-fledgling field of metabiophysics to be considered a pseudoscience of the caliber of numerology and astrology by a number of serious scientists. Yet honesty, and the press of empirical evidence, compel me to reiterate: metahuman abilities are specialized forms of psychic power.
We now have a better idea of just what wild card did to its victims. In so-called ace cases the virus appears to have acted first by enhancing innate psychic ability, which gave direction to the overall progress of the gene-code rewrite. This explains the high degrees of correspondence between the personalities and proclivities of known aces and their metahuman abilities—why, for example, devoted pilots such as Black Eagle acquired powers including that of flight, why the obsessed “avenger of the night” Black Shadow has such control over darkness, why the reclusive Aquarius presents a half-human, half-delfin
appearance and can in fact transform himself into a sort of super-Tursiops . A microscale telekinesis appears to be one of the mechanisms by which wild card effects its changes, enabling the subject subconsciously to choose, or at least influence, the nature of the transformation she or he undergoes.
I understand the enormity of the implication that people might, in some sense, have “chosen” to draw a joker or black queen. Speculation in that direction is, however, beyond the scope of our present researches.
One of the great puzzles of the post-wild card epoch has been precisely how the alien virus, however advanced the technology that produced it, was able to give certain individuals the ability to violate well-established natural laws, such as conservation of mass and energy, the square-cube law, the inviolability of the speed of light itself. At the time the virus was unleashed, science was inalterably hostile to the existence even of psychic powers—justifiably, given the lack of compelling experimenta! corroboration for such phenomena. It has now been compelled to accept people being able to project fire and lightning, to transform themselves into animals, to fly, or to contrive mechanical appliances that enabled them to do these and similar things in flagrant disregard for principles of mechanics and engineering.
Of course, even by 1946 clues were available in the theoretical reaches of quantum physics. In fact, then-modern technology, up to and including nuclear weapons and the fusion devices in the process of development, was largely based upon quantum mechanics, much of the work being done on the basis of “we know it works, but we don’t know how.” Given the impetus of the reality of wild card, psi powers were quickly given a quantum mechanical rationale; “action over distance” without apparent recourse to the strong, electroweak, or gravitic forces being a feature, for example, of the curious interconnectedness of particles that have interacted, postulated by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen in their famous “paradox,” and established with some finality by the Aspect experiment in France in 1982....
... A fairly obvious instance of TK-based power is shape changing. The subject—in almost all cases subconsciously—rearranges her or his component atoms to produce a gross structure that differs considerably from the original: for example, Elephant Girl’s rather unsettling transformation into
a flying Elephas maximus in apparent violation of the mass-energy conservation principle. At least in the case of Elephant Girl, this is explained by subconscious TK on the subatomic level; Ms. O’Reilly can apparently summon into being a cloud of virtual particles and maintain them in existence immensely longer than they would normally exist. (A discussion of virtual particles is, of course, likewise beyond the scope of this presentation. I refer the interested to articles concerning, for example, the particles that “carry” the strong interaction, and that for an infinitesimal instant violate the conservation principle.) As part of restoring herself to her original appearance, Ms. O’Reilly permits the virtual particles that made up the “phantom” mass to lapse into nonexistence.
It was Elephant Girl’s ability to fly in defiance of all known aeronautical principles that sparked the line of inquiry leading to the conclusions expressed in this paper. Simply put, Elephant Girl’s, Peregrine’s, and all known aces’ flight or levitation is simply a variation on TK. In this sense, the Great and Powerful Turtle is the archetypal flying ace, in that he acknowledgedly flies by means of his telekinetic ability. But no trick of physics would permit Elephant Girl’s ears or even Peregrine’s magnificent wings to uphold even a small human in flight, to say nothing of a full-grown Asiatic elephant. They, like the Turtle, fly through use of mind power alone ....
.. Energy projections provide another thorny problem simply explained by—again—TK. Jumpin’ Jack Flash appears to project blasts of flame from the palms of his hands, and moreover can manipulate the fire he produces in remarkable ways. But this individual does not actually project the flame, in the sense that it is not emitted from his own body; in point of fact, it isn’t strictly speaking flame. His TK enables him to regulate the Brownian motion of the circumambient air. He creates a “hot spot” of highly excited particles approximately one micron from the flesh of his palm, and then uses TK to direct the resultant stream of incandescent gas.
... Superluminal-flight powers present a special case. In most cases (and it’s beneficial to keep in mind that each wild card transformation is unique) the individual with the capacity for light-speed or faster-than-light travel has the ability to emulate a single photon, or tachyon in the latter instance, becoming a “macrophoton” or “rnacrotachyon” in a manner similar to the “macroatom” devices University of Sussex researchers under Terry Clark, which can emulate the behavior of a single boson. The spaceships that conveyed the wild card virus to this planet, as well as the humanoid alien known as Dr. Tachyon, employed the samq principle for their superlumina! drive—which led to the coining of the word by which the only earth resident not born on this planet is known to this day.
Faster-than-light travel has proven of only limited utility to aces to date, owing to limits of duration and the problems of navigation over long distances, so far insuperable to our technology. Or so we infer from the fact that no ace has ever journeyed beyond the limits of the solar system (present orbit of Neptune) and returned ....
... A salient feature of the so-called “gadgets”—antigravity belts, dimensional portals, armored suits—is the fact that none of them can be replicated. On disassembly and examination they’re often found to make no mechanica! or electrical sense. Each is a nonreproducible result. This explains why some enterprising gadget-master hasn’t marketed, say, a personal light-speed flying belt, or an antigravity forklift. Only the creator could make one that would work. In some cases, the components consist of ludicrous assemblages of debris, up to and including apple cores, hairpins, and the torsos of Barbie dolls. Others consist ()ply of a diagram of a circuit, which, like the chimerical Hieronymus machine, work as an actua! circuit “should.”
The explanation is, once again, a manifestation of psychic ability. The creator has in effect impressed himself upon his work in a metaphysical (in the current scientific meaning) sense. This explanation makes sense of the frequently observed phenomenon that there seems to be a limit to certain “gadget-masters—creativity, that they will sometimes have to disassemble an old device to get a new one to work. This explanation also makes it simple to predict that attempts by governments all over the world to replicate the astounding Modular Man android are doomed to failure, unless one or more contract the services of “wild talents” of their own ....
... A feature of almost all aces is a higher-energy metabolism than “normal” humans possess. Some seem able to summon up the energy to fue! their abilities from within themselves, or (for want of a better way of putting it) from the Cosmos. Others either need externa! sources of energy to power their talents, or find themselves aided by the availability of such sources. The black strongman known as the Harlem Hammer, for example, finds it necessary to consume a substantial amount of heavy-metal salts in his diet to maintain the high-level reactions of his metabolism, as well as a number of “bone-seekers” such as strontium-90 and barium-140, which seem to be replacing the calcium in his bones, giving them greater-than-normal durability and strength. Jumpin’ Jack Flash draws strength and sustenance from exposure to fire and heat. Others derive their extrahuman energy from “batteries,” which generally prove to be of the same genus as the Hieronymus-type devices. Whatever the source of this energy, no ace has yet been discovered who could not exhaust her or his supply, in a reasonably short time, by intensive exertion of metahuman abilities. Some can “recharge” simply by resting for a time, others actually require an external power supply. Again, each case is unique ....
Further confirmation of the “psychic” hypothesis comes from the case of the so-called Sleeper, who possesses a different set of meta-abilities every time he awakens from sleep. Any other model for the function of ace powers would have difficulty accounting for this phenomenon ....
My colleagues and I are willing, in sum, to go so far as to say that psi can account for all observed ace abilities—and that no other explanation can ....
My name is Xavier Desmond, and I am a joker.
Jokers are always strangers, even on the street where they were born, and this one is about to visit a number of strange lands. In the next five months I will see veldts and mountains, Rio and Cairo, the Khvber Pass and the Straits of Gibraltar, the Outback and the Champs-Elysees—all very far from home for a man who has often been called the mayor of Jokertown. Jokertown, of course, has no mayor. It is a neighborhood, a ghetto neighborhood at that, and not a city. Jokertown is more than a place though. It is a condition, a state of mind. Perhaps in that sense my title is not undeserved.
I have been a joker since the beginning. Forty years ago, when Jetboy died in the skies over Manhattan and loosed the wild card upon the world, I was twenty-nine years of age, an investment banker with a lovely wife, a two-year-old daughter, and a bright future ahead of me. A month later, when I was finally released from the hospital, I was a monstrosity with a pink elephantine trunk growing from the center of my face where my nose had been. There are seven perfectly functional fingers at the end of my trunk, and over the years I have become quite adept with this “third hand.” Were I suddenly restored to so-called normal humanity, I believe it would be as traumatic as if one of my limbs were amputated. With my trunk I am ironically somewhat more than human ... and infinitely less.
My lovely wife left me within two weeks of my release from the hospital, at approximately the same time that Chase Manhattan informed me that my services would no longer be required. I moved to Jokertown nine months later, following my eviction from my Riverside Drive apartment for “health reasons.” I last saw my daughter in 1948. She was married in June of 1964, divorced in 1969, remarried in June of 1972.
She has a fondness for June weddings, it seems. I was invited to neither of them. The private detective I hired informs me that she and her husband now live in Salem, Oregon, and that I have two grandchildren, a boy and a girl, one from each marriage. I sincerely doubt that either knows that their grandfather is the mayor of Jokertown.
I am the founder and president emeritus of the jokers’ Anti-Defamation League, or JADL, the oldest and largest organization dedicated to the preservation of civil rights for the victims of the wild card virus. The JADL has had its failures, but overall it has accomplished great good. I am also a moderately successful businessman. I own one of New York’s most storied and elegant nightclubs, the Funhouse, where jokers and nats and aces have enjoyed all the top joker cabaret acts for more than two decades. The Funhouse has been losing money steadily for the last five years, but no one knows that except me and my accountant. I keep it open because it is, after all, the Funhouse, and were it to close, Jokertown would seem a poorer place.
Next month I will be seventy years of age.
My doctor tells me that I will not live to be seventy-one. The cancer had already metastasized before it was diagnosed. Even jokers cling stubbornly to life, and I have been doing the chemotherapy and the radiation treatments for half a year now, but the cancer shows no sign of remission.
My doctor tells me the trip I am about to embark on will probably take months off my life. I have my prescriptions and will dutifully continue to take the pills, but when one is globe-hopping, radiation therapy must be forgone. I have accepted this.
Mary and I often talked of a trip around the world, in those days before the wild card when we were young and in love. I could never have dreamt that I would finally take that trip without her, in the twilight of my life, and at government expense, as a delegate on a fact-finding mission organized and funded by the Senate Committee on Ace Resources and Endeavors, under the official sponsorship of the United Nations and the World Health Organization. We will visit every continent but Antarctica and call upon thirty-nine different countries (some only for a few hours), and our official charge is to investigate the treatment of wild card victims in cultures around the world.
There are twenty-one delegates, only five of whom are jokers. I suppose my selection is a great honor, recognition of my achievements and my status as a community leader. I believe I have my good friend Dr. Tachyon to thank for it.
But then, I have my good friend Dr. Tachyon to thank for a great many things.
The journey is off to an inauspicious start. For the last hour we have been holding on the runway at Tomlin International, waiting for clearance for takeoff. The problem, we are informed, is not here, but down in Havana. So we wait.
Our plane is a custom 747 that the press has dubbed the Stacked Deck. The entire central cabin has been converted to our requirements, the seats replaced with a small medical laboratory, a press room for the print journalists, and a miniature television ‘studio for their electronic counterparts. The newsmen themselves have been segregated in the tail. Already they’ve made it their own. I was back there twenty minutes ago and found a poker game in progress. The businessclass cabin is full of aides, assistants, secretaries, publicists, and security personnel. First class is supposedly reserved exclusively for the delegates.
As there are only twenty-one delegates, we rattle around like peas in a pod. Even here the ghettoes persist jokers tend to sit with jokers, nats with nats, aces with aces.
Hartmann is the only man aboard who seems entirely comfortable with all three groups. He greeted me warmly at the press conference and sat with Howard and myself for a few moments after boarding, talking earnestly about his hopes for the trip. It is difficult not to like the senator. Jokertown has delivered him huge majorities in each of his campaigns as far back as his term as mayor, and no wonderno other politician has worked so long and hard to defend jokers’ rights. Hartmann gives me hope; he’s living proof that there can indeed be trust and mutual respect between joker and nat. He’s a decent, honorable man, and in these days when fanatics such as Leo Barnett are inflaming the old hatreds and prejudices, jokers need all the friends they can get in the halls of power.
Dr. Tachyon and Senator Hartmann co-chair the delegation. Tachyon arrived dressed like a foreign correspondent from some film noir classic, in a trench coat covered with belts, buttons, and epaulettes, a snap-brim fedora rakishly tilted to one side. The fedora sports a foot-long red feather, however, and I cannot begin to imagine where one goes to purchase a powder-blue crushed-velvet trench coat. A pity that those foreign-correspondent films were all in black and white.
Tachyon would like to think that he shares Hartmann’s lack of prejudice toward jokers, but that’s not strictly true. He labors unceasingly in his clinic, and one cannot doubt that he cares, and cares deeply ... many jokers think of him as a saint, a hero ... yet, when one has known the doctor as long as I have, deeper truths become apparent. On some unspoken level he thinks of his good works in Jokertown as a penance. He does his best to hide it, but even after all these years you can see the revulsion in his eyes. Dr. Tachyon and I are “friends,” we have known each other for decades now, and I believe with all my heart that he sincerely cares for me ... but not for a second have I ever felt that he considers me an equal, as Hartmann does. The senator treats me like a man, even an important man, courting me as he might any political leader with votes to deliver. To Dr. Tachyon, I will always be a joker.
Is that his tragedy, or mine?
Tachyon knows nothing of the cancer. A symptom that our friendship is as diseased as my body? Perhaps. He has not been my personal physician for many years now. My doctor is a joker, as are my accountant, my attorney, my broker, and even my banker-the world has changed since the Chase dismissed me, and as mayor of Jokertown I am obliged to practice my own personal brand of affirmative action.
We have just been cleared for takeoff. The seat-hopping is over, people are belting themselves in. It seems I carry Jokertown with me wherever I go-Howard Mueller sits closest to me, his seat customized to accommodate his nine-foot tall form and the immense length of his arms. He’s better known as Troll, and he works as chief of security at Tachyon’s clinic, but I note that he does not sit with Tachyon among the aces. The other three joker delegates-Father Squid, Chrysalis, and the poet Dorian Wilde-are also here in the center section of first class. Is it coincidence, prejudice, or shame that puts us here, in the seats furthest from the windows? Being a joker makes one a tad paranoid about these things, I fear. The politicians, of both the domestic and UN varieties, have clustered to our right, the aces forward of us (aces up front, of course, of course) and to our left. Must stop now, the stewardess has asked me to put my tray table back up.
Airborne. New York and Robert Tomlin International Airport are far behind us, and Cuba waits ahead. From what I’ve heard, it will be an easy and pleasant first stop. Havana is almost as American as Las Vegas or Miami Beach, albeit considerably more decadent and wicked. I may actually have friends there some of the top joker entertainers go on to the Havana casinos after getting their starts in the Funhouse and the Chaos Club. I must remind myself to stay away from the gaming tables, however; joker luck is notoriously bad.
As soon as the seat belt sign went off, a number of the aces ascended to the first-class lounge. I can hear their laughter drifting down the spiral stairway-Peregrine, pretty young Mistral-who looks just like the college student she is when not in her flying gear-boisterous Hiram Worchester, and Asta Lenser, the ballerina from the ABT whose ace name is Fantasy. Already they are a tight little clique, a “fun bunch” for whom nothing could possibly go wrong. The golden people, and Tachyon very much in their midst. Is it the aces or the women that draw him? I wonder? Even my dear friend Angela, who still loves the man deeply after twenty-odd years, admits that Dr. Tachyon thinks mainly with his penis where women are concerned.
Yet even among the aces there are the odd men out. Jones, the black strongman from Harlem (like Troll and Hiram W and Peregrine, he requires a custom seat, in his case to support his extraordinary weight), is nursing a beer and reading a copy of Sports Illustrated. Radha O’Reilly is just as solitary, gazing out the window. She seems very quiet. Billy Ray and Joanne Jefferson, the two justice Department aces who head up our security contingent, are not delegates and thus are seated back in the second section.
And then there is Jack Braun. The tensions that swirl around him are almost palpable. Most of the other delegates are polite to him, but no one is truly friendly, and he’s being openly shunned by some, such as Hiram Worchester. For Dr.
Tachyon, clearly Braun does not even exist. I wonder whose idea it was to bring him on this trip? Certainly not Tachyon’s, and it seems too politically dangerous for Hartmann to be responsible. A gesture to appease the conservatives on SCARE perhaps? Or are there ramifications that I have not considered?
Braun glances up at the stairway from time to time, as if he would love nothing so much as to join the happy group upstairs, but remains firmly in his seat. It is hard to credit that this smooth-faced, blond-haired boy in the tailored safari jacket is really the notorious Judas Ace of the fifties. He’s my age or close to it, but he looks barely twenty ... the kind of boy who might have taken pretty young Mistral to her senior prom a few years back and gotten her home well before midnight.
One of the reporters, a man named Downs from Aces magazine, was up here earlier, trying to get Braun to consent to an interview. He was persistent, but Braun’s refusal was firm, and Downs finally gave up. Instead he handed out copies of the latest issue of Aces and then sauntered up to the lounge, no doubt to pester someone else. I am not a regular reader of Aces, but I accepted a copy and suggested to Downs that his publisher consider a companion periodical, to be called jokers. He was not overly enthused about the idea.
The issue features a rather striking cover photograph of the Turtle’s shell outlined against the oranges and reds of sunset, blurbed with “The Turtle Dead or Alive?” The Turtle has not been seen since Wild Card Day, back in September, when he was napalmed and crashed into the Hudson. Twisted and burnt pieces of his shell were found on the riverbed, though no body has ever been recovered. Several hundred people claim to have seen the Turtle near dawn the following day, flying an older shell in the sky over Jokertown, but since he has not reappeared since, some are putting that sighting down to hysteria and wishful thinking.
I have no opinion on the Turtle, though I would hate to think that he was truly dead. Many jokers believe that he is one of us, that his shell conceals some unspeakable joker deformity. Whether that is true or not, he has been a good friend to Jokertown for a long, long time.
There is, however, an aspect to this trip that no one ever speaks of, although Downs’s article brings it to mind. Perhaps it falls to me to mention the unmentionable then. The truth is, all that laughter up in the lounge has a slightly nervous ring to it, and it is no coincidence that this junket, under discussion for so many years, was put together so swiftly in the past two months. They want to get us out of town for a while-not just the jokers, the aces too. The aces especially, one might even say.
This last Wild Card Day was a catastrophe for the city, and for every victim of the virus everywhere. The level of violence was shocking and made headlines across the nation. The still-unsolved murder of the Howler, the dismemberment of a child ace in the midst of a huge crowd at Jetboy’s Tomb, the attack on Aces High, the destruction of the Turtle (or at least his shell), the wholesale slaughter at the Cloisters, where a dozen bodies were brought out in pieces, the predawn aerial battle that lit up the entire East Side ... days and even weeks later the authorities were still not certain that they had an accurate death toll.
One old man was found literally embedded in a solid brick wall, and when they began to chip him out, they found they could not tell where his flesh ended and the wall began. The autopsy revealed a ghastly mess inside, where his internal organs were fused with the bricks that penetrated them. A Post photographer snapped a picture of that old man trapped in his wall. He looks so gentle and sweet. The police subsequently announced that the old man was an ace himself, and moreover a notorious criminal, ‘that he was responsible for the murders of Kid Dinosaur and the Howler, the attempted murder of the Turtle, the attack on Aces High, the battle over the East River, the ghastly blood rites performed at the Cloisters, and a whole range of lesser crimes. A number of aces came forward to support this explanation, but the public does not seem convinced. According to the polls, more people believe the conspiracy theory put forward in the National Informer-that the killings were independent, caused by powerful aces known and unknown carrying out personal vendettas, using their powers in utter disregard for law and public safety, and that afterward those aces conspired with each other and the police to cover up their atrocities, blaming everything on one crippled old man who happened to be conveniently dead, clearly at the hands of some ace.
Already several books have been announced, each purporting to explain what really happened-the immoral opportunism of the publishing industry knows no bounds. Koch, ever aware of the prevailing winds, has ordered several cases re-opened and has instructed the IAD to investigate the police role.
Jokers are pitiful and loathed. Aces have great power, and for the first time in many years a sizable segment of the public has begun to distrust those aces and fear that power. No wonder that demagogues like Leo Barnett have swelled so vastly in the public mind of late.
So I’m convinced that our tour has a hidden agenda; to wash away the blood with some “good ink,” as they say, to defuse the fear, to win back trust and take everyone’s mind off Wild Card Day.
I admit to mixed feelings about aces, some of whom definitely do abuse their power. Nonetheless, as a joker, I find myself desperately hoping that we succeed ... and desperately fearing the consequences if we do not.
Another state dinner this evening, but I’ve begged off with a plea of illness. A few hours to relax in my hotel room and write in the journal are most welcome. And my regrets were anything but fabricated-the tight schedule and pressures of the trip have begun to take their toll, I fear. I have not been keeping down all of my meals, although I’ve done my utmost to see that my distress remains unnoticed. If Tachyon suspected, he would insist on an examination, and once the truth was discovered, I might be sent home.
I will not permit that. I wanted to see all the fabled, far-off lands that Mary and I had once dreamed of together, but already it is clear that what we are engaged in here is far more important than any pleasure trip. Cuba was no Miami Beach, not for anyone who cared to look outside Havana; there are more jokers dying in the cane fields than cavorting on cabaret stages. And Haiti and the Dominican Republic were infinitely worse, as I’ve already noted in these pages.
A joker presence, a strong joker voice-we desperately need these things if we are to accomplish any good at all. I will not allow myself to be disqualified on medical grounds.
Already our numbers are down by one-Dorian Wilde returned to New York rather than continue on to Mexico. I confess to mixed feelings about that. When we began, I had little respect for the ‘poet laureate of Jokertown,’ whose title is as dubious as my own mayoralty, though his Pulitzer is not. He seems to get a perverse glee from waving those wet, slimy tendrils of his in people’s faces, flaunting his deformity in a deliberate attempt to draw a reaction. I suspect this aggressive nonchalance is in fact motivated by the same selfloathing that makes so many jokers take to masks, and a few sad cases actually attempt to amputate the deformed parts of their bodies. Also, he dresses almost as badly as Tachyon with his ridiculous Edwardian affectation, and his unstated preference for perfume over baths makes his company a trial to anyone with a sense of smell. Mine, alas, is quite acute.
Were it not for the legitimacy conferred on him by the Pulitzer, I doubt that he would ever have been named for this tour, but there are very few jokers who have achieved that kind of worldly recognition. I find precious little to admire in his poetry either, and much that is repugnant in his endless mincing recitations.
All that being said, I confess to a certain admiration for his impromptu performance before the Duvaliers. I suspect he received a severe dressing down from the politicians.
Hartmann had a long private conversation with “The Divine Wilde” as we were leaving Haiti, and after that Dorian seemed much subdued.
While I don’t agree with much that Wilde has to say, I do nonetheless think he ought to have the right to say it. He will be missed. I wish I knew why he was leaving. I asked him that very question and tried to convince him to go on for the benefit of all his fellow jokers. His reply was an offensive suggestion about the sexual uses of my trunk, couched in the form of a vile little poem. A curious man.
With Wilde gone, Father Squid and myself are the only true representatives of the joker point of view, I feel. Howard M. (Troll, to the world) is an imposing presence, nine feet tall, incredibly strong, his green-tinged skin as tough and hard as horn, and I also know him to be a profoundly decent and competent man, and a very intelligent one, but ... he is by nature a follower, not a leader, and there is a shyness in him, a reticence, that prevents him from speaking out. His height makes it impossible for him to blend with the crowd, but sometimes I think that is what he desires most profoundly.
As for Chrysalis, she is none of those things, and she has her own unique charisma. I cannot deny that she is a respected community leader, one of the most visible (no pun intended) and powerful of jokers. Yet I have never much liked Chrysalis. Perhaps this is my own prejudice and self-interest. The rise of the Crystal Palace has had much to do with the decline of the Funhouse. But there are deeper issues. Chrysalis wields considerable power in Jokertown, but she has never used it to benefit anyone but herself. She has been aggressively apolitical, carefully distancing herself from the JADL and all joker rights agitation. When the times called for passion and commitment, she remained cool and uninvolved, hidden behind her cigarette holders, liqueurs, and upperclass British accent.
Chrysalis speaks only for Chrysalis, and Troll seldom speaks at all, which leaves it to Father Squid and myself to speak for the jokers. I would do it gladly, but I am so tired ....
I fell asleep early and was wakened by the sounds of my fellow delegates returning from the dinner. It went rather well, I understand. Excellent. We need some triumphs. Howard tells me that Hartmann gave a splendid speech and seemed to captivate President de la Madrid Hurtado throughout the meal. Peregrine captivated all the other males in the room, according to reports. I wonder if the other women are envious. Mistral is quite pretty, Fantasy is mesmerizing when she dances, and Radha O’Reilly is arresting, her mixed Irish and Indian heritage giving her features a truly exotic cast. But Peregrine overshadows all of them. What do they make of her?
The male aces certainly approve. The Stacked Deck is close quarters, and gossip travels quickly up and down the aisles. Word is that Dr. Tachyon and Jack Braun have both made passes and have been firmly rebuffed. If anything, Peregrine seems closest with her cameraman, a nat who travels back with the rest of the reporters. She’s making a documentary of this trip.
Hiram is also close to Peregrine, but while there’s a certain flirtatiousness to their constant banter, their friendship is more platonic in nature. Worchester has only one true love, and that’s food. To that, his commitment is extraordinary. He seems to know all the best restaurants in every city we visit. His privacy is constantly being invaded by local chefs, who sneak up to his hotel room at all hours, carrying their specialties and begging for just a moment, just a taste, just a little approval. Far from objecting, Hiram delights in it.
In Haiti he found a cook he liked so much that he hired him on the spot and prevailed upon Hartmann to make a few calls to the INS and expedite the visa and work permit. We saw the man briefly at the Port-au-Prince airport, struggling with a huge trunk full of cast-iron cookware. Hiram made the trunk light enough for his new employee (who speaks no English, but Hiram insists that spices are a universal language) to carry on one shoulder. At tonight’s dinner, Howard tells me, Worchester insisted on visiting the kitchen to get the chef’s recipe for chicken mole, but while he was back there he concocted some sort of flaming dessert in honor of our hosts.
By rights I ought to object to Hiram Worchester, who revels in his acedom more than any other man I know, but I find it hard to dislike anyone who enjoys life so much and brings such enjoyment to those around him. Besides, I am well aware of his various anonymous charities in Jokertown, though he does his best to conceal them. Hiram is no more comfortable around my kind than Tachyon is, but his heart is as large as the rest of him.
Tomorrow the group will fragment yet again. Senators Hartmann and Lyons, Congressman Rabinowitz, and Ericsson from WHO will meet with the, leaders of the PRI, Mexico’s ruling party, while Tachyon and our medical staff visit a clinic that has claimed extraordinary success in treating the virus with laetrile. Our aces are scheduled to lunch with three of their Mexican counterparts. I’m pleased to say that Troll has been invited to join them. In some quarters, at least, his superhuman strength and near invulnerability have qualified him as an ace. A small breakthrough, of course, but a breakthrough nonetheless.
The rest of us will be traveling down to Yucatan and the Quintana Roo to look at Mayan ruins and the sites of several reported antijoker atrocities. Rural Mexico, it seems, is not as enlightened as Mexico City. The others will join us in Chichen Itza the following day, and our last day in Mexico will be given over to tourism.
And then it will be on to Guatemala ... perhaps. The daily press has been full of reports on an insurrection down there, an Indian uprising against the central government, and several of our journalists have gone ahead already, sensing a bigger story than this tour. If the situation seems too unstable, we may be forced to skip that stop.
I have been dilatory about keeping up my journal-no entry yesterday or the day before. I can only plead exhaustion and a certain amount of despondence.
Guatemala took its toll on my spirit, I’m afraid. We are, of course, stringently neutral, but when I saw the televised news reports of the insurrection and heard some of the rhetoric being attributed to the Mayan revolutionaries, I dared to hope. When we actually met with the Indian leaders, I was even briefly elated. They considered my presence in the room an honor, an auspicious omen, seemed to treat me with the same sort of respect (or lack of respect) they gave Hartmann and Tachyon, and the way they treated their own jokers gave me heart.
Well, I am an old man-an old joker in fact-and I tend to clutch at straws. Now the Mayan revolutionaries have proclaimed a new nation, an Amerindian homeland, where their jokers will be welcomed and honored. The rest of us need not apply. Not that I would care much to live in the jungles of Guatemala-even an autonomous joker homeland down here would scarcely cause a ripple in Jokertown, let alone any kind of significant exodus. Still, there are so few places in the world where jokers are welcome, where we can make our homes in peace ... the more we travel on, the more we see, the more I am forced to conclude that Jokertown is the best place for us, our only true home. I cannot express how much that conclusion saddens and terrifies me.
Why must we draw these lines, these fine distinctions, these labels and barriers that set us apart? Ace and nat and joker, capitalist and communist, Catholic and Protestant, Arab and Jew, Indian and Ladino, and on and on everywhere, and of course true humanity is to be found only on our side of the line and we feel free to oppress and rape and kill the “other,” whoever he might be.
There are those on the Stacked Deck who charge that the Guatemalans were engaged in conscious genocide against their own Indian populations, and who see this new nation as a very good thing. But I wonder.
The Mayas think jokers are touched by the gods, specially blessed. No doubt it is better to be honored than reviled for our various handicaps and deformities. No doubt. But ...
We have the Islamic nations still ahead of us ... a third of the world, someone told me. Some Moslems are more tolerant than others, but virtually all of them consider deformity a sign of Allah’s displeasure. The attitudes of the true fanatics such as the Shiites in Iran and the Nur sect in Syria are terrifying, Hiderian. How many jokers were slaughtered when the Ayatollah displaced the Shah? To some Iranians the tolerance he extended to jokers and women was the Shah’s greatest sin.
And are we so very much better in the enlightened USA, where fundamentalists like Leo Barnett preach that jokers are being punished for their sins? Oh, yes, there is a distinction, I must remember that. Barnett says he hates the sins but loves the sinners, and if we will only repent and have faith and love Jesus, surely we will be cured.
No, ?’m afraid that ultimately Barnett and the Ayatollah and the Mayan priests are all preaching the same creedthat our bodies in some sense reflect our souls, that some divine being has taken a direct hand and twisted us into these shapes to signify his pleasure (the Mayas) or displeasure (Nur al-Allah, the Ayatollah, the Firebreather). Most of all, each of them is saying that jokers are different.
My own creed is distressingly simple—I believe that jokers and aces and nats are all just men and women and ought to be treated as such. During my dark nights of the soul I wonder if I am the only one left who still believes this.
Still brooding about Guatemala and the Mayas. A point I failed to make earlier-I could not help noticing that this glorious idealistic revolution of theirs was led by two aces and a nat. Even down here, where jokers are supposedly kissed by the gods, the aces lead and the jokers follow.
A few days ago-it was during our visit to the Panama Canal, I believe Digger Downs asked me if I thought the U.S. would ever have a joker president. I told him I’d settle for a joker congressman (I’m afraid Nathan Rabinowitz, whose district includes Jokertown, heard the comment and took it for some sort of criticism of his representation). Then Digger wanted to know if I thought an ace could be elected president. A more interesting question, I must admit. Downs always looks half asleep, but he is sharper than he appears, though not in a class with some of the other reporters aboard the Stacked Deck, like Herrmann of AP or Morgenstern of the Washington Post.
I told Downs that before this last Wild Card Day it might have been possible ... barely. Certain aces, like the Turtle (still missing, the latest NY papers confirm), Peregrine, Cyclone, and a handful of others are first-rank celebrities, commanding considerable public affection. How much of that could translate to the public arena, and how well it might survive the rough give-and-take of a presidential campaign, that’s a more difficult question. Heroism is a perishable commodity.
Jack Braun was standing close enough to hear Digger’s question and my reply. Before I could conclude-I wanted to say that the whole equation had changed this September, that among the casualties of Wild Card Day was any faint chance that an ace might be a viable presidential candidate Braun interrupted. “They’d tear him apart,” he told us.
What if it was someone they loved? Digger wanted to know. “They loved the Four Aces,” Braun said.
Braun is no longer quite the exile he was at the beginning of the tour. Tachyon still refuses to acknowledge his existence and Hiram is barely polite, but the other aces don’t seem to know or care who he is. In Panama he was often in Fantasy’s company, squiring her here and there, and I’ve heard rumors of a liaison between Golden Boy and Senator Lyons’s press secretary, an attractive young blonde. Undoubtedly, of the male aces, Braun is by far the most attractive in the conventional sense, although Mordecai Jones has a certain brooding presence. Downs has been struck by those two also. The next issue of Aces will feature a piece comparing Golden Boy and the Harlem Hammer, he informs me.
Don’t cry for Jack, Argentina ....
Evita’s bane has comes back to Buenos Aires. When the musical first played Broadway, I wondered what Jack Braun must have thought, listening to Lupone sing of the Four Aces. Now that question has even more poignance. Braun has been very calm, almost stoic, in the face of his reception here, but what must he be feeling inside?
Peron is dead, Evita even deader, even Isabel just a memory, but the Peronistas are still very much a part of the Argentine political scene. They have not forgotten. Everywhere the signs taunt Braun and invite him to go home. He is the ultimate gringo (do they use that word in Argentina, I wonder), the ugly but awesomely powerful American who came to the Argentine uninvited and toppled a sovereign government because he disapproved of its politics. The United States has been doing such things for as long as there has been a Latin America, and I have no doubt that these same resentments fester in many other places. The United States and even the dread “secret aces” of the CIA are abstract concepts, however, faceless and difficult to get a fix onGolden Boy is flesh and blood, very real and very visible, and here.
Someone inside the hotel leaked our room assignments, and when Jack stepped out onto his balcony the first day, he was showered with dung and rotten fruit. He has stayed inside ever since, except for official functions, but even there he is not safe. Last night as we stood in a receiving line at the Casa Rosada, the wife of a union official—a beautiful young woman, her small dark face framed by masses of lustrous black hair-stepped up to him with a sweet smile, looked straight into his eyes, and spit in his face.
It caused quite a stir, and Senators Hartmann and Lyons have filed some sort of protest, I believe. Braun himself was remarkably restrained, almost gallant. Digger was hounding him ruthlessly after the reception; he’s cabling a write-up on the incident back to Aces and wanted a quote. Braun finally gave him something. “I’ve done things I’m not proud of,” he said, “but getting rid of Juan Peron isn’t one of them.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I heard Digger tell him, “but how did you feel when she spit on you?”
Jack just looked disgusted. “ I don’t hit women,” he said. Then he walked off and sat by himself.
Downs turned to me when Braun was gone. “I don’t hit women,” he echoed in a singsong imitation of Golden Boy’s voice, then added, “What a weenie ...”
The world is too ready to read cowardice and betrayal into anything Jack Braun says and does, but the truth, I suspect, is more complex. Given his youthful appearance, it’s hard to recall at times how old the Golden Boy really is-his formative _years were during the Depression and World War II, and he grew up listening to the NBC Blue Network, not MTV No wonder some of his values seem quaintly oldfashioned.
In many ways the Judas Ace seems almost an innocent, a bit lost in a world that has grown too complicated for him. I think he is more troubled than he admits by his reception here in Argentina. Braun is the last representative of a lost dream that flourished briefly in the aftermath of World War II and died in Korea and the HUAC hearings and the Cold War. They thought they could reshape the world, Archibald Holmes and his Four Aces. They had no doubts, no more than their country did. Power existed to be used, and they were supremely confident in their ability to tell the good guys from the bad guys. Their own democratic ideals and the shining purity of their intentions were all the justification they needed. For those few early aces it must have been a golden age, and how appropriate that a golden boy be at its center.
Golden ages give way to dark ages, as any student of history knows, and as all of us are currently finding out.
Braun and his colleagues could do things no one else had ever done-they could fly and lift tanks and absorb a man’s mind and memories, and so they bought the illusion that they could make a real difference on a global scale, and when that illusion dissolved beneath them, they fell a very long way indeed. Since then no other ace has dared to dream as big.
Even in the face of imprisonment, despair, insanity, disgrace, and death, the Four Aces had triumphs to cling to, and Argentina was perhaps the brightest of those triumphs. What a bitter homecoming this must be for Jack Braun.
As if this was not enough, our mail caught up with us just before we left Brazil, and the pouch included a dozen copies of the new issue of Aces with Digger’s promised feature story. The cover has Jack Braun and Mordecai Jones in profile, scowling at each other (All cleverly doctored, of course. I don’t believe the two had ever met before we all got together at Tomlin) over a blurb that reads, “The Strongest Man in the World.”
The article itself is a lengthy discussion of the two men and their public careers, enlivened by numerous anecdotes about their feats of strength and much speculation about which of the two is, indeed, the strongest man in the world.
Both of the principals seem embarrassed by the piece, Braun perhaps more acutely. Neither much wants to discuss it, and they certainly don’t seem likely to settle the matter anytime soon. I understand that there has been considerable argument and even wagering back in the press compartment since Digger’s piece came out (for once, Downs seems to have had an impact on his journalistic colleagues), but the bets are likely to remain unresolved for a long time to come.
I told Downs that the story was spurious and offensive as soon as I read it. He seemed startled. “I don’t get it,” he said to me. “What’s your beef?”
My beef, as I explained to him, was simple. Braun and Jones are scarcely the only people to manifest superhuman strength since the advent of the wild card; in fact, that particular power is a fairly common one, ranking close behind telekinesis and telepathy in Tachyon’s incidence-of-occurrence charts. It has something to do with maximizing the contractile strength of the muscles, I believe. My point is, a number of prominent jokers display augmented strength as well just off the top of my head, I cited Elmo (the dwarf bouncer at the Crystal Palace), Ernie of Ernie’s Bar & Grill, the Oddity, Quasiman ... and, most notably, Howard Mueller. The Troll’s strength does not perhaps equal that of Golden Boy and the Harlem Hammer, but assuredly it approaches it. None of these jokers were so much as mentioned in passing in Digger’s story, although the names of a dozen other superstrong aces were dropped here and there. Why was that? I wanted to know.
I can’t claim to have made much of an impression unfortunately. When I was through, Downs simply rolled his eyes and said, “You people are so damned touchy.” He tried to be accommodating by telling me that if this story went over big, maybe he’d write up a sequel on the strongest joker in the world, and he couldn’t comprehend why that “concession” made me even angrier. And they wonder why we people are touchy ....
Howard thought the whole argument was vastly amusing. Sometimes I wonder about him.
Actually my fit of pique was nothing compared to the reaction the magazine drew from Billy Ray, our security chief. Ray was one of the other aces mentioned in passing, his strength dismissed as not being truly “major league.” Afterward he could be heard the length of the plane, suggesting that maybe Downs would like to step outside with him, seeing as how he was so minor league. Digger declined the offer. From the smile on his face I doubt that Carnifex will be getting any good press in Aces anytime soon.
Since then, Ray has been grousing about the story to anyone who will listen. The crux of his argument is that strength isn’t everything; he may not be as strong as Braun or Jones, but he’s strong enough to take either of them in a fight, and he’d be glad to put his money where his mouth is.
Personally I have gotten a certain perverse satisfaction out of this tempest in a ‘teapot. The irony is, they are arguing about who has the most of what is essentially a minor power.
I seem to recall that there was some sort of demonstration in the early seventies, when the battleship New Jersey was being refitted at the Bayonne Naval Supply Center over in New Jersey. The Turtle lifted the battleship telekinetically, got it out of the water by several feet, and held it there for almost half a minute. Braun and Jones lift tanks and toss automobiles about, but neither could come remotely close to what the Turtle did that day.
The simple truth is, the contractile strength of the human musculature can be increased only so much. Physical limits apply. Dr. Tachyon says there may also be limits to what the human mind can accomplish, but so far they have not been reached.
If the Turtle is indeed a joker, as many believe, I would find this irony especially satisfying.
I suppose I am, at base, as small a man as any.
A hard day in a stricken land. The local Red Cross representatives took some of us out to see some of their famine relief efforts. Of course we’d all been aware of the drought and the starvation long before we got here, but seeing it on television is one thing, and being here amidst it is quite another.
A day like this makes me acutely aware of my own failures and shortcomings. Since the cancer took hold of me, I’ve lost a good deal of weight (some unsuspecting friends have even told me how good I look), but moving among these people made me very self-conscious of the small paunch that remains. They were starving before my eyes, while our plane waited to take us back to Addis Ababa ... to our hotel, another reception, and no doubt a gourmet Ethiopian meal. The guilt was overwhelming, as was the sense of helplessness.
I believe we all felt it. I cannot conceive of how Hiram Worchester must have felt. To his credit he looked sick as he moved among the victims, and at one point he was trembling so badly he had to sit in the shade for a while by himself. The sweat was just pouring off him. But he got up again afterward, his face white and grim, and used his gravity power to help them unload the relief provisions we had brought with us.
So many people have contributed so much and worked so hard for the relief effort, but here it seems like nothing. The only realities in the relief camps are the skeletal bodies with their massive swollen bellies, the dead eyes of the children, and the endless heat pouring down from above onto this baked, parched landscape.
Parts of this day will linger in my memory for a long time—or at least as long a time as I have left to me. Father Squid gave the last rites to a dying woman who had a Coptic cross around her neck. Peregrine and her cameraman recorded much of the scene on film for her documentary, but after a short time she had had enough and returned to the plane to wait for us. I’ve heard that she was so sick she lost her breakfast.
And there was a young mother, no more than seventeen or eighteen surely, so gaunt that you could count every rib, with eyes incredibly ancient. She was holding her baby to a withered, empty breast. The child had been dead long enough to begin to smell, but she would not let them take it from her. Dr. Tacbyon took control of her mind and held her still while he gently pried the child’s body from her grasp and carried it away. He handed it to one of the relief workers and then sat on the ground and began to weep, his body shaking with each sob.
Mistral ended the day in tears as well. En route to the refugee camp, she had changed into her blue-and-white flying costume. The girl is young, an ace, and a powerful one; no doubt she thought she could help. When she called the winds to her, the huge cape she wears fastened at wrist and ankle ballooned out like a parachute and pulled her up into the sky. Even the strangeness of the jokers walking between them had not awakened much interest in the inward-looking eyes of the refugees, but when Mistral took flight, most of them-not, all, but most-turned to watch, and their gaze followed her upward into that high, hot blueness until finally they sank back into the lethargy of despair. I think Mistral had dreamed that somehow her wind powers could push the clouds around and make the rains come to heal this land. And what a beautiful, vainglorious dream it was ....
She flew for almost two hours, sometimes so high and far that she vanished from our sight, but for all her ace powers, all she could raise was a dust devil. When she gave up at last, she was exhausted, her sweet young face grimy with dust and sand, her eyes red and swollen.
Just before we left, an atrocity underscored the depth of the despair here. A tall youth with acne scars on his cheeks attacked a fellow refugee-went berserk, gouged out a woman’s eye, and actually ate it while the people watched without comprehension. Ironically we’d met the boy briefly when we’d first arrived-he’d spent a year in a Christian school and had a few words of English. He seemed stronger and healthier than most of the others we saw. When Mistral flew, he jumped to his feet and called out after her. “Jetboy!” he said in a very clear, strong voice. Father Squid and Senator Hartmann tried to talk to him, but his English-language skills were limited to a few nouns, including “chocolate,”
“television,” and “Jesus Christ.” Still, the boy was more alive than mosthis eyes went wide at Father Squid, and he put out a hand and touched his facial tendrils wonderingly and actually smiled when the senator patted his shoulder and told him that we were here to help, though I don’t think he understood a word. We were all shocked when we saw them carrying him away, still screaming, those gaunt brown cheeks smeared with blood.
A hideous day all around. This evening back in Addis Ababa our driver swung us by the docks, where relief shipment stand two stories high in some places. Hartmann was in a cold rage. If anyone can make this criminal government take action and feed its starving people, he is the one. I pray for him, or would, if I believed in a god ... but what kind of god would permit the obscenities we have seen on this trip ....
Africa is as beautiful a land as any on the face of the earth. I should write of all the beauty we have seen this past month. Victoria Falls, the snows of Kilimanjaro, a thousand zebra moving through the tall grass as if the wind had stripes. I’ve walked among the ruins of proud ancient kingdoms whose very names were unknown to me, held pygmy artifacts in my hand, seen the face of a bushman light up with curiosity instead of horror when he beheld me for the first time. Once during a visit to a game preserve I woke early, and when I looked out of my window at the dawn, I saw that two huge African elephants had come to the very building, and Radha stood between them, naked in the early morning light, while they touched her with their trunks. I turned away then; it seemed somehow a private moment.
Beauty, yes, in the land and in so many of the people, whose faces are full of warmth and compassion.
Still, for all that beauty, Africa has depressed and saddened me considerably, and I will be glad to leave. The camp was only part of it. Before Ethiopia there was Kenya and South Africa. It is the wrong time of year for Thanksgiving, but the scenes we have witnessed these past few weeks have put me more in the mood for giving thanks than I’ve ever felt during America’s smug November celebration of football and gluttony. Even jokers have things to give thanks for. I knew that already, but Africa has brought it home to me forcefully.
South Africa was a grim way to begin this leg of the trip. The same hatreds and prejudices exist at home of course, but whatever our faults we are at least civilized enough to maintain a facade of tolerance, brotherhood, and equality under the law. Once I might have called that mere sophistry, but that was before I tasted the reality of Capetown and Pretoria, where all the ugliness is out in the open, enshrined by law, enforced by an iron fist whose velvet glove has grown thin and worn indeed. It is argued that at least South Africa hates openly, while America hides behind a hypocritical facade. Perhaps, perhaps ... but if so, I will take the hypocrisy and thank you for it.
I suppose that was Africa’s first lesson, that there are worse places in the world than Jokertown. The second was that there are worse things than repression, and Kenya taught us that.
Like most of the other nations of Central and East Africa, Kenya was spared the worst of the wild card. Some spores would have reached these lands through airborne diffusion, more through the seaports, arriving via contaminated cargo in holds that had been poorly sterilized or never sterilized at all. CARE packages are looked on with deep suspicion in much of the world, and with good reason, and many captains have become quite adept at concealing the fact that their last port of call was New York City.
When one moves inland, wild card cases become almost nonexistent. There are those who say that the late Idi Amin was some kind of insane joker-ace, with strength as great as Troll or the Harlem Hammer, and the ability to transform into some kind of were-creature, a leopard or a lion or a hawk. Amin himself claimed to be able to ferret out his enemies telepathically, and those few enemies who survived say that he was a cannibal who felt human flesh was necessary to maintain his powers. All this is the stuff of rumor and propaganda, however, and whether Amin was a joker, an ace, or a pathetically deluded nat madman, he is assuredly dead, and in this corner of the world, documented cases of the wild card virus are vanishingly hard to locate.
But Kenya and the surrounding nations have their own viral nightmare. If the wild card is a chimera here, AIDS is an epidemic. While the president was hosting Senator Hartmann and most of the tour, a few of us were on an exhausting visit to a half-dozen clinics in rural Kenya, hopping from one village to another by helicopter. They assigned us only one battered chopper, and that at Tachyon s insistence. The government would have much preferred that we spend our time lecturing at the university, meeting with educators and political leaders, touring game preserves and museums.
Most of my fellow delegates were only too glad to comply. The wild card is forty years old, and we have grown used to it-but AIDS, that is a new terror in the world, and one that we have only begun to understand. At home it is thought of as a homosexual affliction, and I confess that I am guilty of thinking of it that way myself, but here in Africa, that belief is given the lie. Already there are more AIDS victims on this continent alone than have ever been infected by the Takisian xenovirus since its release over Manhattan forty years ago.
And AIDS seems a crueler demon somehow. The wild card kills ninety percent of those who draw it, often in ways that are terrible and painful, but the distance between ninety percent and one hundred is not insignificant if you are among the ten who live. It is the distance between life and death, between hope and despair. Some claim that it’s better to die than to live as a joker, but you will not find me among their number. If my own life has not always been happy, nonetheless I have memories I cherish and accomplishments I am proud of. I am glad to have lived, and I do not want to die. I’ve accepted my death, but that does not mean I welcome it. I have too much unfinished business. Like Robert Tomlin, I have not yet seen The Jolson Story. None of us have.
In Kenya we saw whole villages that are dying. Alive, smiling, talking, capable of eating and defecating and making love and even babies, alive to all practical purposes-and yet dead. Those who draw the Black Queen may die in the agony of unspeakable transformations, but there are drugs for pain, and at least they die quickly. AIDS is less merciful.
We have much in common, jokers and AIDS victims.
Before I left Jokertown, we had been planning for a JADL fund-raising benefit at the Funhouse in late May-a major event with as much big-name entertainment as we could book. After Kenya I cabled instructions back to New York to arrange for the proceeds of the benefit to be split with a suitable AIDS victims’ group. We pariahs need to stick together. Perhaps I can still erect a few necessary bridges before my own Black Queen lies face up on the table.
The open city of Jerusalem, they call it. An international metropolis, jointly governed by commissioners from Israel, Jordan, Palestine, and Great Britain under a United Nations mandate, sacred to three of the world’s great religions.
Alas, the apt phrase is not “open city” but “open sore.” Jerusalem bleeds as it has for almost four decades. If this city is sacred, I should hate to visit one that was profane.
Senators Hartmann and Lyons and the other political delegates lunched with the city commissioners today, but the rest of us spent the afternoon touring this free international city in closed limousines with bulletproof windshields and special underbody armor to withstand bomb blasts. Jerusalem, it seems, likes to welcome distinguished international visitors by blowing them up. It does not seem to matter who the visitors are, where they come from, what religion they practice, how their politics lean-there are enough factions in this city so that everyone can count on being hated by someone.
Two days ago we were in Beirut. From Beirut to Jerusalem, that is a voyage from day to night. Lebanon is a beautiful country, and Beirut is so lovely and peaceful it seems almost serene. Its various religions appear to have solved the problem of living in comparative harmony, although there are of course incidents-nowhere in the Middle East (or the world, for that matter) is completely safe.
But Jerusalem-the outbreaks of violence have been endemic for thirty years, each worse than the one before. Entire blocks resemble nothing so much as London during the Blitz, and the population that remains has grown so used to the distant sound of machine-gun fire that they scarcely seem to pay it any mind.
We stopped briefly at what remains of the Wailing Wall (largely destroyed in 1967 by Palestinian terrorists in reprisal for the assassination of al-Haziz by Israeli terrorists the year before) and actually dared to get out of our vehicles. Hiram looked around fiercely and made a fist, as if daring anyone to start trouble. He has been in a strange state of late; irritable, quick to anger, moody. The things we witnessed in Africa have affected us all, however. One shard of the wall is still fairly imposing. I touched it and tried to feel the history. Instead I felt the pocks left in the stone by bullets.
Most of our party returned to the hotel afterward, but Father Squid and I took a detour to visit the Jokers’ Quarter. I’m told that it is the second-largest joker community in the world, after Jokertown itself ... a distant second, but second nonetheless. It does not surprise me. Islam does not view my people kindly, and so jokers come here from all over the Middle East for whatever meager protection is offered by UN sovereignty and a small, outmanned, outgunned, and demoralized international peacekeeping force.
The Quarter is unspeakably squalid, and the weight of human misery within its walls is almost palpable. Yet ironically the streets of the Quarter are reputed safer than any other place in Jerusalem. The Quarter has its own walls, built in living memory, originally to spare the feelings of decent people by hiding we living obscenities from their sight, but those same walls have given a measure of security to those who dwell within. Once inside I saw no nats at all, only jokers jokers of all races and religions, all living in relative peace. Once they might have been Muslims or Jews or Christians, zealots or Zionists or followers of the Nur, but after their hand had been dealt, they were only jokers. The joker is the great equalizer, cutting through all other hatreds and prejudices, uniting all mankind in a new brotherhood of pain. A joker is a joker is a joker, and anything else he is, is unimportant.
Would that it worked the same way with aces.
The sect of Jesus Christ, joker has a church in Jerusalem, and Father Squid took me there. The building looked more like a mosque than a Christian church, at least on the outside, but inside it was not so terribly different from the church I’d visited in Jokertown, though much older and in greater disrepair. Father Squid lit a candle and said a prayer, and then we went back to the cramped, tumbledown rectory where Father Squid conversed with the pastor in halting Latin while we shared a bottle of sour red wine. As they were talking, I heard the sound of automatic weaponry chattering off in the night somewhere a few blocks away. A typical Jerusalem evening, I suppose.
No one will read this book until after my death, by which time I will be safely immune from prosecution. I’ve thought long and hard about whether or not I should record what happened tonight, and finally decided that I should. The world needs to remember the lessons of 1976 and be reminded from time to time that the JADL does not speak for all jokers.
An old joker woman pressed a note into my hand as Father Squid and I were leaving the church. I suppose someone recognized me.
When I read the note, I begged off the official reception, pleading illness once again, but this time it was a ruse. I dined in my room with a wanted criminal, a man I can only describe as a notorious international joker terrorist, although he is a hero inside the Jokers’ Quarter. I will not give his real name, even in these pages, since I understand that he still visits his family in Tel Aviv from time to time. He wears a black canine mask on his “missions” and to the press, Interpol, and the sundry factions that police Jerusalem, he is variously known as the Black Dog and the Hound of Hell. Tonight he wore a completely different mask, a butterfly-shaped hood covered with silver glitter, and had no problem crossing the city.
“What you’ve got to remember,” he told me, “is that nats are fundamentally stupid. You wear the same mask twice and let your picture get taken with it, and they start thinking it’s your face.”
The Hound, as I’ll call him, was born in Brooklyn but emigrated to Israel with his family at age nine and became an Israeli citizen. He was twenty when he became a joker. “ I traveled halfway around the world to draw the wild card,” he told me. “I could have stayed in Brooklyn.”
We spent several hours discussing Jerusalem, the Middle East, and the politics of the wild card. The Hound heads what honesty forces me to call a joker terrorist organization, the Twisted Fists. They are illegal in both Israel and Palestine, no mean trick. He was evasive about how many members they had, but not at all shy about confessing that virtually all of their financial support comes from New York’s Jokertown.
“You may not like us, Mr. Mayor,” the Hound told me, “but your people do.” He even hinted slyly that one of the joker delegates on our tour was among their supporters, although of course he refused to supply a name.
The Hound is convinced that war is coming to the Middle East, and soon. “It’s overdue,” he said. “Neither Israel or Palestine have ever had defensible borders, and neither one is an economically viable nation. Each is convinced that the other one is guilty of all sorts of terrorist atrocities, and they’re both right. Israel wants the Negev and the West Bank, Palestine wants a port on the Mediterranean, and both countries are still full of refugees from the 1948 partition who want their homes back. Everyone wants Jerusalem except the UN, which has it. Shit, they need a good war. The Israelis looked like they were winning in ‘48 until the Nasr kicked their asses. I know that Bernadotte won the Nobel Peace Prize for the Treaty of Jerusalem, but just between you and me, it might have been better if they’d fought it out to the bitter end ... any kind of end.”
I asked him about all the people who would have died, but he just shrugged. “They’d be dead. But maybe if it was over, really over, some of the wounds would start to heal. Instead we got two pissed-off half-countries that share the same little desert and won’t even recognize each other, we’ve got four decades of hatred and terrorism and fear, and we’re still going to get the war, and soon. It beats me how Bernadotte pulled off the Peace of Jerusalem anyway, though I’m not surprised that he got assassinated for his troubles. The only ones who hate the terms worse than the Israelis are the Palestinians.”
I pointed out that, unpopular as it might be, the Peace of Jerusalem had lasted almost forty years. He dismissed that as “a forty-year stalemate, not real peace. Mutual fear was what made it work. The Israelis have always had military superiority. But the Arabs had the Port Said aces, and you think the Israelis don’t remember? Every time the Arabs put up a memorial to the Nasr anywhere from Baghdad to Marrakesh, the Israelis blow it up. Believe me, they remember. Only now the whole thing’s coming unbalanced. I got sources say Israel has been running its own wild card experiments on volunteers from their armed forces, and they’ve come up with a few aces of their own. Now that’s fanaticism for you, to volunteer for the wild card. And on the Arab side, you’ve got Nur al-Allah, who calls Israel a ‘bastard joker nation’ and has vowed to destroy it utterly. The Port Said aces were pussycats compared to his bunch, even old Khof. No, it’s coming, and soon.”
“And when it comes?” I asked him.
He was carrying a gun, some kind of small semiautomatic machine pistol with a long Russian name. He took it out and laid it on the table between us. “When it comes,” he said, “they can kill each other all they want, but they damn well better leave the Quarter alone, or they’ll have us to deal with. We’ve already given the Nur a few lessons. Every time they kill a joker, we kill five of them. You’d think they’d get the idea, but the Nur’s a slow learner.”
I told him that Senator Hartmann was hoping to set up a meeting with the Nur al-Allah to begin discussions that might lead to a peaceful solution to this areas problems. He laughed.
We talked for a long time, about jokers and aces and nats, and violence and nonviolence and war and peace, about brotherhood and revenge and turning the other cheek and taking care of your own, and in the end we settled nothing. “Why did you come?” I finally asked him.
“I thought we should meet. We could use your help. Your knowledge of Jokertown, your contacts in nat society, the money you could raise.”
“You won’t get my help,” I told him. “I’ve seen where your road leads. Tom Miller walked that road ten years ago.”
“Gimli?” He shrugged. “First, Gimli was crazy as a bedbug. I’m not. Gimli wants the world to kiss it and make it all better. I just fight to protect my own. To protect you, Des. Pray that your Jokertown never needs the Twisted Fists, but if you do, we’ll be there. I read Time’s cover story on Leo Barnett. Could be the Nur isn’t the only slow learner. If that’s how it is, maybe the Black Dog will go home and find that tree that grows in Brooklyn, right? I haven’t been to a Dodger game since I was eight.”
My heart stopped in my throat as I looked at the gun on the table, but I reached out and put my hand on the phone. “I could call down to our security right now and make certain that won’t happen, that you won’t kill any more innocent people.”
“But you won’t,” the Hound said. “Because we have so much in common.”
I told him we had nothing in common.
“We’re both jokers,” he said. “What else matters?” Then he holstered his gun, adjusted his mask, and walked calmly from my room.
And God help me, I sat there alone for several endless minutes, until I heard the elevator doors open down the hall-and finally took my hand off the phone.
I am in a good deal of pain today. Most of the delegates have gone on a day trip to various historic sights, but I elected to stay at the hotel once again.
Our tour ... what can I say? Syria has made headlines around the world. Our press contingent has doubled in size, all of them eager to get the inside story of what happened out in the desert. For once, I am not unhappy to have been excluded. Peri has told me what it was like ....
Syria has touched all of us, myself included. Not all of my pain is caused by the cancer. There are times when I grow profoundly weary, looking back over my life and wondering whether I have done any good at all, or if all my life’s work has been for nothing. I have tried to speak out on behalf of my people, to appeal to reason and decency and the common humanity that unites us all, and I have always been convinced that quiet strength, perseverance, and nonviolence would get us further in the long run. Syria makes me wonder ... how do you reason with a man like the Nur al-Allah, compromise with him, talk to him? How do you appeal to his humanity when he does not consider you human at all? If there is a God, I pray that he forgives me, but I find myself wishing they had killed the Nur.
Hiram has left the tour, albeit temporarily. He promises to rejoin us in India, but by now he is back in New York City, after jetting from Damascus to Rome and then catching a Concorde back to America. He told us that an emergency had arisen at Aces High that demanded his personal attention, but I suspect the truth is that Syria shook him more than he cared to admit. The rumor has swept round the plane that Hiram lost control in the desert, that he hit General Sayyid with far more weight than was necessary to stop him. Billy Ray, of’course, doesn’t think Hiram went far enough. “If it’d been me, I would have piled it on till he was just a brown and red stain on the floor,” he told me.
Worchester himself refused to talk about it and insisted that he was taking this brief leave of us simply because he was “sick unto death of stuffed grape leaves,” but even as he made the joke, I noticed beads of sweat on his broad, bald forehead and a slight tremor in his hand. I hope a short respite restores him; the more we have traveled together, the more I have to come to respect Hiram Worchester.
If clouds do indeed have a silver lining, however, then perhaps one good did come out of the monstrous incident in Syria: Gregg Hartmann’s stature seems to have been vastly enhanced by his near brush with death. For a decade now his political fortunes have been haunted by the specter of the Great Jokertown Riot in 1976, when he “lost his head” in public. To me his reaction was only human-he had just witnessed a woman being torn to pieces by a mob, after all. But presidential candidates are not allowed to weep or grieve or rage like the rest of us, as Muskie proved in 72 and Hartmann confirmed in ‘76.
Syria may finally have put that tragic incident to rest. Everyone who was there agrees that Hartmann’s behavior was exemplary-he was firm, cool-headed, courageous, a pillar of strength in the face of the Nur’s barbarous threats. Every paper in America has run the AP photo that was taken as they pulled out: Hiram helping Tachyon into the helicopter in the background, while in the foreground Senator Hartmann waited, his face streaked with dust, yet still grim and strong, his blood soaking through the sleeve of his white shirt.
Gregg still claims that he is not going to be a presidential candidate in 1988, and indeed all the polls show that Gary Hart has an overwhelming lead for the Democratic nomination, but Syria and the photograph will surely do wonders for his name recognition and his standing. I find myself desperately hoping that he will reconsider. I have nothing against Gary Hart, but Gregg Hartmann is something special, and perhaps for those of us touched by the wild card, he is our last best hope.
If Hartmann fails, all my hopes fail with him, and then what choice will we have but to turn to the Black Dog?
I suppose I should write something about Afghanistan, but there is little to record. I don’t have the strength to see what sights Kabul has to offer. The Soviets are much in evidence here, but they are being very correct and courteous. The war is being kept at arm’s length for the duration of our short stopover. Two Afghan jokers have been produced for our approval, both of whom swear (through Soviet interpreters) that a joker’s life is idyllic here. Somehow I am not convinced. If I understand correctly, they are the only two jokers in all of Afghanistan.
The Stacked Deck flew directly from Baghdad to Kabul. Iran was out of the question. The Ayatollah shares many of the Nur’s views on wild cards, and he rules his nation in name as well as fact, so even the UN could not secure us permission to land. At least the Ayatollah makes no distinctions between aces and jokers-we are all the demon children of the Great Satan, according to him. Obviously he has not forgotten Jimmy Carter’s ill-fated attempt to free the hostages, when a half-dozen government aces were sent in on a secret mission that turned into a horrid botch. The rumor is that Carnifex was one of the aces involved, but Billy Ray emphatically denies it. “If I’d been along, we would have gotten our people out and kicked the old man’s ass for good measure,” he says. His colleague from justice, Lady Black, just pulls her black cloak more tightly about herself and smiles enigmatically. Mistral’s father, Cyclone, has often been linked to that doomed mission as well, but it’s not something she’ll talk about.
Tomorrow morning we’ll fly over the Khyber Pass and cross into India, a different world’ entirely, a whole sprawling subcontinent, with the largest joker population anywhere outside the United States.
FEBRUARY 12/CALCUTTA:
India is as strange and fabulous a land as any we have seen on this trip ... if indeed it is correct to call it a land at all. It seems more like a hundred lands in one. I find it hard to connect the Himalayas and the palaces of the Moguls to the slums of Calcutta and Bengali jungles. The Indians themselves live in a dozen different worlds, from the aging Britishers who try to pretend that the Viceroy still rules in their little enclaves of the Raj, to the maharajas and nawabs who are kings in all but name, to the beggars on the streets of this sprawling filthy city.
There is so much of India.
In Calcutta you see jokers on the streets everywhere you go. They are as common as beggars, naked children, and corpses, and too frequently one and the same. In this quasi-nation of Hindu and Moslem and Sikh, the vast majority of jokers seem to be Hindu, but given Islam’s attitudes, that can hardly be a surprise. The orthodox Hindu has invented a new caste for the joker, far below even the untouchable, but at least they are allowed to live.
Interestingly enough, we have found no jokertowns in India. This culture is sharply divided along racial and ethnic grounds, and the enmities run very deep, as was clearly shown in the Calcutta wild card riots of 1947, and the wholesale nationwide carnage that accompanied the partition of the subcontinent that same year. Despite that, today you find Hindu and Muslim and Sikh living side by side on the same street, and jokers and nats and even a few pathetic deuces sharing the same hideous slums. It does not seem to have made them love each other any more, alas.
India also boasts a number of native aces, including a few of considerable power. Digger is having a grand time dashing about the country interviewing them all, or as many as will consent to meet with him.
Radha O’Reilly, on the other hand, is obviously very unhappy here. She is Indian royalty herself, it appears, at least on her mother’s side ... her father was some sort of Irish adventurer. Her people practice a variety of Hinduism built around Gonesh, the elephant god, and the black mother Kali, and to them her wild card ability makes her the destined bride of Gonesh, or something along those lines. At any rate she seems firmly convinced that she is in imminent danger of being kidnapped and forcibly returned to her homeland, so except for the official receptions in New Delhi and Bombay, she has remained closely closeted in the various hotels, with Carnifex, Lady Black, and the rest of our security close at hand. I believe she will be very happy to leave India once again.
Dr. Tachyon, Peregrine, Mistral, Fantasy, Troll, and the Harlem Hammer have just returned from a tiger hunt in the Bengal. Their ‘host was one of the Indian aces, a maharaja blessed with a form of the midas touch. I understand that the gold he creates—is inherently unstable and reverts to its original state within twenty-four hours, although the process of transmutation is still sufficient to kill any living thing he touches. Still, his palace is reputed to be quite a spectacular place. He’s solved the traditional mythic dilemma by having his servants feed him.
Tachyon returned from the expedition in as good a spirit as I’ve seen him since Syria, wearing-a golden nehru jacket and matching turban, fastened by a ruby the size of my thumb. The maharaja was lavish with his gifts, it seems. Even the prospect of the jacket and turban reverting to common cloth in a few hours does not seem to have dampened our alien’s enthusiasm for the day’s activities. The glittering pageant of the hunt, the splendors of the palace, and the maharaja’s harem all seem to have reminded Tach of the pleasures and prerogatives he once enjoyed as a prince of the Ilkazam on his home world. He admitted that even on Takis there was no sight to compare to the end of the hunt, when the maneater had been brought to bay and the maharaja calmly approached it, removed one golden glove, and transmuted the huge beast to solid gold with a touch.
While our aces were accepting their presents of fairy gold and hunting tigers, I spent the day in humbler pursuits, in the unexpected company of Jack Braun, who was invited to the hunt with the others but declined. Instead Braun and I made our way across Calcutta to visit the monument the Indians erected to Earl Sanderson on the site where he saved Mahatma Gandhi from assassination.
The memorial resembles a Hindu temple and the statue inside looks more like some minor Indian deity than an American black who played football for Rutgers, but still ...
Sanderson has indeed. become some sort of god to these people; various offerings left by worshipers were strewn about the feet of his statue. It was very crowded, and we had to wait for a long time before we were admitted. The Mahatma is still universally revered in India, and some of his popularity seems to have rubbed off on the memory of the American ace who stepped between him and an assassin’s bullet.
Braun said very little when we were inside, just stared up at the statue as if somehow willing it to come to life. It was a moving visit, but not entirely a comfortable one. My obvious deformity drew hard looks from some of the highercaste Hindus in the press of the people. And whenever someone brushed against Braun too tightly-as happened frequently among such a tightly packed mass of people-his biological force field would begin to shimmer, surrounding him with a ghostly golden glow. I’m afraid my nervousness got the better of me, and I interrupted Braun’s reveries and got us out of there hastily. Perhaps I overreacted, but if even one person in that crowd had realized who Jack Braun was, it might have triggered a vastly ugly scene. Braun was very moody and quiet on the way back to our hotel.
Gandhi is a personal hero of mine, and for all my mixed feelings about aces I must admit that I am grateful to Earl Sanderson for the intervention that saved Gandhi’s life. For the great prophet of nonviolence to die by an assassin’s bullet would have been too grotesque, and I think India would have torn itself apart in the wake of such a death, in a fratricidal bloodbath the likes of which the world has never seen.
If Gandhi had not lived to lead the reunification of the subcontinent after the death of Jinnah in 1948, would that strange two-headed nation called Pakistan actually have endured? Would the All-India Congress have displaced all the petty rulers and absorbed their domains, as it threatened to do? The very shape of this decentralized, endlessly diverse patchwork country is an expression of the Mahatma’s dreams. I find it inconceivable to imagine what course Indian history might have taken without him. So in that respect, at least, the Four Aces left a real mark on the world and perhaps demonstrated that one determined man can indeed change the course of history for the better.
I pointed all this out to Jack Braun on our ride home, when he seemed so withdrawn. I’m afraid it did not help much. He listened to me patiently and when I was finished, he said, “It was Earl who saved him, not me,” and lapsed back into silence.
True to his promise, Hiram Worchester returned to the tour today, via Concorde from London. His brief sojourn in New York seems to have done him a world of good. His old ebullience was back, and he promptly convinced Tachyon, Mordecai Jones, and Fantasy to join him on an expedition to find the hottest vindaloo in Calcutta. He pressed Peregrine to join the foraging party as well, but the thought seemed to make her turn green.
Tomorrow morning Father Squid, Troll, and I will visit the Ganges, where legend has it a joker can bathe in the sacred waters and be cured of his afflictions. Our guides tell us there are hundreds of documented cases, but I am frankly dubious, although Father Squid insists that there have been miraculous joker cures in Lourdes as well. Perhaps I shall succumb and leap into the sacred waters after all. A man dying of cancer can ill afford the luxury of skepticism, I suppose.
Chrysalis was invited to join us, but declined. These days she seems most comfortable in the hotel bars, drinking amaretto and playing endless games of solitaire. She has become quite friendly with two of our reporters, Sara Morgenstern and the ubiquitous Digger Downs, and I’ve even heard talk that she and Digger are sleeping together.
Back from the Ganges. I must make my confession. I took off my shoe and sock, rolled up my pants legs, and put my foot in the sacred waters. Afterward, I was still a joker, alas ... a joker with a wet foot.
The sacred waters are filthy, by the way, and while I wag fishing for my miracle, someone stole my shoe.
I have been feeling better of late, I’m pleased to say. Perhaps it was our brief sojourn in Australia and New Zealand. Coming close upon the heels of Singapore and Jakarta, Sydney seemed almost like home, and I was strangely taken with Auckland and the comparative prosperity and cleanliness of its little toy jokertown. Aside from a distressing tendency to call themselves “uglies,” an even more offensive term than “joker,” my Kiwi brethren seem to live as decently as any jokers anywhere. I was even able to purchase a week-old copy of the Jokertown Cry at my hotel. It did my soul good to read the news of home, even though too many of the headlines seem to be concerned with a gang war being fought in our streets.
Hong Kong has its jokertown too, as relentlessly mercantile as the rest of the city. I understand that mainland China dumps most of its jokers here, in the Crown Colony. In fact a delegation of leading joker merchants have invited Chrysalis and me to lunch with them tomorrow and discuss “possible commercial ties between jokers in Hong Kong and New York City.” I’m looking forward to it.
Frankly it will be good to get away from my fellow delegates for a few hours. The mood aboard the Stacked Deck is testy at best at present, chiefly thanks to Thomas Downs and his rather overdeveloped journalistic instincts.
Our mail caught up with us in Christchurch, just as we were taking off for Hong Kong, and the packet included advance copies of the latest issue of Aces. Digger went up and down the aisles after we were airborne, distributing complimentary copies as is his wont. He ought to have read them first. He and his execrable magazine hit a new low this time out, I’m afraid.
The issue features his cover story of Peregrine’s pregnancy. I was amused to note that the magazine obviously feels that Peri’s baby is the big news of the trip, since they devoted twice as much space to it as they have to any of Digger’s previous stories, even the hideous incident in Syria, though perhaps that was only to justify the glossy four-page fotospread of Peregrine past and present, in various costumes and states of undress.
The whispers about her pregnancy started as early as India and were officially confirmed while we were in Thailand, so Digger could hardly be blamed for filing a story. It’s just the sort of thing that Aces thrives on. Unfortunately for his own health and our sense of camaraderie aboard the Stacked Deck, Digger clearly did not agree with Peri that her “delicate condition” was a private matter. Digger dug too far.
The cover asks, “Who Fathered Peri’s Baby?” Inside, the piece opens with a double-page spread illustrated by an artist’s conception of Peregrine holding an infant in her arms, except that the child is a black silhouette with a question mark instead of a face. “Daddy’s an Ace, Tachyon Says,” reads the subhead, leading into a much larger orange banner that claims, “Friends Beg Her to Abort Monstrous Joker Baby.” Gossip has it that Digger plied Tachyon with brandy while the two of them were inspecting the raunchier side of Singapore’s nightlife, managing to elicit a few choice indiscretions. He did not get the name of the father of Peregrine’s baby, but once drunk enough, Tachyon displayed no reticence in sounding off about all the reasons why he believes Peregrine ought to abort this child, the foremost of which is the nine percent chance that the baby will be born a joker.
I confess that reading the story filled me with a cold rage and made me doubly glad that Dr. Tachyon is not my personal physician. It is at moments such as this that I find myself wondering how Tachyon can possibly pretend to be my friend, or the friend of any joker. In vino veritas, they say; Tachyon’s comments make it quite clear that he thinks abortion is the only choice for any woman in Peregrine’s position. The Takisians abhor deformity and customarily “cull” (such a polite word) their own deformed children (very few in number, since they have not yet been blessed with the virus that they so generously decided to share with Earth) shortly after birth. Call me oversensitive if you will, but the clear implication of what Tachyon is saying is that death is preferable to jokerhood, that it is better that this child never live at all than live the life of a joker.
When I set the magazine aside I was so livid that I knew I could not possibly speak to Tachyon himself in any rational manner, so I got up and went back to the press compartment to give Downs a piece of my mind. At the very least I wanted to point out rather forcefully that it was grammatically permissible to omit the adjective “monstrous” before the phrase “joker baby,” though clearly the copy editors at Aces feel it compulsory.
Digger saw me coming, however, and met me halfway. I’ve managed to raise his consciousness at least enough so that he knew how upset I’d be, because he started right in with excuses. “Hey, I just wrote the article,” he began. “They do the headlines back in New York, that and the art, I’ve got no control over it. Look, Des, next time I’ll talk to them—”
He never had a chance to finish whatever promise he was about to make, because just then josh McCoy stepped up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder with a rolled-up copy of Aces. When Downs turned around, McCoy started swinging. The first punch broke Digger’s nose with a sickening noise that made me feel rather faint. McCoy went on to split Digger’s lips and loosen a few teeth. I grabbed McCoy with my arms and wrapped my trunk around his neck to try to hold him still, but he was crazy strong with rage and brushed me off easily, I’m afraid. I’ve never been the physical sort, and in my present condition I fear that I’m pitifully weak. Fortunately Billy Ray came along in time to break them up before McCoy could do serious damage.
Digger spent the rest of the flight back in the rear of the plane, stoked up with painkillers. He managed to offend Billy Ray as well by dripping blood on the front of his white Carnifex costume. Billy is nothing if not obsessive about his appearance, and as he kept telling us, “those fucking bloodstains don’t come out.” McCoy went up front, where he helped Hiram, Mistral, and Mr. Jayewardene console Peri, who was considerably upset by the story. While McCoy was assaulting Digger in the rear of the plane, she was tearing into Dr. Tachyon up front. Their confrontation was less physical but equally dramatic, Howard tells me. Tachyon kept apologizing over and over again, but no amount of apologies seemed to stay Peregrine’s fury. Howard says it was a good thing that her talons were packed away safely with the luggage.
Tachyon finished out the flight alone in the first-class lounge with a bottle of Remy Martin and the forlorn look of a puppy dog who has just piddled on the Persian rug. If I had been a crueler man, I might have gone upstairs and explained my own grievances to him, but I found that I did not have the heart. I find that very curious, but there is something about Dr. Tachyon that makes it difficult to stay angry with him for very long, no matter how insensitive and egregious his behavior.
No matter. I am looking forward to this part of the trip. From Hong Kong we travel to the mainland, Canton and Shanghai and Peking and other stops equally exotic. I plan to walk upon the Great Wall and see the Forbidden City. During World War 11 I’d chosen to serve in the Navy in hopes of seeing the world, and the Far East always had a special glamour for me, but I wound up assigned to a desk in Bayonne, New Jersey. Mary and I were going to make up for that afterward, when the baby was a little older and we had a little more in the way of financial security.
Well, we made our plans, and meanwhile the Takisians made theirs.
Over the years China came to represent all the things I’d never done, all the far places I meant to visit and never did, my own personal Jolson story. And now it looms on my horizon, at last. It’s enough to make one believe the end is truly near.
A face out of my past confronted me in Tokyo and has preyed on my mind ever since. Two days ago I decided that I would ignore him and the issues raised by his presence, that I would make no mention of him in this journal.
I’ve made plans to have this volume to be offered for publication after my death. I do not expect a best-seller, but I would think the number of celebrities aboard the Stacked Deck and the various newsworthy events we’ve generated will stir up at least a little interest in the great American public, so my volume may find its own audience. Whatever modest royalties it earns will be welcomed by the JADL, to which I’ve willed my entire estate.
Yet, even though I will be safely dead and buried before anyone reads these words, and therefore in no position to be harmed by any personal admissions I might make, I find myself reluctant to write of Fortunato. Call it cowardice, if you will. Jokers are notorious cowards, if one listens to the jests, the cruel sort that they do not allow on television. I can easily justify my decision to say nothing of Fortunato. My dealings with him over the years have been private matters, having little to do with politics or world affairs or the issues that I’ve tried to address in this journal, and nothing at all to do with this tour.
Yet I have felt free, in these pages, to repeat the gossip that has inevitably swirled about the airplane, to report on the various foibles and indiscretions of Dr. Tachyon and Peregrine and Jack Braun and Digger Downs and all the rest. Can I truly pretend that their weaknesses are of public interest and my own are not? Perhaps I could ... the public has always been fascinated by aces and repelled by jokers ... but I will not. I want this journal to be an honest one, a true one. And I want the readers to understand a little of what it has been like to live forty years a joker. And to do that I must talk of Fortunato, no matter how deeply it may shame me. Fortunato now lives in Japan. He helped Hiram in some obscure way after Hiram had suddenly and quite mysteriously left the tour in Tokyo. I don’t pretend to know the details of that; it was all carefully hushed up. Hiram seemed almost himself when he returned to us in Calcutta, but he has deteriorated rapidly again, and he looks worse every day. He has become volatile and unpleasant, and secretive. But this is not about Hiram, of whose woes I know nothing. The point is, Fortunato was embroiled in the business somehow and came to our hotel, where I spoke to him briefly in the corridor. That was all there was to it ... now. But in years past Fortunato and I have had other dealings.
Forgive me. This is hard. I am an old man and a joker, and age and deformity alike have made me sensitive. My dignity is all I have left, and I am about to surrender it.
I was writing about self-loathing.
This is a time for hard truths, and the first of those is that many nats are disgusted by jokers. Some of these are bigots, always ready to hate anything different. In that regard we jokers are no different from any other oppressed minority; we are all hated with the same honest venom by those predisposed to hate.
There are other normals, however, who are more predisposed to tolerance, who try to see beyond the surface to the human being beneath. People of good will, not haters, well-meaning generous people like ... well, like Dr. Tachyon and Hiram Worchester to choose two examples close to hand. Both of these gentlemen have proven over the years that they care deeply about jokers in the abstract, Hiram through his anonymous charities, Tachyon through his work at the clinic. And yet both of them, I am convinced, are just as sickened by the simple physical deformity of most jokers as the Nur al-Allah or Leo Barnett. You can see it in their eyes, no matter how nonchalant and cosmopolitan they strive to be. Some of their best friends are jokers, but they wouldn’t want their sister to marry one.
This is the first unspeakable truth of jokerhood.
How easy it would be to rail against this, to condemn men like Tach and Hiram for hypocrisy and “formism” (a hideous word coined by a particularly moronic joker activist and taken up by Tom Miller’s jokers for a just Society in their heyday). Easy, and wrong. They are decent men, but still only men, and cannot be thought less because they have normal human feelings.
Because, you see, the second unspeakable. truth of jokerhood is that no matter how much jokers offend nats, we offend ourselves even more.
Self-loathing is the particular psychological pestilence of Jokertown, a disease that is often fatal. The leading cause of death among jokers under the age of fifty is, and always has been, suicide. This despite the fact that virtually every disease known to man is more serious when contracted by a joker, because our body chemistries and very shapes vary so widely and unpredictably that no course of treatment is truly safe.
In Jokertown you’ll search long and hard before you’ll find a place to buy a mirror, but there are mask shops on every block.
If that was not proof enough, consider the issue of names. Nicknames, they call them. They are more than that. They are spotlights on the true depths of joker self-loathing.
If this journal is to be published, I intend to insist that it be titled The Journal of Xavier Desmond, not A Joker’s journal or any such variant. I am a man, a particular man, not just a generic joker. Names are important; they are more than just words, they shape and color the things they name. The feminists realized this long ago, but jokers still have not grasped it.
I have made it a point over the years to answer to no name but my own, yet I know a joker dentist who calls himself Fishface, an accomplished ragtime pianist who answers to Catbox, and a brilliant joker mathematician who signs his papers “Slimer.” Even on this tour I find myself accompanied by three people named Chrysalis, Troll, and Father Squid.
We are, of course, not the first minority to experience this particular form of oppression. Certainly black people have been there; entire generations were raised with the belief that the “prettiest” black girls were the ones with the lightest skins whose features most closely approximated the Caucasian ideal. Finally some of them saw through that lie and proclaimed that black was beautiful.
From time to time various well-meaning but foolish jokers have attempted to do the same thing. Freakers, one of the more debauched institutions of Jokertown, has what it calls a “Twisted Miss” contest every year on Valentine’s Day. However sincere or cynical these efforts are, they are surely misguided. Our friends the Takisians took care of that by putting a clever little twist on the prank they played on us. The problem is, every joker is unique.
Even before my transformation I was never a handsome man. Even after the change I am by no means hideous. My “nose” is a trunk, about two feet long, with fingers at its end. My experience has been that most people get used to the way I look if they are around me for a few days. I like to tell myself that after a week or so you scarcely notice that I’m any different, and maybe there’s even a grain of truth in that.
If the virus had only been so kind as to give all jokers trunks where their noses had been, the adjustment might have been a good deal easier, and a “Trunks Are Beautiful” campaign might have done some real good.
But to the best of my knowledge I am the only joker with a trunk. I might work very hard to disregard the aesthetics of the nat culture I live in, to convince myself that I am one handsome devil and that the rest of them are the funny-looking ones, but none of that will help the next time I find that pathetic creature they call Snotman sleeping in the dumpster behind the Funhouse. The horrible reality is, my stomach is as thoroughly turned by the more extreme cases of joker deformity as I imagine Dr. Tachyon’s must be-but if anything, I am even more guilty about it.
Which brings me, in a roundabout way, back to Fortunato. Fortunato is ... or was at least ... a procurer. He ran a highpriced call girl ring. All of his girls were exquisite; beautiful, sensual, skilled in every erotic art, and by and large pleasant people, as much a delight out of bed as in it. He called them geishas.
For more than two decades I was one of his best customers. I believe he did a lot of business in Jokertown. I know for a fact that Chrysalis often trades information for sex, upstairs in her Crystal Palace, whenever a man who needs her services happens to strike her fancy. I know a handful of truly wealthy jokers, none of whom are married, but almost all of whom have nat mistresses. The hometown papers we’ve seen tell us that the Five Families and the Shadow Fists are warring in the streets, and I know why-because in Jokertown prostitution is big business, along with drugs and gambling. The first thing a joker loses is his sexuality. Some lose it totally, becoming incapable or asexual. But even those whose genitalia and sexual drives remain unaffected by the wild card find themselves bereft of sexual identity. From the instant one stabilizes, one is no longer a man or a woman, only a joker.
A normal sex drive, abnormal self-loathing, and a yearning for the thing that’s been lost ... manhood, femininity, beauty, whatever. They are common demons in Jokertown, and I know them well. The onset of my cancer and the chemotherapy have combined to kill all my interest in sex, but my memories and my shame remain intact. It shames me to be reminded of Fortunato. Not because I patronized a prostitute or broke their silly laws-I have contempt for those laws. It shames me because, try as I did over the years, I could never find it in me to desire a joker woman. I knew several who were worthy of love; kind, gentle, caring women, who needed commitment and tenderness and yes, sex, as much as I did. Some of them became my cherished friends. Yet I could never respond to them sexually. They remained as unattractive in my eyes as I must have been in theirs.
So it goes, in Jokertown.
The seat belt light has just come on, and I’m not feeling very well at present, so I will sign off here.
Very tired. I fear my doctor was correct-this trip may have been a drastic mistake, insofar as my health is concerned. I feel I held up remarkably well during the first few months, when everything was fresh and new and exciting, but during this last month a cumulative exhaustion has set in, and the day-to-day grind has become almost unbearable. The flights, the dinners, the endless receiving lines, the visits to hospitals and joker ghettos and research institutions, it is all threatening to become one great blur of dignitaries and airports and translators and buses and hotel dining rooms.
I am not keeping my food down well, and I know I have lost weight. The cancer, the strain of travel, my age ... who can say? All of these, I suspect.
Fortunately the trip is almost over now. We are scheduled to return to Tomlin on April 29, and only a handful of stops remain. I confess that I am looking forward to my return home, and I do not think I am alone in that. We are all tired.
Still, despite the toll it has taken, I would not have forfeited this trip for anything. I have seen the Pyramids and the Great Wall, walked the streets of Rio and Marrakesh and Moscow, and soon I will add Rome and Paris and London to that list. I have seen and experienced the stuff of dreams and nightmares, and I have learned much, I think. I can only pray that I survive long enough to use some of that knowledge.
Sweden is a bracing change from the Soviet Union and the other Warsaw Pact nations we have visited. I have no strong feelings about socialism one way or the other, but I grew very weary of the model joker “medical hostels” we were constantly being shown and the model jokers who occupied them. Socialist medicine and socialist science would undoubtedly conquer the wild card, and great strides were already being made, we were repeatedly told, but even. if one credits these claims, the price is a lifetime of “treatment” for the handful of jokers the Soviets admit to having.
Billy Ray insists that the Russians actually have thousands of jokers locked away safely out of sight in huge gray “joker warehouses,” nominally hospitals but actually prisons in all but name, staffed by a lot of guards and precious few doctors and nurses. Ray also says there are a dozen Soviet aces, all of them secretly employed by the government, the military, the police, or the party. If these things exist-the Soviet Union denies all such allegations, of course-we got nowhere close to any of them, with Intourist and the KGB carefully managing every aspect of our visit, despite the government’s assurance to the United Nations that this UNsanctioned tour would receive “every cooperation.”
To say that Dr. Tachyon did not get along well with his socialist colleagues would be a considerable understatement. His disdain for Soviet medicine is exceeded only by Hiram’s disdain for Soviet cooking. Both of them do seem to approve of Soviet vodka, however, and have consumed a great deal of it.
There was an amusing little debate in the Winter Palace, when one of our hosts explained the dialectic of history to Dr. Tachyon, telling him feudalism must inevitably give way to capitalism, and capitalism to socialism, as a civilization matures. Tachyon listened with remarkable politeness and then said, “My dear man, there are two great star-faring civilizations in this small sector of the galaxy. My own people, by your lights, must be considered feudal, and the Network is a form of capitalism more rapacious and virulent than anything you’ve ever dreamed of. Neither of us shows any signs of maturing into socialism, thank you.” Then he paused for a moment and added, “Although, if you think of it in the right light, perhaps the Swarm might be considered communist, though scarcely civilized.”
It was a clever little speech, I must admit, although I think it might have impressed the Soviets more if Tachyon had not been dressed in full cossack regalia when he delivered it. Where does he get these outfits?
Of the other Warsaw Bloc nations there is little to report. Yugoslavia was the warmest, Poland the grimmest, Czechoslovakia seemed the most like home. Downs wrote a marvelouslv engrossing piece for Aces, speculating that the widespread peasant accounts of active contemporary vampires in Hungary and Rumania were actually manifestations of the wild card. It was his best work, actually, some really excellent writing, and all the more remarkable when you consider that he based the whole thing on a five-minute conversation with a pastry chef in Budapest. We found a small joker ghetto in Warsaw and a widespread belief in a hidden “solidarity ace” who will shortly come forth to lead that outlawed trade union to victory. He did not, alas, come forth during our two days in Poland. Senator Hartmann, with greatest difficulty, managed to arrange a meeting with Lech Walesa, and I believe that the AP news photo of their meeting has enhanced his stature back home. Hiram left us briefly in Hungary-another “emergency” back in New York, he said-and returned just as we arrived in Sweden, in somewhat better spirits.
Stockholm is a most congenial city, after many of the places we have been. Virtually all the Swedes we have met speak excellent English, we are free to come and go as we please (within the confines of our merciless schedule, of course), and the king was most gracious to all of us. Jokers are quite rare here, this far north, but he greeted us with complete equanimity, as if he’d been hosting jokers all of his life.
Still, as enjoyable as our brief visit has been, there is only one incident that is worth recording for posterity. I believe we have unearthed something that will make the historians around the world sit up and take notice, a hithertounknown fact that puts much of recent Middle Eastern history into a new and startling perspective.
It occurred during an otherwise unremarkable afternoon a number of the delegates spent with the Nobel trustees. I believe it was Senator Hartmann they actually wanted to meet. Although it ended in violence, his attempt to meet and negotiate with the Nor al-Allah in Syria is correctly seen here for what it was-a sincere and courageous effort on behalf of peace and understanding, and one that makes him to my mind a legitimate candidate for next year’s Nobel Peace Prize.
At any rate, several of the other delegates accompanied Gregg to the meeting, which was cordial but hardly stimulating. One of our hosts, it turned out, had been a secretary to Count Folke Bernadotte when he negotiated the Peace of Jerusalem, and sadly enough had also been with Bernadotte when he was gunned down by Israeli terrorists two years later. He told us several fascinating anecdotes about Bernadotte, for whom he clearly had great admiration, and also showed us some of his personal memorabilia of those difficult negotiations. Among the notes, journals, and interim drafts was a photo book.
I gave the book a cursory glance and then passed it on, as did most of my companions. Dr. Tachyon, who was seated beside me on the couch, seemed bored by the proceedings and leafed through the photographs with rather more care. Bernadotte figured in most of them, of course standing with his negotiating team, talking with David Ben-Gurion in one photo and King Faisal in the next. The various aides, including our host, were seen in less formal poses, shaking hands with Israeli soldiers, eating with a tentful of bedouin, and so on. The usual sort of thing. By far the single most arresting picture showed Bernadotte surrounded by the Nasr, the Port Said aces who so dramatically reversed the tide of battle when they joined with Jordan’s crack Arab Legion. Khof sits beside Bernadotte in the center of the photograph, all in black, looking like death incarnate, surrounded by the younger aces. Ironically enough, of all the faces in that photo, only three are sill alive, the ageless Khof among them. Even an undeclared war takes it toll.
That was not the photograph that caught Tachyon’s attention, however. It was another, a very informal snapshot, showing Bernadotte and various members of his team in some hotel room, the table in front of them littered with papers. In one corner of the photograph was a young man I had not noticed in any of the other pictures-slim, darkhaired, with a certain intense look around the eyes, and a rather ingratiating grin. He was pouring a cup of coffee. All very innocent, but Tachyon stared at the photograph for a long time and then called our host over and said to him privately, “Forgive me if I tax your memory, but I would be very interested to know if you remember this man.” He pointed him out. “Was he a member of your team?”
Our Swedish friend leaned over, studied the photograph, and chuckled. “Oh, him,” he said in excellent English. “He was ... what is the slang word you use, for a boy who runs errands and does odd jobs? An animal of some sort ...”
“A gofer,” I supplied.
“Yes, he was a gopher, as you put it. Actually a young journalism student. Joshua, that was his name. Joshua ... something. He said he wanted to observe the negotiations from within so he could write about them afterward. Bernadotte thought the idea was ridiculous when it was first put to him, rejected it out of hand in fact, but the young man was persistent. He finally managed to corner the Count and put his case to him personally, and somehow he talked him around. So he was not officially a member of the team, but he was with us constantly from that point through the end. He was not a very efficient gopher, as I recall, but he was such a pleasant young man that everyone liked him regardless. I don’t believe he ever wrote his article.”
“No,” Tachyon said. “He wouldn’t have. He was a chess player, not a writer.”
Our host lit up with remembrance. “Why, yes! He played incessantly, now that I recall. He was quite good. Do you know him, Dr. Tachyon? I’ve often wondered whatever became of him.”
“So have I,” Tachyon replied very simply and very sadly. Then he closed the book and changed the topic.
I have known Dr. Tachyon for more years than I care to contemplate. That evening, spurred by my own curiosity, I managed to seat myself near to Jack Braun and ask him a few innocent questions while we ate. I’m certain that he suspected nothing, but he was willing enough to reminisce about the Four Aces, the things they did and tried to do, the places they went, and more importantly, the places they did not go. At least not officially.
Afterward, I found Dr. Tachyon drinking alone in his room. He invited me in, and it was clear that he was feeling quite morose, lost in his damnable memories. He lives as much in the past as any man I have ever known. I asked him who the young man in the photograph had been.
“No one,” Tachyon said. “Just a boy I used to play chess with.” I’m not sure why he felt he had to lie to me.
“His name was not Joshua,” I told him, and he seemed startled. I wonder, does he think my deformity affects my mind, my memory? “His name was David, and he was not supposed to be there. The Four Aces were never officially involved in the Mideast, and Jack Braun says that by late 1948 the members of the group had gone their own ways. Braun was making movies.”
“Bad movies,” Tachyon said with a certain venom. “Meanwhile,” I said, “the Envoy was making peace.”
“He was gone for two months. He told Blythe and me that he was going on a vacation. I remember. It never occurred to me that he was involved.”
No more has it ever occurred to the rest of the world, though perhaps it should have. David Harstein was not particularly religious, from what little I know of him, but he was Jewish, and when the Port Said aces and the Arab armies threatened the very existence of the new state of Israel, he acted all on his own.
His was a power for peace, not war; not fear or sandstorms or lightning from a clear sky, but pheromones that made people like him and want desperately to please him and agree with him, that made the mere presence of the ace called Envoy a virtual guarantee of a successful negotiation. But those who knew who and what he was showed a distressing tendency to repudiate their agreements once Harstein and his pheromones had left their presence. He must have pondered that, and with the stakes so high, he must have decided to find out what might happen if his role in the process was carefully kept secret. The Peace of Jerusalem was his answer.
I wonder if even Folke Bernadotte knew who his gopher really was. I wonder where Harstein is now, and what he thinks of the peace that he so carefully and secretly wrought. And I find myself reflecting on what the Black Dog said in Jerusalem.
What would it do to the fragile Peace of Jerusalem if its origins were revealed to the world? The more I reflect on that, the more certain I grow that I ought tear these pages from my journal before I offer it for publication. If no one gets Dr. Tachyon drunk, perhaps this secret can even be kept.
Did he ever do it again, I wonder? After HUAC, after prison and disgrace and his celebrated conscription and equally celebrated disappearance, did the Envoy ever sit in on any other negotiations with the world’s being none the wiser? I wonder if we’ll ever know.
I think it unlikely and wish it were not. From what I have seen on this tour, in Guatemala and South Africa, in Ethiopia and Syria and Jerusalem, in India and Indonesia and Poland, the world today needs the Envoy more than ever.
The interior lights were turned out several hours ago, and most of my fellow travelers are long asleep, but the pain has kept me awake. I’ve taken some pills, and they are helping, but still I cannot sleep. Nonetheless, I feel curiously elated ... almost serene. The end of my journey is near, in both the larger and smaller senses. I’ve come a long way, yes, and for once I feel good about it.
We still have one more stop-a brief sojourn in Canada, whirlwind visits to Montreal and Toronto, a government reception in Ottawa. And then home. Tomlin International,
Manhattan, Jokertown. It will be good to see the Funhouse again.
I wish I could say that the tour had accomplished everything we set out to do, but that’s scarcely the case. We began well, perhaps, but the violence in Syria, West Germany, and France undid our unspoken dream of making the public forget the carnage of Wild Card Day. I can only hope that the majority will realize that terrorism is a bleak and ugly part of the world we live in, that it would exist with or without the wild card. The bloodbath in Berlin was instigated by a group that included jokers, aces, and nats, and we would do well to remember that and remind the world of it forcefully. To lay that carnage at the door of Gimli and his pathetic followers, or the two fugitive aces still being sought by the German police, is to play into the hands of men like Leo Barnett and the Nur al—Allah. Even if the Takisians had never brought their curse to us, the world would have no shortage of desperate, insane, and evil men.
For me, there is a grim irony in the fact that it was Gregg’s courage and compassion that put his life at risk, and hatred that saved him, by turning his captors against each other in that fratricidal holocaust.
Truly, this is a strange world.
I pray that we have seen the last of Gimli, but meanwhile I can rejoice. After Syria it seems unlikely that anyone could still doubt Gregg Hartmann’s coolness under fire, but if that was indeed the case, surely all such fears have now been firmly laid to rest by Berlin. After Sara Morgenstern’s exclusive interview was published in the Post, I understand Hartmann shot up ten points in the polls. He’s almost neck and neck with Hart now. The feeling aboard the plane is that Gregg is definitely going to run.
I said as much to Digger back in Dublin, over a Guinness and some fine Irish soda bread in our hotel, and he agreed. In fact, he went further and predicted that Hartmann would get the nomination. I wasn’t quite so certain and reminded him that Gary Hart still seems a formidable obstacle, but Downs grinned in that maddeningly cryptic way of his beneath his broken nose and said, “Yeah, well, I got this hunch that Gary is going to fuck up and do something really stupid, don’t ask me why.”
If my health permits, I will do everything I can to rally Jokertown behind a Hartmann candidacy. I don’t think I’m alone in my commitment either. After the things we have seen, both at home and abroad, a growing number of prominent aces and jokers are likely to throw their weight behind the senator. Hiram Worchester, Peregrine, Mistral, Father Squid, Jack Braun.’.. perhaps even Dr. Tachyon, despite his notorious distaste for politics and politicians.
Terrorism and bloodshed notwithstanding, I do believe we accomplished some good on this journey. Our report will open some official eyes, I can only hope, and the press spotlight that has shone on us everywhere has greatly increased public awareness of the plight of jokers in the Third World.
On a more personal level, Jack Braun did much to redeem himself and even buried his thirty-year emnity with Tachyon; Peri seems positively radiant in her pregnancy; and we did manage, however belatedly, to free poor Jeremiah Strauss from twenty years of simian bondage. I remember Strauss from the old days, when Angela owned the Funhouse and I was only the maitre d’, and I offered him a booking if and when he resumes his theatrical career as the Projectionist. He was appreciative, but noncommittal. I don’t envy him his period of adjustment. For all practical purposes, he is a time traveler.
And Dr. Tachyon ... well, his new punk haircut is ugly in the extreme, he still favors his wounded leg, and by now the entire plane knows of his sexual dysfunction, but none of this seems to bother him since young Blaise came aboard in France. Tachyon has been evasive about the boy in his public statements, but of course everyone knows the truth. The years he spent in Paris are scarcely a state secret, and if the boy’s hair was not a sufficient clue, his mind control power makes his lineage abundantly clear.
Blaise is a strange child. He seemed a little awed by the jokers when he first joined us, particularly Chrysalis, whose transparent skin clearly fascinated him. On the other hand, he has all of the natural cruelty of an unschooled child (and believe me, any joker knows how cruel a child can be). One day in London, Tachyon got a phone call and had to leave for a few hours. While he was gone, Blaise grew bored, and to amuse himself he seized control of Mordecai Jones and made him climb onto a table and recite “I’m a Little Teapot,” which Blaise had just learned as part of an English lesson. The table collapsed under the Hammer’s weight, and I don’t think Jones is likely to forget the humiliation. He didn’t much like Dr. Tachyon to begin with.
Of course not everyone will look back on this tour fondly. The trip was very hard on a number of us, there’s no gainsaying that. Sara Morgenstern has filed several major stories and done some of the best writing of her career, but nonetheless the woman is edgier and more neurotic with every passing day. As for her colleagues in the back of the plane, josh McCoy seems alternately madly in love with Peregrine and absolutely furious with her, and it cannot be easy for him with the whole world knowing that he is not the father of her child. Meanwhile, Digger’s profile will never be the same.
Downs is, at least, as irrepressible as he is irresponsible. Just the other day he was telling Tachyon that if he got an exclusive on Blaise, maybe he would be able to keep Tach’s impotence off-the-record. This gambit was not well received. Digger has also been thick as thieves with Chrysalis of late. I overheard them having a very curious conversation in the bar one night in London. “I know he is,” Digger was saying. Chrysalis told him that knowing it and proving it were two different things. Digger said something about how they smelled different to him, how he’d known ever since they met, and Chrysalis just laughed and said that was fine, but smells that no one else could detect weren’t much good as proof, and even if they were, he’d have to blow his own cover to go public. They were still going at it when I left the bar.
I think even Chrysalis will be delighted to return to Jokertown. Clearly she loved England, but given her Anglophile tendencies, that was hardly a surprise. There was one tense moment when she was introduced to Churchill during a reception, and he gruffly inquired as to exactly what she was trying to prove with her affected British accent. It is quite difficult to read expressions on her unique features, but for a moment I was sure she was going to kill the old man right there in front of the Queen, Prime Minister, and a dozen British aces. Thankfully she gritted her teeth and put it down to Lord Winston’s advanced age. Even when he was younger, he was never precisely reticent about expressing his thoughts.
Hiram Worchester has perhaps suffered more on this trip than any of us. Whatever reserves of strength were left to him burned out in Germany, and since then he has seemed exhausted. He shattered his special custom seat as we were leaving Paris-some sort of miscalculation with his gravity control, I believe, but it delayed us nearly three hours while repairs were made. His temper has been fraying too. During the business with the seat, Billy Ray made one too many fat jokes, and Hiram finally snapped and turned on him in a white rage, calling him (among other things) an “incompetent little guttermouth.” That was all it took. Carnifex just grinned that ugly little grin of his, said, “For that you get your ass kicked, fat man,” and started to get out of his seat. “ I didn’t say you could get up,” Hiram replied; he made a fist and trebled Billy’s weight, slamming him right back into the seat cushion. Billy was still straining to get up and Hiram was making him heavier and heavier, and I don’t know where it might have ended if Dr. Tachyon hadn’t broken it up by putting both of them to sleep with his mind control.
I don’t know whether to be disgusted or amused when I see these world-famous aces squabbling like petty children, but Hiram at least has the excuse of ill health. He looks terrible these days: white-faced, puffy, perspiring, short of breath. He has a huge, hideous scab on his neck, just below the collar line, that he picks at when he thinks no one is watching. I would strongly advise him to seek out medical attention, but he is so surly of late that I doubt my counsel would be welcomed. His short visits to New York during the tour always seemed to do him a world of good, however, so we can only hope that homecoming restores his health and spirits.
And lastly, me.
Observing and commenting on my fellow travelers and what they’ve gained or lost, that’s the easy part. Summing up my own experience is harder. I’m older and, I hope, wiser than when we left Tomlin International, and undeniably I am five months closer to death.
Whether this journal is published or not after my passing, Mr. Ackroyd assures me that he will personally deliver copies to my grandchildren and do everything in his power to make sure that they are read. So perhaps it is to them that I write these last, concluding words ... to them, and all the others like them ....
Robert, Cassie ... we never met, you and I, and the blame for that falls as much on me as on your mother and your grandmother. If you wonder why, remember what I wrote about self-loathing and please understand that I was not exempt. Don’t think too harshly of me ... or of your mother or grandmother. Joanna was far too young to understand what was happening when her daddy changed, and as for Mary ... we loved each other once, and I cannot go to my grave hating her. The truth is, had our roles been reversed, I might well have done the same thing. We’re all only human, and we do the best we can with the hand that fate has dealt us.
Your grandfather was a joker, yes. But I hope as you read this book you’ll realize that he was something else as wellthat he accomplished a few things, spoke up for his people, did some good. The JADL is perhaps as good a legacy as most men leave behind them, a better monument to my mind than the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, or Jetboy’s Tomb. All in all, I haven’t done so badly. I’ll leave behind some friends who loved me, many treasured memories, much unfinished business. I’ve wet my foot in the Ganges, heard Big Ben sound the hour, and walked on the Great Wall of China. I’ve seen my daughter born and held her in my arms, and I’ve dined with aces and TV stars, with presidents and kings.
Most important, I think I leave the world a slightly better place for my having been in it. And that’s really all that can be asked of any of us.
Remember me to your children, if you will.
My name was Xavier Desmond, and I was a man.
FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES
JULY 17, 1987
Xavier Desmond, the founder and president emeritus of the jokers’ Anti-Defamation League (JADL) and a community leader among the victims of the wild card virus for more than two decades, died yesterday at the Blythe van Rensselaer Memorial Clinic, after a long illness.
Desmond, who was popularly known as the “Mayor of Jokertown,” was the owner of the Funhouse, a well-known Bowery night spot. He began his political activities in 1964, when he founded the JADL to combat prejudice against wild card victims and promote community education about the virus and its effects. In time, the JADL became the nation’s largest and most influential joker rights organization, and Desmond the most widely-respected joker spokesman. He sat on several mayors’ advisory committees, served as a delegate on the recent global tour sponsored by the World Health Organization. Although he stepped down as president of the JADL in 1984, citing age and ill health, he continued to influence the organization’s policies until his death.
He is survived by his former wife, Mary Radford Desmond, his daughter, Mrs. Joanna Horton, and his grandchildren, Robert Van Ness and Cassandra Horton.
From “Red Aces, Black Years,” by Elizabeth H. Crofton, New Republic, May 1977.
From the moment in 1950 when he declared in his famous Wheeling, West Virginia, speech that “... ave here in my hand a list of fifty-seven wild cards known to be living and working secretly in the United States today,” there was little doubt that Senator Joseph R. McCarthy had replaced the faceless members of HUAC as the leader of the anti-wild card hysteria that swept across the nation in the early 50s.
Certainly, HUAC could claim credit for discrediting and destroying Archibald Holmes’s Exotics for Democracy, the “Four Aces” of the halcyon postwar years and the most visible living symbols of the havoc the wild card virus had wrought upon the nation (to be sure, there were ten jokers for every ace, but like blacks, homosexuals, and freaks, the jokers were invisible men throughout this period, steadfastly ignored by a society that would have preferred they not exist). When the Four Aces fell, many felt the circus had ended. They were wrong. It was just beginning, and Joe McCarthy was its ringmaster.
The hunt for ‘Red Aces’ that McCarthy instigated and fronted produced no single, spectacular victory to rival HUAC’s, but ultimately McCarthy’s work affected many more people, and proved lasting where HUAC’s triumph had been ephemeral. The Senate Committee on Ace Resources and Endeavors (SCARE) was birthed in 1952 as the forum for McCarthy’s ace-hunts, but ultimately became a permanent part of the Senate’s committee structure. In time SCARE, like HUAC, would become a mere ghost of its former self, and decades later, under the chairmanship of men like Hubert Humphrey, Joseph Montoya, and Gregg Hartmann, it would evolve into an entirely different sort of legislative animal, but McCarthy’s SCARE was everything its acronym implied. Between 1952 and 1956, more than two hundred men and women were served with subpoenas by SCARE, often on no more substantial grounds than reports by anonymous informants that they had on some occasion displayed wild card powers.
It was a true modern witch-hunt, and like their spiritual ancestors at Salem, those hauled before TailGunner Joe for the non-crime of being an ace had a hard time proving their innocence. How do you prove that you can’t 8y? None of SCARE’s victims ever answered that question satisfactorily. And the blacklist was always waiting for those whose testimony was considered unsatisfactory.
The most tragic fates were suffered by those who actually were wild card victims, and admitted their ace powers openly before the committee. Of those cases, none was more poignant than that of Timothy Wiggins, or “Mr. Rainbow,” as he was billed when performing. “If I’m an ace, I’d hate to see a deuce,” Wiggins told McCarthy when summoned in 1953, and from that moment onward “deuce” entered the language as the term for an ace whose wild card powers are trivial or useless. Such was certainly the case with Wiggins, a plump, nearsighted, forty-eight-year-old entertainer whose wild card power, the ability to change the color of his skin, had propelled him to the dizzy heights of second billing in the smaller Catskill resort hotels, where his act consisted of strumming a ukulele and singing wobbly falsetto versions of songs like “Red, Red Robin,”
“Yellow Rose of Texas,” and “Wild Card Blues,” accompanying each rendition with appropriate color changes. Ace or deuce, Mr. Rainbow received no mercy from McCarthy or SCARE. Blacklisted and unable to secure bookings, Wiggins hanged himself in his daughter’s Bronx apartment less than fourteen months after his testimony.
Other victims saw their lives blighted and destroyed in only slightly less dramatic ways: they lost jobs and careers to the blacklist, lost friends and spouses, inevitably lost custody of their children in the all-too-frequent divorces. At least twenty-two aces were uncovered during SCARE’s investigatory heyday (McCarthy himself often claimed credit for having “exposed” twice that many, but included in his totals numerous cases where the accused’s “powers” were established only by hearsay and circumstantial evidence, without a shred of actual documentation), including such dangerous criminals as a Queens housewife who levitated when asleep, a longshoreman who could plunge his hand into a bathtub and bring the water to a boil in just under seven minutes, an amphibious Philadelphia schoolteacher (she kept her gills concealed beneath her clothing, until the day she unwisely gave herself away by saving a drowning child), and even a potbellied Italian greengrocer who displayed an astonishing ability to grow hair at will.
Shuffling through so many wild cards, SCARE inevitably turned up some genuine aces among the deuces, including Lawrence Hague, the telepathic stockbroker whose confession triggered a panic on Wall Street, and the so-called “panther woman” of Weehawken whose metamorphosis before the newsreel cameras horrified theatergoers from coast to coast. Even that paled beside the case of the mystery man apprehended while looting New York’s diamond center, his pockets bulging with gemstones and amphetamines. This unknown ace displayed reflexes four times as fast as those of a normal man, as well as astonishing strength and a seeming immunity to handgun fire. After flinging a police car the length of the block and hospitalizing a dozen policemen, he was finally subdued with tear gas. SCARE immediately issued a subpoena, but the unidentified man lapsed into a deep, comalike sleep before he could take the stand. To McCarthy’s disgust, the man could not be roused-until the day, eight months later, when his specially reinforced maximum-security cell was suddenly and mysteriously found empty. A startled trusty swore that he had seen the man walk through the wall, but the description he gave did not match that of the vanished prisoner.
McCarthy’s most lasting achievement, if it may be termed an achievement, came with the passage of the socalled “Wild Card Acts.” The Exotic Powers Control Act, enacted in 1954, was the first. It required any person exhibiting wild card powers to register immediately with the federal government; failure to register was punishable by prison terms of up to ten years. This was followed by the Special Conscription Act, granting the Selective Service Bureau the power to induct registered aces into government service for indefinite terms of service. Rumors persist that a number of aces, complying with the new laws, were indeed inducted into (variously) the Army, the FBI, and the Secret Service during the late fifties, but if true the agencies employing their services kept the names, powers, and very existence of these operatives a closely held secret.
In fact, only two men were ever openly drafted under the Special Conscription Act during the entire twenty-two years that the statute remained on the books: Lawrence Hague, who vanished into government service after the stock manipulation charges against him were dropped, and an even more celebrated ace whose case made headlines all over the nation. David “Envoy” Harstein, the charismatic negotiator of the Four Aces, was slapped with an induction notice less than a year after his release from prison, where HUAC had confined him for contempt of Congress. Harstein never reported for conscription. Instead he vanished totally from public life in early 1955, and even the FBI’s nationwide manhunt failed to turn up any trace of the man whom McCarthy himself dubbed “the most dangerous pink in America.”
The Wild Card Acts were McCarthy’s greatest triumph, but ironically enough their passage sowed the seed of his undoing. When those widely publicized statutes were finally signed into law, the mood of the nation seemed to change. Over and over again McCarthy had told the public that the laws were needed to deal with hidden aces undermining the nation. Well, the nation now replied, the laws are passed, the problem is solved, and we’ve had enough of all this.
The next year, McCarthy introduced the Alien Disease Containment Bill, which would have mandated compulsory sterilization for all wild card victims, jokers as well as aces. That was too much for even his staunchest supporters. The bill went down to crashing defeat in both House and Senate. In an effort to recoup and recapture the headlines, McCarthy launched an ill-advised SCARE investigation of the Army, determined to ferret out the “aces in the hole” that rumor insisted had been secretly recruited years before the Special Conscription Act. But public opinion swung dramatically against him during the Army-McCarthy hearings, which culminated in his censure by the Senate.
In early 1955, many had thought McCarthy might be strong enough to wrest the 1956 Republican presidential nomination from Eisenhower, but by the time of the 1956 election, the political climate had changed so markedly that he was hardly a factor.
On April 28, 1957, he was admitted to the Naval Medical Center at Bethesda, Maryland, a broken man who talked incessantly about those who he felt had betrayed him. In his last days, he insisted that his fall was all Harstein’s fault, that the Envoy was out there somewhere, crisscrossing the country, poisoning the people against McCarthy with sinister alien mind control.
Joe McCarthy died on May 2, and the nation shrugged. Yet his legacy survived him: SCARE, the Wild Card Acts, an atmosphere of fear. If Harstein was out there, he did not come forward to gloat. Like many other aces of his time, he remained in hiding.
From The New York Times, September 1, 1966.
JOKERTOWN CLINIC TO OPEN ON WILD CARD DAY
The opening of a privately funded research hospital specializing in the treatment of the Takisian wild card virus was announced yesterday by Dr. Tachyon, the alien scientist who helped to develop the virus. Dr. Tachyon will serve as chief of staff at the new institution, to be located on South Street, overlooking the East River.
The facility will be known as the Blythe van Renssaeler Memorial Clinic in honor of the late Mrs. Blythe Stanhope van Renssaeler. Mrs. van Renssaeler, a member of the Exotics for Democracy from 1947 to 1950, died in 1953 in Wittier Sanatorium. She was better known as “Brain Trust.”
The Van Renssaeler Clinic will open its doors to the public on September 15th, the twentieth anniversary of the release of the wild card virus over Manhattan. Emergency room service and outpatient psychological care will be provided by the 196-bed hospital. “We’re here to serve the neighborhood and the city,” Dr. Tachyon said in an afternoon press conference on the steps of Jetboy’s Tomb, “but our first priority is going to be the treatment of those who have too long gone untreated, the jokers whose unique and often desperate medical needs have been largely ignored by existing hospitals. The wild card was played twenty years ago, and this continued willful ignorance about the virus is criminal and inexcusable.” Dr. Tachyon said that he hoped the Van Renssaeler Clinic might become the world’s leading center for wildcard research, and spearhead efforts to perfect the cure for wild card, the so-called “trump” virus.
The clinic will be housed in a historic waterfront building originally constructed in 1874. The building was a hotel, known as the Seaman’s Haven, from 1888 through 1913. From 1913 through 1942 it was the Sacred Heart Home for Wayward Girls, after which it served as an inexpensive lodging house.
Dr. Tachyon announced that the purchase of the building and a complete interior renovation had been funded by a grant from the Stanhope Foundation of Boston, headed by Mr. George C. Stanhope. Mr .. Stanhope is the father of Mrs. van Renssaeler. “If Blythe were alive today, I know she’d want nothing more than to work at Dr. Tachyon’s side,” Mr. Stanhope said.
Initially the work at the clinic will be funded by fees and private donations, but Dr. Tachyon admitted that he had recently returned from Washington, where he conferred with Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey. Sources close to the Vice President indicate that the administration is considering partial funding of the jokertown clinic through the offices of the Senate Committee on Ace Resources and Endeavors (SCARE).
A crowd of approximately five hundred, many of them obvious victims of the wild card virus, greeted Dr. Tachyon’s announcement with enthusiastic applause.
From “Wild Card Chic,” by Tom Wolfe, New York, June 1971.
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. These are nice. Little egg rolls, filled with crabmeat and shrimp. Very tasty. A bit greasy, though. Wonder what the aces do to get the grease spots off the fingers of their gloves? Maybe they prefer the stuffed mushrooms, or the little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts, all of which are at this very moment being offered them on silver platters by tall, smiling waiters in Aces High livery .... hese are the questions to ponder on these Wild Card Chic evenings. For example, that black man there by the window, the one shaking hands with Hiram Worchester himself, the one with the black silk shirt and the black leather coat and that absolutely unbelievable swollen forehead, that dangerous-looking black man with the cocoa-colored skin and almond-shaped eyes, who came off the elevator with three of the most ravishing women any of them have ever seen, even here in this room full of beautiful people is he, an ace, a palpable ace, going to pick up a little egg roll stuffed with shrimp and crabmeat when the waiter drifts by, and just pop it down the gullet without so much as missing a syllable of Hiram’s cultured geniality, or is he more of a stuffed mushroom man at that ...
Hiram is splendid. A large man, a formidable man, six foot two and broad all over, in a bad light he might pass for Orson Welles. His black, spade-shaped beard is immaculately groomed, and when he smiles his teeth are very white. He smiles often. He is a warm man, a gracious man, and he greets the aces with the same quick firm handshake, the same pat on the shoulder, the same familiar exhortation with which he greets Lillian, and Felicia and Lenny, and Mayor Hartmann, and Jason, John, and D. D.
How much do you think I weigh? he asks them jovially, and presses them for a guess, three hundred pounds, three fifty, four hundred. He chuckles at their guesses, a deep chuckle, a resonant chuckle, because this huge man weighs only thirty pounds and he’s set up a scale right here in the middle of Aces High his lavish new restaurant high atop the Empire State Building, amid the crystal and silver and crisp white tablecloths, a scale like you might find in a gym, just so he can prove his point. He hops on and off nimbly whenever he’s challenged. Thirty pounds, and Hiram does enjoy his little joke. But don’t call him Fatman anymore. This ace has come out of the deck now, he’s a new kind of ace, who knows all the right people and all the right wines, who looks absolutely correct in his tuxedo, and owns the highest, chic-est restaurant in town.
What an evening! The tables are set all around, the silver gleaming, the tremulous little flames of the candles reflected in the encircling windows, a bottomless blackness with a thousand stars, and it is that moment Hiram loves. There seem to be a thousand stars inside and a thousand stars outside, a Manhattan tower full of stars, the highest grandest tower of all, with marvelous people drifting through the heavens, Jason Robards, John and D. D. Ryan, Mike Nichols, Willie Joe Namath, John Lindsay, Richard Avedon, Woody Allen, Aaron Copland, Lillian Heilman, Steve Sondheim, Josh Davidson, Leonard Bernstein, Otto Preminger, Julie Belafonte, Barbara Walters, the Penns, the Greens, the O’Neals ... and now, in this season of Wild Card Chic, the aces.
That knot of people there, that cluster of enthralled, adoring, excited people with the tall, thin champagne glasses in their hands and the rapt expressions on their faces, in their midst, the object of all their attention, is a little man in a crushed-velvet tuxedo, an orange crushedvelvet tuxedo, with tails, and a ruled lemon-yellow shirt, and long shiny red hair. Tisianne brant Ts’ara sek Halima sek Ragnar sek Omian is holding court again, the way he must have done once on Takis, and some of the marvelous people about him are even calling him “Prince” and “Prince Tisianne,” though they don’t often pronounce it right, and to most of them, now and forever, he will remain Dr. Tachyon. He’s real, this prince from another planet, and the very idea of him-an exile, a hero, imprisoned by the Army and persecuted by HUAC, a man who has lived two human lifetimes and seen things none of them can imagine, who labors selflessly among the wretched of Jokertown, well, the excitement runs through Aces High like a rogue hormone, and Tachyon seems excited too, you can tell by the way his lilac-colored eyes keep slipping over to linger on the slender Oriental woman who arrived with that other ace, that dangerouslooking Fortunato fellow.
“I’ve never met an ace before,” the refrain goes. “This is a first for me.” The thrill vibrates through the air of Aces High, until the whole eighty-sixth floor is thrumming to it, a first for me, never known anyone like you, a first for me, always wanted to meet you, a first for me, and somewhere in the damp soil of Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy spins in his coffin with a high, thin whirring sound, and all his worms have come home to roost now. These are no Hollywood poseurs, no dreary politicians, no faded literary flowers, no pathetic jokers begging for help, these are real nobility, these aces, these enchanting electric aces.
So beautiful. Aurora, sitting on Hiram’s bar, showing the long, long legs that have made her the toast of Broadway, the men clustered around her, laughing at her every joke. Remarkable, that red-gold hair of hers, curled and perfumed, tumbling down across her bare shoulders, and those bruised, pouting lips, and when she laughs, the northern lights flicker around her and the men burst into applause. She’s signed to make her first feature film next year, playing opposite Redford, and Mike Nichols will direct. The first ace to star in a major motion picture since—no, we wouldn’t want to mention him, would we? Not when we’re having so much fun.
So astonishing. The things they can do, these aces. A dapper little man dressed all in green produces an acorn and a pocketful of potting soil, borrows a brandy snifter from the bartender, and grows a small oak tree right there in the center of Aces High. A dark woman with sharply sculpted features arrives in jeans and a denim shirt, but when Hiram threatens to turn her away, she claps her hands together and suddenly she is armored head to toe in black metal that gleams like ebony. Another clap, and she’s wearing an evening gown, green velvet, off the shoulder, perfect for her, and even Fortunato looks twice. When the ice for the champagne buckets runs low, a burly rock-hard black man steps forward, takes the Dom Perignon in hand, and grins boyishly as frost rimes the outside of the bottle. “Just right,” he says when he gives the bottle to Hiram. “Any longer and I’d freeze it solid.” Hiram laughs and congratulates him, though he doesn’t believe he has the honor. The black man smiles enigmatically. “Croyd,” is all he says.
So romantic, so tragic. Down there by the end of the bar, in gray leather, that’s Tom Douglas, isn’t it? It is, it is, the Lizard King himself, I hear they just dropped the charges, but what courage that took, what commitment, and say, whatever happened to that Radical fellow who helped him out? Douglas looks terrible, though. Wasted, haunted. They crowd close around him, and his eyes snap up and briefly the specter of a great black cobra looms above him, dark counterpoint to Aurora’s shimmering colors, and silence ripples across Aces High until they leave the Lizard King alone again.
So dashing, so flamboyant. Cyclone knows how to make an entrance, doesn’t he? But that’s why Hiram insisted on the Sunset Balcony, after all, not just for drinks out under the summer stars and the glorious view of the sun going down across the Hudson, but to give his aces a place to land, and it’s only natural that Cyclone would be the first. Why ride the elevator when you can ride the winds? And the way he dresses-all in blue and white, the jumpsuit makes him look so lithe and rakish, and that cape, the way it hangs from his wrists and ankles, and then balloons out in flight when he whips up his winds. Once he’s inside, shaking Hiram’s hand, he takes off his aviator’s helmet. He’s a fashion leader, Cyclone, the first ace to wear an honest-to-god costume, and he started back in ‘65, long before these other aces-come-lately, wore his colors even through those two dreary years in ‘Nam, but just because a man wears a mask doesn’t mean he has to make a fetish of hiding his identity, does it? Those days are past, Cyclone is Vernon Henry Carlysle of San Francisco, the whole world knows, the fear is dead, this is the age of Wild Card Chic when everyone wants to be an ace. Cyclone came a long way for this party, but the gathering wouldn’t be complete without the West Coast’s premier ace, would it?
Although-taboo thought that it is, with stars and aces glittering all around on a night when you can see fifty miles in every direction-really, the gathering isn’t quite complete, is it? Earl Sanderson is still in France, though he did send a brief, but sincere, note of apology in reply to Hiram’s invitation. A great man, that one, a great man greatly wronged. And David Harstein, the lost Envoy, Hiram even ran an ad in the Times, DAVID WON’T YOU PLEASE COME HOME? but he’s not here either. And the Turtle, where is the Great and Powerful Turtle? There were rumors that on this special magical night, this halcyon time for Wild Card Chic, the Turtle would come out of his shell and shake Hiram’s hand and announce his name to the world, but no, he doesn’t seem to be here, you don’t think ... god, no ... you don’t think those old stories are true and the Turtle is a joker after all?
Cyclone is telling Hiram that he thinks his threeyear-old daughter has inherited his wind powers, and Hiram beams and shakes his hand and congratulates the doting daddy and proposes a toast. Even his powerful, cultivated voice cannot cut through the din of the moment, so Hiram makes a small fist and does that thing he does to the gravity waves and makes himself even lighter than thirty pounds, until he drifts up toward the ceiling. Aces High goes silent as Hiram floats beside his huge art-deco chandelier, raises his Pimm’s Cup, and proposes his toast. Lenny Bernstein and John Lindsay drink to little Mistral Helen Carlysle, second generation ace-to-be. The O’Neals and the Ryans lift their glasses to Black Eagle, the Envoy, and the memory of Blythe Stanhope van Renssaeler. Lillian Hellman, Jason Robards, and Broadway Joe toast the Turtle and Tachyon, and everyone drinks to Jetboy, father of us all.
And after the toasting come the causes. The Wild Card Acts are still on the books, and in this day and age that’s a disgrace, something must be done. Dr. Tachyon needs help, help for his Jokertown Clinic, help with his lawsuit, how long has that been dragging on now, his suit to win custody of his spaceship back from the government that wrongly impounded it in 1946-the shame of it, to take his ship after he came all that way to help, it makes them angry, all of them, and of course they pledge their help, their money, their lawyers, their influence. A beautiful woman on either side of him, Tachyon speaks of his ship. It’s alive, he tells them, and by now it’s certainly lonely, and as he talks he begins to weep, and when he tells them that the ship’s name is Baby, there’s a tear behind many a contact lens, threatening the artfully applied mascara below. And of course something must be done about the joker Brigade, that’s little better than genocide, and ...
But that’s when dinner is served. The guests drift to their assigned seats, Hiram’s seating chart is a masterpiece, measured and spiced as precisely as his gourmet food, everywhere just the right balance of wealth and wisdom and wit and beauty and bravura and celebrity, with an ace at every table of course, of course, otherwise someone might go away feeling cheated, in this year and month and hour of Wild Card Chic ...
From “Fear and Loathing in Jokertown,” by Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, Rolling Stone, August 23, 1974.
Dawn is coming up in Jokertown now. I can hear the rumble of the garbage trucks under my window at the South Street Inn, out here by the docks. This is the end of the line, for garbage and everything else, the asshole of America, and I’m feeling close to the end of my line too, after a week of cruising the most vile and poisonous streets in New York ... when I look up, a clawed hand heaves itself over the sill, and a minute later it’s followed by a face. I’m six stories above the street and this speedcrazed shithead comes climbing in the window like it’s nothing. Maybe he’s right; this is Jokertown, and life runs fast & mean here. It’s like wandering through a Nazi death camp during a bad trip; you don’t understand half of what you see, but it scares the piss out of you just the same.
The thing coming in my window is seven fucking feet tall, with triple jointed daddy-long-legs arms that dangle so low his claws cut gouges in the hardwood floor, a complexion like Count Dracula, and a snout on him like the Big Bad Wolf. When he grins, the whole damn thing opens on a foot of pointed green teeth. The fucker even spits venom, which is a good talent to have if you’re going to wander around Jokertown at night. “Got any speed?” he asks as he climbs down from the window. He spies the bottle of tequila on the nightstand, snares it with one of those ridiculous arms of his, and helps himself to a big swallow.
“Do I look like the kind of man who’d do crank?” I say.
“Guess we’ll have to do mine then,” Croyd says, and pulls a fistful of blacks from his pocket. He takes four of them and washes them down with more of my Cuervo Gold ...
... imagine if Hubert Humphrey had drawn a joker, picture the Hube with a trunk stuck in the middle of his face, like a flaccid pink worm where his nose ought to be, and you’ve got a good fix on Xavier Desmond. His hair is thin or gone, and his eyes are gray and baggy as his suit. He’s been at it for ten years now, and you can tell it’s wearing him out. The local columnists call him the mayor of Jokertown and the voice of the jokers; that’s about as much as he’s accomplished in ten years, him and his sorry hack Dockers’ Anti-Defamation League-a couple of bogus titles, a certain status as Tammanys best-loved joker pet, invitations to a few nice Village parties when the hostess can’t get an ace on such short notice.
He stands on the platform in his three-piece suit, holding his fucking hat in his trunk for Christ’s sake, talking about joker solidarity, and voting drives, and joker cops for Jokertown, doing the old soft-shoe like it really meant something. Behind him, under a sagging JADL banner, is the sorriest lineup of pathetic losers you’d ever want to see. If they were blacks they’d be Uncle Toms, but the jokers haven’t come up with a name for them yet ... but they will, you can bet your mask on that. The JADL faithful are heavy into masks, like good jokers everywhere. Not just ski masks and dominoes either. Walk down the Bowery or Chrystie Street, or linger for a while in front of Tachyon’s clinic, and you see facial wear out of some acidhead’s nightmare: feathered birdmasks & deathsheads & leather ratfaces & monks cowls & shiny sequined individualized “fashion masks” that go for a hundred bucks a throw. The masks are part of the color of Jokertown, and the tourists from Boise and Duluth and Muskogee all make sure and buy a plastic mask or two to take home as souvenirs, and every half-blind-drunk hack reporter who decides to do another brainless write-up on the poor fucked-up jokers notices the masks right off. They stare so hard at the masks that they don’t notice the shiny-thin Salvation Army suits and faded-print house dresses the masked jokers are wearing, they don’t notice how old some of those masks are getting, and they sure as shit don’t pick up on the younger jokers, the ones in leather & Levi’s, who aren’t wearing any masks at all. “This is what I look like,” a girl with a face like a jar of smashed assholes told me that afternoon outside a rancid Jokertown porn house. “I could give a shit if the nats like it or not. I’m supposed to wear a mask so some nat bitch from Queens won’t get sick to her stomach when she looks at me? Fuck that.”
Maybe a third of the crowd listening to Xavier Desmond are wearing masks. Maybe less. Whenever he stops for applause, the people in the masks slap their hands together, but you can tell it’s an effort, even for them. The rest of them are just listening, waiting, and they’ve got eyes as ugly as their deformities. It’s a mean young bunch out there, and a lot of them are wearing gang colors, with names like DEMON PRINCES & KILLER GEEKS & WEREWOLVES. I’m standing off to the side, wondering if the Tack is going to show up as advertised, and I don’t see who starts it, but suddenly Desmond just shuts up, right in the middle of a boring declaration about how aces & jokers & nats is all god’s chillums under the skin, and when I look back over they’re booing him and throwing peanuts, they’re pelting him with salted peanuts still in the shell, bouncing them right off his head and his chest and his fucking trunk, tossing them into his hat, and Desmond is just standing there gaping. He’s supposed to be the voice of these people, he read it in the Daily News and the Jokertown Cry, and the sorry old fucker doesn’t have the least little turd of an idea of what’s going down ...
... just past midnight when I walk outside of Freakers to piss casually into the gutter, figuring it’s a safer bet than the men’s room, and the odds against a cop cruising through Jokertown at this time of night are so remote that they’re laughable. The streetlight is busted, and for a moment I think it’s Wilt Chamberlain standing there, but then he comes closer and I notice the arms & claws & snout. Skin like old ivory. I ask him what the fuck his problem is, and he asks me if I’m not the guy wrote the book about the Angels, and a half-hour later we’re sitting in a booth in the back of an all-night place on Broome Street, while the waitress pours gallons of black coffee for him. She has long blond hair and nice legs, and on the breast of her pink uniform it says Sally, and she’s good to look at until you notice her face. I discover that I’m looking down at my plate whenever she comes near, which makes me sick & sad & pissed off. The Snout is saying something about how he never learned algebra, and there’s nothing wrong with me that about four fingers of king-hell crank wouldn’t cure, and after I mention that the Snout shows me his teeth and mentions that while there’s a definite scarcity of real high-voltage crank around these days, it just so happens that he knows where he can put his hands on some ...
...”We’re talking wounds here, we’re talking real deep-bleeding poisonous wounds, the kind that can’t be treated with a fucking Band-Aid, and that’s all Desmond’s got up his trunk, just a fucking lot of Band-Aids,” the dwarf told me, after he gave me his Revolutionary Drug Brothers handshake, or whatever the fuck the goddamned thing is supposed to be. As jokers go, he got a pretty decent draw-there were dwarfs long before the wild card-but he’s still damned pissed-off about it.
“He’s been holding that hat in his trunk for ten years now, and all that ever happens is the nats shit in it. Well, that’s over. We’re not asking anymore, we’re telling them, the JJS is telling them, and we’ll stick it right in their pretty pearllike ears if we have to.” The JJS is the jokers for a just Society, and it’s got about as much in common with the JADL as a piranha has with one of those giant pop-eyed white goldfish you see waddling around in decorative pools outside of dentists’ offices. The JJS doesn’t have Captain Tacky or Jimmy Roosevelt or Rev. Ralph Abernathy helping out on its board of directors-in fact it doesn’t have a board of directors, and it doesn’t sell memberships to concerned citizens and sympathetic aces either. The Hube would feel damned uncomfortable at a JJS meeting, whether he had a trunk on his face or not ...
... even at four in the morning, the Village isn’t Jokertown, and that’s part of the problem, but mostly it’s just that Croyd is hotwired and crazy on meanass crank, and as far as I can tell he hasn’t slept for a week.
Somewhere in the Village is the guy we set out to find, a half-black all-ace pimp who’s supposed to have the sweetest girls in the city, but we can’t find him, and Croyd keeps insisting that the streets are all changing around, like they’re alive and treacherous and out to get him. Cars slow down when they see Croyd swinging down the pavement with those long triple-jointed daddy-long-legs strides of his, and speed up fast again when he looks over at them and snarls. We’re in front of a deli when he forgets all about the pimp we’re supposed to find and decides he’s thirsty instead. He wraps his claws around the steel shutters, gives a little grunt, and just yanks the whole thing out of the brick storefront and uses it to smash in the window glass halfway through the case of Mexican beer we hear the sirens. Croyd opens his snout and spits at the door, and the poison shit hits the glass and starts burning right through it: “They’re after me again,” he says in a voice full of doom & hate & speedfreak rage & paranoia. “They’re all after me.” And then he looks at me and that’s all it takes, I know I’m in deep shit. “You led them here,” he says, and I tell him no, I like him, some of my best fucking friends are jokers, and the red & blue flashers are out front as he jumps to his feet, grabs me, and screams, “I’m not a joker, you fuck, I’m a goddamned ace,” and throws me right through the window, the other window, the one where the plate glass was still intact. But not for long ... while I’m lying in the gutter, bleeding, he makes his own exit, right out the front door with a sixpack of Dos Equis under his arm, and the cops pump a couple rounds into him, but he just laughs at them, and starts to climb ... His claws leave deep holes in the brick. When he reaches the roof, he howls at the moon, unzips his pants, and pisses down on all of us before he vanishes ...
From “Thirty-Five Years of Wild Cards, a Retrospective,” Aces! magazine, September 15, 1981.
“I can’t die yet, I haven’t seen The Jolson Story.”
—Robert Tomlin
“They are an abomination unto the Lord, and on their faces they bear the mark of the beast, and their number in the land is six hundred and sixty-six.”
—anonymous anti-joker leaflet, 1946
“They call it quarantine, not discrimination. We are not a race, they tell us, we are not a religion, we are diseased and so it is right that they set us apart, though they know full well that the wild card is not contagious. Ours is a sickness of the body, theirs a contagion of the soul.”
—Xavier Desmond
“Let them say what they will. I can still fly.”
—Earl Sanderson, Jr.
“Is it my fault that everyone likes me, and no one likes you?”
—David Harstein (to Richard Nixon)
“I like the taste of joker blood.”
—graffiti, NYC subway
“I don’t care what they look like, they bleed red just like anybody else ... most of them, anyway.”
—Lt. Col. John Garrick, Joker Brigade
“If I’m an ace, I’d hate to see a deuce.”
—Timothy Wiggins
“You want to know if I’m an ace or a joker? The answer is yes.”
—The Turtle
I’m a joker, I’m insane,
And you cannot say my name
Coiled in the streets
Waiting only for night
I am the serpent who gnaws the roots of the world
—‘Serpent Time,’ Thomas Marion Douglas
“I’m delighted to have Baby returned to me, but I have no intention of leaving earth. This planet is my home now, and those touched by the wild card are my children.”
—Dr. Tachyon, on the occasion of the return of his spaceship
“They are the demon children of the Great Satan, America.”
—Ayatollah Khomeini
“In hindsight, the decision to use aces to secure the safe return of the hostages was probably a mistake, and I take full responsibility for the failure of the mission.”—President Jimmy Carter “Think like an ace, and you can win like an ace. Think like a joker, and the joke’s on you.”
—Think Like An Ace! (Ballantine, 1981)
“The parents of America are deeply concerned about the excessive coverage of aces and their exploits in the media. They are bad role models for our children, and thousands are injured or killed each year while attempting to imitate their freak powers.”
—Naomi Weathers, American Parents League
“Even their kids want to be like us. These are the ‘80s. A new decade, man, and we’re the new people. We can fly, and we don’t need no bogus airplane like that nat Jetboy The nats don’t know it yet, but they’re obsolete. This is a time for aces.”
—anonymous letter in Jokertown Cry, January 1, 1981
After he had locked up the newsstand for the night, Jube loaded his shopping cart with newspapers and set out on his daily round of the Jokertown bars.
With Thanksgiving less than a week away, the cold November wind had a bitter edge as it came skirling down the Bowery. Jube trudged along with one hand on his battered old porkpie hat, while the other pulled the two-wheeled wire cart over the cracked sidewalk. His pants were big enough to hold a revival meeting, and his blue short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt was covered with surfers. He never wore a coat. Jube had been selling papers and magazines from the corner of Hester Street and the Bowery since the summer of 1952, and he’d never worn a coat once. Whenever he was asked about it, he would laugh around his tusks, slap his belly, and say, “This is all the insulation I need, yes sir.”
On a tall day, wearing heels, Jube Benson topped five feet by almost an inch, but there was a lot of him in that compact package, three hundred pounds of oily blue-black flesh that reminded you of half-melted rubber. His face was broad and cratered, his skull covered with tufts of stiff red hair, and two small tusks curved down from the corners of his mouth. He smelled like buttered popcorn, and knew more jokes than anyone else in Jokertown.
Jube waddled along briskly, grinning at passersby, hawking his papers to the passing cars (even at this hour, the main drag of Jokertown was far from deserted). At the Funhouse, he left a stack of the Daily News for the doorman to hand out to departing patrons, along with a Times for the owner, Des. A couple blocks down was the Chaos Club, which gave away a stack of papers too. Jube had saved a copy of National
Informer for Lambent. The doorman took it in a gaunt, glowing hand. “Thanks, Walrus.”
“Read all about it,” Jube said. “Says there they got a new treatment, turns jokers to aces.”
Lambent laughed. “Yeah, right,” he said, riffling the pages. A slow smile spread across his phosphorescent face. “Hey, looka here, Sue Ellen’s going to go back to J.R.”
“She always does,” Jube said.
“This time she’s going to have his joker baby,” Lambent said. “Jesus, what a dumb cunt.” He folded the paper under his arm. “Have you heard?” he asked. “Gimli’s coming back.”
“You don’t say,” Jube replied. The door opened behind them. Lambent sprang to hold it, and whistled down a cab for the well-dressed couple who emerged. As he helped them in, he gave them their free Daily News, and the man laid a five against his palm. Lambent made it vanish, with a wink at Jube. Jube waved and went on his way, leaving the phosphorescent doorman standing by the curb in his Chaos Club livery, perusing his Informer.
The Chaos Club and the Funhouse were the class establishments; the bars, taverns, and coffee shops on the side streets seldom gave anything away. But he was known in all of them, and they let him hawk his papers table to table. Jube stopped at the Pit and at Hairy ‘s Kitchen, played a game of shuffleboard in Squisher’s Basement, delivered a Penthouse to Wally of Wally’s. At Black Mike’s Pub, under the neon Schaefer sign, he joked with a couple of working girls and let them tell him about the kinky nat politico they’d double-teamed.
He left Captain McPherson’s Times with the desk sergeant at the Jokertown precinct house, and sold a Sporting News to a plainclothesman who thought he had a lead on jokers Wild, where a male hooker had been castrated on stage last week. At the Twisted Dragon on the fringes of Chinatown Jube got rid of his Chinese papers before heading down to Freakers on Chatham Square, where he sold a copy of the Daily News and a half-dozen Jokertown Crys.
The Cry offices were across the square. The night editor always took a Times, a Daily News, a Post, and a Village Voice, and poured Jube a cup of black, muddy coffee. “Slow night,”
Crabcakes said, chewing on an unlit cigar as he turned the pages of the competition with his pincers.
“Heard the cops are going to shut down that joker-porn studio on Division,” Jube said, sipping politely at his coffee. Crabcakes squinted up at him. “You think so? Don’t bet on it, Walrus. That bunch is connected. The Gambione Family, I think. Where’d you hear that?”
Jube gave him a rubbery grin. “Got to protect my sources too, chief. You hear the one about the guy married this joker, just gorgeous, long blond hair, face like an angel, body to match. On their wedding night, she comes out in this white teddy and says to him, honey, I’ve got good news and bad news. He says, yeah, so give me the good news first. Well, she says, the good news is that this is what the wild card did to me, and she whirls around and gives him a good look, till he’s grinning and drooling. So what’s the bad news? he asks. The bad news, she says, is that my real name is Joseph.”
Crabcakes grimaced. “Get out of here,” he said.
The regulars at Ernie’s relieved him of another few Crys and a Daily News, and for Ernie himself he had the issue of Ring that had come in that afternoon. It was a slow night, so Ernie stood him to a piiia colada and Jube told him the one about the joker bride who had good news and bad news for her husband.
The counterman at the all-night doughnut shop took a Times. As he turned up Henry to his final stop, Jube’s load was so light the shopping cart skipped along behind him.
Three cabs stood outside the canopied entrance to the Crystal Palace, waiting for business. “Hey, Walrus,” one of the hacks called out as he passed. “Got a Cry there?”
“Sure do,” Jube said. He swapped a paper for a coin. The cabbie had a nest of thin, snakelike tendrils in place of a right arm, and flippers where his legs should be, but his Checker had special hand controls and he knew the city like the back of his tentacle. Made real good tips, too. These days people were so relieved to get a cabbie who spoke English, they didn’t give a damn what he looked like.
The doorman carried Jube’s cart up the stone steps to the main entrance of the three-story turn-of-the-century row house. Inside the Victorian entry chamber, Jube left his hat and cart with the coat-check girl, gathered the remaining papers under his arm, and walked into the saloon’s huge, highceilinged barroom. Elmo, the dwarf bouncer, was carrying out a squid-faced man in a sequined domino as Jube entered.
There was a nasty bruise on one side of his head. “What did he do?” Jube asked.
Elmo grinned up at him. “It’s not what he did, it’s what he was thinking of doing.” The little man pushed through the stained-glass doors with the squid-face slung over his shoulder like a sack of grain.
It was last call at the Crystal Palace. Jube made a circuit of the main taproom-he seldom bothered with the side rooms and their curtained alcoves-and sold a few more papers. Then.he climbed up on a barstool. Sascha was behind the long mahogany bar, his eyeless face and pencil-thin mustache reflected in the mirror as he mixed a planter’s punch. He put it down in front of Jube without words or money being exchanged.
As Jube sipped his drink, he caught a whiff of familiar perfume, and turned his head just as Chrysalis seated herself on the stool to his left. “Good morning,” she said. Her voice was cool and faintly British. She was wearing a spiral of silver glitter on one cheek, and the transparent flesh beneath made it seem to float like a nebula above the whiteness of her skull. Her lipstick was silver gloss, and her long nails gleamed like daggers. “How’s the news business, Jubal?”
He grinned at her. “Did you hear the one about the joker bride who had good news and bad news for her husband?” Around her mouth, the ghost-gray shadows of her muscles twisted her silvered lips into a grimace. “Spare me.”
“All right.” Jube sipped at his planter’s punch through a straw. “At the Chaos Club they put little parasols in these.”
“At the Chaos Club they serve drinks in coconuts.” Jube nursed his drink. “That place on Division, where they film the hard-core stuff? I heard it’s a Gambione operation. “
“Old news,” Chrysalis said. It was closing time. The lights came up. Elmo began to circulate, stacking chairs on tables and rousting the customers.
“Troll is going to be the new chief of security at Tachyon’s clinic. Doc told me so himself.”
“Affirmative action?” Chrysalis said drily.
“Partly,” Jube told her. “And partly it’s just that he’s nine foot tall, green, and almost invulnerable.” He sucked up the last of his drink noisily, and stirred the crushed ice with his straw. “Guy at the cophouse has a lead on jokers Wild.”
“He won’t find it,” Chrysalis said. “If he does, he’ll wish he hadn’t.”
“If they had any sense, they’d just ask you.”
“There’s not enough money in the city budget to pay for that information,” Chrysalis said. “What else? You always save your best for last.”
“Probably nothing,” Jube said, swiveling to face her. “But I hear Gimli’s coming home.”
“Gimli?” Her voice was nonchalant, but the deep blue eyes suspended in the sockets of her skull regarded him sharply. “How interesting. Details?”
“Not yet,” Jube said. “I’ll let you know.”
“I’m sure you will.” Chrysalis had informants all over Jokertown. But Jube the Walrus was one of the most reliable. Everyone knew him, everyone liked him, everyone talked to him.
Jube was the last customer to leave the Crystal Palace that night. When he went outside it had just begun to snow. He snorted, held his hat firmly, and trudged off down Henry, pulling the empty shopping’cart behind him. A patrol car came up alongside him as he was passing under the Manhattan Bridge, slowed, and rolled down a window. “Hey, Walrus,” the black cop behind the wheel called out. “It’s snowing, you dumb joker. You’ll freeze your balls off.”
“Balls?” Jube called out. “Who says jokers got balls? I love this weather, Chaz. Look at these rosy cheeks!” He pinched his oily, blue-black cheek, and chortled.
Chaz sighed, and opened the back door of the blue-andwhite. “Get in. I’ll ride you home.”
Home was a five-story rooming house on Eldridge, just a short ride away. Jube left his shopping cart under the steps by the trash cans as he opened the police lock on his basement apartment. The only window was completely filled by a huge air conditioner of ancient vintage, its rusted casing now halfcovered with blowing snow.
When he turned on his lights, the red fifteen-watt bulbs in the overhead fixture filled the room with a murky scarlet twilight. It was bone-cold inside, scarcely warmer than the November streets. Jube never turned on the heat. Once or twice a year a man from the gas company came by to check on him and make sure he hadn’t rigged the meter.
Under the window, pans of green, decaying meat covered the top of a card table. Jube stripped off his shirt to reveal a broad, six-nippled chest, got himself a glass of ice to crunch, and picked the ripest steak he could find.
A bare mattress covered the floor of his bedroom, and in the corner was his latest acquisition, a brand-new porcelain hot tub that faced a big-screen projection TV Except that ‘hot tub’ was a misnomer, since he never used the heating system. He had learned a lot about humans in the last twenty-three years, but he’d never understand why they wanted to immerse themselves in scalding water, he thought as he undressed. Even the Takisians had more sense than that.
Holding the steak in one hand, Jube carefully lowered himself into the icy water and turned on the television with his remote control to watch the nevys programs he’d taped earlier. He popped the steak into his wide mouth, and began to chew the raw meat slowly as he floated there, absorbing every word that Tom Brokaw had to say. It was very relaxing, but when the newscast ended, Jube knew it was time to go to work.
He climbed out of his tub, belched, and dried himself vigorously with a Donald Duck towel. An hour, no more, he thought to himself as he padded across the room, leaving wet footprints on the hardwood floor. He was tired, but he had to do some work, or he’d fall even more behind. Standing at the back of his bedroom, he punched out a long sequence of numbers on his remote control. The bare brick wall in front of him seemed to dissolve when he hit the final digit.
Jube walked through into what had been the coal cellar. The far wall was dominated by a holocube that dwarfed even his projection TV A horseshoe-shaped console wrapped around a huge contour chair designed for Jube’s unique physiognomy. All along the sides of the snug chamber were machines, some whose purpose would have been obvious to any high school student, others that would have baled Dr. Tachyon himself.
Primitive as it was, the office suited Jube just fine. He settled into his chair, turned on the power-feed from the fusion cell, and took a crystalline rod as long as a child’s pinky from a rack by his elbow. When he slid it into the appropriate slot on the console, the recorder lit from within, and he began to dictate his latest observations and conclusions in a language that seemed half music and half cacophony, made up in equal parts of barks, whistles, belches, and clicks. If his other security systems ever failed him, his work would still be safe. After all, there wasn’t another sentient being within forty lightyears who spoke his native tongue.
In the rooming house on Eldridge, the tenants were having a little Christmas party, and Jube was dressed as Santa Claus. He was a little short for the part, and the Santas in the store windows seldom had tusks, but he had the ho-ho-ho down pat.
The party was held in the living room on the first floor. It was early this year, because Mrs. Holland was flying out to Sacramento next week to spend the holidays with her grandson, and no one wanted to have the party without Mrs. Holland, who had lived in the building almost as long as Jube, and seen all of them through some rough times. Except for Father Fahey, the alcoholic Jesuit from the fifth floor, the tenants were all jokers, and none of them had a lot of money for Christmas gifts. So each of them bought one present, and all the gifts went into a big canvas mailbag, and it was Jube’s annual assignment to jumble them around and hand them out. He loved the job. Human patterns of gift giving were endlessly fascinating and someday he intended to write a study of the subject, as soon as he finished his treatise on human humor.
He always started with Doughboy, who was huge and soft and mushroom white and lived with the black man they called Shiner in a second floor apartment. Doughboy outweighed Jube by a good hundred pounds, and he was so strong that he ripped the front door off its hinges at least once. a year (Shiner always fixed it). Doughboy loved robots and dolls and toy trucks and plastic guns that made noises but he broke everything within days, and the toys he really loved he broke within hours.
Jube had wrapped his present in silver foil, so he wouldn’t give it to anyone else by mistake. “Oh, boy,” Doughboy shouted when he’d ripped it open. He held it up for all of them to see. “A ray gun, oh boy, oh boy.” It was a deep, translucent red-black, molded in lines that were smooth and sensual yet somehow disquieting, with a pencil-thin barrel. When his immense fingers wrapped around the grip and pointed it at Mrs. Holland, points of lights flickered deep inside, and Doughboy exclaimed in delight as the microcomputer corrected his aim.
“That’s some toy,” Callie said. She was a petite, fastidious woman with four useless extra arms.
“Ho ho ho,” Jube said. “He won’t be able to break it, either.” Doughboy squinted at Old Mister Cricket and pressed the firing stud, making loud sizzling noises through his teeth. Shiner laughed. “Bet he do.”
“You’d lose,” Jube said. Ly’bahr alloy was dense and strong enough to withstand a small thermonuclear explosion. He’d worn the gun himself during his first-year in New York, but the harness had chafed, and after a while it had just gotten to be too much of a nuisance. Of course, Jube had removed the power cell before wrapping the gift for Doughboy, and a Network disrupter wasn’t the sort of thing you could energize with a D battery.
Someone shoved an eggnog, liberally laced with rum and nutmeg, into his hand. Jube took a healthy swallow, grinned with pleasure, and got on with passing out the presents. Callie went next, and drew a coupon book for the neighborhood movie house. Denton from the fourth floor got a woolen knit cap, which he dangled from the end of his antlers, provoking general laughter. Reginald, whom the neighborhood children called Potato-head (though not to his face), wound up with an electric razor; Shiner got a long multicolored scarf. They looked at each other, laughed, and swapped.
He made his way around the room from person to person until everyone had a gift. The last present in the bag was usually his; this year, however, the bag was empty after Mrs.
Holland pulled out her tickets to Cats. Jube was a little nonplussed. It must have showed on his face. There was laughter all around. “We didn’t forget about you, Walrusman,” said Chucky, the spider-legged boy who ran messages down on Wall street. “This year we all chipped in, got you something special,” Shiner added.
Mrs. Holland gave it to him. It was small, and storewrapped. Jube opened it carefully. “A watch!” .
“That’s no watch, Walrus-man, that’s a chronometer!”
Chucky said. “Self-winding, and waterproof and shockproof too.”
“That there watch tell you the date, and the phases of moon, shit, it tell you everything except when your girlfriend be on the rag,” Shiner said.
“Shiner!” Mrs. Holland said in indignation.
“You’ve been wearing that Mickey Mouse watch for, well, for as long as I’ve known you,” Reginald said. “We all thought it was time you had something a little more modern.”
It was a very expensive watch. So, of course, there was nothing to be done but wear it. Jube unstrapped Mickey from his thick wrist, and slid on the brand-new chronometer with its flex-metal band. He put his old watch very carefully atop the mantelpiece, out of the way, and then made a round of the crowded room, thanking each of them.
Afterward, Old Mister Cricket rubbed his legs together to the tune of “Jingle Bells,” and Mrs. Holland served the turkey she’d won in the church raffle (Jube pushed his portion around sufficiently so that it looked as though he’d eaten some), and there was more eggnog to be drunk, and a card game after coffee, and when it got very late Jube told some of his jokes. Finally he figured it was time for him to retire; he’d given his helper the day off, so he’d have to open the stand himself bright and early the next morning. But when he stopped by the mantel on his way out, Mickey was gone. “My watch!” Jube exclaimed.
“What you want with that old thing, now that you have the new one?” Callie asked him.
“It has sentimental value,” Jube said.
“I saw Doughboy playing with it,” Warts told him. “He likes Mickey Mouse.”
Shiner had put Doughboy to bed hours ago. Jube had to go upstairs. They found the watch on Doughboy’s foot, and Shiner was very apologetic. “I think he broke it,” the old man said.
“It’s very durable,” Jube said.
“It’s been making a noise,” Shiner told him. “Buzzing away. Broke inside, I guess.”
For a moment, Jube didn’t understand what he was talking about. Then dread replaced confusion. “Buzzing? How long-?” .
“A good while,” Shiner said as he handed back the watch. From inside the casing came a high, thin whine. “You okay?”
Jube nodded. “Tired,” he said. “Merry Christmas.” And then he thumped downstairs as fast as he could go.
In his cold, dim apartment, he hurried to the coal cellar. Within, sure enough, the communicator was glowing violet, Network color-code for extreme emergency. His hearts were in his mouth. How long? Hours, hours, and all the time he was partying. Jube felt sick. He dropped himself into his chair and keyed the console to play the message it had recorded. The holocube lit from within, in a haze of violet light. In the center was Ekkedme, his hind jumping-legs folded under him so he seemed almost to crouch. The Embe nymph was obviously in a state of great agitation; the cilia covering his face trembled as they tasted the air, and the palps atop his tiny head swiveled frenetically. As Jube watched, code-violet background gave way and the crowded interior of the singleship took form. “The Mother!” Ekkedme cried in the trade tongue, forcing the words through his spiracles in a wheezy Embe accent. The hologram shattered into static.
When it reintegrated an instant later, the Embe lurched suddenly to one side, reached out with a stick-thin forelimb, and clutched a smooth black ball to the pale white fur of his chitinous chest. He started to say something, but behind him the wall of the singleship bulged inward with a hideous metallic screech, and then disintegrated entirely. Jube watched with horror as air, instruments, and Embe were sucked up toward the cold unwinking stars. Ekkedme slammed into a jagged bulkhead and slid higher, holding tight to the ball as his hind legs scrabbled for purchase. A swirl of light ran over the surface of the sphere, and then it seemed to expand. A swift black tide engulfed the Embe; when it receded, he was gone. Jube dared to breathe again.
The transmission broke off abruptly an instant later. Jube punched for a replay, hoping he had missed something. He could only watch half of it. Then he got up, rushed to the toilet, and regurgitated an evening’s worth of eggnog. He was steadier when he returned. He had to think, had to take things calmly. Panic and guilt would get him nowhere. Even if he had been wearing the watch, he could never have gotten down here in time to take the call, and there was nothing he could have done anyway. Besides, Ekkedme had escaped with the singularity shifter, Jube had seen it with his own eyes, surely his colleague had gotten to safety ...... only ... if he had ... where was he?
Jube looked around slowly. The Embe certainly wasn’t here—But where else could he go? How long could he survive in this gravity? And what had happened up there in orbit?
Grimly, he linked to the satellite scanners. There were six of them, sophisticated devices the size of golf balls, loaded with Rhindarian sensors. Ekkedme had used them to monitor weather patterns, military activity, and radio and television transmissions, but they had other uses as well. Jube swept the skies methodically for the singleship, but where it should have been he found only scattered debris.
Suddenly Jube felt very much alone.
Ekkedme had been ... well, not a friend, not the way the humans upstairs were friends, not even as close as Chrysalis or Crabcakes, but ... their species had little in common, really. Ekkedme was a strange solitary sort, enigmatic and uncommunicative; and twenty-three years in orbit, locked in the close confines of his singleship with nothing to occupy him but meditation and monitoring, had only made the nymph stranger still-but of course that was why he had been chosen out of all those the Master Trader might have pegged when the Opportunity came this way so long ago, in the human year 1952, to observe the results of the Takisian grand experiment. Unbidden, the memories came. The vast Network starship had circled the little green planet all that summer, finding little of interest. The native civilization was promising, but scarcely more advanced than it had been on their previous visit a few centuries earlier. And the vaunted Takisian virus, the wild card, seemed to have produced great numbers of freaks, cripples, and monsters. But the Master Trader liked to cover all bets, so when the Opportunity departed, it leftt behind two observers: the Embe in orbit, and a xenologist on the surface. It amused the Master Trader to hide his agent in plain sight, on the streets of the world’s greatest city. And for Jhubben, who had signed a lifetime service contract for the chance to travel to distant worlds, it was a rare chance to dot important work.
Still, until this moment there had always been the knowledge that someday the Opportunity would return, that someday he would know starflight again, and perhaps even return to the glaciers and ice cities of Glabber, beneath its wan red sun. The Embe nymph had never quite been a friend, yet Ekkedme had been something just as important. They had shared a past. Only Jube had known the Embe was there, watching, listening; only Ekkedme had known that Jube the Walrus, joker newsboy was really Jhubben, a xenologist from Glabber. The nymph had been a link to his past, to his homeworld and his people, to the Opportunity and the Network itself, to its one-hundred-thirty-seven member species spread across a thousand-odd worlds.
Jube looked at the new watch his friends had given him. It was past two. The message had been received just before eight. He had never used a singularity shifter himself-it was an Embe device, still experimental, powered by a mini-black hole and capable of functioning as a stasis field, a teleportation device, even a power source, but fantastically expensive, its secrets zealously guarded by the Network. He did not pretend to understand its workings, but it should have brought Ekkedme here, where Jhubben could help him. If the shifter had malfunctioned, the Embe might have teleported into airless space, or the bottom of the ocean, or ... well, anywhere within range.
He shook his massive head. What could he do? If Ekkedme was still alive, he would make his way here. Jube was powerless to help him. Meanwhile, he had a more urgent problem: something, or someone, had discovered, attacked, and destroyed the singleship. The humans had neither the technology nor the motives. Whoever was responsible was clearly no friend of the Network, and if they were aware of his existence, they might be coming after him as well. Jube found himself wishing that he hadn’t just given away his weapon to Doughboy.
He watched the Embe’s last transmission one last time in the hopes of finding a clue to the unknown enemy. There was nothing, except ... “The Mother!” Ekkedme had said.
What was that? Some Embe religious invocation, or was his colleague actually calling on the female who had hatched him? Jube spent the next few hours floating in his tub, thinking. He did not savor those thoughts, yet the logic was inescapable. The Network had many enemies, within and without, but only one truly powerful rival in this sector of space, and only one that might be violently disgruntled to find Earth under observation: a species so like and so unlike the humans, imperious and aloof, racist, implacably bloody-minded, and capable of most any atrocity, to judge from what they’d done on Earth, and what they so regularly did to each other.
When dawn neared, and he dressed after a sleepless night, Jube was virtually convinced of it. Only a Takisian symbiont-ship could have done what he had witnessed. The ghostlance or the laser? he wondered. He was no expert on things martial.
It was a gray, slushy, depressing day, and Jube’s mood matched it perfectly as he opened his newsstand. Business was slow. It was a little after eight when Dr. Tachyon came down the Bowery, wearing a white fur coat and mopping at an egg stain on his collar. “Something wrong, Jube?” Tachyon asked when he stopped for a Times. “You don’t look well.”
Jube had trouble finding the words. “Uh, yeah, Doc. A friend of mine ... uh, died.” He watched Tachyon’s face for any flicker of guilt. Guilt came so easy to the Takisian, surely if he knew he would betray himself.
“I’m sorry,” Doc said, his voice sincere and sympathetic. “I lost someone myself this week, an orderly at the clinic. I have a horrible suspicion that the man was murdered. One of my patients vanished the same day, a man named Spector.” Tachyon sighed. “And now the police want me to perform an. autopsy on some poor joker they found in a dumpster in Chelsea. The man looks like a furry grasshopper, McPherson tells me. So that makes him one of mine, you see.” He shook his head wearily. “Well, they’re just going to have to keep him on ‘ice until I can organize the search for Mr. Spector. Keep your ears open, Jube, and let me know if you hear anything, all right?”
“A grasshopper, you say?” Jube tried to keep his voice casual. “A furry grasshopper?”
“Yes,” Tach said. “Not someone you knew, I hope.”
“I’m not sure.” Jube said quickly. “Maybe I ought to go and take a look. I know a lot of jokers.”
“He’s in the morgue, on First Avenue.”
“I’m not sure I could take it,” Jube said. “I got a queasy stomach, Doc. What kind of place is this morgue?” Tachyon reassured Jube that there was nothing to be frightened of. To allay any misgivings, he described the morgueand its procedures. Jube memorized every detail. “Doesn’t sound so bad,” he said finally. “Maybe I’ll take a looksee, in case it is, uh, the guy I knew.”
Tachyon nodded absently, his mind on other troubles. “You know,” he told Jube, “that man Spector, the patient who vanished-he was dead when they brought him to me. I saved the man’s life. And if I hadn’t, Henry might still be alive. Of course, I have no proof.” Folding his Times up under an arm, the Takisian slogged off through the slush.
Poor Ekkedme, Jube thought. To die so far from home ... he had no idea what sort of burial customs the Embe practiced. There was not even time to mourn. Tachyon did not know, clearly. And more importantly, Tachyon must not know. The Network presence on Earth must be kept a secret at all costs. And if the Takisian performed that autopsy, he would know, there was no doubt of that. Tachyon had accepted Jube as a joker, and why not? He looked as human as most jokers, and he’d been in Jokertown longer than Doc himself. Glabber was a backwater, poor and obscure. It had no starflight of its own, and less than a hundred Glabberans had ever taken service on the great Network starships. The chances of him recognizing Jhubben were slight to nonexistent. But the Embe filled a dozen worlds, their ships were known on a hundred more; they were as much a part of the Network as the Ly’bahr, Kondikki, Aevre, or even the Master Traders. One glance at that body and Tachyon would know.
Jube bounced on his heels, feeling the first faint touches of panic. He had to get that body before Tachyon saw it. And the shifter, how could he forget that! If an artifact as valuable as a singularity shifter fell into Takisian hands, there would be no telling what the consequences might be. But how?
A man he had never laid eyes on before stopped in front of the newsstand. Distracted, Jube looked up at him. “Paper?”
“One cf each,” the man said, “as usual.”
It took a moment to sink in, but when it did, Jube knew he had his answer.
“The holidays are the cruelest time,” Croyd had told him one New Year’s Eve, years ago. Times Square was full of drunks waiting for the ball to come down. Jube had come to observe, and Croyd had hailed him from a doorway. He hadn’t recognized the Sleeper, but then he seldom did. That time, Croyd had been a head shorter than Jube, his loose, baggy skin covered with fine pink down. He’d had webbed feet and a hip flask of dark rum, and had wanted to talk about his family, about lost friends, about algebra. “The holidays are the cruelest time,” he’d repeated, over and over, until the ball fell and Croyd had puffed himself up like a balloon from the Macys Thanksgiving Day parade and drifted off into the sky. “The cruelest time!” he’d shouted down once more, just before he vanished from sight.
It wasn’t till now that Jube had understood what he’d meant. He had always enjoyed the human holidays, which afforded such colorful pageants, such lavish displays of greed and generosity, such fascinating customs for study and analysis. This year, as he stood in his newsstand on the morning of the last day of December, he found that the day had lost its savor.
The irony was too cruel. All around the city, people were preparing to celebrate the start of what could be the last year of their lives, their civilization, and their species. The newspapers were full of retrospectives on the year just ending, and every one of them had pegged the Swarm War as the year’s top story, and every one of them had written it up as if it were all over, except for some mopping up in the third world. Jhubben knew better.
He shuffled some newspapers, sold a Playboy, and looked up glumly into a crisp morning sky. Nothing to be seen but a few cirrus clouds, high up and moving fast. Yet she was still there, he knew. Far from Earth, moving through the darkness of space, as black and massive as an asteroid. She would blot out the stars as she drifted across them, silent and chill, to all outward appearances cold and dead. How many worlds and races had died believing that lie? Inside she lived, evolving, her intelligence and sophistication growing daily, her tactics honing themselves with each setback.
Among the races of the Network, she was the enemy with a hundred names: the demonseed, the great cancer, hellmother, devourer of worlds, mother of nightmares. In the vast minds of the Kondikki godqueens, she was called by a symbol that meant simply dread. The Kreg machine-intelligences referred to her by a string of binary impulses that signified dysfunction, the lyn-ko-neen sang of her in notes high, shrill, and pain-wracked. And the Ly’bahr remembered her best of all. To those vastly long-lived cyborgs, she was Thyat M’hruh, darkness-for-the-race. Ten thousand years past, a Swarm had descended on the Ly’bahr birthworld. Encased in their lifesustaining shells, the cyborged Ly’bahr lived on, but those who had stayed behind to wear flesh instead of metal were gone, and with them all the generations to come. The Ly’bahr had been a dead race for ten thousand years.
“Mother?” Ekkedme had cried out, and Jube had not understood, not until he slit the cord on his stack of newspapers the day the buds landed in New Jersey. It must be some mistake, he had thought inanely when he saw the headlines. The Swarm was a horror from history and legend, it was the nightmare that happened to other planets far distant, not the one you were actually on. It was outside his experience and his expertise; no wonder he had suspected the Takisians when the singleship was lost. He felt as though he was a fool. Worse, he was a doomed and helpless fool.
She was up there still, a palpable living darkness that Jube could almost feel. Inside her festered new generations of swarmlings, the life-that-is-death. Soon her children would come again, and devour this perversely splendid race that he had come to have such affection for ... devour him too, for that matter, and what could he do to stop them?
“You look like a pot of excrement this morning, Walrus,” a voice like sandpaper rasped casually.
Jube looked up .. and up, and up. Troll was nine feet tall. He wore a gray uniform over green warty skin, and when he grinned, crooked yellow teeth stuck out in all directions. A green hand as broad as a manhole cover lifted a copy of the Times delicately between two fingers, nails black and sharp as claws. Behind his custom-made mirrorshades, the red eyes sunk beneath his heavy brow-ridge flicked over the columns of newsprint.
“I feel like a pot of excrement,” Jube said. “The holidays are the cruelest time, Troll. How are things at the clinic?”
“Busy,” said Troll. “Tachyon keeps shuttling back and forth to Washington for meetings.” He rattled the Times. “These aliens ruined everybody’s Christmas. I always knew that Jersey was just one big yeast infection.” He dug in a pocket, handed Jube a crumpled dollar bill. “The Pentagon wants to lob a few H-bombs at the Mother-thing, but they can’t find her.”
Jube nodded as he made change. He had tried to find the Swarm Mother himself, using the sensing satellites the Network had left in orbit, but without success. She might be hiding behind the moon, or on the other side of the sun, or anywhere in the vastness of space. And if he could not locate her with the technology at his disposal, the humans didn’t have a chance. “Doc won’t be able to help them,” he told Troll glumly.
“Probably not,” the other replied. He flipped a half-dollar into the air, caught it neatly, and pocketed it. “Still, you have to try, right? What else can you do but try? Happy New Year, Walrus.” He strode off on legs as thick and gnarled as the trunks of small trees, and as long as Jube was tall.
Jube watched him go. He was right, he thought as Troll vanished around the corner. You do have to try.
He closed the newsstand early that day, and went home. Floating in the cold waters of his tub, awash in dim red light, he considered his options. There was only one, really. The Network could save humanity from the Swarm Mother. Of course, there would be a price. The Network gives nothing away for free. But Jube was sure that Earth would be only too glad to pay. Even if the Master Trader demanded rights to Mars, or the moon, or all of the gas giants, what was that weighed against the life of their species?
But the Opportunity was light-years off, and would not return to this system for another five or six human decades. It must be summoned, the Master Trader must be informed that a sentient race with enormous profit potential was threatened with extinction. And the tachyon transmitter had been lost with the Embe and the singleship.
Jhubben must build a replacement.
He felt hopelessly unequal to the task. He was a xenologist, not a technician. He used a hundred Network devices he could not begin to build, repair, or even comprehend. Knowledge was the most precious commodity in the galaxy, the Network’s only true currency, and each member species guarded its own technological secrets zealously. But every Network outpost had a tachyon transmitter, even primitive worlds like Glabber that could not afford to buy starships of their own. Unless the lesser species had the means to summon the great starships to their scattered, backward worlds, how could trade take place, how could planets be bought and sold, how could profits accrue to the Master Traders of Starholme?
Jube’s library consisted of nine small crystalline rods. One held the collected songs, literature, and erotica of his homeworld; a second his lifework, including all his researches on Earth. The others held knowledge. Surely the plans for a tachyon transmitter would be in there somewhere. Whatever knowledge he accessed would be noted, of course, and its value debited from the value of the researches here on Earth, but surely it was worth it, to save a sentient race?
There would be expenses, he knew. Even if he found the plans, it was unlikely that he would have the necessary parts. He would have to make due with primitive human electronics, the best he could obtain, and probably he would be forced to cannibalize some of his own equipment. So be it; he had equipment he had never used: the security systems that guarded his apartment (extra locks would do), the liquid metal spacesuit that he could no longer squeeze into, the coldsleep coffin in the back closet (purchased against the contigency of a thermonuclear war during his tenure on Earth), the games machine ...
There was a more serious problem. He could build a tachyon transmitter, he was sure of it. But how to power it? His fusion cells might be sufficient to punch a beam through to Hoboken, but there were a lot of light-years between Hoboken and the stars.
Jhubben rose from his tub, toweled himself off. He knew much of what had happened when the Sleeper went after Ekkedme’s body. Croyd had told him, a week after that grim afternoon Jhubben had spent flushing the remains of his Embe brother back to the salt sea from which they had all risen, at least metaphorically. But none of it seemed to matter when the swarmlings landed.
Now it mattered.
He padded into his living room and opened the bottom drawer of the buffet he’d purchased from Goodwill in 1952. The drawer was full of rocks: green, red, blue, white. Four of the white rocks had bought this building in 1955, even though the old man in the green eyeshade had only paid him half of what the stones were worth. Jube had always used this resource sparingly, since no more stones could be synthesized until the Opportunity returned. But the crisis was here.
He was no ace, he had no special powers. These would have to be his power. He reached down with a thick fourfingered hand, and grabbed a handful of uncut sapphires. With these, he would locate the Embe singularity shifter, to power his transmission to the stars.
Or-at the very least-he would try.
On the third floor of the Crystal Palace were the private chambers Chrysalis reserved for herself. She was waiting for him in a Victorian sitting room, sitting in a red velvet wingbacked chair behind an oak table. Chrysalis gestured at a seat. She wasted no time. “You’ve piqued my interest, Jubal.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Jube said, easing himself down on the edge of a ladder-back chair.
Chrysalis opened an antique satin change purse and extracted a handful of gems. She lined them up on the white tablecloth. “Two star sapphires, one ruby, and a flawless bluewhite diamond,” she said in her dry, cool voice. “All uncut, of the highest quality, none weighing less than four carats. All appearing on the streets of jokertown within the past six weeks. Curious, wouldn’t you say? What do you make of it?”
“Don’t know,” Jube replied. “I’ll keep an ear out. Did you hear about the joker with the power to squeeze a diamond until it turned into a lump of coal?”
He was bluffing and they both knew it. She pushed a sapphire across the tablecloth with the little finger of her left: hand, its flesh as clear as glass. “You gave this one to a sanitation worker for a bowling ball that he’d found in a dumpster.”
“Yeah,” Jube said. It was magenta and white, customdrilled for some joker, its six holes arranged in a circle. No wonder it had been dumped.
Chrysalis prodded the ruby with her pinkie, and it moved a half inch. “This one went to a police filing clerk. You wanted to see the records concerning a body liberated from the morgue, and anything they had on this lost bowling ball. I never knew you had such a passion for bowling, Jubal.”
Jube slapped his gut. “Don’t I look like a bowler? Nothing I like better than to roll a few strikes and drink a few beers.”
“You’ve never set foot in a bowling alley in your life, and you wouldn’t know a strike from a touchdown.” Her fingerbones had never looked so frightening as when they picked up the diamond. “This item was tendered to Devil John Darlingfoot in my own red room.” She rolled it across transparent fingers, and the muscles in her face twisted into what must have been a wry smile.
“It was mother’s,” Jube blurted.
Chrysalis chuckled. “And she never bothered to have it cut or set? How odd.” She put down the diamond, picked up the second sapphire. “And this one truly, Jubal! Did you really think Elmo wouldn’t tell me?” She placed the gem back with the others, carefully. “You need to hire someone to perform certain unspecified tasks and investigations. Fine. Why not simply come to me?”
Jube scratched at one of his tusks. “You ask too many questions.”
“Fair enough.” She swept a hand over the jewels. “We have four here. Have there been others?”
Jube nodded. “One or two. You missed the emeralds.”
“A pity. I’m fond of green. The British racing color.” She sighed. “Why gems?”
“People were reluctant to take my checks,” Jube told her, “and it was easier than carrying large amounts of cash.”
“If there are more where these came from,” Chrysalis said, “see that they stay there. Let the word get around Jokertown that the Walrus has a secret cache of precious gems, and I wouldn’t give a bloody fig for your chances. You may have stirred the waters already, but we’ll hope the sharks haven’t noticed. Elmo told no one but me, of course, and Devil John has his own peculiar sense of honor, I think we can rely on him to keep mum. As for the garbageman and the police clerk, when I purchased their gems I bought their silence too.”
“You didn’t have to do that!”
“I know,” she said. “The next time you want information, you know how to find the Crystal Palace. Don’t you?”
“How much do you know already?” Jube asked her. “Enough to tell when you’re lying,” Chrysalis replied. “I know you’re looking for a bowling ball, for reasons incomprehensible to man, woman, or joker. I know that Darlingfoot stole that joker corpse from the morgue, presumably for pay. It’s not the sort of thing he’d do on his own. I know the body was small and furred, with legs like a grasshopper, and quite badly burned. No joker matching that description is known to any of my sources, a curious circumstance. I know that Croyd made a rather large cash deposit the day the body was stolen, and an even larger one the following day, and in between had a public confrontation with Darlingfoot. And I know that you paid Devil John handsomely to reveal whose interests he had represented in this little melodrama, and tried without success to engage his services.” She leaned forward. “What I don’t know is what all this means, and you know how I abhor a mystery.”
“They say that every time a joker farts anywhere in Manhattan, Chrysalis holds her nose,” Jube said. He looked at her intently, but the transparency of her flesh made her expression impossible to read. The skull-face behind her crystalline skin stared at him implacably from clear blue eyes. “What’s your interest in this?” he asked her.
“Uncertain, until I know what ‘this’ is. However, you’ve been quite valuable to me for a long time, and I would hate to lose your services. You know I’m discreet.”
“Until you’re paid to be indiscreet,” Jube pointed out. Chrysalis laughed, and touched the diamond. “Given your resources, silence can be more lucrative than speech.”
“That’s true,” Jube said. He decided that he had nothing to lose. “I’m really an alien spy from a distant planet,” he began.
“Jubal,” Chrysalis interrupted, “you’re wearing on my patience. I’ve never been that fond of your humor. Get to the point. What happened with Darlingfoot?”
“Not much,” Jube admitted. “I knew why I wanted the body. I didn’t know why anyone else would. Devil John wouldn’t tell me. I think they must have the bowling ball. I tried to hire him to get it back for me, but he didn’t want anything more to do with them. I think he’s scared of them, whoever they are.”
“I think you’re right. Croyd?”
“Asleep again. Who knows what use—he’ll be when he comes to? I could wait six months, and he’ll wake up as a hamster.”
“For a commission,” Chrysalis said with cool certainty, “I can engage the services of someone who’ll get you your answers.”
Jube decided to be blunt, since evasion wasn’t getting him anywhere. “Don’t know that I’d trust anyone you’d hire.” She laughed. “Dear boy, that’s the smartest thing you’ve said in months. And you’d be right. You’re too easy a mark, and some of my contacts are admittedly less than reputable. With me as intermediary, however, the equation changes. I have a certain reputation.” Next to her elbow was a small silver bell. She rang it lightly. “In any case, the man who’d be best for this is an exception to the general rule. He actually has ethics.”
Jube was tempted. “Who is he?”
“His name is Jay Ackroyd. Ace private investigator. In both senses of the word. Sometimes he’s called Popinjay, but not to his face. Jay and I do favors for each other from time to time. We both deal in the same product, after all.”
Jube plucked at a tusk thoughtfully. “Yeah. What’s to stop ime from hiring him directly?”
“Nothing,” Chrysalis said. A tall waiter with impressive ivory horns entered, carrying an amaretto and a Singapore sling on an antique silver tray. When he departed, she continued. “If you’d rather have him getting curious about you than about me, that is.”
That gave him pause. “Perhaps it would be better if I stayed in the background.”
“My thought exactly,” Chrysalis said, sipping her amaretto. “Jay won’t even know you’re the client.”
Jube glanced out the window. It was a dark, cloudless night. He could see the stars, and somewhere out there he knew the Mother still waited. He needed help, and cast caution aside. “Do you know a good thief?” he asked her bluntly.
That surprised her. “I might,” she said.
“I need,” he began awkwardly, “uh, parts. Scientific instruments, and, uh, electronics, microchips, things like that. I could write you a list. It involves breaking into some corporate labs, maybe some federal installations.”
“I stay clear of anything that illegal,” Chrysalis said. “What do you need with electronics?”
“Building me a ham radio set,” Jube said. “Would you do it to save the world?” She didn’t answer. “Would you do it for six perfectly matched emeralds the size of pigeon’s eggs?”
Chrysalis smiled slowly, and proposed a toast. “To a long, and profitable, association.”
She could almost be a Master Trader, Jube thought with a certain admiration. Grinning tuskily, he raised the Singapore sling, and brought the straw to his mouth.
The trace was unmistakable.
Jube sat at his console as the readings crawled across his holocube, his hearts thundering away with fear and hope. He had spent most of his first four months on Earth in darkened movie theaters, sitting through the same films a dozen times, reinforcing his English and broadening his grasp of human cultural nuances as reflected in their fiction. He’d learned to love their movies, especially westerns, and his favorite part had always been when the cavalry came thundering over the hill, all its banners flying.
The Network flew no banners; still, Jube thought he could hear the faint sound of bugles and the pounding of hoofbeats in those spiderly twists of light within his holocube.
Tachyons! Bugles and tachyons!
His observation satellites had detected a wash of tachyons, and that could mean only one thing: a starship in nearEarth orbit. Deliverance was at hand.
Now the satellites swept the skies for the source. It was not the Swarm Mother, Jhubben knew that. The Mother crept between the stars at speeds slower than light; time was nothing to her. Only the civilized races used tachyon-drive starships.
If Ekkedme had gotten off a transmission before the singleship was smashed from the skies ... if the Master Trader had decided to check on human progress earlier than planned ... if the Mother had somehow been detected by some new technology undreamed of when Jhubben began his assignment on Earth ... if, if, if ... then it might well be the Opportunity up there, the Network returned to deliver this world, with only the means and price yet to be determined. It would not be easy even then, but of the ultimate result he had no doubt. Jube smiled as his satellites probed and his computers analyzed.
Then the holocube turned violet, and his smile died. He made a low gurgly sound deep in the back of his throat. The sophisticated sensors in his satellites stripped away the screens that cloaked the starship from human instrumentation and displayed its image within the ominous violet of the cube. It revolved slowly, etched in lines of red and white light like some terrible construct of fire and ice. The readouts flashed below the image: dimensions, tachyon output, course. But everything Jube needed to know was written on the lines of the ship: written in every twisted spire, proclaimed by every fanciful excrescence, trumpeted by every baroque whorl and projection, shouted in that panoply of unnecessary lights. It looked like the results of a high-speed collision between a Christmas ornament and a prickly pear. Only the Takisians had such rococo aesthetics.
Jube lurched to his feet. Takisians! Had Dr. Tachyon summoned them? He found that hard to believe, after all the years the doctor had spent in exile. What did it mean? Had Takis been monitoring Earth all this time, observing the wild card experiment even as the Network had? If so, why had Jhubben found no trace of them until now, and how had they managed to conceal themselves from Ekkedme? Would they destroy the Swarm Mother? Could they destroy the Mother? The Opportunity was roughly the size of Manhattan island, and carried tens of thousands of specialists representing countless species, cultures, castes, and vocations-merchants and pleasurers, scientists and priests, technicians, artists, warriors, envoys. The Takisian craft was a tiny thing; it couldn’t possibly hold more than fifty sentients, perhaps only half that number. Unless Takisian military technology had progressed astronomically in the last forty years, what could that little thing hope to do, alone, against the devourer of worlds? And would the Takisians even care about the lives of their experimental animals?
As Jhubben stared at the outlines of the ship with mounting rage and confusion, his phone rang.
For an instant he thought insanely that somehow the Takisians had found him out, that they knew he was looking at them and had rung him up to castigate him. But that was ridiculous. He slammed a thumb into the console, and the holocube went dark as Jube thumped into the living room. He had to detour around the tortured geometries of the half-built tachyon transmitter that dominated the center of the room like isome massive piece of avant-garde sculpture. If the thing didn’t work when he powered it up, Jube planned to title it ‘Joker Lust’ and sell it to some gallery in Soho. Even halfassembled, its angles were curiously deceptive, and he was always bumping into it. This time he dodged around it neatly and took the phone from Mickey’s hand. “Hello,” he said, trying to sound his normal jovial self.
“Juba], this is Chrysalis.” It was her voice, but he had never heard her sound quite like this. She had never called him at home before, either.
“What’s wrong?” he asked her. He’d asked her to procure another batch of microchips last week, and the edge in her voice made him afraid her agent had been apprehended.
“Jay Ackroyd just phoned. He hasn’t been able to report until now. He found out a few things about the people who hired Darlingfoot.”
“But that’s good. Has he located the bowling ball?”
“No. And it’s not as good as you think. I know this sounds insane, but Jay says these people were convinced that body was extraterrestrial in origin. It appears they hoped to use the corpse in some kind of disgusting ritual, to gain power over that alien monster out there.”
“The Swarm Mother,” Jube said in astonishment. “Yes,” Chrysalis said crisply. “Jay says they’re tied in somehow. He thinks they worship that thing. Look, we shouldn’t be talking about this over the phone.”
“Why not?” Jube asked.
“Because these people are dangerous,” Chrysalis said. “Jay is coming to the Palace tonight to give me a full report. Be there. I’m folding my cards on this one, Jubal. You can deal with Jay directly from now on. But if you’d like, I’ll ask Fortunato to drop by. I think he’d be interested in what Jay has turned up.”
“Fortunato!” Jube was horrified. He knew Fortunato mostly by reputation. The tall pimp with the almond-shaped eyes and bulging forehead was a familiar sight at the Crystal Palace, but Jube had always made it a point to avoid him. Telepaths made him nervous. Dr. Tachyon never went into a mind without good reason, but Fortunato was another matter. Who knows how and why he might use his powers, or what he might do if he found out what Jube the Walrus really was?
“No,” he said hurriedly, “no, absolutely not. This has nothing to do with Fortunato!”
“He knows more about these Masons than anyone else in the city,” Chrysalis said. She sighed. “Well, you’re paying for this funeral, so I suppose you get to pick the casket. I won’t say a word. We’ll talk after closing.”
“After closing,” Jube repeated. She hung up before he could think to ask her what she had meant about Masons. Jube knew about the Masons, of course. He’d done a study of human fraternal organizations a decade ago, comparing the Shriners, Knights of Columbus, Odd Fellows, and Freemasons with each other and with the bonding-brotherhoods of the Thdentien moons. Reginald was a Mason, Jube seemed to recall, and Denton had tried to join the Elks, but they’d turned him down because of his antlers. What did the Masons have to do with anything?
That day Jube was too uneasy to joke. Between Swarm Mothers, Takisian warships, and Masons, he hardly knew who to be afraid of. Even if the cavalry did come charging over the hill, Jube thought, would they be able to recognize the Indians? He glanced up at the sky and shook his head. When he locked up for the night he made his deliveries to the Funhouse and the Chaos Club, then decided to cut short his swing through Jokertown and head over to the Crystal Palace as soon as possible. But first he had to make one final stop, at the precinct house.
The desk sergeant took a Daily News and flipped to the sports page, while Jube left a Times and. a Jokertown Cry for Captain Black. He was turning to leave when the plainclothesman saw him. “Hey, fat boy,” the man called out. “You got an Informer?” He had been slouching on the bench along the tiled wall, almost as if he’d been waiting for someone. Jube knew him by sight: a scruffy, nondescript sort with an unpleasant smile. He’d never bothered to tell Jube his name, but he did show up at the newsstand once in a while to help himself to a tabloid. Sometimes he even paid.
But not tonight. “Thanks,” he said, as he accepted the copy of the National Informer that Jube offered him. DID TAKISIANS INVENT HERPES? the banner screamed. It gave Jube a bad turn. Underneath, another story asked if Sean was about to jilt Madonna for Peregrine. The plainclothesman didn’t even glance at the headlines. He was staring at Jube oddly.
The corner of his mouth twitched in a quirky little smile, “You’re just an ugly joker-boy, aren’t you?” the cop asked. Jube gave an ingratiating, tusky grin. “What, me ugly? Hell, I got bigger tits than Miss October!”
“I’ve wasted enough time without listening to your asshole jokes,” the plainclothesman snapped. “But what did I expect? You’re not too bright, are you?”
Bright enough to fool your kind for thirty-four years, Jube thought, but he didn’t say it. “Well, you know how many jokers it takes to turn on a light bulb,” he said.
“Haul your greasy joker ass out of here,” the man said. Jube waddled to the door. At the top of the stairs, he turned back and yelled, “That paper’s on me!” before taking off for the Crystal Palace.
He was early tonight, and the Palace was still crowded. Jube took a stool all the way at the end of the bar, where he could put his back right up against the wall and see the whole room. It was Sascha’s night off, and Lupo was tending bar. “What’ll it be, Walrus?” he asked, long red tongue lolling from one corner of his mouth.
“Piiia colada,” Jube said. “Double rum.”
Lupo nodded and went off to mix it. Jube looked around carefully. He had an uneasy feeling, as if he were being watched. But who? The taproom was full of strangers, and Chrysalis was nowhere in sight. Three stools away, a big man in a lion mask was lighting a cigarette for a young girl whose low-cut evening gown displayed ample cleavage from three full breasts. Further down the bar a huddled shape in a gray shroud stared into his drink. A slender, vivacious green woman made eye contact when Jube glanced at her, and slid the tip of a pink tongue provocatively across her lower lip (at least it might have been provocative to a human male), but she was obviously a hooker, and he ignored her. Elsewhere in the room, he saw Yin-Yang, whose two heads were having a spirited argument, and Old Mister Cricket too. The Floater had passed out and was drifting about near the ceiling again. But there were so many faces and masks Jube did not recognize. Any one of them might be Jay Ackroyd. Chrysalis had never said what the man looked like, only that he was an ace. He might even be the man in lion mask, who-Jube noted with a glance-had now slipped an arm around the threebreasted girl and was brushing his fingertips lightly along the top of the breast on the right.
Lupo mopped the bar, spun down a coaster, and put the pina colada on top of it. Jube had just taken his first sip when a stranger slid onto the barstool beside him. “Are you selling those newspapers?”
“Sure am.”
“Good.” The voice was muffled by his mask, a bone-white death’s head. He wore a black cowled cape over a threadbare suit that did very little for his skinny, hollow-chested body. “I’ll take a Cry, then.”
Jube thought there was something unpleasant about his eyes. He looked away, found a copy of the Cry, handed it over. The cowled man gave him a coin. “What’s this?” Jube said. “A penny,” the man replied.
The penny was larger than it should have been, and a vivid red against Jube’s blue-black palm. He’d never seen anything like it. “I don’t know if—”
“Never mind,” the man interrupted. He took the penny out of Jube’s hand, and gave him a Susan B. Anthony dollar instead. “Where’s my change, Walrus?” he demanded. Jube gave him back three quarters. “You shortchanged me,” the man said nastily when he’d pocketed the coins.
“I did not,” Jube told him with indignation.
“Look me in the eye and say that, you two-bit jerk.” Behind the skull-faced man, the door opened and Troll ducked through into the taproom, followed by a short redhaired man in a lime-green suit. “Tachyon,” Jube said with apprehension, suddenly reminded of the Takisian warship up in orbit.
Jube’s unpleasant companion twisted his head around so sharply that his cowl flopped down, revealing thin brown hair and a bad case of dandruff. He jerked to his feet, hesitated, and rushed for the door as soon as Tachyon and Troll had moved toward the back. “Hey!” Jube called after him, “hey, mister, your paper!” He’d left; the Cry on the bar. The man went out so quickly he almost caught the end of his long black cape in the door. Jube shrugged and went back to his pina colada.
Several hours and a dozen drinks later, Chrysalis had still not made an appearance, nor had Jube spotted anyone who looked like he imagined this Popinjay might look. When Lupo announced last call, Jube beckoned him over. “Where is she?” he asked.
“Chrysalis?” Lupo asked. Deep red eyes sparkled on either side of his long, hairy snout. “Is she expecting you?”
Jube nodded. “Got stuff to tell her.”
“Okay,” Lupo said. “In the red room, third booth from the left. She’s with a friend.” He grinned. “Pretend you don’t see him, if you hear what I’m saying.”
“Whatever she wants.” Jube thought the friend had to be Popinjay, but he didn’t say anything. He lowered himself carefully off the stool and went to the red room, off to the right of the main taproom. Inside, it was dim and smoky. The lights were red, the thick shag carpeting was red, and the heavy velvet drapes around the booths were a deep, rich burgundy. Most booths were empty at this time of night, but he could hear a woman moaning from one that was not. He went to the third booth from the left, pulled back the drape, and stuck his head inside.
They had been talking in low, earnest tones, but now the conversation broke off abruptly. Chrysalis looked up at him. “Jubal,” she said crisply. “What can I do for you?”
Jube looked at her companion, a compact sinewy white man in a black tee shirt and dark leather jacket. He wore the plainest of masks, a black hood that covered everything but his eyes. “You must be Popinjay,” Jube said, before he recalled that the detective did not like to be called by that name. “No,” the masked man replied, his voice surprisingly soft. He glanced at Chrysalis. “We can resume this conversation later if you have business to transact.” He slid out of the booth and walked off without another word.
“Get in,” Chrysalis said. Jube sat down and pulled the drapes closed. “Whatever you have for me, I hope it’s good.” She sounded distinctly annoyed.
“Have for you?” Jube was confused. “What do you mean? Where’s Popinjay, shouldn’t he be here by now?”
She stared at him. Sheathed in transparent flesh and ghost-gray muscles, her skull reminded Jube of the unpleasant man who’d sat next to him at the bar. “I wasn’t aware you knew Jay. What does he have to do with anything? Is there something about Jay that I need to know?”
“The report,” Jube blurted. “He was going to tell us about these Masons who hired Devil John to steal that body from the morgue. They were dangerous, you said.”
Chrysalis laughed at him, drew back the privacy curtains, and rose languidly. “Jubal, I don’t know how many exotic rum drinks you’ve indulged in tonight, but I suspect it was a few too many. That’s always a problem when Lupo is behind the bar. Sascha can tell when a customer has had enough, but not our little wolf-boy. Go home and sleep it off.”
“Go home!” Jube said. “But what about the body, what about Devil John and these Masons ...”
“If you want to join a lodge, the Odd Fellows would suit you better, I’d think,” Chrysalis said in a bored tone. “Other than that, I don’t have the vaguest idea what you’re talking about.”
The walk home was long and hot, and Jube had an uneasy feeling, as if he were being watched. He stopped and looked around furtively several times, to try and catch whoever was following him, but there was never anyone in sight.
Down in the privacy of his apartment, Jube immersed himself gratefully in his cold tub, and turned on his television. The late movie was Thirty Minutes Over Broadway!, but it wasn’t the Howard Hawks version, it was the awful 1978 remake with Jan-Michael Vincent as Jetboy and Dudley Moore doing a comic-relief Tachyon in a hideous red wig. Jube found himself watching it anyway; mindless escape was exactly what he needed. He would worry about Chrysalis and the rest of it tomorrow.
Jetboy had just crashed the JB-1 into the blimps when the picture suddenly crackled and went black. “Hey,” Jube said, stabbing at his remote control. Nothing happened.
Then a hound the size of a small horse walked out of his television set.
It was lean and terrible, its body smoke-gray and hideously emaciated, its eyes windows that opened on a charnel house. A long forked tail curved up over its back like a scorpion’s sting, and twitched from side to side.
Jube recoiled so fast he splashed water all over his bedroom floor, and began shouting at the thing. The hound bared teeth like yellow daggers. Jube realized he was babbling in the Network trade tongue, and switched to English. “Get out!” he told it. “Get away!” He scrabbled over the side of the tub, splashing more water, and retreated. The remote control was still in his hand, if he could reach his sanctum-but what good would that do, against some thing that walked through walls? His flesh went hot with sudden terror.
The hound padded after him, and then stopped. Its gaze was fixed on his crotch. It seemed momentarily bemused by the forked double penis, and full set of female genitalia beneath. Jube decided that his best chance lay in a dash for the street. He edged backward.
“Fat little man,” the hound called out in a voice that was pure unctuous malice. “Will you run from me? You sought me out, fool. Do you think your thick joker legs can carry you faster than Setekh the destroyer?”
Jube gaped. “Who ...”
“I am he whose secrets you sought to know,” the hound said. “Pathetic little joker, did you think we would not notice, did you think we would not care? I have taken the knowledge from the minds of your hirelings, and followed the trail back to you. And now you will die.”
“Why?” Jube said. He had no doubt that creature could kill him, but if he must perish, he hoped at least to understand the reason.
“Because you have wasted my time,” the hound said. Its mouth twisted into obscene, unnatural shapes when it spoke. “I thought to find some great enemy, and instead I find a fat little joker who makes his money selling gossip to a saloonkeeper. How much did you think the secrets of our Order would be worth? Who did you think might pay for them, Walrus? Tell me, and I will not toy with you. Lie, and your dying will last till dawn.”
The hound had no idea what he was, Jhubben realized. How could it? It had learned of him from Chrysalis, from the street; it had not walked behind his false wall. Suddenly, for reasons he could not have explained, Jube knew that Setekh must not know. He must lead it away from his secrets. “I did not mean to pry, mighty Setekh,” he said loudly. He had posed as a joker for thirty-four years, he knew how to crawl. “I beg your mercy,” he said, edging backward toward the living room. “I am not your enemy,” he told it. The hound padded toward him, eyes smoldering, tongue lolling from its long snout. Jube jumped for his living room, slammed the door behind him, and ran.
The hound bounded through the wall to cut him off, and Jube lost his footing as he recoiled. He went down in a heap, the hound raised one terrible paw to strike ... and stopped as Jube cringed away from the killing blow. Its mouth twisted and ran with phantom slaver, and Jube realized it was laughing. It was staring at something behind him and laughing. He craned his head around, and saw only the tachyon transmitter.
When he looked back, the hound was gone. Instead a frail little man in a wheelchair sat staring at him. “We are an old Order,” the little man said. “The secrets have passed through many mouths, and some have gone astray, and some branches have been lost and forgotten. Be glad you were not killed, brother.”
“Oh, yeah,” Jube said, crawling to his knees. He had no idea why he was being spared, but he was not going to argue the point. “Thank you, master. I won’t bother you again.”
“I will let you live, so you may live to serve us,” the apparition in the wheelchair told him. “Even one as stupid and weak as you may have his uses in the great struggle to come. But say nothing of what you have learned, or you will not live to be initiated.”
“I’ve forgotten it already,” Jube said.
The man in the wheelchair seemed to find that vastly amusing. His forehead throbbed as he laughed. A moment later, he was gone. Jube got to his feet very cautiously.
Early the next morning, a joker with vivid crimson skin bought a copy of the Daily News, and paid for it with a shiny red penny the size ou a half dollar. “I’d keep that if I were you, pal o’ mine,” he said, smiling. “I think it might just be your lucky coin.” Then he told when and where the next meeting would be held.
Subways were a human perversion that Jube had never quite grown accustomed to. They were suffocatingly hot, the smell of urine in the tunnels was sometimes overwhelming, and he hated the way the lights flickered on and off as the cars rattled along. The long ride on the A train up to 190th Street was worse than most. In Jokertown, Jube felt comfortable. He was part of the community, someone familiar and accepted. In Midtown and Harlem and points beyond, he was a freak, something that little children stared at and their parents studiously failed to notice. It made him feel almost, well, alien.
But there was no avoiding it. It would never do for the newsboy called Walrus to arrive at the Cloisters in a taxi. These past few months it had sometimes seemed as though his life was in ruins, but his business was doing better . than ever. Jube had discovered that Masons read newspapers too, so he brought a large armful to each meeting, and read them on the A train (when the lights were on) to take his mind off the smells, the noise, and the looks of distaste on the faces of the riders around him.
The lead story in the Times announced the formation of a special federal task force to deal with the Swarm menace. The ongoing jurisdictional squabbles between NASA, the Joint Chiefs, SCARE, and the secretary of defense-all of whom had claimed the Swarm as their own-would finally be ended, it was hoped, and henceforth all anti-Swarm activities would be coordinated. The task force would be headed by a man named Lankester, a career diplomat from State, who promised to begin hearings immediately. The task force hoped to requisition the exclusive use of the VLA radio telescopes in New Mexico to locate the Swarm Mother, but that idea was drawing heavy flak from the scientific community.
The Post highlighted the latest ace-of-spades murder with pictures of the victim, who had taken an arrow through his left eye. The dead man had been a joker with a record as long as his prehensile tail, and ties to a Chinatown street gang variously known as the Snowbirds, the Snowboys, and the Immaculate Egrets. The Daily News—which featured the same murder, minus the art-speculated that the bow-andarrow killer was a Mafia hit man, since it was known that the immaculate Egrets of Chinatown and the Demon Princes of Jokertown had been moving in on Gambione operations, and Frederico “the Butcher” Macellaio was not one to take kindly to such interference. The theory failed to explain why the killer used a bow and arrow, why he dropped a laminated ace of spades on each body, and why he had left untouched the kilo of angel dust his latest victim had been carrying.
The National Informer had a front-page color photograph of Dr. Tachyon standing in a laboratory with a gawky, bewhiskered companion in a purple Uncle Sam suit. It was a very unflattering picture. The cutline read Dr. Tachyon and Captain Zipp pay tribute to Dr. Warner Fred Warren. ‘His contribution to science unparalleled,’ says psychic alien genius. The accompanying article suggested that Dr. Warren had saved the world, and urged that his laboratory be declared a national monument, a suggestion it attributed to Dr. Tachyon. The tabloid’s centerfold was devoted to the testimony of a Bronx cleaning lady, who claimed that a swarmling had attempted to rape her on the PATH tubes, until a passing transit worker transformed himself into a twelve-foot-long alligator and ate the creature. That story made Jube uneasy. He glanced up and studied the others in the A train, hoping that none of them were swarmlings or were alligators.
He had the new issue of Aces magazine too, with its cover story on Jumpin’ Jack Flash, “The Big Apple’s Hottest New Ace. Flash had been utterly unknown until two weeks ago, when he’d suddenly appeared-in an orange jumpsuit slit to his navel-to extinguish a warehouse fire on South Street that was threatening to engulf the nearby Jokertown clinic, by drawing the flames in on himself and somehow absorbing them. Since then, he’d been everywhere-booming along through the Manhattan sky on a roaring column of fire, shooting flame blasts from his fingertips, giving sardonic and cryptic interviews, and escorting beautiful women to Aces High, where his penchant for flambeing his own steaks was giving Hiram fits.” Aces was the first magazine to plaster his foxy grin on its cover, but it wouldn’t be the last.
At the 59th Street station a slender, balding man in a three-piece suit got on the train and sat across the car from Jube. He worked for the Internal Revenue Service, and was known in the Order as. Vest. At 125th Street, they were joined by a hefty, gray-haired black woman in a pink waitress uniform. Jube knew her too. They were ordinary people, both of them. They had neither ace powers nor joker deformities. The Masons had turned out to be full of such people: construction workers and accountants, college students and moving men, sewer workers and bus drivers, housewives and hookers. At the meetings Jube had met a well-known lawyer, a TV weatherman, and a professional exterminator who loved to talk shop and kept giving him cards (‘Lots of roaches in Jokertown, I’ll bet’). Some were rich, a few very poor, most just worked hard for their living. None of them seemed to be very happy.
The leaders were of a more extraordinary cut, but every group needs its rank and file, every army its privates. That was where Jube fit in.
Jay Ackroyd would never know where he had made his mistake. He was a professional private investigator, shrewd and experienced, and he had been painstakingly careful once he had realized what he was dealing with. If only he had been a little less talented, if only Chrysalis had sent a more common sort of man, they might have gotten away with it. It was his ability that had tripped him up, the hidden ace power. Popinjay, that was the street name he loathed: he was a projecting teleport who could point a finger and pop people somewhere else. He had done his best to stay inconspicious, had failed to pop a single Mason, but Judas had sensed the power nonetheless, and that had been enough. Now Ackroyd had no more memory of the Masons than did Chrysalis or Devil John Darlingfoot. Only Jube’s obvious jokerhood and conspicuous lack of power had spared his mind and his life ... that, and the machine in his living room.
It was dark by the time the A train pulled into 190th Street. Spoons and Vest walked briskly from the subway while Jube trudged after them, newspapers under his arm. The harness chafed under his shirt, and he felt desperately alone.
He had no allies. Chrysalis and Popinjay had forgotten everything. Croyd had woken as a bloated gray-green thing with flesh like a jellyfish and had promptly gone to sleep again, sweating blood. The Takisians had come and gone, doing nothing, caring less. The singularity shifter, if it was still intact and functional, was lost somewhere in the city, and his tachyon transmitter was useless without it. He could not go to any human authorities. The Masons were everywhere; they had penetrated the police, the fire department, the IRS, the transit authority, the media. At one meeting, Jube had even spotted a nurse who worked at the Jokertown clinic.
That one had troubled him deeply. He had spent several sleepness nights floating in his cold tub, wondering if he ought to say something to somebody. But who? He could whisper Nurse Greshams name to Troll, he could report Harry Matthias to his captain, he could spill the whole story to Crabcakes at the Cry. But what if Troll was a Mason himself? Or Captain Black, or Crabcakes? The ordinary Masons saw their leaders only at a distance, and frequently in masks, and there were rumors of other high-degree initiates who never came to meetings, aces and power brokers and others in positions of authority. The only one he could really trust was himself.
So he had gone to their meetings, listening, learning. He had watched with fascination when they donned their masks and acted out their pageants and rituals, had researched the attributes of the mythological gods they aped, had told his jokes and laughed at theirs, had made friends with those who would befriend a joker and observed the others who would not. And he had begun to suspect something, something monstrous and troubling.
He wondered, not for the first time, why he was doing this. And found himself remembering a time long ago, aboard the great Network starship Opportunity. The Master Trader had come to his cabin in the guise of an ancient Glabberan, his bristling hair gone black with age, and Jhubben had asked why he was being honored with this assignment. “You are like them,” the Master Trader had said. “Your form is different, but among those warped and twisted by Takisian bioscience, you will be lost, another faceless victim. Your thought patterns, your culture, your values, your moralities-these are closer to the human norms than those of anyone else I might select. In time, as you dwell among them, you will become still more alike, and so you will come to understand them, and be of great value on our return.” .
It had been true, all true; Jube was more human than he would ever have guessed. But the Master Trader had left one thing out. He had not told Jhubben that he would come to love these humans, and to feel responsible for them.
In the shadow of the Cloisters, two youths in gang colors stepped out to confront him. One of them had a switchblade. They knew him by now, but still he had to show them the shiny red penny he carried in his pocket. Those were the rules. They nodded to him silently, and jube passed within, to the great hall where they were waiting with their tabards and masks, with their ritual words and the secrets he was terrified to learn, where they were waiting for him to arrive, to conduct his initiation.
Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing
by Victor Milan
The tall man opened his mouth and said, “Beware. There is danger here.”
Mark Meadows swayed like a radio mast in a high wind, sat down on the hood of a black stretch limo parked in front of the store to wait the dizziness out. It had been a woman’s voice, tinted with Asian accent like ginger flakes.
The slim, blond twelve-year-old girl with him watched him closely, concerned but not afraid. She’d seen these spells before.
He looked up and down the block. Fitz-James O’Brien Street was about the same as always. This fringe of the Village had grown rougher the last few years. But so had the world. And people left him pretty much alone.
He had friends.
You guys are getting pretty restless, he thought. He felt furtive stirrings in the back of his brain, but no more words came unbidden.
Deciding her father was all right, the girl began to swing pendulumlike on her father’s arm, chanting, “We’re home, Daddy, we’re home.” Her voice was that of a four-year-old. The rest of her was twelve.
He gazed down at her. A rush of love suffused him like a hit of windowpane. He pulled her close, hugged her, and stood.
“Yeah, Sprout. Home.” He opened the door beneath the smiling hand-painted sun and the legend COSMIC PUMPKIN-FOOD FOR BODY, MIND & SPIRIT.
Inside was cool and almost dark. It used to be sunny in here on spring days like this, but that was when there was still plate glass in the windows instead of plywood sheets. The sound system was on, tuned by one of his clerks to one of those New Age easy-listening stations popular with people who spend their evenings watching Koyaanisqatsi on remote-programmable VCRs. A little thin for even Mark’s blood, but at the moment better than the usual fare: Bonnie Raitt, something recent with a soft ska beat.
Good business for midafternoon, he thought, with the reflex twinge of guilt he got any time he had such commercial thoughts. A small guy with a fleshy, pointy nose and a silklike jacket with a strip-club logo on the back was haunting the glass-top counter that displayed the dope paraphernalia the Pumpkin was carrying until the inevitable Crusading DA finally got around to cracking down. He seemed to be thinking of hitting on one of Mark’s stumpy, brush-cut clerks, who was sweeping the floor behind the deli counter with muttering bad grace and shooting him hate looks. She gave Mark one, too, when she noticed him. He was a man; this was all his fault.
A handful of even less descript types sat at tables hunched over racing forms and steaming cups of Red Zinger tea. A tall dark-haired woman stood at the comic rack with her back to him, looking at a reprint of an early Freak Brothers classic. The DA was after those, too. Mark put a hand back around to where his long blond hair, more ash now than straw, was gathered into a blue elastic tie. It was too tight, and pulled at random patches of his scalp like doll hands. Nineteen years this spring he’d been wearing his hair long, and he still hadn’t gotten the hang of tying back a ponytail.
Absently he noticed that the woman was well dressed to be grazing the undergrounds. Usually the customers in pricey threads scrupulously confined their attentions to his sprouts-and-tofu cuisine.
His daughter chirped, “Auntie Brenda,” and went running back to give the clerk a hug. The tall man smiled ruefully. He could never tell his clerks apart. They both thought he was a weed, anyway.
Then the well-dressed woman turned and looked at him with violet eyes and said, quietly, “Mark.”
It felt as if one of the youthful football jocks who had been the curse of his adolescence had just chop-blocked his pelvis out from under his spine.
“Sunflower,” he managed to say through a throat gone as pliable as an airshaft.
He heard the squeak-scruff of his daughter’s sneakers on stained linoleum behind him. A moment of silence hung in the air, stretching gradually, agonizingly, like a taffy strand. Then Sprout boiled past and threw herself at the woman, hugging her with all the strength of her thin arms.
“Mommy.”
The rat-faced man slid out of the booth and walked up to Mark. He had wet-looking black eyes and a mustache that looked as if it had been carelessly dabbed on in mascara. Mark blinked at him, very carefully, as if his eyes were fragile and might break.
The smaller man thrust a packet of papers into his hand. “See you in court, buppie,” he said, and sidled out the door.
Mark stared down at the papers. Freewheeling, his mind registered official-looking seals and the phrase determine custody of their daughter, Sprout.
And the other customers came boiling up from their checkered cheesecloth tables as if tied to the same string, stuck big black cameras in Mark’s face, and blasted him back into the door with their strobes.
His vision full of big swarming balloons of light, Mark staggered into the little bathroom and threw up in the toilet beneath the Jimi Hendrix poster. Fortunately the poster was laminated.
Kimberly Anne slid into the limousine by feel, watching the Pumpkin’s front door with bruised-looking eyes. Around the fringes of the plywood she could see the photographers’ flashguns spluttering like an arc welder.
“Poor mark,” she whispered. She turned with mascara beginning to melt down one cheek.
“Is it really necessary to put him through all this?” The backseat’s other occupant regarded her with eyes as pale and dispassionate as a shark’s. “It is,” he said, “if you want your daughter back.”
She stared at fingers knotted in her lap. “More than anything,” she said, just audibly.
“Then you must be ready to pay the price, Mrs. Gooding.”
“My advice to you, Or. Meadows,” Dr. Pretorius said, leaning back and cracking the knuckles of his big, callused hands, “is to go underground.”
Mark stared at the lawyer’s hands. They didn’t seem to fit with the rest of him, which was a pretty unorthodox picture to start with. You didn’t expect hands like that on a lawyer, even a long-haired one, especially not resting above a gold watch-chain catenary on the vest of a thousanddollar charcoal-gray suit. They jarred. Just like fording the cream wallpaper and walnut-wainscoted elegance of Pretorius’s office in a second-floor walk-up in what the tabloids liked to call the festering depths of Jokertown. Or like the strange tang like pus-filled bandages that seemed to stick in the back of Mark’s nose.
Mark couldn’t evade the issue any longer. “I beg your pardon?” he said, blinking furiously. Behind his chair Sprout hummed to herself as she studied the array of insects mounted under glass on the walls.
“You heard me. If you want to hold on to your little girl, the best advice I can give you as a lawyer is to go underground.”
“I don’t understand.”
““Oh, my God,”‘ Pretorius quoted, ““you’re from the sixties.’ Doesn’t ring any bells? You didn’t see that movie they made out of W E Kinsella’s autobiography? No, of course not; chewing up a blotter and sitting through a revival of 2001 three times is more your speed in movies.”
He sighed. “Are you telling me you don’t know what ‘going underground’ means? You know-Huey Newton, Patty Hearst, all those fabulous names of yesteryear.”
Mark glanced nervously back at his daughter, who had her nose pressed to the glass over some kind of bug that looked like a ten-inch twig. Mark had never realized before just how nervous insects made him.
“I know what it means, man. I just don’t know—” He raised his own hands, which in the somewhat stark light began to look to him like specimens escaped from Pretorius’s cases, to try to draw communication out of himself, out of the air, whatever. Outside of one area of life he had never been much good at getting ideas across.
Pretorius nodded briskly. “You don’t know if I’m serious, right? I am. Dead serious.”
He let his hand drop forward onto his desk, onto the copy of the Post Jube had given Mark. “Do you have any idea who you’re dealing with here?”
A blunt finger was tapping Kimberly Anne’s face where it peered over Sprout’s shoulder. “That’s my ex-old lady,” Mark said. “She used to call herself Sunflower.”
“She’s calling herself Mrs. Gooding now. I gather she married the senior partner at her brokerage firm.”
He stared almost accusingly at Mark. “And do you know whom she’s retained? St. John Latham.”
He spoke the name like a curse. Sprout came up and insinuated her hand into her daddy’s. He reached awkwardly across himself to put his free arm around her.
“What’s so special about this Latham dude?”
“He’s the best. And he’s a total bastard.”
“That’s, like, why I came to you. You’re supposed to be pretty good yourself. If you’ll help me, why should I think about running?”
Pretorius’s mouth seemed to heat-shrink to his teeth. “Flattery is always appreciated, no matter how beside the point.”
He leaned forward. “Understand, Doctor: these are the eighties. Don’t you hate that phrase? I thought nothing was ever going to be as nauseous as the cant we had back in the days when Weathermen weren’t fat boys who got miffed at Bryant Gumbel on the morning show. Oh, well, wrong again, Pretorius.” He cocked his head like a big bird. “Dr. Meadows, you claim to be an ace?”
Mark flushed.—“Well, I ...”
“Does the name ‘Captain Trips’ suggest anything?”
“I-that is-yes.” Mark looked at his hands. “It’s supposed to be a secret.”
“Cap’n Trips is a fixture in Jokertown and on the New York ace scene. And does he ever wear a mask?”
“Well ... no.”
“Indeed. So we have a fairly visible but apparently minor ace, whose, ahem, ‘secret identity’ is a man who follows a rather divergent life-style in a day when ‘the nail that stands out must be hammered down’ is the dominant social wisdom. St. John Latham is a man who will do anything to win. Anything. Do you see how you might be, how you say, vulnerable?”
Mark covered his face with his hands. “I just can’t ... I mean, Sunflower wouldn’t do anything like that to me. We, we’re like comrades. I knew her at Berkeley, man. The Kent State protests-you remember that?” His confusion came out in a gush of reproach, accusation almost. He expected Pretorius to bark at him. Instead the attorney nodded his splendid silver head. The perfection of his ponytail filled Mark with jealous awe.
“I remember. I still walk with a limp, thanks to a National Guardsman’s bayonet in my hip-among other reasons.”
Pretorius sat back and gazed at the ceiling. “A radical in ‘70. An executive in ‘89. If you knew how anything but uncommon that story is. At least she’s not with the DEA.”
“And while we’re on that subject, I have formed the impression you don’t say no to recreational chemistry”
“It doesn’t hurt anybody, man.”
“No. Ain’t nobody’s business but your own; couldn’t agree more. Being a Jew in Nuremberg in the thirties didn’t hurt anybody either.”
He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. “Doctor, you are a big, soft, inflated Bozo the Clown doll in the climate of today, and Mr. St. John Motherfucking Latham is going to knock you all over the courtroom. So I say to you, Run, baby, run. Or be prepared for a sea change in your life.”
Mark made a helpless gesture, started to stand. “One more thing,” Pretorius said.
Mark stopped. Pretorius looked to Sprout. She was a shy child, except with those close to her, and the lawyer had an intimidating way-he intimidated her dad, anyway. But she faced Pretorius, solemn and unflinching.
“The question that needs to be asked is, what do you want, Sprout?” Pretorius said. “Do you want to live with your mommy, or stay with your father?”
“I-I’ll abide by her wishes, man,” Mark said. It was the hardest thing .he’d ever said.
She looked from Pretorius to Mark and back. “I miss my mommy,” she said in that precise, childish voice. Mark felt his skeleton begin to collapse within him.
“But I want to stay with my daddy.”
Pretorius nodded gravely. “Then we’ll do what we can to see that you do. But what that will be”—he looked at Mark—“is up to your father.”
Seven o’clock turned up on schedule. Susan-he was fairly sure it was Susan-marched to the front door to flip over the sign to SORRY—WE’RE CLOSED just as a woman materialized and pushed at the door from outside.
Susan resisted, glaring. Mark came around the counter wiping his hands on his apron and felt his stomach do a slow roll.
“It’s okay,” he managed to croak. “She can come in.” Susan turned her glare on Mark. “I’m off now, buster.” Mark shrugged helplessly. The woman stepped agilely inside. She was tall and striking in a black skirt suit with padded shoulders and a deep purple blouse. Her eyes had grown more violet over the years. The blouse turned them huge and glowing.
“This is personal, not business,” she said to Susan. “We’ll be fine.”
“If you’re sure you’ll be okay alone with him,” Susan sniffed. She launched a last glower at Mark and clumped out into the Village dusk.
She turned, Kimberly, and was in Mark’s arms. He damned near collapsed. He stood there a moment with his arms sort of dangling stiffly past her like a mannequin’s. Then he hugged her with adolescent fervor. Her body melted against his, fleetingly, and then she turned and was out of his arms like smoke.
“You seem to be doing well for yourself,” she said, gesturing at the shop.
“Uh, yeah. Thanks.” He pulled a chair back from a table. “Here, sit down.”
She smiled and accepted. He went around behind the counter and busied himself. She lit a cigarette and looked at him. He didn’t point out the LUNGS IN UsE-No SMOKING, PLEASE sign on the wall behind her.
She wasn’t as willowy as she had been back in the Bay days. Nor was she blowsy from booze and depression as she had been when their marriage hit the rocks and she self-destructed at the first custody hearing, back in ‘81. Full-figured was what he thought they, called it, glancing back as he waited for water to boil, though he had it in mind that had become a euphemism for “fat”. She wasn’t; voluptuous might have put it better. Whatever, she wore forty well.
... Not that it mattered, not really. He was still as desperately in love with her as he’d been the first time he saw her, thirty years and more ago, tricycling down their southern California tract-home block.
The lights were low, just a visual buzz of fluorescents above the deli counter. Mark lit candles and a sandalwood stick. The Windham Hill mob was history. The tape machine played real music. Their music.
He brought an earthenware pot and two matching mugs on a tray. He almost tipped the assembly onto the floor, slopping fragrant herbal tea on the red-and-white checkered tablecloth as he transferred the pot to the table. Kimberly sat and watched him with a smile that held no mockery.
He spilled only a little of the pale amber liquid as he poured and handed her a mug. She sipped. Her face lit. “Celestial Seasonings and old Bonnie Raitt.” She smiled. “How sweet of you to remember.”
“How could I forget?” he mumbled into the steam rising from his mug.
A rustle of beaded curtain, and they looked up to see Sprout standing in the gloom at the back of the store. “Daddy, I’m hungry—” she began. Then she saw Kimberly and came flying forward again.
Kimberly cradled her, telling her, “Baby, baby, it’s all right, Mommy’s here.” Mark sat, absently stroking his daughter’s long smooth hair, feeling excluded.
At last Sprout relinquished her hold on Sunflower’s neck and slid down to sit cross-legged on the scuffed linoleum, pressed up against her mother’s black-stockinged shins. Kimberly petted her.
“I don’t want to take her away from you, Mark.” Mark’s vision swirled. His eyes stung. His tongue knotted. “Why-why are you doing this, then? You said I was doing well.”
“That’s different. That’s money.” She gestured around the shop. “Do you really think this is any way for a little girl to grow up? Surrounded by smut and hash pipes?”
“She’s all right,” he said sullenly. “She’s happy. Aren’t you honey?”
Wide-eyed solemn, Sprout nodded. Kimberly shook her head.
“Mark, these are the eighties. You’re a dropout, a druggie. How can you expect to raise a daughter, let alone one as ... special as our Sprout is?”
Mark froze with his hand reaching for the pocket of his faded denim jacket-the one that held his pouch and papers, not the one with the Grateful Dead patch. It came to him how great the gulf between them had become.
“The way I’ve been doing,” he said. “One day at a time.”
“Oh, Mark,” she said, rising. “You sound like an AA meeting.”
The tape had segued to Buffalo Springfield. Kimberly hugged Sprout, came around the table to him. “Families should be together,” she said huskily in his ear. “Oh, Mark, I wish—”
“What? What do you wish?”
But she was gone, leaving him and her last words hanging in a breath of Chanel No. 5.
The stuffed animals sat in a rapt semicircle on the bed and in shelf tiers along the walls. The light of one dim bulb glittered in attentive plastic eyes as the girl spoke.
Mark watched from the doorway. She had not pulled the madras-print cloth to, indicating she didn’t want full privacy. She spoke in a low voice, leaning forward. He could never make out what she said at times like this; it seemed to him that the length of her sentences, the pitch of her voice even, were somehow more adult than anything she managed in the world outside her tiny converted-closet bedroom, in the presence of anyone but the Pobbles and Thumpers and teddy bears. But if he tried to intrude, to come close to catch the sense of what she was saying, she clammed up. It was one area of her life Sprout excluded him from, however desperately he wanted to share it.
He turned away, padded barefoot past the dark cubicle where he had his own mattress on the floor to the lab that took up most of the apartment above the Pumpkin.
Red-eye pilot lights threw little hard shards of illumination that ricocheted fitfully among surfaces of glass and mechanism. Mark felt his way to a pad in the corner beneath a periodic table and a poster for Destiny’s gig at the Fillmore in 1970’s long-lost spring and sat. The smell of cannabis smoke and the layers of paint it had sunk into enfolded him like arms. His cheeks had become wet without his being aware.
He pushed a cabinet on casters away from the wall, untoggled the fiberboard rear panel. The compartment hidden inside contained racks of vials of various colored powders: blue, orange, yellow, gray, black, and silver that swirled together without mixing. He stared at them, ran a finger along them like a stick along a picket fence.
A long time ago a skinny kid with a crew cut and highwater pants, who had just dropped LSD for the first time ever, had stumbled into an alleyway in horror, fleeing a People’s Park confrontation between National Guardsmen and students in the dark angry days that followed Kent State. Moments later a glowing beautiful youth emerged: an ace for the Revolution. Together with Tom Douglas, the Lizard King and doomed lead singer for Destiny, he had stood off the Guard and the Establishment ace Hardhat, and saved the day. Then he partied the night away, with help from the kids, Tom Douglas, and a beautiful young activist called Sunflower. He called himself the Radical.
In the morning the Radical disappeared. He was never seen again. And a certain nerd biochem student stumbled back out of the alley with a head full of the strangest memory fragments.
Becoming the Radical again-if he’d ever really been the Radical-had become Mark’s Holy Grail. He had failed in that quest. The brightly colored powders were what he had found instead. Not what he was looking for-but a means to acceptance all the same. To having, at least for one hour, a dose, what a long-dead Egyptian scribe once prayed for as “effective personality.”
He felt stirrings down around the back of his skull, like the voices of children on a distant playground. He pushed them back down, away. From below the racks he took a bong with a cracked, smoke-stained stack. Right now he needed chemical sanctuary of a more conventional kind.
He soared upward from the roof, upward from the smog and squalor into blue morning sky that darkened around him as he rose. The Village dwindled, was subsumed into the cement scab of Manhattan, became a finger poking a blue ribbon between Long Island and the Jersey shore, was lost in swirls of cloud. Clouds hid the shitbrown garbage bloom from the bay into the Atlantic: a blessing in his present mood.
He rose higher, feeling the air chill and attenuate around him until it was gone, and he floated in blackness, with nothing between him and the hot healing eye of the sun.
He stretched, feeling his body fill with the wild energy of the sun, the lifegiver He was Starshine; he needed no air, no food. Only sunlight. It hit him like a drug—though he knew the rush of cocaine and sizzle of crystal meth only
at one remove and unwillingly, through the experiences of Mark Meadows.
From the Olympian height of orbit you could barely see what a splendid job man was doing of fouling his own nest. He ached to spread the word, the warning, to help the world to its senses with his poems and songs. But the moments of freedom were too few, too few ....
He felt the pressure of other voices within, dragging him back to Earth, in thought if not yet in body. Meadows had a problem, and he knew that this brief liberation was Mark’s way of consulting him. As he would the others.
Changes are due in your life, Mark Meadows, he thought. But what might those changes be? If he himself could do no more, he wished Meadows at least would involve himself more in the world, take a stand. He wished Mark would give up his habits of drug abusethough he couldn’t escape irony there, since if Mark went completely straight, it would be in effect the end of him, of Starshine in his golden body stocking, floating up above the world so high.
He gazed off around the molten-silver limb of the world. A gigantic oil spill was fouling the coast of Alaska; for all his powers, what could he do? What could he do to halt acid rain, or the destruction of the Amazon rain forest?
That last he’d even tried, had flown to Brazil on wings of light, begun destroying bulldozers and work camps with his energy beams, putting the workmen to flight, burning the rotor off a Gazelle gunship that had tried to drive him away-though begrudgingly he had caught it before it crashed, and eased it to a soft landing on a sandbar. Unworthy as they were, he didn’t want the crew’s deaths weighing down his soul.
He had gotten so engrossed in his mission, in fact, that he’d overstayed his hour, stranding Mark in a smoldering patch of devastation in the middle of the Amazon basin with a whole regiment of the Brazilian army closing in and mightily pissed off. Even with his other friends to call on, Mark had some bad moments getting back to the States. He’d been so miffed he hadn’t summoned Starshine for six months afterward.
It did no good, of course. The Brazilian government borrowed more money from the World Bank and bought more and bigger earth-raping machines. The destruction went on with barely a hiccup.
The truth is, the world doesn’t need more aces, he thought. It doesn’t need us at all. We can’t do anything real.
He looked into the sun. Its roaring song of life and light blinded him, suffused him. But for all his exaltation, he was a mote-a spark, quickly consumed.
And he knew that he had come to his truth.
Dr. Pretorius leaned back in his swivel chair and crossed hands over his hard paunch. His suit was white today. He looked like a hip Colonel Sanders.
“So, Dr. Meadows, do you have a decision for me?” Mark nodded, started to speak. A door opened behind Pretorius and the words stuck tight in Mark’s throat. A woman had slipped silently into the room—a girl, maybe; she looked more like a special effect than a human. She was five and a half feet tall, inhumanly slim, and blue-blue green, actually, gleaming in the same shade as the dyes used in blue ice. The room temperature, already cool, had dropped perceptibly.
“You haven’t met my ward, have you? Dr. Meadows, let me present Ice Blue Sibyl.”
She looked at him. At least she turned her face toward him. Whatever she was made of looked hard as glass, but seemed constantly, subtly to be shifting. Her features seemed high-cheekboned and forward thrusting, though it was hard to be sure. Her body was attenuated as a mannequin’s and almost as sexless; though she appeared to be nude, the tiny breasts showed no nipples, nor did she display genitalia. Still, there was some alien, elflike quality to her, something that caused a stirring in Mark’s crotch as she looked at him with her blue-glass stare.
She turned her face to Pretorius, tipped it attentively. Mark got the impression that some communication passed between them. The lawyer nodded. Sibyl turned and walked to the door with sinuous inhuman grace. She stopped, gave Mark a last glance, vanished.
Pretorius was looking at him. “You’ve decided?” Mark reached out and hugged his daughter to him. “Yeah, man. There’s only one thing I can do.”
“Hello? Is anyone here?” Dr. Tachyon stepped cautiously through the open door. Today he wore an eighteenthcentury peach coat over a pale pink shirt with lace spraying out the front of a mauve waistcoat. His breeches were deep purple satin, caught at the knee with gold rosettes. His stockings were lilac, his shoes gold. Instead of an artificial hand, he wore a lace cozy on his stump, with a red rose sprouting from it.
Amazement stopped him cold. The Pumpkin was gutted. Tables were overturned, the counter torn up, the magazine racks lying on their backs, the psychedelic-era posters gone from the walls. Somewhere music played.
“Burning Sky! What’s happened here? Markl Mark!” Through a doorway at the back that looked curiously naked without the beaded curtain that had always hung there stepped a remarkable figure. It wore torn khaki pants, a black Queensrykche T-shirt stretched to the bursting point across a disproportionately huge chest. With a narrow head and finely sculpted, almost elfin features set on an inhumanly squat body, the newcomer looked the way pretty-boy movie martial-artist Jean Claude Van Damme would if they put him in a hydraulic press and mashed him down him a foot or so.
He stopped and turned a cool smile on Tachyon. “So. The little prince.” His English had a curious, almost Eastern European accent. Just like Tachyon’s.
“What have you done to Mark?” Tachyon hissed. His flesh hand inched back toward the little H&K nine-millimeter tucked in a waistband holster inside the back of his breeches.
The other put fist to palm and flexed. Cloth tore. “Served loyally and without stint, as befits a Morakh.” Being destroyed as an abomination befits a Morakh, Tachyon thought. He was about to say so when an equally outlandish apparition loomed up behind the creature. This one had a gray sleeveless sweatshirt and paint-splashed dungarees hung on a frame like a street sign and graying blond hair clipped skull close. He seemed to consist all of nose, Adam’s apple, and elbows.
“Doc! How are you, man?” the scarecrow said. Tachyon squinted at him. “Who the hell are you?” The other blinked and looked as if he were about to cry. “It’s me, man. Mark.”
Tachyon goggled. A blond rocket in cutoffs shot out the door, hit the Morakh in the middle of his broad back, scaled him like a monkey, and seated itself with slim bare legs straddling his rhinoceros neck.
“Uncle Tachy!” Sprout chirped. “Uncle Dirk is giving me a piggyback ride.”
“Indeed.” Ignoring the Morakh’s scowl, Tach stepped close to kiss the girl on her proffered cheek.
Durg at-Morakh was the strongest non-ace on Earth: no Golden Boy or Harlem Hammer, but far stronger than any normal human. He was not human; he was Takisian—a Morakh, a gene-engineered fighting machine created by the Vayawand, bitter enemies of Tachyon’s House Ilkazam. He had come to Earth with Tachyon’s cousin Zabb, a foe of a more intimate nature.
Now he served Mark, having been defeated in unarmed combat by Mark’s “friend” Moonchild. He and Tachyon tolerated each other for Mark’s sake.
Tachyon gripped his old friend by the biceps. “Mark, man, what has happened to you?”
Mark grimaced. Tachyon realized he had never seen his chin before.
“It’s this court thing,” Mark said, glancing at his daughter. “They start taking depositions soon. Dr. Pretorius said I needed to, like, straighten up my image.”
Taking his cue, Durg patted Sprout’s shins and said, “Let us go for a walk, little mistress.” They went out into the sunlight on Fitz-James.
“‘Dr. Pretorius,”‘ Tachyon repeated with distaste. The two regarded each other like a pair of dogs who claim the same turf. “He thinks you should then give in, change the way you lives—the way you wear your hair?”
Mark shrugged helplessly. “He says if I challenge the system, I’ll lose.”
“Perhaps if you had a more competent lawyer.”
“Everybody says he’s the best. The legal version of, like, you.”
“Well.” Tach fingered his narrow chin. “I admit I’ve no cause to believe that your justice’ is aptly named. What are you doing to your store?”
“Pretorius says if I go in as a head-shop owner I’ll get blown out of the water. So I’m selling off the paraphernalia and letting Jube take the comix as a lot. I’m making the Pumpkin into more a New Age place. Gonna call it a ‘Wellness Center’ or something.”
Tachyon winced.
“Yeah, man, I know. But it’s, like, the eighties.”
“Indeed.”
Mark turned and went into the back, where he had boxes of refuse piled to go into the dumpster in the alley. Tachyon followed.
“What music is this?” he asked, gesturing to a tape player with a coat-hanger antenna.
“Old Buffalo Springfield. “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing.”‘ He dabbed a fingertip at a corner of his eye. ‘Always has made me cry, darn it.”
“I understand.” Tach plucked a silken handkerchief from the sleeve of his stump and dabbed at the sweat that daintily beaded his eyebrows. “So Pretorius thinks changing your life-style at this late date will impress the court? It seems a childishly obvious expedient.”
“Appearances count for a lot in court, he says. See, the judge decided to hold open hearings at the end, not just take depositions and briefs like they usually do in custody cases. And Doc Pretorius says Sun-Kimberly’s attorney’s trying to get the press in, and they’ll play it up big; the ace thing and all. You know how popular we are now. So this image thing, it’s like, if a biker gets busted for murder or something, they shave off his beard and put a suit on him for trial.”
“But you are not on trial.”
“Dr. E says I am.”
“Hmm. Who is the judge?”
“Justice Mary Conower.” He bent, picked up a box, and brightened. “She’s supposed to be a liberal; she was, like, a big Dukakis supporter. She won’t let all these ace haters trash me. Will she?”
“I remember her from the campaign. Last fall I’d have said you were correct. Now ... I’m not so sure. It seems we have few friends on any side.”
“Maybe that’s why Dr. E told me to go underground instead ‘ of doing the court thing. But I always thought being a liberal meant you believed in people’s rights and stuff.”
“A lot of us thought that, once.” Something stuffed in a box caught Tach’s eye. He stooped like a hawk. “Mark, no!” he exclaimed, brandishing a crumpled purple top hat.
Mark stood holding the box and avoiding his eyes. “I had to straighten up. Stop doing drugs. Pretorius said they’d ream me out royally if I didn’t. Might even go to the DA and get me busted.”
“Your Sunflower would do this to you?”
“Her attorney would. Dude named Latham. They call him, like, Sturgeon or something.”
“‘Sinjin.’ Yes. He would do that. He would do anything.” He held up the hat. “But this?”
The tears were streaming freely down Mark’s shorn cheeks now. “I decided on my own, man. After the vials I got now are all used up, I’m not making any more. There’s just too much risk, and I gotta keep Sprout. No matter what.”
“So Captain Trips—”
“Has hung it up, man.”
“Have you ever used drugs, Dr. Meadows?”
With effort Mark pulled his consciousness back to the deposition room. The oak paneling seemed to be pressing him like a Salem witch. His attention was showing a tendency to spin around inside his skull.
“Uh. Back in the sixties,” he told St. John Latham. Pretorius opposed conceding even that much. But this new Mark, the one emerging from a cannabis pupa into the chill of century’s end, thought that would be a little much.
“Not since?”
“No.”
“What about tobacco?”
He rubbed his eyes. He was getting a headache. “I quit smoking in ‘78, man.”
“And alcohol?”
“I drink wine, sometimes. Not too often.”
“You eat chocolate?”
“Yes.”
“You’re a biochemist. It surprises me you aren’t aware these are all drugs; addictive ones, in fact.”
“I do know” Very subdued.
“Ah. What about aspirin? Yes? Penicillin? Antihistamines?”
“Yeah. I’m, uh, allergic to penicillin.”
“So. You do still use drugs. Even addictive drugs. Though you just now denied doing it.”
“I didn’t know that’s what you meant.”
“What other drugs do you use that you claim you don’t?”
Mark glanced to Pretorius. The lawyer shrugged. “None, man. I mean, uh, none.”
When they got back to the Village from Latham’s office, Mark could tell Sprout was tired and footsore, simply because she wasn’t bouncing around in the usual happy-puppy way she had when she was out somewhere with Daddy. She wore a lightweight dress and flats, and her long straight blond hair was tied in a ponytail to keep it off her neck. Mark fingered his own nape, which still felt naked in the sticky-hot spring-afternoon breeze, rich with polynucleic aromatic hydrocarbons.
A couple of kids in bicycling caps and lycra shorts clumped by on the other side of the street. They watched Sprout with overt interest. She was just falling into adolescence, still skinny as a car antenna. But she had an ingenue face, startlingly pretty. The kind to attract attention. Reflexively he tugged her closer. I’m turning into an uptight old man, he thought, and tugged again at the loosened white collar of his shirt. His neck felt ropeburned by the tie now wadded in the pocket of his gray suit coat.
The light of the falling sun shattered like glass on windshields and shop windows and filled his eyes with sharp fragments. Even in this backwater street the noise of nearby traffic was like a rocker-arm engine pounding in his skull, and each honk of a horn threatened to pop his eyes like a steel needle.
For years Mark had lived in a haze of marijuana smoke. He dabbled in other drugs, but that was more in the nature of biochemical experimentation with himself as subject-such as had called up the Radical, and subsequently his “friends.” Grass was his drug of choice. Way back in those strange days of the late sixties early seventies, actually, but the sixties didn’t end until Nixon did-it seemed a perfect solace to someone who had come to terms with the fact that he was doomed to disappoint everyone who expected anything of him. Especially himself.
Now he was emerging from the cushioning fog. Off the weed, the world was a lot more surreal place to be. Someone stepped from the doorway of the Pumpkin, features obscured by the broad straw brim of a hat. Mark’s hand moved to the inside pocket of his coat, where he kept a set of his dwindling supply of vials.
Sprout lunged forward with arms outspread. The figure knelt, embraced her, and then violet eyes were looking up at him from beneath the hat brim.
“Mark,” Kimberly said. “I had to see you.”
The ball bounced across the patchy grass of Central Park as though it were bopping out the lyrics to a sixties cigarette-commercial jingle. Sprout pursued it, skipping and chirping happily.
“What does your old man think of all this?” Mark asked, lying on his elbows on the beach towel Kimberly had brought along with the ball.
“About what?” she asked him. She wasn’t showing her agency game face this afternoon. In an impressionistic cotton blouse and blue jeans that looked as if they’d been worn after she bought them instead of before, knees drawn up to support her chin and hair hanging in a braid down her back, she looked so much like the Sunflower of old he could barely breathe.
He wanted to say, “about the trial,” but he also wanted to say, “about you seeing me,” but the two kind of jostled against each other and got jammed up like fat men trying to go through a men’s room door at the same time, and so he just made vaguely circular gestures in the air and said, “About, uh, this.”
“He’s in Japan on business. T. Boone Pickens is trying to open up the country to American businesses. Cornelius is one of his advisers.” She seemed to speak with unaccustomed crispness, but then he’d never been good at telling that kind of thing. It had been one of their problems. One of many.
He was trying to think of something to say when Sunflower-no, Kimberly—clutched his arm. “Mark, look—” Their daughter had followed the bouncing ball into the middle of a large blanket and the Puerto Rican family that occupied it, almost bowling over a stout woman in lime-green shorts. A short, wiry man with tattoos all over his arm jumped up and started expostulating. Half a dozen children gathered around, including a boy about Sprout’s own age with a switchblade face.
“Mark, aren’t you going to do something?”
He looked at her, puzzled. “What, man? She’s okay.”
“But those ... people. That is, Sprout ran into them, they’re justifiably upset—”
He laughed. “Look.”
The Puerto Ricans were laughing, too. The fat woman hugged Sprout. The tough kid smiled and tossed her the ball. She turned and came racing back up the slope toward her parents, graceful and clumsy as a week-old foal.
“See? She gets along pretty well with people, even if ...” The sentence ran down uncompleted, as they usually did on that subject.
Kimberly still looked skeptical. Mark shrugged, then by reflex touched the pocket of the denim jacket he wore despite the heat.
Maybe he did rely on the implicit promise of his ‘friends’ too much. He’d have to go cold turkey from that, too, one of these days. He wasn’t calling up the personae too often. Occasionally he felt the peevish pressure in his brain, like heckling from the back of an old auditorium, though he had explained to his ‘friends’ what he had to do and thought most of them accepted it. But eventually the powders would be gone.
As it was, Pretorius would kill him if he knew he still had any of them. Pretorius thought a raid was a real possibility, and the vials contained a wider variety of proscribed substances than a DEA agent was liable to resell in a year.
But what am I supposed to do? Pour them down the drain? That felt like murder.
Then Sprout’s arms horseshoed his skinny neck and they went over, all three of them, in a laughing, tickling tangle, and for a moment it was almost like real life.
The Parade of Liars, as Pretorius called the succession of expert witnesses he and Latham took turns deposing, trudged on from spring into summer. The Twenty-eighth Army taught the students in Gate of Heavenly Peace Square what the old dragon Mao had told them so often: where political power springs from. Nur al-Allah fanatics attacked a joker-rights rally in London’s Hyde Park with bottles and brickbats, winning praise from Muslim leaders throughout the West. “Secular law must yield to the laws of God,” a noted Palestine-born Princeton professor announced, “and these creatures are an abomination in the eyes of Allah.”
A skinhead beat a joker to death with a baseball bat. The media swelled with indignation. When it turned out that the chief of staff of the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee had tried the same thing back in ‘73, liberals called it “a meanness out there, a feeding frenzy” when people took him to task for it. After all, he had helped to pass some very caring legislation, and anyway the bitch survived.
Kimberly flitted in and out of Mark’s life like a moth. Every time he thought he could catch hold of her, she eluded him. She seldom kept a date two times running. But she never stayed away long.
The hearings began.
Pretorius turned up precious few character witnesses for Mark. Dr. Tachyon, of course, and Jube the news dealer; Doughboy, the retarded joker ace, broke down and sobbed mountainously as he recounted how Mark and his friends had saved him from being convicted of murder—and, incidentally, saved the planet from the Swarm. His testimony was corroborated by laconic Lieutenant Pilar Arrupe of Homicide South, who chewed a toothpick in place of her customary cigarillo. Pretorius wanted to bring on reporter Sara Morgenstern, but she had dropped from sight after the nightmare of last year’s Atlanta convention.
No aces testified on Mark’s behalf. The Aces High crowd was laying low these days. Besides, most of them seemed embarrassed by Cap’n Trips and his plight.
He just wasn’t an eighties kind of guy.
“Dr. Meadows, are you an ace?”
“Yes.”
“And would you mind describing the nature of your powers?”
“Yes.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“ I mean,—I, uh—I would mind.”
“Your honor, I ask that the court take notice of the witness’s lack of cooperation.”
“Your honor—”
“Dr. Pretorius, you needn’t gesticulate. You and Mr. Latham may approach the bench.”
Pretorius always thought the rooms of the New Family Court on Franklin and Lafayette had all the human warmth of a dentist’s waiting room. The too-bright fluorescents hurt his eyes.
The media were back in force, he noted with displeasure as he gimped to the bench. After the publicity that attended Mark’s getting served, the press had lost interest; lots of nothing visible had happened for a while.
“Dr. Meadows is refusing to answer a vital question, your honor,” Latham said.
“He can’t be compelled to answer. Indiana v. Mr. Miraculous,—I964. Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination apply.”
With blue eyes and blond hair worn in a pageboy cut, judge Mary Conower looked more pretty than anything else-ingenue, belying her reputation as a hard-ass. A slight dry tautness to her skin gave her the appearance of a cheerleader gone sour on life.
“This isn’t a criminal trial, Doctor,” she said. Pretorius bit down hard on several possible responses. He was getting kind of old to pull another night in the Tombs for contempt.
“Then I object on the grounds that the line of questioning is irrelevant.”
Conower raised an eyebrow at Latham. “That seems valid.”
“Mrs. Gooding contends that the fact of her former husband’s acehood constitutes a threat to the welfare of her daughter,” Latham said.
“That’s absurd(“ Pretorius exclaimed.
“We intend to demonstrate that it is not at all absurd, your honor.”
“Very well,” Conower said. “You may attempt to so demonstrate. But the court will not compel Dr. Meadows to describe his powers.”
Latham stood a moment before Mark, staring holes in him with reptile eyes. In the audience someone coughed. “You have friends who are aces, Dr. Meadows?” Mark glanced at Sprout, busy drawing doodles on one of Pretorius’s legal pads, at Kimberly, who was dressed like the centerfold in Forbes and wouldn’t meet his eye. Finally he looked to Pretorius, who sighed and nodded. “Yes.”
Latham nodded slowly, as if this was Big News. Mark could feel the press begin to rustle around out there like snakes waking up among leaves. They sensed he was getting set up; he sensed he was getting set up. He glanced at Pretorius again. Pretorius gave him a drop-’em-and-spread-’em shrug.
“It’s been suggested that you play a sort of Jimmy Olsen role to several of New York’s most powerful aces. Is that a fair assessment?”
Mark tried to keep his eyes from sidling to Pretorius yet again. He didn’t want Conower to think he was shifty-eyed. This justice trip was a lot more complicated than he ever thought.
... It came to him he had no idea how to answer the question. Other than, No, more of a Clark Kent role, which he badly did not want to say. He turned red and stuttered.
“Would it be fair,” Latham continued, with a fractional smile to let Mark know he had him right where he wanted him, “to say that you are on intimate terms with certain aces, including one who variously styles himself Jumpin’ Jack Flash and JJ Flash?”
“Um ... Yes.”
“Briefly describe Mr. Flash’s powers for us, if you will. Come, there’s no reason to be coy; they’re not exactly a secret.”
Mark hadn’t been being coy. Latham’s smug unfairness didn’t make it easy to answer.
“Ah, he, ah—he flies. And he, like-I mean, he shoots fire from his hands.”
Plasma, schmuck, a voice said in the back of his skull. I just pretend tit’s fire. Jesus, you’re making a royal screw-up out of this.
He looked around, terrified he had spoken aloud. But the mob showed blank expectant faces, and Latham was turning back from his table with a manila folder in his hands.
“I’d like to call the court’s attention,” Latham said, “to this photographic evidence of the damage done by just such a fire-shooting ace.”
In the crowd somebody gasped; someone else retched. Latham pivoted like a bullfighter. Mark felt his stomach do a slow roll at the sight of the eight-by-ten photo he held in his hand. Judging from the skirt and Mary Janes, it had been a girl not much older than Sprout.
But from the waist up it was a blackened, shriveled effigy with a hideous grin.
Pretorius’s cane tip cracked like a rifle. “Your honor, I object in the strongest possible termsl What the hell does counsel think he’s doing with this horror show?”
“Presenting my case,” Latham said evenly. “Preposterous. Your honor, this picture is of a victim of the ace the press dubbed Fireball, a psychopath apprehended by Mistral this spring in Cincinnati. Whatever his relationship to Mark Meadows, JJ Flash had no more to do with it than you or I or Jetboy. To show it here is irrelevant and prejudicial.”
“Do you suggest I might be swayed by evidence not germane to this case?” Conower asked silkily.
“I suggest that Mr. Latham is attempting to try his case in the press. This is rank sensationalism.”
Conower frowned. “Mr. Latham?”
Latham spread his hands as if surprised. “What am I to do, your honor? My opponent avers that ace powers are harmless. I demonstrate the contrary.”
“I aver no such damn fool thing.”
“Perhaps he would put it, Ace powers don’t kill people—people kill people. I intend to demonstrate that the destructive potential of these powers is too enormous to be dismissed with a flip syllogism.”
Pretorius grinned. “I have to hand it to you, St. John. You are stone death walking to straw men.”
He shifted weight to the cane from his bad leg and turned to the judge. “Mr. Latham is trying to drag in atrocities with no connection to JJ Flash other than that they were committed by an ace with fire-related powers. And even if Flash were involved, to indict Dr. Meadows on that account smacks of guilt by association.”
“If Dr. Meadows commonly associated with known members of the Medellin Cartel,” Latham said ingenuously, “would your honor say that fact lacked relevance to his suitability as a parent?”
Conower squeezed her mouth till her lips disappeared. “Very well, Mr. Latham. You may present your case. And may I remind you, Dr. Pretorius, that I’m the one charged with evaluating the evidence?”
Mark felt more exposed and humiliated than he ever had in his life. This was worse than one of those balls-outon-Broadway dreams. All his life he’d shunned attention, in his own persona at least. Now all these strangers were looking at him and Sprout and thinking about those awful pictures.
Pretorius turned away from the bench. His eyebrows bristled over blue-hot eyes. Latham approached the witness stand with a look like an Inquisitor with a fresh-lit torch.
Kimberly was studying her fingernails. Mark looked at Sprout. Seeming to sense his attention, she looked up into his eyes and smiled.
He wanted to die.
“We need to do more, Mrs. Gooding,” St. John Latham said.
“Such as what? You seem to be doing a marvelous job of emasculating my ex-husband as it is.”
Latham stood. She sat on the couch, to the extent sitting was possible on a chrome-framed Scandinavian slab. It was more a matter of trying not to slide off onto the black marble floor. If the lawyer noticed the bitter sarcasm in her voice-as if she and Mark were on one side and he on the other-he didn’t acknowledge it.
“Dr. Pretorius is a chronic romantic, and his notions of human nature and interactions downright quaint. Nonetheless, he is not a total fool. He is cunning, and he knows the law. And you are not without your vulnerable points.” She threw her cigarette half-smoked into her drink and set the tumbler down on the irregular glass coffee table with a clink. “Such as?”
“Such as your breakdown in court during the first custody hearing. It lost the case for you then. It cannot help you now”
The two exterior walls that met at one corner of the Goodings’ living room were glass. Kimberly gazed out over Manhattan and thought about how much the view reminded her of a black velvet painting. Apartments with panoramic views like this one always came off better in the movies, somehow.
“ I was under a lot of stress.”
“As are you now. It is not inconceivable that Pretorius might try to reduce you to another such breakdown on the stand.”
She looked at him. “Is that what you’d do in his place?”
He said nothing.
She lit another cigarette and blew smoke toward him. “Okay. What did you have in mind?”
“A concrete demonstration of your husband’s ace powers. Or solid evidence of the actual nature of the connection between him and Flash and Moonchild and the rest, if he is no more than a Jimmy Olsen figure.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What are you saying.”
“If your former husband loves your daughter as much as he claims, a perceived threat to her would certainly lead him to employ any powers he might have.”
She went white, tensed as if she were about to leap up and attack him. Then she settled back and elaborately studied her manicure.
“ I shouldn’t be surprised that you’re a bastard, Mr. Latham,” she said. “After all, that’s why I hired you. But it occurs to me—”
She lowered her hand and gave him a smile, poisonous and V—shaped. “It occurs to me that you’re insane. You want me to use my daughter for bait?”
He didn’t flinch. Didn’t even flicker.
“I said perceived threat, Mrs. Gooding. I am talking about a set-piece-a stratagem. There would be no real risk.”
Showing as little emotion as he, she picked up her glass and threw it hard at his head. He shifted his weight. The glass sailed past to shatter against the window. In New York, people who live in glass houses have to have stoneproof walls; it’s in the building code.
“I’m paying you to win this in court, you son of a bitch. Not to play games with my daughter’s life.”
He showed her the ghost of a smile. “What do you think the law is but playing games with people’s lives?”
“Get out,” she said. “Get out of my house.”
“Certainly.” Calm. Always calm. Infuriating, impermeable, irresistible. “Anything the client desires. But reflect on this: Not even I can get your daughter for you if you don’t want her badly enough to sacrifice.”
Sprout clung tightly to her parents’ hands. “Mommy and Daddy, be nice to each other,” she said solemnly. “In that court place, everybody always sounds mad all the time. It makes me afraid.”
She clouded up and started to sniffle. “I’m afraid they’ll take me away from you.”
Her mother hugged her, hard. “Honey, we’ll always be with you.” A hooded look to Mark. “One of us will. Always.”
Sprout let Kimberly lower her onto the mattress among the stuffed toys and gazed up with wide eyes. “Promise?”
“Promise,” her mother said.
“Yeah,” Mark said around an obstruction in his throat. “One of us will always be around. We can promise you that much.”
Kimberly sipped Chianti from her jelly jar. “Your room looks so naked without all the psychedelia.” Candlelight struck half-moon amethyst highlights off her eyes. “I mean, who’d—imagine you without that huge poster of Tom Marion over your bed?”
He smiled ruefully. “The worst part is this futon I got in place of my old mattress. It’s like nothing at all sometimes. I wake up with sore patches on my knees and elbows from the floor.”
Kimberly drank wine and sighed. Mark tried hard not to think about the way her breasts rode up inside the thin cotton blouse. He’d been alone too long.
“Oh, Mark, what happened to us?”
He shook his head. His eyes grew misty. Way back and down, he felt derisive sounds coming out of Flash and Cosmic Traveler, sitting like hecklers in the cheap seats of his mind. It was rare enough they agreed on anything. He felt wordless care and concern from Moonchild, nothing at all from Aquarius. Starshine was vaguely disapproving. He was probably afraid Mark was going to have fun. It wasn’t socially conscious.
She moistened her lips. “I know St. John is being awfully hard on you. I wish it didn’t have to be this way.” He looked at her with eyes that felt as if they had no moisture in them, parched by each random breath of air. It was strange, considering how close he was to tears. Would it do me any good to beg? he wondered. Oh, please, the Traveler said.
She settled back on his pillow. Even in the eighties a man got to have a pillow. For a moment she half lay that way, one leg cocked, her hair hanging in her eyes and around her shoulders with just a little bit of perm kink still in it. He thought she’d never looked so beautiful. Not even when she was carrying Sprout and they were both breaking their necks to make believe that everything was going to work out.
She sighed again. “All my life I’ve had this feeling of shapelessness,” she began.
Mark’s mouth said, “Oh, baby, don’t talk that way, you’re beautiful,” before he could stop it. Flash and Traveler hooted and twirled noisemakers. Even Moonchild winced.
Kimberly ignored him. “It’s like I’ve always been searching for landmarks to define myself by: jocks, radicals.” A smile. “You.”
She smoothed her hair back and let her head drop toward one shoulder. “Does any of this make any sense?” Mark made earnest noises. She smiled and shook her head.
“After we split I spent a few years in heavy therapy. I guess you knew about that, huh? Then one day I decided it was time to try something new, just completely different from anything I’d done before. I did the furthest-out thing I could think of set out to become a by-God businesswoman, a real hard-charging lady entrepreneur. Entrepreneuse. Whatever. Is that strange, or what?”
She laughed. “And I did, Mark, I did it. I do it. Racquetball and power lunches. I even have a muscular male bimbo for a secretary, even if he is gay. You can’t imagine what this is costing me in lost time, aside from dear St. John’s astronomical fees.”
Mark looked away and felt selfish for reflexively thinking of what all this was costing him, and not at all in terms of money.
“Then I met Cornelius. He’s really a wonderful man.”
“I’m sure you’d like him if you got to know him. Only you and he are ... worlds apart.”
She poured them both more wine. “Domestic little creature, aren’t I? I’m starting to have the horrible suspicion that no matter how liberated I think I am, my gut notion’s Norman Rockwell. You know, all those Saturday Evening Post covers when we were kids-don’t make faces like that, I know it’s silly. But I want to capture that feed.”
She leaned toward him. He ached to stroke her hair. “Anything you want is fine. I want you to be happy.” She smiled at him, sidelong. “You really mean that, don’t you? In spite of what’s going on.”
He wanted to say-well, everything. But the words tried to come so fast they jammed tight in his throat. She brought her face close to his. Her mass of hair shadowed both their faces.
“Remember that guy I went with in high school? The big guy, blond, captain of the football team?”
Mark winced at long-remembered pain. “Yeah.”
She laughed softly. “About three weeks after he broke your nose, he broke mine.” She set the jelly glass down beside the futon and kissed him lightly on the lips.
“Funny how things turn out sometimes, huh?”
His lips were numb and stinging all at once, as if somebody had punched him in the mouth. She slipped her hand behind his head, drew his face to hers. Almost he hung back. Then their mouths touched again, and her tongue slid between his lips, teased across his teeth. He grabbed her like a drowning man and clung, with his hands, his lips, his soul.
In her sleep, in her room, Sprout cried out.
They were both on their feet at once. Mark just beat Kimberly through the door of his microscopic bedroom. Lying on her own lumpy mattress, Sprout murmured to herself, hugged her Pooh-bear closer to herself, and rolled over and back deeper into sleep. Mark and Kimberly watched her for a moment, not speaking, barely breathing. Kimberly disengaged, went and sat on the futon. Mark practically melted beside her, reaching for her. She was tense, unyielding.
“I’m sorry,” she said without looking at him. “It won’t work. Don’t you see? I’ve tried this. I can’t go back.”
“But we can be together I’d do anything for you—for Sprout. We can be, like, a family again.”
She glanced at him over her shoulder. Her eyes gleamed with tears. “Oh, Mark. It can’t be. You’re too much the free spirit. “
“What’s wrong with freedom?”
“Responsibility took its place.”
“But I can be what you wannl I’ll do anything for you. I can help give you shape, if that’s what you need.” Smiling sadly, she shook her head. She stood up, faced him, took his face in her hands. “Oh, Mark,” she said, and kissed him lightly but chastely on the lips, “I do love you. But really, it’s all you can do to get up feet-first in the morning.”
She was gone. Mark lurched to his feet, but her Reeboks were already doing a muted Ginger Baker number down the stairs. He hung there in the door frame, heart pounding. He could feel it especially in the scrotum; his belly and inner thighs ached and trembled with frustrated tension.
He had almost forgotten what the blue balls felt like. This shit, JJ Flash said, has got to stop.
“Dr. Pretorius, what do you mean by appearing in my court like this?”
“You mean this, your honor?” He gestured at his right leg. The immaculately tailored trousers ended at the knee. The limb below was black and green and wanted like a frog’s. Yellow pus oozed from a dozen lesions. Judge Conover’s nose wrinkled at the smell.
“This is my wild card. It makes me a joker-except the condition is spreading upward by degrees, and when it reaches my torso, it will kill me. So I suppose it also qualifies as a Black Queen, albeit slow”
“It’s disgusting. Do you intend to make mockery of this court?”
“I intend to display only what exists, your honor. Be it the physical disfigurement of a joker or the emotional and mental disfigurement of bigots who would condemn people for having drawn a wild card.”
“I am tempted to find you in contempt.”
“You can’t make it stick,” he said affably. “Jokers may not be enjoined from public display of their traits, unless these conflict with indecent-exposure laws. That’s state and federal law; would you like citations?”
Her cheeks pinched her nose. “No. I know the law” He turned to Kimberly, who sat in the box as if she’d just been carved from a block of ice.
“Mrs. Gooding, you’ve been to court before to get custody of Sprout. What happened the first time?” Anger flared in her eyes. He let himself show a slight smile. Good Elizabeth Taylor. Before her John Belushi days, of course.
“You know perfectly well what happened,” she said crisply.
“Please tell the court anyway.” He let her see him glance toward the press-packed courtroom. He and Mark had awakened to headlines screaming TRIPS CUSTODY CASE LAWYER EQUATES ACES, DRUG LORDS and ACE POWERS KILL, ATTORNEY SAYS. He wanted her and Latham to know he intended to share the joy.
There was also an article that said President Bush, after specifically pledging not to do so during his campaign, was considering calling for a revival of the old Ace Registration Acts. Didn’t have anything to do with this, of course. Just another sign of the times.
She folded her hands before her. “I was under an enormous amount of stress at the time. There was our daughter’s condition, and marriage to Mark was not precisely easy on me.”
Touche, he thought, not that it’ll do you any good. “So what happened?”
“I broke down on the stand.”
“Went to pieces is more like it, wouldn’t you say?” Her mouth tightened to a razor cut. “I was ill at the time. I’m not ashamed of that, why should I be? I’ve had treatment.”
“Indeed. And how else have circumstances changed from that time?”
“Well—” She glanced at Mark, who as usual was gazing at her like a blond basset pup. “My life has become much more stable. I’ve found a career, and a marvelous husband.”
“So you would say that you can offer a far more stable home environment to Sprout than you could before?” She looked at him, surprised and wary. “Why, yes.” He expected Latham to object right then, on GPs, just to break the rhythm of questioning even or maybe especially if he didn’t know where it was headed. You aren’t infallible after all, are you, motherfucker?
“So you are saying that now you are a suitable parent because you’re richer? What you’re saying, then, is that rich people make better parents than poor ones?”
That pulled Latham’s string. He actually jumped to his feet and raised his voice when he objected. Conower was pounding her gavel to restore order. She was going to sustain, no doubt about it. But he’d seen the flicker in her eyes. He’d gotten the point home. Punched her liberal-guilt button with his customary sledgehammer subtlety.
Christ, I hate myself sometimes.
After lunch break Pretorius asked, “Have you ever used illegal drugs, Ms. Gooding.”
“Yes.” She was forthright, meeting his eyes, not trying to evade an allegation she knew he could prove. “A long, long time ago. It was in the wind.” A half smile. “We weren’t as wise back then.”
Nicely done. “And did you ever try LSD-25?” A pause, then, “Yes.”
“Did you use it frequently?”
“That depends on your definition.”
“I’ll trust your judgment, Ms. Gooding.”
She dropped her eyes. “It was the sixties. It was the thing to do. We were experimenting, trying to liberate our consciousness as well as our bodies.”
“And did you ever stop to consider the genetic damage such experimentation might be doing?” He let it ring: “Did you not consider the welfare of your future children, Ms. Gooding?”
The courtroom blew up again.
After Conower called recess Mark was waiting for Pretorius, kind of hopping up and down without leaving his horrible chair, ergonomically designed to conform perfectly to the mass man but to fit no individual. He looked as if his ears were made of iron and had been stuck in a microwave.
“What was all that bullshit about?” he hissed at Pretorius. “Acid isn’t a proven teratogen. Not like, like alcohol.”
“Alcohol isn’t the issue. They haven’t gotten around to reprohibiting it yet, at least not in time for the morning editions. Latham wants to make an issue of drugs. So we’ll give him drugs good and hard.”
For a moment Mark could only sputter in outrage. “Wuh-what about the truth?” he finally managed to get out.
“Truth.” Pretorius laughed, a low, sour sound. “You’re in a court of law, son. Truth is not the issue here.”
He sighed and sat. “Never believe that the days of trial by combat are over. Trials are still duels. It’s just that the champions wised up and rewrote the rules. Now we fight with writs and precedents instead of maces, and instead of risking our own lives, all we risk is our clients’ money. Or lives or freedom.”
He rested both hands on the gargoyle-head knob of his cane. You don’t like what I’m doing. Son, I don’t either. But I take my role as your champion seriously. If I have to wallow in shit to win your case for you, that’s what I do.
“These are witch-hunt times. You want to challenge that essential fact; hell, so do I. But if that’s all I do, you lose your daughter. That’s why they call it the system, Mark. Because like it or not, it’s the way things work. Defy it too openly, it grinds you up and spits you out.”
Mark and Kimberly had a date for that night, Friday. She didn’t keep it. He wasn’t surprised. He didn’t even blame her. He felt dirtied by the way Pretorius had treated her, ashamed.
What was worst in his own mind was that he hadn’t stopped him.
Saturday the guilty depression got to be too much. Mark closed the Wellness Center early. There was something he had to do. A matter of voices in his head.
The small man stood with one red Adida on the roof parapet, looking at the stop-and-go Third World traffic of jokertown a dozen stories below. He wore a red jogging suit over an orange T-shirt. His face was narrow, foxlike, with a sharp prominent nose and a sardonic bend to the eyebrows. Russet hair blew like flames in the stinking breeze.
He held a hand out before him. A jet of flame spurted from the forefinger tip. It became a ball, jumped from one finger to the next. He rolled the hand palm up. The flame swelled to baseball size, settled in the palm. For a moment it burned there, pallid in the sunlight, while he stared at it, as if fascinated. Then with a roar it shot into the high haze on a gusher of fire that seemed to spring from his palm.
He watched the flame dissipate. Then he drew a deep breath, let it sigh out through a lopsided grin.
“About fucking time,” he said, and stepped into space. He let himself fall about fifteen feet, far enough to see a startled face flash by in a window. Then he straightened his body and put his arms out before him like a swimmer in a racing dive and took off flying. No point freaking the citizenry too much. The poor schmucks in J-town had enough on their plates already.
He flew north, toward the park, thinking Mark’s really. put his foot in it this time. At least the poor fool hadn’t quite had the nuts to make a clean break with the past. Didn’t have a cold enough core to pour out his remaining vials of powder and see his other selves swirl away down the drain.
Thank God. It was chafing enough, the half-life he and the others led, like spectators at the back of an old and cavernous movie house where the film kept breaking.
He hated that he only existed on sufferance, only knew his own body, his own flesh, the feel of flight and the wind in his hair, in sixty-minute increments. For a man as full of life as he, that was hell.
Hell was a cold place, for him. The life that roared inside him, he expressed as flame.
A helicopter vaulted off a building top to his left. He angled toward it. When he was a thousand yards away, he kicked in some flame, went streaking for it like a SAM.
He threw himself into a corkscrew, drawing a spiral of orange fire into which the chopper flew.
It was a traffic chopper. The crew knew him; the announcer grinned and waved while his assistant pointed a live-action minicam at him.
JJ Flash, superstar. He grinned and waved. The pilot’s face was as white as a brother’s ever gets. He obviously hadn’t run into Jumpin’ Jack before.
That was fine, too. Flash had a certain amount of mean in him, that needed some harmless outlet.
.. About then he realized where he was heading. He smiled again, wolfishly. His subconscious knew what it was doing.
Kimberly Ann Cordayne Meadows Gooding looked up from her magazine. A man was floating outside the glass corner of her penthouse, tapping with one finger.
She gasped. Her hand reached up to twitch her indigo robe a little more closed over the sheer lilac negligee. He made urgent gestures for her to open the window. She bit her lip, shook her head.
“It doesn’t open,” she said.
“Fuck,” his mouth said soundlessly. He pushed away about six feet, rolled out his hand palm up, as if introducing his next guest on late-night TV Orange fire jetted out and splashed against the window.
Kimberly recoiled. Almost she screamed. Almost. The window wavered, melted in a rough oval. A breath of warm diesel-perfumed wind washed in. The man in red stepped through.
“Sorry about the window,” he said. “I’ll pay for it. I had to talk to you.”
“My husband’s a rich man,” she said. Her voice caught, like a hand running over silk.
“I’m JJ Flash.”
“I know who you are. I’ve seen you on Peregrine’s Perch.”
Without asking, he dropped onto a merciless white chair. “Yeah. And you’ve seen those pictures your fuck lawyer flashed around. Some poor teenybopper pan-fried by a psycho in a town I’ve never even been to.”
She glanced at the window. The wind was blowing her hair. “Maybe Mr. Latham’s the one you should be visiting.”
“No. You’re the one I want. Why are you jacking Mark Meadows around?”
She leapt up. “How dare you speak to me like thad” He laughed. “Can the indignation, babe. All your life ... as long as you’ve known him, it’s been the same. You tantalize and glide away. He’s a putz in a lot of ways, but he deserves better.”
He tipped his head sideways and looked more like a fox than ever. “Or are you just setting the boy up?”
For a moment her eyebrows formed fine arches of fury above eyes that had gone meltwater pale. Then she stood and spun, walked a few steps away. He watched the way her full buttocks moved the heavy cloth of the robe. “He must tell you a lot about himself,” she said tartly. A grin came across Flash’s face. He held up crossed fingers. “We’re like this.” The grin hardened, set. “Answer the question, babe.”
She stood by the melt-edged hole. “Do you think it’s easy for me?”
“From where I sit,” he said, “it looks like the easiest thing in the world.”
“I love Mark. Really,” she said in a clotted voice. “He is the kindest man I’ve ever known.”
“Or the biggest schmuck. Because you equate kind with weak, don’t you?” He was on his feet now, in her face.
Weeping, she started to spin away. He caught her by the shoulder and made her face him. Small flames danced around his fist.
“Too many women,” he said, “are afraid of themselves. They buy the old Judeo-Christian rap that they’re innately wicked, tainted. So they look for a man to abuse them. Give them the punishment they deserve. Like that jock who busted Mark’s beak and then yours. Is that your gig, Ms. Kimberly Perfect?”
She gasped. Smoke wisped up around the curve of one nostril, and suddenly her gown flashed into flame. Kimberly shrieked, tried to run. Flash held her. His free hand tangled the burning synthetic, pulling with surprising strength. Robe and gown tore away.
She slumped to the floor, sobbing in terror. Flash methodically wadded the burning garment, almost seeming to wash his hands with it. The fire diminished, went out. He tossed the half-molten mass in the corner and knelt beside her.
She clung to him. For a moment he held her, absently stroking her hair. Then he pushed her away.
“Let’s see what kind of shape you’re in, while I can still do you some good.”
Ignoring her attempts to marshal belated modesty and indignation, he looked her over. She seemed unharmed, except for a reddening glare of burn stretching from her left shoulder to breast. He laid a hand over the angry patch, began to run it down.
She tried to jerk back. “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Drawing the energy out,” he said, preoccupied. “It’s like hitting a minor burn with a piece of ice. If I get to it quickly enough, there’s no harm done.”
She looked at him. “I thought fire was your element,” she said from somewhere down in her throat.
“It is.” He cupped her breast. Where his hand had passed, the skin was white, unmarked. “Just a little parlor trick.”
“You’re a dangerous man to be around, Mr. Flash.” His thumb stroked her nipple. She gasped, stiffened. The nipple rose. Her eyes held his. Her lips were moist. “I’m not an eighties kind of guy,” he said huskily, “any more than Mark is. He’s a gentle flake from the sixties. ‘And I’m a bastard for the nineties.”
She grabbed the back of his neck and pulled his head down.
In an alley behind an elegant Park Avenue high rise Mark Meadows sat with his knees up around his prominent ears.
How long has it been, that I’ve dreamed of that? Of holding her, feeling her, tasting her, seeing the way her eyes go dark and then pale, the way she tosses her hair and clutches and moans ....
He felt two-timed. He felt like a voyeur. He felt like a fool.
He put his face in his spider hands and cried.
That night Mark sat up and killed a bottle of wine. Sprout played with her Tinkertoy set. Kimberly never came.
Eventually Mark got down on the new white linoleum he and Durg had laid and helped Sprout build an airplane with a propeller that really spun. It never got off the ground.
“I’ll do it,” she said.
He looked at her the way a cobra looks at you through the glass in the zoo. Without interest, without sign of even seeing.
“Do what, Mrs. Gooding?”
“What whatever you ask me to. To make sure I keep her.”
She stood there, her whole body clenched, holding a breath inside until it threatened to burst her rib cage. Just daring him to ask what caused her change of heart.
He didn’t give her the satisfaction. He just nodded. And she found herself hating his certainty as desperately as she needed it.
Sunday the front doorbell rang just as the sun was checking out. Mark came and stared through the replacement glass for a long moment before unlocking the door.
She had a flushed, bright-eyed, breathless quality, as though there was frost in the air. She wore a loose dark smock over blue jeans tonight.
“Feel like a walk?” she asked.
“You mean, after what happened the other day? You can still, like, talk to me?”
She recoiled a fraction of an inch. Then she went to the toes of her fashionable low-top boots and kissed his cheek. “Of course I can, Mark. What happens in court ought to stay there. Let’s go.”
Afterward he never could remember what they talked about. All he could remember was feeling that, despite it all, she might really be coming back this time.
Then they turned a corner and stopped. A pair of NYPD motorcycles were drawn across the street. Down the block a building waved flags of flame against the night.
Fire trucks were drawn up in front, arcing jets of water into the blaze. As he watched, one pulsed once spastically and died.
He drifted forward, pulling away from Kimberly’s hand that clutched his sleeve. He felt the flames on his face. At the far end of the block a knot of skinheads cheered and jeered. One was just darting back into their midst, pursued by a fireman clumsy in his big boots. In horror Mark realized the skin had just slashed a hose.
“What’s happening, man?” he asked a bystander. “Somebody torched an old apartment. Chink family on the third floor was trying to start some kind tailor shop.” He spat on the sidewalk. “Slopes got it coming, you ask me. Tryin’ to mess with our rent control, sneak the place into bein’ commercial property. They in it with the landlord, that’s for sure.”
A line of cops crowded the skins, pushing them back. Mark ran forward. Sprout screamed, “Daddy!”, broke Kimberly’s grip, and lunged after him. Kimberly followed, trying to grab her arm.
Am ambulance was parked this side of the blaze. Beside it cops were trying to keep back an Asian family. A man and woman were wrestling with the officers and firemen who hemmed them in, howling and windmilling painfully thin arms. A man in an asbestos suit was hanging on the end of a ladder; a truck was trying to bring him into position to get inside a window, but huge bellows of flames kept lashing out at him, driving him back despite his protective clothing.
Several other men in inferno suits stood in a puddle on the street with helmets off. “You gotta get in there,” a florid-faced man with a chiefs badge on his helmet yelled. “There’s still a little girl inside.”
“It’s suicide. Fucking roofs going.”
Mark was fumbling in his Dead patch pocket. Kimberly caught up with Sprout a few feet away.
“Mark! What’s happening?”
He shook his head, unheeding. Black and silver-no. Yellow: useless. Gray, worse than. In his haste he discarded them. His lives fell in glittering arcs to shatter on the asphalt.
“Mark, what what in God’s name are you doing?” The last two. One blue-and, thank God, an orange. He stuck the blue vial back in his pocket. Then he tossed the orange one’s contents down his throat.
Kimberly saw him stagger back. And then he changed. The familiar gawky outlines blurred, shifted, condensed. A different man stood there, with film-star looks, a Jewish nose, a devil’s grin. And a red sweatsuit, worn over an orange T-shirt.
JJ Flash tipped a one-finger salute to Kimberly. “Later, toots. Take care of the kid.”
He launched himself into the sky.
The man on the ladder said a couple of Had Marys and prepared to jump through the window. He was going to his death. But that was better than hearing the little girl in there crying every time he closed his eyes for the rest of his life.
He jumped. Something grabbed the back of his protective hood, bought him up short, and hung him on the end of the ladder.
“Just trying to save you from yourself, pal,” said the man hovering next to him in midair. “Better leave this one to the professionals.”
“Jumpin’ Jack Flash!” the fireman gasped.
The ace put a finger beside his nose. “It’s a gas-gasgas,” he said, and darted into the heart of the fire.
JJ Flash was on fire.
But his flesh didn’t blacken and crackle, his eyeballs didn’t melt. His blow-dried hair wasn’t even mussed. In the midst of hell, he was in heaven.
E J. O’Rourke heaven, in fact the fire felt like sitting in a Jacuzzi with a couple of lines up each nostril and a teenage girl by your side eeling out of her string bikini and getting ready to audition as a sword-swallower for Barnum & Bailey. This was fine.
Best of all, he could still hear the little girl crying. “Where are you, honey?” he yelled. She didn’t seem to hear, just kept bawling, but that was enough. He went down a short hallway wallpapered in big batts of flame, gave a wall a jolt so hot the inferno around him seemed tepid. It went away in a puff of yellow incandescence.
She was sitting in about the only square yard of the whole fucking building that wasn’t on fire, a little girl in pigtails and smoldering pj’s with Yodas all over them. He walked up to her, knelt, and smiled.
The roof fell in.
Even the firemen gasped when they heard the thunderous series of cracks and saw a fresh spray of sparks shoot up through the column of smoke. Sprout screamed, “Daddy!” and threw herself forward.
A Puerto Rican cop in a riot helmet grabbed her arm. “Hold on, little lady,” he said. “Your daddy’ll be fine.” The wet lines on his cheeks made a liar of him.
JJ Flash lay on his side with the little girl beneath him and an elephant on top. He moved, felt the raw ends of ribs grate against each other.
The girl was still alive, sheltered by his body. A miracle she hadn’t seared her lungs. He looked up. There was still more building to fall on him, and while the flame couldn’t harm him, a structural member could damn well snuff his lights. And there was only so long before the little girl breathed in the flames that were crowding around like teenyboppers at a Bon Jovi concert.
“As Archbishop Hooper said,” he grunted, “‘More fire’” Hugging the girl to him, he reared up. The flame rushed in with a joyous greedy roar. He thrust his arm down its throat.
It wasn’t fire that almost nailed the poor son of a bitch working his futile hose from the end of the ladder. It was a jet of incandescent gas and vaporized cement and steel, bright as the sun and a couple degrees cooler. For a heartbeat the inferno died back to a few stray flickers.
A man flew out of the hole the jet had made. Flames wreathed his body and the little girl he hugged against him. They were absorbed into his body as he landed lightly next to the frantic family.
“Here you go, ma’am,” JJ Flash said, handing the girl to her mother. “Better let the medics look her over before you hug her too tight.”
He turned away before they could try hugging him, scanning the crowd for Sprout. All Mark’s personae shared his overriding imperative love for her; they couldn’t help it. Plus he just plain liked the kid.
“Madre de Dios,” the Puerto Rican cop said, staring at Flash.
Kimberly Gooding reeled away. Her mind was spinning. Unraveling as it went.
And then she saw him. Standing at the end of the block, immaculate in his camel-hair coat. He caught her eye and nodded.
For the first time since she’d known him, St. John Latham was showing something like emotion. He was showing ... triumph.
She knew, then, what she had been a party to. Kimberly put her hands to her cheeks and dug in, slowly and deliberately, until the nails drew blood from just beneath her eyes.
“Mr. Latham,” Judge Conower asked gravely, “where is your client?”
“She has been released to the custody of a private mental-health clinic.”
“And her condition?”
Latham paused just a sliver of a second. “She is in a fragile state, your honor.”
“Indeed. Mr. Latham, Dr. Pretorius, kindly step forward.”
The house was packed today, and Pretorius was expending lots of effort not to have hackneyed thoughts about bread and circuses. He glanced aside at Mark, who sat beside him wearing a lightweight buff blazer over the bandages wrapped around his upper body. JJ Flash or Mark A. Meadows, his ribs were cracked just the same. Mark only had eyes for his daughter, sitting at the table in the center between the opposing camps, directly facing the bench.
“This court is compelled to find that Ms. Gooding is clearly too unstable to be entrusted with custody of Sprout Meadows.”
Pretorius caught his breath. Could it be—
“On the other hand,” the judge said, turning to him, your client is in fact an ace-perhaps several aces, whose names have been linked to extremely risky and irresponsible behavior. Moreover, he seems still-and in spite of his sworn testimony-to be a user of dangerous drugs, if the preliminary tests conducted on the vials recovered from the street at the site of last night’s fire are any indication. In fact, at the close of these proceedings, Dr. Meadows will be remanded to the custody of the Drug Enforcement Agency.
“With these facts in view I cannot in conscience award him custody of the girl either. Therefore I declare Sprout Meadows to be a ward of the state, and remand her to a juvenile home until arrangements can be made for a foster family.”
Pretorius slammed down his cane. “This is monstrous! Have you asked the girl what she wants? Have you?”
“Of course not,” Conower said. “We are acting on the advice of a qualified expert in children’s welfare. You could hardly expect us to consult a minor in matters this important, even if the minor in question were not ... special.” Sprout leapt to her feet. “Daddy! Daddy, don’t let them take rne away!”
With a wordless bellow Mark jumped onto the table. Bailiffs with sweat moons under their arms were on him like weasels, pulling him back down. A couple of men in suits stepped off from the rear wall and began making their way purposefully through the crowded courtroom.
Mark managed to get a hand inside his blazer. It came out with something, darted to his mouth.
“Stop him!” the judge screamed. “Cyanide!” Another bailiff threw his bulky body across the table at him. And through him, into the front row, scattering TV cameras and onlookers and a portable spotlight array. The two bailiffs who had been wrestling with Mark fell against one another and rolled back to the floor.
In Mark’s place a glowing blue man stood atop the table. He wore a black hooded cloak; stars seemed to glow within its folds. He shot the court the finger, wrapped the cloak about him, and sank with all deliberation through the table and the floor.
Dr. Pretorius thumped the bottle of Laiphroaig down on the table and measured by eye how much of it he’d killed at a shot. About a quarter, he thought; about right. He passed the bottle across the desk to Mark.
“We fucked up,” he announced as Mark’s prominent Adam’s apple worked up and down.
“No, Doc,” Mark said breathlessly, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“Bullshit. I told you to run; I should have stuck to my guns. Now you’re on the run without the girl ... sorry; shouldn’t have reminded you.”
Mark shook his head. “It’s not like you did remind me,” he said quietly.
Pretorius sighed. “You know what we did, Mark? We compromised. You cut your hair. I went against the wishes of a client because I thought it was for his own good. An aging hippie and an old libertarian: we sell out and for what? To screw the pooch.”
He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. The door opened and lee Blue Sibyl came in to massage his shoulders with her blue-ice fingers.
“What will you do now, Mark?” he asked.
Mark gazed out the window at the darkness that lay over Jokertown. “I have to get her back,” he said. “But I don’t know how”
“I’ll help, Mark. Anything I can do. Even if I have to go underground myself.” He grabbed a pinch of belly. “I’m getting flabby. Spiritually as well as physically. Might do me good to go on the run. And in this kinder, gentler America, I suspect it’s what I’ll have to do, soon or late.” But Mark said nothing. Just stared out the window. Somewhere out there, beyond the open wound of Jokertown, his daughter was crying.
There was a knock on the door. Dressed in a pair of plaid Bermuda shorts and a Brooklyn Dodgers tee shirt, Jube padded across the basement and peered through the spyhole.
Dr. Tachyon stood on the stoop, wearing a white summer suit with wide notched lapels over a kelly-green shirt. His orange ascot matched the silk handkerchief in his pocket and the foot-long feather in his white fedora. He was holding a bowling ball.
Jube pulled back the police bolt, undid the chain, lifted the hook from the eye, turned the key in the deadlock, and popped the button in the middle of the doorknob. The door swung open. Dr. Tachyon stepped jauntily into the apartment, flipping the bowling ball from hand to hand. Then he bowled it across the living-room floor. It came to rest against the leg of the tachyon transmitter. Tachyon jumped in the air and clicked the heels of his boots together.
Jube shut the door, pressed the button, turned the key, dropped the hook, latched the chain, and slid shut the police bolt before turning.
The red-haired man swept of his hat and bowed. “Dr. Tachyon, at your service,” he said.
Jube made a gurgling sound of dismay. “Takisian princes are never at anyone’s service,” he said. “And white isn’t his color. Too, uh, colorless. Did you have any trouble?”
The man sat down on the couch. “It’s freezing in here,” he complained. “And what’s that smell? You’re not trying to save that body I got you, are you?”
“No,” said jube. “Just, uh, a little meat that went bad.” The man’s outlines began to waver and blur. In the blink of an eye, he’d grown eight inches and gained fifty pounds, the red hair had turned long and gray, the lilac eyes had gone black, and a scraggly beard had sprouted from a square-cut jaw.
He locked his hands around his knee. “No trouble at all,” he reported in a voice much deeper than Tachyon’s. “I came in looking like a spider with a human head, and told them I had athlete’s feet. Eight of them. Nobody but Tachyon would touch a case like that, so they stuck me behind a curtain and went for him. I turned into Big Nurse and ducked into the ladies’ room down from his lab. When they paged him, he went south and I went north, wearing his face. If anyone was looking at the security monitors, they saw Dr. Tachyon entering his lab, that’s all.” He held his hands up appraisingly, turning them up and down. “It was the strangest feeling. I mean, I could see my hands as I walked, swollen knuckles, hair on the back of my fingers, dirty nails. Obviously there wasn’t any kind of physical transformation involved. But whenever I passed a mirror I saw whoever I was supposed to be, just like everyone else.” He shrugged. “The bowling ball was behind a glass partition. He’d been examining it with scanners, waldoes, X rays, stuff like that. I tucked it under my arm and strolled out.”
“They let you just walk out?” Jube couldn’t believe it. “Well, not precisely. I thought I was home free when Troll walked past and said good afternoon as nice as you please. I even pinched a nurse and acted guilty about stuff that wasn’t my fault, which I figured would cinch things for sure.” He cleared his throat. “Then the elevator hit the first floor, and as I was getting off, the real Tachyon got on. Gave me quite a start. “
Jube scratched at a tusk. “What did you do?”
Croyd shrugged. “What could I do? He was right in front of me, and my power didn’t fool him for an instant. I turned into Teddy Roosevelt, hoping that might throw him, and devoutly wished to be somewhere else. All of a sudden I was.”
“Where?” Jube wasn’t sure he really wanted to know.
“My old school,” Croyd said sheepishly. “Ninth-grade algebra class. The same desk I was sitting at when Jetboy blew up over Manhattan in ‘46. I have to say, I don’t remember any of the girls looking like that when I was in ninth grade.” He sounded a little sad. “I would have stayed for the lecture, but it caused quite a commotion when Teddy Roosevelt suddenly appeared in class clutching a bowling ball. So I left, and here I am. Don’t worry, I changed subways twice and bodies four times.” He got to his feet, stretched. “Walrus, I’ve got to give it to you, it’s never dull working for you.”
“I don’t exactly pay minimum wage either,” Jube said.
“There is that,” Croyd admitted. “And now that you mention it ... have you ever met Veronica? One of Fortunato’s ladies. I had a notion to take her to Aces High and see if I could talk Hiram into serving his rack of lamb.”
Jube had the stones in his pocket. He counted them out into the Sleeper’s hand. “You know,” Jube said when Croyd’s fingers closed over his wages, “you could have kept the device for yourself. Maybe gotten a lot more from someone else.”
“This is plenty,” Croyd said. “Besides, I don’t bowl. Never learned to keep score. I think they do it with algebra.” His outline shimmered briefly, and suddenly Jimmy Cagney was standing there, dressed in a snappy light-blue suit with a flower in his lapel. As he climbed the steps to the street, he began to whistle the theme song to an old musical called Never Steal Anything Small.
Jube shut the door, pressed the button, turned the key, dropped the hook, and latched the chain. As he slid the police bolt shut, he heard a soft footstep behind him, and turned.
Red was shivering in a green-and-yellow Hawaiian shirt filched from Jube’s closet. He’d lost all of his own clothing in the raid on the Cloisters. The shirt was so big he looked like a deflated balloon. “That the gizmo?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Jube replied. He crossed the room and lifted the black sphere with careful reverence. It was warm to the touch. Jube had watched the televised press conference when Dr. Tachyon returned from space to announce that the Swarm Mother was no longer a threat. Tachyon spoke eloquently and at length about his young colleague Mai and her great sacrifice, her courage within the Mother, her selfless humanity. Jhubben found himself more interested by what the Takisian left unsaid. He downplayed his own role in the affair, and made no mention of how Mai had gotten inside the Swarm Mother to effect the merging he spoke of so movingly. The reporters seemed to assume that Tachyon had simply flown Baby to the Mother and docked. Jube knew better.
When the Sleeper woke, he had decided to play his hunch.
“Hate to tell you, but it looks like a bowling ball to me,” Red said amiably.
“With this, I could send the complete works of Shakespeare to the galaxy you call Andromeda,” Jube told him.
“Pal o’ mine,” said Red, “they’d only send it back, and tell you it wasn’t suitable to their current needs.” He was in much better shape now than when he’d first turned up on Jube’s doorstep three weeks after the aces had smashed the new temple, wearing a hideous moth-eaten poncho, work gloves, a full-face ski mask, and mirrorshades. Jube hadn’t recognized him until he’d lifted his shades to show the red skin around his eyes. “Help me,” he’d said. And then he’d collapsed. Jube had dragged him inside and locked the door. Red had been gaunt and feverish. After fleeing the Cloisters (Jube had missed the whole thing, for which he was profoundly grateful), Red had put Kim Toy on a Greyhound to San Francisco, where she had old friends in Chinatown who would hide her. But there was no question of his going with her. His skin made him too conspicuous; only in Jokertown could he hope to find anonymity. He’d run out of money after ten days on the street, and had been eating out of the trash cans behind Hairy’s ever since. With Roman under arrest and Matthias dead (freeze-dried by some new ace whose name had been carefully kept from the press), the rest of the inner circle were the objects of a citywide manhunt.
Jube might have turned him in. Instead he fed him, cleaned him up, nursed him back to health. Doubts and misgivings gnawed at him. Some of what he had learned about the Masons appalled him, and the greater secrets they hinted at were far, far worse. Perhaps he should call the police. Captain Black had been aghast at the involvement of one of his own men in the conspiracy, and had publicly sworn to nail every Mason in Jokertown. If Red was found here, it would go badly for Jube.
But Jube remembered the night that he and twelve others had been initiated at the Cloisters, remembered the ceremony, the masks of hawk and jackal and the cold brightness of Lord Amun as he towered over them, austere and terrible. He remembered the sound of TIAMAT as the initiates spoke the word for the first time, and remembered the tale the Worshipful Master told them of the sacred origins of the order, of Guiseppe Balsamo, called Cagliostro, and the secret entrusted him by the Shining Brother in an English wood.
No more secrets had been forthcoming on that night of nights. Jube was only a first-degree initiate, and the higher truths were reserved for the inner circle. Yet it had been enough. His suspicions had been confirmed, and when Red in his delerium had stared across Jube’s living room and cried out, “Shakti!” he had known for a certainty.
He could not abandon the Mason to the fate he deserved. Parents did not abandon children, no matter how depraved and corrupt they might grow with the passage of years. Twisted and confused and ignorant the children might be, but they remained blood of your blood, the tree grown from your seed. The teacher did not abandon the pupil. There was no one else; the responsibility was his.
“We going to stand here all day?” Red asked as the singularity shifter tingled against the palms of Jube’s hands. “Or are we going to see if it works?”
“Pardon,” Jube said. Lifting a curved panel on the tachyon transmitter, he slid the shifter into the matrix field. He began the feed from his fusion cell, and watched as the power flux enveloped the shifter. Saint Elmo’s fire ran up and down the strange geometries of the machine. Readouts swam across shining metal surfaces in a spiky script that Jube had half forgotten, and vanished into angles that seemed to bend the wrong way.
Red lapsed back into Irish Catholicism and made the sign of the cross. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he said.
It works, Jhubben thought. He should have been triumphant. Instead he felt weak and confused.
“I need a drink,” Red said.
“There’s a bottle of dark rum under the sink.”
Red found the bottle and filled two tumblers with rum and crushed ice. He drank his down straightaway Jube sat on the couch, glass in hand, and stared at the tachyon transmitter, its high, thin sound barely audible above the air conditioner. “Walrus,” Red said when he had refilled his tumbler, “I had you figured for a lunatic. An amiable lunatic, sure, and I’m grateful to you for taking me in and all, with the police after me the way they are. But when I saw you’d built your own Shakti machine, well, who’d blame me for thinking you were a little short on the gray matter.” He downed a slug of rum. “Yours is four times as big as Kafka’s,” he said. “Looks like a bad model. But I never saw the roach’s light up that way.”
“It’s larger than it needs to be because I built it with primitive electronics,” Jube told him. He spread his hands, three thick fingers and blunt curved thumb. “And these hands are incapable of delicate work. The device at the Cloisters would have lit up had it ever been powered.” He looked at Red. “How did the Worshipful Master plan to accomplish that?”
Red shook his head. “I can’t tell you. Sure, and you’re a prince to save my sweet red ass, but you’re still a first-degree prince, if you get my meaning.”
“Could a first-degree initiate construct a Shakti machine?” Jube asked him. “How many degrees had you passed before they even told you the device existed?” He shook his head. “Never mind, I know the punch line. How many jokers does it take to turn on a light bulb? One, as long as his nose is AC. The Astronomer was going to power the machine himself.”
The look on Red’s face was all the confirmation Jube needed. “Kafka’s Shakti was supposed to give the order dominion over the Earth,” the Mason said.
“Yeah,” Jube said. The Shining Brother in the wood gave the secret to Cagliostro, and told him to keep it safe, to hand it down from generation to generation until the coming of the Dark Sister. Probably the Shining Brother had given Cagliostro other artifacts; without a doubt he had given him a power source, there being no way the Takisian wild card could have been anticipated two centuries ago:
“Clever,” Jube said aloud, “yeah, but still a man of his times. Primitive, superstitious, greedy. He used the things he had been given for selfish personal gain.”
“Who?” Red asked, confused.
“Balsamo,” Jube replied. Balsamo had invented the rest himself, the Egyptian mythos, the degrees, the rituals. He took the things he had been told and twisted them to his own use. “The Shining Brother was a Ly’bahr,” he announced.
“What?” Red said.
“A Ly’bahr,” Jube told him. “They’re cyborgs, Red, more machine than flesh, awesomely powerful. The jokers of space, no two look alike, but you wouldn’t want to meet one in the alley. Some of my best friends are Ly’bahr.” He was babbling, he realized, but he was helpless to stop. “Oh, yeah, it could have been some other species, maybe a Kreg, or even one of my people in a liquid-metal spacesuit. But I think it was a Ly’bahr. Do you know why? TIAMAT”
Red just stared at him.
“TIAMAT,” Jhubben repeated, the newsboy gone from his voice and manner, speaking as a Network scientist might speak. “An Assyrian deity. I looked that up. Yet why call the Dark Sister by that name? Why not Baal, or Dagon, or one of the other nightmarish godlings you humans have invented? Why is the ultimate power word Assyrian when the rest of the mythology Cagliostro chose was Egyptian?”
“I don’t know,” Red said.
“I do. Because TIAMAT sounds vaguely like something the Shining Brother said. Thyat M’hruh. Darkness-for-therace. The Ly’bahr term for the Swarm.” Jube laughed. He had been telling jokes for thirty-odd years, but no one had ever heard his real laugh before. It sounded like the bark of a seal. “The Master Trader would never have given you world dominion. We don’t give anything away for free. But we would have sold it to you. You would have been an elite of high priests, with ‘gods’ who actually listened and produced miracles on demand.”
“You—are crazy, pal o’ mine,” Red said with forced jocularity. “The Shakti device was going to—”
“Shakti just means power,” Jhubben said. “It’s a tachyon transmitter, and that’s all it ever was.” He rose from the couch and thumped over to stand by the machine. “Setekh saw it and spared me. He thought I was a stray, a leftover from some offshoot branch. Probably he felt it would be wise to keep me around in case anything happened to Kafka. He’d be here now, but when TIAMAT headed back toward the stars, the Shakti device must have seemed somewhat irrelevant.”
“Sure, and isn’t it?”
“No. The transmitter has been calibrated. If I send the call, it will be heard on the nearest Network outpost in a matter of weeks. A few months later, the Opportunity will come.”
“What opportunity is that, brother?” Red asked.
“The Shining Brother will come,” Jhubben told him. “His chariot is the size of Manhattan Island, and armies of angels and demons and gods fight at his beck and call. They had better. They’ve got binding contracts, all of them.”
Red’s eyes narrowed in a squint. “You’re telling me it’s not over,” he said. “It can still happen, even without the Dark Sister.”
“It could, but it won’t,” Jube said. “Why not?”
“I don’t intend to send the call.” He wanted to make Red understand. “I thought we were the cavalry. The Takisians used your race as experimental animals. I thought we were better than that. We’re not. Don’t you see, Red? We knew she was coming. But there would have been no profit if she never arrived, and the Network gives nothing away for free.”
“I think I’m getting it,” Red said. He picked up the bottle, but the rum was gone. “I need another drink,” he said. “How about you?”
“No,” Jube said.
Red went into the kitchen. Jube heard him opening and closing drawers. When he came out, he had a large carving knife in his hands. “Send the message,” he said.
“I went to see the Dodgers once,” Jube told him. He was tired and disappointed. “Three strikes and you’re out at the old ball game, isn’t that what they say? The Takisians, my own culture, and now humanity. Is there anyone who cares for anything beyond themselves?”
“I’m not kidding, Walrus,” Red said. “Don’t want to do this, pal o’ mine, but us Irish are a stubborn bunch of cusses. Hey, the cops are hunting us down out there. What kind of life is that for me and Kim Toy, I ask you? If it’s a choice between eating out of garbage cans and ruling the world, I’ll take the world every time.” He waved the carving knife. “Send the message. Then I’ll put this away and we can order up a pizza and swap a few jokes, okay? You can have rotten meat on your half.”
Jube reached under his shirt and produced a pistol. It was a deep translucent red-black, its lines smooth and sensual yet somehow disquieting, its barrel pencil-thin. Points of light flickered deep inside it, and it fit Jube’s hand perfectly. “Stop it, Red,” he said. “It won’t be you ruling the world. It will be the Astronomer, and Demise, or guys just like them. They’re bastards, you told me so yourself “
“We’re all bastards,” Red told him. “And the Irish aren’t as thick as they say: That’s a toy ray-gun, pal o’ mine.”
“I gave it to the boy upstairs for Christmas,” Jube said. “His guardian gave it back. It wouldn’t break, you see, but the metal was so hard that Doughboy was breaking everything else in the house when he played with it. I put the power cell back in, and wore the harness whenever I went to the Cloisters. It made me feel a little braver.”
“I don’t want to do this,” Red said. “Neither do I,” Jhubben replied. Red took a step forward.
The phone rang a long time. Finally someone picked it up at the other end. “Hello?”
“Croyd,” Jube said, “sorry to bother you. It’s about this body ...”
From Wild Times: An Oral History of the Postwar Years, by Studs Terkel (Pantheon, 1979).
Herbert L. Cranston
Years later, when I saw Michael Rennie come out of that flying saucer in The Day the Earth Stood Still, I leaned over to the wife and said, “Now that’s the way an alien emissary ought to look.” I’ve always suspected that it was Tachyons arrival that gave them the idea for that picture, but you know how Hollywood changes things around. I was there, so I know how it really was. For starts, he came down in White Sands, not in Washington. He didn’t have a robot, and we didn’t shoot him. Considering what happened, maybe we should have, eh?
His ship, well, it certainly wasn’t a flying saucer, and it didn’t look a damn thing like our captured V-2s or even the moon rockets on Werner’s drawing boards. It violated every known law of aerodynamics and Einstein’s special relativity too.
He came down at night, his ship all covered with lights, the prettiest thing I ever saw. It set down plunk in the middle of the proving range, without rockets, propellers, rotors, or any visible means of propulsion whatsoever. The outer skin looked like it was coral or some kind of porous rock, covered with whorls and spurs, like something you’d find in a limestone cavern or spot while deep-sea diving.
I was in the first jeep to reach it. By the time we got there, Tach was already outside. Michael Rennie, now, he looked right in that silvery-blue spacesuit of his, but
Tachyon looked like a cross between one of the Three Musketeers and some kind of circus performer. I don’t mind telling you, all of us were pretty scared driving out, the rocketry boys and eggheads just as much as the GIs. I remembered that Mercury Theater broadcast back in ‘39, when Orson Welles fooled everybody into thinking that the Martians were invading New Jersey, and I couldn’t help thinking maybe this time it was happening for real. But once the spotlights hit him, standing there in front of his ship, we all relaxed. He just wasn’t scary.
He was short, maybe five three, five four, and to tell the truth, he looked more scared than us. He was wearing these green tights with the boots built right into them, and this orangy shirt with lace sissy ruffles at the wrists and collar, and some kind of silvery brocade vest, real tight. His coat was a lemon-yellow number, with a green cloak snapping around in the wind behind him and catching about his ankles. On top of his head he had this wide-brimmed hat, with a long red feather sticking out of it, except when I got closer, I saw it was really some weird spiky quill. His hair covered his shoulders; at first glance, I thought he was a girl. It was a peculiar sort of hair too, red and shiny, like thin copper wire.
I didn’t know what to make of him, but I remember one of our Germans saying that he looked like a Frenchman.
No sooner had we arrived than he came slogging right over to the jeep, bold as you please, trudging through the sand with a big bag stuck up under one arm.
He started telling us his name, and he was still telling it to us while four other jeeps pulled up. He spoke better English than most of our Germans, despite having this weird accent, but it was hard to be sure at first when he spent ten minutes telling us his name.
I was the first human being to speak to him. That’s God’s truth, I don’t care what anybody else tells you, it was me. I got out of the jeep and stuck out my hand and said, “Welcome to America.” I started to introduce myself, but he interrupted me before I could get the words out.
“Herb Cranston of Cape May, New Jersey,” he said. “A rocket scientist. Excellent. I am a scientist myself.” He didn’t look like any scientist I’d ever known, but I made allowances, since he came from outer space. I was more concerned about how he’d known my name. I asked him.
He waved his ruffles in the air, impatient. “I read your mind. That’s unimportant. Time is short, Cranston. Their ship broke up.” I thought he look more than a little sick when he said that; sad, you know, hurting, but scared too. And tired, very tired. Then he started talking about this globe. That was the globe with the wild card virus, of course, everyone knows that now, but back then I didn’t know what the hell he was going on about. It was lost, he said, he needed to get it back, and he hoped for all our sakes it was still intact. He wanted to talk to our top leaders. He must have read their names in my mind, because he named Werner, and Einstein, and the President, except he called him “this President Harry S Truman of yours.” Then he climbed right into the back of the jeep and sat down. “Take me to them,” he said. “At once. “
Professor Lyle Crawford Kent
In a certain sense, it was I who coined his name. His real name, of course, his alien patronymic, was impossibly long. Several of us tried to shorten it, I recall, using this or that piece of it during our conferences, but evidently this was some sort of breach of etiquette on his home world, Takis. He continually corrected us, rather arrogantly I might say, like an elderly pedant lecturing a pack of schoolboys. Well, we needed to call him something. The title came first. We might have called him “Your Majesty” or some such, since he claimed to be a prince, but Americans are not comfortable with that sort of bowing and scraping. He also said he was a physician, although not in our sense of the word, and it must be admitted that he did seem to know a good deal of genetics and biochemistry, which seemed to be his area of expertise. Most of our team held advanced degrees, and we addressed each other accordingly, and so it was only natural that we fell to calling him “Doctor” as well.
The rocket scientists were obsessed with our visitor’s ship, particularly with the theory of his faster-than-light propulsion system. Unfortunately, our Takisian friend bad burned out his ship’s interstellar drive in his haste to arrive here before those relatives of his, and in any case he adamantly refused to let any of us, civilian or military, inspect the inside of his craft. Werner and his Germans were reduced to questioning the alien about the drive, rather compulsively I thought. As I understood it, theoretical physics and the technology of space travel were not disciplines in which our visitor was especially expert, so the answers he gave them were not very clear, but we did grasp that the drive made use of a hithertounknown particle that traveled faster than light.
The alien had a term for the particle, as unpronounceable as his name. Well, I had a certain grounding in classical Greek, like all educated men, and a flair for nomenclature if I do say so myself. I was the one who devised the coinage “tachyon.” Somehow the GIs got things confused, and began referring to our visitor as “that tachyon fellow.” The phrase caught on, and from there it was only a short step to Doctor Tachyon, the name by which he became generally known in the press.
Colonel Edward Reid, U.S. Army Intelligence (Ret.)
You want me to say it, right? Every damned reporter I’ve ever talked to wants me to say it. All right, here it is. We made a mistake. And we paid for it too. Do you know that afterwards they came within a hair of court-martialing all of us, the whole interrogation team? That’s a fact. The hell of it is, I don’t know how we could have been expected to do things any differently than we did. I was in charge of his interrogation. I ought to know. What did we really know about him? Nothing except what he told us himself. The eggheads were treating him like Baby Jesus, but military men have to be a little more cautious. If you want to understand, you have to put yourself in our shoes and remember how it was back then.
His story was utterly preposterous, and he couldn’t prove a single damned thing.
Okay, he landed in this funny-looking rocket plane, except it didn’t have rockets. That was impressive. Maybe that plane of his did come from outer space, like he said.
But maybe it didn’t. Maybe it was one of those secret projects the Nazis had been working on, left over from the war. They’d had jets at the end, you know, and those V-2s, and they were even working on the atomic bomb. Maybe it was Russian. I don’t know. If Tachyon had only let us examine his ship, our boys would have been able to figure out where it came from, I’m sure. But he wouldn’t let anyone inside the damned thing, which struck me as more than a little suspicious. What was he trying to hide?
He said he came from the planet Talds. Well, I never heard of no goddamned planet Takis. Mars, Venus, Jupiter, sure. Even Mongo and Barsoom. But Takis? I called up a dozen top astronomers all around the country, even one guy over in England. Where’s the planet Takis? I asked them. There is no planet Takis, they told me.
He was supposed to be an alien, right? We examined him. A complete physical, X rays, a battery of psychological tests, the works. He tested human. Every which way we turned him, he came up human. No extra organs, no green blood, five fingers, five toes, two balls, and one cock. The fucker was no different from you and me. He spoke English, for crissakes. But get this-he also spoke German. And Russian and French and a few other languages I’ve forgotten. I made wire recordings of a couple of my sessions with him, and played them for a linguist, who said the accent was Central European.
And the headshrinkers, whoa, you should have heard their reports. Classic paranoid, they said. Megalomania, they said. Schitzo, they said. All kinds of stuff. I mean, look, this guy claimed to be a prince from outer space with magic fucking powers who’d come here all alone to save our whole damned planet. Does that sound sane to you?
And let me say something about those damned magic powers of his. I’ll admit it, that was the thing that bothered me the most. I mean, not only could Tachyon tell you what you were thinking, he could look at you funny and make you jump up on your desk and drop your pants, whether you wanted to or not. I spent hours with him every day, and he convinced me. The thing was, my reports didn’t convince the brass back east. Some kind of trick, they thought, he was hypnotizing us, he was reading our body posture, using psychology to make us think he read minds. They were going to send out a stage hypnotist to figure out how he did it, but the shit hit the fan before they got around to it.
He didn’t ask much. All he wanted was a meeting with the President so he could mobilize the entire American military to search for some crashed rocket ship.
Tachyon would be in command, of course, no one else was qualified. Our top scientists could be his assistants. He wanted radar and jets and submarines and bloodhounds and weird machines nobody had ever heard of. You name it, he wanted it. And he did not want to have to consult with anybody, either. This guy dressed like a fag hairdresser, if you want the truth, but the way he gave orders you would’ve thought he had three stars at least.
And why? Oh, yeah, his story, that sure was great. On this planet Takis, he said, a couple dozen big families ran the whole show, like royalty, except they all had magic powers, and they lorded it over everybody else who didn’t have magic powers. These families spent most of their time feuding like the Hatfields and McCoys. His particular bunch had a secret weapon they’d been working on for a couple of centuries. A tailored artificial virus designed to interact with the genetic makeup of the host organism, he said. He’d been part of the research team.
Well, I was humoring him. What did this germ do? I asked him. Now get this-it did everything.
What it was supposed to do, according to Tachyon, was goose up these mind powers of theirs, maybe even give them some new powers, evolve ‘em almost into gods, which would sure as hell give his kin the edge over the others. But it didn’t always do that. Sometimes, yeah. Most often it killed the test subjects. He went on and on about how deadly this stuf was, and managed to give me the creeps. What were the symptoms? I asked. We knew about germ weapons back in 46; just in case he was telling the truth, I wanted us to know what to look for.
He couldn’t tell me the symptoms. There were all kinds of symptoms. Everybody had different symptoms, every single person. You ever hear of a germ worked like that? Not me.
Then Tachyon said that sometimes it turned people into freaks instead of killing them. What kind of freaks? I asked. All kinds, he said. I admitted that it sounded pretty nasty, and asked him why his folks hadn’t used this stuff on the other families. Because sometimes the virus worked, he said; it remade its victims, gave them powers. What kinds of powers? All kinds of powers, naturally.
So they had this stuff. They didn’t want to use it on their enemies, and maybe give them powers. They didn’t want to use it on themselves, and kill off half the family.
They weren’t about to forget about it. They decided to test it on us. Why us? Because we were genetically identical to Takisians, he said, the only such race they knew of, and the bug was designed to work on the Takisian genotype. So why were we so lucky? Some of his people thought it was parallel evolution, others believed that Earth was a lost Takisian colony-he didn’t know and didn’t care.
He did care about the experiment. Thought it was “ignoble.” He protested, he said, but they ignored him. The ship left. And Tachyon decided to stop them all by himself. He came after them in a smaller ship, burned out his damned tachyon drive getting here ahead of them. When he intercepted them, they told him to fuck of, even though he was family, and they had some kind of space battle. His ship was damaged, theirs was crippled, and they crashed. Somewhere back east, he said. He lost them, on account of the damage to his ship. So he landed at White Sands, where he thought he could get help.
I got down the whole story on my wire recorder. Afterwards, Army Intelligence contacted all sorts of experts: biochemists and doctors and germ-warfare guys, you name it. An alien virus, we told them, symptoms completely random and unpredictable. Impossible, they said. Utterly absurd. One of them gave me a whole lecture about how Earth germs could never affect Martians like in that H. G. Wells book, and Martian germs couldn’t affect us, either. Everybody agreed that this random-symptom bit was a laugh. So what were we supposed to do? We all cracked jokes about the Martian flu and spaceman’s fever. Somebody, I don’t know who, called it the wild card virus in a report, and the rest of us picked up on the name, but nobody believed it for a second.
It was a bad situation, and Tachyon just made it worse when he tried to escape. He almost pulled it off, but like my old man always told me, “almost” only counts in horseshoes and grenades. The Pentagon had sent out their own man to question him, a bird colonel named Wayne, and Tachyon finally got fed up, I guess. He took control of Colonel Wayne, and together they just marched out of the building. Whenever they were challenged, Wayne snapped off the orders to let them pass, and rank does have its privileges. The cover story was that Wayne had orders to escort Tachyon back to Washington. They commandeered a jeep and got all the way back to the spaceship, but by then one of the sentries had checked with me, and my men were waiting for them, with direct orders to ignore anything Colonel Wayne might say. We took him back into custody and kept him there, under heavy guard. For all his magic powers, there wasn’t much he could do about it. He could make one person do what he wanted, maybe three or four if he tried real hard, but not all of us, and by then we were wise to his tricks.
Maybe it was a bonehead maneuver, but his escape attempt did get him the date with Einstein he’d been badgering us for. The Pentagon kept telling us he was the world’s geatest hypnotist, but I wasn’t buying that anymore, and you should have heard what Colonel Wayne thought of the theory. The eggheads were getting agitated too. Anyway, together Wayne and I managed to wrangle authorization to fly the prisoner to Princeton. I figured a talk with Einstein couldn’t do any harm, and might do some good. His ship was impounded, and we’d gotten all we were going to get from the man himself. Einstein was supposed to be the world’s greatest brain, maybe he could figure the guy out, right?
There are still those who say that the military is to blame for everything that happened, but it’s just not true. It’s easy to be wise in hindsight, but I was there, and I’ll maintain to my dying day that the steps we took were reasonable and prudent.
The thing that really burns me is when they talk about how we did nothing to track down that damned globe with the wild card spores. Maybe we made a mistake, yeah, but we weren’t stupid, we were covering our asses. Every damned military installation in the country got a directive to be on the lookout for a crashed spaceship that looked something like a seashell with running lights. Is it my fucking fault that none of them took it seriously?
Give me credit for one thing, at least. When all hell broke loose, I had Tachyon jetting back toward New York within two hours. I was in the seat behind him. The redheaded wimp cried half the fucking way across the country. Me, I prayed for Jetboy.
When he’d moved into the dorm back in September, the first thing that Thomas Tudbury had done was tack up his signed photograph of President Kennedy, and the tattered 1944 Time cover with Jetboy as Man of the Year.
By November, the picture of Kennedy was riddled with holes from Rodneys darts. Rod had decorated his side of the room with a Confederate flag and a dozen Playboy centerfolds.
He hated Jews, niggers, jokers, and Kennedy, and didn’t like Tom much either. All through the fall semester, he had fun; covering Tom’s bed with shaving cream, short-sheeting him, hiding his eyeglasses, filling his desk drawer with dog turds.
On the day that Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Tom came back to his room fighting to hold the tears. Rod had left him a present. He’d used a red pen. The whole top of Kennedy’s head was dripping blood now, and over his eyes Rod had drawn little red X’s. His tongue was sticking out of the corner of his mouth.
Thomas Tudbury stared at that for a long, long time. He did not cry; he would not allow himself to cry. He began to pack his suitcases.
The freshman parking lot was halfway across campus. The trunk on his ‘54 Mercury had a broken lock, so he tossed the bags into the backseat. He let the car warm up for a long time in the November chill. He must have looked funny sitting there; a short, overweight guy with a crewcut and horn-rim glasses, pressing his head against the top of the steering wheel like he was going to be sick.
As he was driving out of the lot, he spied Rodney’s shiny new Olds Cutlass.
Tom shifted to neutral and idled for a moment, considering. He looked around. There was no one in sight; everybody was inside watching the news. He licked his lips nervously, then looked back at the Oldsmobile. His knuckles whitened around the wheel. He stared hard, furrowed his brow, and squeezed.
The door panels gave first, bending inward slowly under the pressure. The headlights exploded with small pops, one after the other. Chrome trim clattered to the ground, and the rear windshield shattered suddenly, glass flying everywhere. Fenders buckled and collapsed, metal squealing in protest. Both rear tires blew at once, the side panels caved in, then the hood; the windshield disintegrated entirely. The crankcase gave, and then the walls of the gas tank; oil, gasoline, and transmission fluid pooled under the car. By then Tom Tudbury was more confident, and that made it easier. He imagined he had the Olds caught in a huge invisible fist, a strong fist, and he squeezed all the harder. The crunch of breaking glass and the scream of tortured metal filled the parking lot, but there was no one to hear. He methodically mashed the Oldsmobile into a ball of crushed metal.
When it was over, he shifted into gear and left college, Rodney, and childhood behind forever.
Somewhere a giant was crying.
Tachyon woke disoriented and sick, his hangover throbbing in time to the mammoth sobs. The shapes in the dark room were strange and unfamiliar. Had the assassins come in the night again, was the family under attack? He had to find his father. He lurched dizzily to his feet, head swimming, and put a hand against the wall to steady himself.
The wall was too close. These weren’t his chambers, this was all wrong, the smell... and then the memories came back. He would have preferred the assassins.
He had dreamed of Takis again, he realized. His head hurt, and his throat was raw and dry. Fumbling in the darkness, he found the chain-pull for the overhead light. The bulb swung wildly when he yanked, making the shadows dance. He closed his eyes to still the lurching in his gut. There was a foul taste at the back of his mouth. His hair was matted and filthy, his clothing rumpled. And worst of all, the bottle was empty. Tachyon looked around helplessly. A six-by-ten room on the second floor of a lodging house named ROOMS, on a street called the Bowery. Confusingly, the surrounding neighborhood had once been called the Bowery too-Angelface had told him that. But that was before; the area had a different name now. He went to the window, pulling up the shade. The yellow light of a streetlamp filled the room. Across the street, the giant was reaching for the moon, and weeping because he could not grasp it.
Tiny, they called him. Tachyon supposed that was human wit. Tiny would have been fourteen feet tall if only he could stand up. His face was unlined and innocent, crowned with a tangle of soft dark hair. His legs were slender, and perfectly proportioned. And that was the joke: slender, perfectly proportioned legs could not begin to support the weight of a fourteen-foot-tall man. Tiny sat in a wooden wheelchair, a great mechanized thing that rolled through the streets of Jokertown on four bald tires from a wrecked semi. When he saw Tach in the window, he screamed incoherently, almost as though he recognized him. Tachyon turned away from the window, shaking. It was another Jokertown night. He needed a drink.
His room smelled of mildew and vomit, and it was very cold. ROOMS was not as well heated as the hotels he had frequented in the old days. Unbidden, he remembered the Mayflower down in Washington, where he and Blythe... but no, better not to think of that. What time was it anyway? Late enough. The sun was down, and Jokertown came to life at night.
He plucked his overcoat from the floor and slipped it on. Soiled as it was, it was still a marvelous coat, a lovely rich rose color, with fringed golden epaulets on the shoulders and loops of golden braid to fasten the long row of buttons. A musician’s coat, the man at the Goodwill had told him. He sat on the edge of his sagging mattress to pull on his boots.
The washroom was down at the end of the hall. Steam rose from his urine as it splashed against the rim of the toilet; his hands shook so badly that he couldn’t even aim right. He slapped cold, rust-colored water on his face, and dried his hands on a filthy towel.
Outside, Tach stood for a moment beneath the creaking ROOMS sign, staring at Tiny. He felt bitter and ashamed. And much too sober. There was nothing to be done about Tiny, but he could deal with his sobriety. He turned his back on the weeping giant, slid his hands deep into the pockets of his coat, and walked off briskly down the Bowery.
In the alleys, jokers and winos passed brown paper bags from hand to hand, and stared with dull eyes at the passersby. Taverns, pawnbrokers, and mask shops were all doing a brisk trade. The Famous Bowery Wild Card Dime Museum (they still called it that, but admission was a quarter now) was closing for the day. Tachyon had gone through it once, two years ago, on a day when he was feeling especially guilt-ridden; along with a half-dozen particularly freakish jokers, twenty jars of “monstrous joker babies” floating in formaldehyde, and a sensational little newsreel about the Day of the Wild Card, the museum had a waxworks display whose dioramas featured Jetboy, the Four Aces, a Jokertown Orgy... and him.
A tour bus rolled past, pink faces pressed to the windows. Beneath the neon light of a neighborhood pizza parlor, four youths in black leather jackets and rubber facemasks eyed Tachyon with open hostility. They made him uneasy. He averted his eyes and dipped into the mind of the nearest: mincing pansy looka that hair dye job fershure thinks he’s inna marching band like to beat his fuckin’ drums but no wait shit there’s better we’U find us a good one tonight yeah wanna get one that squishes when we hit it. Tach broke the contact with distaste and hurried on. It was old news, and a new sport: come down to the Bowery, buy some masks, beat up a joker. The police didn’t seem to care.
The Chaos Club and its famous All-Joker Revue had the usual big crowd. As Tachyon approached, a long gray limo pulled up to the curb. The doorman, wearing a black tuxedo over luxuriant white fur, opened the door with his tail and helped out a fat man in a dinner jacket. His date was a buxom teenager in a strapless evening gown and pearls, her blond hair piled high in a bouffant hairdo.
A block farther on, a snake-lady called out a proposition from the top of a nearby stoop. Her scales were rainbowcolored, glistening. “Don’t be scared, Red,” she said, “it’s still soft inside.” He shook his head.
The Funhouse was housed in a long building with giant picture windows fronting the street, but the glass had been replaced with one-way mirrors. Randall stood out front, shivering in tails and domino. He looked perfectly normaluntil you noticed that he never took his right hand out of his pocket. “Hey, Tacky,” he called out. “Whattaya make of Ruby?”
“Sorry, I don’t know her,” Tachyon said.
Randall scowled. “No, the guy who killed Oswald.”
“Oswald?” Tach said, confused. “Oswald who?”
“Lee Oswald, the guy who shot Kennedy. He got killed on TV this afternoon.”
“Kennedy’s dead?” Tachyon said. It was Kennedy who’d permitted his return to the United States, and Tach admired the Kennedys; they seemed almost Takisian. But assassination was part of leadership. “His brothers will avenge him,” he said. Then he recalled that they didn’t do things that way on earth, and besides, this man Ruby had already avenged him, it seemed. How strange that he had dreamed of assassins.
“They got Ruby in jail,” Randall was saying. “If it was me, I’d give the fucker a medal.” He paused. “He shook my hand once,” he added. “When he was running against Nixon, he came through to give a speech at the Chaos Club. Afterward, when he was leaving, he was shaking hands with everybody.” The doorman took his right hand out of his pocket. It was hard and chitinous, insectile, and in the middle was a cluster of swollen blind eyes. “He didn’t even flinch,” Randall said. “Smiled and said he hoped I’d remember to vote.”
Tachyon had known Randall for a year, but he had never seen his hand before. He wanted to do what Kennedy had done, to grasp that twisted claw, embrace it, shake it. He tried to slide his hand out of the pocket of his coat, but the bile rose in the back of his throat, and somehow all he could do was look away, and say, “He was a good man.”
Randall hid his hand again. “Go on inside, Tacky,” he said, not unkindly. “Angelface had to go and see a man, but she told Des to keep your table open.”
Tachyon nodded and let Randall open the door for him. Inside, he gave his coat and shoes to the girl in the checkroom, a joker with a trim little body whose feathered owl mask concealed whatever the wild card had done to her face. Then he pushed through the interior doors, his stockinged feet sliding with smooth familiarity over the mirrored floor. When he looked down, another Tachyon was staring back up at him, framed by his feet; a grossly fat Tachyon with a head like a beachball.
Suspended from the mirrored ceiling, a crystal chandelier glittered with a hundred pinpoint lights, its reflections sparkling of the floor tiles and walls and mirrored alcoves, the silvered goblets and mugs, and even the waiters’ trays. Some of the mirrors reflected true; the others were distorting mirrors, funhouse mirrors. When you looked over your shoulder in the Funhouse, you could never tell what you’d find looking back. It was the only establishment in Jokertown that attracted jokers and normals in equal numbers. In the Funhouse the normals could see themselves twisted and malformed, and giggle, and play at being jokers; and a joker, if he was very lucky, might glance in the right mirror and see himself as he once had been.
“Your booth is waiting, Doctor Tachyon,” said Desmond, the maitre d’. Des was a large, florid man; his thick trunk, pink and wrinkled, curled around a wine list. He lifted it, and beckoned for Tachyon to follow with one of the fingers that dangled from its end. “Will you be having your usual brand of cognac tonight?”
“Yes,” Tach said, wishing he had some money for a tip. That night he had his first drink for Blythe, as always, but his second was for John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
The rest were for himself.
At the end of Hook Road, past the abandoned refinery and the import/export warehouses, past the railroad sidings with their forlorn red boxcars, beneath the highway underpass, past the empty lots full of weeds and garbage, past the huge soybean-oil tanks, Tom found his refuge. It was almost dark by the time he arrived, and the engine in the Mere was thumping ominously. But Joey would know what to do about that.
The junkyard stood hard on the oily polluted waters of New York Bay. Behind a ten-foot-high chain link fence topped with three curly strands of barbed wire, a pack of junkyard dogs kept pace with his car, barking a raucous welcome that would have terrified anyone who knew the dogs less well. The sunset gave a strange bronze cast to the mountains of shattered, twisted, rusted automobiles, the acres of scrap metal, the hills and valleys of junk and trash. Finally Tom came to the wide double gate. On one side a metal sign warned TRESPASSERS KEEP OUT, on the other side another sign told them to BEWARE OF THE DOGS. The gate was chained and locked.
Tom stopped and honked his horn.
Just beyond the fence he could see the four-room shack that Joey called home. A huge sign was mounted on top of the corrugated tin roof, with yellow spotlights stuck up there to illuminate the letters. It said DI ANGELIS SCRAP METAL & AUTO PARTS. The paint was faded and blistered by two decades of sun and rain; the wood itself had cracked, and one of the spots had burned out. Next to the house was parked an ancient yellow dump truck, a tow truck, and Joey’s pride and joy, a blood-red 1959 Cadillac coupe with tail fins like a shark and a monster of a hopped-up engine poking right up through its cutaway hood.
Tom honked again. This time he gave it their special signal, tooting out the Here-he-comes-to-save-the-daaaay! theme from the Mighty Mouse cartoons they’d watched as kids.
A square of yellow light spilled across the junkyard as Joey came out with a beer in either hand.
They were nothing alike, him and Joey. They came from different stock, lived in different worlds, but they’d been best friends since the day of the third-grade pet show. That was the day he’d found out that turtles couldn’t fly; the day he realized what he was, and what he could do.
Stevie Bruder and Josh Jones had caught him out in the schoolyard. They played catch with his turtles, tossing them back and forth while Tommy ran between them, red-faced and crying. When they got bored, they bounced them off the punchball square chalked on the wall. Stevie’s German shepherd ate one. When Tommy tried to grab the dog, Stevie laid into him and left him on the ground with broken glasses and a split lip.
They would have done worse, except for Junkyard Joey, a scrawny kid with shaggy black hair, two years older than his classmates, but he’d already been left back twice, couldn’t hardly read, and they always said he smelled bad on account of his father, Dom, owned the junkyard. Joey wasn’t as big as Stevie Bruder, but he didn’t care, that day or any day. He just grabbed Stevie by the back of his shirt and yanked him around and kicked him in the balls. Then he kicked the dog too, and he would have kicked Josh Jones, except josh ran away. As he fled, a dead turtle floated off the ground and flew across the schoolyard to smack him in the back of his fat red neck.
Joey had seen it happen. “How’d you do that?” he said, astonished. Until that moment, even Tommy hadn’t realized that he was the reason his turtles could fly.
It became their shared secret, the glue that held their odd friendship together. Tommy helped Joey with his homework and quizzed him for tests. Joey became Tommy’s protector against the random brutality of playground and schoolyard. Tommy read comic books to Joey, until Joey’s own reading got so much better that he didn’t need Tommy. Dom, a grizzled man with salt-and-pepper hair, a beer belly, and a gentle heart, was proud of that; he couldn’t read himself, not even Italian. The friendship lasted through grammar school and high school and Joey’s dropping out. It survived their discovery of girls, weathered the death of Dom DiAngelis and Toms family moving off to Perth Amboy. Joey DiAngelis was still the only one who knew what Tom was.
Joey popped the cap on another Rheingold with the church key that hung around his neck. Under his sleeveless white undershirt a beer belly like his father’s was growing. “You’re too fucking smart to be doing shitwork in a TV repair shop,” he was saying.
“It’s a job,” Tom said. “I did it last summer, I can do it full time. It’s not important what kind of job I have. What’s important is what I do with my, uh, talent.”
“Talent?” Joey mocked.
“You know what I mean, you dumb wop.” Tom set his empty bottle down on the top of the orange crate next to the armchair. Most of Joey’s furnishings weren’t what you’d call lavish; he scavenged them from the junkyard. “I been thinking about what Jetboy said at the end, trying to think what it meant. I figure he was saying that there were things he hadn’t done yet. Well, shit, I haven’t done anything. All the way back I asked what I could do for the country, y ‘know? Well, fuck, we both know the answer to that one.”
Joey rocked back in his chair, sucking on his Rheingold and shaking his head. Behind him, the wall was lined with the bookshelves that Dom had built for the kids almost ten years ago. The bottom row was all men’s magazines. The rest were comic books. Their comic books. Supermans and Batmans, Action Comics and Detective, the Classics Illustrateds that Joey had mined for all his book reports, horror comics and crime comics and air-war comics, and best of all, their treasure-an almost complete run of Jetboy Comics.
Joey saw what he was looking at. “Don’t even think it,” he said, “you’re no fuckin’ Jetboy, Tuds.”
“No,” said Tom, “I’m more than he was. I’m—”
“A dork,” Joey suggested.
“An ace,” he said gravely. “Like the Four Aces.”
“They were a colored doo-wop group, weren’t they?” Tom flushed. “You dump wop, they weren’t singers, they—”
Joey cut him of with a sharp gesture. “I know who the fuck they were, Tuds. Gimme a break. They were dumb shits, like you. They all went to jail or got shot or something, didn’t they? Except for the fuckin’ snitch, whatsisname.” He snapped his fingers. “You know, the guy in Tarzan.”
“Jack Braun,” Tom said. He’d done a term paper on the Four Aces once. “And I bet there are others, hiding out there. Like me. I’ve been hiding. But no more.”
“So you figure you’re going to go to the Bayonne Times and give a fucking show? You asshole. You might as well tell em you’re a commie. They’ll make you move to Jokertown and they’ll break all the goddamned windows in your dad’s house. They might even draft you, asswipe.”
“No,” said Tom. “I’ve got it scoped out. The Four Aces were easy targets. I’m not going to let them know who I am or where I live.” He used the beer bottle in his hand to gesture vaguely at the bookshelves. “I’m going to keep my name secret. Like in the comics.”
Joey laughed out loud. “Fuckin’ A. You gonna wear longjohns too, you dumb shit?”
“God damn it,” Tom said. He was getting pissed of. “Shut the fuck up.” Joey just sat there, rocking and laughing. “Come on, big mouth,” Tom snapped, rising. “Get of your fat ass and come outside, and I’ll show just how dumb I am. C’mon, you know so damned much.”
Joey DiAngelis got to his feet. “This I gotta see.” Outside, Tom waited impatiently, shifting his weight from foot to foot, breath steaming in the cold November air, while Joey went to the big metal box on the side of the house and threw a switch. High atop their poles, the junkyard lights blazed to life. The dogs gathered around, sniffing, and followed them when they began to walk. Joey had a beer bottle poking out of a pocket of his black leather jacket.
It was only a junkyard, full of garbage and scrap metal and wrecked cars, but tonight it seemed as magical as when Tommy was ten. On a rise overlooking the black waters of New York Bay, an ancient white Packard loomed like a ghostly fort. That was just what it had been, when Joey and he had been kids; their sanctum, their stronghold, their cavalry outpost and space station and castle rolled all in one. It shone in the moonlight, and the waters beyond were full of promise as they lapped against the shore. Darkness and shadows lay heavy in the yard, changing the piles of trash and metal into mysterious black hills, with a maze of gray alleys between them. Tom led them into that labyrinth, past the big trash heap where they’d played king-of-the-mountain and dueled with scrapiron swords, past the treasure troves where they’d found so many busted toys and hunks of colored glass and deposit bottles, and once even a whole cardboard carton full of comic books.
They walked between rows of twisted, rusty cars stacked one on another; Fords and Chevys, Hudsons and DeSotos, a Corvette with a shattered accordion hood, a litter of dead Beetles, a dignified black hearse as dead as the passengers it had carried. Tom looked at them all carefully. Finally he stopped. “That one,” he said, pointing to the remains of a gutted old Studebaker Hawk. Its engine was gone, as were its tires; the windshield was a spiderweb of broken glass, and even in the darkness they could see where rust had chewed away at the fenders and side panels. “Not worth anything, right?”
Joey opened his beer. “Go ahead, it’s all yours.”
Tom took a deep breath and faced the car. His hands became fists at his side. He stared hard, concentrating. The car rocked slightly. Its front grill lifted an unsteady couple of inches from the ground.
“Whooo-eeee,” Joey said derisively, punching Tom lightly in the shoulder. The Studebaker dropped with a clang, and a bumper fell off. “Shit, I’m impressed,”. Joey said.
“Damn it, keep quiet and leave me alone,” Tom said. “I can do it, I’ll show you, just shut your fuckin’ mouth for a minute. I’ve been practicing. You don’t know the things I can do.”
“Won’t say a fuckin’ word,” Joey promised, grinning. He took a swig of his beer.
Tom turned back to the Studebaker. He tried to blot out everything, forget about Joey, the dogs, the junkyard; the Studebaker filled his world. His stomach was a hard little ball. He told it to relax, took several deep breaths, let his fists uncurl. Come on, come on, take it easy, don’t get upset, do it, you’ve done more than this, this is easy, easy.
The car rose slowly, drifting upward in a shower of rust. Tom turned it around and around, faster and faster. Then, with a triumphant smile, Tom threw it fifty feet across the junkyard.
It crashed into a stack of dead Chevys and brought the whole thing down in an avalanche of metal.
Joey finished his Rheingold. “Not bad. A few years ago, you could barely lift me over a fence.”
“I’m getting stronger all the time,” Tom said.
Joey DiAngelis nodded, and tossed his empty bottle to the side. “Good” he said, “then you won’t have any problem with me, willya?” He gave Tom a hard push with both hands.
Tom staggered back a step, frowning. “Cut it out, Joey.”
“Make me,” Joey said. He shoved him again, harder. This time Tom almost lost his footing.
“Damn it, stop it,” Tom said. “It’s not funny, Joey.”
“No?” Joey said. He grinned. “I think it’s fuckin’ hilarious. But hey, you can stop me, can’t you? Use your damn power.” He moved right up in Tom’s face and slapped him lightly across the cheek. “Stop me, ace,” he said. He slapped him harder. “C’mon, Jetboy, stop me.” The third slap was the hardest yet. “Let’s go, supes, whatcha waitin’ for?” The fourth blow had a sharp sting; the fifth snapped Tom’s head half around. Joey stopped smiling; Tom could smell the beer on his breath. Tom tried to grab his hand, but Joey was too strong, too fast; he evaded Tom’s grasp and landed another slap. “You wanna box, ace? I’ll turn you into fuckin’ dogmeat. Dork. Asshole.” The slap almost tore Tom’s head off, and brought stinging tears to his eyes. “Stop me, jagoff,” Joey screamed. He closed his hand, and buried his fist in Tom’s stomach so hard it doubled him over and took his breath away.
Tom tried to summon his concentration, to grab and push, but it was the schoolyard all over again, Joey was everywhere, fists raining down on him, and it was all he could to do get his hands up and try to block the blows, and it was no good anyway, Joey was much stronger, he pounded him, pushed him, screaming all the while, and Tom couldn’t think, couldn’t focus, couldn’t do anything but hurt, and he was retreating, staggering back, and Joey came after him, fists cocked, and caught him with an uppercut that landed right on his mouth with a crack that made his teeth hurt. All of a sudden Tom was lying on his back on the ground, with a mouth full of blood.
Joey stood over him frowning. “Fuck,” he said. “I didn’t mean to bust your lip.” He reached down, took Tom by the hand, and yanked him roughly to his feet.
Tom wiped blood from his lip with the back of his hand. There was blood on the front of his shirt too. “Look at me, I’m all messed up,” he said with disgust. He glared at Joey. “That wasn’t fair. You can’t expect me to do anything when you’re pounding on me, damn it.”
“Uh-huh,” Joey said. “And while you’re concentrating and squinting your eyes, you figure the fuckin’ bad guys are just gonna leave you alone, right?” He clapped Tom across the back. “They’ll knock out all your fuckin’ teeth. That’s if you’re lucky, if they don’t just shoot you. You ain’t no Jetboy, Tuds.” He shivered. “C’mon. It’s fuckin’ cold out here.”
When he woke in warm darkness, Tach remembered only a little of the binge, but that was how he liked it. He struggled to sit up. The sheets he was lying on were satin, smooth and sensual, and beneath the odor of stale vomit he could still smell a faint trace of some flowery perfume.
Unsteady, he tossed off the bedclothes and pulled himself to the edge of the four-poster bed. The floor beneath his bare feet was carpeted. He was naked, the air uncomfortably warm on his bare skin. He reached out a hand, found the light switch, and whimpered a little at the brightness. The room was pink-and-white clutter with Victorian furnishings and thick, soundproofed walls. An oil painting of John R Kennedy smiled down from above the hearth; in one corner stood a three-foot-tall plaster statue of the Virgin Mary.
Angelface was seated in a pink wingback chair by the cold fireplace, blinking at him sleepily and covering her yawn with the back of her hand.
Tach felt sick and ashamed. “I put you out of your own bed again, didn’t I?” he said.
“It’s all right,” she replied. Her feet were resting on a tiny footstool. Her soles were ugly and bruised, black and swollen despite the special padded shoes she wore. Otherwise she was lovely. Unbound, her black hair fell to her waist, and her skin had a flushed, radiant quality to it, a warm glow of life. Her eyes were dark and liquid, but the most amazing thing, the thing that never failed to astonish Tachyon, was the warmth in them, the affection he felt so unworthy of. With all he had done to her, and to all the rest of them, somehow this woman called Angelface forgave, and cared.
Tach raised a hand to his temple. Someone with a buzzsaw was trying to remove the back of his skull. “My head,” he groaned. “At your prices, the least you could do is take the resins and poisons out of the drinks you sell. On Takis, we—”
“I know,” Angelface said. “On Takis you’ve bred hangovers out of your wines. You told me that one already.” Tachyon gave her a weary smile. She looked impossibly fresh, wearing nothing but a short satin tunic that left her legs bare to the thigh. It was a deep, wine red, lovely against her skin. But when she rose, he glimpsed the side of her face, where her cheek had rested against the chair as she slept. The bruise was darkening already, a purple blossom on her cheek. “Angel ..” he began.
“It’s nothing,” she said. She pushed her hair forward to cover the blemish. “Your clothes were filthy. Mal took them out to be cleaned. So you’re my prisoner for a while.”
“How long have I slept?” Tachyon asked.
“All day,” Angelface replied. “Don’t worry about it. Once I had a customer get so drunk he slept for five months.” She sat down at her dressing table, lifted a phone, and ordered breakfast: toast and tea for herself, eggs and bacon and strong cofee with brandy for Tachyon. With aspirin on the side. “No,” he protested. “All that food. I’ll get sick.”
“You have to eat. Even spacemen can’t live on cognac alone.”
“Please...”
“If you want to drink, you’ll eat,” she said brusquely. “That’s the deal, remember?”
The deal, yes. He remembered. Angelface provided him with rent money, food, and an unlimited bar tab, as much drink as he’d ever need to wash away his memories. All he had to do was eat and tell her stories. She loved to listen to him talk. He told her family anecdotes, lectured about Takisian customs, filled her with history and legends and romances, with tales of balls and intrigues and beauty far removed from the squalor of Jokertown.
Sometimes, after closing, he would dance for her, tracing the ancient, intricate pavanes of Takis across the nightclub’s mirrored floors while she watched and urged him on. Once, when both of them had drunk far too much wine, she talked him into demonstrating the Wedding Pattern, an erotic ballet that most Takisians danced but once, on their wedding night. That was the only time she had ever danced with him, echoing the steps, hesitantly at first, and then faster and faster, swaying and spinning across the floor until her bare feet were raw and cracked and left wet red smears upon the mirror tiles. In the Wedding Pattern, the dancing couple came together at the end, collapsing into a long triumphant embrace. But that was on Takis; here, when the moment came, she broke the pattern and shied away from him, and he was reminded once again that Takis was far away.
Two years before, Desmond had found him unconscious and naked in a Jokertown alley. Someone had stolen his clothing while he slept, and he was fevered and delirious. Des had summoned help to carry him to the Funhouse. When he came to, he was lying on a cot in a back room, surrounded by beer kegs and wine racks. “Do you know what you were drinking?” Angelface had asked him when they’d brought him to her office. He hadn’t known; all he recalled was that he’d needed a drink so badly it was an ache inside him, and the old black man in the alley had generously offered to share. “It’s called Sterno,” Angelface told him. She had Des bring in a bottle of her finest brandy. “If a man wants to drink, that’s his business, but at least you can kill yourself with a little class. The brandy spread thin tendrils of warmth through his chest and stopped his hands from shaking. When he’d emptied the snifter, Tach had thanked her effusively, but she drew back when he tried to touch her. He asked her why. “I’ll show you, she had said, offering her hand. “Lightly,” she told him. His kiss had been the merest brush of his lips, not on the back of her hand but against the inside of her wrist, to feel her pulse, the life current inside her, because she was so very lovely, and kind, and because he wanted her.
A moment later he’d watched with sick dismay as her skin darkened to purple and then black. Another one of mine, he’d thought.
Yet somehow they had become friends. Not lovers, of course, except sometimes in his dreams; her capillaries ruptured at the slightest pressure, and to her hypersensitive nervous system even the lightest touch was painful. A gentle caress turned her black and blue; lovemaking would probably kill her. But friends, yes. She never asked him for anything he could not give, and so he could never fail her.
Breakfast was served by a hunchbacked black woman named Ruth who had pale blue feathers instead of hair. “The man brought this for you this morning,” she told Angelface after she’d set the table, handing across a thick, square packet wrapped in brown paper. Angelface accepted it without comment while Tachyon drank his brandy-laced coffee and lifted knife and fork to stare with sick dismay at the implacable bacon and eggs.
“Don’t look so stricken,” Angelface said.
“I don’t think I’ve told you about the time the Network starship came to Takis, and what my great-grandmother Amurath had to say to the Ly’bahr envoy,” he began.
“No,” she said. “Go on. I like your great-grandmother.”
“That’s one of us. She terrifies me,” Tachyon said, and launched into the story.
Tom woke well before dawn, while Joey was snoring in the back room. He brewed a pot of coffee in a battered percolator and popped a Thomas English muffin into the toaster. While the coffee perked, he folded the hide-a-bed back into a couch. He covered his muffins with butter and strawberry preserves, and looked around for something to read. The comics beckoned.
He remembered the day they’d saved them. Most had been his, originally, including the run ofJetboy he got from his dad. He’d loved those comics. And then one day in 1954 he’d come home from school and found them gone, a full bookcase and two orange crates of funny books vanished. His mother said some women from the PTA had come by to tell her what awful things comic books were. They’d shown her a copy of a book by a Dr. Wertham about how comics turned kids into juvenile delinquents and homos, and how they glorified aces and jokers, and so his mother had let them take Tom’s collection. He screamed and yelled and threw a tantrum, but it did no good.
The PTA had gathered up comic books from every kid in school. They were going to burn them all Saturday, in the schoolyard. It was happening all over the country; there was even talk of a law banning comic books, or at least the kinds about horror and crime and people with strange powers. Wertham and the PTA turned out to be right: that Friday night, on account of comic books, Tommy Tudbury and Joey DiAngelis became criminals.
Tom was nine; Joey was eleven, but he’d been driving his pop’s truck since he was seven. In the middle of the night, he swiped the truck and Tom snuck out to meet him. When they got to the school, Joey jimmied open a window, and Tom climbed on his shoulders and looked into the dark classroom and concentrated and grabbed the carton with his collection in it and lifted it up and floated it out into the bed of the truck. Then he snatched four or five other cartons for good measure.
The PTA never noticed; they still had plenty to burn. If Dom DiAngelis wondered where all the comics had come from, he never said a word; he just built the shelves to hold them, proud as punch of his son who could read. From that day on, it was their collection, jointly.
Setting his coffee and muffin on the orange crate, Tom went to the bookcase and took down a couple of issues of Jetboy Comics. He reread them as he ate, Jetboy on Dinosaur Island, Jetboy and the Fourth Reich, and his favorite, the final issue, the true one, Jetboy and the Aliens. Inside the cover, the title was “Thirty Minutes Over Broadway.” Tom read it twice as he sipped his cooling coffee. He lingered over some of the best panels. On the last page, they had a picture of the alien, Tachyon, weeping. Tom didn’t know if that had happened or not. He closed the comic book and finished his English muffin. For a long time he sat there thinking.
Jetboy was a hero. And what was he? Nothing. A wimp, a chickenshit. A fuck of a lot of good his wild card power did anybody. It was useless, just like him.
Dispiritedly, he shrugged into his coat and went outside. The junkyard looked raw and ugly in the dawn, and a cold wind was blowing. A few hundred yards to the east, the bay was green and choppy. Tom climbed up to the old Packard on its little hill. The door creaked when he yanked it open. Inside, the seats were cracked and smelled of rot, but at least he was out of that wind. Tom slouched back with his knees up against the dash, staring out at sunrise. He sat unmoving for a long time; across the yard, hubcaps and old tires floated up in the air and went screaming off to splash into the choppy green waters of New York Bay. He could see the Statue of Liberty on her island, and the hazy outlines of the towers of Manhattan off to the northeast.
It was nearly seven-thirty, his limbs were stiff, and he’d lost count of the number of hubcaps he’d flung, when Tom Tudbury sat up with a strange expression on his face. The icebox he’d been juggling forty feet from the ground came down with a crash. He ran his fingers through his hair and lifted the icebox again, moved it over twenty yards or so, and dropped it right on Joey’s corrugated tin roof. Then he did the same with a tire, a twisted bicycle, six hubcaps, and a little red wagon.
The door to the house flew open with a bang, and Joey came charging out into the cold wearing nothing but boxer shorts and a sleeveless undershirt. He looked real pissed. Tom snatched his bare feet, pulled them out from under him, and dumped him on his butt, hard. Joey cursed.
Tom grabbed him and yanked him into the air, upside down. “Where the fuck are you, Tudbury?” Joey screamed. “Cut it out, you dork. Lemme down.”
Tom imagined two huge invisible hands, and tossed Joey from one to the other. “When I get down, I’m going to punch you so fuckin’ hard you’ll eat through a straw for the rest of your life,” Joey promised.
The crank was stiff from years of disuse, but Tom finally managed to roll down the Packard’s window. He stuck his head out. “Hiya kids, hiya, hiya, hiya,” he croaked, chortling.
Suspended twelve feet from the ground, Joey dangled and made a fist. “I’ll pluck your fuckin’ magic twanger, shithead,” he shouted. Tom yanked off his boxer shorts and hung them from a telephone pole. “You’re gonna die, Tudbury” Joey said.
Tom took a big breath and set Joey on the ground, very gently. The moment of truth. Joey came running at him, screaming obscenities. Tom closed his eyes, put his hands on the steering wheel, and lifted. The Packard shifted beneath him. Sweat dotted his brow. He shut out the world, concentrated, counted to ten, slowly, backward.
When he finally opened his eyes, half expecting to see Joey’s fist smashing into his nose, there was nothing to behold but a seagull perched on the hood of the Packard, its head cocked as it peered through the cracked windshield. He was floating. He was flying.
Tom stuck his head out of the window. Joey stood twenty feet below him, glaring, hands on his hips and a disgusted look on his face. “Now,” Tom yelled down, smiling, “what was it you were saying last night?”
“I hope you can stay up there all day, you son of a bitch,” Joey said. He made an ineffectual fist, and waved it. Lank black hair fell across his eyes. “Ah, shit, what does this prove? If I had a gun, you’d still be dead meat.”
“If you had a gun, I wouldn’t be sticking my head out the window,” Tom said. “In fact, it’d be better if I didn’t have a window.” He considered that for a second, but it was hard to think while he was up here. The Packard was heavy. “I’m coming down,” he said to Joey. “You, uh, you calmed down?” Joey grinned. “Try me and see, Tuds.”
“Move out of the way. I don’t want to squash you with this damn thing.”
Joey shuffled to one side, bare-ass and goose-pimpled, and Tom let the Packard settle as gently as an autumn leaf on a still day. He had the door half open when Joey reached in, grabbed him, yanked him up, and pushed him back against the side of the car, his other hand cocked into a fist. “I oughtta—” he began. Then he shook his head, snorted, and punched Tom lightly in the shoulder. “Gimme back my fuckin drawers, ace,” he said.
Back inside the house, Tom reheated the leftover coffee. “I’ll need you to do the work,” he said as he made himself some scrambled eggs and ham and a couple more English muffins. Using his teke always gave him quite an appetite. “You took auto shop and welding and all that shit. I’ll do the wiring. “
“Wiring?” Joey said, warming his hands over his cup. “What the fuck for?”
“The lights and the TV cameras. I don’t want any windows people can shoot through. I know where we can get some cameras cheap, and you got lots of old sets around here, I’ll just fix them up.” He sat down and attacked his eggs wolfishly. “I’ll need loudspeakers too. Some kind of PA system. A generator. Wonder if I’ll have room for a refrigerator in there?”
“That Packard’s a big motherfucker,” Joey said. “Take out the seats and you’ll have room for three of the fuckers.”
“Not the Packard,” Tom said. “I’ll find a lighter car. We can cover up the windows with old body panels or something.” Joey pushed hair out of his eyes. “Fuck the body panels. I got armor plate. From the war. They scrapped a bunch of ships at the Navy base in ‘46 and ‘47, and Dom put in a bid for the metal, and bought us twenty goddamn tons. Fuckin’ waste a money-who the fuck wants to buy battleship armor? I still got it all, sitting way out back rusting. You need a fuckin’ sixteeninch gun to punch through that shit, Tuds. You’ll be safe asfuck, I dunno. Safe, anyhow.”
Tom knew. “Safe,” he said loudly, “as a turtle in its shell!”
Only ten shopping days were left until Christmas, and Tach sat in one of the window alcoves, nursing an Irish coffee against the December cold and gazing through the one-way glass at the Bowery. The Funhouse wouldn’t open for another hour yet, but the back door was always unlocked for Angelface’s friends. Up on stage, a pair of joker jugglers who called themselves Cosmos and Chaos were tossing bowling balls around. Cosmos floated three feet above the stage in the lotus position, his eyeless face serene. He was totally blind, but he never missed a beat or dropped a ball. His partner, six-armed Chaos, capered around like a lunatic, chortling and telling bad jokes and keeping a cascade of flaming clubs going behind his back with two arms while the other four flung bowling balls at Cosmos. Tach spared them only a glance. As talented as they were, their deformities pained him.
Mal slid into his booth. “How many of those you had?” the bouncer demanded, glaring at the Irish coffee. The tendrils that hung from his lower lip expanded and contracted in a blind wormlike pulsing, and his huge, malformed blue-black jaw gave his face a look of belligerent contempt.
“I don’t see that it’s any of your business.”
“You’re no damn use at all, are you?”
“I never claimed I was.”
Mal grunted. “You’re worth ‘bout as much as a sack of shit. I don’t see why the hell Angel needs no damn pantywaist spaceman hanging ‘round the place sopping up her booze...”
“She doesn’t. I told her that.”
“You can’t tell that woman nothin’,” Mal agreed. He made a fist. A very large fist. Before the Day of the Wild Card, he’d been the eighth-ranked heavyweight contender. Afterward, he had climbed as high as third... until they’d banned wild cards from professional sports, and wiped out his dreams in a stroke. The measure was aimed at aces, they said, to keep the games competitive, but there had been no exceptions made for jokers. Mal was older now, sparse hair turned iron gray, but he still looked strong enough to break Floyd Patterson over his knee and mean enough to stare down Sonny Liston. “Look at that,” he growled in disgust, glaring out the window. Tiny was outside in his chair. “What the hell is he doing here? I told him not to come by here no more.” Mal started for the door.
“Can’t you just leave him alone?” Tachyon called after him. “He’s harmless.”
“Harmless?” Mal rounded on him. “His screamin’ scares of all the fuckin’ tourists, and who the hell’s gonna pay for all your free booze?”
But then the door pushed open, and Desmond stood there, overcoat folded over one arm, his trunk half-raised.
“Let him be, Mal,” the maitre d’ said wearily. “Go on, now.” Muttering, Mal stalked off. Desmond came over and seated himself in Tachyon’s booth. “Good morning, Doctor,” he said.
Tachyon nodded and finished his drink. The whiskey had all gone to the bottom of the cup, and it warmed him on the way down. He found himself staring at the face in the mirrored tabletop: a worn, dissipated, coarse face, eyes reddened and puffy, long red hair tangled and greasy, features distorted by alcoholic bloat. That wasn’t him, that couldn’t be him, he was handsome, clean-featured, distinguished, his face was Desmond’s trunk snaked out, its fingers locking around his wrist roughly, yanking him forward. “You haven’t heard a word I’ve said, have you?” Des said, his voice low and urgent with anger. Blearily, Tach realized that Desmond had been talking to him. He began to mutter apologies.
“Never mind about that,” Des said, releasing his grip. “Listen to me. I was asking for your help, Doctor. I may be a joker, but I’m not an uneducated man. I’ve read about you. You have certain-abilities, let us say.”
“No,” Tach interrupted. “Not the way you’re thinking.”
“Your powers are quite well documented,” Des said. “I don’t...” Tach began awkwardly. He spread his hands. “That was then. I’ve lost-I mean, I can’t, not anymore.” He stared down at his own wasted features, wanting to look Des in the eye, to make him understand, but unable to bear the sight of the joker’s deformity.
“You mean you won’t,” Des said. He stood up. “I thought that if I spoke to you before we opened, I might actually find you sober. I see I was mistaken. Forget everything I said.”
“I’d help you if I could,” Tach began to say.
“I wasn’t asking for me,” Des said sharply.
When he was gone, Tachyon went to the long silverchrome bar and got down a full bottle of cognac. The first glass made him feel better; the second stopped his hands from shaking. By the third he had begun to weep. Mal came over and looked down at him in disgust. “Never knew no man cried as much as you do,” he said, thrusting a dirty handkerchief at Tachyon roughly before he left; to help them open.
He had been aloft for four and a half hours when the news of the fire came crackling over the police-band radio down by his right foot. Not very far aloft, true, only about six feet from the ground, but that was enough-six feet or sixty, it didn’t make all that much difference, Tom had found. Four and a half hours, and he didn’t feel the least bit tired yet. In fact, he felt sensational.
He was strapped securely into a bucket seat Joey had pulled from a mashed-up Triumph TR-3 and mounted on a low pivot right in the center of the VW The only light was the wan phosphor glow from an array of mismatched television screens that surrounded him on all sides. Between the cameras and their tracking motors, the generator, the ventilation system, the sound equipment, the control panels, the spare box of vacuum tubes, and the little refrigerator, he hardly had space to swing around. But that was okay. Tom was more a claustrophile than a claustrophobe anyway; he liked it in here. Around the exterior of the gutted Beetle, Joey had mounted two overlapping layers of thick battleship armor. It was better than a goddamned tank. Joey had already pinged a few shots off it with the Luger that Dom had taken off a German officer during the war. A lucky shot might be able to take out one of his cameras or lights, but there was no way to get to Tom himself inside the shell. He was better than safe, he was invulnerable, and when he felt this secure and sure of himself, there was no limit on what he might be able to do.
The shell was heavier than the Packard by the time they’d gotten finished with it, but it didn’t seem to matter. Four and a half hours, never touching ground, sliding around silently and almost effortlessly through the junkyard, and Tom hadn’t even worked up a sweat.
When he heard the report over the radio, a jolt of excitement went through him. This is it! he thought. He ought to wait for Joey, but Joey had driven to Pompeii Pizza to pick up dinner (pepperoni, onion, and extra cheese) and there was no time to waste, this was his chance.
The ring of lights on the bottom of the shell threw stark shadows over the hills of twisted metal and trash as Tom pushed the shell higher into the air, eight feet up, ten, twelve.
His eyes flicked nervously from one screen to the next, watching the ground recede. One set, its picture tube filched from an old Sylvania, began a slow vertical roll. Tom played with a knob and stopped it. His palms were sweaty. Fifteen feet up, he began to creep forward, until the shell reached the shoreline. In front of him was darkness; it was too thick a night to see New York, but he knew it was there, if he could reach it. On his small black-and-white screens, the waters of New York Bay seemed even darker than usual, an endless choppy ocean of ink looming before him. He’d have to grope his way across, until the city lights came into sight. And if he lost it out there, over the water, he’d be joining Jetboy and J. F K. a lot sooner than he planned; even if he could unscrew the hatch quick enough to avoid drowning, he couldn’t swim.
But he wasn’t going to lose it, Tom thought suddenly. Why the fuck was he hesitating? He wasn’t going to lose it ever again, was he? He had to believe that.
He pressed his lips together, pushed off with his mind, and the shell slid smoothly out over the water. The salt waves beneath him rose and fell. He’d never had to push against water before; it felt different. Tom had an instant of panic; the shell rocked and dropped three feet before he caught hold of himself and adjusted. He calmed himself with an effort, shoved upward, and rose. High, he thought, he’d come in high, he’d fly in, like Jetboy, like Black Eagle, like a fucking ace. The shell moved out, faster and faster, gliding across the bay with swift serenity as Tom gained confidence. He’d had never felt so incredibly powerful, so good, so goddamned right.
The compass worked fine; in less than ten minutes, the lights of the Battery and the Wall Street district loomed up before him. Tom pushed still higher, and floated uptown, hugging the shoreline of the Hudson. Jetboy’s Tomb came and went beneath him. He’d stood in front of it a dozen times, gazing up at the face of the big metal statue out front. He wondered what that statue might think if it could look up and see him tonight.
He had a New York street map, but tonight he didn’t need it; the flames could be seen almost a mile off. Even inside his armor Tom could feel the heat waves licking up at him when he made a pass overhead. He carefully began a descent. His fans whirred, and his cameras tracked at his command; below was chaos and cacophony, sirens and shouting, the crowd, the hurrying firemen, the police barricades and the ambulances, big hook-and-ladder trucks spraying water into the inferno. At first no one noticed him, hovering fifty feet above the sidewalk-until he came in low enough for his lights to play on the walls of the building. Then he saw them looking up, pointing; he felt giddy with excitement.
But he had only an instant to relish the feeling. Then, from the corner of an eye, he saw her in one of his screens. She appeared suddenly in a fifth-floor window, bent over and coughing, her dress already afire. Before he could act, the flames licked at her; she screamed and jumped.
He caught her in midair, without thinking, without hesitating, without wondering whether he could do it. He just did it, caught her and held her and lowered her gently to the ground. The firemen surrounded her, put out her dress, and hustled her into an ambulance. And now, Tom saw, everyone was looking up at him, at the strange dark shape floating high in the night, with its ring of shining lights. The police band was crackling; they were reporting him as a flying saucer, he heard. He grinned.
A cop climbed up on top of his police car, holding a bullhorn, and began to hail him. Tom turned off the radio to hear better over the roar of the flames. He was telling Tom to land and identify himself, asking who he was, what he was. That was easy. Tom turned on his microphone. “I’m the Turtle,” he said. The VW had no tires; in the wheel wells, Joey had rigged the most humongous speakers they could find, powered by the largest amp on the market. For the first time, the voice of the Turtle was heard in the land a booming “I’M THE TURTLE” echoing down the streets and alleys, a rolling thunder crackling with distortion. Except what he said didn’t sound quite right. Tom cranked the volume up even higher, injected a little more bass into his voice. “I AM THE GREAT AND POWERFUL TURTLE,” he announced to them all.
Then he flew a block west, to the dark polluted waters of the Hudson, and imagined two huge invisible hands forty feet across. He lowered them into the river, cupped them full, and lifted. Rivulets of water dribbled to the street all the way back. When he dropped the first cascade on the flames, a ragged cheering went up from the crowd below.
“Merry Christmas,” Tach declared drunkenly when the clock struck midnight and the record Christmas Eve crowd began to whoop and shout and pound on the tables. On stage,
Humphrey Bogart cracked a lame joke in an unfamiliar voice. All the lights in the house dimmed briefly; when they came back up, Bogart had been replaced by a portly, round-faced man with a red nose. “Who is he now?” Tach asked the twin on his left.
“W C. Fields,” she whispered. She slid her tongue around the inside of his ear. The twin on the right was doing something even more interesting under the table, where her hand had somehow found a way into his trousers. The twins were his Christmas gift from Angelface. “You can pretend they’re me,” she’d told him, though of course they were nothing like her. Nice kids, both of them, buxom and cheerful and absolutely uninhibited, if a bit simpleminded; they reminded him of Takisian sex toys. The one on the right had drawn the wild card, but she wore her cat mask even in bed, and there was no visible deformity to disturb the sweet pleasure of his erection.
W C. Fields, whoever he was, ofered some cynical observations about Christmas and small children. The crowd hooted him off the stage. The Projectionist had an astonishing array of faces, but he couldn’t tell a joke. Tach didn’t mind; he had all the diversion he needed.
“Paper, Doe?” The vendor thrust a copy of the Herald Tribune across the table with a thick three-fingered hand. His flesh was blue-black and oily looking. “All the Christmas news,” he said, shifting the clumsy stack of papers under his arm. Two small curving tusks protruded from the corners of his wide, grinning mouth. Beneath a porkpie hat, the great bulge of his skull was covered with tufts of bristly red hair. On the streets they called him the Walrus.
“No thank you, Jube,” Tach said with drunken dignity. “I have no desire to wallow in human folly tonight.”
“Hey, look,” said the twin on the right. “The Turtle!” Tachyon looked around, momentarily befuddled, wondering how that huge armored shell could possibly have gotten inside the Funhouse, but of course she was referring to the newspaper.
“You better buy it for her, Tacky,” the twin on the left said, giggling. “If you don’t she’ll pout.”
Tachyon sighed. “I’ll take one. But only if I don’t have to listen to any of your jokes, Jube.”
“Heard a new one about a joker, a Polack, and an Irishman stuck on a desert island, but just for that I’m not going to tell it,” the Walrus replied with a rubbery grin.
Tachyon dug for some coins, found nothing in his pockets but a small, feminine hand. Jube winked. “I’ll get it from Des,” he said. Tachyon spread the newspaper out on the table, while the club erupted in applause as Cosmos and Chaos made their entrance.
A grainy photograph of the Turtle was spread across two columns. Tachyon thought it looked like a flying pickle, a big lumpy dill covered with little bumps. The Turtle had apprehended a hit-and-run driver who had killed a nine-year-old boy in Harlem, intercepting his flight and lifting the car twenty feet off the ground, where it floated with its engine roaring and its tires spinning madly until the police finally caught up. In a related sidebar, the rumor that the shell was an experimental robot flying tank had been denied by an Air Force spokesman.
“You’d think they’d have found something more important to write about by now,” Tachyon said. It was the third big story about the Turtle this week. The letter columns, the editorial pages, everything was Turtle, Turtle, Turtle. Even television was rabid with Turtle speculation. Who was he? What was he? How did he do it?
One reporter had even sought out Tach to ask that question. “Telekinesis,” Tachyon told him. “It’s nothing new. Almost common, in fact.” Teke had been the single ability most frequently manifested by virus victims back in ‘46. He’d seen a dozen patients who could move paper clips and pencils, and one women who could lift her own body weight for ten minutes at a time. Even Earl Sanderson’s flight had been telekinetic in origin. What he did not tell them was that teke on this scale was unprecedented. Of course, when the story ran, they got half of it wrong.
“He’s a joker, you know,” whispered the twin on the right, the one in the silver-gray cat mask. She was leaning against his shoulder, reading about the Turtle.
“A joker?” Tach said.
“He hides inside a shell, doesn’t he? Why would he do that unless he was really awful to look at?” She had taken her hand out of his trousers. “Could I have that paper?”
Tach pushed it toward her. “They’re cheering him now,” he said sharply. “They cheered the Four Aces too.”
“That was a colored group, right?” she said, turning her attention to the headlines.
“She’s keeping a scrapbook,” her sister said. “All the jokers think he’s one of them. Stupid, huh? I bet its just a machine, some kind of Air Force flying saucer.”
“He is not,” her twin said. “It says so right here.” She pointed to the sidebar with a long, red-painted nail. “Never mind about her,” the twin on the left said. She moved closer to Tachyon, nibbling on his neck as her hand went under the table. “Hey, what’s wrong? You’re all soft.”
“My pardons,” Tachyon said gloomily. Cosmos and Chaos were flinging axes, machetes, and knives across the stage, the glittering cascade multiplied into infinity by the mirrors around them. He had a bottle of fine cognac at hand, and lovely, willing women on either side of him, but suddenly, for some reason he could not have named, it did not feel like such a good night after all. He filled his glass almost to the brim and inhaled the heady alcoholic fumes. “Merry Christmas,” he muttered to no one in particular.
Consciousness returned with the angry tones of Mal’s voice. Tach lifted his head groggily from the mirrored tabletop, blinking down at his puffy red reflection. The jugglers, the twins, and the crowd were long gone. His cheek was sticky from lying in a puddle of spilled liquor. The twins had jollied him and fondled him and one of them had even gone under the table, for all the good it did. Then Angelface had come to the tableside and sent them away. “Go to sleep, Tacky,” she’d said. Mal had come up to ask if he should lug him back to bed. “Not today,” she’d said, “you know what day this is. Let him sleep it off here.” He couldn’t recall when he’d gone to sleep.
His head was about to explode, and Mal’s shouting wasn’t making things any better. “I don’t give a flyin’ fuck what you were promised, scumbag, you’re not seeing her,” the bouncer yelled. A softer voice said something in reply. “You’ll get your fuckin money, but that’s all you’ll get,” Mal snapped.
Tach raised his eyes. In the mirrors he saw their reflections darkly: odd twisted shapes outlined in the wan dawn light, reflections of reflections, hundreds of them, beautiful, monstrous, uncountable, his children, his heirs, the offspring of his failures, a living sea of jokers. The soft voice said something else. “Ah, kiss my joker ass,” Mal said. He had a body like a twisted stick and a head like a pumpkin; it made Tach smile. Mal shoved someone and reached behind his back, groping for his gun.
The reflections and the reflections of the reflections, the gaunt shadows and the bloated ones, the round-faced ones and the knife-thin ones, the black and the white, they moved all at once, filling the club with noise; a hoarse shout from Mal, the crack of gunfire. Instinctively Tach dove for cover, cracking his forehead hard on the edge of the table as he slid down. He blinked back tears of pain and lay curled up on the floor, peering out at the reflections of feet while the world disintegrated into a sharp-edged cacophony. Glass was shattering and falling, mirrors breaking on all sides, silvered knives flying through the air, too many for even Cosmos and Chaos to catch, dark splinters eating into the reflections, taking bites out of all the twisted shadow-shapes, blood spattering against the cracked mirrors.
It ended as suddenly as it had begun. The soft voice said something and there was the sound of footsteps, the crunch of glass underfoot. A moment later, a muffled scream from off behind him. Tach lay under the table, drunk and terrified. His finger hurt: bleeding, he saw, sliced open by a sliver of mirror. All he could think of were the stupid human superstitions about broken mirrors and bad luck. He cradled his head in his arms so the awful nightmare would go away.
When he woke again, a policeman was shaking him roughly.
Mal was dead, one detective told him; they showed him a morgue photo of the bouncer lying in a pool of blood and a welter of broken glass. Ruth was dead too, and one of the janitors, a dim-witted cyclops who had never hurt anyone. They showed him a newspaper. The Santa Claus Slaughter, that was what they called it, and the lead was about three jokers who’d found death waiting under the tree on Christmas morning.
Miss Fascetti was gone, the other detective told him, did he know anything about that? Did he think she was involved? Was she a culprit or a victim? What could he tell them about her? He said he didn’t know any such person, until they explained that they were asking about Angela Fascetti and maybe he knew her better as Angelface. She was gone and Mal was shot dead, and the most frightening thing of all was that Tach did not know where his next drink was coming from.
They held him for four days, questioning him relentlessly, going over the same ground again and again, until Tachyon was screaming at them, pleading with them, demanding his rights, demanding a lawyer, demanding a drink. They gave him only the lawyer. The lawyer said they couldn’t hold him without charging him, so they charged him with being a material witness, with vagrancy, with resisting arrest, and questioned him again.
By the third day, his hands were shaking and he was having waking hallucinations. One of the detectives, the kindly one, promised him a bottle in return for his cooperation, but somehow his answers never quite satisfied them, and the bottle was not forthcoming. The bad-tempered one threatened to hold him forever unless he told the truth. I thought it was a nightmare, Tach told him, weeping. I was drunk, I’d been asleep. No, I couldn’t see them, just the reflections, distorted, multiplied. I don’t know how many there were. I don’t know what it was about. No, she had no enemies, everyone loved Angelface. No, she didn’t kill Mal, that didn’t make sense, Mal loved her. One of them had a soft voice. No, I don’t know which one. No, I can’t remember what they said. No, I don’t know if they were jokers or not, they looked like jokers, but the mirrors distort, some of them, not all of them, don’t you see? No, I couldn’t possibly pick them out of a lineup, I never really saw them. I had to hide under the table, don t you see, the assassins had come, that’s what my father always told me, there wasn’t anything I could do.
When they realized that he was telling them all he knew, they dropped the charges and released him. To the dark streets of Jokertown and the cold of the night.
He walked down the Bowery alone, shivering. The Walrus was hawking the evening papers from his newsstand on the corner of Hester. “Read all about it,” he called out. “Turtle Terror in Jokertown.” Tachyon paused to stare dully at the headlines. POLICE SEEK TURTLE, the Post reported. TURTLE CHARGED WITH ASSAULT, announced the World-Telegram. So the cheering had stopped already. He glanced at the text. The Turtle had been prowling Jokertown the past two nights, lifting people a hundred feet in the air to question them, threatening to drop them if he didn’t like their answers. When police tried to make an arrest last night, the Turtle had deposited two of their black-and-whites on the roof of Freakers at Chatham Square. CURB THE TURTLE, the editorial in the WorldTelegram said.
“You all right, Doc?” the Walrus asked.
“No,” said Tachyon, putting down the paper. He couldn’t afford to pay for it anyway.
Police barriers blocked the entrance to the Funhouse, and a padlock secured the door. CLOSED INDEFINITELY, the sign said. He needed a drink, but the pockets of his bandleader’s coat were empty. He thought of Des and Randall, and realized that he had no idea where they lived, or what their last names might be.
Trudging back to ROOMS, Tach climbed wearily up the stairs. When he stepped into the darkness, he had just enough time to notice that the room was frigidly cold; the window was open and a bitter wind was scouring out the old smells of urine, mildew, and drink. Had he done that? Confused, he stepped toward it, and someone came out from behind the door and grabbed him.
It happened so fast he scarcely had time to react. The forearm across his windpipe was an iron bar, choking off his scream, and a hand wrenched his right arm up behind his back, hard. He was choking, his arm close to breaking, and then he was being shoved toward the o en window, running at it, and Tachyon could only thrash feebly in a grip much stronger than his own. The windowsill caught him square in the stomach, knocking the last of his breath right out of him, and suddenly he was falling, head over heels, locked helplessly in the steel embrace of his attacker, both of them plunging toward the sidewalk below.
They jerked to a stop five feet above the cement, with a wrench that elicited a grunt from the man behind him. Tach had closed his eyes before the instant of impact. He opened them as they began to float upward. Above the yellow halo of the streetlamp was a ring of much brighter lights, set in a hovering darkness that blotted out the winter stars.
The arm across his throat had loosened enough for Tachyon to groan. “You,” he said hoarsely, as they curved around the shell and came to rest gently on top of it. The metal was icy cold, its chill biting right through the fabric of Tachyon’s pants. As the Turtle began to rise straight up into the night, Tachyon’s captor released him. He drew in a shuddering breath of cold air, and rolled over to face a man in a zippered leather jacket, black dungarees, and a rubbery green frog mask. “Who... ?” he gasped.
“I’m the Great and Powerful Turtle’s mean-ass sidekick,” the man in the frog mask said, rather cheerfully. “DOCTOR TACHYON, I PRESUME,” boomed the shell’s speakers, far above the alleys of Jokertown. “I’VE ALWAYS WANTED TO MEET YOU. I READ ABOUT YOU WHEN I WAS JUST A KID.”
“Turn it down,” Tach croaked weakly.
“OH. SURE. Is that better?” The volume diminished sharply. “It’s noisy in here, and behind all this armor I can’t always tell how loud I sound. I’m sorry if we scared you, but re couldn’t take the chance of you saying no. We need you.”
Tach stayed just where he was, shivering, shaken. “What do you want?” he asked wearily.
“Help,” the Turtle declared. They were still rising; the lights of Manhattan spread out all around them, and the spires of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building rose uptown. They were higher than either. The wind was cold and gusting; Tach clung to the shell for dear life.
“Leave me alone,” Tachyon said. “I have no help to give you. I have no help to give anybody.”
“Fuck, he’s crying,” the man in the frog mask said. “You don’t understand,” the Turtle said. The shell began to drift west, its motion silent and steady. There was something awesome and eerie about the flight. “You have to help. I’ve tried on my own, but I’m getting nowhere. But you, your powers, they can make the difference.”
Tachyon was lost in his own self-pity, too cold and exhausted and despairing to reply. “I want a drink,” he said. “Fuck it,” said frog-face. “Dumbo was right about this guy, he’s nothing but a goddamned wino.”
“He doesn’t understand,” said the Turtle. “Once we explain, he’ll come around. Doctor Tachyon, we’re talking about your friend Angelface.”
He needed a drink so badly it hurt. “She was good to me,” he said, remembering the sweet perfume of her satin sheets, and her bloody footprints on the mirror tiles. “But there’s nothing I can do. I told the police everything I know.”
“Chickenshit asshole,” said frog-face.
“When I was a kid, I read about you in Jetboy Comics,” the Turtle said. “‘Thirty Minutes Over Broadway,’ remember? You were supposed to be as smart as Einstein. I might be able to save your friend Angelface, but I can’t without your powers. “
“I don’t do that any longer. I can’t. There was someone I hurt, someone I cared for, but I seized her mind, just for an’’ instant, for a good reason, or at least I thought it was for a good reason, but it... destroyed her. I can’t do it again.”
“Boo hoo,” said frog-face mockingly. “Let’s toss ‘im, Turtle, he’s not worth a bucket of warm piss.” He took something out of one of the pockets of his leather jacket; Tach was astonished to see that it was a bottle of beer.
“Please,” Tachyon said, as the man popped off the cap with a bottle-opener hung round his neck....ip, Tach said.
“Just a sip.” He hated the taste of beer, but he needed something, anything. It had been days. “Please.”
“Fuck off,” frog-face said.
“Tachyon,” said the Turtle, “you can make him.”
“No I can’t,” Tach said. The man raised the bottle up to green rubber lips. “I can’t,” Tach repeated. Frog-face continued to drink. “No.” He could hear it gurgling.
“Please, just a little.”
The man lowered the beer bottle, sloshed it thoughtfully. “Just a swallow left,” he said.
“Please.” He reached out, hands trembling.
“Nah,” said frog-face. He began to turn the bottle upside down. “‘Course, if you’re really thirsty, you could just grab my mind, right? Make me give you the fuckin’ bottle.” He tipped the bottle a little more. “Go on, I dare ya, try it.”
Tach watched the last mouthful of beer dribble down onto the Turtle’s shell and run off into empty air.
“Fuck,” said the man in the frog mask. “You got it bad, don’t you?” He pulled another bottle from his pocket, opened it, and handed it across. Tach cradled it with both hands. The beer was cold and sour, but he had never tasted anything half so sweet. He drained it all in one long swallow.
“Got any other smart ideas?” frog-face asked the Turtle. Ahead of them was the blackness of the Hudson River, the lights of Jersey off to the west. They were descending. Beneath them, overlooking the Hudson, was a sprawling edifice of steel and glass and marble that Tachyon suddenly recognized, though he had never set foot inside it: Jetboy’s Tomb. “Where are we going?” he asked.
“We’re going to see a man about a rescue,” the Turtle said. Jetboy’s Tomb filled the entire block, on the site where the pieces of his plane had come raining down. It filled Tom’s screens too, as he sat in the warm darkness of his shell, bathed in a phosphor glow. Motors whirred as the cameras moved in their tracks. The huge flanged wings of the tomb curved upward, as if the building itself was about to take flight. Through tall, narrow windows, he could see glimpses of the full-size replica of the JB-1 suspended from the ceiling, its scarlet flanks aglow from hidden lights. Above the doors, the hero’s last words had been carved, each letter chiseled into the black Italian marble and filled in stainless steel. The metal flashed as the shell’s white-hot spots slid across the legend:
I CAN’T DIE YET, I HAVEN’T SEEN THE JOLSON STORY
Tom brought the shell down in front of the monument, to hover five feet above the broad marble plaza at the top of the stairs. Nearby, a twenty-foot-tall steel Jetboy looked out over the West Side Highway and the Hudson beyond, his fists cocked. The metal used for the sculpture had come from the wreckage of crashed planes, Tom knew. He knew that statue’s face better than he knew his father’s.
The man they’d come to meet emerged from the shadows at the base of the statue, a chunky dark shape huddled in a thick overcoat, hands shoved deep into his pockets. Tom shone a light on him; a camera tracked to give him a better view. The joker was a portly man, round-shouldered and well-dressed. His coat had a fur collar and his fedora was pulled low. Instead of a nose, he had an elephant’s trunk in the middle of his face. The end of it was fringed with fingers, snug in a little leather glove.
Dr. Tachyon slid off the top of the shell, lost his footing and landed on his ass. Tom heard Joey laugh. Then Joey jumped down too, and pulled Tachyon to his feet.
The joker glanced down at the alien. “So you convinced him to come after all. I’m surprised.”
“We were real fuckin’ persuasive,” Joey said.
“Des,” Tachyon said, sounding confused. “What are you doing here? Do you know these people?”
Elephant-face twitched his trunk. “Since the day before yesterday, yes, in a manner of speaking. They came to me. The hour was late, but a phone call from the Great and Powerful Turtle does pique one’s interest. He offered his help, and I accepted. I even told them where you lived.”
Tachyon ran a hand through his tangled, filthy hair. “I’m sorry about Mal. Do you know anything about Angelface? You know how much she meant to me.”
“In dollars and cents, I know quite precisely,” Des said. Tachyon’s mouth gaped open. He looked hurt. Tom felt sorry for him. “I wanted to go to you,” he said. “I didn’t know where to find you.”
Joey laughed. “He’s listed in the fuckin’ phone book, dork. Ain’t that many guys named Xavier Desmond.” He looked at the shell. “How the fuck is he gonna find the lady if he couldn’t even find his buddy here?”
Desmond nodded. “An excellent point. This isn’t going to work. Just look at him!” His trunk pointed. “What good is he? We’re wasting precious time.”
“We did it your way,” Tom replied. “We’re getting nowhere. No one’s talking. He can get the information we need. “
“I don’t understand any of this,” Tachyon interrupted. Joey made a disgusted sound. He had found a beer somewhere and was cracking the cap.
“What’s happening?” Tach asked.
“If you had been the least bit interested in anything besides cognac and cheap tarts, you might know,” Des said icily.
“Tell him what you told us,” Tom commanded. When he knew, Tachyon would surely help, he thought. He had to. Des gave a heavy sigh. “Angelface had a heroin habit. She hurt, you know. Perhaps you noticed that from time to time, Doctor? The drug was the only thing that got her through the day. Without it, the pain would have driven her insane. Nor was hers an ordinary junkie’s habit. She used uncut heroin in quantities that would have killed any normal user. You saw how minimally it affected her. The joker metabolism is a curious thing. Do you have any idea how expensive heroin is, Doctor Tachyon? Never mind, I see that you don’t. Angelface made quite a bit of money from the Funhouse, but it was never enough. Her source gave her credit until she was in far over her head, then demanded... call it a promissory note. Or a Christmas present. She had no choice. It was that or be cut off. She hoped to come up with the money, being an eternal optimist. She failed. On Christmas morning her source came by to collect. Mal wasn’t about to let them have her. They insisted.”
Tachyon was squinting in the glare of the lights. His image began to roll upward. “Why didn’t she tell me?” he said. “I suppose she didn’t want to burden you, Doctor. It might have taken the fun out of your self-pitying binges.”
“Have you told the police?”
“The police? Ah, yes. New York’s finest. The ones who seem so curiously uninterested whenever a joker is beaten or killed, yet ever so diligent if a tourist is robbed. The ones who so regularly arrest, harass, and brutalize any joker who has the poor taste to live anywhere outside of Jokertown. Perhaps we might consult the officer who commented that, raping a joker woman is more a lapse in taste than a crime.” Des snorted. “Doctor Tachyon, where do you think Angelface bought her drugs? Do you think any ordinary street pusher would have access to uncut heroin in the quantities she needed? The police were her source. The head of the Jokertown narcotics squad, if you care to be precise. Oh, I’ll grant you that it’s unlikely the whole department is involved. Homicide may be conducting a legitimate investigation. What do you think they’d say if we told them that Bannister was the murderer? You think they’d arrest one of their own? On the strength of my testimony, or the testimony of any joker?”
“We’ll make good her note,” Tachyon blurted. “We’ll give this man his money or the Funhouse or whatever it is he wants.”
“The promissory note,” Desmond said wearily, “was not for the Funhouse.”
“Whatever it was, give it to him!”
“She promised him the only thing she still had that he wanted,” Desmond said. “Herself. Her beauty and her pain. The word’s out on the street, if you know how to listen. There’s going to be a very special New Year’s Eve party somewhere in the city. Invitation only. Expensive. A unique thrill. Bannister will have her first. He’s wanted that for a long time. But the other guests will have their turn. Jokertown hospitality.”
Tachyon’s mouth worked soundlessly for a moment. “The police?” he finally managed. He looked as shocked as Tom had been when Desmond told him and Joey.
“Do you think they love us, Doctor? We’re freaks. We’re diseased. Jokertown is a hell, a dead end, and the Jokertown police are the most brutal, corrupt, and incompetent in the city. I don’t think anyone planned what happened at the Funhouse, but it happened, and Angelface knows too much. They can’t let her live, so they’re going to have some fun with the joker cunt.”
Tom Tudbury leaned toward his microphone. “I can rescue her,” he said. “These fuckers haven’t seen anything like the Great and Powerful Turtle. But I can’t find her.”
Des said, “She has a lot of friends. But none of us can read minds, or make a man do something he doesn’t want to.”
“I can’t,” Tachyon protested. He seemed to shrink into himself, to edge away from them, and for an instant Tom thought the little man was going to run away. “You don’t understand. “
“What a fuckin’ candy-ass,” Joey said loudly.
Watching Tachyon crumble on his screens, Tom Tudbury finally ran out of patience. “If you fail, you fail,” he said. “And if you don’t try, you fail too, so what the fuck difference does it make? Jetboy failed, but at least he tried. He wasn’t an ace, he wasn’t a goddamned Takisian, he was just a guy with a jet, but he did what he could.”
“I want to..... just... can’t.”
Des trumpeted his disgust. Joey shrugged.
Inside his shell, Tom sat in stunned disbelief. He wasn’t going to help. He hadn’t believed it, not really. Joey had warned him, Desmond too, but Tom had insisted, he’d been sure, this was Doctor Tachyon, of course he’d help, maybe he was having some problems, but once they explained the situation to him, once they made it clear what was at stake and how much they needed him-he had to help. But he was saying no. It was the last goddamned straw.
He twisted the volume knob up all the way. “YOU SON OF A BITCH,” he boomed, and the sound hammered out over the plaza. Tachyon flinched away. “YOU NO-GOOD FUCKING LITTLE ALIEN CHICKENSHIT!” Tachyon stumbled backward down the stairs, but the Turtle drifted after him, loudspeakers blaring. “IT WAS ALL A LIE, WASN’T IT? EVERYTHING IN THE COMIC BOOKS, EVERYTHING IN THE PAPERS, IT WAS ALL A STUPID LIE. ALL MY LIFE THEY BEAT ME UP AND THEY CALLED ME A FUCKING WIMP AND A COWARD BUT YOU’RE THE COWARD, YOU ASSHOLE, YOU SHITTY LITTLE WHINER, YOU WON’T EVEN TRY, YOU DON’T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT ANYBODY, ABOUT YOUR FRIEND ANGELFACE OR ABOUT KENNEDY OR JETBOY OR ANYBODY, YOU HAVE ALL THESE FUCKING POWERS AND YOU’RE NOTHING, YOU WON’T DO ANYTHING, YOU’RE WORSE THAN OSWALD OR BRAUN OR ANY OF THEM.” Tachyon staggered down the steps, hands over his ears, shouting something unintelligible, but Tom was past listening. His anger had a life of its own now. He lashed out, and the alien’s head snapped around and reddened with the force of the slap. “ASSHOLE!” Tom was shrieking. “YOU’RE THE ONE IN A SHELL.” Invisible blows rained down on Tachyon in a fury. He reeled, fell, rolled a third of the way down the stairs, tried to get back to his feet, was bowled over again, and bounced down to the street head over heels. “ASSHOLE!” the Turtle thundered. “RUN, YOU SHITHEAD. GET OUT OF HERE, OR I’LL THROW YOU IN THE DAMNED RIVER! RUN, YOU LITTLE WIMP, BEFORE THE GREAT AND POWERFUL TURTLE REALLY GETS UPSET! RUN, DAMN IT! YOU’RE THE ONE IN THE SHELL! YOU’RE THE ONE IN THE SHELL!”
And he ran, dashing blindly from one streetlight to the next, until he was lost in the shadows. Tom Tudbury watched him vanish on the shell’s array of television screens. He felt sick and beaten. His head was throbbing. He needed a beer, or an aspirin, or both. When he heard the sirens coming, he scooped up Joey and Desmond and set them on top of his shell, killed his lights, and rose straight up into the night, high, high up, into darkness and cold and silence.
That night Tach slept the sleep of the damned, thrashing about like a man in a fever dream, crying out, weeping, waking again and again from nightmares, only to drift back into them.
He dreamt he was back on Takis, and his hated cousin Zabb was boasting about a new sex toy, but when he brought her out it was Blythe, and he raped her right there in front of him. Tach watched it all, powerless to intervene; her body writhed beneath his and blood flowed from her mouth and ears and vagina. She began to change, into a thousand joker shapes each more horrible than the last, and Zabb went right on, raping them all as they screamed and struggled. But afterward, when Zabb rose from the corpse covered with blood, it wasn’t his cousin’s face at all, it was his own, worn and dissipated, a coarse face, eyes reddened and puffy; long red hair tangled and greasy, features distorted by alcoholic bloat or perhaps by a Funhouse mirror.
He woke around noon, to the terrible sound of Tiny weeping outside his window. It was more than he could stand. It was all more than he could stand. He stumbled to the window and threw it open and screamed at the giant to be quiet, to stop, to leave him alone, to give him peace, please, but Tiny went on and on, so much pain, so much guilt, so much shame, why couldn’t they let him be, he couldn’t take it anymore, no, shut up, shut up, please shut up, and suddenly Tach shrieked and reached out with his mind and plunged into Tiny’s head and shut him up.
The silence was thunderous.
The nearest phone booth was in a candy store a block down. Vandals had ripped the phone book to shreds. He dialed information and got the listing for Xavier Desmond on Christie Street, only a short walk away. The apartment was a fourthfloor walk-up above a mask shop. Tachyon was out of breath by the time he got to the top.
Des opened the door on the fifth knock. “You,” he said. “The Turtle,” Tach said. His throat was dry. “Did he get anything last night?”
“No,” Desmond replied. His trunk twitched. “The same story as before. They’re wise to him now, they know he won’t really drop them. They call his bluff. Short of actually killing someone, there’s nothing to do.”
“Tell me who to ask,” Tack said. “You?” Des said.
Tach could not look the joker in the eye. He nodded. “Let me get my coat,” Des said. He emerged from the apartment bundled up for the cold, carrying a fur cap and a frayed beige raincoat. “Put your hair up in the hat,” he told Tachyon, “and leave that ridiculous coat here. You don’t want to be recognized.” Tach did as he said. On the way out, Des went into the mask shop for the final touch.
“A chicken?” Tach said when Des handed him the mask. It had bright yellow feathers, a prominent orange beak, a floppy red coxcomb on top.
“I saw it and I knew it was you,” said Des. “Put it on.” A large crane was moving into position at Chatham Square, to get the police cars off Freakers roof. The club was open. The doorman was a seven-foot-tall hairless joker with fangs. He grabbed Des by the arm as they tried to pass under the neon thighs of the six-breasted dancer who writhed on the marquee. “No jokers allowed,” he said brusquely. “Get lost, Tusker.”
Reach out and grab his mind, Tachyon thought. Once, before Blythe, he would have done it instinctively. But now he hesitated, and hesitating, he was lost.
Des reached into his back pocket, pulled out a wallet, extracted a fifty-dollar bill. “You were watching them lower the police cars,” he said. “You never saw me pass.”
“Oh, yeah,” the doorman said. The bill vanished in a clawed hand. “Real interesting, them cranes.”
“Sometimes money is the most potent power of all,” Des said as they walked into the cavernous dimness within. A sparse noontime crowd sat eating the free lunch and watching a stripper gyrate down a long runway behind a barbed-wire barrier. She was covered with silky gray hair, except for her breasts, which had been shaved bare. Desmond scanned the booths along the far wall. He took Tach’s elbow and led him to a dark corner, where a man in a peacoat was sitting with a stein of beer. “They lettin’ jokers in here now?” the man asked gruffly as they approached. He was saturnine and pockmarked.
Tack went into his mind. Fuck what’s this now the elephant man’s from the Funhouse who’s the other one damned jokers anyhow gotta gotta nerve
“Where’s Bannister keeping Angelface?” Des asked. “Angelface is the slit at the Funhouse, right? Don’t know no Bannister. Is this a game? Fuck off, joker, I ain’t playing.” In his thoughts, images came tumbling: Tack saw mirrors shattering, silver knives flying through the air, felt Mat’s shove and saw him reach back for a gun, watched him shudder and spin as the bullets hit, heard Bannister’s soft voice as he told them to kill Ruth, saw the warehouse over on the Hudson where they were keeping her, the livid bruises on her arm when they’d grabbed her, tasted the man’s fear, fear of jokers, fear of discovery, fear of Bannister, the fear of them. Tach reached out and squeezed Desmond’s arm.
Des turned to go. “Hey, hold it right there,” the man with the pockmarked face said. He flashed a badge as he unfolded from the booth. “Undercover narcotics,” he said, “and you been using, mister, asking asshole junkie questions like that.” Des stood still as the man frisked him down. “Well, looka this,” he said, producing a bag of white powder from one of Desmond’s pockets. “Wonder what this is? You’re under arrest, freak-face. “
“That’s not mine,” Desmond said calmly.
“The hell it ain’t,” the man said, and in his mind the thoughts ran one after another little accident resisting arrest what could i do huh? jokers’ll scream but who listens to a fuckin’ joker only whatymi gonna do with the other one? and he glanced at Tachyon. Jeez looka the chickenman’s shaking maybe the fucker IS using that’d be great.
Trembling, Tach realized the moment of truth was at hand.
He was not sure he could do it. It was different than with Tiny; that had been blind instinct, but he was awake now, and he knew what he was doing. It had been so easy once, as easy as using his hands. But now those hands trembled, and there was blood on them, and on his mind as well... he thought of Blythe and the way her mind had shattered under his touch, like the mirrors in the Funhouse, and for a terrible, long second nothing happened, until the fear was rank in his throat, and the familiar taste of failure filled his mouth.
Then the pockfaced man smiled an idiot’s smile, sat back down in his booth, laid his head on the table, and went to sleep as sweetly as a child.
Des took it in stride. “Your doing?” Tachyon nodded.
“You’re shaking,” Des asked. “Are you all right, Doctor?”
“I think so,” Tachyon said. The policeman had begun to snore loudly. “I think maybe I am all right, Des. For the first time in years.” He looked at the joker’s face, looked past the deformity to the man beneath. “I know where she is,” he said. They started toward the exit. In the cage, a full-breasted, bearded hermaphrodite had started into a bump-and-grind. “We have to move quickly.”
“In an hour I can get together twenty men.”
“No,” Tachyon said. “The place they’re holding her isn’t in Jokertown.”
Des stopped with his hand on the door. “I see,” he said. “And outside of Jokertown, jokers and masked men are rather conspicuous, aren’t they?”
“Exactly,” Tach said. He did not voice his other fear, of the retribution that would surely be enacted should jokers dare to confront police, even police as corrupt as Bannister and his cohorts. He would take the risk himself, he had nothing left to lose, but he could not permit them to take it. “Can you reach the Turtle?” he asked.
“I can take you to him,” Des replied. “When?”
“Now,” Tach said. In an hour or two, the sleeping policeman would awaken and go straight to Bannister. And say what? That Des and a man in a chicken mask had been asking questions, that he’d been about to arrest them but suddenly he’d gotten very sleepy? Would he dare admit to that? If so, what would Bannister make of it? Enough to move Angelface? Enough to kill her? They could not chance it.
When they emerged from the dimness of Freakers, the crane had just lowered the second police car to the sidewalk. A cold wind was blowing, but behind his chicken feathers, Doctor Tachyon had begun to sweat.
Tom Tudbury woke to the dim, muffled sound of someone pounding on his shell.
He pushed aside the frayed blanket, and bashed his head sitting up. “Ow, goddamn it,” he cursed, fumbling in the darkness until he found the map light. The pounding continued, a hollow boom boom boom against the armor, echoing. Tom felt a stab of panic. The police, he thought, they’ve found me, they’ve come to drag me out and haul me up on charges. His head hurt. It was cold and stuffy in here. He turned on the space heater, the fans, the cameras. His screens came to life.
Outside was a bright cold December day, the sunlight painting every grimy brick with stark clarity. Joey had taken the train back to Bayonne, but Tom had remained; they were running out of time, he had no other choice. Des found him a safe place, an interior courtyard in the depths of Jokertown, surrounded by decaying five-story tenements, its cobblestones redolent with the smell of sewage, wholly hidden from the street. When he’d landed, just before dawn, lights had blinked on in a few of the dark windows, and faces had come to peer cautiously around the shades; wary, frightened, not-quitehuman faces, briefly seen and gone as quickly, when they decided that the thing outside was none of their concern.
Yawning, Tom pulled himself into his seat and panned his cameras until he found the source of the commotion. Des was standing by an open cellar door, arms crossed, while Doctor Tachyon hammered on the shell with a length of broom handle.
Astonished, Tom flipped open his microphones. “YOU.” Tachyon winced. “Please.”
He lowered the volume. “Sorry. You took me by surprise. I never expected to see you again. After last night, I mean. I didn’t hurt you, did I? I didn’t mean to, I just—”
“I understand,” Tachyon said. “But we’ve got no time for recriminations or apologies now.”
Des began to roll upward. Damn that vertical hold. “We know where they have her,” the joker said as his image flipped. “That is, if Doctor Tachyon can indeed read minds as advertised.”
“Where?” Tom said. Des continued to flip, flip, flip. “A warehouse on the Hudson,” Tachyon replied. “Near the foot of a pier. I can’t tell you an address, but I saw it clearly in his thoughts. I’ll recognize it.”
“Great!” Tom enthused. He gave up on his efforts to adjust the vertical hold and whapped the screen. The picture steadied. “Then we’ve got them. Let’s go.” The look on Tachyon’s face took him aback. “You are coming, aren’t you?” Tachyon swallowed. “Yes,” he said. He had a mask in his hand. He slipped it on.
That was a relief, Tom thought; for a second there, he’d thought he’d have to go it alone. “Climb on,” he said. With a deep sigh of resignation, the alien scrambled on top of the shell, his boots scrabbling at the armor. Tom gripped his armrests tightly and pushed up. The shell rose as easily as a soap bubble. He felt elated. This was what he was meant to do, Tom thought; Jetboy must have felt like this.
Joey had installed a monster of a horn in the shell. Tom let it rip as they floated clear of the rooftops, startling a coop of pigeons, a few winos, and Tachyon with the distinctive blare of Here-l-come-to-save-the-daaaaaay.
“It might be wise to be a bit more subtle about this,” Tachyon said diplomatically.
Tom laughed. “...don’t believe it, I got a man from outer space who mostly dresses like Pinky Lee riding on my back, and he’s telling me I ought to be subtle.” He laughed again as the streets of Jokertown spread out all around them.
They made their final approach through a maze of waterfront alleys. The last was a dead end, terminating in a brick wall scrawled over with the names of gangs and young lovers. The Turtle rose above it, and they emerged in the loading area behind the warehouse. A man in a short leather jacket sat on the edge of the loading dock. He jumped to his feet when they hove into view. His jump took him a lot higher than he’d anticipated, about ten feet higher. He opened his mouth, but before he could shout, Tach had him; he went to sleep in midair. The Turtle stashed him atop a nearby roof.
Four wide loading bays opened onto the dock, all chained and padlocked, their corrugated metal doors marked with wide brown streaks of rust. TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED said the lettering on the narrow door to the side.
Tach hopped down, landing easily on the balls of his feet, his nerves tingling. “I’ll go through,” he told the Turtle. “Give me a minute, and then follow.”
“A minute,” the speakers said. “You got it.”
Tach pulled off his boots, opened the door just a crack, and slid into the warehouse on purple-stockinged feet, summoning up all the stealth and fluid grace they’d once taught him on Takis. Inside, bales of shredded paper, bound tightly in thin wire, were stacked twenty and thirty feet high. Tachyon crept down a crooked aisle toward the sound of voices. A huge yellow forklift blocked his path. He dropped flat and squirmed underneath it, to peer around one massive tire.
He counted five altogether. Two of them were playing cards, sitting in folding chairs and using a stack of coverless paperbacks for a table. A grossly fat man was adjusting a gigantic paper-shredding machine against the far wall. The last two stood over a long table, bags of white powder piled in neat rows in front of them. The tall man in the flannel shirt was weighing something on a small set of scales. Next to him, supervising, was a slender balding man in an expensive raincoat. He had a cigarette in his hand, and his voice was smooth and soft. Tachyon couldn’t quite make out what he was saying. There was no sign of Angelface.
He dipped into the sewer that was Bannister’s mind, and saw her. Between the shredder and the baling machine. He couldn’t see it from under the forklift, the machinery blocked the line of sight, but she was there. A filthy mattress had been tossed on the concrete floor, and she lay atop it, her ankles swollen and raw where the handcuffs chafed against her skin.
“.. fifty-eight hippopotami, fifty-nine hippopotami, sixty hippopotami,” Tom counted.
The loading bays were big enough. He squeezed, and the padlock disintegrated into shards of rust and twisted metal. The chains came clanking down, and the door rattled upward, rusty tracks screeching protest. Tom turned on all his lights as the shell slid forward. Inside, towering stacks of paper blocked his way. There wasn’t room to go between them. He shoved them, hard, but even as they started to collapse, it occurred to him that he could go above them. He pushed up toward the ceiling.
“What the fuck,” one of the cardplayers said, when they heard the loading gate screech open.
A heartbeat later, they were all moving. Both cardplayers scrambled to their feet; one of them produced a gun. The man in the flannel shirt looked up from his scales. The fat man turned away from the shredder, shouting something, but it was impossible to make out what he was saying. Against the far wall, bales of paper came crashing down, knocking into neighboring stacks and sending them down too, in a chain reaction that spread across the warehouse.
Without an instant’s hesitation, Bannister went for Angelface. Tach took his mind and stopped him in mid-stride, with his revolver half-drawn.
And then a dozen bales of shredded paper slammed down against the rear of the forklift. The vehicle shifted, just a little, crushing Tachyon’s left hand under a huge black tire. He cried out in shock and pain, and lost Bannister.
Down below, two little men were shooting at him. The first shot startled him so badly that Tom lost his concentration for a split second, and the shell dropped four feet before he got it back. Then the bullets were pinging harmlessly off his armor and ricocheting around the warehouse. Tom smiled. “I AM THE GREAT AND POWERFUL TURTLE,” he announced at full volume, as stacks of paper crashed down all around. “YOU ASSHOLES ARE UP SHIT CREEK. SURRENDER NOW”
The nearest asshole didn’t surrender. He fired again, and one of Tom’s screens went black. “OH, FUCK,” Tom said, forgetting to kill his mike. He grabbed the guy’s arm and pulled the gun away, and from the way the jerk screamed he’d probably dislocated his shoulder too, goddammit. He’d have to watch that. The other guy started running, jumping over a collapsed pile of paper. Tom caught him in mid-jump, took him straight up to the ceiling, and hung him from a rafter. His eyes flicked from screen to screen, but one screen was dark now and the damned vertical hold had gone again on the one next to it, so he couldn’t make out a fucking thing to that side. He didn’t have time to fix it. Some guy in a flannel shirt was loading bags into a suitcase, he saw on the big screen, and from the corner of his eye, he spied a fat guy climbing into a forklift...
His hand crushed beneath the tire, Tachyon writhed in excruciating pain and tried not to scream. Bannister-had to stop Bannister before he got to Angelface. He ground his teeth together and tried to will away the pain, to gather it into a ball and push it from him the way he’d been taught, but it was hard, he’d lost the discipline, he could feel the shattered bones in his hand, his eyes were blurry with tears, and then he heard the forklift’s motor turn over, and suddenly it was surging forward, rolling right up his arm, coming straight at his head, the tread of the massive tire a black wall of death rushing toward him... and passing an inch over the top of his skull, as it took to the air.
The forklift flew nicely across the warehouse and embedded itself in the far wall, with a little push from the Great and Powerful Turtle. The fat man dove off in midair and landed on a pile of coverless paperbacks. It wasn’t until then that Tom happened to notice Tachyon lying on the floor under the place the forklift had been. He was holding his hand funny and his chicken mask was all smashed up and dirty, Tom saw, and as he staggered to his feet he was shouting something. He went running across the floor, reeling, unsteady. Where the fuck was he going in such a hurry?
Frowning, Tom smacked the malfunctioning screen with the back of his hand, and the vertical roll stopped suddenly. For an instant, the image on the television was clear and sharp. A man in a raincoat stood over a woman on a mattress. She was real pretty, and there was a funny smile on her face, sad but almost accepting, as he pressed the revolver right up to her forehead.
Tach came reeling around the shredding machine, his ankles all rubber, the world a red blur, his shattered bones jabbing against each other with every step, and found them there, Bannister touching her lightly with his pistol, her skin already darkening where the bullet would go in, and through his tears and his fears and a haze of pain, he reached out for Bannister’s mind and seized it... just in time to feel him squeeze the trigger, and wince as the gun kicked back in his mind. He heard the explosion from two sets of ears.
“Noooooooooooooooooo!” he shrieked. He closed his eyes, sunk to his knees. He made Bannister fling the gun away, for what good it would do, none at all, too late, again he’d come too late, failed, failed, again, Angelface, Blythe, his sister, everyone he loved, all of them gone. He doubled over on the floor, and his mind filled with images of broken mirrors, of the Wedding Pattern danced in blood and pain, and that was the last thing he knew before the darkness took him.
He woke to the astringent smell of a hospital room and the feel of a pillow under his head, the pillowcase crisp with starch. He opened his eyes. “Des,” he said weakly. He tried to sit, but he was bound up somehow. The world was blurry and unfocused.
“You’re in traction, Doctor,” Des said. “Your right arm was broken in two places, and your hand is worse than that.”
“I’m sorry,” Tach said. He would have wept, but he had run out of tears. “I’m so sorry. We tried,.... I’m so sorry, I—”
“Tacky,” she said in that soft, husky voice.
And she was there, standing over him, dressed in a hospital gown, black hair framing a wry smile. She had combed it forward to cover her forehead; beneath her bangs was a hideous purple-green bruise, and the skin around her eyes was red and raw. For a moment he thought he was dead, or mad, or dreaming. “It’s all right, Tacky. I’m okay. I’m here.”
He stared up at her numbly. “You’re dead,” he said dully. “I was too late. I heard the shot, I had him by then but it was too late, I felt the gun recoil in his hand.”
“Did you feel it jerk?” she asked him. “Jerk?”
“A couple of inches, no more. Just as he fired. Just enough. I got some nasty powder burns, but the bullet went into the mattress a foot from my head.”
“The Turtle,” Tach said hoarsely.
She nodded. “He pushed aside the gun just as Bannister squeezed the trigger. And you made the son of a bitch throw away the revolver before he could get off a second shot.”
“You got them,” Des said. “A couple of men escaped in the confusion, but the Turtle delivered three of them, including Bannister. Plus a suitcase packed with twenty pounds of pure heroin. And it turns out that warehouse is owned by the Mafia.”
“The Mafia?” Tachyon said.
“The mob,” Des explained. “Criminals, Doctor Tachyon.”
“One of the men captured in the warehouse has already turned state’s evidence,” Angelface said. “He’ll testify to everything-the bribes, the drug operation, the murders at the Funhouse.”
“Maybe we’ll even get some decent police in Jokertown,” Des added.
The feelings that rushed through Tachyon went far beyond relief. He wanted to thank them, wanted to cry for them, but neither the tears nor the words would come. He was weak and happy. “I didn’t fail,” he managed at last.
“No,” Angelface said. She looked at Des. “Would you wait outside?” When they were alone, she sat on the edge of the bed. “I want to show you something. Something I wish I’d shown you a long time ago.” She held it up in front of him. It was a gold locket. “Open it.”
It was hard to do with only one hand, but he managed. Inside was a small round photograph of an elderly woman in bed. Her limbs were skeletal and withered, sticks draped in mottled flesh, and her face was horribly twisted. “What’s wrong with her?” Tach asked, afraid of the answer. Another joker, he thought, another victim of his failures.
Angelface looked down at the twisted old woman, sighed, and closed the locket with a snap. “When she was four, in Little Italy, she was run over while playing in the street. A horse stepped on her face, and the wagon wheel crushed her spine. That was in, oh, 1886. She was completely paralyzed, but she lived. If you could call it living. That little girl spent the next sixty years in a bed, being fed, washed, and read to, with no company except the holy sisters. Sometimes all she wanted was to die. She dreamed about what it would be like to be beautiful, to be loved and desired, to be able to dance, to be able to feel things. Oh, how she wanted to feel things.” She smiled. “I should have said thank you long ago, Tacky, but its hard for me to show that picture to anyone. But I am grateful, and now I owe you doubly. You’ll never pay for a drink at the Funhouse.”
He stared at her. “I don’t want a drink,” he said. “No more. That’s done.” And it was, he knew; if she could live with her pain, what excuse could he possibly have to waste his life and talents? “Angelface,” he said suddenly, “I can make you something better than heroin. I was... I am a biochemist, there are drugs on Takis, I can synthesize them, painkillers, nerve blocks. If you’ll let me run some tests on you, maybe I can tailor something to your metabolism. I’ll need a lab, of course. Setting things up will be expensive, but the drug could be made for pennies.”
“I’ll have some money,” she said. “I’m selling the Funhouse to Des. But what you’re talking about is illegal.”
“To hell with their stupid laws,” Tach blazed. “I won’t tell if you won’t.” Then words came tumbling out one after the other, a torrent: plans, dreams, hopes, all of the things he’d lost or drowned in cognac and Sterno, and Angelface was looking at him, astonished, smiling, and when the drugs they had given him finally began to wear off, and his arm began to throb again, Doctor Tachyon remembered the old disciplines and sent the pain away, and somehow it seemed as though part of his guilt and his grief went with it, and he was whole again, and alive.
The headline said TURTLE, TACHYON SMASH HEROIN RING. Tom was gluing the article into the scrapbook when Joey returned with the beers. “They left out the Great and Powerful part,” Joey observed, setting down a bottle by Tom’s elbow. “At least I got first billing,” Tom said. He wiped thick white paste off his fingers with a napkin, and shoved the scrapbook aside. Underneath were some crude drawings he’d made of the shell. “Now,” he said, “where the fuck are we going to put the record player, huh?”
The day arrived at last, as he had known it would. It was a Saturday, cold and gray, with a brisk wind blowing off the Kill. Mister Coffee had a pot ready when he woke at half past ten; on weekends Tom liked to sleep in. He laced his first cup liberally with milk and sugar, and took it into his living room.
Old mail was strewn across his coffee table: a stack of bills, supermarket flyers announcing long-departed sales, a postcard mailed by his’sister when she’d gone to England the summer before, a long brown envelope that said Mr. Thomas Tudbury might already have won three million dollars, and lots of other junk that he needed to deal with real soon now. Underneath it all was the invitation.
He sipped his coffee and stared at the mail. How many months had it been sitting there? Three? Four? Too late to do anything about it now. Even an RSVP would be woefully inappropriate at this date. He remembered the way The Graduate had ended, and savored the fantasy. But he was no Dustin Hoffman.
Like a man picking at an old scab, Tom rummaged through the mail until he found that small square envelope once again. The card within was crisp and white.
Mr. & Mrs. Stanley Casko request the honor of your presence at the wedding of their daughter, Barbara, to Mr. Stephen Bruder, of Weehawken. St. Henry’s Church 2:00 p.m., March 8
Reception to follow at the Top Hat Lounge
RSVP 555-6853
Tom fingered the embossed paper for a long time, then carefully set it back on the coffee table, dumped the junk mail into the wicker trash basket by the end of his couch, and went to stare out the window.
Across First Street, piles of black snow were heaped along the footpaths of the narrow little waterfront park. A freighter flying the Norwegian flag was making its way down the Kill van Kull toward the Bayonne Bridge and Port Newark, pushed along by a squat blue tugboat. Tom stood by his living-room window, one hand on the sill, the other shoved deep in his pocket, watching the kids in the park, watching the freighter’s stately progress, watching the cold green water of the Kill and the wharves and hills of Staten island beyond.
A long long time ago, his family had lived in the federal housing projects down at the end of First Street, and their living-room window had looked out over the park and the Kill.
Sometimes at night when his parents were asleep, he would get up and make himself a chocolate milk and stare out the window at the lights of Staten Island, which seemed so impossibly far away and full of promise. What did he know? He was a project kid who’d never left Bayonne.
The big ships passed even in the night, and in the night you couldn’t see the rust streaks on their sides or the oil they vented into the water; in the night the ships were magic, bound for high adventure and romance, for fabled cities where the streets shone dark with danger. In real live, even Jersey City was the land unknown as far as he was concerned, but in his dreams he knew the moors of Scotland, the alleys of Shanghai, the dust of Marrakesh. By the time he turned ten, Tom had learned to recognize the flags of more than thirty different nations.
But he wasn’t ten anymore. He would turn forty-two this year, and he’d come all of four blocks from the projects, to a small orange-brick house on First Street. In high school he’d worked summers fixing TV sets. He was still at the same shop, though he’d risen all the way to manager, and owned almost a third of the business; these days the place was called the Broadway ElectroMart, and it dealt in VCRs and CD players and computers as well as in television sets.
You’ve come a long way, Tommy, he thought bitterly to himself And now Barbara Casko was going to marry Steve Bruder.
He couldn’t blame her. He couldn’t blame anyone but himself. And maybe Jetboy, and Dr. Tachyon ... yeah, he could blame them a little too.
Tom turned away and let the drapes fall back across the window, feeling like shit. He walked to the kitchen, and opened a typical bachelor’s refrigerator. No beer, just an inch of flat Shop Rite cola at the bottom of a two-liter bottle. He stripped the foil off a bowl of tuna salad, intending to fix himself a sandwich for breakfast, but there was green stuff growing all over the top. Suddenly he lost his appetite.
Lifting the phone from its wall cradle, he punched in seven familiar numbers. On the third ring, a child answered. “Hewo?”
“Hey, Vito,” Tom said. “The old man home?”
There was the sound of another extension being lifted. “Hello?” a woman said. The child giggled. “I’ve got it, honey,” Gina said.
“G’bye, Vito,” Tom said, as the child hung up.
“Vito,” Gina said, sounding both aggravated and amused. “Tom, you’re crazy, you know that? Why do you want to confuse him all the time? Last time it was Guiseppe. The name is Derek.”
“Pfah,” Tom replied. “Derek, what kind of wop name is that? Two nice dago kids like you and Joey, and you name him after some clown in a soap opera. Dom would’ve had a fit. Derek DiAngelis—sounds like a walking identity crisis.”
“So have one of your own and name him Vito,” Gina said. It was just a joke. Gina was just kidding around, she didn’t mean anything by it. But the knowledge didn’t help. He still felt like he’d been kicked in the gut. “Joey there?” he asked brusquely.
“He’s in San Diego,” she said. “Tom, are you all right? You sound funny.”
“I’m okay. Just wanted to say hello.” Of course Joey was in San Diego. Joey traveled a lot these days, the lucky stiff. Junkyard Joey DiAngelis was a star driver on the demolition derby circuit, and in winter the circuit went to warmer climes. It was sort of ironic. When they were kids, even their parents had figured Tom was the one who’d go places while Joey stayed on in Bayonne and ran his old mans junkyard. And now Joey was almost a household word, while his old family junkyard belonged to Tom. Should have figured it; even in grade school, Joey was a demon on the bumper cars. “Well, tell him I called. “
“I’ve got the number of the motel they’re at,” she offered. “Thanks anyway. It’s not that important. Catch you later, Gina. Take care of Vito.” Tom set the phone back in its cradle. His car keys were on the kitchen counter. He zipped up a shapeless brown suede jacket, and went down to the basement garage. The door slid closed automatically behind his dark green Honda. He headed east on First Street, past the projects, and turned up Lexington. On Fifth Street, he hung a right, and left the residential neighborhoods behind.
It was a cold gray Saturday in March, with snow on the ground and winter’s chill in the air. He was forty-one years old and Barbara was getting married, and Thomas Tudbury needed to crawl into his shell.
They met in junior Achievement, seniors from two different high schools.
Tommy had little interest in learning how the freeenterprise system worked, but he had a lot of interest in girls. His prep school was all boys, but JA drew from all the local high schools, and Tom had joined first as a junior.
He had a hard enough time making friends with boys, and girls terrified him. He didn’t know what to say to them, and he was scared of saying something stupid, so he said nothing at all. After a few weeks, some of the girls began to tease him. Most just ignored him. The Tuesday-night meetings became something he dreaded all through his junior year.
Senior year was different. The difference was a girl named Barbara Casko.
At the very first meeting, Tom was sitting in the corner, feeling pudgy and glum, when Barbara came over and introduced herself. She was honestly friendly; Tom was astonished. The really incredible thing, even more astonishing than this girl going out of her way to be nice to him, was that she was the prettiest girl in the company, and maybe the prettiest girl in Bayonne. She had dark blond hair that fell to her shoulders and flipped up at the ends, and pale blue eyes, and the warmest smile in the world. She wore angora sweaters, nothing too tight but they showed her cute little figure to good advantage. She was pretty enough to be a cheerleader.
Tommy wasn’t the only one who was impressed with Barbara Casko. In no time at all, she was president of the JA company. And when her term ran out, after Christmas, and it was time for new elections; she nominated him to succeed her as president, and she was so popular that they actually elected him.
“Ask her out,” Joey DiAngelis said in October, when Tom worked up the nerve to tell him about her. Joey had dropped out of school the year before. He was training as a mechanic in a service station on Avenue E. “She likes you, shithead.”
“C’mon,” Tom said. “Why would she go out with me? You ought to see her, Joey, she could go out with anybody she wanted.” Thomas Tudbury had never had a date in his life. “Maybe she’s got shitty taste,” Joey said, grinning.
But Barbara’s name came up again. Joey was the only one Tom could talk to, and Barbara was all he could talk about that year. “Gimme a break, Tuds,” Joey said one December night when they were drinking beer inside the old ruined Packard by the bay. “If you don’t ask her out, I will.”
Tommy hated that idea. “She’s not your type, you dumb wop.”
Joey grinned. “I thought you said she was a girl?”
“She’s going to college to be a teacher.”
“Ah, never mind that shit. How big are her tits?” Tom punched him in the shoulder.
By March, when he still hadn’t asked her out, Joey said, “What the hell are you waiting for? She nominated you to be president of your fuckin’ candyass company, didn’t she? She likes you, dork.”
“Just ‘cause she knew I’d make a good company president doesn’t mean she’d go out with me.”
“Ask her, shithead.”
“Maybe I will,” Tom said uncomfortably. Two weeks later, on a Wednesday night after a meeting where Barbara had been especially friendly, he got as far as trying to look up her number in the phone book. But he never made the call. “There are nine different Caskos listed,” he told Joey the next time he saw him. “I wasn’t sure which one was her.”
“Call ‘em all, Tuds. Fuck, they’re all related.”
“I’d feel like an idiot,” Tom said.
“You are an idiot,” Joey told him. “So look, if that’s so hard, next time you see her, ask for her phone number.” Tom swallowed. “Then she’d think I wanted to ask her out. “
Joey laughed. “So? You do want to ask her out!”
“I’m just not ready yet, that’s all. I don’t know how.” Tom was miserable.
“It’s easy. You phone, and when she answers you say, ‘Hey, it’s Tom, you want to go out with me?”‘
“Then what if she says no?”
Joey shrugged. “Then we’ll phone every pizza place in town and have pies delivered to her house all night long. Anchovy. No one can eat anchovy pizza.”
By the time May had rolled around, Tom had figured out which Casko family Barbara belonged to. She’d made a casual comment about her neighborhood, and he’d noted it in the obsessive way he noted everything she said. He went home and tore that page from the phone book and circled her phone number with his Bic. He even began to dial it. Five or six times. But he never completed the call.
“Why the fuck not?” Joey demanded.
“It’s too late,” Tom said glumly. “ I mean, we’ve known each other since September, and I haven’t asked her out; if I ask her out now, she’ll think I was chickenshit or something.”
“You are chickenshit,” Joey said.
“What’s the use? We’re going to different colleges. We’ll probably never see each other again after June.”
Joey crushed a beer can in his fist, and said two words. “Senior prom.”
“What about it?”
“Ask her to your senior prom. You want to go to your senior prom, don’t you?”
“I dunno,” Tom said. “I mean, I can’t dance. What the fuck is this? You never went to no goddamned prom!”
“Proms are shit,” Joey said. “When I go out with a girl, I’d rather drive her out on Route Four-forty and see if I can get bare tittie than hold her fuckin’ hand in some gym, you know? But you ain’t me, Tuds. Don’t shit me. You want to go to that stupid prom and we both know it, and if you walked in with the prettiest date in the place, you’d be in fuckin’ heaven.”
“It’s May,” Tom said sullenly. “Barbara’s the cutest girl in Bayonne, no way she doesn’t have a prom date already.”
“Tuds, you go to different schools. She’s probably got a date to her prom, yeah, but what are the fuckin’ odds that she’s got one to your prom? Girls love that prom horseshit, dressing up and wearing corsages and dancing. Go for it, Tuds. You got nothing to lose.” He grinned. “Unless you count your cherry.”
In the week that followed, Tom thought about nothing but that conversation. Time was running out. Junior Achievement was wrapping up, and once it was over he’d never see Barbara again, unless he did something. Joey was right; he had to try. On Tuesday night, his stomach was tied in a knot all during the long bus ride uptown, and he kept rehearsing the conversation in his head. The words wouldn’t come out right, no matter how many times he rearranged them, but he was determined that he would get something out, somehow. He was terrified that she would say no to him, and even more terrified that she might say yes. But he had to try. He couldn’t just let her go without letting her know how much he liked her.
His biggest worry was how in the world he could possibly get her aside, away from all the other kids. He certainly didn’t want to have to ask her in front of everybody. The thought gave him goose bumps. The other girls thought he was hilarious enough as is, the presumption of him asking Barbara Casko to the prom would double them up with laughter. He just hoped she wouldn’t tell them, after. He didn’t think she would.
The problem was solved for him. It was the last meeting, and the advisers were interviewing the presidents of all the different companies. They gave a bond to the kid picked as president of the year. Barbara had been president of their company for the first half-year, Tom for the second; they found themselves waiting outside in a hallway, just the two of them, alone together, while the other kids were in at the meeting and the advisers were off doing interviews.
“I hope you win,” Tom said as they waited.
Barbara smiled at him. She was wearing a pale blue sweater and a pleated skirt that fell to just below her knees, and around her neck was a heart-shaped locket on a slender gold chain. Her blond hair looked so soft that he wanted to touch it, but of course he didn’t dare. She was standing quite close to him, and he could smell how clean and fresh it was. “You look really nice,” he blurted awkwardly.
He felt like an idiot, but Barbara seemed not to notice. She looked at him with those blue, blue eyes. “Thank you,” she said. “I wish they’d hurry.” And then she did something that startled him-she reached out and touched him, put her hand on his arm, and said, “Tommy, can I ask you a question?”
“A question,” he repeated. “Sure.”
“About your senior prom,” Barbara said.
He stood like a zombie for a long moment, aware of the chill in the hall, of distant laughter from the classroom, of the advisers’ voices coming through the frosted-glass door, of the slight pressure of Barbara’s hand, and above all, of the nearness of her, those deep blue eyes looking at him, the locket hanging down between the small round bumps of her breasts, the clean, fresh-washed smell of her. For once, she wasn’t smiling. The expression on her face might almost have been nervousness. It only made her prettier. He wanted to hug her and kiss her. He was desperately afraid.
“The prom,” he finally managed. Weakly. Absurdly, he was suddenly aware of a huge erection pressing against the inside of his pants. He only hoped it didn’t show.
“Do you know Steve Bruder?” she asked.
Tom had known Steve Bruder since second grade. He was the class president, and played forward on the basketball team. Back in grammar school, Stevie and his friends used to humiliate Tom with their fists. Now they were sophisticated seniors, and they just used words.
Barbara didn’t wait for his answer. “We’ve been going out together,” she told him. “I thought he was going to ask me to his prom, but he hasn’t.”
You could go with me! Tom thought wildly, but all he said was, “He hasn’t?”
“No,” she said. “Do you know, I mean, has he asked somebody else? Is he going to ask me, do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Tom said dully. “We don’t talk much.”
“Oh,” Barbara said. Her hand fell away, and then the door opened and they called his name.
That night Tom won a $50 savings bond as junior Achievement President of the Year. His mother never understood why he seemed so unhappy:
The junkyard was on the Hook, between the sprawl of an abandoned oil refinery and the cold green waters of New York Bay. The ten-foot-high chain-link fence was sagging, and there was rust on the sign to the right of the gate that warned trespassers to keep out. Tom climbed from his car, opened the padlock and undid the heavy chains, and pulled inside.
The shack where Joey and his father Dom had lived was far gone in decay now. The paint on the rooftop sign had faded to illegibility, but Tom could still make out the faint lettering: DI ANGELIS SCRAP METAL & AUTO PARTS. Tom had bought and closed the junkyard ten years ago, when Joey got married. Gina hadn’t wanted to live in a junkyard, and besides, Tom had been tired of all the people who prowled around for hours looking for a DeSoto transmission or a bumper for a 1957 Edsel. None of them had ever stumbled on his secrets, but there had been close calls, and more than once he’d been forced to spend the night on some dingy rooftop in Jokertown because the coast wasn’t clear at home.
Now, after a decade of benign neglect, the junkyard was a sprawling wasteland of rust and desolation, and no one ever bothered driving all the way out there.
Tom parked his Honda behind the shack, and strode off into the junkyard with his hands shoved into his pockets and his cap pulled down against the cold salt wind off the bay. No one had shoveled the snow here, and there had been no traffic to turn it into filthy brown slush. The hills of scrap and trash looked as though they’d been sprinkled with powdered sugar, and he walked past drifts taller than he was, frozen white waves that would come crashing down when the temperatures rose in the spring.
Deep in the interior, between two looming piles of automobiles turned all to razor-edged rust, was a bare place. Tom kicked away snow with the heel of his shoe until he had uncovered the flat metal plate. He knelt, found the ring, and pulled it up. The metal was icy cold, and he was panting before he managed to shift the lid three feet to the side to open the tunnel underneath. It would be so much easier to use teke, to shift it with his mind. Once he could have done that. Not now. Time plays funny tricks on you. Inside the shell, he had grown stronger and stronger, but on the outside his telekinesis had faded over the years. It was all psychological, Tom knew; the shell had become some kind of crutch, and his mind refused to let him teke without it, that was all. But there were days when it almost felt as though Thomas Tudbury and the Great and Powerful Turtle had become two different people.
He dropped down into darkness, into the tunnel that he and Joey had dug together, night after night, way back inwhat year had that been? ‘69? ‘70? Something like that. He found the big plastic flashlight on its hook, but the beam was pale and weak. He’d have to remember to bring some new batteries from the store the next time he came out. Alkaline next time; they lasted a lot longer.
He walked about sixty feet before the tunnel ended, and the blackness of the bunker opened up around him. It was just a big hole in the ground he’d scooped out with his teke, its crude roof covered over with a thin layer of dirt and junk to conceal what lav beneath. The air was thick and stale, and he heard rats scuttling away from the light of his flashlight beam. In the comic book, the Turtle had a secret Turtle Cave deep under the waters of New York Bay, a marvelous place with vaulted ceilings and computer banks and a live-in butler who dusted all the trophies and prepared gourmet meals. The writers at Cosh Comics had done one fuck of a lot better for him than he had ever managed to do for himself.
He walked past two of the older shells to the latest model, punched in the combination, and pulled up the hatch. Crawling inside, Tom sealed the shell behind him and found his chair. He groped for the harness, and belted himself in. The seat was wide and comfortable, with thick padded armrests and the friendly smell of leather. Control panels were mounted at the ends of both arms for easy fingertip access. His fingers played over the keys with the ease of long familiarity, turning on ventilators, heat, and lights. The interior of the shell was snug and cozy, covered with green shag carpet. He had four 23-inch color televisions mounted in the carpeted walls, surrounded by banks of smaller screens and other instrumentation.
His left index finger jabbed down and the outside cameras came to life, filling his screens with vague gray shapes, until he went to infrared. Tom pivoted slowly, checking the pictures, testing his lights, making sure everything was functional. He rummaged through his box of cassettes until he found Springsteen. A good Jersey boy, Tom thought. He slammed the cassette into the tape deck, and Bruce tore right into “Glory Days.” It brought a flat, hard smile to his face.
Tom leaned forward and threw a toggle. From somewhere outside came a whirring sound. That garage door opener would have to be replaced soon from the sound of it. On the screens, he saw light.pour into the bunker from overhead. A cascade of snow and ice fell down onto the bare earth floor. He pushed up with his mind; the armored shell lifted, and began to drift toward the .light. So Barbara Casko was getting married to that asshole Steve Bruder, so what the hell did he care; the Great and Powerful Turtle was going out to kick some monster butt.
One thing Tom Tudbury had found out a long time ago was that life doesn’t give you many second chances. He was lucky. He got a second chance at Barbara Casko.
It happened in 1972, a decade after he’d last seen her. The store was still called Broadway Television and Electronics then, and Tom was assistant manager. He was behind the register, his back to the counter while he straightened some shelves, when a woman’s voice said, “Excuse me.”
“Yeah,” he said, turning, then staring.
Her dark blond hair was much longer, falling halfway down her back, and she was wearing tinted glasses in oversized plastic frames, but behind the lenses her eyes were just as blue. She wore a Fair Isle sweater and a faded pair of jeans, and if anything her figure was even better at twentyseven than it had been at seventeen. He looked at her hand, and all he saw there was a college class ring. “Barbara,” he said.
She looked surprised. “Do I know you?”
Tom pointed at the McGovern button pinned to her sweater. “Once you nominated me for president,” he said. “ I don’t,” she began, with a small puzzled frown on that face, still the prettiest face that had ever smiled at Tom Tudbury in all his life.
“ I used to wear a crew cut,” he said. “And a doublebreasted corduroy jacket. Black.” He touched his aviator frames. “These were horn rims the last time you saw me. I weighed about the same then, but I was maybe an inch shorter. And I had such a crush on you that you wouldn’t believe. “
Barbara Casko smiled. For a moment he thought she was bluffing. But her eyes met his, and he knew. “How are you, Tom? It’s been a long time, huh?”
A long time, he thought. Oh yeah. A different eon. “I’m great,” he told her. It was at least half-true. That was at the end of the Turtle’s headiest decade. Tom’s life was going nowhere fast-he’d dropped out of college after JFK had been shot, and ever since he’d been living in a crummy basement apartment on 31st Street. He didn’t really give a damn. Tom Tudbury and his lousy job and his lousy apartment were incidental to his real life; they were the price he paid for those nights and weekends in the shell. In high school, he’d been a pudgy introvert with a crew cut, a lot of insecurity, and a secret power that only Joey knew about. And now he was the Great and Powerful Turtle. Mystery hero, celebrity, ace of aces, and allaround hot shit.
Of course, he couldn’t tell her any of that.
But somehow it didn’t matter. just being the Turtle had changed Tom Tudbury, had given him more confidence. For ten years he’d been having fantasies and wet dreams about Barbara Casko, regretting his cowardice, wondering about the road not taken and the prom he’d never attended. A decade too late, Tom Tudbury finally got the words out. “You look terrific,” he said with all sincerity. “I’m off at five. You free for dinner?”
“Sure,” she said. Then she laughed. “ I wondered how long it’d take you to ask me out. I never guessed it’d be ten years. You may just have set a new school record.”
Monsters were like cops, Tom decided: never around when you really needed one.
December had been a different story. He remembered his first sight of them, remembered that long surreal trip down the Jersey Turnpike toward Philadelphia. Behind him was an armored column; ahead; the turnpike was deserted. Nothing moved but a few newspapers blowing across the empty traffic lanes. Along the sides of the road, the toxic waste dumps and petrochemical plants stood like so many ghost towns. Every so often, they’d come across some haggard refugees fleeing the Swarm, but that was it. It was like a movie, Tom thought. He didn’t quite believe it.
Until they made contact.
A cold chill had gone up his spine when the android came streaking back to the column with the news that the enemy was near, and moving on Philly. “This is it,” Tom said to Peregrine, who’d been riding on his shell to rest her wings. He had just long enough to find a cassette-Creedence Gold and slide it into his tape deck before the swarmlings came over the horizon like a black tide. The fliers filled the air as far as his cameras could see, a moving cloud of darkness like a vast onrushing thunderhead. He remembered the twister from The Wizard of Oz, and how much it had scared him the first time he’d seen the movie.
Beneath those dark wings the other swarmlings movedcrawling on segmented bellies, scrabbling on meter-long spider legs, oozing along like the Blob, and with Steve McQueen nowhere in sight. They covered the road from shoulder to shoulder, and spilled out over its edges, and they moved faster than he could have imagined.
Peregrine took off. The android was already plunging back toward the enemy, and Tom saw Mistral coming down from above, a flash of blue among the thin cold clouds. He swallowed, and turned the volume on his speakers all the way up; ‘Bad Moon Rising’ blasted out over the dark sky. He remembered thinking that life would never be the same. He almost wanted to believe it. Maybe the new world would be better than the old.
But that was December, and this was March, and life was a lot more resilient than he’d given it credit for. Like the passenger pigeons, the swarmlings had threatened to blot out the sun, and like the passenger pigeons, they were gone in what seemed like no time at all. After that first unforgettable moment, even the war of the worlds had turned into just another chore. It was more extermination than combat, like killing especially large and ugly roaches. Claws, pincers, and poisoned talons were useless against his armor; the acid secreted by the flappers did fuck up his lenses pretty badly, but that was more a nuisance than a danger. He found himself trying to think of new, imaginative ways of killing the things to relieve the boredom. He flung them high into the air, he ripped them in half, he grabbed them in invisible fists and squeezed them into guacamole. Over and over again, day after day, endlessly, until they stopped coming.
And afterward, back home, he was astonished at just how quickly the Swarm War faded from the headlines, and how easily life flowed back into the old channels. In Peru, Chad, and the mountains of Tibet, major alien infestations continued their ravages, and smaller remnants were still troubling the Turks and Nigerians, but the third-world swarms were just page-four filler in most American newspapers. Meanwhile, life continued. People made their mortgage payments and went to work; those whose homes and jobs had been wiped out dutifully filed insurance claims and applied for unemployment. People complained about the weather, told jokes, went to movies, argued about sports.
People made wedding plans.
The swarmlings hadn’t been completely exterminated, of course. A few remnant monsters lurked here and there, in outof-the-way places and some not-so-out-of-the-way. Tom wanted one badly today. A small one would do-flying, crawling, he didn’t care. He would have settled for some ordinary criminals, a fire, an auto accident, anything to take his mind off Barbara.
Nothing doing. It was a gray, cold, depressing, dull day, even in Jokertown. His police monitor was reporting nothing but a few domestic disturbances, and he’d made it a rule never to get involved in those. Over the years he’d discovered that even the most abused wife tended to be somewhat aghast when an armored shell the size of a Lincoln Continental crashed through her bedroom wall and told her husband to keep his hands off her.
He cruised up the length of the Bowery, floating just above rooftop level, his shell throwing a long black shadow that kept pace with him on the pavement below. Traffic passed through underneath without even slowing. All his cameras were scanning, giving him views from more angles than he could possibly need. Tom glanced restlessly from screen to screen, watching the passersby. They scarcely noticed him anymore. A quick glance up when the shell hove into their peripheral vision, a flicker of recognition, and then they went back to their own business, bored. It’s just the Turtle, he imagined them saying. Yesterday’s news. The glory days do pass you by.
Twenty years ago, things had been different. He’d been the first ace to go public after the long decade of hiding, and everything he did or said was celebrated. The papers were full of his exploits, and when the Turtle passed overhead, kids would shout and point, and all eyes would turn in his direction. Crowds would cheer him wildly at fires and parades and public assemblies. In Jokertown, men would doff their masks to him, and women would blow him kisses as he went by. He was Jokertown’s own hero. Because he hid in an armored shell and never showed his face, a lot of jokers assumed he was one of them, and they loved him for it. It was love based on a lie, or at least a misunderstanding, and at times he felt guilty about that, but in those days the jokers had desperately needed one of their own to cheer, so he had let the rumors continue. He never did get around to telling the public that he was really an ace; at some point, he couldn’t remember just when, the world had stopped caring who or what might be inside the Turtle’s shell.
These days there were seventy or eighty aces in New York alone, maybe as many as a hundred, and he was just the same old Turtle. Jokertown had real joker heroes now: the Oddity,
Troll, Quasiman, the Twisted Sisters, and others, joker-aces who weren’t afraid to show their faces to the world. For years, he had felt bad about accepting joker adulation on false premises, but once it was gone he found that he missed it.
Passing over Sara Roosevelt Park, Tom noticed a joker with the head of a goat squatting at the base of the red steel abstraction they’d put up as a monument to those who had died in the Great Jokertown Riot of 1976. The man stared up at the shell with apparent fascination. Maybe he wasn’t wholly forgotten after all, Tom thought. He zoomed in to get a good look at his fan. That was when he noticed the thick rope of wet green mucus hanging from the corner of the goat-man’s mouth, and the vacancy in those tiny black eyes. A rueful smile twisted across Tom’s mouth. He turned on his microphone. “Hey, guy,” he announced over his loudspeakers. “You all right down there?” The goat-man worked his mouth silently.
Tom sighed. He reached out with his mind and lifted the joker easily into the air. The goat-man didn’t even struggle. Just stared off into the distance, seeing god knows what, while drool ran from his mouth. Tom held him in place under the shell, and sailed off toward South Street.
He deposited the goat-man gently between the worn stone lions that guarded the steps of the Jokertown clinic, and turned up the volume on his speakers. “Tachyon,” he said into the microphone, and “TACHYON” boomed out over the street, rattling windows and startling motorists on the FDR Drive. A fierce-looking nurse popped out of the front door and scowled at him. “I’ve brought one for you,” Tom said more softly.
“Who is he?” she asked.
“President of the Turtle Fan Club,” Tom said. “How the hell do I know who is he? He needs help, though. Look at him.”
The nurse gave the joker a cursory examination, then called for two orderlies who helped the man inside. “Where’s Tachyon?” Tom asked.
“At lunch,” the nurse said. “He’s due back at one-thirty. He’s probably at Hairy’s.”
“Never mind,” Tom said. He pushed, and the shell rose straight up into the sky. The expressway, the river, and the rooftops of Jokertown dwindled below him.
Funny thing, but the higher you got, the more beautiful Manhattan looked. The magnificent stone arches of the Brooklyn Bridge, the twisting alleys of Wall Street, Lady Liberty on her island, the ships on the river and ferries on the bay, the soaring towers of the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building, the vast green-and-white expanse of Central Park; from on high the Turtle surveyed it all. The intricate pattern of the tragic flowing through the city streets was almost hypnotic if you stared at it long enough. Looking down from the cold winter sky, New York was gorgeous and awesome, like no other city in the world. It was only when you got down among those stone canyons that you saw the dirt, smelled the rotten garbage in a million dented cans, heard the curses and the screams, and sensed the depth of fear and misery.
He drifted high over the city, a cold wind keening around his shell. The police monitor crackled with trivialities. Tom switched to the marine band, thinking maybe he could find a small boat in distress. Once he’d saved six people off a yacht . that had capsized in a summer squall. The grateful owner had laid a huge reward on him afterward. The guy was smart too; he paid cash, small worn bills, nothing bigger than a twenty. Six damned suitcases. The heroes Tom had read about as a kid always turned down rewards, but none of them lived in a crummy apartment or drove an eight-year-old Plymouth. Tom took the money, salved his conscience by giving one suitcase to the clinic, and used the other five to buy his house. There was no way he’d ever have been able to own a house on Tom Tudbury’s salary. Sometimes he worried about IRS audits, but so far that hadn’t come up.
His watch said it was 1:03. Time for lunch. He opened the small refrigerator in the floor, where he’d stashed an apple, a ham sandwich, and a six-pack.
When he finished eating, it was 1:17. Less than forty-five minutes, he thought, and he remembered that old Cagney movie about George M. Cohan, and the song “Forty-Five Minutes From Broadway.” A bus leaving right now from Port Authority would take forty-five minutes to get to Bayonne, but it was quicker by air. Ten minutes, fifteen at the most, and he could be back.
But for what?
He turned off the radio, pushed the Springsteen tape back in, and rewound until he found ‘Glory Days’ again.
The second time around, things went a lot better. After graduation she’d gone to Rutgers, Barbara told him that first night, over steak sandwiches and mugs of beer at Hendrickson’s. She’d gotten a teaching certificate, spent two years in California with a boyfriend, and come back to Bayonne when they broke up. She was teaching locally now, kindergarten, and in Tom’s old grammar school, ironically enough. “ I love it,” she said. “The kids are fantastic. Five is a magic age.”
Tom had let her talk about her life for a long time, happy just to be sitting there with her, listening to her voice. He liked the way her eyes sparkled when she talked about the kids. When she finally ran down, he asked her the question that had been bugging him all these years. “Did Steve Bruder ever ask you to our prom?”
She made a face. “No, the son of a bitch. He went with Betty Moroski. I cried for a week.”
“He was an idiot. Jesus, she wasn’t half as pretty as you.”
“No,” Barbara said, with a wry twist to her mouth, “but she put out, and I didn’t. Never mind that. What about you? What have you been doing for the last ten years?”
It would have been infinitely more interesting if he had told her about the Turtle, about life in the cold skies and mean streets, about the close calls and the high times and the head lines. He could have bragged about capturing the Great Ape during the big blackout of 1965, could have told her how he’d saved Dr. Tachyon’s life and sanity, could have casually dropped the names of the famous and infamous, aces and jokers and celebrities of every stripe. But all that was part of another life, and it belonged to an ace who came canned in an iron shell. The only thing he had to offer her was Thomas Tudbury. As he talked about himself, he realized for the first time how bare and dreary his ‘real’ life truly was.
Yet somehow it seemed to be enough.
That first date led to a second, the second to a third, and soon they were seeing each other regularly. It was not the world’s most exciting courtship. On weekdays they went to local movies at the DeWitt or the Lyceum; sometimes they just watched television together and took turns cooking dinner. On weekends, it was off to New York; Broadway plays when they could afford it, late dinners in Chinatown and Little Italy. The more he was with her, the more he found himself unable to be without her.
They both liked red wine, and pizza, and rock ‘n’ roll. She had marched on Washington the year before, to get the troops out of Vietnam, and he’d been there too (inside his shell, floating over the mall with peace symbols painted on his armor and a gorgeous blonde in a halter top and jeans sitting on top, singing along to the antiwar songs that blared from his speakers, but he couldn’t tell her that part). She loved Gina and Joey, and her parents seemed to approve of him. She was a baseball fan, brought up to abominate the Yankees and love the Brooklyn Dodgers, just like him. Come October, she sat beside him in the Ebbetts Field bleachers, when Tom Seaver pitched the Dodgers to victory over the Oakland A’s in the seventh and deciding game of the Series. A month later, he was there to share her anguish at McGovern’s landslide defeat. They had so much in common.
Just how much he did not realize until the week after Thanksgiving, when she came to his place for dinner. He’d gone to the kitchen, to open the wine and check his spaghetti sauce, and when he came back he found her standing by his bookcase, leafing through a paperback copy of Jim Bishop’s Day of the Wild Card. “You must be interested in this stuff,” she said, nodding toward the books. His wild card collection took up almost three shelves. He had everything; all the biographies of Jetboy, Earl Sanderson’s collected speeches and Archibald Holmes’s memoirs, Tom Wolfe’s Wild Card Chic, the autobiography of Cyclone as told to Robin Moore, the Information Please Almanac of Aces, and so much more. Including, of course, everything that had ever been published about the Turtle.
“Yeah,” he said, “it’s, uh, always interested me. Those people. I’d love to meet a wild card one day.”
“You have,” she said, smiling, sliding the book back on the shelf next to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
“I have?” He was confused, and a bit taken aback. Had he given himself away, somehow? Had Joey told her? “Who?”
“Me,” Barbara said. He must have looked incredulous. “No, really,” she said. “I know, it doesn’t show. I’m not an ace or anything. It didn’t do anything to me, as far as anyone can tell. But I did get it. I was only two, so I don’t remember anything. My mother said I almost died. The symptoms-I must have been quite a sight. Our doctor thought it was the mumps at first, but my face just kept on swelling, until I looked like a basketball. Then he transferred me to Mt. Sinai. That’s where Dr. Tachyon was working at the time.”
“Yeah,” Tom said.
“Anyway, I pulled through. The swelling only lasted a couple of days, but they kept me for a month, running tests. It was the wild card all right, but it might as well have been the chicken pox, for all the difference it made to me.” She grinned. “Still, it was our deep, dark family secret. Dad quit his job and moved us to Bayonne, where nobody knew. People were funny about the wild card back then. I didn’t even know myself until I was in college. Mom was afraid I’d tell.”
“Did you?”
“No,” Barbara said. She looked strangely solemn. “No one. Not until tonight, anyway.”
“So why did you tell me?” Tom asked her. “Because I trust you,” she said quietly.
He almost told her then, right there in his living room. He wanted to. Afterward, whenever he thought about that evening, he found himself wishing that he had, and wondering what would have happened.
But when he opened his mouth to say the words, to speak to her of teke and Turtles and junkyard secrets, it was as though the years had rolled back and he was in high school again, standing with her in that corridor, wanting so desperately to ask her to the prom and somehow unable to. He’d kept his secrets for so long. The words would not come. He tried, for a long moment he tried. Then, defeated, he had hugged her and mumbled “I’m glad you told me,” before retreating to the kitchen to gather his wits. He looked at the spaghetti sauce simmering on the stove, and suddenly reached out and turned off the burner.
“Get your coat,” he said when he returned to her. “The plans have changed. I’m taking you out for dinner.”
“Out? Where?”
“Aces High,” he said as he lifted the phone to call for the reservation. “We’re going to see those wild cards tonight.” They dined among aces and stars. It cost him two weeks’ salary, but it was worth it, even though the maitre d’ took one look at his corduroy suit and led them to a table way back by the kitchen. The food was almost as extraordinary as the light in Barbara’s eyes. They were enjoying an aperitif when Dr. Tachyon came in, wearing a green velveteen tuxedo and escorting Liza Minelli. Tom went over to their table, and got both of them to autograph a cocktail napkin.
That night he and Barbara made love for the first time. Afterward, as she slept curled up against him, Tom held on tightly to her warmth, dreaming of the years to come, and wondering why the hell he had taken so long.
He was making a swing over Central Park Lake, listening to Bruce and eating a bag of Nacho Cheese-flavored Doritos, when he noticed that he was being followed by a pterodactyl.
Through a telephoto lens, Tom watched it circle above him, riding the winds on a leathery six-foot wingspan. Frowning, he killed his tape and went to his loudspeakers. “HEY!” he boomed into the winter air. “COLD ENOUGH FOR YOU? YOU’RE A REPTILE, KID, YOU’RE GOING TO FREEZE YOUR SCALY ASS OFF”
The pterodactyl replied with a high, thin shriek, made a wide turn, and came in for a landing on top of his shell, flapping energetically as it touched down to keep from going over the edge. Its claws scrabbled against his metal and found purchase in the cracks between his armor plates.
Sighing, Tom watched on one of his big screens as the pterodactyl rippled, flowed, and turned into Kid Dinosaur. “It’s just as cold for you,” the kid said.
“I’ve got heaters in here,” Tom said. The kid was already turning blue, which wasn’t surprising, considering that he was naked. He didn’t look too steady up there either. The top of the shell was pretty broad, but it did have a pronounced pitch, and human fingers couldn’t get into the cracks between the plates nearly as well as pterodactyl claws. Tom began to drift downward. “It would serve you right if I did a loop and flipped you into the lake.”
“I’d just change again and fly off,” Kid Dinosaur said. He shivered. “It is cold. I hadn’t noticed.” In his human form, New York’s only brat ace was an ungainly thirteen-year-old with a small birthmark on his forehead. He was gawky and uncoordinated, with shaggy hair that fell across his eyes. The merciless gaze of the cameras showed the blackheads on his nose in excruciating detail. He had a big pimple in the cleft of his chin. And he was uncircumcised, Tom noted.
“Where the hell are your clothes?” Tom asked. “If I set you down in the park, you’ll get busted for indecent exposure.”
“They wouldn’t dare,” Kid Dinosaur said with the cocksure certainty of the adolescent. “What’s going on? Are you off on a case? I could help.”
“You read too many funny books,” Tom told him. “I heard about the last time you helped someone.”
“Aw, they sewed his hand back on, and Tacky says it’s going to be just fine. How was I supposed to know that the guy was an undercover cop? I wouldn’t of bit him if I’d known.”
It wasn’t the least bit funny, but Tom smiled. Kid Dinosaur reminded him of himself. He’d read a lot of funny books too. “Kid,” he said, “you’re not always running around naked turning into dinosaurs, right? You’ve got another life?”
“I’m not gonna tell you my secret identity,” Kid Dinosaur said quickly.
“Scared I’d tell your parents?” Tom asked.
The boy’s face reddened. The rest of him was bluer than ever. “I’m not scared of anything, you old fart,” he said. “You ought to be,” Tom said. “Like me, for starts. Yeah, I know, you can turn into a three-foot-tall tyrannosaur and break your teeth on my armor. All I can do is shatter every bone in your body in twelve or thirteen places. Or reach inside you and squeeze your heart to mush.”
“You wouldn’t do that.”
“No,” Tom admitted, “but there are people who will. You’re getting in way over your head, you dumb little fuck. Hell, I don’t care what kind of toy dinosaur you turn into, a bullet can still kill you.”
Kid Dinosaur looked sullen. “Fuck you,” he said. The emphatic way he said it made it clear that he didn’t often use language like that at home.
This wasn’t going well, Tom thought. “Look,” he said in a conciliatory tone, “I just wanted to tell you some things I learned the hard way. You don’t want to get too caught up. It’s great that you’re Kid Dinosaur, but you’re also, uh, whoever you are. Don’t forget that. What grade are you in?”
The kid groaned. “What is it with all you guys? If you’re going to start in about algebra, forget it!”
“Algebra?” Tom said, puzzled. “I didn’t say a thing about algebra. Your classes are important, but that’s not all there is either. Make friends, damn it, go on dates, make sure you go to your senior prom. Just being able to turn into a brontosaurus the size of a Doberman isn’t going to win you any prizes in life, you understand?”
They landed with a soft thump on the snow-covered grass of the sheep meadow. Nearby, a hot-pretzel vendor in earmuffs and overcoat was staring in astonishment at the armored shell and the shivering boy atop it. “Did you hear what I said?” Tom asked.
“Yeah. You sound just like my dad. You boring old farts think you know everything.” His high, nervous laugh turned into a long reptilian hiss as bones and muscles shifted and flowed, and his soft skin thickened and grew scaly. Very daintily, the little triceratops deposited a proto-coprolite on top of the shell, skittered down its side, and waddled off across the meadow with its horns jutting arrogantly into the air.
That was the best year in Thomas Tudbury’s life. But not for the Great and Powerful Turtle.
In the comic books, the heroes never seemed to need sleep. Things weren’t so simple in real life. With a full-time nine-to-five job to keep him busy, Tom had done nearly all his Turtling on nights and weekends anyway, and now Barbara was taking up that slack. As his social life took up more of his time, his career as an ace suffered proportionately, and the iron shell was seen less and less frequently over the streets of Manhattan.
Finally, a day dawned when Thomas Tudbury realized with something of a shock that almost three and a half months had passed since he’d last gone out to the junkyard and his shells. The trigger for the realization was a small story on page twenty-four of the Times, with a headline that read ‘TURTLE MISSING’ FEARED DEAD. The story mentioned that dozens of calls for the Turtle had gone unanswered in the past few months (he hadn’t turned on his ham radio since God knows when), and that Dr. Tachyon had been especially worried, to the extent that he’d been running classified ads in the papers and offering a small reward for the news of any Turtle sightings (Tom never read the classifieds, and these days he hardly read the papers).
He ought to get into his shell and pay a call on the clinic, he thought when he read that. But there wasn’t time. He’d promised to help Barbara take her class on a field trip up to Bear Mountain, and they were due to leave in two hours.
Instead he went out to a public phone booth, and called the clinic.
“Who is this?” Tachyon demanded irritably when Tom finally got him on the line. “We’re quite busy here, and I can’t spare a lot of time for people who refuse to give their names.”
“This is the Turtle,” Tom said. “I wanted to let you know that I’m all right.”
There was a moment of silence. “You don’t sound like the Turtle,” Tachyon said.
“The sound system in the shell is designed to disguise my voice. Of course I don’t sound like the Turtle. But I am the Turtle.”
“You’ll have to convince me of that.”
Tom sighed. “God, you’re a pain. But I should have expected it. You whined at me for ten years just because your arm got broken, and it was your own goddamn fault. You didn’t tell me you were going to hide under a forklift, damn it. I’m not telepathic like some people I could name.”
“I didn’t tell you to knock over half the warehouse either,” Tachyon said. “You’re just lucky I wasn’t crushed to death. A man with powers like yours ought to ...” He paused. “You are the Turtle.”
“Ahem,” said Tom.
“What have you been doing?”
“Being happy. Don’t worry, I’ll be back now and again. Not as often as before, though. I’m pretty busy. I think I’m going to get married. As soon as I work up the courage to ask her.”
“Congratulations,” Tachyon said. He sounded pleased. “Who is the lucky bride?”
“Ah, that would be telling. You know her, though. One of your patients from way, way back. She had a little bout with the wild card when she was two. Nothing serious. She’s completely normal today. I’d invite you to the wedding, Tacky, but that would kind of give away the game, wouldn’t it? Maybe we’ll name one of the kids after you.”
There was a long, awkward moment of silence. “Turtle,” the alien finally said, in a voice somehow gone flat, “we need to talk. Can you find the time to come over to the clinic? I’ll arrange my schedule to suit.”
“I’m awfully busy,” Tom said. “It’s important,” Tachyon insisted.
“Well, all right. Late at night, then. Not tonight, I’ll be too tired. Tomorrow, say, after Johnny Carson.”
“Agreed,” said Tachyon. “I’ll meet you on the roof.”
By now the wedding was safely over. He could thank Kid Dinosaur for that much, at least; the little fuck distracted him through the worst part.
His shell drifted slowly up Broadway toward Times Square, but his mind was across New York Bay at the Top Hat. The last time he’d been to the Top Hat had been for the reception after Joey and Gina had gotten married. He’d been the best man. That had been a good night. He could remember it all, everything from the flocked wallpaper down to the taste of kielbasa and the sound of the band.
Barbara would be wearing her grandmother’s wedding gown. She’d shown it to him once, a decade ago. Even now, he could close his eyes and see the expression on her face when she brushed her hand over all that antique lace.
Unbidden, her image filled his mind. Barbara in the gown, her blond hair behind the veil, her face uplifted. “I do.” And next to her, Steve Bruder. Tall, dark, very fit. If anything, the sonofabitch was better-looking now than he had been in high school. He was a raquetball fanatic, Tom knew. With a boyish smile and a fashionable Tom Selleck mustache. He’d look wonderful in his tux. Together, they’d make a dynamite couple.
And their child would be a stunner.
He should go. So what if he hadn’t replied to the invitation, they’d still let him in. Dump the shell in the junkyard, dump the shell in the fucking river for all it mattered, pick up his car, and he could be there in no time at all. Dance with the bride, and smile at her, and wish her happiness, all the happiness in the world. And shake the hand of the lucky groom. Shake Bruder’s hand. Yeah.
Bruder had a great handshake. He was in real estate now, in Weehawken and Hoboken mostly; he’d bought early and been perfectly positioned when all the yuppies in Manhattan woke up one morning and discovered that New Jersey was just across the Hudson. Making a bloody fortune, going to be a millionaire by forty-five. He’d told Tom himself, that hideous night when Barbara had gotten them both to dinner. Handsome and self-assured, with that jaunty boyish grin, and going to be a millionaire too, but his life wasn’t all roses, his big screen TV was giving him a little trouble and maybe Tom could take a look at it, eh? For old times’ sake.
In grade school, they’d shaken hands once and Steve had squeezed so hard that Tom had gone to his knees, crying, unable to break loose. Even now, Steve Bruder’s sophisticated grown-up handshake was still a lot firmer than it needed to be. He liked to see the other guy wince.
I’d like the Turtle to shake his fucking hand, Tom thought savagely. Grab the hand with his mind and give a little friendly squeeze, until the hand began to crimp and twist, until that smooth tanned skin ripped and the fingers snapped like broken red chopsticks, bones sticking through the flesh. The Turtle could pump his fucking arm up and down until it came right out of its socket, and then he could pull off the fingers one by one. She loves me she loves me not she loves me she loves me not she loves ME.
Tom’s throat was dry, and he felt sick and dizzy. He opened the refrigerator and got out a beer. It tasted good. The shell was moving above the sleaze of Times Square. His eyes went restlessly from screen to screen. Peep shows and porn theaters, adult bookstores, live sex on stage, neon signs that screamed GIRLS GIRLS NAKED GIRLS and HOTTEST SHOW IN TOWN and NUDE TEENAGE MODELS, male hustlers in denim and cowboy hats, pimps in long mink coats with razors in their pockets, hard-faced hookers in fishnet stockings and slit leather skirts. He could pick up a whore, Tom thought suddenly. Literally. Yank her twenty feet off the ground, make her show him what she was selling, make her take it off right there in the center of Times Square, give the fucking tourists a real show. Or take it off for her, rip it off piece by piece and let it float to the ground. He could do that, yeah. Let Bruder have his wedding night with Barbara, the Turtle could have a wedding night of his own.
He swallowed another slug of beer.
Or maybe he should just clean out this filth. Everyone was always bitching about what a pesthole Times Square had become, but no one ever did anything about it. Fuck it, he’d do it for them. He’d show them how to clean out a bad neighborhood, if that’s what they wanted. Pull down those marquees one by one, herd the fucking whores and pimps and hustlers into the river, drive a few pimpmobiles through the windows of those third-floor photographic studios with the nude teenage models, rip up the goddamned sidewalks if he’d a mind to. It was about time somebody did it. Look at this place, just look at it, and barely spitting distance from Port Authority, so it was the first thing a kid would see after getting of the bus.
Tom drained the beer. He chucked the can onto the floor, swiveled, and searched for another, but there was nothing left in his six-pack but the plastic holder. “Fuck it,” he said. Suddenly he was furious. He turned on his microphone, twisted the volume all the way. “FUCK IT,” he shouted, and the voice of the Turtle thundered over 42nd Street, distorted and amplified into a red roar. People stopped dead on the sidewalk, and eyes craned up at him. Tom smiled. He had their attention, it seemed. “FUCK IT ALL,” he said. “FUCK EVERY ONE OF YOU.”
He paused, and was about to expand on that topic, when a police dispatcher’s voice, crackling over his monitor, caught his attention. She was repeating the code for an officer in trouble, repeating it over and over again.
Tom left them gaping, while he listened carefully for details. Part of him felt sorry for the poor asshole who was about to get his head handed to him.
His shell rose straight up, high above the streets and buildings, and shot south toward the Village.
“I figured you were just slow,” Barbara said, when she had composed herself. “It always took you time to work up to anything. I don’t understand, Tom.”
He couldn’t look into her eyes. He looked around her living room, his hands in his pockets. Over her desk she’d hung her diploma and teaching certificate. Around them were arrayed the photographs: pictures of Barbara grimacing as she changed the diaper on her four-month-old niece, pictures of Barbara and her three sisters, pictures of Barbara showing her class how to cut black witches and orange pumpkins out of posterboard for Halloween, supervising six dancing presidents for a school play, loading a projector to run cartoons. And reading a story. That was his favorite picture. Barbara with a tiny little black girl on her lap and another dozen kids ranged all around her, staring at her with rapt faces while she read aloud from The Wind in the Willows. Tom had taken that photograph himself.
“There’s nothing to understand,” he’d snapped when he looked away from the pictures. “It’s over, that’s all. Let’s break it off clean, okay?”
“Is there someone else?” she said.
It might have been kinder to lie to her, but he was a poor liar. “No,” he said.
“Then, why?”
She was baffled and hurt, but her face had never been lovelier, Tom thought. He couldn’t face her. “It’s just best,” he said, turning to look out her window. “We don’t want the same things, Barbara. You want to get married, right? Not me. Forget it, no way. You’re terrific, its not you, it’s .. fuck it, it just isn’t working. Kids; every time I turn around there’s a mob of kids. How many does your sister have, three? Four? I’m tired of pretending. I hate kids.” His voice went up. “I despise kids, you understand?”
“You can’t mean that, Tommy. I’ve seen you with the kids in my class. You took them to your house and showed them you comic collection. You helped jenny build that model of Jetboy’s plane. You like kids.”
Tom laughed. “Oh, fuck it, how naive can you get? I was just trying to impress you. I wanted to get into your pants. I don’t—” His voice broke. “Damn it,” he said. “If I like kids so fucking much, then how come I had a vasectomy? How come, huh? Tell me that?”
When he turned, her face was as red as if he had hit her.
The playground was surrounded by police cruisers, six of them, flashers strobing red and blue in the gathering dusk. Cops were crouched behind the cars with guns drawn. Beyond the high chain-link fence, two dark shapes sprawled under the basketball net, and a third was draped over one of the barrels. Someone was whimpering in pain.
Tom spotted a detective he knew, holding the collar of a skinny young joker whose face was as soft and white as tapioca pudding, shaking him so hard his jowls bounced. The boy wore Demon Prince colors, Tom saw on a close-up shot. He drifted lower. “HEADS UP,” he boomed. “WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?”
They told him.
A gang dispute, that was all. Penny-ante shit. Some nat juvies operating around the fringes of Jokertown had trespassed onto Demon Prince turf. The Demon Princes had gotten together fifteen or twenty members and gone into the East Village to teach the interlopers some respect for territorial boundaries. It had gone down in the playground. Knives, chains, a few guns. Nasty.
And then it had gotten weird.
The nats had something, tapioca-face screamed.
They’d come out of it as friends. He was proud of that. It was hardest when their wounds were still raw, and for the first eleven months they avoided each other. But Bayonne was a small town in its own way, and they knew too many people in common, and it was not something that could go on forever. Maybe that was the hardest eleven months Tom Tudbury ever lived through. Maybe.
One night she called him out of the blue. He was glad. He had missed her desperately, but he knew he could never call her after what had happened between them. “I need to talk,” she’d said. She sounded as though she’d had a few beers. “You were my friend, Tom. Besides everything else, you were my friend, right? I need a friend tonight, okay? Can you come over?”
He bought a six-pack and went over. Her youngest sister had been killed that afternoon in a motorcycle accident. There was nothing to be done or said, but Tom did and said all the usual useless things, and he was there for her, and he let her talk until the dawn broke, and afterward he put her to bed. He slept on the couch.
He woke in late afternoon, with Barbara standing over him, wearing a terry-cloth robe, red-eyed from crying. “Thank you,” she said. She sat down at the foot of the couch and took his hand and held it for a long time in silence. “I want you in my life,” she said finally, with difficulty. “I don’t want us to lose each other again. Friends?”
“Friends,” Tom said. He wanted to pull her down on top of him and smother her with kisses. Instead he squeezed her hand. “No matter what, Barbara. Always. Okay?”
Barbara smiled. He faked a yawn, and buried his face in a pillow, to keep her from seeing the look in his eyes.
“STAY DOWN,” the Turtle warned the policemen. They didn’t need to be told twice. The kid was hiding inside one of the cement barrels, and they’d seen what happened to the cop who had tried to go into the playground after him. Gone, gone as if he’d never existed, blinked out, engulfed in a sudden blackness and somehow ... erased.
“We were cutting the fuckers,” the Demon Prince said, “teaching ‘em good, teaching them the price if they come bothering Jokertown, fuckin’ nat wimps, we had ‘em dead, and then this spic come at us with a motherfuckin’ bowling ball, and we just laughed at the fucker, what’s he gonna do, try to bowl us down, stupid little prick, and then he held out the ball at Waxy and it grew, man, like it was alive. Some kind of black shit came out of it, real fast, black light or a big dark hand or something I don’t know, only it moved real fast, and Waxy was just gone.” His voice got shrill. “He was gone, man, he just wasn’t there no more. And the nat fucker did the same to Razor and the Ghoul. That was when Heehaw shot him and he almost dropped the ball, got ‘im in the shoulder I think, but then he did it to Heehaw. You can’t fight nothin’ like that. Even that motherfuckin’ cop couldn’t do shit.” ‘
The shell slid above the chain-link fence that surrounded the playground, silent and slow.
“We have something,” Barbara said. “We have something special.” Her finger traced patterns in the condensation on the outside of her glass. She looked up at him, her blue eyes bold and frank, as if she were challenging him. “He’s asked me to marry him, Tom.”
“What did you say?” Tom asked her, trying to keep his voice calm and steady.
“I said I’d think about it,” Barbara said. “That’s why I wanted to get together. I wanted to talk to you first.”
Tom signaled for another beer. “It’s your decision,” he said. “I wish you’d let me meet this guy, but from everything you’ve told me he sounds pretty good.”
“He’s divorced,” she said.
“So’s half the world,” Tom said, as his beer arrived. “Everyone but you and me,” Barbara, said, smiling. “Yeah.” He frowned down at the head of his beer and sighed uncomfortably. “Does the mystery beau have kids?”
“Two. His ex has custody. I’ve met them, though. They like me.”
“Goes without saying,” Tom said. “He wants to have more. With me.” Tom looked her in the eye. “Do you love him?” Barbara met his gaze calmly. “I guess. Sometimes I’m not so sure these days. Maybe I’m not as romantic as I used to be.” She shrugged. “Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if things had worked out differently for you and me. We could be celebrating our tenth anniversary.”
“Or maybe the ninth anniversary of our acrimonious divorce,” Tom said. He reached across the table and took Barbara’s hand. “Things haven’t turned out so badly, have they? It would never have worked the other way.”
“The roads not chosen,” she said wistfully. “I’ve had too many might-have-beens in my life, Tom, too many regrets for things left undone and choices not made. My biological clock is ticking. If I wait any longer, I’ll wait forever.”
“I just wish you’d known this guy longer,” Tom said. “Oh, I’ve known him a long time,” she said, tearing a corner off her cocktail napkin.
Tom was confused. “I thought you said you met him last month at a party.”
“Yes. But we knew each other before. In high school.” She looked at his face again. “That’s why I didn’t tell you his name. You would have been upset, and at first I didn’t know it would lead anywhere.”
Tom didn’t have to be told. He and Barbara had been good friends for more than a decade. He looked into the blue depths of her eyes, and he knew. “Steve Bruder,” he said numbly.
He hovered above the playground and floated the fallen warriors over the fence, one by one, to the police waiting outside. The two from the basketball court were dead meat. It would take a lot of scrubbing to wash the bloodstains from the cement. The boy draped over the barrel turned out to be a girl. She wimpered in pain when he lifted her with his teke, and from the way she was clutching herself it looked like her guts had been sliced open. He hoped they could do something for her.
All three were nats. The battleground was free of fallen jokers. Either the Demon Princes had really been kicking ass, or their own dead were somewhere else. Or both.
He touched a control on the arm of his chair, and all his floodlights came on, bathing the playground in a white-hot brilliance. “IT’S OVER,” he said, and his loudspeakers roared the words into the twilight. Over the years, he’d learned that sheer volume scared the hell out of punks. “COME ON OUT, KID. THIS IS THE TURTLE.”
“Go away,” a hoarse thin voice screamed back at him from inside the cement barrel. “I’ll disintegrate you, you joker fuckface. I got the thing here with me.”
All day Tom had been looking for someone to hurt; a monster to pull apart, a killer to pound on, a target for his rage, a sponge to soak up his pain. Now the moment was finally at hand, and he found he had no more anger in him. He was tired. He wanted to go home. Behind his bravado, the boy in the barrel was obviously young and scared. “YOU’RE REAL TOUGH,” Tom said. “YOU WANT TO PLAY THE SHELL GAME? GREAT” He concentrated on the barrel to the left of the boy’s cover, held it in his mind, squeezed. It collapsed as suddenly as if a wrecking ball had smashed into it, shards and dust flying everywhere when the cement shattered. “NOT IN THAT ONE. GEE.” He did the same thing to the barrel on the other side of the kid. “NOT IN THAT ONE EITHER. GUESS I’LL TRY THE MIDDLE ONE.”
The boy exited in such haste that he whacked his head on the overhang of the barrel as he stood up. The impact dazed him momentarily. The bowling ball he’d been clutching with both hands was suddenly whisked from his grip. It shot straight up. The boy screamed obscenities through shiny steelcapped teeth. He made a desperate leap for his weapon, but all he managed to do was brush the tips of his fingers against its underside. Then he came down hard, scraping his hands and knees along the concrete.
By then the cops were already moving in. Tom watched as they surrounded him, yanked him to his feet, and read him his rights. He was nineteen, maybe younger, wearing gang colors and a studded dog collar, shaggy black hair teased out in spikes. They asked him where all the people were, and he snarled curses at them and screamed that he didn’t know.
As they hustled him toward the waiting cruisers, Tom opened an armored portal and floated the bowling ball inside his shell for a closer look, shivering in the blast of cold air that came with it. It was a weird thing. Too light to be a bowling ball, he thought when he hefted it; four pounds, maybe five. No holes either. When he ran his hand over it, his fingers tingled, and colors glimmered briefly on its surface, like the rainbows on an oil slick. It made him uneasy. Maybe Tachyon would know what to make of it. He set it aside.
Darkness was falling over the city. Tom pushed his shell higher and higher, until he floated up above even the distant tower of the Empire State Building. He stayed there for a long time, watching the lights go on all across the city, transforming Manhattan into an electric fairyland.
From this high up, on a clear cold night like this, he could even see the lights of Jersey over across the frigid black water. One of those dots was the Top Hat Lounge, he knew.
He shouldn’t just float here, he thought. He ought to take the bowling ball to the clinic; that was the next order of business. He didn’t move. He’d do it tomorrow, he thought. Tachyon wasn’t going anywhere, and neither was the bowling ball. Somehow Tom could not bring himself to face Tachyon tonight. Not tonight of all nights.
In those days, his shell was a lot more primitive. No telephoto lenses, no zooms, no infrared cameras. Just a ring of hot spotlights, so bright that they left Tachyon squinting. But he needed them. It was dark on the roof on the clinic, where the shell had come to rest.
The photographs that Tachyon held up were not the sort that Tom wanted to see in more detail anyway. He sat in darkness, staring into his screens, saying nothing, as Tachyon shuffled through them one by one. They had all been taken in the clinic’s maternity ward. One or two of the children had lived long enough to be moved to the nursery.
Finally he found his voice. “Their mothers are jokers,” he said, his voice emphatic with false conviction. “Bar—She’s normal, I tell you. A nat. She got it when she was two, damn it; it’s like it never happened.”
“It happened,” Tachyon said. “She may appear normal, but the virus is still there. Latent. Most likely, it will never manifest, and genetically it’s axecessive, but when you and she have—”
“I know a lot of people think I’m a joker,” Tom interrupted, “but I’m not, believe me, I’m an ace. I’m an ace, damn it! So what if the kid carries the wild card gene, so he’ll have major-league teke. He’ll be an ace, like me.”
“No,” Tachyon said. He slid the photographs back into the file folder, his eyes averted from the cameras. Deliberately? “I’m sorry, my friend. The odds against that are astronomical.”
“Cyclone,” Tom had said, on the edge of hysteria. Cyclone was a West-Coast ace whose daughter had inherited his command of the winds.
“No,” said Tachyon. “Mistral—is a special case. We’re almost certain now that her father somehow subconsciously manipulated her germ plasm while she was still in the womb. On Takis ... well, the process is not unknown to us, but it rarely succeeds. You’re the most powerful telekineticist I’ve ever seen, but something like that demands a fine control that is orders of magnitude beyond you, not to mention centuries of experience in microsurgery and gene splicing. And even if you had all of that, you’d probably fail. Cyclone had no idea what he was doing on any conscious level, and was freakishly lucky on top of it.” The Takisian shook his head. “Your case is entirely different. All that’s guaranteed is that you’ll be drawing a wild card, and the odds are just the same as if—”
“I know the odds,” Tom said hoarsely. Of every hundred humans dealt the wild card, only one developed ace powers. There were ten hideously malformed jokers for every ace, and ten black-queen deaths for every joker.
In his mind’s eyes, he saw Barbara sitting up in bed, the sheet tangled about her waist, her blond hair cascading softly around her shoulders, her face solemn and sweet as their child suckled at her breast. And then the infant looked up, and he saw its teeth and bulging eyes and monstrous, twisted features; and when it hissed at him, Barbara cried out in pain as the milk and blood flowed freely from her raw, torn nipple. “I’m sorry,” Dr. Tachyon repeated numbly.
It was past midnight before Tom returned to his empty house on First Street.
He shrugged out of his jacket, sat down on the couch, and stared out the window at the Kill and the lights of Staten Island. A freezing rain had begun. The droplets pinged against his windows with a sharp, crystalline sound, like forks tinging off empty wineglasses when the wedding guests want the newlyweds to kiss. Tom sat in the dark for a long time.
Finally, he turned on a lamp and picked up the telephone. He punched six numbers, and couldn’t bring himself to hit the seventh. Like a high-school kid terrified of asking a pretty girl for a date, he thought, smiling grimly. He pressed the button down firmly, and listened to the ring.
“Top Hat,” a gruff voice said.
“I’d like to speak to Barbara Casko,” Tom said.
“You mean the new Missus Bruder,” the voice replied. Tom took a long breath. “Yes,” he said.
“Hey, the newlyweds left hours ago. Off for their wedding night.” The man was obviously drunk. “Going to Paris for the honeymoon.”
“Yeah,” Tom said. “Is her father still there?”
“I’ll look and see.”
There was a long silence before the phone was picked up again. “This is Stanley Casko. Who am I speaking to?”
“Tom Tudbury. I’m sorry I couldn’t attend, Mr. Casko. I was, uh, occupied.”
“Yes, Tom. Are you all right?”
“Fine. Couldn’t be better. I just wanted ...”
“Yes?”
He swallowed. “Just tell her to be happy, okay? That’s all. Just tell her I want her to be happy.” He set the phone back in its cradle.
Outside in the night, a big freighter was going down the Kill. It was too dark to see what flag it flew. Tom turned out the lights and watched it pass him by.
The boys from DEA paid a visit to the New Dawn Wellness Center just after morning rush when a few last late-running yuppies-if that isn’t a contradiction in termswere polishing off their bulghur-wheat doughnuts and the center’s famous low-cal, low-cholesterol, vegetarian “fried eggs,” with tofu whites and whipped-squash yolks. Enough onlookers to be duly impressed, but not enough to get underfoot or in line for serious hurt. In the last winter of the 1980s, America’s drug warriors could do no wrong in the eyes of the press, the public, or the law, but the powers that be felt that if the shithammer came down-as every member of the strike team devoutly hoped-it wouldn’t do to have too many punctured civilians bleeding on camera.
Especially at the scene of what, if it came off, would be the media bust of the decade: the DEA versus a renegade ace.
While agents in civilian garb secured the customers and the single brush-cut, stocky, grumpy female clerk, a threeman element of the Covert Lab Enforcement Team dashed through the restaurant in their black Darth Vader togs, CAR-15s with fat suppressors shrouding the barrels clutched in their black-gauntleted hands. One of them paused to bang his Kevlar-helmeted head against the jamb of the door to the back before dashing upstairs.
“We’re waiting on you, Lynn,” his buddy Dooley said as he came highstepping up to the second floor. Dooley’s mask muffled his words, but Lynn knew he was grinning, with the ESP that came from being pals since eighth grade. Lynn grinned back and bobbed his head.
He and Dooley pressed backs to either side of the door while Matteoli slipped the rubberized tip of a big orange wrecking bar between the frame and the door and popped it open. The other two wheeled inside, Lynn low and left, Dooley high and right.
“DEA! Covert Lab Enforcement Team! Freeze, motherfuckers!”
It was a fairyland, a fucking fairyland. It wasn’t very big, but neither of them had ever seen anything like it outside a government facility or university. This was their eleventh lab bust, and they’d never even seen half the equipment in here. The only things out of place were the two men standing in the middle of all that gleaming technology. The CLET strike force had been briefed to expect the kind of scum that would hang around an overage hippie. Not a middle-aged black guy and a leaner younger Hispanic dude in jackets and ties.
The Hispanic was in motion already, reaching inside his jacket in a motion that could mean only one thing: Dooley tracked him with his muzzle.
“Hold it right—”
The big vent-ribbed Colt Python roared as it came on-line, chopping Dooley off in the middle of his sentence. The bulky armor encasing his body would definitely have stopped even the high-speed .357 slug, the face plate might have turned it. But the jacketed hollowpoint nipped neatly between the lip of his helmet and the top of his mask, punched through his right eye and right out the back of his skull.
“Dooley!” Lynn screamed, and held back the trigger. Like everybody else in CLET, he’d had the three-round burst regulator on his assault rifle disabled the moment he’d been issued the thing. He let the whole magazine go on full rock’n’roll, felt the ripple of high-velocity slugs in passing as Matteoli did the same from the doorway.
The Hispanic dropped the Python and did a little jitterbug dance as the white front of his shirt came all over red. The black guy dove out of sight.
Lynn spun and dropped with his back to a lab table that would never stop a bullet but would at least hide him from sight. He dropped the spent magazine, fumbled another from a belt pouch, and rammed it home.
“Matty, pop a stun grenade on the puke!” he yelled. “Backup!” Matteoli screamed back. “We gotta call for backup!”
Fuck that, Lynn thought. His eyes stung with tears. Payback’s a mother. He jacked the charging handle and rose. To see a black arm waving from the midst of all that mechanism, brandishing a black leather holder with an alltoo-distinctive gold shield inset.
“Narcotics Enforcement. We’re NYPD, you dumb sons of bitches!”
TWO DIE IN SHOOT-OUT AT ACE DRUG LAB, the headline said, or screamed. The subhead read, Drug Czar Calls Illicit Lab “Most Sophisticated Ever”; Nationwide Manhunt Declared.
Dr. Pretorius sighed and looked over the half-moons of his old-fashioned reading glasses. “So a couple of your cowboys came off the handle and shot it out with New York’s finest. What does this have to do with my client?”
The youngest of the three came out of his leathercovered chair with an incoherent scream of rage. Pretorius raised an eyebrow.
“Lynn,” the eldest said, not loud but with a certain attack-dog-trainer snap. “Maybe you’d better wait outside.” The young man with the shock of black hair falling into wild eyes turned and pounded the heel of one fist against a wall, making display cases with exotic insects inside dance. The he ran out of the attorney’s office.
“Whatever was that about?” Pretorius asked.
“Agent Saxon was involved in the incident you so insensitively spoke of,” said the third man. He was in his early fifties and in all ways average except for the expensive cut of his lawyerly three-piece and the bland smoothness of his face. A man for George Bush’s America. “His partner was killed.” He settled back, apparently looking for expressions of regret or sympathy.
“My question still stands,” Pretorius said.
The third man’s face hardened momentarily. “Under New York law, Dr. Meadows can be held responsible for violent deaths associated with his crimes.”
“We’re talking capital here,” the attack-dog trainer added.
Pretorius began to laugh. The two of them stared at him as if he’d sprouted great big white wings like Peregrine’s. “That is the farthest-fetched interpretation of the law I’ve heard in a long time,” he said, taking off his glasses and wiping his eyes. “Is there no limit to the arrogant disregard you people have for concepts like ‘rights’ and ‘due process’—not to mention common sense?”
Kinder-and-Gentler smiled. “Given that seventy percent of the American public believes any measures at all are justified in combating the drug menace,” he said, “no.”
The trainer pulled a sheaf of papers from an inside pocket of his sport coat. “We have something for you, too, Pretorius.” He slammed a packet of official-looking papers on the desk and smiled up at Pretorius with satisfaction glinting in his steely gray eyes. Pretorius gave it a 6.5.
“As you’re no doubt aware,” Kinder-and-Gentler said, as smooth as his face, “under the Racketeering-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations and Continuing Crime Acts, all property belonging to drug dealers is liable to confiscation. As you’re also aware, I’m sure, recent interpretations of the law permit us to seize the property of attorneys who represent such scum. We can’t permit the enormous sums commanded by drug dealers to deflect justice, now, can we, Doctor?” And he smiled too.
My, we’re a happy group today, Pretorius thought. He reached for the telephone, pressed a button. When a voice answered, he said simply, “Go.”
His guests stiffened. The Attack Dog Trainer was leaning so far forward, he was in danger of toppling over and splitting Pretorius’s desk with the blade of his face. “What are you trying to pull?” he barked.
It was Pretorius’s turn to try his hand at smiling, and he gave it his all. “Your latest little perversion of due process does not precisely take me by surprise, gentlemen. I was just speaking to an associate of mine waiting at the federal courthouse. If you’ll be patient a few moments, a court order voiding your seizure should shortly arrive by messenger.”
They stared at him with eyes like boiled eggs. He reached into a drawer of his desk. The Trainer stiffened, and his hard right hand started inside his suit coat.
Kinder-and-Gentler put a hand on his arm. “He’s not going for a gun, Pat. Act your age.”
“At the very outset of the Meadows custody case,”
Pretorius said, “I foresaw you gentlemen and your modern Star Chamber tactics might become involved. And I personally have no need for money.”
“You can’t weasel out of this by waiving your fee, bunky,” the Trainer said.
“Nor did L” He trumped the trainer’s sheaf with his own embossed legal envelope. “I charged Dr. Meadows my full hourly rate-payable, under the terms of this contract, directly to the March of Dimes for research into mental retardation. And if you wish to try to confiscate their assets, gentlemen, I wish you luck.”
“We’re the future, pal!”
An open-hand slap cracked across the yellow stripe dyed down the center of his close-cropped skull. Trash-clogged foreshore and sagging graffiti-crusted buildings swam in stench thick as heat haze, or maybe from the blow. The tall man hunched his shoulders and raised his arms defensively across his face.
He’d ridden to the Rox in a giant jellyfish in search of shelter. It didn’t surprise him much to find there was no shelter there, either. It did made him kind of sad.
He wasn’t sure how many joker boys were on him. He’d never had much head for detail on a macro scale. It didn’t really matter. Make Love Not War were the words he’d always lived by.
In his proper person, anyway. Which was all he had to help him now.
An attacker slammed the scarred pale Hormel ham he carried instead of a hand into the midriff of the tall man’s faint paint-dappled Pendleton shirt. He whoofed and doubled and staggered back, and the empirical part of him noted that there had to be at least two assailants since another was, sure enough, down on all fours behind him to take him behind the calves and send him sprawling. That trick had been a constant companion in childhood and early adolescence. Made him nostalgic, almost.
Coughing and sobbing for breath, he tried to remember what the survivors of the Czechago Convention had told him: Curl up, get small, try not to give them a crack at your joints or skull.
Mayor Daley’s disorder preservers had had nightsticks. These boys had body parts a la wild card. Like the calcareous hoof somebody was slamming rhythmically into the small of his back, aiming to pulp his kidneys.
“Hey, nat! You ain’t gettin’ any younger. And maybe (kick) you ain’t getting (kick) any older either!”
The others laughed their jackal laughs, and as painspikes jolted up his spine and down into his scrotum, the tall man wondered if he was actually going to survive. And he thought the thing he’d always sworn he never would: If my friends were here, you’d never dare treat me like this!
Laughter. “Hey, old dude, you got no friends! Or didn’t you figure that out yet?”
There. It was out. He’d even spoken it aloud without meaning to. Shame as much as anger and pain and fear made his eyes run suddenly hot with tears as the impact of their limbs and their laughter redoubled.
And then a voice, cutting like a busted-off car antenna. “What the fuck is going on here?”
The blowstorm stopped. He rolled over and sat up, curiosity overcoming caution.
A woman-a girl-stood facing the joker quartet. Her hair was short, moussed into a nondescript-colored spike palisade to guard her scalp. Silver bangles and skull-and bones swung from one ear. “I said ‘What the fuck?’ Don’t try to hide from me, Foureyes,” she added to the smallest, who had maneuvered himself behind his companions.
“Hey, hey,” the joker said defensively, blinking his namesakes furiously. “Just trashin’ this old nat, you know? Passin’ the time.”
“Whofuck you tellus wha’do?” the biggest one said, the one with the premium ham for a hand and a face that was all fissures and flanges, like a leaf-eating bat. Saliva shot from his face like Silly String when he spoke. “Juzda dumb cunt.”
“Cool it, Tyrone,” Foureyes said urgently. “She’s a jumper.” A slim black kid, normal-looking except for the hoof with which he’d tried to do street surgery on the tall man’s kidneys, put a sneer on his chiseled handsome face. “She big time. She his squeeze.” He added a head flip on his.
A quick steel veronica: balisong, a butterfly knife, unfolding its wings very pretty, like in the movies, and then just the tip stuck up the black kid’s right nostril. “That’s K.C. Strange to you, Footloose. And I don t need anybody’s help to fuck up a bunch of detached assholes like you, capisc’? And don’t be trying to circle around behind me anymore, Zero, or your friend here’s gonna start looking lots more like Tyrone. In fact—”
Stung, or thinking he’d seen an opening, the gigantic Tyrone had begun to roll forward. K.C. smiled.
Footloose stepped back, looked Tyrone dead in the eyes, and laughed shrilly. Then his face changed, and he tried to take a step forward. The hoof didn’t want to move. He pitched facefirst into sand caked with something dark, sticky, and sweetly fetid.
Tyrone stopped dead. He raised his hands to his face. The clubbed hand blundered heedlessly into his eye.
He screamed.
Zero was dancing around the perimeter. “What? Foureyes, what’s going on?”
“Oh, fuck, oh, Tyrone, you useless fuck!” Foureyes moaned. Footloose raised his head to stare at him. Foureyes began to kick him. “She multiple jumped the stupid bastards, swapped their fucking minds.”
K.C. smiled and made her knife disappear. “You’re not as dumb as I thought you were. “
“Shit! Shit, we gotta get outta here,” Zero gobbled. He grabbed Footloose his body, anyway-under the arm and dragged him upright as he began to roar incoherently. Foureyes caught hold of the weeping Tyrone-Footloose and hustled him away along the stinking beach.
“Come back tomorrow and ask nice, I may sort your little minds out again,” she called after them. Then she shook her head. “Damn. The way we fight each other, all the Combine has to do is wait. We’ll do the job on ourselves, and they won’t have to worry about how to crash the wall.” She looked down at the tall man. He slumped there, rubbing the ache in his face while the filthy waves of Upper New York Bay shot needles of sunlight in through his eyes and up to the roof of his skull. A twitch of breeze sent crinkled Ding Dong wrappers and styrofoam cup shards skittering like small animals to the shelter of his thin haunch. “So who are you?” she demanded.
“M-mark,” he said. His lips felt big as basketballs. He saw no reason to lie to her. “Mark Meadows.”
But she was looking away across the water, at the Circle Line ferry beyond the cordon of Harbor Police boats that surrounded the Rox, chugging toward the foreskin tip of Manhattan.
“Wha—” he gagged, spat sand that tasted like stuff you flossed from between your teeth, “what’s the Combine?” She tossed her pointy little chin after the ferryboat. “Them. The straights, the nats, the outside world. The government. Everybody but us wretched refuse huddled here on the Rox, brother.”
Oh. That was nothing new... a light dawned.
“Hey, man, I remember now. Randall McMurphyl He’s the one with the Combine. Like, Nurse Ratched and them.” She laughed. “You’re the first person I’ve met on this damned island who knew that.” She walked away whistling.
Some social worker had given her the small pink-plush elephant, back at another of the dim cold places with echoing halls. Now it lay on her metal-frame bed, slashed open, its cotton entrails strewn everywhere.
Tears filled her eyes. She didn’t understand. Didn’t understand the jeering taunts of the other girls, the makebelieve caring of the doctor people, the rough unconcern of the people who actually took care of her, to the extent anybody did. She had grown up with love and warmth and a constant glow of happy safety. Now, in only a few months’ time, she’d learned to treasure being ignored. She began to gather up the fragments of the stuffed toy.
She didn’t understand what she was doing here. The other girls said they were here for doing bad things, but she had never done anything bad. Her daddy always said she was a good girl. The doctor people said she was special. When she asked if that was why she was inside, they told her no, it was because her daddy was a bad man.
She sniffled. Her daddy wasn’t a bad man. He was Daddy.
She threw herself down on the bed. Her roommate wasn’t in. She liked this roommate. She didn’t pick on her, didn’t pay any attention to her at all.
The tears were overwhelming her now. Most of all, she missed her daddy, tall and strong and always there for her. He wasn’t a bad man. And she knew that he wouldn’t let her stay here forever. Someday he’d come for her. No matter what.
And a voice inside her head told her, You’re what the other girls say you are. Just a stupid. You’re going to be here forever and ever.
Alone.
She gathered the sad empty head of the elephant to her cheek. Its black-disc pupils rolled up in its plastic-button eyes. She hugged it to her and drifted into sleep, weeping for the death of her friend.
Head thrown back to let the dawn wind ruffle his red brush cut with bloatblack-stinking fingers, Blaise walked through the Rox’s gray huddle. He was just in via the Charon Express from a night run with the jumpers. Just a casual cruise to see how some of their investment properties over in Manhattan were doing, and he was on top of the world.
You always lectured me about the proper uses of power, grandpere, he thought, and his smile turned edged and ugly. And I must hand it to you, you have indeed taught me to use it.
It came to him then that it might be time to go down below the medical building for a new lesson in the use of power. He was still fairly fresh, with a sixteen-year-old’s endurance, and these little jaunts into town tended to leave him unsatisfied and maybe a trifle bored. His jumpers were too simple, too American. It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy the same things they did. Only not as long.
And he wanted more. Putting the expensively cultured body of a millionaire’s daughter through its paces while its owner looked on had its rewards. But mostly it served to draw his appetite thin and tight like the skin on a starving man’s ribs. He could taste real power. That was what their victims commanded, why they were chosen.
He was tired of tasting it at one remove. It was like eating soup through a straw.
He came around a corner. To his right the river licked the beach like a wound. A knot of assorted seedballs was drifting though the wet cold sand toward the food tables, gray shapes half distinct in the false light. He paid them no mind. They were the basic flotsam that that fat fool Bloat got such a charge of clasping to his bosom, or whatever you called it: jokers, monstrous to the Takisian sensibilities Blaise had picked up as much despite his grandfather as because of him, nat trash not a lot more tasteful. The sort of scum he would’ve gotten a kick out of finding asleep in some alley, soaking down with gas, and lighting off if he’d been born a mere groundling.
Then Blaise saw him.
In cognition’s ground-zero flash he went from a gangly shape stilting head and shoulders over the trash stream to a terror that yammered in Blaise’s skull and pounded on the temples like a mad thing trying to get out. With a martial artist’s backward leap, Blaise put the cold block of a building between him and the awful apparition. Burning Sky, could he have seen me?
“Blaise?”
Like a soft knife, the voice cut through the hammering in his temples. He looked up and saw K. C. Strange framed by his knees, realized he’d sunk into a sort of fetal crouch with his back to the chill cement wall.
“Blaise, what’s the matter? You look like you’re about to throw up.”
He felt a stab of fury, a yellow ice pick through the purple throbbing fog in his brain. How dare she intrude? How dare she question? But the anger flickered and vanished like sparks from an oil-drum fire.
From the other jumpers he got fear and deference and awe—even from Molly Bolt, who hated his guts. From K.C. he got concern. He had never had people really care about him for his own sake before-he didn’t count his grandfather or the one-eyed bitch. Tach’s only interest was to keep him from becoming what he was truly meant to be, and Cody was only playing with him. In that last few years he had come to realize, to acknowledge, that for his beloved “Uncle George” he had never been more than a means to an end, and he’d been a kind of revolutionary mascot to the terrorist cells who raised him before that, before his accursed grandfather stumbled across him. K.C. of all the people he’d known gave a fuck for him._
Maybe that was why he kept her around in spite of her mouth. She was cute. But with his shoulders and attitude and sculpted looks, most of all with his power, he could have cute any time, any way.
He let out a long sobbing breath. “It’s him. He’s come for my grandfather.”
“Who?”
“Him. He’s cut his hair, he dresses differently, but it is him. I can smell him. I can feel his mind. He is here to rescue Tachyon.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
He shot her a hot-eyed look, which she ignored. “Nobody knows about Tachyon except us-and Bloat, because he knows everything that goes down on the Rox. But Bloat’s got a bigger hard-on for the straights than we do. He’d never spill.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Blaise. “He is an ace. He has his ways.”
“Now go back to the beginning and tell me just who this he is.”
“Mark Meadows,” he said in a voice that rang with adolescent Sturm and Drang. “Captain Trips.”
“Mark Meadows?” She laughed. “You’re working up a sweat for nothing, lover boy. Why, I met him yesterday. He’s just a harmless old—who did you say he was?”
“Captain Trips. The ace who has the friends. Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Starshine, Moonchild-I am not sure how many more. He was one of Grandfather’s best friends.” He looked up at her with a face drawn like a Greco martyr’s. “I must stop him. He will destroy us.”
K.C. laughed. Blaise’s face froze. She ruled his hair. Her fingers did a better job than the wind. As she teased and tickled his scalp, he relaxed slightly, knew again why he tolerated her.
He also knew that one day he would pay her back for each and every impertinence, with interest. But he was learning to defer gratification, sometimes. Grandpere would be so proud.
“Relax. He’s just a harmless old geezer.”
“He’s an ace, I tell you—”
She laughed again. “He may have been a big ace, babe. He’s nothing now, capisc’? When I tripped over him, he was in the process of getting his skinny butt kicked by Tyrone and Foureyes and company. Righteous dweebs. They were about to stomp his brains out through his big beaky nose until a little tiny teenage girl with a toy knife turned up to the rescue.” She squatted beside him and played with the braided tail that hung down the back of Blaise’s bombardier’s jacket. “Some ace, huh?”
He shook his head clear with a flip of irritation. “He is undercover. He has to hide his powers. You never lived underground. You would not know”
“No, hey, I just lived out on the streets since I was twelve years old, I wouldn’t know anything about that, and anyway I’m just a girl.”
“That’s right.”
She reared back, ready to spit at him like a cobra. At the last instant before she said something he would have to destroy her for, he showed his teeth in a feral gin. She blinked, grinned back, hung her hands around his neck, and shook her head. “You son of a bitch.”
This is our game, he thought, smiling complacently. I push her to see how far she pushes back. She pushes back to see how far I’ll go.
And the stakes are her life. Wouldn’t that surprise her? He remembered Mark, then, and lost his taste for games. He pushed her arms off his neck, only half roughly, and started to stand. “Enough of this, cheri.”
“Ooh, I love it when you talk dirty”
He shook his head sharply, like a ferret with a mouse. She took the hint. “Your Mark Meadows has played a foolish game and lost. It’s time to take from him the pricé“
“Andrieux.”
He looked up. Mustelina and Andiron stood there. Mustelina cradled an AKM assault rifle in her furry paws-not one of the semiautomatics the liberals were so spastic about, but a real assault rifle, full auto as issued to a Baltic conscript with the Warsaw Pact in Poland, who had sold it for a lid. Andiron wasn’t armed. He just tapped his blunt greenishblack forearms together gently with a ringing like weights dropped cn a carpeted gym floor.
Blaise snapped upright, heels together, and performed a mock bow, half Takisian, half French. “To what do I owe the honor?”
Monsters, he thought, and his skin crawled. “Governor wants to see you,” Mustelina said.
Blaise smiled his beautiful smile at the ferretlike joker. “Ah, but I regret, urgent business requires me—” Andiron’s handless arms pealed like a bell. “Now,” he said.
Blaise’s eyes became slits. “I could make you dance a waltz into the river and drown.”
“Sure you could,” Mustelina agreed easily, “but you won’t.”
Blaise stood a moment longer, his lips stretching across his teeth so tightly he feared they’d tear. “Someday,” he hissed.
Mustelina levered the AK from full auto to safe with two loud clacks. “Someday,” she agreed.
Blaise turned to K. C., gripped her by the arms. “Go find Meadows. Get to know him. Find out what he wants.” She nodded and slipped away.
He turned to the two Bloat guards, straightened, pulled back his shoulders, and adjusted the fit of his leather jacket. “Well? We burn the daylight.”
Mark settled down with his rump propped on a mostly horizontal slab of asphalt, part of a stack of paving chunks piled at the tip of the southern arm of the blocky U that was Ellis Island, next to the mouth of the tiny little harbor. It was a crisp, clear morning. His breath smoked like a dragon’s as he tried to get comfortable with his plastic plate of lukewarm beans perched on his knees.
“Hey there.”
He started at the voice, looked up furtively, prepared to run. He still wasn’t sure he was entitled to eat. The fooddistribution system on the Rox was pretty rough and ready:
Some plundered steam tables out on the sand, where a pair of truly horrible-looking puswad jokers in stained paper hats ladled out crud to queues of shabby, surly residents. Another joker, as big and as ugly as any two of the bunch who’d hassled him yesterday, stood watch with a pair of lean mean kids, not jokers-which meant they probably were jumpersarmed with bats. They scrutinized him when he took his place in line behind somebody with a head like a burn-victim mushroom growing out of a black leather jacket, but didn’t challenge. He guessed the drill was if you looked too familiar, they figured you were trying to jump seconds and thumped you accordingly.
For a moment he feared they’d belatedly decided he didn’t look familiar enough, but the shadow between him and the sun rising over Manhattan was small. Also familiar.
“Mind if I sit down?” K. C. Strange asked. “No, no. Uh, like, go ahead.”
She hunkered down next to him. He tried hard not to notice the contours of her black Spandex pants. This wasn’t the time or the place or the person. He was an outsider. Just an old nat.
He proffered his plate. She waved him off. “You like the water?” she asked.
“I never thought the smell of the Hudson would be a relief.”
He regretted it immediately. She seemed to be a big Rox booster. But she laughed.
“Well, it isn’t your white-bread world here, that’s for sure.” She glanced down at him. “Sleep okay?”
“Done worse.” Right after the trial he’d spent a few weeks on the street, just wandering, sleeping in alleys or the occasional midnight mission, while Pretorius did all he could, which unfortunately wasn’t much. That had been in summer. The makeshift dorms of the Rox smelled so bad, the stench was like a weight, and the debris rustled constantly with small unseen things, but they kept the winter wind off. He didn’t care that some of the bodies pressed against his were human only by ancestry; they were warm.
“Thought I’d check on you. After all, it isn’t everybody out here I can talk about One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest with.”
“Not even your, uh, your boyfriend?”
Why did you ask that, you nitwit? the little guy who sat in the peanut gallery of his mind asked. It used to be Flash and the Traveler who sat back there and gave him a hard time. Now it was just a little gray guy, anonymous as everybody else in New York. Mark didn’t have a ready answer anyway.
She looked at him from the sides of her eyes. They were gray eyes, pale, almost silver. “He doesn’t read much. What brings you to the Rox?”
“Had a little ... run-in with the law.”
It was funny. Here he’d been a member of the counterculture most of his adult life, even when the original countercultural heavies were all joining brokerage firms or flogging diet plans and self-help seminars on paid-programming TV shows. And now that he was at last genuinely, authentically underground, it embarrassed the hell out of him. Also, he understood in an inchoate sort of way that it wasn’t exactly survival-positive to trot out his personal problems in front of strangers. It’s 1990, and, as Gilbert Shelton used to say, government spies are everywhere.
She laughed. “Come on. It had to be more than that.” He stuck out his lower lip, mulish, and she laughed louder.
“Give me a break. We don’t have informers here, even if President George is coming to town to encourage us all to turn in our neighbors. Take a look over there.”
She pointed with her chin. A shape was just breaking water out in the miniature harbor, streaming water thousandcolored like an oil slick: a translucent glabrosity, a Portuguese man-o’-war the size of Godzilla’s piles. “That’s Charon. Making a late run; he usually doesn’t like to surface by daylight. He’s how you got here, right?”
“Uh, yeah.”
He didn’t know it-he-was called Charon. All he knew was what the joker who looked like a clump of seaweed in an Orioles cap and Coors Light jacket and oozed into the record store to warn him the DEA were on their way had told him: If he thought he might need the sanctuary of the Rox, he ought to blow what roll he carried on a bag of groceries at some late-night bodega, go down to the river, fire up a flashlight, and think real hard about how bad he wanted to go there. It smacked to Mark of clicking his tiny heels together and chanting “There’s No Place Like Home,” three times, but the drug-war dogs were on his track, and if they took him, he’d never get Sprout free, and so he did what he was told.
And the damnedest thing of all, it worked.
“He’s how most people get here. Now look real close. What do you see inside him?”
Mark squinted into the spindrift sun. From this perspective, Charon looked like a grotesque exaggerated glass Oliver Hardy-shaped Christmas-tree ornament; you could just see a hint of face, up near the top. With the late-dawn light shining through his body, you could see—
“Nothing.”
“Good answer. But think about this. Charon never makes dry runs.”
He felt the greasy congealed beans he’d choked down start becoming buoyant. “But—”
“Yeah. And when you come to the wall-Bloat’s Wall that surrounds this place-you start to feel Big Fear. And then you better want to get here real bad. Because if you don’t, you stick-and Charon never stops, either. So the wall holds you in place, and he just sort of oozes out from around you and leaves you on the bottom. Osmosis, like.”
Mark bit his lip and put his plate down on the damp sand. But he took care not to spill it; his appetite might come back in a bit. He’d learned to be practical that way these last few months.
K.C. shaded her face with her hand and looked at him. She was quite pretty, once you got past the crown-of-thorns hair.
“So what’re you really doing on the Rox? You’re not just on the run for knocking over a 7-11.”
“It’s my little girl. My daughter. I need to get her back.”
“She’s on the Rox? Joker or jumper, let me tell you, dude, if she’s here, you don’t really want to see her. Capisc’?”
“No. It isn’t that. She’s in a juvenile detention center. I don’t know which one. I need to find her and get her out.” Something passed behind her ice-fleck eyes. Then her face hardened. “A middle-class wimp who’s spun out on the ice past thirty-something, run a jailbreak? Give me a break. You wouldn’t know the first thing about it.”
“Hey, I can do it!” he exclaimed, outraged. “I can do something, anyway,” he mumbled, coming all over uncertain. “Yeah. Like what?” Her smile taunted him.
“Uhh—” His ears got hot. Aware he’d said too much, he turned quickly away.
“So tell me,” she whispered, right by his ear, “where are your friends, Cap’n Trips?”
When he spun around, she was gone.
“Now, Blaise,” the creature called Bloat said, and tittered. “I heard you. thinking bad thoughts about one of our guests here on the Rox. That won’t do. It won’t do at all, at all.”
Blaise let his nose and upper lip contort in disgust at the stench that washed off the shimmering translucent maggot mass as palpably as the evil black crud that cascaded endlessly down its sides. It wouldn’t do any good to hide his reaction, even though K. C. said it made him look like a fruit bat. Bloat could read his mind.
Blaise hated that. He let the nausea shine back like a beacon, filled his head with images of throwing up, great yellow geysers.
Hovering in attendance, the big cockroach Kafka made a set of sounds like knuckles popping. Kafka was kind of grand vizier to Bloat and was always trying to make sure his boss got the treatment merited by his position as governor of the Rox, and not that earned by his appearance. Kafka didn’t much like the jumpers. He liked Blaise least of all.
“I suppose you’re going to try to tell us what to think now,” Blaise said, very brassy. “Authority has gone to your head, wherever the hell you keep it.”
“No,” Bloat said, and he forgot to titter. “I wish I could tell you what to think. Better yet, I’d like to tell you not to think. But you can’t help thinking, any more than I can help ... hearing you.”
He faltered a little, because Blaise had conjured up a vivid memory of going down on K. C. Strange. Her pubic hair was sparse, dark blonde and very fine. Her flesh was pink, and when he moved his tongue, she moved with it.
“Then why did you send your pet monsters to drag me here?” Blaise asked.
“Ahh. Mark Meadows. The man who once was Cap’n Trips. You plan to harm him.”
“What of it?”
“He is a victim of the straight world’s hatred and fear. I choose to offer him refuge. If he still has his ace powers, he will be an invaluable ally when the nats try to crush us. If he does not ... his body is still warm. He can still attract bullets that might otherwise find homes in joker flesh. I forbid you to touch him.”
Blaise laughed. “What gives you the right, fat thing?”
“He’s the governor of the Rox,” Kafka hissed, his voice like a snake in dry leaves.
Blaise started to give back static, but Bloat had pulled it from his mind already. “Give me a break. We’ve had this discussion before. You need the Rox, which means you need me. And if you think you’re going to change that, Latham might have a few different ideas.”
Latham. That cold fish. He felt a memory of pain deep in his belly and shuddered. He was not ready to square accounts with Latham. Which meant settling Bloat had to be deferred-and worse, the monster knew it.
“Very well, Governor.” He performed a mock bow. Bloat just giggled. “I bow to your authority ... on the Rox. If Mark Meadows takes action against me here, I claim the right of self-defense.”
“Please, Blaise, don’t make this difficult. You have that right. But Meadows isn’t going to move against you. He doesn’t know what you’ve done with his friend, your grandfather. I read his mind, remember?”
He’s an ace, remember?
“He thinks you’re his friend, Blaise.”
“Be that as it may, I have other scores to settle with him. Should he leave the Rox, he leaves your domain, and then he is mine.”
“The mainland is a dangerous place,” Kafka rasped. Blaise frowned at him. He wasn’t naive enough to take the cockroach’s agreement at face value. “Even you could have an accident there, Blaise.”
To his own surprise, Blaise’s reaction was amusement, not anger. “If anyone was going to lay hurt on me, I’d read it. And I’d hurt them worse.” He was bluffing, of course. It was always good to keep the monsters off balance. And even if Bloat had the perseverance to endure the image of K. C.’s lean thighs wrapped around Blaise’s head, he would be able to read only that Blaise was bluffing. Not to what extent.
“Your power is great, Blaise,” Kafka said, “but what’s its range? There’s a thing called a Barrett Light Fifty. A sniper’s rifle. It fires the same round as a fifty-caliber machine gun. It has a range of over a mile. Does your power reach that far, Blaise?” He moved his chitinous limbs in the gesture that served him as a shrug. “I’m afraid somebody might take it in mind to pick you right off the Rox with a shot from the mainland. Meadows has lots of friends among the jokers, Blaise.”
Tight-lipped, Blaise glared at him. Anger seethed, but there was still Latham. “Don’t threaten me,” he said sullenly. “He’s not threatening you, Blaise,” Bloat said earnestly. “I don’t tolerate threats. He’s concerned for you. You’re one of my people too.”
Like hell I am. “You look to use him, don’t you? You think he’d be a big help when the nats come for you.” Bloat said nothing. Nameless sounds rumbled from the depths of him.
“All right. But what if something happens to Meadows that I don’t have anything to do with?” God, he hated truckling to these beasts. “He’s a fugitive. He’s wanted by the authorities.”
“You’re being clever, Blaise,” Bloat said. He almost sounded sharp. “I hate it when you’re clever. But if Meadows falls afoul of circumstances beyond your control, there’s no way we can hold you to account.”
“Then we are understood. Mark Meadows is safe from me.” Blaise bowed again, much lower than before. “Gentlemen, I wish you good day.”—
A furry joker and a nat with his hair shaved in sidewalls and a coiled dragon tattooed on either side of his skull were going at it ankle-deep in the sludgy water. Somebody cranked up the Butthole Surfers on a box by way of sound track. Mark ducked his head reflexively between his shoulders and just walked on with his hands deep in the pockets of his Goodwill windbreaker. Other residents of the Rox, living less in the shadow of the Summer of Love, thronged like so many seabirds on a rock and watched with interest.
He hadn’t brooded as much about K. C.’s being in on his secret as he thought he would. He was too full of the need to do something for Sprout to give much room to other emotions. What he could do he had no idea. Having been all on fire to get here to the Rox, having gotten here alive only because he wanted to so badly, he now was all on fire to get off again. But he had nowhere else to go.
A change in the crowd noise made him stop and look up. A squad of nat-looking youths were moving in on the fight, led by a tall kid in black T-shirt, tight jeans, and a leather jacket. His hair was a startling rich red, blood red, and cut in a brush. He looked somehow familiar.
The spear carriers stopped and cracked their knuckles a respectful three yards away. The redhead walked, not quickly but purposefully, between the combatants. A braided tail hung down the back of his jacket.
Words changed hands. The joker squalled and aimed a roundhouse punch at the interloper. He blocked with a forearm, doubled the joker with a fist in the gut, dropped him with a hammerhand to head, right in the surf.
The tattooed nat lunged at his back. The newcomer half turned, drove a thrust kick into his solar plexus. Dragon Boy staggered back. His antagonist stepped in and kicked, stepped in and kicked, driving him back deeper into the filthy slog of the water. Finally he spun a balletic backkick into one dragon tattoo, his tail scything behind his head, and walked ashore, leaving his opponent bobbing gently.
“You asked about my boyfriend,” a voice behind him said. “There he is.”
He turned as the jumpers ran to fish out the tattooed kid. She was perched on the prongs of a rusted-out front-end loader, squatting with elbows on trim thighs. “You may have noticed things don’t run so smoothly around here,” she said. “They don’t seem to run at all.”
She jutted the chin. “He’s trying to put a stop to that. Start getting things a little organized.”
“Looks like it’s weighted kinda heavily in favor of head busting.”
“A lot of these wags don’t capisc’ much else. “ She shrugged. “He’s kind of like an ace, too, he’s got very advanced mental powers. He does things this way a lot, though. To show he’s real. That’s the kind of leadership the Rox needs.”
“‘Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.’”
She dropped light to the sand. “I don’t need tired old hippie shit.”
He grinned at her. For some reason he was enjoying this. “I’m a tired old hippie.”
“Yeah. Gone prematurely orange, like Ron Reagan, except more electric. And it’s more maybe pineapple, on the sides, anyway. What made you do that to your hair? You look like a total dick.”
They were walking now, along a line of makeshift structures jumbled together of fiberboard and plastic. A couple of kids-whether nat or joker it was impossible to tell under the grime-cooked what Mark hoped wasn’t really a cat on a metal rod over an oil-drum fire.
“It was for the custody trial over who got Sprout-that’s my daughter-my ex-old lady or me. She’s gone real Park Avenue, and my lawyer told me to cut my hair or I’d get blown out of the water in court. So I did.”
“So what happened?”
“I got blown out of the water.”
She spat. “Combine justice. Where’d you get the twotone head?”
“I figured nobody in the world would connect Cap’n Trips the federal fugitive, with his long flowing locks and his goatee, with some trashed-out punker.” He stopped and looked down at her. It was a long way; at six-four, he was a good foot taller. “But you did,” he said. “How’d you recognize me?”
“I-I read the papers sometimes. And you told me your name, for Christ’s sake. You still have a lot to learn about security”
“Oh,” he said, crestfallen. “But, I thought—I mean, you said I was among friends....”
“Yeah, which is why you were getting your skinny ass kicked ‘in when I found you.”
Suddenly the knife was in her hand, its sharp little point poking under his chin, tipping his head back. “There aren’t any friends, any where. Capisc’?”
He nodded, gingerly. The knife hilt parted and snapped around, devouring the blade.
“Learn that and you’ve gone a long way toward surviving on the streets,” she said, walking on. He followed a beat late, still shaken by the crazy intensity he’d seen in those silver eyes. “Tell you the truth, I didn’t make the name at first. It was only when you got that about the Combine. I suddenly thought, who else but an old flower child would know about Ken Kesey? Then it clicked.”
“How’d you know, then? You’re no flower child. You’re hardly any older than Sprout.”
“She’s thirteen, and I’m a lot older than that. Centuries, maybe. Don’t look surprised; I’ve been checking you out.” She laughed, a sound brittle and edgy as old copper. “Tyrone and his butthole buddies would be shitting live rats if they knew who they’d been messing with-you got some powerful references among our heavier jokers. They still remember what you did for Doughboy, like you’re some kind of martyred hero or something.”
He looked away, embarrassed. He’d heard a few things along those lines, never taken them too seriously. Still, there was the joker who’d warned him to blow the record store....
“On the other hand, we have a few prominent citizens right here on the Rox who might be even happier to have their hooks in you than your friendly local DEA. Might be some of them remember the Cloisters-and don’t go all pale and shaky and start having a coronary on me. You’ve still got your secrets. I don’t make a habit of running my head. As I may have told you, snitches ain’t welcome on the Rox.”
“Does your ... friend know?”
“Hey, Blaise is my main man, honey. You’re just some bum I picked up on a beach. More’n that, he’s the main man for the Rox, in a way poor Bloat can never be. If I think he needs information, he’s got it. Okay?”
It wasn’t, but he didn’t see what he could do about it. He had his head cocked, as if listening for an echo. Something she had said... Sometimes it seemed as if he were walking along a slope with depression hanging over him like snowdrift cliffs, and every once in a while it’d land on him in an avalanche, muddle his thinking more than years of constant marijuana buzz ever had.
Whatever bond there’d been between them seemed broken now. He looked at her. “What did you say your boyfriend’s name was?”
“Blaise. Blaise Andrieux. He’s—”
Mark’s head snapped around. The red-haired boy was walking along the beach toward them, and Mark wondered why he hadn’t recognized him at once.
He jumped to his feet and lurched into an ankle-deep run. “Blaise! Blaise, how are you doing, man?”
Blaise walked with tight-butted dancer’s grace through the clinging reeking sand. A satisfied smile was fitted tightly to his face, even if it was taking some effort to keep from shaking his right hand in the air. He’d caught the kid with the dragon tat wrong with a backfist knuckle to the cheekbone and it stung something fierce. But he couldn’t show pain. It wouldn’t do to have his bannermen getting the idea he was human.
He’d bulked up amazingly in the months since he first ran away from his grandfather. His body was just a volcano of boiling growth hormones, and the hot adolescent anger that ran in his veins like live steam had kept him keen on the martial-arts exercises and weight training his grandfather had insisted he maintain. He was already larger than almost anybody of Takisian stock had ever been-anyone who grew so far beyond the classic somatotype would be destroyed as a monster-and his Takisian-derived muscles were denser and more efficient than a human’s, his neurons firing and recovering quicker.
All of which was to say that while he’d grown a bit bored with the effortless control his mind power gave him, he had discovered the existential pleasures of kicking ass.
He told K.C. it was to set an example for the others, of course. To show that he wasn’t just some effete egghead ace, just a wimp, like-well, like his grandfather. That was because K.C. wasn’t tough, even if she was smart and, when the mood hit her, as happily savage as any of the jumpers. She liked to rationalize Blaise’s violence by imagining that he was crafting a New Order of some sort out of the Rox rabble. Since she amused him, it amused him to play along.
Meanwhile, he was enjoying the animal pleasures, the morning light almost warm on his face, the breeze blowing stiff enough from seaward that he could smell the ocean over bloathlack and New Jersey, the tingling muscle memory of flesh-on-flesh impact, his bannermen murmuring respectfully behind him. “Did you see the way he straightened those fuckers out?”
He heard someone calling his name. He looked up. The sensual mood turned to dust and blew away. The hated stilt figure of Mark Meadows was running like a horrible scarecrow with an orange do, right along the beach, right at him, waving his arms and calling his name.
Blaise was stupefied. He must be some kind of monster. How can he be so bold?
“Blaise! Blaise, man.” Meadows stopped a few feet away, looked him up and down. “It’s good to see you. How long has it been? A year?”
“I, uh. I think so, Mark.”
Merde! He makes me feel thirteen again.
“You’re lookin’ good, man. Growin’ up and fillip’ out. “
I should have fucked your daughter in the ass the way Latham fucked me. She was a beautiful little vegetable. She could have been a marvelous toy, and I could break her and throw her away if I wished....
“Thanks,” he said. His lips tasted like paper.
Mark’s watery gaze flicked past Blaise at the bannermen, then back to the boy. “So what, uh, what brings you to the Rox, man? Pigs come down on you too?”
“Yes. Yes, Mark, I guess they did.”
Meadows nodded sagely. “Nail that stands out must be hammered down, huh? These’re tough times to be different, man.”
Yes, they are. And I’ll show you just how tough.... “So, have you seen your grandpa recently, man? I, I really need to talk to him about something.”
Blaise felt himself smile. It wasn’t feigned. “Real recently.”
“He’s doing very well. What do you need to talk to him about?”
“It’s kind of personal, man. I’m sorry.”
Blaise gave a petulant little flip of his shoulders.
“Hey, I’d tell you if I could, you know that. But you’re young, and I just hate to involve you, y’know?” He glanced around. “Well, I guess I’ll catch you around. Good seeing you again, man.” Meadows turned and walked away.
Incredible, he thought at the narrow retreating back. Such arrogance. Tell me now he doesn’t wish me harm, dear Governor.
But he’s still safe from me. Oh yes, so very safe.
K.C. was still hunkered on the sand where he’d left her. Her arms were around her knees, and her eyes were hooded. “Tell me one thing,” she said, “and tell me straight. Is that true what you said, that the reason you came to the Rox, the reason you blew off your store, your being an ace, your whole comfortable little fantasyland life, was all for this daughter of yours?”
“Yes.”
She stood. “You’re a real case, buster. See you around.”
He didn’t see her the next day. He didn’t expect to, and was disappointed anyway. In the chilly, fetid, humid dorm that night he reflected that he always seemed to be attracted to women who didn’t see him the next day.
Ha. Attracted to her. There’s a thought. For a moment, the voice n his head sounded like the familiar banter of JJ Flash, Esquire. But sharp-edged as he was, Flash was never quite that gratuitously nasty. And Mark’s friends had dwindled away to nothingness within weeks after the trial. Actually, they’d drowned in booze for a few weeks, like the rest of his mind, and when he got a grip on himself they were gone. He wondered if he’d ever get them back.
Maybe he didn’t deserve to. He had deserted them, after all-flushed them down the john on his lawyer’s advice, to avoid a holding rap that would scuttle his chances of hanging onto his daughter. He had kept five vials, one for each persona. Three had been broken, one had sufficed to save the life of a child-at the cost of his secret, his life aboveground, and Sprout. The final one had gotten him out of Family Court just as the DEA was closing in on him. He had abandoned his friends. Maybe he had murdered them. And it hadn’t done one damned bit of good. He wouldn’t come back if he was one of them.
He went to sleep.
She caught up with him the next day, just after noon. They went for a walk again, and just talked. About books, about the fucked-up world they lived in, about the things Mark had been through, as an ace or beyond. Never about her, though; the times he asked she went quiet and spiky, and he quit after a while. She was a bright, bitter, and all-tooknowing kid, cynical and vulnerable by random turns.
She was also beautiful. He tried not to think about that. He settled into the routine of life on the Rox. Or nonroutine. Aside from the steam tables, which came to life sometime in the morning and sometime toward sunset, the only rhythms the Rox knew were the sun and the tides and what people felt like cranking through their ghetto blasters. Mark was going mad. Somewhere his daughter was trapped in a nightmare she couldn’t possibly comprehend. He had to help her. But not even Pretorius-sticking his neck way out-had been able to turn up clue one to her whereabouts.
“I can’t tell him.”
The night wind unreeled flame and light from the tiki torches like a kid jerking at a roll of toilet paper. Pairs of jumpers sparred with one another on the landfill margin behind the Admin Building in the uncertain light.
Blaise paused in mopping his forehead with a towel. He always insisted on clean fresh towels being brought over from the mainland for his showers and workouts. He got them.
“What do you mean, you can’t tell him?” His voice took on a dangerous edge.
“It means so much to him. I feel like I’m ... like I’m using him.”
Anger hit him. Trembling anger. She saw it in his face and stepped back.
You bitch. You bitch! Are you beginning to feel loyal to him?
“You haven’t used people before? You haven’t used people up? Think, K. C. Think hard. You’re a jumper, remember? Jumpers use people. Especially burned-out old nat pukes.”
“He’s not a nat, he’s an ace”She stiffened as if expecting to receive a blow. “Besides ... besides, I’m through with that. You know that. We need to build something out here, something strong that the Combine can’t just sweep away like a kid knocking down a bunch of blocks.”
“You’re starting to sound like Bloat.”
“I thought I was sounding like you. You with your talk of a New Order. Is that all that it is, just talk?”
I should kill her now. But the thought fell like a dead leaf through his consciousness, without heat, without weight. He already knew he was through with her. But instead of destroying her here and now, he would use her. Use her up in the destruction of Captain fucking Trips.
I’m learning patience, Grandpere. You’ll be so proud of me when I tell you.
“No. And that that’s why you’re going to tell him. We need his help. We, we need his ace power when the Combine comes to call. Besides, you’ll be giving him what he wants most in the world, won’t you?”
She looked at him a moment, eyes glinting like coins in the firelight. She stood tiptoe to kiss his cheek. “Yeah,” she breathed huskily in his ear, and kissed him on the adolescent down of his cheek. “Sometimes, Blaise, you’re almost human.” She turned and ran away.
I’ll pay you for that one too, he thought.
“She’s in the Reeves Diagnostic and Development Institute, in Brooklyn. Borough Park area. It’s a Kings County joint; there’s some kind of deal down between the city, the state, and the counties to share custody, so they can keep her circulating.”
He was sitting with his butt planted in damp frigid sand, squinting at the occasional stab of a patrol-boat spotlight. It was cold as hell tonight, but you had to be flat desperate to retreat into one of the crumbling turn-of-the-century buildings crammed together on Ellis. She hunkered behind him, seemingly inured to cold in her thin jacket and thinner pants. “‘Diagnostic and Development’?” he said.
“Yeah. Combine sure talks purty, don’t it? Pig Latin for ‘kid jail,’ pal. It’s in a pretty decent neighborhood, never run too far down, starting to maybe catch a case of the yuppies. Not too bad. As hellholes go.”
He turned and looked at her, disbelief struggling with the will to believe on the battlefield of his face. “How could you find out, when the best lawyer in Jokertown drew a blank?”
“Best lawyer in Jokertown is by definition not a juvenile delinquent, darlin’. Capisc’? ‘You wanna find a missing kid, ask an outlaw,’ or words to that effect.”
He jumped up, walked toward the water, walked back, sidestepping a drunk or drugged joker face down in the sand. He began to pace in front of K. C. “I have to make plans. I have to do this right. Think now, Mark. Think.” He plumped down in the depression he’d made before, feeling heavy and overwhelmed.
“Maybe you should get some sleep first.” She bent over and kissed him lightly on the forehead, then melted into black.
Mark stood on the sidewalk in front of the Blythe van Rensselaer Clinic with tears standing like small hot crowds on his face. Tachyon wasn’t in, the surly and unfamiliar face behind the desk of the strangely deserted reception room had told him. And when the doctor was in, he wasn’t receiving visitors. Any visitors.
Cody was dead. The news lay in Mark’s stomach like a gallon of ice. That lady had meant so much to Tach, had done so much to bring him back from the terrible events of the Atlanta Convention.
Sprout had always loved her. And now she was gone, apparent victim of Tachyon’s enemies.
Tach had crawled back into the bottle. As he had when honor had forced him to destroy the mind of Blythe van Rensselaer. It would not be easy for him to escape a second time.
And that was tough.
Mark rubbed spidery hands over his face as if scrubbing his cheeks clean with the tears. As he closed his eyes, he saw his daughter’s hand reaching out for him again, while he asCosmic Traveler sank through the floor of the courthouse and the bailiffs closed in.
I’m sorry, Doc. She needs me worse than you do. No matter what’s happening to you.
I’m sorry.
He raised his head. A patrol car prowled by. The flat black face of the cop on the passenger side seemed to track him through the chicken-wire mesh that covered the windows of all the cars from the jokertown precinct as it slid sharklike through the sightseers huddled in schools against the strangeness of the scene.
Time for my boot heels to be wandering, his nascent street-sense told him.
He stuck his hands in the pocket of his army jacket and walked away. But not too fast.
The Demon Princes had shot out the streetlights again. The man walking home from swing shift down the Jokertown side street paid no mind. It would take more than cracks in the sidewalk to disrupt the primo ballerino grace with which he walked, as it would take more than the chill of a New York January evening to require him to add the threadbare windbreaker thrown over one shoulder to the black Cinderella T-shirt. Besides, he saw in the dark like a leopard.
His chest and shoulders were those of a much taller man, swollen with muscle. His head was small and narrow, the features almost elfin. His eyes were slanted, the color of lilacs. He diverged far enough from the human somatotype to be considered a joker. Yet he carried no trace of the wild-card virus.
He wasn’t a nat, either. He wasn’t human at all.
“Hey, man.” The voice came from the dark alley, a few feet away to his right: a sick-crow caw. The lilac eyes never wavered. He had no time for importunate groundlings. And if it was more than a panhandler ...
Seventeen months ago, a nat youth had attempted to mug him at gunpoint on a street much like this one. The youth was unduly confident in the superstitious terror in which the denizens of this vast, reeking, unaesthetic jumble of a city held their primitive firearms, or perhaps his confidence was chemically enhanced. He had been so little challenge that the man with lilac eyes had been merciful. There was a chance the boy had received medical attention in time to keep from bleeding to death after having his arm torn off at the shoulder.
“burg,” the voice said, quieter now. “Durg at-Morakh. It’s you, isn’t it, man?”
He froze, turned slowly. The tall gaunt figure that shuffled toward him from blackness into mere darkness did not much resemble the owner of that voice as he remembered him. Still, the pale eyes of a being shaped by gene engineering and training to be the consummate bodyguard were not to be deceived by a few alterations in silhouette.
“Dr. Meadows.” Durg performed a brief bow, accompanied by a hand gesture.
The taller man stood there in a posture of helplessness. Durg waited, legs braced, head up. He would maintain that pose all night or all week: awaiting orders.
“Uh, how’s life, man?”
“My job as a stevedore provides adequate exercise. The pay affords me such comfort as this overly warm and insufficiently civilized world can provide.” Thin lips smiled. “Should I require more funds, my coworkers are ever eager to wager on contests of strength and dexterity. Some of your people are dismally slow learners, lord. I would hope your own fortunes have changed for the better.”
“No. Not really. Except-except I’ve found my little girl.”
“I rejoice that the Little Mistress has been discovered. Does your government still hold her captive?”
“Yeah.” Mark bit his lip and shuffled his feet. “I-I have to get her back. God only knows what she’s going through.”
“You mean, then, to employ force?”
Mark’s gaze rummaged among the fissures in the pavement. He nodded. “You know I’m not comfortable with this kind of thing. But I’m desperate, man. I’m really strung out. I need to know, will you help me?”
“Does the sun yet shine on Avendrath Crag?”
“Beg pardon?”
“A Morakh saying, lord. So long as the sun of Takis shines, so long as the great rock of Avendrath shall stand-so long shall the loyalty of a Morakh run true.”
“It’ll mean breaking the law”
The elfin head tipped back, rang laughter like the pealing of a big silver bell. “I care as much for the laws of your kind as you care what legislation dogs might pass. Had you listened to me, you would have defied the law long since and fought to keep your daughter by force or stealth.”
“I wasn’t ready, man. I-I still believed in justice.”
“Your world entertains many quaint superstitions. What now, my lord?”
“Now I’m gonna get Sprout back,” Mark said. “Whatever it takes.”
Bloat said he hated pity. His visitor pitied him, and he found it oddly pleasurable. What the man didn’t feel was repugnance. That made all the difference.
“Dr. Meadows,” he said, “welcome.”
Mustelina and Andiron took their cue and left. Meadows stood blinking up at Bloat’s bloatblack-slimy sides. “Thanks, uh, Governor. Like, to what do I owe the honor?”
You’re dying to know what’s become of your friend, Bloat thought, and couldn’t help but giggle. The poor man. Should I tell you where he is?
“I understand you have a project in mind.”
The tall man swallowed. Bloat heard him turn up the deception card and toss it away without hesitation, as if he were unused to its use. How rare that was.
“It’s my daughter, Governor.” He glanced at Kafka. “I have to get her back.” With or without your permission. He didn’t speak the words, but of course Bloat heard them.
“You don’t need my permission,” Bloat said, and tittered at the way Mark jumped to hear his own thoughts quoted. “But you have it. My blessings, even. More than that, Doctor. I want to offer my help.”
“What-what do you mean, man?”
“You want to see if you can bring your friends back. Don’t look so surprised, Doctor; you’ve got to know I can read your mind. I know what you need. You need certain drugs and a safe place to work. I can offer those things.”
“What do you want from me?”
Bloat clucked. “My, my. The Last Hippie has gotten cynical.”
“It’s just the way the world works, man.”
“Exactly. Dr. Meadows, you’ve felt the anger of the straight world-the anger and the fear. We’ve offered you shelter from it.”
“Yeah, thanks, man, like I really appreciate—”
“Wait. That’s understood. I want to make sure you understand that this can’t last. The nats-the straights-won’t let us defy them forever. They have to reassert their power. To destroy us for being different and daring to hold our heads up and not be ashamed.”
Meadows nodded. “You think the Combine will move in on you. Makes sense.”
“The Combine? Oh, you’ve been talking to K.C. Strange. Yes. We’re inevitably going to be attacked, and we will fight. What I ask in exchange for my help is that you fight beside us when the time comes.”
He read Meadows’s hesitation and, stifled his own feelings of disappointed anger and I thought you would be different. “I know it’s a big step. Asking you to cut yourself off completely from the nat world. But it’s really a fait accompli, isn’t it, Doctor? The straight world’s rejected you. It’s hunting you like a vicious animal. Do you really have anything left to lose?”
“No,” Meadows said quietly. “Like, I guess not.” He raised his head. “I’m with you, man.”
Bloat giggled happily. “Marvelous! And now I have something—”
“Just one thing. When I get Sprout back, I have to find out what’s happened to Tachyon. If he’s in trouble, my friends and I will have to get him out. Then I’ll, like, be happy to help you.”
Uh-oh, Bloat thought. He switched in mid-sentence. “—something to ask you. What do you think of Hieronymous Bosch?”
Meadows’s eyes lit. “ I love him, man. He’s my favorite. Him and M.C. Escher. And, uh, Peter Max.”
When Mark had left, Kafka said, “You should have told him to go to Blaise for help hunting Tachyon. It would have been amusing.”
Bloat’s jellyfish sides heaved. The black ran glistening down. “I need them both,” he said. “I need all the help I can get.”
“You toyed with the notion of telling him, though, didn’t you? About Tachyon.”
“Blaise is-he’s like a force of nature. I don’t dare challenge him. He’ll destroy us all. It’s all I can do to get him to keep a lid on his taste for atrocity, and that’s only here on my island.”
Kafka produced clicking sounds with his chitinous joints. “Someday, Kafka. Someday we’ll face down the nats and win. Then maybe Mark Meadows will hear a few things that’ll raise his eyebrows. And then maybe Jumpin’ Jack Flash will burn pretty Blaise fucking Andrieux down to a cinder. Someday.”
“We’re all secure here,” K.C. Strange said. “Bloat’s people are keeping the gawkers away.”
Mark swallowed, nodded convulsively. He didn’t look up from his work. “Ready in a minute, man. Don’t rush me.” The metal table was rickety, its washers rattling at every random gust that bulled its way into the fiberboard shack. The light from the alcohol lamp was thin and thready as a dying woman’s pulse. Conditions were not ideal. But Mark in his way was an artist, who knew how to work around the limitations of his surroundings and his media. And this was a familiar task, even after so many months he didn’t care to count. In the doing of it, he was even able to take a certain shelter: from thought, from demands the world and he laid upon him that he realized he in all likelihood could not fulfill. K. C. sat down and drew her knees under her chin. Her eyes glowed like coins in the lamplight as she watched Mark measure powder into glittering mounds of color.
Something passed behind Mark’s eyes. His hand faltered, but none of the precious powder fell from the scoop. Even Bloat had only been able to obtain a fraction of the substances Mark needed. Enough to summon two of his friends for perhaps an hour apiece. Not necessarily the two he would have chosen.
He let his hand rest on the cold thin-gauge tabletop, suddenly uncertain. “I think there’s something wrong with Tach,” he said.
K. C. shifted her weight with a mouse rustle.
“This isn’t like him. He’d never give up the clinic. He’s stronger than he was back in the Forties. The clinic made him strong. It gave him something to live for.”
“Fucking give it up!” Her voice rang like brass knucks on a steel surgical table. “He’s ditched you. He’s ditched the jokers and you and every fucking body. Sometimes people just turn their back and walk away from you, capisc’?”
He lowered his head and shut his eyes in pain. Instantly she was by his side, hand on arm. “I’m sorry, babe,” she said. “I’ve gotten some pretty rough licks from life. Made me pretty cynical, okay? I don’t have to lay it off on you.”
“No,” Mark said. “No, it’s okay. I still cant believe he’s abandoned me. I think something’s happened to him.”
Her nails dug into his arm. “What are you going to do about it?”
“Nothing.” The word fell to the tabletop with scarcely more sound than a drop of sweat. “Not now. I hope he’s okay.”
“I’ll do anything I can to help him-later. But Sprout that’s stronger than friendship. I’m sorry.”
She ran her hand up to his shoulder. He started to shy away, then relaxed with an audible sigh.
“You got nothin’ to apologize for, babe,” she said, low in her throat.
He emptied the contents of the scoop into a tiny vial, then stoppered it quickly, as if expecting the orange powder to escape. “Let’s go.”
K.C. followed him out onto the reeking beach. Mark stood with his feet spread wide in the sand, twisted the plastic cap off and tossed the orange powder down his throat. He sighed explosively, lowered his arm.
Then he burst into flame.
K. C. screamed and threw herself forward. Furnace heat threw her back. She smelled her eyebrows scorching. Reeling back, she saw that Mark was not fighting the flame. He had staggered several steps away from her, but now he seemed to be letting the fire have its way with him. “God, oh God, Mark, what have you done?” He was charring down to a mummy right before her eyes. She had read that happened when you burned. She never thought it could happen so fast. God, he’s already down to my size! The mummy spread its arms.
K.C. screamed. The flames began to die, seeming to be sucked into the burning man. Astonished, she saw a flash of unburned skin, and then a small man in an orange jogging suit was standing there, grinning, while a final few flames chased each other through his shock of red hair.
“So you’re the kind of babe Mark’s hanging with these days,” he said. “Bit less Park Avenue than the last one, but I’m not sure that’s not an improvement.”
Her first attempt at speech failed. She swallowed and tried again. “Who are you?”
He laughed. “Jumpin’ Jack Flash, at your service, dear.” He spread his hands and a tiny fireball arced from palm to palm. “It’s a gas-gas-gas.”
“Then it’s true. He really was Cap’n Trips.”
The fragment of fire sizzled and died on the upturned palm. Its echo still glimmered in his eyes as he raised them to hers and said, “He still is Cap’n Trips, doll.”
He twisted left and right, the locked his hands, held them up over his head and back, stretching.
“Let’s do it,” he said. An orange glow sprang up in the air around him, without apparent source.
K.C. looked around nervously. “Jesus, do you have to do that? We don’t need to advertise the fact that Cap’n Trips is back to the immediate world.”
“Yeah, you’re right. When you’re right, you’re right. I don’t need the FIX. It’s just been so damn long, and I’m used to going in style ... oh, well.”
He flexed his knees and leapt into the sky.
Half an hour later, Flash touched down again, flipping a finger at the white foam wake of a harbor patrol boat churning outside the wall a few hundred yards away.
“Officious fucks. Don’t even let me have a final flourish. ‘Scuse me just a moment, hon. My exits aren’t quite as stagy as my entrances.” He stepped around the end of the shack.
K.C. stood, brushed wet sand off the taut seat of her black leather pants. “I’ve seen some scaly shit,” she said, “I’ve done some. But this could take some getting used to.”
She heard a strange whump like gasoline lighting off, and then a moan. She ran to find Mark Meadows lying in the fetal position in a depression in the sand, buck naked and turning blue.
She helped him sit up. Inside the shack was an army blanket. She brought it, wrapped it around Mark’s shoulders. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get inside out of the cold.”
K.C. threaded one of Mark’s arms around her shoulders, urged him to his feet. He lurched into the shack like a radio mast that had come to life and decided to take a hike. Inside she sat him on a second blanket thrown over a pad of old newspapers.
Mark turned his face toward the wall. His shoulders shook. “You’re crying!” She touched his shoulder. He shrugged her off. “Why? What’s the matter?”
“I can’t do it,” he sobbed.
“What? What are you talking about? You’re an ace again. You changed. You got to fly. How long has it been, babe?”
“Too-too long. I don’t know” He sat up shaking his head. Tears streamed down his wasted cheeks, glinting like melted butter in the yellow lamplight. “I don’t think I can handle it.”
“What do you mean? You ought to be high as a kite right now. You’ve won.”
“No. You don’t understand. They won. I’m not innocent anymore, man. I’ve lost the purity. Lost the dream.”
“It’s the drugs. You’re just crashing.” She put her arm around him. “You’ll be okay in a while.”
“No!” He tore away, lunged to his feet. “You don’t understand. I’m no good any more.”
“You’d do anything, right? For her?” He nodded.
“Mark. Listen to me. That’s love. That’s loyalty. I’ve seen aces, dude. I know plenty of people who can do weird stuff. Shit, I can chase people out of their own heads and party hearty inside, bust up all the furniture if I want to. But to have that much loyalty to a person, to love her that much—” It was her turn to move away. “Nobody’s ever felt that way about me. Nobody.”
He slumped to the floor. “Yeah. I let you down too. I let everybody down. And now Sprout shit, man, I can’t even help her.”
“What?”
“I can’t do it any more. It just isn’t right. I wanted to be more than an ace. I wanted to be a hero. But that’s all just illusion.” He hung his head. “At least for me it is.”
“What the fuck?” She grabbed him under the arms, hauled him to his feet with a strength she didn’t know she had. “Listen to me, you son of a bitch. You don’t think you got what it takes to be a hero? Then be a fucking villain.”
“The world thinks you’re fucked up. The world thinks you’re evil. The world thinks it’s a good idea to stick your little girl in kid jail where the other girls can use her for a punching bag. Where sooner or later some counselor is going to get the idea how very pretty her blonde little head would look bobbing up and down on his needle dick. Decide that’s just the therapy she needs.”
“Don’t say that!”
“Don’t tell me you don’t know! It’s the only thing that kept you going all these months. What brought you out of the gutter and onto the Rox. It’s real, Jack. I can tell you it is. Okay? We are not talking hearsay. This doesn’t just happen in Linda Blair movies. I know. I fucking know.”
She had backed him into the wall. He slid slowly down. “But what am I gonna do?”
“Welcome to the jungle, babe. You’re on the Rox now.”
“You’re an outlaw. The first thing you do is accept that. The second is, kick some ass.”
He stared at his hands. “Yeah. I guess so.”
Her leather jacket slumped down beside him. He jumped, looked up at her.
She was skinning her Jane’s Addiction T-shirt off over her head. Her breasts were small and conical. The nipples stood up into points.
“ I lied,” she said, undoing her fly. “There is something else you’re going to do first.”
He was instantly hard. To his horror, his erection tented up the front of the blanket he had wrapped around him poncho-style. He tried to edge away.
“But, uh, Blaise—” he stammered. “But Bloat—”
“But nothing.” She covered his mouth with hers.
There were eight million stories in the naked city. Most of them were about assholes. The Great and Powerful Turtle looked over the monitor screens around the control console of his shell and thought pissed-off thoughts about how there was never anything good on television.
He canted his shell and slid down for a look at the crowds by Madison Square. “Imagine,” he said aloud. “I’m up here looking out for that asshole, George Bush.”
The president was in town to confer with the new mayor. A number of the more prominent public aces had volunteered to help ensure there were no incidents, with the grudging acquiescence of police and city officials. It wasn’t that they liked Bush. The very idea that anyone might think he did pissed Turtle off no end. But this jumper thing was getting way the hell out of hand. It was more than mere media hype.
Given the country’s current mood, anything that happened to Bush was liable to be blamed on aces and the Medellin cartel, a connection George had done so much to establish in the public mind. And if an ace, even a jumper, had anything to do with actually harming the president...
It would be easy to call the consequences unthinkable. But they were all too thinkable. They’d make McCarthy look like the Phil Donahue Show. So the Turtle was up here farting around to watch over a man who’d just as soon see him in a concentration camp. Great. Just fucking great.
A disturbance below. A stout black woman, hat askew, sat on the sidewalk. A skinny youth elbowed his way through the tourist throngs clutching her handbag by a strap.
“Don’t these assholes ever give it a break?” Turtle asked the air. He punched up the megaphone. “Okay, dickweed, this is the Great and Powerful Turtle. Hold it right there or I’ll spoil your whole damn day.”
The purse snatcher looked left and right, but not up. “What a weenie,” Turtle said, and winced as he felt his amplified words reverberate through his armor plate. Forgot to dump the mike. Great.
He reached down with his teke hand and grabbed the kid by the ankle, swooping him into the air. While the crowd gawked and pointed—”git a picture o’ that, Martha, or the folks’ll never believe us back in Peoria”—he carried the kid, the top of his head ten feet off the pavement, back to where the stout black woman was picking herself up. He shook the kid up and down until he let go of the handbag. “Oh, thank you, Mr. Turtle,” the woman called. “God bless you.”
“Yeah, lady, anytime.” He stuffed the kid in a dumpster and flew off.
“George fucking Bush,” he said. “Jesus.” Fortunately he’d turned the microphone off.
“This is never gonna work,” Mark Meadows said, feeling his head again. The Grecian Formula he’d doused his head with to cover the punk racing stripes had reacted funny with some of the dye, and now it felt as if he’d been moussing with old paint.
Up front in the driver’s seat, Durg impassively kept his eyes on the road and his hands upon the wheel, just like the old song. His head looked odd sprouting from his collar and broad, suit-coated shoulders, like some narrow vegetable.
Frowning, K.C. scrunched herself farther down next to Mark. “Quit fussing, will you? Jesus.”
Mark plucked at his tan corduroy sport coat and improbably wide maroon tie, and ran his fingers under the harness of his shoulder holster. There was nothing in the shoulder holster; Mark had a terror of guns, and like a good modern liberal knew for a fact that if he carried one, it would instantly take possession of his mind and cause him to rush into a subway and start shooting black teenagers. But K.C. insisted he at least wear the holster so he’d have the appropriate bulge under his left arm.
“I’m never gonna pass for a cop. I look like a total geek.”
“You don’t know much about cops, do you? We should have got you a bad hairpiece too. And maybe strapped a pillow to your stomach so you’d look like you’d put in your time on a Dunkin Donuts stool. Besides” she turned and stretched quickly to kiss his cheek—”you are kind of a geek, babe. Lucky for you I got kinky tastes.”
He shuddered. “ I don’t know what I think I’m doing. I got no right to involve you and Durg in this.”
K.C. fell back against the seat, bounced briefly. “You don’t have a gun, sugar, so you couldn’t hold one to my head.”
“ I live to serve,” Durg said.
Mark’s loosely strung-together collection of features twitched in irritation. “That’s just a cliche, man. Your life is your own.”
“Perhaps it is a cliche among your kind. To the Morakh, it is biological fact. For me, a master is like food-I can go without, but only for a short period of time. Then I must weaken and die.”
“Things work different on our world, man.”
“My genes are not of this world. They make me what I am.”
“You must hate what they’ve done to you,” K.C. said. “The people who created you.”
He glanced over the butte of his shoulder. The look in the lilac eyes was amusement. It hit her like a blow. “What they have done to me, lady, is give me life. And strength, and agility, and skill. They have given me perfection. Among your kind I am an ace. Among Takisians I am an object of awe, even terror. Are these things not glorious? All they ask of me in return is that I do what I am uniquely equipped to do. I see no disparity.”
“A man who knows what he wants.” K. C. leaned forward and breathed in Mark’s ear. “I think I love him.”
She nipped Mark’s earlobe. He blushed furiously. She giggled.
Durg cleared his throat. “We approach our objective.”
“All right.” K. C. subsided in her seat. “I’m back to being a bad little prisoner girl now. Kind of like a skinny, mean Michelle Pfeiffer.”
Her short neutral-colored hair had been washed and combed out wet into bangs. She wore a scuffed leather jacket over tight black pants and a white T-shirt with three defiant transverse slashes across the belly. No spikes; when they committed you to the juvie justice system, they relieved you of props like that. She did look like a skinny, mean Michelle Pfeiffer.
“So, how’d you get this gig, anyway, Durg? What’s a Takisian doing hanging out with a skinny Earthling biochemist kind of guy?”
“I came to this planet with Prince Zabb of House Ilkazam, cousin and blood-foe of the being you know as Dr. Tachyon. Dr. Meadows, more loyal a friend than Tachyon deserves, fought to aid him. In one of his avatars he bested me in single combat, thereby winning my loyalty. I have found him a good master, if somewhat prone to forget his servant.”
“Sounds kinky,” K.C. said.
They topped a hill, rolled down a block of shabbygenteel stone buildings with plenty of wrought iron at ground level. On the right, Reeves showed the street a blank high wall looped with strands of razor tape, a gate of wrought-iron spikes.
“Why are you slowing so soon, man?” Mark asked as Durg braked.
Durg nodded his narrow head. “That sedan at the head of the next block. It has two occupants in the front, more perhaps in back. I am disquieted.”
“The windshield’s so dark,” K.C. said, “how can you see anything?”
“He can see, man,” Mark said. “Should I drive on?”
“You’re being paranoid, Durg,” K.C. said.
They were almost at the gate, which stood open. On the far wall a small bronze plaque proclaimed RICHARD REEVES JUVENILE DIAGNOSTIC AND DEVELOPMENTAL CENTER through patina and soot. On the near wall a sign said DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS IN THIS AREA.
Beyond those walls was Sprout.
From what Tach had told him of Takisa pang of guilt here, over possibly leaving his friend in a tight place-a tendency to err on the side of caution would be a highly desirable trait in a Morakh. K.C.’s right, he told himself. “No. We go in.”
Durg turned his head a fraction to the right, flicked Mark with his lilac eyes. Mark swallowed. Years of association with the alien told him that was the closest a Morakh could come to open mutiny. He set his jaw and tried to look determined.
Reeves occupied an outsize lot with a paved courtyard. Durg cranked the wheel to bring the car around in front of the cement steps behind a station wagon with heavy wire mesh in the rear windows—
And abruptly slammed the stick into reverse, Mark’s chin bouncing off the front seat back as the LeBaron accelerated backward.
Not even Morakh hearing and Morakh reflexes were quite quick enough. The long sedan with the tinted windshield was already blocking the gate, trapping them.
“Daigla bal’nagh!” Durg braked to a bucking stop and reached inside his dark suit coat. He did have a gun in his shoulder holster, a Colt 10-mm auto that would shoot through an engine block and knock down a man in body armor.
K. C. dug nails into his arm like talons. “No! Look.” Men in flak jackets, dark blue baseball caps, and identical aviator sunglasses were pouring out of the building and around the brick sides, pointing shotguns and M16s at the car.
“Holy shit,” Mark gulped. His hand dived into the inside pocket of his sport coat.
“Come out of the car with your hands up,” Lieutenant Norwalk said through the megaphone. He stood tall at the head of the front steps, ignoring the SWAT team’s frantic signals to seek cover. He knew these New Age wimps. Mark Meadows would never hurt him. Norwalk bet he didn’t even carry a gun.
As he lowered the loudspeaker he cheated his face slightly to the right, so that the Action News team on the roof opposite would be sure to catch his best profile. He was a rangy man who really and truly thought he looked like actor Scot Glenn.
The LeBaron’s windows were tinted, so that he couldn’t see clearly inside. But he thought he saw movement, and a ripple of tension among the crouching SWAT men confirmed it.
The rear passenger’s side door nearest Norwalk began to open. He put his head back and waited, conscious that even the way the late-morning bluster ruled the sandy hair brushed across his balding crown was reminiscent of Scot Glenn.
Out of the car stepped ... George Bush.
“Hey, kid,” the SWAT cop yelled from behind the trunk of a cruiser blocking the street above Reeves. “Get back. Get out of here.”
The boy kept coming. A tall athletic-looking red-haired kid in a leather jacket, who obviously thought he was Major Bad News.
“Fuck,” the policeman said under his breath. They could have the fucking news teams set up to cover the big event, but they couldn’t detail enough people to keep civilians from wandering into the line of fire. Too much danger of alerting the quarry. Oh, yeah. He should have stayed in the army. He stood up, flipping on the safety of his Remington 870 riot gun. Then he stopped, leaned the shotgun against the car, and began taking off his uniform.
Blaise knelt beside a pair of officers behind the sedan parked across the gate into Reeves. The policeman’s uniform was a couple of sizes too big, especially in the gut, but that wasn’t too overt. With his riot helmet and dark glasses and his tail tucked down inside his flak jacket, nobody spared him a glance.
He was filled with wild hot energy, the energy of repletion, like taking a woman for the first time, or mind-controlling a man into cutting his own throat with a razor. The kind of energy that needed occasional venting so it wouldn’t get the better of him. It was coming down payback time on Mark Meadows and K.C. fucking Strange. He knew how to savor these moments.
Thanks to New York regulations, when you dropped a dime on someone, you still actually dropped a dime. Bloat would suspect. At Blaise’s first unguarded moment, Bloat would know. But he would never take action any length of time after the fact. Bloat needed the jumpers, needed their drugs, needed their numbers when the Man came to call.
More than that, Bloat was too cowardly to burn Blaise in cold blood. He was too sensitive. The ultimate eighties kind of guy.
Blaise giggled. A couple of cops briefly turned faces hidden by sunsplash on visors toward him, but their body language showed neither surprise nor concern. Giggling is more common on the firing line than jackboot-opera cop shows want you to believe.
Then the cops’ body language changed to stone confusion.
“What is all this here? What is this? I approve of men on the front lines in the war against crime in our streets showing initiative, but don’t you think this is taking things too far?”
No, Lieutenant Norwalk thought, bullshit-no way. This cannot be the president. But still-he looked like Bush, and he acted like Bush, and he had that prissy little mouth ... and Christ knew he talked like George Bush.
The SWAT troopies were back on their heels, lifting weapons off-line in confusion. They couldn’t quite believe it was Bush either, but if it was, their nifty Hard Corps vests with SWAT in big tape letters on the back were not going to keep their asses out of Leavenworth on a long-term lease if they pointed fucking guns at him. And it would be just like the weenie to pull a spot inspection of some chickensquat D-home on zero notice.
No, no, where’s the Secret Service? Reality got hold of Norwalk’s brain again, and he opened his mouth to give orders to grab the impostor. Then a small nasty-looking number in black leather stuck her Michelle Pfeiffer snub nose out the door behind the pseudopresident. Her pale eyes met his.
“Put down your guns, men,” Lieutenant Norwalk rapped. “Can’t you see it’s the president? Dammit, move when I tell you!”
The SWAT men eyed him dubiously but obeyed, straightening up from behind the station wagon, rising out of the empty flower beds. Norwalk had a rep for liking to chew ass. If he said this was George Bush, that made it official.
The little cupcake in black sagged against the car with drool trailing from the corner of her mouth. Since she was a lot more fun to look at than the president, several of the team noticed her open her mouth as though about to scream. A plainclothes cop who looked like a compressed Jean-Claude van Damme slid around from the driver’s side and caught her arm just above the elbow. No sound came out of her. George Bush strode up the steps. Lieutenant Norwalk held the door for him. The squat cop and his prisoner followed.
In the foyer George Bush looked left and right. No one in sight. He stooped slightly to honk the girl’s left butt-cheek. “No one can say I don’t take an active interest in today’s young people,” he croaked.
“If I was in my own body, I’d break your arm for you, you asshole,” Lieutenant Norwalk said, stumbling slightly. The president gave the policeman a horrible stroke victim’s leer. “It’s nothing I haven’t done before, my child.”
“That was Mark. I don’t even know who you are, you creepy blue thing, so just fucking watch it.”
“I’m your salvation, you ungrateful little—”
“Shh,” Durg said pointedly. He gave the captive a quick slap on the side of the head, enough to scramble whatever wits she had been able to gather. Or he, actually. Most people who were jumped were incapable of doing anything meaningful for a while, but he was taking no chances.
In the reception area a couple of uniforms stood, making sure the staff didn’t go pressing their noses to the front door and giving away the show or getting in the way of any stray slugs. They gaped at the intruders.
“Mr. President,” the black cop said.
“Just a moment,” a heavyset black woman in a mauve dress with an outsize collar exclaimed. “That’s not really the president.”
Durg pushed K. C.’s body to the scuffed hardwood floor. His arm whipped out with the big black Colt in his fist. “But this is really a gun. Nobody move.”
K. C. guided Norwalk’s body past him. Keeping clear of his line of fire, he relieved the black cop of his sidearm, tossed it to Durg. He caught it one-handed, pointed it at the other cop as K. C. disarmed him.
“Oh, my,” the man who looked like George Bush said. “I don’t approve of firearms. People might use them to defy the law”
“Shut the fuck up,” K.C. Norwalk said. To the administrator in the mauve dress she said, “Sprout Meadows. Where?”
“I won’t tell you.”
K.C. pointed the second officer’s pistol at her. “If I kill you, maybe somebody else will be a little more sensible.”
“Lieutenant Norwalk,” the white cop breathed.
“Blow me, Patrolman. Now, where’s the girl?” She cocked the pistol. “One—”
“Rec room. Annex in the back, second floor.”
Turtle blinked and stabbed a finger at the control of his police-band radio, overriding the automatic scanner. He punched it back three channels, to the broadcast that had belatedly caught his attention.
“—tell you it’s the president of the United States!” a voice was insisting. “George Bush. The weenie himself. He’s on some kind of cockamamy spot inspection—”
The Turtle frowned. Bush was supposed to be under massive guard, addressing a Turn-In-Your-Parents rally somewhere in Harlem. He looked at the digital readout, checked the freek against a dog-eared looseleaf notebook hung beside his console. Brooklyn.
The voices were still arguing about whether the president could possibly be at something called the Reeves Institute. He turned his shell east.
Sprout Meadows sat to one side looking at the pictures in a magazine with a yellow cover. She liked to look at that magazine because it always had nice animals in it. Sometimes it almost seemed she could tell what the words said. But never quite.
Fine Young Cannibals were on the television high on the wall. A couple of girls were arguing over whether to keep watching MTV or switch to Santa Barbara. It sounded as if they were going to start hitting each other at any moment. Sprout was getting good at telling things like that. Fortunately the other girls had gotten bored with picking on her; she was mostly left alone these days. That meant the counselors scolded her for not getting more involved in what the other girls did. She hated being scolded. But she hated getting picked on more.
She glanced up. The monitor lady was watching her intently, just as she’d thought. That always happened when other girls got ready to fight. Sprout thought it was because the monitor lady got in trouble if she reported that the other girls were fighting but got rewarded if she told on Sprout. But that probably just meant Sprout was stupid, like the other girls always told her.
The door opened. Two men walked in. One of the girls squealed in surprise. The monitor stepped forward, frowning. “I’m sorry, you’re not supposed-my God, it’s President Bush.”
“Yes. Yes it is. How perceptive of you to notice.” He smiled and nodded at her, then looked around the room. “Sprout? Is there a Sprout Meadows here?”
Cheeks burning, Sprout dropped her National Geographic and stood up. She couldn’t say a word. Inside she quailed, knowing that he’d never see her because she couldn’t make herself talk.
But he did. He smiled and dropped to one knee. “Come here, honey. I’ve come to take you to your daddy.”
The movies notwithstanding, a human being is not physically capable of aiming two handguns at different targets with any degree of accuracy. A Morakh is. Somehow the two police officers sensed it.
They hadn’t offered any backchat when he ordered them to drop their trousers around their ankles. Now he’d gotten them to cuff themselves together, back-to-back, and stand to one side, still covered by the Colt, while a nervous staffer pulled the phones out of the wall under the watchful eye of the service revolver. The people outside were still dithering. Everything seemed to be under control.
He knew it couldn’t last.
“I can’t believe this is going so smoothly,” K.C. said as they approached the stairwell. Her voice sounded strange in her ears; everything sounded strange in her ears. She was getting antsy to get back in her own body. She’d never liked long-term jumps. They disoriented her, and her borrowed bodies never seemed to respond well to her commands.
“Are you really taking me to my daddy?” Sprout asked George Bush, who was holding her hand.
“Yes, I am. I’m not really the president, you see. I’m one of your daddy’s friends. Cosmic Traveler, I’m called.”
Her face lit up. “Oh, I know! The blue one. The one everybody says is a weenie.”
Black, and menacing in his borrowed cop suit, Blaise stalked down the reform-school corridor, head buzzing with fury and the disinfectant smell that forced its way into his nostrils like probing fingers. He had set the perfect trap for Meadows: the pigs had the drop on him, and even if Meadows found the balls to act, no matter how powerful a “friend” the ancient hippie summoned, he or she couldn’t make his companions bulletproof Meadows didn’t have the spine to write them off and drive for his daughter on his own. Blaise knew that as he knew he could make a five-year-old skip rope into the path of a speeding semi.
Yet Meadows had found a way through the jaws of the perfect trap.
I was right to fear him! he yammered in his mind, as if Bloat could read him from here. He’s too powerful! He must be destroyed!
Ahead of him Blaise saw that the corridor led into a waiting room of some sort. A familiar pair of legs encased in skintight black protruded from the left, lying up against a chest-high wood-sided planter.
He paused, unsnapped the safety strap on his holster. He’d left the riot gun propped inside the side door he’d let himself in through. To a European, a shotgun is a peasant’s weapon.
He preferred the precision of a handgun, and was vain of the combat shooting skills his grandfather had drilled into him. He drew the pistol. It was one of the new Walther nine millimeters with an ultra-high-capacity magazine. Solid Euroworkmanship; he approved. He shifted to the right-hand wall of the corridor ard moved forward with the pistol held in both hands, ready.
The rest of K. C. came into view. She lay with her arms cuffed behind her. Her head hung listlessly on her neck. Blaise recognized a common jump reaction. K.C. wasn’t home right now. His pulse raced with hunter’s eagerness. Swiftly, sure, he glided forward into the foyer.
As expected, the monster was there, positioned to cover both the front door and the white-faced D-home staffers. The Morakh. The ultimate abomination-a variant Takisian.
Despite the hostility between Tachyon and Morakh, Durg had often been set to watch young Blaise. The boy had a nasty way with baby-sitters. But a Morakh mind cannot be controlled. Try as he might, Blaise had been unable to dent Durg’s mindshield.
But that was then. Blaise had grown, and learned. He was unique, a new thing beneath the sun of Takis or Earth, and he knew no rules.
He reached for Durg’s mind. It was like grabbing at a wall, massive as battleship steel, friction-free as glass. Yet for just a moment he actually had a grip. The narrow head snapped around, the lilac eyes found his and widened.
The tree-trunk arm swung around. Blaise narrowed his focus, pouring his entire being into a desperate attempt to stop it. It was like trying to keep a tank gun from traversing. The heavy Colt rose inexorably on-line.
For the rest of Blaise’s life he would believe he saw the black 10-mm eye of the pistol flash yellow. Only Takisian reflexes saved him then. He felt the hot breath of the bullet’s passage as he threw himself back into the corridor, and its miniature sonic boom stung his cheek like a slap.
He hit the right-hand wall with enough force to send the air out of him, went down on butt and shoulderblades. But his training held; he kept two-handed control of the SWAT man’s wonder nine, kept the pistol trained generally on the corridor mouth the whole time.
When he stopped sliding, he firmed his aim in the middle of the door where he judged the center of the Morakh’s mass would appear. He held there for a dozen highspeed heartbeats, ignoring the trembling in his arms.
The monster did not follow up his advantage. Blaise fought panic like a swimmer in an undertow, forcing his mind to the surface. Durg would not pursue him, he realized. To do so would leave the door unguarded, and holding the surrounding police at bay would be Durg’s main priority. Short of a direct threat to his master-or death-there was no force in the universe that could move a Morakh from his post.
The fear receded. Rage took its place. Blaise dropped his eyes to the limp body of K.C. Strange and smiled. With a gymnast’s bound, he came to his feet. He flexed his knees slightly, locked his arms into the isosceles triangle of the Weaver stance, drew a deep breath.
The fat white dot of the foresight hovered like a moon over K. C. Strange’s sternum. Blaise began to let the breath out. The trigger slack came in.
“Shit! There’s shooting!” K. C. stopped halfway down the stairs.
“Well, it can’t hurt me, at least,” read George Bush’s lips.
She tossed her pistol to Cosmic Traveler and fumbled a pair of handcuffs out of a pocket of Norwalk’s coat. “Put these on my wrists.”
“Whatever for?”
“Something’s coming down. I’ve gotta get back to my body.”
“But it’s too soon! You have to get us out of here!”
“You’re the ace. If I have to, I can jump somebody else. Jesus, come on.”
“Oh, this is just too much. Trust Meadows to have such unreliable friends. How can you leave me and this innocent child in the lurch?”
“You, easy.” She finished snapping the cuffs around Norwalk’s knobby ginger-haired wrists. “Sayonara, sucker.”
Blaise squeezed the trigger with one smooth pull, felt the sear break crisply.
K.C. raised her head. Her eyes met his above the sights. “No!” he screamed. The gun bucked and roared. The bullet hit K.C. two inches above the right nipple and slammed her back into the planter.
Durg at-Morakh fired three quick rounds into the corridor from which the shot had come. He was firing blind, suppressive fire; the angle was bad, and he couldn’t see a target. It was impossible to cover the gaggle of prisoners, the front door, and the side corridors all at once. Even Morakh had their limitations.
Still, he could scarcely believe he had missed his first shot at the intruding policeman. There had been something behind his eyes, a flicker of touch, like nothing he had ever felt before. Perhaps that had thrown off his aim by a fraction of are.
It was no excuse. A Morakh knew no excuses, only success or death. If his lord demanded his life for K. C. Strange, it was his.
For now, he still had duty.
Cosmic Traveler and Sprout had just reached bottom when the shot hit K. C. The Traveler cringed as Durg blasted shots in return. His impulse was to go insubstantial and melt through the floor into the basement. It was the sensible thing to do. He could keep himself insubstantial only so long, and then bullets would be able to hurt him, cops would be able to lay heavy coarse hands on him. He couldn’t tolerate that risk. But something-residual influence of the baseline Mark persona perhaps-made it impossible for him simply to vanish and leave Sprout to her fate.
Durg saw him, waved him back. “Go. I’ll catch up with you.”
Traveler rabbited up the stairs with Sprout in tow. Tears stung Blaise’s eyes as he stumbled down the corridor. Oh, K.C., K.C., why did you have to choose that moment to jump back?
She was hurt too badly to muster the mental concentration needed to jump to safety in another body. She was lost to him, lost. Rage and grief rose up and threatened to overwhelm him.
Now I’ll never get to torture you to death! Oh, Mark Meadows, you have much to answer for.
Durg ignored his captives’ screaming. He was focused on the front entrance now. The police outside would have heard the shooting.
Bulky in his flak jacket, a SWAT man hit the outer door, popped it open, and rolled in, leveling a shotgun from the hip.
Durg had orders from his lord to avoid violence if possible, to avoid killing at all costs. Durg had mentally amended that to not killing anyone except to preserve the life of Mark or his daughter. He could always atone with his life later if Mark would not absolve him of guilt for disobedience; to preserve the life of one’s lord was a higher imperative even than to obey. But Durg felt confident he need take no lives. None of these groundlings was a big enough threat.
Without seeming to hurry, he pivoted, bringing the Colt around. He fired as it came on-line.
The Kevlar jacket was guaranteed to stop anything up to a .44 Magnum. The 10-mm was slightly less potent, equivalent to a .4-I Magnum. As advertised, the vest did stop it. But the copper-jacketed bullet delivered a lot of energy right through the vest into the patrolman’s solar plexus. He went down gasping like a grounded carp.
“Ohh,” Cosmic Traveler moaned at the pistol crack that chased them up the stairs like Fate hounding a classical Greek hero. They popped out the top, and there at hand was salvation, the Traveler’s ultimate refuge: a broom closet. He tried the door. Locked, of course.
“Shit,” he said.
Sprout gasped. Heart in throat, he whirled, expecting to see fifteen hundred SWAT cops and federal agents thundering down on them like a herd of buffalo. Instead, the girl was staring straight at his face, and he realized he’d resumed his preferred form, a blue and hairless humanoid with a black cowl. “Wait here a moment, honey,’.” he said, and stepped through the door.
Once inside, he thought, why open the door? It will only let them know I’m here. And they’d never hurt a mere child.
The universe seemed to vibrate to a single plangent chord. A chasm opened beneath his feet. “No!” he screamed. “It’s not possible! I’m supposed to get an hour! Oh, God, the fool will get me killllled!...”
He plummeted into black infinity.
“Something’s going on here,” SWAT lieutenant Dixon said to the pencil neck from plainclothes. “I’m assuming Lieutenant Norwalk has been taken hostage. I’m taking command here.” He pumped his neck and shoulders a little, hearkening back to lineman days.
The honkie from Serious Crimes kind of fell on himself. “Okay.”
A couple of officers had dragged Torres from the doorway, and he was unloading breakfast into what winter and half a hundred booted feet had left of a rosebush.
“All right, we’re going in again, but this time we’re gonna do it right. Connelly, take your men around to the left. Washington, you go right. Kelly, you get three and take the back. The rest of us are going right through the front door.” There was no one in view down the corridor when Durg got there. He waved his Colt back at the terrified staffers. “I’m letting you go now. Out the front door.”
The captives just stared at each other and trembled. He fired a round into the wall over their heads. It sounded like a howitzer going off.
“Now!”
They stampeded for the exit just as the cops were coming in.
For a moment, Mark Meadows stood in the dark with his hands braced against the door and his head hung between them. It had been a long time since he’d been the Traveler. He’d almost forgotten what this concentration of Lysol and ammonia smelled like.
Cosmic Traveler’s final fading plaint still echoed in his skull.
I never promised you an hour, man. That’s just the max. He was pleased to have thought of filling a vial with a sixth of a normal dose for just this kind of emergency, and by chance his timing had been perfect. Maybe he could do something right. By accident at least.
“Sprout,” he breathed. He fumbled at the door, got it open, got his feet tangled, and fell on his knees in the front of his daughter.
Without a word, she lunged forward and wrapped her arms around his neck.
At the foot of the stairs he found Durg. The Morakh had his Colt jammed up in the notch formed by Lt. Norwalk’s jaw and his ear, and was winding duct tape around the officer’s head to hold it in place. Mark looked past him and yelped. “K.C.!” She was lying against the wall. The front of her T-shirt was scarlet. She was breathing with difficulty. Her eyes were half closed and looked at nothing.
He knelt beside her. “Baby,” he said.
“Don’t touch her,” Durg said. “She’s badly hurt.” There was a band of duct tape diagonally across her chest, holding down a gauze compress, now dripping red. Durg believed in being prepared.
Mark touched her cheek. She moaned. Blood bubbled from her lips.
Durg finished taping the dazed policeman. “We must move. The groundlings in front will eventually compose themselves enough to act.”
Mark looked a wordless appeal at him.
“I can bear her,” the Morahk said. “You take the young mistress and go.”
“Come on, honey.” Mark grabbed Sprout’s hand, and they raced back up the stairs.
At the top, Mark turned to his daughter. “Stand back,” he said. He reached into the inside pocket of his cord jacket, brought out a tiny vial full of orange powder, raised it to his lips.
From the far end of the corridor, a voice screamed, “Meadows!”
From thirty feet away, he could see Meadows’s mouth fall open. “Blaise?”
Blaise laughed.
What he was about to do was fantastically risky. He was beyond caring. Besides, he was young, and he was Blaise, and he was immortal.
He seized Meadows’s eyes with his, coiled his soul like a panther, and sprang.
Sprout looked from the strangely familiar man dressed like a policeman to her daddy. Her father was wrapped in flames. The expression of calm happiness and love on her perfect features never flickered. Sprout took it for granted that everybody’s daddy periodically caught fire and turned into somebody else.
Roiling red and black surrounded Blaise, suffused him. For a moment, he saw his own now-vacant body through a roaring curtain of flame. And then his soul exploded outward, went spinning into an endless treacherous dark where shadows went to die.
JJ Flash rocked on his feet. It was as if he were whirling around and around inside his own head, surrounded by a maelstrom of shrieking blackness.
The whirlpool effect subsided like water gurgling down a drain, carrying with it a dying shrill keening like nothing Flash had ever heard. “Wow,” he said. Bloat must’ve gotten burned with some impure shit. JJ would like to hunt up his supplier someday and return the favor just a bit, teach him better business practices. Guys like that gave the free market a bad name.
He opened his eyes to see a SWAT cop collapsing like a marionette with its strings snipped at the far end of the hall. “What the fuck?”
“Hi, JJ,” Sprout said shyly.
“Babe. What’s happening?” He gave her a quick hug and hung his head over the stairwell.
“Durg. Go for it.”
Durg kicked the back door. He put a bit too much IEnglish on it. The heavy meshed-glass-and-steel door popped right off its hinges and went spinning out into the small blacktopped yard to bounce off the eight-foot wall that separated the institute grounds from the street.
He stopped, slung K.C. over his shoulder as gently as he could. Then he thrust Norwalk out into the cloud-filtered light, holding the Colt with his left hand.
“Everybody get back,” he commanded. “I’m holding the hammer back with my thumb. If I release it, the lieutenant dies.”
He gave them a few beats to mull that over, then stepped outside. He could see four squaddies hunkered in pairs, covering the door from either side. He walked deliberately to the back wall. Then he looked up at the second-floor window of the annex.
JJ Flash kissed Sprout on the forehead. “Stick tight, honey. Back in half a tick.”
He rolled his hand onto its back. Flame leapt forth, played against the window. Glass and steel wire shimmered, puffed away. Flash followed.
“You can’t use tear gas,” the therapist said. She was a redheaded woman with saddlebag thighs and thick horn-rim glasses. “That kind of brutality would devastate our developmental strategies—”
“Screw your strategies,” Dixon said. “I’m talkin’ lives heré“
“Yo!” a voice said. “Down there. Pay attention.”
The babble of voices in the courtyard stopped. Everybody looked at one another, then up.
There was a small red-haired man in an orange jogging suit hovering just above the peak of the roof. “You might want to stand back away from the LeBaron, there.”
“Nail the bastard!” Dixon roared.
Guns came up. Flash let his hand loll out. A jet of fire flashed to the top of the car Mark and company had arrived in. Just enough to melt through the roof and start the vinyl inside burning nicely.
“The gas tank!” somebody screamed. “Get back!”
Cops and institute staffers scattered. Now that somebody’d had an idea, JJ Flash turned up the heat. The LeBaron exploded with a very satisfactory whoomp and a ball of yellow flame.
Explosion! A quarter mile ahead, Turtle saw a fireball blossom into the sky.
“Here we fucking go again.” He tipped his shell into a shallow dive and accelerated.
The four cops in back turned to stare at the big black ball of smoke rising from the far side of the building. Leaving K.C. balanced on his broad shoulder, Durg rammed his right fist into the wall.
Brick gave. Powdered mortar drooled away. He punched the wall again. It bowed outward.
JJ Flash shot out the second-story window, holding Sprout in his arms.
Durg spun a back-kick into the wall. A man-size section exploded outward as though struck by a cannon shell. Nodding politely to the SWAT men, he backed through, dragging Norwalk with him.
Fire has a wonderful effect on people. The fear of burning is immediate and deeply ingrained. Flash enjoyed burning things but not people, so the psychological effect of his fireballs was very convenient.
The Brooklyn cops hadn’t forgotten all about the back wall. They thought it unlikely the fugitives could make it out that way, so they’d just stuck a patrol car and a couple of uniforms there on general principles.
By a remarkable coincidence, both uniformed patrolmen remembered urgent appointments when JJ Flash burned through the roof of the car’s backseat. Took off down the street in opposite directions.
“It smells icky in here,” Sprout complained as she slid in back.
“Be better once the car gets moving,” Flash said.
He helped Durg ease K. C. in beside her, then fired a blast back through the hole in the wall to keep the SWAT boys on the other side from getting too curious. Durg broke pistol and gun hand free of Norwalk’s head, shoved the still-stunned detective lieutenant in the passenger seat, then ran around to slide in behind the wheel.
“I’ll catch up with you later,” Flash said. “Want to make sure our friends on the other side have their minds right—whoa!”
He was snatched straight up into the sky. A voice boomed down, “FLASH? JJ FLASH? WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING, YOU NITWIT?”
“Run!” Flash shouted. “I’ll handle him.”
Without a backward glance, Durg put the car in gear and floored it.
Flash tried to dart away. An invisible hand seemed to be holding him fast, pinning his arms to his side. He couldn’t move. “Don’t make me get rough with you,” he said.
Turtle chewed his underlip. “Have you gone nuts?” he asked his microphone.
“Just a little stir-crazy,” came back through the audio pickups mounted in the hull. “Look, it’s great schmoozing with you, Turtle, but the boys in blue are going to get sorted out down there and start shooting at me in a minute, and I’ve got things to see and people to do.”
“You’re a federal fugitive, for God’s sake. Why are you—” He stopped. “I get it. It’s Sprout.”
“You definitely win the Bonus Round. It’s Sprout. Now let me go.”
“Jesus, Flash, this is jailbreak. I can’t let you get away with this.”
“So you’re lining up with the pigs? Battle lines are being drawn and all that sixties stuff is that the side of the barricades you’re comfortable with?”
A shot popped off from below. Turtle winced. Flame darted from Flash’s hand. An especially bold SWAT man yelped and dropped his M16 as if it were red-hot, largely because it was.
“You people down there stop that,” Turtle said. “I have the situation under control.”
“My ass you do.”
“It’s your ass that’s gonna get extra holes shot in it if they don’t think I can handle you. Come on, Flash, don’t you see this isn’t the way?”
“We’re fresh out of other ways.”
“Flash, I feel for you and Mark, and especially Sprout. But we can’t do things this way anymore. And not now, for God’s sake! George Bush is in town. The whole country thinks aces are arm-in-arm with the devil. What’s a scene like this going to do to wild cards everywhere?”
“Not a fucking thing, you complacent tin-plated son of a bitch! If they’re going to let the lynch mobs loose, they’ll find an excuse sooner or later. They’ll make one up if they have to. Let me go.”
“No,” Turtle said primly. “The welfare of everybody touched by the wild card’s at stake here. I’m taking you in.”
“A little girl’s life is at stake, you bastard. And Mark Meadows isn’t going to rot in federal slam!”
Flash set his jaw and forced flame out through every pore of his body. The unseen grip did not slacken. “So I can’t singe your telekinetic fingers, eh?”
“THEY’RE ONLY IMAGINARY, YOU KNOW.”
“Yeah? Well what can they do to me, then?”
“THIS.” Inexorably, the hand began to crush the air out of him.
He looked around. The cop car was already out of sight. Durg had instructions what to do if Mark was captured, in whatever persona. The mission was a success if only Sprout got away. And K.C.
Damn, that’s a fine one. And Mark really loves her. But there’s nothing I can do for her.
His vision began to swim. Blackness gathered around the edges. He knew Turtle didn’t want to kill him, just black him out. But he had a higher metabolic rate than a nat, used air more quickly. Old Ironsides might hold on just a little too long, and then it was going to be JJ Flash, Turnip. And he knew that wouldn’t do Meadows much good either.
Besides, he was Jumpin’ Jack Flash. No pansy who wouldn’t go out in public without his fat ass wrapped in armor plate was going to take him. He began to rotate his left hand, slowly so that Turtle wouldn’t notice. The Turtle hadn’t bothered to immobilize him totally, and Flash was fairly sure he could. Slowly, slowly-there. Palm outward.
“It’s not—that—easy,” he gritted. Fire shot from his palm and splashed against the underside of the Turtle’s shell.
“GIVE IT A REST, JJ, ALL RIGHT? THIS IS BATTLESHIP PLATE. ITS DESIGNED TO STAND UP TO SIXTEEN-INCH SHELLS. YOU THINK A LITTLE FIRE’S GOING TO DO ANYTHING?”
The hand squeezed tighter. Flash gasped in pain, blackness flickered across his brain, the fire jet sputtered. “Go-ahead-and-squash me. But you’re gonna-be Great-and Powerful-Turtle-soup.”
The flame got brighter. The roar was like a blast furnace in full throat. Flash felt his chest being crushed, felt ribs give and squeak as they reached the breaking point.
He screamed. And put all the force of his pain and fury into the fire.
A tentacle of smoke ran up Turtle’s nose. He froze. His control panel lit up like a crash scene on the Triboro Bridge, and the display from his forward vid pickup popped and died from the heat.
“Shit!” Turtle yelled. “Shit!”
A klaxon began its cat-in-a-stamping-mill yammer as the fire-suppression system-the same as the M-1 Abrams used, surplus production from FY 1988-flushed the interior with halon gas. He freaked.
The teke hand crushing the life from Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Esquire, became sudden nothing.
Bullets hit the hull like hail as the policemen on the ground cut loose. It was too late.
The shell plummeted toward the peaked roofs of the neighborhood. Fear hit the Turtle like a cattle prod in the nuts. For a rare moment in his life, it was a focusing fear, a fear that overrode the reflex panic induced by heat-noiselight-smoke: fear of collision with the planet.
Like a man about to be hanged, Turtle found his mind wonderfully concentrated. The shell wobbled, sideslipped, knocked over a chimney with a sliding clatter of yellow brick, and rolled out to a flat hover just below rooftop level.
By that time, even the afterimage of Flash’s blazing departure had faded from the watchers eyes.
For a moment, Blaise just lay there. He felt like a man drowning in rapids who had abruptly fetched up on the bank. He had been spinning, spinning in a roaring sunless void. Reaching out for something he could barely remember, reaching and feeling and desperately trying to force himself toward that familiar shard he sensed in a place without time and space and things.
Home. He was back in his body, his splendid body. Burning Sky, that was close! he thought.
Any other jumper would have been lost when he was bounced out of Mark Meadows’s body during the phase-shift to JJ Flash. Would have spun forever, or until his consciousness had unraveled and diffused and gone, become one with ever-black. Only the supreme power of Blaise’s mind had saved him. It was a test he alone could meet, and he had met it.
Exaltation filled him like a gush of semen: I have triumphed. I am Blaise!
Then he remembered what he had come for, and it turned to bile in his mouth. Meadows, his idiot blond brat, Durg, K.C., had escaped. He had failed. Blaise.
He rolled onto his belly and began to pound his fist against the floor.
Round sunset, this stretch of New Jersey was just like Disneyland, if your tastes ran to industrial. Car corpses strewed fields to either side of the road, inorganic fertilizer spread perhaps to foster the growth of the squat tanks and pipe tangles that hovered in the shimmering petrochemical haze of the horizon. The sun swelled like a huge red festering boil as it fell into the pooled gray-brown crud. It made World War III look like not such a bad idea.
K. C. Strange lay on her back on a dirty old blanket next to the station wagon they’d stashed a few blocks from Reeves and collected when they ditched the cop car and a grumpy, groggy Lieutenant Norwalk. Her breath was coming quick and shallow now, and pink froth bubbled her lips at each exhalation.
Sprout Meadows bent over her, trailing tears and long blond hair in the jumper’s upturned face. “Don’t die, pretty lady. Please.” Her father stroked her hair with the hand that wasn’t cradling K. C.’s head in his lap.
Durg stood a discreet distance down the road, keeping watch. A rose-gray Toyota Corolla had been parked there since yesterday, all full of blankets and nonperishable food and stuffed toys for Sprout, to ensure they began the crosscountry leg of their escape as clean as possible.
“Blaise did this?” he repeated wonderingly. “Blaise.” K. C. repeated.
He shook his head. “He tried to do something to mejump me, I guess. Why, man? You were his-his lady. I was his friend!” He bit his lip. “It wasn’t because wé“
She laughed, winced. “He was through with me. He ... hated you. Thought you were ... threat. Tell you his dirty secret, babe ... mine too. He has his grand—”
He pressed a finger to her lips. “Cool it. No time for that now” It was cold as hell out here on this long-forgotten county road, and his breath came in puffs of fog. He didn’t notice. “We’re away from the city. You gotta let us take you to a hospital. Nobody’ll recognize you.”
Her fingernails dug into his arm through the thin cotton of his Brooks Brothers shirt with a strength he didn’t think she still had. “No! Ahh!”
She clung, eyes shut, until the pain spasm passed. “No,” she said again, a whisper now. “Don’t give me up to the Combine.”
“Nobody’s looking for you, babe. We’ll tell ‘em you got shot when somebody tried to rape you—”
She was shaking her head, slowly, as if each movement tore her further open. “No. I’m wanted. Hospitals, pigs ... all part of the Combine. Too late, anyway-I’m ... about out of air time.” Her eyes came all the way open and looked way back in his. “I’d rather die free than live in a cage.”
“You don’t have to die.”
“No,” she said, and her voice was clear. “ I don’t.”
She reached up and grabbed his head with both hands. Mark cried out in alarm as blood welled up around the edges of the tape Durg had wound around her chest, almost black in the orange dusklight. She pulled his face close to hers. Her eyes held his like pins through a butterfly’s wings.
“I don’t have to die.” The blood-froth static was back now, and her voice was sinking under it. “I’m a... jumper, remember? I don’t have to-go down with this ship. But I can’t touch the alien. I won’t touch the baby. And you—”
She forced her shoulders up off the mottled blanket, forced her mouth to his. “ I love you, Mark,” she said, falling back. Her eyes met his again. “Remember... me ...”
Something passed behind his eyes as the light went out of hers. And then her blood was on his mouth, and she was dead.
The three shots were startlingly loud. They seemed to race clear to the horizon, where a thin scum of day’s last light lay like self-luminous chemical waste, and rebound in a heartbeat.
The smell of gasoline from the station wagon’s ruptured tank crowded Mark’s nostrils as Durg slowly lowered the 10-mm. Mark held the highway flare before his skinny chest desperate-hard for just one moment, so the tendons stood out on the back of his hand. Then he pulled the tab. “Good-bye, K.C.,” he said. “Rest easy, babe.” He tossed the hissing magenta spark into the dark pool spreading below the vehicle.
It went up in a rush and a shout of yellow flame.
Mark stood there staring until the heat got so intense that even Sprout backed up, tugging her daddy’s hand with gentle insistence. He stayed put. Durg took hold of the back of his shirt and drew him irresistibly back until his eyebrows were in no danger of crisping.
“It is done,” the alien said. “We must leave before someone comes to investigate the fire.”
They walked to the Toy, soles crunching quietly in the cinder berm.
Mark unlocked and opened the passenger door, then walked to the other side. Durg awaited him.
“The bike we stashed for you is still all right?” Mark asked.
The alien nodded. “You intend to leave me, then,” he said flatly.
“We talked about this before, man. The three of us together are, like, just too distinctive.”
The fine narrow head nodded. “Indeed. But later ... may I not join you?”
Mark felt tears crowding his eyes again. I thought I’d run out of those.
“No, man. I’m sorry. I’ve put you through too much already.”
“It is what I am made for.”
“No. I can’t. People can’t own people, man. It doesn’t work that way here.” Like a man breaking through a membrane wall, Mark abruptly leaned forward and wrapped scarecrow arms briefly around Durg’s shoulders. It was like hugging a statue. “Don’t be so sad. It’s freedom, man. It’s the greatest thing in the world.”
“It is for you.”
Sprout hugged the Morakh. He smiled then, and hugged her back. She and Mark climbed into the car.
“Look, man,” Mark said out the window, “maybe you should, like, try the Rox. I can’t go back, not with Blaise there. But it’s me Blaise is mad at, you were just like incidental. Talk to Bloat. He can help keep Blaise off your back if he tries to come down on you, and you can help him out like I was supposed to. Do that, yeah. The Rox.”
“Do you so order me, lord?”
Compassion struggled with principle in Mark. As it sometimes should, compassion won. “Yes,” he said, not meeting the lilac eyes. “I so order it.”
Durg stepped back. “I thank you, lord.”
“Good-bye, man, I’ll never forget you.”
“Nor I you,” said Durg at-Morakh.
The Toyota rolled away through crackling gravel. Sprout leaned out the window and waved.
Mark looked back himself, once, as the tires took the cracked, neglected blacktop. For a flicker, he thought he saw something glistening on the alien’s high cheek. But it had to be a trick of the light from K.C.’s pyre.
Sprout began to sing a song, something of her own, with words that made sense only to her. The road curved. The alien and the burning car were wiped from sight, and nothing remained but a glow in the sky that gradually faded as the Toyota pulled west for California and freedom. Eventually it was gone.
The tall man opened his mouth and said, “Beware. There is danger here.”
Mark Meadows swayed like a radio mast in a high wind, sat down on the hood of a black stretch limo parked in front of the store to wait the dizziness out. It had been a woman’s voice, tinted with Asian accent like ginger flakes.
The slim, blond twelve-year-old girl with him watched him closely, concerned but not afraid. She’d seen these spells before.
He looked up and down the block. Fitz-James O’Brien Street was about the same as always. This fringe of the Village had grown rougher the last few years. But so had the world. And people left him pretty much alone.
He had friends.
You guys are getting pretty restless, he thought. He felt furtive stirrings in the back of his brain, but no more words came unbidden.
Deciding her father was all right, the girl began to swing pendulumlike on her father’s arm, chanting, “We’re home, Daddy, we’re home.” Her voice was that of a four-year-old. The rest of her was twelve.
He gazed down at her. A rush of love suffused him like a hit of windowpane. He pulled her close, hugged her, and stood.
“Yeah, Sprout. Home.” He opened the door beneath the smiling hand-painted sun and the legend COSMIC PUMPKIN-FOOD FOR BODY, MIND & SPIRIT.
Inside was cool and almost dark. It used to be sunny in here on spring days like this, but that was when there was still plate glass in the windows instead of plywood sheets. The sound system was on, tuned by one of his clerks to one of those New Age easy-listening stations popular with people who spend their evenings watching Koyaanisqatsi on remote-programmable VCRs. A little thin for even Mark’s blood, but at the moment better than the usual fare: Bonnie Raitt, something recent with a soft ska beat.
Good business for midafternoon, he thought, with the reflex twinge of guilt he got any time he had such commercial thoughts. A small guy with a fleshy, pointy nose and a silklike jacket with a strip-club logo on the back was haunting the glass-top counter that displayed the dope paraphernalia the Pumpkin was carrying until the inevitable Crusading DA finally got around to cracking down. He seemed to be thinking of hitting on one of Mark’s stumpy, brush-cut clerks, who was sweeping the floor behind the deli counter with muttering bad grace and shooting him hate looks. She gave Mark one, too, when she noticed him. He was a man; this was all his fault.
A handful of even less descript types sat at tables hunched over racing forms and steaming cups of Red Zinger tea. A tall dark-haired woman stood at the comic rack with her back to him, looking at a reprint of an early Freak Brothers classic. The DA was after those, too. Mark put a hand back around to where his long blond hair, more ash now than straw, was gathered into a blue elastic tie. It was too tight, and pulled at random patches of his scalp like doll hands. Nineteen years this spring he’d been wearing his hair long, and he still hadn’t gotten the hang of tying back a ponytail.
Absently he noticed that the woman was well dressed to be grazing the undergrounds. Usually the customers in pricey threads scrupulously confined their attentions to his sprouts-and-tofu cuisine.
His daughter chirped, “Auntie Brenda,” and went running back to give the clerk a hug. The tall man smiled ruefully. He could never tell his clerks apart. They both thought he was a weed, anyway.
Then the well-dressed woman turned and looked at him with violet eyes and said, quietly, “Mark.”
It felt as if one of the youthful football jocks who had been the curse of his adolescence had just chop-blocked his pelvis out from under his spine.
“Sunflower,” he managed to say through a throat gone as pliable as an airshaft.
He heard the squeak-scruff of his daughter’s sneakers on stained linoleum behind him. A moment of silence hung in the air, stretching gradually, agonizingly, like a taffy strand. Then Sprout boiled past and threw herself at the woman, hugging her with all the strength of her thin arms.
“Mommy.”
The rat-faced man slid out of the booth and walked up to Mark. He had wet-looking black eyes and a mustache that looked as if it had been carelessly dabbed on in mascara. Mark blinked at him, very carefully, as if his eyes were fragile and might break.
The smaller man thrust a packet of papers into his hand. “See you in court, buppie,” he said, and sidled out the door.
Mark stared down at the papers. Freewheeling, his mind registered official-looking seals and the phrase determine custody of their daughter, Sprout.
And the other customers came boiling up from their checkered cheesecloth tables as if tied to the same string, stuck big black cameras in Mark’s face, and blasted him back into the door with their strobes.
His vision full of big swarming balloons of light, Mark staggered into the little bathroom and threw up in the toilet beneath the Jimi Hendrix poster. Fortunately the poster was laminated.
Kimberly Anne slid into the limousine by feel, watching the Pumpkin’s front door with bruised-looking eyes. Around the fringes of the plywood she could see the photographers’ flashguns spluttering like an arc welder.
“Poor mark,” she whispered. She turned with mascara beginning to melt down one cheek.
“Is it really necessary to put him through all this?” The backseat’s other occupant regarded her with eyes as pale and dispassionate as a shark’s. “It is,” he said, “if you want your daughter back.”
She stared at fingers knotted in her lap. “More than anything,” she said, just audibly.
“Then you must be ready to pay the price, Mrs. Gooding.”
“My advice to you, Or. Meadows,” Dr. Pretorius said, leaning back and cracking the knuckles of his big, callused hands, “is to go underground.”
Mark stared at the lawyer’s hands. They didn’t seem to fit with the rest of him, which was a pretty unorthodox picture to start with. You didn’t expect hands like that on a lawyer, even a long-haired one, especially not resting above a gold watch-chain catenary on the vest of a thousanddollar charcoal-gray suit. They jarred. Just like fording the cream wallpaper and walnut-wainscoted elegance of Pretorius’s office in a second-floor walk-up in what the tabloids liked to call the festering depths of Jokertown. Or like the strange tang like pus-filled bandages that seemed to stick in the back of Mark’s nose.
Mark couldn’t evade the issue any longer. “I beg your pardon?” he said, blinking furiously. Behind his chair Sprout hummed to herself as she studied the array of insects mounted under glass on the walls.
“You heard me. If you want to hold on to your little girl, the best advice I can give you as a lawyer is to go underground.”
“I don’t understand.”
““Oh, my God,”‘ Pretorius quoted, ““you’re from the sixties.’ Doesn’t ring any bells? You didn’t see that movie they made out of W E Kinsella’s autobiography? No, of course not; chewing up a blotter and sitting through a revival of 2001 three times is more your speed in movies.”
He sighed. “Are you telling me you don’t know what ‘going underground’ means? You know-Huey Newton, Patty Hearst, all those fabulous names of yesteryear.”
Mark glanced nervously back at his daughter, who had her nose pressed to the glass over some kind of bug that looked like a ten-inch twig. Mark had never realized before just how nervous insects made him.
“I know what it means, man. I just don’t know—” He raised his own hands, which in the somewhat stark light began to look to him like specimens escaped from Pretorius’s cases, to try to draw communication out of himself, out of the air, whatever. Outside of one area of life he had never been much good at getting ideas across.
Pretorius nodded briskly. “You don’t know if I’m serious, right? I am. Dead serious.”
He let his hand drop forward onto his desk, onto the copy of the Post Jube had given Mark. “Do you have any idea who you’re dealing with here?”
A blunt finger was tapping Kimberly Anne’s face where it peered over Sprout’s shoulder. “That’s my ex-old lady,” Mark said. “She used to call herself Sunflower.”
“She’s calling herself Mrs. Gooding now. I gather she married the senior partner at her brokerage firm.”
He stared almost accusingly at Mark. “And do you know whom she’s retained? St. John Latham.”
He spoke the name like a curse. Sprout came up and insinuated her hand into her daddy’s. He reached awkwardly across himself to put his free arm around her.
“What’s so special about this Latham dude?”
“He’s the best. And he’s a total bastard.”
“That’s, like, why I came to you. You’re supposed to be pretty good yourself. If you’ll help me, why should I think about running?”
Pretorius’s mouth seemed to heat-shrink to his teeth. “Flattery is always appreciated, no matter how beside the point.”
He leaned forward. “Understand, Doctor: these are the eighties. Don’t you hate that phrase? I thought nothing was ever going to be as nauseous as the cant we had back in the days when Weathermen weren’t fat boys who got miffed at Bryant Gumbel on the morning show. Oh, well, wrong again, Pretorius.” He cocked his head like a big bird. “Dr. Meadows, you claim to be an ace?”
Mark flushed.—”Well, I...”
“Does the name ‘Captain Trips’ suggest anything?”
“I-that is-yes.” Mark looked at his hands. “It’s supposed to be a secret.”
“Cap’n Trips is a fixture in Jokertown and on the New York ace scene. And does he ever wear a mask?”
“Well ... no.”
“Indeed. So we have a fairly visible but apparently minor ace, whose, ahem, ‘secret identity’ is a man who follows a rather divergent life-style in a day when ‘the nail that stands out must be hammered down’ is the dominant social wisdom. St. John Latham is a man who will do anything to win. Anything. Do you see how you might be, how you say, vulnerable?”
Mark covered his face with his hands. “I just can’t... I mean, Sunflower wouldn’t do anything like that to me. We, we’re like comrades. I knew her at Berkeley, man. The Kent State protests-you remember that?” His confusion came out in a gush of reproach, accusation almost. He expected Pretorius to bark at him. Instead the attorney nodded his splendid silver head. The perfection of his ponytail filled Mark with jealous awe.
“I remember. I still walk with a limp, thanks to a National Guardsman’s bayonet in my hip-among other reasons.”
Pretorius sat back and gazed at the ceiling. “A radical in ‘70. An executive in ‘89. If you knew how anything but uncommon that story is. At least she’s not with the DEA.”
“And while we’re on that subject, I have formed the impression you don’t say no to recreational chemistry”
“It doesn’t hurt anybody, man.”
“No. Ain’t nobody’s business but your own; couldn’t agree more. Being a Jew in Nuremberg in the thirties didn’t hurt anybody either.”
He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. “Doctor, you are a big, soft, inflated Bozo the Clown doll in the climate of today, and Mr. St. John Motherfucking Latham is going to knock you all over the courtroom. So I say to you, Run, baby, run. Or be prepared for a sea change in your life.”
Mark made a helpless gesture, started to stand. “One more thing,” Pretorius said.
Mark stopped. Pretorius looked to Sprout. She was a shy child, except with those close to her, and the lawyer had an intimidating way-he intimidated her dad, anyway. But she faced Pretorius, solemn and unflinching.
“The question that needs to be asked is, what do you want, Sprout?” Pretorius said. “Do you want to live with your mommy, or stay with your father?”
“I-I’ll abide by her wishes, man,” Mark said. It was the hardest thing .he’d ever said.
She looked from Pretorius to Mark and back. “I miss my mommy,” she said in that precise, childish voice. Mark felt his skeleton begin to collapse within him.
“But I want to stay with my daddy.”
Pretorius nodded gravely. “Then we’ll do what we can to see that you do. But what that will be”—he looked at Mark—”is up to your father.”
Seven o’clock turned up on schedule. Susan-he was fairly sure it was Susan-marched to the front door to flip over the sign to SORRY—WE’RE CLOSED just as a woman materialized and pushed at the door from outside.
Susan resisted, glaring. Mark came around the counter wiping his hands on his apron and felt his stomach do a slow roll.
“It’s okay,” he managed to croak. “She can come in.” Susan turned her glare on Mark. “I’m off now, buster.” Mark shrugged helplessly. The woman stepped agilely inside. She was tall and striking in a black skirt suit with padded shoulders and a deep purple blouse. Her eyes had grown more violet over the years. The blouse turned them huge and glowing.
“This is personal, not business,” she said to Susan. “We’ll be fine.”
“If you’re sure you’ll be okay alone with him,” Susan sniffed. She launched a last glower at Mark and clumped out into the Village dusk.
She turned, Kimberly, and was in Mark’s arms. He damned near collapsed. He stood there a moment with his arms sort of dangling stiffly past her like a mannequin’s. Then he hugged her with adolescent fervor. Her body melted against his, fleetingly, and then she turned and was out of his arms like smoke.
“You seem to be doing well for yourself,” she said, gesturing at the shop.
“Uh, yeah. Thanks.” He pulled a chair back from a table. “Here, sit down.”
She smiled and accepted. He went around behind the counter and busied himself. She lit a cigarette and looked at him. He didn’t point out the LUNGS IN UsE-No SMOKING, PLEASE sign on the wall behind her.
She wasn’t as willowy as she had been back in the Bay days. Nor was she blowsy from booze and depression as she had been when their marriage hit the rocks and she self-destructed at the first custody hearing, back in ‘81. Full-figured was what he thought they, called it, glancing back as he waited for water to boil, though he had it in mind that had become a euphemism for “fat”. She wasn’t; voluptuous might have put it better. Whatever, she wore forty well.
... Not that it mattered, not really. He was still as desperately in love with her as he’d been the first time he saw her, thirty years and more ago, tricycling down their southern California tract-home block.
The lights were low, just a visual buzz of fluorescents above the deli counter. Mark lit candles and a sandalwood stick. The Windham Hill mob was history. The tape machine played real music. Their music.
He brought an earthenware pot and two matching mugs on a tray. He almost tipped the assembly onto the floor, slopping fragrant herbal tea on the red-and-white checkered tablecloth as he transferred the pot to the table. Kimberly sat and watched him with a smile that held no mockery.
He spilled only a little of the pale amber liquid as he poured and handed her a mug. She sipped. Her face lit. “Celestial Seasonings and old Bonnie Raitt.” She smiled. “How sweet of you to remember.”
“How could I forget?” he mumbled into the steam rising from his mug.
A rustle of beaded curtain, and they looked up to see Sprout standing in the gloom at the back of the store. “Daddy, I’m hungry—” she began. Then she saw Kimberly and came flying forward again.
Kimberly cradled her, telling her, “Baby, baby, it’s all right, Mommy’s here.” Mark sat, absently stroking his daughter’s long smooth hair, feeling excluded.
At last Sprout relinquished her hold on Sunflower’s neck and slid down to sit cross-legged on the scuffed linoleum, pressed up against her mother’s black-stockinged shins. Kimberly petted her.
“I don’t want to take her away from you, Mark.” Mark’s vision swirled. His eyes stung. His tongue knotted. “Why-why are you doing this, then? You said I was doing well.”
“That’s different. That’s money.” She gestured around the shop. “Do you really think this is any way for a little girl to grow up? Surrounded by smut and hash pipes?”
“She’s all right,” he said sullenly. “She’s happy. Aren’t you honey?”
Wide-eyed solemn, Sprout nodded. Kimberly shook her head.
“Mark, these are the eighties. You’re a dropout, a druggie. How can you expect to raise a daughter, let alone one as ... special as our Sprout is?”
Mark froze with his hand reaching for the pocket of his faded denim jacket-the one that held his pouch and papers, not the one with the Grateful Dead patch. It came to him how great the gulf between them had become.
“The way I’ve been doing,” he said. “One day at a time.”
“Oh, Mark,” she said, rising. “You sound like an AA meeting.”
The tape had segued to Buffalo Springfield. Kimberly hugged Sprout, came around the table to him. “Families should be together,” she said huskily in his ear. “Oh, Mark, I wish—”
“What? What do you wish?”
But she was gone, leaving him and her last words hanging in a breath of Chanel No. 5.
The stuffed animals sat in a rapt semicircle on the bed and in shelf tiers along the walls. The light of one dim bulb glittered in attentive plastic eyes as the girl spoke.
Mark watched from the doorway. She had not pulled the madras-print cloth to, indicating she didn’t want full privacy. She spoke in a low voice, leaning forward. He could never make out what she said at times like this; it seemed to him that the length of her sentences, the pitch of her voice even, were somehow more adult than anything she managed in the world outside her tiny converted-closet bedroom, in the presence of anyone but the Pobbles and Thumpers and teddy bears. But if he tried to intrude, to come close to catch the sense of what she was saying, she clammed up. It was one area of her life Sprout excluded him from, however desperately he wanted to share it.
He turned away, padded barefoot past the dark cubicle where he had his own mattress on the floor to the lab that took up most of the apartment above the Pumpkin.
Red-eye pilot lights threw little hard shards of illumination that ricocheted fitfully among surfaces of glass and mechanism. Mark felt his way to a pad in the corner beneath a periodic table and a poster for Destiny’s gig at the Fillmore in 1970’s long-lost spring and sat. The smell of cannabis smoke and the layers of paint it had sunk into enfolded him like arms. His cheeks had become wet without his being aware.
He pushed a cabinet on casters away from the wall, untoggled the fiberboard rear panel. The compartment hidden inside contained racks of vials of various colored powders: blue, orange, yellow, gray, black, and silver that swirled together without mixing. He stared at them, ran a finger along them like a stick along a picket fence.
A long time ago a skinny kid with a crew cut and highwater pants, who had just dropped LSD for the first time ever, had stumbled into an alleyway in horror, fleeing a People’s Park confrontation between National Guardsmen and students in the dark angry days that followed Kent State. Moments later a glowing beautiful youth emerged: an ace for the Revolution. Together with Tom Douglas, the Lizard King and doomed lead singer for Destiny, he had stood off the Guard and the Establishment ace Hardhat, and saved the day. Then he partied the night away, with help from the kids, Tom Douglas, and a beautiful young activist called Sunflower. He called himself the Radical.
In the morning the Radical disappeared. He was never seen again. And a certain nerd biochem student stumbled back out of the alley with a head full of the strangest memory fragments.
Becoming the Radical again-if he’d ever really been the Radical-had become Mark’s Holy Grail. He had failed in that quest. The brightly colored powders were what he had found instead. Not what he was looking for-but a means to acceptance all the same. To having, at least for one hour, a dose, what a long-dead Egyptian scribe once prayed for as “effective personality.”
He felt stirrings down around the back of his skull, like the voices of children on a distant playground. He pushed them back down, away. From below the racks he took a bong with a cracked, smoke-stained stack. Right now he needed chemical sanctuary of a more conventional kind.
He soared upward from the roof, upward from the smog and squalor into blue morning sky that darkened around him as he rose. The Village dwindled, was subsumed into the cement scab of Manhattan, became a finger poking a blue ribbon between Long Island and the Jersey shore, was lost in swirls of cloud. Clouds hid the shitbrown garbage bloom from the bay into the Atlantic: a blessing in his present mood.
He rose higher, feeling the air chill and attenuate around him until it was gone, and he floated in blackness, with nothing between him and the hot healing eye of the sun.
He stretched, feeling his body fill with the wild energy of the sun, the lifegiver He was Starshine; he needed no air, no food. Only sunlight. It hit him like a drug—though he knew the rush of cocaine and sizzle of crystal meth only
at one remove and unwillingly, through the experiences of Mark Meadows.
From the Olympian height of orbit you could barely see what a splendid job man was doing of fouling his own nest. He ached to spread the word, the warning, to help the world to its senses with his poems and songs. But the moments of freedom were too few, too few....
He felt the pressure of other voices within, dragging him back to Earth, in thought if not yet in body. Meadows had a problem, and he knew that this brief liberation was Mark’s way of consulting him. As he would the others.
Changes are due in your life, Mark Meadows, he thought. But what might those changes be? If he himself could do no more, he wished Meadows at least would involve himself more in the world, take a stand. He wished Mark would give up his habits of drug abusethough he couldn’t escape irony there, since if Mark went completely straight, it would be in effect the end of him, of Starshine in his golden body stocking, floating up above the world so high.
He gazed off around the molten-silver limb of the world. A gigantic oil spill was fouling the coast of Alaska; for all his powers, what could he do? What could he do to halt acid rain, or the destruction of the Amazon rain forest?
That last he’d even tried, had flown to Brazil on wings of light, begun destroying bulldozers and work camps with his energy beams, putting the workmen to flight, burning the rotor off a Gazelle gunship that had tried to drive him away-though begrudgingly he had caught it before it crashed, and eased it to a soft landing on a sandbar. Unworthy as they were, he didn’t want the crew’s deaths weighing down his soul.
He had gotten so engrossed in his mission, in fact, that he’d overstayed his hour, stranding Mark in a smoldering patch of devastation in the middle of the Amazon basin with a whole regiment of the Brazilian army closing in and mightily pissed off. Even with his other friends to call on, Mark had some bad moments getting back to the States. He’d been so miffed he hadn’t summoned Starshine for six months afterward.
It did no good, of course. The Brazilian government borrowed more money from the World Bank and bought more and bigger earth-raping machines. The destruction went on with barely a hiccup.
The truth is, the world doesn’t need more aces, he thought. It doesn’t need us at all. We can’t do anything real.
He looked into the sun. Its roaring song of life and light blinded him, suffused him. But for all his exaltation, he was a mote-a spark, quickly consumed.
And he knew that he had come to his truth.
Dr. Pretorius leaned back in his swivel chair and crossed hands over his hard paunch. His suit was white today. He looked like a hip Colonel Sanders.
“So, Dr. Meadows, do you have a decision for me?” Mark nodded, started to speak. A door opened behind Pretorius and the words stuck tight in Mark’s throat. A woman had slipped silently into the room—a girl, maybe; she looked more like a special effect than a human. She was five and a half feet tall, inhumanly slim, and blue-blue green, actually, gleaming in the same shade as the dyes used in blue ice. The room temperature, already cool, had dropped perceptibly.
“You haven’t met my ward, have you? Dr. Meadows, let me present Ice Blue Sibyl.”
She looked at him. At least she turned her face toward him. Whatever she was made of looked hard as glass, but seemed constantly, subtly to be shifting. Her features seemed high-cheekboned and forward thrusting, though it was hard to be sure. Her body was attenuated as a mannequin’s and almost as sexless; though she appeared to be nude, the tiny breasts showed no nipples, nor did she display genitalia. Still, there was some alien, elflike quality to her, something that caused a stirring in Mark’s crotch as she looked at him with her blue-glass stare.
She turned her face to Pretorius, tipped it attentively. Mark got the impression that some communication passed between them. The lawyer nodded. Sibyl turned and walked to the door with sinuous inhuman grace. She stopped, gave Mark a last glance, vanished.
Pretorius was looking at him. “You’ve decided?” Mark reached out and hugged his daughter to him. “Yeah, man. There’s only one thing I can do.”
“Hello? Is anyone here?” Dr. Tachyon stepped cautiously through the open door. Today he wore an eighteenthcentury peach coat over a pale pink shirt with lace spraying out the front of a mauve waistcoat. His breeches were deep purple satin, caught at the knee with gold rosettes. His stockings were lilac, his shoes gold. Instead of an artificial hand, he wore a lace cozy on his stump, with a red rose sprouting from it.
Amazement stopped him cold. The Pumpkin was gutted. Tables were overturned, the counter torn up, the magazine racks lying on their backs, the psychedelic-era posters gone from the walls. Somewhere music played.
“Burning Sky! What’s happened here? Markl Mark!” Through a doorway at the back that looked curiously naked without the beaded curtain that had always hung there stepped a remarkable figure. It wore torn khaki pants, a black Queensrykche T-shirt stretched to the bursting point across a disproportionately huge chest. With a narrow head and finely sculpted, almost elfin features set on an inhumanly squat body, the newcomer looked the way pretty-boy movie martial-artist Jean Claude Van Damme would if they put him in a hydraulic press and mashed him down him a foot or so.
He stopped and turned a cool smile on Tachyon. “So. The little prince.” His English had a curious, almost Eastern European accent. Just like Tachyon’s.
“What have you done to Mark?” Tachyon hissed. His flesh hand inched back toward the little H&K nine-millimeter tucked in a waistband holster inside the back of his breeches.
The other put fist to palm and flexed. Cloth tore. “Served loyally and without stint, as befits a Morakh.” Being destroyed as an abomination befits a Morakh, Tachyon thought. He was about to say so when an equally outlandish apparition loomed up behind the creature. This one had a gray sleeveless sweatshirt and paint-splashed dungarees hung on a frame like a street sign and graying blond hair clipped skull close. He seemed to consist all of nose, Adam’s apple, and elbows.
“Doc! How are you, man?” the scarecrow said. Tachyon squinted at him. “Who the hell are you?” The other blinked and looked as if he were about to cry. “It’s me, man. Mark.”
Tachyon goggled. A blond rocket in cutoffs shot out the door, hit the Morakh in the middle of his broad back, scaled him like a monkey, and seated itself with slim bare legs straddling his rhinoceros neck.
“Uncle Tachy!” Sprout chirped. “Uncle Dirk is giving me a piggyback ride.”
“Indeed.” Ignoring the Morakh’s scowl, Tach stepped close to kiss the girl on her proffered cheek.
Durg at-Morakh was the strongest non-ace on Earth: no Golden Boy or Harlem Hammer, but far stronger than any normal human. He was not human; he was Takisian—a Morakh, a gene-engineered fighting machine created by the Vayawand, bitter enemies of Tachyon’s House Ilkazam. He had come to Earth with Tachyon’s cousin Zabb, a foe of a more intimate nature.
Now he served Mark, having been defeated in unarmed combat by Mark’s “friend” Moonchild. He and Tachyon tolerated each other for Mark’s sake.
Tachyon gripped his old friend by the biceps. “Mark, man, what has happened to you?”
Mark grimaced. Tachyon realized he had never seen his chin before.
“It’s this court thing,” Mark said, glancing at his daughter. “They start taking depositions soon. Dr. Pretorius said I needed to, like, straighten up my image.”
Taking his cue, Durg patted Sprout’s shins and said, “Let us go for a walk, little mistress.” They went out into the sunlight on Fitz-James.
“‘Dr. Pretorius,”‘ Tachyon repeated with distaste. The two regarded each other like a pair of dogs who claim the same turf. “He thinks you should then give in, change the way you lives—the way you wear your hair?”
Mark shrugged helplessly. “He says if I challenge the system, I’ll lose.”
“Perhaps if you had a more competent lawyer.”
“Everybody says he’s the best. The legal version of, like, you.”
“Well.” Tach fingered his narrow chin. “I admit I’ve no cause to believe that your justice’ is aptly named. What are you doing to your store?”
“Pretorius says if I go in as a head-shop owner I’ll get blown out of the water. So I’m selling off the paraphernalia and letting Jube take the comix as a lot. I’m making the Pumpkin into more a New Age place. Gonna call it a ‘Wellness Center’ or something.”
Tachyon winced.
“Yeah, man, I know. But it’s, like, the eighties.”
“Indeed.”
Mark turned and went into the back, where he had boxes of refuse piled to go into the dumpster in the alley. Tachyon followed.
“What music is this?” he asked, gesturing to a tape player with a coat-hanger antenna.
“Old Buffalo Springfield. “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing.”‘ He dabbed a fingertip at a corner of his eye. ‘Always has made me cry, darn it.”
“I understand.” Tach plucked a silken handkerchief from the sleeve of his stump and dabbed at the sweat that daintily beaded his eyebrows. “So Pretorius thinks changing your life-style at this late date will impress the court? It seems a childishly obvious expedient.”
“Appearances count for a lot in court, he says. See, the judge decided to hold open hearings at the end, not just take depositions and briefs like they usually do in custody cases. And Doc Pretorius says Sun-Kimberly’s attorney’s trying to get the press in, and they’ll play it up big; the ace thing and all. You know how popular we are now. So this image thing, it’s like, if a biker gets busted for murder or something, they shave off his beard and put a suit on him for trial.”
“But you are not on trial.”
“Dr. E says I am.”
“Hmm. Who is the judge?”
“Justice Mary Conower.” He bent, picked up a box, and brightened. “She’s supposed to be a liberal; she was, like, a big Dukakis supporter. She won’t let all these ace haters trash me. Will she?”
“I remember her from the campaign. Last fall I’d have said you were correct. Now... I’m not so sure. It seems we have few friends on any side.”
“Maybe that’s why Dr. E told me to go underground instead ‘ of doing the court thing. But I always thought being a liberal meant you believed in people’s rights and stuff.”
“A lot of us thought that, once.” Something stuffed in a box caught Tach’s eye. He stooped like a hawk. “Mark, no!” he exclaimed, brandishing a crumpled purple top hat.
Mark stood holding the box and avoiding his eyes. “I had to straighten up. Stop doing drugs. Pretorius said they’d ream me out royally if I didn’t. Might even go to the DA and get me busted.”
“Your Sunflower would do this to you?”
“Her attorney would. Dude named Latham. They call him, like, Sturgeon or something.”
“ ‘Sinjin.’ Yes. He would do that. He would do anything.” He held up the hat. “But this?”
The tears were streaming freely down Mark’s shorn cheeks now. “I decided on my own, man. After the vials I got now are all used up, I’m not making any more. There’s just too much risk, and I gotta keep Sprout. No matter what.”
“So Captain Trips—”
“Has hung it up, man.”
“Have you ever used drugs, Dr. Meadows?”
With effort Mark pulled his consciousness back to the deposition room. The oak paneling seemed to be pressing him like a Salem witch. His attention was showing a tendency to spin around inside his skull.
“Uh. Back in the sixties,” he told St. John Latham. Pretorius opposed conceding even that much. But this new Mark, the one emerging from a cannabis pupa into the chill of century’s end, thought that would be a little much.
“Not since?”
“No.”
“What about tobacco?”
He rubbed his eyes. He was getting a headache. “I quit smoking in ‘78, man.”
“And alcohol?”
“I drink wine, sometimes. Not too often.”
“You eat chocolate?”
“Yes.”
“You’re a biochemist. It surprises me you aren’t aware these are all drugs; addictive ones, in fact.”
“I do know” Very subdued.
“Ah. What about aspirin? Yes? Penicillin? Antihistamines?”
“Yeah. I’m, uh, allergic to penicillin.”
“So. You do still use drugs. Even addictive drugs. Though you just now denied doing it.”
“I didn’t know that’s what you meant.”
“What other drugs do you use that you claim you don’t?”
Mark glanced to Pretorius. The lawyer shrugged. “None, man. I mean, uh, none.”
When they got back to the Village from Latham’s office, Mark could tell Sprout was tired and footsore, simply because she wasn’t bouncing around in the usual happy-puppy way she had when she was out somewhere with Daddy. She wore a lightweight dress and flats, and her long straight blond hair was tied in a ponytail to keep it off her neck. Mark fingered his own nape, which still felt naked in the sticky-hot spring-afternoon breeze, rich with polynucleic aromatic hydrocarbons.
A couple of kids in bicycling caps and lycra shorts clumped by on the other side of the street. They watched Sprout with overt interest. She was just falling into adolescence, still skinny as a car antenna. But she had an ingenue face, startlingly pretty. The kind to attract attention. Reflexively he tugged her closer. I’m turning into an uptight old man, he thought, and tugged again at the loosened white collar of his shirt. His neck felt ropeburned by the tie now wadded in the pocket of his gray suit coat.
The light of the falling sun shattered like glass on windshields and shop windows and filled his eyes with sharp fragments. Even in this backwater street the noise of nearby traffic was like a rocker-arm engine pounding in his skull, and each honk of a horn threatened to pop his eyes like a steel needle.
For years Mark had lived in a haze of marijuana smoke. He dabbled in other drugs, but that was more in the nature of biochemical experimentation with himself as subject-such as had called up the Radical, and subsequently his “friends.” Grass was his drug of choice. Way back in those strange days of the late sixties early seventies, actually, but the sixties didn’t end until Nixon did-it seemed a perfect solace to someone who had come to terms with the fact that he was doomed to disappoint everyone who expected anything of him. Especially himself.
Now he was emerging from the cushioning fog. Off the weed, the world was a lot more surreal place to be. Someone stepped from the doorway of the Pumpkin, features obscured by the broad straw brim of a hat. Mark’s hand moved to the inside pocket of his coat, where he kept a set of his dwindling supply of vials.
Sprout lunged forward with arms outspread. The figure knelt, embraced her, and then violet eyes were looking up at him from beneath the hat brim.
“Mark,” Kimberly said. “I had to see you.”
The ball bounced across the patchy grass of Central Park as though it were bopping out the lyrics to a sixties cigarette-commercial jingle. Sprout pursued it, skipping and chirping happily.
“What does your old man think of all this?” Mark asked, lying on his elbows on the beach towel Kimberly had brought along with the ball.
“About what?” she asked him. She wasn’t showing her agency game face this afternoon. In an impressionistic cotton blouse and blue jeans that looked as if they’d been worn after she bought them instead of before, knees drawn up to support her chin and hair hanging in a braid down her back, she looked so much like the Sunflower of old he could barely breathe.
He wanted to say, “about the trial,” but he also wanted to say, “about you seeing me,” but the two kind of jostled against each other and got jammed up like fat men trying to go through a men’s room door at the same time, and so he just made vaguely circular gestures in the air and said, “About, uh, this.”
“He’s in Japan on business. T. Boone Pickens is trying to open up the country to American businesses. Cornelius is one of his advisers.” She seemed to speak with unaccustomed crispness, but then he’d never been good at telling that kind of thing. It had been one of their problems. One of many.
He was trying to think of something to say when Sunflower-no, Kimberly—clutched his arm. “Mark, look—” Their daughter had followed the bouncing ball into the middle of a large blanket and the Puerto Rican family that occupied it, almost bowling over a stout woman in lime-green shorts. A short, wiry man with tattoos all over his arm jumped up and started expostulating. Half a dozen children gathered around, including a boy about Sprout’s own age with a switchblade face.
“Mark, aren’t you going to do something?”
He looked at her, puzzled. “What, man? She’s okay.”
“But those ... people. That is, Sprout ran into them, they’re justifiably upset—”
He laughed. “Look.”
The Puerto Ricans were laughing, too. The fat woman hugged Sprout. The tough kid smiled and tossed her the ball. She turned and came racing back up the slope toward her parents, graceful and clumsy as a week-old foal.
“See? She gets along pretty well with people, even if...” The sentence ran down uncompleted, as they usually did on that subject.
Kimberly still looked skeptical. Mark shrugged, then by reflex touched the pocket of the denim jacket he wore despite the heat.
Maybe he did rely on the implicit promise of his ‘friends’ too much. He’d have to go cold turkey from that, too, one of these days. He wasn’t calling up the personae too often. Occasionally he felt the peevish pressure in his brain, like heckling from the back of an old auditorium, though he had explained to his ‘friends’ what he had to do and thought most of them accepted it. But eventually the powders would be gone.
As it was, Pretorius would kill him if he knew he still had any of them. Pretorius thought a raid was a real possibility, and the vials contained a wider variety of proscribed substances than a DEA agent was liable to resell in a year.
But what am I supposed to do? Pour them down the drain? That felt like murder.
Then Sprout’s arms horseshoed his skinny neck and they went over, all three of them, in a laughing, tickling tangle, and for a moment it was almost like real life.
The Parade of Liars, as Pretorius called the succession of expert witnesses he and Latham took turns deposing, trudged on from spring into summer. The Twenty-eighth Army taught the students in Gate of Heavenly Peace Square what the old dragon Mao had told them so often: where political power springs from. Nur al-Allah fanatics attacked a joker-rights rally in London’s Hyde Park with bottles and brickbats, winning praise from Muslim leaders throughout the West. “Secular law must yield to the laws of God,” a noted Palestine-born Princeton professor announced, “and these creatures are an abomination in the eyes of Allah.”
A skinhead beat a joker to death with a baseball bat. The media swelled with indignation. When it turned out that the chief of staff of the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee had tried the same thing back in ‘73, liberals called it “a meanness out there, a feeding frenzy” when people took him to task for it. After all, he had helped to pass some very caring legislation, and anyway the bitch survived.
Kimberly flitted in and out of Mark’s life like a moth. Every time he thought he could catch hold of her, she eluded him. She seldom kept a date two times running. But she never stayed away long.
The hearings began.
Pretorius turned up precious few character witnesses for Mark. Dr. Tachyon, of course, and Jube the news dealer; Doughboy, the retarded joker ace, broke down and sobbed mountainously as he recounted how Mark and his friends had saved him from being convicted of murder—and, incidentally, saved the planet from the Swarm. His testimony was corroborated by laconic Lieutenant Pilar Arrupe of Homicide South, who chewed a toothpick in place of her customary cigarillo. Pretorius wanted to bring on reporter Sara Morgenstern, but she had dropped from sight after the nightmare of last year’s Atlanta convention.
No aces testified on Mark’s behalf. The Aces High crowd was laying low these days. Besides, most of them seemed embarrassed by Cap’n Trips and his plight.
He just wasn’t an eighties kind of guy.
“Dr. Meadows, are you an ace?”
“Yes.”
“And would you mind describing the nature of your powers?”
“Yes.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“ I mean,—I, uh—I would mind.”
“Your honor, I ask that the court take notice of the witness’s lack of cooperation.”
“Your honor—”
“Dr. Pretorius, you needn’t gesticulate. You and Mr. Latham may approach the bench.”
Pretorius always thought the rooms of the New Family Court on Franklin and Lafayette had all the human warmth of a dentist’s waiting room. The too-bright fluorescents hurt his eyes.
The media were back in force, he noted with displeasure as he gimped to the bench. After the publicity that attended Mark’s getting served, the press had lost interest; lots of nothing visible had happened for a while.
“Dr. Meadows is refusing to answer a vital question, your honor,” Latham said.
“He can’t be compelled to answer. Indiana v. Mr. Miraculous,—I964. Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination apply.”
With blue eyes and blond hair worn in a pageboy cut, judge Mary Conower looked more pretty than anything else-ingenue, belying her reputation as a hard-ass. A slight dry tautness to her skin gave her the appearance of a cheerleader gone sour on life.
“This isn’t a criminal trial, Doctor,” she said. Pretorius bit down hard on several possible responses. He was getting kind of old to pull another night in the Tombs for contempt.
“Then I object on the grounds that the line of questioning is irrelevant.”
Conower raised an eyebrow at Latham. “That seems valid.”
“Mrs. Gooding contends that the fact of her former husband’s acehood constitutes a threat to the welfare of her daughter,” Latham said.
“That’s absurd(“ Pretorius exclaimed.
“We intend to demonstrate that it is not at all absurd, your honor.”
“Very well,” Conower said. “You may attempt to so demonstrate. But the court will not compel Dr. Meadows to describe his powers.”
Latham stood a moment before Mark, staring holes in him with reptile eyes. In the audience someone coughed. “You have friends who are aces, Dr. Meadows?” Mark glanced at Sprout, busy drawing doodles on one of Pretorius’s legal pads, at Kimberly, who was dressed like the centerfold in Forbes and wouldn’t meet his eye. Finally he looked to Pretorius, who sighed and nodded. “Yes.”
Latham nodded slowly, as if this was Big News. Mark could feel the press begin to rustle around out there like snakes waking up among leaves. They sensed he was getting set up; he sensed he was getting set up. He glanced at Pretorius again. Pretorius gave him a drop-’em-and-spread-’em shrug.
“It’s been suggested that you play a sort of Jimmy Olsen role to several of New York’s most powerful aces. Is that a fair assessment?”
Mark tried to keep his eyes from sidling to Pretorius yet again. He didn’t want Conower to think he was shifty-eyed. This justice trip was a lot more complicated than he ever thought.
... It came to him he had no idea how to answer the question. Other than, No, more of a Clark Kent role, which he badly did not want to say. He turned red and stuttered.
“Would it be fair,” Latham continued, with a fractional smile to let Mark know he had him right where he wanted him, “to say that you are on intimate terms with certain aces, including one who variously styles himself Jumpin’ Jack Flash and JJ Flash?”
“Um ... Yes.”
“Briefly describe Mr. Flash’s powers for us, if you will. Come, there’s no reason to be coy; they’re not exactly a secret.”
Mark hadn’t been being coy. Latham’s smug unfairness didn’t make it easy to answer.
“Ah, he, ah—he flies. And he, like-I mean, he shoots fire from his hands.”
Plasma, schmuck, a voice said in the back of his skull. I just pretend tit’s fire. Jesus, you’re making a royal screw-up out of this.
He looked around, terrified he had spoken aloud. But the mob showed blank expectant faces, and Latham was turning back from his table with a manila folder in his hands.
“I’d like to call the court’s attention,” Latham said, “to this photographic evidence of the damage done by just such a fire-shooting ace.”
In the crowd somebody gasped; someone else retched. Latham pivoted like a bullfighter. Mark felt his stomach do a slow roll at the sight of the eight-by-ten photo he held in his hand. Judging from the skirt and Mary Janes, it had been a girl not much older than Sprout.
But from the waist up it was a blackened, shriveled effigy with a hideous grin.
Pretorius’s cane tip cracked like a rifle. “Your honor, I object in the strongest possible termsl What the hell does counsel think he’s doing with this horror show?”
“Presenting my case,” Latham said evenly. “Preposterous. Your honor, this picture is of a victim of the ace the press dubbed Fireball, a psychopath apprehended by Mistral this spring in Cincinnati. Whatever his relationship to Mark Meadows, JJ Flash had no more to do with it than you or I or Jetboy. To show it here is irrelevant and prejudicial.”
“Do you suggest I might be swayed by evidence not germane to this case?” Conower asked silkily.
“I suggest that Mr. Latham is attempting to try his case in the press. This is rank sensationalism.”
Conower frowned. “Mr. Latham?”
Latham spread his hands as if surprised. “What am I to do, your honor? My opponent avers that ace powers are harmless. I demonstrate the contrary.”
“I aver no such damn fool thing.”
“Perhaps he would put it, Ace powers don’t kill people—people kill people. I intend to demonstrate that the destructive potential of these powers is too enormous to be dismissed with a flip syllogism.”
Pretorius grinned. “I have to hand it to you, St. John. You are stone death walking to straw men.”
He shifted weight to the cane from his bad leg and turned to the judge. “Mr. Latham is trying to drag in atrocities with no connection to JJ Flash other than that they were committed by an ace with fire-related powers. And even if Flash were involved, to indict Dr. Meadows on that account smacks of guilt by association.”
“If Dr. Meadows commonly associated with known members of the Medellin Cartel,” Latham said ingenuously, “would your honor say that fact lacked relevance to his suitability as a parent?”
Conower squeezed her mouth till her lips disappeared. “Very well, Mr. Latham. You may present your case. And may I remind you, Dr. Pretorius, that I’m the one charged with evaluating the evidence?”
Mark felt more exposed and humiliated than he ever had in his life. This was worse than one of those balls-outon-Broadway dreams. All his life he’d shunned attention, in his own persona at least. Now all these strangers were looking at him and Sprout and thinking about those awful pictures.
Pretorius turned away from the bench. His eyebrows bristled over blue-hot eyes. Latham approached the witness stand with a look like an Inquisitor with a fresh-lit torch.
Kimberly was studying her fingernails. Mark looked at Sprout. Seeming to sense his attention, she looked up into his eyes and smiled.
He wanted to die.
“We need to do more, Mrs. Gooding,” St. John Latham said.
“Such as what? You seem to be doing a marvelous job of emasculating my ex-husband as it is.”
Latham stood. She sat on the couch, to the extent sitting was possible on a chrome-framed Scandinavian slab. It was more a matter of trying not to slide off onto the black marble floor. If the lawyer noticed the bitter sarcasm in her voice-as if she and Mark were on one side and he on the other-he didn’t acknowledge it.
“Dr. Pretorius is a chronic romantic, and his notions of human nature and interactions downright quaint. Nonetheless, he is not a total fool. He is cunning, and he knows the law. And you are not without your vulnerable points.” She threw her cigarette half-smoked into her drink and set the tumbler down on the irregular glass coffee table with a clink. “Such as?”
“Such as your breakdown in court during the first custody hearing. It lost the case for you then. It cannot help you now”
The two exterior walls that met at one corner of the Goodings’ living room were glass. Kimberly gazed out over Manhattan and thought about how much the view reminded her of a black velvet painting. Apartments with panoramic views like this one always came off better in the movies, somehow.
“ I was under a lot of stress.”
“As are you now. It is not inconceivable that Pretorius might try to reduce you to another such breakdown on the stand.”
She looked at him. “Is that what you’d do in his place?”
He said nothing.
She lit another cigarette and blew smoke toward him. “Okay. What did you have in mind?”
“A concrete demonstration of your husband’s ace powers. Or solid evidence of the actual nature of the connection between him and Flash and Moonchild and the rest, if he is no more than a Jimmy Olsen figure.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What are you saying.”
“If your former husband loves your daughter as much as he claims, a perceived threat to her would certainly lead him to employ any powers he might have.”
She went white, tensed as if she were about to leap up and attack him. Then she settled back and elaborately studied her manicure.
“ I shouldn’t be surprised that you’re a bastard, Mr. Latham,” she said. “After all, that’s why I hired you. But it occurs to me—”
She lowered her hand and gave him a smile, poisonous and V—shaped. “It occurs to me that you’re insane. You want me to use my daughter for bait?”
He didn’t flinch. Didn’t even flicker.
“I said perceived threat, Mrs. Gooding. I am talking about a set-piece-a stratagem. There would be no real risk.”
Showing as little emotion as he, she picked up her glass and threw it hard at his head. He shifted his weight. The glass sailed past to shatter against the window. In New York, people who live in glass houses have to have stoneproof walls; it’s in the building code.
“I’m paying you to win this in court, you son of a bitch. Not to play games with my daughter’s life.”
He showed her the ghost of a smile. “What do you think the law is but playing games with people’s lives?”
“Get out,” she said. “Get out of my house.”
“Certainly.” Calm. Always calm. Infuriating, impermeable, irresistible. “Anything the client desires. But reflect on this: Not even I can get your daughter for you if you don’t want her badly enough to sacrifice.”
Sprout clung tightly to her parents’ hands. “Mommy and Daddy, be nice to each other,” she said solemnly. “In that court place, everybody always sounds mad all the time. It makes me afraid.”
She clouded up and started to sniffle. “I’m afraid they’ll take me away from you.”
Her mother hugged her, hard. “Honey, we’ll always be with you.” A hooded look to Mark. “One of us will. Always.”
Sprout let Kimberly lower her onto the mattress among the stuffed toys and gazed up with wide eyes. “Promise?”
“Promise,” her mother said.
“Yeah,” Mark said around an obstruction in his throat. “One of us will always be around. We can promise you that much.”
Kimberly sipped Chianti from her jelly jar. “Your room looks so naked without all the psychedelia.” Candlelight struck half-moon amethyst highlights off her eyes. “I mean, who’d—imagine you without that huge poster of Tom Marion over your bed?”
He smiled ruefully. “The worst part is this futon I got in place of my old mattress. It’s like nothing at all sometimes. I wake up with sore patches on my knees and elbows from the floor.”
Kimberly drank wine and sighed. Mark tried hard not to think about the way her breasts rode up inside the thin cotton blouse. He’d been alone too long.
“Oh, Mark, what happened to us?”
He shook his head. His eyes grew misty. Way back and down, he felt derisive sounds coming out of Flash and Cosmic Traveler, sitting like hecklers in the cheap seats of his mind. It was rare enough they agreed on anything. He felt wordless care and concern from Moonchild, nothing at all from Aquarius. Starshine was vaguely disapproving. He was probably afraid Mark was going to have fun. It wasn’t socially conscious.
She moistened her lips. “I know St. John is being awfully hard on you. I wish it didn’t have to be this way.” He looked at her with eyes that felt as if they had no moisture in them, parched by each random breath of air. It was strange, considering how close he was to tears. Would it do me any good to beg? he wondered. Oh, please, the Traveler said.
She settled back on his pillow. Even in the eighties a man got to have a pillow. For a moment she half lay that way, one leg cocked, her hair hanging in her eyes and around her shoulders with just a little bit of perm kink still in it. He thought she’d never looked so beautiful. Not even when she was carrying Sprout and they were both breaking their necks to make believe that everything was going to work out.
She sighed again. “All my life I’ve had this feeling of shapelessness,” she began.
Mark’s mouth said, “Oh, baby, don’t talk that way, you’re beautiful,” before he could stop it. Flash and Traveler hooted and twirled noisemakers. Even Moonchild winced.
Kimberly ignored him. “It’s like I’ve always been searching for landmarks to define myself by: jocks, radicals.” A smile. “You.”
She smoothed her hair back and let her head drop toward one shoulder. “Does any of this make any sense?” Mark made earnest noises. She smiled and shook her head.
“After we split I spent a few years in heavy therapy. I guess you knew about that, huh? Then one day I decided it was time to try something new, just completely different from anything I’d done before. I did the furthest-out thing I could think of set out to become a by-God businesswoman, a real hard-charging lady entrepreneur. Entrepreneuse. Whatever. Is that strange, or what?”
She laughed. “And I did, Mark, I did it. I do it. Racquetball and power lunches. I even have a muscular male bimbo for a secretary, even if he is gay. You can’t imagine what this is costing me in lost time, aside from dear St. John’s astronomical fees.”
Mark looked away and felt selfish for reflexively thinking of what all this was costing him, and not at all in terms of money.
“Then I met Cornelius. He’s really a wonderful man.”
“I’m sure you’d like him if you got to know him. Only you and he are ... worlds apart.”
She poured them both more wine. “Domestic little creature, aren’t I? I’m starting to have the horrible suspicion that no matter how liberated I think I am, my gut notion’s Norman Rockwell. You know, all those Saturday Evening Post covers when we were kids-don’t make faces like that, I know it’s silly. But I want to capture that feed.”
She leaned toward him. He ached to stroke her hair. “Anything you want is fine. I want you to be happy.” She smiled at him, sidelong. “You really mean that, don’t you? In spite of what’s going on.”
He wanted to say-well, everything. But the words tried to come so fast they jammed tight in his throat. She brought her face close to his. Her mass of hair shadowed both their faces.
“Remember that guy I went with in high school? The big guy, blond, captain of the football team?”
Mark winced at long-remembered pain. “Yeah.”
She laughed softly. “About three weeks after he broke your nose, he broke mine.” She set the jelly glass down beside the futon and kissed him lightly on the lips.
“Funny how things turn out sometimes, huh?”
His lips were numb and stinging all at once, as if somebody had punched him in the mouth. She slipped her hand behind his head, drew his face to hers. Almost he hung back. Then their mouths touched again, and her tongue slid between his lips, teased across his teeth. He grabbed her like a drowning man and clung, with his hands, his lips, his soul.
In her sleep, in her room, Sprout cried out.
They were both on their feet at once. Mark just beat Kimberly through the door of his microscopic bedroom. Lying on her own lumpy mattress, Sprout murmured to herself, hugged her Pooh-bear closer to herself, and rolled over and back deeper into sleep. Mark and Kimberly watched her for a moment, not speaking, barely breathing. Kimberly disengaged, went and sat on the futon. Mark practically melted beside her, reaching for her. She was tense, unyielding.
“I’m sorry,” she said without looking at him. “It won’t work. Don’t you see? I’ve tried this. I can’t go back.”
“But we can be together I’d do anything for you—for Sprout. We can be, like, a family again.”
She glanced at him over her shoulder. Her eyes gleamed with tears. “Oh, Mark. It can’t be. You’re too much the free spirit. “
“What’s wrong with freedom?”
“Responsibility took its place.”
“But I can be what you wannl I’ll do anything for you. I can help give you shape, if that’s what you need.” Smiling sadly, she shook her head. She stood up, faced him, took his face in her hands. “Oh, Mark,” she said, and kissed him lightly but chastely on the lips, “I do love you. But really, it’s all you can do to get up feet-first in the morning.”
She was gone. Mark lurched to his feet, but her Reeboks were already doing a muted Ginger Baker number down the stairs. He hung there in the door frame, heart pounding. He could feel it especially in the scrotum; his belly and inner thighs ached and trembled with frustrated tension.
He had almost forgotten what the blue balls felt like. This shit, JJ Flash said, has got to stop.
“Dr. Pretorius, what do you mean by appearing in my court like this?”
“You mean this, your honor?” He gestured at his right leg. The immaculately tailored trousers ended at the knee. The limb below was black and green and wanted like a frog’s. Yellow pus oozed from a dozen lesions. Judge Conover’s nose wrinkled at the smell.
“This is my wild card. It makes me a joker-except the condition is spreading upward by degrees, and when it reaches my torso, it will kill me. So I suppose it also qualifies as a Black Queen, albeit slow”
“It’s disgusting. Do you intend to make mockery of this court?”
“I intend to display only what exists, your honor. Be it the physical disfigurement of a joker or the emotional and mental disfigurement of bigots who would condemn people for having drawn a wild card.”
“I am tempted to find you in contempt.”
“You can’t make it stick,” he said affably. “Jokers may not be enjoined from public display of their traits, unless these conflict with indecent-exposure laws. That’s state and federal law; would you like citations?”
Her cheeks pinched her nose. “No. I know the law” He turned to Kimberly, who sat in the box as if she’d just been carved from a block of ice.
“Mrs. Gooding, you’ve been to court before to get custody of Sprout. What happened the first time?” Anger flared in her eyes. He let himself show a slight smile. Good Elizabeth Taylor. Before her John Belushi days, of course.
“You know perfectly well what happened,” she said crisply.
“Please tell the court anyway.” He let her see him glance toward the press-packed courtroom. He and Mark had awakened to headlines screaming TRIPS CUSTODY CASE LAWYER EQUATES ACES, DRUG LORDS and ACE POWERS KILL, ATTORNEY SAYS. He wanted her and Latham to know he intended to share the joy.
There was also an article that said President Bush, after specifically pledging not to do so during his campaign, was considering calling for a revival of the old Ace Registration Acts. Didn’t have anything to do with this, of course. Just another sign of the times.
She folded her hands before her. “I was under an enormous amount of stress at the time. There was our daughter’s condition, and marriage to Mark was not precisely easy on me.”
Touche, he thought, not that it’ll do you any good. “So what happened?”
“I broke down on the stand.”
“Went to pieces is more like it, wouldn’t you say?” Her mouth tightened to a razor cut. “I was ill at the time. I’m not ashamed of that, why should I be? I’ve had treatment.”
“Indeed. And how else have circumstances changed from that time?”
“Well—” She glanced at Mark, who as usual was gazing at her like a blond basset pup. “My life has become much more stable. I’ve found a career, and a marvelous husband.”
“So you would say that you can offer a far more stable home environment to Sprout than you could before?” She looked at him, surprised and wary. “Why, yes.” He expected Latham to object right then, on GPs, just to break the rhythm of questioning even or maybe especially if he didn’t know where it was headed. You aren’t infallible after all, are you, motherfucker?
“So you are saying that now you are a suitable parent because you’re richer? What you’re saying, then, is that rich people make better parents than poor ones?”
That pulled Latham’s string. He actually jumped to his feet and raised his voice when he objected. Conower was pounding her gavel to restore order. She was going to sustain, no doubt about it. But he’d seen the flicker in her eyes. He’d gotten the point home. Punched her liberal-guilt button with his customary sledgehammer subtlety.
Christ, I hate myself sometimes.
After lunch break Pretorius asked, “Have you ever used illegal drugs, Ms. Gooding.”
“Yes.” She was forthright, meeting his eyes, not trying to evade an allegation she knew he could prove. “A long, long time ago. It was in the wind.” A half smile. “We weren’t as wise back then.”
Nicely done. “And did you ever try LSD-25?” A pause, then, “Yes.”
“Did you use it frequently?”
“That depends on your definition.”
“I’ll trust your judgment, Ms. Gooding.”
She dropped her eyes. “It was the sixties. It was the thing to do. We were experimenting, trying to liberate our consciousness as well as our bodies.”
“And did you ever stop to consider the genetic damage such experimentation might be doing?” He let it ring: “Did you not consider the welfare of your future children, Ms. Gooding?”
The courtroom blew up again.
After Conower called recess Mark was waiting for Pretorius, kind of hopping up and down without leaving his horrible chair, ergonomically designed to conform perfectly to the mass man but to fit no individual. He looked as if his ears were made of iron and had been stuck in a microwave.
“What was all that bullshit about?” he hissed at Pretorius. “Acid isn’t a proven teratogen. Not like, like alcohol.”
“Alcohol isn’t the issue. They haven’t gotten around to reprohibiting it yet, at least not in time for the morning editions. Latham wants to make an issue of drugs. So we’ll give him drugs good and hard.”
For a moment Mark could only sputter in outrage. “Wuh-what about the truth?” he finally managed to get out.
“Truth.” Pretorius laughed, a low, sour sound. “You’re in a court of law, son. Truth is not the issue here.”
He sighed and sat. “Never believe that the days of trial by combat are over. Trials are still duels. It’s just that the champions wised up and rewrote the rules. Now we fight with writs and precedents instead of maces, and instead of risking our own lives, all we risk is our clients’ money. Or lives or freedom.”
He rested both hands on the gargoyle-head knob of his cane. You don’t like what I’m doing. Son, I don’t either. But I take my role as your champion seriously. If I have to wallow in shit to win your case for you, that’s what I do.
“These are witch-hunt times. You want to challenge that essential fact; hell, so do I. But if that’s all I do, you lose your daughter. That’s why they call it the system, Mark. Because like it or not, it’s the way things work. Defy it too openly, it grinds you up and spits you out.”
Mark and Kimberly had a date for that night, Friday. She didn’t keep it. He wasn’t surprised. He didn’t even blame her. He felt dirtied by the way Pretorius had treated her, ashamed.
What was worst in his own mind was that he hadn’t stopped him.
Saturday the guilty depression got to be too much. Mark closed the Wellness Center early. There was something he had to do. A matter of voices in his head.
The small man stood with one red Adida on the roof parapet, looking at the stop-and-go Third World traffic of jokertown a dozen stories below. He wore a red jogging suit over an orange T-shirt. His face was narrow, foxlike, with a sharp prominent nose and a sardonic bend to the eyebrows. Russet hair blew like flames in the stinking breeze.
He held a hand out before him. A jet of flame spurted from the forefinger tip. It became a ball, jumped from one finger to the next. He rolled the hand palm up. The flame swelled to baseball size, settled in the palm. For a moment it burned there, pallid in the sunlight, while he stared at it, as if fascinated. Then with a roar it shot into the high haze on a gusher of fire that seemed to spring from his palm.
He watched the flame dissipate. Then he drew a deep breath, let it sigh out through a lopsided grin.
“About fucking time,” he said, and stepped into space. He let himself fall about fifteen feet, far enough to see a startled face flash by in a window. Then he straightened his body and put his arms out before him like a swimmer in a racing dive and took off flying. No point freaking the citizenry too much. The poor schmucks in J-town had enough on their plates already.
He flew north, toward the park, thinking Mark’s really. put his foot in it this time. At least the poor fool hadn’t quite had the nuts to make a clean break with the past. Didn’t have a cold enough core to pour out his remaining vials of powder and see his other selves swirl away down the drain.
Thank God. It was chafing enough, the half-life he and the others led, like spectators at the back of an old and cavernous movie house where the film kept breaking.
He hated that he only existed on sufferance, only knew his own body, his own flesh, the feel of flight and the wind in his hair, in sixty-minute increments. For a man as full of life as he, that was hell.
Hell was a cold place, for him. The life that roared inside him, he expressed as flame.
A helicopter vaulted off a building top to his left. He angled toward it. When he was a thousand yards away, he kicked in some flame, went streaking for it like a SAM.
He threw himself into a corkscrew, drawing a spiral of orange fire into which the chopper flew.
It was a traffic chopper. The crew knew him; the announcer grinned and waved while his assistant pointed a live-action minicam at him.
JJ Flash, superstar. He grinned and waved. The pilot’s face was as white as a brother’s ever gets. He obviously hadn’t run into Jumpin’ Jack before.
That was fine, too. Flash had a certain amount of mean in him, that needed some harmless outlet.
.. About then he realized where he was heading. He smiled again, wolfishly. His subconscious knew what it was doing.
Kimberly Ann Cordayne Meadows Gooding looked up from her magazine. A man was floating outside the glass corner of her penthouse, tapping with one finger.
She gasped. Her hand reached up to twitch her indigo robe a little more closed over the sheer lilac negligee. He made urgent gestures for her to open the window. She bit her lip, shook her head.
“It doesn’t open,” she said.
“Fuck,” his mouth said soundlessly. He pushed away about six feet, rolled out his hand palm up, as if introducing his next guest on late-night TV Orange fire jetted out and splashed against the window.
Kimberly recoiled. Almost she screamed. Almost. The window wavered, melted in a rough oval. A breath of warm diesel-perfumed wind washed in. The man in red stepped through.
“Sorry about the window,” he said. “I’ll pay for it. I had to talk to you.”
“My husband’s a rich man,” she said. Her voice caught, like a hand running over silk.
“I’m JJ Flash.”
“I know who you are. I’ve seen you on Peregrine’s Perch.”
Without asking, he dropped onto a merciless white chair. “Yeah. And you’ve seen those pictures your fuck lawyer flashed around. Some poor teenybopper pan-fried by a psycho in a town I’ve never even been to.”
She glanced at the window. The wind was blowing her hair. “Maybe Mr. Latham’s the one you should be visiting.”
“No. You’re the one I want. Why are you jacking Mark Meadows around?”
She leapt up. “How dare you speak to me like thad” He laughed. “Can the indignation, babe. All your life ... as long as you’ve known him, it’s been the same. You tantalize and glide away. He’s a putz in a lot of ways, but he deserves better.”
He tipped his head sideways and looked more like a fox than ever. “Or are you just setting the boy up?”
For a moment her eyebrows formed fine arches of fury above eyes that had gone meltwater pale. Then she stood and spun, walked a few steps away. He watched the way her full buttocks moved the heavy cloth of the robe. “He must tell you a lot about himself,” she said tartly. A grin came across Flash’s face. He held up crossed fingers. “We’re like this.” The grin hardened, set. “Answer the question, babe.”
She stood by the melt-edged hole. “Do you think it’s easy for me?”
“From where I sit,” he said, “it looks like the easiest thing in the world.”
“I love Mark. Really,” she said in a clotted voice. “He is the kindest man I’ve ever known.”
“Or the biggest schmuck. Because you equate kind with weak, don’t you?” He was on his feet now, in her face.
Weeping, she started to spin away. He caught her by the shoulder and made her face him. Small flames danced around his fist.
“Too many women,” he said, “are afraid of themselves. They buy the old Judeo-Christian rap that they’re innately wicked, tainted. So they look for a man to abuse them. Give them the punishment they deserve. Like that jock who busted Mark’s beak and then yours. Is that your gig, Ms. Kimberly Perfect?”
She gasped. Smoke wisped up around the curve of one nostril, and suddenly her gown flashed into flame. Kimberly shrieked, tried to run. Flash held her. His free hand tangled the burning synthetic, pulling with surprising strength. Robe and gown tore away.
She slumped to the floor, sobbing in terror. Flash methodically wadded the burning garment, almost seeming to wash his hands with it. The fire diminished, went out. He tossed the half-molten mass in the corner and knelt beside her.
She clung to him. For a moment he held her, absently stroking her hair. Then he pushed her away.
“Let’s see what kind of shape you’re in, while I can still do you some good.”
Ignoring her attempts to marshal belated modesty and indignation, he looked her over. She seemed unharmed, except for a reddening glare of burn stretching from her left shoulder to breast. He laid a hand over the angry patch, began to run it down.
She tried to jerk back. “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Drawing the energy out,” he said, preoccupied. “It’s like hitting a minor burn with a piece of ice. If I get to it quickly enough, there’s no harm done.”
She looked at him. “I thought fire was your element,” she said from somewhere down in her throat.
“It is.” He cupped her breast. Where his hand had passed, the skin was white, unmarked. “Just a little parlor trick.”
“You’re a dangerous man to be around, Mr. Flash.” His thumb stroked her nipple. She gasped, stiffened. The nipple rose. Her eyes held his. Her lips were moist. “I’m not an eighties kind of guy,” he said huskily, “any more than Mark is. He’s a gentle flake from the sixties. ‘And I’m a bastard for the nineties.”
She grabbed the back of his neck and pulled his head down.
In an alley behind an elegant Park Avenue high rise Mark Meadows sat with his knees up around his prominent ears.
How long has it been, that I’ve dreamed of that? Of holding her, feeling her, tasting her, seeing the way her eyes go dark and then pale, the way she tosses her hair and clutches and moans....
He felt two-timed. He felt like a voyeur. He felt like a fool.
He put his face in his spider hands and cried.
That night Mark sat up and killed a bottle of wine. Sprout played with her Tinkertoy set. Kimberly never came.
Eventually Mark got down on the new white linoleum he and Durg had laid and helped Sprout build an airplane with a propeller that really spun. It never got off the ground.
“I’ll do it,” she said.
He looked at her the way a cobra looks at you through the glass in the zoo. Without interest, without sign of even seeing.
“Do what, Mrs. Gooding?”
“What whatever you ask me to. To make sure I keep her.”
She stood there, her whole body clenched, holding a breath inside until it threatened to burst her rib cage. Just daring him to ask what caused her change of heart.
He didn’t give her the satisfaction. He just nodded. And she found herself hating his certainty as desperately as she needed it.
Sunday the front doorbell rang just as the sun was checking out. Mark came and stared through the replacement glass for a long moment before unlocking the door.
She had a flushed, bright-eyed, breathless quality, as though there was frost in the air. She wore a loose dark smock over blue jeans tonight.
“Feel like a walk?” she asked.
“You mean, after what happened the other day? You can still, like, talk to me?”
She recoiled a fraction of an inch. Then she went to the toes of her fashionable low-top boots and kissed his cheek. “Of course I can, Mark. What happens in court ought to stay there. Let’s go.”
Afterward he never could remember what they talked about. All he could remember was feeling that, despite it all, she might really be coming back this time.
Then they turned a corner and stopped. A pair of NYPD motorcycles were drawn across the street. Down the block a building waved flags of flame against the night.
Fire trucks were drawn up in front, arcing jets of water into the blaze. As he watched, one pulsed once spastically and died.
He drifted forward, pulling away from Kimberly’s hand that clutched his sleeve. He felt the flames on his face. At the far end of the block a knot of skinheads cheered and jeered. One was just darting back into their midst, pursued by a fireman clumsy in his big boots. In horror Mark realized the skin had just slashed a hose.
“What’s happening, man?” he asked a bystander. “Somebody torched an old apartment. Chink family on the third floor was trying to start some kind tailor shop.” He spat on the sidewalk. “Slopes got it coming, you ask me. Tryin’ to mess with our rent control, sneak the place into bein’ commercial property. They in it with the landlord, that’s for sure.”
A line of cops crowded the skins, pushing them back. Mark ran forward. Sprout screamed, “Daddy!”, broke Kimberly’s grip, and lunged after him. Kimberly followed, trying to grab her arm.
Am ambulance was parked this side of the blaze. Beside it cops were trying to keep back an Asian family. A man and woman were wrestling with the officers and firemen who hemmed them in, howling and windmilling painfully thin arms. A man in an asbestos suit was hanging on the end of a ladder; a truck was trying to bring him into position to get inside a window, but huge bellows of flames kept lashing out at him, driving him back despite his protective clothing.
Several other men in inferno suits stood in a puddle on the street with helmets off. “You gotta get in there,” a florid-faced man with a chiefs badge on his helmet yelled. “There’s still a little girl inside.”
“It’s suicide. Fucking roofs going.”
Mark was fumbling in his Dead patch pocket. Kimberly caught up with Sprout a few feet away.
“Mark! What’s happening?”
He shook his head, unheeding. Black and silver-no. Yellow: useless. Gray, worse than. In his haste he discarded them. His lives fell in glittering arcs to shatter on the asphalt.
“Mark, what what in God’s name are you doing?” The last two. One blue-and, thank God, an orange. He stuck the blue vial back in his pocket. Then he tossed the orange one’s contents down his throat.
Kimberly saw him stagger back. And then he changed. The familiar gawky outlines blurred, shifted, condensed. A different man stood there, with film-star looks, a Jewish nose, a devil’s grin. And a red sweatsuit, worn over an orange T-shirt.
JJ Flash tipped a one-finger salute to Kimberly. “Later, toots. Take care of the kid.”
He launched himself into the sky.
The man on the ladder said a couple of Had Marys and prepared to jump through the window. He was going to his death. But that was better than hearing the little girl in there crying every time he closed his eyes for the rest of his life.
He jumped. Something grabbed the back of his protective hood, bought him up short, and hung him on the end of the ladder.
“Just trying to save you from yourself, pal,” said the man hovering next to him in midair. “Better leave this one to the professionals.”
“Jumpin’ Jack Flash!” the fireman gasped.
The ace put a finger beside his nose. “It’s a gas-gasgas,” he said, and darted into the heart of the fire.
JJ Flash was on fire.
But his flesh didn’t blacken and crackle, his eyeballs didn’t melt. His blow-dried hair wasn’t even mussed. In the midst of hell, he was in heaven.
E J. O’Rourke heaven, in fact the fire felt like sitting in a Jacuzzi with a couple of lines up each nostril and a teenage girl by your side eeling out of her string bikini and getting ready to audition as a sword-swallower for Barnum & Bailey. This was fine.
Best of all, he could still hear the little girl crying. “Where are you, honey?” he yelled. She didn’t seem to hear, just kept bawling, but that was enough. He went down a short hallway wallpapered in big batts of flame, gave a wall a jolt so hot the inferno around him seemed tepid. It went away in a puff of yellow incandescence.
She was sitting in about the only square yard of the whole fucking building that wasn’t on fire, a little girl in pigtails and smoldering pj’s with Yodas all over them. He walked up to her, knelt, and smiled.
The roof fell in.
Even the firemen gasped when they heard the thunderous series of cracks and saw a fresh spray of sparks shoot up through the column of smoke. Sprout screamed, “Daddy!” and threw herself forward.
A Puerto Rican cop in a riot helmet grabbed her arm. “Hold on, little lady,” he said. “Your daddy’ll be fine.” The wet lines on his cheeks made a liar of him.
JJ Flash lay on his side with the little girl beneath him and an elephant on top. He moved, felt the raw ends of ribs grate against each other.
The girl was still alive, sheltered by his body. A miracle she hadn’t seared her lungs. He looked up. There was still more building to fall on him, and while the flame couldn’t harm him, a structural member could damn well snuff his lights. And there was only so long before the little girl breathed in the flames that were crowding around like teenyboppers at a Bon Jovi concert.
“As Archbishop Hooper said,” he grunted, “ ‘More fire’ “ Hugging the girl to him, he reared up. The flame rushed in with a joyous greedy roar. He thrust his arm down its throat.
It wasn’t fire that almost nailed the poor son of a bitch working his futile hose from the end of the ladder. It was a jet of incandescent gas and vaporized cement and steel, bright as the sun and a couple degrees cooler. For a heartbeat the inferno died back to a few stray flickers.
A man flew out of the hole the jet had made. Flames wreathed his body and the little girl he hugged against him. They were absorbed into his body as he landed lightly next to the frantic family.
“Here you go, ma’am,” JJ Flash said, handing the girl to her mother. “Better let the medics look her over before you hug her too tight.”
He turned away before they could try hugging him, scanning the crowd for Sprout. All Mark’s personae shared his overriding imperative love for her; they couldn’t help it. Plus he just plain liked the kid.
“Madre de Dios,” the Puerto Rican cop said, staring at Flash.
Kimberly Gooding reeled away. Her mind was spinning. Unraveling as it went.
And then she saw him. Standing at the end of the block, immaculate in his camel-hair coat. He caught her eye and nodded.
For the first time since she’d known him, St. John Latham was showing something like emotion. He was showing... triumph.
She knew, then, what she had been a party to. Kimberly put her hands to her cheeks and dug in, slowly and deliberately, until the nails drew blood from just beneath her eyes.
“Mr. Latham,” Judge Conower asked gravely, “where is your client?”
“She has been released to the custody of a private mental-health clinic.”
“And her condition?”
Latham paused just a sliver of a second. “She is in a fragile state, your honor.”
“Indeed. Mr. Latham, Dr. Pretorius, kindly step forward.”
The house was packed today, and Pretorius was expending lots of effort not to have hackneyed thoughts about bread and circuses. He glanced aside at Mark, who sat beside him wearing a lightweight buff blazer over the bandages wrapped around his upper body. JJ Flash or Mark A. Meadows, his ribs were cracked just the same. Mark only had eyes for his daughter, sitting at the table in the center between the opposing camps, directly facing the bench.
“This court is compelled to find that Ms. Gooding is clearly too unstable to be entrusted with custody of Sprout Meadows.”
Pretorius caught his breath. Could it be—
“On the other hand,” the judge said, turning to him, your client is in fact an ace-perhaps several aces, whose names have been linked to extremely risky and irresponsible behavior. Moreover, he seems still-and in spite of his sworn testimony-to be a user of dangerous drugs, if the preliminary tests conducted on the vials recovered from the street at the site of last night’s fire are any indication. In fact, at the close of these proceedings, Dr. Meadows will be remanded to the custody of the Drug Enforcement Agency.
“With these facts in view I cannot in conscience award him custody of the girl either. Therefore I declare Sprout Meadows to be a ward of the state, and remand her to a juvenile home until arrangements can be made for a foster family.”
Pretorius slammed down his cane. “This is monstrous! Have you asked the girl what she wants? Have you?”
“Of course not,” Conower said. “We are acting on the advice of a qualified expert in children’s welfare. You could hardly expect us to consult a minor in matters this important, even if the minor in question were not... special.” Sprout leapt to her feet. “Daddy! Daddy, don’t let them take rne away!”
With a wordless bellow Mark jumped onto the table. Bailiffs with sweat moons under their arms were on him like weasels, pulling him back down. A couple of men in suits stepped off from the rear wall and began making their way purposefully through the crowded courtroom.
Mark managed to get a hand inside his blazer. It came out with something, darted to his mouth.
“Stop him!” the judge screamed. “Cyanide!” Another bailiff threw his bulky body across the table at him. And through him, into the front row, scattering TV cameras and onlookers and a portable spotlight array. The two bailiffs who had been wrestling with Mark fell against one another and rolled back to the floor.
In Mark’s place a glowing blue man stood atop the table. He wore a black hooded cloak; stars seemed to glow within its folds. He shot the court the finger, wrapped the cloak about him, and sank with all deliberation through the table and the floor.
Dr. Pretorius thumped the bottle of Laiphroaig down on the table and measured by eye how much of it he’d killed at a shot. About a quarter, he thought; about right. He passed the bottle across the desk to Mark.
“We fucked up,” he announced as Mark’s prominent Adam’s apple worked up and down.
“No, Doc,” Mark said breathlessly, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“Bullshit. I told you to run; I should have stuck to my guns. Now you’re on the run without the girl ... sorry; shouldn’t have reminded you.”
Mark shook his head. “It’s not like you did remind me,” he said quietly.
Pretorius sighed. “You know what we did, Mark? We compromised. You cut your hair. I went against the wishes of a client because I thought it was for his own good. An aging hippie and an old libertarian: we sell out and for what? To screw the pooch.”
He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. The door opened and lee Blue Sibyl came in to massage his shoulders with her blue-ice fingers.
“What will you do now, Mark?” he asked.
Mark gazed out the window at the darkness that lay over Jokertown. “I have to get her back,” he said. “But I don’t know how”
“I’ll help, Mark. Anything I can do. Even if I have to go underground myself.” He grabbed a pinch of belly. “I’m getting flabby. Spiritually as well as physically. Might do me good to go on the run. And in this kinder, gentler America, I suspect it’s what I’ll have to do, soon or late.” But Mark said nothing. Just stared out the window. Somewhere out there, beyond the open wound of Jokertown, his daughter was crying.
MacHeath had a jackknife, so the song went.
Mackie Messer had something better. And it was ever so much easier to keep out of sight.
Mackie blew into the camera store on a breath of cool air and diesel farts from the Kurfiirstendamm. He left off whistling his song, let the door hiss to behind him, and stood with his fists rammed down in his jacket pockets to catch a look around.
Light slamdanced on countertops, the curves of cameras, black and glassy-eyed. He felt the humming of the lights down beneath his skin. This place got on his tits. It was so clean and antiseptic it made him think of a doctor’s office. He hated doctors. Always had, since the doctors the Hamburg court sent him to see when he was thirteen said he was crazy and penned him up in a Land juvie/psych ward, and the orderly there was a pig from the Tirol who was always breathing booze and garlic over him and trying to get him to jerk him off ... and then he’d turned over his ace and walked on out of there, and the thought brought a smile and a rush of confidence.
On a stool by the display counter lay a Berliner Zeitung folded to the headline: “Wild Card Tour to Visit Wall Today.” He smiled, thin.
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Then Dieter came in from the back and saw him. He stopped dead and put this foolish smile on his face. “Mackie. Hey. It’s a little early, isn’t it?”
He had a narrow, pale head with dark hair slicked back in a smear of oil. His suit was blue and ran to too much padding in the shoulders. His tie was thin and iridescent. His lower lip quivered just a little.
Mackie was standing still. His eyes were the eyes of a shark, cold and gray and expressionless as steel marbles.
“I was just, you know, putting in my appearance here, Dieter said.” A hand jittered around at the cameras and the neon tubing and the sprawling shiny posters showing the tanned women with shades and too many teeth. The hand glowed the white of a dead fish’s belly in the artificial light. “Appearances are important, you know. Got to lull the suspicions of the bourgeoisie. Especially today.”
He tried to keep his eyes off Mackie, but they just kept rolling back to him, as if the whole room slanted downward to where he stood. The ace didn’t look like much. He was maybe seventeen, looked younger, except for his skin-that had a dryness to it, a touch of parchment age. He wasn’t much more than a hundred seventy centimeters tall, even skinnier than Dieter, and his body kind of twisted. He wore a black leather jacket that Dieter knew was scuffed to gray along the canted line of his shoulders, jeans that were tired before he fished them out of a trash can in Dahlem, a pair of Dutch clogs. A brush of straw hair stuck up at random above the drawn-out face of an El Greco martyr, oddly vulnerable. His lips were thin and mobile.
“So you stepped up the timetable, came for me early,” Dieter said lamely.
Mackie flashed forward, wrapped his hand in shiny tie, hauled Dieter toward him. “Maybe it’s too late for you, comrade. Maybe maybe.”
The camera salesman had a curious glossy-pale complexion, like laminated paper. Now his skin turned the color of a sheet of the Zeitung after it had spent the night blowing along a Budapesterstrasse curb. He’d seen what that hand could do.
“M-mackie,” he stammered, clutching at the reed-thin arm.
He collected himself then, patted Mackie affectionately on a leather sleeve. “Hey, hey now, brother. What’s the matter?”
“You tried to sell us, motherfucker!” Mackie screamed, spraying spittle all over Dieter’s after-shave.
Dieter jerked back. His arm twitched with the lust to wipe his cheek. “What the fuck are you talking about, Mackie? I’d never try—”
“Kelly. That Australian bitch. Wolf thought she was acting funny and leaned on her.” A grin wnched its way across Mackie’s face. “She’s never going to the fucking Bundeskriminalamt now, man. She’s Speck. Lunchmeat.”
Dieter’s tongue flicked bluish lips. “Listen, you’ve got it wrong. She was nothing to me. I knew she was just a groupie, all along—”
His eyes informed on him, sliding ever so slightly to the right. His hand suddenly flared up from below the register with a black snub revolver in it.
Mackie’s left hand whirred down, vibrating like the blade of a jigsaw. It sheared through the pistol’s top strap, through the cylinder and cartridges, and slashed open the trigger guard a piece of a centimeter in front of Dieter’s forefinger. The finger clenched spastically, the hammer came back and clicked to, and the rear half of the cylinder, its fresh-cut face glistening like silver, fell forward onto the countertop. Glass cracked.
Mackie grabbed Dieter by the face and hauled him forward. The camera salesman put down his hands to steady himself, shrieked as they went through the countertops. The broken glass raked him like talons, slashing through blue coat sleeve and blue French shirt and fishbelly skin beneath. His blood streamed over Zeiss lenses and Japanese import cameras that were making inroads in the Federal Republic despite chauvinism and high tariffs, ruining their finish.
“We were comrades! Why? Why?” Mackie’s whole skinny body was shaking in hurt fury. Tears filled his eyes. His hands began to vibrate of their own accord.
Dieter squealed as he felt them rasping at the post-shave stubble he could never get rid of, the only flaw in his neo-sleek grooming. “ I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he screamed. “ I never meant to do it-I was playing her along—”
“Liar!” Mackie yelled. The anger jolted through him like a blast from the third rail, and his hands were buzzing, buzzing, and Dieter was flopping and howling as the flesh began to come off his cheeks, and Mackie gripped him harder, hands on cheekbones, and the rising vibration of his hands was transmitted through bone to the wet mass of Dieter’s brain, and the camera salesman’s eyes rolled and his tongue came out and the violent agitation flash-boiled the fluids in his skull and his head exploded.
Mackie dropped him, danced back howling like a man on fire, swiping at the clotted stuff that filled his eyes and clung to his cheeks and hair. When he could see, he went around the counter and kicked the quivering body. It slid onto the cuffed linoleum floor. The cash register was flashing orange error-condition warnings, the display case swam with blood, and there were lumps of greasy yellow-gray brains all over everything.
Mackie dabbed at his jacket and screamed again when his hands came away slimy. “You bastard!” He kicked the headless corpse again. “You got this shit all over me, you asshole. Asshole, asshole, asshole!”
He hunkered down, pulled up the tail of Dieter’s suit coat, and wiped the worst lumps off his face and hands and leather jacket. “Oh, Dieter, Dieter,” he sobbed, “ I wanted to talk to you, stupid son of a bitch—” He picked up a cold hand, kissed it, tenderly rested it on a spattered lapel. Then he went back to the john to wash down as best he could.
When he came out, anger and sorrow both had faded, leaving a strange elation. Dieter had tried to fuck with the Fraction and he’d paid the price, and what the hell did it matter if Mackie hadn’t been able to find out why? It didn’t matter, nothing mattered. Mackie was an ace, he was MacHeath made flesh, invulnerable, and in a couple of hours he was going to show the cocksuckers—
The glass doors up front opened and somebody came in. Laughing to himself, Mackie changed phase and walked through the wall.
Rain jittered briefly on the roof of the Mercedes limo. “We’ll be meeting a number of influential people at this luncheon, Senator,” said the young black man with the long narrow face and earnest expression, riding with his back to the driver. “It’s going to be an excellent opportunity to show your commitment to brotherhood and tolerance, not just for jokers, but for members of oppressed groups of all persuasions. Really excellent.”
“I’m sure it will, Ronnie.” Chin on hand, Hartmann let his eyes slide away from his junior aide and out the condensation-fogged window. Blocks of apartments rolled by, tan and anonymous. This close to the Wall Berlin seemed always to be holding its breath.
“Aide et Amitie has an international reputation for its work to promote tolerance,” Ronnie said. “The head of the Berlin chapter, Herr Prahler, recently received recognition for his efforts to improve public acceptance of the Turkish ‘guest workers,’ though I understand he’s a rather, ah, controversial personality—”
“Communist bastard,” grunted Moller from the front seat. He was a strapping blond kid plainclothesman with big hands and prominent ears that made him resemble a hound pup. He spoke English out of.deference to the American senator, though between a grandmother from the Old Country and a few college courses, Hartmann knew enough German to get by.
“Herr Prahler’s active in Rote Hilfe, Red Help,” explained Moller’s opposite number, Blum, from the backseat. He was sitting on the other side of Mordecai Jones, who sometimes and with poor grace responded to the nickname Harlem Hammer. Jones was concentrating on The New York Times crossword puzzle and acting as if no one else were there. “He’s a lawyer, you know. Been defending radicals since Andy Baader’s salad days.”
“Helping damned terrorists get off with a slap on the wrists, you mean.”
Blum laughed and shrugged. He was leaner and darker than Moller, and he wore his curly black hair shaggy enough to push even the notoriously liberal standards of the Berlin Schutzpolizei. But his brown artist’s eyes were watchful, and the way he held himself suggested he knew how to use the tiny machine pistol in the shoulder holster that bulked out his gray suit coat in a way not even meticulous German tailoring could altogether conceal.
“Even radicals have a right to representation. This is Berlin, Mensch. We take freedom seriously here if only to set an example for our neighbors, ja?” Moller made a skeptical sound low in his throat.
Ronnie fidgeted on the seat and checked his watch. “Maybe we could go a little faster? We don’t want to be late.” The driver flashed a grin over his shoulder. He resembled a smaller edition of Tom Cruise, though more ferret faced. He couldn’t have been as young as he looked. “The streets are narrow here. We-don’t want to have an accident. Then we’d be even later.”
Hartmann’s aide set his mouth and fussed with papers in the briefcase open on his lap. Hartmann slid another glance toward the bulk of the Hammer, who was still stolidly ignoring everybody. Puppetman was amazingly quiescent, given his gut dread of aces. Maybe he was even feeling a certain thrill at Jones’s proximity.
Not that Jones looked like an ace. He appeared to be a normal black man in his mid to late thirties, bearded, balding, solidly built, looking none too well at ease knotted into coat and tie. Nothing out of the ordinary.
As a matter of fact he weighed four hundred and seventy pounds and had to sit in the center of the Merc so it wouldn’t list. He might be the strongest man in the world, stronger than Golden Boy perhaps, but he refused to engage in any kind of competition to settle the issue. He disliked being an ace, disliked being a celebrity, disliked politicians, and thought the entire tour was a waste of time. Hartmann had the impression he’d only agreed to come along because his neighbors in Harlem got such a kick out of his being in the spotlight, and he hated to let them down.
Jones was a token. He knew it. He resented it. That was one reason Hartmann had goaded him into coming to the Aide et Amitie luncheon; that and the fact that for all their pious pretensions of brotherhood, most Germans didn’t like blacks and were uncomfortable around them; they pretended, but that wasn’t the sort of thing you could hide from Puppetman. He found the Hammer’s pique and the discomfort of their hosts amusing; almost worthwhile to take Jones on as a puppet. But not quite. The Hammer was known primarily as a muscleman ace, but the full scope of his powers was a mvstery Any chance of discovery was too much for Puppetman.
Beyond the minor titillations poking everyone off balance provided, Hartmann was getting fed up with Billy Ray. Carnifex had fumed and blustered when Hartmann ditched him with the rest of the tour back at the Wall-detailed to escort Mrs. Hartmann and the senator’s two senior aides back to the hotel-but he couldn’t say much without offending their hosts, whose security men were on the job. And anyway, with the Hammer along, what could possibly happen?
“Scheisse,” the driver said. He had turned a corner to find a gray and white telephone van parked blocking the street next to an open manhole. He braked to a halt.
“Idiots,” said Moller. “They’re not supposed to do that.” He unlocked the passenger door.
Beside Hartmann, Blum flicked his eyes to the rearview mirror. “Uh-oh,” he said softly. His right hand went inside his coat.
Hartmann craned his neck. A second van had cranked itself across the street not thirty feet behind them. Its doors were open, spilling people onto pavement wet from the rain spasm. They held weapons. Blum shouted a warning to his partner.
A figure loomed up beside the car. A terrible metal screeching filled the limousine. Hartmann’s breath turned solid in his throat as a hand cut through the roof of the car in a shower of sparks.
Moller winced away. He drew his MP5K from its shoulder holster, pressed it to the window, and fired a burst. Glass exploded outward.
The hand snapped back. “Jesus Christ,” Moller shouted, “the bullets went right through him!”
He threw open the door. A man with a ski mask over his face fired an assault rifle from the rear of the telephone van. The noise rattled the car’s thick windows, on and on. It sounded oddly remote. The windshield starred. The man who’d cut through the roof screamed and went down. Moller danced back three steps, fell against the Mercedes’s fender, collapsed to the pavement squirming and screaming. His coat fell open. Scarlet spiders clung to his chest.
The assault rifle ran dry. The sudden silence was thunderous. Puppetman’s fingers were clenched on the padded handle of the door as Moller’s mindscream jolted into him like speed hitting the main line. He gasped, at the hot mad pleasure of it, at the cold rush of his own fear.
“Hande hoch!” shouted a figure beside the van that had boxed them from behind. “Hands up!”
Mordecai Jones put a big hand on Hartmann’s shoulder and pushed him to the floor. He clambered over him, careful not to squash him, put his weight against the door. Metal wailed and it came away with him as Blum, more conventional, pulled the lever on his own door to disengage the latching mechanism, twisted, and shouldered it open. He brought his MP5K up with his left hand clutching the vestigial foregrip, aimed the stubby machine pistol back around the frame as Hartmann yelled, “Don’t shoot!”
The Hammer was racing toward the telephone van. The terrorist who’d shot Moller pointed his weapon at him, pumped his finger on the empty weapon’s trigger in a comic pantomime of panic. Jones backhanded him gently. He sailed backward to rebound off the front of a building and land in a heap on the sidewalk.
The moment hung in air like a suspended chord. Jones squatted, got his hands under the phone van’s frame. He strained, straightened. The van came up with him. Its driver screamed in terror. The Hammer shifted his grip and pressed the vehicle over his head as if it were a not-particularly-heavy barbell.
A burst of gunfire stuttered from the second van. Bullets shredded open the back of Jones’s coat. He teetered, almost lost it, swung in a ponderous circle with the van still balanced above his head. Then several terrorists fired at once. He grimaced and fell backward.
The van landed right on top of him.
The limo driver had his door open and a little black P7 in his hand. As the Hammer fell, Blum blazed a quick burst at the van behind. A man ducked back as 9mm bullets punched neat holes in thin metal-a joker, Hartmann realized. What the hell’s going on here?
He ducked his head below window level and grabbed at Blum’s coattail. He felt the vehicle shudder on its suspension as bullets struck it. The driver gasped and slumped out of the car. Hartmann heard somebody yelling in English to cease fire. He shouted for Blum to quit shooting.
The policeman turned toward him. “Yes, sir,” he said. Then a burst punched through his opened door and sugared the glass in the window and threw him against the senator.
Ronnie was plastered against the back of the driver’s seat. “Oh, God,” he moaned. “Oh, dear God!” He jumped out the door the Hammer had torn from its hinges and ran, with papers scattered from his briefcase swooping around him like seagulls.
The terrorist Mordecai Jones had brushed aside had recovered enough to come to one knee and stuff another magazine into his AKM. He brought it to his shoulder and emptied it at the senator’s aide in a juddering burst. A scream and mist of blood sprayed from Ronnie’s mouth. He fell and skidded.
Hartmann huddled on the floor in fugue, half-terrified, half orgasmic. Blum was dying, holding on to Hartmann’s arm, the holes in his chest sucking like lamia mouths, his life-force surging into the senator like arrhythmic surf.
“I’m hurt,” the policeman said. “Oh, mama, mama please—” He died. Hartmann jerked like a harpooned seal as the last of the man’s life gushed into him.
Out by the street Hartmann’s young aide was dragging himself along with his arms, glasses askew, leaving a snail-trail of blood on the sidewalk. The slightly built terrorist who had shot him ambled up, stuffing a third magazine into his weapon. He positioned himself in front of the wounded man.
Ronnie blinked up at him. Disjointedly Hartmann remembered he was desperately nearsighted, virtually blind without his glasses.
“Please,” Ronnie said, and blood rolled from his mouth. “Please.”
“Have a Negerkuss,” the terrorist said, and fired a single shot into his forehead.
“Dear God,” Hartmann said. A shadow fell across him, heavy as a corpse. He looked up with inhuman eyes at a figure black against the gray-cloud sky beyond. A hand gripped him by the arm, electricity blasted through him, and consciousness exploded in ozone convulsion.
Substantial again, Mackie bounced to his feet and tore off his ski mask. “You shot at me! You could have killed me,” he shrieked at Anneke. His face was almost black.
She laughed at him.
The world seemed to come on to Mackie in Kodachrome colors. He started for her, hand beginning to buzz, when a commotion behind him brought his head around.
The dwarf had grabbed Ulrich’s rifle by the still-hot muzzle brake and spun him round, echoing Mackie’s theme, with variations. “You stupid bastard, you could have killed him!” he screamed. “You could have offed the fucking senator!” Ulrich had fired the final burst that downed the cop in the back of the limousine. Weight lifter though he was, he was only just hanging on to his piece against the dwarf°s surprising strength. The two were orbiting each other out there on the street, spitting at one another like cats.
Mackie had to laugh.
Then Molniya was beside him, touching his shoulder with a gloved hand. “Let it go. We have to move quickly.” Mackie arched like a cat to meet the touch. Comrade Molniya was worried he was still mad at Anneke for shooting at him and then laughing about it.
But that was forgotten. Anneke was laughing too, over the body of the man she’d just finished off, and Mackie had to laugh with her.
IA Negerkuss,” he said. “You said did he want a Negerkuss. Huh huh. That was pretty good.” It meant Negro Kiss, a small chocolate-covered cake. It was especially funny since they’d told him Negro Kisses were a trademark of the group from back in the old days, back when all of them but Wolf were kids.”
It was nervous laughter, relieved laughter. He’d thought he’d lost it when the pig shot at him; he’d just seen the gun come up in time to phase out, and the anger burned black within him, the desire to make his hand vibrate till it was hard as a knife blade and drive it into that fucking cop, to make sure he felt the buzz, to feel the hot rush of blood along his arm and spraying in his face. But the bastard was dead, it was too late now ....
He’d worried again when the black man picked up the van, but then Comrade Ulrich shot him. He was strong, but he wasn’t immune to bullets. Mackie liked Comrade Ulrich. He was so self-assured, so handsome and muscular. Women liked him; Anneke could hardly keep her hands off him. Mackie might have envied him, if he hadn’t been an ace.
Mackie didn’t have a gun himself. He hated them, and anyway he didn’t need a weapon-there wasn’t any weapon better than his own body.
The American joker called Scrape was fumbling Hartmann’s limp body out of the limousine. “Is he dead?” Mackie called in German, caught up by sudden panic. The dwarf let go of Ulrich’s rifle and stared wildly at the car. Ulrich almost fell over.
Scrape looked up at Mackie, face frozen into immobility by its exoskeleton, but his lack of understanding clear from the tilt of his head. Mackie repeated the question in the halting English he’d learned from his mother before the worthless bitch had died and deserted him.
Comrade Molniya pulled his other glove back on. He wore no mask, and now Mackie noticed he looked a little green at the sight of the blood spilled all over the street. “He’s fine,” he replied for Scrape. “I just shocked him unconscious. Come now, we must hurry”
Mackie grinned and bobbed his head. He felt a certain satisfaction at Molniya’s squeamishness, even though he wanted to please the Russian ace almost as much as he did his own cell leader Wolf He went to help Scrape, though he hated being so close to the joker. He feared he might touch him accidentally; the thought made his flesh crawl.
Comrade Wolf stood by with his own unfired Kalashnikov dangling from one huge hand. “Get him in the van,” he ordered. “Him too.” He nodded to Comrade Wilfried, who’d stumbled from the driver’s seat of the telephone van and was on his knees pitching breakfast on the wet asphalt.
It started to rain again. Broad pools of blood on the pavement began to fray like banners whipped by the wind. In the distance sirens commenced their hair-raising chant.
They put Hartmann into the second van. Scrape got behind the wheel. Molniya slid in beside him. The joker backed up onto the sidewalk, turned, and drove away.
Mackie sat on the wheel well, drumming a heavy-metal beat on his thighs. We did it! We captured him! He could barely sit still. His penis was stiff inside his jeans.
Out the back window he saw Ulrich spraying letters on a wall in red paint: RAE He laughed again. That would make the bourgeoisie shit their pants, that was for sure. Ten years ago those initials had been a synonym for terror in the Federal Republic. Now they would be again. It gave Mackie happy chills to think about it.
A joker wrapped head to toe in a shabby cloak stepped up and sprayed three more letters beneath the first with a hand wrapped in bandages: JJS.
The other van heeled way over to the side as its wheels rolled over the supine ,body of the black American ace, and they were gone.
With her NEC laptop computer—tucked under one arm and a a bit of her cheek caught between her small side teeth, Sara strode across the lobby of the Bristol Hotel Kempinski with briskness that an outside observer would probably have taken for confidence. It was a misapprehension that had served her well in the past.
Reflexively she ducked into the bar of Berlin’s most luxurious hotel. The tour proper’s long since been mined out, at least of stuff we can print, she thought, but what the heck? She felt heat in her ears at the thought that she was the star of one of the tour’s choicer unprintable vignettes.
Inside was dark, of course. All bars are the same song; the polished wood and brass and old pliable leather and elephant ears were grace notes to set apart this particular refrain. She tipped her sunglasses up on top of her nearly white hair, drawn back this afternoon in a severe ponytail, and let her eyes adjust. They always adjusted to dark more quickly than light.
The bar wasn’t crowded. A pair of waiters in arm garters and starched highboy collars worked their way among the tables as if by radar. Three Japanese businessmen sat at a table chattering and pointing at a newspaper, discussing either the exchange rates or the local tit bars, depending. In the corner Hiram was talking shop, in French of course, with the Kempinski’s cordon bleu, who was shorter than he was but at least as round. The hotel chef had a tendency to flap his short arms rapidly when he spoke, which made him look like a fat baby bird that wasn’t getting the hang of flight.
Chrysalis sat . at the bar drinking in splendid isolation. There was no joker chic here. In Germany, Chrysalis found herself discreetly avoided rather than lionized.
She caught Sara’s eye and winked. In the poor light Sara only knew it because of the way Chrysalis’s mascaraed eyelashes tracked across a staring eyeball. She smiled. Professional associates back home, sometime rivals in the bartering of information that was the meta-game of Jokertown, they’d grown to be friends on this trip. Sara had more in common with Debra-Jo than her nominal peers who were along.
At least Chrysalis was dressed. She was showing a different face to Europe than she did the country she pretended wasn’t her native one. Sometimes Sara envied her, secretly. People looked at her and saw a joker, an exotic, alluring and grotesque. But they didn’t see her.
“Looking for me, little lady?”
Sara started, turned. Jack Braun sat at the end of the bar, hardly five feet from her. She hadn’t noticed him. She had a tendency to edit him out; the force of him made her uncomfortable.
“I’m going out,” she said. She slapped the computer, a touch harder than necessary, so her fingers stung. “Down to the main post office to file my latest material by modem. It’s the only place you can get a transatlantic connection that won’t scramble all your data.”
“I’m surprised you’re not off pushing cookies with Senator Gregg,” he said, eyeing her cantwise from beneath bushy eyebrows.
She felt color come to her cheeks. “Senator Hartmann attending a banquet may be a hot item for my colleagues with the celebrity-hunting glossies. But it’s not exactly hard news, is it, Mr. Braun?”
It was an open afternoon. There wasn’t much hard news here, not the kind to interest readers following the WHO tour. The West German authorities had blandly assured the visitors there was no wild card problem in their country, and used the tour as a counter in whatever game they were playing with their Siamese twin to the east-that damp, dreary ceremony this morning, for instance. Of course they were right: even proportionally, the number of German wild card victims was minuscule. The most pathetic or unsightly couple of thousand were kept discreetly tucked away in state housing or clinics. Much as they’d sneered at Americans for their treatment of jokers during the Sixties and Seventies, the Germans were embarrassed by their own.
“Depends on what gets said at the banquet, I guess. What’s on your schedule after you file your piece, little lady?” He was grinning that B-movie leading-man grin at her. Golden highlights glimmered on the planes and contour edges of his face. He was flexing his muscles to bring on the glow that gave him his ace name. Irritation tightened the skin at the outskirts of her eyes. He was either coming on to her for real or teasing her. Either way she didn’t like it.
“I have work to do. And I could use a little time to catch my breath. Some of us have had a busy time on this tour.” Is that really the reason you were relieved when Gregg dropped the hint that it might not be discreet to tag along to the banquet with him? she wondered. She frowned, surprised at the thought, and turned crisply away.
Braun’s big hand closed on her arm. She gasped and spun back to him, angry and starting to panic. What could she do against a man who could lift a bus? That detached observer inside her, the journalist within, reflected on the irony that Gregg, whom she’d come to hate, yes, obsessively, should be the first man in years whose touch she’d come to welcome—
But Jack Braun was frowning past her, into the lobby of the hotel. It was filling up with purposeful, husky young men in suit coats.
One of them came into the bar, looked hard at Braun, consulted a piece of paper in his hand. “Herr Braun?”
“That’s me. What can I do you for?”
“I am with the Berlin Landespolizei. I’m afraid I must ask you not to leave the hotel.”
Braun pushed his jaw forward. “And why might that be?”
“Senator Hartmann has been kidnapped.”
Ellen Hartmann shut the door with eggshell care and turned away. The flowered vines fading in the carpet seemed to twine about her ankles as she walked back into the suite and sat down on the bed.
Her eyes were dry. They stung, but they were dry. She smiled slightly. It was hard to let her emotions go. She had so much experience controlling her emotions for the cameras. And Gregg—
I know what he is. But what he is is all I have.
She picked up a handkerchief from the bedside table and methodically began to tear it to pieces.
“Welcome to the land of the living, Senator. For the moment at least.” .
Slowly Hartmann’s mind drained into consciousness. There was a tinny taste in his mouth and a singing in his ears. His right upper arm ached as if from sunburn. Someone hummed a familiar song. A radio muttered.
His eyes opened to darkness. He felt the obligatory twinge of blindness anxiety, but something pressed his eyeballs, and from the small stinging pull at the back of his head he guessed it was taped gauze. His wrists were bound behind the back of a wooden chair.
After the awareness of captivity, what struck hardest was the smells: sweat, grease, mildew, dust, sodden cloth, unfamliar spices; ancient urine and fresh gun oil, crowding his nostrils clear to his sinuses.
He inventoried all these things before permitting himself to recognize the rasping voice.
“Tom Miller,” he said. “ I wish I could say it’s a pleasure.”
“Ah, yes, Senator. But I can.” He could feel Gimli’s gloating as he could smell his stinking breath-toothpaste and mouthwash belonged to the surface-worshiping nat world. “ I could also say you have no idea how long I’ve waited for this, but of course you do. You know full well.”
“Since we know each other so well, why don’t you undo my eyes, Tom.” As he spoke he probed with his power. It had been ten years since he’d last had physical contact with the dwarf, but he didn’t think the link, once created, ever decayed. Puppetman feared loss of control more than anything but discovery; and being discovered itself represented the ultimate loss of power. If he could get his hooks back into Miller’s soul, Hartmann could at the very least be sure of holding down the panic that bubbled like magma low in his throat.
“Gimli!” the dwarf shouted. His spittle sprayed Hartmann’s lips and cheeks.
Instantly Hartmann dropped the link. Puppetman reeled. For a moment he’d felt Gimli’s hatred blazing like an incandescent wire. He suspects!
Most of what he’d sensed was the hate. But beneath that, beneath the conscious surface of Gimli’s mind lay awareness that there was something out of the ordinary about Gregg Hartmann, something inextricably tied to the bloody shambles of the Jokertown Riots. Gimli wasn’t an ace, Hartmann was sure of that. But Gimli’s natural paranoia was itself something of a sixth sense.
For the first time in his life Puppetman faced the possibility he had lost a puppet.
He knew he blanched, knew he flinched, but fortunately his reaction passed for squeamishness at being spat on. “Gimli,” the dwarf repeated, and Hartmann sensed he was turning away. “That’s my name. And the mask stays on, Senator. You know me, but the same doesn’t apply to everybody here. And they’d like to keep it that way.”
“That’s not going to work too well, Gimli. You think a ski mask is going to disguise a joker with a furry snout? I—that is, if anybody saw you grab me, they’ll have little enough trouble identifying you and your gang.”
He was saying too much, he belatedly realized-he didn’t want Miller dwelling too much on the fact that Hartmann could make him and some of his accomplices. Whatever had put him out had stirred his brains like omelette batter.—an electrical shock of some sort, he thought. Back in the Sixties he’d been a freedom rider briefly-it was an up-and-coming New Frontier sort of thing to do, and there was always the hatred, heady as wine, the possibility of lovely violence, crimson and indigo. A peckerwood state trooper had nailed him with a cattle prod during the Selma protests, which was too firsthand for his taste and sent him back north in a hurry. But it had felt like that, back in the limousine.
“Come now, Gimli,” said a gritty baritone voice in accented but clear English. “Why not have the mask off? The whole world will know us soon enough.”
“Oh, all right,” Gimli said. Puppetman could taste his resentment without having to reach. Tom Miller was having to share stage with someone, and he didn’t like it. Little bubbles of interest began to well up through the seethe of Hartmann’s incipient panic.
Hartmann heard the scrape of feet on bare floor. Someone fumbled briefly, cursed, and then he caught his breath involuntarily as the tape was unwound, pulling reluctantly away from his hair and skin.
The first thing he saw was Gimli’s face. It still looked like a bagful of rotten apples. The look of exultation didn’t improve it any. Hartmann pushed his gaze past the dwarf to the rest of the room.
It was a shitty little tenement, like shitty little tenements pretty much everywhere in the world. The wooden floor was stained and the striped wallpaper had patches of damp like a workman’s armpits. From the general scatter of crunchy and crinkly trash underfoot, Hartmann guessed the place was derelict. Still, a lightbulb glared in a busted-globe fixture overhead, and he felt a radiator drumming out too much heat the way every radiator in Germany did until it came down June.
For all he knew he could be in the Eastern sector, which was a hell of a cheery thought. On the other hand, he’d been in German homes before. This one smelled wrong, somehow.
There were three other overt jokers in the room, one swathed from head to feet in a dusty-looking cowled robe, one covered with yellowish chitin dotted with tiny red pimples, a third the furry one he’d seen next to the van. The three young nats in Hartmann’s field of vision looked offensively normal by comparison.
His power felt others behind him. That was strange. He wasn’t usually able to taste another’s emotions, unless that one was broadcasting strongly, or was a puppet. He sensed a peculiar squirming in the power inside him.
He glanced back. Two more back there, nats to the eye, though the scrawny youth leaning on the stained wall next to the radiator had an odd look to him. A man in his mid-thirties sat next to him in a gaudy plastic chair with his hands in the pockets of an overcoat. Hartmann thought the older man was subconsciously straining away from the younger; when their eyes met he caught a quick impression of sadness.
That’s odd, he thought. Maybe tension had heightened his normal perceptions; maybe he was imagining things. But something was coming off that kid as he grinned at Hartmann, something that prickled all around the edges of his awareness. Again he had that evasive feeling from Puppetman.
A shoe crunched debris. He turned, found himself looking up at an enormous nat dressed in suit coat and trousers of an odd tan-green, almost military. The man had no tie; his shirt collar hung unbuttoned around a thick neck, open to a spray of grizzled blond chest hair. Big hands rested on his hips with the coattails swept up behind, like something out of a little theater production of Inherit the Wind. His long hair lay combed back from a high forehead.
He smiled. He had one of those rugged ugly faces women fall for and men believe.
“A very great pleasure to meet you, Senator.” It was the rolling sea swell of the voice he’d heard urge Gimli to remove his blindfold.
“You have the advantage.”
“That’s true. Oh, but I daresay my name won’t be unfamiliar to you. I am Wolfgang Prahler.”
Behind Hartmann someone tsked in exasperation. Prahler frowned, then laughed. “Ah, now, Comrade Molniya, do I break security? Well, did we not agree that we must come out into the light of day to accomplish a task so important?” Like many educated Berliners he spoke English with a pronouncedly British cast. From behind, Puppetman felt a flicker of agitation at the name Molniya. It was Russian. It meant lightning; the Soviets had a series of communications satellites by that name.
“What exactly is going on here?” Hartmann demanded. His heart lurched at the words. He didn’t mean to take that tone with cold-blooded killers who had him altogether at their mercy. But Puppetman, coming suddenly into arrogance, had taken the bit in his teeth. “Couldn’t you wait until the Aide et Amitie banquet to make my acquaintance?”
Prahler’s laugh resonated up from deep in his chest. “Very good. But have you not figured it out? It was never intended you should reach the banquet, Senator. You were, as you Americans say, set up.”
“Drawn to the bait and trapped,” said a slight redheaded woman who wore a black turtleneck and jeans. “Set cheese for a rat; set a fine banquet to catch a fine lord.”
“Rats and lords,” a voice repeated. “A fine rat. A fine lord.” It giggled. It was a male voice, cracked and adolescent: the leather boy. Hartmann felt a tickle run along the cord of his scrotum like the fingers of a whore. No doubt about it. He was getting emotion from him like static on a line. A hint of something potent-something terrible. For once Puppetman felt no desire to probe further.
He feared this one. More than the others, Prahler, these casual youths with guns. Even Gimli.
“You went to all this trouble to help Gimli here settle an old, imaginary score?” he made himself say. “That’s generous of you.”
“We’re doing this for the revolution,” said a youthful nat with a blond flattop and a heat-lamp tan and the air of having worked hard to memorize the line. His turtleneck and jeans were molded around an athlete’s figure. He stood by the wall caressing the muzzle brake of a Soviet assault rifle grounded by his foot.
“You’re of no significance, Senator,” the woman said. She flipped her square-cut bangs off her forehead. “Simply a tool. What your naive egotism tells you notwithstanding.”
“Who the hell are you people?”
“We bear the sacred name of the Red Army Fraction,” she told him. She hovered over a stocky youngster who sat cross-legged fiddling with a radio perched on a warped wooden nightstand. He wouldn’t meet Hartmann’s eyes.
“Comrade Wolf gave it to us,” the blond boy said. “He used to hang out with Baader and Meinhof and them. They used to be close like this.” He held up a clenched fist.
Hartmann sucked in his lips. Since the terrorist wars had gotten underway for true in the early Seventies, it wasn’t uncommon for radical attorneys to come to involve themselves selves directly in the activities of those they represented in court, especially in Germany and Italy. Apparently, if what the kid said was true, Prahler had been a leader in the Baader-Meinhof group and the RAF all along, without the authorities ever getting wind of the fact.
Hartmann looked at Tom Miller. “I’ll rephrase my question. How did you get mixed up in this, Gimli?”
“We just happened to be in the right place at the right time, Senator.”
The dwarf smirked at him. Puppetman felt an urge to crush that smug face, to tear out the dwarf’s guts and throttle him with them. The frustration was physical torment.
Sweat crawled down Hartmann’s forehead like a centipede. His emotions were oddly distinct from Puppetman’s. His other self whipsawed from rage to fear. What he mostly felt now was tired and annoyed.
And sad. Poor Ronnie. He meant so well. He tried so hard.
The redhead suddenly slapped the seated man on the shoulder. “You idiot, Wilfried, there it was! You went past it.” He mumbled apology and dialed back.
“—captured by the Red Army Fraction, acting in concert with comrades from the jokers for a just Society who have fled persecution in Amerika.” It was Comrade Wolf’s voice, pouring like liquid amber from the cheap little radio. “The terms of his release are these: release of the Palestinian freedom fighter al-Muezzin. An airliner with sufficient fuel to take al-Muezzin to a country in the liberated Third World. Immunity from prosecution for members of this action team. We demand that the Jetboy memorial be torn down and in its place a facility built to provide shelter and medical attention to joker victims of Amerikan intolerance. And finally, just to poke the capitalist swine where it most hurts them, ten million dollars cash, which will be used to aid victims of Amerikan aggression in Central Amerika.”
“If these terms are not met by ten o’clock tonight, Berlin time, Senator Gregg Hartmann will be executed.”
“We return you now to regularly scheduled programming.”
“We have to do something.” Hiram Worchester tangled his fingers in his beard and gazed out the window at the patchy Berlin sky.
Digger Downs turned over a card. Trey of clubs. He grimaced.
Billy Ray paced the carpet of Hiram’s suite like a tyrannosaurus with an itch. “If I’d been there, this shit would never have happened,” he said, and aimed a green glare at Mordecai Jones.
The Hammer sat on the sofa. It was oak and flowered upholstery, and like many of the hotel’s furnishings had survived the war. Fortunately they’d built stout furniture back in the 1890s.
Jones made a dirty-gearbox noise toward the center of him and stared at his big hands, which he was working into tangles between his knees.
The door opened and Peregrine flew into the room. Figuratively, at least, her wings jittering on her back. She wore a loose’ velour blouse and jeans that muted the advanced state of her pregnancy.
“I just heard on the radio-isn’t it terrible?” Then she stopped and stared at the Hammer. “Mordecai-what on earth are you doing here?”
“Just like you, Ms. Peregrine. Won’t let me out.”
“But why aren’t you in the hospital? The reports said you were terribly injured.”
“Just shot a little.” He slapped his gut. “Got me a pretty tough hide, kind of like that Kevlar stuff you read about in Popular Science.”
Downs turned up a new card. Red eight. “Shit,” he muttered.
“But a van fell on you,” Peregrine said.
“Yeah, but see, I got these funky heavy metals replacing the calcium in my bones, so they’re like stronger and more flexible and all, and my innards and whatnot are a lot sturdier than most folks’. And I heal mighty fast-don’t even get sick-since I turned up my ace. I’m a pretty durable sort of dude.”
“Then why’d you let them get away?” Bill Ray challenged, almost shouting. “Goddamn, the senator was your responsibility. You could’ve kicked some ass.”
“To tell you the entire truth, Mr. Ray, it hurt like a sonofabitch. I wasn’t good for much for a while there.” The Mister came out differently than Ms. had. Billy Ray cocked his head and looked hard at him. Jones ignored him. “Lay off him, Billy,” said Carnifex’s partner, Lady Black, who sat to one side with her long legs crossed at the ankles before her.
Peregrine came and touched Mordecai on the shoulder. “It must have been awful. I’m surprised they let you out of the hospital.”
“They didn’t,” Downs said, splitting open the deck in his left hand to catch a peek inside. “He released himself. Smashed right through the wall. The public health people are kind of pissed about it.”
Jones looked down at the floor. “Don’t like doctors,” he muttered.
Peregrine looked around. “Where’s Sara? The poor thing. This must be hell for her.”
“They let her go over to the crisis control center in City Hall. No other reporter from the tour. Just her.” Downs made a face and went back to his solitaire game.
“Sara took over a statement from Mr. Jones about what he saw and heard during the abduction,” Lady Black said. “He didn’t give one before he left the hospital.” After the accident that triggered his wild card virus, Jones had been held by the Oklahoma Department of Public Health as a lab specimen, a virtual prisoner. The experience had given him an almost pathological fear of medical science and all its appurtenances.
“Funny damn thing,” Jones said, shaking his head. “I was lying there trying to breathe with this fu-with this van on my chest, and I keep hearing all these people yelling at each other. Like little kids fightin’ on a playground.”
Hiram turned from the window. The rings that had been sinking in around his eyes since the tour began were even more pronounced. “I understand,” he said, bringing his hands up cupped before his chest. They were dainty hands, and fit oddly with his bulk. “ I understand what’s happening here. This has been a blow to all of us. Senator Hartmann isn’t just the last best hope for jokers to get a fair shake-and maybe aces too, with this crazy Barnett fellow on the loosehe’s our friend. We’re trying to soften the blow by talking around the subject. But it wont do. We have to do something.”
“That’s what I say.” Billy Ray slammed a fist into his palm. “Let’s kick butts and take names!”
“Whose butt?” Lady Black asked tiredly. “Whose name?”
“That sawed-off little bastard Gimli for starters. We should have grabbed him when he was dicking around New York last summer—”
“Where are you going to find him?”
He flung out his arm. “Hell, that’s why we ought to be looking for him, instead of sitting here on our duffs wringing our hands and saying how sorry we are the fucking senator’s gone.”
“There are ten thousand cops out there combing the streets,” Lady Black said. “You think we’ll find him quicker?”
“But what can we do, Hiram?” Peregrine asked. Her face was pale, and the skin stretched tight over her cheekbones. “I feel so helpless.” Her wings opened slightly, then folded again.
Hiram’s little pink tongue dabbed his lips. “Peri, I wish I knew. Surely there must be something—”
“They mentioned ransom,” Digger Downs said.
Hiram punched his palm twice in unconscious imitation of Carnifex. “That’s it. That’s it! Maybe we can raise enough money to buy him back.”
“Ten million’s a lot of bread,” Mordecai said.
“That’s just a bargaining position,” Hiram said, sweeping aside objections with his small hands. “Surely we can work them down.”
“What about their demands this terrorist dude be released? We can’t do nothing about that.”
“Money talks,”—Downs said. “Nobody walks.”
“Inelegantly put,” Hiram said, beginning to drift here and there like an ungainly cloud, “but correct. Surely if we can scrape together sufficient funds, they’ll leap at our offer.”
“Now, wait a minute—” Carnifex began.
“I’m a man of not inconsiderable means,” Hiram said, scooping up a handful of mints from a silver salver in passing. “ I can contribute a fair amount—”
“I have money,” Peregrine said excitedly. “I’ll help.” Mordecai frowned. “I’m not crazy about politicians, but shoot, I feel I lost the man and shit. Count me in, for what it’s worth.”
“Hold on, dammit!” Billy Ray said. “President Reagan has already announced there will be no negotiating with these terrorists.”
“Maybe he’ll go for it if we throw in a Bible and a mess of rocket launchers,” Mordecai said.
Hiram elevated his chin. “We’re private citizens, Mr. Ray. We can do as we please.”
“We’ll by God see—”
The door opened. Xavier Desmond walked in. “ I couldn’t bear to sit alone any longer,” he said. “I’m so worried-my God, Mordecai, what are you doing here?”
“Never mind that, Des,” Hiram said. “We’ve got a plan.”
The man from the Federal Criminal Office tapped his pack of cigarettes on the edge of the desk in the crisis center in City Hall, shook out a cigarette, and put it between his lips. “What on earth were you thinking of, permitting that to go over the air without consulting me!” He made no move to light the cigarette. He had a young man’s face with an old man’s wrinkles, and lynx yellow eyes. His ears stuck out.
“Herr Neumann,” the mayor’s representative said, trapping the phone receiver between his shoulder and a couple of chins and getting it quite sweaty, “here in Berlin our reflex is to shy away from censorship. We had enough of that in the bad old days, na ja?”
“ I don’t mean that. How are we to control this situation if we’re not even informed when steps like this are taken?” He leaned back and stroked a finger down one of the furrows that bracketed his mouth. “This could turn into Munich all’ over again.”
Tachyon studied the digital clock built into the high heel of one of the pair of boots he’d bought on the Ku’damn the day before. Aside from the clocks he was in full seventeenthcentury regalia. This tour was a political stunt, he thought. But still, we might have accomplished some good. Is this how it’s going to end?
“Who is this al-Muezzin?” he asked.
“Daoud Hassani is his name. He’s an ace who can destroy things with his voice, rather like your own late ace Howler,” Neumann said. If he noticed Tachyon’s wince he gave no sign. “He’s from Palestine. He’s one of Nur al-Allah’s people, works out of Syria. He claimed responsibility for the downing of that El Al jetliner at Orly last June.”
“I’m afraid we’ve heard far from the last of the Light of Allah,” Tachyon said. Neumann nodded grimly. Since the tour had left Syria, there had been three dozen bombings worldwide in retribution for its “treacherous attack” on the ace prophet.
If only that wretched woman had finished the job, Tach thought. He was careful not to speak it aloud, These Earthers could be sensitive about such things.
Sweat ran down the side of his neck and into the lace collar of his blouse. The radiator hummed and groaned with heat. I wish they were less sensitive to cold. Why do these Germans insist on making their hot planet so much hotter? The door opened. Clamor spilled in from the international press corps crammed into the corridor outside. A political aide slipped inside and whispered to the mayor’s man. The mayor’s man petulantly slammed down his phone.
“Ms. Morgenstern has come from the Kempinski,” he announced.
“Bring her in at once,” Tachyon said.
The mayor’s man jutted his underlip, which gleamed wet in the fluorescents. “Impossible. She’s a member of the press, and we have excluded the press from this room for the duration.”
Tachyon looked at the man down the length of his fine, straight nose. “I demand that Ms. Morgenstern be admitted at once,” he said in that tone of voice reserved on Takis for grooms who tread on freshly polished boots and serving maids who spill soup on heads of allied Psi Lord houses who are guesting in the manor.
“Let her in,” Neumann said. “She’s brought Herr Jones’s tape for us.”
Sara was wearing a white trench coat with a hand-wide belt red as a bloody bandage. Tach shook his head. Like all fashion statements she made, this one jarred.
She came to him. They shared a brief, dry embrace. She turned away, unslinging her heavy handbag.
Tachyon wondered. Had that been a touch of metal in her watercolor eyes, or only tears?
“Did. you hear that?” the redhead called Anneke warbled. “One of the pigs we got today was a Jew.”
Early afternoon. The radio simmered with reports and conjectures about the kidnapping. The terrorists were exalted, strutting and puffing for each other’s benefit.
“One more drop of blood to avenge our brothers in Palestine,” said Wolf sonorously.
“What about the nigger ace?” demanded the one who looked like a lifeguard and answered to Ulrich. “Has he died yet?”
“He’s not going to anytime soon,” Anneke said. “According to the news, he walked out of the hospital within an hour of being admitted.”
“That’s bullshit! I hit him with half a magazine. I saw that van fall on him.”
Anneke sidled over from the radio and ran her fingers along the line of Ulrich’s jaw. “Don’t you think if he can lift a van all by himself, he might be a little hard to hurt, sweetheart?” She stood up on the toes of her sneakers and kissed him just behind the lobe of his ear. “Besides, we killed two—”
“Three,” said Comrade Wilfried, who was still monitoring the airwaves. “The other, uh, policeman just died.” He swallowed.
Anneke clapped her hands in delight. “You see?”
“I killed somebody too,” said the boy’s voice from behind Hartmann. Just the sound of it filled Puppetman with energy. Easy, easy, Hartmann cautioned his other half, wondering, do I have this one? Is it possible to create a puppet without knowing it? Or is he constantly emoting at such a pitch that I can feel it without having the link?
The power didn’t answer.
The leather boy shuffled forward. Hartmann saw he was hunchbacked. A joker?
“Comrade Dieter,” the teenager said. “I offed himbrrr-like that!” He held his hands up in front of him and suddenly they were vibrating like a powersaw blade, a blur of lethality.
An ace! Hartmann’s own breath hit him in the chest. The vibration stopped. The boy showed yellow teeth around at the others. They were very quiet.
Through the pounding in his ears Hartmann heard a scrape of tubular metal on wood as the man in the coat got up from his chair. “You killed someone, Mackie?” he asked mildly. His German was a touch too perfect to be natural. “Why?”
Mackie tucked his head down. “He was an informer, Comrade,” he said sidelong. His eyes jittered between Wolf and the other. “Comrade Wolf ordered me to take him into custody. But he-he tried to kill me! That was it. He pulled a gun on me and I buzzed him off.” He brandished a vibrating hand again.
The man came slowly forward where Hartmann could see him. He was medium height, dressed well but not too well, hair neat and blond. A man just on the handsome side of nondescriptness. Except for his hands, which were encased in what appeared to be thick rubber gloves. Hartmann watched them in sudden fascination.
“Why wasn’t I told of this, Wolf?” The voice stayed level, but Puppetman could hear an unspoken shout of anger. There was sadness too-the power was pulling it in, no question now. And a hell of a lot of fear.
Wolf rolled heavy shoulders. “There was a lot going on this morning, Comrade Molniya. I learned that Dieter planned to betray us, I sent Mackie after him, things got out of hand. But everything’s all right now, everything’s going fine.”
Facts dropped into place like tumblers in a lock. Molniya—lightning. Suddenly Hartmann knew what had happened to him in the—limousine. The gloved man was an ace, who’d used some kind of electric power to shock him under.
Hartmann’s teeth almost splintered from the effort it took to bite back the terror. An unknown ace! He’ll know me, find me out ....
His other self was ice. He doesn’t know anything. But how can you know? We don’t know his powers. He’s a puppet.
It was a fight to keep his face from matching his emotion. How the hell can that be?
I got him when he shocked me. Didn’t even have to do anything; his own power fused our nervous systems for a moment. That’s all it took.
Mackie squirmed like a puppy caught peeing on the rug. “Did I do right, Comrade Molniya?”
Molniya’s lips whitened, but he nodded with visible effort. “Yes ... under the circumstances.”
Mackie preened and strutted. “Well, there it is. I executed an enemy of the Revolution. You’re not the only ones.” Anneke clucked and brushed fingertips across Mackie’s cheek. “Preoccupied with the search for individual glory, Comrade? You’re going to have to learn to watch those bourgeois tendencies if you want to be part of the Red Army Fraction.”
Mackie licked his lips and slunk away, flushing. Puppetman felt what was going on inside him, like the roil beneath the surface of the sun.
What about him? Hartmann asked.
Him too. And the blond jock as well. They both handled us after the Russian shocked you. That jolt made me hypersensitive.
Hartmann let his head drop forward to cover a frown. How could all this happen without my knowledge?
I’m your subconscious, remember? Always on the job.
Comrade Molniya sighed and returned to his seat. He felt hairs rise on the back of his hands and neck as his hyperactive neurons fired off. There was nothing he could do about low-level discharges such as this; they happened of their own accord under stress. It was why he wore glovesand why some of the more lurid tales they told around the Aquarium about his wedding night had damned near come to pass.
He had to smile. What’s there to be tense about? Even if he were identified for what he was, after the fact, there would be no international repercussions; that was how the game was played, by us and by them. So his superiors assured him.
Right.
Good God, what did I do to deserve being caught up in this lunatic scheme? He wasn’t sure who was crazier, this collection of poor twisted men and bloodthirsty political naifs or his own bosses.
It was the opportunity of the decade, they’d told him. Al-Muezzin was in the vest pocket of the Big K. If we spring him, he’ll fall into our hands out of gratitude. Work for us instead. He might even bring the Light of Allah along.
Was it worth the risk? he’d demanded. Was it worth blowing the underground contacts they’d been building in the Federal Republic for ten years? Was it worth risking the Big War, the war neither side was going to win no matter what their fancy paper war plans said? Reagan was president; he was a cowboy, a madman.
But there was only so far you could push, even if you were an ace and a hero, the first man into the Bala Hissar in Kabul on Christmas Day of ‘79. The gates had closed in his face. He had his orders. He needed no more.
It wasn’t that he disagreed with the goals. Their archrivals, the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti-the State Security Committee-were arrogant, overpraised, and undercompetent. No good GRU man could ever object to taking those assholes down a peg. As a patriot he knew that Military Intelligence could make far better use of an asset as valuable as Daoud Hassani than their better-known counterparts the KGB.
But the method ...
It wasn’t for himself he worried. It was for his wife and daughter. And for the rest of the world too; the risk was enormous, should anything go wrong.
He reached into a pocket for cigarettes and a lighter. “A filthy habit,” Ulrich said in that lumbering way of his. Molniya just looked at him.
After a moment Wolf produced a laugh that almost didn’t sound forced. “The kids these days, they have different standards. In the old days-ah, Rikibaby, Comrade Meinhof, she was a smoker. Always had a cigarette going.”
Molniya said nothing, just kept staring at Ulrich. His eyes bore a trace of epicanthic fold, legacy of the Mongol Yoke. After a moment the blond youth found somewhere else to look.
The Russian lit up, ashamed of his cheap victory. But he had to keep these murderous young animals under control. What an irony it was that he, who had resigned from the Spetsnaz commandos and transferred to the Chief Intelligence Directorate of the Soviet General Staff because he could no longer stomach violence, should find himself compelled to work with these creatures for whom the shedding of blood had become addiction.
Oh, Milya, Mashes, will I ever see you again?
“Herr Doktor.”
Tach scratched the side of his nose. He was getting restive. He’d been cooped up here two hours, unsure of what he might be contributing. Outside ... well, there was nothing to be done. But he might be with his people on the tour, comforting them, reassuring them.
“Herr Neumann,” he acknowledged.
The man from the Federal Criminal Office sat down next to him. He had a cigarette in his fingers, unlit despite the layer of tobacco that hung like a fogbank in the thick air. He kept turning it over and over.
“I wanted to ask your opinion.”
Tachyon raised a magenta eyebrow. He had long since realized the Germans wanted him here solely because he was the tour’s leader in Hartmann’s absence. Otherwise they would hardly have cared to have a medical doctor, and a foreigner at that, underfoot. As it was, most of the civil and police officials circulating through the crisis center treated him with the deference due his position of authority and otherwise ignored him.
“Ask away,” Tachyon said with a hand wave that was only faintly sardonic. Neumann seemed honestly interested, and he had shown signs of at least nascent intelligence, which in Tach’s compass was rare for the breed.
“Were you aware that for the past hour and a half several members of your tour have been trying to raise a sum of money to offer Senator Hartmann’s kidnappers as ransom?”
“No.”
Neumann nodded, slowly, as if thinking something through. His yellow eyes were hooded. “They are experiencing considerable difficulty. It is the position of your government—”
“Not my government.”
Neumann inclined his head. “—of the United States government, that there will be no negotiation with the terrorists. Needless to say, American currency restrictions did not permit the members of the tour to take anywhere near a sufficient amount of money from the country, and now the American government has frozen the assets of all tour participants to preclude their concluding a separate deal.”
Tachyon felt his cheeks turn hot. “That’s damned high-handed.”
Neumann shrugged. “I was curious as to what you thought of the plan.”
“Why me?”
“You’re an acknowledged authority on joker affairs-that’s the reason you honor our country with your presence, of course.” He tapped the cigarette on the table next to a curling corner of a map of Berlin. “Also, you come of a culture in which kidnapping is a not uncommon occurrence, if I do not misapprehend.”
Tach looked at him. Though he was a celebrity, most Earthers knew little of his background beyond the fact that he was an alien. “I can’t speak of the RAF, of course—”
“The Rote Armee Fraktion in its current incarnation consists primarily of middle-class youths-much like its previous incarnations, and for that matter most First World revolutionary groups. Money means little to them; as children of our so-called Economic Miracle, they’ve been raised always to assume a sufficiency of it.”
“That’s certainly not something you can say for the JJS,” Sara Morgenstern said, coming over to join the conversation. An aide moved to intercept her, reaching a hand to shepherd her away from the important masculine conversation. She shied away from him as if a spark had jumped between them and glared.
Neumann said something brisk that not even Tachyon caught. The aide retreated.
“Frau Morgenstern. I am also much interested in what you have to say.”
“Members of the jokers for a just Society are authentically poor. I can vouch for that at least.”
“Would money tempt them, then?”
“That’s hard to say. They are committed, in a way I suspect the RAF members aren’t. Still—” a butterfly flip of the hand—“they haven’t lost any Mideastern aces. On the other hand, when they demand money to benefit jokers, I believe them. Whereas that might mean less to the Red Army people.”
Tach frowned. The demand to knock down Jetboy’s Tomb and build a joker hospice rankled him. Like most New Yorkers, he wouldn’t miss the memorial-an eyesore erected to honor failure, and one he’d personally prefer to forget. But the demand for a hospice was a slap in his face: When has a joker been turned away from my clinic? When?
Neumann was studying him. “You disagree, Herr Doktor?” he asked softly.
“No, no. She’s right. But Gimli—” he snapped his fingers and extended a forefinger. “Tom Miller cares deeply for jokers. But he has also an eye for what Americans call the main chance. You might well be able to tempt him.”
Sara nodded. “But why do you ask, Herr Neumann? After all, President Reagan refuses to negotiate for the senator’s return.” Her voice rang with bitterness. Still, Tach was puzzled. As high-strung as she was, he’d thought that surely worry for Gregg would have broken her down by now. Instead she seemed to be growing steadier by the hour. Neumann looked at her for a moment, and Tach wondered if he was in on the ill-kept secret of her affair with the missing senator. He had the impression those yellow eyesred-rimmed now from the smoke-missed little.
“Your President has made his decision,” he said softly. “But it’s my responsibility to advise my government on what course to take. This is a German problem too, you know.”
At two-thirty Hiram Worchester came on the air reading a statement in English. Tachyon translated it into German during the pauses.
“Comrade Wolf-Gimli, if you’re there,” Hiram said, voice fluting with emotion, “we want the senator back. We’re willing to negotiate as private citizens.”
“Please, for the love of God-and for jokers and aces and all the rest of us-please call us.”
Molniya stared at the door. White enamel was coming away in flakes. Striae of green and pink and brown showed beneath the white, around gouges that looked as if someone had used the door for knife-throwing practice. He was all but oblivious to the others in the room. Even the mad boy’s incessant humming; he’d long since learned to tune that out for sanity’s sake.
I should never have let them go.
It took him aback when both Gimli and Wolf wanted to make the meet with the tour delegation. It was about the first thing they’d agreed on since this whole comic-opera affair had gotten underway.
He’d wanted to forbid them. He didn’t like the smell of this rendezvous ... but that was foolish. Reagan had closed the door on overt negotiation, but didn’t the current Irangate hearings with which the Americans were currently amusing themselves prove he was not averse to using private channels to deal with terrorists against whom he’d taken a hard public line?
Besides, he thought, I’ve long since learned better than to issue orders I doubt will be obeyed.
It had been so different in Spetsnaz. The men he’d commanded were professionals and more, the elite of the Soviet armed forces, full of esprit and skilled as surgeons.
Such a contrast to this muddle of bitter amateurs and murderous dilettantes.
If only he’d at least had someone trained back home, or in a camp in some Soviet client state, Korea or Iraq or Peru. Someone except Gimli, that is-he had the impression years had passed since anything but plastique would open the dwarf’s mind enough to accept input from anyone else, nats in particular.
He wished at least he might have gone on the meet. But his place was here, guarding the captive. Without Hartmann they had nothing—except a worldful of trouble.
Does the KGB have this much trouble with its puppets? Rationally he guessed they did. They’d fluffed a few big ones over the years-the mention of Mexico could still make veterans wince and GRU had evidence of plenty of missteps the Big K thought they’d covered up.
But the Komitet’s publicists had done their job well, on both sides of the quaintly named “Iron Curtain.” Down behind his forebrain not even Molniya could shake the image of the KGB as the omniscient puppet master, with its strings wrapping the world like a spider’s web.
He tried to envision himself as a master spider. It made him smile.
No. I’m not a spider. Just a small, frightened man whom somebody once called hero.
He thought of Ludmilya, his daughter. He shuddered. There are strings attached to me, right enough. But I’m not the one who pulls them.
I want him.
Hartmann looked around the squalid little room. Ulrich was pacing, face fixed and sullen at having been left behind. Stocky Wilfried sat cleaning an assault rifle with compulsive care. He always seemed to be doing something with his hands. The two remaining jokers sat by themselves saying nothing. The Russian sat and smoked and stared at the wall.
He studiously didn’t look at the boy in the scuffed leather jacket.
Mackie Messer hummed the old song about the shark and its teeth and the man with his jackknife and fancy gloves. Hartmann remembered a mealymouthed version popular when he was a teenager, sung by Bobby Darin or some such teen-idol crooner. He also recalled a different version, one he’d heard for the first time in a dim dope-fogged room on Yale’s Old Campus when antiwar activist Hartmann returned to his alma mater to lecture in ‘68. Dark and sinister, a straighter translation of the original, sung in the whisky baritone of a man who, like old Bertolt Brecht himself, delighted in playing Baal: Thomas Marion Douglas, Destiny’s doomed lead singer. Remembering the way the words went down his spine on that distant night, he shuddered.
I want him.
No! his mind shouted. He’s insane. He’s dangerous. He could be useful, once I get us out of here.
Hartmann’s body clenched in rictus terror. No! Don’t do anything! The terrorists are negotiating right now. We’ll get out of this.
He felt Puppetman’s disdain. Seldom had his alter ego seemed more discrete, more other. Fools. What has Hiram Worchester ever been involved in that amounted to anything? It’ll fall through.
Then we just wait. Sooner or later something will be worked out. It’s how these things go. He felt slimy vines of sweat twining his body inside his blood-spattered shirt and vest.
How long do you think we have to wait? How long before our jokers and their terrorists friends blow up in each other’s faces? I have puppets. They’re our only way out.
What can they do? I can’t just make someone let me go. I’m not that little mind-twister Tachyon.
He felt a smug vibration within.
Don’t forget 1976, he told his power. You thought you could handle that too.
The power laughed at him, until he closed his eyes and concentrated and forced it to quiescence.
Has it become a demon, possessing me? he wondered. Am I just another of Puppetman’s puppets?
No. I’m the master here. Puppetman’s just a fantasy. A personification of my power. A game I play with myself. Inside the tangled corridors of his soul, the echo of triumphant laughter.
“It’s raining again,” Xavier Desmond said.
Tach made a face and refrained from a rejoinder commending the joker’s firm grasp of the obvious. Des was a friend, after all.
He shifted his grip on the umbrella he shared with Desmond and tried to console himself that the squall would soon pass. The Berliners strolling the paths that veined the grassy Tiergarten park and hurrying along the sidewalks of the nearby Bundes Allee clearly thought so, and they should know. Old men in homburgs, young women with prams, intense young men in dark wool sweaters, a sausage vendor with cheeks like ripe peaches; the usual crowd of Germans taking advantage of anything resembling decent weather after the lengthy Prussian winter.
He glanced at Hiram. The big round restaurateur was resplendent in his pin-striped three-piece suit, hat at a jaunty angle, and black beard curled. He had an umbrella in one hand, a gleaming black satchel in the other, and Sara Morgenstern standing primly next to him, not quite making contact.
Rain was dripping off the brim of Tach’s plumed hat, which swept beyond the coverage of the cheap plastic umbrella. A rivulet ran down one side of Des’s trunk. Tach sighed.
How did I let myself get talked into this? he wondered for the fourth or fifth time. It was idle; when Hiram had called to say a West German industrialist who wished to remain nameless had offered to front them the ransom money, he’d known he was in.
Sara stood stiff. He sensed she was shivering, almost subliminally. Her face was the color of her raincoat. Her eyes were a paleness that somehow contrasted. He wished she hadn’t insisted on coming along. But she was the leading journalist on this junket; they’d have had to lock her up to keep her from covering this meeting with Hartmann’s kidnappers at first hand. And there was her personal interest.
Hiram cleared his throat. “Here they come.” His voice was pitched higher than usual.
Tachyon glanced right without turning his head. No mistake; there weren’t enough jokers in West Germany that it was likely to have two just happen along at this moment, even if there could be any doubt about the identity of the small bearded man who walked with the Toulouse-Lautrec roll beside a being who looked like a beige anteater on its hind legs.
“Tom,” Hiram said, voice husky now.
“Gimli,” the dwarf replied. He said it without heat. His eyes glittered at the satchel hanging from Hiram’s hand. “You brought it.”
Of course ... Gimli.” He handed the umbrella to Sara and cracked the satchel. Gimli stood on tiptoe and peered in. His lips pursed in a soundless whistle. “Two million American dollars. Two more after you hand Senator Hartmann over to us.’
A snaggletoothed grin. “That’s a bargaining figure.” Hiram colored. “You agreed on the phone—”
“We agreed to consider your offer once you demonstrated your good faith,” said one of the two nats who accompanied Gimli and his partner. He was a tall man made bulkier by his raincoat. Dark blond hair was slicked back and down from a balding promontory of forehead by the intermittent rain. “ I am Comrade Wolf. Let me remind you, there is the matter of the freedom of our comrade, al-Muezzin.”
“Just what is it that makes German socialists risk their lives and freedom on behalf of a fundamentalist Muslim terrorist?” Tachyon asked.
“We’re all comrades in the struggle against Western imperialism. What brings a Takisian to risk his health in our beastly climate on behalf of a senator from a country that once whipped him from its shores like a rabid dog?”
Tach drew his head back in surprise. Then he smiled. “Touch&” He and Wolf shared a look of perfect understanding. “But we can only give you money,” Hiram said. “We can’t arrange for Mr. Hassani to be released. We told you that.”
“Then it’s no sale,” said Wolfs nat companion, a redheaded woman Tach could have found attractive but for a sullen, puffy jut to her lower lip and a bluish cast to her complexion. “What use is your toilet-paper money to us? We merely demand it to make you pigs sweat.”
“Now, wait a minute,” Gimli said. “That money can buy a lot for jokers.”
“Are you so obsessed with buying into consumption fascism?” sneered the redhead.
Gimli went purple. “The money’s here. Hassani’s in Rikers, and that’s a long way away.”
Wolf was frowning at Gimli in a speculative sort of way. Somewhere an engine backfired.
The woman spat like a cat and jumped back, face pale, eyes feral.
Motion tugged at the corner of Tach’s eye.
The chubby sausage seller had flipped open the lid of his cart. His hand was coming out with a black Heckler & Koch mini-machine pistol in it.
Ever suspicious, Gimli traced his gaze. “It’s a trap!” he shrieked. He whipped open his coat. He’d been holding one of those compact little Krinkov assault rifles beneath.
Tachyon kicked the foreshortened Kalashnikov from Gimli’s hand with the toe of an elegant boot. The nat woman pulled out an AKM from inside her coat and stuttered a burst onehanded. The sound threatened to implode Tach’s eardrums. Sara screamed. Tach threw himself onto her, bore her down to wet, fragrant grass as the female terrorist tracked her weapon from left to right, face a rictus of something like ecstasy.
There was motion all around. Old men in homburgs and young women with prams and intense young men in sweaters were whipping out machine pistols and rushing toward the party clumped around the two umbrellas.
“Wait,” Hiram shouted, “hold on! It’s all a misunderstanding.”
The other terrorists had guns out now, firing in all directions. Bystanders screamed and scattered. The slicksoled shoes of a man waving a machine pistol with one hand lost traction on the grass and shot out from under him. A man with an MP5K and a business suit tripped over a baby carriage whose operator had frozen on the handle and fell on his face.
Sara lay beneath Tachyon, rigid as a statue. The clenched rump pressed against his crotch was firmer than he would have expected. This is the only way I’m ever going to get on top of her, he thought ruefully. It was almost physical pain to realize it was contact with him and not fear of the bullets crackling like static overhead that made her go stiff.
Gregg, you are a lucky man. Should you somehow survive this imbroglio.
Scrambling after his rifle, Gimli ran into a big, nat who snatched at him. He picked him up by one leg with that disproportionate strength of his and pitched him into the faces of a trio of his comrades like a Scot tossing the caber. Des was making love to the grass. Smart man, Tachyon thought. His head was full of burned powder and the green and brown aromas of wet turf. Hiram was wandering dazed through a horizontal firestorm, waving his arms and crying, “Wait, wait-oh, it wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”
The terrorists bolted. Gimli ducked between the legs of one nat who flailed his arms at him in a grab, came up and punched a second in the nuts and followed them.
Tach heard a squeal of pain. The snouted joker fell down with black ropy strands of blood unraveling from his belly. Gimli caught him up on the run and slung him over his shoulder like a rolled carpet.
A gaggle of Catholic schoolgirls scattered like blue quail, pigtails flying, as the fugitives stampeded through them.
Tachyon saw a man go to one knee, raise his machine pistol for a burst at the terrorists.
He reached out with his mind. The man toppled, asleep. A van coughed into life and roared from the curb with Gimli thrashing for the handles of the open doors with his stubby arms.
Hiram sat on the wet grass, weeping into his hands. The black satchel wept bundled money beside him.
“The political police,” Neumann said, as if trying to work a shred of spoiled food from inside his mouth. “They don’t call them Popo for nothing.”
“Herr Neumann—” the man in mechanic’s coveralls began beseechingly.
“Shut up. Doctor Tachyon, you have my personal apology.” Neumann had arrived within five minutes of the terrorists’ escape, just in time to keep Tachyon from being arrested for screaming abuse at the police interlopers.
Tachyon sensed Sara beside and behind him like a whiteout shadow. She’d just finished narrating a sketch of what had just happened into the voice-actuated mike clipped to the lapel of her coat. She seemed calm.
He gestured at the ambulances crowded together like whales with spinning blue lights beyond the police cordon, with a hat still bedraggled from being jumped up and down on. “How many people did your madmen gun down?”
“Three bystanders were injured by gunfire, and one policeman. Another officer will require hospitalization but he, ah, was not shot.”
“What were you thinking of?” Tachyon screamed. He thought he’d blasted all his fury out of him, all over the plainclothes officers who’d been stumbling across each other demanding to know how the terrorists could possibly have gotten away. But now it was back, filling him up to overflow. “Tell me, what did you people think you were doing?”
“It wasn’t my people,” Neumann said. “It was the political branch of the Berlin Land police. The Bundeskriminalamt had nothing to do with it.”
“It was all a setup,” Xavier Desmond said, stroking his trunk with leaden fingers. “That millionaire philanthropist who lent the ransom—”
“Was fronting for the political police.”
“Herr Neumann.” It was a Popo with grass stains on the knees of his once sharply pressed trousers, pointing an accusing finger at Tachyon “He let the terrorists go. Pauli had a clear shot at them, and he-he knocked him down with that mind power of his.”
“The officer was aiming his weapon at a crowd of people through whom the terrorists were fleeing,” Tach said tautly. “He could not have fired without hitting innocent bystanders. Or perhaps I am confused as to who is the terrorist.”
The plainclothesman turned red. “You interfered with one of my officers! We could have stopped them=“ Neumann reached out and grabbed a pinch of the man’s cheek. “Go elsewhere,” he said softly. “Really.”
The man swallowed and walked away, sending hostile looks back over his shoulder at Tachyon. Tachyon grinned and shot him the bird.
“Oh, Gregg, my God, what have we done?” sobbed Hiram. “We’ll never get him back.”
Tachyon tugged on his elbow, more trying to encourage him to his feet than help him. He forgot about Hiram’s gravity power; the fat man popped right up. “What do you mean, Hiram, my friend?”
“Are you out of your mind, Doctor? They’ll kill him now.”
Sara gasped. When Tach glanced to her she looked quickly away, as if unwilling to show him her eyes.
“Not so, my friend,” Neumann said. “That’s not how the game is played.”
He stuck hands in the pockets of his trousers and gazed off across the misty park at the line of trees that masked the outer fences of the zoo. “But now the price will go up.”
“The bastards!” Gimli turned, whipping rain from the tail of his raincoat, and beat fists on the mottled walls. “The cocksuckers. They set us up!”
Shroud and Scrape were huddled over the thin, filthy mattress on which Aardvark lay moaning softly. Everybody else seemed to be milling around a room crowded with heavy damp as well as bodies.
Hartmann sat with his head pulled protectively down inside his sweat-limp collar. He agreed with Gimli’s character assessment. Are those fools trying to get me killed?
A thought went home like a whaler’s bomb-lance: Tachyon!
Does that alien demon suspect? is this a convoluted Takisian plot to get rid of me without a scandal?
Puppetman laughed at him. ‘Never attribute to malice what may adequately be explained by stupidity,’ he said. Hartmann recognized the quote; Lady Black had said it to Carnifex once, during one of his rages.
Mackie Messer stood shaking his head. “This isn’t right,” he said, half-pleading. “We have the senator. Don’t they know that?”
Then he was raging around the room like a cornered wolf, snarling and hacking air with his hands. People jostled to get out of the way of those hands.
“What do they think’s going on?” Mackie screamed. “Who do they think they’re fucking with? I’ll tell you something. I’ll tell you what. Maybe we should send them a few pieces of the Senator here, show them what’s what.”
He buzzed his hand inches from the tip of the captive’s nose.
Hartmann yanked his head back. Christ, he almost got me! The intent had been there, for real-Puppetman had felt it, felt it waver at the final millisecond.
“Calm down, Detlev,” Anneke said sweetly. She seemed exalted by the shootout in the park. She’d been fluttering around and laughing at nothing since the group’s return, and red spots glowed like greasepaint on her cheeks. “The capitalists wont be eager to pay all we ask for damaged goods.” Mackie went white. Puppetman felt fresh anger burst inside him like a bomb. “Mackie! I’m Mackie Messer, you fucking bitch! Mackie the Knife, just like my song.”
Detlev was slang for faggot, Hartmann remembered. He kept his last breath inside.
Anneke smiled at the youthful ace. From the side of his eye Hartmann saw Wilfried pale, and Ulrich picked up an AKM with an elaborate casualness he wouldn’t have thought the blond terrorist could muster.
Wolf put his arm around Mackie’s shoulders. “There, Mackie, there. Anneke didn’t mean anything by it.” Her smile made a liar of him. But Mackie pressed against the big man’s side and allowed himself to be gentled. Molniya cleared his throat, and Ulrich set the rifle down.
Hartmann let the breath go. The explosion wasn’t coming. Quite yet.
“He’s a good boy,” Wolf said, giving Mackie another hug and letting him go. “He’s the son of an American deserter and a Hamburg whore another victim of your imperialist venture in Southeast Asia, Senator.”
“My father was a general,” Mackie shouted in English. “Yes, Mackie; anything you say. The boy grew up running the docks and alleys, in and out of institutions. Finally he drifted to Berlin, more helpless flotsam cast up by our own frenetic consumer culture. He saw posters, began to attend study groups at the Free University-he’s barely literate, the poor child-and that’s where I found him. And recruited him.”
“And he’s been sooo helpful,” Anneke said, rolling her eyes at Ulrich, who laughed. Mackie glanced at them, then quickly away.
You win, Puppetman said. What?
You’re right. My control isn’t perfect. And this one is too unpredictable, too ... terrible.
Hartmann almost laughed aloud. Of all the things he’d come to expect from the power that dwelt within him, humility wasn’t one.
Such a waste; he’d be such a perfect puppet. And his emotion, so furious, so lovely-like a drug. But a deadly drug.
So you’ve given up. Relief flooded him. No. The boy just has to die. But that’s all right. I’ve got it all worked out now.
Shroud squatted over Aardvark like a solicitous mummy, bathing his forehead with a length of his own bandage, which he’d dipped in water from one of the five-liter plastic cans stacked in the bedroom. He shook his head and murmured to himself.
Eyes malice-bright, Anneke danced up to him. “Thinking of all that lovely money you lost, Comrade?”
“Joker blood’s been shed-again,” Shroud said levelly. “It better not have been for nothing.”
Anneke sauntered over to Ulrich. “You should have seen them, sweetheart. All ready to hand Senator Schweinfleisch over for a suitcase full of dollars.” She pursed her lips. “I do believe they were so excited they forgot all about the frontline fighter we’ve sworn to liberate. They would have sold us all.”
“Shut up, you bitch!” Gimli yelled. Spittle exploded from the center of his beard as he lunged for the redhead. With a scratch of chitin on wood Scrape interposed himself, threw his horny arms around his leader as guns came up.
A loud pop stopped them like a freeze-frame. Molniya stood with a bare hand upturned before his face, fingers extended as if to hold a ball. An ephemeral blue flicker limned the nerves of his hand and was gone.
“I€ we fight among ourselves,” he said calmly, “we play into our enemies’ hands.”
Only Puppetman knew his calm was a lie.
Deliberately Molniya drew his glove back on. “We were betrayed. What more can we expect from the capitalist system we oppose?” He smiled. “Let us strengthen our resolve. If we stand together, we can make them pay for their treachery”
The potential antagonists fell back away from each other. Hartmann feared.
Puppetman exulted.
The last of day lay across the Brandenburg plain west of the city like a layer of polluted water. From the next block tinny Near Eastern music skirled from a radio. Inside the little room it was tropical, from the heat billowing out of the radiator that the handy Comrade Wilfried had got going despite the building’s derelict status, as well as electricity; from the humidity of bodies confined under stress.
Ulrich let the cheap curtains drop and turned away from the window. “Christ, it stinks inhere,” he said, doing stretches. “What do those fucking Turks do? Piss in the corners?”
Lying on the foul mattress next to the wall, Aardvark huddled closer around his injured gut and whimpered. Gimli moved over beside him, felt his head. His ugly little face was all knotted up with concern. “He’s in a bad way,” the dwarf said.
“Maybe we oughta get him to a hospital,” Scrape said. Ulrich jutted his square chin and shook his head. “No way. We decided.”
Shroud knelt down next to his boss, took Aardvark’s hand, and felt the low fuzzy forehead. “He’s got some fever.”
“How can you tell?” Wilfried asked, his broad face concerned. “Maybe he’s naturally got a higher temperature than a person, like a dog or something.”
Quick as a teleport Gimli was across the room. He swept Wilfried off his feet with a transverse kick and straddled his chest, pummeling him. Shroud and Scrape hauled him off.
Wifried was holding his hands up before his face. “Hey, hey, what did I do?” He seemed almost in tears.
“You stupid bastard!” Gimli howled, windmilling his arms. “You’re no better than the rest of the fucking nats! None of you!”
“Comrades, please—” Molniya began.
But Gimli wasn’t listening. His face was the color of raw meat. He sent his companions flying with a heave of his shoulders and marched to Aardvark’s side.
Puppetman hated to let Gimli off like this, walking away clear. He’d have to kill the evil little fuck someday.
But survival surmounted even vengeance. Puppetman’s imperative was to shave the odds against him. This was the quickest way.
Tears streamed over Gimli’s lumpy cheeks. “That’s enough,” he sobbed. “We’re taking him for medical attention, and we’re taking him now.” He bent down and looped a limp furry arm over his neck. Shroud glanced around, eyes alert above the bandage wrap, then joined him.
Comrade Wolf blocked the door. “Nobody leaves here.”
“What the fuck are you talking about, little man?” Ulrich said pugnaciously. “He’s not hurt that badly.”
“Who says he’s not eh?” Shroud said. For the first time Hartmann realized he had a Canadian accent.
Gimli’s face twisted like a rag. “That’s shit. He’s hurting. He’s dying. Dammit, let us go.”
Ulrich and Anneke were sidling for their weapons. “United we stand, brother,” Wolf intoned. “Divided we fall. As you Amis say.”
A double clack brought their heads around. Scrape stood by the far wall. The assault rifle he’d just cocked was pointed at the buckle of the blond terrorist’s army belt. “Then maybe we just fell, comrades,” he said. “Because if Gimli says we’re going, we’re gone.”
Wolfs mouth crumpled in on itself, as if he were old and had forgotten his false teeth. He glanced at Ulrich and Anneke. They had the jokers flanked. If they all moved at once ...
Clinging to one of Aardvark’s wrists, Shroud brought up an AKM with his free hand. “Keep it cool, nat.”
Mackie felt his hands beginning to buzz. Only the touch of Molniya’s hand on his arm kept him from slicing some joker meat. Ugly monsters! I knew we couldn’t trust them.
“What about the things we’re working for?” the Soviet asked.
Gimli wrung Aardvark’s hand. “This is what we’re working for. He’s a joker. And he needs help.”
Comrade Wolf’s face was turning the color of eggplant. Veins stood out like broken fingers on his temples. “Where do you think you’re going?” he forced past grinding teeth.
Gimli laughed. “Right through the Wall. Where our friends are waiting for us.”
“Then leave. Walk out on us. Walk out on the great things you were going to do for your fellow monsters. We still have the senator; we are going to win. And if we ever catch you—”
Scrape laughed. “You gonna have trouble catching your breath after this goes down. The pigs’ll be crawling all over you, I guarantee. You’re such total fuckups I can smell it.”
Ulrich’s eyes were rolling belligerently despite the rifle aimed at his midsection. “No,” Molniya said. “Let them go. If we fight everything is lost.”
“Get out,” Wolf said.
“Yeah,” Gimli said. He and Shroud gently carried Aardvark out, into the unlit hallway of the abandoned building. Scrape covered them until they were out of sight, then swiftly crossed the room. He paused, gave them as much of a smile as chitin would permit, and closed the door.
Ulrich hurled his Kalashnikov against the door. Fortunately it failed to go off. “Bastards!”
Anneke shrugged. Clearly she was bored with the psychodrama. “Americans,” she said.
Mackie sidled over to Molniya. Everything seemed wrong. But Molniya would make it right. He knew he would.
The Russian ace was cake.
Ulrich swung around with his big hands tied into fists. “So what’s going to happen? Huh?”
Wolf sat on a stool with his belly on his thighs and hands on his knees. He’d visibly aged as the thrill of high adventure ebbed. Perhaps the exploit he’d hoped to cap his double life with was going sour on his tongue.
“What do you mean, Ulrich?” the lawyer asked wearily. Ulrich turned him a look of outrage. “Well, I mean it’s our deadline. It’s ten o’clock. You heard the radio. They still haven’t met our demands.”
He picked up an AKM, jacked a round into the chamber. “Can’t we kill the son of a bitch now?”
Anneke laughed like a ringing bell. “Your political sophistication never ceases to amaze me, lover.”
Wolf hiked up the sleeve of his coat and checked his wristwatch. “What happens now is that. you, Anneke, and you, Wilfried, will go and telephone the message we agreed upon to the crisis center the authorities have so conveniently established. We’ve both proved we can play the waiting game; it’s time to make things move a little.”
And Comrade Molniya said, “No.”
The fear was gathering. Bit by bit it coalesced into a cancer, black and amorphous in the center of his brain. With each minute’s passage it seemed Molniya’s heart gained a beat. His ribs felt as if they were vibrating from the speed of his pulse. His throat was dry and raw, his cheeks burned as though he stared into the open maw of a crematorium. His mouth tasted like offal. He had to get out. Everything depended on it.
Everything.
No, a part of him cried. You’ve got to stay. That was the plan.
Behind his eyes he saw his daughter Ludmilya sitting in a rubbled building with her melted eyes running down blister-bubbled cheeks. This is at stake, Valentin Mikhailovich, another, deeper voice replied, if anything goes wrong. Do you dare entrust this errand to these adolescents?
“No,” he said. His parched palate would barely produce the word. “I’ll go.”
Wolf frowned. Then the ends of his wide mouth drew up in a smile. Doubtless it occurred to him that would leave him in complete control of the situation. Fine. Let him think as he will. I’ve got to get out of here.
Mackie blocked the door, Mackie Messer with tears thronging the lower lids of his eyes. Molniya felt fear spike within him, almost ripped off a glove to shock the boy from his path. But he knew the young ace would never harm him, and he knew why.
He mumbled an apology and shouldered past. He heard a sob as the door shut behind him, and then only his footsteps, pursuing him down the darkened hall.
One of my better performances, Puppetman congratulated himself.
Cake.
Mackie beat his open palms on the door. Molniya had abandoned him. He hurt, and he couldn’t do anything about the hurt. Not even if he made his hands buzz so they’d cut through steel plate.
Wolf was still here. Wolf would protect him ... but Wolf hadn’t. Not really. Wolf had let the others laugh at him-him, Mackie the ace, Mackie the Knife. It had been Molniya who’d stood up for him the last few weeks. Molniya who had taken care of him.
Molniya who was gone. Who wasn’t supposed to go. Who was gone.
He turned, weeping, and slid slowly down the door to the floor.
Exhilaration swelled Puppetman. It was all working just as he had planned. His puppets cut the capers he directed and suspected nothing. And here he sat, at breath’s distance, drinking their passions like brandy. Danger was no more than added poignance; he was Puppetman, and in control.
And finally the time had come to make an end of Mackie Messer and get himself out of here.
Anneke stood over Mackie, taunting: “Crybaby. And you call yourself a revolutionary?” He pulled himself upright, whimpering like a lost puppy.
Puppetman reached out for a string, and pulled.
And Comrade Ulrich said, “Why didn’t you just go with the rest of the jokers, you ugly little queer?”
“Kreuzberg,” Neumann said.
Slumped in his chair, Tachyon could barely muster the energy to lift his head and say, “I beg your pardon?” Ten o’clock was ancient history now. So, he feared, was Senator Gregg Hartmann.
Neumann grinned. “We have them. It took the Devil’s own time, but we traced the van. They’re in Kreuzberg. The Turkish ghetto next to the Wall.”
Sara gasped and quickly looked away.
“ An antiterrorist team from GSG-9 is standing by,” Neumann said.
“Do they know what they’re doing?” Tach asked, remembering the afternoon’s fiasco.
“They’re the best. They’re the ones who sprang the Lufthansa 737 the Nur al-Allah people hijacked to Mogadishu in 1977. Hans-Joachim Richter himself is in charge.” Richter was the head of the Ninth Border Guards Group, GSG-9, especially formed to combat terrorism after the Munich massacre of ‘72. A popular hero in Germany, he was reputed to be an ace, though nobody knew what his powers might be. Tach stood. “Let’s go.”
Mackie’s left hand cut right down Comrade Ulrich’s right side from the base of his neck to the hip. It felt good going through, and the kiss of bone thrilled him like speed.
Ulrich’s arm fell off. He stared at Mackie. His lips peeled back away from perfect teeth, which clacked open and closed three times like something in the window of a novelty store.
He looked down at what had been his perfect animal body and shrieked.
Mackie watched in fascination. The scream made his exposed lung work in and out like a vacuum cleaner bag, all grayish purple and moist and veined with blue and red. Then his guts started to spill out the side of him, piling over his fallen rifle, and the blood rushing out of him carried away the strength that kept him standing, and he dropped.
“Holy Mary mother of God,” Wilfried said. Puke slopped from a corner of his mouth as he backed away from the wreckage of his comrade. Then he looked past Mackie and yelled, “No—”
Anneke aimed her Kalashnikov at the small of the ace’s back. Fear knotted her finger sphincter-tight.
Mackie phased out. The burst splashed Wilfried all over the wall.
Molniya stood with hands on knees and his back against the side of a stripped Volvo, pulling in deep breaths of diesel-flavored Berlin night. It wasn’t a part of town in which. strangers cared to spend much time alone. That didn’t concern him. What he feared was fear.
What came over me? I’ve never felt like that in my life. He’d fled the apartment in a bright haze of panic. No sooner had he stepped outside than it evaporated like water spilled on a sun-heated rock in the Khyber. Now he was trying to collect himself, unsure for the moment whether to carry on with his errand or go back and send a couple of Wolf’s vicious cubs.
Papertin was right, he told himself. I’ve gotten soft. IFrom above came a familiar heavy stutter. His blood ran like freon through his veins as he raised his head to see fireflashes dancing on chintz curtains two stories up.
It was all over.
If I’m not found here, he thought, then maybe—conceivably—the Third World War won’t happen tonight.
He turned and walked away down the street, very fast.
Hartmann lay on his side with the floorboards throbbing against the bruise they’d made on his cheekbone. He’d kicked the chair over as soon as things started happening.
What in hell’s name went wrong? he wondered desperately. The bastard wasn’t supposed to talk, just shoot.
It was ‘76 all over again. Once again Puppetman in his arrogance had overreached himself. And it may just have cost him his ass.
His nostrils buzzed with the stink of hot lubricant and blood and fresh moist shit. Hartmann could hear the two surviving terrorists stumbling around the room shouting at each other. Ulrich was dying in wheezes a few feet away. He could feel the energy running-from him like an ebb tide.
“Where is he? Where’d the fucker go?” Wolf was saying. “He went through the wall,” Anneke said. She was hyperventilating, tearing the words out of the air like pieces of cloth.
“Well, watch for him. Oh, holy Jesus.”
Their terror was stark as crucifixion as they stood trying to cover all three interior walls with their guns. Hartmann shared it. The twisted ace had gone berserk.
Someone shrieked and died.
Mackie stood for a moment with his arm elbow-deep in Anneke’s back. He took the buzz off, leaving his hand jutting from the woman’s sternum like a blade. Blood oozed greasily around the leather sleeve on Mackie’s arm where it vanished into her torso. He enjoyed the look of it, and the intimate way what remained of Anneke’s heart kept hugging his arm. The fools hadn’t even been looking his way when he slipped back through the wall from the bedroom, not that it would have helped them if they had. Three quick steps and that was it for redheaded little Comrade Anneke.
“Fuck you,” he said, and giggled.
The heart convulsed one last time around Mackie’s arm and was still. Putting a slight buzz on, Mackie pulled his arm free. He swung the corpse around as he did so.
Wolf was standing there with his cheeks quivering. He brought up his gun as Mackie turned. Mackie pushed the corpse at him. He fired. Mackie laughed and phased out.
Wolf emptied the magazine in. a shivering ejaculation. Plaster dust filled the room. Anneke’s corpse collapsed across the senator. Mackie phased back in.
Wolf screamed pleas, in German, in English. Mackie took the Kalashnikov away from him, pinned him against the door, and taking his time about it, sawed his head in two, right down the middle.
Riding in the armored van with the particolored lights of downtown Berlin washing over her and the faces and weapons of the GSG-9 men who sat facing her, Sara Morgenstern thought, What’s come over me?
She wasn’t sure whether she meant now or before weeks before, when the affair with Gregg began.
How strange, how very strange. How could I have ever have thought I loved ... him? I feel nothing for him now. But that wasn’t really true. Where love had left a vacuum an earlier emotion was seeping in. Tainted with a toxic flavor of betrayal.
Andrea, Andrea, what have I done?
She bit her lip. The GSG-9 commando riding across from her saw and grinned, his teeth startling in his blackened face. She was instantly wary, but there was no sex in that smile, only the self-distracting camaraderie of a man facing battle with both pleasure and fear. She made herself smile back and nestled closer against Tachyon, sitting by her side.
He put his arm around her. It wasn’t just a brotherly gesture. Even the prospect of danger wasn’t enough to drive sex wholly from his mind. Oddly she found she didn’t mind the attention. Perhaps it was her acute awareness of how incongruous they were, a pair of small gaudy cockatoos riding among panthers.
And Gregg ... did she really care what happened to him?
Or do I hope he never leaves that tenement alive?
The screaming had stopped, and the buzz-saw sounds. Hartmann had feared they might go on forever. He gagged on the reek of friction-burned hair and bone.
He felt like something from a medieval fable as painted by Bosch: a glutton presented with the fullest of feasts, only to have it turn to ashes in his mouth. Puppetman had drawn no nourishment from the terrorists’ dying. He’d been nearly as terrified as they.
A humming, coming closer: Moritat, The Ballad of Mackie the Knife. The mad ace was locked in killing frenzy now, stalking toward him with his terrible hand still dripping brains. Hartmann writhed in his bonds. The woman Mackie had impaled was a dead weight across his legs. He was going to die now. Unless ...
Bile surged up his throat at what he was going to do. He choked it back, reached for a string, and pulled. Pulled hard. The humming stopped. The soft tocking of clogs on wood stopped. Hartmann looked up. Mackie leaned over him with glowing eyes.
He pulled Anneke off Hartmann’s legs. He was strong for his size. Or maybe inspired. He pulled Hartmann’s chair upright. Hartmann winced, dreading contact, fearing death. Fearing the alternative almost as much.
His own breathing nearly deafened him. He could feel the emotion swelling within Mackie. He steeled himself and stroked it, teased it, made it grow.
Mackie went to his knees before the chair. He unfastened the fly of Hartmann’s trousers, slipped fingers inside, tugged the senator’s cock out into the humid air and fastened his lips around the glans. He began to pump his head up and down, slowly at first, then gaining speed. His tongue went caduceus round and round.
Hartmann moaned. He couldn’t let himself enjoy this.
If you don’t it’s never going to end, Puppetman taunted. What are you doing to me?
Saving you. And securing the best puppet of all.
But he’s so powerful-so ... unpredictable. Involuntary pleasure was breaking his thoughts into kaleidiscope fragments. But I’ve got him now. Because he wants to be my puppet. He loves you, the way that neurasthenic bitch Sara never could.
God, God, am I still a man?
You’re alive. And you’re going to smuggle this creature back to New York. And anyone who stands in our way from now on will die.
Now relax and enjoy it.
Puppetman took over. As Mackie sucked his cock, he sucked the boy’s emotions with his mind. Hot-wet and salty, they gushed into him.
Hartmann’s head went back. Involuntarily he cried out. He came as he had not come since Succubus died.
Senator Gregg Hartmann pushed through a door from which the glass had long since been broken. He leaned against the cold metal frame and stared into a street that was empty except for gutted cars and weeds pushing up through cracks in the pavement.
White light drilled him from the rooftop opposite, fierce as a laser. He raised his head, blinking.
“My God,” a German voice yelled, “it’s the senator.” The street filled up with cars and whirling lights and noise. It didn’t seem to—take any time at all. Hartmann saw magenta highlights struck like sparks off Tachyon’s hair, and Carnifex in his comic-book outfit, and from doorways and behind the automotive corpses appeared men totally encased in black, trotting warily forward with stubby machine pistols held ready.
Past them all he saw Sara, dressed in a white coat that was the defiant antithesis of camouflage.
“I ... got away,” he said, voice creaking like an unused door. “It’s over. They-they killed each other.”
Television spotlights spilled over him, hot and white as milk fresh from the breast. His gaze caught Sara’s. He smiled. But her eyes drilled into his like iron rods.
Cold and hard. She’s slipped away! he thought. With the thought came pain.
But Puppetman wasn’t buying pain. Not tonight. He drove himself into her through the eyes.
And she came running for him, arms spread, her mouth a red hole through which love-words poured. And Hartmann felt his puppet wrap her arms around his neck and makeupstreaked tears gush onto his collar, and he hated that part of him that had saved his life.
And down away where light never was, Puppetman smiled.
November night wind whipped his trousers, stinging skinny legs like triffid tendrils as he shoehorned himself into a small club not far from campus. The murk throbbed like a wound, pulsing red and blue and noise. He stopped, hovering there in the door with the lumpy orange-and-green plaid coat in which his mother had packed him off to MIT three years before hanging on his narrow shoulders like a dead dwarf. Don’t be such a coward, Mark, he told himself. This is for science.
The band lunged at “Crown of Creation” and wrestled it to the floor as he instinctively sought the darkest corner, teacup in hand-he’d learned how unhip it was to order Coke or coffee, at least.
Other than that he’d learned none of the moves in weeks of research. The way he was dressed, in his high-water pants and pastel polyester shirt of the sort that always pouched out at the sides like a sail in the wind, he might’ve been in danger of being taken for a narc—this was the fall that followed Woodstock, the year Gordon Liddy invented the DEA to give Nixon an issue to distract attention from the war-but Berkeley and San Francisco were hip towns, university towns; they knew a science student when they saw one.
The Glass Onion had no dance floor as such; bodies swayed in crepuscular crimson and indigo glow between tables or crowded into a clear space before the tiny stage, with a whisper of beads and buckskin fringe and the occasional dull glint of Indian jewelry. He kept as far from the action’s center as he could, but being Mark he inevitably bumped into everyone he passed, leaving a wake of glares and thin embarrassed “excuse me’s” behind him. His prominent ears burning, he had almost reached his goal, the little rickety table made out of a Ma Bell cable spool with a single dented green auditorium chair beside it and an unlit candle in an empty peanut butter jar plunked down on it, when he ran smack into somebody.
The first thing that happened was that his massive hornrim glasses slid down the ramp of his nose and disappeared in the dark. Next he grabbed the person he’d bumped with both hands as his balance went. The teacup hit the floor with a crash and a clatter. “Oh, dear, oh, please excuse me, I’m sorry ...” tumbled from his mouth like gumballs from a broken machine.
He realized there was a certain softness of the person his skinny hands were clinging to so fervently, and a smell of musk and patchouli detached itself from the general miasma and drilled its way right up into his sensorium. He cursed himself: You had to go and run over a beautiful woman. At least she smelled beautiful.
Then she was patting him on the arm, murmuring that she was sorry, and they both bent down to the floor together in search of teacup and glasses while the bodies went round and round around them, and they bumped heads and recoiled amid apologies, and Mark’s fevered fingers found his glasses, miraculously intact, and fit them back in front of his eyes, and he blinked and found himself staring from a distance of five inches into the face of Kimberly Ann Cordayne.
Kimberly Ann Cordayne: the girl, yes, of his dreams. Childhood sweetheart, unrequited, from the moment he’d first beheld her, pinafored and five, riding her trike down the modest suburban SoCal street where they both lived. He’d been so entranced by her Hallmark Card perfection that the raspberry scoop fell off his ice cream cone to hot doom on the sidewalk and he never noticed. She pedaled over his bare toes and cruised on with her pert nose in the air, never acknowledging his existence. From that day his heart had been lost.
Hope and despair surged up like surf within him. He straightened, his tongue too tied to produce words. And she yelled, “Mark! Mark Meadows! Fuck, but it’s good to see you.” And hugged him.
He stood there blinking like an idiot. No female who wasn’t a relative had ever hugged him before. He swallowed spastically. What if I get an erection? Belatedly, he made feeble patting gestures at the small of her back.
She pushed away, held him at arm’s length. “Let me look at you, brother. Why, you haven’t changed a bit.”
He winced. The taunting would begin now, for his skinniness, his clumsiness, his crew cut, the pimples still sprinkled across scrawny, allegedly postadolescent features and his most recent, most aggravating deficit, his utter and complete inability to be anywhere near With It. In high school, Kimberly Ann had evolved from indifference into his foremost tormentor-or, rather, a succession of jocks on whose overelaborated biceps she hung, cooing encouragements, had assumed the role.
But here she was tugging him toward that corner table. “Come on, man. Let’s talk about the bad old days.”
It was an opportunity for which he’d hopelessly hoped three quarters of his life. Face-to-face with his paragon of love and beauty while the band on stage assaulted the Beatles’
“Blackbird”—and he couldn’t think of one damned thing to say. But Kimberly Ann was more than happy to do the talking. About the changes she’d been through since good old Rexford Tugwell High. About the far-out people she’d met at Whittier College, how they turned her on and opened her eyes. How she’d dropped out midway through her senior year and come here, the Bay Area, the bright mecca of Movement. How she’d been finding herself ever since.
Perhaps he hadn’t changed, but she most definitely had. Gone was the straight black ponytail, pleated skirts, pastel lipstick and nail polish, the prim stewardess perfection of an up-and-coming Bank of America executive’s one daughter. Kimberly’s hair had grown long, hanging down well past her shoulders in a great kinky cloudy Yoko Ono mane. She wore a frilly peasant blouse embroidered with mushrooms and planets, a voluminous skirt tie-dyed into what reminded Mark of nothing so much as fireworks displays in Disneyland. He knew her feet were bare, from having stepped on one. She looked more beautiful than he ever could have imagined.
And those pale eyes, winter-sky eyes, that had so often frozen him in the past, were glowing at him with such warmth he could barely stand to look at them. It was heaven, but somehow he couldn’t buy it. Being Mark, he had to question. “Kimberly—” he began.
She held up two fingers. “Hold it right there, dude. I left that name behind me with my bourgeois ways. I’m Sunflower now.”
He bobbed his head and his Adam’s apple. “OkaySunflower.”
“So what brings you here, man?”
“It’s an experiment.”
She eyed him across the rim of her jelly jar wineglass, suddenly wary.
“I just finished my undergrad work at MIT,” he explained in a rush. “Now I’m here to get my doctorate in biochemistry from the University of California at Berkeley.”
“So what’s that got to do with this scene?”
“Well, what I’ve been working on is figuring out just how DNA encodes genetic information. I published some papers, stuff like that.” At MIT they’d compared him to Einstein, as a matter of fact, but you’d never catch him saying that. “But this summer I found something that interests me a lot more. The chemistry of mind.”
Blue blankness, her eyes.
“Psychedelics. Psychoactive drugs. I read all the material-Leary, Alpert, the Solomon collection. It really-what’s the expression? Really turned me on.” He leaned forward, fingers plucking unconsciously at the felt-tip pens nestled in their plastic protector in his breast pocket. In his excitement he sprinkled the spool tabletop with unconscious spittle. “It’s a really vital area of research. I think it might lead to answering the really important questions-who we are, and how, and why.”
She looked at him with half a frown and half a smile. “I still don’t get it.”
“I’m doing fieldwork to establish a context for my research. On the drug culture-the, uh, the counterculture. Trying to get an angle on how hallucinogen use affects people’s outlook. “
He moistened his lips. “It’s really exciting. There’s a whole world I never knew existed-here.” A nervous tic encompassed the Onion’s smoky confines. “But somehow I can’t really, well, make contact. I’ve bought all the Grateful Dead records, but I still feel like an outsider. I-I almost feel I’d like to be part of this whole hippie thing.”
“Hippie?” she said with a patrician snort. “Mark, where’ve you been? It’s 1969. The hippie movement’s been dead for two years.” She shook her head. “Have you actually done any of these drugs you’re trying to study?”
He flushed. “No ..... uh-I’m not ready to get to that stage. “
“Poor Mark. You’re so uptight. Looks as if I’m going to have my work cut out for me, trying to show you what it is that’s happening, Mr. Jones.”
The reference skimmed his flattop, but suddenly his face brightened and his nose and cheekbones and whatnot went in happy directions, and he showed his horsy teeth. “You mean you’ll help me?” He grabbed her hand, snatched his fingers away as if afraid they’d leave marks. “You’ll show me around?” She nodded.
“Great!” He picked up the teacup, clinked it against an upper tooth, realized it was empty and clacked it down again. “I’ve been wondering why-that is, I-well, you’ve never, ah, talked to me like this before.”
She took one of his hands in both of hers and he thought his heart would stop. “Oh, Mark,” she said, tenderly, even. “Always the analytical one. It’s just that since my eyes have been opened, I’ve realized that everyone’s beautiful in his own way, except the pigs who oppress the people. And I see youstill straight. But you haven’t sold out, man. I can tell; I can read it in your aura. You’re still the same old Mark.”
His head whirled like a carousel out of control. Cynical, his left brain tossed up the hypothesis that she was homesick, that he was part of a childhood and past she had cut herself off from, perhaps, too completely. He brushed it aside. She was Kimberly Ann, invulnerable, unapproachable. Any minute now she’d recognize him for the impostor he was.
She didn’t. They talked on into the night—or rather, she talked and he listened, wanting to believe but still unable to. When the band took a long-overdue break, somebody cued up side one of Destiny’s new album on the sound system. The gestalt burned itself irrevocably in: darkness and colored lights playing in the hair and face of the most beautiful woman in his world, and behind it the husky baritone of Tom Marion Douglas singing of love and death and dislocation, of elder gods and destinies best not hinted at. It changed him, that night. But he didn’t know yet.
He was almost too surfeited with wonder to be elated or even surprised when, halfway through the band’s exiguous second set, Kimberly stood up suddenly, clutching his hand.
“This is getting to be a drag. These guys don’t know where it’s at. Why don’t you come over to my pad, drink a little wine, get a little high?” Her eyes challenged, and there was a bit of that old haughtiness, the old ice, as she pulled on waffle-stomper boots with red laces. “Or are you too straight for that?”
He felt as if he had a cotton ball sitting in the middle of his tongue. “Ah, I—no. I’d be more than happy to.”
“Far out. There’s hope for you yet.”
In a daze Mark followed her out of the club, to a liquor store with a massive sliding San Quentin grating over the windows, where a balding pasty-faced proprietor sold them a bottle of Ripple under a gaze of fish-eyed distaste. Mark was a virgin. He had his fantasies, the Playboy magazines with their pages stuck together stacked among the scientific papers under the tumbledown bed in his apartment on the fringes of Chinatown. But not even in fantasy did he ever dare to imagine himself coupled with the resplendent Kimberly Ann. And now-he drifted the streets as if weightless, barely noticing the freaks and street people who exchanged greetings with Sunflower as they passed.
And he barely noticed on the rickety backstairs when Sunflower said, “.... eet my old man. You’ll love him; he’s a really heavy dude.”
Then the words crunched into his brain like a lead mallet. He stumbled. Kimberly caught him by the arm, laughing. “Poor Mark. Always so uptight. Come on, we’re almost there.”
So he wound up in this little one-lung apartment with a hot plate and a leaky faucet in the bathroom. By one wall a salvaged mattress with a madras-print coverlet rested on a door propped on cinder blocks. Crosslegged on the spread beneath a giant poster of the beatified Che sat Philip, Sunflower’s Old Man. He was dark-eyed and intense, a black tee shirt stretched over his brawny chest with a blood-red fist and the word Huelga lettered under it. He was watching clips of a demonstration on a little rumpsprung portable TV with a coat-hanger aerial.
“Right on,” he was saying as they came in. “The Lizard King has his head together. These clean-for-Gene work-withinthe-system aces like Turtle don’t know what it’s all about: confrontation with fascist Amerika. Who the fuck are you?” After Sunflower took him off to one corner and explained to him in a fierce whisper that Mark was not a police spy but an old, old friend, and don’t embarrass me, asshole, he consented to shake Mark’s hand. Mark craned past him at the TV; the bearded face of the man now being interviewed looked familiar somehow.
“Who’s that?” he asked.
Philip lifted a lip corner. “Tom Douglas, of course. Lead singer for Destiny. The Lizard King.” He scanned Mark from flattop to penny loafers. “Or maybe you’ve never heard of him.”
Mark blinked, said nothing. He knew of Destiny and Douglas-as research he’d just bought their new album, Black Sunday, plain maroon cover dominated by a huge black sun. He was too embarrassed to say so.
Sunflower’s eyes went faraway. “You should have seen him today at the demonstration. Facing down the pigs as the Lizard King. Truly far out.”
Amenities out of the way, the two of them broke out a contrivance of glass and rubber tubing, tamped its bowl full of dope, and lit up. Had Sunflower by herself offered Mark the grass, he would have accepted. But now he was feeling strange and alien again, as if his skin didn’t fit him right, and he refused. He slouched in the corner next to a pile of Daily Workers while his host and hostess sat on the bed and smoked dope and stocky intense Philip lectured him about the Necessity for Armed Struggle until he thought his head was going to fall off, and he drank the whole bottle of sickly sweet wine by himself-he didn’t drink, either-and finally Kimberly began to snuggle up close to her Old Man and fondle him in a way that made Mark distinctly uneasy, and he mumbled excuses and stumbled out and somehow found his way home. As the first light of dawn drooled in the windows of his own dingy flat, he regurgitated the contents of the Ripple bottle into his cracked porcelain toilet, and it took him fifteen flushes to get it clear again.
So began Mark’s courtship of Sunflower, nee Kimberly Ann Cordayne.
“I want you ...” The words spilled across the wind, insolent, suggestive, the voice like molten amber with a whiskey edge for all the New Year’s-noisemaker quality of the little Jap transistor. Wojtek Grabowski pulled his windbreaker tighter over his wide chest and tried not to hear.
The crane reared back like a zombie dinosaur, swayed a girder toward him. He gestured to the operator with exaggerated underwater moves. “I want you ..” the voice insisted. He felt a flash of irritation. “A blast from the past—1966, and Destiny’s first hit song,” the announcer had warbled in his professional-adolescent voice. These Americans, Wojtek thought, they think 1966 is ancient history.
“Turn off that boogie-woogie shit,” somebody growled. “Fuck you,” the radio’s owner said. He was twenty years old, two meters tall, and six months out of ‘Nam. Marine. Khe Sanh. The argument ended.
Grabowski wished the boy would turn the radio off, but he didn’t like to push himself forward. He was tolerated-a solid worker, who could drink the strongest man on-site under the table of a Friday night. But he kept to himself.
As the girder came down and the crew swarmed up to fix it in place and the cold wind off the bay drilled through thin nylon and aging skin, he thought how strange it was to find himself here-him, the middle child of a prosperous Warsaw household, the small sickly one, the studious. He was going to be a doctor, a professor. His brother Kliment-half envied, wholly admired, big, bold, dashing, with a cavalryman’s black mustache-was going into the Officers’ Academy, was going to be a hero.
Then the Germans came. Kliment was shot in the back of the head by the Red Army in Katyn Wood. Sister Katja disappeared into the field-brothels of the Wehrmacht. Mother died in the last bombardment of Warsaw, while the Soviets squatted on the Vistula and let the Nazis do their dirty work for them. Father, a minor government functionary, outlived the war a few months before collecting his own bullet in the back of the neck, purged by the puppet Lublin regime.
Young Wojtek, dreams of university forever shattered, spent six and a half years as a partisan in the woods, ended them a fugitive, exiled to a foreign land with only a single hope to keep his blood beating.
“I want you.” The repetition was beginning to grate on him. He’d grown up with Mozart and Mendelssohn. And the message ... This was no love song, it was a lust song-an invitation to rut.
Love meant more to him-a moment of cool moisture, sluicing across his vision, wiped away by the wind’s chill hand. He remembered marrying Anna, his partisan girl, in what the Stukas had left of a village church, and afterward the priest himself had hitched up his threadbare cassock and played Bach’s Toccata and Fugue on the organ, miraculously intact, while a starveling girl crouched to work the bellows. Next day they’d lie in ambush for the fascists, but that night, that night ...
Another girder rose. Anna had left before him, smuggled out by helpful British operatives in June of 1945, bound for America with their child in her womb. He fought as long as he could, then followed.
Now he dwelt in a land he loved almost as a lover. He had nothing else. In twenty-three years he had found no sign of the woman he loved and the child she must have borne. Though, sweet Mary, how he’d searched.
“I waaaaaant you .”
He shut his eyes. If I must endure that banal lyric one more time. “.. to die with me.”
The music diminuendoed in an eerie wail. For a moment he stood very still, as if the wind had turned the sweat to ice within his shirt. What had seemed a mere syrup confection was infinitely more-more evil. Here was a man, anointed spokesman of youth, for whom the blandishments ou love or even lust-were degraded into a totentanz, a ritual of death.
The girder clipped an upright and rang like a cracked bell. Grabowski shook himself, gestured the crane man to stop. At the same time, he strained, heard the announcer say the name Tom Douglas.
It was a name he would remember.
Mark hoped it was a courtship. Two days later Sunflower caught him coming out of a meeting with his sponsor and took him for a walk in the park. She let him tag along to the night spots and late-night rap sessions, to protest rallies in People’s Park, to concerts. Always as her friend, her protege, the childhood friend she had made it her personal crusade to redeem from straightness. But not, unfortunately, in the exalted role of her Old Man.
He found reason to hope, however. He never saw the studly Philip again. In fact, he never saw one of Sunflower’s boyfriends more than once. They were all intense, passionate, brilliant (and at pains to tell you so). Committed. And muscular; that much of Kimberly’s taste hadn’t changed. That gave Mark many choice moments of despair, but deep inside his skinny bosom he nursed the notion that someday she would feel the need of a rock of stability, and would come to him as a seabird to land.
But still, he never, never made it across the gap that yawned between him and the world he yearned for-the world Sunflower inhabited and personified.
He survived that winter on hope and the chocolate-chip-oatmeal cookies his mother sent.
And music. He came from a household where they sang along with Mitch, and Lawrence Welk occupied the same pinnacle as J. F K. Rock ‘n’ roll was never permitted to sully the air of his parents’ house. He himself had been as oblivious to it as to everything outside of his lab and his private fantasies. He hadn’t been aware of the Beatles’ invasion, Mick Jagger’s arrest for lycanthropy at the Isle of Wight concert, of the Summer of Love and the acid-rock explosion.
Now it all came rushing in on him. The Stones. The Beatles. The Airplane. The Grateful Dead. Spirit and Cream and the Animals, and the Holy Trinity: Janis, Jimi, and Thomas Marion Douglas.
Tom Douglas most of all. His music brooded like an ancient ruin, dark, foreboding, hooded. Though his real affinity was to the gentler Mamas & Papas sound of an era already history, Mark was drawn to the Douglas touch-dark humor, darker twists-even as the Nietzschean fury implicit in the music repelled him. Perhaps it was that Douglas was everything Mark Meadows wasn’t. Famous and vibrant and courageous and With It and irresistible to women. And an ace.
Aces and the Movement: in many ways they blasted into the mainstream of public consciousness flying formation like the heavy-metal warbirds Mark’s father had led into battle over North Vietnam. There were more rock ‘n’ roll aces than among any other segment of the population. Their powers tended not to be subtle. Some had the ability to project dazzling displays of lights, others made extravagant music without the need of instruments. Most, though, played mind games with the audience by means of illusion or straight emotional manipulation. Tom Douglas-the Lizard King-was the head-trip master of them all.
Spring arrived. Mark’s faculty adviser pressured him for results. Mark began to despair, hating himself for his lack of resolution, or whatever defect of manhood kept him from precipitating himself into the drug scene, unable to continue his research until he did. He felt like the fly preserved in a Lucite ice cube his parents had inexplicably possessed when he was a child.
April saw him withdraw from the world into microcosm, to the paper reality inside his peeling walls. He had all Destinys records, but he couldn’t play them now, or the Dead, or the Stones, or martyred Jimi. They were a taunt, a challenge he could not meet.
He ate his chocolate cookies and drank his soda pop and emerged from his room only to indulge a nostalgic childhood vice: love of comic books. Not only the old classics, fables of Superman and Batman from the days of innocence before humanity drew the wild card, but also their modern successors, which featured the fictionalized exploits of real aces, like the penny dreadfuls of the Old West. He devoured them with addict’s fervor. They fulfilled by proxy the longing that had begun to eat him up from inside.
Not for metahuman powers; nothing so exotic. Not his craving for acceptance into the mysterious world of Counterculture, nor the desire for the lithe braless body of the former Kimberly Ann Cordayne that kept him awake night after sweaty night. What Mark Meadows desired more than anything in the world was effective personality. The ability to do, to achieve, to make a mark; good or bad, it scarcely mattered.
An evening toward April’s end, Mark’s retreat was shattered by a knock on his apartment door. He just lay there on his thin mattress on sheets unchanged in living memory, burying his long nose farther in the pages of Cosh Comics’ Turtle number 92. His first reaction was fear, then anger at the intrusion. The world, he’d decided, was too much for him; he’d resolved to let it alone. Why couldn’t it do as much for him?
Again the knock, imperative, threatening the thin veneer of wood over emptiness. He sighed.
“What do you want?” He edged the words with a whine. “Are you going to let me in, or am I going to have to smash through this papier-mache thing your pig landlord calls a door?”
For a moment Mark just lay there. Then he laid the comic on the mottled hardwood floor by the bed, and in his dingy tired socks padded to the door.
She stood there with hands on hi s. She had on another Fourth of July skirt and a faded pink louse, and against the spring Bay chill she’d pulled on a Levi’s denim jacket with a black United Farm Workers eagle stenciled on the back and a peace symbol sewn on the left breast. She pushed into the room and slammed the door behind her.
“Look at this shit,” she said with a gesture that bisected the walls at breastbone level. “How can a human being live like this? Living on processed sugar”—a nod at a plate of half devoured cookies and a glass of brown soda that had been flat last week—“and wadding your mind with that pig-authoritarian bullshit”—another knife-edge gesture toward Turtle, lying in a crumpled heap on the floor. She shook her head. “You’re eating yourself alive, Mark. You’ve cut yourself off from your friends, the people who love you. This has got to stop.”
Mark just stood there. He’d never seen her look so beautiful, though she was berating him, talking like his mother-or more correctly, his father. And then his skinny body began to vibrate like a tuning fork, because it struck him that she had said she loved him. It wasn’t the sort of love he’d yearned and burned for from her. But emotionally he couldn’t be a chooser.
“It’s time you came out of your shell, Mark. Out of this womb-room of yours. Before you turn into something from Night of the Living Dead.”
“I’ve got work to do. “
She cocked an eyebrow and nudged Turtle 92 with a booted toe.
“You’re coming with us.”
“Where?” He blinked. “Who?”
“Haven’t you heard?” A shake of the head. “Of course not. You’ve been locked here in your room like some kind of monk. Destiny’s back in town. They’re playing a concert at the Fillmore tonight. My dad sent money. I have tickets for usyou, me, and Peter. So get your clothes on; we’ve got to leave now so we don’t have to stand in line forever. And for god’s sake try not to dress like such a straight.”
Peter looked like a surfer and thought he was Karl Marx. His looks reminded Mark uncomfortably of an earlier boyfriend of Kimberly Ann’s, the football team captain who’d busted his nose in high school for staring at her too avidly. Standing outside in a threadbare tweed jacket and his one pair of jeans, breathing humid air and used smoke, he listened while Peter delivered the same lecture on the Historical Process all Sunflower’s boyfriends gave him. When Mark didn’t agree avidly enough-he could never make enough sense out of all these manifestos to form much of an opinion-Peter fixed him with an ice-blue Nordic glare and growled, “I will destroy you.”
Later Mark found the line was a direct steal from the old man with the beard himself. Right now it made him want to melt through the tired pavement outside the auditorium. It didn’t help that Sunflower was standing there beaming at the two of them as if they’d just won her a prize.
Fortunately Peter got into a screaming argument with the cops who frisked them for booze at the door, diverting his wrath from Mark. Guiltily, Mark hoped the cops would slam Peter over his blond head with a nightstick and haul him off to the slammer.
But Destiny was concluding its most tumultuous tour ever. Tom Douglas, whose consumption of booze and mindaltering chemicals was as legendary as his ace powers, had been getting mean drunk before every show. The Lizard King was on a rampage; last week’s New Haven concert had culminated in a riot that trashed Yale’s Old Campus and half the town. In their own clumsy way the cops were trying to avoid confrontation tonight. Frisking wasn’t the shrewdest way to go about it, but the cops-and the Fillmore managementweren’t eager to have the kids getting any wilder than Tom Douglas was going to make them anyway. So the audience got shaken down as they came in, but gingerly. Peter and his golden head went unbusted.
Mark’s first Destiny concert was everything he might have imagined, raised to the tenth power. Douglas, characteristically, was two hours late onstage—equally characteristically, so fucked up he could barely stay standing, much less keep from pitching off into the mob of adoring fans. But the three musicians who made up the rest of Destiny were among the tightest performers in rock. Their expertise covered a multitude of sins. And gradually, around the solid skeleton of their playing, Douglas’s ramblings and inchoate gestures resolved into something magical. The music was a blast of acid, dissolving Mark’s lucite prison around him, until it reached his skin, and stung.
At the end of the set the lights went out like the shutting of a great door. Somewhere a drum began a slow, thick beating. From darkness broke a tormented guitar wail. A single blue spot spiked down to illuminate Douglas, alone with the mike in the center of the stage, his leather pants glittering like snakeskin. He began to sing, a soft low moan, increasing in urgency and volume, the intro to his masterpiece, “Serpent Time.” His voice soared in a sudden shriek, and the lights and the band boomed suddenly about him like storm surf breaking against rocks, and they were launched on an odyssey to the furthest reaches of the night.
At last he took upon him the aspect of the Lizard King. A black aura beat from him like furnace heat and washed across the audience. Its effect was elusive, illusive, like some strange new drug: some onlookers it lifted to pinnacles of ecstasy, others it crammed down deep into hard-packed despair; some saw what they most desired, others stared straight down the gullet of Hell.
And in the center of that midnight radiance Tom Douglas seemed to grow larger than life, and now and again there flickered in place of his broad half-handsome features the head and flaring hood of a giant king cobra, black and menacing, darting left and right as he sang.
As the song climaxed in a howl of voice and organ and guitar, Mark found himself standing with tears streaming unabashed down his thin cheeks, one hand holding Sunflower’s, the other a stranger’s, and Peter sitting glumly on the floor with his face in his hands, mumbling about decadence.
The next day was the last of April. Nixon invaded Cambodia. Reaction rolled across the nation’s campuses like napalm.
Mark found Sunflower across the Bay, listening to speeches in the midst of an angry crowd in Golden Gate Park. “I can’t do it,” he shouted over the oratory din. “I can’t cross over—can’t get outside myself.”
“Oh, Mark!” Sunflower exclaimed with an angry, tearful shake of her head. “You’re so selfish. So-so bourgeois.” She whirled away and lost herself in the forest of chanting bodies. That was the last he saw of her for three days.
He searched for her, wandering the angry crowds, the thickets of placards denouncing Nixon and the war, through marijuana smoke that hung like scent around a honeysuckle hedge. His superstraight attire drew hostile looks; he shied away from a dozen potentially ugly encounters that first day alone, despairing ever more of his inability to become one with the pulsating mass of humanity around him.
The air was charged with revolution. He could feel it building like a static charge, could almost smell the ozone. He wasn’t the only one.
He found her at an all-night vigil a few minutes before midnight of May third. She was crosslegged on a small patch of etiolated grass that had survived the onslaught of thousands of protesting feet, idly strumming a guitar as she listened to speeches shouted through a bullhorn. “Where have you been?” Mark asked, sinking to the ankles in mud left by a passing shower.
She just looked at him and shook her head. Frantic, he plopped himself down beside her with a small squelching splash. “Sunflower, where have you been? I’ve been looking all over for you.”
She looked at him at last, shook her head sadly. “I’ve been with the people, Mark,” she said. “Where I belong.” Suddenly she leaned forward, caught him by the forearm with surprising strength. “It’s where you belong too, Mark. It’s just that you’re so-so selfish. It’s as if you’re armored in it. And you have so much to offer-now, when we need all the help we can get, to fight the oppressors before it’s too late. Break out, Mark. Free yourself.”
Surprised, he saw a tear glimmering off in one corner of her eye. “I’ve been trying to,” he said honestly. “I ... I just can’t seem to do it.”
A breeze was blowing in off the sea, cool and slightly sticky, occasionally shouldering aside the words garbling out of the megaphone. Mark shivered. “Poor Mark. You’re so uptight. Your parents, the schools, they’ve locked you into a straitjacket. You’ve got to break out.” She moistened her lips. “I think I can help.”
Eagerly he leaned forward. “How?”
“You need to tear down the walls, just like the song says. You need to open up your mind.”
She fumbled for a moment in a pocket of her embroidered denim jacket, held out her closed hand, palm up. “Sunshine.” She opened her hand. A nondescript white tablet rested on the palm. “Acid.”
He stared at it. Here it was, the object of his long vicarious study: quest and quest’s goal alike. The difficulty of obtaining LSD legally-and his deeply engrained reluctance to attempt to attain it on the black market, along with his instinctive fear that his first attempt to purchase any would land him in San Quentin-had helped him put off the day of reckoning. Acid had been offered him before in hip camaraderie; always he refused it, telling himself it was because you never could be sure what was in a street drug, secretly because he’d always been afraid to step beyond the multiplex door it presented. But now the world he yearned to join was surging about him like the sea, the woman he loved was offering him both challenge and temptation, and there it sat slowly melting in the rain.
He grabbed it from her, quickly and gingerly, as if suspecting it would burn his fingers. He poked it well down into a hip pocket of his black pipestem trousers, now so thoroughly imbued with mud they resembled an inept experiment in tie-dyeing. “I’ve got to think about it, Sunflower. I can’t rush something like this.” Not knowing what more to say or do, he started to untangle his lanky legs and stand.
She caught him by the arm again. “No. Stay here with me. If you go home now you’ll flush it down the john.” She drew him down beside her, closer than he’d ever actually been to her before, and he was suddenly acutely aware that her usual blond vanguard fighter was nowhere in evidence. “Stay here, among the people. Right beside me,” she husked beside next to his ear. Her breath fluttered like an eyelash on his lobe. “See what you have to gain. You’re special, Mark. You could do so much that really matters. Stay with me tonight.”
Although the invitation wasn’t as comprehensive as he might have wished, he settled himself back into the mud, and so the night passed in cold communion, the two of them huddling inside the dubious shelter of her jacket, shoulder to shoulder, while orators thundered revolution-the final confrontation with Amerika.
By early-morning gray the demonstration began to autolyze. They drifted together to a little all-night coffeehouse near the campus, ate an organic breakfast Mark couldn’t taste, while Sunflower spoke urgently of the destiny lying in his reach: “If only you could break out of yourself, Mark.” She reached out and took one of his long, pale hands in a tan compact one. “When I ran into you at that club last fall, I was glad to see you because I guess I was homesick for the old days, bad as they were. You were a friendly face.”
He dropped his eyes, blinking rapidly, startled by her open admission that she sought him out because of what he was rather than who he was. “That’s changed, Mark.” He looked up again, tentative as a deer surprised in an early morning garden, ready to flee at the slightest hint of danger. “I’ve come to appreciate you for what you are. And what you could be. There’s a real person hiding beneath that crew cut and those horn-rimmed glasses and uptight Establishment clothes you wear. A person crying to be let out.”
She put her other hand on top of his, stroked it lightly. “I hope you let him out, Mark. I very much want to meet him. But the time’s come for you to make the decision. I can’t wait any longer. The time has come to choose, Mark.”
“You mean—” His tongue tripped. To his fatigue-fogged mind she seemed to be promising much more than friendship-and at the same time threatening to withdraw even that, if he could not bring himself to act.
He walked her home to the backstairs apartment. On the landing outside she grabbed him suddenly behind the neck, kissed him with surprising ferocity. Then she vanished inside, leaving him blinking.
“They finally taught them little Commie fuckers a lesson. Right on, I say; right fuckin’ on.”
Standing to one side of the base of the skyscraper-inprogress, sipping hot tea from a thermos, Wojtek Grabowski listened to his coworkers discussing the news they’d just heard on the omnipresent transistor: the National Guard had fired into a rally on Ohio’s Kent State University campus, several students known dead. They seemed to think it was high time.
He did too, but the news filled him with sadness, not elation.
Later, walking the beams up above the world so high, he reflected on the tragedy of it all. American soldiers were fighting to defend American values and rescue a brother nation from Communist aggression-and here were fellow Americans spitting on them, reviling them. Ho Chi Minh was portrayed as a hero, a would-be liberator.
Grabowski knew that was a lie. He had bled to learn just what Communists meant bv “liberation.” When he heard them hailed as heroes, his murdered friends and family rose up in a chorus at the back of his mind, crying denunciations. It just wasn’t what the protesters stood for, it was who they were. Children of privilege, overwhelmingly uppermiddle-class, lashing out with the petulance of the spoiled against the very system that had given them comfort and security unparalleled in human history. “America eats its young,” they screamed-but he saw it differently: America was in danger of being devoured by its young.
They were led by false prophets, led horribly astray. By men like Tom Douglas. He’d read up on the singer since his song had so shocked him, last November. He knew now that Douglas was one of the tainted, marked by the alien poison released that afternoon in September of 1946, a child of the evil new dawn whose birth Grabowski himself had witnessed from the deck of a refugee ship moored off Governor’s Island. No wonder the children rose like serpents to strike their elders, when they were counseled by men Satan had marked his own.
“Hey,” shouted the huge ex-Marine with the radio. “Them hippie bastards are filling the streets down at city hall, bustin’ windows and burnin’ American flags!”
“The fuckers!”
“We gotta do something! It’s revolution, right here and now.”
The young vet pulled on his Levi’s jacket and settled his steel hat on his crew cut head. “It’s only a few blocks from here. I don’t know about you, but I am gonna do something about it.” He led a rush toward the lift cage.
Grabowski would have shouted, No, wait, don’t go! You must leave this to the authorities-if brother begins fighting brother, the forces of disorder will have won. But speech was denied him.
Because he was as furious as the rest, and fearful, for he alone had seen firsthand the consequences of this revolution everyone talked about. And in his emotion he had gripped a girder with all his might.
His fingers had sunk into the steel as if it were the soft sticky paste Americans called ice cream.
He was himself marked with the mark of the Beast.
Mark passed the rest of the day in a strange haze compounded of lust, hope, and fear. He missed the word from Kent State. While the rest of America reacted in horror or approbation, he spent the night locked in his apartment with a plateful of cookies, poring through his papers and wellthumbed books on LSD, taking out the acid tablet, turning it over and over in his fingers like a talisman. When the sun was weakly established in the sky a transient surge of resolution made him pop it in his mouth. A quick slug of flat orange soda pop washed it down before nerve could fail him again.
From his reading he knew acid generally took between an hour and an hour and a half to kick in. He tried to slide past the time by flipping from the Solomon anthology to Marvel comics to the Zap comix he’d accrued in his pursuit of understanding. After an hour, too nervous to await the drug’s effects by himself any longer, he left his apartment. He had to find Sunflower, tell her he’d found his manhood, had taken the fateful step. Also, he was afraid to be alone when the acid hit.
Finding Sunflower was always like tracking a flower petal kicked about by the breeze, but he knew she gravitated toward UCB, which had long since replaced the moribund Haight as the locus of hip Bay Area culture, and she worked spasmodically at a head shop near People’s Park. So, at about nine-thirty on the morning of May 5, 1970, he wandered into the parkand straight up against the most spectacular confrontation between aces of the entire Vietnam epoch.
For one brief shining moment, everyone, Establishment and enemies alike-knew the time had come for fighting in the streets. If the revolution was coming, it was coming now, in the first hot flush of fury following the Kent State massacre. Bay Area radical leaders had called a mammoth rally that morning in People’s Park-and not just the police forces of the Bay Area but Ronald Reagan’s own contingent of the National Guard had turned out to take them on.
By a quarter to ten the police had withdrawn from the park, establishing a cordon sanitaire around the campus area to prevent conflagration from spreading. It was just the kids and several deuce-and-a-half trucks spilling National Guardsmen in battle dress and gas masks from under their canvas covers forty meters away. With a loose clattering squeal and diesel chug, an M113 armored personnel carrier pulled to a halt behind the line of fixed bayonets, treads chewing at the sod like mouths. A man in captain’s bars sat stiff and resolute in the cupola behind a fifty-caliber machine gun, wearing what looked like a Knute Rockne football helmet on his head.
Students ebbed from the green line like mercury from a fingertip. They’d been shouting to bring the war home; like their brothers in Ohio, it seemed they’d succeeded in doing just that. The Guard was regularly called in to break up demonstrations-but the boxy, ugly shape of the APC represented something new, a note of menace even the most sheltered couldn’t miss. The crowd faltered, buzzing alarm.
Into the space between the lines a single figure stepped, slim in black leather. “We came to be heard,” said Thomas Marion Douglas, his voice pitched to carry, “and were damned well going to be heard.”
Behind him the crowd began to solidify. Here was a superstar-an ace-taking his stand with them. Across the bayonet hedge the eyes of National Guard troopers flickered nervously behind the thick lenses of their masks. They were mostly young men who’d joined the Guard to avoid being drafted and sent to ‘Nam; they knew who was facing them. Many owned Destiny records, had Douglas’s haughty features staring down from posters on their bedroom walls. It was harder, somehow, to use bayonet or rifle-butt against someone you knew, even if it was only as a face on a record jacket or in a photo spread in Life magazine.
Their captain was of sterner stuff. He barked an order from the cupola. Tear-gas guns coughed, a half-dozen small comets arched down around Douglas and among the crowd surging up to join him. Billows of thick white smoke, CS gas, hid the singer from view.
Taking a shortcut through an alley, Mark had managed to miss the police lines. At this moment he emerged to a perfect sideline view of his very own idol standing with smoke swirling around him like a medieval martyr at the stake. He stopped and stared openmouthed at the confrontation shaping up before him.
The acid kicked in.
He felt reality’s collagens dissolve, but the scene before him was too intense for hallucination. As the stiff morning breeze tattered the curtains of gas, a man standing with legs braced and fists raised appeared, auburn hair streaming back from a broad face that somehow flickered, interspersed with the head of a giant cobra, scales gleaming black, hood extended. The Guardsmen drew back; the Lizard King was in their midst.
The King moved forward in a sinuous glide. Uniforms gave way. Someone jabbed at him with a bayonet, or maybe just didn’t back off quickly enough. A flick of the wrist, seeming lazy and disdainful but delivered with superhuman speed, and the rifle went spinning away as its owner stumbled backward to the grass with a yelp of terror. The captain in his iron box shouted hoarsely, trying to pull together the fraying strands of his, men’s determination.
But as he assumed his Lizard King aspect, Douglas loosed his mind games upon them; their eyes began to wander, seeking visions of desperate beauty or mind-numbing horror, each affected in his own way by the Lizard King’s black aura. The crowd was advancing now, chanting, shouting, menacing. The Guard captain did the only thing he could-his thumb pulsed once against the fifty-caliber’s butterfly trigger. The gun vomited noise to bust glass and a Volkswagen flame, streaming tracers over the protesters’ heads.
Triumphant an eyeblink before, the crowd came apart in screaming panic. The noise of the shots struck Mark like a giant pillow and spun him backward along endless, twisting corridors. But the scene stayed before him, light at the end of a tunnel, terrible and insistent. No one had been hit by the burst, but the protesters, like Mark himself, had come up for the first time against the reality their prophet Mao had tried to impress on them: where power comes from.
Tom Douglas was standing so close that muzzle-flash singed his eyebrows. He didn’t flinch, though the noise struck him with a force a truckload of speakers couldn’t match. Instead he met it with a roar of his own that sent Guardsmen tumbling like frightened puppies.
A prodigious leap and he stood on the upper deck of the APC. He bent, grasped the gun’s barrel, heaved. The heavy Browning came away from its mounting like a sapling torn up by the roots. He held the weapon above his head, bothhanded, then with a single convulsion of shoulders and biceps bent the barrel almost double. Having displayed his contempt for the Establishment and its war machines, he tossed the ruined machine gun after the troopers, now in full rout, and bent forward to pluck the now-terror-stricken captain from the cupola by the front of his blouse. He held the man up before him, legs kicking feebly.
And was struck down from behind by a blow driven with the full awesome strength of an unknown ace.
Mark snapped. With a shriek his soul vanished into swirling dark. His body turned and blindly ran.
Wojtek Grabowski saw the sinister serpent figure in black leap onto the APC and tear the weapon from its mountings and knew it had been the right choice to live.
Only devout Catholicism had stopped him from throwing himself to his death. He’d hurried from the site-already deserted as the workers rushed to attack the demonstratorsand home to his cramped apartment to a nightlong vigil of misery and silent prayer.
With dawn had indeed come Light; and he knew with a warm rush that his ace affliction was divinely sent, a blessing not a curse. Revolution threatened his adopted home, led by those who’d sworn allegiance to the forces of darkness. He had washed, dressed, made his own way to the park with peace in his heart.
Now he was confronted with a beast that seemed to have many heads, knew that he was face-to-face with the hated Tom Douglas himself.
Fury blasted into him. The ace transformation overtook him, bulking his muscles hugely to fill his baggy clothes to the bursting point. The steel hat of his profession was on his head, a yard-long pipefitter’s wrench in his hand. Lingering doubts about using his strength against normal humans vanished; here was an enemy worthy of him, an ace, a traitor-a servitor of Hell.
He raced forward, vaulted onto the vehicle even as the snake-headed creature in black plucked its commander from the hatch. Students cried warnings Douglas didn’t hear.
Hardhat raised his wrench and struck at the back of a head now bushy-haired, now black and glabrous and obscene.
The blow would have pulped the skull of a normal human, or torn his head from his shoulders. But the constant shifting of Douglas’s appearance confused Grabowski’s aim. The blow glanced off. Douglas dropped the squirming officer and slumped bonelessly off the vehicle as momentum carried the wrench downward to buckle the aluminum top-armor like tinfoil.
Thinking he had killed him, Grabowski felt strength ebb. He needed rage to stay in the meta state, but all he felt was shame. Desperate, he turned to face the crowd. “Go home,” he shouted in his hoarse, harsh English. “Go home now, is over. You must not fight no more. Obey your leaders and live in peace.”
They stood and stared at him with sheep’s faces. Morning dew had sucked the tear gas down into it and poisoned the grass. A few white CS tendrils writhed on the ground like dying snakes. Tears streamed down Grabowski’s face. Wouldn’t they listen?
From the rear of the crowd a young man shouted, “Fuck you! Fuck you, you motherfuckin’ fascist!”
To have that epithet thrown at him, a man who still carried fascist bullets in his flesh, by some spoiled, insolent, ignorant puppy-anger filled him in abundance, and with it that inhuman strength.
Fortunately for him, because about then Tom Douglas got his wits back, jumped to his feet, grabbed the Hardhat by the ankles, and yanked his boots out from under him. Grabowski’s helmet struck the deck like a giant cymbal. Every bit as furious as the man who’d taken him down, Douglas caught him as he fell, slammed him against the side of the vehicle, and began to piledrive blows into him with his own ace strength.
But Grabowski too had more than human durability. He dragged his wrench up between their bodies, thrust Douglas violently away. Douglas’s feet slipped once on the wet grass, he caught himself with serpent agility and lunged forward to the attack-only to check himself and go up on tiptoe like a ballet dancer while a savage two-handed swipe of the wrench whined within an inch of his abdomen.
Douglas dove inside the wrench’s deadly arc. He grappled his opponent, slamming punches in under the short ribs. Grabowski took a quick step backward, put a hand on Douglas’s sternum, and pushed. Douglas fell back a step. The wrench lashed out, and this time only Douglas’s metahuman reflexes saved him from catching it square in the front of his skull.
The tool-steel beak raked his forehead. Blood cascaded. He backpedaled furiously, wiping his eyes with one hand while the other thrashed about in an attempt to ward the following blow.
Hardhat swung his wrench like a baseball bat and took Douglas under the right arm with a sound that echoed through the park like a grenade explosion. Douglas went down.
Hardhat stood over him with legs spread wide, raising the wrench slowly above his head like a headsman preparing the stroke. Blood drooled from the corner of his mouth. He was berserk, beyond compunction, beyond compassion, devoid of anything but the need to smash his opponent’s skull like a snail on a rock.
But even as the gleaming blood-dripping wrench started down, a golden chain wrapped around it from behind and stopped the blow before it was launched.
With a fighter’s reflex Hardhat instantly relaxed his arms, allowing his wrench to travel in the direction the sudden restraint pulled. Then he snapped the weapon forward and down, spinning as he did so to throw the entire augmented weight of his body against the slack. But as he moved, a houlihan rippled down the chain and it loosened, so that the wrench slithered free with a musical sound. Motion unchecked by expected impact, Hardhat spun around completely, staggering forward, continued through another half-turn so that he faced his opponent across five meters of muddy, trampled earth.
A youth stood there, slender and tall, golden hair falling to his shoulders, dangling a saucer-sized peace medallion of gold on a long chain. Despite Bay-morning chill he wore only a pair of jeans. To the short, dark Grabowski, he looked like nothing so much as a figure stepped from a Nazi recruiting poster.
“Who are you?” Hardhat snarled. Then, realizing he had spoken in his own tongue, repeated it in English.
The youth frowned briefly, as if perplexed. “Call me Radical” he said then with a grin. “I’m here to protect the people.”
“Traitor!” Hardhat launched himself, swinging the wrench. Radical danced aside. No matter how savagely Hardhat attacked, no matter how he feinted, his opponent eluded him with apparent ease. Frustrated at his attempts to strike the golden youth, Hardhat turned once again to Douglas, still moaning on the ground. And Radical was there, peace symbol weaving a golden figure of eight in the air before him, warding Hardhat’s most ferocious blows with sparks of coruscance while soldiers and students alike stood transfixed by the spectacle.
But if Hardhat couldn’t strike past the amulet, Radical seemed unwilling or unable to counterattack. Noting this Hardhat backed away, waving his wrench menacingly. After a moment Radical followed, flowing like mist. Hardhat circled widdershins. Radical kept pace. Slowly the Pole drew his longhaired opponent away from the recumbent Douglas.
Lightning fast, he wheeled left and hurled himself at the onlookers. Though his speed wasn’t as great as Radical’s it was greater than a norm’s, and he was among the crowd of protesters before any could react, wrench upraised to smash. Caught by surprise, Radical was unable to react in time. The wrench stayed up, frozen like a fly in lucite. Radical sprang forward, driven to attack by desperation, swinging his peace medallion at the back of the tree-trunk neck below the helmet’s sweep. It connected with the chunk of an ax striking wood; not as mighty a blow as the Lizard King could have delivered, not to be compared in the least with the terrible force of Grabowski’s wrench, but sufficient to scramble Hardhat’s senses, send him pitching face first into the grass and mud and crumpled signs.
Radical poised above him, swinging his medallion in a slow circle at his side. A moment later Douglas joined him, rubbing his side and grimacing. “Think he cracked a few ribs, there,” he rasped in his familiar dirt-road baritone. “What the hell?”
Even as they watched, the inhumanly squat form of Hardhat dwindled into a stocky, balding man in baggy clothes, lying with his face in the mud, sobbing as if his heart were broken. Shaking his shaggy mane, Douglas turned to his benefactor. “I’m Tom Douglas. Thanks for saving my ass.”
“The pleasure’s mine, man.”
And then Douglas stepped forward and embraced the taller blond man, and a cheer went up from the crowd. The National Guard soldiers were already in retreat, leaving their APC behind. The revolution would not come today, or ever, perhaps, but the kids had been saved.
As the television cameras churned, Tom Douglas proclaimed Radical his comrade in arms and called into being a celebration as wild as any the Bay Area had known. While the police kept their uneasy perimeter and the National Guard licked its wounds, thousands of kids poured into the park to hail the conquering heroes. The abandoned M 113 provided an impromptu stage. Tents dotted the park like colorful mushrooms. Music and drugs and booze flowed freely, all that day and all that night.
At the center of it all glowed Tom Douglas and his mysterious benefactor, surrounded by beautiful, compliant women-none more so than the willowy brunette with eyes like impacted ice everybody called Sunflower, who appeared to have sprouted from Radical’s hip like a postnatal Siamese twin. The newcomer would give no other name than Radical, and he turned away all questions as to his origin, and how he happened to be at that place at that time, with a grin and a shy “I was here because I was needed here, man.” At dawn the next day, he slipped quietly away from the dwindling festivities and vanished.
He was never seen again.
In the spring of 1971, charges against Tom Douglas stemming from the People’s Park confrontation were dropped—at the recommendation of Dr. Tachyon, who’d been called in by SCARE to help investigate the incident just as Destiny’s album City of Night hit the stands. Shortly thereafter, Douglas electrified the rock world by announcing he was retiring-not just as a musician, but as an ace.
So he took Doc Tachyon’s experimental trump cure, and was one of the fortunate thirty percent on whom it worked. The Lizard King disappeared forever, leaving behind Thomas Marion Douglas, norm.
Who was dead in six months. His overuse of drugs and alcohol had achieved such heroic proportions that only ace endurance kept him alive. Once that was gone his health deteriorated rapidly. He died of pneumonia in a seedy hotel in Paris in the fall of 1971.
As for Hardhat-interviewed by Dr. Tachyon the day after the confrontation, hospitalized for observation with a mild concussion, Wojtek Grabowski insisted his foes had not defeated him. “All you need is love” ran the received wisdom of the day-and love had brought him down. Or so he claimed. Because when he hurled himself against the crowd, he found himself staring into the face of Anna, his wife, lost to him for two decades and a half.
Not quite Anna, he said tearfully; there were differences, in the color of hair, the shape of nose. And, of course, Anna would not now be a woman in her early twenties.
But their daughter would be. Grabowski was convinced he had seen, at last, the child he had never known. The horrible knowledge that his anger had almost led him to destroy that which he cherished most in all the world bled the strength from him in an instant, so that what Radical’s medallion struck was a being in transition from full ace strength to a normal human state.
Touched, Dr. Tachyon helped Grabowski search the Bay Area for his daughter. Privately he never expected to find her; at the moment Grabowski believed he saw her, Tom Douglas had been recovering, his Lizard King aspect still active. And that black aura could make you see what you most wished to see. As far as Tachyon was concerned, it had.
To none of his surprise, the search turned up nothing. In any event, he was able to devote little time to Grabowski, no matter how much the man’s plight affected him. He returned East after three weeks of assisting Grabowski and SCARE investigators. A couple of months later he learned that Grabowski had vanished, no doubt to pursue the search for his family. Since then, no more had been heard of Wojtek Grabowski, or Hardhat.
And as for Radical ...
In the early morning hours of May 6th, 1970, Mark Meadows staggered out of an alley opening into People’s Park with his head full of white noise, clad only in his one pair of jeans. He had no memory of what had happened to him, scarcely realized where he was. He found himself amongst the remnants of last night’s celebrants, heavy-eyed with fatigue but still chattering like speed freaks about the fantastic events of the last twenty-four hours. “You should have been there, man,” they told him. And as they described the events of yesterday morning, strange fragments of memory, surreal and disjointed, began to bubble to the surface of Mark’s mind: perhaps he had.
Was he remembering his own experiences? Or was the last of the acid casting up images to match the breathless, vivid descriptions a dozen eyewitnesses pressed on him at once? He didn’t know. All that he knew was that the Radical represented the realization of his wildest dream: Mark Meadows as Hero. And when he saw Sunflower standing nearby, hair disarrayed, eyes dreamy, and she said to him, “Oh, Mark, I just met the most fantastic dude,” he knew that whatever hopes he’d had of being more than Sunflower’s friend had just gone poof. Unless he were, in fact, the Radical.
He knew what to do, of course. He’d learned more than he consciously realized during his street apprenticeship with Sunflower; by nightfall he was crosslegged on his own mattress among his cookies and comic books, clutching two weeks’ living-expenses worth of LSD. He was so exalted when he popped the first tab that he barely needed the drug to get off.
Which was all he did. No Radical transformation. Nothing. He just ... tripped out.
For a week he didn’t leave the apartment, living on moldy crumbs, slamming down increasing doses of acid as fast as the effects of the last charge faded. Nothing. When at last he staggered forth for more drugs he’d already taken on a blur around the edges.
So began the quest.
CONTROVERSIAL SCIENTIST BRUTALLY SLAIN IN LAB, the headline read.
“You should see what it says in the Daily News,” she said. “Young lady,” Dr. Tachyon said, shoving the sheaf of New York Timeses away with fastidious fingertips and settling back perilously far in his swivel chair, “a policeman I am not. A doctor I am.”
She frowned at him across the meticulous rectangle of his desk, cleared her throat, a small, fussy sound. “You have a reputation as father and protector to jokertown. If you don’t act, an innocent joker is going to go down for murder.”
It was his turn to frown. He ticked the high heel of one boot against the desk’s metal lip. “Have you evidence? If so, the unfortunate fellow’s legal counsel is the man to take it to.”
“No. Nothing.”
He plucked a yellow daffodil from a vase at his elbow, twirled its bell before his nose. “I wonder. You are perceptive enough to play on my sense of guilt, surely.”
She smiled back, made a deprecating hand-wave, forestanimal quick and almost furtive, but slightly stiff. It was coming to him, irrelevantly, how acculturated he had become to this heavy world; his first reaction had been that she was scarcely this side of painfully thin, and only now did he appreciate how closely she approached the elfin pallid Takisian ideal of beauty. An albino almost, skin pale as paper, whiteblond hair, eyes barely blue. To his eyes she was drably dressed, a peach-colored skirt suit, cut severely, worn over a white blouse, a chain at her neck, as pale and fine as one of her hairs.
“It’s my job, Doctor, as you’re well aware. My paper expects me to know what goes on in Jokertown.” Sara Morgenstern had been the Washington Post’s expert on ace affairs since her coverage of the Jokertown riots ten years ago had gleaned her a nomination for the Pulitzer prize.
He made no response. She dropped her eyes. “Doughboy wouldn’t do that, wouldn’t kill anyone. He’s gentle. He’s retarded, you see.”
“I know that.”
“He lives with a joker they call the Shiner, down on Eldridge. Shiner looks after him.”
“An innocent.”
“Like a child. Oh, he was arrested in ‘76 for attacking a policeman. But that was ... different. He—it was in the air.” She seemed to want to say more, but her voice snagged.
“Indeed it was.” He cocked his head. “You seem unusually involved.”
“I can’t stand to see Doughboy get hurt. He’s bewildered, afraid. I just can’t keep my journalist’s objectivity.”
“And the police? Why not go to them?”
“They have a suspect.”
“But your paper? Surely the Post is not without influence.”
She shook back icefall hair. “Oh, I can write a scathing expose, Doctor. Perhaps the New York papers will pick it up. Maybe even Sixty Minutes. Maybe-oh, in a year or two there’ll be a public outcry, maybe justice will be done. In the meantime he’s in the Tombs, Doctor. A child, lonely and afraid. Do you have any idea what it’s like to be unjustly accused, to have your freedom wrongfully taken away?”
“Yes. I do.”
She bit her lip. “I forgot. I’m sorry.”
“It’s nothing.”
Tach leaned forward. “I’m a busy man, dear lady. I have a clinic to run. I keep trying to convince the authorities that the Swarm Mother won’t necessarily go away simply because we defeated her first incursion, but instead may be preparing a new and even deadlier attack ..” He sighed. “Well. I suppose I must look into this.”
“You’ll help?”
“I will.”
“Thank God.”
He stood up and came around to stand by her. She tipped her head back, lips curiously slack, and he had the sense that she was trying to be alluring without quite knowing how to go about it.
What is this? he wondered. He was not normally one to pass up an invitation from so attractive a woman, but there was something hidden here, and the old Takisian blood-feud instincts made him sheer away. Not that he sensed a threat; just a mystery, and that in itself was threatening to one of his caste.
On a whim, half irritated that she was making an offer and making it impossible to accept, he reached out and snagged the chain at her throat. A plain silver locket emerged, engraved with the initials A. W in copperplate. She reached for it quickly, but cat-nimble he flipped it open.
A picture of a girl, a child, no more than thirteen. Her hair was yellow, the features fuller, the grin haughtier, but she bore an unmistakable resemblance to Sara Morgenstern. “Your daughter?”
“My-my sister.”
“A. W.?”
“Morgenstern was my married name, Doctor. I kept it after my divorce.” She half-turned away, knees pressed together, shoulders hunched. “Andrea was her name. Andrea Whitman.”
“Was?”
“She died.” She stood up rapidly.
“Sorry.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Uncle Tachy! Uncle Tachy!” A blond projectile hit him in the shin and wrapped about him like seaweed as he stepped up to the door of the Cosmic Pumpkin (‘Food for Body, Mind, & Spirit’) Head Shop and Delicatessen on Fitz-James O’Brien Street, near the border of Jokertown and the Village. Laughing, he bent down, scooped the little girl up and hugged her. “What did you bring me, Uncle Tachy?”
He rooted in a pocket of his coat, produced a caramel cube. “Don’t tell your father I gave you this.” Wide-eyed solemn, she shook her head.
He carried her into amiable clutter. Inside he was clenched. Hard to believe this beautiful child of nine was mentally retarded, like Doughboy, permanently consigned to four.
Doughboy had been easier, somehow. He was immense, over two meters tall, an almost-spherical mass of white flesh, hairless, faintly bluish, face bloated almost to featurelessness, raisin eyes staring out from fat and tears. He was in his late twenties. He could not remember ever being called by anything other than a cruel nickname from a bakery’s registered trademark. He was frightened. He missed Mr. Shiner and Mr. Benson the newsdealer who lived below them, he wanted the Go-Bot Shiner had bought him shortly before the men came and took him away. He wanted to go home, to get away from strange harsh men who poked him with their fingers and called him mocking names. He was pathetically grateful to Tachyon for coming to see him; when Tach took leave, in the bile-green visitation room in the Tombs, he clung to his hand and wept.
Tach wept too, but afterward, when Doughboy couldn’t see.
But Doughboy was obviously a joker, victim of the wild card virus Tach’s own clan had brought this world. Sprout Meadows was physically a perfect child, exquisite even by the exacting standards of the lord-lines of Ilkazam or Alaa or Kalimantari, sweeter-tempered than any daughter of Takis. Yet she was no less deformed than Doughboy, no less a monster by the standards of Tach’s homeworld-and like him would have been instantly destroyed.
He looked around. A couple of secretaries nibbled late lunch by the front window, under the weathered aegis of a cigar-store Indian. “Where’s your daddy?”
Her mouth carameled shut, she nodded her head left toward the head shop.
“What are you staring at, buster?” a voice demanded. He blinked, focused belatedly on a sturdy young woman in a soiled gray CUNY sweatshirt standing behind the glass deli display. “I beg your pardon?”
“Listen, you male chauvinist asshole, I know about you. Just watch yourself.”
Belatedly Tach recalled Mark Meadows’s interchangeable pair of clerks. “Ah-Brenda, is it?” A pugnacious nod. “Very well, Brenda, let me assure you I had no intention of staring at you.”
“Oh, I get it. I’m not a debutante type like Peregrine, not your kind at all. I’m one of those women men like you don’t see.” She ran a hand through a stiff brush of hair, reddish with tea-colored roots, sniffed.
“Doc!” A familiar stork figure stood bent over in the doorway to the head shop.
“Mark, I am so glad to see you,” Tachyon said with feeling. He kissed Sprout on the forehead, ruffled her pigtailed hair, set her on the murky linoleum. “Run and play, dearest child. I would speak with your father.”
She scooted off. “Have you a moment, Mark?”
“Oh, sure, man. Always, for you.”
A pair of kids with leather overcoats and dandelion-climax hair lurked among the paraphernalia and vintage posters on the other side, but Mark was not the suspicious type. He nodded Tach toward a table by the far wall, collected a teapot and a couple of mugs, and followed, loose-limbed, bobbing his head slightly as he walked. He had on an ancient pink Brooks Brothers shirt, a fringed leather vest, a pair of vast elephant bells faded almost to the hue of the white firework bursts tiedyed into them. Shoulder-length blond hair was crimped at his temples by a braided thong. Had Tachyon not seen him in the full splendor of his secret identity, he’d have thought the man had no sense of dress at all.
“So what can I do for you, man?” Mark asked, beaming happily through the glass planchets of his wire-rims.
Tach set elbows on the tablecloth-also tie-dyed-pursed his lips as Mark poured. “A joker named Doughboy has been arrested for murder. A young woman reporter has come to me maintaining that be’s innocent.”
He drew breath. “ I myself believe it, too. He is a very gentle individual, for all that he is huge and hideous and possesses metahuman strength. He is ... retarded.”
He waited a moment, heart hanging in his throat, but what Mark said was, “So it’s a rip-off, man. Why do the pigs say he did it?” The epithet was spoken without rancor.
“The murdered man is a Dr. Warner Fred Warren, a popular astronomy-to use the term loosely-writer in the tabloids. To give you some idea, he wrote an article last year entitled, ‘Did Comet Kohoutek Bring AIDS?”‘
Mark grimaced. He was not your standard hippie, disdaining/distrusting all science. Then again, he was a latecomer to the faith, who had gotten into Flower Power at a time when everyone else in the Bay Area was getting heavily into Stalin.
“Dr. Warren’s latest prognostication is that an asteroid is about to strike the Earth and end all life, or at least civilization as you know it. It did create quite a bit of controversy; amazing what attention you Earthers lavish on such folly. The police theorize that Doughboy heard his friends talking about it, became frightened, and one night last week went into the doctor’s lab and beat him to death.”
Mark whistled softly. “Any evidence?”
“Three witnesses.” Tach paused. “One of them positively identifies Doughboy as the man he saw leaving Warren’s apartment building the night of the crime.”
Mark waved a hand. “No problem. We’ll get him free, man.”
Tachyon opened his mouth, shut it. Finally he said, “We need to see what other information they have amassed in the case. The police are not proving cooperative. They tell me to mind my own business, almost!”
Mark’s blue eyes drifted off Tach’s sightline. Tach sipped his tea. It was stringent and crisp, some kind of mint. “I know how you can take care of that. Does Doughboy, like, have an attorney?”
“Legal Aid.”
“Why don’t you get in touch with him, offer to act as unpaid medical expert.”
“Splendid.” He looked quizzically at his friend, head tipped like a curious bird. “How do you know to do that?”
“I don’t know, man. It just came to me. So, like, where do I come in?”
Tach studied the tabletop. In the background forks clove tofu and thunked against earthenware cushioned by soggy romaine lettuce. It had been as much for the tonic effect Mark had on his spirits that he’d come here from the Tombs. But still ...
He was out of his depth; he was, as he’d assured Sara, no detective. Now, Mark Meadows, the Last Hippie, didn’t on the surface appear a much more promising candidate for sleuth, but he happened also to be Marcus Aurelius Meadows, PhD, the most brilliant biochemist alive. Before dropping out he’d been responsible for a number of breakthroughs, laid the groundwork for many more. He was trained to observe and trained to think. He was a genius.
Also, Tach liked the cut of his coat, which in itself was about enough for a Takisian.
“You’ve already helped me, Mark. This is your world, after all. You understand its ways better than L” Though I’ve been on it longer, he realized. “And there are your friends. You do have, ah, others than the two we met on my cousin’s ship?” Mark nodded. “Three others, so far.”
“Good. I hope these prove more tractable than the others.” He hoped one or the other of the Captain’s alter egos would have skills that might fall handy; fortunately he could imagine no purpose the surly were-porpoise Aquarius might serve, but the vainglorious coward Cosmic Traveler was another matter. And, even to save poor Doughboy from death in life, he wasn’t ready to endure the Traveler again so soon.
He scraped his chair back and rose. “Let us go play detective together, you and L”
The kid had cammie pants and a Rambo rag, standing there on the corner of Hester and the Bowery trying to hold down magazine pages against the wind’s tugging. Tach glanced over his shoulder. The article was slugged, “Dr. Death: Selfmade Cyborg Soldier of Fortune Battles Commies in Salvo.” The kid looked up as the two men took their places beside him at the newsstand, truculence tightening lean Puerto Rican features. His expression flowed like wax into awe.
He was looking at the center button of a yellow paisley vest. Out over his forehead an immense green bow tie with yellow polka dots blossomed from a pink shirt collar. To either side hung a purple tailcoat. A purple stovepipe hat, its green band embossed in gold peace signs, threatened the wateredmilk overcast.
Yellow-gloved fingers flashed a V “Peace,” said the beaky norteamericano face hovering up there amid all that color. The kid tossed the magazine at the proprietor and fled. Captain Trips stood blinking after him, wounded. “What’d I say, man?”
“Never mind,” chortled the being behind the counter. “He wouldn’t have bought it anyway. What can I do you for, Doctor? And your colorful friend here?”
“Mm,” said Mark, sniffing, nostrils wide, “fresh popcorn.”
“That’s me,” Jube said. “That’s how I smell.” Tachyon winced.
“Far out!”
For a moment glass-bead eyes stared, blue-black skin rumpled up Jubal’s forehead: orogenic surprise. Then he laughed.
“I get it! You’re a hippie.”
The Cap’n beamed. “That’s right, man.”
Blubber shook. “Goo-goo-goo-Jube,” he bellowed. “I am the Walrus. Pleased to meetcha.”
He did look like a walrus, five foot nothing, hanging fat, a big smooth skull. with random hair-tufts sticking out from it here and there like rusty shaving brushes, flowing into the collar of his green and black and yellow Hawaiian shirt without the intervention of a neck. He had little white tusks stuck at either end of his grin. He pushed out a Warner Brothers cartoon hand, three fingers and a thumb, which the Captain eagerly shook.
“This is Captain Trips. An ace, a new associate of mine. Captain, meet Jubal Benson. Jube, we need from you some information.”
“Shoot.” He made a pistol gesture with his right hand, rolled his eyes at Trips.
“What do you know about the joker called Doughboy?” Jube scowled tectonically. “That’s a bum rap. Boy wouldn’t hurt a fly. He even lives in the same rooming house I do. See him most every day-used to, before this came down.”
“He didn’t, like, hear people talking about an asteroid crashing into the Earth and get real worked up about it, did he?” Trips asked. A vagrant piece of newsprint had washed up against the backs of his calves on a wind that hadn’t yet realized it was spring. He ignored it and the chill alike.
“If he’d heard anything like that, he’d hide under his cot and you’d never get him out till you convinced him it was a joke. IS that what they’re claiming?”
Trips nodded.
“The one to talk to is Shiner. He rents the place, feeds Doughboy, and lets him stay there. He’s got a shoeshine stand up Bowery almost to Delancey, up where Jokertown’s more touristy.”
“Would he be there now?” Tach asked.
Jube consulted a Mickey Mouse watch whose band all but vanished into his rubbery wrist. “Lunch hour’s over, which means he’s prob’ly knocking off himself to eat lunch right now. He should be home. Apartment Six.”
Tachyon thanked him. Solemn, Trips tipped his hat. They started off.
“Doc.”
“Yes, Jubal.”
“Better get this cleared up quick. Things could get very heavy around here this summer if Doughboy gets a railroad job. They say Gimli’s back on the streets.”
An eyebrow rose. “Tom Miller? But I thought he was in Russia.”
The Walrus laid a finger along his broad flat nose. “That’s what I mean, Doc. That’s what I mean.”
“I found him, oh, fifteen, sixteen year ago it was.” The man called Shiner sat on his cot in the single room of the apartment on Eldridge Street, rocking to and fro with his hands clasped between skinny knees. “Back in 1970. Wintertime it was. He was sitting there next to a dumpster in a alley behind this mask shop, bawling his eyes out. Mama just took him there and left him.”
“That’s terrible, man,” said Trips. He and Tach were standing on the meticulously swept hardwood floor of the apartment. Shiner’s cot and a big mattress with stained ticking were the only furniture.
“Oh, I guess maybe I can understand. He was eleven or twelve, already twice as big as me, stronger’n most men. Must have been powerful hard to take care of.”
He was small for an Earther, shorter than Tach. From a distance he looked to be an unexceptional black man in his fifties, with gray-dusted hair and a gold right incisor. Up close you noticed that he shone with an unnatural luster, more like obsidian than skin. “I do my own advertisin’, like,” he’d explained to Trips when Tachyon introduced them. “Drum up business for my ‘shine stand.”
“How well could Doughboy find his way around the city unaided?” Tachyon asked.
“He couln’nt. Find his way around Jokertown all right, always be jokers looking out for him, you know, seeing he didn’t wander off.” For a moment he sat and stared at a spill of sunlight in which a tiny metal Ferrari lay on its side. “They say he killed this scientist dude up by the Park. He never even been to the Park but twice. He don’t know nothin’ about no astronomy.”
He squeezed his eyes shut. Tears leaked through. “Oh, Doctor, you got to do something. He’s my boy, he’s like my son, and he’s hurtin’. And there nothing I can do.”
Tachyon shifted weight from boot to boot. The Captain plucked a daisy, rather the worse for wear, from his lapel, squatted down and held it out to Shiner.
Sobbing, the black man opened his eyes. They narrowed at once, in suspicion, confusion. Trips just hunkered there with flower proffered. After a moment Shiner took it.
Trips squeezed his hand. A tear fell on his own. He and Tachyon quietly left.
“Dr. Warren was not just a scientist,” Martha Quinlan said as she guided them back through the apartment, “he was a saint. The quest to get the truth before the people was never ending for him. He is a martyr to man’s quest for Knowledge.”
“Oh, wow,” Cap’n Trips said.
As far as Tachyon had been able to learn, the late Warner Fred Warren had had no next of kin. A legal battle was shaping up for possession of the trust fund which had enabled him to keep a penthouse apartment on Central Park and devote his life to science—his grandfather had been an Oklahoma oil millionaire who attributed his success to dowsing and died claiming he was Queen Victoria-but in her capacity as managing editor of the National Informer Ms. Quinlan seemed to be acting as executor for Warren’s estate.
“It’s so good of you to come pay your respects to a fallen colleague, Dr. Tachyon. It would have meant so much to dear Fred, to know our distinguished visitor from the stars had taken a personal interest in him.”
“Dr. Warren’s contribution to the cause of science was unparalleled,” Tachyon said sonorously ... since Trofim Lysenko, he emended mentally. Ah, Doughboy, may you never guess what I endure to gain you justice. It was a reflexive bit of Takisian misdirection, the story Tachyon had given Quinlan when he called to see about looking over the murder scene.
“It’s a terrible thing,” Quinlan warbled, leading them along a hallway hung with framed prints of hunting dogs from 1920s magazines. She was a little taller than Tach, wearing a dress like a black sack from neck and elbows to thighs, scarlet tights, white shoes, and thick plastic bracelets. Her gray-blond hair was styled straight and cut at a bias. Her eyes were made up like Theda Bara’s; she wore no lipstick. “A tragedy. So fortunate they caught the fellow who did it. Not right in the head, they say, and a joker to boot. Probably some kind of sex deviant. Our reporters are looking into this story very carefully, I can assure you.”
Trips made a sound. Quinlan stopped at the end of the .hall. “Here it is, gentlemen. Preserved as it was the day he died. We intend to make this a museum, against the day poor Fred’s greatness is at last acknowledged by the scientific establishment which so persecuted him.” She gestured them grandly in.
The door to Dr. Fred’s lab had been wood, solid even for a ritzy New York apartment. It didn’t seem to have slowed down his last visitor. Conscientious gnomes from the forensic lab in the brick tower at One Police Plaza had swept up most of the splinters, but a shattered stub of door still hung on bent brass hinges.
Tachyon still had a certain difficulty fitting his eyes around the utilitarian, rectilinear shapes of terrestrial scientific equipment. Science on Takis was the province of the few, even among the Psi Lords; their equipment was grown of geneengineered organisms even as their ships were, or custombuilt by craftsmen concerned to make each piece unique, significant. Here he didn’t have much trouble. The gear that occupied the rubber-topped workbenches had been busted all to hell. Papers and shattered glass were strewn everywhere.
“Did he have, like, his observatory here?” Trips asked, craning around with his stupendous topper in hand.
“Oh, no. He had an observatory out on Long Island where he did most of his stargazing. He analyzed his results here, I suppose. There’s a darkroom and everything.” She rested a long fingernail on the line of her jaw. “What exactly was your name again? Captain ... ?”
“Trips. “
“Like in that Stephen King book? What was it? The Stand.”
“Uh, no. It’s like, they used to call Jerry Garcia that.” When she showed no signs of enlightenment, he went on, “He was the leader of the Grateful Dead. He, uh, he still is. He didn’t draw an ace, you know, like Jagger or Tom Douglas, and ...” He noticed that her eyes had gone glassy and focused on oblivion, trailed his words away, and wandered off around the perimeter of the largish, cluttered, ruined room.
“Say, Doctor, what’re these dark splashes all over the walls?”
Tach glanced up. “Oh, those? Dried blood, of course.” Trips paled and his eyes bulged a bit. Tachyon realized he’d run roughshod yet again over Earther sensibilities. For a folk so robust, Terrestrials had such tender stomachs.
Still, even he was amazed at the savagery vented on the penthouse lab. There was a mindless quality to it, a palpable psychic emanation of fury and malice. Given the limited imagination of most police he’d encountered, Tachyon was no longer surprised they found Doughboy a plausible suspect; they thought him a demented freak, a caricature from a slasher flick, and that certainly described Dr. Warner Fred Warren’s assailant. Yet Tach was more convinced than ever that vast gentle child was incapable of such an act, however provoked.
The Informer editor had vanished, overcome with emotion no doubt. “Hey, Doe, come look at this,” Trips called. He was bending over a drafting table scattered with star-speckled photographs, peering intently at one edge.
Tach bent down beside him. There was a thin patch of gray, wrinkled, like a bit of tissue paper that had been wetted, stretched on the plastic surface, and left to dry. There was a curious membraneous quality to it that tickled the fringes of cognition.
“What is this stuff?” Trips asked.
“I do not know.” His eyes skimmed curiously over the photographs. A date penciled on the edge of one caught his eye: 4/5/86, the day Warren was murdered.
From a pocket Cap’n Trips produced a little vial and a scalpel in a disposable plastic sheath. “Do you always carry such implements?” Tach asked as he began to scrape up a few flakes of the gray stuff.
“Thought they might come in handy, man. If I was gonna be a detective and all.”
Shrugging, Tach turned his attention to the photograph that had caught his eye. It was the top of a small stack. Picking it up, he discovered a dozen or more photos which to his untrained eye all seemed to show the same star field.
“All right, Doc, Captain,” an unfamiliar voice blared from behind. “Give us a big smile for posterity.”
With a dexterity that surprised even himself, Tach half-rolled the photos and slipped them into one voluminous coat sleeve even as he spun to face the intruder. Martha Quinlan stood inside the door beaming while a young black man dropped to one knee and bombed them with a camera flash that could have driven a laser beam to Mars.
With a certain reluctance Tach let his fingers slip from the outsized wooden grips of the .357 magnum neatly concealed in a shoulder rig beneath his yellow coat. “I presume you’ve an explanation for this,” he said with fine Takisian frost.
“Oh, this is Rick,” Quinlan warbled. “He’s one of our staff photographers. I simply had to have him come down and record this event.”
“Madam, I’m afraid I do not do this for publicity,” Tach said, alarmed.
Unfolding himself, Rick waved a reassuring hand. “Don’t sweat it, man,” he said. “It’s just for our files. Trust me.”
“Tezcatlipoca,” Dr. Allan Berg said, tossing the print back on top of the mound of books, papers, and photos under which his desk putatively lurked.
“Say what?” Trips said.
“1954C-1100. It’s a rock, gentlemen. Nothing more, nothing less.”
The little office smelled strongly of sweat and pipe tobacco. Trips stared out the window at the afternoon Columbia campus, watching a gray squirrel halfway up a maple tree cussing out a black kid walking past with a scuffed French-horn case.
“A curious name,” Tachyon said.
“It’s an Aztec deity. A pretty surly one, I gather, but that’s the way it goes: you find an asteroid, you get to name it.” Berg grinned. “I’ve thought about hunting for one to name after me. What the hey-immortality of a sort.” He looked like a goodnatured Jewish kid, eager eyes, long oval face, big nose, except that his curly unkempt hair was gray. He had a blue shirt and brown tie under a sweater so loosely woven you could just about fish with it. His manner was infectious.
“It’s big enough to, like, do some damage if it hits?” Trips asked. “Or is that more exaggeration?”
“No, ah, Captain, I can assure you it’s not.” He stumbled a little over the honorific. “Norms, especially in the New York area, had pretty well had to accustom themselves to the ways of aces, especially those who chose to emulate the comic-book heroes of yore and don colorful costumes. And Cap’n Trips was weirder than most.”
“Tezcatlipoca’s a nickel-iron oblong roughly a kilometer by a kilometer and a half, weighing a good many million metric tons. Depending on the angle at which it struck, it could create devastating tidal waves and earthquakes, it could produce effects such as those hypothesized for a nuclear winter, it could quite conceivably crack the crust or blow away much of the atmosphere. It would almost certainly be the greatest catastrophe in recorded history-I might give you a better estimate if I took time to work it all out on paper.”
“But I won’t. Because it’s not going to hit the planet.” He sipped coffee from a cracked mug. “Poor Fred.”
“I admit I was rather startled that you spoke so sympathetically of him when I called you, Dr. Berg,” Tachyon said. Berg set the cup down, stared at the tepid black surface. “Fred and I went to MIT together, Doctor. We were roommates for a year.”
“But I thought everybody said Dr. Warren was just some kind of crackpot,” Trips said.
“That’s what they say. And he was a crackpot, much as I hate to say it., But he was not just any crackpot.”
“I fail to see how a trained scientist could espouse the theories for which Dr. Warren was so, ah—”
“Notorious, Doctor. Go ahead and say it. You sure you won’t have any coffee?” They refused politely. Berg sighed. “Fred had what you call a will of iron. And he had a romantic streak. He always felt there should be fantastic things out there-ancient astronauts, alien machines on the moon, creatures unknown to science. He wanted to be the first to go out and rigorously prove so many things respectable scientists scoffed at.” His mouth slipped into a sad smile. “And who knows? When Fred and I were kids, people thought the idea of intelligent life on other planets was farfetched. Maybe he could have pulled it off.”
“But Fred was impatient. When he didn’t see the results he wanted-why, he started seeing them anyway, if you know what I mean.”
“So it was as Dr. Sagan said in his article in the Times,” Tachyon said, “Dr. Warren fastened upon a rock which falls by the Earth at regular intervals and embued it with menace.”
Berg frowned. “With all due respect, Dr. Sagan got it wrong this time. Gentlemen, Dr. Warren had an infinite capacity for self-deception, but he wasn’t just some fool the Informer dragged in off Seventh Avenue. He knew how to use an ephemeris, was surely cognizant of 1954C-1100’s history.”
“He was a trained astronomer, and as far as technical and observational details go, a damned fine one.” He shook his shaggy head. “How he could talk himself into believing this nonsense about Tezcatlipoca, God alone knows.”
Trips was polishing his glasses on his fantastic bow tie. “Any chance he could’ve been right, man?”
Berg laughed. “Forgive me, Captain. But Tezcatlipoca’s newest approach was spotted and plotted eight months ago by Japanese astronomers. It does in fact intersect the Earth’s orbital path, but well clear of the planet itself “
He stood up, smoothed down his sweater, which had ridden up to the center of his stomach. “That’s the pity, gentlemen. Oh, not this”—patting incipient paunch—“but the disservice Fred performed his fellow scientists. Our instruments are so much more sophisticated than they were even last time Tezcatlipoca passed, in 1970. And yet any astronomer who dares twitch his telescope in its direction will wind up lumped with von Daniken and Velikovsky forevermore.”
The night was well advanced. Tach was sitting slumped in a chair in his apartment in a maroon smoking jacket and semidarkness, listening to Mozart in violins, bibbing brandy, and getting far gone in maudlin when the phone rang.
“Doe? It’s me, Mark. I’ve found something.”
The tone in his voice cut through brandy fog like a firehose. “Yes, Mark, what is it?”
“I think you better come see for yourself.”
“On my way.”
Fifteen minutes later he was on the floor above the Cosmic Pumpkin, gaping around in stoned amazement. “Mark? You have a whole laboratory above your head shop?”
“It’s not complete, man. I don’t have any real big-scale stuff, no electron microscopes or anything. Just what I was able to piece together over the years.”
It looked like a cross between Crick & Watson and a hippie crash pad circa 1967, shoehorned into a space barely larger than a broom closet. Diagrams of DNA strands and polysaccharides shared wall with posters of the Stones, Jimi, Janis, and, of course, Mark’s hero Tom Marion Douglas, the Lizard King-a twinge here for Tach, who still blamed himself for Douglas’s death in 1971. A Terrestrial biochemist’s tools were more familiar to Tach than an astronomers, so he recognized here a centrifuge, there a microtome, and so on. A lot of it had obviously seen hard use before passing into Trips’s hands, some was jerry-rigged, but it all looked serviceable. Mark was in a lab coat, looking grim. “‘Course, I didn’t need anything too fancy, once I saw the gas chromatography on that tissue sample.”
Tach blinked and shook his head, realizing the large and convolute piece of equipment whose identity he’d been puzzling over the last half-minute was possibly the world’s most intricate bong. “What did you find, then?” he demanded. Mark passed him a slip of paper. “I don’t, like, have enough data to confirm the structure of that protein chain. But the chemical composition, the proportions ...”
Tachyon felt as if a coin were being dragged down the vertebrae in his neck. “Swarmling biomass,” he breathed. Mark gestured at a bale of papers stacked on a bench. “You can check the references on this, analyses from the Swarm invasion. I—”
“No, no. I trust your work, Mark, more than anyone’s but mine.” He shook his head. “So swarmlings murdered Dr. Warren. Why?”
“How about how, man? I thought swarmlings were great big things, like in some Japanese monster movie.”
“At first, yes. But a Swarm culture-a Mother-how to say?—evolves in response to stimuli. Its first brute-force attack failed. Now it refines its approach-as I’ve been warning those fools in Washington it might, all along.” His mouth tightened. “I suspect that it is now attempting to emulate the life-form that repulsed it before. Such is a common pattern for these monsters.”
“So you’ve had a lot of experience with these things?”
“Not I. But my people, yes. They are, you might say, our bitterest enemies, these Swarm creatures. And we theirs.”
“And now they’re, like, infiltrating us?” Mark shuddered. “I think they are a long way from being able to pass undetected. Yet something about this troubles me. Usually at this stage of a Swarm incursion they are not so discriminating.”
“And why did they pick on poor Fred?”
“You begin to sound like that horrid woman, my friend.” Tach grinned, clapped him on the shoulder. “I hope we’ll find the answer to that question when we track these horrors down. Which is the next thing we must do.”
“What about Doughboy?”
Tach sighed. “You’re right. I will call the police, first thing in the morning, and tell them what we learned.”
“They’re never gonna buy it.”
“I can but try. Get rest, my friend.”
They didn’t buy it.
“So you found swarmling tissue in Warren’s lab,” rasped the Homicide South lieutenant in charge of the case. By phone she sounded young, Puerto Rican, harassed, and as if she did not at the moment love Tisianne brant Ts’ara of House Ilkazam. “You are taking a very active interest in this case for a medical expert witness, Doctor.”
“ I am trying to perform my civic duty. To prevent an innocent man from suffering further. And, incidentally, to alert the proper authorities to a frightful danger which may threaten this entire world.”
“I appreciate your concern, Doctor. But I’m a homicide investigator. Planetary defense is not in my jurisdiction. I have to get permission just to go into Queens.”
“But I have solved a homicide for you!”
“Doctor, the Warren case is under investigation by the competent authorities, which is us. We have a witness who positively identifies Doughboy leaving the scene at the right time.”
“But the tissue samples—”
“Maybe he was growing them in a petri jar. I don’t know, Doctor. Nor do I know the credentials of whoever identified this alleged swarmling tissue—”
“ I assure you I am an alien biochemistry expert—”
“In several senses.” He jerked slightly back from the receiver; perversely, he was starting to like this woman. “I’m not saying I doubt you, Doctor. But I can’t just wave my hand and let your man walk free. That’s up to the DA. Whatever you have, take to Doughboy’s attorney and have him present it. And if you’ve really found more swarmlings, I’d suggest you take that up with General Meadows at SPACECOM.” Who is Mark’s father. “And one more thing, Doctor.”
“What is that, Lt. Arrupe?”
“Get off this case or I’ll chuck your ass in the joint. I don’t need amateurs muddying the water.”
Chrysalis looked at him with a face glass-clear and china bone. “Anything strange happening in Jokertown?” she drawled in that hermaphrodite British accent of hers. “Whatever makes you think anything strange might happen here?” He sat at one end of the bar, well away from the morning regulars. He wasn’t exactly a stranger at the Crystal Palace. He never quite relaxed here, just the same.
“Not just Jokertown. This part of Manhattan, from Midtown south.”
She set down a glass she was polishing. “You’re serious?”
“When I say strange, I mean strange for jokertown. Not the latest outrage at jokers Wild. Not Black Shadow dangling some mugger from a streetlamp by his foot. Not even another bow-and-arrow murder by that maniac with his playing cards. Something out of what passes for the ordinary hereabouts.”
“Gimli’s back.”
Tach sipped his brandy and soda. “So they say.”
“What are you paying?”
He raised a brow.
“Dammit, I’m not just a back-fence gossip! I pay for my information.”
“And are well paid. I’ve contributed my share, Chrysalis.”
“Yes. But there’s so much you don’t tell me. Things that go on at the clinic ... confidential things.”
“Which shall remain confidential.”
“All right. Goodwill in this mutant community is my stock in trade too, and you don’t have to remind me how influential you are. But someday you’ll go too far, you metal-haired little alien fox. “
He grinned at her. And was gone.
Tring. Tach winched one eye open. The world was dark but for the usual Manhattan light-haze and perhaps a little moonlight oozing in through open curtains, silvering the bare female rump upturned beside him on the maroon coverlet of his water bed. He blinked, gummily, and tried to remember the name of the person to whom the buttocks belonged. They were really outstanding buttocks.
Tring. More exigent this time. One of this world’s most satanic inventions, the telephone. Beside him the glorious buttocks shifted slightly and a pair of shoulders came into view from behind a ridge of comforter.
Trrrr—He picked up the phone. “Tachyon.”
“It’s Chrysalis.”
“Delighted to hear from you. Do you have any idea what hour of the night it is?”
“One-thirty, which is more than you knew. I’ve got something for you, Doctor darling.”
“Whozat, Tach?” mumbled the woman at his side. He patted her rump abstractedly, trying to remember her name. Janet? Elaine? Blast.
“What is it?” Cathy? Candi? Sue? Chrysalis hummed a tune.
“What in the name of the ideal was that?” he demanded. Mary? Confound Chrysalis and her damned humming!
“A song we used to sing, back when I was at camp. ‘Johnny Rebeck.’”
“You called at one-thirty in the morning to sing me a campfire song?” Belinda? This was getting to be too much. “‘And all the neighbors’ cats and dogs will nevermore be seen/They’ve all been ground to sausages in Johnny Rebeck’s machine.”‘
Tach sat up. “What is it?” the woman beside him demanded, petulant now, turning toward him a face masked with sleep and dark hair.
“You’ve got something.”
“Like I told you, luv. Not Jokertown, but nearby. Around Division, next to Chinatown. Dogs and cats disappearingstrays, pets; people in these parts aren’t too concerned with leash laws. And pigeons. And rats. And squirrels. Several blocks are just devoid of the usual urban wildlife. Jokes about oriental cuisine aside, I thought this might qualify as your strange event.”
“It does.” Ancestors, how it does! She purred. “You owe me, Tachyon.”
He was swinging his legs out of bed, wishing for courtesy’s sake he could remember this young woman’s name to send her packing. “I do.”
“And by the way,” Chrysalis said, “her name’s Karen.”
“Doctor,” Trips said through a cloud of his own breath, “do you have any idea what Brenda called me when I phoned her to come look after Sprout at this hour of the night?”
In the weeks he’d known Mark, it was the first time he had heard him voice a complaint of any sort. He sympathized. “I don’t want to even imagine, dear Mark. But this is crucial. And I feel we have no time to waste.”
Mark crumpled. “Yeah. You’re right. Doughboy’s got it a whole lot worse than anything I’ve ever known. I’m sorry, Doc. “
Tachyon looked at this man, a brilliant scientist whom personal demons had driven to batter himself into little more than a derelict, and honestly wondered. He stroked his arm. “No harm done, Mark.”
Not far away the cars hissed over the Manhattan Bridge. They had here a dark side street in a none-too-prepossessing part of town, small shops and shadows and loan sharks and derelict manors, gray cramped buildings winking here and there with broken windows in the glow of a single fading streetlight. Not an hour to be abroad here, even without the prospect of otherworldy menace.
“This may just be a false alarm,” Tach said. “When Chrysalis told me about the animal disappearances, it occurred to me that swarmlings need food, and unless this culture advances more quickly than any I’ve heard of, they could scarcely buy it at the A&P “
He stopped, faced his friend, gripped him by the biceps. “Understand this now, Mark. There may be nothing here. But if we’ve found what. we are looking for, we are going to be confronting a monster like something from a horror movie. But it’s real. It’s the enemy of every living organism on this planet, and it is utterly without compunction.”
Mildly, Mark gestured up the block. “Does it look anything like that, man?”
Tach stared at him a moment. Slowly he swiveled his head right.
A figure stood on the corner at the end of the block nearer the overpass. A coat was stretched around it, a hat pulled low, but even muffled as it was there was no hiding that its proportions were never those of a normal human being.
“Excuse me a moment, man,” Trips said. He pulled away, and holding hat on head ran from the apparition, rounding the corner with knee-swinging sole-slapping strides.
Coward! blazed up nova in Tach’s breast, and then, But no, I cannot be so hard on him, for he is no fighter and this is a menace strange to his kind. He squared his shoulders, straightened his cravat, and turned to face the creature.
It took a swaying step forward, another. One foot made a sucking sound as it came off the asphalt. From the darkness behind it another figure lurched; clothed the same way, its outline different but clearly kindred. Ah, Benafsaj, you were right to doubt me. I never imagined there might be two. He readied his spirit for death.
“Doctor.”
His head snapped round. A young woman stood beside him, dressed from throat to soles in black broken only by the sideways commas of a yin-yang design on her chest. The emblem was matched by a black mask which curved up from her left cheekbone across the right side of her forehead, leaving half her face bare. She was taller than he. Her hair was black and lustrous. What he could see of her face looked Oriental and breathtakingly beautiful.
He performed a courtly if abbreviated bow. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”
“I am Moonchild, Doctor. And I have the honor of knowing you-if not exactly at first hand.”
It was beginning to seep through his blood-brain barrier. “You’re one of the Captain’s friends.”
“I am.”
Danger always made his blood run high. At least that was his subsequent excuse for the lechery that gripped him now. “Dearest child,” he breathed, grabbing her hands, “you are the loveliest sight these eyes have beheld in ages ...”
Even in the diffuse glow he saw her blush. “I will do my poor best to aid you, Doctor,” she said, misunderstanding ... maybe.
She whirled from him and glided down the street, relaxed and poised and deadly-seeming as a stalking leopard. He marveled at her aura of strength, her liquid grace, the play of buttocks beneath her tight black suit-buttocks were much with him, tonight. He trotted after her, Takisian-unwilling to let a woman face danger.
When she was twenty meters from the nearer swarmling she flowed into a charge, at ten launched herself clear of the street with panache that made him gasp. She pirouetted in flight, snapped her right heel around behind her, pivoting, driving a perfect spinning back kick into the shoulder of the beast. There was a dry squelch, dropped-pumpkin sound. The thing gave back. Still spinning, Moonchild rebounded, touched lightly down, recovered into battle stance.
The monster’s arm fell off. Dropped right out of its sleeve. She freaked.
All at once she was all over the street without even moving. Screaming, wailing, thrashing like a three-way catfight, sinking to the pavement all the while. Tachyon stared. But she made such a strong start, he thought plaintively.
For a moment the swarmlings seemed to stare at her too. Then as one they turned back to face Tachyon, the chemoreceptors that had alerted them to his nearness guiding them inexorably toward the hated, dreaded Takisian. An empty sleeve flapped grotesquely against the first one’s side. Tach reached for its mind. It was like clutching fog. His thought passed ineffectually through the diffusion of electrochemical signals that made up the thing’s mind. Unsurprised, he pulled out the snub-nosed Smith & Wesson, leaned into an isosceles stance, gun gripped bothhanded, sights lined up on the center of that unlovely mass, inhaled, held it, squeezed twice. The pistol produced a very satisfactory amount of flame and recoil and noise. No other results.
Shocked, he lowered the pistol. The beast was twenty meters away; he couldn’t have missed. Then he saw the two small holes, right where they should have been, one on either side of the buttoned coat-front. Mental attacks weren’t the only things that passed right through a swarmling.
“I’m in trouble,” he announced. He aimed for the shadow beneath the hat-brim, fired twice more. The hat flew off. So did great chunks of the diseased-potato mass within that served the being as a head. It came on.
Moonchild had quit screaming and beating at herself, and sat with hands between knees, watching intently. “Bullets don’t hurt them,” she said, voice raw from screaming. “They—they’re not human.”
“Very observant.” He fired off the last two, started backing away, groping in a pocket for a speed reloader, hoping he had one.’
“I thought I had mutilated a human being, a joker,” she said. She was on her feet. She raced toward a building to Tach’s right, crossing behind the lumbering swarmlings, launching herself again, this time on a trajectory Tach would have sworn would take her to the third floor of the structure. But he didn’t see, because when she entered the building’s shadow she vanished.
To reappear seconds later, feetfirst right through the middle of the second swarmling. Cloth tore, biomass gave, and the being just generally came apart as she hit pavement and rolled.
A moment and she was up again, sprinting forward, dropping low to support herself on one hand while her leg swept before her in a scything kick. The first swarmlings legs simply snapped out from beneath it at the knees. It landed on the stumps, plodded imperturbably on. Grimly, Moonchild closed.
Sirens were chasing each other up the sky when she finished. Tachyon applauded softly as she walked up to him. “I owe you an apology, lovely lady, for what I was thinking about you. “
She started to smooth back her hair, looked at her fingers, used her wrist instead. “You need never apologize to me, Doctor. You had reason to think as you did. But I must never use my arts to permanently harm a thinking being. And I thought I had.”
He gathered her into his arms. She laid her head on his shoulder. Indeed, he thought. He was not sure how he was going to explain this to Mark ....
She pushed herself away. “It won’t do for me to be found here. Too many questions.”
“But wait. Don’t go-there’s so much to say!”
“But no time to say it.” She kissed him on the cheek. “Be careful, Father,” she said, and once more disappeared.
“So you really did turn up swarmlings, Doctor,” said Lieutenant Pilar Arrupe, taking a plastic-tipped black cigarillo out of her mouth. “You are definitely the most active expert witness I ever saw. “
‘Father,’ he was thinking. An honorific, nothing more. “Sure did a number on those mothers,” observed a patrolman who clutched a riot gun like a talisman.
“With a little help from his friends, Dr, Smith and Dr. Wesson,” somebody else offered.
The street was full of flashing blue lights and uniforms and camera crews. “Guns don’t do much against those Swarm fuckers,” the first cop said.
“So how did you overcome these creatures, Doctor?” asked a reporter, thrusting the foam phallus of a mike under his nose.
. “Mystic fighting arts.”
“Get these jerks out of here,” Arrupe said. To Tach’s disappointment she wasn’t pretty. She was stumpy and thicklegged, with a bulldog face and ;tiff short hair, like Brenda’s at the Pumpkin. She had dark freckles liberally smeared across her pug nose. But her eyes were sharp as glass shards.
“Well, Lieutenant,” he said. “Will you let Doughboy go now?”
“You have got alleged swarmling stuff in the victim’s lab, and you got a whole street full of unmistakable swarmling parts, except where they used to look like Godzilla’s baby they now look like derelicts, which may or may not be an improvement. It’s a hell of a state of affairs.”
“You won’t.”
“I have a witness, Doctor.”
“Burning Sky, woman, have you no compassion? Don’t you care for justice?”
“Do you think I’m just of the boat from San Juan? This is a solid citizen, doesn’t know Doughboy from the Pope, has no grudge against jokers, and he walks in and describes him personally. And don’t tell me witnesses are unreliable. They are. But this one’s solid.”
Tach combed back his hair with clutching fingers. “Let me talk to .him.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s important. Something is happening, not just Doughboy. I know it.”
“You have some kind of damned alien brujeria in mind.” Lothario grin: “But of course.”
She slumped. “You made yourself a hero with these swarmlings, Doctor. And you know more about this kind of thing than I do.” Sidelong: “But you fuck me up with a civil liberty beef on this, ‘rnanito, I’m just simply gonna shoot you.”
As soon as he touched the mind, he knew.
He was a dentist, a short, athletic, ruddy man in his fifties who lived in the building next door to Warren’s. He’d been out walking the dog around the block-a daring act at that time of the night-and seen a peculiar-looking man emerge from the alleyway that ran behind the apartments. The man stopped for a moment, not ten feet away, looked the intrepid dentist straight in the eye, and shambled off into the Park.
The story jibed with that of the other two witnesses, one of whom was the super of Warren’s building, who had been investigating a broken-in back door when he was clubbed down from behind, the other a woman who had for reasons best known to herself been looking down into the alley from the apartments across. They had both glimpsed a large, pallid, manlike shape coming out the back door and lurching down the alley. But neither could offer anything but the most general description.
Tachyon had only to brush the dentist’s mind to know his story was untrue. Not a lie; he believed it implicitly. Because it had been implanted.
Reluctantly, Tach dug deeper. The old pain of Blythe had receded, he no longer went clammy inside at the mere thought of using his mental powers; it wasn’t that. The nature of the implant clearly revealed what sort of being had made it. All that remained was to uncover which individual from among a very few possibilities. He had a good idea.
In a way it didn’t matter. The implications were already inescapable.
And monstrous beyond anything Tach had imagined.
“I mislike that place,” grumbled Durg at’Morakh bo Zabb Vayawand-sa as they mounted the rickety back stair to their flat in a less than fashionable corner of the Village.
Rabdan sneered back over a gold shoulder-board. “How can you cavil? You never went inside.”
“The Gatekeeper, the one with the strange dead face, he wouldn’t let me.”
“Ha! What would the Vayawand say, if they knew one of their precious Morakh sports permitted a groundling to say him nay? Truly, their sperm runs thin.”
Durg flexed a hand that could powder granite. The tough white twill of his uniform sleeve parted at his biceps with a sound like a pistol shot. “Zabb brant Sabina sek Shaza sek Risala commands I fight only as needful to the mission,” he grated. “Even as he commands me to serve one as unworthy as you, to test my devotion. But I warn you: some day your incompetence will lose you the master’s pleasure. And on that day I pluck your limbs off, little man, and squash your head like a pimple.”
Rabdan tried to laugh. It stumbled, so he tried again. “So hostile. Such a pity you could not have seen: a woman flayed, a maid dismayed; quite stylish entertainment. When the groundlings are destroyed some rare talents shall be lost, I must admit.”
They came to the top landing and their door. Rabdan paused outside, furrowed his brow as his mind probed within.
It would not do to be ambushed by groundling burglars. Durg stood silently a few steps below. His kindred were of the Psi Lord class, but like most Morakh he was virtually mind-blind. If Rabdan detected danger, then he would fulfill his function.
Satisfied, Rabdan unlocked the door and stepped inside. Durg followed, closed it behind him. From the hallway to the bedrooms stepped a figure.
“Tisianne! But I searched—”
“You of all my cousin’s people could never drive a probe I could not deflect,” said Tachyon. “It bodes ill for us all that I find you here. Indeed, perhaps for all of Takis.”
“But worst for you,” Rabdan said. He stepped to one side. “burg, dismember him.”
“Zabb’s monster!” Tach hissed, despite himself.
“The little prince,” Durg said. “This will be sweet.”
A second figure appeared at Tachyon’s side. “Doctor, who is this?” Moonchild asked, squinting a little in the bright light of the single lamp on the low table.
She saw a small man—even to her, unmistakably Takisian-with fine sharp features, metallic blond hair, pale eyes that bulged and rapidly blinked. The being lumbering across the threadbare carpet of the little living room she found harder to classify. He was short, barely above five feet, but terrifically muscled, literally almost as broad as tall. Yet his head was a Takisian elf-lord’s, long and thin, austere of feature: beautiful. The contrast was jarring.
“My cousin’s toady Rabdan,” Tach said, “and his monster, Durg.” For all that he had lived four decades among jokers Tach could scarcely stomach sight of the Morakh killer. This was not a near-Takisian Earther twisted into a grotesque misshape; this was the sight most abhorrent to Tach’s people, a perversion of the Takisian form itself. Part of what made Morakh so terrible in war was the revulsion they instilled in their foes.
“He’s a creature bred by a family hostile to mine. An organic killing machine, powerful as an elephant, trained to perfection.” Durg had halted, perfect brow furrowed at this new arrival. “Even by our standards they’re almost indestructible. Zabb took this one in a raid when he was a pup; he transferred his loyalty to him.”
“Doctor, how can you speak of a human being that way?”
“He’s not a human,” he gritted, “and watch him.” Squat as a troll, Durg lunged with a speed no human could match. But Moonchild wasn’t strictly human; whatever she was, wherever she came from, she was an ace. She caught gold-braided sleeve behind the hand that grabbed for her, tugged, pivoted her hips. Durg shot past to slam into the wall in an explosion of plaster.
“How did you find us?” Rabdan asked, leaning against the doorjamb.
“Once we found that man whose mind you tampered with, I knew Takisians were still on Earth,” Tach said, sidling away from Durg, “and from the ineptness of technique I deduced it could be none but you. Once we knew what to look for, you weren’t that hard to trace. Your appearance is distinctive, and you would hardly cower in an abandoned warehouse and subsist off rats and stray cats like the swarmlings.”
“Of course—” he nodded at Rabdan’s white-and-gold outfit, “I never guessed even you’d be fool enough to venture out in Zabb’s own livery.”
“The groundlings find us the height of fashion. And would you have swans go about in the guise of geese?”
“When the swans’ mission—” Durg came up from the depression he’d made in the plasterboard, moaning, shaking off plaster powder like water “—is to pass for geese, then yes.”
Durg’s hand lashed out in a vicious knifehand that caught Moonchild in the ribs and threw her into the bar that separated living room from kitchen. Wood splintered. Tach started forward with a cry. Grinning, Durg came for him.
Moonchild lunged from the wrecked bar, took two mincing steps forward, kicked Durg in the side of the knee. His leg buckled. She slammed a second kick into the side of his jaw. He groaned-his hand flashed up, caught her ankle, yanked her forward into reach of his other arm.
He grappled for a backbreaking hold. Tach started forward again. Rabdan’s hand came out of his tunic with the flat black glint of an arrester. “Go for him and I’ll finish you now, Tis.”
Moonchild slammed an elbow down on top of Durg’s head. Tach heard teeth slam together like a trap. She swung cupped palms viciously inward against his ears. He groaned, shook his head, and she writhed free.
... Durg was on his feet facing her. She kicked for his chest. He blocked without effort. She flew at him with bolas fury, kicking for head, knee, groin. He gave back several steps, then as she struck again leapt up and lashed out with both feet, kicking Moonchild across the room to smash against the outside wall.
Tachyon hesitated. He could attempt to seize Durg’s mind, but that ran him up against the sole psionic ability the Morakh possessed, an all-but-insurmountable resistance to mental compulsion. While he concentrated on Durg, Rabdan would kill him ... if he tried to fight down Rabdan’s rather feeble screens, Durg would kill Moonchild. He reached for his pistol, hoping the girl would not think too harshly of him.
She stirred. Durg was shocked; when he kicked someone that hard, they stayed down. He hurled himself forward, heedless.
She met him halfway. Grabbing his tunic front she fell backward with her boot in his belly, projected him over her. The combined force of his leap and her thrust drove him like a rivet through the wall, four stories above the street.
“Oh, dear,” she said, standing, “ I hope I didn’t hurt him.” She ran to the hole. “He’s still moving.” She clambered out without hesitation.
Guessing she could take care of herself Tach let her go, still all aback. Durg was as strong as some powerhouse human aces. Moonchild, though she had metahuman strength, was nowhere his match-she had mastered him with skill alone, Durg the master slayer.
Rabdan came out of freeze and threw open the door. Tachyon’s mind grabbed his like a mailed fist. And squeezed. And now, friend Rabdan,” he remarked, “we are going to talk.
It was bad. Rabdan was an incompetent and more than something of a coward. Yet he was a Psi Lord, and at the last he behaved as one, the worse for him. No normal shield he might erect could keep the subtle Tisianne from prying the last crumb of information from his brain. But Rabdan in extremis went heroic, put the deathlock on, laid his name upon it. All that he was opposed Tachyon, and no subtlety, no artifice, no force, could get past such an opposition and leave anything of Rabdan intact.
Perhaps that was Rabdan’s final cunning; knowing his distant cousin’s softness of heart, he gambled that Tisianne would turn away from the awful finality of unraveling his mind skein by skein.
Rabdan’s judgment was never the best.
Joy, joy, joy. My master comes again so soon. Or is something wrong, that he has so much time for me of a sudden?
Knock it off, Baby.
“Hi, Baby. What’s happenin’?” She twinkled her lights in happy greeting and sphinctered open a lock in her side. The damned rock was headed for Earth, of course. Zabb’s people had deflected it months ago. Not much; it would take tremendous amounts of power to change the moment of such a mass by any appreciable amount. A sliver of a degree, scarcely perceptible-but over time, enough.
It was a rock familiar to the groundlings, its reappearance unremarkable. Nonetheless Rabdan and Durg had been sent down to make sure its intended recipients didn’t realize its itinerary had changed. What luck, then, when the alteration in course had been noted by the one man absolutely no one in authority would listen to-whose having claimed the rock for his own, as it were, would mean every other scientist on the planet would shun it like offal. The Takisians could have asked for nothing better to seal the planet’s fate. No one would realize what was happening until the asteroid was so close its path was unmistakable. And that would be too late, not all the thermonuclear weapons in all the planet’s stockpiles could forestall the wrath to come.
But their ally had panicked. Zab’s ally. Much as he hated his cousin, Tachyon could barely bring himself to believe it. The vast lump of malignance which was the Swarm Mother had detected Hellcat as she floated in orbit around the world it intended, in its dim, insistent way, to make its own, and had attacked. And somehow, for his own mad reasons, once the attack was repulsed, the warhound of the Ilkazam had made alliance with the greatest enemy of his house—of all Takisians.
Together they had made a plan. Semisentient, the Mother had perceived only that the plan was detected when Dr. Warren made his announcement. It acted in haste leaving Rabdan something less than leisure to try to undo the damage it had wrought.
It had seemed fabulous fortune to spot on the Jokertown streets a being who might be mistaken for a swarmling. So Rabdan and Durg went up to Central Park and made themselves a witness. How can it fail? Rabdan had gloated to his comrade.
Tach had given Rabdan the final mercy no Takisian could deny another. Moonchild accepted that his heart gave out unexpectedly under mind probe, and Tach felt soiled at having lied to her. Tach took the pictures purloined from Warren’s lab to Baby. Her astrogational analysis confirmed Rabdan’s story. A hasty planning session, a night spent trying to sleep.
Now Trips and Tachyon were ready to launch a genuinely harebrained scheme to Save the World. There was no time to come up with a better one. It might already be too late.
And out there Zabb waited. Zabb. Who’d killed Tach’s Kibr. And betrayed all Takis. In his warship: Zabb.
Jake was trucking down the street with his bottle of La Copita in its paper bag in hand. On the waterfront, in Jokertown, and him a nat, and it was no damned thing to do at this hour of the night, especially if you were this shitfaced. But Jake wasn’t sure where he’d wandered since the big fuck with the head like an iguana threw him out of his bar for messing on the floor. A good thing he’d thought to carry a spare in his coat pocket.
A rumbling took his ear. He stopped and watched as the top came off a building right in front of him-not exploding, not collapsing, but coming off in a piece, neatly as you please, like the lid off a box. It set down gently on the roof next door, and then this gigantic seashell covered all over with tiny specks of light came floating up out of the building. Nary a sound was made. It hovered against the dull-orange sky while the roof floated back into place. Then it angled upward and was gone, lining out for the Long Black.
Very deliberately, Jake walked to the nearest storm drain, and with precise aim dropped his half-full La Copita bottle down it. Then he walked very rapidly out of Jokertown.
“I never thought of, like, flying a starship from your bedroom, man,” Captain Trips said, clearly enchanted.
“I think your people would call this a stateroom, yes?” As a matter of fact, it looked like a cross between an Ottoman harem and Carlsbad Caverns. In the midst of it all was a huge canopied bed piled with fat cushions, and in a dressing gown in the midst of that lay Tach. He had long ago sworn to die in bed; Takisian biotechnology made it possible to achieve that goal and a heroic demise at the same time, if you were so inclined.
“There is no formal command center—bridge?—on a ship such as this. On most warships, such as my cousin’s vessel Hellcat, there is, but on a yacht, no.” He felt a sizzle of fury from Baby at the mention of Hellcat’s name. They were rivals of long standing.
“A Takisian symbiont-ship is psionically controlled. The pilot can receive information directly, mentally, or visually. For example ...” Tach gestured and an image of Earth sprang into being on a curve of membranous bulkhead next to the bed. A yellow line reached away from it, describing their orbit. Then like a computer animation the globe spun away, dwindled, until an out-of-scale image of their entire projected flight path from Earth to 1954C-1100 was displayed.
Trips applauded. “That’s fantastic, man. Groovy.”
“Yes, it is. You Earthers are attempting to create sentience in your computers; we have grown sophonts who are capable of performing computer functions. And much more.”
“How does Baby feel about all this?”
The picture vanished. Words appeared: I am honored to convey lords such as Master Tis and yourself-though I’m afraid you may poke me with that hat, it’s so tall.
Trips jumped. “I didn’t know she could do that.”
“Neither did I. She’s stealing knowledge of written English from me with a very low-powered drain-which is mildly naughty. However, she knows I .am indulgent, and will forgive her.”
Trips shook his head in amazement. He was sitting on a chair that had thrust itself from the floor for him and adjusted to his frame when Tach finally convinced him to sit on it. “Not that I don’t have faith in Baby,” he said, “but isn’t your cousin’s vessel, like, a warship?”
“Yes. And you don’t have to ask the question you’re hoping not to have to. Under normal circumstances Baby would have no chance against Hellcat-and don’t go static in my head like that, Baby, or I’ll spank you! It’s true.”
“But Baby is fast, even with her ghostdrive gone, none faster. And maneuverable. And, frankly, smarter than Hellcat. But the important factor is that Hellcat was badly injured by the Swarm attack. A Swarm Mother as ancient and vast as this one generally will have developed biological weapons antibodies, almost-against Takisians and their ghostships. We use similar weapons against them, since only a full war fleet can carry enough firepower to harm even a small one, whereas infection can spread of itself. Zabb fought off a boarding attack, with sword and pistol and bioweapons, and was able to drive off the swarmlings. But Hellcat was infected and damaged, and though they arrested the sickness she will be a long time healing.”
Softly: “And Zabb felt each of her wounds as his own, whatever you may say of him.” His eyes stung.
Mournfully Trips shook his head. “Talking about fighting bums me out, man.”
“This must be hard for you, given your pacifist convictions. But your role in what lies ahead is not martial, and I’ll fight only if attacked.”
“But Moonchild fought. Most of the others would too. I’ve never fought in my life. I only hit one person, and he hauled off and busted my nose, and then one day I’m in, like, someone else’s body while she throws some muscle-bound alien through a wall.”
“It was a glorious spectacle,” said Tach, chuckling despite himself.
“Being an ace is turning out to be a pretty heavy trip.” Tisianne, I feel her! Hellcat comes.
Tach rumpled his hair and sighed. “I fear it’s time, my friend.” He swung his legs out of bed and rose. “I’ll see you to the lock.”
Luminance paced them down a curving corridor. “You’re sure you—he—can find the rock?” Tachyon said.
“It’s not like there’re going to be many others in the vicinity, Doc.”
The bitch is shaping interception orbit. Max weapons range in twenty minutes.
Head her off Baby.
They stopped by the inner sphincter of the crewlock. Tach and Trips embraced, both weeping, both trying not to show it. “Good luck, Mark.”
“Same to you, Doc. Say, this whole ship is Baby, isn’t it?”
“That’s right.”
Self-consciously, Trips leaned over and lightly kissed a brace whose form flowed like a stalagmite. “Bye, Baby. Peace.”
“Good-bye, Captain. Godspeed.”
Pandering to primitive superstitions, Tach chided as they withdrew politely around a bend.
Amusement. What will the new person be like, Tis?
I don’t know. I’m eager to see. Another Moonchild was too much to hope for. Fortuitous enough that they had access to an ace with a combination of powers that gave them some small chance of success.
“Doctor?” The voice rolled around to them like liquid amber, deep and rich. Tachyon walked forward.
The visual impact stopped him in his tracks. Ace as Greek god: tall, elaborately muscled, a jaw like a bridge abutment, a clear green gaze, a nimbus of curly blond hair, all wrapped in a skintight yellow suit with a sunburst blazing on the chest. “I,” the vision said, “am Starshine.”
“The honor is entirely mine,” Tach said reflexively. “Quite correct. You are a militarist, representative of a decadent and repressive civilization. I am about to attempt to avert a horror brought upon my world by your unbridled technology, while you engage in combat with another faction of the same technocratic gang that afflicted Earth with your satanic virus in the first place. Under the circumstances I find it difficult to wish you success, Doctor. Nonetheless, I do so.” Tachyon’s voice seemed to have vanished, and Baby was making little staticky phosphene pops in his head. “I’m so grateful,” he managed at last.
“Yes.” Starshine stroked his heroic jaw. “Perhaps I shall compose a poem, about the moral dilemma I face—”
“Hadn’t you better go face the asteroid first?” Tach almost screamed.
Starshine scowled like Zeus caught by Hera, but he said, “I suppose so.”
The lock dilated. “Farewell,” Tach said. “Thank you.” He stepped through.
As the outer lock cycled open, Baby transmitted the view from outside very square centimeter of her skin was photosensitive at need-to Tach’s mind. Starshine floated out into vacuum, turned his face into the full glare of the sun, now more or less astern, and appeared to take a deep breath. Then he pushed off from the ship, arms and body straightened to a line, and he became a single brilliant yellow beam bisecting eternal night.
“Photon transformation,” Tach said, impressed. “Like the tachyon transformation of our ghostdrive, but allowing only lightspeed. Incredible.” For a moment he felt almost proud of the wild card.
He shook the sensation off. “I’m going to find it hard,” he remarked, “to like that one.”
He’s sure a prick. I liked the Captain ever so much better .. Tis, they’re coming.
Floating, timeless. Pure release, nonexistence/coexistence with all the universe. The final consummation: satori in a laser beam.
But duration must be. Resolution, downward to ego. To matter.
The asteroid awaited. An unlovely lumpish mass of slag, seeming to fall toward Starshine, though his line of sight ran perpendicular to its path.
He rubbed his jaw and frowned. He had a lot more to say to that alien doctor, about the evil his kind had brought the world, about his own culpability in luring that pathetic burnout Trips into wild dangers. But it would have to wait; time passed.
He wondered how much time he had. From the memories he shared with Mark and the rest, he knew the drug lasted an hour. He hoped he could do what had to be done in that time.
He held out a hand. A beam of light leapt from it to Tezcatlipoca’s pockmarked surface, dazzling white-hot. A circle of rock raced the spectrum and boiled from the surface in a glowing jet.
He was fabulously strong. But all his strength would not divert the evil mass. Nor did he have the power to destroy the rock. What he could do was use his sunbeam to heat a spot on its flank, so that the stuff of the asteroid flared away like a rocket exhaust at right angles to its orbit. Even now, a million miles from Earth, a tiny deflection would make all the difference.
But even the tiniest deviation in the asteroid’s course would require fantastic amounts of energy. And an unknown amount of time.
By increments Starshine increased his output. He felt alive, and huge, and full of power; he could not fail, here before the holy Sun’s naked eye, with her energy to sustain him.
At stake was a planet, his planet, Earth, green and gravid.
And, incidentally, his own life, and that of Mark Meadows and the other entities whose existence was somehow locked in his.
At detection’s instant Tach knew Hellcat’s deadliest weapon was out. The coherent tachyns of her ghost lance would have strewn Baby’s component atoms-and his-across a dozen dimensions in an attosecond if it still functioned, and with Baby’s ghostdrive gland had also gone her tachyon sense, so they would have had no warning. But Tach gambled that the Swarm attack had disabled the tachyon beam. It would have been the Mother’s most urgent target; the planetoid-beings feared the lance, even small ones such as Courser-class ships like Hellcat carried.
Zabb’s ship was far from helpless, though. As Baby thrust on a course tangent to hers, crossing outsystem from the path Starshine had taken, a pulse of purple light flashed by to port. I was expecting that, Baby said smugly as she threw herself into an evasive dance, intricate as a minuet, which kept her crossing Hellcat’s bows as the other vessel rounded on her.
Together they sent forth a probe, Tach directing Baby’s greater raw psionic powei to scan the other craft. He sensed damage that brought bile to his throat, raw wounds with edges burned or withered gaping in Hellcat’s flanks. She seeks our lives, he thought, but no faithful ship of Takis deserves the taint of swarmling contagion.
Before he could gain a sharper vision he was cut off by mental force like a guillotine blade. No matter; Baby had sensed enough to evaluate what capacity her rival still possessed. Still, he was surprised.
Spavined slut, consort of barges! Tach felt Hellcat’s anger stab Baby like a spear. This jaundiced sun shall taste thee and thy weakling lord.
Brave talk, thou who cannot waddle fast enough to catch me!
Your mental powers have grown, cousin, he projected. A dry chuckle came into his mind. Adversity forces growth. You’ve come, Tisianne. I take it you found my emissaries on Earth?
Baby was reporting Hellcat’s status: Tegument weakened in several sections; a lesion in her main drive organ ... I have, thought Tach.
Rabdan was a fool. You’ve disposed of him? I perceive you have. And Durg? His death was clean, I trust.
He lives, cousin. With malice: He’s transferred his loyalty to the groundling who bested him. Your former captive, Captain Trips.
White-hot anger spike: You lie! A moment. But no. Perhaps you begin to understand why I’ve taken the steps I have, then, Tis.
According to plan, Baby shaped a curving orbit on constant boost. Despite her best efforts Hellcat could not close the range. Her fire control had suffered as well; at this distance the overwhelming superiority of her firepower was cancelled by the more precise aim of Baby’s single heavy laser-picking at her, forcing her to trade pursuit for evasion.
I understand you’ve betrayed our clan and our people, Tach thought.
It seems so, Tis. But consider: this virus you loosed on that hot, heavy world threatens our existence far more surely than the mindless Swarm.
The experiment was a success.
Therein lies the danger. These altered groundlings, these aces, aided you to escape against all our strength. Now you tell me a gangling weakling bested the deadliest bare-hand fighter Takis has produced. Do you not in this see the eclipse of our kind, Tisianne?
Perhaps the fall of the Psi Lords is overdue.
And you call me traitor. The thought felt more wearily amused than outraged.
You would’ve destroyed the entire species. Of course. They’re groundlings.
Agony splashed Tach’s brain like acid. He was thrown half out of bed as Baby’s acceleration compensator slipped. Baby! Are you all right?
A grazing wound, Lord Tis. I’m fine. But there was a tentative note; she’d never been injured in battle before. He caressed her with a brief, healing mind-touch, drove fiercely at Zabb, So you made common cause with the filthy Swarm?
You’ve seen what they did to poor Hellcat. This Mother’s encountered Takisians before, or shared plasm with another who had, and survived-which ought to tell you much, cousin mine. A pod seeded swarmlings in orbit on the far side of this adoptive world of yours, where they remained inert until we drifted in among them. Then they were upon us, with acid, quick-acting pathogens, and brute force.
We drove them off. Tach’s mind filled with images stolen from Rabdan’s, of battle in wavering light against amorphous beings whose touch might mean death by irreversible dissolution. Of swordblades glinting, and screams, and the most desperate defense of all, laser pistols flaring in the corridors while peristaltic spasms racked Hellcat’s whole fabric. We lost four your old weapons-master among them. The next attack would have finished us. So I chose negotiation.
Violet eyes clenched shut. Sedjur.
After we repulsed the assault, Zabb continued, I managed to touch the swollen dimness that is the Mother’s consciousness even as we tended our wounded and flushed the passageways with antibiotic emulsion, to impress on her that I wished to deal. She understood but vaguely; I believe she felt something akin to curiosity at my temerity, wanted to examine me at closer range. I traveled to her in a single lifeboat, passed within.
Baby was back in control of herself; her violent high-gee maneuvering no longer so much as rippled the surface of the brandy remaining in the goblet by the bed. Sweat stood out in cool domes on Tach’s forehead. Despite himself he felt awe of his cousin-even admiration. To journey alone and unarmed into the colossal body of the Mother, ancient enemy, bogey of a million cradle stories-that took courage from the epic songs.
And this above all was why Zabb had done it, Tach knew: he had suffered humiliation at Tach’s hands, he who had never known defeat. He had to perform some fabulous deed or have his significance, his virtu, drain from him like water from a broken vessel. And to a Takisian even treason was glorious, if grand enough in scale.
Inside a great cavern I stepped from my craft and stood upon the very substance of our oldest foe. The walls around seemed festooned with strands of black moss, illuminated by witchlights in half a hundred pallid covers; the stink was such my vision dimmed. But I made contact with a mind as huge and diffuse as a nebula. After a fashion, we communicated.
The monster and I alike had interest in destroying life on this Earth of yours. So we came to an accommodation. Bile bubbled into Tach’s mouth in shocked reflex. We came to an accommodation. With what insouciance his cousin passed the thought, as if it did not at once describe the greatest treason and the greatest act of courage their kind had known. I honor you, Zabb. I must. If you win this day, they’ll sing your song for a thousand generations. But ... I despise you.
I’ll try to bear up.
Tach shuddered in a breath. And you murdered Benafsaj. I had to do so. She would never have consented to taking action against you and your precious Earth, to say nothing of treating with the Swarm. To all appearances she died in the swarmling assault; Rabdan saw to it, you’ll be pleased to know. A tear fell to the silk coverlet.
Zabb. I’m coming to kill you.
Perhaps you even can, so weakened is Hellcat. Or it may be I’ll kill you. A weary chuckle. Either outcome is satisfactory, from my point of view.
Baby screamed.
Suddenly Tach was bouncing around the organiform opulence of his stateroom. He smelled hot silicone; his mind reverberated to his vessel’s anguish.
Now, bitch, came Hellcat’s thought, sizzling with hatred, thou cant flee no longer. A blue-white flare unfolded as Hellcat threw her drive into terminal triumphant overdrive, closing for the kill.
Baby, Baby! Her mind was white-noise terror and pain. Symbiont-ships had advantages over nonliving craft, could think for themselves, could heal themselves of damage. But they had wills of their own, and those could be broken.
Tach grabbed a projection, clung, spread his mind to encompass his tormented ship. Air rushed from a two-meter gash in her hull, tumbling her through space. Oh, Baby, get control of yourself!,
He felt the demon breath of a laser pass her by. Daddy, Daddy, I can’t, I can’t!
Light pulsed from the walls in random splashes of color. He summoned all his healing strength, all his love and empathy for his ship, poured his whole being on the terrified flames within her. I love you, Baby. But you must let me help you.
No!
Our lives lie at stake. A whole world’s at stake. Slowly terror ebbed. The ship’s wild gyration damped, and Tach felt her compensator TK field enfold him once again. He breathed once more.
Hellcat had shape now without magnification, a spiked darkness alive with tiny lights, riding a tidal wave of fire. Her triumph filled Tach’s head as a laser spiked forth and one of Baby’s sponsons evanesced in a flash. Scream for mercy, coward! Thou’ll float forever friendless!
DAMN YOU! Baby’s internal lights dimmed as she channeled all power to her laser. A scarlet spike impaled Hellcat just ahead of her drive. She shrieked-then again, louder, a tumult of agony that went on and on until Tach thought his brain would burst.
1954C-1100 was vomiting its own substance into space. For a moment Starshine almost wished he’d brought some sort of instrument, to measure his progress. Time was fast running out, and no sign of that treacherous alien technocrat returning. It would be good to know if his sacrifice was going to be in vain.
He firmly squelched the thought. He would at least die free of the subtle chains of technology. And the green Earth would live a while longer, until the land-rapers and technofreaks burned her out. But he would have done his part.
He began composing his final poem; a poignant piece, the more so since there were none to hear it above the asteroid’s silent photonic scream but the other entities who made up the composite which was Captain Trips.
When he could think again: Baby, are you all right? We won! Lord Tis, I beat her!-An image of Hellcat, lightless and torn, tumbling away on a cometary path, away from the world her master had sought to devastate.
Zabb! Zabb, do you still live? No reply, and he wondered why his pulse quickened anxiously.
And then, I do. Damn you. Can you do nothing right? What of our people?
Three died when your shot blew the drive: Aliura, Zovar S’ang, that servant wench you were so fond of. All vanished in a gout of flame. Are you then proud, Tisianne?
He sat dead still, cold emptiness within. He had murdered his own kinsman, first Rabdan, then these others. And Talli, his playmate, who’d warned him of Zabb’s intentions when he and Turtle and Trips were kidnapped. All for a good cause, of course. Yet could not Zabb claim the same? You’ve won. Take your vengeance, Tisianne.
Baby, match vectors with Hellcat. This must be quickly done.
But, Master ... What?
Starshine-he’s about to revert to Captain Trips. What are you waiting for? A rising note. Do you gloat, Tisianne? It isn’t like you. Finish it.
Tach stared blankly at the membrane-wall ahead, where Baby formed an image of her stricken foe. His pride demanded consummation. And practicality: as long as Zabb lived, Tachyon was in mortal peril, and Earth besides.
Tis: when my mother cast that mongrel bitch who pupped you down the stairs, I watched. I stood by the balustrade and laughed. The way her head lolled on her neck
But Tachyon laughed. Enough. Save your venom for the Void, Zabb.
Shoot, then. Damn you, shoot.
No. Repair your ship if you can, limp back to Takis, fly to Network space and live as a renegade. Live in the knowledge that I’ve bested you again. That you betrayed your lineageand failed.
He threw up a wall against a surge of fury. Baby, find the Captain quickly! She sheered away, her own drives a yellow coma.
... destroy you, Tisianne, I swear ... he sensed. Then Zabb was gone out of range, tumbling into the infinite hole of night.
The shine of his hands winked out. As they did, Starshine felt a sickness, a shifting of the very fabric of his being. At least I died in the Sun’s embrace .
Three hundred seconds later Baby braked to match velocity with a form hanging apparently lifeless above a stillglowing crater in the asteroid’s flank. Gently she reached out with her grappler field, caught up the purple-clad form with blood dried in rings about mouth and ears, the silk hat which followed it like a purple satellite, drew them within her. As her master bent weeping over his friend she set her prow toward the world which had become their home.
“Mark, Mark old man!” Dr. Tachyon exploded through the door of the Cosmic Pumpkin, arms full of bouquets and bottles of wine in paper bags.
Mark wheeled his chair in from the head shop. “Doc! It’s, like, far out to see you. What’s the occasion?” His face had an unnaturally ruddy cast where vacuum had burst capillaries beneath the skin, and until his eardrums healed he was hearing by a little bone-conduction unit taped to the mastoid process beside his left ear, but on the whole he didn’t look too bad for what he’d survived.
“What’s the occasion? What’s the occasion? Doughboy is cleared of all charges, he comes home today. You’re a herothat is, your friend the Captain is. And I, of course. There’s a celebration at the Crystal Palace, and the drinks are on the house. “
“What about those bottles?”
“These?” A smile. “I might be having a private celebration of my own, after the festivities at Chrysalis’s.”
He stuck out a bouquet. “These are for you. Let me be the first to congratulate you, Mark.”
Mark sniffed. “Uh, thanks, Doc.”
“Shall we away? Why don’t you slip into-you knowmore formal clothing?”
Mark glanced away. “ I, uh, like, I think I better stay here. I got the store and Sprout to look after, and I’m not getting around too well.”
“Nonsense. You must come. You’ve earned adulation, Mark. You. You’re a hero.”
His friend evaded his eye. “Brenda will be more than happy to look after the shop and Sprout for you.”
“Not so fast, buster,” said the woman behind the counter. “And I’m Susan.”
Tach fixed her with a penetrant stare. After a moment she crumpled. “I, I guess I could.”
“But this chair,” Mark whined.
“Do you require assistance, Mistress Isis?” a voice asked from the rear of the store, deep and resonant like an alien gong. Durg at’Morakh bo-Isis Vayawand-sa emerged into the deli, a collector’s-item Steppenwolf tee shirt stretched to near explosion across his giant chest. He was limping, his cheeks puffy and bruised, but otherwise little the worse for wear. “I can carry you wherever you wish to go, Mistress.”
Mark’s drunkard’s flush deepened. “ I wish you’d quit calling me that, man. My name’s Mark.”
Durg nodded.’”As you wish, Mistress. If you wish to conceal your name from the envy of your weaker fellows as you conceal your form, I shall use your nom de guerre when there are groundlings present.”
“Jesus,” Mark said. For his part Tach was annoyed that the Morakh had managed to learn that Moonchild’s real name (whatever that meant) was Isis Moon, which was more than he knew. He was also more than slightly amused.
“Splendid,” he said, shifting his grip on his burdens. “You run upstairs and change, and I’ll meet you at the Palace.”
“Where’ll you be?”
“I’ve an appointment first.” Durg picked Mark up, wheelchair and all, and carried him up the stairs.
Sara Morgenstern’s face was flushed almost as deeply as Mark’s, here in the late-afternoon gloom of Tach’s office. “So you did it,” she breathed.
He was aware of the scent ou her, sensed her excitement. He could barely contain his own. “It was simple,” he lied. “Tell me. How was the crime committed?”
He told her, with a minimum of embellishment, since concupiscence enjoyed a higher priority even than inflating his ego. And when he finished he saw to his amazement that her eager expression had collapsed on itself like a fallen souffle. “Aliens? It was aliens?” She could barely force the words out; her disappointment beat at his frontal lobes like surf. “Why yes, new-stage swarmlings in league with my cousin Zabb. And that’s an important part of this story you will write, the danger posed by this new manifestation by the Swarm. Because this means the Mother’s not been content to go and leave this world in peace.”
The bouquet he’d given her dropped to the floor. A dozen roses lay around her feet like trees flattened by an air-bursting bomb. “Andi,” she sobbed, face distorted, shellacked with tears. Then she was gone, heels ticking heedlessly down the corridor.
As they receded Tach knelt, tenderly picked up a single blood-red bud. I will never understand these Earthers, he thought.
Tucking the flower into the buttonhole of his sky-blue coat, he stepped delicately over the other flowers, shut the door, locked it, and went out whistling to join the celebration.
But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, Who is neither tarnished or afraid ....
—RAYMOND CHANDLER
Brennan woke suddenly, though the night was quiet and Jennifer was sleeping undisturbed beside him. He wondered what had woken him. Then he caught again a faint whiff of grease and gun oil, and sat up as the night was split by thunder and fire.
He pushed Jennifer off the right side of their futon and rolled to the left as a bullet seared his side and another ripped through his upper thigh. He gritted his teeth, ignoring the agony that lanced through his leg as he dove naked through the darkness. His first thought was to draw the fire away from Jennifer. His second was to get the bastard who was doing the shooting.
There was a problem with that. Brennan no longer kept weapons in the house. They were all locked away in the backyard shed as a repudiation of the life he’d once lived. He regretted this decision as a stream of bullets tracked him while he hurtled through the bedroom door into the interior of the house. There was the sound of smashing glass, and a stabbing winter wind struck Brennan as the assassin crashed through the bedroom window and followed him.
Brennan headed for the kitchen, stopped, and reversed his field as he heard a second hit man breaking down the front door. He turned for the door that led to the backyard. His only hope, he suddenly realized, was to get outside where he could use his hunting skills to neutralize the numerical superiority of his heavily armed opponents.
Brennan flung himself through the back door, dodging left and rolling on the ground. Another assassin was waiting for him, but Brennan went through the door too quickly for the killer to draw an accurate aim.
Brennan gritted his teeth against the pain lancing through his leg as he sprinted across his meticulously raked sand garden, ruining the serenity of the gravel-sculpted waves with footprints and bloodspatters. The assassin was too slow to track him, and a fusillade of shots ripped into the ground at Brennan’s heels as he dove into the thick brush surrounding his isolated country home.
The cold night air frosted Brennan’s breath as he stood naked on the frigid ground. His bare feet burned in the snow, and his thigh throbbed as it dripped blood, but he scarcely felt the pain as he crouched low in the snow-laden bushes. A second black-garbed figure joined the one who’d been lying in ambush in the backyard. They conversed in low unintelligible voices, and one of them gestured toward the forest in Brennan’s general direction. Neither seemed eager to go into the darkness.
Brennan grimaced, forcing his mind into dispassionate rationality. His biggest problem was time. His assailants could afford to wait him out. He was crouched naked in a frigid winter night that was already sapping all the warmth from his bones. He had to get to the shed behind the greenhouse before he became an immobile hunk of frozen meat.
Just as Brennan convinced himself to move, the assassins were joined by a third figure, who thumbed on a powerful flashlight and aimed it into the woods just to Brennan *s left. Brennan’s hopes sank even lower. Now it would be almost impossible to get away. The hit men could jacklight him and shoot him down the moment he moved. But if he stayed put, he’d freeze and save them the effort of pulling the triggers. He scrabbled through the snow with fingers stiffened by the cold and found a fist-size rock that was slick with ice. It was a poor excuse for a weapon, but it would have to do. He shifted silently as the beam from the flashlight swept closer. He stood to throw the rock; then suddenly something fell from the loft window overlooking the backyard.
A tiny figure, no more than ten inches high, landed on the shoulders of one of the assassins with a thin high-pitched scream. There was the gleam of metal flashing in the light of a slivered moon, and the figure screamed again and stuck what looked like a fork into the back of the assassin’s neck. The hit man yelled in pain mixed with fear and swatted at the creature. It fell to the cold ground in a pitiful little heap and lay unmoving.
Brennan’s heart fell as he realized that it was Pumpkinhead, one of the manikins he’d rescued from the tunnels under the Crystal Palace. There were about thirty of them, children of a strange joker they’d called Mother. They’d been Chrysalis’s eyes and ears through the city, but with Chrysalis dead and the Palace destroyed, Brennan had brought them to the country to live with him and Jennifer.
And now they were supplying the diversion Brennan had prayed for. They leapt screaming from the loft window, falling upon the assassins like living rain. They were armed with whatever feeble weapons they could find about the houseforks, kitchen knives, even sharpened pencils. They outnumbered the assassins ten to one, but they were all small and weak. Brennan watched with horror as the killers got over their initial surprise and swatted them down like kittens.
Curly Joe was the first to follow Pumpkinhead out of the loft window, and quickly into oblivion. He’d missed his intended target, who stomped him into the ground with bone-crunching force, quickly silencing his thin reedy cries. Kitty Kat managed to sink a kitchen knife into her target’s ankle before she was smashed by his flashlight. Lizardo jabbed his foe in the shoulder with a pencil but was too weak to do much more than break the hit man’s skin before the thug broke his scaly neck.
Brennan clamped down on his anger and pity and moved as quickly as he could, ignoring the pain running through his injured leg, ignoring the stones, sticks, and sharp slivers of ice that tore at his bare feet.
He flitted through the snow-shrouded trees like a ghost, circling around the A-frame and the greenhouse beyond. He stopped at the shed behind the greenhouse and cursed. He’d forgotten the key. He drew himself back to try to batter down the door, but a small hissing voice stopped him before he could strike.
“Boss! Boss, the key!”
It was Brutus, a foot-tall manikin with leathery skin that sagged in puffy pouches about his gray, hairless face. Brutus had settled into the role of the tribe’s chief. He was more intelligent than most of the homunculi, but even he was no brighter than a smart child. At the moment, however, he seemed to have assessed the situation with remarkable accuracy. He tossed the key to the shed’s padlock to Brennan, who caught it with cold clumsy fingers and tried to fit it into the lock.
Brennan fumbled a few times before the key finally clicked into place. He threw open the door and took down the bow that hung in a bracket nearby, quickly stringing it with the line dangling from one of its tips. It was only a hardwood recurve with a sixty-pound pull, but it was powerful enough. He grabbed the quiver that hung from the bracket and stepped back into the night.
Brennan no longer felt naked or cold. His anger spread from his gut outward, warming him as he ran over the snow back to the house, Brutus following on his heels.
The scene in the backyard was worse than Brennan had imagined. Tiny broken bodies violated the calm serenity of his Zen garden. Crushed and pulped, the manikins had fought fiercely and hopelessly against giants who could kill them with a single blow.
Brennan cried out in sorrow and rage, freezing one of the assassins in the act of squashing Bigfoot with the butt of his assault rifle. As the hit man looked around with his rifle lifted, Brennan sank down to one knee, drew shaft to ear, and loosed. The razor-tipped hunting arrow cut silently through the night and struck the assassin high on his chest. He fell backward, slamming against the wall of the A-frame, then crumpled forward and dropped his weapon.
An eerie cry of triumph rose from the living homunculi as Brennan drew a second shaft, shifted aim, and fired before the other hit men could react. He gut-shot his second target, who was swarmed by the remaining manikins. The killer screamed wordlessly and tried desperately, futilely, to crawl away.
The third assassin clicked off the flashlight he’d been using as a club, turned, and ran back into the house. Brennan fired and saw his shaft strike home, but the assassin kept moving.
Brennan nocked another arrow to his string and stood, listening. The assassin being pummeled by the manikins had finally stopped screaming. The first one Brennan had shot was dead.
“See to your people,” Brennan told Brutus, then limped over to the back door. He stood listening for a moment but could hear nothing move inside. He couldn’t wait long, even if the assassin was lying in ambush. He had to go in.
He scooped up the assault rifle dropped by the first assassin, then went through the doorway low and fast. The house was still dark, still quiet. From the front Brennan could hear the sound of a receding car engine.
He flicked on the bedroom light. The room was a shambles. The window had been shattered, and glass lay all over the floor. Bullets had stitched the walls, smashing the framed Hokusai and Yoshitosi woodblocks hanging over the futon where Jennifer lay quiet and still as death, awash in a sea of blood.
Men liked his new body. It was young, had two functioning hands, and best of all had ace capabilities that he’d quickly gotten use to. He could see how Philip Cunningham had enjoyed being Fadeout. But there was one problem with the body. It was not of his race. Kien wondered if that was the cause of the dreams he’d been having lately.
His father had been visiting him, speaking softly of the good old days back in Vietnam when Kien had worked in the family’s small store. He had always been a dutiful son, though the stifling life of a storekeeper in a small village had bored him unmercifully. But he had stayed on until his father had been murdered by the French in the last days of the Vietnamese rebellion against their European masters. Then, and only then, had Kien moved on to the city and joined the army of the fledgling Republic of Vietnam. Of course, he had had to change some things to blend in. There was no way he was going to have a successful military career with an ethnic Chinese name among the extremely prejudiced Vietnamese.
“Once again you have abandoned us,” Old Dad told him, waving the cane that he often used to emphasize his arguments. “First you turned your back on your family when you pretended to be Vietnamese and took the name Kien Phuc. And now you go even further. You’ve become a white man.”
It was difficult to argue with a dream, but Kien tried. “No, Father,” he explained patiently, “I have abandoned no one. This is all part of my plan, a misdirection to finish off my enemies.”
The spectre snorted, unconvinced. “You always were a tricky one, boy, I’ll give you that.”
“Tonight,” Kien said, “Captain Brennan dies. And his bitch who’d taken half my hand.” He smiled at his father. “That will be the second woman of his I’ve killed. Too bad he won’t live to realize that.”
“And after this Brennan?”
“After Brennan, then Tachyon. He knows too much, and he could easily discover my newest secret, that I still live in the body of Philip Cunningham. Tachyon has to die.”
“When?” his father asked.
“Soon. Today. When the Egrets return with the heads of Brennan and his bitch.”
Old Dad frowned. “It sounds like you’re planning on keeping that body,” he said.
Kien shook his new head. “Only until my enemies are dead.”
“Have you ever run out of enemies, my son?” Kien smiled.
Brutus climbed up the back of the car seat and dropped down onto the van’s passenger side. “Miss Jennifer has stopped bleeding, but she looks funny.”
“Funny?” Brennan asked, not daring to stop even for a moment to check on Jennifer’s condition.
“She’s getting clear, like she’s fading,” the manikin said. Brennan gritted his teeth, concentrating on his driving, afraid to give full vent to his feelings. Since entering the city limits, he’d kept the van at the speed limit. He couldn’t afford to be stopped by a traffic cop, not with Jennifer’s life hanging so tenuously that any delay might be fatal.
He’d driven like a madman down Route 17 before reaching the city. The old road was narrower and more twisting than the Thruway but was also darker, had less traffic, and was rarely patrolled by the state troopers. And rocketing along the road like a meteor on wheels, he needed a quiet, unpoliced road.
He fought to keep his attention on driving. His mind kept wandering back nearly sixteen years to a situation that was achingly similar to this one.
It was back in Nam. Brennan and his men had captured documents that contained enough evidence to connect General Kien solidly with all his various criminal activities, from prostitution to drug running to consorting with the North Vietnamese. But they never reached base with the evidence. Brennan and his men were ambushed while waiting for their pickup. It had all been a setup by Kien. In fact, the general personally put a bullet through the head of Sergeant Gulgowski and taken the briefcase with the incriminating documents. Brennan, momentarily paralyzed by a bullet-creased forehead, was lying in the jungle surrounding the landing zone. He’d witnessed the slaughter of all his men but had been unable to do anything about it.
It had taken Brennan nearly a week to walk out of the jungle. Once he reached base, exhausted and more than a little delirious from wounds, infection, and fever, he made the mistake of denouncing Kien to his commanding officer. For his trouble Brennan was nearly thrown in the stockade. Somehow he managed to control himself, and rather than a court-martial he was let off with a warning to leave General Kien alone.
That night he’d returned to Ann-Marie, his FrenchVietnamese wife. She’d thought he was dead. Pregnant with their first child, she cried in his arms with relief, then they made love, careful of their son swelling her usually lithe form. As they slept, Kien’s assassins crept into their bedroom to silence Brennan permanently. They missed their prime target, but Ann-Marie had died in her husband’s arms, and their son had died with her.
“There’s the entrance,” Brutus said, yanking Brennan back into the present.
He pulled into the curb before the Blythe van Rensselaer Memorial Clinic, threw the door open, and limped around the front of the van before the sound of screeching brakes had died on the still night air. A fine snow fell like a freezing mist, the tiny flakes clinging momentarily to Brennan’s face before melting in his body warmth.
He went through the double glass doors that whooshed open automatically as he approached and looked around the lobby. It was deserted except for an old joker who seemed to be sleeping in one of the uncomfortable-looking plastic chairs and a tired-looking nurse who was scanning a sheaf of papers behind the registration counter. He went up to her.
“Is Tachyon in? There’s an emergency—”
The nurse sighed and looked at Brennan with weary eyes old beyond her years. He wondered briefly how many people had said these very words to her, how many desperate life-and-death situations she’d had to deal with.
“Dr. Tachyon is busy now. Dr. Havero is on call.”
“I need Tachyon’s expertisé“ Brennan began, then stopped.
From somewhere came the faint whiff of salt and fish and briny water. From somewhere came the unmistakable tang of the sea.
Brennan whirled around. A cluster of vending machines was set off in the corner of the receiving area, offering soft drinks, soda, and candy. Standing before one of them was a huge figure in priestly robes, humming softly to himself as he made his selection.
“Father Squid!” Brennan cried.
The priest turned his head toward the reception desk, the nictitating membranes covering his eyes blinking rapidly in surprise. “Daniel?”
Father Squid was a stout joker, huge in his priestly cassock. A few inches taller than Brennan, he weighed about a hundred pounds more. He looked solid, not blubbery, with broad shoulders, a thick chest, and a comfortably padded stomach. His hands were large, with long, sinuous-looking fingers and lines of vestigial suckers on their palms. He had a fall of tentacles instead of a nose, and he always smelled faintly, not unpleasantly, of the sea.
He was Brennan’s friend and confidant. They’d known each other since Nam, where the priest had been a sergeant in the joker Brigade and Brennan a recondo captain. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Jennifer’s been shot,” Brennan said tersely, “and she’s fading. I need Tachyon.”
Father Squid moved quickly for a man his size. He rolled up to the desk with a smooth, fluid gait and said to the nurse, “Call Tachyon, now”
She looked from the priest, a well-known figure about Jokertown, to the mysterious stranger who’d just come barging in. “He’s resting,” she protested. “Dr. Havero—”
“Get Tachyon!” Father Squid barked in the voice he’d used to chivvy know-nothing joker kids when they hit the jungle for the first time, and the nurse jumped and reached for the phone. The priest turned to Brennan. “Bring Jennifer in. I’ll get a gurney.”
Brennan nodded and limped back to the van. “What’s up, boss?” Brutus piped.
“We’re going in,” Brennan said shortly. He gathered together the blanket wrapped about Jennifer and carefully lifted her from the van. She felt no heavier than a child in Brennan’s arms. She was fading away, unconsciously using her ace power to turn insubstantial to the world.
“Put her here,” Father Squid said, suddenly materializing behind him with a gurney. Brennan laid her down carefully. Brutus leapt onto the cart and clung to her blanket as Brennan and Father Squid wheeled her into the clinic’s receiving area.
Tachyon was standing at the desk, knuckling sleep from his lilac eyes. The diminutive alien was still wearing a wrinkled white lab coat that looked like it’d been slept in. “What’s this all about? I told you—” He turned toward the doors when they whooshed open. He stared for a moment, frowning, then his eyes went wide in astonishment. “Daniel!”
He took a quick step forward, arms wide as if to embrace Brennan, then stopped short as he saw the look on Brennan’s face and remembered the circumstances of their last parting. “It’s ... good to see you,” he finished somewhat lamely.
Brennan only nodded. The two men had been through a lot together, from battling the Swarm to fighting Kien and the Shadow Fists, but Brennan still found himself unable to forget what had happened the last time they’d seen each other.
It had been over a year ago. Brennan and Jennifer had tracked down Chrysalis’s murderer, Hiram Worchester, to a hotel in Atlanta. Tachyon, who had also been on the scene, made a fine little speech about how things should be handled in strict accordance with the law. Tachyon, of course, got his way since he backed up his speech by mind-controlling Brennan. Worchester, had later turned himself in to the police and copped a pea bargain that kept him out of prison. Chrysalis was dead, and Worchester had a suspended sentence. True, equitable justice.
Still, Brennan couldn’t let himself brood on the past. He had another life to worry about now. Jennifer’s.
For the first time, Tachyon looked down from Brennan to the gurney. “What happened?” he asked.
“Three men hit our home this morning,” Brennan said shortly.
Tachyon leaned over and peeled the layers of blankets away from Jennifer. She was translucently pale, the only color about her the crimson-soaked bandage that Brennan had wrapped around her forehead.
As the ace known as Wraith, Jennifer Maloy could turn insubstantial to the physical world. She could walk through walls, sink through floors, and pass through locked doors as quietly as a ghost. But now, wounded and unconscious, her mind adrift in the uncharted depths of a black coma, there was nothing to anchor her body to the physical world. She would fade until nothing was left.
Tachyon looked up at Brennan. “We’ll take her to a security room on the top floor,” Tachyon said in a low voice. “I’ll examine her thoroughly there.”
They went down the corridor, up an elevator to the top floor, then down another corridor that was dark and obviously rarely used. The room they took Jennifer to had a steelreinforced door and thick wire mesh on the windows. Once inside, Brennan carefully lifted her onto the bed and watched anxiously as Tachyon examined her.
“Will she be all right?” Brennan finally asked after Tachyon straightened up, a distant, worried expression on his face.” Her wounds,” Tachyon said, “are not life-threatening. You did a good job of field-dressing them, and I can carry on from there. She should be in no danger from them.” Brennan detected a hesitancy in Tachyon’s voice. “She will be all right?”
Tachyon’s eyes, as he looked straight at Brennan, were uncertain. “There is something else ... wrong. Terribly wrong. I could not touch her mind.”
Brennan stared at the alien physician. “She’s dead?” he asked in a low, dangerous voice. Father Squid put a steadying hand on Brennan’s right forearm as Brutus moaned softly from the head of the bed.
Tachyon shook his head. “Look at her, man. She still breathes. The blood still rushes through her veins. Her pulse is steady. Faint, but steady.”
Tachyon seemed to be speaking in riddles, but the years Brennan had spent in a Zen monastery made him used to that. Tachyon was making a koan, a Zen riddle designed to teach a subtle lesson about the nature of life.
Brennan’s mind seized on that familiarity of form like a life raft tossing about on the ocean of emotion raised by the possibility of Jennifer’s death. “When is life like death, and death like life?” he said so softly that Tachyon and Father Squid could barely hear him. He looked from the priest to the doctor. “When the mind is gone,” he finished.
Tachyon nodded. “That’s correct. The strange thing is, I can detect no organic reason for her ... emptiness.”
“Was she attacked on the mental plane?” Father Squid asked.
Tachyon shook his head. “I could detect no damage to indicate forcible entry and removal of her mind. It’s almost as if it’d been lost ... somehow ...”
“Can you find it again?” Brennan asked.
Tachyon looked at Brennan, uncertainty in his eyes. “I wouldn’t even know where to begin,” he said simply. Brennan groaned and grabbed the bed’s headboard with enough force to crush a section of its tubular piping. “There’s Trace,” Father Squid said.
“Trace?” Tachyon snorted and shook his head. “That charlatan!”
Brennan looked at Father Squid. “What are you talking about?”
“A mysterious ace who calls herself Trace. No one seems to know much about her, but she has strange mental capabilities. She can find nearly anything that’s been lost by ‘looking’ back on its pathway of existence.”
“Can she find lost minds?” Brennan asked. “I doubt it,” Tachyon said firmly.
Father Squid shook his head. “I don’t know,” the priest said. “She has other rather odd powers. Or claims to.”
“Get her,” Brennan said. “Get anyone who can help.”
“I’ll try,” Father Squid said doubtfully.
“If you can’t bring her here,” Brennan said forcefully, “I will.”
The priest shook his head. “No amount of coercion would ever work on Trace. If she wants to help you, fine. If not, nothing on earth will ever make her change her mind. And she is the wrong person to anger.”
“So am I,” Brennan said.
“Don’t make a hard situation more difficult,” Father Squid pleaded.
“Okay.” Brennan took deep breaths to calm himself. “Go make the call, or whatever it takes to get this Trace here. Tell her I’ll do anything I can, anything she wants, if she’ll only help.”
Father Squid, eyes closed, nodded. “I already have,” he said.
Latham chivvied the last bit of eggs Benedict onto his fork with the last half of the last muffin on the plate sitting on Kien’s desk. “Bloat is getting to be something of a problem,” he told Kien.
Kien poured himself another glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice from the decanter on his silver serving tray and washed down his caviar-covered muffin. He loved freshly squeezed orange juice almost as much as he loved wielding authority. Almost. Combining the two into a power breakfast was the perfect way to start the day. “Can we do without him?” he asked his lieutenant.
Latham considered the question as he chewed and swallowed, and finally shook his head. “Not yet. Perhaps soon.” He fastidiously wiped his lips with his linen napkin. “I created another three jumpers last week. Soon we’ll have a force big enough to deal with all the grotesque jokers Bloat has accumulated on the Rox.”
“Three?” Kien repeated, impressed. Latham had gone without sex, as far as Kien knew, for the first twenty years he’d known the man. Now that his ace had turned, the heretofore abstemious lawyer was acting like a damn rabbit. Still, it was all to Kien’s benefit in the long run. Latham created the jumpers, and Kien controlled them through his loyal lieutenant. Soon they’d be potent enough to add as a third main branch to the tree of the Shadow Fists: Immaculate Egrets, Werewolves, and jumpers.
Kien, in fact, had already availed himself of their services, obtaining through them this fine ace body that had once belonged to one of his less-loyal lieutenants.
The jangle of the telephone sitting on the edge of his desk cut through Kien’s reverie. “Yes,” he said quietly into the receiver as Latham looked on curiously.
“It’s Lao.”
Lao was the head of the assassin team he’d sent after Brennan and that bitch of his. Kien didn’t like Lao’s tone of voice.
“Yes.” Kien’s reply was sharper this time, and Lao hesitated. “We-we ran into some unexpected difficulties,” he finally said.
“Is he dead?” Kien asked in a hard voice. “The woman is ... I think ...”
“You ‘think,”‘ Kien ground out. He growled deep in his throat, his fury robbing him of the ability to articulate. He waited for the blaze of emotion to fade so he could speak clearly again. “All right. You and the others come in. I shall give you a chance to redeem yourselves.”
There was another long silence, and then Lao said, “The others are dead.”
Kien swallowed his fury. “All right. I will give you another chance. Do not fail me again.”
He didn’t hear Lao’s voluble reassurances as he hung up the phone. Good help, Kien reflected, was so hard to find these days. Wyrm was dead, Blaise-well, there was a possibility, but it was difficult to control the little bastard. The Whisperer-impossible to reach on short notice. Warlock and the Werewolves ... another possibility, but Kien had secrets, many secrets, that he didn’t want exposed. Latham, though, already knew most of them.
“I might,” Kien said, struck by sudden inspiration, “have need of your jumpers again. Round up three or four that you can trust.”
Latham nodded slowly. “All right. Three or four trustworthy, disposable jumpers.”
“‘Disposable,”‘ Kien repeated. “Good point.”
They could get rid of them after the job and keep Kien’s newest secrets even more closely held. Latham stood, folded his napkin down neatly on his breakfast tray, nodded, and left the room. Kien scarcely realized that he was gone. He was wondering what it would feel like to wear, like a newly purchased coat, the body of his longtime enemy.
Brutus jumped down from Brennan’s shoulder to the head of Jennifer’s bed. He laid a tiny hand on her forehead and shivered. “She’s cold, boss, real cold.”
Brennan could only nod. The wait was excruciating. Tachyon had dealt with Jennifer’s wounds as best he could, then had to leave on clinic business, leaving Brennan, Brutus, and Father Squid to their bedside vigil. It didn’t help that Father Squid could offer no suggestion as to how long they’d have to wait for Trace or whether she would even show up.
“Not much is known about her,” Father Squid explained, “other than the fact that she possesses mental abilities of the highest order. Some say she’s a hideous joker, others that she’s a beautiful ace. No one can say for sure because everyone who looks at her sees something different.” Brennan frowned. “How can that be?”
Father Squid shrugged massive shoulders. “It is apparently her will to vary her image with each beholder. No one can say why that is. Some claim that she’s mad.”
“Not very flattering,” said a voice behind Brennan, “to say about someone you need help from.”
Brennan started, hand reaching for the Browning High Power holstered in the small of his back. He had heard no one enter the hospital room, and with nerves stretched by worry verging on desperation, he acted without thinking. But even as he drew his gun, he lowered it.
Facing him, standing straight and unhurt, was Jennifer Maloy. He had to glance down at the real Jennifer lying comatose on the bed to make himself believe that the image before him was some kind of simulacrum. He glanced at Father Squid. He, too, seemed taken by some sort of vision. “Holll-eeee,” Brutus said. He jumped from the top of the bed’s headboard and landed lightly on Brennan’s shoulder. He clung on by winding a small fist in a lock of Brennan’s hair and then said in a low voice that only Brennan could hear. “It’s Chrysalis, boss. In the flesh. And bones. But it can’t be. She’s dead.”
“Guns won’t help, either,” the Jennifer simulacrum said. Brennan realized that the newcomer wasn’t speaking with Jennifer’s voice. “I could,” she said, “if it’s that important.”
And she was.
“Thank you for coming,” Father Squid said.
Trace dropped into the uncomfortable hospital chair placed next to Jennifer’s bed. “Nothing else to do,” she said. “Thought I’d drop by and see what you wanted.”
“How’d you get through the clinic’s security?” Brennan asked.
She shrugged. “It wasn’t hard.”
“Can you help us?” Father Squid asked.
She looked at the priest, then Brennan. Brennan s eyes locked with hers, and he felt a shiver run down his spine, as if she were holding his naked brain in her hands. Her eyes shone like cateyes in the dark, and then they were Jennifer’s again, and she smiled a bright Jennifer smile. “I see,” she said. “I suppose I could take a look around. But what’s in it for me?”
“Anything,” Brennan said. “Anything you want.”
She looked at him with Jennifer’s face in a way that tore the heart from him. “Anything?” Trace repeated, giving the word a light, provocative lilt that made Brennan clench his teeth.
“Anything that I can give,” he said. “If you’re as powerful as you claim to be, you should realize the extent—and sincerity-of my offer.”
She shrugged. “Just wanted to hear you say it in words. Words make things seem more real to you people.”
“But not to you?” Brennan asked.
“Words have their place. But I can see beneath their surface, down to their real meanings.” She frowned momentarily. “Your words are real enough. You mean what you say.”
Abruptly, Trace sat forward, turning her attention from Brennan and focusing on Jennifer. There was a long uncomfortable silence, then Trace sat back in the chair again, nodding. She looked at Brennan. “You’re right. She’s gone. She must be lost, wandering somewhere. The body won’t last much longer without the mind.”
“Can you help?” the priest said. “I suppose.”
“Will you?”
“Oh, I guess.”
Brennan realized that he was holding his breath and released it in a long sigh.
“In exchange for what?” Father Squid asked.
“Oh—” she waved it away—“we’ll talk about that later.” She turned her gaze on Brennan. “Go away now. Your brain is emitting too much static. I can’t concentrate.”
“All right.” Brennan nodded at Father Squid who followed him and Brutus out of the room into the corridor beyond. “You should have decided upon a settlement back then,” Father Squid told him. “Trace has been known to exact a heavy price for her services.”
“I got that idea,” Brennan said, “but the important thing is that she find Jennifer’s consciousness and bring it back to her body. I can settle with her later.”
“I hope it will be that easy,” Father Squid said as Brennan picked up Brutus and unzippered his leather jacket. Brutus snuggled down inside it and reclosed the zipper until only his head was showing.
“Easy or not,” Brennan said, “if she brings Jennifer back, we’ll settle fairly. Now tell me what you know about Kien’s death.”
“You suspect him?”
“Always.”
Father Squid nodded ponderously. “I don’t know much of anything beyond that which was in the papers. It was a heart attack, apparently, sudden and unexpected. Wait a minute,” he said, his long, slender fingers waving in sudden excitement. “There was something else. I remember talking with Cosmo Cosgrove-you know, from the mortuary”
Brennan nodded. The Cosgrove brothers were Jokertown’s preeminent morticians.
“Now,” Father Squid continued, “the Cosgrove Mortuary did not handle the affair, but, well, apparently morticians talk among themselves, and Cosmo told me that Kien’s mortician mentioned that there was something irregular about the body.”
“‘Irregular’?” Brennan asked. “Like what?”
Father Squid shrugged. “He knew no details. Just that there was something odd about the corpse.”
“I’ll bet,” Brennan muttered. “Is Fadeout the head of the Shadow Fists now?”
The priest nodded. “As far as I can tell. The Fists have kept a very low profile in recent months. As profitable-and cold-blooded-as ever, of course, but the Shadow Fist Society has been avoiding rather than seeking headlines recently.”
Brennan nodded. “That sounds like Fadeout, all right.”
He’d try to operate as circumspectly as possible. He’d consider it a good business practice. He looked into the priest’s eyes. “Thanks, Bob,” he said.
“For what?”
“For being here when I needed help.”
“What else is a priest for? I still have high hopes for your soul, Daniel.”
“At least someone does. Keep an eye on Jennifer for me.” Father Squid nodded and went back into the room. Brennan and Brutus went down the corridor, took the elevator back to the first floor, and went out into the night.
Brutus, huddled under Brennan’s leather jacket, shivered. “I’m cold, boss.”
“Don’t worry,” Brennan said. It had started to snow again, and the wind was blowing hard. Brennan turned his face into the driving snow as he headed toward his van. “I’m sure things are going to warm up very soon now”
“Shit,” Brutus said, and huddled down even more.
Kien looked up from his desk when Rick and Mick entered the office. The joker brothers were Siamese twins, of a sort. They had one pair of legs and one trunk, though their body bifurcated halfway through the rib cage, giving them two chests and two sets of arms and shoulders. Though they were impressive physical specimens, Kien sometimes thought that they didn’t have half a brain between them.
“Guy here to see you,” Rick said.
Mick looked at his brother with a hurt expression. “I was going to tell Fadeout that. I spoke to the guy, after all.”
“You spoke to him, but it was my idea to see the boss first before letting him in.”
“Your idea? I—”
“Please,” Kien said, holding up a hand. It was times like this that he missed Wyrm. “Does the gentleman have a name?”
They both thought about it, said “Cowboy” simultaneously, then glared at each other.
Kien stiffened. That was the name Daniel Brennan used when he’d gone undercover and joined the Shadow Fists in an attempt to bring them down from within. His ploy failed because he blew his cover to save Tachyon’s life, but he managed to do a fair bit of damage to the Fists before giving himself away.
Kien knew that Brennan and Cunningham had been chummy. Now, he thought, he’d discover exactly how chummy. “Show him in,” Kien told his joker bodyguards.
He made himself sit calmly when his longtime enemy entered the room. Brennan was wearing a mask, a simple black hood, that he took off after Rick and Mick had left the room, shutting the door behind them. He looked fit and tanned despite the winter season. He hadn’t gained a pound since Vietnam, though his face had more lines in it and his hair was flecked with grey.
He looked around the room curiously, then at Kien. His eyes were as flat and hard as Kien remembered them, though they had an even greater bleakness, as if a major new worry was gnawing at him. His bitch, Kien noticed, wasn’t with him. Maybe the hit hadn’t been a total washout after all. “Don’t you think taking the man’s office when you took over his organization was a bit much?” Brennan asked suddenly.
Kien shrugged and smiled. This was his hidden hole card, the ace up his sleeve. Brennan thought he was Fadeout. That was all the advantage Kien needed to finally crush his long-time foe. “Why not? It’s a nice place and the lease suddenly became open. Besides, I felt that it would help provide for a smoother transition of power.”
Brennan nodded, as if he bought the explanation, then sat down without being invited. Annoyed, Kien opened his mouth to say something, then suddenly closed it. Cunningham apparently tolerated such behavior.
“Back in town for a visit?” Kien asked in as casual a voice as possible.
Brennan nodded. “Someone hit my house this morning.” Kien put a shocked look on his face. “Any idea who?”
“I would guess Kien,” Brennan said steadily, “if he wasn’t dead.”
Kien nodded. “Good guess, but he’s dead. I saw his body myself.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“I’ve heard,” Brennan said, “that there was something a bit odd about the corpse. Something that usually doesn’t happen to heart-attack victims.”
Kien shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Ah, the severed head, you mean,” he guessed.
Brennan nodded silently.
“Well,” Kien said, suddenly inspired to mix truth and lies in equal proportions, “there was a lot of information locked up in his brain.”
“Deadhead?” Brennan asked.
Kien tried to look defensive. “There was a lot I needed to know”
Brennan let out a deep breath. “I guess I can believe that.”
Deadhead was an insane ace with the capability of accessing people’s memories by eating their brains. When Kien had set the trap to catch the disloyal Philip Cunningham, he used his own corpse as bait, having been jumped into the body of Leslie Christian. He then had his head removed from his own body so Cunningham couldn’t feed the brain to Deadhead and uncover his plot.
“If Kien didn’t send the killers, then who did?” Brennan asked, half to himself.
“Well, Captain, you’ve made a few enemies along the way.” Kien paused as if deep in thought. “And I can’t pretend to have total control over the Shadow Fists, particularly the Egrets. Maybe elements loyal to Kien’s memory finally tracked you down and tried to eliminate you.”
“Maybe,” Brennan said tightly.
“And you know,” said Kien, as if struck by sudden inspiration, “maybe these same elements will be going after Tachyon as well. Maybe someone should warn him.”
“Maybe,” Brennan said thoughtfully. “I’ll mention it to Tachyon when I go back to the clinic to check on Jennifer.”
“So you’ve seen Tachyon already?” Kien asked. Brennan nodded abstractedly. “I took Jennifer to the clinic. She was wounded during the hit.”
“Not too seriously, I hope,” Kien said as he stifled his glee.
Brennan stood. “No, not too seriously.”
Kien rose to walk him to the door. “I’m sure she’ll pull through. And if you need anything, just call.”
Brennan slipped the hood back on and stared at him with his hard unblinking gaze. “All right,” he said, and left the office, going by Rick and Mick who were arguing because Rick couldn’t concentrate on his comic book while Mick had the television on.
Kien watched him go, a smile of sudden unexpected glee on his face. He had managed to maneuver all of his targets into the same basket. Now he could strike once and get rid of them all.
“What’s up, boss?” Brutus asked when Brennan returned to the van.
Brennan glanced down at the homunculus, who was huddled against the cold in one of Brennan’s old work shirts that he’d dragged up from the back. “I don’t know,” Brennan said. “But I don’t believe that things are as they seem. As is usual in this town.”
He started the van and pulled away from the curb. “Where’re we headed?” Brutus asked.
Brennan glanced at him as he drove into an alley that bordered Kien’s apartment building. “I’m going back to the clinic,” Brennan said, “but you’re staying behind to keep an eye on things here.”
Brutus stretched, peering over the edge of the dashboard. “It looks cold out there,” he said.
“All the more reason to find a way inside as soon as you can.”
“Right.”
Brennan pulled up next to a pile of overflowing garbage cans and opened the van’s passenger door.
“So what am I supposed to be watching?” Brutus asked. “Cunningham.”
“Why?”
Brennan shook his head. “I’m not sure. Cunningham seemed ... odd. Not normal. I can’t really put my finger on it, but things aren’t right. He called me ‘Captain.’ He’s never called me that before. There’s no way he could even know I’d been a captain in the army ... unless ...” Brennan shook his head again.
Brutus grunted and jumped down from the van. The sun had risen, but the sky was dark with clouds and the promise of snow. A cold wind cut through the alley as Brutus scurried behind a pile of garbage, mumbling to himself. Brennan leaned out of the van’s passenger door as Brutus disappeared in the trash.
“And Brutus.”
The manikin poked his head from around a greasestained brown-paper bag. “Yeah?”
“Be careful.”
The homunculus smiled. “You too, boss,” he said, then vanished into the garbage.
Brennan pulled the door shut and drove off, telling himself not to worry. Brutus had been one of the Chrysalis’s best spies. He knew how to take care of himself.
Chrysalis. His thoughts turned to her for the first time in quite a while. They were linked inextricably with the events that had occurred the last time he’d seen Tachyon, when he confronted the doctor, Jay Ackroyd, the EL, and Hiram Worchester, Chrysalis’s murderer.
Ackroyd had been incensed with Brennan. For a man neck-deep in a sordid and violent business, he had a more than somewhat unrealistic view about violence. But Brennan didn’t hold that against him. He never held a man’s ideals against him.
But Tachyon. Tachyon had missed an important point with his speech about slavish obedience to the letter of the law. Laws are only words written on paper, words that change on society’s whim and are interpreted differently daily by politicians, lawyers, judges, and policemen. Anyone who believes that all laws should always be obeyed would have made a fine slave catcher. Anyone who believes that all laws are applied equally, despite race, religion, or economic status, is a fool.
The only thing a man can do is decide for himself what is right or wrong and what must be done to combat the wrong. And then he must face the consequences of his decision, no matter what they are.
Brennan pulled up before the Jokertown Clinic, killed the engine, and got out of the van. He walked through the sliding glass doors that led into the receiving area and entered chaos.
A half-hysterical woman was shouting to a harried-looking nurse that no, dammit, her baby was always that sort of suffocated purplish color, but still, her gills just weren’t working right, while another white-uniformed nurse was explaining to an excessively furry man that Blue Cross usually didn’t consider electrolysis a necessary medical procedure, no matter how badly he wanted a career in the food-service industry. Another joker-female and quite attractive if you discounted the mottled, flaking condition of her skin was sitting reading an eight-month-old copy of National Geographic while her toddlers slithered after each other in and out of the chairs, circling around a gaunt, hollow-eyed old joker who was coughing continually and spitting up unhealthy-looking gobs of something into a styrofoam cup clutched firmly in his chelate forepaws.
Someone behind Brennan muttered, “Excuse me,” in a harried voice, and swept by. It was Tachyon. He was accompanied by a woman who was attractive in a gaunt, hard-edged sort of way, despite the eye patch and the jagged scar that ran down her right cheek. She moved in a graceful economical manner that suggested she knew how to handle herself in almost any situation. That was rather a necessity for anyone who spent a lot of time around the doctor.
“Tachyon.”
He turned with a put-upon sigh that caught in his throat as he recognized Brennan and he frowned at the expression on Brennan’s face. “What is it? Is Jennifer—”
“We have to talk,” Brennan said, glancing at the woman. “Somewhere in private.”
She looked curiously from Tachyon to Brennan and back again to the alien. Tachyon gestured at her vaguely with his small delicate-looking hands. “Daniel, this is Cody Havero, Dr. Cody Havero. Cody, this is, uh, a friend of mine ...”
As usual, Tachyon’s mouth had worked faster than his brain, mentioning Brennan’s real first name. Brennan, exlast year as the mysterious bow-and-arrow vigilante known as Yeoman, preferred to keep such information private. “Daniel Archer,” Brennan supplied.
Tachyon nodded, and Havero offered her hand. “What is it? Is Jennifer all right?” Tachyon repeated. Brennan shook his head as he released Havero’s hand. “I haven’t had a chance to check on her yet. There’s something else we have to discuss. Immediately.”
Havero glanced again from Tachyon to Brennan. “I can take a hint,” she said. “I have to go over some patient histories with Nurse Follet at the front desk. We can finish our discussion after you two are done.”
“Right,” Tachyon said. “Thank you, Cody.” He glanced around the reception area. “Come,” he said to Brennan, taking his arm. “The coffee machine seems to be deserted. We can talk while I get some caffeine into my system. It looks like it’s going to be one of those days.”
Mother and gilled baby rushed past them with a sympathetic nurse, and the squealing joker children played tag around them as they walked by, but the area around the vending machine was deserted. Tachyon put eighty cents into the coffee machine and got a small paper cup full of a black, strong-smelling liquid.
“Can I get one for you?” Tachyon asked Brennan, but Brennan shook his head. “That’s right,” Tachyon said. “You take tea. I can have some brought from my office—”
Brennan shook his head again. “Let’s get down to it, Doctor.”
Tachyon looked at him, hurt in his lilac eyes. “We used to be friends, Daniel. We fought the Swarm togetherl Wé“
“We fought many battles together, Doctor,” Brennan said stiffly. “That didn’t keep you from walking into my mind and taking it when you saw fit.”
“I had to do that! You were going to kill Hiram, and Jay wanted you sent to jail! Burning Sky! What was I supposed to do?”
“There are no easy answers,” Brennan said. “Neither of us follows the herd. Both of us do what we have to do. Both of us have to live with the consequences of our actions.”
“We were friends,” Tachyon whispered.
“Once,” Brennan said.
There was a moment’s silence, and Tachyon looked down into his coffee cup. He took a sip and grimaced. “Now it’s cold,” he said. “Well. What did you want to see me about?”
“I think that Kien may have been behind the attack,” Brennan said.
Tachyon stared at him. “Nonsense,” he snorted. “Kien is dead.”
Brennan shook his head. “Maybe. But maybe he’s reaching out from the grave. Maybe he gave his underlings orders to kill all his enemies when he died.”
Tachyon frowned, considering it. “Why would they wait over a year to strike?”
Brennan shrugged. “I don’t know. But remember. You were on Kien’s hit list too.”
“I was, wasn’t L” Tachyon sighed. “Yet another complication in an already too-complicated life.” He looked at Brennan and was about to add something more, but a shout from the reception desk made them both turn and stare.
“Tachyon!” Havero called out suddenly. “Alert the staff, stat! Something’s—”
Even as Havero spoke, there was a commotion at the door. An ambulance, lights flashing, sirens wailing, roared up and braked to a sudden halt. Havero reached over the counter, punched a button on the hospital intercom, and was reeling off orders as the ambulance attendants leapt out of the vehicle. One ran around to the rear of the ambulance; the other approached the clinic’s double glass doors, which whooshed open as he neared.
“Gang fight,” the driver cried. “Killer Geeks and Demon Princes. We’ve got a load, and there’s more on the way.” Tachyon cut across the reception area, Brennan on his heels. The driver headed back to help the attendant open the vehicle’s back door. They slid a blanket-covered gurney from the ambulance, and Havero, standing in front of the reception counter, screamed, “Everyone get down!”
Brennan and Tachyon reacted with the reflexes of seasoned combat veterans. They hit the polished linoleum floor as the figure on the ambulance gurney sat up, threw his blanket off, and emptied a clip from an Uzi into the reception area at full automatic.
Brennan rolled as he hit the floor. In a frozen second he saw the bullets whine through the reception area like a swarm of angry bees. The old man spitting into the cup was stitched across the chest. He hunched forward and slid off the chair, surprise and pain on his face as his expression froze and his eyes glazed.
The woman reading the National Geographic was unharmed until she saw her children cut down as they stood rooted in terror in the center of the room. She leaped to her feet, an endless hysterical scream ripping out of her throat. The furry guy was lucky, too, but Cody Havero’s luck was miraculous. The gunman seemed drawn by her scream and half instinctively swept his weapon in her direction. But she leaned backward, doing a strange sort of limbo, and Brennan saw out of the corner of his eye that most of the burst punched through the counter above her.
By then, he had reached the Browning holstered in the small of his back. Stomach pressed tight to the floor, he drew and aimed with one fluid motion, almost forgetting that he had a gun, replaying in his brain the instant coordination of muscle and mind that was his when firing a bow. He held the pistol out before him, both arms extended, hands clasped loosely, muscles relaxed, eyes almost closed. He squeezed off a single shot, and the man sitting on the stretcher bucked backward. Brennan’s mind trapped the moment like an insect encased in amber. He played it back as the man fell and saw a round black hole punched in the middle of the assassin’s forehead.
“Christ!” one of the ambulance attendants swore, and fumbled for something buttoned up under his coat. Brennan now knew that he had plenty of time, and he knew that they needed some questions answered. He shot both attendants in their kneecaps.
Tachyon was on his feet before they hit the floor. The hideous screaming of the joker mother suddenly ended, and she slumped into the pool of her children’s blood. Brennan glanced at Tachyon.
“Told her to sleep,” the little alien said shortly. He stood, fury clenching his delicate face into a hard, angry fist. “Ancestors! In my clinic. My clinic!”
“Better see to Dr. Havero,” Brennan said. “I think she took a round.”
Havero straightened as Tachyon ran toward her and waved him off. “Two rounds,” she managed to say. “Just flesh wounds. I’m all right.”
Tachyon changed direction in midstride, heading for the leaking bodies of the joker children. Brennan didn’t bother. He could still see the snapshots his mind had taken of the bullets ripping their bodies, and he knew there was no hope. He went to Havero. She had two flesh wounds, upper arm and calf. The bullets had missed all bones and major blood vessels.
“How’d you do it?” Brennan asked her as Tachyon moved helplessly from corpse to corpse.
She shifted her weight and grimaced. “The old Havero luck,” she said.
Brennan nodded. I should be so lucky, he thought. The reception room was suddenly the focal point of an explosion of activity. Brennan knew that he had little time to waste. Someone had assuredly called the police, and he couldn’t be here when they arrived. Also, maybe this was just a diversion. Maybe the real attack had gone through a side entrance and up a freight elevator to a supposedly secure room on the clinic’s upper floor.
He walked calmly toward the two hit men still writhing on the floor. Neither looked very happy, but then, neither did Brennan.
“Talk,” he said to the one who had been the spokesman. “I don’t know, I don’t know nothing, man.”
“How about a busted elbow to go with your blown knee?” Brennan asked, aiming the Browning.
“No, man, I swear, I swear to Christ!”
Brennan aimed his pistol. The hit man shrieked and blubbered, but his cries didn’t stop Brennan. Tachyon did. “He’s telling the truth,” Tachyon said. The alien sounded bone-weary but not especially surprised at the violence that entangled him. “They’re freelance muscle, hired by the man on the gurney whom you shot. And he’s not going to talk anymore.”
Brennan nodded and holstered his gun. “Yes he is, in a way,” Brennan said. He hunkered over the body and tore off its shirt, pointing to the bulky bandage high on the left shoulder blade. “I hit the only survivor of the attack on my country place right about there. This was his second try.” He stood, reached into his back pocket, and took out an ace of spades. He scaled it at the body, and it stuck, face up, to the blood running from the dead man’s forehead. “Something for your friends from the law to think about when they finally get here from the doughnut shop,” he said, and turned away.
“Wait a minute,” Tachyon said. “Where are you going?”
Brennan glanced overhead. “To check on things.” Tachyon nodded. “I understand. Be careful.”
Brennan nodded. Avoiding the lumbering elevator, he took the stairs up to the clinic’s top floor. The corridor was dark and quiet. He went down it like a skulking cat, and when he flung open the door to Jennifer’s room, a startled Father Squid whirled to stare at him.
“What was all that commotion down below?” the priest asked.
“Another hit,” Brennan said briefly, holstering his Browning. “Everyone all right?”
Brennan shook his head. “I think they need you down there, Father.”
The priest crossed himself and dashed out of the room. Trace was sitting in a chair by Jennifer’s bed, looking like a statue of the wounded woman. Jennifer herself had faded to the point of translucence. She looked like a serene, beautiful corpse.
Brennan winced. This couldn’t be doing her any good. He started to say something, but Trace looked up and rubbed tiredly at her eyes with the heels of her hands.
She looked at Brennan. “I found her,” she said wearily. “She’s lost, afraid and wandering. She wouldn’t come back with me.”
“You have to bring her back,” Brennan said.
Trace shrugged. “I can’t. She doesn’t trust me.” She looked at Brennan speculatively. “But maybe you can. If you have the guts.”
Brennan started to answer her, but she held up her hand. “Don’t be so quick to commit yourself,” she said. “I know you’re tough and brave and all that, but physical bravery has little to do with this.” She pursed her lips and looked at Brennan seriously. “Your Jennifer was in a deep dream state when you were attacked. Instead of snapping back into her body, her mind somehow shunted itself off into another plane-another dimension. I suspect that this has something to do with the nature of her ace powers, that when she turns immaterial, she somehow shifts through adjacent dimensions.”
“And this time,” Brennan said, “only her mind shifted. Her body stayed behind, and she can’t find her way back to it.”
“Correct,” said Trace.
“What’s this other dimension like?” Brennan asked. “Now it’s just a gray void, but that’s because Jennifer’s conscious mind is dormant. Once a waking mind enters it, it’ll become the living manifestation of the archetypes that govern that mind.”
Brennan frowned. “I see. I think. But what’s so dangerous about that?”
“If you enter this dimension, it’ll become populated by the driving images, by the symbolic figures that stalk your subconscious. Do you dare face them?”
Brennan hesitated. He had no great desire to examine closely the hidden secrets of his mind. But it seemed he had no choice. He nodded.
Trace smiled, but there was little humor in it. “All right,” she said. “I guess we’ll get to see how brave you really are.”
Kien got up, walked to his office door, and closed it, shutting out the annoying beep-boop-bap coming from the antechamber where Rick and Mick were playing Donkey Kong on the Atari.
It baled Kien why anybody would waste his time like that, but he allowed lesser men their divertimenti. He had his own plans to occupy his mind. He should be hearing from Lao about the hit on the clinic at any time now. If Brennan and that arrogant little space bastard were dead, fine. But Kien had the feeling that it wouldn’t be that easy, that he would need a more subtle web to ensare them. Then, spiderlike, he could suck out their juices and cast aside their desiccated corpses like yesterday’s garbage.
Yes, he told himself as he sat back in his chair, feet on his desk and fingers interlaced behind his head, nice image. I like it. I am a spider, a great, powerful emperor spider who sits in the center of his web, patient and cunning, reading the vibrations made by lesser men as they scurry like trembling flies from strand to strand. I pick those to reward and those to use and discard. I’ve come a long way since Vietnam and the store that was my father’s.
His father, Kien realized, had frequently been on his mind lately. It wasn’t like him to be obsessive about the past. Thinking about the past did no good. It couldn’t change things. It did no good to brood about the old man’s death, the way Kien had found him lying slaughtered on the dirt floor of their store. Kien had never had much as a child. He endured poor food and patched clothing, and was jeered at by the other children in the village as much for his pauperish appearance as for being Chinese. But the French bastards who murdered his father took what little money the old man had accumulated, dug the strongbox right out of the secret place where Old Dad had kept it hidden. They left nothing for Kien. That was why he had to change his name and go to the city. He didn’t desert his family. He did what he could for them—
There was a sound, a knock on his door, and Kien started. “Come in,” he said.
It was Rick and Mick. “Just got word from your informant on the police force,” Rick said.
“He kept an eye out like you told him,” Mick added, “and went to the scene when the call came that something was going down at the Jokertown Clinic.”
“And?” Kien prompted.
Rick and Mick looked at each other, and Kien realized that neither wanted to be the bearer of bad tidings. They nudged each other a couple of times, and Rick finally came out with it. “Lao’s dead. Shot once through the forehead. There was an ace of spades on his body.”
Kien clenched his teeth. “And Brennan and Tachyon?” Rick and Mick shook their heads. “Don’t think they were hurt. Lao got some joker—kids, a joker geezer. He also wounded one of the doctors. Tachyon’s still at the clinic, but from what the witnesses said, this Brennan guy just disappeared. He kneecapped the guys Lao hired to help him and left them behind for the cops.”
“But they don’t know nothin’,” Mick was quick to add. “They’re not Fists. They’re not connected to you.”
They seemed to expect some kind of explosion, but Kien just nodded. “I’d planned for this possibility” he said. “If you want something done right,” he mused aloud, “you have to do it yourself.”
He stood, clasped his hands behind his back, and started to pace around the room. “Tachyon’s no problem,” he muttered. “I can deal with the little fool anytime I want to. It’s Brennan I have to track down as soon as possible.” He fixed Rick and Mick with a stare. “Where would he go after the attack?” Rick and Mick looked at each other, looked back at Kien, and shrugged.
“He would be worried about his bitch. Yes. His sentimentality would get the best of him, and he’d head right for her side to make sure that she was all right.” He stopped, stared at a three-tiered glass stand that held part of his fabulous collection of ancient and rare Chinese ceramics. “He said that she _ was at the clinic, but they wouldn’t just put her in an open ward. She’d be somewhere that they thought was safe.” He paced back to his desk. “Where, precisely, would that be?”
Someone behind him sneezed. “Bless you,” Kien said reflexively. “I didn’t sneeze, boss,” Rick said. “Neither did I,” Mick added.
Kien whirled around. “Then who did?”
“I think it came from there,” Rick said, pointing at the vase on the middle tier of the glass stand.
It was a green-glazed vase with a black background dating from the Yung Cheng period. Very old and extremely rare in color and form, it was one of the cornerstones of Kien’s art collection. He frowned, stood, and went back to the glass stand. He peered into the vase.
Inside was a manikin, a wrinkled, leathery-looking homunculus whose skin seemed about five sizes too large for his body. He had both hands clamped over his nose and mouth, and tried to stifle another sneeze. It came out with a tiny blatting noise. He wiped his nose on his arm and stared back up at the huge face looking down at him.
“Oh, shit,” he said.
The city was afire, though it did not burn.
Brennan had never felt such heat. The air shimmered with it. It rose off the pavement in waves, licking his face like the fetid tongue of a great panting beast. It crawled over his body, sending tendrils of sweat trickling down his back and legs. If he had been of a religious bent, he’d suspect that this was hell. He remembered the motto commonly found embroidered on jackets favored by combat vets in Nam: I’m going to heaven when I die ’cause I’ve already spent my time in hell.
Maybe this wasn’t hell, but it was the city of Brennan’s worst nightmares. He moved on down the alley, stepping over the bubbles of asphalt oozing through the cracks in the pavement. The buildings surrounding him were decaying, the streets buckling and choked with uncollected trash. It was a ghost town. No one but Brennan walked the garbageinfested streets.
He emerged from the alley and looked up at the rusted and bent sign hanging overhead from the streetlamp: Henry Street. The Crystal Palace, then, should be ...
Brennan looked down the street, and there it was. The Palace still stood in this place. And if the Palace still stood ... Brennan found himself drawn down the street like a sailor pulled helplessly to siren-infested rocks.
The door to the Palace was unlocked. Inside it was dark and cool. Brennan felt a shiver go through him as the sweat running down his face and body suddenly evaporated, leaving him cold and clammy.
Maybe it was the coolness of the Palace’s interior that caused the shiver. Maybe it was the sight of her sitting in her customary table in her customary high-backed chair, barely visible in the dark, her customary glass of amaretto sitting by her hand.
“Chrysalis,” Brennan whispered.
She looked at him, the expression on her fleshless face as unreadable as ever. Chrysalis was a woman of blood and bone, her skin and flesh invisible, her muscles mostly so.
Some found her hideous. Brennan had been fascinated by her.
“Is it really you?” he asked.
“Who else would be sitting in this place, in this body, drinking amaretto from a crystal glass?” the spectre asked. Brennan shook his head. She hadn’t really answered his question. Perhaps the rules governing this skewed dimension didn’t allow her to. Or perhaps she was forbidden to speak clearly by the rules that governed his skewed subconscious. “You knew everything that happened in Jokertown,” Brennan said. “What about in this place?”
“I know you,” she replied. “I know something of that which goes on in your mind.”
“Can you help me?” he asked. “Can you help me find Jennifer?”
If the spectre was upset by his mention of her rival, she didn’t show it. “Look in the center of things,” she told him. “You will find that which is most precious to you in the arms of your greatest enemy. But be careful. You are not alone in this world.”
“Is this place,” he asked her, “real?”
“It seems real enough to me,” she replied.
“Me too,” Brennan said in a small voice. He hesitated. He wanted to touch her, but somehow he didn’t think that was a very good idea. He was afraid that she would dissipate like smoke. Worse, he was afraid that she would feel warm and alive, like solid flesh. “I have to go,” he finally said. Chrysalis nodded. “Another quest,” she said as Brennan backed out of the room. “Be careful, my archer. Be very, very careful.”
It seemed to Brennan that she looked sad, but there was nothing he could do to cure her sadness. He just took a piece of it with him as he left the Palace for the last time.
Outside, the sun was so bright that he had to blink against its glare. It hadn’t gotten any cooler, either, and he broke out in an instant sweat as he stood outside the Palace considering his next move.
If he was to take Chrysalis’s advice, he should look for the “center of things.” That, unfortunately, was a rather nebulous description. He started up the street, thinking about it, and then he noticed that another part of Chrysalis’s prophecy had come true.
He wasn’t alone.
There were people on the street. Most were wearing the blue satin jackets of the Immaculate Egret gang, or the face masks of the Werewolves. They stood singly or in small groups, in front of, behind, and all around him.
Brennan reached for the Browning holstered in the snug of his back but came away empty. His gun, it seemed, hadn’t been translated to this place with him. Then he suddenly realized that it might not matter whether he had his gun.
Add the men surrounding him were already dead.
Add were bloody. All had open wounds. Most had arrows sticking in chests, throats, backs, or eyes. Their faces, as Brennan watched them approach, were mostly familiar, and he realized that these were the men he had kidded since coming back to the city.
There were a dot of them.
Brennan was momentarily frozen, unable to decide upon a plan of action as the dead men approached. There was a sudden movement, a sudden flicker of motion that Brennan caught out of the corner of his eye. He whirled to face it head-on and, saw a ghastly-grinning man with a horribly tattooed face tanding within arm’s length of him.
It was Scar, the teleporting ace and gang deader who Brennan had kidded when he’d first come to the city. Scar’s face was tattooed with the scarlet and black whorls that were the mark of the Cannibal Headhunters. He was a sadistic ace who took vast delight in utilizing his power to help him slowly slice up his victims with a straight razor. “I’m back, asshole,” he said in a ghastly whisper through the throat that Brennan had crushed with a bowstring. “And this time I’ve got help.” He gestured at the company of dead men slowly surrounding them in the brutal heat.
“You’ll need it,” Brennan said with a confidence he didn’t totally feed. “I already kidded you once.”
Scar hissed in rage, disappeared, and reappeared right in Brennan’s face. He slashed out with his straight razor. Brennan ducked and half blocked the blow, but not before the razor cut across his chest, slicing his sweat-soaked T-shirt and scoring the flesh underneath. Scar disappeared, then flicked back into existence half a dozen feet from Brennan.
“Time to play,” the sadistic ace said.
Brennan felt blood mingle with the sweat running down his chest, and he suddenly realized that he could die in this place. He looked around quickly, spotted a narrow gap between two dead Egrets who were closing in on him, and sprinted for it. Brennan stiff-armed the Egret who moved to intercept him and pushed his way through.
“Run, you bastard, run!” Scar screamed with crazed delight. “You’ll never get away, never! You’re meat—dead, rotting meat!”
Brennan ran, the dead men on his trail, Scar watching and laughing horrible constricted daughter.
Rick and Mick held up the pickle jar and looked at it intently. Brutus stared back at them, his face forlornly pressed up against the glass, bruised and swollen. Blood trickled from his nose, and he tried, unsuccessfully, to cradle his broken right arm as Rick shook the jar and watched the joker bounce around.
“Why are we bringing the little geek with us?” he asked Kien.
Kien glanced down at him as he drove carefully through the flurry of fat damp snowflakes. “Ultimately, as a receptacle for Captain Brennan s soul. After we’ve captured them, I’ve decided to have our jumper allies transfer me to his body for a while and him to that thing.”
“Cool,” Rick said. He gave the bottle another shake. “Better take the did off and give the geek a little air,” Mick said. “He’s starting to turn blue.”
Kien chuckled indulgently, then turned his attention back to the street. Kien didn’t dike driving, and he liked driving in snowstorms even less, but he wanted privacy on this trip. Once it was over, he would have another body, another identity, one that no one would survive to know about. Not the jumpers who would effect the transference. Not even Rick and Mick. He glanced at the monsters torturing the helpless little joker. They were getting almost as much fun from that as they had when they manhandled the joker until it told where Jennifer was being kept in the clinic.
They had their crude uses, but Kien knew he wouldn’t miss them. It was time to invest in a better grade of help.
Kien pulled into the clinic’s parking lot, next to the van that had ARCHER LANDSCAPING AND GARDENING painted on its side. It had taken months of detective work to track down Brennan and his bitch, but nothing was beyond Kien’s power. Nothing.
“All right. Wait here until I send for you, then bring your friend,” Kien said, gesturing at the pickle jar.
Rick held it up, giving it another shake as Kien slipped out of the car. Kien would miss the thrill of being an ace when he gave up this body. He faded down to his eyes-it had taken a little practice to realize that when he faded out totally, he was also totally blind-and moved through the falling snow like an animated silhouette. He made his way to an unlocked service entrance at the back of the clinic and silently slipped inside. He paused for a moment, orienting himself, then went to the room on the top floor the pathetic joker had told him about.
It was easy to fade to nothing whenever he saw an approaching nurse or orderly, easy to fade his eyes back in when he heard them walk by. No one saw him. The door to the room was shut. Kien looked through the small window set high on the security door and saw Brennan’s bitch lying in the bed, her forehead bandaged. The big joker priest, Father Squid, was standing next to the bed. Someone was sitting in a chair next to the priest, but the priest was in the way, and Kien couldn’t identify him. Or her.
Everyone was intent on Brennan’s bitch. Kien drew the gun he carried in his coat pocket and pushed open the door. “Be quiet,” he said in his most commanding voice, “and I’ll let you live awhile.”
The priest turned and stared. Kien let his gun fade in until everyone could see it. “Don’t be stupid,” Kien said, and the priest held his ground, an unreadable expression on his ugly joker face. “Stand back, slowly. And remember, I’m not afraid to shoot.”
“Listen to him,” the joker priest said. “It’s Fadeout, of the Shadow Fists. He means what he says.”
“You’re right,” Kien said, laughing aloud, “but also wrong. Very, very wrong.”
There seemed to be no reason to remain invisible any longer. Kien faded in as the priest stepped back from the bed, and the person sitting in the chair looked up at him. Kien stared. It was a small Asian man, white-haired, wrinkle-faced, with a long, sparse chin beard. He was dressed in shabby, patched clothes. It was his father.
Kien’s gun shook as he pointed it at him.
“Such a son,” his father said in the familiar hated tone of voice.
The old man shook his head sadly, and Kien started to lower the gun. It’s a trick, he suddenly thought. It’s got to be a trick. He raised the gun again, trembling fingers almost pulling the trigger unwillingly.
“Who are you?” Kien asked.
The image of his father shook his head again, sadly. “It is an evil child who doesn’t recognize his own father, Hsiang Yu,” the apparition said.
“What do you want from me?” Kien shouted, unnerved at the spectre’s use of his real name.
His father shook his head. “Only the respect due me. For that,” he continued, “I will give you a gift. Your greatest, fondest desire.”
“What’s that?” Kien asked in a shaken voice.
“Do you want the head of Daniel Brennan?” his father purred.
Kien’s eyes grew wide. “You know I do.”
“Then you shall have it,” Kien’s father told him. “If,” he added in the voice of a devil, “you are man enough to take it.”
His father pointed to the other side of the bed. Kien carefully leaned forward, looking over the bed, and saw Brennan lying asleep on the floor.
Kien smiled wolfishly. “This is a great gift, oh Father,” he said, and pointed his gun at Brennan.
His father shook his head. “You were always one for taking the easy way, my son,” he said.
Kien glanced at him, but before he could say anything, there was a sudden, terrifying wrenching. Kien felt his mind whirling into a mad vortex. He closed his eyes, but it wouldn’t stop. He tried to vomit, but he couldn’t. He swallowed hot bile, and when he opened his eyes again, he lurched forward to steady himself against the great teakwood desk that stood in the office of his apartment that overlooked Central Park.
He took a deep breath, fighting the nausea still rumbling through his stomach, and looked around. It was his office, all right. Everything looked normal. All his art treasures were in their places, all his expensive furniture polished and unmarred, even the surface of his teakwood desk, which had been horribly damaged during his faked death when that idiot Blaise had pinned his watchdog joker to its surface with a letter opener.
He ran his hand pensively across the desktop that was so highly polished that he could see himself in it. He leaned forward for a closer look, mumbling to himself as he realized that he was back in his old body. He was Kien again. He looked at his right hand and wrung it with his left, and then laughed a short relieved laugh. At least he had two whole hands. He looked away, startled when the door to his office opened.
Wyrm stood in the doorway. But that couldn’t be. Wyrm was dead. He looked dead, Kien suddenly realized-and pissed.
“I wasss your loyal ssservant,” the scaleless reptiloid joker hissed, “and I died becausssse of your ssschemes.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” Kien protested. He still half refused to believe that Wyrm was standing before him, but the evidence was hard to ignore. It looked like Wyrm, talked like Wyrm, and even had a big ugly wound in its throat where Fadeout had stuck it with the same letter opener that had killed the watchdog joker. “Fadeout killed you,” Kien added. Wyrm approached, still looking angry, and Kien drew back behind his desk. Wyrm was inhumanly strong, and his bite was highly poisonous. Kien knew that he was no match for the joker.
“I died,” Wyrm hissed furiously, “becaussse you wouldn’t give me the loyalty I alwayssss gave you.” He loomed over Kien like an avatar of death, and the general cringed. Kien pictured Wyrm’s great gaping maw crunching down ruthlessly on his throat.
“Don’t,” he managed to get out. “Don’t,” he repeated, shielding his face with his arms.
Wyrm drew back with a sneer. “You’re not to meet your dessstiny at my handsss,” he said, clenching and unclenching powerful fists. “But out there.” The joker pointed out the window facing Central Park.
Kien came around from behind his desk cautiously and peered out. Central Park was gone. In its place was a dense, thick jungle.
Just like home, Kien thought. Just like Vietnam.
Brennan ran, pursued by dead men and Scar’s maniacal laughter.
Scar was toying with him, Brennan realized. The teleporting ace could have forced a face-off, but apparently wanted to make Brennan suffer before finishing him off. He flickered just in front of or just behind Brennan, slashing ferociously with his razor. Sometimes Brennan dodged or blocked, sometimes he didn’t. His shirt was soon in tatters, and he was leaving a splattered trail of blood for the pursuing dead men to follow.
Even without Scar, there were too many corpses to handle. He needed help, and he needed weapons, preferably both. But the run-down streets were deserted, the decaying buildings dark and empty.
Brennan was in excellent physical condition, but his pursuers didn’t tire. He knew he couldn’t keep running and running. He’d eventually fall exhausted, and then his foes could deal with him at their leisure. Somehow he had to shake the pursuit, which seemed unlikely, or at least break up the pack and deal with it in small groups.
A familiar building caught his eye as he surged up the street, gasping in the killing heat, throat dry, heart starting to pound. It was the Famous Bowery Wild Card Dime Museum. Inside it would be cool, and dark, with plenty of hiding places.
He pounded up the stairs, twenty yards ahead of his nearest pursuer, and slammed hard against the front door. It swung wide open, and the cool, dark interior of the museum beckoned him. He dashed inside and put his back against the wall, catching his breath before moving into the interior.
He looked around at the familiar exhibits, the wall of monstrous joker babies floating in jars, the diorama of the Four Aces, Earth verses the Swarm, Kien’s assassins attacking him and Ann-Marie. Brennan stopped and stared. There was, of course, no such exhibit in the real Famous Bowery Wild Card Dime Museum, but then, this wasn’t the real Famous Bowery Wild Card Dime Museum. This version of it had been conjured from the depths of Brennan’s mind and was filled with the archetypes and images that had shaped his psyche over the years.
He wandered on to the next exhibit. It was the Fall of Saigon recreated in all its casual brutality. Brennan was in the foreground ripping off his captain’s bars and walking away from it. There was a scene of him fighting some forgotten battle in some forgotten Asian country during his mercenary years and one of him practicing Zen archery in the temple with his roshi Ishida looking on. There was Brennan after his return to the States in Minh’s restaurant, but too late to do anything besides avenge his comrade’s death at the hands of the Immaculate Egrets. There was Brennan meeting Chrysalis, Brennan fighting the Swarm, Brennan and Jennifer.
He wandered on in a daze. The last exhibit took him full circle in time and history, and he found himself looking at a diorama that was similar, so similar, to the first one he’d seen. Kien’s assassins were breaking into his house, but it was Jennifer, not Ann-Marie, lying covered in blood.
Am I doomed, Brennan wondered, to repeat the cycle of death time and time again despite my best intentions? Are destruction and violence always to follow me like vicious pet dogs that I can never tame? He reached out a hand toward the wax figure of Jennifer in the last diorama, and a sound made him stop, turn, and look.
Scar stood at the head of the pack of dead men, grinning like an idiot.
“You think you’re so smart,” Scar said, mockingly. “We knew this was the first place you’d go.” He looked over and pointed at a diorama that Brennan hadn’t noticed before. “Wanna see the future, asshole? Look over there.”
It was a scene of Brennan lying bloody and torn, Scar crouched on his chest, holding a dripping straight razor in one hand and Brennan’s heart in the other.
Brennan turned to face the sadistic ace, and the myriad pairs of shining, unblinking eyes of all the men Brennan had killed since coming back to the city. There was nowhere to run, no place to go. “Let’s see,” he said, “if dead men can die twice.”
Scar grinned, lifted his razor, and flickered out of sight. He popped into existence three feet to Brennan’s right. Brennan moved to block him, but something interceded.
Something that appeared from the shadows at Brennan’s back quick as a cat, and struck Scar with a wooden staff. Scar took the blow on his throat and staggered back, wide-eyed and gaping like a suffocating fish. He dropped his razor, went down on his knees, and like Brennan, stared at the newcomer.
It was a man, a young man in his midteens. He was shorter than Brennan, slimly built but lithely muscled. He wore black pants and black slippers, and handled a bo staff with the ease of an expert martial artist.
Scar looked from the newcomer to Brennan, hate glinting in his crazed eyes. He sighed, as if with a final expulsion of breath, “Not again ...” and collapsed on the floor, his hands clutching his severely crushed throat.
A murmur rose from the ranks of the dead men as the newcomer spoke. “You know who I am,” he said in a soft youthful voice. “You know that I stand with this man. As do,” he said, gesturing with his staff, “these others.”
The dead men looked around the dark chamber, as did Brennan. His lips worked, but he was too stunned to speak. There was his old comrade the Tiger Scout Minh, with his daughter Mai, who had sacrificed herself so that the earth would be free of the Swarm. There was Sergeant Gulgowski and his squad from Nam. There was Chrysalis with a swarm of manikins at her feet.
The dead men still outnumbered them, but punks and bullies that they were, they no longer seemed to have guts for a fight. Brennan watched in astonishment as they drifted back slowly through the darkness until all were gone. And when he looked around, all his old friends and allies had also disappeared, all except the youth who stood before him. “Who are you?” Brennan asked quietly.
His young ally said nothing but turned slowly to face Brennan for the first time. Brennan stared into his face and thought, My God, he’s got Ann-Marie’s eyes. He smiled, and he had Ann-Marie’s smile too.
“Are you real?” Brennan whispered.
“As real as I would have been if things had worked out differently.” He leaned on his staff, still smiling. “Come,” he said, “it’s time to go to the center of things. Everyone is waiting.”
Brennan nodded. There was much he wanted to ask the boy, but he stopped himself. Somehow, he thought, it was better not to question some things. Some things it was better simply to accept.
The two left the Dime Museum in companionable silence. In the company of the boy the city no longer seemed so deathly hot, so terribly decayed. Brennan noted signs of life as green plants thrust through the cracks in the sidewalk, and a cool breeze blew through the concrete canyons.
The walk seemed to last a long time, but Brennan didn’t mind. The farther they went, the more calm he felt. They were headed, he realized, toward Central Park. Of course. The “center of things.”
Only this was not the Central Park that Brennan knew. It was a jungle that seemed to have been lifted out of Southeast Asia and transplanted into Brennan’s dream Manhattan. Brennan and the boy stopped at the edge of the jungle.
“You have to proceed alone,” the boy told him. Brennan nodded. “Thank you,” he said, “for your help and your companionship. Will I ever see you again?”
The boy shrugged. “Many things are possible.” Brennan nodded again. He opened his arms. The boy came to him, and they hugged fiercely. Brennan kissed the top of his head, and then they parted. The boy smiled and, twirling his staff, disappeared into the heat waves rising up from the streets of the smoldering city. Brennan watched him until he was gone, then plunged into the jungle.
Kien hated the jungle. He’d always hated the jungle. He was an urbanite at heart. He liked air-conditioning, ice cubes in his drinks, and buildings with real floors and walls, all of which were rather lacking in the jungle.
But Wyrm had told him that his destiny was here, and he wasn’t about to argue with the dead joker. He hit upon a strangely familiar path as soon as he reached the jungle. He half knew where it would take him as soon as he found it, so it was no real surprise that he came upon the village where he’d spent his childhood. It was strange, but Kien was beyond surprise by now. He accepted it as he accepted all the strangeness of this place, but he approached the village with all the caution that he could muster because he still had the feeling that death could be found here much as it could be found in the real world.
The village seemed deserted. He headed straight for the dirt-floored store that was his father’s, where he’d spent so many hated hours when he was a child.
His father, Kien thought, had been such a hypocrite, always crying and moaning about how poor they were. He would scarcely put decent food on the table, let alone buy decent clothes for his children. It was bad enough growing up ethnic Chinese among the damned Vietnamese. It was worse to wear ragged and patched clothes that made him the laughingstock of the village school. And it wasn’t, Kien remembered as he approached the store’s entrance, that they didn’t have the money. No. Kien’s father, besides being a shrewd businessman in his dealings with the village, was also a blackmarketeer. He sold weapons, munitions, and medicine to the insurgents fighting the French, and everything he sold, he sold dear.
Kien walked into the dark interior of the store. Old Dad had plenty of money. In fact, Kien knew where the miser hid it, buried beneath a pile of cheap straw mats in a cache dug into the store’s dirt floor. Right there.
As Kien looked at the spot in the floor, he was seized with the same compulsion that had once gripped him over thirty-five years ago. He took a sharp-pointed mattock down from those hanging from hooks on the wall and roughly pushed the pile of cheap mats away. He started to dig in a frenzy, cutting quickly through the cool, slightly moist soil in a spate of wild hoeing. Within moments he had dug a hole over two feet deep, and the blade of the mattock hit something that clanged with a metallic chink. He dropped the mattock, grubbed with his hands in the dirt, and pulled out a metallic strongbox that felt heavy with the weight of untold riches.
“You!” a voice squeaked in rage.
Kien looked wildly over his shoulder. It was Old Dad. “What are you doing there? What are you doing with my box?”
“I—” Kien began, confused by the blurring of memories and events unfolding before him.
“My son, a thief,” the old man said haughtily. He raised the cane that he always carried and struck Kien sharply on the shoulder. Kien ducked his head like a turtle retreating into his shell and took the blow as he always did.
Old Dad struck him again and again, and something snapped in Kien. He wailed in anger and pain, reached out and grabbed the object nearest to him, and struck out wildly at his father. He felt the shock of contact run up his arms, and his father stopped beating him. He opened his eyes and saw the truth that he had hidden with a thousand elaborate lies. He saw the mattock blade embedded in the center of his father’s forehead. Old Dad looked at him with astonished, already glazed eyes.
He was dead. Kien had killed him. There was only one thing to do now. He had to run. He needed money. He reached gingerly over his father’s cooling corpse and lifted the key the old man wore on a thong around his neck. He put the key into his pocket and tucked the strongbox under his arm. It was heavy, heavy enough to buy him a new life and a new identity in Saigon. He could finally get out of the jungle.
He rushed out of the store and came face-to-face with Daniel Brennan. The two stared at each other like the old enemies they were.
“What are you doing here?” Kien ground out.
“Looking for something you took from me,” Brennan said. His eyes went from Kien’s face to the box, and he remembered what Chrysalis had told him when he’d first come to the strange place.
Kien, too, looked at the box. “This is mine,” he said. “I took it to buy myself a new life.”
Brennan shook his head. “It is the means of my new life,” he said, advancing.
Kien looked wildly around, but there was nowhere to go. He tried to dodge past Brennan, but Brennan was too fast for him. They grappled for the box, and it fell to the ground and burst like a ripe watermelon. Golden light shone out of the box so powerfully that it nearly blinded both men.
They shielded their eyes and stared as a tall slim figure stepped out of the light. It was Jennifer Maloy, naked and beautiful and alive.
She looked around dazedly, then saw Brennan. They met and embraced while Kien crawled to the shattered remnants of the strongbox, moaning like a lost child. Brennan hugged and kissed Jennifer, wanting never to let her go, but he finally had to release her to take a breath.
“ I was so lost and afraid,” she said. “ I couldn’t find my way back to you.”
Brennan smoothed her hair and smiled. “It’s over now,” he said. “Let’s go home.”
Jennifer looked around in bewilderment and finally focused on Kien, who was staring like a broken man at the smashed and empty strongbox. “What about him?” she asked.
Brennan felt totally serene. It surprised him. All of the hate and anger had been burned away, perhaps by the joy of finding Jennifer again. He wondered for a moment if somehow, some impossible way, he’d achieved enlightenment, the ultimate Zen goal of a totally self-realized man, then rejected that notion as farfetched. He was hardly worthy of such a state.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe we should just leave him.” Kien looked up for the first time. “Leave me? Here?” Brennan looked at him with cold eyes. “Why not?” Kien jumped up and hurled himself at Brennan. Brennan met his furious attack calmly, serenely, simply pushing him aside, and Kien fell panting to the ground.
Brennan looked around. “This doesn’t look like too bad a place to me,” he said. “Probably better than you deserve.”
“The jungle?” Kien cried, looking around wildly. “You don’t know what I’ve done to escape this place! Don’t leave me here!”
The desperation on Kien’s face was almost enough to incline Brennan to pity. Almost. But there was little he could do about it anyway. He and Jennifer started to fade-or this strange little universe, this simulacrum built from the mortar and bricks of Brennan’s memories and psyche, started to fade. They were never sure which.
But they heard Men scream, “Don’t leave me here forever,” and it echoed over and over again as a reedy voice crying, “ever ... ever ... ever ...” like a condemned man questioning an unendurable sentence.
Then there was silence.
Brennan opened his eyes, rubbed them vigorously, then stood and leaned anxiously over Jennifer. Her eyes fluttered, then opened, and she smiled. Brennan didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He leaned over and hugged her fiercely.
He turned and looked at the rest of the room for the first time.
Father Squid was staring at them with wide-open eyes.
Kien’s body-Fadeout’s body-was lying slack-mouthed and drooling on the floor. The door to the room suddenly swung open, and there was Rick and Mick, carrying a large jar tucked under Rick’s right arm.
“Okay, boss,” Rick said. “Here we are.” They stopped, looked around, looked at each other, and said, “Oh-oh” in unison.
“We’ve been tricked,” Mick added. “Something’s wrong with the boss.”
“Let’s get out of here,” said Rick. They dropped the glass jar as they ran from the room, and it shattered. Brennan made a move to follow them, then stopped as he saw Brutus among the remains of the glass jar. The homunculus was bloody and torn. Brennan rushed over to him and kneeled. He reached out a hand but didn’t dare touch him. He knew there was nothing he could do to mend the damage his comrade had sustained.
Brutus looked up at him, barely able to see through swollen, bruised eyes. “Sorry I told where you were, boss, but I guess it worked out.”
“It did,” Brennan said quietly. “Did we get Jennifer back?”
Brennan glanced to his side to see Jennifer kneeling down next to him.
“You did, Brutus,” she said.
“Good.” His tiny body was wracked by a spasm of coughing, and he leaned back among the shards of glass. “This is damned uncomfortable,” he said, and closed his eyes.
Brennan sighed and leaned back on his heels. Jennifer gripped his forearm and laid her head against his shoulder as Father Squid crossed himself and quickly whispered the prayer for the dead.
“You did very well out there,” a voice said. Brennan looked up to see Trace standing over him and Jennifer. “Satisfied?”
Brennan looked at her before answering. She was a young woman-slim, dark-eyed, with high cheekbones and Indian eyes. He didn’t know who she was for a moment, then he remembered. She was his mother, who had died when Brennan was very young. He didn’t remember much about her, only gentle hands and soft songs sung in Spanish and Mescalero Apache.
Brennan felt he couldn’t be ungrateful. He had, after all, gotten Jennifer back. But he looked down at Brutus’s shattered body and knew there was still immense suffering and injustice in the world, and no matter what he did, he couldn’t stop it all.
Trace shook her head. “You are very hard to please,” she said, not ungently.
“I guess I am,” Brennan admitted. “Did you trick the joker into bringing Brutus back to us?”
“It was easy,” Trace said. “Everything I do should be so easy.”
“How much was you in that place,” Brennan asked, “and how much was real?”
“Haven’t you learned your lesson about the reality of reality yet?” Trace asked.
“I don’t know,” Brennan said. “I just wish it weren’t so hard.”
“It’s as hard as you make it,” Trace told him in his mother’s voice. “Sometimes there’s nothing anyone can do to make it easier. Sometimes there is.”
The door to the room shot open, and Dr. Tachyon rushed in. “What’s going on?” he demanded. “A strange joker was seen running out of here—”
He looked around, genuinely puzzled. “What did I miss?”
Brennan looked at him. It was time, he thought, to try to make things easier. He went to Tachyon and took his hand. “The end of an age, old friend, and the beginning of a new.”
“From envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness, Good Lord, deliver us.”
—The Litany, Book of Comnwn Prayer
His rudimentary sexual organs were dysfunctional, but his mounts thought of him as masculine, perhaps because his stunted, wasted body looked more male than female. What he thought of himself was an unopened book. He never communicated about matters of that sort.
He had no name but that borrowed from folklore and given to him by his mounts-Ti Malice-and he didn’t really care what they called him as long as they addressed him with respect. He liked the dark because his weak eyes were unduly sensitive to light. He never ate because he had no teeth to chew or tongue to taste. He never drank alcohol because the primitive sack that was his stomach couldn’t digest it. Sex was out of the question.
But he still enjoyed gourmet foods and vintage wines and expensive liquors and all possible varieties of sexual experience. He had his mounts.
And he always was looking for more.
i.
Chrysalis lived in the Jokertown slum where she owned a bar, so she was accustomed to viewing scenes of poverty and misery. But Jokertown was a slum in the most affluent country on the earth, and Bolosse, the slum district of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s sprawling waterfront capital city, was in one of the poorest.
From the outside the hospital looked like a set from a B-grade horror movie about an eighteenth-century insane asylum. The wall around it was crumbling stone, the sidewalk leading to it was rotting concrete, and the building itself was filthy from years of accumulated bird shit and grime. Inside, it was worse.
The walls were abstract designs of peeling paint and mildew. The bare wooden floors creaked ominously and once Mordecai Jones, the four-hundred-and-fifty-pound ace called the Harlem Hammer, stepped on a section that gave way. He would have fallen all the way through the floor if an alert Hiram Worchester hadn’t quickly relieved him of nine tenths of his weight. The smell clinging to the corridors was indescribable, but was mostly compounded of the various odors of death.
But the very worst, thought Chrysalis, were the patients, especially the children. They lay uncomplainingly on filthy bare mattresses that reeked of sweat, urine, and mildew, their bodies racked by diseases banished long ago in America and wasted by the bloat of malnutrition. They watched their visitors troop by without curiosity or comprehension, serene hoplessness filling their eyes.
It was better being a joker, she thought, though she loathed what the wild card virus had done to her oncebeautiful body.
Chrysalis couldn’t stand any more of the unrelievable suffering. She left the hospital after passing through the first ward and returned to the waiting motorcade. The driver of the jeep. she’d been assigned to looked at her curiously, but said nothing. He hummed a happy little tune while they waited for the others, occasionally singing a few off key phrases in Haitian Creole.
The tropical sun was hot. Chrysalis, bundled in an all-enveloping hood and cloak to protect her delicate flesh and skin from the sun’s burning rays, watched a group of children playing across the street from the run-down hospital. Sweat trickling in tickling rivulets down her back, she almost envied the children in the cool freedom of their near nakedness. They seemed to be fishing for something in the depths of the storm drain that ran under the street. It took Chrysalis a moment to realize what they were doing, but when she did, all thoughts of envy disappeared. They were drawing water out of the drain and pouring it into battered, rusty pots and cans. Sometimes they stopped to drink a mouthful.
She looked away, wondering if joining Tachyon’s little traveling show had been a mistake. It had sounded like a good idea when Tachyon had invited her. It was, after all, an opportunity to travel around the world at government expense while rubbing shoulders with a variety of important and influential people. There was no telling what interesting tidbits of information she would be able to pick up. It had seemed like such a good idea at the time ....
“Well, my dear, if I hadn’t actually seen it with my own eyes, I’d say you hadn’t the stomach for this sort of thing.” She smiled mirthlessly as Dorian Wilde heaved himself into the backseat of the jeep next to her. She wasn’t in the mood for the poet’s famous wit.
“I certainly wasn’t expecting treatment like this,” she said in her cultured British accent as Dr. Tachyon, Senator Hartmann, Hiram Worchester, and other important and influential politicians and aces streamed toward the limos waiting for them, while Chrysalis, Wilde, and the other obvious jokers on the tour had to make do with the dirty, dented jeeps clustered at the rear of the cavalcade.
“You should’ve,” Wilde said. He was a large man whose delicate features were loosing their handsomeness to bloat. He wore an Edwardian outfit that was in desperate need of cleaning and pressing, and enough floral-scented body wash to make Chrysalis glad that they were in an open vehicle. He waved his left hand languorously as he talked and kept his right in the pocket of his jacket. “Jokers, after all, are the niggers.of the world.” He pursed his lips and glanced at their driver, who, like ninety-five percent of Haiti’s population, was black. “A statement not without irony on this island.”
Chrysalis grabbed the back of the driver’s seat as the jeep jounced away from the curb, following the rest of the cavalcade as it pulled away from the hospital. The air was cool against Chrysalis’s face hidden deep within the folds of her hood, but the rest of her body was drenched with sweat. She fantasized about a long, cool drink and a slow, cool bath for the hour it took the motorcade to wend its way through Port-au-Prince’s narrow, twisting streets. When they finally reached the Royal Haitian Hotel, she stepped down into the street almost before the jeep stopped, anxious for the waiting coolness of the lobby, and was instantly engulfed by a sea of beseeching faces, all babbling in Haitian Creole. She couldn’t understand what the beggars were saying, but she didn’t have to speak their language to understand the want and desperation in their eyes, tattered clothing, and brittle, emaciated bodies.
The press of imploring beggars pinned her against the side of the jeep, and the immediate rush of pity she’d felt for their obvious need was submerged in fear fueled by their piteously beseeching voices and the dozens of thin, sticklike arms thrust out at her.
The driver, before she could say or do anything, reached under the jeep’s dashboard and grabbed a long, thin wooden rod that looked like a truncated broomstick, stood up, and began swinging it at the beggars while shouting rapid, harsh phrases in Creole.
Chrysalis heard, and saw, the skinny arm of a young boy snap at the first blow. The second opened the scalp of an old man, and the third missed as the intended victim managed to duck away.
The driver drew the weapon back to strike again. Chrysalis, her usually cautious reserve overcome by sudden outrage, turned to him and screamed, “Stop! Stop that!” and with the sudden movement the hood fell away from her face, revealing her features for the first time. Revealing, that is, what features she had.
Her skin and flesh were as clear as the finest blown glass, without flaw or bubble. Besides the muscles that clung to her skull and jaw, only the meat of her lips was visible. They were dark red pads on the gleaming expanse of her skull. Her eyes, floating in the depths of their naked sockets, were as blue as fragments of sky.
The driver gaped at her. The beggars, whose importunings had turned to wails of fear, all fell silent at once, as if an invisible octopus had simultaneously slapped a tentacle over each one’s mouth. The silence dragged on for a half dozen heartbeats, and then one of the beggars whispered a name in a soft, awed voice.
“Madame Brigitte.”
It passed among the beggars like a whispered invocation, until even those who had crowded around the other vehicles in the motorcade were craning their necks to get a glimpse of her. She pressed back against the jeep, the concentrated stares of the beggars, mixed fear and awe and wonder, frightening her. The tableau held for another moment until the driver spoke a harsh phrase and gestured with his stick. The crowd dispersed at once, but not, however, without some of the beggars shooting Chrysalis final glances of mingled awe and dread.
Chrysalis turned to the driver. He was a tall, thin black in a cheap, ill-fitting blue serge suit and an open-necked shirt. He looked back at her sullenly, but Chrysalis couldn’t really read his expression because of the dark sunglasses he wore.
“Do you speak English?” she asked him.
“Oui. A little.” Chrysalis could hear the harsh edge of fear in his voice, and she wondered what put it there. “Why did you strike them?”
He shrugged. “These beggars are peasants .. Scum from the country, come to Port-au-Prince to beg on the generousness of people as yourself. I tell them to go.”
“Speak loudly and carry a big stick,” Wilde said sardonically from his seat in the back of the jeep.
Chrysalis glared at him. “You were a big help.”
He yawned. “I make it ‘a habit never to brawl in the streets. It’s so vulgar.”
Chrysalis snorted, turned back to the driver. “Who,” she asked, “is ‘Madame Brigitte’?”
The driver shrugged in a particularly Gallic manner, illustrating again the cultural ties Haiti had to the country from which she’d been politically independent for nearly two hundred years. “She is a loa, the wife of Baron Samedi.”
“Baron Samedi?”
“A most powerful loa. He is the lord and guardian of the cemetary. The keeper of the crossroads.”
“What’s a loa?”
He frowned, shrugged almost angrily. “A loa is a spirit, a part of God, very powerful and divine.”
“And I resemble this Madame Brigitte?”
He said nothing, but continued to stare at her from behind his dark glasses, and despite the afternoon’s tropical heat Chrysalis felt a shiver run down her spine. She felt naked, despite the voluminous cloak she wore. It wasn’t a bodily nakedness. She was, in fact, accustomed to going half-naked in public as a private obscene gesture to the world, making sure that everyone saw what she had to see every time she looked in a mirror. It was a spiritual nakedness that she felt, as if everyone who was staring at her was trying to discover who she was, was trying to divine the precious secrets that were the only masks that she had. She felt a desperate need to get away from all the staring eyes, but she wouldn’t let herself run from them. It took all her nerve, all the cool she could muster, but she managed to walk into the hotel lobby with precise, measured steps.
Inside it was cool and dark. Chrysalis leaned against a high-backed chair that looked as if it’d been made sometime in the last century and dusted sometime in the last decade. She took a deep, calming breath and let it out slowly.
“What was that all about?”
She looked over her shoulder to see Peregrine regarding her with concern. The winged woman had been in one of the limos at the head of the parade, but she’d obviously seen the byplay that had centered around Chrysalis’s jeep. Peregrine’s beautiful, satin-feathered wings only added a touch of the exotic to her lithe, tanned sensuality. She should be easy to resent, Chrysalis thought. Her affliction had brought her fame, notoriety, even her own television show. But she looked genuinely concerned, genuinely worried, and Chrysalis felt in need of sympathetic company.
But she couldn’t explain something to Peregrine that she only half-understood herself. She shrugged. “Nothing.” She looked around the lobby that was rapidly filling with tour personnel. “I could use a few moments of peace and quiet. And a drink.”
“So could I,” a masculine voice announced before Peregrine could speak. “Let’s find the bar and I’ll tell you some of the facts of. Haitian life.”
Both women turned to look at the man who’d spoken. He was six feet tall, give or take, and strongly built. He wore a suit of white, tropical-weight linen that was immaculately clean and sharply creased. There was something odd about his face. His features didn’t quite match. His chin was too long, his nose too broad. His eyes were misaligned and too bright. Chrysalis knew him only by reputation. He was a justice Department ace, part of the security contingent Washington had assigned to Tachyon’s tour. His name was Billy Ray. Some wit at JD with a classical education had tagged him with the nickname Carnifex. He liked it. He was an authentic badass.
“What do you mean?” Chrysalis asked.
Ray looked around the lobby, his lips quirking. “Let’s find the bar and talk things over. Privately.”
Chrysalis glanced at Peregrine, and the winged woman read the appeal in her eyes.
“Mind if I tag along?” she asked.
“Hey, not at all.” Ray frankly admired her lithe, tanned form, and the black-and-white-striped sundress that showed it o$: He licked his lips as Chrysalis and Peregrine exchanged unbelieving glances.
The hotel lounge was doing desultory afternoon business. They found an empty table surrounded by other empty tables and gave their orders to a red-uniformed waiter who couldn’t decide whom to stare at, Peregrine or Chrysalis. They sat in silence until he’d returned with the drinks, and Chrysalis drank down the thimbleful of amaretto that he’d brought.
“The travel brochures all said that Haiti’s supposed to be a bloody tropical paradise,” she said in a tone that indicated she felt the brochures all lied.
“I’ll take you to paradise, babe,” Ray said.
Chrysalis liked it when men paid attention to her, sometimes too much. Sometimes, she realized, she conducted her affairs for all the wrong reasons. Even Brennan (Yeoman, she reminded herself, Yeoman. She had to remember that she wasn’t supposed to know his real name) had become her lover because she’d forced herself on him. It was, she supposed, the sense of power that she liked, the control she had when she made men come to her. But making men make love to her body was also, she recognized with her habit of relentless self-scrutiny, another way to punish a revulsed world. But Brennan (Yeoman, damnit) had never been revulsed. He had never made her turn out the lights before kissing her, and he had always made love with his eyes open and watching her heart beat, her lungs bellow, her breath catch behind tightly clenched teeth ....
Ray’s foot moved under the table, touching hers, drawing her back from thoughts of the past, of what was over. She smiled a lazy smile at him, gleaming teeth set in a gleaming skull. There was something about Ray that was unsettling. He talked too loud, he smiled too much, and some part of him, his hands or his feet or his mouth, was always in motion. He had a reputation for violence. Not that she had anything against violence as long as it wasn’t directed at her. For goodness’s sake, even she’d lost track of all the men Yeoman had sent to their reward since, his arrival in the city. But, paradoxically, Brennan wasn’t a violent man. Ray, according to his reputation, had a habit of running amuck. Compared to Brennan, he was a self-centered bore. She wondered if she’d be comparing all the men she would know to her archer, and she felt a rush of annoyance, and regret.
“I doubt that you’d have the skill to transport me to the dreariest shithole in the poorest part of Jokertown, dear boy, let alone paradise.”
Peregrine squelched a twitchy smile and looked away. Chrysalis felt Billy’s foot move away as he fixed her with a hard, dangerous stare. He was about to say something vicious when Dr. Tachyon interrupted by flopping into the empty chair next to Peregrine. Ray shot Chrysalis a look that told her the remark wouldn’t be forgotten.
“My,dear.” Tachyon bowed over Peregrine’s hand, kissed it, and nodded greetings to everyone else. It was common knowledge that he was hot over the glamorous flyer, but then, Chrysalis reflected, most men were. Tachyon, however, was self-confident enough to be determined in his pursuit, and thickheaded enough not to call it off, even after numerous polite rebuffs on Peregrine’s part.
“How was the meeting with Dr. Tessier?” Peregrine asked, removing her hand delicately from Tachyon’s grasp when he showed no inclination of letting it go on his own.
Tachyon frowned, whether in disappointment at Peregrine’s continuing coolness or in remembrance of his visit to the Haitian hospital, Chrysalis couldn’t tell.
“Dreadful,” he murmured, “simply dreadful.” He caught the eye of a waiter and gestured him over. “Bring me something cool, with lots of rum in it.” He looked around the table. “Anyone else?”
Chrysalis tinged a red-painted fingernail-it looked like a rose petal floating on bone against her empty cordial glass. “Yes. And more, um?”
“Amaretto.”
“Amaretto for the lady there.”
The waiter sidled up to Chrysalis and slipped the glass out from in front of her without making eye contact. She could feel his fear. It was funny, in a way, that someone could be afraid of her, but it angered her as well, almost as much as the guilt in Tachyon’s eyes every time he looked at her. Tachyon ran his fingers dramatically through his long, curly red hair. “There wasn’t much incidence of wild card virus that I could see.” He fell silent, sighed gustily. “And Tessier himself wasn’t overly concerned about it. But everyting else ... by the Ideal, everything else ...”
“What do you mean?” Peregrine asked.
“You were there. That hospital was as crowded as a Jokertown bar on Saturday night and about as sanitary. Typhus patients were cheek to jowl with tuberculosis patients and elephantiasis patients and AIDS patients and patients suffering from half a hundred other diseases that have been eradicated everywhere else in the civilized world. As I was having a private chat with the hospital administrator, the electricity went out twice. I tried to call the hotel, but the phones weren’t working. Dr. Tessier told me that they’re low on blood, antibiotics, painkillers, and just about all medicinals. Fortunately, Tessier and many of the other doctors are masters at utilizing the medicinal properties of native Haitian flora. Tessier showed me a thing or two he’s done with distillations from common weeds and such that was remarkable. In fact, someone should write an article on the drugs they’ve concocted. Some of their discoveries deserve widespread attention in the outside world. But for all their efforts, all their dedication, they’re still losing the fight.” The waiter brought Tachyon’s drink in a tall slim glass garnished with slices of fresh fruit and a paper umbrella. Tachyon threw out the fruit and paper umbrella and swallowed half his drink in a single gulp. “ I have never seen such misery and suffering.”
“Welcome to the Third World,” Ray said.
“Indeed.” Tachyon finished off his drink and fixed Chrysalis with his lilac-colored eyes.
“Now, what was that disturbance in front of the hotel?” Chrysalis shrugged. “The driver started beating the beggars with a stick—”
“A cocomacaques.”
“I beg your pardon?” Tachyon said, turning to Ray. “It’s called a cocomacaques. It’s a walking stick, polished with oil. Hard as an iron bar. A real nasty weapon.” There was approval in Ray’s voice. “The Tonton Macoute carry them.”
“What?” three voices asked simultaneously.
Ray smiled a smile of superior knowledge. “Tonton Macoute. That’s what the peasants call them. Essentially means ‘bogeyman.’ Officially they’re called the VSN, the Volontaires de la Securite Nationale.” Ray had an atrocious accent. “They’re Duvalier’s secret police, headed by a man named Charlemagne Calixte. He’s black as a coal mine at midnight and ugly as sin. Somebody tried to poison him once. He lived through it, but it scarred his face terribly. He’s the only reason Baby Doc’s still in power.”
“Duvalier has his secret police acting as our chaffeurs?” Tachyon asked, astonished. “Whatever for?”
Ray looked at him as if he were a child. “So they can watch us. They watch everybody. It’s their job.” Ray laughed a sudden, barking laugh. “They’re easy enough to spot. They all have dark sunglasses and wear blue suits. Sort of a badge of office. There’s one over there.”
Ray gestured to the far corner of the lounge. The Tonton Macoute sat at an otherwise empty table, a bottle of rum and half-filled glass in front of him. Even though the lounge was dimly lit, he had on dark glasses, and his blue suit was as unkempt as any of Dorian Wilde’s.
“I’ll see about this,” Tachyon said, outrage in his voice. He started to stand, but settled back in his chair as a large, scowling man came into the lounge and strode straight toward their table.
“It’s him,” Ray whispered. “Charlemagne Calixte.”
He didn’t have to tell them. Calixte was a dark-skinned black, bigger and broader than most Haitians Chrysalis had seen so far, and uglier too. His short kinky hair was salted with white, his eyes were hidden behind dark glasses, and shriveled scar tissue crawled up the right side of his face. His manner and bearing radiated power, confidence, and ruthless efficiency.
“Bon jour.” He bowed a precise little bow. His voice was a deep, hideous rasp, as if the poison that had eaten away the side of his face had also affected his tongue and palate.
“Bon jour,” Tachyon replied for them all, bowing a precise millimeter less than Calixte had.
“My name is Charlemagne Calixte,” he said in gravelly tones barely louder than a whisper. “President-for-Life Duvalier has charged me with seeing to your safety while you are visiting our island.”
“Join us,” Tachyon offered, indicating the final empty chair.
Calixte shook his head as precisely as he’d bowed. “Regretfully, Msie Tachyon, I cannot. I have an important appointment for the afternoon. I just stopped by to make sure everything is all right after that unfortunate incident in front of the hotel.” As he spoke he looked directly at Chrysalis. “Everything’s fine,” Tachyon assured him before Chrysalis could speak. “What I want to know, though, is why the Tomtom—”
“Tonton,” Ray said.
Tachyon glanced at him. “Of course. The Tonton whatevers, your men, that is, are watching us.”
Calixte gave him a look of polite astonishment. “Why to protect you from that very sort of thing that happened earlier this afternoon.”
“Protect me? He wasn’t protecting me,” Chrysalis said. “He was beating beggars.”
Calixte stared at her. “They may have looked like beggars, but many undesirable elements have come into the city.” He looked around the almost empty room, then husked in a barely intelligible whisper, “Communist elements, you know. They are unhappy with the progressive regime of President-for-Life Duvalier and have threatened to topple his government. No doubt these ‘beggars’ were communist agitators trying to provoke an incident.”
Chrysalis kept quiet, realizing nothing she could say would make any difference. Tachyon was also looking unhappy, but decided not to pursue the matter at this time. After all, they would only be in Haiti one more day before traveling to the Dominican Republic on the other side of the island. “Also,” Calixte said with a smile as ugly as his scar, “I am to inform you that dinner tonight at the Palais National will be a formal affair.”
“And after dinner?” Ray said, openly gauging Calixte with his frank stare.
“Excuse me?”
“Is anything planned for after dinner?”
“But of course. Several entertainments have been arranged. There is shopping at the Marche de Fer-the Iron Market-for locally produced handicrafts. The Musee National will stay open late for those who wish to explore our cultural heritage. You know,” Calixte said, “we have on display the anchor from the Santa Maria, which ran aground on our shores during Columbus’s first expedition to the New World. Also, of course, galas have been planned in several of our world-famous nightclubs. And for those interested in some of the more exotic local customs, a trip to a hounfour has been arranged.”
“Hounfour?” Peregrine asked.
“Oui. A temple. A church. A voodoo church.”
“Sounds interesting,” Chrysalis said.
“It’s got to be more interesting than looking at anchors,” Ray said insouciantly.
Calixte smiled, his good humor going no farther than his lips. “As you wish, msie. I must go now.”
“What about these policemen?” Tachyon asked.
“They will continue to protect you,” Calixte said depreciatingly, and left.
“They’re nothing to worry about,” Ray said, “leastways while I’m around.” He struck a consciously heroic pose and glanced at Peregrine, who looked down at her drink.
Chrysalis wished she could feel as confident as Ray. There was something unsettling about the Tonton Macoute sitting in the corner of the lounge, watching them from behind his dark glasses with the unblinking patience of a snake. Something malevolent. Chrysalis didn’t believe that he was there to protect them. Not for one single, solitary second.
Ti Malice particularly liked the sensations associated with sex. When he was in the mood for such a sensation he’d usually mount a female, because, on the whole, females could maintain a state of pleasure, particularly those adept at self-arousal, much longer than his male mounts could. Of course, there were shades and nuances of sexual sensation, some as subtle as silk dragged across a sensitive nipple, some as blatant as an explosive orgasm ripped from a throttled man, and different mounts were adept at different practices.
This afternoon he wasn’t in the mood for anything particularly exotic, so he’d attached himself to a young woman who had a particularly sensitive tactile sense and was enjoying it enjoying itself when his mount came in to report.
“They’ll all be at the dinner tonight, and then the group will break up to attend various entertainments. It shouldn’t be difficult to obtain one of them. Or more.”
He could understand the mount’s report well enough. It was, after all, their world, and he’d had to make some accommodations, like learning to associate meaning with the sounds that spilled from their lips. He couldn’t reply verbally, of course, even if he’d wanted to. First, his mouth, tongue, and palate weren’t shaped for it, and second, his mouth was, and always had to be, fastened to the side of his mount’s neck, with the narrow, hollow tube of his tongue plunged into his mount’s carotid artery.
But he knew his mounts well and he could read their needs easily. The mount who’d brought the report, for instance, had two. Its eyes were fastened on the lithe nakedness of the female as it pleasured itself, but it also had a need for his kiss.
He flapped a pale, skinny hand and the mount came forward eagerly, dropping its pants and climbing atop the woman. The female let out an explosive grunt as it entered.
He forced a stream. of spittle down his tongue and into his mount’s carotid artery, sealing the breach in it, then gingerly climbed, like a frail, pallid monkey, to the male’s back, gripped it around the shoulders, and plunged his tongue home just below the mass of scar tissue on the side of its neck.
The male grunted with more than sexual pleasure as he drove his tongue in, siphoning some of the mount’s blood into his own body for the oxygen and nutrients he needed to live. He rode the man’s back as the man rode the woman, and all three were bound in chains of inexpressible pleasure. And when the carotid of the female mount ruptured unexpectedly, as they sometimes did, spewing all three with pulsing showers of bright, warm, sticky blood, they continued on. It was a most exciting and pleasurable experience. When it was over, he realized that he would miss the female mount-it had had the most incredibly sensitive skin-but his sense of loss was lessened by anticipation.
Anticipation of new mounts, and the extraordinary abilities they would have.
ii.
The Palais National dominated the north end of a large open square near the center of Port-au-Prince. Its architect had cribbed its design from the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., giving it the same colonnaded portico, long white facade, and central dome. Facing it on the south end of the square were what looked like, and in fact were, military barracks.
The inside of the Palais stood out in stark contrast to everything else Chrysalis had seen in Haiti. The only word to describe it was opulent. The carpets were deep-pile shags, the furniture and bric-a-brac along the hallway they were escorted down by ornately uniformed guards were all authentic antiques, the chandeliers hanging from the high vaulted ceilings were the finest cut crystal.
President-for-Life Jean-Claude Duvalier, and his wife, Madame Michele Duvalier, were waiting in a receiving line with other Haitian dignitaries and functionaries. Baby Doc Duvalier, who’d inherited Haiti in 1971 when his father, Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, had died, looked like a fat boy who’d outgrown his tight-fitting tuxedo. Chrysalis thought him more petulant-looking than intelligent, more greedy than cunning. It was difficult to imagine how he managed to hold power in a country that was obviously on the brink of utter ruin.
Tachyon, wearing an absurd peach-colored crushed-velvet tuxedo, was standing to his right, introducing Duvalier to the members of his tour. When it came Chrysalis’s turn, Baby Doc took her hand and stared at her with the fascination of a young boy with a new toy. He murmured to her politely in French and continued to stare at her as Chrysalis moved down the line.
Michele Duvalier stood next to him. She had the cultivated, brittle look of a high-fashion model. She was tall and thin and very light-skinned. Her makeup was immaculate, her gown was the latest off-the-shoulder designer creation, and she wore lots of costly, gaudy jewelry at her ears, throat, and wrists. Chrysalis admired the expense with which she dressed, if not the taste.
She drew back a little as Chrysalis approached and nodded a cold, precise millimeter, without offering her hand. Chrysalis sketched an abbreviated curtsy and moved on herself, thinking, Bitch.
Calixte, showing the high status he enjoyed in the Duvalier regime, was next. He said nothng to her and did nothing to acknowledge her presence, but Chrysalis felt his stare boring into her all the way down the line. It was a most unsettling feeling and was, Chrysalis realized, a further sample of the charisma and power that Calixte wielded. She wondered why he allowed Duvalier to hang around as a figurehead.
The rest of the receiving line was a confused blur of faces and handshakes. It ended at the doorway leading into the cavernous dining room. The tablecloths on the long wooden table were linen, the place settings were silver, the centerpieces were fragrant sprays of orchid and rose. When she was escorted to her seat, Chrysalis found that she and the other jokers, Xavier Desmond, Father Squid, Troll, and Dorian Wilde, were stuck at the end of the table. Word was whispered that Madame Duvalier had had them seated as far away from her as possible so the sight of them wouldn’t ruin her appetite.
However, as wine was being served with the fish course (Pwason rouj, the waiter had called it, red snapper served with fresh string beans and fried potatoes), Dorian Wilde stood and recited an extemporaneous, calculatedly overblown ode in praise of Madame Duvalier, all the while gesticulating with the twitching, wriggling, dripping mass of tentacles that was his right hand. Madame Duvalier turned a shade of green only slightly less bilious than that of the ooze that dripped from Wilde’s tendrils and was seen to eat very little of the following courses. Gregg Hartmann, sitting near the Duvaliers with the other VIPs, dispatched his pet Doberman, Billy Ray, to escort Wilde back to his seat, and the dinner continued in a more subdued, less interesting manner.
As the last of the after-dinner liquors were served and the party started to break up into small conversational groups, Digger Downs approached Chrysalis and stuck his camera in her face.
“How about a smile, Chrysalis? Or should I say DebraJo? Perhaps you’d care to tell my readers why a native of Tulsa, Oklahoma, speaks with a British accent.”
Chrysalis smiled a brittle smile, keeping the shock and anger she felt off her face. He knew who she was! The man had pried into her past, had discovered her deepest, if not most vital, secret. How did he do it? she wondered, and what else did he know? She glanced around, but it seemed that no one else was paying them any attention. Billy Ray and Asta Lenser, the ballerina-ace called Fantasy, were closest to them, but they seemed absorbed in their own little confrontation. Billy had a hand on her skinny flank and was pulling her close. She was smiling a slow, enigmatic smile at him. Chrysalis turned back to Digger, somehow managing to keep the anger she felt out of her voice.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Digger smiled. He was a rumpled, sallow-looking man. Chrysalis had had dealings with him in the past, and she knew that he was an inveterate snooper who wouldn’t let go of a story, especially if it had a juicy, sensational angle.
“Come, come, Miss Jory. It’s all down in black and white on your passport application.”
She could have sighed with relief, but kept her expression stonily hostile. The application had had her real name on it, but if that was as far as Digger had probed, she’d be safe.
Thoughts of her family raced poisonously through her mind. When she was a little girl, shed been their darling with long blond hair and a naive young smile. Nothing had been too good for her. Ponies and dolls and baton twirling and piano and dancing lessons, her father had bought them all for her with his Oklahoma oil money. Her mother had taken her everywhere, to recitals and to church meetings and to society teas. But when the virus had struck her at puberty and turned her skin and flesh invisible, making her a walking abomination, they shut her up in a wing of the ranch house, for her own good of course, and took away her ponies and her playmates and all contact with the outside world. For seven years she was shut up, seven years .... ‘
Chrysalis shut off the hateful memories rushing through her mind. She was still, she realized, walking on tricky ground with Digger. She had to concentrate fully on him and forget the family that she’d robbed and fled from.
“That information is confidential,” she told Digger coldly. He laughed aloud. “That’s very funny, coming from you,” he said, then suddenly sobered at her look of uncontainable fury. “Of course, perhaps the true story of your real past wouldn’t be of much interest to my readers.” He put a conciliatory expression on his pale face. “I know that you know everything that goes on in Jokertown. Maybe you know something interesting about him.”
Digger gestured with his chin and let his eyes flicker in the direction of Senator Hartmann.
“What about him?” Hartmann was a powerful and influential politician who felt strongly about jokers’ rights. He was one of the few politicians that Chrysalis supported financially because she liked his policies and not because she needed to keep the wheels greased.
“Let’s go somewhere private and talk about it.”
Digger was obviously reluctant to discuss Hartmann openly. Intrigued, Chrysalis glanced at the antique brooch watch pinned above the bodice of her gown. “I have to leave in ten minutes.” She grinned like a Halloween skeleton. “I’m going to see a voodoo ceremony. Perhaps if you care to come along, we might find time to discuss things and come to a mutual understanding about the newsworthiness of my background.”
Digger smiled. “Sounds fine to me. Voodoo ceremony, huh? They going to stick pins in dolls and stuff? Maybe have some kind of sacrifice?”
Chrysalis shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never been to one before.”
“Think they’ll mind if I take photos?”
Chrysalis smiled blandly, wishing she was on familiar turf, wishing that she had something to use on this gossipmonger, and wondering, underneath it all, why his interest in Gregg Hartmann?
In a fit of sentiment Ti Malice chose one of his oldest mounts, a male with a body almost as frail and withered as his own, to be his steed for the night. Even though the mount’s flesh was ancient, the brain encased in it was still sharp, and more strong-willed than any other Ti Malice had ever encountered. It said, in fact, a lot for Ti Malice’s own indominatable will that he was able to control the stubborn old steed. The mental fencing that accompanied riding it was a most pleasurable experience.
He chose the dungeon for the meeting place. It was a quiet, comfortable old room, full of pleasurable sights and smells and memories. The lighting was dim, the air was cool and moist. His favorite tools, along with the remains of his last few partners in experience, were scattered about in agreeable disarray. He had his mount pick up a bloodencrusted flaying knife and test it on its callused palm while he drifted in pleasant reminiscence until the snorting bellow in the corridor outside proclaimed Taureau’s approach.
Taureau-trois-graines, as he had named this mount, was a huge male with a body that was thick with slabs of muscle. It had a long, bushy beard and tufts of coarse black hair peered through the tears in its sun-faded work shirt. It wore frayed, worn denim pants, and it had a huge, rampant erection pushing visibly at the fabric that covered its crotch. It always had.
“ I have a task for you,” Ti Malice told his mount to say, and Taureau bellowed and tossed its head and rubbed its crotch through the fabric of its pants. “Some new mounts will be awaiting you on the road to Petionville. Take a squad of zobops and bring them to me here.”
“Women?” Taureau asked in a slobbering snort. “Perhaps,” Ti Malice said through his mount, “but you are not to have them. Later, perhaps.”
Taureau let out a disappointed bellow, but knew better than to argue.
“Be careful,” Ti Malice warned. “Some of these mounts may have powers. They may be strong.”
Taureau let out bray that rattled the tattered half-skeleton hanging in the wall niche next to it. “Not as strong as me!” It thumped its massive chest with a callused, horny hand.
“Maybe, maybe not. Just take care. I want them all.” He paused to let his mount’s words sink in. “Do not fail me. If you do, you will never know my kiss again.”
Taureau howled like a steer being led to the slaughter block, backed out of the room, bowing furiously, and was gone.
Ti Malice and his mount waited.
In a moment a woman came into the room. Its skin was the color of coffee and milk mixed in equal amounts. Its hair, thick and wild, fell to its waist. It was barefooted and obviously wore nothing under its thin white dress. Its arms were slim, its breasts large, and its legs lithely muscled. Its eyes were black irises floating in pools of red. Ti Malice would have smiled at the sight of it, if he could, for it was his favorite steed.
“Ezili-je-rouge,” he crooned through his mount, “you had to wait until Taureau left, for you couldn’t share a room with the bull and live.”
It smiled a smile with even, perfectly white teeth. “It might be an interesting way to die.”
“It might,” Ti Malice considered. He had never experienced death by means of intercourse before. “But I have other needs for you. The blancs that have come to visit us are rich and important. They live in America and, I’m sure, have access to many interesting sensations that are unavailable on our poor island.”
Ezili nodded, licking red lips.
“I’ve set plans in motion to make some of these blancs mine, but to ensure my success, I want you to go to their hotel, take one of the others, and make it ready for my kiss. Choose one of the strong ones.”
Ezili nodded. “Will you take me to America with you?” she asked nervously.
Ti Malice had his mount reach out an ancient, withered hand and caress Ezili’s large, firm breasts. It shivered with delight at the touch of the mount’s hand.
“Of course, my darling, of course.”
iii.
“A limousine?” Chrysalis said with an icy smile to the broadly grinning man wearing dark glasses who was holding the door for her. “How nice. I was expecting something with four-wheel drive.”
She climbed into the backseat of the limo, and Digger followed her. “ I wouldn’t complain,” he said. “They haven’t let the press go anywhere. You should’ve seen what I had to go through to crash the dinner party. I don’t think they like reporters much ... here ...”
His voice ran down as he flopped onto the rear seat next to Chrysalis and noted the expression on her face. She was staring at the facing seat, and the two men who occupied it.
One was Dorian Wilde. He was looking more than a little tipsy and fondling a cocomacaques similar to the one Chrysalis had seen that afternoon. The stick obviously belonged to the man who was sitting next to him and regarding Chrysalis with a horrible frozen grin that contorted his scarred face into a death mask.
“Chrysalis, my dear!” Wilde exclaimed as the limo pulled away into the night. “And the glorious fourth estate. Dug up any juicy gossip lately?” Digger looked from Chrysalis to Wilde to the man sitting next to him and decided that silence would be his most appropriate response. “How rude of me,” Wilde continued. “I haven’t introduced our host. This delightful man has the charming name of Charlemagne Calixte. I believe he’s a policeman or something. He’s going with us to the hounfour.”
Digger nodded and Calixte inclined his head in a precise, nondeferential bow.
“Are you a devotee of voodoo, Monsieur Calixte?” Chrysalis asked.
“It is the superstition of peasants,” he said in a raspy growl, thoughtfully fingering the scar tissue that crawled up the right side of his face. “Although seeing you would almost make one a believer.”
“What do you mean?”
“You have the appearance of a loa. You could be Madame Brigitte, the wife of Baron Samedi.”
“You don’t believe that, do you?” Chrysalis asked. Calixte laughed. It was a gravelly, barking laugh-that was as pleasant as his smile. “Not I, but I am an educated man. It was the sickness that caused your appearance. I know. I have seen others.”
“Other jokers?” Digger asked with, Chrysalis thought, his usual tact.
“I don’t know what you mean. I have seen other unnatural deformities. A few.”
“Where are they now?” Calixte only smiled.
No one felt much like talking. Digger kept shooting Chrysalis questioning glances, but she could tell him nothing, and even if she had a inkling of what was going on, she could hardly speak openly in front of Calixte. Wilde played with Calixte’s swagger stick and cadged drinks from the bottle of clairin, cheap white rum, that the Haitian took frequent swallows from himself. Calixte drank over half the bottle in twenty minutes, and as he drank he stared at Chrysalis with intense, bloodshot eyes.
Chrysalis, in an effort to avoid Calixte’s gaze, looked out the window and was astonished to see that they were no longer in the city, but were traveling down a road that seemed to cut through otherwise unbroken forest.
“Just where are we going?” she asked Calixte, striving to keep her voice level and unafraid.
He took the bottle of clairin from Wilde, gulped down a mouthful, and shrugged. “We are going to the hounfour. It is in Petionville, a small suburb just outside Port-au-Prince.”
“Port-au-Prince has no hounfours of its own?”
Calixte smiled his blasted smile. “None that put on such a fine show”
Silence descended again. Chrysalis knew that they were in trouble, but she couldn’t figure out exactly what Calixte wanted of them. She felt like a pawn in a game she didn’t even know she’d been playing. She glanced at the others. Digger was looking confused as hell, and Wilde was drunk. Damn. She was more sorry than ever that she’d left familiar, comfortable Jokertown behind to follow Tachyon on his mad, worthless journey. As usual, she only had herself to depend on. It had always been like that, and always would. Part of her mind whispered that once there had been Brennan, but she refused to listen to it. Come to the test, he would have proved as untrustworthy as the rest. He would have.
The driver suddenly pulled the limo to the side of the road and killed the engine. She stared out the window, but could see little. It was dark and the roadside was lit only by infrequent glimpses of the half moon as it occasionally peered out from behind banks of thick clouds. It looked as if they had stopped beside a crossroad, a chance meeting of minor roads that ran blindly through the Haitian forest. Calixte opened the door on his side and climbed out of the limo smoothly and steadily in spite of the fact that he’d drunk most of a bottle of raw rum in less than half an hour. The driver got out too, leaned against the side of the limo, and began to beat a swift tattoo on a small, pointed-end drum that he’d produced from somewhere.
“What’s going on?” Digger demanded.
“Engine trouble,” Calixte said succinctly, throwing the empty rum bottle into the jungle.
“And the driver is calling the Haitian Automobile Club,” Wilde, sprawled across the backseat, said with a giggle. Chrysalis poked Digger and gestured to him to move out. He obeyed, looking around bewilderedly, and she followed him. She didn’t want to be trapped in the back of the limo during whatever it was that was going to happen. At least outside the car she had a chance to run for it, although she probably wouldn’t be able to get very far in a floor-length gown and high heels. Through the jungle. On a dark night. “Say,” Digger said in sudden comprehension. “We’re being kidnapped. You can’t do this. I’m a reporter.”
Calixte reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a small, snub-nosed revolver. He pointed it negligently at Digger and said, “Shut up.”
Downs wisely did.
They didn’t have long to wait. From the road that intersected the one they’d been driving upon came the cadenced sound of marching feet. Chrysalis turned to stare down the road and saw what looked like a column of fireflies, bobbing up and down, coming in their direction. It took a moment, but she realized that it was actually a troop of marching men. They wore long, white robes whose hems brushed the roadtop. Each carried a long, skinny candle in his left hand and each was also crowned with a candle set on his forehead by a cloth circlet, producing the firefly effect. They wore masks. There were about fifteen of them.
Leading the column was an immense man who had a decidedly bovine look about him. He was dressed in the cheap, tattered clothes of a Haitian peasant. He was one of the largest men that Chrysalis had ever seen, and as soon as he spotted her he headed straight toward her. He stood before her drooling and rubbing his crotch, which, Chrysalis was surprised and not happy to see, was bulging outward and stretching the frayed fabric of his jeans.
“Jesus,” Digger muttered. “We’re in trouble now. He’s an ace.”
Chrysalis glanced at the reporter. “How do you know?”
“Well, ah, he looks like one, doesn’t he?”
He looked like someone who’d been touched by the wild card virus, Chrysalis thought, but that didn’t necessarily make him an ace. Before she could question Digger further, however, the bull-like man said something in Creole, and Calixte snapped off a guttural “Non” in answer.
The bull-man seemed momentarily ready to dispute Calixte’s apparent order, but decided to back down. He continued to glower at Chrysalis and finger his erection as he spoke in turn to the strangely garbed men who had accompanied him.
Three of them came forward and dragged a protesting Dorian Wilde from the backseat of the limo. The poet looked around bewilderedly, fixed his bleary eyes on the bull-man, and giggled.
Calixte grimaced. He snatched his cocomacaques from Wilde and lashed out with it, spitting the word “Masisi” as he struck.
The blow landed where Wilde’s neck curved into his shoulder, and the poet moaned and sagged. The three men supporting him couldn’t hold him, and he fell to the ground just as all hell broke loose.
The snap, crack, and pop of small-arms fire sounded from the foliage bordering the roadside, and a couple of the men so strangely crowned by candles went down. A few others broke and ran for it, though most held their ground. The bull-man bellowed in rage and hurtled toward the undergrowth. Chrysalis, who’d dropped to the ground at the first sound of gunfire, saw him get hit in the upper body at least twice, but he didn’t even stagger. He crashed into the underbrush and in a moment high-pitched screams mixed with his bellowing.
Calixte crouched behind the limo and calmly returned fire. Digger, like Chrysalis, was huddled on the ground, and Wilde just lay there moaning. Chrysalis decided that it was time to exercise the better part of valor. She crawled under the limo, cursing as she felt her expensive gown snag and tear.
Calixte dove after her. He snatched at her left foot, but only grabbed her shoe. She twisted her foot, the shoe came off, and she was free. She scrambled all the way under the limo, came out on the other side, and rolled into the jungle foliage lining the roadside.
She took a few moments to catch her breath, and then was up and running, staying low and keeping to cover as much as she could. Within moments she was away from the conflict, safe, alone, and, she quickly realized, totally, utterly lost.
She should have paralleled the road, she told herself, rather than taking off blindly into the forest. She should have done a lot of things, like spending the winter in New York and not on this insane tour. But it was too late to worry about any of that. Now all she could do was push ahead. Chrysalis never imagined that a tropical forest, a jungle, could be so desolate. She saw nothing move, other than tree branches in the night wind, and heard nothing other than the sounds made by that same wind. It was a lonely, frightening feeling, especially to someone used to having a city around them.
She’d lost her brooch watch when she’d scrambled under the limo, so she had no way of measuring time other than the increasing soreness in her body and dryness in her throat. Hours, certainly, had passed before, totally by accident, she stumbled upon a trail. It was rough, narrow, and uneven, obviously made by human feet, but finding it filled her with hope. It was a sign of habitation. It led to somewhere. All she had to do was follow it, and somewhere, sometime, she’d find help.
She started down the trail, too consumed by the exigencies of her immediate situation to worry any more about Calixte’s motives in bringing her and the others to the crossroads, the identity of the strangely dressed men crowned with candles, or to even wonder about their mysterious rescuers, if, indeed, the band that had ambushed their kidnappers had meant to rescue them.
She walked through the darkness.
It was difficult going. Right at the start of her trek she’d taken off her right shoe to even her stride, and sometime soon afterward she’d lost it. The ground was not without sticks and stones and other sharp objects, and before long her feet hurt like hell. She cataloged her miseries minutely so she’d know exactly how much to take out of Tachyon’s hide if she ever got back to Port-au-Prince.
Not if, she told herself repeatedly. When. When. When. She was chanting the word as a short, snappy little marching song when she suddenly realized that someone was walking toward her on the trail. It was difficult to say for sure in the uncertain light, but it looked like a man, a tall, frail man carrying a hoe or shovel or something over his shoulder. He was headed right toward her.
She stopped, leaned against a nearby tree, and let out a long, relieved sigh. The brief thought flashed through her mind that he might be a member of Calixte’s odd gang, but from what she could discern, he was dressed like a peasant, and he was carrying some sort of farm implement. He was probably just a local out on a late errand. She had the sudden fear that her appearance might scare him away before she could ask for help, but quenched it with the realization that he had to have already seen her, and he was still steadily approaching.
“Bon jour,” she called out, exhausting most of her French. But the man made no sign that he had heard. He kept on walking past the tree against which she leaned.
“Hey! Are you deaf?” she reached out and tugged at his arm as he passed by, and as she touched him, he stopped, turned, and fixed her with his gaze.
Chrysalis felt as if a slice of night had stabbed into her heart. She went cold and shivery and for a long moment couldn’t catch her breath. She couldn’t look away from his eyes.
They were open. They moved, they shifted focus, they even blinked slowly and ponderously, but they did not see. The face from which they peered was scarcely less skeletal than her own. The brow ridges, eye sockets, cheekbones, jaw, and chin stood out in minute detail, as if there were no flesh between the bone and the taut black skin that covered them. She could count the ribs underneath the ragged work shirt as easily as anyone could count her own. She stared at him as he looked toward her and her breath caught again when she realized that he wasn’t breathing. She would have screamed or run or done something, but as she stared he took a long, shallow breath that barely inflated his sunken chest. She watched him closely, and twenty seconds passed before he took another.
She suddenly realized that she was still holding his ragged sleeve, and she released it. He continued to stare in her direction for a moment or two, then turned back the way he’d been headed and started walking away.
Chrysalis stared at his back for a moment, shivering, despite the warmth of the evening. She had just seen, talked to, and even touched, she realized, a zombi. As a resident of jokertown and a joker herself, she’d thought herself inured to strangeness, accustomed to the bizarre. But apparently she wasn’t. She had never been so afraid in her life, not even when, as a girl barely out of her teens, she had broken into her father’s safe to finance her escape from the prison that was her home.
She swallowed hard. Zombi or not, he had to be going somewhere. Somewhere where there might be other ... real ... people.
Timorously, because there was nothing else she could do, she began to follow him.
They didn’t have far to go. He soon turned off onto a smaller, less-traveled side trail that wound down and around a steep hill. As they passed a sharp curve in the trail, Chrysalis noticed a light burning ahead.
He headed toward the light, and she followed him. It was a kerosene lantern, stuck on a pole in front of what looked like a small, ramshackle but clinging to the lower slopes of the precipitous hillside. A tiny garden was in front of the hut, and in front of the garden a woman was peering into the night.
She was the most prosperous looking Haitian that Chrysalis had yet seen outside of the Palais National. She was actually plump, her calico dress was fresh and new-looking, and she wore a bright orange madras bandanna wrapped around her head. The woman smiled as Chrysalis and the apparition she was following approached.
“Ah, Marcel, who has followed you home?” She chuckled. “Madame Brigitte herself, if I’m not mistaken.” She sketched a curtsy that, despite her plumpness, was quite graceful. “Welcome to my home.”
Marcel kept walking right on past her, ignoring her and heading for the rear of the hut. Chrysalis stopped before the woman, who was regarding her with an open, welcoming expression that contained a fair amount df good-natured curiosity in it.
“Thank you,” Chrysalis said hesitantly. There were a thousand things she could have said, but the question burning in the forefront of her mind had to be answered. “I have to ask you ... that is ... about Marcel.”
“Yes?”
“He’s not actually a zombi, is he?”
“Of course he is, my child, of course he is. Come, come.” She made gathering motions with her hands. “I must go inside and tell my man to call off the search.”
Chrysalis hung back. “Search?”
“For you, my child, for you.” The woman shook her head and made tsking sounds. “You shouldn’t have run off like that. It caused quite a bit of trouble and worry for us. We thought that the zobop column might capture you again.”
“Zobop? What’s a zobop?” It sounded to Chrysalis like a term for some kind of jazz afficionado. It was all she could do to keep from laughing hysterically at the thought.
“Zobop are”—the woman gestured vaguely with her hands as if she were trying to describe an enormously complicated subject in simple words—“the assistants of a bokor-an evil sorcerer-who have sold themselves to the bokor for material riches. They follow his bidding in all things, often kidnaping victims chosen by the bokor.”
“I ... see ... And who, if you don’t mind my asking, are you?” The woman laughed good-humoredly. “No, child, I don’t mind at all. It shows admirable caution on your part. I am Mambo Julia, priestess and premiere reine of the local Bizango chapter.” She must have correctly read the baled look on Chrysalis’s face, for she laughed aloud. “You blancs are so funny! You think you know everything. You come to Haiti in your great airplane, walk about for one day, and then dispense your magical advice that will cure all our ills. And not once do even one of you leave Port-au-Prince!” Mambo Julia laughed again, this time with some derision. “You know nothing of Haiti, the real Haiti. Port-au-Prince is a gigantic caricer that shelters the leeches that are sucking the juices from Haiti’s body. But the countryside, ah, the countryside is Haiti’s heart!”
“Well, my child, I shall tell you everything you need to know to begin to understand. Everything, and more, than you want to know. Come to my hut. Rest. Drink. Have a little something to eat. And listen.”
Chrysalis considered the woman’s offer. Right now she was more concerned about her own difficulties than Haiti’s, but Mambo Julia’s invitation sounded good. She wanted to rest her aching feet and drink something cold. The idea of food also sounded inviting. It seemed as if she’d last eaten years ago.
“All right,” she said, following Mambo Julia toward the hut. Before they reached the door, a middle-aged man, thin, like most Haitians, with a shock of premature white hair, came around from the back.
“Baptiste!” Mambo Julia cried. “Have you fed the zombi?” The man nodded and bobbed a courteous bow in Chrysalis’s direction. “Good. Tell the others that Madame Brigitte has found her own way home.”
He bowed again, and Chrysalis and Mambo Julia went into the hut.
Inside, it was plainly, neatly, comfortably furnished. Mambo Julia ushered Chrysalis to a rough-hewn plank table and served her fresh water and a selection of fresh, succulent tropical fruits, most of which were unfamiliar, but tasty.
Outside, a drum began to beat a complicated rhythm to the night. Inside, Mambo Julia began to talk.
One of Ti Malice’s mounts delivered Ezili’s message at midnight. It had succeeded in the task he’d given it. A new mount was lying in drugged slumber at the Royal Haitian Hotel, awaiting its first kiss.
Excited as a child on Christmas morning, Ti Malice decided that he couldn’t wait at the fortress for the mounts he’d sent Taureau after to be delivered. He wanted new blood, and he wanted it now.
He moved from his old favorite to a different mount, a girl not much bigger than he, that was already waiting in the special box that he’d had built for occasions when he had to move about in public. It was the size of a large suitcase and was cramped and uncomfortable, but it afforded the privacy he needed for his public excursions. It took a bit of caution, but Ti Malice was smuggled unseen to the third floor of the Royal Haitian Hotel where Ezili, naked and hair flying wild, let him into the room and stood back while the mount bearing him opened the lid and stepped from the box as he moved from the girl’s chest to the more comfortable position upon its back and shoulders.
Ezili led him into the bedroom where his new mount was sleeping peacefully.
“He wanted me the moment he saw me,” Ezili said. “It was easy to get him to bring me here, and easier yet to slip the draught into his drink after he had me.” She pouted, fingering the large, dark nipple of her left breast. “He was a quick lover.” she said with some disappointment.
“Later,” Ti Malice said through his mount, “you shall be rewarded.”
Ezili smiled happily as Ti Malice ordered his mount to bring him closer to the bed. The mount complied, bending over the sleeping man, and Ti Malice transferred himself quickly. He snuggled against the man’s chest, nuzzling its neck. The man stirred, moaned a little in its drugged sleep. Ti Malice found the spot he needed, bit down with his single, sharp tooth, then drove his tongue home.
The new mount groaned and feebly reached for its neck. But Ti Malice was already firmly in place, mixing his saliva with his mount’s blood, and the mount subsided like a grumpy child having a slightly bad dream. It settled down into deep sleep while Ti Malice made it his.
It was a splendid mount, powerful and strong. Its blood tasted wonderful.
iv.
“There have always been two Haitis,” Mambo Julia said. “There is the city, Port-au-Prince, where the government and its law rule. And there is the countryside, where the Bizango rules.”
“You used that word before,” Chrysalis said, wiping the sweet juices of a succulent tropical fruit off her chin. “What does it mean?”
“As your skeleton, which I can see so clearly, holds your body together, so the Bizango binds the people of the countryside. It is an organization, a society with a network of obligations and order. Not everyone belongs to it, but everyone has a place in it and all abide by its decisions. The Bizango settles disputes that would otherwise rip us apart. Sometimes it is easy. Sometimes, as when someone is sentenced to become a zombi, it is difficult.”
“The Bizango sentenced Marcel to become a zombi?” Mambo Julia nodded. “He was a bad man. We in Haiti are more permissive about certain things than you Americans. Marcel liked girls. There is nothing wrong with that. Many men have several women. It is all right as long as they can support them and their children. But Marcel liked young girls. Very young girls. He couldn’t stop, so the Bizango sat in judgment and sentenced him to become a zombi.”
“They turned him into a zombi?”
“No, my dear. They judged him.” Mambo Julia lost her air of convivial jollity. “ I made him into what he is today, and keep him that way by the powders I feed him daily.” Chrysalis placed the half-eaten fruit she was holding back upon its plate, having suddenly lost her appetite. “It is a most sensible solution. Marcel no longer harms young girls. He is instead a tireless worker for the good of the community.”
“And he’ll always be a zombi?”
“Well, there have been a few zombi savane, those who have been buried and brought back as zombis, then somehow managed to return to the state of the living.” Mambo Julia plucked her chin thoughtfully. “But such have always remained somewhat ... impaired.”
Chrysalis swallowed hard. “ I appreciate what you’ve done for me. I ... I’m not sure what Calixte intended, but I’m sure he meant me harm. But now that I’m free, I’d like to return to Port-au-Prince.”
“Of course you do, child. And you shall. In fact, we were planning on it.”
Mambo Julia’s words were welcome, but Chrysalis wasn’t sure that she cared much for her tone. “What do you mean?” Mambo Julie looked at her seriously. “I’m not sure, either, what Calixte planned for you. I do know that he’s been collecting people such as yourself. People who’ve been changed. I don’t know what he does to them, but they become his. They do the dirty deeds that even the Tonton Macoute refuse. And he keeps them busy,” she said with a clenched jaw.
“Charlemagne Calixte is our enemy. He is the power in Port-au-Prince. Jean-Claude Duvalier’s father, Francois, was in his own way a great man. He was ruthless and ambitious. He found his way into power and held it for many years. He first organized the Tonton Macoute, and they helped him line his pockets with the wealth of an entire country.”
“But Jean-Claude is unlike his father. He is foolish and weak-willed. He has allowed the real power to flow into Calixte’s hands, and that devil is so greedy that he threatens to suck the life from us like a loup garou.” She shook her head. “He must be stopped. His stranglehold must be loosened so the blood will flow through Haiti’s veins again. But his power runs deeper than the guns of the Tonton Macoute. He is either a powerful bokor, or he has one working for him. The magic of this bokor is very strong. It has enabled Calixte to survive several assassination attempts. Though one of them, at least,” she said with some satisfaction, “left its mark on him.”
“What has all this to do with me?” Chrysalis asked. “You should go to the United Nations or the media. Let your story be known.”
“The world knows our story,” Mambo Julia said, “and doesn’t care. We are beneath their notice, and perhaps it is best that we are left to work out our problems in our own way.”
“How?” Chrysalis asked, not sure that she wanted to know the answer.
“The Bizango is stronger in the country than in the city, but we have our agents even in Port-au-Prince. We’ve been watching you blancs since your arrival, thinking that Calixte might be bold enough to somehow take advantage of your presence, perhaps even try to make one of you his agent. When you publicly defied the Tonton Macoute, we knew that Calixte would be driven to get even with you. We kept close watch over you and so were able to foil his attempt to kidnap you. But he did manage to take your friends.”
“They’re not my friends,” Chrysalis said, starting to realize where Mambo Julia’s argument was heading. “And even if they were, I couldn’t help you rescue them.” She held her hand up, a skeleton’s hand with a network of cord and sinew and blood vessels woven around it. “This is what the wild card virus did to me. It didn’t give me any special powers or abilities. You need someone like Billy Ray or Lady Black or Golden Boy to help you—”
Mambo Julia shook her head. “We need you. You are Madame Brigitte, the wife of Baron Samedi “
“You don’t believe that.”
“No,” she said, “but the chasseurs and soldats who live in the small, scattered hamlets, who cannot read and who have never seen television, who know nothing of what you call the wild card virus, they may look upon you and take heart for the deeds they must do tonight. They may not totally believe either, but they will want to and will not think upon the impossibility of defeating the bokor and his powerful magic.”
“Besides,” she said with some finality, “you are the only one who can bait the trap. You are the only one who escaped the zobop column. You will be the only one who will be accepted into their stronghold.”
Mambo Julia’s words both chilled and angered Chrysalis. Chilled her, because she never even wanted to see Calixte again. She had no intention of putting herself in his power.
Angered her, because she didn’t want to become mixed up in their problems, to die for something she knew virtually nothing about. She was a saloon keeper and information broker. She wasn’t a meddling ace who stuck her nose in where it didn’t belong. She wasn’t an ace of any kind.
Chrysalis pushed her chair away from the table and stood up. “Well, I’m sorry, but I can’t help you. Besides, I don’t know where Calixte took Digger and Wilde any more than you do.”
“But we do know where they are.” Mambo Julia smiled a smile totally devoid of humor. “Though you eluded the chasseurs who were sent to rescue you, several of the zobop did not. It took some persuading, but one finally told us that Calixte’s stronghold is Fort Mercredi, the ruined fortress overlooking Port-au-Prince. The center of his magic is there.” Mambo Julia stood herself and went to open the door. A group of men stood in front of the hut. They all had the look of the country about them in their rough farm clothes, callused hands and feet, and lean, muscular bodies. “Tonight,” Mambo Julia said, “the bokor dies once and for all.”
Their voices rose in a murmur of surprise and awe when they saw Chrysalis. Most bowed in a gesture of respect and obeisance.
Mambo Julia cried out in Creole, gesturing at Chrysalis, and they answered her loudly, happily. After a few moments she closed the door, turned back to Chrysalis, and smiled.
Chrysalis sighed. It was foolish, she decided, to argue with a woman who had the demonstrated ability to create zombis. The feeling of helplessness that descended over her was an old feeling, a feeling from her youth. In New York she controlled everything. Here, it seemed, she was always controlled. She didn’t like it, but there was nothing she could do but listen to Mambo Julia’s plan.
It was a rather simple plan. Two Bizango chasseurs-men with the rank of hunter in the Bizango, Mambo Julia explained-would dress in the zobop robes and masks that they’d captured earlier that evening, bring Chrysalis to Calixte’s fortress, and tell him that they tracked her down in the forest. When the opportunity presented itself (Chrysalis wasn’t pleased with the plan’s vagueness on this point, but thought it best to keep her mouth shut), they would let their comrades in and proceed to destroy Calixte and his henchmen.
Chrysalis didn’t like it, even though Mambo Julia assured her airily that she would be perfectly safe, that the loa would watch over her. For further protection-unnecessary as it was, Mambo Julia said-the priestess gave her a small bundle wrapped in oilskin.
“This is a paquets congo,” Mambo Julia told her. “I made it myself. It contains very strong magic that will protect you from evil. If you are threatened, open it and spread its contents all around you. But do not let any touch yourself! It is strong magic, very, very strong, and you can only use it in this simplest way.”
With that, Mambo Julia sent her off with the chasseurs. There were ten or twelve of them, young to middle-aged.
Baptiste, Mambo Julia’s man, was among them. They continually chattered and joked among themselves as if they were going on a picnic, and they treated Chrysalis with the utmost deference and respect, helping her over the rough spots on the trail. Two carried robes they had taken from the zobop column earlier that evening.
The foot-trail they followed led to a rough road where an ancient vehicle, a minibus or van of some kind, was parked. It hardly looked capable of moving, but the engine started right up after everyone had piled in. The trip was slow and bumpy, but they made better time when they eventually turned off onto a wider, graded road that eventually led back to Port-au-Prince.
The city was quiet, although they did occasionally pass other vehicles. It struck Chrysalis that they were traveling through familiar scenery, and she suddenly realized that they were in Bolosse, the slum section of Port-au-Prince where the hospital she’d visited that morning-it seemed like a thousand years ago-was located.
The men sang songs, chattered, laughed, and told jokes. It was hard to believe that they were planning to assassinate the most powerful man in the Haitian government, a man who was reputedly an evil sorcerer as well. They were acting more as if they were going to a ball game. It was either a remarkable display of bravado, or the calming effect of her presence as Madame Brigitte. Whatever caused their attitude, Chrysalis didn’t share it. She was scared stiff.
The driver suddenly pulled over and silence fell as he parked the minibus on a narrow street of dilapidated buildings, pointed, and said something in Creole. The chasseurs began to disembark, and one courteously offered Chrysalis a hand down. For a moment she thought of running, but saw that Baptiste was keeping a wary, if inconspicuous, eye on her. She sighed to herself and joined the line of men as they walked quietly up the street.
It was a strenuous climb up a steep hill. After a moment Chrysalis realized that they were heading toward the ruins of a fort that she had first noticed when they’d passed through the area earlier in the day. Fort Mercredi, Mambo Julia had called it. It had looked picturesque in the morning. Now it was a dark, looming wreck with an aura of brooding menace about it. The column stopped in a small copse of trees clustered in front of the ruins, and two chasseurs, one of them Baptiste, changed into the zobop robes and masks. Baptiste courteously motioned Chrysalis forward, and she took a deep breath, willed her legs to stop trembling, and went on. Baptiste took her arm above her elbow, ostensibly to show that she was a prisoner, but she was grateful for the warmth of a human touch. The shaft o: night had returned to her heart, but it had grown, had spread until it felt like a dark, icy curtain that had totally enveloped her chest.
The fortress was encircled by a dry moat that had a dilapidated wooden bridge spanning it. They were challenged as they reached the bridge by a voice that shouted a question in Creole. Baptiste answered satisfactorily with a curt passwordmore information, Chrysalis guessed, wrenched from the unfortunate zobop who’d fallen into the hands of the Bizangoand they crossed the bridge.
Two men wearing the semiofficial blue suit of the Tonton Macoutes were lounging on the other side, their dark glasses resting in their breast pockets. Baptiste told them some long, involved story, and looking impressed, they passed them on through the outer defenses of the citadel. They were challenged again in the courtyard beyond, and again passed on this time led into the interior of the decrepit fort by one o the second pair of guards.
Chrysalis found it maddening not to understand what was being said around her. The tension was growing higher, her heart colder, as fear wound her tighter than a compressed spring. There was nothing she could do, though, but endure it, and hope, however hopelessly, for the best.
The interior of the fortress seemed to be in moderately good repair. It was lit, medievally enough, by infrequent torches in wall niches. The walls and flooring were stone, dry and cool to the touch. The corridor ended at a railless spiral staircase of crumbling stone. The Tonton Macoute led them downward.
Images of a dank dungeon began to dance in Chrysalis’s mind. The air took on a damp feel and a mildewy smell. The staircase itself was slippery with unidentifiable ooze and difficult to negotiate in the sandals made from bits of old automobile tires that Mambo Julia had given her. Torches were infrequent, and the pools of light they threw didn’t overlap, so they often had to pass through patches of total darkness.
The staircase ended in a large open space that had only a few uncomfortable-looking bits of wooden furniture in it. A series of chambers debouched off this area, and it was to one of these that they were led.
The room was twenty feet on a side and lit better than the corridors through which they’d just passed, but the ceiling, corners, and some spots along the back wall were all in darkness. The dancing light thrown by the torches made it difficult to discern details, and after her first glance inside the room, Chrysalis knew that was probably for the best.
It was a torture chamber, lined with antique devices that looked well cared for and recently used. An iron maiden lay half-open against one wall, the spikes in its interior coated by flakes of either rust or blood. A table loaded down with impedimenta such as pokers and cleavers and scalpels and thumb and foot screws stood next to what Chrysalis imagined was a rack. She didn’t know for certain because she’d never seen one, never thought she would see one, never, ever, wanted to see one.
She looked away from the instruments of torture and focused on the group of half a dozen men clustered in the rear of the room. Two were Tonton Macoutes, enjoying the proceedings. The others were Digger Downs and Dorian Wilde, the bull-man who had led the zobop column, and Charlemagne Calixte. Downs was shackled in a wall niche next to a moldering skeleton. Wilde was the center of everyone’s attention.
A stout, thick beam stuck out from the dungeon’s rear wall, close to the ceiling, parallel to the floor. A block and tackle hung from the beam and a rope descended from the sharp, wicked-looking metal hook at the bottom of the block and tackle set. Dorian Wilde was dangling from the rope by his arms. He was trying to haul himself up, but lacked the muscular strength to do so. He couldn’t even get a proper grip on the coarse hemp with the mass of tentacles that was his right hand. Sweating, wild-eyed, and straining, he swayed desperately while Calixte operated a ratcheted handcrank that lowered the rope until the bottoms of Wilde’s naked feet were hanging just above a bed of hot glowing coals burning in a low brazier that had been placed below the gibbet. Wilde would desperately swing his feet away from the searing heat, Calixte would crank him up and give him a brief respite, then lower him again. He stopped when the bull-man glanced toward the front of the room, noticed Chrysalis, and let out a bellow.
Calixte looked at her and their eyes met. His expression was wildly exultant, and he was sweating profusely, though it was damply cool in the dungeon. He smiled and said some thing in Creole to the men in the background, who sprang forward and removed Wilde from the gibbet. He then spoke to Baptiste and the other chasseur Baptiste must have answered him satisfactorily, for he nodded, then dismissed them with a curt word and a gesture of his head.
They bowed and started to walk away. Chrysalis took a single instinctive step to follow them, and then the bull-man was before her, breathing heavily and eyeing her strangely. His erection, she noted sickly, was still rampant.
“Well,” Calixte growled in English. “We are all together again.” He came to Chrysalis, put a hand on the bull’s shoulder, and pushed him away. “We were having a bit of amusement. The blanc offended me and I was teaching him some manners.” He nodded at Wilde, who was huddled on the damp flagstone paving, heaving great shuddering breaths. Calixte never took his eyes off Chrysalis. They were bright and fevered, burning with unspeakable excitement and pleasure. “You also have been difficult.” He plucked at the scar tissue that glinted glassily in the torchlight. He seemed deep in mad thought. “You need, I think, a lesson also.” He seemed to make up his mind. “He’ll have the others. I don’t think he’d mind if we used you up. Taureau.” He turned to the bull-man, spoke some words in Creole.
Chrysalis scarcely understood him, even though he spoke English. His words were thick and blurry, even more so than usual. He was either very drunk, very stoned, or very mad.
Perhaps, she realized, all three. She was frantic with terror. The chasseurs weren’t supposed to leave, she thought wildly. They were supposed to kill Calixte! Her heart beat faster than the drums she’d heard sounding through the Haitian night. The dark fear centered in her chest threatened to flow out and overwhelm her entire being. For a moment she teetered on the thin edge of irrationality, and then Taureau came forward, snorting and drooling, one massive hand unbuttoning the fly of his jeans, and Chrysalis knew what she had to do.
She clutched the packet that Mambo Julia had given her and with frantic, shaking fingers pulled off the paper wrapping, exposing a small leather sack closed by a drawstring.
She ripped open the mouth of the sack and with trembling hands threw it and its contents at Taureau.
The sack hit him in the face and he walked right into a cloud of fine, grayish powder that billowed out from it. It coated his hands, arms, chest, and face. He stopped for a moment, snorted, shook his head, then kept right on coming. Chrysalis broke. She turned with a sob and started to run, thinking incoherently that she should have known better, that Mambo Julia was a conniving fraud, that what was about to happen was nothing compared to what she would experience in a lifetime of domination by Calixte, and then she heard a horrible, bellowing scream that froze every nerve, muscle, and sinew in her body.
She turned. Taureau was standing still, but shivering from head to toe as every massive muscle in his body spasmed. His eyes nearly bulged from his head as he stared at Chrysalis and screamed again, a horrible, drawn-out wail that wasn’t even remotely human. His hands clenched and unclenched, and then he began to rake at his face, tearing long furrows of meat away from his cheeks with his thick, blunt fingernails, howling all the while like a damned soul burning.
A memory flashed through Chrysalis’s mind, a terse recollection of a cool, dark bar, a delightful drink, and a short Tachyon speech on Haitian herbal medicine. Mambo Julia’s paquets congo contained no magic powder, no concoction compounded during a fearful ritual and consecrated to the dark voodoo loa. It was simply some herbal preparation, a fast acting, topically effective neurotoxin of some kind. At least that’s what she told herself, and almost believed.
The awful tableau held for a moment, and then Calixte barked a word to the Tonton Macoutes who were watching Taureau with astonished eyes. One stepped forward, put a hand on the bull-man’s shoulder. Taureau turned with the speed of an adrenalized cat, grabbed the man by his wrist and shoulder, and ripped his arm from his body. The Tonton Macoute stared at Taureau for a moment with unbelieving eyes, and then, blood fountaining from his shoulder, he fell weeping to the floor, trying unsuccessfully to stanch the bleeding with his remaining hand.
Taureau brandished the arm above his head like a gory club, shaking it at Chrysalis. Blood splattered across her face and she choked back the bile that rose in her throat.
Calixte roared an order in Creole, whether at Taureau or his other man Chrysalis didn’t know, but the Tonton Macoute ran from the chamber as Taureau whirled in a mad circle, trying to watch everyone at once from crazed, fear-distended eyes.
Calixte kept shouting at Taureau, who was shaking and trembling with terrible muscle spasms. His face was the face of a tortured lunatic, and his dark skin was turning darker. His lips were becoming distinctly blue. He shambled toward Calixte, screaming words that Chrysalis, even though she couldn’t understand the language they were spoken in, knew were gibberish.
Calixte calmly drew his pistol. He pointed it at Taureau and spoke again. The joker continued to advance. Calixte squeezed off a shot that hit Taureau high in the left side of his chest, but he kept coming. Calixte shot three more times before the maddened bull covered the distance between them, and the last shot hit him right between the eyes.
But Taureau kept coming. He dropped the arm he’d been brandishing, grabbed Calixte, and with a final spasm of incredible strength, threw him at the chamber’s rear wall.
Calixte screamed. He reached out to grasp the rope hanging from the gibbet, but he missed. He missed the rope, but not the meathook from which it hung.
The hook took him in the stomach, ripped up through his diaphragm, and skewered his right lung. He showered screams and blood as he kicked his legs and swung in counterpoint rhythm to the spasmodic jerking of his body.
Taureau staggered, clutching his shattered forehead, and fell onto the brazier of burning coals. After a moment he stopped bellowing and there came the crisp sizzle and sweet smell of burning flesh.
Chrysalis was violently sick. After she finished wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she looked up to see Dorian Wilde standing before the limp, swaying form of Charlemagne Calixte. He smiled and recited:
“It is sweet to dance to violins
When Love and Life are fair:
To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes
Is delicate and rare:
But it is not sweet with nimble feet
To dance upon the air!”
Digger Downs rattled his chains impotently. “Someone get me out of here,” he pleaded.
Chrysalis heard the snap of small-arms fire in the upper reaches of the fortress, but the Bizango chasseurs were too late. The bokor, swaying from the meathook above the dungeon floor, was already dead.
It was hushed up, of course.
Senator Hartmann asked Chrysalis to be silent to help diffuse the fear of the wild card virus that was raging back home. He didn’t even want there to be a hint of American jokers and aces mixing in foreign politics. She agreed for two reasons: First, she wanted him in her debt, and second, she always avoided personal publicity anyway. Not even Digger filed a story. He was recalcitrant at first, until Senator Hartmann had a private talk with him, a talk from which Downs emerged happy, smiling, and oddly closemouthed.
The death of Charlemagne Calixte was ascribed to a sudden, unexpected illness. The other dozen bodies found in Fort Mercredi were never mentioned, and the twoscore odd deaths and suicides among government officials over the next week or so were never even connected to Calixte’s death.
Jean-Claude Duvalier, who suddenly found himself with a sullen, poverty-stricken country to run, was grateful for the lack of publicity, but there was something he discovered at the end of the affair, something puzzling and terrifying that he carefully kept secret.
Among the bodies recovered from Fort Mercredi was that of an old, old man. When Jean-Claude saw the body he blanched nearly white and had it interred in the Cimetiere Exterieur in haste, at night, without ceremony, before anyone else could recognize it and ask how it was that Francois Duvalier, supposedly dead for fifteen years, was, or had been until very recently, still alive.
The only one who could answer that question was no longer in Haiti. He was on his way to America where he anticipated a long, interesting, and productive search for new and exciting sensations.
“If you wish to find the unclouded truth, do not concern yourself with right and wrong.”
—Seng-ts’an: Hsin-hsin Ming.
Brennan watched all the color fade from the landscape as the bus came down from the quiet coolness of the mountains to the sweltering stickiness of a summer city day. Endless asphalt parking lots replaced meadows and grassy fields. Buildings grew taller and crowded closer to the roadway. Leaden lightpoles supplanted the trees on the median and along the road. Even the sky turned sullen and gray, threatening rain.
He disembarked at the Port Authority with the other passengers. They scattered to their myriad destinations, their eyes averted in the habitual manner of the big-city dweller, without giving him a second glance. Not that there was anything about him to cause someone to glance twice.
He was tall, but not excessively so. His build was more lithe than bulky. His hands were large. Suntanned and scarred, veins and cords stood out on their backs like thick wires. His face was dark and lean and unremarkable. He wore a denim jacket, frayed and sunbleached, a dark cotton tee shirt, a fresh pair of blue jeans, and dark running shoes. He carried a small soft-sided bag in his left hand and a flat leather case in his right.
Forty-second Street outside the Port Authority building was crowded. He merged into the flow of the foot traffic, allowing it to take him into an area of Manhattan that was only slightly less seedy than some of the more polite parts of Jokertown. He extricated himself from the swarm of pedestrians after a few blocks and went up the decaying stone steps of the Ipswhich Arms, a blowsy hotel that apparently catered to the local hooker trade. It looked as if business was bad. People were apparently going to Jokertown for their kicks. They were cheaper there and, even if only a fraction of what he had read was true, a lot kickier.
The desk clerk looked dubious when he came in alone and with luggage, but took his money and gave him directions to a room that was as small and dirty as he had thought it would be.
He closed the door, put his bag on the floor, and carefully set his leather case on the sagging bed.
The room was sweltering, but Brennan had been in hotter places. He felt confined by the filthy bare walls around him, but opening a window wouldn’t have helped. He laid down on the bed and stared at the peeling ceiling without seeing the roaches racing above his head. The words of a letter he had received the day before kept running through his mind.
“Captain Brennan, he is here. I have seen him, but I am afraid that he saw and recognized me as well. Come to the restaurant. Be cautious, but open.”
There was no signature, but he recognized Minh’s elegant, precise hand. There was no address, but he didn’t need one. Minh had hidden him in his restaurant for several days when he had surreptitiously returned to the States three years before. And Brennan had no doubt to whom his old friend referred in the letter. It was Kien.
He closed his eyes and saw a face: masculine, lean, predatory. He tried to make it vanish. He tried to blank it from his mind by conjuring-from the depths of his consciousness the sound of one hand clapping. He tried, but failed. The face smiled, mocking him. It began to laugh.
He sat on the bed, waiting for the darkness and what it would bring.
The air was flat and unmoving and clogged Brennan’s nostrils with the miasma of seven million people crammed too closely together. After three years in the mountains he was unused to the city, but he was still able to take advantage of it. One man among thousands, he was seen but not noticed, heard but not remembered, as he walked to Minh’s restaurant on Elizabeth, carrying his flat leather case.
It was early evening and the street was still crowded with potential customers, but the restaurant was closed. That was strange.
The vestibule, the only part of the restaurant’s interior visible from the street, was dark. The sign hanging on the inside of the outer glass door said “Closed. Please call again.” in English and Vietnamese. Three men, city punks, lounged on the street in front of the building, joking among themselves.
Brennan walked to the corner, trying to drape his sudden apprehension with a cloak of calmness. He ran through a series of breathing exercises that had been Ishida’s first lesson to him when he had decided to give direction to his life by studying the Way. Apprehension, fear, nervousness, hatred-these would do him no good. He needed the ineffable calmness of an unbroken, unclouded mountain pool.
Kien was still alive. Of that he never had a doubt. Kien was a cunning and ruthless survivor to whom the fall of Saigon was merely an inconvenience. It would have taken him some time, but Brennan knew that he must have built a network of agents as potent and relentless as his network in Vietnam. These agents, given the few days that it took the letter to be written, delivered, and acted upon, could have tracked Minh down.
He turned the corner and, unnoticed by the other pedestrians on the street, slipped into a side alley bordering Minh’s restaurant. It was dark there, and as quiet and rank as death. He crouched next to a pile of uncollected garbage, listening and watching. He saw nothing, as his eyes adjusted to the deeper gloom of the alley, besides scavenging cats. He heard nothing but the rustling sounds they made as they searched through the garbage.
He set his case down and flicked open its latches. He could barely see in the gloom, but he needed no light at all to assemble what lay inside. He snapped on and dogged down the limbs, upper and lower, to the central grip, and with sure, practiced strength slipped the string over the lower tip, stepped through, set the tip of the lower limb against his foot, bent the upper limb against the back of his thigh, and slipped the string over its tip. He brushed the taut string with his fingers and smiled at the low thrumming sound it produced.
He held a recurved bow, forty-two inches long, made of layers of fiberglass laminated around a yew core. Brennan knew it was a good bow. He had made it himself. It pulled at sixty pounds, powerful enough to bring down a deer, bear, or man.
The case also held a three-fingered leather glove which Brennan slipped on his right hand and a small quiver of arrows which he attached to his belt by Velcro tabs. He pulled one free. It was tipped by a hunting broadhead with four razorsharp vanes. He nocked it loosely to the taut string and, more silent than the cats scrabbling through the uncollected garbage, crept to the restaurant’s back door.
He listened, but could hear nothing. He tried the door, found it unlocked, and cracked it open half an inch. An arc of light spilled out and he found himself looking into a swatch of the kitchen. It, too, was empty and quiet.
He slid inside, a silent blot of darkness in the stainless steel and white porcelain room. Keeping low, moving fast, he went to the double swinging doors that led out into the dining area and cautiously peeked through the oval window set into the door. He saw what he had been afraid he would see. The waiters, cooks, and customers were huddled together in one corner of the room under the watchful eyes of a man armed with an automatic pistol. Two others held Minh spreadeagled against a wall while a third worked him over. Minh’s face was bruised and bloody, his eyes were swollen shut. The man who was beating him methodically with a leather sap was also questioning him.
Brennan slipped down below the window, his teeth clenched, rage swelling the veins in his neck and reddening his face.
Kien had recognized Minh and ordered him hunted down. Minh was one of the few people in America who could identify Kien, who knew that he had methodically and ruthlessly used his position as an ARVN general to betray his country, his men, and his American allies. Brennan, of course, also knew Kien for what he was. He also knew that whatever place Kien had made for himself in America, those in authority would respect, listen to, and probably even fear him. Brennan, on the other hand, since he had walked away from the Army in disgust during the debacle of the Fall of Saigon, was an outlaw. No one in authority knew that he was back in the States, and he wanted to keep it that way.
He reached into his back pocket, withdrew a hood, and slipped it on, covering his features from his upper lip to the top of his head.
He took a moment to breathe deep, to drown his emotions in a void of nothingness, to forget his rage, his fear, his friend, his need for revenge, to forget even himself. He became nothing so that he would be all. He was not angry, not calm. He rose silently to his feet and stepped through the door, sank down on one knee behind a table and drew his first shaft.
The quiet, assured words of Ishida, his roshi, filled his mind like the somnolent tolling of a great bell.
“Be simultaneously the aimer and the aimed, the hitter and hit. Be a full vessel waiting to be emptied. Loose your burden when the moment is right, without thinking or direction, and in that manner know the Way.”
He stared without seeing, forgetting whether his targets were men or bales of hay, loosed his first shaft, dropped his hand to the quiver at his belt, took out his next arrow, nocked, lifted the bow, and drew the string while the first shaft was still on its way.
The first arrow hit while he was shifting his aim to take in the third target. They realized they were being attacked by the time the second arrow had struck and the fourth was released. By then it was too late.
He had chosen the order of his targets before becoming submerged in the void. The first was the man guarding the hostages with the drawn gun. The shaft struck him in the back, high on the left side. It skewered his heart, sliced through one lung, and burst out half a foot from his chest. The impact hurled him forward, astonished, into the arms of a waiter.
They both stared at the bloody aluminum shaft protruding from his chest. The gunman opened his mouth to swear or pray, but blood gushed forth, drowning his words. He slumped forward, his legs gone rubbery, and the waiter dropped him.
The two who held Minh released him. He slumped to the floor as they reached for the weapons at their belts. One had his hand pinned to his stomach before he could draw; the other was nailed to the wall. He dropped his pistol and clutched at the shaft pinning him like an insect staked to a drying-board. The last, the one who had been questioning Minh, whirled around and was struck in the side. The arrow angled upward, slipped between his ribs, pierced his heart, and punched upward through his right shoulder.
Nine seconds had elapsed. The sudden silence was broken only by the pained weeping of the man nailed to the wall.
Brennan crossed the room in a dozen strides. The hostages were still too stunned to move. Two of the thugs were dead. Brennan took no pleasure in their deaths, as he took no pleasure in killing deer to provide meat for his table. It was just something that had to be done. Neither did he waste his pity on them.
The one who was gutshot was curled up on the floor, unconscious and in shock. The other, pinned to the wall by the shaft that had pierced his chest, was still alert. Fear twisted his face and when he looked into Brennan’s eyes his sobbing grew to a wail.
Brennan stared at him without remorse. He drew a shaft from his quiver. The man started to babble. Brennan slashed out. The broadhead cut the man’s throat as easily as if it were a razor. Brennan dispassionately stepped aside from the sudden spurt of blood, slipped the arrow back into the quiver, and knelt down by Minh.
He was badly hurt. All his limbs were broken-it must have been agonizing to have been held up the way he wasand internal damage must have been massive. His breathing was shallow and shuddering. His eyes were swollen shut. They probably wouldn’t have focused even if he could have opened them.
“Ong Id ai?” he breathed at Brennan’s gentle, probing touch. Who are you?
“Brennan.”
Minh smiled a ghastly smile. Blood bubbled on his lips and gleamed on his teeth.
“I knew you would come, Captain.”
“Don’t speak. We have to get help—”
Minh shook his head. The effort cost him. He coughed and grimaced in pain.
“No. I am dying. I must tell you. It is Kien. This proves it. They wanted to know if I told anyone, but I would say nothing. They don’t know of you.”
“They will,” Brennan promised. Minh coughed again.
“I had hoped to help. Like the old days. Like the old days.” His mind wandered for a moment and Brennan looked up.
“Call an ambulance,” he ordered. “And the police. Tell them there’s three more on the street in front. Move.” One of the waiters leaped to follow his orders while the others watched in mute incomprehension.
“Help you,” Minh repeated, “help you.” He fell silent for a moment and then seemed to make a supreme effort to speak rationally and clearly. “You must listen. Scar has kidnapped Mai. I was following him, trying to get a lead to where he had taken Mai, when I saw him and Kien together in the back of a limousine. Go to Chrysalis, Crystal Palace. She might know where he’s taken her. I couldn’t ... find ... out.” His last sentence was interrupted by bloody fits of coughing.
“Why did they take her?” Brennan asked gently. “For her hands. Her bloody hands.”
Brennan wiped the beads of sweat from Minh’s forehead. “Rest easy now,” he said.
But Minh didn’t listen. He rose up, clutching Brennan’s arm.
“Find Mai. Help. Her.”
He settled back, sighed. Blood bubbled on his lips. “Toi met,” he said. I am tired.
Brennan clenched his jaw against the ache and answered softly in. Vietnamese.
“Rest, then.”
Minh nodded and died.
Brennan let him down gently and sat back on his heels, blinking rapidly. Not another one, he said to himself. Not another death. It was another thing Kien had to answer for. He stood, looked around, and saw nothing but fear on the faces of the people he had rescued. There was no sense in waiting. The police would only ask awkward questions. Like his name. There were plenty of people who would like to know that Daniel Brennan was still alive and back in the United States, Kien only one among them.
He had to leave before the police arrived. He had to follow the slim lead that Minh had left him. Chrysalis. Crystal Palace.
But he stopped, turned to the freed hostages. “... eed a pen,” he said.
One of the waiters had a felt-tip marker that he wordlessly handed to Brennan. He paused for a moment. He wanted Kien to wake up at night in a cold sweat, thinking, wondering.
It wouldn’t get to him right away, but, with enough messages, enough dead agents, it eventually would.
He scrawled a message next to the man nailed to the wall by his arrow. It said: “I’m coming for you, Kien.”He stopped before signing it. His name wouldn’t do. It would take the fear of the unknown from his attacks and give Kien, his agents, and his government contacts too concrete a clue to follow. He smiled as sudden inspiration struck him.
The code name of his last mission in Vietnam, when Kien had betrayed him and his unit into the hands of the North Vietnamese, had been Operation Yeoman. That name would make Kien think. He might suspect that it was Brennan who stood behind the name, but he wouldn’t know for sure. It would gnaw at him in the night and salt his dreams with memories of deeds he’d thought long buried. It was also an appropriate name in a grimly ironic way. It suited him well.
He signed the short message Yeoman and then, in a burst of final inspiration, drew a small ace of spades, the Vietnamese symbol of death and ill-fortune, and colored it in. The Vietnamese waiters and kitchen help muttered to themselves at the sight of the mark, and the waiter from whom Brennan had borrowed the pen refused to take it back with quick, birdlike shakes of his head.
“Suit yourself,” Brennan said. “How do I get to the Crystal Palace?”
One of them stammered directions and Brennan went back out through the kitchen, into the dark alley. He disassembled his bow, slipped it back into its case, and was gone before the police arrived. Still wearing his mask, he kept to the alleys and dark streets, passing other phantom figures in the darkness. Some watched him, some were absorbed in their own doings. None tried to stop him.
The Crystal Palace, on Henry, was part of a block-long three-story rowhouse. About half the row had been destroyed in the Great Jokertown Riot of 1976 and had never been rebuilt. Some of the debris had been cleared away, some remained in great piles sitting next to tottering walls. As Brennan passed he saw eyes, whether human or animal he couldn’t tell, gleaming out from cracks and crevices within the piles of wreckage. He wasn’t tempted to investigate. He went farther down the street to where the rowhouse was still intact, up the short stone staircase under a canopied entrance, through a small antechamber, and found himself in the main taproom of the Crystal Palace.
It was dark, crowded, and smoky. There was an occasional obvious joker, like the short, blubbery, tusked fellow peddling newspapers by the door and the bicephalic singer on the small stage managing some nice harmony on a Cole Porter tune. Some were normal enough until one looked close. Brennan noticed one man, normal, handsome even, except that he lacked a nose and mouth and had instead a long, curled proboscis that he extended like a straw into his drink as Brennan watched. Some wore costumes that called attention to their strangeness, as if to proclaim their infection in a defiant manner. Some wore masks to hide their deformities, although some who wore masks were naturals, or nats, in joker slang. “You a salesman?”
It took Brennan a moment to realize that the question was directed at him. He looked over to the end of the long wooden bar where a man sat on a high stool, swinging his short, stubby legs well clear of the floor. He was a dwarf, about four feet tall and four feet wide. His neck was as tall as a can of tuna fish and as thick as a man’s thigh. He looked as solid and expressionless as a slab of marble.
“Those your samples?” he asked, gesturing at Brennans case with a hand that was twice the size of Brennan’s. “Just the tools of my trade.”
“Sascha.”
One of the bartenders, a tall, thin man with a pencil mustache and an oily curl of hair falling limply over his forehead, turned toward the dwarf. Brennan had noticed him out of the corner of his eye, mixing and dispensing drinks with incredible speed and surety. When he turned at the dwarf’s call Brennan saw that he had no eyes, only a blank, unbroken expanse of skin covering his sockets. The bartender looked in his direction and nodded rapidly.
“He’s okay, Elmo, he’s okay.” The dwarf nodded and took his eyes off Brennan for the first time since he had spoken. Brennan frowned, was about to speak, but the bartender beat him to it. He pointed down to the other end of the bar and said, “She’s over there.”
Brennan pursed his lips. The eyeless man smiled briefly and turned away to mix another drink. Brennan looked in the direction the bartender had indicated and caught his breath.
A woman sat at a corner table with a slim, light-skinned black man who was wearing a red kimono splashed with yellow dragons and embroidered with what Brennan took to be mystical formulae. He was handsome, but for the bulging forehead that marred his profile. The chair he sat in was ordinary. The woman’s chair was throne-sized, with a black walnut frame and red velvet cushions. She set down the thimble-sized crystal glass from which she was sipping a honey-colored liqueur, looked directly at Brennan, and smiled.
She wore pants that clung to her lithe figure and a sheathlike wrap that gathered over her right shoulder, leaving half her chest naked. Her skin was completely invisible, exposing vague, shadowy muscles and the organs that labored underneath them. Brennan could see blood pulsing in the network of veins and arteries that ran through her flesh, could see her ghostly, semitransparent muscles shift and glide at her slightest movement, could even see, faintly, the beating of her heart within the cage of her ribs and the fluttering of her lungs as they labored evenly and unceasingly.
She smiled at him. Brennan knew that he stared, but he couldn’t help himself. She looked too bizarre to be beautiful, but she was fascinating. Her exposed breasts was totally invisible, save for its fine network of interlacing blood vessels and its large, dark nipple. Her face—well, who could tell? Her eyes were blue; her cheekbones, under the sheath of jaw muscle, high; her nose a cavity in her skull. Her lips, like the nipple of her breast, were visible. They were full and inviting and curved in a sardonic smile. She had no hair to hide her white skull. He threaded his way through the crowd toward her table and she watched him with what seemed to be, if he could read her bizarre expression, detached amusement. He watched the mechanism of her throat work as she sipped her drink.
“Forgive me,” he began, and ran down to silence. She laughed. It was good-humored, with no bitterness, reproach, or anger. “Forgiveness granted, masked man,” she said. “I’m a sight to behold. No one seeing me for the first time can act casual about it. I’m Chrysalis, owner and proprietress of the Crystal Palace, as I guess you know. This is Fortunato.” The black looked at Brennan and he could see the man’s eastern blood in the shape of his eyes. They nodded at each other wordlessly. There was, Brennan realized, an aura of power about this man. He was an ace, of that Brennan was suddenly sure.
“What’s your name?” Chrysalis asked him.
She spoke in a cultured British accent, which would have surprised Brennan if he hadn’t already exceeded his surprise quotient for the evening. Her voice had grown thoughtful, her expression seemed calculating.
“Yeoman,” Brennan said, wondering how open he could afford to be.
“Interesting. Its not your real name, of course.” Brennan looked at her silently.
“Would you like to know it?” her companion asked. Fortunato smiled lazily and she shrugged and smiled back noncommittally.
Fortunato looked at Brennan. ‘His eyes grew deeper, darker. Brennan sensed a swirling vortex of power growing in them, power he suddenly realized was directed toward him.
He flashed with anger, his fists clenching, and he knew that he couldn’t keep the spore-given ability of Fortunato from penetrating into the core of his brain. There was only one thing he could do.
He took a deep breath, held it, and let all thought drain from his mind. He was back in Japan again, facing Ishida, trying to answer the riddle the roshi has posed him when he had first sought entry to the monastery.
“A sound is heard when both hands are clapped. What is the sound of one hand clapping?”
Wordlessly Brennan had thrust forth one hand, clasped into a fist. Ishida had nodded, and Brennan’s training began in earnest. He called upon that training now. He entered deeply into zazen, the state of meditation where he emptied himself of all thought, feeling, emotion, and expression. A timeless time passed and, as if from a long distance away, he heard Fortunato mutter, “Extraordinary” and he brought himself back.
Fortunato looked at him with a modicum of respect in his eyes. Chrysalis watched them both carefully.
“You’re into Zen?” Fortunato asked.
“A humble student,” Brennan murmured, his voice sounding even to him as if coming from a distant mountain peak.
“Maybe I’d better speak to Yeoman alone,” Chrysalis said. “If you want.” Fortunato stood.
“A moment.” Brennan shook himself like a dog shedding water and returned entirely to the room. He looked at Fortunato. “Don’t do that again.”
Fortunato pursed his lips, nodded. “I’m sure we’ll meet again.”
He left the table, threading his way through the crowded room.
Brennan took his chair as Chrysalis gazed at him with what seemed to be a calculating expression.
“Strange that I haven’t heard of you before,” she said. “I’ve just come to town.”
Her gaze had become penetrating, captivating. It was with some effort that Brennan pulled his gaze away from her eyes floating naked in their hollow sockets.
“On business?” she asked. Brennan nodded and she sipped her drink, sighed, put her glass down. “I can see that you’re not in the mood for small talk. What do you want of me?”
“Your bartender,” he began. “How does he get along so well without eyes?”
“That’s an easy one,” Chrysalis said with a smile. “I’ll give it to you for free. Sascha’s a telepath, among other things. Don’t worry. Whatever secrets you’re hiding behind your mask are safe. He’s a skimmer. He can only read surface thoughts. Makes his job easier, makes the Crystal Palace safer. He tells Elmo who the dangerous, the sick, the twisted, are. And Elmo gets rid of them.”
Brennan nodded, feeling a little safer. He was glad to learn that the bartender’s ability was limited. He didn’t like the thought of anyone poking about in his brain.
“What else?” Chrysalis asked.
“I need to know about two men. A man named Scar and his boss, Kien.”
Chrysalis looked at him and frowned. At least, the muscles of her face bunched up. Like her bodily musculature, they looked wispy, insubstantial, as if that which made her flesh and skin totally invisible affected them to the point of translucency.
“You know that they’re connected? That’s something maybe only three people outside their own circle know. Are they friends of yours?” Sudden anger blazed across Brennan’s face and she flinched. “No. I guess not.”
Her words brought to life memories of treachery and violence. Sascha turned his blind gaze to their corner. Elmo stood on tiptoes, craning his thick neck. Around the room half a dozen people fell silent. One man clutched his temples and fainted dead away. He whimpered like a whipped dog as the others at his table tried to bring him out of his trance. Chrysalis broke her gaze from Brennan’s, waved Elmo off, and the tension began, slowly, to dissipate.
“They’re dangerous, both of them,” she said calmly. “Kien’s Vietnamese, an ex-general. He showed up about, oh, eight years ago. He quickly insinuated himself into the drug trade and now owns a large share of it. In fact, he has his fingers in most other illegal activities in the city, while maintaining a facade of solid respectibility. Owns a string of dry-cleaning establishments and restaurants. Donates to the proper charities and political parties. Gets invited to all the big social events. Scar’s one of his lieutenants. He doesn’t report directly to Kien. The general keeps himself well insulated.”
“Tell me more about Scar.”
“Local boy. I don’t know his real name. He’s called Scar because of the strange tattoos he’s had smeared all over his face. They’re supposed to be Maori tribal markings.”
Brennan must have looked incredulous because Chrysalis shrugged. He watched muscles shift and bones rotate in their sockets. The nipple of her exposed breast bobbed up and down on its pad of invisible flesh.
“He supposedly got the idea from an anthropologist from NYU. who was studying his street gang. Something about urban tribalism. Anyway, he’s one mean dude. He’s Kien’s chief muscle. Unbeatable in a fight.” She gazed at him shrewdly. “You’re going up against him.”
It was a statement, not a question.
“What makes him unbeatable?”
“He’s an instantaneous teleport. He can vanish quicker than anyone can move and reappear anywhere he wants to. Usually behind his opponent. He’s also mean as hell. He could be big stuff, but he likes to kill too much. He’s content with being one of Kien’s lieutenants. Not that he does badly for himself.” She toyed with her glass for a moment, then looked directly at Brennan. “Are you an ace?”
Brennan said nothing. Their eyes locked for a long moment and then Chrysalis sighed.
“You have nothing. You’re just a man. A nat. What makes you think you can take Scar?” she repeated.
“As you said, I’m a man. He’s kidnapped the daughter of a friend of mine. I’m the only one left to go after her.”
“The police?” Chrysalis began reflexively, then laughed at her own suggestion. “No. Scar, through Kien, has enough police protection. I take it you have no solid evidence that Scar has the girl? No. What about one of the other aces? Black Shadow, Fortunato perhaps ...”
“There’s no time. I don’t know what he’s doing to her. Besides”—he stopped for a moment and looked back ten years, “this is personal.”
“So I suspected.”
Brennan drew his gaze back into the room. He stared hard at Chrysalis.
“Where can I find Scar?”
“I’m in the business of selling information and I’ve already given you plenty for free. That tidbit will cost you.”
“I have no money.”
“I don’t need money from you. I do you a favor, you do me one.”
Brennan scowled. “I don’t like being in anyone’s debt.”
“Then find your information elsewhere.”
The need to be doing something was burning in Brennan. “Very well.”
She took a sip of her liqueur and regarded the crystal goblet, held in a hand whose flesh was as clear as the goblet itself.
“He has a big place on Castleton Avenue, Staten Island. It’s isolated and fenced in and sits on extensive grounds. He likes to hunt. Men.”
“He does?” Brennan asked, his gaze thoughtful, considering.
“Why did Scar kidnap this girl? Is she special in any way?”
“I don’t know,” Brennan said, shaking his head. “I thought it was to keep her father quiet because he had seen Scar and Kien together, but the sequence of events is all wrong. Minh saw them together when he was following Scar, trying to pick up clues about the kidnapping. He told me that they took her for her ‘bloody hands.’ That mean anything to you?”
Chrysalis shook her head.
“Can’t you get him to be less cryptic?”
“He’s dead.”
She reached out, put one of her hands on his and something passed between them. “You probably won’t heed my warnings, but I’ll give them anyway. Be careful.” Brennan nodded. Her hand, invisible on his, was warm and soft. He watched blood pulse rhythmically through it. “Possibly,” she continued, “you’d like to discharge some of your debt?”
“How?” Brennan asked, meeting the subtle challenge of her tone and expression.
“If you survive your encounter with Scar, come back to the Palace, tonight. Don’t worry about the time. I’ll be waiting for you.”
There was no mistaking her meaning. She offered entanglements that he had avoided for a long time, relationships that he had wanted no part of for years.
“Or do you find me repulsive?” she asked matter-of-factly in the lengthy silence that stretched between them.
“No,” he said more curtly than he had intended. “Its not that, not that at all.”
His voice sounded harsh in his own ears. He had isolated himself so long from human contact that the thought of entering into any kind of intimate relationship was frightening.
“Your secrets will be safe from me, Yeoman,” Chrysalis said.
He took a deep breath, nodded.
“Good.” Her smile returned. “I’ll expect you.”
He turned without a word, and her smile slipped from her face. “If,” she said so softly that only she heard the words, “you can do the impossible. If you can beat Scar.”
There were, Brennan thought, two ways to go about this. He could be surreptitious. He could sneak into Scar’s mansion, not knowing what security system he might have, and flit from room to room, not knowing what was in each room, not even knowing if Mai was in the building. Or he could just walk in, putting his trust in luck, nerve, and his ability to think on his feet.
He unmasked after he left the Crystal Palace and found a cab. The cabbie was reluctant to take him out to Staten Island, but he flashed a couple of twenties and the hack became all smiles. It was a long ride, by cab and ferry, and Brennan spent it in unhappy reminiscence. Ishida would have disapproved, but then, Brennan knew, he had never been the best of the roshi’s students.
He had the cabbie drop him off a block or so from the Castleton address that Chrysalis had given him, paid the fare, and gave the hack a tip that wiped out most of his cash reserves. As the cab pulled away he moved quietly in the shadows until he stood across the street from Scar’s place. It was as Chrysalis had described.
The house itself was a hulking stone mansion set a couple hundred yards off the street. A few lights shone through scattered windows on each of the three floors, but there was no illumination on the outside. The wall that encircled the grounds was stone, about seven feet high, surmounted by strands of electrical wire. The small glass-sided guardbox that stood by the wrought-iron gate held a single sentinel. It didn’t look as if the security would be very difficult to breach, but the mansion was definitely too big to search room by room.
It would have to be boldness, nerve, and luck. A lot of luck, Brennan thought as he walked briskly from the shadows. The man in the guardbooth was watching a small television set, a talk show hosted by a beautiful woman with wings. Brennan, who hadn’t watched television since his return to the States, nevertheless recognized her as Peregrine, one of the most visible aces, the hostess of Peregrine’s Perch. She was watching an immense bearded man in a chef’s hat doing something culinary. They chatted amiably as his large hands moved with surprising grace and Brennan realized that he was Hiram Worchester, alias Fatman, another of the more-public aces.
The guard was engrossed in Peregrine, who wore an undeniably attractive costume that was slit down nearly to her navel. Brennan had to rap on the glass door of the booth to get his attention, though he had made no effort to conceal his approach.
The guard opened the door. “Where did you come from?”
“A cab.” Brennan gestured vaguely over his shoulder. “I sent it away.”
“Oh, oh sure,” the guard said. “I heard it. What do you want?”
Brennan was about to say that Kien sent him about the girl, but he bit the words back at the last instant. Chrysalis had told him that only very few people knew that Kien and Scar were connected. This flunky certainly wasn’t one of them.
“The boss sent me. About the girl,” he said, keeping as vague as possible while making his voice assured and knowing. “The boss?”
“Call Scar. He knows.”
The guard turned, picked up a phone. He hung up after a few seconds of muffled conversation and touched a panel in front of him. The wrought-iron gate swung open silently.
“Go on in,” he said, turning back to the television, where Hiram and Peregrine were eating sugar-coated chocolate crepes with delighted looks on their faces. Brennan hesitated briefly.
“One more thing,” he said.
The guard sighed, turned slowly, more than half-watching the television set.
Brennan rammed his palm, hard, in an upward motion against the guard’s nose. He felt bone buckle and shatter at the force of his blow. The man convulsed once as splinters of bone knifed through his brain, and then went utterly slack. Brennan snapped off the television as Fatman and Peregrine were finishing the crepes, and dragged the body into the yard and dumped it behind some concealing shrubbery. Regretfully, he left his bowcase stashed there as well, but, so as not to go totally unarmed, extracted a spare bowstring and looped it loosely around his hips, under the waistband of his jeans. He walked briskly up the drive to the mansion.
Scar needed a gardener. The yard had turned feral. The grass hadn’t been cut all summer; the shrubberies had gone crazy. Untended, they had spilled over their original boundaries and provided a fairly dense undergrowth beneath the thick, untrimmed trees. It was more of an acre or two of forest than a front yard and for a moment it made Brennan long for the quiet peacefulness of the Catskills. Then he was at the front door and he remembered what had brought him here. He rang the bell.
The man who answered the front door had the insolence of a city punk and the gun that he carried under his armpit in a shoulder rig looked big enough to bring down an elephant.
“Come on in. Scar’s got a client. They’re with the girl.” Brennan frowned at the man’s back as he led him into the mansion. What was going on? Prostitution? Weird sex? He wanted to question the man who was leading him to the rear of the mansion, but knew that it was best to keep his mouth shut. He’d find answers soon enough.
Scar kept a little better care of the interior of his mansion than he did of the yard, but not much. The marble parquet floor was filthy, and there were stale odors clogging the air that made Brennan sick. He was afraid to breathe too deeply, lest he find himself able to identify some of the odors. A stairway swept upward into the upper stories of the mansion, but they stayed on the first floor, heading toward the rear of the building.
His guide turned to the left, passed through a metal detector which beeped once, and looked back at Brennan. Brennan followed him. The detector was silent. The thug nodded and led Brennan into a well-lit room that had four other people in it. One was a tough, identical for all practical purposes to the one who had met Brennan at the door. Another was a woman with long blond hair. She wore a mask that covered her entire face.
Another was Mai. She looked up at him dully as he entered the room and quick stifled the look of recognition that came to her face when she saw him. It had been three years since he had seen her. She had grown into a beautiful young woman, small, delicate, fine-featured, with thick, glossy hair and dark, dark eyes. She looked unharmed, if terribly tired.
There were circles under her eyes and Brennan could read the weariness in her every muscle by the way she held herself. The last was Scar. He was tall and lean, dressed in tee shirt and black chinos. His face was a nightmare. The patterns tattooed on it in black and scarlet turned it into the leering, bestial face of a demon. His eyes were sunk in black pits, his teeth inset in a scarlet cave. Brennan was surprised to see, when Scar smiled at him, that his teeth weren’t filed.
“What’s your name, man?” he asked in the thick argot of the inner city. “I ain’t never seen you before.”
“Archer,” Brennan lied automatically. “What’s going on here?”
Scar flashed his smile again. It twisted his face into odd contortions that showed nothing of humor.
“You just in time, man. The sister here is going to demonstrate her power, aren’t you?”
Everyone looked at Mai, who bowed her head in silent, wearied resignation.
“She can do it?” the masked woman asked, her voice oddly eager and sibilant.
Scar only nodded and gestured at Mai. The two thugs watched with disinterest. Scar kept shifting his gaze back and forth to Brennan, Mai, and the woman.
“Tell the man,” he said, watching Brennan closely as Mai approached the woman, “that I was going to tell him all about her. I was just checking things out.”
Brennan nodded impatiently, aloof and hard-eyed outside, indecisive inside. Mai walked to the woman without glancing in his direction. Whatever was going to happen, he thought, couldn’t be too bad. She seemed to be taking things calmly enough. He decided to wait.
“You have to take the mask off,” Mai told the woman quietly. She drew back a little and glanced at the men watching her, but obeyed. Brennan watched impassively as she unmasked, Scar watched with a slight, sly smile. She was obviously ashamed of her face. Brennan had seen worse, but it was enough to evoke leering whispers from Scar’s men. She had no chin and only a slight lower jaw. Her nose consisted of flat nostrils set above her lipless mouth. Her forehead was tiny. Her whole face was thrust forward in a reptilian manner that was enhanced by the colorfully beaded texture of her skin. She looked all the world like a Gila monster with long blond hair.
“I used to be beautiful,” she said, looking down.
Scar’s men snickered aloud, but Mai took her roughskinned cheeks between her palms and said quietly, “You will be again.”
The woman looked up at her, a world of pain in her eyes. Mai gazed calmly at her, her face blank with the serenity of a madonna. For a moment nothing happened. Brennan glanced from her to Scar, who was watching him carefully, then back again. Then, where her palms touched the leathery skin of the woman’s cheeks, blood began to run in little trickles. It seemed to be welling from the woman’s cheeks, Mai’s palms, or both. Tiny rivulets ran from between Mai’s fingers, down the backs of her hands to her wrists. Mai moaned and Brennan stared at her as her face changed. Her chin receded, her jaw shrank. Her forehead narrowed and her skin became thick and pebbly and banded in orange and black and scarlet. It took some minutes. Brennan watched with pursed lips. Scar watched him watch. He smiled malevolently, his tattooed face a demonic mask.
Two lizard-women faced each other, one blond, one darkhaired. The woman looked at Mai wide-eyed, Mai looked back reassuringly. She sighed, longly, like a lover after release, and she began to change. Her skin lost its roughness, its bright color. The bone beneath it shifted back to normal configurations. Her lips twitched slightly, perhaps at the pain of the metamorphosis, but she said nothing. It took a moment longer, but the blond woman, too, began to change. Skin softened, bleached itself. Bone flowed like soft wax. Tears ran down her high, fine cheeks, whether from pain or joy, Brennan couldn’t tell. The transformation took some minutes. When the tiny rivulets of blood ceased to flow, Mai took her hands from the woman’s face. The woman was right. She had been beautiful, and was again. Weeping silently, she took Mai’s hand and pressed a kiss into her palm. Mai smiled at her and swayed tiredly. Brennan could see that willpower alone kept her on her feet. Every line and muscle of her body cried out in weariness.
The woman reached down to a purse on a small table near where she stood and took out a thick envelope. Scar gestured. One of his smirking thugs took it, put it in his back pants pocket, and escorted the woman from the room.
“Well, man, what you think?”
“Fantastic,” Brennan said, still looking at Mai. “What is it, genetic manipulation of some sort?”
“I don’t know about that shit,” Scar said. “I just heard that she was healing jokers in the neighborhood, and I figured why should she fix up those poor jokers when she can fix up jokers who’ll pay plenty. So I snatched her.”
Brennan turned away from Mai and met Scar’s eyes. “She’s worth a lot. You should have told Kien about her. I’ll have to take her to him.”
Scar puckered his tattooed lips in mock consternation. “You will? You seem to know a lot, man. How come you don’t know that I told the man about her when that gook saw us together in the back of the man’s limo?” He turned, looked at Mai, and added maliciously, “And then the man had the old gook hit so he wouldn’t tell no one about it.”
“My father?” Mai asked.
Scar nodded, grinning like a devil. Mai gasped, swayed, and would have fallen if Scar’s man hadn’t grabbed her roughly by the arm. Brennan moved.
He launched himself across the room, ripped the gun from the man’s shoulder rig, jammed the barrel against his chest, and pulled the trigger. There was an immense roar as the blast lifted the man ofu his feet and threw him against the wall. He left a red smear as he slumped to the floor, his eyes open and unbelieving.
Brennan whirled, but Scar was gone. He saw a flicker at the edge of his vision and felt sharp pain as Scar chopped down on his wrist, knocking the gun from his grasp. Scar ducked Brennan’s sweeping arm, kicked the gun across the room, and vanished silently and utterly.
He reappeared between Brennan and the gun, smiling crazily.
“You need a gun to go up against Scar? You some kind of crazy nat,” he said. “What name you want on your tombstone?” He reached into the pocket of his chinos and with a practiced flick of his wrist opened a six-inch-long straight razor. He vanished again and Brennan felt a sudden biting pain in his side. He heard Mai’s cry, threw himself away, rolled, and stood. Blood ran down his side where Scar had slashed a long, shallow cut across his ribs. He barely had time to stand before Scar appeared again, slashed his cheek open, and popped away. It was as Chrysalis had said. He was fast and precise in his teleporting. And he did enjoy his work.
“I cut you slowly, man,” he said, appearing with killing lust in his eyes, “I cut you till you beg me to finish you.” He twitched his wrist, flicking Brennan’s blood off the edge of his blade. It was bright in the room, bright and closed in. Brennan was trapped, confined, and he knew he didn’t have a chance in hell. Scar would cut him to ribbons, laughing, as he tried to reach the gun. He breathed deeply, calming his racing mind, drawing, as Ishida had taught him, into a state of serene tranquility, and he knew what he had to do. Scar slashed his back as he turned, ran, and hurled himself through the French windows in the rear of the room. He burst out of the light onto a dark patio.
Scar smiled a genuinely happy smile and stepped out onto the patio after him. He whistled tunelessly and watched Brennan run into the yard and blunder into a thick patch of trees.
“Hey, nat!” he called out. “Where are you, man? I tell you what. You give me a good hunt, I’ll cut you a few times then finish you fast. You disappoint me, I’ll cut your balls off. Even the gook chick won’t be able to grow you a new pair.”
Scar laughed at his joke, then followed Brennan into the dark. He stopped after a moment and listened. He heard nothing but the sounds of the wind in the trees and, distantly, occasional cars moving in the far streets. His prey was gone, vanished into the night. Scar frowned. Something was wrong. He walked deeper into the trees.
And from nowhere, a ghost silent among shadows, Brennan rose from his hiding place, his waxed nylon bowstring wrapped around his fists. He looped the string around Scars throat from behind, yanked, and twisted. Flesh and gristle crumpled and Scar vanished. He reappeared a few feet away, clutching at his crushed windpipe. He tried to suck in air, but nothing reached his laboring lungs. He opened his mouth to say something at Brennan, to curse him or plead with him, but no words came. He vanished again, but reappeared a microsecond later in the same place, his tattooed face screwed up in pain and fear, his concentration shattered, his control gone. Brennan watched him flicker crazily among the trees, desperation on his face, teleporting madly, nonsensically. Finally he appeared spewing blood from his mouth, staggered against a tree, dropped his razor, and fell face up. Brennan approached cautiously, but he was dead. He hunkered over him, and took out the felt-tip pen that the waiter had given him in Minh’s restaurant. He drew an ace of spades on the back of Scar’s right hand, and, to be sure that Kien wouldn’t miss it, placed the hand over Scar’s marked face.
He made his way back through the trees silently, like the ghost of a forest animal. Mai was waiting for him on the patio. She didn’t seem surprised when it was he who emerged from the trees. She knew him, and what he could do.
“Captain Brennan, is Father really dead?”
He nodded, unable to say the words. She seemed to shrink, to look frailer, more tired, if that were possible. She closed her eyes and tears welled silently from beneath their lids.
“Let’s go home.”
He led her into the welcome darkness of the night.
He left after she bandaged his wounds, promising to drop by when he could, sadness for her welling inside him, merging with the grief he himself felt at Minh’s death. Another comrade, another friend, gone.
Kien had to be brought down. It was up to him, one man, alone, with nothing but the strength of his hands and the cunning of his mind. It would take a long time. He needed a base to operate from, and equipment. Special bows, special arrows. He needed money.
He drew back into the shadows of the Jokertown night, waiting for a certain type of man to come by, a street merchant who exchanged packets of white powder for green bills crumpled in sweaty desperation.
He breathed deeply. The night stank with the countless scents of seven million people and their myriad hopes, fears, and desperations. He was one of them now. He had left the mountains and returned to humanity and he knew that this return would bring with it disappointment and grief and lost hopes. And comfort, some part of him said, wondering at the warm touch of invisible flesh and the sight of a visible heart beating faster and faster with growing passion.
A sudden noise, a softly scraping step, caught his attention. A man passed him. He was dressed richly for a poor neighborhood, and he walked with jaunty arrogance. This was the one for whom he waited.
Brennan slipped quietly among the shadows, following him. The hunter had come to the city.
Dead Heart Beating
by John J. Miller
“It’sss the General’ssss order, Fadeout,” Wyrm hissed, his foot-long tongue lolling out disgustingly over his chin, his eyes as expressionless as a pair of cuff links stuck through the sleeves of a frayed, cheap shirt.
“Since when have I had to be frisked before seeing the old man?” Philip Cunningham asked Kien’s loyal watch joker.
“Ssssince the General ordered it.” Wyrm’s stare was unrelenting.
Cunningham gave his best put-upon sigh. “All right,” he said, good-naturedly raising his hands over his head as Wyrm patted him down.
But the easy smile and air of practiced indifference hid the sudden unease running through Cunningham’s mind. He knows, Cunningham thought. Somehow the old bastard found out about New Day. That’s why he called me in to see him.
Wyrm grunted, stood back. “Okay,” he said almost grudgingly. “You can go in.”
Cunningham hesitated. He was sure that an angry Kien was waiting for him beyond the closed door to his private office, an angry, vengeful Kien, ready to confront Cunningham with his knowledge of the scheme that would have put Cunningham in his place as head of the Shadow Fists. Cunningham wondered briefly who had betrayed him to Kien, but decided to worry about that later. Now he had something more basic on his mind. Survival.
He could try to make a break for it, or he could bull his way through by putting the blame for New Day on someone else. Loophole, maybe. Or Warlock. That might be his best bet.
He squared his shoulders and opened the door to Kien’s inner office. Inside, it was quiet and dimly lit. The only illumination came from the shaded lamp on the edge of Kien’s desk. The room’s atmosphere was dark and sepulchral, with the glass cases housing the fabulously expensive antique Orientalia scattered around the room playing the part of the grave offerings.
“You wanted to see me?” Cunningham asked as he entered the room. He stopped, frowning. “Kien?”
The shadowy figure sitting behind the huge teakwood desk was only dimly lit by the small lamp. Cunningham stepped forward cautiously, then suddenly realized that the Shadow Fists would have a new master much earlier than even he’d anticipated.
Kien was dead.
If that indeed was Kien seated behind the desk. Cunningham approached slowly, disbelievingly, wondering if his boss was playing some kind of macabre gag. But it wasn’t anywhere near April 1 and Kien wasn’t the type to pull practical jokes. The body slumped behind the desk was headless, but Cunningham could tell it was Kien from the half hand flopped carelessly in the fine blue powder scattered on the desk surface. And Kien wasn’t the only deader in the room. The watchdog joker that Kien normally kept in a jar on his desk was pinned to the desktop with Kien’s platinum letter opener, horribly marring the wood’s glossy finish.
Cunningham gingerly leaned over the desk, first shifting the lampshade to throw a little more light on the body. Carefully keeping clear of the blue powder sprinkled on the desktop that had mixed with a massive quantity of congealing blood, he reached out cautiously and laid two fingers on the back of Kien’s whole hand. The flesh was still warm and pliable. Kien’s fingertips were stained blue, and more of the powder clung to the front of his bloodsoaked shirt.
“Rapture,” Cunningham said to himself, stepping back from the desk. The blue powder was manufactured in Kien’s own Shadow Fist labs. It enhanced the pleasure of anything, turning food into ambrosia, a simple touch into an orgasm. It also had some unfortunate side effects. In a way, Cunningham thought, it was ironic justice rarely seen out of bad television shows that Kien had been using his own wares.
Cunningham didn’t think of himself as a stuffed shirt, but he was old-fashioned in his choice of recreational vehicles. He stayed away from the pernicious new stuff, with the often correct notion that he wasn’t going to fool around with any kind of chemical until it was proven relatively safe by countless others. He was too bright to be anyone’s human guinea pig.
The thing of it was, though, Cunningham could have sworn that Kien had a more conservative attitude toward drugs. When Kien played Kubla Khan In His Pleasure Dome, he would occasionally indulge in a pipe of opium, which had a long history of acceptance in Chinese culture. But that was it. He used no other drugs and was only a light drinker. It was a surprise to discover that Kien was a rap head.
Or was he?
Cunningham carefully considered the death scene. Why would Kien kill his own watchdog joker? And if Kien hadn’t killed the sorry little bastard, who had?
The person who had taken Kien’s head as a souvenir. But why steal the head of a dead man?
To keep the memories locked in Kien’s dead brain away from Deadhead.
Perhaps. If that were the case, then this was an inside job. Knowledge of Deadhead’s unique ability to access the memories of dead brains wasn’t exactly widespread outside the Shadow Fists.
Cunningham tugged the letter opener from the batrachian joker’s chest, then set it aside. A small box stuffed with elegant wrapping paper sat on the edge of Kien’s desk. The box was stamped with the name “Lin’s Curio Emporium,” an expensive antique store that was part of Kien’s far-flung commercial empire. Besides importing costly Asian antiquities, Lin’s was also a high-class drugstore where well-heeled clientele could pick up anything from marijuana to heroin. To rapture.
Cunningham put the jokers body in the box. The joker might be dead, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be questioned. Not as long as Deadhead was available.
Cunningham took a long, careful look around the room. There were no windows and the room’s only door led to the antechamber guarded by Wyrm. He sighed. It looked like a classic locked-room mystery. Too bad he never read Agatha Christie.
Only the door to the office wasn’t locked. It suddenly opened and Wyrm stuck his head in, saying, “Excussss ...” and stopped before he got the first word out.
Leslie Christian stood behind Wyrm. Cunningham didn’t like the weathered-looking British ace who’d appeared from nowhere the previous year and had somehow stepped right into the Shadow Fist Society as Kien’s personal confidant. He was a smug, supercilious bastard who stank of unsavory secrets.
The two in the doorway stared at the scene inside Kien’s office, then Christian said laconically, “So, finally made your move, old boy?”
There was a moment of shocked silence, then Wyrm howled in anger as Christian’s words finally penetrated his stunned brain. The joker rushed into the room, his foot long tongue whipping back and forth, his fangs bared and dripping poison.
Wyrm wasn’t very bright, and he was intensely loyal to his master. When he got an idea through his skull, it tended to stay there. And now he had the notion, neatly planted by Christian, that Cunningham had killed Kien. Cunningham knew he wouldn’t have the opportunity to talk things over with the insanely jealous joker.
He faded. Fading made Cunningham as blind as he was invisible, but his other senses had been sharply honed by continual practice. He called a picture of Kien’s office onto the video screen of his mind, and moved around a freestanding glass case that contained a selection of delicately inlaid and enameled snuff bottles. He headed out of Wyrm’s path and to the office door.
But Wyrm’s angry screams got closer. Rapidly. Cunningham ducked and there was a loud crash as Wyrm hurled himself forward, barely missed, and smashed through the front of the display case. The angry joker floundered through shards of shattered glass and broken bits of priceless antiquities, hot on Cunningham’s trail despite his total invisibility.
What the hell was going on? Cunningham thought, then felt on his face the wet caress of Wyrm’s ultrasensitive tongue. The bastard can smell me, Cunningham realized. Then Wyrm was on him.
He twisted away as the, joker grabbed at him and one of his flailing hands caught in Cunningham’s shirt. Wyrm pulled him close. Cunningham could picture the wide gaping mouth, sharp fangs running with saliva like the drool of a mad dog.
He was no match, Cunningham knew, for Wyrm’s wild-card-enhanced strength.
He faded in his eyes to see Wyrm ferociously biting empty air and brought his right knee up hard between Wyrm ‘s legs.
Wyrm screamed and Cunningham pulled away, glancing quickly around the room. That bastard Christian had disappeared, pulling the office door shut behind him. Crossed on the wall near the door were a pair of antique ceremonial daggers, their hilts encrusted with pearls, rubies, and emeralds. Cunningham sprinted across the room, cursing Wyrm under his breath as the joker hobbled after him. He ripped the daggers from their wall mounts. Wyrm’s hot breath was on the back of his neck as he faded again, taking the daggers with him to invisibility.
Wyrm slammed into him, smashing him hard into the wall. The breath exploded from Cunningham’s lungs as he turned and slashed with both daggers. But the weapons, centuries-old antiques, were no longer useful for anything but show. One glanced harmlessly off Wyrm’s forearm, the other snapped on his rib cage.
Cunningham wanted to swear, but he couldn’t catch his breath. Wyrm caught his face with one of his inhumanly strong hands, his clawed fingers raking furrows on Cunningham’s cheeks. One of the joker’s fingers found its way into Cunningham’s mouth, and ace bit down hard.
He tasted blood in his mouth as Wyrm screamed and instinctively pulled away. His lungs laboring for air, Cunningham staggered back across the room to where he remembered seeing a viable weapon: the letter opener he’d put down next to the lamp on Kien’s desk. He faded in his eyes just as he ran into the desk. Pain flashed through his knees as he bashed them against the edge of the desk, then he skidded across the stinking, sticky mixture of congealed blood and blue powder. He slid over and off the polished surface and landed on the desk chair and Kien’s cooling corpse. Somehow he managed to grab the letter opener as he went sailing by.
Wyrm followed him, leaping over the desk with outstretched talons and dripping fangs. Cunningham thrust out his right hand, holding the letter opener, as Wyrm slammed into him, flipping the chair, Cunningham, and Kien’s corpse all to the floor.
Cunningham was stunned by the double impact of colliding with Wyrm and smashing into the floor. It took him a moment to realize that he was still holding the letter opener and that something wet and sticky was running down his hand. The letter opener, he finally realized, had penetrated Wyrm’s throat, angled upward through the joker’s mouth and into his brain. The joker’s blood was pulsing thick and warm on his hand.
Cunningham lay there for a moment breathing in the cloud of swirling blue powder.
It tasted so good to be alive.
Kien’s chair felt comfortable against Cunningham’s body. It was soft and plush and swiveled silently on well-oiled casters. Cunningham spun around in it idly, knowing that he should get going, that Christian could return at any moment with a goon squad, but somehow he just couldn’t help savoring the feeling of complete triumph over his onetime boss. He stopped twirling around in the chair and rested one foot on Kien’s headless corpse, another on Wyrm’s rapidly cooling body.
So this is what it felt like to be head of the Shadow Fists. It was a heady mixture of power and mastery flavored with the anticipation of sweet riches to come. Of course, Cunningham realized, some of this flight of fancy had been caused by the rapture he’d breathed. He had to get it in gear. He couldn’t afford to get _caught napping now.
He reached out gingerly, careful not to disturb any more of the fine blue powder that had settled back down upon the desktop, and picked up the telephone hanging precariously on the desk’s edge. He dialed.
“Fadeout,” he said into the phone. “Put me through to Warlock.”
He hummed as he waited for his co-conspirator, the head of the Werewolf street gang, to get on the line. Warlock was tall and strongly built; no one, not even Cunningham, knew what form his jokerhood took. He always wore a mask. The Werewolf custom of wearing a common mask originated with him, as his followers aped whatever celebrity mask he wore for however long he chose to wear it.
“This is Warlock.” The head Werewolf s voice was deep and emotionless, though there was something of cold, dispassionate danger in it. The Werewolves were, in Cunningham’s opinion, mainly just a bunch of jokers with delusions of toughness. Warlock, though, was authentically dangerous. Even his ace power, which Warlock called his death wish, was eerily perilous.
Warlock would simply wish a target dead, and within twenty-four hours he’d get his wish. Sometimes the victim’s heart would give out, or a blood vessel would burst in his brain. Sometimes they’d be in the wrong place at the wrong time and a runaway taxi would do the job. Once one of Warlock’s victims had had the cosmically bad luck to be drilled between the eyes by a micrometeorite. No one knew how he did it, but Warlock’s death wish never failed. He was a man to be cautious around.
“New Day is on,” Cunningham told him with raptureinduced exuberance in his voice. “Now”
“Already?” Warlock asked thoughtfully. “It wasn’t scheduled until next week. No one’s in place—”
“We have to move now,” Cunningham interrupted, and told Warlock about Kien’s death. “I don’t know who did it or why, but Christian’s got to be involved somehow,” he finished. “He showed up here too damn conveniently, and left after sitting Wyrm on me.”
“What’s his motive for wanting Kien dead?” Warlock asked.
“I don’t know,” Cunningham admitted. “But we’ll find out when we get ahold of him. Right now we’ve got to move. Fast. He’s already tried to pin the killing on me once. I figure he might bring Sui Ma in next.”
Warlock made a sound deep in his throat and Cunningham knew that he’d pushed the right button. Even though both gangs belonged to the Shadow Fist Society, there was no love lost between the Werewolves and the Immaculate Egrets. The Wolves were jokers. They had the smell of the street on them. The Egrets were nats, for the most part smug, snotty nats. Though they worked the streets like the Werewolves, somehow they thought themselves superior to their brothers in the Fists, an attitude actively encouraged by their leader Sui Ma, Kien’s sister.
“Put the Wolves on alert,” Cunningham said. “Find Chickenhawk. Contact the Whisperer. I have a feeling idea we may need him before this shakes out.”
“Lazy Dragon?” Warlock asked.
“Still missing,” Cunningham said. “Last time I checked his place his sister was living there, and she hadn’t heard from him in months. I’m afraid that Christian—or whoever’s behind Kien’s killing-might have already taken him out.”
“What about Loophole?”
Cunningham made a dismissive gesture. “Leave him for now. He probably knows where a lot of the bodies are buried, so he may be useful later. But I can’t see how he can hurt us now. He’s just a lawyer.”
“All right,” Warlock said. “You want me to send a few of the brothers along to keep an eye on you?”
“That’s a good idea,” Cunningham said. He looked at the box with the tiny joker body in it. “I’m going to head for the Lair, but first I have to find Deadhead. I’ve got a little something for him here.”
Fortunately Cunningham knew just where to look.
Cunningham knew the rapture was still playing tricks with him when he had to fight down the urge to buy half a dozen sandwiches at the Horn and Hardart at Third Avenue and Forty-second Street. He walked firmly through the food line, reminding himself that he was there looking for someone and not to stuff himself with mystery-meat sandwiches.
Although the eatery was crowded, Cunningham spotted Deadhead sitting by himself in an otherwise deserted corner. It was as if the automat’s patrons-not usually considered a finicky crowd-were instinctively avoiding the half-mad ace. Cunningham couldn’t blame them. At the best of times Deadhead was a repellent figure. His clothing was one step up from a bum’s, his hair hadn’t been washed since the Reagan presidency, and his corpsewhite face was continually dancing with nervous twitches and tics that made him look like he was suffering through electroshock therapy.
“Hello, Glen,” Cunningham said carefully as he approached Deadhead’s table. He looked at the empty plate before Deadhead and sighed. The deranged ace was often difficult to handle after a meal. “What’d you have to eat, Glen?”
“Not much,” Deadhead said defensively. He refused to look Cunningham in the eye. “I can feel the sun and see the rolling plains. The grass tastes good.”
“Christ,” Cunningham muttered. “You didn’t have a hamburger, did you?”
“Mooo,” Deadhead said, loud enough to make people stare.
Cunningham pasted a smile on his face and put a hand on Deadhead’s arm, lifting him from his seat. “We have to go now,” he said. “I have something for you to do,” he added quietly.
Deadhead nodded and got down on all fours.
“Up we go,” Cunningham said in a voice that tried to be casual. “Time to go home.”
“Mooo,” Deadhead replied.
Cunningham kept a smile on his face, but leaned down and whispered fiercely, “Get ahold of yourself. I’m not going to drag you to the damn car.”
Deadhead nodded and stood, straightening his clothes as best he could. His eyes darted around the automat. “I’m fine. Really. Just wait a moment.”
He went to the cash register and bought a pack of gum. He unwrapped all the sticks with shaking hands and popped them into his mouth one by one. He let out an ecstatic sigh and chewed contentedly. Cunningham flashed a knowing smile at the cashier and led him out of the automat.
“Come on,” he said, pulling him down the street to the parking garage where he’d left his Maserati. Deadhead followed him meekly, his eyes fastened on the faraway scenes playing in his brain as he relived the life of the cow who’d been part of his lunch. At least, Cunningham told himself, counting his blessings, Deadhead hadn’t collapsed into an insensate stupor like he often did after ingesting meat.
He deposited Deadhead in the passenger’s side of his Maserati, locked the door, and stood. A man was standing in front of his car. He hadn’t been there a moment ago. He was Asian and wore mirror shades that gave his youthful face a blank, hard-edged look. His hands were in the pockets of his satin jacket that Cunningham just knew had a large white bird embroidered on the back. He could afford to act casual. The two similarly attired thugs standing behind him were carrying Uzis.
It took Cunningham a moment to put a name to the face: Jack Chang, a lieutenant in the Immaculate Egrets. He smiled at Cunningham. “Sui Ma,” he said, “wants to see you. It’s about her brother’s missing head.”
“Careful,” Cunningham said as Chang parked the Maserati by carelessly wedging it between a pair of overflowing garbage cans in a narrow Chinatown alley. “You’ll ruin the paint job.”
The Egret grinned. “What’s the matter? Don’t you have insurance?”
Cunningham didn’t like Chang’s attitude, but he kept quiet about it as they got out of the car and waited for the other Egrets to show. Macho posturing was a waste of breath. He preferred to remember insults, mark them down, and act on them later under the proper circumstances. And Chang had just made his list.
The Egrets following in the van screeched to a halt right behind Cunningham’s Maserati. The driver laughed as he tapped Cunningham’s car with the van’s bumper, pushing it forward gently against the brick wall in front of it. Cunningham kept his expression impassive, but added another to his list as the Egrets piled out of the van, laughing. Two dragged a stupefied Deadhead by his arms. His payback list, Cunningham thought, was going to be very long before this day ended.
“Let’s go,” Chang said. “Little Mother is waiting.” Like her late brother, Sui Ma was something of a sinophile. In her case, she made the Egrets who guarded her headquarters wear costumes out of what looked to Cunningham like the road show of Anna and the King of Siam. Though, Cunningham noted, discreetly holstered opposite the guards’ stubby-bladed Chinese swords were very modern-looking machine pistols.
Sui Ma’s headquarters always made Cunningham feel uncomfortable, and it was not just because of the feeling that he was entering the den of the Dragon Lady. Behind the staid brick facade that was the outer wall was a fantasy land of silken tapestries and screens, electric torches glittering in wall sconces, and the heavy scent of incense billowing on the air.
Sui Ma herself was waiting for them in her reception room, sitting on her intricately carved wooden throne that was decorated with hundreds of peacock feathers. She wore robes of dark blue silk embroidered with the dazzlingly white birds that were the sigil of the Egrets. She was a short woman, rather plain and chubby, just coming into middle age. But her mild appearance masked a powerful mind as ruthless as her brother’s. And right now she didn’t look exactly pleased to see Cunningham.
“Your ambition,” she said coldly to Cunningham, “has finally driven you too far. Not only have you slain my brother and his faithful bodyguard, but you then mutilated my brother’s corpse. You’ll pay for both acts.”
Cunningham couldn’t tell if she sincerely believed that he had killed Kien or if she was just using the circumstances as a convenient excuse for taking him out. He shook his head. “I’ll take the blame for Wyrm, but it was self-defense. Christian sicced him on me. I’ll give you even money that he was the one who told you that I’d killed Kien.”
An expression flitted across Sui Ma’s face that told Cunningham he’d given her something to think about. He spoke rapidly to press his advantage. “If I killed the General, what did I do with his head?”
She smiled. “You took it to feed to that disgusting creature of yours to learn all the secrets of the Shadow Fist Society.”
“That’s a fine theory,” Cunningham admitted, “if I had the head in my possession. I don’t.”
“Then why,” Sui Ma asked triumphantly, “did you go immediately from my brother’s murder to pick up Deadhead at the automat?”
“Because I had something else for him,” Cunningham explained. “The body of the watchdog joker that Kien had kept in a jar on his desk. The murderer killed the joker to keep it from blabbing about Kien’s death. Someone seems to be running around behind the scenes trying to pin the blame on me.”
“Christian,” Sui Ma said thoughtfully. She gazed off into the distance for a long moment as Cunningham felt something like hope sweep over him for the first time since he’d been brought into her presence. “Where’s the body of this joker?” she asked him.
“In a box in the glove compartment of my car,” Cunningham said. Sui Ma glanced at Chang and nodded. He gestured at one of his goons, who immediately left to fetch it.
“And Deadhead?” Sui Ma asked.
“We have him in the antechamber,” Chang said. “Bring him.”
Chang nodded and also left, leaving Cunningham alone with Sui Ma and the half-dozen impassive guards who stood behind and around her peacock throne. She continued to stare silently at him, as—if weighing the value of his life. He decided that now wasn’t the time to annoy her with idle chitchat.
The goon returned with the joker in the box. He presented it to Sui Ma. She looked in the box, nodded, and gave it back to the Egret who placed it at her feet on the upper tier of the throne’s dais. A moment later there was another short, respectful knock on the door, and Chang led in two Egrets dragging Deadhead between them.
The disheveled ace stared around the room with his dark, confused eyes, mumbling something to himself that no one else could understand. He looked at Cunningham, nervously licking his lips. “You have a job for me?” he finally asked.
Sui Ma nodded and pointed at the box. “In there.” Deadhead stepped forward and removed the box’s lid with shaking hands. “It’s so little,” he said. Cunningham nodded. “Consider it an appetizer.” Deadhead’s smile turned broad and fixed. A line of spittle ran down his chin as he reached into his pocket and took out a small leather case. Inside were a number of small, shiny, sharp implements. He chose one and began to saw, humming to himself. Cunningham looked away as Deadhead cut through the tiny skull. Sui Ma watched fixedly.
It took Deadhead only a few moments to cut away the top of the joker’s skull. He glanced furtively at Cunningham and Sui Ma as he finished, then hunkered over the body. Half hiding his actions, he scooped out the joker’s brain and popped it in his mouth. He chewed hastily, noisily, then swallowed. He knelt on the middle step of the dais before Sui Ma with a dreamy smile on his face, the tics and spasms that usually contorted his features subsiding into satiated serenity. His eyes closed.
“How long will this take?” Sui Ma asked with more than detached interest.
“It depends,” Cunningham said. “The corpse was rather ... fresh ... so that should cut down on the time it takes him to assimilate the memories.”
It took a few moments, but then Deadhead finally began to groan and squirm. “Noooo!” he cried, twisting as if to avoid a fatal blow.
Cunningham leaned forward eagerly. “Who killed you?” he asked.
“Red hair,” Deadhead panted in his trance. “Smiling face. The boy likes it, he does.” He squirmed again and let out a long, keening cry.
“Is he alone? Is there another in the room?” Deadhead whipped his head back and forth. “Another. Too far back. Blurry. Can’t see who—”
Cunningham cursed to himself. The joker who’d guarded Kien’s desk had been terribly myopic. “What about Kien? Is he in the room?”
“At his desk.”
“What’s he doing?”
“He is afraid. He opens the box, though he doesn’t want to. He is saying, ‘Why are you doing this to me? I don’t want to. Don’t make me do this.’ He puts his face down in the box—”
Cunningham and Sui Ma looked at each other. “Mind control,” Cunningham said, and Sui Ma nodded. “Someone-the redhead-made him inhale enough rapture to kill a whole platoon of r-heads.”
“Redhead,” Sui Ma said. “Mind control.”
“Dr. Tachyon,” they said together.
Sui Ma frowned, shaking her head. “I don’t get it,” she said. She looked critically at Deadhead, who was panting like a dog and tossing and jerking spasmodically on the floor, caught up in the aftereffects of brain-eating. “Why would Tachyon make Kien kill himself?”
“Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe it was some other redheaded mind-control artist.” Cunningham shrugged. “Deadhead can draw a picture of our man when he comes out of it.” He looked at Sui Ma. “You can see, anyway, that I was telling the truth. I didn’t have anything to do with your brother’s death.”
Sui Ma again looked into the distance. “That may be true,” she admitted, “but since when did truth have anything to do with deciding upon the proper course of action?” She looked at Cunningham. “My brother is dead and I shall be the new supreme power in the Shadow Fist Society. I do not think that you’d care to work for me, Fadeout, and frankly I don’t think that I would trust you.”
“So I’m still dead,” he said with as much flippancy as he could muster.
“Let us say that the firm is eliminating your position,” Sui Ma said with a smile.
“Okay,” he said. “In that case, fuck it.”
He faded to total invisibility. He didn’t know the layout of Sui Ma’s room as well as he did Kien’s, but he’d done his best to memorize it in the last few minutes. He hit the ground, rolled, and came up dodging as he heard Sui Ma shout and her guards blunder around the room. There was a short burst of gunfire, an anguished scream, and then Sui Ma shouted, “Use your swords, idiots, and guard the door!”
He moved ‘toward the sound of her voice, and stumbled over what sounded like a moaning Deadhead. He landed silently, rolled, stood, and bumped into someone else. His hand slashed out and sunk into firm, muscular flesh, and he felt sudden, searing pain as a sharp blade chopped down into his upper thigh. He stifled a scream, and struck up at where he judged the sword wielder’s wrist would be.
He struck flesh again, and pulled away. The blade came with him, still lodged in his thigh. He set his teeth together and yanked the sword from his leg, fading it out. Clasping both hands around the hilt, he swung in a great figure eight, feeling it slice through meat like a hot knife through butter.
Sui Ma shouted again at her guards, and that was a mistake because now he knew where she was. He started to circle toward her, holding the invisible sword out before him like a blind man might hold out his cane, and to the confusion and panic running through the room something new was suddenly added.
There were deep, hoarse shouts in new voices, and the sound of gunfire blasted deafeningly through the chamber. Cunningham risked fading in his eyes for a moment and had to stifle a cry of relief as he saw that the cavalry had arrived in the form of a Werewolf squadron led by Warlock himself.
There were more than a dozen Wolves wearing leathers and delicately featured Michael Jackson masks, and armed to the teeth with automatic weapons and combat shotguns. One of them had a portable boom box, and the song “I’m Bad” was blasting through the chamber louder than the reports of their weapons.
Sui Ma was standing before her throne, more anger than fear on her face, braced by two of her guards, who were dropping their swords and fumbling for the guns holstered at their sides. Cunningham gauged the distance between them and slipped back into total invisibility. He lunged forward silently, swinging his razor-sharp blade.
He felt something warm and sticky splatter on his face and faded in his eyes, knowing that the mask of blood he was now carrying would give him away anyway.
One of the guards was down, but the other was turning toward him, gun up and ready. Cunningham tensed to dodge, but before the Asian could fire, a shotgun blast from the hands of a Werewolf cut him down. He fell forward, thudding down the steps of the dais, and Sui Ma was standing unprotected and alone before her throne.
She looked at Cunningham. “You seem to have won for now,” she said, almost graciously.
He nedded. “You were right,” he said. “ I could never work for you. And I don’t think that you could ever work for me.”
He thrust the blade up and into her stomach, and she gasped, collapsing backward onto her chair. She looked at him for what seemed a long time before her eyes glazed over. Cunningham sighed and turned away. He’d killed before, but it made him feel funny to kill a woman like that. He couldn’t totally console himself with the thought that she’d been prepared to do the—same for him.
In the rest of the chamber the Werewolves were wrapping up the last few of their surprised, outnumbered foes. Warlock stepped over Deadhead, cowering on the floor, and came up to join Cunningham at the top of the dais.
“Got here as soon as we could,” he said, “after one of the brothers spotted you being hustled out of that laundromat. Finally figured, what the hell, bust in and—”
He stopped and stared at Cunningham. Cunningham supposed that he was quite a sight. His leg was throbbing like hell. The sword cut he’d taken on the thigh was bleeding like a goddamn river, and the blood of the guard he’d killed was splattered all over his face. Warlock was staring at his face. From the look in his eyes, peering through his Michael Jackson mask, he looked like he’d seen a ghost. The blood, Cunningham realized, must make him look like he’d taken a bad head wound.
“Don’t worry”—he laughed—“I’m all right. This isn’t mine.” He wiped at the blood, smearing it but managing to remove some of it from his features.
Warlock seemed to catch himself. “Right,” he said. “Glad you’re okay. But we’d better move it before more of these damned gooks show up.” He gestured at Sui Ma’s corpse. “They’re not going to like that.”
“Okay,” Cunningham said. He looked away from the corpse-littered room. Most of the bodies were Egrets, but a few Werewolves had gone down at the hands of Sui Ma’s men. “It’s back to the Lair. We’ve got to figure out where that damned head is.”
But despite the death surrounding him, despite the pain he himself felt, Cunningham couldn’t keep back a wide smile. It was over. The New Day had come. He was the new head of the Shadow Fists.
In the far-gone days when the Bowery had been noted for its fashionable nightspots, the decrepit building now known as the Werewolves’ Lair had been a famous luxury hotel. When things started going bad for the neighborhood, the hotel had been turned into apartments. When the neighborhood really hit the skids, it had degenerated into a flophouse, then been abandoned for well over a decade, sinking even further into pathetic decrepitude before the Werewolves took it over as their headquarters.
They’d made some effort to clean it up, though Werewolf sanitary standards were not exactly those of the Ritz.
It was a smelly warren of dirty little rooms the heart of which was Warlock’s Sanctorum. This was a large chamber behind double wooden doors that had a crude pentacle surrounded by the legend 666: LAIR OF THE BEAST Sloppily lettered on them in drippy red paint. It was dimly lit and cluttered with books overflowing their shelves and piled against the walls and sitting on the dusty furniture where they competed for space with occult gimcracks ranging from real human skulls to bundles of dyed chicken feathers that looked like they’d come from Auntie Leveaux’s Hoodoo and Love Potion Shoppe.
Cunningham had co-opted Warlock’s normal seat behind a desk piled high with more occult stuff, under a rather badly executed portrait of a bald and jowly Aleister Crowley, Warlock’s patron saint. Warlock sat in a chair across the desk that was usually reserved for visitors. He was watching Cunningham closely. The ace sat with his bandaged leg held stiffly in front of him, his voice low and thoughtful as he mused on the day’s wild events.
“It’s Christian,” he muttered, “it’s got to be Christian. But how did that limey bastard think he was going to get away with taking over? He’s too much of an outsider in the Shadow Fists to have a real power base.”
“Unless he was conspiring with Sui Ma,” Warlock suggested.
Cunningham shook his head. “She seemed genuinely surprised that her brother was dead. I think she really thought that I did it.”
“There’s Loophole,” Warlock said. “He might figure in somewhere.”
“He might,” Cunningham agreed. “That’s why I sent a few of the brothers to his office to pick him up. Maybe he can clear up some of the mystery.” He fingered a sheet of paper lying on the desk in front of him. “Like who the hell this is.”
It was a sketch done in colored pencil of the redhaired mind-control artist who’d killed Kien’s watchdog. Deadhead was really a talented artist, and he’d caught an expression of cruel delight in the kid’s smile that was doubly horrific on such a young, otherwise sweet face. There was a respectful knock on the Sanctorum’s double doors, and Cunningham looked up from the sketch to see two Werewolves come in with Edward St. John Latham between them.
Latham was a lean, handsome man in a dark gray Brooks Brother suit with a light, almost imperceptible purple pinstripe. His face had no expression at all as he entered the room and nodded at Cunningham. He ignored Warlock as he sat down in the chair next to him, crossing his leg casually, ankle over knee. “I suppose congratulations of a sort are in order,” he said.
“Thanks, Sinjin.” Cunningham knew that Latham disliked being called Sinjin as much as he could be said to dislike anything. He was an emotionless, supposedly utterly loyal bastard. It was hard to see where he’d fit into a conspiracy against Kien. “But there’s still some things I’d like to clear up.”
“Such as?”
“Such as are you with me and Warlock, or the general and his sister?”
Latham smiled without humor. “I’ve already heard about the late general and his late sister. There’s not much of a decision to make, is there?”
“I’m glad to see that you’re being sensible. Tell me. What do you know about Leslie Christian?”
“Christian?” Loophole frowned. “Why?”
“He’s the missing ace from the deck. I’ve got, the Werewolves scouring the city for him, but he seems to have disappeared. Not, however, before trying to pin Kien’s murder on me.”
Loophole looked faintly surprised. “Then you didn’t kill Kien?”
Cunningham shook his head. “No. Would I do a thing like that? I figure Christian had to have been involved in the killing somehow. He showed up right after I’d found the body and tried to frame me, then he disappeared.”
“Why would Christian kill Kien?” Latham asked.
“I don’t know. But what do we really know about him?” Cunningham asked, ticking the points off one by one on his fingers. “He’s an ace of some kind. He’s foreign. He drinks. Somehow he wormed his way into Kien’s confidence. He could have half a million reasons for wanting Kien dead, but we don’t know enough about him to guess what they might be.”
“Whereas,” Latham said dryly, “you just had one reason for wanting the general dead.”
“Okay,” Cunningham conceded. “We’re being honest with each other. I admit it. I wanted to be head of the Shadow Fists. I had ... plans. But I didn’t kill Kien.” He reached across the desk and handed Latham the drawing of the youthful mind-control artist that had skewered Kien’s batrachian watchdog. “He did.”
Latham took it, glanced at it. Something flickered across his face, and for a moment Cunningham could swear that the usually unflappable lawyer was unsure of himself.
“The joker saw this kid mind-control Kien and make him shove his face into a bag of rapture. Then the kid killed the joker.”
“Interesting,” Latham murmured.
“You have any idea who this could be?”
Latham looked at him a long while, then said, “Perhaps. “
“Do you want to let me in on it?”
Latham considered it for another long moment, then nodded. “In the interest of truth,” he said without a trace of irony in his voice, “and justice.”
Cunningham suppressed a smile, but Warlock let out an audible snort.
“He runs with a street gang that’s done some work for the Shadow Fists,” Latham said. “His name is Blaise. He is Dr. Tachyon’s grandson.”
A half-dozen derelict jokers were sitting around the entrance to the boarded-up old movie theater in the heart of the Bowery, sharing a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag and soaking up the last rays of the autumnal sun like a clutch of bloated lizards.
“How’s it going, fellows?” Cunningham asked the bums. A few looked up as he spoke. “Maybe you guys could help me. I’m looking for someone. This kid.” He waved Deadhead’s drawing. “I heard he hangs out here with a gang.” He pulled a roll of bills from his pocket and peeled off a twenty. That elicited a little more interest.
One of the joker’s eyes rotated forward like a chameleon’s and focused on Cunningham. “You a cop or something?”
“That’s right,” Cunningham told him.
“You look like a cop. Kind of clean-cut, anyway. A cop on television. That right, boys?” There was general murmured assent, and Cunningham decided that he’d better bring the conversation back on track.
“What about the kid?”
“That bratty asshole. Him and his gang of assholes. The theater used to be ours before they moved in. Now it’s loud music every time of the day and night and you really gotta be careful. They know when the welfare money comes in and they’ll take it right from you.”
“Is he inside now?”
“Yeah,” the joker said. “Him and his expensive clothes. You can tell he’s rich. He don’t need to hang out here. He should give it back to us and go home to Manhattan. Him and all those brats.”
Cunningham smiled, and dropped the twenty-dollar bill. It fluttered onto the bum’s lap and he grabbed at it as the other derelicts surged to their feet. Cunningham watched them scramble for the loot, and then weave and stagger to the liquor store across the street in the wake of the lucky stiff who’d grabbed it.
He crossed the street himself and looked into the window of the car idling at the curb. Warlock was driving. Deadhead was in the seat next to him, looking jittery and unsure as always. Latham was in the backseat, flanked by a pair of fierce-looking Werewolves. There were three cars parked at discreet distances behind this one. All were loaded with heavily armed Werewolves.
“Okay,” Cunningham said. He took a deep breath. “This looks like a job for Fadeout.” He smiled. “I’m going to try the back door. I want you guys to wait here for now” Warlock nodded. “Be careful,” he said.
“I will. Trust me on that.” He-nodded to the Werewolf and recrossed the street.
The theater’s back door was locked, but the lock was old and cheap and yielded easily to Cunningham’s probe. The door opened into musty darkness, a dank, garbage-choked passageway that apparently led behind the movie screen, then forked into the auditorium. Cunningham froze in his tracks as the sound of gunfire suddenly blasted through the theater. He crouched in the darkness, listening. The sound had an unreal quality to it. The voice shouting over it was familiar and almost inhumanly loud. There was a thundering crash, the sound of roaring engines, and the plaintive cry, “I can’t die. I haven’t seen The Al Jolson Story yet!” and Cunningham suddenly realized what was happening.
Someone was screening a movie, apparently the hideous remake of Howard Hawkes’s classic Thirty Minutes Over Broadway. Cunningham waited in the darkness as the sound of a plane going down filled the theater. There was a loud explosion as it crashed on the Manhattan shoreline, then cheers and whistles from the audience. There were apparently few Jetboy fans in attendance.
Cunningham went on down the passageway. He brushed past a thick, dusty cloth hanging and found himself in the auditorium. It wasn’t crowded. There were twenty, maybe twenty-five kids sitting close to the screen in the center section. Few seemed very interested in the images flickering before them. Some were gorging themselves on candy and ice cream, others were making out though making out was a rather tame term for some of the acts Cunningham witnessed in the light reflected from the huge white screen.
One boy, though, was riveted to the action on the screen, despite the underaged siren rubbing up against him like an affection-starved cat. Even in the darkness, Cunningham could make out his gorgeous red hair and delicately handsome features. It had to be Blaise, the kid Latham had identified as Tachyon’s grand-brat.
His eyes were glued to the screen, where people were now turning into rubber and plastic monsters courtesy of cheap special effects as the wild-card virus rained down from the sky. There was a scene cut, and Dudley Moore was suddenly strutting across the stage in a grotesque parody of Tachyon, wearing a ghastly red wig and an outfit that would have done justice to a drag queen.
Moore clutched at his hair as if he were searching for cooties. “Burning sky!” he swore. “ I warned them! I warned them all!” Then he broke into an hysterical fit of weeping.
Blaise stood, throwing aside the girl who had been squirming against him and licking his ear, and drew a handgun he’d had holstered at his side. Cunningham shrank back against the wall as Blaise squeezed off a round. The report was startlingly loud within the confines of the auditorium, making the soundtrack explosions sound like harmless popguns in comparison.
But Blaise wasn’t shooting at Cunningham. He hadn’t even seen him. He’d put a bullet through the screen right between Dudley Moore’s eyes. The ragtag audience of juvenile delinquents cheered, and Blaise sat down, a malevolent smile on his lips. In that moment Blaise looked as hardened and evil as the most twisted characters Cunningham ever had to deal with in the Fists. It was frightening to see such an expression on such a young face.
Cunningham shuddered, and moved on.
The lobby was dirty, dark, and deserted. The afternoon’s last light filtered in through the cracks between the plywood boards haphazardly placed over the theater’s glass doors. The concession stand was empty and dusty, though fresh popcorn was in the popper and cardboard boxes half-full of candy treats were stacked atop the counter. The confections all looked recent, probably brought in by the gang to devour while watching the main feature. They had, Cunningham remembered, also been eating ice-cream bars.
He went to the portable ice-cream cart parked next to the candy counter and opened the door in the top. He looked in it for a long moment. There, nestled among a couple dozen ice-cream sandwiches, was Kien’s head, raggedly cut off at the neck.
Cunningham found himself oddly reluctant to touch the cold, dead flesh. He wasn’t squeamish, and he’d had no great love for Kien when the general had been alive, but there was something ghastly about his manner of death that disturbed him. He looked down at the glassily staring eyes and sighed.
There was no way he was going to get any answers unless he got the head to Deadhead. He picked it up. It was cold as a block of ice. Somehow he felt better after he’d dumped a box of candy bars behind the counter, put the head in the box, and faded it all to invisibility.
He peeked into the auditorium. The movie had progressed through the scene where Tachyon had saved Blythe van Rennsaeler from a gang of crazed joker lootersto accompanying hisses and boos from the watching gang. They were just raggedy-ass kids. Sure, some were armed and Tachyon’s grand-brat was a mind-control artist, but Cunningham had a couple of carloads of Werewolves outside waiting for his call. He crept back into the lobby and set the box with Kien’s head in it on the candy counter. He went up to the lobby doors. They were pulled shut with a chain looped around their bars. with an open padlock dangling from the chain. He creaked the doors open cautiously and peered out the front of the theater.
The bums were back, but they were too engrossed in squabbling over the newly purchased bottle of booze to even notice Cunningham. He gestured at the cars parked at the curb across the street, waving vigorously, and doors opened and Werewolves got out. They crossed the street. The derelicts noticed them and realized at last that something was about to happen. They moved off silently down the street, clutching their paper-bag-wrapped bottles as if afraid the Werewolves were going to try to take them away.
“What is it?” Warlock asked as they approached. “It’s Blaise and his fellow delinquents, all right. Round ’em up, but don’t start anything rough. Watch out for Blaise. He’s got a gun and some kind of mind-control powers, but he should be smart enough not to start anything when he sees there’s a bunch of us. And Deadhead.” The insane ace looked almost guiltily at Cunningham. “I’ve got something for you.”
“The head?” Warlock and Latham asked at the same time.
Cunningham nodded.
The Werewolves filed silently through the lobby. There were a dozen of them, big, tough mothers dressed in leather and armed to the teeth with automatic weapons and shotguns. Cunningham was at their head, after showing a happily drooling Deadhead the cardboard box on the candy counter and leaving him to it.
“Remember,” he warned the Werewolves, “keep it quiet, but if that Blaise brat tries to start anything, blow him loose.” He turned to the Werewolf leader. “Warlock, stick close to Latham. Make sure he behaves.”
“You heard him,” Warlock said. “Let’s do it.”
Inside the auditorium the movie had progressed to the famous scene between Dudley Moore as Tachyon and Pia Zadora as Blythe van Rennsaeler, with Moore, rose in mouth, playing an elephantine melody on the piano while Zadora sang of “alien love” and the audience roared with laughter.
Time to end this, right now, Cunningham thought. He stepped into the auditorium, drew his pistol, and fired off a round into the ceiling.
That got everyone’s attention. Candy and popcorn went flying as the teenage delinquents leaped to their feet and made abortive attempts to flee.
“Hold it, everyone!” Cunningham shouted in his best authoritative voice. Either his tone of command worked or the sight of a dozen heavily armed Werewolves did. Everyone froze. Everyone but Blaise.
He stood slowly, and faced Cunningham from across the auditorium. “What do you want?” he shouted over Zadora’s sudden squeals of ecstasy as Dudley Moore had his way with her on the piano bench.
“Just to talk,” Cunningham said. “There’s nothing to fear.”
“Sure,” Blaise said. He sauntered up slowly to the head of the auditorium, fully aware that everyone’s eyes were on him and playing his role as gang chieftain to the hilt. “What do you want to talk about?” he asked Cunningham casually.
Cunningham jerked his head back to the lobby. “In there.” He looked at the Werewolves. “You five keep an eye on the kids. The rest of you come with us.”
The Werewolves followed Cunningham, Blaise, Warlock, and Latham back into the lobby. Deadhead looked around guiltily. “Chinese food,” he said through a full mouth, and turned back to his task.
Blaise frowned. “Oh,” he said. “I see you found it. Too bad. He said I could have it.”
“He?” Cunningham asked, leaning forward eagerly in anticipation.
“Me,” a new voice drawled.
Everyone turned to look at the stairs leading up to the projection booth to see a middle-aged, blond, weatherbeaten man standing there, smiling. Something in his smile made Cunningham feel cold.
“Christian,” he said, swiveling his gun toward the British ace. “I knew itl Why did you do it? Why did you kill Kien?”
Christian’s sardonic smile widened as he ambled casually down the remaining stairs and joined the others on the floor of the lobby. “But I didn’t,” he protested.
“You can’t deny that you were this brat’s accomplice.”
“I’m not denying that at all,” Christian said blandly. “I’m simply denying that we killed Kien.”
“What?” Cunningham asked.
As if on cue, Deadhead suddenly moaned and turned and faced them. “Why are you doing this to me?” he whined. “Why are you stealing my body? Why, Kien?”
A cold wind blew through Cunningham. “Kien?” he repeated softly.
Christian leaned against the candy counter. “Of course,” he said with a sardonic smile on his tanned features. “You’ve been plotting and planning to take my place for a long time. I got sick of it. I decided to flush all the conspirators into the open, using,” and he nodded at Blaise, “my jumper friend here to provide me with a perfect cover.”
“No,” Deadhead whined. “Please, no. I’ve been loyal ...”
“Jumpers?” Cunningham said. The realization that Blaise and the others were jumpers made him turn cold. “You changed bodies with Christian and faked your own murder?”
“Exactly. Latham had brought the jumpers into our sphere of influence some time ago. I decided, however, to bypass him this time and approach Blaise directly. I used him to switch bodies. Since then I’ve been using Christian’s astral projection to keep track of you and the others.”
That explained a lot, Cunningham thought, grateful that he was surrounded by a band of friendly Werewolves. “Too bad, in the end, you miscalculated.” He turned to Warlock. “Waste him,” he said.
Warlock’s face was unreadable behind the Michael Jackson mask. He lifted his pump shotgun, then turned and placed its barrels directly under Cunningham’s chin. “Sorry,” he said.
Christian—Kien—laughed. “Splendid!”
“What are you doing?” Cunningham demanded. “Kill him! Kill him and it’s all over.”
“It is over,” Warlock said gently. “You see, my power allows me to see death on people’s faces. I saw it this morning on yours at Sui Ma’s. I knew then that you would die before the day ended.”
Cunningham felt sudden sweat spring up on his forehead. “But kill him! All you have to do is kill him!” Warlock shook his head and Kien laughed and laughed. Cunningham turned to face him. “You were dead. I thought you were dead—” he started, but Kien held up his hand, stopping him.
“No excuses. No lies. I have flushed out a traitor, but find myself trapped in an old, badly abused body. I think,” he said, looking hard at Cunningham, “that I would like to trade it in on a younger model.”
“No!” Cunningham screamed. He tried to fade and run, but he heard high, tittering laughter from Blaise and a hand of cold metal clamped down on his naked brain. The room spun and he was somewhere else. His legs were young and strong, but everything was whirling about, making him dizzy and nauseated, and he couldn’t get them to work. His perspective shifted again almost immediately and he’fell against the candy counter. He bounced, hit the floor, and started to crawl away, but his body was old and tired and his head was swimming and confused.
He heard faraway laughter, and an eager young voice said, “Let me!”
Someone turned him over and he saw blazing red hair and a young, horrible grin, but most of all he saw a huge gun barrel pointing right at his face.
He closed his eyes and tried to speak, but no words would come. He may have heard the horribly loud, terribly frightening explosion. But that was all.
MONDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1969: OFF DAY
T OMMY DOWNS kept a straight face as he showed Sister Aquilonia the Ebbets Field press pass his father had obtained for him. It was hard not to smile, but he knew the Sister would deem him insufficiently serious if he did, and deny him leave from school.
Sister Aquilonia, his ninth grade English teacher at Sanguis Christi and the faculty advisor to the school newspaper, The Weekly Gospel, was obviously impressed by the pass, but still needed some convincing to sign him out of school for the day. Tommy didn’t know how he knew that, he just did. He was, he frequently told himself, a good judge of character. It helped when he was hot on a story.
“Well ...” Sister Aquilonia stroked her vermillion chin. She used to be a Negro, until the wild card virus had turned her a striking orangey-reddish. Some of the boys said that it had changed her body in other interesting ways, but it was impossible to tell for certain because of her voluminous habit. She did, Tommy noted, smell rather sweet, but he wasn’t sure if that was her actual odor, or some kind of perfume. Nuns, he knew, generally didn’t use perfume, but neither did he remember her smelling so nice before. He thought of complimenting her on it, but something told him not to.
“I gotta get to Ebbets today, Sister,” Tommy pressed his case. “I gotta take advantage of this opportunity. My Dad went through a lot of trouble to get me the pass.”
Tommy’s father was a salesman for a Cadillac dealership over in Manhattan. He was a real wheeler dealer. He knew how to get a little sugar for himself when he closed the deal, or in this case, for his son. Even though Tommy was only in the ninth grade there was no doubt that he was going to be a reporter when he grew up, and he was already working hard to establish his credentials. The Weekly Gospel was only his first step, as he saw it, on his way to journalistic immortality.
“No doubt,” Sister Aquilonia agreed.
Tommy knew he almost had her. “Think of it. I bet I’m the only reporter on a high school paper with a Series press pass. The Gospel will have an exclusive: Inside the World Series through the eyes of Thomas Downs.”
The idea of covering the Series appealed to him largely because it meant four days away from school, four days of freedom untrammeled by nuns and uniforms and kids mostly bigger than himself. Not that Tommy wasn’t a Dodger fan. There was hardly a boy breathing in the city who wasn’t a Dodger fan that summer. Cellar dwellers for as long as Tommy could remember, the Dodgers had somehow catapulted themselves out of the basement and had taken the National League East Division crown. Then they’d beaten the vaunted Milwaukee Braves in the first ever Divisional Series, and, as National League champions, were facing the heavily favored American League champs, the Orioles, in the World Series. They’d already split the first two games in Baltimore. The next three were scheduled Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday for the Dodgers old park in Flatbush, a thirty minute subway ride from Sanguis Christi, in Queens.
“Well ...” The nun considered options with agonizing deliberation. “Okay.” Tommy suppressed any signs of glee as Sister Aquilonia scribbled on a release form, tore it off the pad, and handed it to him. “Here’s a pass for the day—good for noon. That should give you plenty of time to get over to Brooklyn and run down your story.”
Tommy hid his disappointment. Only noon? He’d miss less than half the day? Well, he philosophized, that was better than nothing. Knowing he had to stay on the nun’s good side, he pasted a smile on his face. “Thanks, Sister. I’ll get a good story, you’ll see.”
“I’m counting on it.”
“I won’t let you down,” Tommy said, as he pushed open the classroom door and went into the corridor beyond. Let’s see, he thought, first period study hall. The penguin’s note will let me report late. No need to hurry.
Study hall was in the cafeteria. He didn’t hate it, but it was boring. You had to sit there for almost an hour, being quiet, at least pretending you were doing something. He went down the silent, empty corridor, his footsteps echoing loudly. At the intersection he showed his pass to the hall monitor, almost contemptuously. There was no lower form of life at Sanguis Christi than hall monitors. They were all brown noses.
The monitor checked his pass, waved him on. He went down the hall, past the second floor boy’s bathroom. Dare he go in, he wondered? Sometimes you could kill some time with the guys, but sometimes it wasn’t the best place to be, all depending on who was hanging. A sudden urge to pee decided him, and he pushed open the heavy door and ducked inside.
Almost immediately, he knew he’d made a mistake. By then it was too late to back away. That would only have compounded his mistake, making him look like a scaredy-cat, and he couldn’t afford to look like that.
The air was redolent with cigarette smoke, and something else. Tommy couldn’t define it, but he could smell the wrongness in the air, hidden in the cigarette smoke. He couldn’t define that smell, though the familiar odor had been popping up lately in unexpected, unexplained times and places. It was subtle. He couldn’t figure out where it came from. It was just sometimes there, tickling his nose and prodding his consciousness, as it was doing now.
“Hey, look,” one of the three said, “it’s Tommy boy.”
Tommy recognized him from around Christi. He was known to all, even the nuns, as Butch. The kids also called him Butch the Bully, but not to his face. He was a senior, much older than Tommy, who having skipped a year in grade school, was young for a freshman. If rumors were to be believed, Butch was older than anyone else in school. From what Tommy knew about him, he was dumb enough to have been held back a year, or even two. Dumb but big. And mean.
That was a bad combination.
“C’mere, Tommy boy.”
Tommy approached the three reluctantly. Butch was looking pseudo-serious. His sycophants were grinning. Not a good sign. Tommy knew that anything from a verbal hazing to a lunch money shakedown to a serious beating was in store. He also knew that it’d be worse if he ran and they had to chase him.
Butch straightened up from the sink he was leaning against. He expelled a long stream of smoke from his nostrils. It didn’t smell like smoke from a real cigarette. Maybe that was where the sweet smell was coming from.
“How come you’re not in class, Tommy boy?”
He had six inches and fifty pounds on Tommy. He was as menacing as any monster out of myth or movie, and much more frightening because he was there, he was real, and Tommy knew he could kick the shit out of him without breaking a sweat. That sudden, sweet order was strong around him. It was coming off him in waves. Not from the hand-rolled cigarette he was sucking on, pulling the smoke deep into his lungs, but from him. None of the others seemed to notice it. Somewhere in a corner of his frightened mind, Tommy wondered why.
“How come, Tommy?” Butch the Bully repeated, a harder edge in his already edgy voice.
“I have to pee,” Tommy said.
Butch looked at his sycophants. “He has to pee,” he repeated in an almost apt imitation of Tommy’s higher, lighter voice. He looked back at Tommy. “I hope you don’t pee your pants little boy.”
His voice was lilting, mocking. The other two laughed. “Yeah, pee your pants,” one of them said.
Tommy gulped, started to move backward, and Butch came towards him, his sycophants right at his heels. He had a bright, weird look in his too-focused eyes. Some bullies, Tommy knew, liked to have their henchmen deliver beatings for them. Butch looked like he liked to hand them out himself. “Do you need a diaper, little boy?” he said, grinning slow and lazy. “Only babies need diapers.”
I hate this place, Tommy thought, closing his eyes.
Butch towered over him. Backed up against the row of sinks, Tommy had nowhere to go. Butch grabbed Tommy’s shirt and pulled him up onto his toes with little effort. Tommy closed his eyes against the tears that suddenly sprang up in them. Would he rather take the humiliation of a pants-wetting, or the pain of a beating? Considering, though, that they’d probably kick his ass no matter what ....
You bastard, he thought, you big dumb ugly bastard.
Butch put his face close down almost against Tommy’s. Tommy’s eyes were still shut, but he could feel Butch’s hot breath against his cheeks. “Piss your pants, boy,” the bully said, his breath oddly sweet as a field of flowers in May. “Pisssssssss—”
Butch’s final word was elongated, like a reptilian hiss, and it concluded with a strange, funny sound like a whispered, gagging, choke. Tommy opened his eyes. Butch’s suddenly stricken face was changing contours.
His features slackened, then seemed to stiffen and tighten. He screamed into Tommy’s face as his head grew narrower, more elongated. His hair fell out in clumps, down upon his shoulders and chest. Butch screamed again and his tongue flopped out of his mouth. It was long and bifurcated. It caressed Tommy’s face like gentle fingers.
“Clarence—” one of his sycophants said, “Uh, I mean, Butch?”
Everyone stared at Butch as he started to twitch all over. Tommy got it first.
“He’s turning a card!” Tommy pulled away from the bully’s suddenly slack grip and started to back away fast. It took the other two a moment, then they barkpedaled as Butch sank to his knees.
“Whu—whut’s happening to me?” Butch asked plaintively, barely able to shape the words with his suddenly lolling tongue and elongated jaw. He shook like a dog trying to throw off droplets of invisible water, but no one answered him.
The boys ran from the bathroom, Butch’s companions screaming like they were on fire. Tommy lost himself in the ensuing excitement, blending in as just another ordinary kid in a group of ordinary, if excited, kids. Eventually Butch was taken away by emergency medics. Tommy, watching safely from the crowd as they wheeled him past, saw that he was tied down to the dolly with all but his head covered with a sheet. He was still alive, at least. He twisted frantically against his bonds, almost as sinuous as a snake or lizard, hissing all the time.
Everyone was talking about it. Tommy, after getting back to the bathroom and unburdening his frightfully over-strained bladder, kept silent about his participation in the affair. He wondered about the strange smell Butch had exuded like a night-blooming orchid. As the morning progressed he managed to get next to Sister Aquilonia for a moment, and took a deep sniff. She gave off the same smell, but not as strongly. A couple others around Christi had it, too. Tommy made careful inquiries among his classmates, and nobody seemed aware of Sister Aquilonia’s perfume, or that of the strange girl in eleventh grade who was quite pretty but had feathers instead of hair. As he checked out of Sanguis to take the sub-way to Ebbets Field over in Brooklyn, Tommy began to wonder. Began to think if maybe detecting that odor was an ability he had alone. It made him feel queasy and excited at the same time.
Was he a wild carder? If so, he was one of the lucky ones. He wasn’t one of those pathetic misfit jokers, but more like Golden Boy, and that Eagle guy, and Cyclone who had that cool uniform. And the Turtle, of course, but no one knew what he looked like. Maybe he was a creepy joker hiding in his shell, but he, Tommy, was a normal kid, maybe just a little smarter than the others.
Tommy was running over the possibilities in his head as he arrived at Ebbets Field and asked directions to the locker room. The gate attendants were skeptical that he was a reporter, but all he had to do was show his magic pass and they let him through.
As he walked through the bowels of Ebbets Field, heading to the locker room, his mind wasn’t on baseball. It was whirling with notions of him, Tommy Downs, actually being a wild carder, being—let’s face it—an ace, with the secret power to ferret out those infected with the virus.
God, he thought as he entered the locker room, that would be great. I wonder if I should get a cool uniform of some kind, like Cyclone’s?
He stood on the threshold of the locker room, looking over the scene of ball players undressing. They were legends, too. Some of them, anyway. Don Drysdale, Tom Seaver, Ed Kranepool. Others were just faces to Tommy, who was just a casual fan. Reporters wove in among them, chattering, asking questions, laughing, taking notes. Real reporters, from real newspapers. Not rags like The Weekly Gospel.
Tommy swelled with a sudden pride. He could do something the real reporters couldn’t. He could sniff out wild carders. Maybe. He took a deep breath, almost unconsciously, and, almost unconsciously, focused his nascent power. And in among the locker room odors of dirty uniforms and sweaty athletes and ointments and balms of a hundred acrid scents, he caught a weak whiff of what he thought of as the wild card smell, and stood there stunned as someone went by and said, “Hey, kid, don’t block the doorway.”
But he hardly heard him, hardly felt the man brush by. He didn’t even recognize him as Pete Reiser, Dodger manager.
All he was thinking was, There’s a secret ace on the Brooklyn Dodgers! Gee, what a story!
It had been quite a year for Pete Reiser. He’d received the call from Cooperstown in January telling him he’d been elected to the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. It wasn’t unexpected because when he’d retired he’d had the most hits, most runs scored, and highest batting average in baseball history, but it was still a stunning achievement for a poor boy from the mid-west who’d wanted nothing more from life than to be a ball-player, who, throughout his twenty-one season career, played like his pants were on fire in every inning of every game, no matter the score, unafraid of opposing players, head-hunting pitchers, or outfield walls.
What was unexpected was that as the first-year manager of a team that hadn’t been out of the cellar since ‘62 he was still managing in October, his team tied at one game apiece in the World Series. He could hardly hope for things to get any better, but he did. He longed with all his heart to win the Series, to bring the Dodgers back to the heights of glory that he knew with them in the 1950s.
And it just seemed possible that they might do it.
He stood inside the doorway to the clubhouse, watching his team unwind after a light workout. They were a loose bunch, mainly kids with a sprinkling of veterans, built around a solid core of young pitching and little else. Seaver, Koosman, Ryan, Gates, and Drysdale, the glowering veteran brought in to solidify the staff and, not incidentally, to teach how and when to throw inside, a lesson that Seaver, the young superstar, had learned quickly and well ... Jerry Grote, great at handling a staff and calling a game, not so great at hitting ... Tommy Agee, a gifted defensive center fielder ... Ron Swoboda, a lousy defensive right fielder with occasional binges of power ... Cleon Jones, their only .300 hitter ... Al Weis, the hundred and sixty five pound infielder who couldn’t hit his weight ... Donn Clendenon, bought from the expansion Expos to spell the grizzled Ed Kranepool (he was only twenty-five but had been with the Dodgers for eight seasons; that was enough to grizzle anyone) and provide some pop from the right side of the plate ... Ed “The Glider” Charles, their oldest everyday player who could still pick it at third but whose bat had left him two seasons ago ... they were an odd and motley crew, but they managed to win, somehow, with great but inconsistent pitching, timely hitting, and an often suspect defense.
And excellent coaching, of course, Reiser thought.
One of the excellent coaches, the pitching coach, was conversing with rookie Jeff Gates at the youngster’s locker. Gates and most of the pitchers called him “Sir,” Drysdale and Reiser and a few of the older players still called him El Hacon, The Hawk. He’d gotten the name as a youngster, partly for the great blade of his nose, partly for his sharp, black eyes. Campy had hung it on him in the spring of 1950 when he’d been traded to the Dodgers from the Washington Senators. He’d pitched for the Dodgers for fifteen seasons, many of them great, some of them awful, and finished his career with four years with the powerhouse Washington Senators. Reiser had watched him save the last game of the ‘68 Series for the Senators, throwing with guile and guts and nothing else. He could see that there was nothing left in the Hawk’s arm but pain. Reiser knew that if he was going to make anything out of the mess that had become the Dodgers, he needed El Hacon. Not for this arm anymore, but for his sharp brain which had absorbed so much knowledge over his twenty year major league career. The one thing the Dodgers had was some good young throwers. He needed a pitching coach who could turn them into pitchers, and he knew that Fidel Castro was the man for the job.
He caught Castro’s eye across the room, and Castro acknowledged him with a slight nod, offered a few more words of wisdom to the young rookie, patted him on the ass, and made his way slowly across the room, dropping a word here and there for Seaver and Drysdale and Grote.
“What’s your thoughts about tomorrow, amigo?” Reiser asked his pitching coach in a low voice.
Castro’s eyes were dark and earnest. His voice was that of a prophet supplying wisdom to his high priest. “We’re one and one. Plenty of games left to play. Go with the Drysdale tomorrow, then we can come back with Seaver on three day’s rest for Wednesday. Keep Gates in the bullpen, with Ryan, just in case. But Drysdale, he is ready.”
Reiser nodded thoughtfully. “I believe you’re right, Hawk.” His gaze suddenly narrowed as he looked across the locker room. “Who’s that kid talking to Agee? Should he be here?”
Castro looked, shrugged. “Who knows, jefe? Maybe a new club-house boy.”
Reiser shrugged as well. He had more important things to do than worry about stray clubhouse boys. He had a World Series to win.
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 14, 1969: GAME 3
The next day Tommy decided to forego school entirely. If he didn’t show up they couldn’t stop him from leaving early, and he had something more important to do than waste his time on phys ed, algebra, and Great Expectations. He was on the trail of a real honest-to-Jesus story. An exclusive about the Dodgers’ secret ace. This was a story a real paper would be glad to print, and maybe even pay big bucks for.
He arrived at Ebbets Field early, and his press pass again got him past skeptical security guards at the gate. The stadium was empty and eerily quiet. Tommy thought it downright spooky as he wandered around, trying to find the manager’s office. He got lost almost immediately, and probably would have stayed lost until game time if he hadn’t run into a clubhouse attendant wheeling a cart of freshly washed uniforms to the home locker room. The attendant dropped Tommy off at the door of the manager’s office while on his way to the adjacent locker room, and left him there standing nervously in front of the closed door.
Tommy was not a huge baseball fan, but every boy who grew up in New York and had an atom of interest knew who Pete Reiser was. Besides Babe Ruth, maybe, he was simply the greatest player ever. Ruth held the career home run record, but Reiser had set marks in many other offensive categories while playing a stellar center field. He’d done most of that with the Dodgers, though his last four years he’d spent with the Yankees as a part-time outfield and pinch-hitter. He was a baseball god, and Tommy was reluctant to disturb him in his sanctuary.
But, Tommy thought, disturbing a god was a small price to pay for a good story. He made himself knock on the door. There was an instantaneous reply of “Come in,” and Tommy did.
The office was a lot smaller than he’d imagined. The walls were covered with black and white photos of old Dodgers, going back to the real old days. There was a rickety bookcase across the back wall crammed with notebooks and thick manilla folders and across the opposite wall an old leather sofa with cracked upholstery. The room needed painting. Reiser was seated behind his desk, pen in hand, scowling down at a blank line-up card on his neat desktop. He transferred the scowl to Tommy. “No autographs now, son. I’m busy,” he said, then looked back down at the card.
“I—” Tommy’s voice caught, then he took a deep breath, trying to calm himself. “I’m not looking for an autograph. I’m on a story.”
“What?” Reiser asked, looking up again.
Tommy took a step into the room, suddenly confident. “Yeah, I’m a reporter. See.”
He took the press pass from the pocket of his Sanguis Christi uniform jacket and held it out for Reiser to see.
Reiser frowned. “Christ, I can’t read that from here. Come on in.”
Tommy advanced into the room until he stood across Reiser’s desk. Reiser studied the pass, frowning. “You sure you didn’t steal that from your father?”
“No, sir. I’m Tommy Downs. I represent The Weekly Gospel.”
Reiser grunted. He seemed to notice Tommy’s Sanguis Christi uniform for the first time. “Catholic boy, huh?”
Actually, he wasn’t. Tommy’s father just didn’t want him in public school, and the really private private schools were just a little too pricey. Sanguis Christi fit the family budget, barely. But Tommy saw no sense into going into all that. He could discern approval radiating from Reiser when he eyed the uniform. He simply nodded vigorously to Reiser’s question.
“Well, I guess I can spare you a couple of minutes. Sit down.”
Tommy took the chair across the desk, and slipped the note-book out of his pocket. He opened it and poised his pen over the first page, and said, “Ummmm.” He realized that he didn’t know what to ask Reiser. He couldn’t just ask him if there was a secret ace on the Dodgers. Tommy suddenly had an awful thought. What if Pete Reiser were the secret ace?
What if all season long he’d been manipulating a lousy Dodger team, nudging things here and there with the awesome power of his mind, making a ball go through the infield here, making a batter strike out there, clouding a base runner’s mind so that he tried to go on to third where he was easily thrown out?
Tommy surreptitiously took a long, shallow breath.
He smelled nothing unusual, discounting the stale odors seeping from the locker room next door. Still, he was uncertain in this ability. It was new to him. He wasn’t sure how reliable—
Suddenly he realized that Reiser was frowning.
“Have I seen you before?” Reiser asked.
“I was in the locker room yesterday,” Tommy said, “getting background for my story.”
“Yeah, I remember you now,” Reiser said. “So, what’s this story you’re talking about?”
“Story?” Tommy repeated. “Sure. I was just wondering. Wondering if, ummm, anything strange has happened this season? Anything unusual?”
Reiser laughed. “Unusual? Hell, son, the Dodgers were in last place last year. This year we won the pennant. I’d say the whole damned season was pretty damned unusual. Um—” Reiser hesitated. “Don’t say ‘damned’ in your article. Say ‘darned.’”
“Yes, I understand. But what I’m getting at ... what I mean ...”
Reiser waited patiently. Tommy realized that the only way he could think of saying it, was just by saying it. “What I wonder is if you suspect that maybe someone on the team has some kind of power or ability that he used to help win ball games, like, maybe a secret ace or something?”
Reiser stared at him. “A secret ace? You think someone on the Dodgers is an ace?”
Tommy nodded. Reiser suddenly turned cold.
“Using an unnatural ability to win a ball game would be cheating,” Reiser said flatly. “What makes you think someone on my team would cheat like that?”
“I can—” Tommy shut his mouth. He was about to say, “I can smell him,” and then he realized how unbelievably dorky that sounded. Smell him.
Reiser just looked at him.
“I can—I can read their minds.”
“Really?” Reiser asked, apparently unconvinced. “Can you read my mind?”
Tommy shook his head. “No. Only the minds of wild carders. I can tell that they’re different than normal people. But, I’m, uh, I’m kind of new at it. I’m just learning how, so, especially in crowds, it’s hard to tell who’s who.” That much, anyway, was true.
Reiser nodded. “Okay. Well. I’ll tell you what. You’ve got your press pass. Hang around. Check things out. And come back to me first thing,” he emphasized, “when you discover who the secret ace is. Because I want to know, first thing, when you uncover him. All right?”
“Okay.” Tommy stood. There was no sense in questioning Reiser any longer. Reiser didn’t know anything, and couldn’t help the investigation. Tommy was sure of that.
“Remember,” Reiser told him. “You come to me first with the name.”
“I will.”
“Fine. Good luck, Tommy.”
“Thanks.”
Tommy trudged from the office, half-discouraged, half-angry. Not only hadn’t he advanced his investigation, he’d made himself look like a fool. Because he could tell, he just knew, that Reiser was patronizing him. He didn’t believe Tommy for one second. He didn’t believe there was a secret ace on the Dodgers, not at all.
Just another day in the dugout, Reiser thought, but of course, it wasn’t. Ebbets hadn’t seen a day like this since 1957.
The old park was jammed to over-flowing and the fans had cheered themselves hoarse before the first pitch was thrown. All the regular Dodger fanatics were present; the five-piece band known as the Dodger Symphony that played loud but almost unrecognizable tunes as they marched around the park, the guy on the third base line known as Sign Man, who could cause letters to appear on his blank piece of white cardboard, and all the thousands of normal (and abnormal) fans who’d experienced one of the great rides in baseball history as the ‘69 Dodgers fought their way to the National League pennant.
Reiser, returned from the pregame conference at home plate with the umpires and Baltimore manager Earl Weaver, plopped down next to Fidel Castro in the Dodger dugout. “How’d he look warming up?”
“Drysdale? Caliente, boss.”
“He better be caliente,” Reiser said. “We need this one.”
Drysdale was one of the old Dodgers come home, probably to finish his career. He had started with the Dodgers in 1956 and put up some decent numbers for a fading team, as well as garnering a reputation as one of the meanest sons of bitches to toe the rubber. In one of the disastrous trades that marked the end of his general managerialship, Branch Rickey had traded him in 1960 to the Yankees for Marv Throneberry, Jerry Lumpe, and pitching legend Don Larsen who had thrown a perfect game in the 1956 World Series, then squandered his career on booze and broads. Drysdale had put up near Hall of Fame numbers with the Yankees, while only Throneberry had proved marginally useful to the Dodgers. When the Yankees disintegrated in the mid-1960’s, Drysdale went on to have some good years for the Cardinals. The Dodgers had bought him back in ‘69 to help anchor the fine young pitching staff they were assembling.
He sauntered in from the bullpen, a towel wrapped around his neck to soak up the sweat he’d already broken. He was a tall, lean, big-jawed man with a ruthless disposition and will to win. He was one of Reiser’s favorites. Reiser knew better than to pep-talk him or pat his ass. That would just annoy him, take him out of the zone he carefully crafted where every ounce of concentration, every erg of energy, was geared toward one thing: throwing the ball where he wanted to throw it. That done, everything else would simply take care of itself.
Drysdale sat off to one side in his own world. The rest of the dugout was full of chatter, young men pretending they believed they belonged in the Series, veterans just enjoying their Christmas in October and hoping that it would last a few more days. Their energy was nearly palpable. Reiser thought that if you’d stick wires in their asses they’d light up the whole city.
“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,” the P.A. system blared, “please direct your attention to right field, where the first pitch will be thrown by a very unusual special guest. It will be caught by our own Roy Campanella, first base coach and Hall of Fame catcher from Dodger glory days!”
The cheers started again as Campy, gone from stocky to just plain plump, strode out to a position midway between home and the pitcher’s mound. The fans’ ovation dwindled into murmured puzzlement as Campy, wearing his old, battered catcher’s mitt, faced the outfield wall.
An armored shell swooped over the rightfield bleachers into the outfield and came to rest over the pitcher’s mound. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the P.A. announcer blared again, “we present The Great and Powerful Turtle!”
There was a murmur of surprise that quickly grew into an appreciative outpouring of welcome as the Dodger faithful greeted the city’s great new, unknown hero. All over the stands people turned to one another and said, “I knew he was a Dodger fan. I just knew it.”
A small porthole opened in the fore of the shell, and a baseball dropped, hovered, and performed a series of swoops, turns, and arabesques, eventually settling down soft as a feather into Campy’s outstretched glove.
“LET’S GO DODGERS!” the Turtle blared from his own set of loudspeakers. His shell rose majestically and moved off to a spot right above the rightfield bleachers where it stayed for the duration of the game.
Drysdale rose, took off his warm up jacket. “Enough of this shit,” he said. “Let’s go.”
He stepped out of the dugout, and the rest of the team ran out onto the field after him. Castro, Reiser thought as Drysdale hummed his eight warm-up pitchers, was right. D has his stuff today. He retired the Orioles one-two-three in the top of the first.
Jim Palmer was pitching for the Orioles, the youngest of their three twenty game winners, and he looked good, too, as he warmed up in the bottom of the first inning.
Then Tommie Agee stepped up to the plate and lined a homer into the lower deck of the center field bleachers, and Reiser thought, Here we go again. This team is amazing.
But is it? a small voice in the back of Reiser’s head suddenly asked. Is it the team, or was that kid right? Is it someone just manipulating things, jerking puppet strings, with some kind of power given them by the wild card?
Reiser would never had thought of it, if it wasn’t for that kid. Sure, it’s crazy to think that the kid was right, but the world was crazy, had been since September 1946 when the wild card virus had rained down out of the skies of New York City.
Wild carders were banned from pro sports. A guy like Golden Boy would make a mockery of the game. But what if others were subtle, even sly, in the use of their powers?
Reiser looked down the bench. The Hawk sat in his usual spot next to him. Beyond him were the men who had fought so hard over the long summer to bring pride and faith back to Brooklyn. Was one of them secretly manipulating events behind the backs of all the others, stacking the deck so that the Dodgers would win?
Reiser snorted aloud. Bullshit. He knew these men. He’d gone to war with them all summer long. They won and they lost, and it was their skill, determination, and, yes, sometimes their luck that bought them their victories. That was baseball. Sometimes luck was on your side and the little pop up off the end of your bat fell in for a double down the line; sometimes it wasn’t and your screaming line drive sought out the third baseman’s glove like a leather-seeking missile.
Castro caught his eye. “What?”
Reiser shook his head. “De nada.”
But, somehow, he couldn’t shake the kid’s question from his mind.
Tommy Downs could tell that the Ebbets Field press box attendant was a wild carder, and not only because of his sweet smell. The guy was about five and a half feet tall and he was shaped like a snail without a shell. His hands were tiny, his arms almost stick-like in their frailty. He had neither legs nor feet, but his body tapered down to a slug-like tail. He even had snail-like feelers on the top of his head and a mucous coating on his exposed skin. His features were doughy, but good natured.
“Hi ya, kid,” he said cheerfully as Tommy approached the press box. “I’m Slug Maligne, ex-Yankee, press box attendant.”
“Tommy Downs,” Tommy said routinely, holding out his press pass, “The Weekly Gospel.” He paused as the joker’s words sunk in. “Ex-Yankee? You mean, the New York Yankees?”
Slug nodded cheerfully, as if this were a subject he never tired of discussing. “That’s right. I was with them for twelve days in the spring of ‘59. Even got into a game. Yogi and Ellie Howard were both hurt. That was why I was on the roster. I was playing for the Joker Giant Kings—you know, the barnstorming team; I played for them off’n’on for over twenty years—and we were in town when Yogi and Ellie went down on consecutive days. Maybe I wasn’t the greatest hitter, but I was terrific defensively. Nobody could block the plate like me,” Slug said proudly. “Game I played was the second game of a doubleheader. Johnny Blanchard caught the first game; we were winning the second twelve to two and I caught Duke Maas for the last two innings.”
“Wow,” Tommy said. There was a story there, too—The Forgotten Joker of Baseball—but he couldn’t lose sight of the story he was chasing. In fact, maybe here was somebody who could help him, if he played his cards right. “That’s really interesting. Say, do you think you could spot another wild carder, if they were on the Dodgers?”
Slug frowned. “An ace, do you mean? Because anyone could spot a joker like me—and as far as I know I’m the only one who made it to the majors, even for a single game.”
“Yeah,” Tommy said. “An ace. Haven’t some funny things been happening on the Dodgers this year?”
Slug’s upper body shimmered, as if he’d shrugged tiny shoulders. “Kid, you hang around any team for a year, you’ll see a lot of funny things. Why, I remember back in ‘56 when I was playing with the Joker Giant Kings—”
A sudden roar again shattered the air.
“Man,” Tommy said. “I’ve really gotta follow what’s going on with the game. Can we talk later?”
“Sure, kid,” Slug smiled, and Tommy made his way into the crowded press box where rows of reporters were banging away at their portables.
“What’d I miss?” Tommy asked.
“Drysdale doubled two in,” one of the scribes said laconically, shifting his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. “Dodgers lead three to nothing.”
Reiser didn’t have to even think about managing until the fourth when Drysdale showed his first sign of weakness. He gave up a walk and a single. With two outs Ellie Hendricks, the big, hard-hitting Oriole catcher, scorched a line drive into left center. It looked like a certain two-run double, but Tommie Agee came out of nowhere with his smooth center-fielder glide that ate up the ground under his feet, reached his glove back-handed across his body, and snow-coned the ball in the webbing, robbing the stunned Orioles of two runs.
Sign Man held up his sheet of cardboard and the word “SENSATIONAL” appeared upon it in thick, black, sans serif letters. The Symphony broke into a spirited rendition of ... something ... as Agee trotted smilingly into the dugout and the Ebbets faithful shouted themselves hoarse all over again.
“What do you think?” Reiser asked Castro as Drysdale came into the dugout, put on his warm-up jacket, and sat down on his end of the bench.
Castro shook his head. “Don’t worry, yet. He’s throwing smooth. His motion is loose. He’s got a couple more innings in him.”
Once again, the prophet was right. It was the seventh before Drysdale ran out of gas. He retired the first two batters, but then walked three in a row. Reiser hardly needed Castro’s confirmation. It was time for the veteran to come out.
Reiser strolled out to the mound, and signaled for the right-hander, the twenty-two year old flamethrower out of Alvin, Texas, a tall angular kid named Nolan Ryan. Ryan could throw harder than anyone since Bob Feller. The only problem was, he didn’t have much of an idea where the ball was going once he released it. He struck out more than a batter per inning pitched, but walked nearly that many, and with the bases loaded and a three run Dodger lead, there was no room for error.
“We need one out,” Reiser told Ryan as he handed him the ball. Ryan nodded calmly, like he always did, and started his warm-ups as Reiser headed back to the dugout.
“It had to be Blair up next,” Reiser said as he sat down next to Castro. The Hawk, understanding what Reiser meant, only shrugged.
Paul Blair was a veteran, a patient hitter. He’d know Ryan was prone to wildness, and test him by taking a pitch or two. But today the kid seemed to have his control. He poured over two fastballs for strikes as Reiser, watching, gripped the bench, trying to squeeze sawdust out of it.
Castro muttered, “Waste one now, hermano. Make him go fishing. Waste one ...”
But Ryan, perhaps overly confident in his stuff, came with heat right down the middle. Blair jumped it. He connected solidly, driving the ball on a line to right center, and Reiser knew that this one was going into the gap and would clear the bases for sure.
But Agee didn’t. He ran to his left with the effortless stride of the born center fielder. Reiser, watching, seemed to see the years fall away and it was as if he himself was out there again, running down the ball. Agee, mindless of the outfield wall as Reiser ever was, dove, skidded, and bounced on the warning track, and some-how managed to spear the ball right before it hit the ground, turning an inside the park home run into an out, and the end of the inning.
If Ebbets had gone crazy before, now it became totally delirious. Sign Man’s sign read “DID I SAY SENSATIONAL?” and the Sym-phony’s percussionist dropped his base drum and it rolled down the bleacher’s concrete steps rumbling like thunder. In the sky above The Turtle’s speakers blared “Happy Days Are Here Again.” The fans deluged Agee with applause. Reiser and Castro just looked at each other and shook their heads as Ryan strolled calmly off the mound.
The inning was over, and so for all intents and purposes was the game. Ed Kranepool hit a homer in the eighth, making it four to nothing. Ryan went two and a third innings, giving up only one hit and striking out four, and the Dodgers were up two games to one.
As the team charged the mound at the end of the ninth, engulfing Ryan in a swarming mass of laughing, jumping, hugging bodies, Reiser sat in the dugout and smiled.
Just another day, he thought, at the ballyard.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 15TH, 1969: GAME 4
The press box was oddly quiet as the game started. Tom Seaver, who in only his third year with the Dodgers was already known as “The Franchise,” had taken the mound against the veteran screwballer, Mike Cuellar, another of the Orioles’ plethora of twenty-game winners. Reporters were mostly sitting before their portables wondering what would be the next improbable turn of event, who would be the next unlikely hero.
Tommy found Slug in his favorite perch in the back of the press box, where the joker could see the action on the field below, the action in the box, and the action at the buffet where management fed the reporters hotdogs, burgers, fries, pretzels, and soda. “Hi, Slug.”
“Hiya, kid,” the joker replied with a jolly smile. “Want a hot dog?”
“Sure.”
“Help yourself.”
Tommy fixed himself a dog from the covered serving tray and took a bite, savoring for a moment his favored status as a member of the fifth estate. For the paying customers dogs were fifty cents each. And he could have as many as he wanted. For free.
“Take a coke to wash it down with,” Slug said.
“Thanks.”
But being a reporter wasn’t all free dogs and cokes, clearly. He was getting nowhere with his story. He had managed to strike maybe about ten names off his list of possible aces, and even then he couldn’t be sure he was right. He didn’t trust his nascent power. It seemed to be working pretty well now, standing next to Slug. He could smell the wild card odor come off him in waves, dampened only a little by the mucous layer which covered his body. But in the locker room it was confusing. Today he’d only managed to get close enough to Jerry Grote, Tommy Agee, and Al Weis to cross them off his list. If he had the time, maybe he’d eventually be able to eliminate all the innocent Dodgers. But he had only the rest of today and tomorrow. If he couldn’t find the culprit by then, bye bye story.
He needed help. He needed a strategy, a way to approach the hunt that might lead him to the more likely suspects. There must be some way to eliminate some of them. If anybody knew, Slug, who had seen all their home games, might.
“I looked you up in The Baseball Encyclopedia this morning,” Tommy said. It wasn’t much of an entry. One game for the 1959 Yankees, zero at bats, four putouts. But somehow Tommy knew that Slug would be pleased if he mentioned it.
And he was. The joker nodded happily. “That’s right. It wasn’t much of a career, but it’s more than any of those joes had,” he said, waving his frail-looking arm at the legion of reporters before them. He looked at Tommy. “You know, some people think the Yankees put me in a game as sort of a joke. You know, ‘Look at the joker, ain’t he something?’” Slug shook his head. “But, if they did, the joke was on them. Me, I get to say I was a major leaguer. I’m in the Encyclopedia. I still have my Yankee hat. Out of all the millions and millions of kids who grew up playing and loving baseball, I could say I made it. I was a big leaguer.”
Tommy nodded. This was exactly the mood he wanted Slug to be in. “And you know a lot about baseball.”
“It’s been my life,” Slug said simply. “I played it for over twenty years. Wasn’t a greatly remunerative life, barnstorming around the country with the Joker Giant Kings. Sometimes we barely got out of town with a nickel between us all ... but the places we seen, the things we did, the boys we played against ...”
“What about the Dodgers?” Tommy asked, steering the conversation back at least to basic relevancy. “What happened to them? They were so great in the fifties, then they got bad ... real bad. How come?”
Slug shrugged nearly non-existent shoulders. “Nature of the game, Tommy. Branch Rickey bought the team when Walter O’Malley turned into a pile of ooze back on that first Wild Card Day in 1946.” Slug shuddered. He looked remarkably like a bowl of sentient jello. “Every time I feel sorry for myself, I think of what could have happened, and I feel grateful. Anyway—Rickey was a great man. A great thinker. They called him the Mahatma because he was so clever. He bought the colored man back into the major leagues. Jackie and Campy and Don Newcombe and the rest. Other teams followed him quickly, but he was there first and he got the best. It gave him a couple of years where he was ahead of everybody. He made some great trades. He kept the Dodgers together.
“But nothing lasts forever in baseball, kid. The Dodgers won their last pennant in ‘57. They came close in ‘58. Finished second to Milwaukee, who they’d just beaten the year before. But after that it just went bad. All of a sudden the team seemed to get old, all at once. Jackie was gone, retired after ‘57. Campanella battled age and injury. He hung on for a few years, but he was just a shadow of himself. Pee Wee, Newk, Carl Furillo, all faded. Only Reiser played on, but one man can’t carry a team. Their only decent pitchers were Drysdale and Castro, and Rickey traded Drysdale. In a last attempt to capture past glory, Rickey traded Duke Snider for five prospects, none of whom panned out. Rickey was in his seventies then, and not as sharp as he used to be. His son, who they called The Twig (but not to his face), took over more and more of the operation, but he was never as sharp as the Mahatma. When Rickey died in 1962 the Dodgers started their long stretch on the bottom of the league.”
“But what was special about this year? How come they won the pennant?” Tommy asked.
Slug laughed. “Hell, kid, if I knew for sure I’d write it down in a book and somebody’d pay me ten thousand dollars for it.”
“Do you think,” Tommy said carefully, “someone could be, well, manipulating things ... using some kind of power to change the outcome of the games?”
“What, like an ace or something?”
Tommy nodded. “Or something.”
Slug laughed again, giggling like a bowlful of jelly. “If they were, kid, they’re doing a hell of a job. Listen, I’ve watched them all season. They win games every way imaginable. Why, one night Carlton struck out twenty men! Twenty! That’s a record. But he lost four to two because Ron Swoboda hit two two run homers—”
“Then Swoboda—” Tommy interrupted eagerly.
“Swoboda hit .237 with nine home runs for the season. Does he sound like a secret ace to you?”
“No ...”
“Another time they had a doubleheader. They won both games one to nothing. In both games the pitcher knocked in the run, Jerry Koosman and Don Drysdale.”
“Then—”
Slug shook his head. “All I’m saying, kid, is that these guys win by every means imaginable. By pitching, by clutch hitting, by hustling on every play. It isn’t one man.” Slug gestured down to the field, where Seaver had retired the Orioles one-two-three again and was running off the mound. “Not even him. And he’s great. He’s terrific. But the Dodgers didn’t win in ‘67 or ‘68 when they had him. And this year he’s still their greatest player, their only great player. Nope. Nobody’s pulling any strings behind the scenes.”
“What about Reiser?” Tommy said quietly.
Slug frowned momentarily. “Reiser? Well, no one was greater them him. No one wanted to win more than him. I don’t know, kid. What kind of power would he have? The will to win? How would that work?”
Tommy shrugged. As it happened, Tommy knew that Reiser couldn’t be the secret ace. He smelled totally normal. Unless. Tommy thought, somehow he, Reiser was clouding his Tommy’s mind. Tommy sighed. Best not start thinking like that, he thought. That way lay craziness.
“Uh-oh,” Slug said with some concern. “Looks like Seaver could be getting into trouble.”
In the ninth inning the Dodgers were up one to nothing. Seaver needed only three more outs to nail down the Dodgers’ third win. He retired lead-off man Don Buford, but then Blair got only his second hit of the Series. Frank Robinson followed with another single, putting men on first and third. “He’s tiring,” Reiser said.
Castro nodded. “Let him gut it out.”
Reiser blew out a deep breath. “I’m going to go talk to him. We can’t let this one go.”
Castro nodded, and Reiser sauntered out to the mound, taking his time. The bullpen was up and working. Given a few more minutes and Gates and McGraw would both be ready, but Reiser didn’t want to take Seaver out. You had to show faith in the youngsters. You had to let them work out of their own trouble, or else they’d never learn how to do it. He’d learned that lesson under Leo Durocher, his first Dodger manager, and it was a lesson he’d never forgotten.
When he got to the mound the look in Seaver’s eyes told him everything he wanted to know. Very few pitchers would actually ask to be taken out. Their eyes told the real story, whether they were tired, hurt, or scared. Seaver’s eyes told Reiser that he was just impatient to get back to work. Reiser nodded.
“Right,” Reiser said. “I just wanted to make sure you were okay, and I’m sure. Remember—Boog Powell is up. Jam him, jam him, and jam him again, but if the pitch catches any of the plate on the inside he’ll hit it out. If you want to waste one, waste it outside, far outside. Don’t let the big son of a bitch get his arms extended. If you do, he’ll hit it out.”
Out of the corner of his eye he saw the umpire hustling up to the mound to break up the conversation. He looked at Seaver, who still had that somewhat far-away look of glassy-eyed concentration. He looked at Grote, who snapped off a nod and a wink. Grote couldn’t hit much, but he was a great defensive catcher and called the finest game in the majors. He’d make sure Seaver kept his wits about him.
“Okay,” Reiser said. He turned and strolled back to the dugout as Powell approached the plate.
Boog settled into the batters box and pumped the bat twice, three times at the mound. Seaver stared into his catcher’s glove like an automaton, then went into his windup and unleashed his arm like an arbolast blasting a rock at a castle wall. The ball whistled out of his hand, fastball, inside, on the black.
Boog cut at it, unleashing his long, furious swing, and the bottom of the ball sliced off the top of the bat handle, backward, foul, whistling just over Grote’s shoulder and by the umpire’s head.
Boog half-stepped out of the box, swinging the bat loosely in his hands. “That boy sure is fast. Give me another of those.”
Grote smiled. “Okay.”
He put a single finger down, hidden between his thighs, and the runners took off from first and third. Seaver wound up and pumped another fastball to the same spot, maybe a little lower, maybe a little more inside.
Boog swung again, one of the fastest bats in the league, and caught it square, but the ball was right where Seaver wanted it to be, inside, off the black, and Powell hit it right off the handle. The bat shattered, the end helicoptering out somewhere near second, the handle still in his hand as he started to run to first.
Boog was strong. If anyone else had hit that ball it was just a little pop-up to the second baseman, infield fly and two out, but Boog was strong. Weiss, playing second, knew the ball was over his head, knew he had no chance to get it, but ran out into right field anyway, legs pumping desperately. He glanced into the outfield and saw Ron Swoboda running right at him, furiously, eyes clenched on the ball as it floated softly up and out. Swoboda was a solid two-ten, a one-time ballyhooed slugger who didn’t quite make it. He was one of the three or four rotating Dodger right fielders. He was by far the worst fielder. Weiss was a slightly less robust one-sixty-five, a utility infielder who had a very light stick but a great glove. He figured if anyone would catch it, it would have to be him, so he kept going, though Swoboda was thundering at him like an avalanche of doom and the ball was dying out there in no-man’s land beyond second base but hardly into the outfield, kind of in center but Agee was nowhere in the picture and kind of in right but there was no way Rocky was going to reach it, no way in hell, and suddenly Swoboda was diving, was springing forward parallel to the ground as the ball was coming down so softly it would barely dent the grass when it hit but it didn’t hit the grass as just an inch or two from the ground Swoboda stabbed it, reaching out back-handed, hit hard, tumbled over, and held on.
For a second there was silence in the stadium. No one seemed to believe what had happened. Blair, on third, had kept his presence of mind, and as Swoboda caught the ball and bounced along the turf, came in to score on the sacrifice fly, cursing all the way. Frank Robinson, on first, had gone half-way to second, then turned and went back when he was sure Swoboda had held onto the ball, cursing all the way. Boog, standing near first with the handle-half of the broken bat still in his right hand, stopped, and cursed.
Castro, in that one calm, utterly quiet moment, turned to Reiser and said, “Even the man with hands of stone can flash leather when you need it most,” like he was quoting from some forgotten book of the Bible.
Then, as Swoboda stood and tossed the ball back into second, Ebbets Field erupted into unbelieving applause, the fans pouring their hearts out to the man who stood in right, the front of his uniform stained with grass and dirt.
It was like Mays’ over the shoulder catch against Wertz in ‘54, Reiser against Mantle in ‘56 among the monuments in center, Agee’s the previous day. But, hell, those guys were fielders. They could catch the ball. Swoboda, for all his lovable determination, was a butcher. He couldn’t catch measles if you put him in a hospital ward full of spotted children.
Sign Man flashed “MIRACLE IN FLATBUSH,” the band played something, nobody was quite sure what, and the fans yelled themselves hoarse. Again. Brooks Robinson came to the plate, and had to step out because the noise still surged over Ebbets like an unanswerable tide, until Swoboda, hands planted firmly on hips, touched his cap in acknowledgment. There was one last crescendo of approval, and then the noise dulled to a muted background rumble that peaked again when Seaver dispensed with B. Robby with three pitches and the Dodgers trotted back to the dugout.
“All right,” Reiser shouted. “We’ll get it back, we’ll get it back,” but the Dodgers didn’t. They went down in the ninth, and, the score one to one, the fourth game of the 1969 World Series went into extra innings.
“You okay,” Castro said to Seaver in the dugout as he took off his warm-up jacket, and the young pitcher nodded at the tone Castro used, which was more statement than question. He went out into the field and disposed of the O’s with no problems in the tenth.
Grote led off the bottom of the tenth for the Dodgers, the seventh man in the batting order. Reiser wondered how much longer the game would go—likely longer than ten since this was the weakest part of a rather weak Dodger batting order, and the O’s had a strong, well-rested pen.
Grote hit an easy fly ball to left, and Reiser was thinking that maybe Seaver could go another inning, maybe not. Then he realized that Buford, normally a fine outfielder, was standing rooted to the spot. When he finally started after Grote’s fly-ball, he didn’t have a chance to catch it, and it dropped in front of him. The “H” in the Schaefer Beer sign on the top of the right centerfield scoreboard flashed to signify “hit,” but Reiser knew that base runner was a gift.
Grote didn’t hit very well and couldn’t run very fast but he hustled on every play, so by the time the ball got back into the infield he was standing on second base.
“Hayes,” Reiser shouted. Milton Hayes, defensive replacement and pinch runner, went out to second for Grote. “We need this run, we need it,” Reiser said tensely to Castro.
“We’ll get it.”
Weiss, hitting eighth, was intentionally walked, bringing up the pitcher’s spot in the batting order. Seaver was out in the on-deck circle.
“We’ve got to get that run,” Reiser called Seaver back.
“You could leave him in to bunt,” Castro said, but Reiser shook his head.
“We’ll create more doubt if we put in a pinch-hitter to do the bunting.” He looked down the bench. The Dodgers had a weak bench, but there was one man who might be able to do the job, and, at the same time, plant the maximum amount of doubt in the Orioles’ mind. Reiser called to Don Drysdale. “You’re hitting. I want you to get the bunt down. Ignore whatever the signs say, just get the bunt down. We need those men moved over.”
“Yes sir,” Drysdale said.
He marched out of the dugout and took his place in the batter’s box. The O’s bought in a right-hander to pitch to the righty-hitting Drysdale who promptly plopped the first pitch down the first base line. He took off as fast as he could. Ellie Hendricks sprang out from behind the plate, quicker than seemed possible for a man his size, pounced on the ball, and threw it to first. Drysdale’s arms were pumping like a sprinter’s but his feet were moving with somewhat less speed. His left arm pumped downwards just as Hendricks released the ball, and his throw hit Drysdale on the wrist. Hendricks watched unbelievingly as the ball trickled towards second base. Davy Johnson and Boog Powell scampered after it, but Hayes, clapping his hands like a madman, crossed the plate by the time Johnson picked up the ball. There was no one even covering the plate, and the Dodgers had won two to one.
Ebbets Field went insane. The words flashed on Sign Man’s cards, “AMAZING, AMAZING, AMAZING,” as the Dodgers celebrated in a mass dance around home plate.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15TH, 1969: GAME 5
Tommy knew this was his last chance to uncover the identity of the secret ace, to get the story of a lifetime and start himself on the pathway of fame and fortune.
The game had already begun. Koosman was pitching against McNally, Tommy thought. He didn’t really know. He was losing track of the unimportant stuff and focusing in on the big picture: the identity of the secret ace.
Slug Maligne seemed like a nice guy for a joker, and he sure knew his baseball. He didn’t believe that a secret ace was molding events for the Dodgers. But maybe he was being just a little naive. Even though he was young, Tommy figured he had a pretty well-developed detective sense, and he knew a scam when he smelled one. And he could smell one at Ebbets, all right.
Only he couldn’t pin the smell down to a specific individual. There were always too many people around. The scent itself was rather weak, but it had to stick to the clothes and belongings of whoever it came from. If he could check out the lockers on the quiet, take a whiff of the equipment, the players’ street clothes, maybe he could finally track down the ace who’d been manipulating things behind the scenes.
He’d come to believe that Slug was right about one thing, though. It probably wasn’t one of the big name players. He’d managed to eliminate some of the names conclusively. Some he wasn’t sure of. But it had to be, he figured, one of the little guys, one of the newcomers to the Dodgers. Otherwise, why hadn’t they played their cards before? Why hadn’t they built success for them and their team in the past? Swoboda, for example, or Ed Charles. Why would they wait for this year to start pulling their tricks?
He had a couple of people in mind. He waited his chance and slipped behind a laundry hamper in the corner of the trainer’s room while no one was looking; then it was a matter of quiet patience until the locker room cleared out right before game time. He had to be careful. He had to be quiet and subtle because occasionally a player would pop into the locker room to go to the bathroom or something, but Tommy had good ears. He could hear them coming down the hall and he was quick to hide. The lockers themselves presented no obstacles. They were stalls rather than real lockers, made of boards and wire fencing, totally open in the front. Some were messy enough to briefly hide in if someone came into the room.
It was nerve wracking, but Tommy thought you needed nerves to be a good reporter, and he had plenty.
He’d checked the first two guys on his list—Nathan Bright, the third string catcher, and Steve Garvey, a young third baseman the Dodgers had called up late in the season mainly for pinch-hitting duty—and found nothing out of the ordinary, except that Garvey seemed to get an inordinate amount of fan mail from girls who liked to include their photos with their autograph requests. He found himself lingering over a couple of the photos, almost tempted to pocket one or two—Garvey’d never miss them—until a sudden roar from the crowd outside wrenched his mind back to his quest.
He put the photos back. There was one more name on his list of suspects, Milt Hayes. He’d been in the majors for a couple of years, and was a fringe talent. The Dodgers mainly used him as a pinch-runner and defensive specialist in the outfield. Maybe, Tommy thought, he figured his time in the big leagues was limited. Maybe he saw the Dodgers had a chance this year and he figured to get that one championship ring in his career. Maybe—
“Can I help you, kid?”
Tommy straightened up from Hayes’ locker, a startled, guilty look on his face. He turned to see Don Drysdale staring down at him, a look of concern compounded with wonder on his stern features. Drysdale was big, raw-boned and said to be downright nasty. He must move quieter than a snake, too, otherwise he wouldn’t have caught me. He stared at Tommy with a hard glare that had intimidated more than a few major league batters.
“Uh, gee, no, Mr. Drysdale,” Tommy said, “I was, uh, I was—I have a press pass!” Tommy held it out like a magic talisman in front of him.
Drysdale nodded uncertainly. “Uh-huh. Well, kid, I suggest you get your butt back up to the press box, then, with the other pervs and drunks. I don’t think you’re going to get much of a story out of sniffing somebody’s street pants.”
If only I could tell you, Tommy said to himself. But he knew he couldn’t.
“Yes sir, yes sir,” he said, sidling past the player, who turned to keep an eye on him as he scuttled for the locker room door.
He was almost there, when suddenly it hit him.
The smell. What he’d been looking for. There was no doubt about it whatsoever. He looked at the name over the locker, and was stunned.
He was sure Drysdale thought he was nuts when he started to laugh.
Tommy heard another roar from the crowd before he could make his way up to the press box, but it had a sort of downcast, moaning note to it, so Tommy knew that whatever had happened was bad for the Dodgers.
“What happened?” he asked Slug Maligne, who was perched in his usual spot in the box.
“Where you been, Tommy?” Slug asked. “You’ve missed half the game.”
“Working on my story,” Tommy said.
Slug shook his head. “You’re missing the story, Tommy. The game is the story, kid. If you want to be a reporter you have to remember that, first and foremost. What happens down there on the field, where men give their hearts, where sometimes they leave pieces of themselves, all in search of that moment of perfection, whether it’s a throw or a catch or swing of the bat, that’s the story kid. Everything else is just lipstick on a pretty girl.”
Tommy was pretty sure he didn’t believe that. The story, to him, was a secret found and exposed, but he didn’t feel like discussing the philosophy of journalism with Slug, who wasn’t a journalist, so couldn’t be expected to understand such things. “Well,” Tommy said, “what’d I miss?”
“First, McNally hit a two-run homer for the Orioles.”
“McNally?”
“Yeah. McNally. You know, the Orioles pitcher?”
“Um, yeah.”
“Now Frank Robinson just hit another one. It’s three to nothing for the Orioles.”
Tommy wanted to shake his head and laugh, but he didn’t. That would upset Slug, and he did sort of like the guy.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “The Dodgers are going to win.”
Slug smiled at him. “I like a fan with faith in their team.”
Sure, they’re going to win, Tommy thought. The secret ace will take control any time now. He settled back to watch and wait.
As the game wore on, McNally looked invincible. Koosman found his groove and gave up nothing more. But McNally was still in total command as Cleon Jones, who hit .349 during the season but was having a poor Series, stepped up to lead-off the sixth. McNally threw one of his sharp-breaking curves and it bounced in the dirt at Jones’ feet. Play halted as the ball rolled towards the Dodger dugout, and Jones got into a discussion with the plate umpire.
“What’s going on?” Tommy asked.
“Looks like he’s claiming the pitch hit him,” Slug said.
Suddenly Pete Reiser bounced out of the dugout and showed the ball to the plate umpire. The umpire looked at, and waved Jones to first. Earl Weaver ran out of the Orioles dugout, his face already red, but turned back without a word as the umpire silently showed him the ball.
“What—” Tommy began, and Slug shrugged.
“You got me, kid. The ball probably hit Jones on the foot. Maybe it got shoe polish on it. Must have. It’d take something like that to shut Weaver up so suddenly.”
Donn Clendenon, the on-deck batter who’d been watching with interest, stepped to the plate and immediately jacked a two-run shot into the stands.
Slug shook his head, as if in disbelief. “Can you believe this shi—stuff? My God, has this been scripted?”
The next inning Al Weiss, the utility infielder who’d hit two home runs all season, hit another one out, and Tommy suddenly knew it was all over but for the question of the final score.
“It’s like they’re blessed,” Slug said.
Tommy smiled to himself. That’s one way of putting it, he thought.
The Dodgers settled it in the eighth with two runs. Like most of their scoring that season, it was a team effort with a Jones double, a Clendenon ground out, bloop singles, and ground ball errors on the part of the Orioles.
The Dodgers took the field in the ninth leading five to three. The tension was so great that the stadium was virtually silent. Frank Robinson led off the inning with a walk, and Boog Powell came up as the tying run.
It always seemed to be the way of the game. The big man came to bat with the game on the line. If Powell was feeling the pressure, he didn’t show it. He took a mighty swing at Koosman’s first offering. He hit the ball hard, but on the ground, up the middle. Weiss, ranging far to his right at second base, dove, stopped it, got up and threw to Harrelson covering the bag. Robinson barreled down and Harrelson had to leap over him as he hit the bag in a hard slide. He couldn’t make the relay throw to first. One out, Powell safe at first.
The game wasn’t over yet, but Tommy knew that, really, it was. The secret ace wouldn’t let the Dodgers lose.
Brooks Robinson, a tough hitter with decent power, lifted an easy fly to Ron Swoboda, who circled under it (Tommy held his breath, as did every Dodger fan in the stands) and caught it with a smile.
Davy Johnson followed Brooks to the plate. He was a tough hitter with decent power for a middle infielder, but he, too, managed only an easy fly to medium left field. Cleon Jones went right to the spot where the ball would come down, camped under it, caught it, and touched his knee to the ground as if in prayer. Grote ran out to the mound where the Dodgers’ senior citizen third baseman Ed “The Glider” Charles was already doing a dance of inexpressible joy, and it was as if suddenly someone threw a switch and turned the sound on and the stadium erupted with an out-pouring of cheers and screams and shouts that Brooklyn hadn’t heard in years and years. On the third base line Sign Man held up his sign and it said, “THERE ARE NO WORDS,” and, indeed, there were none.
The locker room was like some scene out of a madcap version of hell, or at least pandemonium. Half-naked players ran around whooping and shouting like little boys, spraying themselves with champagne and beer and shaving cream. The utter joy of the moment almost over-whelmed Tommy. He snuck a bottle of champagne for himself, and swallowed a bit, but it was cheap stuff, rather stinging and bitter, not at all how Tommy imagined it would taste, and he ended up surreptitiously spraying it all over the locker room.
He wanted to join in the celebration openly, but the other reporters were at least trying to keep themselves somewhat aloof from the partisan festivities. They were wandering around the room (most surreptitiously swigging beers) asking what Tommy thought were mostly inane questions of the players. Slug’s shoe polish theory was confirmed, but Tommy heard nothing else of importance.
Tommy was determined to keep the surprise to himself, not to let anyone else in on his secret. He wanted to confront Reiser with his certain knowledge, and get the manager’s reaction. Then, The Weekly Gospel would get their exclusive, and what an exclusive it would be: Miracle Dodger Victory Engineered by Secret Ace!
Well, perhaps he would have to work on shortening that headline.
In the end, it was surprisingly easy. Tommy hung around in the rear of the room, in the shadows, watching as the celebration wound down without really ending as the players showered, dressed, and left the locker room still clearly high on emotion and crazed energy. It took awhile, but the locker room emptied of players and reporters and finally the only ones left in the clubhouse were those who also usually arrived first at the ballpark. Tommy found them in the manager’s office, sipping beer and smoking thick, fragrant Cuban cigars.
“I know who the secret ace is,” Tommy said in a dramatic, almost accusatory voice.
Reiser, lounging behind his desk with his feet up and a cigar in his mouth, groaned and sat up straight. “You, again? Jesus, kid, there ain’t no secret ace. I’ve been over it in my head, I’ve watched everyone. There just ain’t no secret ace.”
“Really?” Tommy said archly as he came into the room. “How do you account for all the strange things that happened during the Series? The spectacular catches, the bad throws and Oriole errors, the unexpected home runs, the shoe polish incident?”
Reiser shrugged. “It’s baseball, kid. It’s the nature of the game. Strange things happen. Sometimes players rise to the occasion. Sometimes occasions rise to the players. You can’t explain it. No one can.”
“Then how do you explain the way he smells?” Tommy asked dramatically, pointing at Fidel Castro, who was sitting across the desk from Reiser, cigar in one hand, champagne bottle in the other.
“The way he smells?” Reiser asked.
Shit, Tommy thought, I blew it. “I mean—” He realized there was no sense in lying now. It was better to stick to the truth. “Yeah. I should have told you before. I can smell people who are affected by the wild card—”
“That’s ridiculous—” Reiser began, but Castro interrupted him. “No. He’s right.”
Reiser turned to his old friend. “What?”
“I am a wild carder.”
Tommy couldn’t restrain himself from saying, “See? I told you, I told you!” He could barely restrain himself from doing a little dance of joy. Visions of headlines ran in his head. Screw The Weekly Gospel. He’d take this to The Daily News. And he was only in the ninth grade! Visions of future Pulitzers danced in his head.
“But I am not an ace.”
“What?” Tommy’s face fell. “I don’t believe you.”
Castro shrugged. “It’s true. I never knew I’d been infected with the virus until last winter. I went to see the doctors about my arm. They did tests and discovered I had the wild card. They discovered my ‘power’ when examining my arm.”
“What is it?” Reiser asked.
Castro shrugged again. “My tendons and ligaments are maybe twice as flexible as an ordinary man’s.” He illustrated by bending back the fingers in his right hand. They bent back pretty far. “But, more flexible or not, they were finished in my pitching arm. My arm was dead, useless for pitching. So, I retired.”
“Flexible fingers?” Tommy asked weakly. “That’s your power?”
“My elbow, too,” Castro said, taking a reflective puff of his cigar.
“Hmmm. That’s not much of a story,” Reiser said.
“Still ...” Tommy said, but hope was fading even as he tried to grasp it.
Reiser looked at him thoughtfully. “Look, maybe we can, uh, make this up to you if you keep it our own little secret.”
“How?” Tommy asked.
Reiser shrugged. “I don’t know. How about a season’s ticket for next year?”
“Well ...” Tommy wasn’t much of a baseball fan, but his father was. And other people were. With the Dodgers being world champs, tickets would be tough to come by next year. They’d be hot items. People might be willing to tell him things, to do things for him, if he had tickets for important games. “How about two season tickets?”
Reiser shrugged. “All right.”
“Okay,” Tommy nodded, absorbing the notion that he could just as easily be paid for not revealing something, as for revealing it. “I guess I should go write my story now.”
“Your story with no secret aces,” Reiser said.
“My story with no secret aces,” Tommy agreed. Flexible tendons weren’t a footnote, let alone a whole story. Also, he suddenly realized, he’d have had to reveal how he discovered Castro was a wilder carder—by smelling him. Maybe he shouldn’t tell the whole wide world about his talent.
Tommy smiled to himself. As it turns out, he thought, there is a secret ace in the story after all. Me.
He left the two men in the manager’s office, celebrating their victory. He had his story to write, his own victory to celebrate. Maybe it wasn’t as glorious as he’d hoped it would be. There’d be no blazing headlines, no by-line in a real newspaper, but Dodgers World Champs wasn’t exactly chopped liver, and it was a more manageable headline.
It’s so cool, Tommy Downs thought, being a reporter.
He strolled down the corridors of Ebbets Field, dreaming of the thousands of stories to come.
Brennan followed the Mercedes full of Immaculate Egrets to the gate of the cemetery in a gray BMW he had stolen from the gang three days before.
He stopped a hundred yards behind them, his headlights off, while one of the Egrets got out of the Mercedes and swung open the graveyard’s sagging wrought-iron gate. He waited until they went on into the cemetery, then he slid out of the BMW, took his bow and quiver of arrows from the back seat, slipped his hood over his head, and crossed the street after them.
The six-foot-high brick fence around the graveyard was stained with city grime and crumbling with age. He pulled himself over it easily and dropped down inside without a sound.
The Mercedes was somewhere near the center of the cemetery. The driver killed the engine and turned the headlights off as Brennan watched. Car doors opened and slammed shut. He could hear or see nothing significant from where he stood. He had to get closer to the Egrets.
It was a dark night, the full moon often hidden by thick, shifting clouds. The trees growing wild inside the cemetery screened most of what city light there was. He moved slowly in the darkness, the sounds of his passing covered by the wind blowing with a hundred whispering voices through the branches overhead.
A shadow shifting among shadows, he moved behind an old slab tombstone canted like a crooked tooth in the mouth of an unkempt giant. He watched three of the Egrets enter a mausoleum that had once been the crowning glory of the cemetery. The monument of a once rich, now forgotten family, it had been allowed to sink into decay like the rest of the graveyard. Its marble stonework had been eaten away by acid rain and bird droppings, its giltwork had flaked away over years of neglect. One of the Egrets stayed behind as the others went through the wrought-iron door into the interior of the mausoleum. He closed the door behind the others, and leaned against the front wall of the sepulcher. He lit a cigarette and his face shone briefly in the flame of the match. It was Chen, the Egret lieutenant Brennan had been following for the last two weeks.
Brennan crouched behind the tombstone, frowning. He had known since Vietnam that Kien was channeling heroin to the States through a Chinatown street gang called the Immaculate Egrets. He had scouted the gang and latched onto Chen, who appeared to rank fairly high in the organization, with the hope of finding hard evidence to link the Egrets to Kien. He had witnessed a dozen felonies over the last few weeks, but had uncovered nothing concerning Kien.
There was one inexplicable thing. The past several weeks had seen an incredible influx of heroin into the city. It was so plentiful that the street price had plummeted and there had been a record number of o.d.’s. The Immaculate Egrets, through whom the drug flowed, were selling it at cut-rate prices, stealing customers right and left from the Mafia and Sweet William’s Harlem crowd. But Brennan had been unable to discover how they were getting their stag so cheaply and plentifully.
Skulking behind a tombstone was getting him nowhere. The answers, if the graveyard had any, would be in the mausoleum.
His mind made up, he drew an arrow from the quiver velcroed to his belt and nocked it to the string of his bow. He breathed deeply, smoothly, once, twice, caught his breath, and stood. As he did he glimpsed the name pecked into the weathered rock of the tombstone. Archer. He hoped it wasn’t an omen.
It wasn’t a difficult shot, but he still called on his Zen training to clear his mind and steady his muscles. He aimed a foot lower and a little to the left of the glowing cigarette tip, and, when the time was right, let the string slip from his fingers.
His bow was a four-wheel compound with elliptical cams that, once the tension point was reached, reduced the initial pull of one hundred and twenty pounds to sixty. The nylon bowstring thrummed, sending the shaft through the night like a hawk swooping on an unsuspecting target. He heard a thud and a strangled groan as the arrow struck home. He slipped out of the shadows like a cautious animal, and ran to where Chen lay slumped against the mausoleum wall.
He tarried long enough to make sure that Chen was dead and to leave one of his cards, a plastic-laminated ace of spades, stuck on the arrowtip protruding from Chen’s back.
He nocked another arrow to his bowstring and creaked open the wrought-iron door that closed off the interior of the tomb. Inside, a stairway led down a dozen steps to another door haloed by a dim, steady light that burned in a chamber beyond. He waited for a moment, listening, then went down the stairs silently. He stopped at the door of the inner chamber to listen again. Someone was moving around inside. He counted to twenty, slowly, but heard only quiet, scuffing footsteps. He’d come this far. There was no sense in turning back now.
Brennan dove through the door, and came up on one knee, bowstring drawn back to his ear. One man wearing the colors of the Immaculate Egrets was in the room. He was counting plastic bags of white powder and marking the tally on a sheet of paper on a clipboard. He opened his mouth wide in astonishment just as Brennan released the arrow. It struck him high in the chest and knocked him backward over the kneehigh pile of keys.
Brennan leaped across the chamber, but the Egret was as dead as everyone else in the boneyard by the time Brennan reached him. Brennan looked up from the body and glanced around.
What had happened to the other two Snow Birds who had gone into the sepulcher? They had vanished into thin air. Or, more likely, Brennan thought, through a door concealed in one of the walls.
He slung the bow across his back and checked the walls, running his hands over them, looking for hidden seams or cracks, rapping and listening for a hollow sound. He had finished one wall without finding anything, and was starting on the next when he heard a muffled whoosh of air at his back and felt a warm, humid breeze.
He whirled around. The look of astonishment on his face matched that of the two men who had appeared from nowhere into the middle of the mausoleum. One, who wore the colors of the Egrets, had saddlebags draped over each shoulder. The other, a thin, reptilian-looking joker, was carrying what looked like a bowling ball. They had, Brennan realized with some astonishment, vanished into thin air. And now they were back.
The Egret carrying the bulging saddlebags was closest to him. Brennan unslung his bow, swung it like a baseball bat, and connected with the side of the Egret’s head. The man dropped with a groan, collapsing next to the pallet loaded with heroin.
The joker reared back, hissing sibilantly. He was taller than Brennan and thin to the point of emaciation. His skull was hairless, his nose a slight bump with a pair of flaring nostril pits. Overlong incisors protruded from his upper jaw. He stared unblinkingly at Brennan. When he opened his lipless mouth and hissed, he exposed a lolling forked tongue that flicked frantically in Brennan’s direction. He clutched his bowling ball tighter.
Only, Brennan realized, it wasn’t a bowling ball that the joker held. It was the proper size and shape, but it had no finger holes and, as Brennan watched, the air around it started to pulsate with flickering bits of coruscating energy. It was some kind of device that had enabled the joker and his companion to materialize into the mausoleum. They were using it to bring heroin in from-somewhere. And the joker was starting to activate it again.
Brennan swung his bow at the joker, who dodged with easy, fluid grace. The halo around the artifact grew brighter. Brennan dropped his bow and closed in, determined to take the device from the joker before he could escape or turn the thing’s energies on him.
He grappled the joker easily, but found that his opponent was unexpectedly strong. The joker twisted and heaved in Brennan’s grasp in an oddly fluid manner, as if his bones were utterly flexible. They tugged against each other for a moment and then Brennan found himself staring at the joker, their faces inches apart.
The joker’s long, grotesque tongue flicked out, caressing Brennan’s face in a lingering, almost sensual manner. Brennan flinched backward involuntarily, exposing his neck and throat to the taller joker. The reptiloid lunged forward, relinquishing his grip on the strange device, and fastened his mouth on the side of Brennan’s throat where it curved into his shoulder.
Brennan felt the joker’s teeth pierce his flesh. The joker worked his mouth, pumping saliva into the wound. The area around the bite went numb almost immediately and Brennan panicked.
A surge of horror-induced strength enabled him to pull free from the joker’s embrace. He felt his flesh tear, and blood ran down his throat and chest. The numbness spread rapidly over his right side.
The joker let Brennan pull away with the device. He smiled cruelly and licked Brennan’s blood from his chin with his lolling forked tongue.
He’s poisoned me, Brennan thought, recognizing the symptoms of a fast-acting neurotoxin. He knew that he was in trouble. He wasn’t an ace. He had no special protection or defenses, no armor or fortified constitution. The joker was confident in the efficacy of his poison. He stood back to watch Brennan die. Brennan knew he needed help fast. There was only one person who might be able to reverse the damage the poison was already wreaking on his body. She’d be at Tachyon’s Jokertown clinic now, but there was no way to reach her. Already he was finding it hard to stand as his heart pumped poison to every cell of his body.
Mai could help him, if he could get to her.
Brennan silently screamed her name with a surge of desperate energy.
Mai!
He was aware, dimly, of the corresponding pulsation of energy in the device that he cradled to his chest. It felt warm and comforting as he hugged it. The joker’s smile turned into a frown. He hissed and sprung forward. Brennan couldn’t move, but that didn’t matter.
There was an instant of gut-wrenching disorientation that his numbed mind and body only half-felt and then he was in a well-lit, softly painted corridor. Mai was standing there, talking to a small, slight, foppishly dressed man who had long curly red hair.
They turned and stared at him in astonishment. Brennan, himself, was beyond such a feeling.
“Poison,” he croaked through stiff, heavy lips, and collapsed, dropping the artifact and plunging into deep darkness.
It was a swirly, starry darkness, redolent with musky jungle smells. The pinpricks of light scattered across his consciousness were the ends of his men’s cigarettes and the faraway stars scattered across the Vietnamese night. There was silence all around him, broken only by the sounds of soft breathing and the noises made by the animals deep within the jungle. He glanced at the luminous dial of his wristwatch. Four A. M.
Gulgowski, his top sergeant, squatted next to him in the underbrush.
“It’s late,” Gulgowski hissed.
Brennan shrugged. “Choppers are always late. It’ll get here.”
The sergeant grunted noncommittally. Brennan smiled into the night. Gulgowski was always the pessimist, always the one to see the gloomy side of things. But that never stopped him from doing his damndest when the going got rough, never stopped him from picking up the others when they felt everything was hopeless.
From faraway came the whupping sound of a chopper. Brennan turned to him, grinned. Gulgowski spat silently onto the jungle floor.
“Get the men ready. And hang onto that briefcase. It cost a lot to get it.”
Mendoza, Johnstone, Big Al ... three of the ten-man picked squad that Brennan had led on a raid on regional VC headquarters were dead. But they had achieved their objective. They had captured documents proving what Brennan had suspected for a long time. There were men in both the Vietnamese Army and the United States Army who were dirty,’ who were working with the enemy. He’d only had a chance to glance at the papers before stuffing them in the briefcase, but they had confirmed his suspicions that the biggest thief, the vilest traitor, was the ARVN general Kien. These papers would hang him.
The chopper landed in the clearing and Gulgowski, clutching the evidence that would damn a score of men as traitors, chivied the others to their ride home. Brennan waited in the underbrush, staring down the trail from which he expected pursuing VC to come at any moment. Finally satisfied that they had shaken the pursuit, he backed into the clearing as a withering hail of bullets burst unexpectedly into the night.
He heard the screams of his men, half-turned, and felt a searing flash of pain as a slug creased his forehead. He went down and his rifle spun away from him into the darkness. The shots had come from the clearing. From the chopper.
He flopped silently on the ground, staring into the clearing with pain-misted eyes. His men lay sprawled in the starlight. All of them were down. Other men walked among them, searching. He blinked blood out his eyes as one of the searchers, dressed in ARVN-style fatigues, shot Gulgowski in the head with a pistol as the sergeant tried to stand.
A flashlight beam picked out the killer’s face. It was Kien. Brennan bit back curses as he saw one of his henchmen pry the briefcase from Gulgowski’s death-grip and hand it to him. Kien rifled through it, nodded in satisfaction, and then methodically burned its contents. As the papers burned, Kien stared out into the jungle, looking, Brennan knew, for him. He cursed the paralytic shock that gripped his body, making him shake like he had a fever. The last thing he remembered was Kien striding toward the chopper, and then shock drove him into unconsciousness.
There were no lights in this darkness, but sudden hands of cool fire on his cheeks. They burned with a soothing touch. He felt all his pain and grief and anger drawn outward through them bit by slow bit, taken away from him like a worn-out cloak. He sighed deeply, content to remain in the healing darkness, as a sea of ineffable serenity washed over him. He was done, he thought, with strife, with killing. None of the killing had ever done any good anyway. Evil lived. Evil and Kien. He killed my father, but I can not, should not, harm him. It is wrong to bring harm to another sentient being, wrong ...
Confused, Brennan forced open his eyes. He wasn’t in Vietnam. He was in a hospital. No, the Jokertown clinic of Dr. Tachyon. A face was pressed close to his, eyes closed, mouth screwed up tightly. Young, feminine, beautiful in a serene way, though now touched by extreme pain. Mai. Her long glossy hair enveloped his face like bird’s wings. Her hands were pressed against his cheeks. Blood trickled down their backs from between the spread fingers.
She was using her wild card power to take his damaged body to herself, make repairs, and order Brennan’s body to do the same. They had mingled minds and beings and he, for a moment, became something of her while she became something of him. In a confused meld of memories, he experienced Mai’s grief at the death of her father at the hands of Kien’s men.
She opened her eyes and smiled with—the serenity of a madonna.
“Hello, Captain Brennan,” she said in a voice so low that only he could hear it. “You are well again.”
She took her palms from his cheeks and the mingling of minds ended with the breaking of physical contact. He sighed, missing her touch already, missing the serenity that he could never in a thousand years find again on his own.
The man who had been with Mai in the corridor came to his bedside. It was Dr. Tachyon.
“It was touch and go there for a moment,” Tachyon said, a look of concern on his face. “Thank the Ideal for Mai ...” He let his voice trail off, regarding Brennan closely. “What happened? How did you come to possess the singularity shifter?”
Brennan sat up gingerly. The numbness was gone from his body, but he still felt light-headed and disoriented from Mai’s treatment.
“Is that what it’s called?” he asked. Tachyon nodded. “What is it?”
“A teleporting device. One of the rarest artifacts in the galaxy. I thought it was gone, lost forever.”
“It’s yours, then?”
“I had it for a while.” Tachyon told Brennan the story of the peripatetic singularity shifter, at least what he knew of it. “How did the Egrets get it?”
“Eh?” Tachyon glanced from Brennan to Mai. “Egrets?”
“A Chinatown street gang. The Immaculate Egrets. They’re also known as the Snow Birds because they control a good deal of the city’s hard-drug trade. They were apparently using this shifter device to smuggle heroin. I took it away from them, but was wounded by one of their more ... extraordinary operatives.”
“It vanished when we landed in Harlem,” Tachyon said. “Perhaps an Egret was in the crowd that gathered around us?”
“And took it, realizing what it was? Not likely,” Brennan said softly, his gaze turned inward. “Not likely at all. Besides, Harlem isn’t Egret turf. They have agents there, but not many of them.”
“Well, however it turned up, I’m glad it did,” Tachyon said. “It provides the possibility of a splendid alternative to Lankesters foolish plan of attacking the Swarm in space.”
“The Swarm?” Brennan had been aware of the semisentient alien invaders that had been trying to get a toehold on the Earth for the past several months, but the fight against them had so far bypassed him. “What use could this, this shifting thing be against the Swarm?”
“It’s a long story.” Tachyon sighed and ran a hand across his face. “A man from the State Department named Lankester is in charge of the Anti-Swarm Task Force. He’s been pestering me for weeks now to use my influence with the aces to convince them to attack the Swarm Mother-the source of the Swarm attacks-that’s in an eccentric orbit around the sun. Its a nonsensical idea, of course. It would be suicide for even the most powerful aces to go up against that thing. It would be like gnats flinging themselves against an elephant. The singularity shifter, however, presents some interesting possibilities.”
“It can teleport a man that far?” Brennan asked, seeing some of them himself.
“Someone totally unfamiliar with it, as, say, yourself,” Tachyon said, “could use the shifter to teleport short distances. It would take a powerful telepath to reach the Swarm Mother. But it could be done. A man could shift himself into the interior of the thing. A man armed with, say, a tactical nuclear device.”
Brennan nodded. “I see.”
“ I was sure you would. I’m explaining all this to you because, pragmatically speaking, the singularity shifter is yours.”
Brennan looked from Tachyon, to Mai standing silently at the side of his bed, back to Tachyon again. He had the feeling that Mai had told Tachyon something about him, but he knew Mai would tell the doctor only what she had to. And only because she trusted him.
“I’m in your debt,” Brennan said. “It’s yours.” Tachyon gripped Brennan’s forearm in a warm, friendly manner.
“Thank you,” he said. He glanced at Mai, looked at Brennan again. “I know that you’re involved in some sort of vendetta with people here in the city. Mai told me something of it in explaining her own background and abilities. No details. None were necessary.” He paused. “ I know all too well about debts of honor.”
Brennan nodded. He believed Tachyon, and, up to a point, trusted him. Tachyon probably wasn’t connected with Kien, but one of the aces who had been with him-Turtle, Fantasy, or Trips-was. One of them must have stolen the shifter and given it to Kien. And Brennan, someday, somehow, would discover which ace it was.
Brennan left the clinic a little before midnight and went home to the one-room apartment on the fringes of Jokertown that was his base of operations. There was a sense of organized clutter about the apartment, which consisted of a bathroom, kitchen area, and living area with a sofa-bed, ancient rocking chair, and an obviously handmade workbench overflowing with equipment any bowyer would recognize. And some that a bowyer wouldn’t.
He pulled the bed out of the sofa, stripped, and flopped down with a bone-weary sigh. He slept for twenty-four hours, completing the healing process that Mai had begun. He was ravenously hungry when he awoke and was fixing himself a meal when there came a light knock on the door. He peered out of the peephole. It was, as he had expected, Mai, the only person who knew where he lived.
“Trouble?” Brennan asked, seeing the worry on her usually-placid features. He stepped aside to let her into the room.
“I don’t know. I think so.”
“Tell me about it.” He went behind the counter that divided the kitchen area from the rest of the apartment and poured water from the pot whistling on the stove into two small, handleless teacups. They were porcelain, hand-painted with the colors of a dream. They were older than the United States and the most precious things Brennan owned. He handed one to Mai in the rocking chair, and sat down on the rumpled bed opposite her.
“It’s Dr. Tachyon.” She sipped the hot, aromatic tea, gathering her thoughts. “He’s been acting ... strange.”
“In what way?”
“He’s been brusque, demanding. And he’s neglecting his patients.”
“Since when?”
“Yesterday, since coming back from his meeting with the man from the State Department. There’s something else.” She balanced the precious teacup on her lap and took a folded newspaper from the purse that she had set beside the rocker.
“Have you seen this?” Brennan shook his head.
The headlines screamed TACHYON TO LEAD ACE ASSAULT AGAINST SPACE MENACE. A picture below the bold letters showed Tachyon standing with a man identified as Alexander Lankester, head of the Anti-Swarm Task Force. The accompanying article stated that Tachyon was recruiting aces to follow him in an assault against the Swarm Mother orbiting the Earth beyond ballistic missile range. Captain Trips and Modular Man had already agreed to go along.
Something was wrong, Brennan thought. Tachyon had hoped the singularity shifter would end the request for such a useless assault. Instead, it seemed as if the opposite were happening.
“Do you think the government is blackmailing him into doing this?” Brennan asked. “Or is controlling his mind somehow?”
“It is possible,” Mai shrugged. “I only know that he may need help.”
He looked at her for a long moment and she calmly returned his gaze.
“He has no friends?”
“Many of his friends are poor, helpless jokers. Others are hard to reach. Or may not be inclined to act swiftly if the government is somehow involved.”
Brennan stood up and turned his back to her while carrying his teacup back to the counter. The network of human relationships was reaching out, ensnaring him in its sticky grip once again. He dumped the dregs of his tea into the sink and gazed into the bottom of the teacup. It was the blue of a perfect, depthless pool, the blue of an empty, endless sky. Looking into it was like contemplating the void. It was pleasurable in its utter peacefulness, but not, Brennan realized, his particular pathway to enlightenment.
He turned around to face Mai again, his mind made up. “All right. I’ll check it out. But I don’t know anything about things like mind control. I71 need some help.”
He reached for the phone and dialed a number.
Brennan had rarely been in the public rooms of the Crystal Palace, though he had spent more than one night in the rooms on the third floor. Elmo nodded as he came in, without commenting on the case he carried. The dwarf gestured to the corner table where Chrysalis sat with a man wearing black jeans and a brown leather jacket. He had handsome, regular features, except for his bulging forehead.
“You,” Fortunato said as Brennan came up to their table. He looked from Brennan to Chrysalis. She regarded him with a level gaze, the blood pulsing steadily through the arteries of her glass-clear throat. She looked at Brennan and nodded coolly, showing no sign of the passion that Brennan knew from the time he spent on the Palace’s third floor.
“This is Yeoman,” she said as Brennan took the third seat at the table. “I believe that he has some information you might find interesting.”
Fortunato frowned. Their last meeting hadn’t exactly been cordial, though there was no actual animosity between the two.
“Word has it that you’re looking for a way to get at the Swarm. I know something that could help.”
“I’ll listen. “
Brennan told him about the singularity shifter. He told no lies, but he shaded things skillfully, having been coached by Chrysalis as to the approach that would most likely sway Fortunato to help him investigate Tachyon’s strange behavior. “What can you do beside making your mind go away?” Fortunato asked when Brennan was done with his story.
“I can take care of myself. And most others who might try to interfere with us.”
“You that crazed killer the papers been speculating about lately?”
Brennan reached into his back pants pocket and withdrew a card. He dropped it face up on the table in front of Fortunato. The sorcerer-pimp looked at it, nodded.
“Me and the Black Shadow are the only aces of spades I know of.” He looked up at Brennan. “But I guess there’s room for one more. The only thing I don’t understand is what you get out of this,” he said, turning to Chrysalis.
“If this works out, whatever I want. From both of you .... “
Fortunato grunted. He stood up.
“Yeah. You always do. Well, come along. We’d best be checking if that alien Beau Brummell’s still got all his brains.” Brennan drove them through the early-morning darkness to Tachyon’s apartment. Out of the corner of his eye he occasionally caught Fortunato studying him, but the ace chose not to ask any questions. Fortunato hadn’t accepted him yet, Brennan realized, and he was still wary and watchful, if not openly distrustful. But that was all right. He wasn’t sure of Fortunato yet, either.
He parked the BMW in the alley beside Tachyon’s apartment building. He and Fortunato got out and looked up at the building.
“We go in by the front door,” Fortunato asked, “or the back door?”
“When there’s been a choice, it’s always been my policy to go in by the back.”
“Smart man,” Fortunato murmured, “smart man.” Fortunato watched with a dubious expression, but said nothing as Brennan took his case from the BMW’s trunk, opened it, slung his compound bow over his back, then attached the quiver of arrows to his belt.
“Let’s go.”
They made their way to the rear of the apartment building, and Fortunato burned a bit of his psychic energy in bringing down the fire-escape ladder. They cat-footed along the fire escape until they came to the window of Tachyon’s apartment, and peered inside his bedroom.
The room, lit by the light from an overturned bedside lamp, was a shambles. It had been tossed by an impatient searcher who hadn’t bothered to set things right again. Brennan and Fortunato glanced at each other.
“Something weird is happening,” Fortunato muttered. The window was locked, but that wasn’t an obstacle to Brennan. He removed a circle of glass from the lower pane with his glass cutter, reached a hand in, unlatched the window, and silently slid it up. He put out an arm, stopping Fortunato from entering, and laid a finger across his lips. They listened for a moment, but heard nothing.
Brennan went in first, leaping down from the windowsill as silently as a cat, his strung bow in his left hand, his right hand hovering near the quiver velcroed to his belt. Fortunato followed, making enough noise to cause Brennan to stare at him accusingly. The ace shrugged and Brennan led the way through the room. In the hallway that led to the kitchen, living area, and guest bedroom, they heard a series of crashes, hollow thumps, and occasional shattering sounds, as if a careless or uncaring searcher were rummaging through the rooms deeper in the apartment.
They went quietly down the hall, passing a closed door to a guest bedroom. The hall opened out into the apartment’s living room, which looked as devastated as a trailer park after a tornado. A slight, short man with long curly red hair was methodically pulling books off their shelves, looking behind them.
“Tachyon,” Brennan said aloud.
He turned and looked at the two in the hallway, totally calm, utterly unstartled. He started toward them, no expression at all on his face.
Fortunato suddenly put a hand in the small of Brennan’s back and pushed, sending him sprawling to the carpet. “That’s not Tachyon!” he shouted.
The next few seconds seemed to Brennan as if he were viewing a videotape on fast forward. Fortunato was doing something to time. He became a blur rocketing through the air toward the Tachyon look-alike, but was just as quickly thrown aside as soon as the two of them touched.
Brennan drew an arrow and snapped off a shot from a kneeling position.
The arrow was fletched with color-coded red and black feathers. Its shaft was hollow aluminum, packed with plastic explosives. Its tip was a pressure-sensitive detonator. The arrow was too heavy to be aerodynamically stable over long distances, but the thing masquerading as Tachyon was less than twenty-five feet away.
Brennan’s arrow struck it high on the chest and exploded, sending a shower of flesh and green ooze over the room. The thing was flung backward by the impact. Its upper half disappeared, leaving a twitching pair of legs attached to a trunk that spilled inhuman organs and oozed a thick green ichor. It was some moments before the legs ceased their attempts to walk.
“What was that thing?” Brennan shouted over the roaring in his ears:
“Damned if I know,” Fortunato said, getting up from where it had flung him. “I tried to scan its mind, but it had no mind. Nothing human, anyway.”
“It looked like Tachyon,” Brennan said in a lower voice, his hearing returning to normal. “Down to the last detail.” He frowned, looked at Fortunato. “Tachyon’s mind wasn’t taken over. He was replaced.”
“When was the last time you saw what you’re certain was the real Tachyon?”
“Yesterday. At the clinic. Before he went to a meeting at the Olympia Hotel with that Lankester fellow from the State Department.”
“Let’s check in.”
The frail, white-haired old man in the bellhop uniform lifted Brennan over his head and slammed him against the wall. Brennan hit the wall hard and slid down to the carpet, panting like a dog for breath. He was in trouble.
The bellhop loomed over him, no expression at all on his lined face. Brennan surged to his knees, his lungs on fire, and saw the bellhop’s eyes roll up in his head. The bellhop tottered backward, windmilling his limbs as if he were caught in a hurricane wind. He did a crazy staggering dance and crashed through the window at the end of the hall. It was a long way to the street below.
Brennan pulled himself upright while Fortunato flexed his fingers. He took Brennan’s arm and said, “No brains to control, but you can push them around.”
“Someone probably heard that,” Brennan gasped, the breath returning to his lungs.
“I could have let it smash you flat.”
“There’s that.” He took a deep, grateful breath. “We need to lie low for awhile.”
They stopped in front of one of the rooms.
“How about this one?” Fortunato asked. Brennan shrugged silently. Fortunato put his hand on the knob and reached out with his mind. Tumblers clicked and bolts lifted and the door opened.
“It’ll take them some time to track us down,” the ace said as they entered the dark hotel room. “How many agents you think they have?”
“No telling,” Brennan said, stretching his aching back carefully. “More than I suspected, for sure.”
“I thought you were surreptitious as shit.”
Brennan shook his head. The plan had been for him to scout the floor where Lankester’s suite was located, gathering what intelligence he could, while Fortunato used his mental powers to monitor his progress from the stairwell. The false bellhop had spotted and attacked him almost immediately. It was all Brennan could do to hang on until Fortunato arrived. “We’d better try our alternate plan,” Brennan said.
“It may take some time.”
Fortunato settled himself on one of the double beds, legs crossed in front of him, back straight, hands dangling in his lap. He stared ahead at nothing. Brennan stood between him and the door, listening for sounds in the corridor outside, as he removed his bow and quiver of arrows from the case Fortunato had kept for him while he scouted the hotel.
Fortunato seemed to sink deep into a trance, not unlike, Brennan thought, a student of Zen descended into zazen, the state of meditation. After a moment, a set of ram’s horns materialized from Fortunato’s bulging forehead, shimmering and indistinct in the darkness.
Brennan watched with pursed lips. His Zen training had taught him that there was no such thing as magic, but here was evidence to the contrary, right before his eyes. What was magic, perhaps, but unexplained science?
Brennan filed the question away for later meditation as Fortunato abruptly opened his eyes. They were pools of darkness, his pupils dilated so much that they almost swallowed the irises. His voice was husky, a little shaken.
“They’re all around us, those things,” he said. “At least twenty. Maybe more. They’re not human, not even of this Earth. Their minds, if you could call them that, are alien, utterly beyond my experience.”
“Are they Swarm creatures?”
Fortunato rose with easy, fluid grace, shrugged. “Could be. I thought the best they could do was hulks that looked like the Pillsbury doughboy. I thought bellboys and shit like that was beyond them.”
“Maybe they’ve refined their technique.” Brennan held up a hand, pressed his ear to the door. The footsteps in the corridor beyond passed by their room as he and Fortunato waited quietly. “What about Tachyon?”
Fortunato frowned. “I contacted one human mind. A maid. She didn’t realize anything unusual was going on. A little pissed off that the guests on this floor weren’t tipping too well. Weren’t tipping at all, in fact. There was also something I touched by the elevators. Could’ve been Tachyon’s mind, but there was a blanket on it, a fence around it. I could catch only vague, filtered notions. They were full of weariness. And pain.”
“It could be Tachyon?”
“It could.”
Brennan took a deep breath. “Any plans?”
“All out of ’em.”
The two looked at each other. Brennan touched the quiver at his side.
“I wish you had a weapon,” he said.
“I do. Several.” He tapped his forehead. “And they’re all in here.”
They waited until it was quiet in the corridor outside, then opened the door and moved fast. They ran as quietly as they could down the hotel corridor, hung a right as it turned to a T, and found themselves by the bank of elevators. In a niche, of to one side, was something that looked like a linen closet. Brennan notched an arrow and drew it back while Fortunato gestured the door open.
Brennan lowered the bow.
“Sweet Christ in heaven,” he murmured. Fortunato glanced from him to the closet, and froze. ‘
Tachyon was inside. His hair, drenched with sweat, fell over his face in limp curls. His eyes stared through the tangle of hair. They were puffy and bloodshot, and glazed with pain and weariness. The shelves and linens had been removed from the closet, making room for Tachyon and the thing that embraced him. Tachyon was pressed against a vast, purplish couch of biomass that bound him with a score of ropy tendrils across his neck, chest, arms, and legs. The thing pulsed rhythmically, rippling like a fat lady bouncing on a water bed.
Tachyon was set into a hollow in its surface that cupped him securely, perfectly following his contours and dimensions. His eyes focused upon Fortunato, flicked to Brennan. “Help,” he croaked, his lips working for several moments before any sound came out.
Brennan reached down, drew the knife he carried in an ankle sheath, and slashed at the tendrils binding Tachyon to the thing. It was like cutting through hard, stretchy rubber, but he sawed away grimly,—ignoring the increasing pulsations of the thing and the greenish ichor that splattered himself and Tachyon.
It took a minute to saw through all the tendrils, but even then it still clung to Tachyon. It was then that Brennan noticed the suckers fastened to the sides and back of Tachyon’s neck. “How do we get you out?” he asked.
“Just pull,” Tachyon whispered.
Brennan did, and Tachyon began to scream.
The doctor finally came free. He collapsed into Brennan’s arms, stinking of sweat and fear and alien secretions. He was deathly pale and bleeding profusely from the points where the suckers had fastened. The wounds didn’t look serious, but there was, Brennan realized, no telling how damaging they actually might be.
“Look out,” Fortunato said, “we’ve got company.” Brennan looked up the corridor. A dozen of the human simulacra were approaching, dressed as bellhops, maids, and ordinary men and women in dresses and three-piece suits. In the middle of them was Lankester of the State Department. Brennan dragged Tachyon over to the elevator as the creatures advanced at a steady pace, their faces composed and utterly unemotional. Fortunato joined him, a worried look on his face.
“What do we do now?”
“Punch for an elevator.”
The things were twenty feet away when they heard the chime of an arriving elevator.
“Take him,” Brennan said, thrusting the limp, barely conscious form of Tachyon into Fortunato’s arms. He drew an arrow from his quiver as the elevator door swished open. Inside were three middle-aged men dressed in conservative business suits with Shriner’s hats on their heads. They stared wide-eyed as Fortunato dragged Tachyon inside. Fortunato looked at them.
“Basement, please,” he said. The one standing by the panel of buttons punched it automatically as Fortunato stopped the door from closing with his foot. Brennan placed three explosive arrows in the midst of the advancing creatures. The first one hit Lankester in the chest. The second and third exploded to the left and right of him, blowing gore and protoplasm all over the hotel corridor. He fell back into the elevator and Fortunato let the door close.
Brennan leaned on his bow, took a deep, relieved breath. The Shriners huddled together fearfully in the corner of the elevator.
Fortunato looked at them. “First time in town?”
“So Lankester had been replaced by one of these newgeneration swarmlings some time ago?” Brennan asked. Tachyon nodded and took a long pull from the mug Mai handed him. It was full of thick black coffee, laced generously with brandy.
“Before I ever met him-it. That’s why it was pushing for that insane attack plan. It knew we wouldn’t be able to really harm the Swarm Mother, yet such an attack would make everyone think something concrete was being done to fight the menace.” He paused, took another long pull from the mug. “And there’s another thing. The Swarm Mother might want specimens of aces.”
Brennan looked at him quizzically. “Specimens?”
“To take apart and replicate from her own biomass.”
“Shit,” Fortunato murmured. “It wants to grow its own aces. “
They were in Tachyon’s office at the clinic. Tachyon had cleaned up, but was still pale and shaky from the ordeal he had undergone. There was a bandage around his neck where the Swarm creature had attached its suckers.
“What happens now?” Brennan asked. Tachyon sighed, set the mug aside.
“We attack the Swarm Mother.”
“What?” Fortunato said. “That Swarm thing scramble your brains? You just said it was insane to attack the Mother.”
“It was. It is. But it’s the best option open to us.” He looked from Fortunato, who was openly incredulous, to Brennan, who looked blankly noncommittal. “Look, the Swarm has started a new wave of attack which is much more ‘ sophisticated than its previous ones. There’s no telling how far they’ve managed to penetrate into the government.”
“If they could replace Lankester,” Brennan murmured, “who else might they have gotten?”
“Exactly. Whom does it have?” Tachyon shuddered. “The possibilities are mind-boggling. If it could replace enough key personnel to carry it off, it’d think nothing of starting a worldwide nuclear exchange and simply waiting the necessary millenia until the surface of the planet is inhabitable once again.”
“It’s obvious that we can’t trust anyone from the government to help us attack the Swarm Mother. We have to do it ourselves.”
“How do we do that?” Fortunato asked in a tone that indicated he wasn’t won over by Tachyon’s arguments. “We have the singularity shifter,” Tachyon said, his voice rising eagerly. “We need a weapon, though. Takisians have successfully used biological weapons against Swarm Mothers in the past, but your biological sciences aren’t sophisticated enough to produce a suitable weapon. Perhaps I can come up with something ...”
“There is a weapon,” a quiet voice said. The three men turned and looked at Mai, who had been silently listening to their conversation.
Tachyon stared at her, and then sat upright in his chair, sloshing the brandy-laced coffee over the front of his brocaded dressing gown.
“Don’t talk nonsense,” he said sharply.
Fortunato looked from Tachyon to Mai. “What is this shit?”
“Nothing,” Tachyon said. “Mai works with me at the clinic. She’s used her power to help some of my patients, but it would be out of the question for her to get involved in this.”
“What power?”
Mai lifted her hands, palms facing outward. “I can touch a person’s soul,” she said. “We become one and I find the sickness in it. I take the sickness to myself and soothe it, smoothing the curves of the life pattern and mending the breaks. We can then both become well again.”
“Meaning, in English?” Fortunato asked.
“She manipulates genetic material,” Tachyon said with a sigh. “She can mold it in near any way she visualizes. I suppose she could use her power on the Swarm Mother in a reverse manner to cause cellular disruption on a massive scale.”
“She can give the Mother cancer?” Fortunato asked. “She probably could,” Tachyon conceded. “If I allowed her to get involved, which I’m not. It would be insanely dangerous for a woman.”
“It’s insanely dangerous for anyone,” Fortunato said sharply. “If she’s the best bet against that Mother and she’s willing to try, I say let her do it.”
“And I forbid it!” Tachyon said, sloshing coffee from his mug as he slammed it against the arm of his chair.
“It is not for you to forbid,” Mai said. “I must do it. It is my karma.”
Tachyon turned to Brennan. “Can’t you talk some sense into her?”
Brennan shook his head. “It’s her decision,” he said slowly. He wished he could agree with Tachyon, but Brennan knew he couldn’t interfere with Mai’s karma, her chosen path to enlightenment. But, Brennan resolved, she wouldn’t walk her path alone.
“That’s settled, then,” Fortunato said flatly. “We get Mai up to the Swarm Mother and she sticks it with a fatal dose of cancer. I’m going too. I want a piece of that motherfucker myself. “
Tachyon looked from Fortunato to Mai to Brennan and saw that nothing he could say would change their minds. “All right,” he sighed. He turned to Fortunato. “You’ll have to power the singularity shifter,” Tachyon said. “I can’t do it myself.” He dragged his fingers through his curly hair. “The swarmling temporarily burned out some of my powers in trying to suck out my memories for the duplicate Tachyon. We can’t afford to wait until they come back.”
“I can, however, ferry a boarding party close to the Swarm Mother in Baby. Fortunato can shift the party inside the Swarm Mother. Speed and stealth will be necessary, but the boarders will need some protection. Modular Man perhaps, or maybe one of Trips’s friends ...”
Brennan shook his head. “You said speed and stealth would be necessary. If you sent Modular Man in there blazing away, he’d bring down the defenses of the Swarm Mother in an instant. “
Tachyon massaged his forehead wearily. “You’re right. Any suggestions?”
“Of course.” Brennan took a deep breath. This was getting far from his original reasons for coming to the city, but he couldn’t let Mai face the Swarm without him. He wouldn’t. “Me.”
“You?” Tachyon said hesitantly. “Are you up for it?”
“He was up for rescuing you from the blob,” Fortunato broke in. He looked at Brennan, the doubt in his eyes replaced by certainty. “I’ve seen him in action. He can handle himself,” Tachyon nodded decisively. “It’s settled, then.” He turned to Mai. “I don’t like sending a woman into danger, but you’re right. You’re the only one who has a chance of destroying the Swarm Mother.”
“I’ll do what I have to,” she said quietly.
Tachyon nodded gravely and took her hand in his, but a cold chill passed through Brennan at her words. He was sure that Tachyon had heard an entirely different meaning in them than he had.
Lift-off was something Brennan filed away as an interesting experience. He would not willingly seek it out again, but the sight of the Earth in Baby’s viewscreens was a scene of awesome beauty that he would carry for the rest of his life. He felt almost unworthy of the sight and wished that Ishida, his roshi, could view it.
There were three others in the Arabian Nights fantasy that was Tachyon’s control room. Tachyon guided his ship in silence. He was still hurting from his mistreatment by the Swarm. Brennan could see that he kept himself going by willpower alone. His face was lined with weariness and uncharacteristic tenseness.
Fortunato virtually crackled with impatient, nervous energy. He had spent the time before lift-off charging his batteries, as he had put it. He was now ready, and impatient for action.
Only Mai seemed calm and unmoved. She sat quietly on the control room’s couch, her hands in her lap, watching everything with unworried interest. Brennan watched her watch. She had agreed readily to Tachyon’s plan. How she would carry it out, though, was a different matter. That thought worried him.
After a time, Tachyon spoke, tension and weariness cracking his voice.
“There it is.”
Brennan peered over Tachyon’s shoulder at the globular monstrosity that filled Baby’s forward viewscreens.
“It’s immense,” he said. “How do we find our way around it?”
Tachyon turned to Fortunato. “Instruct the singularity shifter to take you to the middle of the thing. You should end up pretty close to where you want to be. You can find the nerve center by tracking its mind.” Tachyon felt the mind of his ship tug at his brain. What is it, Baby?
We’re approaching the Swarm Mother’s detector range. Thank you. He turned to the others. “You’d better get ready. It’s almost time.”
Fortunato took out the singularity shifter from the backpack in which Tachyon had hidden it in the spare bedroom of his apartment. In the bottom of the pack was a .45 automatic in a shoulder rig.
“What’s this?” Fortunato said. He looked at Tachyon. “You may need it,” the doctor said. “It’s going to take more out of you than you know, to power this jump.” Fortunato touched the butt of the gun, looked at Tachyon. He shrugged. “What the hell,” he said, and strapped it on. He hefted the singularity shifter, and he and Brennan and Mai formed a circle. All helped hold’the shifter. Brennan glanced at Mai. She looked back steadily. Out of the corner of his eye he saw in a viewscreen a brilliant flash of light wink out from the Swarm Mother. Baby rocked as the organically generated particle beam struck her, but her defensive screens held. Brennan felt a soft whisper in his brain.
Remember. You must not allow Mai or Fortunato to be captured by the Swarm Mother.
He looked up at Tachyon, who stared at him steadily for a moment, then turned back to his viewscreen.
“Go!” Tachyon shouted.
Fortunato’s eyes closed, his brow furrowed in concentration. Spectral ram’s horns glimmered from the sides of his head. Brennan felt a sudden wrenching, a tearing as if every cell of his body were being hurled apart. He couldn’t breathe with lungs that were no more, he couldn’t relax muscles that were torn into their constituent molecules and hurled across hundreds of miles of empty vacuum. He stiffled a scream and his consciousness slammed up against a wall of nausea. The trip was worse than his jaunt to the clinic, for it seemed to last forever, though Tachyon had said a journey by singularity shifter lasted no time at all.
Then, suddenly, he was whole again. He and Mai and Fortunato were in a corridor that was dimly lit by large blue and green phosphorescent cells in the translucent ceiling and walls. Ropy tendrils ran below their feet, presumably conduits for whatever was used as blood and nutrients in the thing. The air was hot and wetly humid and smelled like a greenhouse gone bad. Its oxygen content was enough to make Brennan giddy until he adjusted his breathing. He felt light on his feet, though there was a definite gravitational pull. The Swarm Mother, he realized, must be spinning, producing artificial gravity that was necessary for directed organic growth.
“Are you all right?” he asked his companions.
Mai nodded, but Fortunato was breathing harshly. His face was an ashen mask.
“The ... space faggot was right ..”he panted. “That was a bitch.” His hands were shaking as he fumbled the shifter back into the backpack.
“Relax—” Brennan began, and fell silent.
Somewhere ahead in the twisting, rolling passageway was a vast sucking sound.
“Which way do we have to go?” Brennan asked quietly. Fortunato concentrated mightily. “I can sense some kind of mind up ahead.” He pointed in the direction of the sucking sound. “If you could call it a mind ...”
“Great,” Brennan muttered. He unslung his bow. “Listen,” Fortunato grabbed Mai’s arm. “You could help me out ...”
“No time for that,” Brennan said. “Besides, Mai will need all her own energy to get through this thing. And so will L” Fortunato began to say something, but the sucking sound, which was getting louder and louder, was suddenly right upon them when a grotesque green and yellow mass of protoplasm rolled down a bend in the tubular corridor toward them. It had a score of suckers placed randomly over a globular body that nearly filled the passageway.
“Christ!” Fortunato swore. “What is that thing?”
It was plastered to the side of the corridor, scouring the wall and floor with myriad suckerlike mouths that were ringed by hundreds of foot-long cilia.
“I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out,” Brennan said. “Let’s get going.”
He selected an arrow and laid it loosely on the string of his bow, and started to edge past the thing. Mai and Fortunato followed warily. The thing continued to scour away. The cilia of the mouths facing them quivered eagerly as they passed, but the creature made no move toward them.
Brennan sighed in relief.
The blue phosphorescent twilight tinged their surroundings with a sense of soft-focus unreality as they followed the passageway deeper into the Swarm Mother. The unmoving air was so thick with the scents of living things that it reminded Brennan of the jungles of Vietnam. He kept glancing around, twitching with nervousness, feeling as if he were in the crosshairs of a sniper’s rifle. He couldn’t shake the ominous, oppressive sensation of being watched.
They followed the undulating passageway for half an hour in tense silence, always expecting, but never actually facing, a deadly attack from the Swarm Mother’s killing machines. They stopped when the corridor branched into a Y—shaped fork. Both tines of the Y seemed to be leading in the direction they needed to go.
“Which way?” Brennan asked.
Fortunato rubbed his swollen forehead tiredly.
“I can hear a thousand little twitterings. Not real minds, at least not sentient minds, but their noise is driving me crazy. The big one is still up ahead, somewhere.”
Brennan glanced at Mai. She looked at him placidly, as if willing to let him make all the decisions. Brennan tossed a coin in his mind and it came up heads.
“This way,” he said, taking the right fork.
They hadn’t gone a hundred yards before Brennan realized that something was different in this passageway. The air smelled sweet, almost cloying. It was difficult to breathe, yet at the same time almost intoxicating. The odor grew stronger as they advanced.
“I’m not sure I like this,” Brennan said. “Do we have a choice?” Mai asked. Brennan looked at her and shrugged. They went on, turned a sharp bend in the passageway, and stopped, staring at the scene before them.
The passageway widened to forty feet across. On both sides of it, hanging near the ceiling, were scores of grotesque swarmlings with shriveled limbs and huge, swollen abdomens. They were nursing from what looked like swollen nipples jutting from the walls of the passageway.
In turn, Swarm creatures of every size and description crowded around each of the hanging swarmlings, jostling for a place at one of the hollow tubes dangling from their swollen abdomens. The Swarm creatures ranged in size from tiny, insectlike entities to tentacular monstrosities that must have weighed several tons. There were hundreds of them.
“It looks like they’re feeding,” Fortunato whispered. Brennan nodded. “We can’t go through there. We’ll have to go back and try the other branch.”
They started back down the passageway, and suddenly stopped when they heard a quiet buzzing, as if from a multitude of small wings, drift down toward them from the way they had come.
“Shit,” Fortunato said in disbelief. “We’re caught in the middle of a damn shift change.”
“The first Swarm creature we ran into ignored us,” Brennan said. “Maybe these will too.”
They hugged the wall of the passageway-it was warm, Brennan found, and pliable to the touch-and were as quiet and unobtrusive as they could be. They waited.
A swarm of the insectoid creatures buzzed down the corridor. They were four to six inches long with segmented bodies and large, membranous wings. The first few passed them by and went straight to the feeding chamber, and Brennan thought they were safe. But then one stopped and landed on Mai. Another joined it, then another and another. She looked down at them calmly. One landed on Brennan’s shoulder. He stared at it. Its mouth parts consisted of multiple mandibular arrangements. One set of mandibles began tearing at the fabric of Brennan’s shirt while another stuffed fragments of cloth into its little mouth.
Brennan brushed the thing aside distastefully and stepped on it. It crunched loudly under his foot, like a cockroach, but two had already taken its place on Brennan’s body. He heard Fortunato swear and knew they were crawling over him, as well.
“Let’s try to move away from them,” he said quietly, but that did no good. The bugs followed and landed on the three in increasing numbers.
“Run for it,” Brennan called, and they took off down the corridor.
Some of the swarm continued on to the feeding chamber, but more followed them down the passageway in an angrily buzzing cloud. Brennan batted at them as he ran, knocking some out of the air. He slapped at the ones crawling on him, but there were many to take the place of those he knocked down or crushed. They landed on his face and arms and he could feel their thousand little feet crawl all over him. They seemed to be most interested in his clothes, and, more importantly, his bow and arrows. It was as if they were scavengers programmed to dispose of nonliving matter. But that didn’t make them harmless. Brennan felt their sharp mandibles tear into his flesh nearly as often as not. The buzzing of their wings and the clacking sounds of their mandibles were loud in Brennan’s ears. They had to get away from them.
They reached the point where the passageway divided into the Y, looking desperately for something, anything, that would enable them to shake the little scavengers. Fortunato ran down the other branch of the passageway and Brennan and Mai followed. The floor was slick with moisture. Its surface was uneven. The moisture caught in shallow pools that set off a fine spray of liquid as they slogged through them. The liquid was warm and clear, though murky. They splashed down the corridor and the swarm of insectoids seemed to pull back. Fortunato flopped down into a shallow pool that had gathered in one of the deeper hollows, and rolled around and around, dislodging and crushing the insectoids that were crawling all over him. Brennan and Mai joined him. Brennan kept his lips shut tightly, but the murky liquid drenched him from head to toe. It looked, and smelled, like tepid water with fine particles suspended in it. Brennan was not particularly eager to ingest any of it.
Brennan glanced at his companions as they crouched in the shallow pool. Their clothes looked like they had been attacked by a legion of moths, and they had numerous cuts and gouges, but no one seemed badly injured. The swarm of persistent insectoids hovered over their heads, buzzing, it seemed to Brennan somewhat angrily.
“How do we get rid of them?” he asked, irritated himself. “I may have enough left to send those little mothers somewhere,” Fortunato ground out.
“I don’t know—” Brennan began, and never got a chance to finish.
The surface below their feet fell away as a sphincter opened. All the liquid in the passageway gushed downward and they went with it. Brennan had time to take a deep breath and a tight grip on his bow. He reached out and grabbed Mai by an ankle as she was sucked down into darkness and he swirled down after her, cursing as he lost half the arrows in his quiver.
There was more liquid in the passageway than he had realized. They were caught in a rushing vortex with no air to breathe and no light to see by. Brennan held tight to his Mai’s ankle, remembering Tachyon’s silent warning.
They splashed down into a large chamber, totally submerged in a pool of liquid the size of an Olympic swimming pool. Brennan and Mai bobbed to the surface and treaded water, glancing about. Fortunately, this chamber was lit by the same blue phosphorescence as the passageway above. Fortunato swam over to join them, fighting against a current that was drawing them to the other end of the pool.
“What the hell is this?” Fortunato asked.
Brennan found that it was hard to shrug while treading water. “I don’t know. Maybe a reservoir? All living things need water to survive.”
“At least those bugs are gone,” Fortunato said. He struck out for the side of the chamber, and Brennan and Mai followed.
They scrabbled up the slope, going slowly and cautiously because the surface was wet and slippery. They finally flung themselves down, panting, for a moment’s rest. Brennan patched up the worst bug-bites with bandages from the small first-aid kit he carried on his belt.
“Which way now?”
Fortunato took a moment to orient himself, and then pointed. “There.”
They went on through the belly of the beast. It was a nightmarish trek through a strange realm of organic monstrosities. The passageway they followed opened up into vast halls where menlike creatures mewling in half-formed idiocy hung by umbilical cords from pulsating ceilings, led through galleries where sacks of undifferentiated biomass quivered like loathsome jellies while awaiting sculpting by the will of the Swarm Mother, passed by chambers where monsters of a hundred alien forms were being manufactured for what purpose the Swarm Mother alone knew. Some of these last were developed enough to be aware of the interlopers, but they were all still attached to the body of the Mother by protoplasmic umbilical cords. They snapped and snarled and hissed as Brennan and the others passed by, and he was forced to put arrows through the brains of a few of the more persistent creatures.
Not all had the inhuman forms of swarmlings. Some were manlike in shape and appearance, with human faces. Recognizable human faces. There was Ronald Reagan with slickedback hair and a twinkle in his eye. There was Maggie Thatcher, looking stern and unyielding. And there was Gorbachev’s head, strawberry-colored birthmark and all, set upon a mass of quivering protoplasm that was as soft and puffy as a human body sculpted from bread dough.
“Sweet Jesus,” Fortunato said. “It looks like we got here just in time.”
“I hope so,” Brennan murmured.
The passageway began to narrow and they had to stoop, and finally get down on hands and knees and crawl. Brennan looked back at Fortunato and the ace nodded them on.
“It’s ahead. I can feel it pulsing: feed and grow, feed and grow.”
The flesh of the tunnel wall was rubbery and warm. Brennan disliked touching it, but he pushed himself forward. The tunnel narrowed until it was so cramped that Brennan realized he couldn’t bring his bow to bear. They were helpless, and traveling into the most dangerous area in the Swarm Mother, her nerve center. He shoved on through a crawlway of living flesh for a hundred yards or more, Mai and Fortunato following him, until at last he popped out into an open space. Fortunato followed and they both helped Mai down.
They looked around. It was a small chamber. There was hardly room in it for the three of them and the large, tri-lobed, gray-pink organ suspended in the middle of the chamber by a network of fibrous tendrils that penetrated into the floor, ceiling, and walls.
“This is it,” Fortunato muttered in an exhausted voice.
“The nerve center of the Swarm Mother. Its brain or core or whatever you want to call it.”
He and Brennan turned to Mai. She stepped forward and Brennan took her arm.
“Kill it,” he urged. “Kill it and let’s get out of here.” She looked at him calmly. He could see his reflection in her large, dark eyes. “You know I’ve sworn to never harm another sentient being,” she said quietly.
“Are you crazy?” Fortunato cried. “What did we come here for?”
Brennan released her arm and she walked toward the organ suspended in the net of nerve fibers. Fortunato looked at Brennan. “Is the bitch crazy?”
Brennan shook his head, unable to speak, knowing that he was losing another. No matter which way this turned out, he was losing another.
Mai slipped around the tendrils ‘and placed her palms against the flesh of the Swarm Mother. Her blood began to flow down the organ of the alien creature.
“What’s she doing?” Fortunato asked, caught between fear and anger and wonder.
“Merging.”
The narrow tunnel that led to the Swarm Mother’s sanctum began to dilate. Brennan turned to face the opening. “What’s happening?”
Brennan nocked an arrow to his bowstring. “The Swarm Mother’s resisting,” he said, and shut his surroundings, shut Fortunato; shut Mai even, from his mind. He narrowed the focus of his being until the mouth of the tunnel was his universe. He drew the bowstring to his cheek and stood as taut and ready as the arrow itself, ready to shoot himself into the heart of their enemy.
The fanged and taloned killing-machines of the Swarm Mother poured through the opening. Brennan fired. His hands moved without conscious direction, drawing, pulling, loosing. Bodies piled up by the mouth of the tunnel and were cleared away by the creatures trying to push their way inside and by the blasts of the explosive arrows. Time ceased to flow. Nothing mattered but perfect coordination between mind and body and target, born from the union of flesh and spirit.
It seemed like forever, but the resources of the Swarm Mother were not inexhaustible. The creatures stopped coming when Brennan had three arrows left. He stared down the corridor for over a minute before he realized that no more targets were in sight and he lowered his bow.
His back ached and his arms burned like they were on fire. He looked at Fortunato. The ace stared at him, shook his head wordlessly. Brennan’s consciousness returned from the pool where his Zen training had sunk it.
A sudden movement caught his eye and he turned. His hand dropped to the quiver at his belt, but stopped before it drew an arrow. There were three forms, man-sized, man shaped, at the mouth of the tunnel. A sense of dislocation swept through Brennan like a cold wind and he lowered his bow. He recognized them.
“Gulgowski? Mendoza? Minh?”
He went forward as if in a dream as they stepped over and around the blasted bodies of the swarmlings, coming to meet him. Brennan was numb, caught between joy and disbelief.
“I knew you would come,” Minh, Mai’s father, said. “I knew you would rescue us from Kien.”
Brennan nodded. A feeling of vast weariness swept over him. He felt as if his brain were isolated from the rest of his body, as if somehow it had been wrapped in layers of cotton batting. He should have known all along that Kien was behind the Swarm. He should have known.
Gulgowski hefted the briefcase he carried. “We’ve got the evidence here to nail the bastard, Cap’n. Come here’n take a look. “
Brennan dropped his bow, stepped forward to look into the briefcase Gulgowski proffered, ignoring the shouts behind him, ignoring the blasting roar that reverberated through the corridor.
Gulgowski, holding out the briefcase toward him, staggered. Brennan looked at him. It was odd. He had only one eye now. The other had been shot out and thick green fluid was running sluggishly down his cheek. But that was all right. Brennan seemed to remember that Gulgowski had been shot in the head before, and lived. He was here, after all. He looked at the briefcase. The handle melted into the flesh of Gulgowski’s hand. They were one thing. The mouth of the briefcase was lined with rows of sharp teeth. It jerked at him, the teeth snapping.
He felt a sudden shock as something hurled itself at his knees from behind. He went down and lay with his cheek pressed against the floor of the chamber, feeling its pulsating warmth, and glanced back in annoyance.
Fortunato had tackled him. The ace released his hold on Brennan, kneeled, and drew the .45 again. Brennan looked up at his men. Fortunato shot pieces of them away, part of a face here, a bit of an arm there. Fortunato cursed in a steady stream as he fired the .45 and Brennan’s men died again. Brennan felt a surge of tremendous anger. He half-stood and closed his eyes. The roar of gunfire stopped as Fortunato ejected an empty clip, but the stench of powder was in the air, the thunder of gunfire was in his ears, and the hot, humid smell of the jungle was in his nose. He opened his eyes again. Ghastly caricatures of men, faces and body parts shot away, dripping green slime, were shambling toward him. They weren’t his men. Mendoza had died in the raid on VC headquarters. Gulgowski had been killed by Kien later that night. And Minh had been killed years later by Kien’s men in New York City.
Although his brain was still foggy, Brennan picked up his bow, and shot his last explosive arrow at the simulacra. It hit the caricature of Minh and exploded, sending gobbets of biomass everywhere. The backblast knocked Brennan down and took out the other two simulacra as well.
Brennan took a deep breath, and wiped slime and crushed protoplasm from his face.
“The Swarm Mother took their images from your mind,” Fortunato said. “The other things were just buying time so it could prepare those walking wax-dummies.”
Brennan nodded, his face hard and set. He turned from Fortunato and looked at Mai.
She was almost gone, nearly covered by the gray-pink flesh of the alien being. Her cheek rested against the pulsating organ and the half of her face that Brennan could see was untouched. Her eye was open and clear.
“Mai?”
The eye turned, tracking the sound of his voice, and focused on him. Her lips moved.
“So vast,” she whispered. “So wondrous and vast.” The light in the chamber dimmed for a moment, then came back.
“No,” Mai murmured. “We shall not do that. There is a sentient being in the ship. And the ship itself is also a living entity. “
The floor of the chamber shook, but the light remained on. Mai spoke again, more to herself than Brennan or Fortunato.
“To have lived so long without thought ... to have wielded so much power without consequence ... to have traveled so far and seen so much without realization ... this shall change ... all change ...”
The eye focused again upon Brennan. There was recognition in it that faded as she spoke.
“Don’t mourn, Captain. One of us has given herself to save her planet. The other has given up her race to save ... who knows what? Perhaps some day the universe. Don’t be sad. Remember us when you look to the night sky; and know we are among the stars, probing, pondering, discovering, thinking innumerable wondrous things.”
Brennan blinked back tears as the eye in Mai’s face closed. “Good-bye, Captain.”
The singularity shifter began to throw off sparks. Fortunato slung the pack off his back. He looked down at it, startled. “I’m not doing that. She ... it .”
They were back on the bridge of Tachyon’s ship. The three men stared at each other.
“You succeeded?” Tachyon asked after a moment.
“Oh yeah, man,” Fortunato said, collapsing on a nearby hassock. “Oh yeah.”
“Where’s Mai?”
Brennan felt a stab of anger cut into him like a knife. “You let her go,” he cursed, taking a step toward Tachyon, his hands clenched into quivering fists. But his eyes told who he really blamed for Mai’s loss. He shuddered all over like a dog throwing off water, then abruptly turned away. Tachyon stared at him, then turned to Fortunato.
“Let’s go home,” Fortunato said.
After a while, Brennan would remember Mai’s words, and wonder what philosophies, what realms of thought, the spirit of a gentle Buddhist girl melded with the mind and body of a creature of nearly unimaginable power would spin down through the centuries. After a while, he’d remember. But now, with a sense of pain and loss as familiar to him as his own name, he felt none of that. He just felt half past dead.
Brennan moved through the autumnal night as if he were part of it, or it were part of him.
The fall had brought a coolness to the air that reminded Brennan, however palely, of the Catskills. He missed the mountains more than almost anything, but as long as Kien was free they were as unattainable as the ghosts of dead friends and lovers that had lately come to haunt his dreams. He loved the mountains as surely as he loved all the people he’d failed down through the years, but who could love the dirty sprawl of the city? Who could even know the city, could even know Jokertown? Not him, certainly, but Kien’s presence bound him to Jokertown as solidly as chains of adamantine steel.
He crossed the street, entering the half block of urban debris that bordered the Crystal Palace. With the sixth sense of the hunter he could feel eyes follow him as he passed through the wreckage. He shifted the canvas bag that carried his broken-down bow to a more comfortable position, wondering, not for the first time, what sort of creatures chose to make the mounds of junk their home. Once or twice he heard twittering rustles that weren’t the wind and glimpsed flashes of movement that weren’t shifting moonshadow, but no one interfered as he swung up onto the rusted fire escape hanging down the Palace’s rear wall. He climbed silently to the roof, went through the security system that would have given him pause if Chrysalis hadn’t keyed him to it, and entered through the trapdoor that opened on the Palace’s third floor, Chrysalis’s private domain. The corridor was totally dark, but he avoided, by memory the delicate stands cluttered with antique bric-a-brac and let himself into her bedroom. Chrysalis was awake. Sitting naked on her plush winecolored fainting couch, she was playing solitaire with a deck of antique playing cards.
Brennan watched her for a moment. Her skeleton, her ghostly musculature, her internal organs, and the network of blood vessels that laced through it all were delicately lit by rosy light from the Tiffany lamp hanging above the couch upon which she’d spread her cards. He watched the articulated skeleton of her hand flip through the deck and turn over the ace of spades.
She looked up at him and smiled.
Her smile, like Chrysalis herself, was an enigma. Difficult to read because her face was only lips and smudges of ghostly muscle on her cheeks and jaw, it could have meant any of the thousand things a smile could mean. Brennan chose to interpret it as a welcome.
“It’s been some time.” She looked at him critically. “Long enough for you to start a beard.”
Brennan closed the door and set his bow case against the wall. “I’ve had business,” he said, his voice soft and deep. “Yes.” Her smile continued until Brennan could no longer ignore the edge in it. “Some of which interfered with mine.” There was no doubt as to what she referred. Several weeks ago, on Wild Card Day, Brennan had broken up a meeting at the Palace at which Chrysalis was brokering a very valuable set of books that included Kien’s personal diary. Brennan, hoping that volume had enough evidence in it to nail Kien’s damnable hide to the wall, had eventually gotten it for himself, but it had proven to be worthless. All the writing in it had been destroyed.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I needed that diary.”
“Yes,” she repeated. Ghostly muscles bunched, indicating a frown. “And you’ve read it?”
Brennan hesitated a beat. “Yes.”
“And you’ll not be adverse to sharing the information in it?”
It was more of a demand than a request. It would do no good, Brennan thought, to tell her the truth. She probably would think he was trying to keep it all to himself. “Possibly.”
“In that case I suppose I coud forgive you,” she said in a not-very-forgiving voice. She gathered her cards together slowly, careful of their age and value, and set them aside on a spider-legged table that stood next to the couch. She leaned back languorously, her nipples bobbing on invisible pads of flesh whose warmth and firm texture Brennan knew well.
“I’ve brought you something,” Brennan said conciliatorily. “It’s not information but something you might like almost as well.”
He sat down on the edge of the couch, reached into the pocket of his denim jacket, and handed Chrysalis a small, clear envelope. When she reached out to take it, her warm, invisible thigh touched, then rested on, Brennan’s own.
“It’s a Penny Black,” he said, as she held the glassine envelope up to the light. “The world’s first postage stamp. Mint, in perfect condition. Rather rare in that state, rather valuable. The portrait is an engraving of Queen Victoria.”
“Very nice.” She smiled her enigmatic smile. “I won’t ask you where you got it.”
Brennan smiled in response, said nothing. He knew that she knew perfectly well where he’d gotten it. He’d asked Wraith for it when they were inspecting the stockbooks full of rare stamps she’d heisted from Kien’s safe, the same safe from which she’d removed his diary during the early hours of Wild Card Day. Wraith had felt bad that Brennan hadn’t gotten what he’d wanted from the worthless diary and had gladly given him the stamp when he’d asked for it.
“Well, I hope you like it.” Brennan stood and stretched as Chrysalis set the envelope aside on her stack of cards. It had been a long day and he was tired. He went to the sidetable by Chrysalis’s canopied four-poster bed and lifted the decanter of Irish whiskey that she kept there for him. He looked at it, frowned, and put it down. He rejoined Chrysalis on the couch.
She edged forward lithely and covered his body with hers. He drank in the musky, sexual scent of her perfume and watched the blood rush through the carotid artery in her neck. “Change your mind about the drink?” she asked softly. “The decanter was empty.”
Chrysalis drew back a little, stared into his questioning eyes.
“You only drink amaretto.” It was a statement, not a question. She nodded.
Brennan sighed. “When I first came to you, I only wanted information. I didn’t want anything personal between us. You started that. If it’s to continue and become meaningful, I have to be the only one in your bed. It’s the way I am. It’s the only way I can give myself to anyone.”
Chrysalis stared at him for several seconds before replying. “Whomever else I sleep with is no concern of yours,” she finally drawled in the British accent that Brennan, with his ear for languages, knew was faked.
He nodded. “Then I’d better be going.” He stood and turned.
“Wait.” She stood too. They looked at each other for a long moment, and when she spoke, it was in a conciliatory voice. “At least have your drink. I’ll go downstairs and fill the decanter. You can have your drink and we ... we can talk.”
Brennan was tired and had no other place in Jokertown he wanted to be. “All right,” he said softly. Chrysalis wrapped herself in a silk kimono spattered with whisps of smoke shaped like galloping horses and left him with a smile that was more shy than enigmatic.
Brennan paced the room, watching his image shift across the myriad antique mirrors that decorated the walls of Chrysalis’s bedchamber. He should get out, he told himself, and leave well enough alone, but Chrysalis was as fascinating out of bed as in it. His best intentions to the contrary, he knew that he needed her companionship and, he admitted to himself, her love.
It had been more than ten years since he’d allowed himself to love a woman, but as he’d been discovering since his arrival in Jokertown, the emotions that he allowed himself weren’t the only ones he felt. He couldn’t live on hate alone. He didn’t know if he could love Chrysalis as he’d loved the French-Vietnamese wife whom he’d lost to Kien’s assassins. He didn’t even want to love a woman while he was on Kien’s trail, but despite all his fixity of purpose, despite his Zen training, what he wanted and what actually happened were often two entirely different things.
He stood in the silence of Chrysalis’s bedroom, studiously not thinking about his past. Long minutes passed and he suddenly realized that Chrysalis should have returned.
He frowned. It was almost inconceivable that something could happen to Chrysalis in the Crystal Palace, but the habitual caution that had saved Brennan’s life more times than he cared to remember made him assemble his bow before going after her. He would feel foolish if he bumped into her in the dark, but he had ‘felt foolish before. It was preferable to feeling dead, a sensation he was more intimately acquainted with than he liked.
Chrysalis wasn’t in the corridors of the third floor, nor on the stairway leading down to the taproom, but he heard murmuring voices as he crept down the stairs.
He drew an arrow, placed it on the string of his bow, and peered around the edge of the stairwell where it opened up into the back of the taproom. He gritted his teeth. He had been right to be cautious.
Chrysalis was standing before the long, polished-wood bar that ran almost the entire length of the taproom. The whiskey decanter, still empty, was forgotten on the bar next to her. Her arms were crossed and her jaw was clenched. Her lips were compressed in a thin, angry line.
Two men bracketed her and a third sat facing her at a table in front of the bar. Brennan coud discern few details in the dimness of the night-light that burned above the bar, but the men all had hard, tough faces. The one facing her drummed his fingers on the tabletop next to a chrome-plated pistol.
“Come on,” he said in a soft but dangerous-sounding voice. “We just want some information. That’s all. We won’t even say where we got it.” He leaned back in his chair. “Soon there’s going to be war, but we don’t know who to hit.”
“And you think I do?” Brennan recognized the edge anger put in Chrysalis’s drawl, but he also recognized the fear under the anger.
The seated man smiled. “We know you do, babe. You know everything about this Jokertown shithole. All we know is that someone has put together these nickel-and-dime gangs into something called the Shadow Fists. They’re moving into our territory, taking our customers, and cutting into our profits. It’s got to stop.”
“If I knew a name,” Chrysalis said, coming down hard on the if, “it would cost you more than you can pay to learn it.” The man sitting at his table shook his head. “You don’t understand,” he said. “This is war, babe. And it’s going to cost you more than you can pay to keep your mouth shut.” He let his words sink in while he drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “Sal,” he said after a moment, nodding at the man who stood to Chrysalis’s right. “ I wonder if her famous invisible skin would scar?”
Sal considered the question. “Let’s see,” he finally said. There was a loud snick and Brennan saw light glint off a shiny blade. Sal waved it in Chrysalis’s face, and she shrank back against the bar. She opened her mouth to scream, but the man standing on her left clamped his gloved hand over it. Sal laughed and Brennan stood and loosed the arrow he’d been holding. It struck Sal in the back and catapulted him over the bar. No one had any idea what had happened, except possibly Chrysalis. The man seated at the table snatched his pistol and leaped to his feet. Brennan calmly shot him through the throat. The thug holding Chrysalis let out a startled stream of obscenities and fumbled under his jacket for a pistol that he carried in a shoulder rig. Brennan shot him through the right forearm. He dropped his gun and spun away from Chrysalis, staring at the aluminum-shafted hunting arrow skewering his arm and mumbling, “Jesus, oh, Jesus.” He stooped to pick up his pistol.
“Touch it,” Brennan called from the darkness, “and I’ll put the next arrow through your right eye.”
The thug wisely stood up and backed against the bar. He clutched his bleeding arm and moaned.
Brennan stepped forward into the diffuse light cast by the nightlamp burning over the bar. The man stared at the razor-tipped arrow nocked to his bowstring.
“Who are they?” Brennan asked Chrysalis in a harsh, clipped voice.
“Mafia,” she replied, her voice cracking with tension and fear.
Brennan nodded, never taking his eyes off the thug who stared at the arrow that was pointed at his throat.
“Do you know who I am?”
The mafioso nodded violently. “Ya. You’re that Yeoman guy-the bow ‘n’ arrow killer. I read about you alla time in the Post.” The words tripped out of his mouth in a fear-filled torrent.
“That’s right,” Brennan said. He spared the man who’d been sitting at the table a quick glance and saw that he was curled on the floor in a widening pool of blood, a foot of arrow sticking out from the nape of his neck. He didn’t bother checking Sal. He’d had a clean heart shot on him.
“You’re a lucky man,” Brennan continued in his same dead voice. “Know why?”
The mafioso bobbed his head vigorously side to side, sighing in relief when Brennan relaxed the tension on the taut bowstring and set the bow aside.
“Someone has to deliver a message for me. Someone has to tell your boss that Chrysalis is off bounds. Someone has to tell him that I have an arrow with his name on it, an arrow I would not be slow in delivering if I heard that something had happened to Chrysalis. Do you think you could tell him that?”
“Sure. Sure I could.”
“Good.” Brennan reached into his back pocket and showed the thug a playing card, a black ace of spades. “This is so he knows you’re telling the truth.”
He grabbed the man’s wounded arm by the elbow and yanked it straight. The thug groaned as Brennan stuck the card on the arrowtip.
“And this,” Brennan said through gritted teeth, “is to make sure you don’t loose it.”
With a sudden, forceful jerk he impaled the man’s other arm on the arrowpoint. The mafioso screamed at the sharp, unexpected pain. He sagged to his knees as Brennan bent the aluminum shaft of the arrow under and around both of his arms, pinning them together as tightly as handcuffs would. Brennan yanked him to his feet. The man was sobbing in fear and pain and couldn’t look Brennan in the eye.
“If I ever see you again,” Brennan said, “you’ll die.” The thug staggered away, sobbing and gibbering incomprehensible protestations. Brennan watched him until he tottered through the front door, then turned to Chrysalis. She was looking at him with fear in her eyes, more than some of which, he was sure, was directed toward him. “Are you all right?” he asked softly.
“Yes ... yes, I think so .... “
“You’ll have to answer a lot of questions,” Brennan said, “unless we get rid of the bodies.”
“Yes.” ; She nodded sharply, suddenly decisive, suddenly in control again. “I’ll call Elmo. He’ll handle it.” She looked him straight in the eye. “I owe you.”
Brennan sighed. “Does your entire life have to consist of rigidly tabulated credits and debits?”
She looked at little startled, but nodded. “Yes,” she said firmly. “Yes, it does. It’s the only way to keep track, to make sure ...” Her voice trailed away, and she turned and went around the bar. She looked down at Sal’s body, and when she spoke again, she voiced a totally different thought. “You know, Tachyon invited me to go on that world tour of his. I think I’ll take him up on it. No telling what information I’ll pick up rubbing elbows with all those politicians. And if there’s going to be street warfare between the Mafia and Kien’s Shadow Fists,”—she looked into Brennan’s eyes for the first time—“I would be safer elsewhere.”
They looked at each other for a long moment, and then Brennan nodded.
“I’d better be going, then.”
“Your whiskey?”
Brennan let out a long sigh. “No.” He looked at the body at his feet. “Drink brings memories, and I don’t need any tonight.” He looked back at her. “I’m going to be ... indisposed ... for the next few weeks. I probably won’t see you before you leave. Good-bye, Chrysalis.”
She watched him go, a crystalline tear glistening on her invisible cheek, but he never looked back, he never saw.
The Twisted Dragon was located somewhere within the nebulous boundary of an interlocking Jokertown and Chinatown. One of Brennan’s street sources had told him that the bar was the hangout of Danny Mao, a man who had a moderately high position in the Shadow Fist Society and was said to be in charge of recruitment.
Brennan watched the entrance for a while. The swirling snowflakes that missed the brim of his black cowboy hat caught on his thick, drooping mustache and in his long sideburns. A fair number of Werewolves-they were wearing Richard Nixon masks this month-were going into and out of the place. He’d also seen a few Egrets, though for the most part the Chinatown gang was too picky to hang out in a joint frequented by jokers.
He smiled, smoothing the tips of his mustache in a gesture that had already become habitual. Time to see if his plan was a stroke of genius, as he sometimes thought, or a quick way to a hard death, as he more frequently thought.
It was warm inside the Dragon, more, Brennan guessed, from the press of bodies than the bar’s heating system, and it took a moment for him to spot Mao, who was, as Brennan’s source had told him he’d be, sitting in a booth in the back of the room. Brennan threaded his way between crowded tables and the shuffling barmaids, staggering drunks, and swaggering punks who crossed his path as he headed toward the booth.
A girl, young and blond and looking vaguely stoned, sat next to Mao. Three men crowded the bench across the table from him. One was a Werewolf in a Nixon mask, one was a young Oriental, and the one in the middle was a thin, pale, nervous-looking man. Before Brennan could say anything a street punk stepped in Brennan’s path, blocking his way.
He was a lean six four or five, so he towered over Brennan despite the cowboy boots that added an inch or two to Brennan’s height. He wore stained leather pants and an oversize leather jacket that was draped with lengths of chain. His spiked hair added several inches to his apparent height, and the scarlet and black scars crawling on his face added apparent fierceness to his appearance, as did the bone-a human finger-bone, Brennan realized-that pierced his nose.
The scars that patterned his cheeks, forehead, and chin were the insigna of the Cannibal Headhunters, a once-feared street gang that had disintegrated when Brennan had killed its leader, an ace named Scar. Gang members not slain in the bloody power struggle after Scar’s demise had for the most part gravitated to other criminal associations, such as the Shadow Fist Society.
“What do you want?” The Headhunter’s voice was too reedy to sound menacing, but he tried.
“To see Danny Mao.” Brennan spoke softly, his voice pitched in the slow drawl that he remembered so well from his childhood. The Headhunter bent lower to hear Brennan over the cacaphony of music, manic laughter, and half a hundred conversations that washed over them.
“‘Bout what?”
“‘Bout what’s not your business, boy.”
Brennan saw out of the corner of his eye that conversation in the booth had stopped and that everyone was watching them.
“I say it is.” The Headhunter smiled a grin he fondly thought savage, showing filed front teeth. Brennan laughed aloud. The Headhunter frowned. “What’s so funny, asshole?”
Brennan, still laughing, grabbed the bone in the Headhunter’s nose and yanked. The Headhunter screamed and reached for his torn nose and Brennan kicked him in the crotch. He fell with a choking moan, and Brennan dropped the bloody bone he’d ripped from his nose onto his curled-up body.
“You,” Brennan told him, then slid into the booth next to the blond girl, who was staring at him in stoned astonishment. Two of the three men sitting across the table started to rise, but Danny Mao waved a negligent hand and they sat back down, muttering at each other and staring at Brennan.
Brennan took his hat off, set it on the table in front of him, and looked at Danny Mao, who returned his gaze with apparent interest.
“What’s your name?” Mao asked. “Cowboy,” Brennan said softly.
Mao picked up the glass in front of him and took a short sip. He looked at Brennan as if he were some kind of odd bug and frowned. “You for real? I ain’t never seen a Chinese cowboy before.”
Brennan smiled. The epicanthic folds given his eyes by Dr. Tachyon’s deft surgical skills had combined, as he had known they would, with his coarse, dark hair and tanned complexion to give him an Oriental appearance. This slight alteration of his features, his newly grown facial hair, and his western manner of speaking and dressing all added up to a simple but effective disguise. It wouldn’t fool anyone who knew him, but he wasn’t likely to run into anyone who did.
And the irony of his disguise, Brennan thought, was that every aspect of his new identity, except for the eyes given him by Tachyon, was true. His father had been fond of saying that the Brennans were Irish, Chinese, Spanish, several kinds of Indian, and all-American.
“My Asian ancestors helped build the railroads. I was born in New Mexico, but found it too limiting.” That, too, was true.
“So you came to the big city looking for excitement?” Brennan nodded. “Some time ago.”
“And found enough so that you have to use an alias?” He shrugged, said nothing.
Mao took another sip of his drink. “What do you want?”
“Word on the street,” Brennan said, his intense excitement buried under his southwestern drawl, “is that your people are going to war with the Mafia. You’ve already hit them once Don Picchietti was assassinated two weeks ago by an invisible ace who shoved an ice pick in his ear while he was eating dinner at his own restaurant. That was certainly a Shadow Fist job. The Mafia will undoubtedly retaliate, and the Shadow Fists will need more soldiers.”
Mao nodded. “Why should we hire you?”
“Why not? I can handle myself.”
Mao glanced at his erstwhile bodybuard, who had managed to drag himself to a hunched position on his knees, his forehead resting on the floor. “Fair enough,” he said thoughtfully. “But do you have the stomach for it I wonder?” He looked at the three men crowded together on the bench across the table, and Brennan, too, looked at them closely.
The Werewolf sat on the outside and the Oriental, probably an Immaculate Egret, was on the inside. The man they sandwiched, though didn’t look like a street tough.
He was small, thin, and palid. His hands looked soft and weak, his eyes were dark and bright. Many street toughs had a streak of madness in them, but even on first sight Brennan could see that this man was more than touched by insanity. “These men,” Danny Mao said, “are going on a mission. Care to join them?”
“What kind of mission?” Brennan asked.
“If you have to ask, maybe you’re not the type of man we’re looking for.”
“Maybe,” Brennan said, smiling, “I’m just cautious.”
“Caution is an admirable trait,” Mao said blandly, “but so is faith in and obedience to your superiors.”
Brennan put his hat on. “All right. Where’re we headed?” The pale man in the middle laughed. It was not a pleasant sound. “The morgue,” he said gleefully.
Brennan looked at Mao with a lifted eyebrow.
Mao nodded. “The morgue, as Deadhead says.”
“Do you have a car?” the Werewolf asked Brennan. His voice was a mushy growl behind the Nixon mask.
Brennan shook his head.
“I’ll have to steal one,” the Werewolf said.
“Then we can go to the drive-up window!” the man called Deadhead enthused. The Asian sitting next to him looked vaguely disgusted but said nothing. “Let’s go!” Deadhead pushed at the Werewolf, urging him out of the booth.
Brennan lingered to glance at Mao, who was watching him carefully.
“Whiskers,” Mao said, nodding at the Werewolf, “is in charge. He’ll tell you what you need to know. You’re on probation, Cowboy. Be careful.”
Brennan nodded and followed the unlikely trio onto the street. The Werewolf turned and looked at Brennan.
“I’m Whiskers,” he said in his indistinct growl. “This is Deadhead, like Danny said, and this is Lazy Dragon.” Brennan nodded at the Oriental, realizing his initial assessment of the man had been wrong. He wasn’t an Egret. He wasn’t wearing Egret colors, and he didn’t have the demeanor of a gang member. He was young, maybe in his early twenties, small, about five six or seven, and slender enough so that his baggy pants hung loosely on his lean hips. His face was oval, his nose slightly broad, his hair longish and indifferently combed. He didn’t have the aggressive attitude of the street punk. There was a reserve about him, an air of almost melancholy thoughtfulness.
Whiskers left them waiting on the corner. Lazy Dragon was silent, but Deadhead kept up a constant stream of chatter, most of which was nonsensical. Lazy Dragon paid him no attention, and neither did Brennan after a while, but that seemed to make no difference to Deadhead. He burbled on and Brennan ignored him as best he could. Once Deadhead reached into the pocket of his dirty jacket and pulled out a bottle of pills of different sizes and colors, shook out a handful, and tossed them into his mouth. He chewed and swallowed noisily and beamed at Brennan.
“Take vitamins?”
Brennan wasn’t sure if Deadhead was offering him some or asking if he took vitamins himself. He nodded noncommittally and turned away.
Whiskers finally showed up with a car. It was a dark, late model Buick. Brennan hopped into the front seat, leaving the back for Deadhead and Lazy Dragon.
“Good suspension. Smooth drive,” Whiskers commented as they pulled away from the curb. Brennan looked into the rear-view mirror and saw Lazy Dragon nod and reach into his pocket for a small clasp knife and a block of soft, white material that looked like soap. He opened the knife and began to whittle.
Deadhead kept up a stream of running chatter that no one listened to. Whiskers drove smoothly, cursing potholes, spotlights, and other drivers in his muffled voice, continually glancing in the mirror to follow Lazy Dragon’s progress as he carefully carved the small block of soap with delicate, skillful hands.
Brennan didn’t know where the morgue was or what it looked like, but the dark, forbidding structure that they finally stopped before met all of his expectations.
“Here it is,” Whiskers announced unnecessarily. They watched the building for a few moments. “Still looks busy.” Occasional lights illuminated scattered rooms throughout the multistoried structure, and as they watched, people occasionally entered or left by the main entrance.
“Ready yet?” Whiskers growled, glancing into the mirror. “Just about,” Lazy Dragon said without looking up. “Ready for what?” Brennan asked, and Whiskers turned to him.
“You gotta take Deadhead to the room they use for long-term body storage. It’s in the basement. Deadhead will take it from there. Dragon will go first and scout. You’re muscle in case anything goes wrong.”
“And you?”
Whiskers may have grinned under his mask, but Brennan couldn’t be sure. “Now that you’re here, I just wait in the car.”
Brennan didn’t like it. This wasn’t the way he liked to do things, but he was obviously being tested. Equally obviously, he had no choice. He made one more try for information.
“What are we looking for?”
“Deadhead knows,” Whiskers said, and Brennan heard a disquieting titter from the backseat. “And Dragon knows the general layout. You just deal with anyone who tries to interfere.” He glanced back into the mirror. “Ready?”
Lazy Dragon looked up. “Ready,” he said calmly. He folded his knife, put it away, and stared critically at what he had carved. Brennan, mystified and curious, turned around for a better look and saw that it was a small but credible mouse. Lazy Dragon studied it carefully, nodded as if satisfied, set it on his lap, settled back comfortably in his seat, and closed his eyes. For a moment nothing happened, then Dragon slumped as if asleep or unconscious, and the carving began to twitch.
The tail lashed, the ears perked up, and then, creakily at first but with increasing fluidity, the thing stretched. It stopped for a moment to preen its fur, then it leaped from Dragon’s lap to the shoulder of the driver’s seat. Brennan stared at it and it stared back. It was a goddamn living mouse. Brennan glanced back at Lazy Dragon, who seemed to be sleeping, then looked at Whiskers, who was watching impassively beneath his Nixon mask.
“Nice trick,” Brennan drawled.
“It’s okay,” Whiskers said. “You carry him.”
Lazy Dragon, who seemed to be vitalizing and possessing the little figurine he’d carved, climbed up on Brennan s shoulder, scurried down his chest, and popped into his vest pocket. He peeked out, holding the pocket-top with his little clawed paws. This was, Brennan thought, more than passing strange, but he had the feeling that things would get stranger before the night was over.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.” Whatever it was.
They entered the morgue through an unlocked service entrance in a side alley and took the stairway to the basement. Lazy Dragon popped out of his pocket, ran down his vest and pant-leg, and scurried down the poorly lit corridor in which they found themselves. Deadhead started after him, but Brennan held him back.
“Let’s wait until the mou-until Lazy Dragon gets back.” Deadhead’s eyes were shiny and he was even more jittery than usual. His hands shook as he took out his pill bottle, and he dropped a dozen capsules on the floor as he gulped down a mouthful. The pills scattered on the concrete floor, making loud skittering noises. He grinned maniacally and the corner of his mouth kept twitching in a torturous grimace.
What the hell, Brennan thought, am I doing in a morgue corridor with a madman and a living mouse carved out of soap?
Lazy Dragon came scampering back before Brennan could think of a satisfactory answer to this disturbing question, his tiny feet moving as if he were being chased by the hungriest cat in the world. He stopped at Brennan’s feet, dancing with excitement. Brennan sighed, bent over, and held out his hand. Lazy Dragon jumped up on his palm, and Brennan, still hunkered down, lifted the mouse close to his face.
Lazy Dragon sat up on his haunches, his beady eyes bright with intelligence. He drew his tiny right front paw over his throat repeatedly. Brennan sighed again. He hated charades.
“What is it?” he asked. “Danger? Someone in the corridor?” The mouse nodded excitedly and held up his paw. “One man?” Again the mouse nodded. “Armed?” The mouse shrugged a very human-looking shrug, looked doubtful. “Okay.” Brennan let the mouse down, then stood up. “Follow me.” He turned to Deadhead. “You wait here.”
Deadhead nodded a jittery nod, and Brennan went off down the corridor, Lazy Dragon scurrying at his heels. He had no confidence in Deadhead and wondered what part in the mission he could possibly play. It’s hard, he thought to himself, when your most dependable man is a mouse. Around the bend of the corridor a man was sitting in a metal folding chair, eating a sandwich and reading a paperback. He looked up as Brennan approached.
“Can I help you, buddy?” He was middle-aged, fat, and balding. The book he was reading was Ace Avenger #49, Mission to Iran.
“Got a delivery.”
The man frowned. “I don’t know nothing about that. I’m the night janitor. We usually get deliveries during the day.” Brennan nodded understandingly. “This is a special delivery,” he said. When he was close enough, he reached behind his back and drew the stiletto he carried in a belt sheath under his vest, touching the tip of its blade lightly against the janitor’s throat. The janitor’s lips made a round O of astonishment and he dropped his book.
“Jesus, mister, what are you doing?” he asked in a strangled whisper, trying to move his throat as little as possible. “Where’s the long-term storage room?”
“Over there, over that way.” The janitor made little jerking motions with his eyeballs, afraid to move even a muscle.
“Go get Deadhead.”
“I don’t know no one with that name,” the fat man pleaded, sweat beading his forehead.,
“I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to the mouse.”
“O Lord.” The janitor started to mumble an incoherent prayer, sure that Brennan was a crazed maniac who was going to murder him.
Brennan waited patiently until Lazy Dragon returned with Deadhead.
“Anyone else on this floor?” he asked, urging the janitor up with a slight flick of his knife wrist. The janitor, catching on quickly, stood immediately.
“No one. Not now.”
“No guards?”
The janitor looked as if he wanted to shake his head, but the proximity of the knife to his throat stopped him. “Don’t really need them. No one’s broke into the morgue for, jeez, months now.”
“Okay.” Brennan eased the knife away from the janitor’s throat and the man visibly relaxed. “Take us to the storeroom. Be quiet and no funny business.” By way of emphasis Brennan touched the tip of the janitor’s nose with the tip of his knife, and the janitor nodded carefully.
Brennan squatted and held out his palm, and Lazy Dragon climbed onto it. He put the mouse in his vest pocket, holding back a smile at the janitor’s bug-eyed stare. He looked as if he wanted to ask Brennan a question, then thought better of it.
“It’s this way,” the janitor said, and Deadhead and Brennan, with Lazy Dragon peering from his pocket, followed him.
The janitor let them into the room with his key. It was a dark, cold, depressing room with floor-to-ceiling body lockers in the walls. It was where the city kept all the corpses that no one wanted or that no one could identify, before their pauper burials.
Deadhead’s jittery smile widened when they entered the room, and he hopped from foot to foot with ill-suppressed excitement.
“Help me find it!” he commanded. “Help me find it!”
“What?” Brennan asked, truly mystified.
“The body. Gruber’s fat, cold body.” He looked frantically at the lockers, capering in a macabre dance as he went along the wall.
Brennan frowned, herded the janitor in front of him, and started searching the opposite wall. Most of the name tags set into the little metal holders on the locker doors simply had anonymous ID numbers. A few had names.
“Say, this what you looking for?”
The docile janitor, who was preceeding Brennan, looked back helpfully. Brennan stepped to his side. The locker he was pointing at was third up from the floor, about waist high. The tag on it said Leon Gruber September 16.
“Here it is,” Brennan called softly, and Deadhead scuttled across the room. There had to be, Brennan thought, some sort of message on the corpse, something that only Deadhead could decipher. Perhaps this Gruber had smuggled something into the country in a body cavity ... but surely, he thought, anything like that would’ve been found by the morgue technicians.
“The body’s been here a long time,” Brennan commented as Deadhead opened the locker door and pulled out the retractable table on which the corpse lay.
“Yes, it has, yes, indeed,” Deadhead said, staring at the dingy sheet that covered the body. “They pulled strings. Pulled strings to keep it here until I ... until I could get out.”
“Get out?”
Deadhead pulled the sheet down, exposing Gruber’s face and chest. He had been a fat young man, soft and pastylooking. The expression of fear and horror pasted on his face was the worst that Brennan had even seen on a corpse. His chest was puckered with bullet holes, small caliber from the look of them.
“Yes,” Deadhead said, but he never looked up from Gruber’s dead, staring eyes. “ I was in prison ... hospital, really.” From somewhere on his person he had produced a small, shiny hacksaw. His lips twitched in incessant, spasmodic jerks, and a line of spittle ran from the corner of his mouth to drip off his chin. “For corpse abuse.”
“Are we taking the body with us?” Brennan asked through tightly clenched lips., “No thanks,” Deadhead said brightly. “I’ll eat it here.” He began to saw Gruber’s skull. The blade cut through the bone easily. Brennan and the janitor watched, horrified, as the top of the skull came off and Deadhead, with maniacal, somehow furtive glee, scooped chunks off Gruber’s brain and stuffed them in his mouth. He chewed noisily.
Brennan felt Lazy Dragon dive into his vest pocket. The janitor vomited and Brennan fought off the rising tide of nausea that threatened to overwhelm him, holding on with grim, tight-lipped self-control.
Brennan gagged the janitor with his handkerchief and bound him at wrist and ankle with packing tape Lazy Dragon found in a corner of the storage room. He had to do all the work himself because Deadhead, mumbling incoherently, had sagged against the wall after wolfing down Gruber’s brain. After Brennan took care of the janitor he guided the mumbling maniac out of the storeroom. Brennan wished that Lazy Dragon could tell him what the hell was going on.
“How’d it go?” Whiskers asked when Brennan threw open the Buick’s rear passenger door and pushed Deadhead in. Brennan slammed the door and slid onto the front seat before answering.
“Fine, I think. Deadhead had a snack.”
Whiskers nodded, started the car, and pulled away from the curb. Lazy Dragon climbed from Brennan’s pocket, balanced precariously on the shoulder of the car seat, then leaped onto the lap of his human body, which, after a moment, awoke, yawned, and stretched. The mouse, undergoing a transformation somewhat analagous to that of Lot’s overcurious wife, turned back into a block of soap.
“How’d it go?” Whiskers mumbled again, glancing up into the rearview mirror as he dove.
“Lazy Dragon dropped his mouse-sculpture in his jacket pocket and nodded. ‘As planned. We found the body and Deadhead ... dined. Cowboy did fine.”
“Great. We’d better get Deadhead to the boss while he’s still digesting.”
“Now that we’re all buddies,” Brennan drawled, “maybe you can tell me what’s going on.”
Whiskers flipped off a driver who’d cut in front of them. “Well ... I suppose it’d be all right. Deadhead there,” he snickered, “is an ace, sort of. He can get people’s memories by eating their brains.”
Brennan made a face. “Jesus. So Gruber knew something that Mao wants to know.”
Whiskers nodded and gunned the Buick, running a red light. “We think so. We hope so, anyway. You see, Danny Mao’s boss is this guy named Fadeout who wants to find some ace who calls herself Wraith. Gruber was her fence before she bumped him off. Mao figures Gruber probably knew enough about her so we can use his memories to track her down.”
Brennan pursed his lips, suppressing a smile. He knew more about this than these guys did. Fadeout was one of Kien’s aces who had tried, and failed, to capture him and Wraith on Wild Card Day, and Wraith had told him that someone-not her-had killed her fence that very day. “Why’d you wait so long to get to Gruber’s corpse?” Brennan asked.
Whiskers shrugged. “Deadhead was in some kinda hospital. Cops caught him doing his thing with a body he’d found on the street back on Wild Card Day, and it took the lawyers a couple of months to spring him.”
Brennan nodded, and to stay in his role as bewildered newcomer, he asked a question he already knew the answer to. “So why does Fadeout want to find this Wraith?”
Because she’d lifted Kien’s private diary in the early morning hours of the wildest Wild Car Day ever, Brennan thought, but the Werewolf evidently didn’t know that. He shrugged. “Hey, you think I’m Fadeout’s confidant or something?”
Brennan nodded. He wasn’t at least he tried not to be, introspective. His memories of the past were frequently painful, but Wraith-Jennifer Maloy-had often been on his mind since their meeting in September. It was more than the adventure they’d shared on Wild Card Day, more than the easy comradeship and grudging confidence between them, more than her tall, athletic-looking body. Brennan couldn’t, wouldn’t, admit why, but he knew that he’d try to get himself on the Shadow Fist task force that’d been given the job of hunting her. In that way he’d be in position to help her if the Fists got too close.
Not, he thought, that they’d be able to use Gruber’s memories to track her down. Although Wraith had never told Brennan his name, she’d mentioned that she hadn’t trusted her fence and had, in fact, never even told him her real name.
They drove on in silence. Whiskers finally pulled over and killed the engine in front of a three-story brownstone in the heart of Jokertown.
“Cowboy, you and Lazy Dragon help Deadhead. He can’t do much on his own while he’s digesting.”
Brennan took his left arm, Lazy Dragon took his right, and they dragged him across the sidewalk and up the flight of stairs to the brownstone’s entrance, where Whiskers was already talking with one of the Egrets who’d been standing in the foyer. They passed them on into the interior of the building, where another Egret guard spoke briefly into a house telephone and then told them to go upstairs. Getting Deadhead up two flights of stairs was like dragging a sack of half-set cement, but Whiskers didn’t offer to help. Another Egret nodded to them on the third-floor landing. They went down a corridor with a threadbare carpet, and Whiskers rapped smartly on the door at the end of the hall. A masculine voice called out, “Come in,” and Whiskers opened the door and preceded Brennan, Lazy Dragon, and Deadhead into the room.
It was a comfortably appointed room, rather luxurious compared to what Brennan had seen of the rest of the house. A man in his thirties, handsome, well-dressed, and fit-looking, was standing in front of a well-stocked liquor cart, having just fixed himself a drink.
“How did it go?”
“Fine, Fadeout, just fine.”
Brennan didn’t recognize him. He’d last seen him on Wild Card Day, but Fadeout had been invisible until Wraith had bashed him on the head with a garbage can lid and he’d fallen unconscious to the street. Brennan had had his hands full of Egrets at the time and had only spared the fallen ace the briefest of glances. It was evident that Fadeout also didn’t recognize Brennan, who’d been masked at the time. “Who’s this?” the ace asked, nodding in Brennan’s direction. “New guy named Cowboy. He’s all right.”
“He’d better be.” Fadeout stepped away from the cart, settled himself in a comfortable chair nearby. “Help youself,” he said, gesturing at the liquor.
Whiskers stepped forward eagerly. Brennan and Lazy Dragon turned to dump the near-comatose Deadhead, who was now mumbling about excessive overhead and the price of cocaine, in a convenient chair, when a sudden, terrifyingly loud explosion boomed through the building, shaking it to its foundations. It seemed to come from the roof.
Fadeout’s drink sloshed over his suit, Whiskers fell into the liquor cart, and Lazy Dragon and Brennan dropped Deadhead.
“Jesus Christ!” Fadeout swore, lurched to his feet, and staggered to the door as the ratcheting roar of automatic gunfire came from below.
Brennan followed Fadeout and found himself staring at three men armed with Uzis who’d come through a hole they’d blasted in the ceiling. Fadeout stood rooted in place by fear-induced paralysis. Brennan, acting instinctively, knocked the ace to the floor as a stream of slugs from their assailants’ compact machine guns ripped into the wall above their heads. Brennan carried his Browning Hipower in a shoulder rig, and he knew that he couldn’t draw it in time to return fire, he knew that he was going to be nailed to the floor by the next burst of slugs. Cursing the fate that had brought him to die among his enemies, he grabbed for his gun.
Something tossed from the room behind them fluttered in the hallway, a small sheet of paper that had been intricately folded. Before Brennan could draw his automatic, before their assailants could trigger another burst, there was a twisting shimmering in the air as the paper changed, transformed, grew, into a breathing, living, roaring tiger charging down the corridor, its eyes red and glaring, its mouth full of long, sharp teeth.
It caught a burst of slugs but didn’t stop. It hurled itself at the three men at the end of the corridor, and Brennan heard bones splinter as it landed among them.
Brennan got to his knees, drew and aimed his Browning.
Lazy Dragon was holding one man down with his front paws, and with a single, quick motion bit cleanly through his throat. Blood sprayed over the hallway as a panicked gunman put a long burst through Dragon from point-blank range. The red dot from the sighting mechanism of Brennan’s pistol shone on the gunman’s forehead, and Brennan shot him as the tiger collapsed, falling with all its weight on the third assailant.
Fadeout had faded. Brennan half-stood and ran in crouching, crablike fashion down the corridor. He put a bullet through the head of the man who was trying frantically to pull himself out from under Lazy Dragon, then dropped to his knees before the gigantic cat. It was covered in blood, whether its own or from the slain men around it Brennan couldn’t tell, but it was perforated by scores of wounds and was panting heavily. Brennan had seen enough mortally wounded creatures to know that Dragon was dying. He had no idea what he should do, or what this meant to Lazy Dragon’s human form. He paused to pat the tiger sympathetically, then quickly moved on.
Bursts of automatic gunfire still rattled below as Brennan cautiously made his way down to the second-floor landing and carefully peered over the rail to the ground floor.
The foyer’s double doors were open. Half a dozen Egrets, shot to pieces by automatic gunfire, lay on the stained marble floor. As Brennan watched, the few living members of the assault team backed grudgingly through the wreckage of the front door, swapping gunfire with the Egret guards and their reinforcements. Within moments the firefight had moved unto the stret outside, where gunfire echoed loudly in the night.
Brennan stood up. “Goddamn wops.”
He looked over his right shoulder. A pair of blue eyes, nerve tendrils and connective tissue dangling eerily from them, were floating five and a half feet above the floor. Fadeout blinked into existence, looking slightly rumpled and very, very angry.
“The Mafia?” Brennan asked.
“That’s right, Cowboy. Rico Covello’s men. I recognized what was left of their ugly faces from our dossiers.” He paused, his anger replaced by sudden gratefulness. “I owe you one. They would’ve had me if you hadn’t knocked me down.”
Brennan shrugged. “If not for Lazy Dragon, we’d both be chopped meat. Wed better see if he’s okay. His tiger got shot to shit.”
“Right.”
They went back upstairs. Brennan was relieved to see then immediately angry at himself for the feeling-that Dragon was sitting calmly in one of Fadeout’s comfortable chairs. He looked up as they entered the room.
“Everything is all right?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t say that,” Fadeout replied, still angry. “Those guinea bastards just waltzed in here and almost offed me.” He looked angrily at Whiskers, who was standing uncertainly in the middle of the room. “What were you doing about it, you joker shitbag?”
Whiskers shrugged. “I-I thought someone should stay with Deadhead—”
“Take off that goddamned mask when you talk to me!” Fadeout ordered angrily. “I’m sick and tired of looking at Nixon’s mug. No matter how ugly you are, it can’t be worse.”
Lazy Dragon watched Whiskers with calculated interest, and Brennan’s hand crept closer to his holstered Browning. Werewolves had been known to fly into killing rages when unmasked, but Whiskers, as indicated by his earlier actionor lack of action-wasn’t the fiercest of Werewolves. He took off his mask and stood in the center of the room uncomfortably shifting his weight from foot to foot.
Every bit of his face, except for his eyeballs, was covered with thick, coarse hair. Even his tongue, which was nervously licking his lips, was furred. No wonder, Brennan thought, his voice was so mushy.
Fadeout grunted, said something under his breath that Brennan didn’t quite catch but had ‘joker bastard’ in it, and turned away from the Werewolf.
“We’ve got to leave. The police will be here any minute. Dragon, you and Whiskers get that freak,-he nodded at Deadhead, who was still slumped muttering in his chair,and bring him around back. Get the car and pick me up in front. Cowboy, come with me. I have to do a quick damage assessment.”
Dragon stood. Brennan stopped in front of him and they looked at each other for a long moment. There was something strange about Lazy Dragon, Brennan suddenly thought, something hidden, something utterly unfathomable that went beyond his unusual ace power. But the man had saved his life.
“Lucky you had a tiger on you.”
Dragon smiled. “I like to have a backup handy. Something more deadly than a mouse.”
Brennan nodded. “I’m in your debt,” he said.
“I’ll remember that.” Dragon turned to help Whiskers with Deadhead.
Downstairs there were five dead Egrets, and half a dozen deceased mafiosi. The surviving Egrets were buzzing like angry bees.
Fadeout shook his head. “Damn. It’s escalating. Little Mother isn’t going to like this.”
Brennan squelched the expression of sudden interest before it reached his face. He said nothing, because he was afraid his voice would betray him. Little Mother, Sin Ma, was the head of the immaculate Egrets. If Fadeout was a lieutenant in Kien’s organization, she was at least a colonel. In all his months of investigation he’d discovered only that she was an ethnic Chinese from Vietnam who’d come to the states in the late 1960s to become the wife of Nathan Chow, the leader of a penny-ante street gang called the Immaculate Egrets. Her arrival corresponded with a quick rise in the fortune of the Egrets, little of which was enjoyed by Chow. He had died under unspecified but mysterious circumstances in 1971, and Siu Ma took over the gang, which continued to grow and prosper. Kien, then still an ARVN general, used it to funnel heroin into the States. There was no doubt that Siu Ma was very high in Kien’s organization, very high indeed.
“We have to split before the cops arrive,” Fadeout said. He turned to an Ingram-toting Egret. “Leave this place. Take all the files, all valuables.”
The Egret nodded, sketched an informal salute, and started shouting orders in rapid Chinese.
“Let’s go,” Fadeout repeated, carefully picking his way among the bodies.
“Where to?” Brennan asked as casually as he could. “Little Mother’s place in Chinatown. I’ve got to tell her what happened.”
A sleek limo pulled up to the curb. Whiskers was driving, Deadhead lolled in the backseat with Lazy Dragon. Fadeout got in and Brennan followed him, excitement thrumming through his body like tautly stretched wire.
He carefully noted the route that Whiskers took, but he had no idea at all where they were when the limo finally stopped in a small, ramshackle garage in a dirty, garbage choked alley. His unfamiliarity with the area irritated him and upset his fine-tuned sense of control. He hated the helpless feeling that had been plaguing him lately, but there was nothing to do but swallow it and go on.
Whiskers, his mask back in place, and Lazy Dragon dragged Deadhead from the limo on Fadeout’s order. The significance of that wasn’t lost on Brennan. He knew that he’d gone up a notch or two in Fadeout’s estimation, which was exactly what he wanted. The closer he got to the core of Kien’s organization, the easier it would be for him to bring it tumbling down like a house of cards.
The door they approached wasn’t as flimsy as it appeared. It was also locked and guarded, but the sentinel let them in after peering through a peephole when Fadeout knocked.
“Siu Ma is asleep,” the guard said. He was a large Chinese dressed in traditional baggy trousers, broad leather belt, and matching tunic top. The machine pistol holstered on his broad leather belt was a jarring anachronism with his antique style of dress, but, Brennan reflected, was a sensible compromise with what was apparently Siu Ma’s strongly developed sense of tradition.
“She’ll want to see us,” Fadeout said grimly. “We’ll be in the audience chamber.”
The guard nodded, turned to a very modern intercom system, and spoke Chinese too quickly for Brennan to follow. The audience chamber was as luxurious as the outside of the building was dilapidated. The decorating motif was dynastic China. There were rich rugs, beautiful lacquered screens, delicate porcelain, a couple of massive green bronze temple demons, and undoubtedly valuable knickknacks of ivory, jade, and other precious and semiprecious stones set about on tables of teak and ebony and other rare woods. Wraith, Brennan thought, would love this place.
Although it could have been overwhelming, the room’s overall effect was actually quite pleasing. It was like a living museum exhibit that had been assembled with a discerning eye and in the utmost good taste.
Siu Ma was already waiting for them. She was seated on a gilt chair that dominated the chamber’s rear wall, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. She was short with a round, plump face, dark, long-lashed eyes, and black glossy hair. She looked to be in her early thirties. She stiffled a yawn with a pudgy hand and frowned at Fadeout.
“This had better be important,” she said, glancing distastefully at Deadhead and his attendants, curiously at Brennan. Her English was excellent, with just a lingering trace of a French accent.
“It is,” Fadeout assured her. He told her of the Mafia hit on his brownstone. As he spoke, a young girl bearing a tray came into the room and poured her a small cup of tea. Siu Ma sipped the tea as she listened to Fadeout’s story, and her frown deepened.
“This is intolerable,” she said when he’d finished. “We must teach those comic-book criminals a lesson they won’t forget.”
“I agree,” Fadeout said. “However, our spies have told us that Covello has withdrawn to his estate in the Hamptons. It’s one of the Mafia’s most heavily fortified strongholds. It has two walls around it-an armored outer wall that encircles the entire estate and an inner electrified fence that protects the main building. Covello’s entrenched there with a company of heavily armed Mafia thugs.”
Siu Ma looked at Fadeout coldly, and Brennan could see ruthless strength in her near-black eyes.
“The Shadow Fists have weapons too,” she said. Fadeout bobbed his head. “I agree, but we don’t want to expend our men in a futile attempt at revenge. And think of the unwanted attention such an assault would draw from the authorities.”
There was an uncomfortable silence as Siu Ma sipped her tea and stared coldly at Fadeout. Brennan saw his chance.
“Excuse my interruption,” he said in his soft drawl, “but one man can often go where many would be unwelcome.” Fadeout turned to him, frowned. “What do you mean?” Brennan shrugged depreciatingly. “A one-man sortie might accomplish what a full-scale raid could never hope to do.”
Brennan felt Siu Ma’s eyes boring into him. “Who is this man?” she asked.
“His name’s Cowboy,” Fadeout said, distraction in his voice. “He’s new.”
Siu Ma finished her tea and set the cup down on the tray. “He sounds as if he has a head on his shoulders. Tell me ,”she said, speaking directly to Brennan for the first time, “are you volunteering to be this man?”
He bobbed his head in a respectful bow. “Yes, Dama.” She smiled, pleased as he’d hoped she’d be by the respectful form of address.
“It will be dangerous, very, very dangerous,” Fadeout said cautiously.
Siu Ma turned her gaze to him. “Never,” she said, “stop to count danger in a matter of revenge.”
Brennan suppressed a smile. Siu Ma, it seemed, was a woman after his own heart.
It was bone-chillingly cold at the West Thirtieth Street Heliport. The wind was an icy whip that cut through the stained jumpsuit that Brennan wore. The smell of immanent snow was in the air, though Brennan could barely discern it through the grease and oil odors of the heliport where, disguised as a mechanic, he waited patiently.
Brennan was good at waiting. He’d spent two days and nights doing just that in a hidden observation post across the road from Covello’s Southampton estate. It was apparent that Covello, choosing discretion over valor, had decided to go to ground for the duration of the Mafia-Shadow Fist war. He was surrounded by a company of heavily armed Mafia goons and protected by walls that were safe to anything but a full-scale assault. The only vehicles allowed inside the grounds brought supplies to feed the don and underlings to consult with him, and even these were stopped and thoroughly checked at the front gate.
The only other way into the estate was the helipad on the mansion’s roof. Brennan had watched Covello’s helicopter come and go several times each day, on different occasions ferrying in and out expensive-looking women and dark-suited men. The men, when identified by snaps Brennan took of them with a telephoto lens, were mostly high-ranking members of the other Families. The women were apparently call girls.
His reconnaissance over, Brennan waited patiently at the heliport that was the Manhattan base of Covello’s chopper. Since, he decided, he couldn’t go through Covello’s walls, he’d go over them. In Covello’s own chopper.
Night had fallen before the chopper pilot showed up with a trio of shivering women dressed in fur coats. There was no one else near the chopper. As Brennan approached them, the pilot let down the ladder to the cabin. The first hooker was trying to climb aboard, but was finding it difficult to mount the metal stairs in her high-heeled boots.
It was too almost too easy. Brennan slugged the pilot, and he staggered backward, hit hard against the body of the chopper, and slid to the ground. The call girl who’d been clutching his arm teetered precariously, her arms windmilling vigorously, then Brennan steadied her with a hand on her rump.
“Hey!” she complained, either at the placement of Brennan’s hand or his treatment of the pilot.,
“Change in plan,” Brennan told them. “Go on home.” They regarded him suspiciously. The one on the stairs spoke. “We haven’t been paid yet.”
Brennan smiled his best smile. “You haven t been killed yet, either.” He reached for his wallet, emptied it of cash. “Cab fare,” he said, handing the bills over.
The three glanced at each other, at Brennan, then back at each other. The one climbed down the stairs, and hunched over against the cold, walked away muttering. The others followed.
Brennan hauled the pilot into the chopper cabin. He was out cold, but his pulse was steady and strong. Brennan stared at him for a moment. The man, after all, was nothing to him, not even an enemy. He was just someone who happened to be in the way. Brennan took a ball of strong twine from his jumpsuit pocket, bound him, gagged him, and left him on the floor of the cabin. He stripped off his dirty jumpsuit, wadded it up, and flung it in a corner. He moved through the cabin into the cockpit and slid into the pilot’s seat.
“I’m off,” he said to the empty air, but those listening on the chosen frequency heard him and started on their own way to Southampton.
Brennan hadn’t piloted a chopper in more than ten years, and this was a commercial rather than a military model, but the old skills returned quickly to his hands. He asked for and received takeoff clearance, and scrupulously following the flight plan he’d found on a clipboard in the cabin, soon left behind the million twinkling jewels that was New York City.
Flying over Long Island in the cold, clear night gave him a fresh, clean feeling that he lost himself in. All too soon, however, Covello’s brightly lit private helipad was below him.
As he settled down as gently as a feather, a guard carrying an assault rifle waved at him. Brennan sighed. He shook the clean feeling of the night sky from his brain. It was time to get back to work.
The guard sauntered casually toward the chopper. Brennan waited until he was half a dozen steps away, then he leaned out the cockpit window and shot him in the head with his silenced Browning. No one saw him enter the mansion through the door in the roof, no one saw him flit from room to room, as quiet and purposeful as a haunting spirit.
He found Covello in a library that had rows and rows of unread books that had been bought by the mansion’s interior decorator because of their matched bindings. The don, whom Brennan recognized from his photo in Fadeout’s dossier, was shooting pool with his consuldre while a man who was obviously a bodyguard watched silently.
Covello missed an easy cushion shot, swore to himself, then looked up. He frowned at Brennan. “Who the hell are you?”
Brennan said nothing. He raised his gun and shot the astonished bodyguard. Covello started to scream in a curiously high-pitched, womanish voice, and the consulare swung at Brennan with his poolstick. Brennan ducked out of the way and put three slugs in the consuldre’s chest, blowing him over the pool table. He shot the don in the back as he was running for the door.
Covello was still breathing as Brennan stood over him. There was a pleading look in his eyes and he tried to speak. Brennan wanted to finish him with a shot to the head, but couldn’t. He had orders.
He pulled a small black nylon sack from his back pocket, and a knife, much longer and heavier than the one he usually carried, from the belt sheath at the small of his back.
He was on the clock now. Covello’s screams had certainly aroused the household, and he had little time before more goons would arrive. He bent down. The dying don closed his eyes in unutterable horror at the sight of the knife in Brennan’s hands.
The man wasn’t his enemy, but neither would his death be a great loss to society. Still, as he cut through Covello’s throat, leaning hard on the blade to sever the spinal cord, Brennan couldn’t help but feel that he deserved a cleaner death. That no one deserved a death like this.
He lifted Covello’s head by his oiled hair and dropped it in the nylon bag. Moving quickly, he went back through the corridors that led to the roof and waiting chopper. He moved quickly and quietly, but he was seen.
A Mafia soldier let out a wild burst of gunfire and shouted to his companions. The burst didn’t come close to hitting Brennan, but he knew now they were on his trail. He moved faster, running down corridors and up stairs. Once he blundered into a group of men. He had no idea who they were, and they looked surprised and not a little bewildered at the commotion. He emptied the Browning’s clip at them as he charged, and they scattered without offering resistence as the sounds of pursuit drew closer and closer.
He spoke aloud to unseen listeners without breaking stride. “I’ve got the package and I’m coming home. I need backup.” He reached into his vest pocket, dropped something to the carpet, and ran on.
A fluttering sheet of delicate paper, intricately folded into a small, complicated shape, fell from his hand. He didn’t look back, but he heard the challenging roar of a big cat, terribly loud in the close confines of the corridor, reverberate and echo endlessly as it mixed with the sounds of gunfire and the screams of terrified men.
The route he flew to the small Suffolk County airport was on no authorized flight plan, and the flight itself was not as exhilarating with the stained and leaking black bag keeping him company on the copilot’s seat.
Fadeout and Whiskers were waiting at the airport with a limo.
“How’d it go?”
“As planned.” Brennan held out the bag and Whiskers took it.
Fadeout nodded. “Wrap it up in a blanket or something and put it in the trunk.” He caught Brennan’s look of disgust as Whiskers hustled off. He shrugged. “Yeah, it gets to me, too, sometimes. Deadhead is a useful tool, though. Think of all the inside info he’ll pick up from Covello’s brain.”
“I thought Deadhead was working on another problem,” Brennan said casually. “Some ace named Wraith?”
“Oh, that?” Fadeout waved a hand. “He solved it. Wraith apparently didn’t like Gruber too much. Never even told him her real name. But she did let her birthday slip once. And Deadhead is a talented sketch artist-hard to think of him as having any real human qualities. We have deep connections in a lot of government agencies, the DMV, for example. Her birthday and Deadhead’s sketch will be enough to nail that bitch to the wall.”
A wave of fear washed through Brennan, sweeping away the fatigue that weighed heavily on his body and spirit. To hide it he rubbed his face and yawned hugely.
“Well,” he said, desperately trying to sound casual, “it sounds pretty important. I’d like to be in on it.”
Fadeout looked at him closely, but nodded. “Sure, Cowboy. You earned it. It won’t come down for a day or two, but you look like you could sleep that long.”
Brennan forced a grin. “I could at that.”
They dropped Brennan at his jokertown apartment, where he slept around the clock, then worried for another day before he got the call. It was Whiskers’s mushy voice at the other end of the line.
“We got her name, Cowboy, and we got her address.”
“Who’s in on it?”
“You and me and two of my Werewolf pals. They’re watching her place now.”
Brennan nodded. He was glad that Lazy Dragon wouldn’t be along. He had ample respect for the ace’s power and adaptability.
“There’s a problem, though.” Whiskers hesitated. “She can turn into a ghost or something and walk right through walls and shit, so we can’t even really threaten her.”
Brennan smiled. Jennifer was extraordinarily difficult to deal with.
“Fadeout’s got a plan though. We break into her place and see if we can find this book he’s looking for. If not, we can try to deal with her. Buy it back or something. Then,” Whiskers said, some satisfaction in his voice, “she can always catch a bullet in the back of her head sometime. She ain’t always going to be a ghost.”
“Good plan,” Brennan made himself say. And it was. They knew her name. They knew where to find her. He had to do something or she wouldn’t live out the month, even if they turned over the diary. His mind raced. “I’ll meet you in an hour, at her place. Give me the address.”
“Right, Cowboy. You know, it’s too bad she can turn into a ghost. She’s real good-looking. We could have a real party with her.”
“Yeah, a real party.” Brennan hung up after Whiskers gave him directions to the apartment. He stared at nothing for a moment, marshaling all his Zen training to calm his mind, to soothe his racing pulse. He needed calmness, not a brain drenched in hate, anger, and fear. Part of him wondered at his strong reaction to Whiskers’s news. Part of him knew the reason, but the biggest part told him to forget it for now, to bury it and examine it later. There was a way out of this mess ... there had to be ....
He sunk his consciousness in the pool of being, seeking knowledge through perfect tranquility, and when he brought his mind back from zazen, he had his answer. It was Kien, and what he knew of the man, his fears, his strengths, his weaknesses.
Some of the details would be tricky, and painful, to work out. He picked up the phone, dialed a number. It rang, then he heard the sound of her voice on the other end of the line: “Hello?” he held the phone tightly, realizing that he had missed her voice, and despite the circumstances, he was glad to hear it again. “Hello?”
“Hello, Jennifer. We have to talk ...”
Snow was falling in blinding sheets and the wind was roaring like lost souls through the gray city canyons. Somehow winter seemed colder here than in the mountains, Brennan thought, colder and dirtier and lonelier. The maskless Werewolves, dressed as maintenance men, were waiting in the lobby of Jennifer’s apartment building. One was tall and thin with acne-scarred cheeks. His joker deformities were hidden by the baggy coveralls he wore. The other was short and thin, his deformity evident in his sharply twisted spine that rotated his torso abnormaly from his hips. Whiskers and Brennan, also wearing coveralls, stamped the snow from their boots.
“Cold as hell,” Whiskers offered. “She’s gone?” he asked in a low whisper.
The tall and thin one nodded. “She left no more’n ten minutes ago. Caught a cab.”
“Okay, let’s do it.”
No one saw them go up to Jennifer’s apartment. Her front door yielded easily to the Werewolves’ burglary tools. Brennan told himself that he’d have to speak to her about that, if, he amended, they were both still around when this caper was finished.
“We’ll toss the bedroom first,” Whiskers said as they entered the apartment. He stopped and frowned at the bookshelf-lined walls. “Shit, finding a book in this will be like looking for a needle in a goddamned haystack.”
He led the way into a small bedroom that contained a single bed, a nightstand with a lamp, an ancient wardrobe, and more bookshelves.
“We’ll have to check all those damn books,” Whiskers said. “One might be hollowed out or something.”
“Jeez, Whiskers,” the short and thin Werewolf said, “you’ve seen too many mov—”
He stopped, stared, as a tall, slim, good-looking blonde in a black string bikini stepped out of the wall. She wavered, solidified, and pointed a silenced pistol at them. She smiled. “Freeze,” she said.
They froze, more in astonishment than fear.
Whiskers swallowed. “Hey, we, we just want to talk. We were sent by important people.”
The woman nodded. “I know.”
“You know?” Whiskers asked, bewildered.
“I told her.”
Everyone turned to stare at Brennan. He had opened the drawer of the nightstand, and he, too, had a gun. It was a long-barreled, peculiar-looking pistol. He pointed it at Whiskers. The joker’s eyeballs bulged from his furry face.
“What the hell are you doing, Cowboy? What’s going on?” Brennan looked at him with no expression at all. He flicked his wrist, squeezed the trigger twice. There were two small, nearly soundless explosions of air, and the Werewolves stared in astonishment at the darts implanted in their chests. The tall, thin one opened his mouth to say something, sighed, closed his eyes, and slipped to the floor. The other didn’t even try to speak.
“Cowboy!”
Brennan shook his head. “My name isn’t Cowboy. It isn’t Yeoman either, but that will do.”
Whiskers’s face took on an almost comical look of terror. “Look, let me go. Please. I won’t tell anyone. Honest. Trust me “ He sagged to his knees, his hands clasped imploringly, tears soaking his furry cheeks.
Brennan s air pistol spat another dart, and Whiskers slipped facedown on the carpet. Brennan turned to Jennifer. “Hello, Wraith.”
She dropped the gun on the bed. “Can’t you ... can’t you let them go?”
Brennan shook his head. “You know I can’t. They know who I am. It’d blow my cover. It’d also ruin our plan.”
“They have to die?”
He approached within reach of her but made his arms stay at his side. “This is deadly business you’re involve in.” He gestured at the drugged Werewolves. “No one can walk away from this, except me, if you want to live.” He stopped, looked troubled. “Even then, there’s no guarantee ...”
Jennifer sighed. “Their lives are on my head—”
“They made the decisions and led the lives that brought them here. They were prepared to rape, maim, and kill you. Still”—Brennan looked away from Jennifer, looked inward to himself—“still ...”
His voice ran down to silence. Jennifer put her hand on his cheek, and he looked up, his dark eyes haunted by memories of death and destruction that despite his Zen training, despite his dogged concentration, were never far from the surface of his thoughts.
Jennifer smiled slightly. “ I like your new eyes.” Brennan smiled back and almost unwillingly covered her hand with his.
“I have to get going. It’ll be dark soon and I have to take care of them,-he nodded at the unconscious Werewolves,and ... other details.”
Jennifer nodded. “Will I see you again? Soon, I mean.” Brennan took his hand away, half-turned, shrugged. “Don’t you have enough problems?”
“Hey, the crime lord of New York City has marked me for death. How much worse could it get?”
Brennan shook his head. “You couldn’t even begin to guess. Look, you’d better disappear. I have to take care of things.”
Jennifer looked at him silently. “I’ll call you.”
“Promise?” she asked.
Brennan nodded. She gave the Werewolves a final troubled glance, then faded through the wall again. Brennan had no intention of keeping the promise. None. Not at all. But by the time he’d hoisted the first unconscious joker to his shoulders, his resolve was already fading.
Fadeout, Siu Ma, and Deadhead were in conference when Brennan was admitted to the audience chamber. Deadhead was babbling lists of names, addresses, telephone numbers, bank accounts, and government connections. Everything that Covello had kept in the storehouse of his brain was Deadhead’s. Everything the don had known ....
A sudden insight struck Brennan. Only the dead, he thought, could know everything. They were finished and done with. Their lives were complete. Only the dead could know Jokertown, totally and completely, for they had no need of new knowledge. Like him, when he’d been in the mountains. His life had been peaceful, unchanging, and serene. And quite dead. Now he was living again. The sense of uncertainty and loss of control that had increasingly been plaguing him was the price he paid for living. It was a high price, but so far, he realized, he could afford it.
Fadeout and Siu Ma exchanged concerned glances when Brennan entered the chamber alone.
“What happened?” Fadeout asked.
“Ambush. That crazy Yeoman bastard. Killed Whiskers and the other Werewolves. Pinned me to the wall by my damn hand.” Brennan held out his right hand. It was wrapped in a bloody rag torn from his shirt. It had hurt like hell to drive the arrow through his palm. It’d been, Brennan reflected, penance of a sort for what he’d done since his arrival in the city.
“He let you live?” Siu Ma asked.
“He wanted me to deliver this. He said it was no good to him.” He held up Kien’s diary, which had been blanked when Jennifer had ghosted it from Kien’s wall safe. He hated like hell to give it back and let Kien know that he was safe from the secrets he’d written therein, but he had to give Kien something concrete to get him off Jennifer’s back.
Fadeout took the diary from him and, mystified, riffled through its blank pages. “Did ... did Yeoman do this?” Brennan shook his head. “He said it happened when Wraith stole it.”
Fadeout smiled. “Well, that’s great. That’s really great.” Even Siu Ma looked pleased.
“There was one more thing.” Brennan forced himself to speak like a dispassionate messenger when he really wanted to brand the words on Fadeout’s forehead so Kien would be sure to understand the iron behind them.
Fadeout and Siu Ma looked at him expectantly.
“He also had a message. He said to tell Kien-yeah, the name was Kien-that he knows where Kien lives, just as Kien knows where Wraith lives. He said to tell Kien that their feud goes beyond life and death, that it is one of honor and retribution, but that he will be satisfied with Kien’s life if anything happens to Wraith. He says he has an arrow with Kien’s name on it waiting ... just waiting.”
He’d delivered a similar promise a few months ago in behalf of another. But perhaps justifiably she had refused to accept his protection and chose instead to go away. Jennifer, though, had simply nodded when he’d told her his plan, had accepted it as if she truly, totally trusted him.
“I see.” Fadeout and Siu Ma exchanged worried glances. “Well, yes, I’ll pass that on.” Fadeout nodded decisively. “I will indeed.” He pulled worriedly at his lower lip.
Siu Ma stood up. “You have proven yourself worthy,” she said. “I hope that your association with the Shadow Fists will be long and prosperous.”
Brennan looked at her. He permitted himself to smile. “I’m sure it will,” he said. “I’m sure it will.”
The new locks that Jennifer had had installed were so efficacious that Brennan couldn’t let himself into her apartment. That was good, he thought. She’d probably need them.
He sat on the fire escape landing outside her bedroom window and watched the city traffic pass below him. He had hated the city when he’d first arrived. Still did in fact, but now he hated the thought of leaving even more.
And he had to leave. When he’d first come to the city, nothing could’ve stopped him from bringing down Kien. He would have sacrificed heaven and hell to get him. But now he wasn’t the same man. Now he had allowed himself to care, and he had to pay the price for his weakness. Kien had won. His vendetta was over. He watched the city move beneath his feet, realizing for the first time how lonely the mountains would be.
The warm spring afternoon had turned to dusk before a small sound in the room behind him made him turn around. Jennifer, home from the library, was looking out the window, watching him. After a moment she crossed the room and opened the window and Brennan ducked inside.
“Well,” Jennifer said,
“every few months you turn up just like clockwork.”
She was angry, and Brennan knew why. He hadn’t seen her since he’d foiled a Shadow Fists ambush at her apartment in the wintertime. There’d been something of an unspoken agreement between them that he’d come back to see her, but he hadn’t until now.
“I have to warn you.” There was no easy way to say it. “I’m leaving the city. Kien said he’ll leave you alone, but I don’t trust him.”
Jennifer frowned. “You’re leaving because of me?” Brennan shrugged. “Let’s just say that I’ve chosen the living over the dead.”
Her frown deepened. “He did use me to threaten you. He said he’d send his goons after me if you kept at him.”
“Something like that,” Brennan admitted. “He pointed out that he’d have nothing to live for if I brought him down. That there’d be nothing I could threaten him with to keep him from killing you.”
Jennifer nodded slowly. “ I see. Then my life means so much to you that you’d give up your vendetta, that you’d let Kien win?”
Brennan let out a deep breath and nodded.
Jennifer smiled. “It’s good to know that. It’ll make things easier.”
“Things?” Brennan said suspiciously. “What things?”
“Things neither you nor Kien took into account. The fact that I won’t allow myself to be held hostage by anyone. The fact that I can’t be held hostage if no one knows where I am.” She looked at Brennan for a long, long moment, and he felt a stab of pain at the love and beauty he saw on her face. “Good-bye, Daniel, and good hunting.”
She ghosted. She stepped out of her clothes and through her bedroom wall and vanished. Brennan stared at the blank wall utterly confounded. She was gone, vanished like an exorcised specter.
“wait—” he croaked, but it was too late. The room was empty, except for him and her belongings, abandoned and deserted now and forever. “Wait ...”
He sat down heavily on the bed, overcome by shock and a sense of overwhelming loss that struck him with the force of a physical blow.
“You don’t understand,” he said aloud to the empty room, partly to himself, partly to a vanished Jennifer, struck with the force of his sudden insight. “Kien presented me with the choice, but I’m making it freely. I want you more than, him. I want love more than hate ... life more than death ... “
His voice trailed off and he stared at the wall where Jennifer had vanished. His eyes nearly bugged out of their sockets when she stuck her head back through the wall.
“Good.” She smiled. “ I hoped you’d say something like that.”
He shot off the bed. “Christ Almighty! Get back in here and get solid!”
“Why? Are you going to kiss me or slug me?”
“You’ll have to take your chances,” Brennan started to say, but her mouth covered his before he could get half the words out.
“You know,” Jennifer said when they finally got their breath back, “it may be be best to play Kien’s game ... at least for a little while.”
Brennan nodded, his right arm tight around her waist, his left hand gently tracing the delicate curves of her jawline and chin.
“You’re right.” His voice, his eyes, were dreamy and strange-looking. Jennifer was startled, and then immensely pleased, to see happiness and perhaps even contentment in them. “I have a beautiful place in the Catskills I’d like you to see. And I haven’t been back to New Mexico since ... since ... Christ has it really been that long?”
She smiled and kissed him again.
“And Kien?” she asked him when they broke apart. Brennan shrugged. “He’ll be here. I can wait.” His smile came back, but there was a chill in it that both frightened and attracted her, drawing her like a moth to a dangerously burning flame. “It’s what a hunter does best.”
It’s kind of hard for me to talk about the past. I mean, I know it’s the past, that it’s 1992, not 1962, but it’s hard to come to grips with, you know? Like being dead. And waking up in a woman’s body. And knowing the woman who killed you is out there, somewhere, with your son.
But let me tell you my story. It all took place so far away from here and now, you might as well think of it as an old movie. Fade in. Superimpose title: Hollywood, California. February 15, 1962. Orson Welles’ office, the Fox lot.
I slipped inside, shutting the door behind me, and took off my fedora. The one I’m wearing right now, though it was new then. But even in ‘62, it was still the only thing about me that looked the part of the private investigator. The rest looked like central casting had got mixed up and sent out for a hero for some Viking flick: six-three, blond hair, blue eyes and a California tan. A Malibu Seigfried, and since it’s bad luck to speak ill of the dead, I’ll say I was pretty darn good looking, not that it matters now. It would have been a liability any other place than Hollywood, but snooping around the studios, everybody took me for just another nowhere actor and didn’t give me a second glance.
Welles sat behind his desk, trying to grow a beard over his baby fat. He leaned over and stabbed the intercom with a pudgy finger: “Hold all calls, Agnes.” His face had same jaded and disturbed look he’d worn in Citizen Kane.
There was one of those nasal voices you only hear in movies: “Right-O, Mr. Welles.” Central casting had done their job with the receptionist at least.
“Make yourself comfortable, Mr. Williams. This should take a while.” He gestured to an overstuffed leather armchair and I sat down, perching my fedora on one knee. “Nice hat,” he added. “Makes you look the part. Cigar?”
“Cigarette, thanks.” I took one from the box he proffered and accepted a light, though passed on the burgundy he held up next. If I got tipsy, I’d start glowing with St. Elmo’s fire; I said I preferred not to drink on the job.
I guess I can safely admit it now that I’m dead. I was one of those “hidden aces” McCarthy was talking about. Had been since my sophomore year in college when I stepped out of the pool and into the high voltage cord for the floodlights. I got electrified. It wasn’t fatal, just permanent. Two days later, I found I could toss around balls of lightning and light myself up like a Christmas tree. I did my best not to, grounded my excess, and went on with my life, which led roundabout to detective work, though that’s another story.
Welles took a swallow of burgundy and a long pull on his cigar. “You know Wally Fisk, Nick?”
I shrugged. “Not much. Good detective.”
“Bit of a bastard too,” Welles finished my unspoken thought. “He was working for me.”
“Was?”
He flicked his cigar ash to indicate the past tense. “He went mad.”
I didn’t bother to echo him this time, just waited until he filled in the rest. He was paying, after all.
“Stark, raving mad,” Welles said finally. “Torched his apartment, burned his files and ran around screaming that everyone was out to get him. They got him before he could top it off with a suicide. He’s in the lockdown ward at County General.
“Yesterday he was sitting in the exact same chair you are now, saner than most people in this town.” Welles took a long pull on his cigar and let it out slowly.
He watched the smoke as it drifted toward the ceiling. “Will you take over?”
“Depends on the case.”
Welles smiled. “Smart man. Wally was hired to protect my film. If he’d turned up dead, I’d at least have some of my suspicions confirmed. This ... I don’t know. I’ve never had a detective go mad on me before.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t anything he’d planned.” I took a puff on my cigarette. “Did he find anything that would make him snap?”
Welles shrugged. “Who knows? He torched everything he hadn’t turned into me already.”
“What was he protecting?”
“Blythe.” Welles said it more like he was invoking a goddess than saying the name of a woman or a film.
I just took a drag and waited until he continued.
“I got the script from Dalton Trumbo.” Welles took a long sip of burgundy. “It’s the story of the Four Aces, focusing on the House Committee on Un-American Affairs. Picture it in all its sordid glory.” His voice was the showman’s now, ringing through the office as he sketched pictures in the air with his cigar. “Dr. Tachyon as the Lost Prince. Black Eagle as Othello. Jack Braun as Judas and Senator Joseph McCarthy as Torquemada. And Blythe Van Renssaeler as the beautiful, doomed madwoman.”
I knew about as much as any wild card about the Four Aces. They’d been the few lucky ones the first Wild Card Day, and Archibald Holmes had got them together as the
Exotics For Democracy. Black Eagle, who could fly. David Harstein, the Envoy, sort of a Shylock with a conscience, who could get you to agree to anything, no matter how bizarre. Blythe Van Renssaeler, Brain Trust, who had the world’s greatest intellects all within her own mind.
And then there was Golden Boy, the strongest man in the world, who’d told everyone’s secrets to the Committee on Un—American Affairs in exchange for a thank you and thirty pieces of silver. Black Eagle flew away, Tachyon was deported, Holmes and Harstein were sent to prison, and Blythe Van Renssaeler went mad and died in an insane asylum a few years later.
And Jack Braun got to go on being an indifferent actor, in between busting heads for the government.
Welles swirled the burgundy in his glass, contemplating the color. “You come recommended as someone both thorough and discreet, and not overly worried about danger, so long as you receive adequate compensation.”
It was a leading statement. “Who did you hear that from?”
“Kim Wolfe.”
I know I blushed, and I was hard pressed to keep from topping it off with St. Elmo’s fire. A detective does a lot of questionable things in his profession, and I think the worst thing I ever did was take pictures of Jack Braun with his wife’s pretty girl dermatologist. It got her a divorce and me a down-payment on my house. In celebration, Kim Wolfe tried to get me into bed.
They should have stayed married. They deserved each other.
I didn’t feel so bad about that case—believe what you will, it’s standard for a P.I.—as I did about what came after. I got into the habit of taking similar photos and selling them to Braun’s successive wives. There were enough for an erotic pin-up calendar and another brace of divorce suits. I told myself I was doing it to give the Judas ace a taste of his own medicine, but with 20/20 hindsight, I can say I did it for the money.
But back then, I was doing it for the money. “What sort of pay are we talking here?”
Welles named a figure that you’d never find anywhere but the budget of a major motion picture.
I know I paused too long. “I need to know all of my duties before I accept anything.”
“Smart man,” Welles said again. “You’ll be doing anything and everything to protect Blythe. If someone tries something, you’ll stop it, and if possible get evidence we can use for P.R.” He tapped the ash off his cigar with a final gesture. I watched it fall. “And of course you won’t breath a word of this to Hedda or Louella.”
Now there’s something you ought to know about Hollywood, or at least the Hollywood I knew: The gossip columnists ran the town. And the two biggest harpies in Hollywood were Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper.
Louella, or “Lollipop” as she liked to be called, invented the business. She was a neurotic old biddy with a bald spot and a voice like a crow, but at least she could be reasoned with. She didn’t have an axe to grind, only papers to sell.
Hedda was another matter. Hedda was a failed actress who found that all the venom she’d built up over the years actually sold papers and radio spots. She was also a weird old lady who went around in these giant hats and hated everything outside of Middle America prewar, pre-wild card. She hated Reds, she hated Pinks. She hated lavender boys and foreigners and Charlie Chaplin and just about everyone else. But more than anything, she hated wild cards.
Her files must have pinned about half the people on the Black List. And if you were an ace-in-hiding, you didn’t forget that she was thick as the Forty Thieves with J. Edgar Hoover.
She was also tight-knit with Willie Hearst, whose papers owned Louella, and the animosity between them and Welles was public knowledge. If anyone was to get the scoop, it wasn’t going to be Hedda Hopper or the Hearst empire.
“Let me tell you something, Nick,” Welles said. “Blythe is going to be big and it’s going to piss off more people than Citizen Kane. But unlike Kane, I’m not keeping it under wraps.”
I paused and took a drag on my cigarette. “You’ve done a pretty good job so far.”
Welles poured himself another glass of wine. “That, Nick, is the problem. It isn’t a secret, but short of taking out adds in Variety, no one knows what’s being produced. And with the number of spies and rumor—mongers in this town, it doesn’t take a genius to recognize a conspiracy of silence when he hears one.
“I hired Wally to see just how deep it went. This is what he found before he went nuts.”
He gave me a sheaf of documents: letters, bills, newspaper clippings, insurance claims, unproduced scripts like The Bowery Boys in “Jokers’ Town,” and scenes cut from 30 Minutes Over Broadway.
What it added up to was that someone had it out for wild cards, and scenes that made aces a little too heroic had gotten the axe. And movies that showed jokers as anything but monsters terrorizing teenage beach parties invariably had set fires or other accidents.
Welles swirled his burgundy. “I was over at MGM when they were doing Golden Boy. From what I saw of the dailies, it looked to be a reasonably good film. What happened in the cutting room was criminal, probably in every sense of the word.
“Someone doesn’t like wild cards, Nick,” Welles said. “I want you to find out who. Blythe is going to go ahead and it’s going to be the best damn picture I’ve done.”
He gave me a copy of the script and filled me in. They hadn’t contracted all of the players yet, and Trumbo was still doing a polish, but Zanuck had lent him Marilyn Monroe for the title. After her performance in Cleopatra, they’d have lines down the block.
I believed it. Blond Marilyn was nothing compared to raven-haired Marilyn. I was one of ten thousand men wanting to have been that asp.
I stubbed out my cigarette and Welles offered another before I had to ask. “Marilyn,” he said, giving me a light, “is the risky bit. She’s on the bottle, and that wouldn’t be half so bad if it weren’t for Paula Strasberg, her acting coach, and her new psychiatrist, Dr. Rudo. Between the two of them they’ve got her loaded down with more pills than any woman should be able to swallow.” Welles scrunched down, mimicking the posture and accent of a New York matron: “Marilyn, darling, take one of your tranquilizers.” He straightened up then, affecting a haughty look and an aristocratic German accent: “Miss Monroe, I prescribe a Damn-It-All. Take two, they’re small.”
I bit my cigarette to keep from laughing. “So you want me to pry Marilyn away from her bottle and pills?”
Welles was back to himself, trimming another cigar. “I don’t care,” he said, lighting up and sucking smoke like some sort of directorial dragon. “I don’t care if she takes twice as many or goes cold turkey, just so long as she can act. The money for Blythe comes from people who’re willing to bet on the combination of Monroe/Trumbo/Welles, not a bunch of philanthropists who’ll pay for any actress to play a diseased schizophrenic the government’s glad is dead.”
He paused, leaning back in his chair, tapping the cigar with finality. “If Marilyn goes, Blythe is dead too. And whoever doesn’t like wild cards gets what they want.”
I may have been a hidden ace, but I was still a wild card. There was no way I was letting this one go. “I’ll take it.”
“Deal,” Welles said and we shook.
And as Sheherezayd said, “Yet that is not the end of my tale ....”
P leasant evening, artist. A present. And a responsibility.” Sam looked up from his sketchbook just in time to see miniature squid attempting to escape from pirouline cookies, the pastry flutes impaled in a goblet filled with guacamole mixed with pomegranate seeds, winking like demonic eyes behind the round facets. While on one level he knew it was meant to be an exotic appetizer, fusion cuisine of the East-meets-West-goes-South-then-hits-the-other-side-of-the-galaxy school, the end result looked like nothing half so much as a sundae for the Elder Gods.
Hastet benasari Julali Ackroyd, earth’s first and currently only Takisian chef, set the eldritch offering on the table in Martha Stewart’s “It’s a good thing” presentation position.
Sam knew enough to smile, trying to avoid the wide-eyed “Help me!” stares and frantic tentacles of the squidlets which were, he noted out of the corner of one eye, frozen into position with strands of carmelized sugar.
“And the responsibility?”
“Inclusion in tomorrow’s brunch menu?” She preened, smoothing down her apron. “Since you’re already redoing it, I thought this might be Starfields’ new feature item.”
It looked more like a feature from the Bowery Wild Card Dime Museum. A diorama of the Swarm Invasion perhaps, or one of the more disturbing examples of the Monstrous Joker Babies. But Sam knew it would not be politic to say so. Not if he wanted to keep his job. “Um ... could we do it as table placards?”
“As you like,” said Hastet. “I just showed my husband, and he said it would be perfect for Halloween.” She beamed at the mass of tentacles, then frowned. “But that’s not till Wednesday, isn’t it?”
Sam gestured to the patrons in costume about the restaurant. “People celebrate early.”
“Oh good.” She pursed her lips then. “I haven’t given it a name yet. I was thinking ‘Takisian Surprise,’ but given the last one, I don’t think that would sell.” Absently, she tucked a stray brown curl under her chef’s pepperbox. “Jay also said something about ‘Lovecraft’ when he saw it. But that would be for Valentine’s Day, wouldn’t it?”
Sam pictured Cthulhu got up as Cupid and was immediately sorry he had. “No, not exactly.”
Hastet rolled her eyes. “You earthlings have too many holidays.” She gave a grandiloquent wave of dismissal to the tentacle parfait, which Sam guessed to be the Takisian equivalent of ‘Whatever.’”I trust your judgment. Just let it speak to you.” With that, she slipped back through the arch to the kitchen, leaving Sam alone with the otherworldly hors d’oeuvre.
He leaned closer and gave it a wary glance, half expecting it to go scuttling across the table.
It was looking back. A nameless thing from the far depths of space. Bloodstone eyes watched below, flat lavender ovals stared above. Lidless. Unblinking. Alien. Sam wondered how it could possibly speak to him, afraid that it would.
Then it did: “Nice hat you have there.”
A lifetime of living in Jokertown had taught Sam that the most unlikely things could speak. Plants. Animals. Even the urinal in Squisher’s Basement. Things that had once been people, and horribly, on some level, still were, the wild card twisting their bodies into forms no longer even remotely human. But only rarely did they become entities as bizarre as Hastet’s new appetizer. “What?”
“I said ‘Nice hat,’” the dish of tentacles and avocado ichor repeated, its voice incongruously dulcet and feminine, albeit slightly annoyed. “Had it long?” Sam then realized that none of the squid were moving their lips, and unless the eldritch sundae were telepathic—always an option when dealing with victims of an alien virus—it was more likely that the speaker was someone behind it.
He sat up straight and looked past the sugar-frosted cephalopods.
The voice belonged to a woman. A nat woman to all appearances, mid-thirties but damn fine for all that, as petite or even more so than Hastet, with one of those figures you usually need corsetry to get, displaying it to best advantage in a tux shirt, black tie, swallowtail coat, black satin short-shorts, and cobweb-patterned black fishnets over stiletto heels. This ensemble was topped off with a top hat, worn over masses of Titian curls somewhere between Dr. Tachyon and the naturally vain girl from Peanuts. Accented with devil red lipstick and nails, the whole look said either stage magician or hooker, or something with the same effect thrown together for a semi-elegant semi-trashy evening of clubbing the Saturday before Halloween.
Sam heartily approved of the outfit, and the woman in it, and not just because his was almost the same, except he had the cobweb lace as cravat and cuffs, jeans instead of short-shorts, Does in place of stilettos, and slightly more gothic taste in nailpolish. And black velvet gloves, at least on his left hand. He tapped it to the brim of his own top hat. “No, just picked it up.” Sam felt a grin steal across his face as he took in the sights, since up close she looked even better than when he’d first noticed her an hour ago. “Nice threads yourself. Columbia, or Sally from Cabaret?”
She paused for a moment. “No, Topper.”
“She was one of the SCARE aces, right?” Now that she mentioned the name, Sam could see the likeness. “’Cause if you’re supposed to be the guy from the old ghost movies, I never would have gotten it. But speaking of spirits, can I buy you a drink?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Are you old enough to drink?”
Sam grinned. “ID’s are not a problem.” He chuckled then. “Of course, if you’re Topper, you’d just pull whatever you want out of your hat, right? Get me a Long Island?”
She gave a strained smile. “I’d be happy to, assuming I had the right hat ....”
Sam shook his head. “Nice try, but wrong answer. You got the costume perfect, but the real Topper can use any hat—top hats, bowlers, sombreros. And she never does requests.” Sam grinned further. “Besides, she retired that outfit when she quit the Justice Department.”
“Aces High is having a costume party. So sue me.” She put her hands on her hips. “So, how do you know so much about the ‘real’ Topper? Ace groupie?”
“Nah,” Sam shook his head, “someone donated a bunch of back issues of Aces! to the J-town orphanage. Topper was on the cover in the eighties. Had a pinup and everything.” Sam shrugged. “Haven’t made the cover yet myself, but we aces like to keep tabs on each other.”
She arched the same eyebrow. “New ace, huh?” Her eyes flicked over him. “So who are you then, the Artful Dodger?”
“That’s sort of the look I was going for,” Sam said, still smiling, “but actually, you can call me Swash.”
“Swash?”
“Well, it’s either that or ‘His Nibs,’ but even a goth can only be so pretentious.” He held up his ungloved right hand, which had been hidden behind his sketchbook. “Pardon me if I don’t shake, but I’m a little inky right now.”
He watched her eyes start, a pretty cerulean blue, as she took note of his hand, which was stained with that shade and several others beneath his hooked black-enameled Fu Manchu manicure. It wasn’t a joker, but it still had shock value, like an unexpected tongue-stud.
Sam laid his sketchbook flat, displaying the Art Nouveau letters and dancing pumpkins of the menu he’d been re-illuminating. He flexed his fingers, letting a drop of ink come to the tip of each split sharpened crow-quill pointed nail, glanced to Hastet’s nameless appetizer, then flipped to a fresh page and clawed down it. A twitch here, a slash there, a drop of the chartreuse of revulsion and the pale lavender of disquiet, and he’d pretty accurately captured his impression of the tentacular delight. He tossed in a few word balloons with the squidlets saying, “Eat me!” instead of “Help me!” then added a banner borne aloft by Cupidthulhu putti with a caption in dramatically dripping Salamanca script: “Dare you partake of LOVECRAFT’S MADNESS?”
With one more jig of his thumb, he signed it Swash. “See?” He used his gloved left hand to turn the book around. “Not just my ace name, but my artist’s signature too.” He blotted the nails of his right on one of Hastet’s no-longer-immaculately-white napkins. “Like I said, ID’s are not a problem.”
The woman applauded lightly. “Nice trick.”
“Thanks.” Sam grinned.
“Can I have my hat back now?”
He picked up his spare glove and slipped it on, sliding his fingertips into the special pencap sheathes. “Uh, you’re wearing it.” He shook his cuff so the lace fell properly, black cobwebs on black, stealing a glance up from beneath the brim of his own top hat.
“No, I think you’re wearing it.” She gestured to the bar. “About a half hour ago, when the waiter dropped his tray? Someone bumped into me and knocked my hat off.”
Sam remembered the loud and spectacular crash, which had not only made him jump and squirt ink all over a page, ruining one of his sketches, but had also had caused him to dig in his nails, injecting pigment into several pages previous, destroying hours of work. Which in fact was why he was still here, recopying pages and hitting up Hastet for snacks to refill his ink reservoirs. “And ... ?”
“And my grandfather was a stage magician. I know all about misdirection.” She looked pointedly at a spot a few inches above his eyes. “Likewise the bump-and-switch.” She reached up and tapped her hat. “And while this is the same size and vintage as the one I came in with—even the same haberdasher’s mark—it’s not the same hat.”
Sam grimaced. He should have known it was something more than just mutual admiration of gothic finery. “If you wanted to look at my hat ...” He doffed it, stray bits of blond mane falling into his face, “... all you had to do was ask.” He extended it to her. “Was yours a rental prop?”
“No,” she said coldly, grasping the brim, “but it had a lot of sentimental value.” She then thrust her arm inside his hat, up to the elbow. Her hand came out the other end, where the crown was partially detached, becoming even more detached as she did so, and Sam watched as her expression changed, from a look of smug satisfaction, to puzzlement, then to worry as her painted nails fumbled at the air, to red-faced embarrassment as she caught sight of them over the brim of the hat. “Wha—?”
Something in her expression made him flash back to the teenage girl on the cover of Aces! and he realized that, with the exception of Golden Boy, most aces didn’t stay unchanged since the early eighties. “Wait a second,” Sam said, “you really are Topper, aren’t you?” She looked at him and that look cinched it. “That article, it was wrong, right? SCARE disinformation. Your ace crutch isn’t just any hat, or a top hat, it’s one top hat in particular, the one you got from your grandfather. You hid it inside that sombrero and—”
“Not so loud!” she hissed, withdrawing her arm from his hat and abruptly sitting next to him. “I don’t want everyone to—What’s the matter?”
Sam gritted his teeth to keep from screaming. “You’re sitting on my tail!”
She looked. “Uh, it’s a nice tail coat but ...”
Sam twitched his real tail, hidden down the sheath in the left-hand train of his own swallowtail coat where it had been stretched out in the booth, and Topper’s eyes started. She abruptly raised back up so he could yank it under himself, having a moment of trouble as it got tangled with the tails of her coat and the velvet of the upholstery, but at last he got it situated. “My Jokertown membership card, a little joker to go with my deuce.” He blinked back the pain, even though his tail was still smarting. “Okay, now you know my secret too.”
She sighed. “I’m sorry. I won’t tell if you won’t tell.” She grimaced and covered her eyes with one hand, shaking her head softly. “Good god, if Jay ever finds out that I’ve lost my hat, I’ll never hear the end of it ....”
“Hastet’s Jay?”
She dropped her hand and nodded. “I work for his agency.”
Sam glanced down at her fishnets through the hole in his hat. “What sort of agency ... ?”
She follow his gaze, then muttered, “There was a reason I retired this costume ....” Then she glared at him. “Detective agency. Gads, I work for Popinjay, not Fortunato.” She looked then at Sam’s top hat, with its crown falling out, and gave a sheepish grin that made her look years younger. “Sorry about that ....” She glanced around the restaurant. “Do you see any other top hats?”
Sam looked himself. Starfields was packed, and given the night, he saw every sort of hat imaginable, from the odd dozen ostrich-plumed cavalier hats worn by the Dr. Tachyon lookalike waiters to representational foam rubber creations liberated from the Theatre District, looking to be cast-offs from last month’s Wild Card Follies everything from the Great Ape climbing the Empire State Building to Dr. Tod’s flaming blimp. But no top hats.
“Right now?” He smoothed his hair back with one velvet glove and replaced his battered hat with the other, pushing the crown inside. “Excepting mine and the one you’re wearing, no.”
She bit her lower lip. “Earlier?”
Sam thought back. “Several. Let me look ....” He picked up his sketchbook, blowing once across it so that the snot-trails from the Salamanca script would be dry, then flipped back past the buffer of blank pages he’d left to protect from bleed-through until he got to the ruined section. He pried open the last two sheets, still damp from the accident, revealing a giant multicolored Rorschach blot of sprayed ink, one hue bleeding into the next, predominantly the shocking pink of surprise. But underneath that, still visible on the lefthand page, were a series of sketches, including an image of the Starfields bar just minutes before the crash. Counting top hats, there were seven individuals of note, the first six wearing tail coats, the last without.
First was Topper, holding a martini, perched at the edge of the bar in her fishnets. Next, a short ways down, was a crippled boy with polio crutches. Then came a young man with a blond mane and velvet gloves, the very image of Sam himself, turned and talking to a darkly handsome man with black hair and a permanent five-o’-clock shadow, fiddling with a small hand-held black box. Then there was a set of improbably wide shoulders, facing the bar and taking up at least three seats, the top hat worn atop a perfectly average, even narrow, head. Next a pale horse-faced giant with a long white goatee and a spiked and spiraled Mohawk, his top hat artfully and absurdly impaled on the twisted spikes. Then, finally, there was a fetish girl, a long, lithe, willowy woman, thin as a supermodel and almost as tall, dressed head to toe in latex. Her catsuit and platform-soled dominatrix boots were all of a piece, broken only by buckles and straps, and her face was hidden by a pantomime mask, a single tear on one cheek. This was backed by long honey blond tresses and topped with a vintage silk top hat.
“Here.” Sam handed the book to Topper.
She scrutinized the page like a rogues gallery. “Do you know any of these people?”
“Everyone except the women on the ends.” Sam paused. “Though I’m getting to know the one of them.”
Topper looked at him, and their proximity, and smirked. “Don’t push it. I’m old enough to be your babysitter.”
Sam shrugged. “I grew up in an orphanage. I never had a babysitter.” He paused. “Though I did have fantasies.”
Topper didn’t touch this, focusing instead on the mystery woman. “So, the Vinyl Vixen here—any idea who she is? Is that an ace uniform? A joker disguise? A Halloween costume? A really kinky fashion statement?”
Sam shrugged. “All of the above? Go to bondage night at the Dead Nicholas and that’s a pretty common look.” Then he added, “I do their club flyers.”
“Is it just me, or does it look like she has an Adam’s apple under the latex?” Topper looked closer at the illustration. “Or is that an inkblot?”
“Hard to tell. When I sketch fast, I just—” He caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of one eye, a flash of silver buckles and golden hair. “Though maybe you could just ask Latex Lass yourself.” He pointed across the restaurant to where the same woman was coming out of the ladies room.
Topper looked, then shoved his sketchbook into his hands, standing up and rushing from the booth. Or really, attempting to. Sam felt a tug on his tail, and realized that when he’d tucked it under himself for safe keeping, he’d taken Topper’s along with it, the cloth ones on her coat. The antique wool snapped back like a pair of suspenders in a vaudeville act, and Topper screeched, over-balancing on her stiletto heels, clawing to save herself, grabbing the tablecloth. Silverware, glassware, and the prodigious greenness of Hastet’s tentacled appetizer clattered down atop her as Sam forewent chivalry to protect his sketchbook, springing back out of the way and halfway atop the booth.
There was, as with all such accidents, a swift silence, followed by even swifter sarcastic applause. Then Takisian Three Musketeers extras were helping Topper to her feet and offering words of solicitous concern while Fetish Girl crossed Starfields’ star-spangled foyer, pushed open the nebula-frosted glass panels of the entrance, and made her exit. Topper gave a strangled shriek of protest, attempting to evade the well meaning interference of the wait staff, and sprinted for the crack in the stars as fast as petite legs in stiletto heels could carry her.
Sam struggled across the wreckage of tablecloth and hors d’oeuvres and was faced with a snap decision: He could stay, finish his work, and try to explain the mess to Hastet, or he could follow Topper. It was an easy choice. Besides which, Hastet was Takisian, and as such, she knew that chivalry had its demands, as did attractive women in fishnet stockings. And while Sam wasn’t tall, he was taller than Topper, and he caught up with her just as she passed through the doors. He leapt through the gap in the nebula after her, his tail pinging the edge of the glass, then it was down the stairs, no waiting for the elevator, and out to the sidewalk.
Topper took three steps outside and looked up and down the street, then back at him. “Where is she?”
Sam looked too, taking in the bustle of Park Row and trying to spot a latex-clad supermodel in a vintage top hat, then shook his head. “Gone. I’m sorry, I—”
“Do you have any idea where she went?”
Sam shook his head again. “No.” Then he paused. “Or actually, yes. I’m pretty certain I do. Follow me.” Topper looked ready to grasp at the slimmest hope, and Sam gave it to her. “Taxi!” he shouted, jumping out into the street and flagging one down.
Sam went into chivalry overdrive, opening the door for Topper, who piled in, with him following.
The driver had a beard and a turban and a wide smile. “What is your destination on this fine night, oh most—” The man stopped, goggling in horror at Topper, as if she’d just sprouted an extra head.
Sam looked. She had. Well, actually no, but the effect was remarkably similar, one of the cephalopod confections caught in her curls, staring at the driver with the same wide-eyed expression, like Father Squid being subjected to an unexpected proctology exam.
It was against Sam’s better judgement, but if he’d learned one thing growing up in Jokertown, it was this: Sometimes you had to freak the nats. Plus Hastet expected him to taste her creations, not just draw them, so the time had come to bite the bullet, or at least the squid.
Sam removed it from Topper’s curls and popped the pirouline into his mouth, biting down. It was crunchy and spicy-sweet, a little like Japanese spider roll, mixed with the dry caraway flavor of kimmel cracker. Then his eyes began to water. Takisian Surprise was right! Hastet had spiked the guacamole with wasabi or some otherworldly equivalent.
Topper looked at him. “Edible?”
Sam swallowed and thumped his chest. “Like Candy Mandy’s fingers.” He wiped the tears with the back of his glove. “Girl I knew back at Jokertown High. Edible fingers. Really.”
There was really no response to this, and Topper didn’t try to make one. Half the Jokertown stories were ‘No, really’ bullshit, and the other were unbelievable, but still true.
The driver was still staring his own rectal-examination stare, and Sam had a bad feeling in his own tail, but pressed ahead anyway, smiling as if nothing could be more natural. “Jokertown, please. Club Chaos.”
At last the cabby’s expression changed, going from a mask of shocked horror to righteous indignation. “This cab, by the Light of Allah, does not go to the abode of the unclean!”
“What if we gave you some unclean money?”
The mask faltered for a moment. “How much?”
“Five hundred bucks,” said Topper.
“Let me see it.”
“Fine.” Topper took her hat off and started to reach inside, then stopped. “Oh shit—I left my wallet in my other hat.” She looked to Sam.
He shrugged. “Don’t look at me. I don’t carry that sort of money.”
“Can’t you ...” She wiggled her nails and gestured towards Sam’s sketchbook.
Forge five hundred dollars on the fly? And without the right paper? “I don’t think so.”
“Get out of my cab. Allah spits on jokers and liars.”
Sam thought, remembering the rantings of the Nur, who’d glowed as green as if he’d swallowed a Lite Brite set, which seemed pretty close to a joker by most people’s definitions. “If I remember correctly, Allah thinks aces are just spiffy.” Sam stripped off his right glove and brought five beads of Nur-green ink to the tip of his nibs, luminous poison green, the color he’d always associated with malice. “See these, dickweed? Allah gave me poison claws, and if you don’t take this fucking cab to Club Chaos before I can say ‘Allah Akbar,’ Allah tells me I get to poison your ass dead.”
“Allah Akbar!” the cabbie agreed fervently and Sam nearly got whiplash as fast as they took off down the street.
Topper stared at him, and Sam didn’t know whether he’d just crossed the line to become her knight in shining armor or a dangerous psychopath—likely something of both—and he wondered how long he could bluff a religious fanatic with what amounted to a handful of fountain pens.
Topper turned to the cabbie. “I’ll also have you know that I’m a federal agent, or at least I used to be. You move so much as a finger towards that gun under your seat, I’ll drop you before poison boy here even gets in a scratch.” She had one of her stiletto heels off in her hand, pressed into the vinyl in back of the cabbie’s seat. “That okay?”
“Allah Akbar!” the cabbie swore, turning left on Chatham Square and into Chinatown, and left again with a squeal of tires onto Confucius Place.
Conventional wisdom said it took only three minutes to get from the Village to J-Town, but Confucius said that men fearing for their lives could get there in less than two, even when all they were threatened with was stiletto heels and fountain pens. “With the grace of Allah, we are here!” They screeched to a stop in front of Club Chaos. “Do not harm me, oh most beloved of Allah!”
“Stay where you are,” Topper told the cabbie, opening her own door, and Sam did the same with his, wiping his nails clean on the headliner as he exited, leaving the cabbie with the message, in elegant sihafa script, Allah says you’re a dickweed. Actually, it was probably something more like, Allah, the compassionate and most merciful, says you’re a putrescent camel penis steeped in mint-fennel sauce, but most of Sam’s Arabic came from falafel house menus.
The cab sped off the moment the doors were shut and Topper grimaced. “Idiot,” she said, balancing flamingo-style as she replaced her shoe.
Sam didn’t know if she were referring to him or the cabbie, and didn’t ask. “Did we just commit a felony?”
“Do you actually have poisonous claws?”
“No.”
“Then no.” She shrugged. “I came closer to it, but I never actually said I had a gun, and I have friends in the Justice Department.” She walked over to him and looked up at the Club Chaos sign, the latest work of the Jokertown Redevelopment Agency. In place of the broken and blighted marquee of the long defunct Chaos Club, there now stood a fifty-foot tall neon version of the new club’s owner, veteran joker comedian, Chaos, back after many lucrative years in Vegas (and a split with his old partner, Cosmos), bringing some of the glitter and tinsel with him to mix with the city’s matching funds. He juggled spaceships and planets with his six arms, while below his feet, sporting considerably less neon, was a television van plastered with a twirling Mtv logo. A huge mass of teenage girls, most of them nats, were standing behind police barricades while a single, albeit large and brown-scaled, police officer attempted to keep them in line. The joke of it was, they were all dressed like Topper—top hats, tail coats, and more than half of them had figured out that fishnets were the way to complete the ensemble, even those who should have considered something else.
Topper stopped and did a double take. Then turned to Sam. “When did my outfit suddenly come into fashion?”
Sam felt a bit uneasy. “Um, it didn’t. I think my outfit came into fashion.”
“Come again?”
“Ever hear of The Jokertown Boys?”
She paused. “They’re a gang, right? Like the Werewolves or the Egrets?”
“Um, no.” Sam reached to the back of his portfolio and pulled out a flier done in the Bauhaus style, with blocky Bremen lettering that had required cutting his thumbnails square. He passed it to Topper and let her read it:
8 PM, Saturday, October 27th
Club Chaos!
The Jokertown Boys
CD Release Party
‘Top Hat, White Tie, and Tails’
Wear Yours and Get in Free!
Below that was a pen-and-ink portrait of the five guys in formalwear from the bar, facing right and sporting canes and white gloves, the pose something Sam had modeled after one of the old posters for Grand Hotel.
Topper looked to Sam and blinked. “You’re in the band?”
“No, I just live with them. I sang backup on a couple tracks, that’s all.” Sam pointed to illustration. “People mistake us all the time, but that’s my brother, Roger.”
“So that wasn’t you by the bar?” Topper scrutinized the flyer, then bit her lip. “You know, except for the guy with the shoulders, they look awfully nat for Jokertown.”
“Looks can be deceiving.” Sam brushed his tail in its swallow-tail sheath against Topper’s leg. “Trust me. They’re all jokers and they’re all from J-town.” He paused. “Well, Dirk there’s from the Village, and we’ve been renting the upstairs of his mom’s shop since we left the orphanage. But Village People? Don’t think so.” He looked at the van, watching a guy in a wizard hat atop it working the crowd, and realized it was Carson Daly. “Since when did they hook up with Mtv?”
There came a squeal from the line of girls and a louder one as he made the mistake of looking, and Sam came to a sudden grim realization: Once again, his fraternal resemblance had carried too far.
“It’s Roger!” screamed a girl in a domino mask, and her screams were picked up by the next teenybopper in line, and the next, like a chorus of howler monkeys at the zoo: “Roger!”
“Roger!”
“Roger, we love you!” The crowd pressed forward and the barricade overturned, the girls trampling the scaled police officer in their mad rush.
It wasn’t the Jokertown Riots, or the Wild Hunt from the Rox War, but it was the closest thing Sam had ever experienced to either. Screaming girls. Clawing girls. A huge slavering hound’s muzzle thrust in his face. “I’m not Roger, I’m his brother!” Sam protested, but the clawing and screaming and tearing at his clothes continued until Topper and the scaled police officer, who’d somehow crawled under the crowd, linked arms before him and held them back, bellowing things about the NYPD and federal agents.
Then autograph books were waved in his face past them. This, at least, was something he could deal with. Roger, he signed, and Roger!!!, and To my dearest fan, and then he was confronted by part of the hunger and madness of the Rox War made flesh, the drooling, panting muzzle of one of the Gabriel hounds, white fangs glistening, fierce and sharp. Except the hound had bows in its hair and was holding an autograph book, and Sam realized he was looking at a joker fangirl with the head of an afghan. He signed all five band members’ names in her book simultaneously, one with each digit: Roger, Jim, Alec, Dirk and Paul, each signature in the respective hand, then did a second line with their wild card manes: Ravenstone, Grimcrack, Alicorn, Atlas and Pretty Paulie, with extra hearts and smiley faces.
Then Topper was shoved aside by sheer bulk. “Sign my breasts!” screamed an obese nat girl who’d exceeded the recommended weight allowance of her halter top.
Sam did not want to scratch her—not that her fellow autograph-seekers had any such reservations when it came to him—but it was not as if these girls were jokerphobic anyway, so he flexed the toes of his left foot, letting his nails piss ink into his Doc Marten, then slipped his tail out of its sheath, dunked it into the impromptu inkwell, and whipped it up and around and through the flourishes of Japanese brushwork. Roger he wrote on the right breast and Ravenstone on the left.
“I’m going to have it tattooed in!” the girl squealed.
Her fellow fanatics howled for more, surging through the gap, then one grabbed his tail and two others grabbed his arms, wrestling him for his sketchbook, and a fourth clawed for his face, snatching off his hat. Then she gasped in shock. “His eyes are blue!” she screamed. “Both of them! And where are his cute little horns?”
“Where’s the raven?” demanded another.
“Wait a second,” said the girl behind him, “since when does Ravenstone have a tail? And wouldn’t it be a devil tail? This is a lion’s tail? What sort of rip is this?”
“I read about him in TeenBeat!” screamed a slightly more knowledgeable fangirl. “That’s Roger’s brother, Swish!”
“That’s Swash!” Sam roared, snatching his hat back and jamming it on, wresting away his sketchbook, and jerking his tail free. The crowd fell back, the scaled police officer shouting for the girls to get their butts behind the barricade. Sam lashed his tail, splashing drops of ink, and stomped forward, his coat torn, his left boot squishy, his hatjammed down around his ears. He hoped Roger had brought spare socks.
Topper scanned the crowd as they walked past. “Any sign of Bondage Babe?” Even with the stiletto heels, she wasn’t tall enough to see more than the teenyboppers just behind the barricades.
“You mean Fetish Girl?” Sam wasn’t much taller than Topper himself. “Not that I can see. Not that that means much.” He shepherded Topper around the side of the building, past a few more autograph seekers, drying off his tail by painting the Chinese characters for Luck, Joy and Get-a-Life on the proffered books.
“You think she’s inside with the band?”
Sam just shrugged, going up the steps to the stage door. There was a bouncer who blocked it, via the simple expedient of being the same size and shape. “Passes?” he asked in a dull monotone.
Topper took off her hat and started to reach inside, then stopped and looked to Sam.
“Check the doorlist. Sam Washburn and ...” He glanced to Topper. He didn’t even know her real name.
“Melissa Blackwood,” Topper supplied.
The doorman looked. “You’re on it, she’s not.”
“Let me see.” The doorman did, and Sam ran a finger down it, not very impressed. Childish roundhand, two steps from Palmer method. “Right here, in the middle.” He tapped the list, dotting the i in Melissa.
The doorman checked again and it was a testimony to his dullness or his professionalism that he just shrugged and stepped aside, crossing them off and handing them passes once Sam flashed him his driver’s license and Topper flashed some leg.
The back of Club Chaos was an old hemp house, an off-Broadway theatre unchanged since the thirties except for facelifts out front, with nothing else special about it, except for the welcome. “Hey, look everyone, it’s His Nibs!” Alec Harner, alias Alicorn, the lead guitarist, waved, easy to spot by virtue of him being something over seven feet tall, not counting the three-foot ice blond spiked Mohawk, which easily put him over ten.
Paul O’Nealy, alias Pretty Paulie, the main vocalist, swung forward on his polio crutches, the lines of his tux somewhat spoiled by the elaborate armature of head, shoulder, back, arm and leg braces necessitated by his rubberized skeleton. With a top hat covering his perpetually unruly brown hair, this and his sweet smile made him look more than a bit like Tiny Tim, posterchild for cute sick boys everywhere—despite the fact that he stood around six feet, depending on how he adjusted his braces that morning. “Sam! I thought you were stuck at Starfields till you redid those menus.”
“Change of plans. Hastet’s not going to find anyone else who can do Takisian calligraphy on short notice, and so long as I get everything there before brunch tomorrow, she won’t kill me.”
“You need to find a different job.” Jim Krakowiez, alias Gimcrack, the band’s keyboardist and tech wizard, looked concerned and not at all a joker, with black hair, intense green eyes, and a permanent five-o’-clock shadow that also made him look far older than his nineteen years. However, looks could be deceiving. Despite the male model face and the tall, toned and perfectly muscled nat body that went with it, the wild card had touched him deep inside his head, making him possibly the most gullible man in the universe, and certainly the most literal-minded. “I know Takisians take their honor seriously, but she shouldn’t kill you just because you messed up a menu. That’s not right and it wasn’t your fault anyway.” He blanched then. “Did she kill the waiter? The one who tripped?”
“No, Jim, he’s fine.” Sam patted his friend on the arm. “Hastet’s not really going to kill me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Looks like someone tried to.” Roger stood in the shadows of the proscenium, looking like a young Odin, with a patch over his left eye, and his pet raven, Lenore, on his right glove. “Sweet Joker-Jesus, Sam, what happened to you?”
Sam sighed, pulling up on his sleeve where the seam had been ripped out at the shoulder. “Some of your fans just tried to play Stretch Armstrong with me.”
“Hey, that’s my shtick!” Paul protested.
Sam ignored him, turning to his brother. “What the fuck’s going on out there?”
“It’s a long and complicated tale,” Roger began, coming forward from the shadows. “I’m not certain where to start ....”
“Britney Spears got food poisoning!” Alec exclaimed, then started to laugh, nearly braying. “Puked Pepsi all over Bob Dole!”
Paul giggled, then made a strangled ralphing noise, followed by a perfectly inflected, girlish, “Oops! I did it again!” The wild card had elasticized his vocal cords along with his bones, giving even more justification for his nickname, a talent for mimicry rivaled only by his vocal range. “Yeah, and she was supposed to be over at Radio City tonight doing the Halloween show for Mtv!”
Alec nodded wildly, his Mohawk bobbing like a sail. “But, puking Britney—they had to cancel.”
“And our video just trashed everyone on Total Request Live!” Paul exclaimed, bouncing up and down on his crutches.
Alec continued to nod, the motion revealing that the bowsprit of his coiffure was actually a spiraled ivory horn, hidden like the Purloined Letter just below his forelock. “And Britney said she thought Paul was cute!”
Paul grinned from ear to ear—literally. “And we were having a concert tonight anyway, so they moved the show here!”
“In a nutshell ... yes.” Roger stroked Lenore, smoothing down her ruffled feathers and keeping a tight hold on her jesses. “Chaos told us the deal when we got back from dinner.”
It was all a little bit much to take at once, surreal in fact, and Sam just took it in stride when a parade of thirty women, all dressed like Topper, filed by in back of the band.
“The Rockettes,” Jim explained. “Mtv said if they paid for them, they were going to use them, and they already know all the Irving Berlin numbers anyway.” Jim smiled. “We didn’t see the nutshell Roger said they came in, but I’m guessing it was a big one, kind of like the giant flying seashell Dr. Tachyon uses.”
“Oh,” said Sam. Topper just stood there in stunned silence, watching the seemingly endless display of top hats.
Alec angled his Mohawk towards her and stroked his equally long, silky and silly goatee. “You’re not a Rockette, are you?” He loomed over Sam. “Going to introduce us to your friend, Swash?”
“Uh, yeah.” Sam shook his head, realizing he’d been forgetting his manners. “Guys, this is Topper. The ace.”
“Alec,” said Alec, bending down to shake hands, “the joker.” Their size differential made them look like Teniel’s illustration of Alice and the Unicorn, except Alec was only horse-faced in the nat sense and Alice didn’t wear a top hat and fishnets. “Or ‘Alicorn,’ if you want my joker name.”
“Nice to meet you,” she said, his hand enveloping hers as they shook. “I remember seeing you at Starfields.” Sam saw her glance to Alec’s immense Mohawk-impaled top hat and immediately discount the possibility.
“People tend to do that,” Alec remarked as he straightened back up and uncricked his back. “It’s the height.”
Topper nodded. “People overlook me. Same reason.”
“That’s not true,” said Jim. “Paul kept looking at your legs. He said they looked totally hot, which kinda confuses me, ’cause in fishnets you’d expect they’d be cool.”
“Jim!” Paul exclaimed, his voice jumping three octaves. Then he looked to Topper, blushing furiously. “Pardon me while I curl up into a ball and die of embarrassment ....” He glanced to Jim. “No, Jim. I’m not really going to. It’s just a metaphor. People don’t really die of embarrassment.”
“Yes they do!” Jim protested. “Don’t you remember Margie? From the orphanage? Five years ago she got her period and stained her choir robe and she said, ‘Oh God, I’m so embarrassed, I’m going to die!’ Then she did die, right there next to us in the middle of church. She drew the black queen, and Father Squid said it was embarrassment that made her card turn, just like she said. And he had a whole sermon next Sunday about the evils of shame and how it kills jokers.” Jim’s lip began to quiver. “And I’ve seen you curl up into a ball. You can even bounce.”
Paul gave Jim a look halfway between sympathy and exasperation. “It’s okay, Jim. I’m not going to die. And shame doesn’t really kill jokers. Usually.” He paused then, taking a deep breath. “And none of us are latents anymore anyway. Even Roger’s drawn his card.”
“I haven’t,” said Jim, blinking at tears. “I’m still a completely normal ....”
“Jim, you’re an ace. A crazy powerful one.”
“Am not.”
“Are too.”
“Am not,” Jim insisted.
Paul let it drop, and there was an uncomfortable silence, which Roger broke with the rolling tones of a born showman: “I believe we were in the middle of introductions. If I may, allow me to introduce Jim and Paul, alias Gimcrack and Pretty Paulie. And this is my assistant, Lenore,” he said, gesturing to his raven. “While as for myself ...” Roger held up his left hand, showed the glove’s palm then the back, then with a flourish, produced a business card from thin air.
Lenore snatched it from him, holding the card in her beak.
“Give it to the nice lady, Lenore,” Roger coaxed, holding the raven towards Topper. “Give it.”
Lenore looked at Topper, then at Roger, then defiantly took the card in one claw and began to shred it into confetti. Roger caught it in his left hand, squeezed tight, then opened it with a flourish, presenting the card to Topper, miraculously restored, if missing a corner. “For you, my good lady. The Amazing Ravenstone, at your service.”
She accepted it with a smile. “A fellow conjurer, I see.”
“But nowhere near your level of skill, I’m afraid.” He retrieved the last corner from Lenore’s beak. “I’m afraid my ace at present only extends to parlor magic. But I’m working to expand my repertoire.” He handed the torn corner to Topper. “Would that I had your skill. Or that of your grandfather.”
“Likewise,” Topper said, putting the missing corner to the card and seeing that they matched. “I only pull rabbits out of my hat, not tigers.”
“The legendary Blackwood Conjure ....” Roger gave a wry smile. “A most impressive feat, especially since Lafayette Blackwood accomplished it without apparent access to curtain, trap door, or gimmicked stand—and this years before the advent of the wild card.” Roger gave her a sidelong glance from his unpatched eye. “I know that almost all his props and effects were destroyed in a fire, but did he ever by any chance pass on the secret personally?”
“Grandpa took it to his grave, I’m afraid.” Topper gave a sad shake of her head. “He always said that a magician’s secrets were meant to be lost, stolen, or traded for one equal, never given out-right or sold for cheap.”
Roger nodded, then quoted, “‘For to do so would cheapen the magic and destroy the wonder, and the world needs mysteries, now more than ever.’”
Jim applauded wildly, then smiled at Topper. “That was the end of the ‘History of Magic’ spiel he gave when we worked at Dutton’s Magic and Novelty Shop.” Jim smiled wider. “Roger always said it just before trying to sell people ‘Topper’s Big Box of Ace Magic Tricks.’ He got a commission.”
“Oh God,” said Topper, “they’re still selling those? I thought the license expired years ago.”
“Mr. Dutton bought up the warehouse. He told us to jack the price and call them collectibles, and if we could unload them, we got an extra twenty percent.” Jim smiled. “I worked there too. I sold more X-ray specs than any other employee.”
Roger glared. “That’s because you used your ace to make them actually work, Jim.”
“I did not,” Jim protested. “They work just fine for anybody, so long as you adjust them right, and it’s not my fault if people keep breaking them after they leave the store.”
“Jim, regular people can’t see through walls.”
“Sure they can. All they need are X-ray glasses. Or windows.” Jim glared at Roger. “You said the same thing when we were kids and you were upset because your sea monkeys didn’t look like the ones on the package and mine did. Just because I know how to follow directions and can get products to work the way they’re supposed to doesn’t make me an ace.”
Roger left the statement unchallenged, as did Sam. There was no point in arguing with Jim, especially when he got in a mood, since the flipside of absolute gullibility and literal-mindedness was absolute faith, and when the universe catered to your belief in it, this was not necessarily misplaced. Even if that belief was mostly in the outrageous promises of advertising, particularly the products in the backs of comic books and supermarket tabloids.
Jim still looked hurt. “You should remember what it’s like, Roger. You were a latent too, before the wild card gave you a black eye.”
Topper looked at Roger, incredulous. “A black eye?”
Roger nodded. “Jim is being accurate here. I got a black eye.” Roger raised his hand and flipped up his eyepatch. His left eye was black, totally black, without trace of white or iris. “As you can see,” Roger said with a wink before hiding the eye again, “Raven-stone is not just my stage name or my nom de ace,” He tapped the brim of his hat, “but also my nom de joker.”
Topper looked at his hat. “Nice hat,” she remarked. “Finchley’s Fifth Avenue?”
“Of course,” said Roger. “The classic magician’s hat. And a good old New York firm too.”
“May I see it? I collect hats.”
“You and Cameo should talk,” Paul remarked.
“Our costume designer,” Roger explained, doffing his hat to reveal a pair of small black horns. “She also collects. Though not just hats.” He handed his to Topper. “She found our costumes for the show.”
“Or made them,” Alec added. “Hard to find my size, even in Jokertown.”
“And she wouldn’t punch holes in a vintage number anyway,” Roger pointed out. “She’d consider it murder.” His eye flicked to Sam’s mangled hat. “I suggest you ask for a loaner, Sam. We may want to drag you on stage later and I can’t have my brother dressed like that.”
“On stage? Oh please.”
“You’re our cover artist. Take your bows.” He smirked. “Besides, we may need a backup singer, in case Alec suddenly gets hoarse ....”
“Please God no ...” said Alec.
Sam was in agreement. “I don’t sing that well, Roger.”
“Better than Alec would,” Roger said. “Besides, you know all the songs.”
“Thank you,” said Topper, returning Roger’s hat and saving Sam from further argument. “May I?” Jim and Paul showed her their hats as well, but Sam knew from her expression that theirs weren’t hers either. “Of course,” she added, “the hat thing is just a hobby. I was hoping you boys could help me with something else. I’m a private investigator, and I was looking for a woman you may have seen at Starfields—who incidentally also wears a top hat. Swash, could you show them your illustration?”
Sam took his cue and opened the sketchbook. The ink had smeared even more and the pages were almost glued together, bits of paper tearing off in little shreds, but at last he showed them the sketch of the Vinyl Vixen.
“I remember her,” said Jim. “Paul said she was totally hot too. But that made sense, ’cause she’s wearing all that latex.”
Paul blushed slightly. “So I’ve got a thing for rubber. Go figure.”
Roger shrugged. “If I recall, she stumbled into the waiter. Likely couldn’t see much with that mask. I helped her up and returned her hat, and last I saw, she ran off for the ladies room, presumably to wash off the Takisian margarita he’d spilled down her back.”
“Presumably,” Topper said.
“I bet she was a fan,” Alec said. “She kept looking at you, Roger, like she was thinking about asking for your autograph.”
“Roger was looking at you the same way,” Jim told Topper.
Roger gave Jim a withering look, then glanced to Topper. “Well, I’ll admit, I am a fan. Though mostly of your grandfather. The man was amazing.”
“So are a number of things,” Topper said, glancing to Roger, then Sam. “Joker-deuce brothers. The odds are what? One in a thousand? Ten thousand?”
“Somewhere in there.” Roger flashed his devilish smile. “Scarce as hen’s teeth and twice as weird.”
“Not that we’re complaining,” Sam added. “The Croyd outbreak killed our parents and left us infected and unadoptable. Same with lots of kids, actually. After I drew my card, I was afraid I was going to lose Roger. After all, look at the odds.”
“We survived. That’s what counts.” Roger stroked Lenore’s feathers. “And the same with some of our friends from the orphanage.” He nodded to Jim, Alec and Paul.
“We didn’t just survive—we’re freakin’ huge!” This last was said, without apparent irony, by Dirk Swenson, alias Atlas, drummer for the Jokertown Boys, who despite a face with delicate, almost Takisian, features, had shoulders about as wide as he was tall, with muscles to match. “I just carried Jim’s piano out on stage and snuck a peek through the curtains and you won’t believe how many girls are out there!”
“And let us not forget our loud friend from the New York School for the Arts ...” Roger said in an aside to Topper.
Dirk was loud in more than one sense of the word. He’d swapped out of his custom tail coat and tux shirt and into a sun-burst tie-die, presumably for the set up, and Sam wondered if the rumors were true, that he was Starshine’s lovechild. Certainly they had the same fashion sense, thought that just might be due to the fact that the muscleboy had been raised following the Grateful Dead until Jerry Garcia died and Dirk’s mom had moved back to the Village to take over The Cosmic Pumpkin.
“I can’t freakin’ believe it!” Dirk boomed. “This is absolutely wild!”
Sam was in agreement, but from a slightly different angle, since ‘wild’ was a pretty accurate description of the nat girls they’d encountered out front.
“Dirk?” Roger said, getting his attention. “Allow me to introduce you to Topper, the famous ace conjurer. Topper, Dirk, our piano-lifting drummer. Dirk, I need you to get back into costume before we do a sound check, but before you do, Topper was wondering if you’d seen the woman in vinyl from the bar.” He pointed to Sam’s illustration.
“Oh, yeah, Bondage Girl,” said Dirk, looking at the illustration. “She was hot.”
“We’ve established that,” Topper said. “Do you know her? Did she by any chance say anything?”
“Nah,” said Dirk, “I think she was doing the mime trip. But I gave her one of the flyers Sam did for the show. I hope she gets in,” he added, “Chaos said it’s, like, going to be standing room only, and the shows around us’ll have to deal with our overflow.”
“The toilets are going to back up?” asked Jim.
“Nah,” said Dirk, “that’s theatre talk. Means girls who can’t get in will go to other clubs.”
Topper looked more than slightly alarmed at this, but only said, “Is that your coat and hat over there? Let me get them for you.”
“Cool. Thanks.” Dirk pulled of his tie-die, revealing musculature like a classical statue of Atlas reinterpreted by an eighties comic book artist, while Topper went to where his ordinary hat and incredibly huge shirt and jacket had been laid over an amp. She came back with them, but Sam could tell from her look that Dirk’s hat had been eliminated from the running as well.
“Here you go,” she said, handing him his clothes. “Mind if we go sneak a peek at the audience? I don’t think I’ve ever seen this many ... girls ... in one place ever before, and I’d like to see them all before the fire marshal turns anyone away.”
“Yeah, go greet my fans,” Sam said, pulling at the lining hanging out of the torn pocket of his coat.
“Sure,” Roger said, “we need to go over some stuff anyway. Glad you could make it after all—and nice to meet you.” Roger tipped his hat to Topper and he and the boys went over to the stage area and started a sound check. Meanwhile, Sam and Topper slipped around the edge of the proscenium, coming out past the red velvet curtain. There were cheers and screams almost immediately: “Roger! Roger!” and “Show us your horns!”
Sam didn’t oblige, just looked out at the main floor of the club. He had never seen so many girls in his life. Girls in black formal-wear and fishnets, leather and lace, shiny patches of vinyl and acres of bare midriffs, with mime masks and dominos and occasional headbands with animal ears or maybe just joker ears sticking out beneath their hats. Top hats. Everywhere. And there were more girls and more than a few boys pouring in all the time, forming a sea of high silk hats on either side of the runway that led forward from the main stage, taking seats at the tables in the upper mezzanine, or swarming through the shadows of the upper balcony.
“Oh my God ...” said Topper, stricken. “I haven’t seen this many possible suspects since the Democratic National Convention ....”
Sam watched the bouncing, waving, shimmying sea of fans. “Well at least my brother and my friends have been lined out.” He glanced to her. “They have been lined out, right?”
“Sorry,” Topper admitted. “First rule of detective work—everyone’s a suspect until you solve the crime. Or the innocent mix-up. But if we don’t figure it out soon, it may become an unsolved mystery ....” She looked out at the sea of top hats. “Can you spot our mystery woman?”
Sam looked. “No. I’d need opera glasses.” He glanced back to Topper. “Got any?”
“If I had my hat, that would not be a problem.” She smiled to the crowd and managed a feeble wave. “But if I had it, the point would be moot.” Topper’s smile looked like it had been affixed with a staplegun.
“We could ask Cameo,” Sam suggested. “If anyone has some, she would.”
“Cameo?” She looked glad for any excuse to look away from the audience. “The costumer for the band?”
“And the Jokertown Players. And Broadway. And the Jokertown High theatre department.” Sam held up his right glove and waggled his fingers, girls in the audience screaming in response. “Made me these. Even recommended Roger and the rest of the guys for the School for the Arts.” He waved again, eliciting more screams from frenzied girls, which was sort of fun now that he wasn’t in the middle of them, but only slightly. “She always has this bag of props. Seen her pull out everything from a feather boa to a frying pan.”
“Worth a shot,” Topper said. “But you ask. I don’t want anyone else to have even a chance of knowing what’s going on.”
“Sure thing.”
She pulled Sam back past the edge of the curtain and sighed, then looked at him. “You know what, Swash? The girls out there are right—you are cute. Way too young for me, but cute.” She gave a nervous grin. “Now let’s go see about those binoculars, Mr. Teen Idol.”
Sam felt a blush stealing into his face. “Sure thing.”
It took a bit of asking around backstage, but they finally located Cameo in the wardrobe room. “Got a sec?”
“No, but tell me what you need anyway.” She emerged from behind a rack of costumes, dressed as a twenties flapper in a fringed tea dress and cloche hat, her only departures from cutting the perfect IT girl figure being a tape measure in place of a string of pearls around her neck and the sudden expression of shock on her face as she stopped, gaping. Then the moment passed. “Sam! What have I told you?” She went over to him, clucking her tongue, clearly more distressed by the rips in his jacket than the scratches on his face. “Old clothes are like old people. You have to treat them gently.”
“Tell that to Roger’s fans.”
Cameo just shook her head. “You take that off before you do any more damage to it.” The cloche hat framed her face, beautiful as a nymph from a Mucha poster, a few spit-curls of golden hair pulled loose to make it a mirror of the face on the cameo she wore on a choker around her neck, her one constant amid her constantly shifting display of vintage outfits and recreations. “I’ll find you a loaner till I can fix it. Something black you can’t stain.”
Topper looked around at the racks of clothes and the stacks of hats, including a huge number of top hats, lingering for a moment on a collection of wigs, one long blond one in particular. “Nice collection,” she said, turning at last. “All this yours?”
“Heaven forfend,” Cameo said, “I do not have the space. Most of this is on loan from Dutton’s Theatrical Supply. We’re in rehearsals for The Boyfriend.” She turned to face a rack of tuxes and rifled through them. “Alec misplaced his cummerbund. I was hoping there might be one he could borrow.”
Topper stared at Cameo’s throat until she turned. “That’s a lovely brooch you have there. Antique?”
“Why yes,” Cameo said, her hand going to it. “Family heir-loom.” She dimpled. “And source of my nickname. My real name’s Ellen.”
“Melissa,” Topper said, her eyes flicking to Cameo’s golden spit-curls. “Were you at Starfields earlier?”
“Me?” said Cameo with a slightly alarmed expression. “You must be joking. I can’t stand eating in restaurants. The tables are never clean enough for me, and the silverware ... Ugh! Just the idea of how many people have had it in their mouths ...” She shuddered delicately. “Give me a nice new styrofoam box and disposable chopsticks any day.”
Sam nodded. “You’re talking to the Queen of Takeout here.”
“Too true,” Cameo sighed, going back to her search. “Call it an eccentricity, but until they invent a fashionable hazmat suit, the most I’ll be able to stand is the occasional stand-up buffet with plastic champagne glasses and cocktail pics.”
Topper gave her a long look. “Aren’t you an ace?”
Cameo chuckled. “If I say ‘yes,’ Marilyn Monroe’s lawyers will sue me. Word to the wise, but never accuse an international idol of card sharkery on national television. Especially if the only proof you can give is ‘revelations from the spirits.’”
“So you’re not an ace?”
“I’m a trance channeler and psychic—for entertainment purposes only—and do seances for the tourists over at the Dead Nicholas. I’m also a famous fraud.” Cameo chuckled. “Peregrine kicked me off her Perch and Hiram Worchester had me barred from Aces High once it came out that my only ace powers were my skills as an actress and the same medium scam that goes back to Houdini. And a positive blood test for the wild card.”
“Positive?” Topper asked.
Cameo nodded, then struck a melodramatic pose, her head cast back, her wrist to her forehead. “Alas, I’m cursed. I’m doomed. I live under a cloud of knowing that any day I might suddenly drop dead or suffer some unimaginable fate—which, if you think about it, sounds pretty much like a joker, not that you can convince many jokers of that,” she said, dropping the pose. “But since being a latent means always having to say your sorry, I decided to quit waiting for the damn card to turn and just picked something out of the deck myself.” She chuckled again. “After all, you don’t have to be a real psychic to go to a murder scene and scream about bad vibes. Besides,” she said, waving to her dress, “aces have an excuse to wear the coolest outfits. And people treat you like a celebrity. What’s not to like?”
Topper chuckled as well. “Do you want a list?”
Cameo paused. “You’re Topper, aren’t you? The conjurer ace?”
“Yes, I—” Topper broke off, spotting something hanging from the corner of one of the costume racks. “Excuse me, what’s that?” Sam looked—a white pantomime mask, a single tear on the cheek. The same as the fetish girl had been wearing back at Starfields.
Cameo glanced over to it. “Oh,” she said, then waved in dismissal, “that’s the mask for Pierrette.” She took Sam’s jacket and put it up on a hanger.
“Pierrette?”
“Poor Pierrette,’ actually,” Cameo said, looking through the tux rack as Topper went over to examine the mask. “Pierrot’s lover, from the comedia d’el arte. It’s one of the numbers in the show.” She pulled out a swallowtail coat. “Here, try this.”
Sam put his arms in the sleeves and shrugged it on. It was good fit, and black, but there wasn’t a sheath for his tail. “Um ...” he said.
Cameo gave him a sharp look. “It’s Halloween in Jokertown, Sam. If you’ve got it, flaunt it. Except for that hat,” she said, removing it from his head. “This the handiwork of those crazed fangirls?”
Sam looked to Topper. “One of them.”
Topper glared while Cameo grimaced and said, “That kind of woman you do not need,” tsking over the ripped seam at the crown. “Now to find you a replacement ....”
“Mind if I help?” Topper gestured to the tux rack and the top hats on top.
“Please do,” Cameo said. “We’re looking for something in a small.”
Topper got a step stool and began to inspect the hats, and Sam could tell she was not just checking their size.
Cameo set his battered hat aside on a work table, then picked up an overstuffed ragbag from the floor and set it next to it. “Let’s see what I’ve got in my bag of tricks. I’d rather not borrow from Dutton if I can help it ....” She opened the bag and rifled through her assortment of costume pieces, pulling out another top hat, collapsed flat. She held it in her hands for a long while, contemplating it, then shook her head, and with an expert flick of her wrist, popped the top out into shape.
She turned, stopping and looked up at Topper where she was perched on the stool. “That’s a lovely hat you have there, Melissa,” she said at last. “Had it long?”
Topper looked at the one in her hands, then set it down and reached up and tapped the one on her head. “Why yes, actually. My grandfather gave it to me shortly before he died ....”
“I’m ... so sorry for your loss. Were you fond of him?”
It was kind of a forward question, even for Cameo, and Topper stopped search through the top shelf for a moment. Then continued. “Very. But it’s a mixed bag. My grandpa was a stage magician. Really great in his day, before the wild card. But it destroyed him.” She grabbed for another stack of top hats, popping them out and checking inside. “He used to work places like this, have bookings all over the country. Then ... nothing.” She grimaced. “He was very bitter about it—I mean, who wants to see someone pull a rabbit out of a hat when in the next tent there’s a woman who can turn into a flying elephant?”
Cameo turned the hat over in her hands. “And then you drew an ace from that infernal deck ....”
“I didn’t tell him,” Topper said, trying another hat. “Or anyone else for that matter. Not until after grandpa died.”
“He knew,” Cameo assured her. “Trust me, he knew. He just didn’t say anything.”
Topper cocked her head. “You really think so?”
“I know so. Grandfathers know these things.” Cameo gave a dark chuckle. “Besides, it’s hard to keep a secret from a professional magician.” Her mouth twisted in a wry grin as she contemplated the hat, turning it over again. “So what did you do after ...” She paused, as if trying to come up with a delicate way to phrase it, then failing, “... your grandfather’s death? If you don’t mind me asking ....”
“I’m a private eye. I’m used to questions.” Topper sighed and shrugged. “I went into government work. I didn’t want to be one of the aces who took the spotlight away from him. That, and the fact that I hate being on stage.” She grimaced. “I must be the only person who ever had the wild card turn from stage fright. Right in the middle of my high school talent show no less.”
“And your grandfather never told you that he knew ....”
“If he did know.” Topper shook her head. “Trust him to die leaving me a mystery.”
“Or two.” Cameo chuckled. “The world needs mysteries now more than ever ....” She laughed long and loud, as if she’d just heard the best joke in the world, then abruptly shook her head and stopped. “You know, Sam,” she said, turning the hat over in her hands, “I don’t think this hat will fit you after all.” She collapsed it, far less deftly than she’d popped it out, then turned and began to replace it in her ragbag.
“Are you sure?” Topper asked, coming down off the steps. “Could I see that one?”
Cameo paused, then shrugged and pulled the flattened top hat back out, flipping it to Topper like a Frisbee. Topper caught it and popped it out, turning it over in her hands and reaching inside to check the lining.
“You see,” Cameo said, coming over next to her and retrieving the hat, “this is a seven and a quarter, and we need more of a six and seven eighths or a seven.” She put the hat on Sam, demonstrating where it went down too low on his forehead, then collapsed it and put it back in her ragbag. Topper gave Sam a look he couldn’t read.
“Here,” Cameo said as she came back, “until I can fix the silk—if I can fix the silk—why don’t you just make do with ordinary felt?” She went to the rack where Topper had been searching and took down a modern top hat with rounded corners, checked the label, then put it on Sam’s head where it fit perfectly, if inelegantly.
“Socks?” Sam bent down and began unlacing his left boot. “And do you by any chance have any opera glasses or binoculars?”
“Are you on a scavenger hunt?” Cameo located a single clean sock, pointing him to a trash bin when he offered her the ink-soaked one. “No binoculars right now. Maybe a lorgnette?”
Topper shook her head lightly. “No, sorry,” Sam said.
“Ask Jim,” Cameo suggested, collecting her ragbag. “I need to go check the greenroom for cummerbunds. Alec isn’t someone you can just fit off the rack.”
She left and Topper came over as Sam finished tying his boot-laces. Sam laughed. “So, your talent show? Mine turned in detention.”
“What?”
Sam waggled his fingers. “My deuce. I was busted for graffiti. The VP tossed my artwork in the furnace.” He paused. “You know, mental cruelty to a latent is a firing offense ....” He stood up and retrieved his sketchbook from the floor. “But hey, I survived, and so did you. Nothing wrong with that.”
“Yeah,” said Topper. “Is it me, or did she pull a Bobo Switch?”
“A what?” Sam asked.
“A Bobo Switch. It’s a magician’s pass that lets you swap one coin with another. You could do it with collapsed hats.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” Topper said. “I would have sworn that the top hat she just had there was mine. And she’s asking all these questions about my grandfather. Then next thing, she starts to put it away, then hands it back, and that’s the exact way a magician would swap one coin for another.” She gave him a sharp look. “Trust me, I may not be great at it anymore, but that was one of my tricks for the talent competition.”
Sam looked at her. “Again ... why?”
Topper waved at the air. “I don’t know. I’m just making suppositions here. She’s the right height and build, and that mask there is awfully suspicious. And while her hair’s too short, it’s the right color, and it’s hard to tell length anyway with that hat, so maybe she has it pinned up. Or maybe she wore a wig—there’s plenty of them here.” Topper gestured to the room. “Plus that brooch of hers—that could have made a lump under the latex that would look like an Adam’s apple. And that weird crack about fashionable hazmat suits—what was Rubber Maid wearing if not that?”
“Or Bondage Babe could have been Mr. Dutton in drag,” Sam pointed out. “He’s thin too. He owns all these wigs and costumes, and he can certainly afford a pair of fake breasts.”
“Or that,” Topper conceded. “That’s the maddening thing about detective work. But was it just me, or was Cameo acting seriously weird?”
“Seriously weird? Remember, this is Jokertown, and you’re talking to a man who’s housemates with Jim. The guy’s almost twenty and still sends letters to Santa—which would just be pathetic, except Christmas morning, there’s extra presents under the tree and the milk and cookies are gone.” Sam let that sink in for effect. “Weird is relative. Cameo’s a theatre person. Weird, yes. Seriously, no. Or at least she always acts like that. We think she’s had one too many method acting classes.” Sam chuckled. “Roger got her drunk at a cast party and she did this hilarious crazed hunchback impression. You should have seen it.”
“Crazed hunchback?” Topper inquired, then shook her head and took a deep breath. “You’re right. I’m being paranoid. Let’s just go see if Jim has any binoculars then check the audience again. The show should start soon.”
They went downstairs and over to the stage where the guys were talking over the sound of an impatient audience coming through the curtain. “What do you think, Sam?” Alec asked. “Ditch the formals? ’Cause I’ve got this Green Knight outfit I was planning to wear for second set—I mean, it’s Halloween and all—and I can’t find the stupid cummerbund and we’re going to be on national TV. Plus the whole tux business makes me look like Lurch anyway.”
“Better than Tiny Tim,” Paul said, glaring. “If I hear ‘God bless us, everyone!’ one more time, I swear, I’m gonna whack someone.”
“‘Top Hat’ is our big number, that’s all I’m saying,” Roger pointed out, “and it’ll look pretty stupid to have four guys in formalwear plus the Rockettes dancing around a Ren Faire refugee. We close on ‘Top Hat’ at the break, then we change costumes, and then you can be the Jolly Green Giant all you want.”
“It’s not the Jolly Green Giant! It’s the Green Knight! From the tale of Sir Gawain.”
“Right, Alec. We all know about your Arthurian fixation. Even the wild card virus knows about your Arthurian fixation. Now lay off and tell us where you hid the cummerbund.”
“I didn’t hide the—Wait a sec,” he said, breaking off and looking down his very long nose at Topper. “Couldn’t you just pull my cummerbund out of your hat?”
Topper stared at him with a deer-in-headlights expression, then slowly shook her head. “Sorry. No requests. Firm rule of mine.”
“Can’t you break it?”
“Only if it’s life or death. Is a cummerbund that serious?”
“You ever been on stage?” Alec’s nostrils flared, making him look even more horse-faced. “With people calling you ‘Lurch’?”
Dirk looked up at Alec. “Hey dude, we could shave your head the rest of the way. Then you’d look like Uncle Fester instead.”
Alec glared down at him. “And if we dressed you in stripes, you’d look like Pugsley.”
“If Pugsley bleached his hair and did a whole ton of steroids,” Paul remarked.
“Shut up, Timmy,” Dirk told him. “It’s not my freakin’ fault I’ve got muscles like this.”
“Well,” said Jim, “if you use the Charles Atlas system for more than five days, what do you expect? You keep saying I’m crazy, but at least I followed the directions.” Jim stood there, cutting a perfect figure in his tux, then added, “But if the problem is Alec being too tall for the lineup, and we need a quick fix, what if we just made Paul taller instead? After all, it’s a lot easier to stretch someone who’s already stretchy, and his braces are fully adjustable.”
Paul waved a crutch. “You know how long it takes me to put these things on, let alone change the settings. We don’t have time.”
“Sure we do,” Jim said. “Look what I just got.”
You could have heard a pin drop at that moment. Jim’s Look what I just gots were usually followed by something spectacular and sometimes frightening, occasionally destructive. He held up his latest gimcrack, what looked like a remote control, with a few extra wires and sparkling diodes held on with strips of duct tape. “It’s a universal remote.” He displayed it with all the pride of a child showing off the new toy Santa had brought him. “The box said it would control all my appliances, electronics, entertainment and audiovisual equipment. I had to fiddle with it a bit before it worked right, but now it does, and doctor always calls Paul’s braces appliances. And look, here’s the vertical.” He pointed the remote at Paul and a jolt of electrical energy shot forth, connecting with the rubber boy’s braces and arcing along them like a Tesla coil.
Paul began to get taller and taller, rapidly nearing Alec’s height then going somewhat beyond, his body becoming correspondingly thinner, like a life-size Stretch Armstrong doll. “Gimcrack! Cut it out!” Paul’s leg braces were clearly visible beyond his highwater tux pants, getting higher still as electricity crackled and adjustment pins on the braces clicked and ratcheted spasmodically, inching higher and higher.
“Cut what out?” asked Jim.
“He means stop,” Roger said. “There’s a stop button, isn’t there, Jim?”
“Sure,” said the ace, “it’s right here.” Jim pressed the remote and the electrical charge zapped into nothingness, Paul’s braces locking just short of eight feet. His elongated midriff stuck out below his shirtwaist and above his tux pants, held up by his massively strained suspenders.
Topper leaned over to Sam and whispered in his ear, “On second thought, let’s not ask about the binoculars.” Sam nodded.
The rubber boy looked down at himself. “Hey, actually this is pretty cool.” He stilt-walked a couple steps towards Alec. “Hey look, Alec, I’m even taller than you!” He smiled then, the corners of his mouth curling up like a caricature. “I can even touch your horn ....”
Paul reached his elongated arm for the forward point of Alec’s Mohawk and the tall joker jerked away. “Don’t you touch it, you fucking rubber chicken!” Alec reared back, his goatee flying. “I know you’re not a virgin!”
Paul grinned even more wickedly. “Hey, when you can beat all the other guys at Freakers annual ‘Whip it out’ contest, the girls can never get enough of you!”
“Really?” Jim looked perplexed again. “That hasn’t been my experience. I keep getting emails about how to ‘Add extra inches,’ and those work, of course, but there’s never any ‘Lose unwanted inches’ programs, at least for your penis.”
There was another of those pin-drop silences. “Jim,” Roger said, shaking his head, “please, whatever you do, don’t mention that once the curtain goes up. And Alec, Paul—that goes double for you two. You should know better. This is our first live broadcast and we don’t want to piss off the network.”
“The Network?” Jim repeated. “The celestial intelligences I hear with my pyramid hat?”
“Well ‘celestial intelligences’ may be going a bit far, but they’re the ones who cut the checks,” said a woman’s voice from behind Sam. “Remember, we’re talking Mtv here.”
Sam turned, seeing a tall brunette in a gold dress with more sequins than the Sultan of Brunei, her hair elaborately coiffed up with pins tipped with gold coins with a matching necklace and drop pendant earrings, and a pair of beautiful brown-and-white-feathered wings behind her. And equally spectacular cleavage in front. Peregrine, the flying ace model and talk show hostess.
She swept forward, regal as the Queen of Angels, which was probably the general idea. “I hope you boys excuse the liberty. I was wanting to talk with you about a possible appearance on my Perch, and Chaos invited us backstage.” She waved behind herself, then partially unfurled her left wing, to both shelter and backdrop two other individuals. “I also wanted to introduce my son, John Fortune. He’s a great fan of yours. And this is his date ...” She glanced back.
“Velvet,” supplied the girl, “Velvet Brown.”
If it was possible to eclipse Peregrine, this girl did. Posed against the feathered curtain, which made her even more radiant, was a startlingly beautiful young woman, no more than sixteen, gorgeous as a Hollywood starlet of another era, with long dark curls, flawless ivory skin, and intense violet eyes. She was dressed in a velvet riding habit, circa 1940s, and a pert little top hat, and had one slim hand laid on the arm of a young man about the same age. This lucky boy was as gorgeous as his mother and almost as tall, with the extra perk of being genuinely exotic, at least on the nat end of the scheme, with café-au-lait skin, kinky hair the color of burnished gold, and huge almond-shaped brown eyes. This didn’t exactly fit with the round black glasses or the purple scar makeup in the shape of a lightning bolt at the edge of his hairline, but having a mother who could actually help you fly was probably consolation for a less-than-convincing Harry Potter costume.
“Wow!” said John. “This is so cool, I can hardly believe it! You guys are really all jokers?”
“Well I’m not,” Jim admitted. “I’m only a latent.” He said this, as always, with a straight face, though this time while holding a universal remote wrapped with duct tape and diodes and arcing with weird electrical energy.
John Fortune looked askance at it, as did Velvet Brown and Peregrine. “There’s so much shoddy workmanship these days,” Jim apologized further, “but then I guess you get what you pay for.” He waved it, making it spark and causing Paul to grow an inch. “I picked this up off the bargain table at the five and dime, so I really shouldn’t complain.”
Alec put his finger next to his ear and twirled it in the universal crazy signal, then looked away and pretended he was primping his Mohawk the moment Jim glanced back.
“I’m a latent too,” said John, smiling the trying-to-make-conversation-with-the-nice-crazy-person smile.
Jim smiled back. “My sympathies.”
“Perhaps you might make your friend a bit shorter, dear?” Peregrine interrupted gently. “Say, six-three, six-four? A little more in the shoulders, a little less in the hips, the Fabio proportions?”
“Okay ....” Jim pressed a couple buttons, causing the static to arc, and Paul began to get shorter and slightly wider, at least across the shoulders, while Jim looked back to John. “Roger was a latent until a little while ago, but he was lucky enough to draw a joker-deuce, and he’s working on making it into an ace.”
“As should we all,” said Peregrine. “Being an ace is an attitude. Though a good fashion designer helps.” Sam realized then that she wasn’t got up as the Queen of Angels but the Queen of Pentacles, wearing what had to be a Bob Mackie original.
Jim began to look distraught, then showed the remote to Peregrine. “I checked all the buttons, but there isn’t a hip-narrowing function ....”
Peregrine smiled. “Oh yes there is. I was in more than enough beauty pageants when I was younger.” She furled her wings and moved closer, checking out Paul’s butt, now that he’d reached a more reasonable height. “Do you have any athletic tape?”
“No,” said Jim, then produced a silver roll from the pocket of his tux, “but I have duct tape.”
Paul’s eyes almost popped out of his head, literally. “You’re not going to duct tape my ass!”
Peregrine’s wings rustled softly as she laid a perfectly manicured hand on his shoulder, her nails as gold as her lipstick. “Trust me, dear—there are no jokers, only aces with bad publicists and fashion designers.”
“Yeah, all Bloat needed was a muumuu ....”
Peregrine only smiled. “And a press kit. This is showbiz. We’re selling a fantasy.” She cast a glance around, then locked eyes with Topper standing next to Sam. “Melissa! My goodness, I didn’t even notice you! What are you doing here?” She smiled her most dazzling smile, an advertisement for the virtues of toothbonding and cosmetic dentistry. “I know you have athletic tape in that hat of yours. Could we trouble you for some?”
“Uh ...” said Topper, and Sam realized that the world’s chattiest ace talk show hostess was the last person that Topper wanted to know that she’d lost her magic conjuring hat.
“Good luck,” said Alec. “She won’t even give me my cummerbund.”
“Which I just found,” said Cameo, appearing from behind Dirk. “It was behind the couch in the greenroom.”
“Cameo!” Peregrine exclaimed. “So lovely to see you.”
“Say it on camera and I’ll believe it, Peri,” she replied, taking a moment to adjust her hat. As she brushed by Peregrine, there was a sudden loud *ZOT* and a flash of electricity and ozone, and the only thing Sam could figure was that the beads on Cameo’s flapper dress had somehow acted as a conductor and allowed the static electricity from Jim’s remote control and Paulie’s braces to arc to Peregrine’s copious amounts of metal jewelry. Her hair went up like the Bride of Frankenstein and her wings spreadeagled on reflex, the feathers whacking the front edge on Alec’s Mohawk, and the spiraled ivory horn.
Alec screamed and the scream turned into a whinny as his face elongated, becoming more horselike, and his body became more staglike, and his legs became more goatlike, and his tuxedo split apart, revealing a lion’s tail, very much like the one Sam possessed, except in white, with an elaborate tassel at the tip, like the one possessed by a heraldic lion-or a unicorn, which was what Alec had become. Only his spiraled horn, Mohawked mane, long white goatee and mass remained constant between forms. He waved his cloven hooves, pawing the air as the remnants of the tuxedo fell to the stage, then he came down hard on them, looking at Peregrine with fire in his eye, an accusatory snort, and his horn pointed straight at her heart.
Lenore was squawking and screaming and trying to become airborne while the static in Peregrine’s hairdo collapsed, and she stood there, a wisp of smoke coming from the underwires of her support bra. “What happened?”
“You’re not a virgin!” Jim exclaimed.
“What?” said Peregrine, dazed. “Of course I’m not a virgin—I’m a mother! How many mothers are virgins?” She blinked, starting to focus on the unicorn in the top hat in front of her.
“Alec shifts if anyone who’s not a virgin touches the tip of his horn,” Jim explained. “He can only change back if he has a virgin ride him.”
“What sort of ‘ride’?” asked Topper.
“A short one. Five, ten minutes, tops.” Jim paused and bit his lip. “As for virgin mothers, there’s Sister Mary Immaculate over at Our Lady of Perpetual Misery. She’s given birth the last seven Christmases in a row, and she’s the one we get to ride Alec if there aren’t any other virgins handy.”
Velvet Brown put up her hand. “So any girl who’s never had sex with a man counts?”
“I think so,” said Jim. “Lesbians can still be virgins, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
Velvet smiled her starlet smile, then threw her arms around Alec’s neck and announced, in the worst British accent Sam had ever heard, “Pie’s the best horse! I’m going to ride him in the Grand Nationals!” With this, she planted a kiss right at the base of Alec’s horn and swung herself up on his back, posing as if she were ready for her closeup.
Alicorn the unicorn’s eyes went wide and then he screamed, rearing up, champing the air, Velvet Brown clinging frantically to his mane as he shook his head till the ridiculous top hat flew free.
“I don’t think she’s a virgin,” Jim said. “Alec gets very upset if someone who’s not a virgin gets—” Jim broke off abruptly as Alicorn’s hoof lashed out and knocked the universal remote from his hand, sending it spinning and skittering across the stage, weird energy arcing in all directions, grounding itself into every bit of metal in sight, then some beyond it as the curtain began to rise, the ropes of the gaffing system beginning to pull it up via electronic pulley.
“What’s happening?” Peregrine demanded.
“My remote!” Jim screamed. “He smashed it! And I think he hit play!”
On cue, the bands’ instruments behind them, everything from Dirk’s drumsticks to Roger’s electric fiddle, rose up into position, borne aloft by strands of phantom energy, and started into the opening strains of Irving Berlin’s ‘Top Hat.’ Then a gap open in the curtain as the drapery swags parted and the unicorn made for it, still screaming, running out onto the runway spit accompanied by the screams of Velvet Brown mixed with those of countless other girls.
A camera operator ran in, wearing headphones and a mike. “Peri! The cameras are acting like they’re possessed, but that doesn’t matter-we’ve somehow got a live network feed! We’re live! We’re live!”
“It’s all audiovisual and entertainment ....” Jim said plaintively. “Did you say The Network?”
Peregrine and Roger exchanged looks, then, with the instincts of veteran showpeople, they turned to the wings and called, “Cue the Rockettes!”
Peregrine then took the cameraman’s headset and stepped forward, into the breech, announcing, “Ladies and gentlemen, live from the new, and aptly named, Club Chaos, Mtv is proud to present a special Halloween show-New York’s new hometown favorite, The Jokertown Boys!”
Sam balked—Alec had become hoarse all right. Or horse. Or unicorn, as was the case, and he had the choice of joining the band as replacement singer or chasing after his friend. It was an easy choice, and not just because of the rattle of tap shoes behind him or the screams and wild applause as the unicorn ran the length of the runway, Topper running after him and Velvet Brown screaming, “Jerry, you idiot!” as they vaulted into the aisle. Sam followed, National Velvet Jerry or whoever she was still astride Alicorn’s back as the unicorn ran into the lobby, out the main doors, and up the street, vaulting cabs.
Somewhere in the lobby, Sam realized that John Fortune was with them, in fact outpacing Topper, quidditch robes far better suited to running than stiletto heels, and they all caught up with Velvet Brown just as she was dumped on her ass in the middle of the roadway, Alicorn continuing up the street without her.
“That was wicked cool!” John exclaimed, while Topper and Sam couldn’t do much more than pant.
A moment later, Peregrine landed next to them. “John Fortune!” she exclaimed, using all her stage presence and the fury of mothers everywhere. “What on earth do you think you’re doing running off like that?”
John pointed to his date, who Sam suddenly realized was a dead ringer for long dead movie starlet, Elizabeth Taylor. “You said I was supposed to stick with my bodyguard, mom.”
“That is not your bodyguard,” Peregrine intoned with barely controlled rage. “That is someone who is so fired she’d think J.J. Flash had done it.”
The girl went pale. “And our Agency?”
Peregrine paused. “Has proven itself on other occasions,” she conceded, looking to Topper. “Melissa, are you free?”
“‘Fraid not. I’m on another case.”
Peregrine looked sour at this, but didn’t bother to plead or argue, merely took her son by the shoulders and said, “Young man—I will, of course, be furious if the answer is no, but I need an honest answer to a simple question: Are you a virgin?”
John Fortune’s eyes went wide behind the Harry Potter glasses and he nodded. “Yes ma’am.”
“Good,” said Peregrine, “then you get to ride a unicorn. Assuming ...” She looked askance to Sam and Topper.
Sam nodded. “Male virgins count.” He pointed up the street. “He went that way.”
“Good,” said Peregrine, gathering John Fortune into her arms and winging off down the block.
Jerry-Velvet-Elizabeth got up and dusted herself off, looking after the rapidly disappearing Peregrine, then simply shrugged and walked over to them. “Back to the club?”
“For us. You got fired, remember?” Topper took a couple steps in that direction then stopped, the girl still following. “Yes, Jerry?”
“What sort of case are you on?”
“Um ...” Topper looked stricken, and Sam realized that, the same as Peregrine, Jerry was also someone who under no circumstances could know that Topper had lost her hat.
“Actually, she’s not on a case,” Sam said, taking Topper’s hand. “We’re on a date.”
“Yes, a date.” Topper hugged close to him, putting her head on his shoulder for a moment.
The fallen starlet looked at Topper, then Sam, then back. “I thought you said you didn’t go for younger men.”
“No,” said Topper, “that’s just something I told Pete. I don’t date guys who habitually insult people and smoke huge cigars as over-compensation. But I was trying to be polite.” She looked to the faux Elizabeth Taylor, then Sam, then pulled him into a kiss, full on French, no holds barred.
By the time it was over, Sam felt almost as dazed as Peregrine had been after the jolt. “See?” Topper said. “Date.” She led Sam a few step back towards the club. “And if you tell Pete about any of this, I’ll tell him about you and the dalmatians.”
“What dalmatians?”
“You know Pete,” Topper said. “I don’t need to tell him any more than that.” She paused. “Maybe a number. A hundred. A hundred and one. He already knows you have a thing for Glenn Close.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Try me, Cruella.”
They continued back towards Club Chaos, Jerry-Velvet-Elizabeth tagging along like a kid sister. “Oh well,” the girl said, “even if you’re not on a case, there’s still one mystery left.” Topper looked askance at her until finally the girl let it out: “Do you think Cameo zapped Perry?”
“That’s your mystery?” Topper looked exasperated. “Cameo? We both saw the sparks from Gimcrack’s gizmo.”
“Yeah, but that would give her the perfect cover.”
Topper snorted. “But why? And with what?”
“Her ace,” said the starlet.
“Ace? Jerry, she’s a famous fraud.” Topper bit her lip. “Even if she isn’t, she’s what, a spirit medium? I didn’t see any seance tables. What could she do, zap Perry with ectoplasm?”
“No,” said Jerry, “with a dead ace’s ace.”
Topper balked, bringing her and Sam to a dead stop. “Come again?”
“I went on a mission with her once,” Jerry explained. “Secret government stuff. Very hush-hush. Billy Ray was there. You used to work with him. He tell you?”
“We’re talking Billy,” Topper said. “No.”
Jerry looked smug. “Cameo’s ace lets her channel the dead by touching something they had in life. Something important to them. Like your hat, Melissa. If you were dead, I mean. And if the dead person was an ace, she can channel their powers too.” Jerry looked at Topper’s topper. “Actually, that hat would be a real score for her. Cameo’s payment for the mission was going to be Black Eagle’s jacket, but if she had your hat, she could pull out that, Brain Trust’s pearls, Cyclone’s flight helmet—hell, whatever she wants.”
“If I were dead,” Topper amended.
“Yeah.”
“And this shocking ace?”
“Dunno,” Jerry said, “Cameo had all this junk in her backpack. Said she could summon a shocker with some hat. Never saw it, I ... left the mission early.”
Topper squeezed Sam’s hand, and he squeezed back, and they walked a long while in silence before Topper said, “So you planning to out her? For putting her ace back up her sleeve, I mean, after Peri and everyone laughed at it?”
“Well, maybe Peri ...”
“Would laugh at you too,” Topper finished. “Face it, Jerry-Cameo may have the perfect motive, but she’s also got a perfect alibi. And even if she confessed, Peri wouldn’t believe her.” She paused. “And in the scheme of ace pranks, zapping someone’s butt is pretty trivial. You’d out someone for that? You, of all people?”
“It was probably Jim’s remote anyway,” Sam said.
Jerry paused. ““This sort of thing happens?”
“Since we were kids. You should have seen it when he took drivers ed. The car was an automatic.”
“You know, Jerry,” Topper said, “you could still catch a movie ....”
“Hmm ... the Metreon is showing all the Hammer Draculas. Including Brides.” The starlet looked pensive. “Those girls in the nightgowns are really hot ....”
“And they’re waiting for you,” Topper said. “Look, there’s a cab.”
Jerry looked, then ran for it, waving.
“She’s bisexual, right?” Sam asked. “’Cause regular lesbians don’t set Alec—”
“Jerry’s a special case,” Topper said, shutting him off, “and yes, our agency is a detective agency.”
“Isn’t she a bit young?”
“You’re not one to talk, young man.” Topper squeezed his hand. “But you should see Pete. Not that that matters right now since we know—”
There was a flutter of feathers and gold sequins as Peregrine alighted. “You’re needed on stage, Sam.”
“But—”
“But nothing. You’re the best thing to happen to jokers rights in ten years.” She scooped him up in both arms and Sam and his sketchbook were pressed against the famous cleavage as the flying ace took off, speaking into her headset, “Got him. Cue the Boys for our entrance.” They swept up into the air, then down, and Sam felt his stomach lurch as Peregrine folded her wings in a power dive, fanning them out as they entered the lobby, then folding them again as they plunged through the doors into the main theatre, swooping over the heads of audience. The crowd went wild, with cheers and screams, and Roger’s voice boomed, “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, MY BROTHER, SAM—OUR ACE COVER ARTIST, SWASH!”
Peregrine landed with him and Roger pressed a microphone into his hands. “Jokertown Blues, Sam. C.C.’s version—your lead.”
Sam felt his mouth go dry, but Dirk pressed a bottle of water into his hand and Sam took a swig, realizing that the drummer’s presence meant that Jim’s mad ace was somehow still playing the instruments. He hoped it could take a cue: “And a One-Two-Three!
If you go down to Jokertown
Anyone you might see
Might be a little old lady
Name of Juju Marie
She might look like you
She might look like me
But there’s mighty mean momma
Name of Juju Marie
The radios had played that fourteen years ago, C.C. Ryder’s version of the old Mr. Rainbow song, when Sam and Roger’s parents had taken them to Jokertown for the day. And while they hadn’t met the old blues witch, they’d run into her counterpart, Typhoid Croyd, their parents dying, Sam and Roger going to the J-town orphanage.
If you go down to Jokertown
Better watch what you say
Or that little old lady’s
Gonna blow you away
“Toads and Diamonds,”
That’s what she sings,
“Jokers, and Aces,
And Black Queens and Kings”
Sam put his heart into that verse. ‘Kings’ was J-town slang for latents, shorthand for ‘suicide kings,’ the sword of Damocles of the wild card suspended over every latent’s head until it finally dropped, usually ending in death, sometimes maiming even worse than death.
He’d been a latent for eleven years and a deuce for only three. He knew what it felt like.
If you go down to Jokertown
You better pray hard
That a little old lady
Don’t deal you a card
You might start to weep
You might start to wail
You might feel an urge
To start a-shaking your tail!
Sam did so, flaunting the thing that set him apart from human, the joker that he could have but would never have removed. The audience went wild, girls screaming, snatching and grabbing for it as he danced out of the way.
Then his lion’s tail wasn’t the only one on stage. Alicorn leapt onto the end of the runway, John Fortune dismounting, and the unicorn began slowly walking along the ramp to the adulation of the virgins and somewhat less virginal teenyboppers on both sides as the rest of the Boys joined in on the next verse:
If you go down to Jokertown
Well, you might just stay there
’Cause that mean ol’ woman
Who deal cards, she ain’t fair
If you lose, you win
If you win, you lose
What I’m talking about
Is called the Wild Card Bluuuuuuues ....
On the long sustained note, the unicorn reached the end of the runway and reared up on his hind legs, morphing from Alicorn into Alec—Alec, totally naked—and Sam realized that when he’d catalogued his friend’s changes earlier, he’d been inaccurate. Aside from his horn, mane, and mass, Alec’s unmentionables remained relatively unaffected by the transformation: He was hung like a horse in either form. Girls screamed in appreciation while the Boys got in front of him, strategically placing Dirk’s shoulders between the cameras and Alec, handing him a microphone for the encore:
You’ll get no release!
You’ll get no reprieve!
And if you go down to Jokertown
You might never leave!
The crowd went wild while various individuals attempted to enforce decency standards: cameramen battling to restrain possessed and prurient audiovisual equipment, Jim puzzling over his smashed remote, and Cameo running from offstage carrying a giant green tunic which she threw to Alec. Just as he put it on over his horn and got it low enough for at least regimental standards of decency, the weird electrical energy evaporated into nothingness and the instruments clattered to the stage. As the curtain began to come down, Jim triumphantly held up the universal remote in one hand and the batteries in the other.
“That was fun,” the crazy ace said, turning to the rest of them. “Do you think we’ll be able to top that with the next set?”
“God I hope not ...” Alec prayed. “I must have looked like Herne out there.”
Jim nodded. “A lot like he did in ‘The King of Spring.’”
“Jim,” Paul said, “that’s not a good thing. That’s a joker porn video.”
“It is not,” Jim insisted. “I read the box. It’s a French art film.”
“Where Herne fucks twenty nuns.”
“It’s symbolic. He’s the King of Spring.”
Dirk snorted. “King of Sproing is more like it.”
“You’re not being helpful,” Cameo said, then to Alec, “Honestly, Alec, you do not look like Herne.”
“Herne has antlers,” Jim said helpfully, “you have a unicorn horn. No one could mistake you. Above the waist, at least.”
Alec groaned while Cameo said, “Let’s just get you your tights.”
The went offstage to the changing area where the most noticeable thing was Cameo’s ragbag spilled across the floor. The next most noticeable thing was when Topper snatched the cloche hat off Cameo’s head. “Alright,” she said, stuffing it inside the inverted top hat she held in her other hand, “and for my next trick, I’d like to hear some serious answers. That is, if you ever want to see your own precious hat again.”
Cameo turned and began to glow blue with St. Elmo’s fire, electricity sparking off the bobbypins of her bizarre hairdo, which consisted of her long honey blond tresses pinned up and over a battered fedora, squashed from where it had been hidden beneath the cloche. “I don’t know who you are, lady,” she growled, “but you stay away from Ellen or you’ll have to answer to me.”
“And who are you?” Topper asked, stepping back, her hand still down her hat.
“That, I expect, would be Nick Williams,” said Peregrine, stepping in front of John Fortune, “a dead private investigator. And a dead ace. Will-o’-the-Wisp, the Hollywood phantom.”
“Who—” said Cameo, turning, then, “Oh, the winged bimbo who called me a liar. Ellen too.” A small ball of energy had formed in the air, levitating above her right hand like an ignis fatuous. “Going to call us liars again?”
Peregrine stood there, her face a mask of regal calm. “No. Though you were less than forthcoming with all the particulars of your story.”
“I told you everything,” Cameo said. “I was an ace up the sleeve, and I was murdered for it. Only thing I didn’t tell you was that when Ellen calls me back, she calls my ace too.”
“Is that why you stole my hat?” Topper asked.
“What?” said Cameo, then looked distracted, as if she were listening to someone. “Ellen says she didn’t steal your hat, she stole your grandfather’s hat. She needed to talk with him.” Cameo looked distracted again. “Says he’s a stubborn old bastard, and he’s pissed as hell that you kept your ace up your sleeve. But tit for tat. You never told him your secret, he never told you his.”
Topper’s eyes went wide. “That’s what this is about? Grandpa’s tricks?”
The electrical charge faded back into Cameo and she shook her head. “Yes,” she said, “I’m sorry for borrowing your hat, but you can use any hat for your tricks, while I needed this one in particular.”
Topper looked to Sam, then back to Cameo. “You read that same damned Aces! article, didn’t you?”
“Actually, I did,” said Roger. “I won’t let Cameo take the rap for it alone. I put her up to it. The article said that after the fire, the only personal effects Blackwood the Magnificent had left were his hat—”
“And the International Brotherhood of Magicians pocket watch he was buried with,” Topper finished for him. “And you didn’t want to desecrate his grave. I guess I should thank you for that.” She paused then and grimaced. “Grandpa forgive me ... hopefully soon ....” She reached deep into her hat and came back with a corroded silver pocket watch, covered with dust and gravemold. She tossed it to Cameo.
The medium caught it in one hand, then gazed at it for a long moment. Then she popped the catch and looked at the watchface, remarking, “This is going to need to be cleaned if you expect me to be wearing it.” She looked up then, smiling. “Melissa. How are you, my dear?”
“Grandpa?” Topper asked.
“The same,” she said, “or different. Don’t be so amazed. Swapping places with an assistant is old hat.” She chuckled. “Besides which, if Houdini managed an escape from the grave, why should you be surprised when I play the same trick?”
“This afternoon ... you didn’t tell me it was you.”
“You didn’t ask. Besides which, it wasn’t my trick to reveal.” Cameo raised her eyebrows. “Anything you’d like to tell me now, my dear?”
Topper bit her lip, then let it out all in one breath: “I’m an ace, grandpa.”
The medium nodded. “There, that wasn’t so hard. I’m glad to hear it. But as I can see from the faces here, that secret has been spread rather thin. Indeed, I heard you tell it this afternoon to one who you believed was a complete stranger. Not quite worth the price of the Blackwood legacy.” She looked about the group. “Are there any other takers?” She looked to Roger. “You, sir, the gentleman with the handsome raven—I’m informed you quest after magic. Is this so?”
“Of course,” said Roger. “You’re one of my idols.”
“A flattering thing to hear in a weary world,” Cameo responded, “but flattery is cheap, and you know my price: A secret for a secret. But a bit of professional advice: A good magician has more than one trusted assistant. If you can take those present here into your confidence, I suggest you do so.”
Roger looked around, lingering a long moment on Peregrine and her son, but she nodded as did he. “Alright,” Roger said, “I’m not an ace. Not even a deuce. All my tricks are parlor magic.”
“Anything else?”
Roger paused, then took a deep breath. “I’m not a joker either.” He reached up and lifted his eyepatch, then opened his eye and pinched out a large black lens. “Theatrical contacts.”
“But you have horns!” Jim protested. “I’ve seen them!”
“Those are real,” Roger said, “just not mine. I got them from Hodge-Podge.”
“Hodge-Podge?” Peregrine asked.
“Back alley psychic surgeon,” Roger explained. “She takes bits off animals and put them on people.” Roger replaced his contact and eyepatch, then lifted his hat. “Somewhere there’s a small African antelope missing its horns.”
Everyone looked at Sam’s tail until he tucked it between his legs. “Uh ... guys, this is original equipment.”
“Same here,” said Alec.
“Not here.” Roger dropped his hat. “I’m a latent. That’s all.”
“No,” said Cameo, “you are also a skilled illusionist. I can see from the faces here.” She gazed about the circle. “I also find this very droll—an ace pretending to be a latent aiding a latent pretending to an ace.” She glanced over to Topper. “And teaching my granddaughter a valuable lesson in the bargain: A good magician never relies too heavily on one trick. Enjoy your hat, Melissa. And adieu, for the moment.”
Cameo clicked the watch shut and shook her head. “He’s gone.”
“May I have his watch back?”
Cameo paused, then pressed the stud again, raising a cloud of dust, and fixed Topper with haughty look. “Really, Melissa. It’s my watch, and last I checked, the dearly departed were allowed to take their grave goods into the afterlife however they please. This is how I please. Once Ellen assists with costume changes, we intend to watch the performance—and my new apprentice.”
“I thought I was your apprentice.”
“You were, my dear,” Cameo said softly, “but there’s a difference between something you do to please your grandfather, and something you do out of love for the art. And despite my current state, I still have standards. This young man meets them. Masquerading one magic as another, well, that has a certain flair, don’t you think? You are all assistants in a grand illusion, one final Blackwood trick.” She paused, listening. “And Ellen tells me that it is time for a certain young man to get into his tights. It appears the theatre has not changed much in the years since my death, and I take some comfort in that, so again, adieu for now.” Cameo clicked the watch shut again and said to Topper, “My hat?”
Topper pulled the cloche out of her topper and tossed it to Cameo, and as she and the Boys set about costume changes, Topper came over next to Sam and sighed. “Trust grandpa to upstage me, even after all these years.”
“Trust my brother to join him,” Sam said.
“They’re two of a kind, aren’t they?”
“Seems like. Anything for the show. Your grandpa ever drag you onstage?”
“When I was five ....” Topper bit her lip. “You know, I was planning to go to a costume party at Aces High. Care to blow this popstand and join me?” She paused. “What’s wrong?”
“That phrase.” Sam nodded to where Cameo was helping Jim with a Dr. Frankenstein costume. “Do you know how many sodas have names like ‘Burst’ and ‘Blast’? Jim blew up the 7-11 once.” Sam switched his tail then. “Do I meet the dress code?”
“You’ve just had thousands of girls screaming for you. Hiram’s a snob, not an idiot. And it’s a charity masquerade anyway.” She paused. “The only problem is that I only bought one ticket and it’s sold out. And while Hiram keeps extras in his desk,” With a flourish, she produced a sheaf from her hat, “they require his signature to be valid ....”
“What’s the charity?”
“J-town Clinic, same as always,” Topper said, handing him the passes. “I can slip a few thousand in the till when he’s not looking.”
Sam grinned, laying them out on the cover of his sketchbook. “Got an example?” he asked, pulling off his glove.
Topper produced one, and with a flair, Sam forged both Hiram Worchester’s flamboyant up-and-down signature and his peacock blue fountain pen ink. “Cast party is on me,” said Topper, taking the extras and handing them to Peregrine, “but tell the Boys that I’ve absconded with their backup singer.” She replaced her hat, tapped the top, and extended her arm to Sam. “Care to join your fellow aces?”
Sam accepted her arm. “Sure thing.”
Editor GEORGE R. R. MARTIN was born September 20, 1948 in Bayonne, New Jersey. He began writing very young, selling monserstories to other neighborhood children for pennies, dramatic readings included. Later he became a comic book fan and collector in high school, and began to write fiction for comic fanzines (amateur fan magazines). Martin’s first professional sale was made in 1970 at age 21: “The Hero,” sold to Galaxy, published in February, 1971 issue. Other sales followed.
Four-time winner of the Hugo Award, two-time winner of the Nebula Award, and six-time Locus Award winner, Martin is the author and editor of over two dozen novels and anthologies, and the writer of numerous short stories. His New York Times best-selling novel A Storm of Swords—the third volume in his epic fantasy series “A Song of Ice and Fire”—was published in 2000. Martin lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
“Martin has assembled an impressive array of writers .... Progressing through the decades, Wild Cards keeps its momentum to the end ... I’m looking forward to the next episodes in this saga of mutant Americana.”
—Locus
“Well written and suspenseful and a good read .... The authors had a lot of fun rewriting recent American history.”
—Aboriginal Science Fiction
“Commendable writing ... a zany premise ... narrated with rueful humor and intelligence.”
—Publishers Weekly
Jetboy dove out of the sky in his rocket-sleek plane, speed lines roarin off the swept-back wings. Twenty-millimeter cannons bared ragged calligraphy and the tyrannosaur staggered as the shells tore into him.
“Arnie? Arnie, turn out that light!”
“Yes, Mother,” Arnie said. He slid the fifty-four-page special Jetboy on Dinosaur island back into its plastic bag. He switched of his reading light and carried the comic across the familiar darkness of his bedroom and put it away in the closet. He had a complete run of Jetboy Comics in one of the waxed cardboard boxes they used to ship chickens to grocery stores. On the shelf above it were stacked scrapbooks full of clippings about the Great and Powerful Turtle and the Howler and Jumpin’ Jack Flash. And next to them stood the dinosaur books, not just the kid stuff with the crude drawings, but textbooks on paleontology and botany and zoology.
Hidden in the back of another box of comics was the Playboy that had Peregrine in it. Lately, looking at those pictures had made Arnie feel strange, kind of nervous and excited and guilty all at the same time.
His parents knew about his obsessions, all but the Playboy, anyway. It was only the wild card business that bothered them. Arnie’s grandfather had been on the street that day, had seen it with his own eyes when Jetboy exploded into history. A year later Arnie’s mother had been born with lowgrade telekinesis, just enough to move a coin a few inches across a plastic tablecloth. Sometimes Arnie wished she’d just been normal. Better that than to get a power that wasn’t good for anything.
He’d made his grandfather tell him about it over and over. “He wanted to die,” the old man would say. “He saw the future, and he wasn’t in it. just wasn’t any place for him anymore. “
“Hush, Grandpa,” Arnie’s mother would say. “Don’t talk that way in front of Arnie.”
“I know what I saw,” the old man would say, and shake his head. “I was there.”
Arnie crept quietly back to bed and lay on his stomach, pleasantly aware of the pressure on his groin. He thought about Dinosaur Island. There was no question in his mind that it was real. Aces were real. Aliens were real-they had brought the wild card to earth.
He turned on his side and pulled his knees up toward his chest. What would it be like? When he was eight he’d driven through Utah with his parents and he’d made them stop at Vernal. They’d gone on the Prehistoric Nature Trail, and Arnie had run ahead to be by himself with the life-sized dinosaur models. Dinosaur Island would look like that, he thought, the rugged brush-covered hills in the background, the diplodocus big enough that he could walk under its belly, the struthiomimus like a huge, scaly ostrich, the pteranodon crouched like it had just glided in for a landing.
His eyes closed and he could see them moving now, not just the crummy dinosaurs you could see on TV but the special ones: the tiny, vicious deinonychus, the “terrible claw. “ Or the hideous, lumpy ankylosaur, a thirty-five-foot horned toad with a club on its tail that could dent steel plate.
And deep in his brain, inflamed by the rich, yeasty endocrine soup in which it floated, the wild card virus hovered over a cell, paused, then pumped out its alien message and died. And so, on and on it went, spiraling down through the years in a double helix of fear and ecstasy, mutilation and miraculous change ...
The woman on the other side of the coffee table had a blond crewcut and wire-rimmed glasses. She was around forty. No makeup, a man’s gray sportcoat over a white T-shirt, loose drawstring pants. Dyke, had been Veronica’s first impression, and so far nothing had changed her mind. “Things are just a little out of control right now,” Veronica said. “It’s not my fault. I need a little time.”
The woman’s name was Hannah Jorde. She sighed and said, “I’m so sick of hearing the same old shit.” She put her glasses on the table and rubbed her eyes. “You’re an addict, Veronica. I would have known that in two seconds, even if Ichiko hadn’t told me. You’ve got every symptom in the book.” She put her glasses back on. “I’m going to get you in a program. Methadone. It’ll make you feel better, and keep you alive, but you’ll still be an addict. Only you’ll be addicted to methadone instead of heroin.”
Veronica said, “I can quit—”
“Please,” Hannah said. “Don’t say it. Don’t make me listen to it. I just want to tell you a couple of things, and I want you to think about them. That’s all we can get done this first time anyway.”
“Fine,” Veronica said. She put her hands under her thighs because they had started to shake a little.
“You’re an addict because you don’t want to deal with what’s going on inside you. You’re not just killing yourself, you’re already dead.” She let the words hang for a second and then said, “What is it you do for Ichiko?”
“I’m a—” She stopped herself before she could say “geisha,” Fortunato’s approved term. “I’m a prostitute.” Suddenly Hannah smiled. She could be pretty, Veronica thought, if she made a little effort. The right clothes, makeup. A wig for that awful haircut. What a waste. “Good,” Hannah said. “The truth, for once. Thank you for that.” She filled out a slip of paper and handed it across. “Start your methadone and I’ll see you tomorrow”
A van with a loudspeaker passed her on Seventh Avenue. The recorded message reminded her that it was Election Day and she should exercise her constitutional freedom. Doubtless paid for by the Democrats. Everyone expected a landslide for Bush after the Democrats’ disaster in Atlanta.
A man leaned out of the van and said, “Hey, baby, did you vote today?” She showed him the manicure on her right middle finger. That went for the American political system, too. What kind of freedom was it when the only people you could vote for were politicians?
She got in line outside the methadone clinic, pulling her coat tighter around her. It was embarrassment as much as cold. She didn’t know which was worse, to be surrounded by so many junkies or to be taken for one of them. They mostly seemed to be black women and white boys with long greasy hair.
At least, she thought, she was still on the street. Ichiko had given her three choices: check into a detox center, see Hannah, or look for another job.
Her turn came and the woman at the window handed her a paper cup. The methadone was mixed in a sweet orange-flavored drink. Veronica drank it down and crumpled the cup. The black hooker behind her teetered up to the window on impossibly high heels and said, “Weeee, law, give me that jesus jizz.”
Veronica threw the cup on the street and looked at her watch. Time enough to get uptown to Bergdorf s before her dinner date.
She should have guessed from the name he’d used to make the dinner reservation: Herman Gregg. But she didn’t figure it out till she got to the table.
“Holy shit,” Veronica said. The subdued light of the restaurant was enough, even for Veronica, to know the face. “Senator Hartmann,” she said.
He smiled weakly. “Not senator anymore. I’m just an ordinary citizen again. But you can see why I didn’t want to be alone tonight. You know what they say about politics and strange bedfellows.”
“No,” Veronica said. “What do they say?”
Hartmann shrugged and put the menu down. “How hungry are you?”
“I don’t care. If you just want to go upstairs, that’s fine.” He’d already told her he had a room upstairs at the Hyatt. “Don’t feel like you have to buy me dinner, like this is a real date or anything.”
“Somehow this isn’t quite what I expected. I’d heard so much about Fortunato and his extraordinary women.”
“Yeah, well, Fortunato’s gone. Things have fallen off a bit. If you’re not happy, you don’t have to go through with it.”
“I’m not complaining. I guess you’re more human than I expected. I kind of like that.”
Veronica stood up. “Shall we?”
He was very quiet in the elevator, didn’t touch her or anything. Just one hand on the elbow as they got out, to point her toward the room. Once inside, he locked the door and turned the TV on.
“We don’t need that, do we?” Veronica asked.
“I have to know,” Hartmann said. He took his jacket off and folded it over a chair, then untied his shoes and put them neatly underneath. He loosened his tie and sat on the end of the bed, his tiredness visible in the curve of his spine. “I have to know just how bad it is.”
When Veronica came out of the bathroom in her bra and panties, he was in the same position. Bush was running almost two to one ahead of Dukakis and Jackson. Concession speeches were expected momentarily. She helped Hartmann off with the rest of his clothes, put a condom on him, and got him under the covers.
He didn’t want anything fancy, just got right down to business. As he rocked against her, the election returns continued in a steady stream: “Texas now shows Bush with a staggering fifty-eight percent of the vote, and that’s with thirty-seven percent of the precincts reporting.” Hartmann’s spasm happened quickly and left him on the edge of tears. Veronica stroked the small of his back, where the sweat had just broken, and made soothing noises. Just as he rolled off her, one of the TV reporters said his name and he sat up guiltily.
“Many of us must be asking ourselves the same question tonight,” the reporter went on. “Could Gregg Hartmann have beaten Vice-President Bush? It was just two and a half months ago that Hartmann withdrew from the race after his loss of composure at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. That convention will long be remembered, not only for its bloodshed, but as a turning point in the nation’s attitude toward victims of the wild-card virus.”
She carried the used condom into the bathroom, knotted it, wrapped it in toilet paper, and threw it away. The odor of sperm almost gagged her. She sat on the edge of the tub and washed herself and then brushed her teeth, over and over, telling herself she didn’t need a shot, not yet.
It was after two when Hartmann turned the TV off. Bush was a joke, Hartmann told her. His campaigning against drugs was sheerest hypocrisy, given what his CIA had done in Central America. His cabinet officers would never live up to his claims of ethics, and his “kinder, gentler” America would have no room for aces or jokers.
The wild-card issue meant little to Veronica. Fortunato, the man who had brought her in off the streets, was an ace. Her mother had been one of Fortunato’s geishas and had meant for Veronica to have a college education and a real career. But Veronica had turned tricks anyway. The money was easy and it was easy as well to think of herself that way, as a whore. Together Miranda and Fortunato had decided that if she was going to sell her body, she might as well do it right. Fortunato had brought her back to his apartment and tried, unsuccessfully, to make her into one of his ideal women. She loved him in the way that people loved something sweet and not entirely of this world.
Because of Fortunato she’d met and had sex withother aces and jokers. None of them had seemed quite real to her either. There weren’t even that many of them, not compared to unwed mothers or the homeless or old people, not enough to deserve all the attention they got. And it wasn’t like it was a disease that other people could catch, like AIDS or something.
That thought gave her a chill. For a while the wild card had been contagious, and her sometime boyfriend Croyd Crenson had been spreading it. She’d been exposed to him but fortunately nothing had happened. She didn’t want to think about it.
Eventually Hartmann fell asleep, the soft flesh of his stomach shaking with muffled snores. Veronica lay awake, counting all the many, many things she didn’t want to think about.
She didn’t sleep even when she got back to Ichiko’s, around dawn. This time it was the idea of seeing Hannah again that kept her turning from side to side, chills moving up through her from her stomach.
She got up around noon and made a breakfast she couldn’t eat. Ichiko walked her out to the cab or she might not have made it. Even then she tried to tell the cabby to stop, to let her out, but she couldn’t find her voice. It was like being back in convent school, being sent to the principal, the oldest, scariest nun in the world.
She walked up the stairs and into Hannah’s office. She couldn’t feel her legs. She sat in the middle of Hannah’s square, gray couch. Today Hannah wore jeans and a man’s dress shirt and a cardigan with interwoven gold thread. Veronica couldn’t take her eyes off the sparkles of gold.
“Did you have a chance to think?” Hannah asked her.
Veronica shrugged. “I’ve been busy. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking.”
“Okay, let’s start with that. Tell me about the things you do.”
Without meaning to, Veronica found herself talking about Hartmann. Hannah kept asking for details. What did he look like naked? What exactly was the taste in her mouth afterward? She sounded like she was only mildly curious. What was it like when his penis was inside her? “I don’t know,” Veronica said. “It didn’t feel like anything.”
“What do you mean? He was inside you, but you couldn’t feel it? Did you have to ask him if he was in yet?” Veronica started to laugh, and then she was crying. She didn’t know how it happened. It seemed to be somebody else. “I didn’t want him there,” she said. Who was that talking? “I didn’t want him in me. I wanted him to leave me alone.” Her whole body shook with sobs. “This is ridiculous,” she said. “Why am I crying? What’s happening to me?”
Hannah moved over next to her and wrapped her arms around her. She smelled like Dial soap. Veronica buried her head in the golden fibers of her sweater, felt the softness of the breast underneath. Everything gave way then and she cried until she ran out of tears, until she felt like a wrung-out sponge.
Standing in line, Veronica tapped her foot nervously on the sidewalk. One of the long-haired boys behind her sang a song about shooting up in a low, monotonous voice. “You know I couldn’t find my mainline,” he sang. He didn’t seem aware he was doing it.
Veronica wanted the methadone, wanted it badly. What do they put in that stuff? she thought, and stopped herself before the laughter turned into the other thing again.
She put her hand into her purse and held on to a folded piece of paper with Hannah’s phone number on it.
Veronica came in on a blast of cold air and stood for a second, rubbing her hands together.
“Flowers for you,” Melanie said. She had a Russianlanguage textbook open while she watched the phones. Melanie was new. She still believed in Fortunato’s program, that they were geishas not hookers, that men actually cared how many languages they spoke and whether or not they could discuss postmodernist critical theory. When she finished her telephone shift, she would be off to cooking class or elocution lessons. Then, that night, she would spread her legs for a man who only cared that she had lots of red-blond hair and big boobs.
“Jerry again?” Veronica asked. She threw her coat on the couch and collapsed.
“I don’t see what you have against him. He’s sweet.”
“I don’t have anything against him. I just don’t have anything for him either. He’s a nobody.”
“A nobody with a ton of money, who thinks the sun rises and sets on you. Anyway, I’ve got him down for you tonight, from ten o’clock on.”
“Tonight?” The walls seemed to close in around her. She couldn’t breathe. “I can’t.”
“You have a date you didn’t put on the computer?” Ichiko had bought a Macintosh over the summer and had computerized everything. The girls were responsible for keeping their own schedules current, and if one of them screwed up they all got yelled at.
“No, I ... I’m sick.”
“He’s already paid and everything.”
“Call him back. Will you? I have to go upstairs.” She staggered up to her room and got in bed with her clothes on, doubled up, clutching a pillow to her stomach. From there she watched the street outside turn dark and the headlights of the cars sweep past. Liz, her chubby gray cat, climbed onto the’ peak of her hip and began to knead the covers, purring loudly. “Please shut up,” Veronica said.
Liz was another reminder of Fortunato. She had been Veronica’s to start with, though she hadn’t cared that much about her. Then Fortunato had formed some kind of bond with the cat. Liz used to follow him around his apartment, crying, and would get into his lap whenever he sat down.
When Fortunato left for Japan, it seemed like the cat was all Veronica had left of him.
Finally the cat settled down and started to snore softly. Veronica couldn’t relax, and soon she was trembling. It wasn’t like the shaking that came when she needed a shot. That part of her was quiet. This was something else. She wondered if it was the methadone, some bizarre allergy. The longer it went on, the more out of touch she became. She couldn’t stop shaking. Was she dying?
She fumbled the phone off the hook and dialed Hannah’s number. “It’s Veronica,” she said. “Something’s wrong.”
“I know that,” Hannah said. “Why don’t you come over?”
“Come over?”
“To my apartment.”
“I don’t know if I can make it. I feel so weird.”
“Of course you can. Stand up.”
Veronica stood up. Somehow it was all right. “Are you standing?”
“Yes,” Veronica said.
“Good. Write down this address.”
A few minutes later Veronica was in a cab. She looked down at her legs, saw her wool-knit A-line skirt wrinkled beyond hope. She got a mirror out of her purse and looked at her smudged eyeliner and bloodshot eyes. “I can’t help it,” she said out loud, and the words almost started the flood of tears again.
She knew she was on the edge of something. She didn’t have the strength to keep herself from being pulled into it, but she could feel the depth of the chasm in the pit of her stomach.
Hannah lived on the third floor of a building on Park Avenue South that had escaped remodeling. The varnish was worn off the center of the stairs and the landings were raw concrete. Hannah met her at the door of her apartment. “You made it,” she said. She seemed relieved and happy to see her.
Veronica could only nod. The apartment was two rooms and a kitchen. There was almost no furniture, only tatami mats and pillows, and an expensive stereo with huge speakers that sat in the middle of the floor. Japanese pen-and-ink drawings hung in cheap Plexiglas frames on the wall. The Oriental simplicity of it reminded her of the apartment she’d shared with Fortunato.
“Settle down anywhere,” Hannah said. “I’ll bring you some tea.”
The music on the stereo was instrumental, one of those New Age things. It was an acoustic guitar in a weird tuning over lots of percussion. Like the rest of the room, like Hannah herself, it suggested a serenity that Veronica couldn’t feel. Hannah brought her tea in a small, thick cup with no handle. The tea was green and vaguely sweet.
Hannah sat cross-legged on the couch next to her. “You look like you haven’t been sleeping.”
“I’m all knotted up inside. Maybe it’s the methadone.”
“It’s not the methadone. It’s three years of feelings trying to get out.”
“Is it cold in here?”
Hannah touched her hand. The shaking got worse. “No,” Hannah said. “It’s not the methadone and it’s not the temperature. It’s just you.” And then she leaned forward slowly and kissed Veronica on the lips.
It was gentle but not sisterly, warm but not demanding. Veronica shivered and held herself, feeling like she was fighting to keep from drowning. “You’re confusing me ....”
“You were already confused. When was the last time you enjoyed making love? When was the last time you lay next to somebody and got comfort out of it? When was the last time you thought you deserved to be happy? You don’t have to answer me. I already know”
She stood up and took Veronica’s hand. Veronica followed her, not to the bedroom, like she expected, but to the bath. Hannah started the water running and undressed her, carefully, not touching her more than she had to. The room began to fill with steam. “Get in,” Hannah said, and Veronica got in the tub. The hot water stung her, made her face flush. “Your body is still very beautiful,” Hannah said. “You’ve been careful with the needle.” Veronica nodded. The hot water stopped her shaking and helped her relax. She felt drugged. Had there been something in the tea?
Hannah took her own clothes off and put her glasses on the edge of the sink. She was a little heavy in the waist, and her stomach curved without jeans to hold it in. Her underclothes left red lines around her waist and under her breasts. Still, she seemed beautiful to Veronica, her pale nipples, the discreet tangle of hair between her legs. Veronica found herself about to reach one hand out to touch Hannah’s body, then stopped herself, ashamed and confused.
Hannah poured oil into the tub. It foamed and colored the air with the heavy green smell of wildflowers. Then she knelt beside the tub and kissed Veronica again. Veronica’s mouth opened, against her will, and she tasted the mint tea on Hannah’s breath. “What are you doing to me?” she whispered.
“Seducing you,” Hannah said. “If I do anything that scares you or you don’t feel comfortable with, just say so.” She put her hands on Veronica’s cheeks, then slowly ran them down her neck and shoulders. Veronica leaned back against the tub, eyes closed, her breathing coming raggedly. Hannah’s small, soft hands moved to her breasts. “Oh,” Veronica said. She was melting. Her entire body was liquid. She couldn’t tell where it ended and the bathwater began.
This time when Hannah kissed her she leaned into it and put both arms around her.
By the time Hannah helped her into bed Veronica had no will of her own. She had no strength, no intelligence, only sensation. Hannah was slow and gentle and unafraid. She knew where to touch her and how much pressure to use. The first climax was the most intense Veronica had ever felt. It had been so long she barely recognized the feeling. There were others. They blurred into a continuum of pleasure.
And at the end of it came sleep.
Sunlight woke her. Her eyes opened and saw dark green sheets. The rest of it came back and she sat up quickly, holding the sheet against her. Hannah lay on her side, watching.
“What did you do to me? What was in that tea?”
“Nothing,” Hannah said. “What happened was that we made love.”
“This is too weird. I have to get out of here.” She looked around the room for her clothes, reluctant to get out of bed naked with Hannah there.
“Wait,” Hannah said. There was a stillness about her that Veronica found inescapable. “I know what’s wrong with you. I’m an alcoholic. I was drunk for ten years and now I’ve been sober for six. I was married to a man that I hated, and I hated him just because I didn’t want to have sex with him. It wasn’t his fault, it was the way I am. Only nobody could tell me that was the reason.”
“What’s that got to do with me? Are you saying I’m queer?” There was a towel on the floor next to her. She wrapped herself in it and looked in the bathroom. Her clothes were folded neatly on the floor.
“Maybe you’re not gay.” Hannah raised her voice just enough for Veronica to hear her. “Though I believe you are. That doesn’t matter. You hate yourself for what you’re doing with your body. It makes you feel helpless. And helplessness is what addiction is all about.”
Veronica buttoned her rumpled silk blouse and brushed at the creases in her skirt. “I got to go.”
“I’ve got three o’clock set aside for you. If you want to talk some more.”
“Just talk? Or do you fuck all your patients?”
There was a short, hurt silence. “You’re the first. I suppose I should feel like I’ve pissed away all my ethics, but I don’t.”
Veronica opened the door. “I’ll think about it,” she said. Then she belted on her coat and ran down the stairs.
Jerry was waiting for her when she got back to the brownstone.
“Melanie said you were sick,” he said. “I wanted to see if I could help.”
“No, Jerry. It’s sweet of you and all, but no.”
“Where were you? Did you go out on another date?”
Veronica shook her head. “I’ve been to the doctor, that’s all.”
Jerry looked her up and down. obviously made the decision not to call her out. He sat on the sofa and looked at the flowers he’d sent her the day before, still on the desk by the phone, the card unopened. “I’m wasting my time, aren’t I?”
“Jerry. What do you want me to say? You shouldn’t have fallen in love with a hooker. I mean, what were you thinking about? Did you think I was available on a Rentto-Own plan?” She sat down next to him, touched his face. “You’re a sweet kid, Jerry. Women should go nuts for you. Real women. That’s what you deserve. Not some half-breed Puerto Rican junkie hooker.”
Junkie, she thought. She’d actually said it.
“You’re the one I want,” Jerry said, looking at the floor.
“You don’t even know me. You’ve got no idea. You’re trying to catch up on twenty years overnight, and you see me as some kind of shortcut. Nothing happens that fast. Give yourself some time.”
“Can I see you tonight?”
“No. Not tonight.” She paused, got up her nerve. “Not ever. Not anymore.”
“Why? I love you.”
“You don’t know what love is. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve got some kind of stupid romantic ideas from all those movies you watch and they don’t have anything to do with real life. I can’t stand it. I don’t want to be the only thing propping up this makebelieve world of yours. I’m not strong enough.”
She stood up. “Veronica, please!”
She couldn’t look at him. His face was all twisted, like he was trying not to cry. “I’m sorry, Jerry” she said. “You’ll find somebody. You’ll see.” She ran upstairs.
It wasn’t even noon, but she was wide-awake, her head clear. It made her nervous to feel as good as she did. She showered and put on jeans and a sweater and went downtown for her methadone. Okay, she thought, standing in line, feeling the November sun warm her hair. You can admit you’re a junkie. You can admit you’re tired of iturning tricks. What does that leave you?
All the girls had savings accounts in Ichiko’s name. Half their earnings went into the fund every month, carefully monitored by the new computer. If Veronica gave up the Life, she could collect the money. It would keep her alive for at least a couple of years. Then what? Find some poor sap like Jerry and settle down to have kids?
She got to the head of the line. A boy in a white lab coat behind the window glanced at her card and gave her the dose. She drank it and threw the cup at an overflowing trash can. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough not to hurt, not to have the need. Heroin was more than that, more than an end to pain. It was the rush, the joy, the way the cool fire went through her like God’s love.
She took a battered list of phone numbers out of her purse and started dialing. Twice she left messages on phone machines and the third time she got lucky. “Croyd?” she said.
“Himself. Where are you, darlin’?” His words ended with muffled clicks. She hadn’t seen him in three months. He’d obviously slept, and woken in a distorted body. That was okay. Veronica could see past the surface.
“Chelsea,” she said. “Want to get high?”
He was near the East River, in the waterfront apartment where she’d first spent the night with him, two years before. That was Wild Card Day, when the Astronomer had killed Caroline, and Fortunato had left for Japan.
When she was high, those memories never bothered her.
Croyd answered the door and Veronica stood and stared at him for a long moment. “I’d kiss you,” Croyd said, “but I’m afraid I might hurt you.”
“That’s okay, I’ll pass.” The clicking she’d heard on the phone came when he shut his beak at the end of a word. He was over seven feet tall and covered with feathers. A thin membrane linked his arms to his sides. “Can you fly?”
He shook his head. “Too heavy. Shame, isn’t it? I can glide a little, dive out of a second-story window. So it’s not a complete loss.”
His eyes were shiny black and the wrinkled feathers above them gave him a look of fierce intelligence. “I may be wasting my time,” she said.
The beak opened into a smile. “The wings may not be functional, but the rest of me is.”
Veronica shook her head. “I’m in trouble, Croyd. Have you got any coke?”
They sat at his kitchen table, a slab of pine with cigarette burns and peeling varnish. Veronica did two lines then passed the straw to Croyd. He snorted his into the small black holes at the base of his beak. Veronica wiped the mirror down with her index finger and rubbed it into her gums. “Better,” she said.
“You sure you don’t want to finish this conversation in bed?”
She shook her head. “I need a friend right now. Weird shit is happening to me. I can’t get a handle.” She told him about Hannah, about nearly throwing up after her last “date.”
Croyd listened intently. At least he looked intent. When she finished he said, “It’s probably stupid for me to say this. I mean, this is not in my best interest. But you can’t go against what you feel. You need to see this woman again, in the light of day, and make up your mind about her. Maybe you are gay. So what? Do you really care what a bunch of square assholes think about your sex life?”
“I feel like I’m fourteen,” Veronica said. “All these emotional roller coasters. I can’t keep up.”
“You want my advice, don’t even try. Let it happen. And if you get in trouble, you can call me.” It sounded like they were finished, but Croyd hesitated, like there was something else he had to say. “There’s nothing else happened, right? I mean, no ... no symptoms.”
He was talking about that whole Typhoid Croyd business. She shook her head. “No. No sudden ace powers, no flippers on the ends of my legs. I don’t think it did anything to me at all.”
“It’s just-I feel responsible, that’s all.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
He walked her to the door and she hugged him tight, despite the peculiar acid smell of his feathers. His hands rested flat against her back. “I have to be careful,” he said.
“If I bend my fingers too much, these claws come out.” He showed her the claws. There was a light of pleasure in his eyes when he looked at them.
“So long, Croyd,” she said. “Thanks for everything.”
She got to Hannah’s office just before four. “I’m late,” she said.
Hannah held the door for her. “It doesn’t matter. There’s nobody else scheduled for this afternoon.” Then she said, “I’m glad you came.”
Veronica was giddy from cocaine and nerves and couldn’t sit down. Hannah took her usual position, in the chair across the table from the couch.
“How’s the methadone working out?” Hannah asked. “Fine,” Veronica said. “It’s great.” She walked behind the couch, turned around, leaned into the back of it. “No, it’s not great. It’s not enough. I still want to get high. I need it.”
“Why?”
“Why? What a stupid fucking question. Because I like to feel good. Because when you’re high, you don’t care about wading through all the world’s shit—”
“What shit?” Hannah said. “What shit are you living in that you didn’t put yourself into? You’ve got everything backward. You think you can control your drug habit and you can’t control your life. It’s the other way around, you just don’t know it. You have no control over heroin. It owns you. They call it horse, but it’s really riding you. That’s step one of what they call the Twelve-Step Plan. You have to admit you are powerless to control your addiction. And then, later on, you can learn to take responsibility for the rest of your life. As in ‘the ability to respond.’ Not blame, not control, but responsibility. Something you can live with.”
Veronica shook her head. “That’s all easy for you to say. But I don’t have any kind of life. My mother is a washed-up whore who’s pimping me now. I never knew who my father was, and I don’t think my mother did either. I got no brothers or sisters to turn to. I learned all that shit Fortunato taught us, but it’s not a college diploma. It’s not going to get me _a soft job someplace. Look at the odds. I’m going to end up like the kids I went to school with. Fat and old, either divorced or married to a husband that beats me up on weekends.” It was hard to believe. She’d actually talked herself right out of her cocaine high.
“So what is it you want?”
“Escape. I want a good-looking man with a fast car and a lot of money to come and take me away someplace.”
“And then what?”
“Then we live happily ever after.”
“That’s bullshit, Veronica. You know better than that. If all you want is some man, you could have had plenty. What’s the difference whether you’re dependent on a drug or dependent on a man? There isn’t any, and you know it.” Veronica thought of Jerry, who would take her away if she would only let him. “Why do you care what happens to me?”
Hannah walked over to the window and looked out at the street. “When you walked in here I saw myself, six years ago. There’s a fire in you. A heat. Sexual, emotional, spiritual. It’s been too much for you, all your life. You had to use heroin to keep it from eating you up.” She turned and looked Veronica in the eyes. “I want that fire. I want all you have. The two of us, together, burning until we burn each other up.”
Veronica could not get her breath. She stood up, feeling the fabric of her sweater move against her tight, aching nipples. She walked to the door and locked it. The pressure of her jeans between her legs was maddening. She kicked off her shoes and pulled the sweater over her head.
“Show me,” she said.
At fifteen she’d been in love with an eighteen-yearold pachuco, had fucked him at every possible opportunity, in the backseat of his car, in the park, once in the stairwell of her high school. It was always quick and brutal, and afterward she went home to her empty room.
There she could think about the boy and make herself come with her fingers, the way she could never come when he was inside her.
Since then she’d had sex with hundreds of men. None of them had made her come either, not even Fortunato, and as for love, she’d convinced herself it was just another he.
Hannah changed all of that. They made love five or six times a day. It was all so equal. For everything of Hannah’s there was something of Veronica’s. Afterward they slept in each other’s arms. Under Hannah’s gentle hands and tongue, Veronica found a responsiveness she didn’t think was possible, not for anyone.
“Women don’t come from having men inside them,” Hannah told her. “I’ve read in books that we’re supposed to, I’ve heard there are women who do. But I’ve never talked to one of them. Every woman I’ve ever talked to needs something more.”
“More,” Veronica said. “I want more.”
She only left Hannah’s apartment long enough to score her daily methadone. She wore Hannah’s clothes, when she bothered to wear clothes at all. She did what Croyd had told her to. She stopped fighting and immersed herself in sensation: the smell and feel and taste of Hannah’s body, the exotic foods and teas that Hannah prepared for her, the long nights of physical and emotional intimacy where nothing was forbidden.
Almost nothing, anyway. Veronica found herself talking for hours about her childhood, the terrors of Catholic school, the tangled genealogy of her aunts and uncles and cousins, the hypocrisy of Catholic sexuality in which teenaged girls routinely gave blow jobs but recoiled in horror from the thought of losing their sacred virginity.
It was Hannah that held back. She talked about her childhood, her ex-husband, her parents. She was an imaginative and enthusiastic lover, afraid of nothing. She had Veronica reading about addiction and feminism and Marxism and vegetarianism and everything else that was a part of her life. But she never explained the transition, the years between her drunken marriage and her sober counseling job.
There were hints. She had been part of some kind of radical feminist group. She never mentioned the name. “They believed in a lot of things I wasn’t comfortable with,” was all she would say.
“What sort of things?”
“Things that might appeal to somebody who was still full of anger and bitterness. Things you have to outgrow if you’re going to get anywhere.”
Veronica assumed she was talking about violence. Bombing or assassination or something else illegal. And because Hannah didn’t want to talk about it, Veronica left it alone.
Veronica was the first to say “I love you.”
It was dawn. They lay side by side, their hands between each other’s legs, lips just touching. The pleasure was so strong that the words came out without her quite meaning them to. Hannah held her tightly and said, “It scares me when you say that. People use the word ‘love’ on each other like a weapon. I don’t want that to happen to us.”
“I love you anyway. Whatever you say. Whether you like it or not.”
Hannah pulled far enough away to look into her eyes. “I love you, too.”
“I want to kick the methadone. I want to get clean.”
“Okay.”
“I mean now. Starting today.”
“It’ll be ugly. I can get you drugs to help, but it’s going to tear you apart. Are you sure you’re ready for that?”
“It’s what I want.”
“Give it one more week. We need to get out a little, get you back into the world. If you still want to do it next week, then we’ll try it.”
“I guess that’s what I’m saying.”
“I think I would like to do that,” Veronica said. She dabbed at her eyes with her napkin. They both pretended not to see the tears. “What do I tell Ichiko?”
“I don’t know. What do you think?”
“You’re going into counselor mode again.” Hannah shrugged.
“I guess I tell her I’m moving out. That I’m through. I think she’s probably figured that out already.”
In fact Ichiko had. “I hope you will be very happy,” she said. She hugged Veronica. “I can see already that you are. Here’s a little money to make things easier.” The amount on the check was larger than Veronica had any reason to expect. “Your trust fund, plus a little extra from me.”
“I don’t know ....”
“Take it,” Ichiko said. “Times are changing. I don’t feel so good about this business, the way I used to. I look around, I see all this hatred. They hate jokers and aces. When I first came to this country, they hated me for being Japanese. Fortunato’s father had to hide us during the Pacific War so they wouldn’t put us into camps. People afraid of each other, hurting each other. My geishas don’t help that anymore. When a man uses a woman, it doesn’t make him a better man. Any more than having black people for slaves made white people better. In the end they only come to hate each other.”
“What are you saying? Are you going to close down the business?”
Ichiko shrugged. “It’s something I think about, more and more. There is all this pressure on me, these gangsters and big-money men wanting to take over the business. If I close down, they will go away and leave me alone. I have enough money. Who cares about money anyway?” She pushed the check toward Veronica again, and this time Veronica took it. “You go and be happy and find love where you can.”
Veronica went upstairs and finished packing. Eventually she knew she couldn’t put it off any longer and knocked on the door of her mother’s room.
That afternoon they went to a movie together. They held hands like teenagers. At dinner afterward, over Chinese food, Hannah said, “I think you should bring some of your things over. Clothes and things. You know. And your cat.”
“You mean move in.”
Miranda had heard most of it from Ichiko, and what she hadn’t heard she’d figured out for herself. She took Veronica’s hands and held them both for a long time without saying anything. Finally she said, “You know I don’t care that you’re in love with a woman and not a man. You know I’m happy you’re giving up ... the Life. I never wanted that for you in the first place.” She sighed. “Just be careful, darling, please. You’ve only known this woman for what, not even two weeks?”
Veronica pulled her hands away and stood up. “Mother, for God’s sake.”
“I’m not trying to rain on your parade—”
“Yes, you are. That’s exactly what you’re trying to do.”
“I’m just saying you don’t know her very well. I want this to work out for you, really I do, but it may not, and—”
“Save it,” Veronica said. “I don’t want to hear it. Just once, be happy that I’m happy. And if you can’t, then keep your mouth shut about it.” She walked out and slammed the door and took her things down to the cab where Hannah waited.
On the ride home, with Liz huddled nervously on her lap, Veronica started to shake.
“Are you okay?” Hannah asked her. “Did you get your methadone today?”
“I took it,” Veronica said. “It’s not that.” Though the symptoms were much the same. She felt clammy and her bowels were knotted up. “I’m scared, that’s all.”
Hannah put her arms around her. “Scared? What are you afraid of?”
“I have my whole life in front of me. It’s just out there, waiting. I don’t know what to do with it.”
“You live it,” Hannah said. “That’s all. One day at a time.”
The next afternoon they walked down Fifth Avenue, looking in the windows. Veronica stopped in front of a blue-sequined strapless gown in the window of Sak’s. “God,” she said. “How gorgeous.”
Hannah took her arm and led her away, smiling. “And how politically incorrect. That’s just a harness men put you in. Come on. Let’s get this money of yours in the bank before it turns to fairy dust or something.”
They walked down to the Chase Manhattan and went in. There was a single line, marked off with red velvet ropes, far the Paying and Receiving tellers. Veronica stepped up to the back of the line, already six people long, and two more moved in behind her.
“I’m going to walk around,” Hannah said. “I hate lines. They make me claustrophobic.”
There was a nervousness in Hannah’s eyes Veronica had never seen before. She remembered what her mother had said, realized how little, in fact, she knew this woman she was in love with. “You’re not kidding, are you?”
“No,” she said, her smile flickering like a bad fluorescent bulb. “I’m not.” She stepped over the velvet rope and wandered off into the open part of the lobby. Veronica couldn’t help noticing a good-looking blond kid a few feet away from her, filling out some kind of form at the service counter. Hannah saw him, too, and turned for a second look.
Veronica felt a stab of jealousy. The kid was in his late teens, dressed in expensive khaki pants, loafers, and a V—necked sweater with nothing underneath. He had a long black coat draped casually over one arm. His hair fell over his ears and collar and he had the start of a five-o’clock shadow. There was an effortless sexuality about him that was obvious to everyone around him.
Hannah smiled and shook her head. It looked like she was smiling at herself rather than the kid. She started to walk away. The man in line behind Veronica cleared his throat noisily. Veronica looked up, saw the line had moved, took up the slack. She looked back at Hannah just in time to see her stagger.
“Hannah ... ?” Veronica said.
Hannah caught her balance and took a couple of hesitant steps. It was like her shoes had heels that were too high for her. But Hannah never wore high heels. She turned and looked at Veronica.
Her eyes were wrong. There was something crazy in them, and in the way she smiled. Veronica looked at the long line that stretched out behind her. She didn’t want to lose her place, but if something was really wrong ... Suddenly Hannah began to run.
It was clumsy and slow, but it took the security guard by surprise. Hannah had the gun out of his holster and pointed at his head before he knew what was happening. “Hannah!” Veronica screamed.
The gun kicked in Hannah’s hand. The shot boomed off the marble walls and the room went silent for a long second afterward. The bullet threw the guard against the wall, his face collapsed around the black hole in his cheek. He left a long red smear against pale stone of the wall as he slumped to the floor.
Veronica tried to jump the velvet rope and caught her foot. Hannah turned toward her as she fell and fired again, the bullet howling over Veronica’s head. The silence gave way to screams and shouts of panic. An alarm went off, barely audible over the rest of the noise. The customers, most of them men in dark suits, ran for the doors. Hannah spun around to watch, a hideous joy on her face.
Veronica got her legs under her and ran at Hannah. Guards converged from all over the building, guns out. One of them shouted at Veronica, something like, “Hey, lady, stay down!” Another guard fired a shot over Hannah’s head and Hannah fired back at him, twice.
By then Veronica was in the air.
She tackled Hannah around the waist and they slid across the polished floor. The gun came loose and skittered away. With the strength of absolute fear she pinned Hannah’s arms above her head. “It’s me, goddammit!” Veronica yelled. “What’s wrong with you?”
Across the lobby a body hit the floor.
It was the blond kid in the sweater. He seemed stunned, paralyzed, as if he’d had a stroke. His face was distorted with terror and something else, some kind of alien presence. He started to raise one hand to his face, then jerked forward like a fumbled puppet.
And then, just as the guards swarmed over them, Veronica saw the light come back into Hannah’s eyes. Her mouth moved, but no sound came out. Two pairs of hands pulled Veronica away. Two more bank guards and an NYPD cop shoved gun barrels into Hannah’s face, screaming at her not to move. In seconds they had her in handcuffs and out the door.
Veronica tried to get loose and the guards tightened their hold. She strained to find the blond kid in the crowd. He was gone.
They took her to the precinct station in a squad car. At first they just wanted her story, over and over. Veronica told them she and Hannah were roommates, told them about the heroin, about the check she’d been taking to the bank. When they asked her what happened there, she told them she didn’t know. “It wasn’t Hannah,” she said. “We’ve got a dozen witnesses that say it was.”
“ I mean, it wasn’t her inside her body. It was like she was ... I don’t know. Possessed.”
“Possessed? The devil made her do it?”
“ I don’t know.”
She told the story again and again, until the words lost all meaning.
Then a cop in a suit came out of the darkness and said, “What do you know about a bunch that calls itself WORSE!”
“ I never heard of them. Can I have a glass of water?”
“In a minute. Can you tell me what the initials stand for?”
“I told you, I never—”
“Women’s Organization to Reach Sexual Equality. Now does it ring a bell?”
“No, I—”
“Last year there was a riot outside an abortion clinic. These people from WORSE sent five protesters and a cop to the hospital.”
“Good for them,” Veronica said.
“The cop died. Now do you think it’s funny? There’s at least seven incidents in the last year where these women have provoked violence in the streets. One of the people they’ve got it in for is your old employer. Fortunato.”
“What’s that got to do with Hannah?”
“Not much. She’s only the president.”
“What? That’s impossible.”
“I guess you know everything about her, right? How long did you say you’ve known her? Ten days?”
“She said she had nothing to do with those people anymore.”
“You just said you’d never heard of WORSE.”
“She never mentioned the name. She said she used to be part of some radical organization, but she didn’t agree with their methods. She said it was over a long time ago.”
A little man with pattern baldness and glasses said, “She’s clean, Lou. She’s telling the truth.” The man was a low-grade ace, the weakest sort of telepath. The cops had ten or fifteen on staff to use as lie detectors.
“To hell with it then,” the man in the suit said. “We’re cutting you loose. But I don’t want you away from a phone where I can find you for more than an hour at a time. You got that?”
“I want to see her,” Veronica said.
“Forget it. Her lawyer’s there. That’s all she gets.”
“Who’s her lawyer?”
The man in the suit sighed. “Bud?”
One of the cops looked through the file. “Lawyer’s name is Mundy.” He whistled. “From Latham, Strauss. Hot stuff.”
“Now get out of here,” the man in the suit said. Two uniformed cops gave her a ride home, then followed her inside. They had a warrant, signed and sealed. She sat on the floor and watched them as they took the apartment apart. One of them found the sexual toys in the drawer by the bed. He held up the wooden ben wa balls for his partner to see, then looked over at Veronica. “Fuck you,” Veronica said, blushing, close to tears. “Leave that stuff alone.”
The cop shrugged and put the balls away. Finally they left. Veronica had watched them carefully. There was nothing in the apartment, not a single piece of evidence, to connect Hannah to WORSE.
As soon as they were gone, she called Latham, Strauss. The answering service took her number. She hung up and moved restlessly through the house, putting the Plexiglas framed drawings back on the walls, refolding clothes and putting them in the drawers, wiping down the cabinets. The phone rang.
“Veronica? This is Dyan Mundy.”
“Thank God.”
“I was about to call you when I got your message. Hannah asked me to. She wanted you to know she’s okay, they haven’t hurt her.” The woman’s voice exuded confidence, control, a kind of artificial warmth. Veronica visualized chin-length blond hair, gold rings, three strands of pearls. “There’s no way I can get you in to see her just now. She understands that, and sends you her love.”
Tears ran down Veronica’s cheeks. “What happened? Did she say what happened?”
“She tried to explain, but frankly, her story doesn’t make much sense. She apparently had some kind of out-of-body experience. She felt this shock and disorientation and then she was suddenly off to the side somewhere. Watched herself shoot the guard as if from a great distance. I don’t know how well that’s going to play in court. Do you know if she’s ever been treated for an emotional disturbance? Is there any history of it in her family?”
“There’s nothing the matter with Hannah,” Veronica said. “Somebody else was in her body when the guard was killed. It wasn’t Hannah.”
“That’s what she said.”
“What about the blond kid?”
“What blond kid?”
“When Hannah got ... taken over, or whatever it was, there was this blond kid. He just keeled over, like a zombie. Then at the end Hannah was back in her own body and I couldn’t find the kid anywhere.”
“I don’t understand. What are you trying to make out of this?”
“I don’t know. But I think that kid was involved somehow”
A long pause. “Veronica, I know you’re upset. But you have to trust me. She’s in the hands of the best law firm in the city. If anybody can save her, we can.”
She couldn’t sleep. She thought of Hannah alone in a damp and stinking cell, claustrophobic, terrified out of her mind. Nothing Veronica could do would convince the police-or even Hannah’s lawyer-of what she knew to be the truth. Something that wasn’t Hannah had pulled the trigger.
She called all of Croyd’s numbers, with no luck. Jerry would gladly help, but what could he do? His brother’s law firm was already on the case. And what good were lawyers against an entire bank lobby full of eyewitnesses? Hannah’s smell was still in the sheets. It made Veronica crazy with longing. It was like a heroin habit, tearing up her guts. She couldn’t lie there any longer. She put on running shoes and went out onto the street.
It was nine o’clock on a Friday night. The life of the city went on without her, as it always did. She drifted toward the light and noise of Broadway, hating the faces she saw around her, wanting to throw herself into the river of yellow cabs and pound on them and scream until the world stopped what it was doing and came to help. New York was the best city in the world to be happy in, and the worst if you were desperate. It towered over the helpless, sped by them in clouds of monoxide. It shoved past them on the street without apology, and left its garbage all around them to wade through.
Life meant nothing without Hannah. Without Hannah she would end up back on the needle, would find herself giving blow jobs on car seats for ten dollars a pop. Anything would be better.
That was when she saw the gun.
It was inside the glass display case of a pawnshop, just visible behind the guitars and stereos in the window. It was chrome-plated and heavy and spoke the word “power” to her.
She went inside. The man behind the counter was fifty going on twenty-two. Veronica had had too many tricks just like him. His hairpiece wasn’t even the same color as the fringe around his ears. His polyester shirt was green, with horses on it, ten years out of fashion. It was unbuttoned to show his chest hair and gold chains.
“How much is that pistol?” Veronica asked him. “Now, what would a sweet little number such as yourself want with a big, nasty Smith and Wesson .38?” He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back against the wall behind the counter. On the TV over his shoulder, two football teams smashed into each other.
“I’m not in the mood for bullshit, pal. How much is the gun?”
The man shook his head, smiling. “ I see it all the time. Sweet little thing gets a little upset with her sugar daddy, maybe catches him with his hand in the wrong cookie jar, and suddenly she’s got to blow him away. This is what television has done to modern society. Everybody wants to blow everybody else away.”
“Look, pal—”
The man leaned forward. “No, you look. The law says I’m responsible for what I sell. I don’t like your looks, I don’t have to sell you shit.” He straightened up and his voice softened. “So why don’t you be a good little girl and run along home to Papa?”
In that moment Veronica saw her entire life as one humiliation after another, all at the hands of men, all of whom felt they were privileged to decide her destiny.
From the father who never acknowledged her, to Fortunato who told her how to dress and how to smile, to Jerry who expected her to love him just because he loved her, to the countless men who’d used her and walked away. She was sick of it. For once she wished she had Fortunato’s power, could reach out with her mind and crush this pompous, ugly little man to jelly.
The fluorescent lights overhead flickered. It should have distracted her, but instead she felt connected. The lights flashed with the rhythm of her breathing and she knew she was the cause. She felt the power flowing through the wires, flowing out of the grid and into her mind. The wild card. Croyd. It was happening. The picture on the TV rolled, then turned to snow. The second hand on the big electric clock next to it stopped, then swung back and forth like a pendulum, keeping time with the flashing lights. The man started to turn toward the TV and then went pale. He sat down slowly, his arms crossing tighter, as if he were cold. Sweat beaded his face.
“Are you hurt?” she asked him.
“ I don’t know” His voice was weak, and higher than it had been.
She hadn’t crippled him, apparently. Beyond that she didn’t care. “Give me the gun.”
“I ... I don’t know if I can.”
“Do it!”
He got onto his hands and knees, fumbled a key into the lock, slid the back of the display case open. He had to use both hands to lift the gun onto the counter. Veronica reached for it, then realized what she’d done. Why did she need a gun?
She ran into the street, waving for a cab.
She got as far as the holding tank on nerve alone. The beefy, red-haired guard outside the lockup refused to let her any farther and Veronica tried to do to him what she’d done in the pawnshop. Nothing happened.
She felt a surge of panic. She had no idea what the power was or how it worked. What if she couldn’t use it again right away? What if she needed something that had been in the pawnshop as a catalyst?
“Lady, I told you, this is a restricted area. Now, are you going to get out of here or do I got to call somebody?” Panic turned to helplessness, helplessness to anger. What good was this power if she couldn’t use it to help Hannah? And with the anger it came. The lights flickered and the music from a TV inside the lockup dissolved in static. Suddenly she could hear the prisoners screaming. The man staggered, leaned forward to support himself on his desk. “Jesus Christ,” the man said. “Jesus Christ.”
“Where’s the keys?”
“What’d you do to me, lady? I can’t lift my fuckin’ arms.”
“The keys.”
The man slumped into his chair, unsnapped the keys from his belt, and slid them across the desk. Behind Veronica a man’s voice said, “Charlie?”
Veronica concentrated on the voice without turning around and heard the man slump to the floor. The third key she tried fit a control panel next to the steel lockup door. A motor wheezed and the door bucked but didn’t open. She realized she was still disrupting the electricity and forced herself to relax.
The door slid back. There were four cells inside. Three of them held drunks and addicts and derelicts. In the fourth were four black prostitutes, and Hannah. All of them but Hannah were screaming for help.
Hannah hung from a pipe in the ceiling by her trousers. Her face was swollen and purple and her tongue stuck straight out of her slack mouth. Her eyes bulged. A patch of hair had been ripped out by the zipper in her pants and a drop of dried blood still clung to her scalp. Veronica threw herself at the bars, her screams lost in the voices around her. She felt the keys tugged out of her hand and one of the hookers opened the cell from inside. Veronica ran to Hannah and held her with one arm around her waist, the other hand tugging at the knotted pant leg around her neck.
She refused to think. Not yet. Not while there was still something left to try. She laid Hannah’s body out on the sticky gray floor of the cell. She pushed the swollen tongue aside and dug vomit out of Hannah’s throat with her fingers. She blew air into her lungs until she lost all breath herself.
One of the prostitutes had stayed behind. She looked at Veronica and said, “She a wild woman before she die. Bitch went completely crazy. Never saw anything like it. We couldn’t get near to her.”
Veronica nodded.
“I tried to stop her, but there weren’t no way. Girl was crazy, that’s all.”
“Thank you,” Veronica said.
Then the cell was full of police, guns drawn, and there was nothing she could do but raise her hands and go along with them.
She waited until she was alone with two detectives before she used her power again. She left the two of them barely conscious on the floor of the interrogation room and walked out into the night.
The street was headlights and horns honking, blaring jam boxes and shouting voices, all of it too bright, too loud, too overwhelming. Inside her it was the same. Her mind would not shut up. Hannah was her life, the only thing that mattered. If Hannah was dead, how could she still be alive?
The thought was white-hot, too painful to touch. Better, she thought, to just think of herself as already dead. She watched a bus roar past her and wondered what it would feel like to go under its wheels.
Then she remembered the look on Hannah’s face as she lay on the floor of the bank, as her consciousness came back into her. She remembered the prostitute in the cell. Crazy, wild woman, the prostitute had said.
Someone had done this to Hannah. Somewhere in the city there was someone who knew what had happened, and why.
Not dead, Veronica thought. Hannah is dead, and I’m not. Someone knows why.
It turned into a refrain, a mantra. It brought her back to Hannah’s apartment, took her inside. She lay down in Hannah’s bed and held one of Hannah’s shirts to her face and breathed the smell. Liz crawled up onto the bed next to her and started to purr. Together they lay there and waited to, see if the sun would ever rise.
There were maybe a dozen of them. Fortunato couldn’t be sure exactly because they kept moving, trying to circle behind him. Two or three had knives, the rest had sawed-off pool cues, car antennas, anything that would hurt. They were hard to tell apart. Jeans, black leather jackets, long, slicked-back hair. At least three of them matched the vague description Chrysalis had given him.
“I’m looking for somebody called Gizmo,” Fortunato said. They wanted to herd him away from the bridge, but they didn’t want to physically push him yet. To his left the brick path led uphill into the Cloisters. The entire park was empty, had been empty for two weeks now, since the gangs had moved in.
“Hey, Gizmo,” one of them said. “What do you say to the man?”
That one, with the thin lips and bloodshot eyes. Fortunato locked eyes with the kid nearest to him. “Take off,” Fortunato said. The kid backed away, uncertain. Fortunato looked at the next one. “You too. Get out of here.” This one was weaker; he turned and ran.
That was all he had time for. A pool cue came slicing for his head. Fortunato slowed time and took the cue, used it to knock away the nearest knife. He breathed in and things sped up again.
Now they were all getting nervous. “Go,” he said, and three more ran, including the one called Gizmo. He sprinted downhill, toward the 193rd Street entrance. Fortunato threw the pool cue at another switchblade and ran after him.
They were running downhill. Fortunato felt himself getting tired, and let out a burst of energy that lifted him off the path and sent him sailing through the air. The kid fell under him and rolled, headfirst. Something crunched in the kid’s spine and both his legs jerked at once. Then he was dead.
“Christ,” Fortunato breathed, brushing dead October leaves from his clothes. The cops had doubled patrols around the park, though they were afraid to come in. They’d tried it once, and it had cost them two men to chase the kids away. The next day the kids were back again. But there were cops watching, and for something like this they’d be willing to run in and pick up a body.
He dumped the kid’s pockets, and there it was-a copper coin the size of a fifty-cent piece, red as drying blood. For ten years he’d had Chrysalis and a few others watching for them, and last night she’d seen the kid drop one at the Crystal Palace.
There was no wallet, nothing else that had any meaning. Fortunato palmed the coin and sprinted for the subway entrance.
“Yes, I remember this,” Hiram said, picking the coin up with a corner of his napkin. “It’s been a while.”
“It was 1969,” Fortunato said. “Ten years ago.” Hiram nodded and cleared his throat. Fortunato didn’t need magic to know that the fat man was uncomfortable. Fortunato’s open black shirt and leather jacket weren’t really up to the dress code here. Aces High looked out over the city from the observation deck of the Empire State Building, and the prices were as steep as the view.
Then there was the fact that he’d brought along his latest acquisition, a dark blonde named Caroline who went for five hundred a night. She was small, not quite delicate, with a childlike face and a body that invited speculation. She wore skintight jeans and a pink silk blouse with a couple of extra buttons undone. Whenever she moved, so did Hiram. She seemed to enjoy’ watching him sweat.
“The thing is, that’s not the coin I showed you before. It’s another one.”
“Remarkable. It’s hard to believe that you could come across two of them in this good a condition.”
“ I think you could put that a little stronger. That coin came of a kid from one of those gangs that’s been trashing the Cloisters. He was carrying it loose in his pocket. The first one came of a kid that was messing with the occult.”
It was still hard for him to talk about. The kid had murdered three of Fortunato’s geishas, cut them up in a pentagram for some twisted reason that he still hadn’t figured out. He’d gone on with his life, training his women, learning about the Tantric power the wild card virus had given him, but otherwise keeping to himself.
And, when it got to bothering him, he would spend a day or a week following one of the loose ends the killer had left behind. The coin. The last word he’d said, “TIAMAT” The residual energies from something else that had been in the dead boy’s loft, a presence that Fortunato had never been able to trace.
“You’re saying there’s something supernatural about them,” Hiram said. His eyes shifted to watch Caroline as she stretched languorously in her chair.
“I just want you to take another look.”
“Well,” Hiram said. Around them the luncheon crowd made small noises with their forks and glasses and talked so quietly they sounded like distant water. “As I’m sure I said before, it appears to be a mint 1794 American penny, stamped from a hand-cut die. They could have been stolen from a museum or a coin shop or a private ...” His voice trailed of. “Mmmmm. Have a look at this.”
He held the coin out and pointed with a fleshy little finger, not quite touching the surface. “See the bottom of this wreath, here? It should be a bow. But instead it’s something sort of shapeless and awful looking.”
Fortunato stared at the coin and for a half-second felt like he was falling. The leaves of the wreath turned into tentacles, the ends of the ribbon opened like a beak, the loops of the bow became shapeless flesh, full of too many eyes. Fortunato had seen it before, in a book on Sumerian mythology. The caption underneath had read “TIAMAT”.
“You all right?” Caroline asked.
“I’ll be okay. Go on,” he said to Hiram.
“My instinct would be to say they’re forgeries. But who would forge a penny? And why not take the trouble to age them, at least a little? They look like they’d been stamped out yesterday.”
“They weren’t, if that matters. The auras of both of them show a lot of use. I’d say they were at least a hundred years old, probably closer to two hundred.”
Hiram pushed the ends of his fingers together. “All I can do is send you to somebody who might be more help. Her name is Eileen Carter. She runs a small museum out on Long Island. We used to, um, correspond. Numismatics, you know. She’s written a couple of books on occult history, local stuff.” He wrote an address in a little notebook and tore out the page.
Fortunato took the paper and stood up. “I appreciate it.”
“Listen, do you think ...” He licked his lips. “Do you think it would be safe for a regular person to own one of those?”
“Like, say, a collector?” Caroline asked.
Hiram looked down. “When you’re finished with them. I’d pay.”
“When this is over,” Fortunato said, “if we’re all still around, you’re welcome to them.”
Eileen Carter was in her late thirties, with flecks of gray in her brown hair. She looked up at Fortunato through squaredoff glasses, then glanced over at Caroline. She smiled.
Fortunato spent most of his time with women. Even as beautiful as she was, Caroline was insecure, jealous, prone to irrational dieting or makeup. Eileen was something different.
She seemed no more than a little amused by Caroline’s looks. And as for Fortunato—a half-Japanese black man in leather, his forehead swollen courtesy of the wild card virus-she didn’t seem to find anything unusual about him at all.
“Have you got the coin with you?” she asked. She looked right into his eyes when she talked to him. He was tired of women who looked like models. This one had a crooked nose, freckles, and about a dozen extra pounds. Most of all he liked her eyes. They were incandescent green and had smile lines in the corners.
He put the penny on the counter, tails up.
She bent over to look at it, touching the bridge of her glasses with one finger. She was wearing a green flannel shirt; the freckles ran down as far as Fortunato could see. Her hair smelled clean and sweet:
“Can I ask where you got this?”
“It’s kind of a long story,” Fortunato said. “I’m a friend of Hiram Worchester. He’ll vouch for me if that’ll help.”
“It’s good enough. What do you want to know?”
“Hiram said it was maybe a forgery.”
“Just a second.” She took a book off the wall behind her. She moved in sudden bursts of energy, giving herself completely to whatever she was doing. She opened the book on the counter and flipped through the pages. “Here,” she said. She studied the back of the coin intently for a few seconds, biting on her lower lip. Her lips were small and strong and mobile. He found himself wondering what it would be like to kiss her.
“That one,” she said. “Yes, it’s a forgery. It’s called a Balsam penny. Named after ‘Black John’ Balsam, it says. He minted them up in the Catskills around the turn of the nineteenth century.” She looked up at Fortunato. “The name rings a bell, but I can’t say why.”
“‘Black John’?”
She shrugged, smiled again. “Can I hang on to this? Just for a few days? I might be able to find something else for you.”
“All right.” Fortunato could hear the ocean from where they were and it made things seem a little less dire. He gave her his business card, the one with just his name and phone number on it. On their way out she smiled and waved at Caroline, but Caroline acted like she didn’t see it.
On the train back to the city Caroline said, “You want to fuck her, don’t you?”
Fortunato smiled and didn’t answer her.
“I swear to God,” she said. Fortunato could hear Houston in her voice again. It was the first time in weeks. “An overweight, broken-down old schoolmarm.”
He knew better than to say anything. He was overreacting, he knew. Part of it was probably just pheromones, some kind of sexual chemistry that he’d understood a long time before he learned the scientific basis for it. But he’d felt comfortable with her, something that hadn’t happened very often since the wild card had changed him. She’d seemed to have no self-consciousness at all.
Stop it, he thought. You’re acting like a teenager. Caroline, under control again, put a hand on his thigh. “When we get home,” she said, “I’m going to fuck her right out of your mind.”
“Fortunato?”
He switched the phone to his left hand and looked at the clock. Nine A.M. “Uh huh.”
“This is Eileen Carter. You left a coin with me last week?” He sat up, suddenly awake. Caroline turned over and buried her head under a pillow. “I haven’t forgotten. How are you doing?”
“I may be on to something. How would you feel about a trip to the country?”
She picked him up in her VW Rabbit and they drove to Shandaken, a small town in the Catskills. He’d dressed as simply as he could, Levi’s and a dark shirt and an old sportcoat. But he couldn’t hide his ancestry or the mark the virus had left on him.
They parked in an asphalt lot in front of a white clapboard church. They were barely out of the car before the church door opened and an old woman came out. She wore a cheap navy double-knit pantsuit and a scarf over her head. She looked Fortunato up and down for a while, but finally stuck out her hand. “Amy Fairborn. You would be the people from the city.”
Eileen finished the introductions and the old woman nodded. “The grave’s over here,” she said.
The stone was a plain marble rectangle, outside the churchyard’s white picket fence and well away from the other graves. The inscription read, “John Joseph Balsam. Died 1809. May He Burn In Hell.”
The wind snapped at Fortunato’s coat and blew faint traces of Eileen’s perfume at him. “It’s a hell of a story,” Amy Fairborn said. “Nobody knows anymore how much of it’s true. Balsam was supposed to be a witch of some sort, lived up in the hills. First anybody heard of him was in the 1790s. Nobody knows where he came from, other than Europe somewhere. Same old story. Foreigner, lives off to himself, gets blamed for everything. Cows give sour milk or somebody has a miscarriage, they make it his fault.”
Fortunato nodded. He felt like a foreigner himself, at the moment. He couldn’t see anything but trees and mountains anywhere he looked, except off to the right where the church held the top of the hill like a fort. He felt exposed, vulnerable. Nature was something that should have a city around it. “One day the sheriff’s daughter over to Kingston came up missing,” Fairborn said. “That would be the beginning of August, 1809. Lammastide. They broke in Balsam’s house and found the girl stretched out naked on an altar.” The woman showed her teeth. “That’s what the story says. Balsam was got up in some kind of weird outfit and a mask. Had a knife the size of your arm. Sure as hell he was going to carve her up.”
“What kind of outfit?” Fortunato asked.
“Monk’s robes. And a dog mask, they say. Well, you can guess the rest. They strung him up, burnt the house, salted the ground, knocked trees over in the road that led up there.”
Fortunato took out one of the pennies; Eileen still had the other one. “This is supposed to be called a Balsam penny. Does that mean anything to you?”
“I got three or four more like it at the house. They wash up out of his grave every now and again. ‘What goes down must come up,’ my husband used to say. He buried a good many of these folks.”
“They put the pennies in his grave?” Fortunato asked. “All they could find. When they fired the house they turned up a keg of ’em in the root cellar. You see how red it looks? Supposed to be from a high iron content or some such. Folks at the time said he put human blood in the copper. Anyways, the coins disappeared out of the sheriff’s office. Most people thought Balsam’s wife and kid made off with ’em.”
“He had a family?” Eileen asked.
“Nobody saw too much of either of ’em, but yeah, he had a wife and a little boy. Lit off for the big city after the hanging, at least as far as anybody knows.”
As they drove back through the Catskills he got Eileen to talk a little about herself. She’d been born in Manhattan, gotten a BFA from Columbia in the late sixties, dabbled in political activism and social work and come out of it with the usual complaints. “The system never changed fast enough for me. I just sort of escaped into history. You know? When you read history you can see how it all comes out.”
“Why occult history?”
“I don’t believe in it, if that’s what you mean. You’re laughing. Why are you laughing at me?”
“In a minute. Go on.”
“It’s a challenge, that’s all. Regular historians don’t take it seriously. It’s wide open, there’s so much fascinating stuff that’s never been properly documented. The Hashishin, the Qabalah, David Home, Crowley.” She looked over at him. “Come on. Let me in on the joke.”
“You never asked about me. Which was nice. But you have to know that I have the virus. The wild card.”
“Yes.”
“It gave me a lot of power. Astral projection, telepathy, heightened awareness. But the only way I can direct it, make it work, is through Tantric magic. It has something to do with energizing the spine “
“Kundalini.”
“Yes.”
“You’re talking about real Tantric magic. Intromission. Menstrual blood. The whole bit.”
“That’s right. That’s the wild card part of it.”
“There’s more?”
“There’s what I do for a living. I’m a procurer. A pimp. I run a string of call girls that go for as much as a thousand dollars a night. Have I got you nervous yet?”
“No. Maybe a little.” She gave him another sideways glance. “This is probably a stupid thing to say. You don’t fit my image of a pimp.”
“I don’t much like the name. But I don’t run away from it either. My women aren’t just hookers. My mother was Japanese and she trains them as geishas. A lot of them have PhDs. None of them are junkies and when they’re tired of the Life they move into some other part of the organization.”
“You make it sound very moral.”
She was ready to disapprove, but Fortunato wouldn’t let himself back away. “No,” he said. “You’ve read Crowley. He had no use for ordinary morality, and neither do I. ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.’ The more I learn, the more I realize that everything is there, in that one phrase. Its as much a threat as a promise.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I like you and I’m attracted to you and that’s not necessarily a good thing for you. I don’t want you to get hurt.” She put both hands on the wheel and watched the road. “I can take care of myself,” she said.
You should have kept your mouth shut, he told himself, but he knew that wasn’t true. Better to drive her of now, before he got any more involved.
A few minutes later she broke the silence. “I don’t know whether I should tell you this or not. I took that coin around to a couple of places. Occult bookstores, magic shops, that sort of thing. Just to see what I could turn up. I met a guy named Clarke at the Miskatonic Bookstore. He seemed really interested.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“I said it was my father’s. I said I was curious about it. He started asking me questions like was I interested in the occult, had I ever had any paranormal experiences, that kind of thing. It was pretty easy to feed him what he wanted to hear.”
“And?”
“And he wants me to meet some people.” A few seconds later she said, “You’ve gone quiet on me again.”
“I don’t think you should go. This stuff is dangerous. Maybe you don’t believe in the occult. The thing is, the wild card changed everything. People’s fantasies and beliefs can turn real now. And they can hurt you. Kill you.”
She shook her head. “It’s always the same story. But never any proof. You can argue with me all the way back to New York City, and it’s not going to convince me. Unless I see it with my own eyes, I just can’t take it seriously.”
“Suit yourself,” Fortunato said. He released his astral body and shot ahead of the car. He stood in the roadway and let himself become visible just as the car was on him. Through the windshield he could see Eileen’s eyes go wide. Next to her his physical body sat with a mindless stare. Eileen screamed and the brakes howled and he let himself snap back into the car. They were skidding toward the trees and Fortunato reached over to steer them out of it. The car died and rolled onto the shoulder.
“What ... what ...”
“I’m sorry,” he said. He didn’t manage a lot of conviction. “It was you there in the road!” Her hands still held the wheel and tremors shook her arms.
“It was just ... a demonstration.”
“A demonstration? You scared me to death!”
“It wasn’t anything. You understand? Nothing. We’re talking about some kind of cult that’s a couple of hundred years oid and makes human sacrifices. At the least. It could be worse, a hell of a lot worse. I can’t be responsible for you getting involved.”
She started the car and pulled onto the road. It was a quarter of an hour later, back on 1-87, before she said, “You’re not quite human anymore, are you? That you could scare me that badly. Even though you say you’re interested in me. That’s what you were trying to warn me about.”
“Yes,” he said. Her voice was different, more detached.
He waited for her to say something else, but instead she just nodded and put a Mozart tape in the stereo.
He thought that would be the end of it. Instead, a week later, she called and asked if he could meet her for lunch at Aces High.
He was waiting at the table when she came in. She would never, he knew, look like a fashion model or like one of his geishas. But he liked the way she made the most of what she had: narrow gray flannel skirt, white cotton blouse, navy cardigan, amber beads, and a wide tortoiseshell band for her hair. No visible makeup except for mascara and a little lip gloss.
Fortunato got up to hold her chair and nearly bumped into Hiram. There was an awkward pause. Finally she held out her hand and Hiram bent over it, hesitated just a little too long, and then bowed away. Fortunato stared after him for a second or two. He wanted Eileen to say something about Hiram but she didn’t take the hint. “It’s good to see you,” he said.
“It’s good to see you too.”
“In spite of ... what happened last time?”
“What, is that an apology?” The smile again. ‘
“No,” he said. “Though I really am sorry. I’m sorry I got you into this. I’m sorry I couldn’t have met you some other way. I’m sorry we have this ugly business between us every time we see each other.”
“So am L”
“And I’m afraid for you. I’m up against something like I’ve never seen before. There’s this ... thing, this conspiracy, this cult, whatever it is, out there. And I can’t find anything out about it.” A waiter brought menus and water in crystal goblets. Fortunato nodded him away.
“I’ve been to see Clarke,” Fortunato said. “I asked him some questions, mentioned TIAMAT, and all I got were blank looks. He wasn’t faking it. I looked in his brain.” He took a breath. “He had no memory of you.”
“That’s impossible,” Eileen said. She shook her head. “It’s so strange to see you sitting there talking about reading his mind. There’s got to be some kind of mistake, that’s all. You’re sure?”
Fortunato could see her aura clearly. She was telling the truth. “I’m sure,” he said.
“I saw Clarke last night and I can promise you he remembered me. He took me to meet some people. They’re members of the cult, or society, or whatever it is. The coins are some kind of recognition thing.”
“Did you get their names, or addresses, anything like that?”
She shook her head. “I’d know them again. One of them was called Roman. Very good looking, almost too good looking, if you know what I mean. The other one was very ordinary. Harry, I think his name was.”
“Does the group have a name?”
“They haven’t mentioned one.” She glanced at the menu as the waiter came back. “The veal medallions, I think. And a glass of the chablis.”
Fortunato ordered insalata composta and a Beck’s. “But I did learn some other things,” she said. “I’ve been trying to trace Balsam’s wife and son. I mean, they are a couple of loose ends in the story. First I tried the usual detective routine, birth and death and marriage records. No dice. Then I tried to find occult connections. Do you know the Abramelin Review?”
“No.”
“It’s a sort of Reader’s Guide to occult publications. And that’s where the Balsam family turned up. There’s a Marc Balsam that’s published at least a dozen articles in the last few years. Most of them were in a magazine called Nectanebus. Does that ring any bells?”
Fortunato shook his head. “A demon or something? It sounds like I should know it, but I can’t put my finger on it.”
“It’s a good bet he’s involved with the same society that Clarke is.”
“Because of the coins.”
“Exactly.”
“What about those kid gangs that have been running wild up at the Cloisters? I took a coin off one of those kids. Can you see any possible connection?”
“Not yet. The articles might help, but the magazine’s pretty obscure. I haven’t been able to turn up any copies of it.” The food arrived. Over lunch she finally mentioned Hiram. “Fifteen years ago he was more attractive than you might think. A little hefty, but very charming. Knew how to dress, what to say. And of course he always knew fantastic restaurants.”
“What happened? Or is it any of my business?”
“I don’t know. What ever happens between people? I think most of it was that he was too self-conscious about his weight. Now it’s me that’s self-conscious all the time.”
“You shouldn’t be, you know. You look great. You could have any man you wanted.”
“You don’t have to flirt with me. I mean, you have all this sexual power and charisma and everything, but I don’t like the idea of your using it on me. Manipulating me.”
“I’m not trying to manipulate you,” Fortuanto said. “If it looks like I’m interested in you, it’s because I’m interested in you.”
“Are you always this intense?”
“Yeah. I guess I am. I look over at you and you’re smiling all the time. It drives me crazy.”
“I’ll try to stop.”
“Don’t.”
He’d come on too strong, he realized. She set her silverware neatly on her plate and dropped her folded napkin next to it. Fortuanto pushed the rest of his salad away. Suddenly something bubbled up in his mind.
“What did you say the name of the journal was? Where Balsam was publishing?”
She got a folded scrap of paper out of her purse. “Nectanebus. Why?”
Fortunato signaled for the check. “Listen. Can you come back to my apartment? No funny business. This is important.”
“I suppose.”
The waiter bowed and looked at Eileen. “Mr. Worchester is ... unavoidably detained. But he asked me to tell you that your lunch is compliments of the house.”
“Thank him for me,” Eileen said. “Tell him ... just tell him thank you.”
Caroline was still asleep when they got to the apartment. She made a point of leaving the bedroom door open while she walked naked to the bathroom, then sat on the edge of the bed and slowly put her clothes on, starting with stockings and a garter belt.
Fortunato ignored her, sorting through the stacks of books that had grown to fill an entire wall of the front room. Either she’d learn to control her jealousy or she’d find another line of work.
Eileen smiled at her as she clomped out on her four-inch heels. “She’s beautiful,” she said.
“So are you.”
“Don’t start. “
“You brought it up.” He handed her Budge’s Egyptian Magic. “There you go. Nectanebus.”
“... famous as a magician and a sage, and he was deeply learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.”
“This is coming together. Remember Black John’s dog mask? I’m wondering if Balsam’s cult isn’t the Egyptian Freemasons.”
“Oh my god. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“I’m thinking that the name Balsam could be an Americanization of Balsamo.”
“As in Guiseppe Balsamo of Palermo,” Eileen said. She sat down hard on the couch.
“Better known to the world,” Fortunato said, “as Count Cagliostro. “
Fortuanto pulled up a chair across from her and sat with his elbows on his knees. “The Inquistion arrested him when?”
“Around 1790, wasn’t it? They put him in some kind of dungeon. But his body was never found.”
“He’s supposed to be connected with the Illuminati. Suppose they broke him out of jail and smuggled him to America. “
“Where he shows up as Black John Balsam, the local weirdo. But what was he up to? Why the coins? And the human sacrifice? Cagliostro was a fraud, a con man. All he ever wanted was the good life. Murder just doesn’t sound like his style.”
Fortunato handed her Daraul’s Witches and Sorcerers. “Let’s find out. Unless you’ve got something better to do?”
“England,” Eileen said. “1777. That’s when it happened. He got inducted into the Masons on April twelfth, in Soho. After that Masonry takes over his life. He invents the Egyptian Freemasons as some kind of higher order, starts giving away money, inducting every high-ranking Mason he can.”
“So what brought all that on?”
“Supposedly he took some kind of tour of the English countryside and came back from it a—quote—changed man—endquote. His magic powers increased. He went from an adventurer to a genuine mystic.”
“Okay,” Fortunato said. “Now listen to this. This is Tolstoy on Freemasonry: ‘The first and chief object of our Order ... is the preservation and handing-on to posterity of a certain important mystery .. a mystery on which perhaps the fate of mankind depends.”‘
“This is starting to scare the hell out of me,” Eileen said. “There’s one more piece. The thing that’s on the back of the Balsam penny is a Sumerian deity called TIAMAT It’s what Lovecraft took Cthulu from. Some kind of huge, shapeless monster from beyond the stars. Lovecraft supposedly got his mythology from his father’s secret papers. Lovecraft’s father was a Mason.”
“So you think that’s what it’s all about. This TIAMAT thing.”
“Put it together,” Fortunato said. “Suppose the Masonic secret has something to do with controlling TIAMAT Cagliostro learns the secret. His brother Masons won’t use their knowledge for evil, so Cagliostro forms his own order, for his own ends.”
“To bring this thing to Earth.”
“Yes,” Fortunato said. “To bring it to Earth.” Eileen had finally stopped smiling.
It had gotten dark while they talked. The night was cold and clear and Fortuanto could see stars through the skylights in the front room. He wished he could shut them out.
“It’s late,” Eileen said. “I have to go.”
He hadn’t thought of her leaving. The day’s work had left him full of nervous energy, the thrill of the hunt. Her mind excited him and he wanted her to open up to him-her secrets, her emotions, her body. “Stay,” he said, careful not to use his powers, not to make it a command. “Please.” His stomach felt cold when he asked.
She got up, put on the sweater she’d left on the arm of the couch. “I have to ... digest all this,” she said. “There’s just been too much happening at once. I’m sorry.” She wouldn’t look at him. “I need more time.”
“I’ll walk you down to Eighth Avenue,” he said. “You can catch a cab there.”
Cold seemed to radiate out of the stars, a kind of hatred for life itself. He hunched his shoulders and put his hands deep in his pockets. A few seconds later he felt Eileen’s arm around his waist and he held her close as they walked. They stopped at the corner of Eighth and 19th and a cab pulled up almost immediately. “Don’t say it,” Eileen told him. “I’ll be careful.”
Fortunato’s throat was too tight for him to talk if he’d wanted to. He put a hand behind her neck and kissed her. Her lips were so gentle that he had started to turn away before he realized how good they felt. He turned back and she was still standing there. He kissed her again, harder, and she swayed toward him for a second and then pulled away.
“I’ll call you,” she said.
He watched the cab until it turned the corner and disappeared.
The police woke him at seven the next morning. “We’ve got a dead kid in the morgue,” the first cop said. “Somebody broke his neck up at the Cloisters about a week ago. You know anything about it?”
Fortunato shook his head. He stood by the door, holding his robe closed with one hand. If they came in they would see the pentagram painted on the hardwood floor, the human skull on the bookcase, the joints on the coffee table.
“Some of his pals say they saw you there,” the second cop said.
Fortunato locked eyes with him. “I wasn’t there,” he said. “You want to believe that.”
The second cop nodded and the first one started to reach for his gun. “No,” Fortunato said. The first cop didn’t manage to look away in time. “You believe it too. I wasn’t there. I’m clean. “
“Clean,” the first cop said.
“Go now,” Fortunato said, and they left.
He sat on the couch, hands shaking. They would be back. Or more likely they’d send somebody from the Jokertown division who wouldn’t be affected by his powers.
He wouldn’t be getting back to sleep. Not that he’d been sleeping that well anyway. His dreams had been full of tentacled things as large as the moon, blocking the sky, swallowing the city.
It suddenly occurred to him that the apartment was empty. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d spent the night alone. He almost picked up the phone to call Caroline. It was only a reflex and he fought it o$: What he wanted was to be with Eileen.
Two days later she called again. In those two days he’d been to her museum in Long Island twice, in his astral form. He’d hovered across the room ‘invisible to her’ just watching. He’d have gone more often, stayed longer, but he was taking too much pleasure in it. “It’s Eileen,” she said. “They want to initiate me.”
It was three-thirty in the afternoon. Caroline was at Berlitz, learning Japanese. She hadn’t been around much lately.
“You went back,” he said.
“I had to. We’ve been over this.”
“When is it?”
“Tonight. I’m supposed to be there at eleven. It’s this old church in Jokertown.”
“Can I see you?”
“I guess so. I could come over if you want.”
“Please. As soon as you can.”
He sat by the window and watched until her car pulled up. He buzzed the door for her and then waited for her on the landing. She walked ahead of him into the apartment and turned around. He didn’t know what to expect from her. He closed the door and she held out her hands. He put his arms around her and she turned her face up to him. He kissed her and then he kissed her again. Her arms went around his neck and tightened.
“I want you,” he said. “I want you too.”
“Come to bed.”
“I want to. But I can’t. It’s ... it’s just a lousy idea. It’s been a long time for me. I can’t just climb into bed with you and perform all kinds of weird Tantric sex acts. It’s not what I want. You can’t even come, for crissake!”
He combed through her hair with his fingers. “All right.” He held her a while longer, then let her go. “Do you want anything? A drink?”
“Some coffee, if you have any.”
He put water on the stove and ground a handful of beans, watching her over the breakfast bar. “What I can’t understand,” he said, “is why I can’t get anything from these people’s minds.”
“You don’t think I’m making all this up?”
“I know you’re not,” Fortunato said. “I could tell if you were lying.”
She shook her head. “You take a lot of getting used to.”
“Some things are more important than social niceties.” The water boiled. Fortunato made two cups and took them to the couch.
“If they’re as big as you think they are,” Eileen said, “they’re bound to have aces working with them. Somebody who could set up blocks for them, blocks against other people with mental powers.”
“I guess.”
She drank a little of the coffee. “I met Balsam this afternoon. We all got together at the bookstore.”
“What’s he like?”
“Smooth. He looked like a banker or something. Threepiece suit, glasses. But tanned, like he plays a lot of tennis on weekends.”
“What did he say?”
“They finally mentioned the word ‘Mason.’ Like it was the last test, to see if it would freak me out. Then Balsam gave me a history lesson. How the Scottish and York Rite Masons were just offshoots of the Speculative Masons, and that they only went back to the eighteenth century.”
Fortunato nodded. “That’s all true.”
“Then he started talking about Solomon, and how the architect of his temple was actually an Egyptian. That Masonry started with Solomon, and all the other rites had lost the original meaning. But they say they’ve still got it. Just like you figured.”
“I have to go with you tonight.”
“There’s no way you could get in. Not even if you disguised yourself. They’d know you.”,
“I could send my astral body. I could still see and hear everything. “
“If somebody else came here in their astral body, could you see them?”
“Of course.”
“Well? It’s a hell of chance to take, isn’t it?”
“All right, okay.”
“It has to be just me. There’s no other way.”
“Unless .”
“Unless what?”
“Unless I went inside you,” he said. “What are you talking about?”
“The power is in my sperm. If you were carrying—”
“Oh, come on,” she said. “Of all the lame excuses to get somebody into bed ...” She stared at him. “You’re not kidding, are you?”
“You cant go in there alone. Not just because of the danger. Because you can’t do enough by yourself. You can’t read their minds. I can.”
“Even if you’re just-hitching a ride?” Fortunato nodded.
“Oh God,” she said. “This is-there’s so many reasons not to—I’m having my period, for one thing.”
“So much the better.”
She grabbed her left wrist and held it close to her chest. “I told myself if I ever went to bed with a man again-and I said if-it would have to be romantic. Candlelight and flowers and everything. And look at me.”
Fortunato knelt in front of her and gently moved her hands away. “Eileen,” he said. “I love you.”
“That’s easy for you to say. I’m sure you mean it and everything, but I’m also sure you say it all the time. There’s only two men I’ve ever said it to in my life, and one of them was my father.”
“I’m not talking about how you feel. I’m not talking about forever. I’m talking about me, right now. And I love you.” He. picked her up and carried her into the bedroom.
It was cold in there and her teeth started to chatter. Fortunato lit the gas heater and sat down next to her on the bed. She took his right hand in both of hers and held it to her mouth. He kissed her and felt her respond, almost against her will. He took his clothes off and pulled the covers over the two of them and began to unbutton her blouse. Her breasts were large and soft, the nipples tightening under his tongue as he kissed them.
“Wait,” she said. “I have to ... I have to go to the bathroom.”
When she came back she had taken the rest of her clothes off. She was holding a towel in front of her. “To save your sheets,” she said. There was a smear of blood on the inside of one thigh.
He took the towel away from her. “Don’t worry about the sheets.” She stood naked in front of him. She looked like she was afraid he would send her away. He put his head between her breasts and pulled her toward him.
She got under the covers again and kissed him and her tongue flickered into his mouth. He kissed her shoulders, her breasts, the underside of her chin. Then he rolled onto his hands and knees above her.
“No,” she whispered, “I’m not ready yet .. “
He held his penis in one hand and moved the head of it against her labia, slowly, gently, feeling the brittle flesh turn warm and wet. She bit her lower lip, her eyes closed. Slowly he slipped inside her, the friction sending waves of pleasure up his spine.
He kissed her again. He could feel her lips moving against his, mouthing inaudible words. His hands moved up her sides, around her back. He remembered that he was used to making love for hours at a time and the thought amazed him. It was all too intense. He was full of heat and light; he couldn’t contain it all.
“Aren’t you supposed to say something?” Eileen whispered, breathing raggedly around the words. “Some kind of magic spell or something?”
Fortunato kissed her again, his lips tingling like they’d been asleep and were just now coming back to life. “I love you,” he said.
“Oh God,” she said, and started to cry. Tears rolled down into her hair and at the same time her hips moved faster against him. Their bodies were flushed and hot and sweat ran down Fortunato’s chest. Eileen stiffened and kicked. A second later Fortunato’s own brain went white and he fought off ten years of training and let it happen, let the power spurt out of him and into the woman and for an instant he was both of them at once, hermaphroditic and all-encompassing, and he felt himself expand to the ends of the universe in a giant nuclear blaze.
And then he was back in bed with Eileen, feeling her breasts rise and fall under him as she cried.
The only light came from the gas heater. He must have slept. The pillowcase felt like sandpaper against his cheek. It took all his strength to roll over onto his back.
Eileen was putting on her shoes. “It’s almost time,” she said.
“How do you feel?” he said.
“Unbelievable. Strong. Powerful.” She laughed. “I’ve never felt like this.”
He closed his eyes, slid into her mind. He could see himself lying on the bed, skeletal, his dark golden skin disappearing into the shadows, his forehead shrunken to where it blended smoothly into his hairless scalp.
“And you,” she said. He could feel her voice echoing in her chest. “Are you all right?”
He drifted back to his own body. “Weak,” he said. “But I’ll be okay.”
“Should I ... call somebody for you?”
He knew what she was offering, knew he should agree to it. Caroline, or one of the others, would be the fastest way to get his power back. But it would also weaken his bond to Eileen. “No,” he said.
She finished dressing and bent over to kiss him lingeringly. “Thank you,” she said.
“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t thank me.”
“I’d better go.” Her impatience, her strength and vitality, were a physical force in the room. He was too distant from it to be jealous of her. Then she was gone, and he slept again.
He watched through Eileen’s eyes as she stood by the front door of the bookstore, waiting for Clarke to close up. He could have moved all the way into her mind, but it would have used up what little strength he was slowly getting back. Besides, he was warm and comfortable where he was. Until the hands grabbed him and shook him awake and he was looking into a pair of gold shields. “Get your clothes on,” a voice said. “You’re under arrest.”
They gave him a holding cell to himself. It had a gray tile floor and gray-painted cement walls. He squatted in the corner and shivered, too weak to stand. On the wall next to him somebody had scratched a stick figure with a giant dripping prick and balls.
For an hour he’d been unable to concentrate long enough to make contact with Eileen. He was sure Balsam’s Masons had killed her.
He shut his eyes. A cell door banged closed down the hall and brought him back. Concentrate, goddamn it, he thought. He was in a long room with a high ceiling. Yellow light flickered off the distant walls from banks of candles. The floor was black-and-white-checkered tile. At the front of the, room stood two Doric columns, one on either side, that didn’t quite reach the ceiling. They stood for Solomon’s temple; they were named Boaz and Joachim, the first two Masonic Words.
He didn’t want to take control of Eileen’s body, though he could if it came to that. From what he could tell she was all right. He could feel her excitement, but she wasn’t in pain or even especially afraid.
A man matching Eileen’s description of Balsam stood at the front of the room, on the dais reserved for the Worshipful Master of the Temple. Over his dark suit he wore a white Masonic apron with bright red trim. He wore a tabard like an oversized bib around his neck. It was white too, with a red looped cross in the center. An ankh.
“Who speaks for this woman?” Balsam asked.
There were a dozen or more others in the room, both sexes, all of them in aprons and tabards. They made a curving line along the left side of the room. Most of them seemed normal enough. One man had bright red skin and no hair at all, an obvious joker. Another seemed terribly frail, with thick glasses and a dazed expression. He was the only one not wearing street clothes under his apron. Instead he was wrapped in a white robe a couple sizes too large for him, with a hood and sleeves that hung down over his hands.
Clarke moved out of line and said, “I speak for her.” Balsam handed him an intricate mask, covered in what seemed to be gold foil. It was a hawk’s head, and it completely covered Clarke’s face.
“Who opposes?” Balsam said.
A young oriental woman, rather plain, but with an undefinable sexual quality, stepped forward. “I oppose.” Balsam gave her a mask with long, pointed ears and a sharp face. When she put it on, it gave her a cold, disdainful look. Fortunato felt Eileen’s pulse begin to pick up.
“Who claims her?”
“I claim her.” Another man came forward and took a mask with the jackal face of Anubis.
The air behind Balsam rippled and started to glow. The candles flickered out. Slowly a golden man took shape, lighting the room. He was as tall as the ceiling, with canine features and hot yellow eyes. He stood with folded arms and looked down at Eileen. Her pulse leapt and stuttered and she dug her fingernails into her palms. No one else seemed to notice that he was there.
The woman wearing the pointed mask stood in front of Eileen. “Osiris,” the woman said. “I am Set, of the company of Annu, son of Seb and Nut.”
He felt Eileen open her mouth to speak, but before she could say anything the woman’s right hand exploded against her face. She fell over backward and slid three feet across the tiles. “Behold,” the woman said. She touched her fingers to Eileen’s eyes and they came away wet. “The fertilizing rain.”
“Osiris,” said the jackal-headed man, stepping up to take the woman’s place. “I am Anubis, son of Ra, Opener of the Ways. Mine is the Funeral Mountain.” He moved behind Eileen and held her against the floor.
Now Clarke was kneeling next to her, the golden man looming behind him. “Osiris,” he said. Light glittered from the tiny eyes of the hawk mask. “I am Horus, thy son and the son of Isis.” He pressed two fingers against Eileen’s lips, forcing her mouth open. “I have come to embrace thee, I am thy son Horus, I have pressed thy mouth; I am thy son, I love thee. Thy mouth was closed, but I have set in order for thee thy mouth and thy teeth. I open for thee thy two eyes. I have opened for thee thy mouth with the instrument of Anubis. Horus hath opened the mouth of the dead, as he in times of old opened thy mouth, with the iron which came forth from Set. The deceased shall walk and shall speak, and her body shall be with the great company of the gods in the Great House of the Aged One in Annu, and she shall receive there the ureret crown from Horus, the lord of mankind.”
Clarke took something that looked like a wooden snake from Balsam. Eileen tried to pull away, but the jackal-headed man had too tight a grip on her. Clarke swung the snake back and then gently touched Eileen’s mouth and eyes with it four times. “O Osiris, I have established for thee the two jawbones in thy face, and they are now separated.”
He stood aside. Balsam bent over her until his face was only inches away and said, “Now I give to thee the hekau, the word of power. Horus hath given thee the use of thy mouth and thou canst say it. The word is TIAMAT “
“TIAMAT,” Eileen whispered.
Fortunato, numb with fear, pushed himself into Balsam’s mind.
The trick was to keep moving, not to get overwhelmed by the strangeness of it. If he kept triggering associations he would end up in the part of Balsam’s memory that he wanted.
At the moment Balsam was near ecstasy. Fortunato followed the images and totems of Egyptian magic until he found the earliest ones, and from there made his way to Balsam’s father, and back through seven generations to Black John himself.
Everything Balsam had ever heard or read or imagined about his ancestor was here. His first swindle, when he took the goldsmith Marano for sixty ounces of fine gold. His escape from Palermo. Meeting the Greek, Altotas, and learning alchemy. Egypt, Turkey, Malta, and finally Rome at age twenty-six, handsome, clever, carrying letters of introduction to the cream of society.
Where he met Lorenza. Fortunato saw her as Cagliostro had, naked before him for the first time, only fourteen years old but dizzyingly beautiful: slim, elegant, olive-skinned, With jet-black wavy hair spread out around her, tiny perfect breasts, smelling of wild coastal flowers, her throaty voice screaming his name as she wrapped her legs around him.
Traveling through Europe in coaches lined in deep green velvet, Lorenza’s beauty opening society to them without reservation, living on what they begged in the halls of nobility and handing out the rest as alms.
And finally England.
Fortunato watched as Cagliostro rode into the forest on the back of a blooded ebony hunter. He’d gotten separated, not quite by accident, from Lorenza and the young English lord who was so taken with her. Doubtless His Lordship was having his way with her even now in some ditch beside the road, and doubtless Lorenza had already found a way to turn it to their advantage.
Then the moon fell out of the sky in the middle of the afternoon.
Cagliostro spurred the stallion toward the glowing apparition. It touched down in a clearing a few hundred yards away. The horse wouldn’t get closer than a hundred feet, so Cagliostro tied him to a sapling and approached on foot. The thing was indistinct, made of angles that didn’t connect, and as Cagliostro came toward it a piece of it detached itself .. And that was all. Suddenly Cagliostro was riding back toward London in a carriage with Lorenza, full of some high purpose that Fortunato couldn’t read.
He ransacked Balsam’s mind. The knowledge had to be there somewhere. Some fragment of what the thing in the woods had been, what it had said or done.
That was when Balsam jerked upright and said, “The woman is in my brain.”
He was looking through Eileen’s eyes again, enraged at his own clumsiness. Things liad gone hideously wrong. He found himself staring into the face of the little man with the thick glasses and the robe.
And then he was back in his cell.
Two guards had him by the arms and were dragging him toward the door. “No,” he said. “Please. Just a few more minutes.”
“Oh, like it here, do you?” one of the guards said. He shoved Fortunato toward the door of the cell. Fortunato’s foot slipped on the slick linoleum and he went onto all fours. The guard kicked him near his left kidney, not quite hard enough to make him pass out.
Then they were dragging him again, down endless faded green corridors, into a dark-paneled room with no windows and a long wooden table. A man in a cheap suit, maybe thirty years old, sat on the other side of the table. His hair was medium brown, his face unremarkable. There was a gold shield pinned to the jacket pocket. Next to him sat a man in a polo shirt and expensive sport coat. He had excessive Aryan good looks, wavy blond hair, icy blue eyes. Fortunato remembered the Mason that Eileen had described, Roman.
“Sergeant Matthias?” the second guard said. The man in the cheap suit nodded. “This is the one.”
Matthias leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Fortunato felt something brush his mind.
“Well?” Roman asked.
“Not much,” Matthias Said. “Some telepathy, a little TK, but it’s weak. I doubt he could even pick a lock.”
“So what do you think? Does the boss need to worry about him?”
“I can’t see why. You could hang him up for a while for murdering that kid, see what happens.”
“What’s the use?” Roman said. “He’d just plead self defense. The judge’d probably give him a medal. Nobody cares about those little bastards anyway.”
“Fine,” Matthias said. He turned to the guards. “Kick him loose. We’re done with him.”
It took another hour to get him back on the street, and of course nobody offered him a ride home. But that was all right. Jokertown was where he needed to be.
He sat on the steps of the precinct and reached out for Eileen’s mind.
He found himself staring at the brick wall of an alley. He was empty of thought or emotion. As he struggled to break through the clouds in her brain he felt her bladder let go, and felt the warm urine spread in a puddle under her and quickly turn cold.
“Hey, buddy, no sleeping on the steps.”
Fortunato walked out into the street and flagged a cab. He put a twenty through the little metal drawer and said, “South. Hurry.”
He got out of the cab on Chrystie just south of Grand. She hadn’t moved. Her mind was gone. He squatted in front of her and probed for a few seconds, and then he couldn’t stand it and he walked down to the end of the alley. He pounded on the side of a dumpster until his hands were nearly useless. Then he went back and tried again.
He opened his mouth to say something. Nothing came out. There were no words left in his head, only bloody red clumps and a flood of acid that kept rising up in his eyes.
He walked across the street and dialed 911. It hurt to press the buttons. When he got an operator he asked for an ambulance and gave the address and hung up.
He went back across the street. A car honked at him and he didn’t understand why. He knelt in front of Eileen. Her jaw hung open and a thread of saliva dangled down onto her blouse. He couldn’t stand to look at her. He closed his eyes and reached out with his mind and gently stopped her heart.
It was easy to find the temple. It was only three blocks away. He just followed the energy trails of the men who’d left Eileen in the alley.
He stood across the street from the bricked-up church. He had to keep blinking his eyes to keep them clear. The trails of the men led into the building, and two or three other trails led out. But Balsam was still in there, Balsam and Clarke and a dozen more.
That was good. He wanted them all, but he would settle for the ones that were there. Them, and their coins and their golden masks, their rituals, their temple, everything that had a part in trying to bring their alien monstrosity to Earth, that had spilled blood and destroyed minds and ruined lives to do it. He wanted it over, finished, for good and all.
The night was utterly cold, a vacuum as cold as space, sucking the heat and life from everything it touched. His cheeks burned and then went numb.
He reached for the power he had left and it wasn’t enough.
For a few seconds he stood and shook with helpless rage, ready to go after the building with his bare, battered hands. Then he saw her, on the corner, standing in the classic pose under the streetlight. Black hot pants, rabbit jacket, fake-fur shawl. Hooker heels and too much makeup. He slowly raised his arm and waved her over.
She stopped in front of him, looked him warily up and down. “Hey,” she said. Her skin was coarse and her eyes were tired. “You wanna go out?”
He took a hundred-dollar bill out of his jacket and unzipped his pants.
“Right here in the street? Lover, you must be hurtin’ for certain.” She stared at the hundred and eased down onto her knees. “Woo, this concrete cold.” She fumbled around in his trousers and then looked up at him. “Shit, what is this? Dry blood?”
He took out another hundred. The woman hesitated a second and then stuffed both bills in her purse and clamped the purse under her arm.
At the touch of her mouth Fortunato went instantly hard. He felt a surge all the way up from his feet and it made his scalp and his fingernails hurt. His eyes rolled up until they were staring at the second floor of the old church.
He wanted to use his power to lift the entire city block and hurl it into space, but he didn’t have the strength to break a window. He probed at the bricks and the wooden joists and the electrical wiring and then, he found what he was looking for. He followed a gas line down to the basement and back to the main, and then he began to move the gas through it, building the pressure the way it was building inside him, until the pipes vibrated and the walls shook and the mortar creaked. The hooker looked up and across the street, saw cracks splitting the walls. “Run,” he said. As she clattered away Fortunato reached down and jammed his fingers into the root of his penis, forcing back the hot flood of his ejaculation. His intestines turned to fire, ‘and in the crawlspace over the temple the black steel pipe bent and shook free of its connections. It spurted gas and fell to the floor, knocking sparks off the chicken-wire-and-plaster wall.
The building swelled for an instant like it was filling with water and then it erupted in a ball of smoky orange flame. Bricks smashed into the wall on either side of where Fortunato stood but he wouldn’t look away, not until his eyebrows had been singed to the skin and his clothes had begun to smolder. The roar of the explosion shattered windows up and down the street, and when it finally died the bleating of sirens and alarms took its place.
He wished he’d been able to hear them scream.
Eventually, a cab stopped for him. The driver wanted to take him to the hospital but Fortunato talked him out of it with a hundred-dollar bill.
Climbing the stairs to his apartment took longer than anything he could remember. He went into the bedroom. The pillows still smelled of Eileen’s perfume.
He went back to the kitchen, got a fifth of whiskey, and sat by the window, drinking it down, watching the red glow of the fire slowly die over Jokertown.
When he finally passed out on the couch he dreamed of tentacles and wet rubbery flesh and beaks that opened and closed with long, echoing laughter.
The man was a Shinto priest, but in an attempt to satisfy everyone, he had worn a black suit and black turtleneck. There was enough March sunshine to make the clothing uncomfortable. He had visibly begun to perspire. “Dearly beloved,” he said, with some sort of Asian accent, “we are gathered here today ... to celebraté“ He stopped and looked down at the prayer book, puzzled. Then, looking horribly embarrassed, he flipped forward and started the service for the burial of the dead.
Veronica shifted uncomfortably on her metal folding chair, as did most of the small crowd of mourners. For Veronica, it was an attempt to keep from laughing. Ichiko, she thought, would have laughed. But Ichiko was dead.
“ I did not know Ichiko personally,” the priest said, beginning to drone. “But from what I understand, she was a kind, generous, and loving soul.”
Veronica wondered how he could go through with it, to stand there next to her coffin and issue platitudes, to sum up the life of someone he’d never met. She tuned him out and looked around once again, hoping to see Fortunato. Ichiko was, after all, his mother. Veronica had sent the telegram herself to the monastery on Hokaido where Fortunato had retreated. There had been no answer, just as there had been no answer to any of the other letters or pleas that had been sent him. All she saw now was sunshine, birds splashing in the puddles left from a morning shower.
In all, maybe a dozen people had shown up for the service. Cordelia and Miranda, of course, who had been with Ichiko to the end. A handful of former geishas. Digger Downs, probably hoping for a glimpse of Fortunato. Three elderly men Veronica didn’t recognize. None of Ichiko’s famous clients, of course, could afford to be seen at her funeral. There were lots of flowers.
She looked at the old men again, wondering if one of them might be Jerry Strauss, in disguise. She hadn’t heard from him since the previous fall, but it wasn’t like Jerry to give up easily. It was Miranda who had told her about his ability to change his appearance, something he’d never let on about in all the time he was paying for her professional services. Still, if one of them had been Jerry, he would have been watching her. These three seemed to have trouble staying awake.
Then again, she thought, even Jerry might not recognize me now.
The transformation had started the night Hannah died, a year and a half before.
Hannah had become the thing Veronica lived for, the reason she cared what her body looked like, the reason she was able to wake up in the morning, the reason she went downtown everyday for her jolt of methadone mixed with sicklysweet orange drink. And Hannah had somehow, inexplicably, hanged herself in her jail cell before Veronica could get to her.
In the process of getting there, Veronica had learned something about herself even she hadn’t known. Her sometime lover Croyd, temporarily spreading an infectious wild card virus, had given it to her. She had developed an ability that she didn’t fully understand, that she had hardly used. It seemed to cause another person to become weak, helpless, devoid of willpower.
Even that power had not let her save Hannah’s life. She’d left the police station and wandered back to the apartment she shared with Hannah and gone to bed, holding on to her cat and waiting and waiting for sleep. At three in the morning she came violently awake, sure that she was in danger. The police could find her there, and so could whoever had killed Hannah.
It was murder, beyond question. Some outside force had taken possession of Hannah in a midtown bank, while Veronica stood by helplessly. That same force had to be responsible for her suicide.
She packed a suitcase and put Liz in a cat carrier, and phoned for a cab. She waited in the shadows of the building’s entrance until the cab arrived, then got in quickly and gave the address of Ichiko’s brownstone.
Veronica had to go into Ichiko’s bedroom and wake her up, which was more difficult than she’d expected. Finally Ichiko got out of bed and struggled into a kimono and took a few clumsy strokes at her hair with a brush. Veronica had never seen her without her makeup before. She had let herself forget how old Ichiko was, in her seventies now.
“I need help,” Veronica said. “Hannah’s dead. She killed herself-they say-in her jail cell.” It was Ichiko who had sent her to Hannah in the first place, for drug counseling. “But she would never have killed herself. It’s not like her.”
“No,” Ichiko said. “You are right. It is not her way.”
“There’s something between you two, isn’t there?” A sudden pang of loss blinded her for a second. “I mean, there was something. You sent me to her, out of all the therapists in this city”
Ichiko nodded. “Years ago; she was part of a group, a feminist group.”
“W O. R. S. E.”
“Yes. That one. She had decided to make us her target. She wanted to have her people follow our geishas on their assignments and make trouble for them, draw attention to them, embarrass our clients. There is no doubt she could have destroyed the business this way.”
“When was this?”
“Seven years ago. Nineteen eighty-one. She had just joined the group. She had many problems, with her marriage, with drinking and drugs. She was not ... stable. She came to me and told me what she planned to do. She had not formally proposed it to the group yet.”
“And?”
“And I gave her money not to.”
“Hannah? You bribed Hannah?”
Ichiko held up her hands. “ I made her an offer. A hundred-thousand-dollar anonymous donation to the organization. Enough money to keep them going for years. In exchange she would let me take my business apart slowly, in my own time, in my own way.”
“ I can’t believe it.”
“She was not the same woman then. When she brought in that donation, it gave her much power. She soon became president. That in turn gave her personal strength, let her conquer her private demons. There is no simple good and bad here.”
“So the two of you stayed in touch.”
“We shared that guilty secret. The guilt is mine also. I have done little to keep my end of the promise. Little until now. But perhaps the time has come.”
“What about W O. R. S. E. ? Are you in touch with them? Could they help me?”
“ I will try. But you are not safe here. Check into a hotel somewhere. Pay cash; do not use your real name. Tell no one. Call me tomorrow at noon. I will see what I can do.”
Veronica did as she was told. The next day, Ichiko gave her a single name: Nancy. This was the woman who had arranged for Hannah’s lawyer. Ichiko described her over the phone with typical precision: five foot three, long brown hair parted in the center, wire-rimmed glasses, small breasts, full hips. Veronica was supposed to meet her at Penn Station at three o’clock, by the ticket windows for the Long Island Railroad.
She stopped off for her methadone on the way. She still had a check from Ichiko in her purse, the check she’d been meaning to deposit two days before, when Hannah ...
Her numbness had started to wear off. The thought hurt her more than she could have imagined.
Finish it. When Hannah had gone berserk. Taken a guard’s gun and started shooting.
The check would have to wait. She couldn’t go back into that bank again, even if the cops weren’t likely to be looking for her there.
Ichiko had said she was to be ready to travel, which meant lugging the suitcase and cat carrier with her. Liz hated being in the cage and squalled continuously. The suitcase, full of winter clothes, was enormously heavy. She was tired and sore and sweating by the time she made it through the labyrinth of tunnels to the LIRR.
Someone touched her elbow. “Veronica?”
Ichiko’s description had been carefully nonjudgmental. It had omitted Nancy’s clear skin, her smiling Clara Bow mouth. No makeup, of course. Intelligent light brown eyes. “Yes,” Veronica said.
“I’m Nancy,” she said. “I’ll watch your things. Get us two one-way tickets for East Rockaway. We can just make the 3:23.”
Veronica bought the tickets and Nancy carried her suitcase onto the train for her. They got settled and Veronica opened the door of the cat carrier to stroke Liz, hoping to shut her up. “Where are we going?” Veronica asked.
“I’m putting you up at my place for the duration. You’ll be safe there. Not even Ichiko knows.”
“I don’t know how to thank you. I mean, you don’t even know me.”
“Hannah knew you. That’s enough.”
Veronica noticed the past tense. “You’ve heard, then.” Nancy looked away, nodded stiffly.
“I’m sorry” Veronica said. “I don’t know you, I don’t know what to say to you.”
Nancy nodded again, and Veronica suddenly realized what an effort she was making to be polite. “You don’t have to say anything at all.”
They changed in Jamaica. The wind whistled through the open platform, and Liz huddled in a corner of her cage, crying softly. They boarded the Long Beach train in silence.
When the train stopped in Lynbrook, Nancy suddenly grabbed Veronica’s suitcase and started for the doors. “Come on,” she said. “This is us.”
Veronica got off the train behind her. “I thought ...”
“It never hurts to cover your trail. Carrying that cat around—somebody at the ticket window might remember you.” They walked downstairs and crossed the street to Carpenter Avenue. Veronica had never been on Long Island before, and the sense of space made her uncomfortable. None of the buildings were over two stories high. There were lawns and vacant lots covered with trees and grass. The streets were nearly empty.
Nancy led her to a door in a row of tall, narrow woodframe houses across from the library. There was a dead bolt but no police lock or alarm system. They climbed two flights of stairs to a refurbished attic. There was a bed, a bathroom with a shower, a half-size refrigerator, and a hot plate. A huge leather-covered armchair sat by a lamp and a crowded bookshelf.
“If somebody comes along who’s got a worse problem than you, we’ll have to make other plans. Until then, you can stay. I’ll do your shopping for you, at least for a while, until we see how hard they’re looking for you.”
“I’ve got money,” Veronica said. Or she would have, once she could find a way to cash the check. “I can pay for the room.”
“That’ll help.” Nancy stood up. “I’ll get you some foodand a litter box for the cat-and then I’ve got to get back to the city. Will you be okay here?”
Veronica nodded. Her growing despair seemed to make the wood-paneled walls grow even darker. “I’ll be fine,” she said.
The priest droned to a close, and the coffin was lowered into the ground. Ichiko would rather have been cremated, Veronica suspected. Miranda had refused to hear of it. And she had come up with this bastard amalgamation of Shinto and Catholic for a funeral service. Miranda was Ichiko’s oldest friend, and she was Veronica’s mother, so she got her way.
They filed past the hole, and each threw in a ceremonial shovelful of dirt. Veronica’s dirt hit the coffin with a hollow whack. She passed the shovel on and went to stand by her mother. Miranda had walked well away from the others and stood with her arms folded, watching the driveway.
“He’s not coming, Mother,” Veronica said.
“He’s Ichiko’s only son. How could he not be here?”
“What do you want me to say? I could tell you maybe his flight was delayed. Maybe he got held up in customs. But you know as well as me he just decided not to come. She’s dead, there’s nothing he can do.”
Except, she thought, use his tantric powers to bring her back to life. A particularly nasty thought that she left unsaid. Miranda started to cry. “It’s the end of everything. The business is closed down, Ichiko’s gone, Fortunato might as well be dead. And you, you’ve changed so much ...”
I must be getting stronger, Veronica thought. I can almost handle this. She put her arms around her mother and held her until the crying passed.
It had taken Veronica a week to settle in at Nancy’s house. Nancy had gotten her a fake birth certificate, which they’d then parlayed into a driver’s license and a bank account. Ichiko had rewritten the check with Veronica’s new name on it. With the money Veronica had Nancy buy her a portable stereo and a TV set for her attic cell.
She also got on a methadone program at Mercy Hospital. This was the biggest risk of all, but there was no way around it. It meant riding the bus up Peninsula Avenue once a day.
The hospital, with all its Catholic paraphernalia, seemed comforting to Veronica, an island of her childhood.
More and more she would find herself remembering her comfortable middle-class neighborhood in Brooklyn. Miranda had been making a lot of money working for Fortunato, most of it going into savings. There was enough left over for a good-size apartment in Midwood, new clothes every fall, food, and a color TV Linda, Veronica’s younger sister, lived in the apartment now, with her good-for-nothing husband, Orlando. Between Orlando and the smack, Veronica hadn’t seen her sister in two years.
Nancy tried to talk her out of the trips to the hospital. It would be safer, she said, for Veronica to go back to shooting up. The words alone brought back the memory of the rush.
The floor seemed to drop out from under her like she was in a high-speed elevator. “No,” she said. “Don’t even kid around about it.” What would Hannah have thought?
On her first Saturday night in the attic, there was a meeting downstairs. People showed up all through the afternoon, and the sound of movement and laughter filtering up through the stairwell only made Veronica’s loneliness worse. For a week she had been cooped up there, seeing Nancy for no more than ten minutes a day. She lived for her short bus rides to the hospital, where she might sometimes exchange a few words with a stranger. Her life was turning into a prison sentence.
On Sunday, when Nancy came up to check on her, Veronica said, “ I want to join the organization.”
Nancy sat down. “It’s not that easy. This isn’t NOW or Women’s Action Alliance or something. Hiding fugitives isn’t the only illegal thing we do.”
“ I know that.”
“We only invite people to join us after months, sometimes years of observation.”
“ I can help you. I worked for Ichiko for over two years.” She took a notebook out of the nightstand by her bed. “This is my client list. We’re talking some major people here: restaurant and factory owners, publishers, brokers, politicians. I’ve got names, phone numbers, preferences, personal statistics you’re not going to find in Who’s Who.”
There was more, but Veronica wasn’t willing to tell her the rest, not yet, about her ace power. She still didn’t know how it worked or how to control it. And she didn’t know what Nancy’s reaction would be. Veronica had been watching CNN there in the room and was just starting to realize how strongly the tide had turned against wild cards. Aces and jokers were even turning on each other, thanks to Hiram Whatsisname, the fat guy’s, murder of Chrysalis.
Nancy stood up. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to have to say this, but you pushed me to it. Try and look at it from our point of view. You’re a prostitute, a fugitive, and a heroin addict. You’re not exactly a good risk.”
Veronica’s face felt hot, as if she’d been slapped. She sat motionless, stunned.
“I’ll talk to the others,” Nancy said. “But I can’t make any promises.”
Ichiko’s funeral was on a Sunday. On Monday, Veronica was back at work. At the moment, she was the receptionist at a company that published trade journals: Pipeline Digest,
Catering!, Trout World. The owner, one of Veronica’s former clients, was the only male involved in the business, and he was never there.
When she’d decided to go back on the job market, she’d gone straight to her client files. At her first two interviews, the men who’d once salivated at the sight of her naked body simply stared at her. She’d put on twenty-five pounds in the last four months, and her metabolism, still trying to adjust to life without heroin, had taken it out on her complexion. She wore no makeup, her hair was cut short, and she’d given up dresses for loose drawstring pants and bulky sweaters. The men smiled with faint distaste and told her they’d let her know if something came up. The third interview landed her a cooking job at one of the better New York hotels. After a couple of months, she moved up to a senator’s office.
She’d been with Custom Publishing for six weeks. For the first time in her life, she felt comfortable, surrounded by competent women. She had even relaxed enough to stop for a drink with them now and again at Close Encounters, a fern bar across the street.
Which she did on the Thursday after the funeral. It was still only slowly dawning on her that Ichiko was dead, that the most significant part of her life thus far was finally and absolutely over. She needed a little companionship to ease the sudden fits of panic and loss that would sneak up on her. A drink would have helped, but she’d quit that when she quit the heroin.
She looked up from their corner table at the restaurant to see a man standing beside her.
“Veronica?” he said.
She’d gone back to using her own name, but none of her new friends knew about her past. She wanted to keep it that way. “I don’t think I know you,” she said coolly. Betty, a woman in her fifties with steel-gray hair, stared at the man hungrily. He was young, good-looking in a soap-opera sort of way, wearing an Armani suit.
“We ... went out together a couple of years ago. Donald? You don’t remember?”
There had probably been more than one man she’d forgotten, what with the heroin. “No,” she said. “I wish you’d quit bothering me.”
“I wanted to talk to you, just for a second. Please.”
“Go away,” Veronica said. She didn’t like the touch of hysteria she heard in her own voice. “Leave me alone!” People all around them were looking now. The manDonald?-held up both hands and backed away. “Okay,” he said. “I’m sorry”
Veronica saw, to her horror, that her wild-card power was affecting the man, without her conscious control. He had turned pale and seemed barely able to stay on his feet. He caught his balance on the back of an empty chair and walked unsteadily out the door.
Donna, a thirty-year-old blond who wore short skirts all winter long, said, “Are you crazy? He was gorgeous. And that suit must have cost a thousand bucks.”
Betty said, “This is the first we’ve ever seen of your sordid past.” She turned in her chair, watching Donald move away down the street. “You can’t blame us for being curious. You never drink anything but club soda, you never talk about dates or husbands, none of us even know where you live ....” Veronica tried a smile. It was supposed to be mysterious, but she could feel the wrongness of it. “My lips are sealed,” she said.
On a Saturday evening, her third week in the attic in Lynbrook, there had been a knock on her door.
Nancy stood in the stairway, looking uncomfortable. “It’s okay for you to sit in on the meeting. But for God’s sake, don’t say anything, okay? You’ll just make me look like an idiot.”
Veronica followed her downstairs. A dozen women sat around Nancy’s dining-room table. They were all dressed casually; most wore little or no makeup. Three of them were black, two Latin, one oriental. One was a joker who seemed to have too much skin for her body; she had no hair, and folds of flesh hung off her chin and neck and hands. She looked like one of those weird wrinkled bulldogs that rich people sometimes had.
Only one of the women was under thirty, and she stood out like a panther in a rabbit hutch. She couldn’t have been out of her teens. Even with her bulky winter clothes, Veronica could tell she was a bodybuilder. It showed in her neck and the width of her shoulders, in the way she held herself. Her hair was black, shoulder length, and to Veronica’s expert eye, almost certainly a wig.
Veronica found a chair. The meeting started and lurched slowly forward. Every issue was put to a vote, and then only after endless debate. The young bodybuilder seemed as bored as Veronica. Finally she said, “Screw all that. Let’s talk about Loeffler.”
The joker said, “I can’t see that being as important as the joker issue. Wild-card violence is tearing this city apart.” She slurred her words, and Veronica found it hard to understand her.
One of the black women-Toni, her name was-said, “Zelda’s right. This joker shit could take forever. Let’s talk Loeffler.”
The joker woman objected and was quickly overruled. Even W O. R. S. E., Veronica thought, was not completely free of prejudice. As the discussion heated up, Veronica put the pieces together. Robert Loeffler was the publisher of Playhouse magazine and head of the entire Global Fun & Games empire. The group intended to confront him and force changes in the magazine’s attitude toward women. The problem was, nobody knew a way to get through to him. A slight woman in her fifties named Frances offered to use her locksmithing experience. Zelda wanted to use a bomb.
After a half hour of debate, Veronica excused herself. She went upstairs and copied Loeffler’s unlisted phone number and the combination to his penthouse elevator on a piece of paper. She took it downstairs with her, handed it silently to Nancy, and took her chair again.
Nancy, across the table from her, said, “Where did you get this?”
The debate stopped.
Into the silence Veronica said, “I used to fuck him.” The table came to life. In ten minutes they had the outline of a plan. The rush of power went right through the top of Veronica’s head, like a hit of crystal meth.
Toni said, “Let’s go on this. My only question is, how soon?”
Marline, the joker woman, threw her weight behind the bandwagon. “How about tonight?”
“We haven’t got time to get set up,” Veronica said. “But tomorrow is possible. Sundays were always good for him.” The next night, Nancy and Veronica took the train to Penn Station, and Veronica made the call from a pay phone in the lobby of the Penta Hotel across the street.
“Bob? Veronica.”
“Veronica!” His voice was muffed, but he sounded pleased. “Darling, how are you?”
“I’m gorgeous, Bob. And the thermostat in here doesn’t seem to be working. It’s so hot! I had to take all my clothes off.” A gust of freezing air came through the front doors, attacking her legs. The extra weight she had put on in the attic made her feel thick and clumsy, and her nerves were ringing like a switchboard at a radio station. “And one part of me is hotter than all the others. I bet you remember which part that is.”
She heard a soft moan. “Don’t do this to me, Veronica. I’m a married man now. Don’t you read the papers? She was the May Doll of the Month.”
“I don’t care if you’re married to Miss America. It’s not marriage I’m interested in.” At first, Nancy’s jaw had dropped in amazement. Now she was starting to crack up. Veronica had to turn away to keep from losing it herself. “I’m freelance now, Bob. I’m offering a special to my very favorite clients. The first one’s free. Just to remind you why you should always let a professional take care of your needs. All your special needs. Hint, hint.”
“Oh god. We can’t do it here. Bev would kill me.”
“That’s why the good lord made hotels.”
“Tonight?”
Veronica covered the receiver and mouthed “Tonight?” to Nancy, who nodded. “Sure, baby. I’m just over here at the Penta, with the heat turned all the way up. Oh! It’s really getting damp and sticky in here.”
“I’ll be there in an hour.”
“Call it ten o’clock? I’m ready now, but by ten o’clock I’ll really be ready. I’ll have the room set up just the way you like it. Call me from the lobby.”
She made a kissing noise into the phone and hung up, a little uncomfortable at how easily it all came back. She left Nancy to phone for reinforcements and rented a room under her own name.
By ten till ten, they had five more women, including Toni and Zelda and Martine, the joker. Nancy wanted Veronica to get into bed with Loeffler so they could take pictures. Veronica refused.
“It’s not like you’ve never done it before,” Nancy said. “How much could it hurt?”
“Leave the chick alone,” Zelda said. “I wouldn’t want nobody inside my body unless they was invited.”
“The ends are the means,” said Toni. “We can’t victimize our sister.”
“Okay, okay,” Nancy said.
“I got a better idea,” Zelda said, taking off her clothes. She was not as built-up as Veronica had thought. She was smooth and feminine, with extraordinary muscle definition. Veronica found it a little hard to look away.
The phone rang. It was Loeffer. Veronica gave him the room number and told him to hurry. She left the hall door slightly ajar and took the other women into the darkened bathroom.
“Don’t nobody fart,” Zelda said, and there was muffled laughter.
Veronica heard Loeffler come in, the door clicking shut behind him. “Veronica?” he said. “Did you bring the pickles?” One of the women strangled a laugh.
“Get undressed,” Veronica said through the door. “I’ve got a surprise for you.”
She heard the sound of a zipper. “Mmmmmm. I love surprises.” Clothes hit the floor, covers swished back, the bedsprings creaked. “Okay, darling, do your worst.”
Zelda was the first through the door. She pulled the sheet down and had Loeffer’s erect cock in her hand by the time Nancy got the lights on and the camera focused. Somebody else threw a copy of that day’s New York Times on the bed to verify the date. It took Loeffler at least three frames to shove Zelda away and say, “Veronica, what the hell is going on here?” Veronica shook her head. Toni stood at the foot of the bed and presented their list of demands. They weren’t asking him to kill Playhouse or turn it into a women’s-lib magazine. They wanted the Doll of the Month to become Woman of the Month, and feature the occasional professional woman over thirty. Feature articles supporting the ERA and condemning the NRA. Fiction by women. In short, finish out the decade with at least a minimum of social consciousness.
“And,” Zelda said, “I want your centerfolds to stop lying about their waist sizes. Nobody has a twenty-two-inch waist. That is such bullshit!” Veronica giggled in spite of herself.
Loeffler was not amused. During the lecture, he had gathered up his clothes and gotten dressed. “Do you realize who you’re fucking with, here?”
Nancy said, “Maybe you don’t realize who we are.”
“WORSE would be my guess.”
“That’s right.”
“I’m not afraid of you.”
“You should be,” Toni said. “We can mobilize letterwriting campaigns that will get your magazine pulled from every convenience store in the country. Picket lines to keep your employees from getting to work. Media coverage that will have the fundamentalists all over you like flies on shit.” She nodded toward Nancy and her camera. “Not to mention breaking up your marriage.”
Loeffler sat down to put his shoes on. “If you’d come into the office like reasonable human beings and discussed this, I might have listened to you.”
Martine said, “I’ve been trying for an appointment for three months. Don’t pretend you’re interested in our ‘input.”‘ “Okay, then, I won’t.” He started for the door, then turned to look at Zelda. She was still naked and had been following him around the room. “And put some clothes on,” he told her. “Looking at those muscles makes me sick.”
Zelda didn’t change expression. She merely leaned back, still smiling, and threw a side kick that snapped Loeffler’s neck. His body hitting the floor was the only sound in the room. Veronica thought of the carnage in the bank and Hannah’s swinging corpse. She thought she might pass out. She made herself kneel next to Loweffler’s body and reach for a pulse in his throat.
Zelda slapped her hands away. “He’s dead. Trust me.”
“Jesus,” Veronica said.
“Sorry,” Zelda said without conviction. “ I wasn’t thinking.”
“Zelda, for Christ’s sake,” someone said.
“You really are a loose cannon,” Toni said.
Nobody but Veronica seemed particularly shocked or upset. Nancy looked at Veronica and said, “Uh-oh. Trouble.” Toni took Veronica’s hand and pulled her to her feet. “Give me your room key. We take care of this. You get across the street and catch a train home. Can you do that?” Veronica nodded.
“Shit,” Toni said. “Nancy, you go with her. We handle this.”
After they were out of the city, somewhere around Forest Hills, Nancy said: “Are you okay?”
“It’s so weird.It’s like ... like it was all a dream or something.”
“That’s right,” Nancy said. “That’s all it was. Just a dream.”
It was all over TV the next day. Loeffler’s body was found in an alley near Penn Station, apparently the victim of a robbery.
That evening, Nancy came up to tell her they were in the clear. “You don’t need to know how they did it,” Nancy said. She seemed radiant with success. “But they got him out, and there’s nothing to connect us with him at all.”
“Doesn’t it bother you?” Veronica asked. “That he’s dead?”
“Look, I’m not crazy about violence either. But you have to remember. The guy was scum. With him dead, his daughter takes over GF&G. It becomes a women’s corporation, and that’s going to make things better for women everywhere.” Veronica remembered Loeffler’s childlike energy, the way he threw himself into sex with unrestrained enjoyment. She remembered the flowers he’d always brought her, his sense of humor. “I guess,” she said.
The next Saturday, one of the women brought in photos of Zelda and Loeffler that she’d printed up herself at work. They were passed around to much laughter and admiration.
There was a nervousness behind the bravado. Veronica felt it, and the others probably did too, but no one mentioned it. Veronica left the meeting early, and the next Saturday she stayed in her room. No one came to invite her downstairs, and Nancy never mentioned W O. R. S. E. again.
Donald-whoever he was-had put Veronica off her feed. She left Close Encounters and went home, put a frozen dinner in the micro, and turned on the news. They had a feature story on the Rox, a follow-up on the unsuccessful park ranger raid back in February.
“Admit it,” the reporter said to some man in a ranger uniform. “Those kids could have done a lot worse if they wanted. It was like they didn’t even take you seriously. A few people got shot up, but that was all. They made fools out-of you.”
“Mister,” the ranger said, “you don’t know what’s out there on that island. It’s worse than you could ever imagine. Just pray to God you don’t ever find out.”
Veronica had saved one photo of Hannah. It had been sitting on an end table, but she’d gotten to where the constant sight of it was a reproach. Now she took it out again and sat down with it in front of the TV She realized she had never cried for Hannah, not once in the sixteen months since her death. With that thought, the tears came.
Jumpers, she thought. They made fools of all of us.
She turned the TV off. She couldn’t seem to get herself back together since that man in the restaurant. It was the past come to haunt her. Like all hauntings, it was something she’d brought on herself. It was something she’d left undone. For over a year, she’d been pushing it away, but the questions had been there all this time, fighting to get out.
She walked nervously around the apartment. She wasn’t going to be able to sleep tonight, not in this state. She had to do something, no matter how small, to buy off her conscience. She sat down and dialed Nancy’s number.
“Hello?”
“Nancy?”
“Yes?”
“It’s Veronica.” After the odd terms they’d parted on, she didn’t know how Nancy would react.
“Yes?” she said again, this time nervous, reluctant.
“ I don’t mean to bother you.It’s just ... there’s this question I always wanted to ask you. It’s about ... it’s about Hannah.”
“Go on.”
Veronica could picture her standing on the faded carpet in the hallway, back stiff, eyes staring straight ahead, waiting for some inevitable ax to fall. “Ichiko told me W O. R. S. E. paid for Hannah’s lawyer. I just wanted to know ... I mean ... how did you know she was in jail?”
“You mean, did she use her one phone call to call us, instead of you? Is that what you’re asking?”
“I guess so. I mean, she told me she was through with all of that.”
“She was. She didn’t call us. Latham, Strauss did.”
“They called you?”
“It was Latham himself. He said they would provide Hannah an attorney free of charge, but they didn’t want that fact to get out. They wanted us to say we were paying for it. It wasn’t an offer I was willing to refuse at the time.”
“How did he know where to find you?”
“I have no idea.”
“Really? You don’t have any ties to Latham?”
“We’d talked about targeting Latham for an action. Believe me, it was as much a surprise to us as it was to you.” After a few seconds, Veronica said, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Life goes on. You know?”
“I know,” Veronica said.
When she hung up, her hands were shaking. Latham. She’s seen him on TV: elegant suits, razor-cut hair, eyes as cold as a winter sky. Jerry’s brother was the Strauss in Latham, Strauss, and he’d told her stories about him. He was so inhuman that Jerry’s brother had wondered if maybe he was a secret wild card, that the virus had somehow killed all his emotions. Just the idea that he could somehow be mixed up in Hannah’s death was terrifying. It was like opening up a tiny box and finding everything in the world inside it.
There was nothing left to do that night. She went to bed but didn’t sleep. Instead she lay awake, seeing Latham and Hannah. And Nancy.
When snow fell on Long Island, it stayed. It had lawns to pike up in and kids to make snowmen out of it. Veronica had sat in her cell that December and listened to the wind howl outside.
On Christmas Eve, Nancy brought her a bottle of white wine with a ribbon on it. Veronica had wrapped an antique silver comb just in case, and Nancy had seemed touched by it. Later, Veronica heard her crying downstairs.
She had only been in Nancy’s apartment for W. O. R. S. E. meetings. She agonized for ten minutes, then went down quietly. Nancy was stretched out on the couch, clutching a pillow. She didn’t even look up when Veronica lay down next to her and took her in her arms.
“Nobody should be alone on Christmas,” Veronica said. “Everything, everything just kind of fell apart,” Nancy said. “I was supposed to go to Connecticut, and then their kids got measles, and I ...”
“It’s okay,” Veronica said.
“I can’t believe you’re being so sweet to me when everything’s gone so badly. I’ve left you alone up there, night after night ...”
“You’ve done so much,” Veronica said, trying to be generous.
“No I haven’t. I was jealous. Of you and Hannah. We used to be ...” She didn’t seem able to finish.
“You were lovers.”
“Years ago. But she got tired of me.”
Veronica kissed the top of her head. Nancy looked up at her, helpless and vulnerable. Veronica unhooked Nancy’s glasses and put them on the table, then kissed her on the mouth.
They made love awkwardly, with vague passion and no conviction. Veronica was ashamed of her body. With nothing to do all day, her addict’s metabolism had developed a craving for sugar that she couldn’t control. It took all her strength to stay on methadone and off heroin. There was no strength left to diet. In a month and a half she’d already gained fifteen pounds and was still gaining.
Nancy’s body was covered with fine dark hairs, and her skin seemed unhealthily pale. The taste of her vagina seemed odd and sour. Veronica would find herself remembering Hannah, then have to force herself to go on.
Eventually they moved into the bedroom. They held onto each other through the night but didn’t try to make love again. Toward morning, Veronica woke to find that Nancy had turned away and was snoring softly into her pillow. Veronica got up a little after dawn and got into her clothes. She came back to kiss Nancy lightly on the forehead. Nancy woke long enough to squeeze her hand, then went back to sleep.
After that, Veronica stayed in her room. She stayed there through the bitter cold of January, into the worse cold of February. One Sunday, the temperature fell below zero, and all of Long Island was covered in ice. Veronica was unable to get out of bed. She thought about Hannah, about the things they’d done together. She thought about the scene in the bank, the change that had come over Hannah’s face just before she took the guard’s gun and started shooting. She thought about Hannah hanging in her jail cell, dead.
She curled deeper under the covers. She’d gained another ten pounds, and now she felt heavy all the time. Liz settled into the small of her back, and the two of them slept through the day.
By nightfall, Veronica was sick.
It was like nothing she’d heard or imagined. Suddenly she was outside her body, filling the room, lighter than air. Distantly she felt her body begin to convulse. Vomit trickled out of the distant body’s mouth, and Veronica knew, distantly, that if the body did not roll over, it would likely strangle. The body did move, fortunately, when a fit of coughing made it double up on its side.
Nancy came upstairs to see what had happened when Veronica fell out of bed and crashed onto the floor. She found a bottle of Hydrocodone and made Veronica swallow three of them, forcing them past her raw and swollen throat.
It was another quarter hour before the spasms passed. “I have to get out from under this,” Veronica whispered. “I don’t care what it costs.”
The next morning, she boarded Liz at the vets and checked into Mt. Sinai’s drug-treatment program. It took six weeks. She lost all the weight she’d gained, then put it back on again. Handfuls of hair came out of her scalp, and the crow’s feet that grew out of her eyes never went away, even when she finally got clean and was able to sleep again.
She still had money left from her hooking days, enough to get her through the end of the year, as long as she stayed out of the hospital. But she needed something to fill the empty days. No one seemed to be looking for her. She had her hair cut in a pageboy and bought herself new clothes, pants and sweaters, all dark, all loose-fitting.
She found her own apartment, a few blocks from Nancy’s. Nancy only nodded when Veronica told her the news, cried a little when Veronica brought the last of her things downstairs. “I haven’t been much help to you, have—I?” Nancy said.
“You saved my life.”
Nancy squeezed her, then let her go.
Veronica took a job typing and filing at a Lynbrook insurance office. She made minimum wage and watched while the boss flirted with another of the secretaries, a hardened thirty-year-old who chewed gum. Veronica had less than no interest in a toupeed insurance salesman in a doubleknit suit. Still, it was the first time in her life a man had ignored her. And why not? She had taken herself out of the game. Overweight, severe haircut and clothes, no makeup or perfume, her sallow skin broken out from all the sweets.
It was late summer, the summer of 1989, before she saw how the world around her had changed. Instead of going home after work, she sat on the lawn of the library and watched the kids playing in the grass. It was a perfect afternoon, the skies clear, a light breeze rattling the leaves. She was able to look at it and realize, objectively, how beautiful it was. It seemed possible to her, for the first time in years, that one day she might be able to look at a sunset and actually feel it, and not be overwhelmed by Hannah’s absence or her own fear of being discovered, or her worries about her weight and what she was to make of her life.
She suddenly wondered what was happening in the world. She hadn’t even bothered to plug in the TV at her new apartment. She bought a newspaper, sat on the bench, and started to read.
The headlines were full of something called jumpers. She had to force herself not to skip ahead, ignoring the buzzing in her ears and the unease in her stomach. Teenage gang members all over the city had developed the ability to somehow trade consciousness with unwilling victims. The teenagers would ride around in the shanghaied bodies, killing and looting and terrorizing, and then would jump back into their own bodies when they were done.
Once more, Veronica remembered the scene in the bank, the handsome blond kid whose eyes had dulled at the same time that Hannah’s had changed.
Hannah had been jumped.
The press-and everyone else-was convinced that this was a new manifestation of the wild card. It had cranked the anti-wild-card hysteria in the city to a new pitch. It was a good thing she’d kept quiet about her ace power. All the wild card victims were being treated with fear and hatred. New York State had started a “voluntary” registration for aces. Editorials argued for internment camps, and letters cried out for blood.
Veronica went home and studied herself in the bathroom mirror. In October, less than a month from now, she would be twenty-seven. It seemed beyond belief that so much of her life was already gone. She’d been hiding out almost a year. No one would recognize her the way she looked now. Reading the Times had reminded her how much she missed New York. She was strong enough now, she thought, to stay clean. It would be easier, really, once she was back in the city where there were places to go and things to do. The temptation was always lurking in Lynbrook because of sheer boredom.
It was time to go home.
On the Friday after Ichiko’s funeral, Veronica got up with bags under her eyes and’a feeling of dread in her heart. Before she left for work, she called Latham, Strauss. She asked for Dyan Mundy, Hannah’s lawyer. Mundy wasn’t in, but Veronica got an appointment with her for that afternoon. Lunch at Close Encounters was the office tradition on Friday, followed by very little work getting done the rest of the afternoon. Their usual table for six was waiting for them when they got to the restaurant. Veronica looked around the bar nervously as she walked in, afraid she would see the man in the suit-Donald-again. Instead she saw a woman at the bar and froze where she stood.
Veronica could only see her from behind. She had dark brown hair worn loose past her shoulders. She had on a blue lame dress, cut below the waist in the back, completely inappropriate for afternoon.
It was Veronica’s dress.
The woman turned slowly on her stool. Veronica knew, with the certainty of a nightmare, what she was about to see. She was right. The woman had her face, her old face, the one she’d had when she was hooking. Lean, languidly sexy. Lots of makeup. She stared at the firm breasts and trim waist that had once been hers.
The woman stared back.
Okay, Veronica thought, this is clearly not happening. I am clearly dreaming this.
The woman reached into her purse, and Veronica thought, she’s going to pull out a gun and shoot me; then I’ll wake up. She waited for the eternity it took for the woman’s hand to come up out of the purse. It held a photograph, torn out of a newspaper. It showed a blond boy in a tuxedo-handsome, sensual, smiling with the confidence of money. It was the boy from the bank. The one who’d jumped Hannah.
“What do you want?” Veronica whispered.
The woman stood up, wrapped herself in a shawl. She took a few tentative steps toward Veronica, unsteady on her four-inch heels. “To talk,” she said. It was Veronica’s own voice. “Will you listen to me?”
Veronica nodded and followed the woman outside.
“I’ll make this quick,” the woman said. “I know a lot more about what’s going on than you do. The kid’s name was David Butler. He was seventeen. He was a summer intern at Latham, Strauss. As far as I can tell, he was the one running the kid gang when all this jumping business started.”
“‘Was’?”
“He’s dead. But the jumping is still going on.”
“Who are you?”
“Never mind that now. The point is, this is some kind of wild-card phenomenon. It’s not just a coincidence that all these kids developed the same power. The wild card doesn’t work that way. Somebody is giving it to them.”
The way Croyd gave it to me, Veronica thought guiltily. Then, in an instant, her brain flashed from her own infection to what she had learned about Jerry. About how he could change the way he looked. Change everything.
The woman was saying, “We have to find—” Veronica took a step backward. “Jerry? Is that you?” The woman broke off. “What?”
“It is you, isn’t it? You bastard, how did you find me?”
“Your mother. I convinced her it was life and death.”
“Change back. Change back now. I can’t stand looking at you like this.”
“I haven’t got anything else to wear. I’m not going to stand here as Jerry Strauss in a dress.”
“Do something.”
The woman’s features melted and reformed. It was like a coat of facial mud washing off. Now Veronica was talking to the young Ingrid Bergman.
“Oh Christ,” Veronica said. “Did my mother give you the dress, too?”
Ingrid nodded, blushing.
“What do you want from me? What am I supposed to do?”
“Help me find who’s behind this. Whoever is creating these jumpers is responsible for my brother’s death.”
“Kenneth?”
“That’s right. They killed him. Last fall. They killed Hannah, too. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?” Veronica slapped her, then swung her purse at her head when she tried to cover up. “Don’t you tell me what Hannah meant to me. You bastard! Get out of my life and stay out!” Suddenly she saw the women from the office, watching her out the window of Close Encounters. They’d seen everything, of course. Her life was in a shambles again.
She turned and ran.
It had been Veronica’s mother that told her about Jerry. Veronica had gone to see her that past Christmas. She knew at the time she was taking a risk, letting herself make contact with her former life, but she wasn’t willing to go on living in fear forever.
The brownstone was dark when she arrived. At first, she thought something drastic had happened, that the Mafia or the Shadow Fists or Global Fun & Games had finally taken over and shut the place down. She rang the doorbell, and after a minute or so, Miranda’s voice came over the speaker by the door.
“Yes? Who is it?”
“Mom, it’s me.” She had even called the week before to warn her. “Can’t you see me?”
“Veronica? Is it really you?”
The door opened. Veronica stepped in with her shopping bag full of presents. Miranda hugged her. “I’m sorry, darling, it’s just that ...”
“I know. I’ve changed.”
They had Christmas dinner: turkey in garlic sauce with rice and snow peas. Chinese food was as oriental as Miranda was willing to go as a cook. Ichiko’s native Japanese cuisine appalled her. It was just Miranda, Cordelia, Ichiko, and Veronica. “Most everybody you knew was already gone,” Miranda said. “Melanie is a translator for the UN, if you can believe it. Adrienne is doing shop windows at Bergdorf’s. Everyone has decent jobs, and they all sent Christmas cards. We still get two or three calls a week from clients who hadn’t gotten the word.”
“They need me to help with the rent now,” Cordelia said. Miranda said, “We have all the money we need, and you know it.”
Cordelia shrugged. Her hair was cut short now, very businesslike. “Let me pretend I’m useful. I’ve got money to burn, now that I’m a producer. Everybody in GF&G moved up after Bob was killed.”
Veronica tried not to let her guilt show. She turned to Ichiko. “Have you told Fortunato? About shutting down the business?”
“I wrote him and told him. I got no answer. I write him every so often, but it’s always the same. The letters don’t come back, but there is never an answer either.” Behind the bitterness, Veronica saw how tired Ichiko was. The business was the only thing that had kept her going all these years. Veronica wondered how long she would last without it.
Miranda talked about Linda and Orlando. The marriage, it seemed, was on the rocks. “Pray God,” Miranda said. “Mama!” Veronica said, shocked.
“You were right about him,” Miranda said. “He’s a good-for-nothing. She’s better off without him.”
“Give her my love, okay? I really want to see her.”
“Maybe you should see her. I think she would like that.” It was a thought. It would be good to see the old neighborhood again. Good to patch things up with Linda, to be friends with her. She had another helping of turkey. “What about Jerry?” she asked. “Do you ever hear from him?”
Ichiko and Miranda exchanged a look.
“Mama? What is it? What aren’t you telling me?” Miranda looked at her empty plate. “Did Jerry ever tell you about ... his, uh, special ability?”
Veronica thought she had seen most of Jerry’s abilities, and they were pretty average. “What are you talking about?”
“I was afraid of that.”
“Mama, don’t keep this from me.”
“It’s just, with things the way they are these days, you don’t want to talk about it ... see, baby, Jerry is an ace.”
“You’re kidding. Jerry? He never said anything to me.” But of course he wouldn’t have. Jerry wanted her to love him for himself, as he’d told her more than once.
“Last winter, around the same time as ... as that business with Hannah, he was here.” Miranda flushed, obviously sorry that she’d mentioned Hannah’s name. “Some of those Shadow Fist people were here, threatening us. He ... I don’t know exactly how he did it, but he’s got this ability to change the way he looks. Everything about the way he looks. He turned himself into Fortunato. He made his skin dark, and he got all skinny and even-you know. The thing with the forehead.”
Veronica couldn’t get over it. Jerry an ace. Of course she was one, too, but she didn’t dwell on it. As long as she didn’t use her power, she couldn’t say for sure that it was still there.
“We haven’t seen him since,” Cordelia said. “I think maybe he gave up on you.”
Dessert was fried bananas in honey. Afterward, they gathered around the tiny bonsai pine in what had once been the waiting room. Miranda had bought Veronica a beautiful silk blouse that was now two sizes too small, even if Veronica still wore such things. Cordelia gave her earrings that she couldn’t wear since she’d let the holes in her earlobes close. “They can put clips on them,” Cordelia said awkwardly. Ichiko gave her a delicate china saki jug and bowls. Veronica didn’t mention that she had given up drinking as well. Veronica had bought books for all three of them in a fit of idealism and repressed anger: The Marx-Engels Reader, The Women’s Room, The Feminist Encyclopedia. There was a moment, when all the presents were opened, when Veronica was sure she was going to cry. Then Miranda said, “Some Christmas, huh?” and started to laugh. Then they were all laughing, arms around each other, huddled on the floor, laughing until they did cry, after all.
And as Veronica had feared, Ichiko hadn’t lasted, dying on the last day of February. And Jerry, it seemed, hadn’t given up on her, after all.
Close Encounters, and the magazine offices, were on Broadway north of Columbus Circle. When the first burst of energy from her anger and embarrassment wore off, she kept on walking, into Central Park. She found a bench and looked at the bare trees, the little knots on their branches showing the first fuzzy signs of the leaves to come.
A man and a woman, both in their sixties or seventies, shuffled past, wearing knit caps, gloves, and layers of sweat clothes. They seemed to be jogging in slow motion. And how long, Veronica thought, am I going to keep on running? How long am I going to hide my power and let other people make decisions for me?
The sky had started to cloud over, and the wind had turned cool. Veronica walked south, out of the park, and stopped for a cup of coffee at the Cosmic Cafe, a Greek-run lunch counter. She asked for a phone book and looked up Latham, Strauss. The address was on Park Avenue South.
She took a cab and got there a few minutes early for her appointment. It was an older building, and the wallpaper between the slabs of granite in the lobby was turning the color of nicotine. Latham, Strauss had one of only two suites on the eighth floor. It looked like a movie studio. Behind double glass doors was a reception desk, a single thin sheet of ebony supported by steel legs the diameter of pencils. There was nothing on the desk but a telephone. Behind it was a stunning blond in a white silk blouse, and behind her, on a wall covered in red velvet, was the name Latham, Strauss in gold.
Veronica walked in. “I’m here to see Dyan Mundy.”
“Ms. Mundy is in conference just now. Do you have an appointment?”
Veronica gave her name. The receptionist directed her to a waiting area to her right, out of sight of the elevators. Veronica was fascinated by her precise, emotionless gestures. “What do you do if you have to write something down?” she asked.
The woman smiled mechanically. “We have secretaries for that.”
Veronica looked through the magazines. Smithsonian, Fine Homebuilding, European Travel and Life. No Aces or Cosmo here.
In less than a minute, a woman appeared behind her and said, “Veronica?” She was six feet fall, heavily built, with strong features, glasses, and slicked-back hair. “I’m Dyan Mundy.”
She was not the socialite Veronica had expected. It was comforting, but it made things more difficult as well. Mundy led her down wine-colored carpeting, past recessed lighting, toward a huge office with corner windows. Veronica caught a glimpse of someone she felt sure was Latham himself. Then they turned into a side corridor, and Mundy ushered her into an empty office.
As soon as Mundy sat down, Veronica said, “This is about Hannah. Hannah Jorde.”
“I don’t recall the name.”
“You were hired by an organization called W O. R. S. E. to defend her. A shooting in a bank? There was all this weird stuff about the case. Only it never came to trial because Hannah killed herself in her cell.”
“Yes, yes, I remember it now”
“The problem is, W O. R. S. E. wasn’t paying you at all. Latham, Strauss volunteered to defend her. I want to know why.” Mundy swiveled her chair around and scooted over to a file cabinet. “ I remember you now. You were ... personally involved, I think.”
Veronica gave her a small shrug.
“Ordinarily, the sort of information you’re asking for is confidential. But I can promise you that you’re on a wildgoose chase.” She pulled an olive-drab hanging file out of the cabinet and opened it up on her desk. “Here’s the case file. We show payment in full, by cashier’s check. W O. R. S. E., as I’m sure you understand, is not a chartered corporation with bank accounts and so forth, so that is the form of payment we would be looking for in this situation.”
If the woman was lying, it was beyond Veronica’s ability to tell. Which meant the answers lay higher up.
With Edward St. John Latham.
From Jerry she knew that Latham worked long hours, nights and weekends. When he wasn’t in the courtroom, he was in the office.
Getting a key was not difficult. She called Frances, from W O. R. S. E., who gave her a wax block in a small plastic case. “Be sure and get the whole key,” Frances told her, “head and all, both sides.”
At noon on the following Monday, Veronica rode the elevator up and down in Latham’s building. On her third trip, a young guy in a suit got on at the eighth floor. She followed him to the street, then used her power to stagger him. She shoved him face first against a wall and smiled at the people passing by, who all turned their heads away. He didn’t seem to notice as she took out his key ring and sorted through them. Two keys looked possible. She printed them both and put the key ring back in his pocket. By the time he turned around, she had faded back into the crowd.
Frances made the keys for her while she waited. “You sure you don’t want no help? Been awhile. I’d love some action.”
“It’s a one-woman job,” Veronica said.
“And you won’t tell me who you’re going after.”
“You can read about it in the papers.”
She sat in a coffee shop until ten P.M., so nervous that she ate three pieces of chocolate pie and drank four cups of coffee. There was a guard in the lobby when she went inside. She signed Dyan Mundy’s name and got in an elevator. The guard never looked up from his copy of the Post.
The first key worked. The office was barely lit by a couple of pin spots. Veronica locked the door after herself and retraced the route she’d taken the day before.
Latham’s office was lighted, the door closed. Veronica crept down the hall and tried the knob. It turned. She shoved the door open and stepped inside.
Latham looked up from his desk. He was working at a computer, with green-bar paper spread all around him. He didn’t seem surprised to find a stranger in his office. “Yes?” he said.
“We have to talk,” Veronica said. “I doubt that.”
“It’s about Hannah Jorde. She was jumped, and the jumper made her shoot up a bank. The jumper’s name was David Butler.”
That got a reaction. Latham’s mouth twitched, and his eyes lost their focus for a second.
“Butler worked for you. You arranged to have Latham, Strauss represent Hannah in court. That let you send David down to see her in jail. Where he jumped her again-and made her kill herself.”
Latham’s finger moved a few inches and touched a button on his intercom. Veronica focused her power on him. The hum of the computer drive slowed and made a coughing sound. The lights flickered and dimmed. Before Latham could say anything into the intercom, he blinked, and his hands dropped to his sides.
“Don’t touch that again,” Veronica said. “Now. I think you’re in this up to your neck. What’s your connection with David? What do you know about these jumpers? Why are you helping clean up after them?”
“I—” Latham said. He never finished the sentence. Veronica saw a blur come at her from the right. She ducked reflexively and only caught a grazing blow to her shoulder. Even that was powerful enough to knock her across the room.
“Get rid of her,” Latham said weakly.
Veronica focused her eyes. It was Zelda, minus the wig. Her head was shaved smooth. “You,” Veronica said.
Zelda smiled. “Veronica. Long time no see.” She bent and grabbed a fistful of Veronica’s jacket. “You want her dead, boss?”
“Yes,” Latham said. “Dead.”
“I’ll take her out to the Rox to do it. Bloat can find out what she knows.”
Veronica felt the room start to spin. “You were working for Latham ... all the time.”
Zelda threw her into the hallway and shut Latham in his office. Veronica started to crawl toward the receptionist’s desk. “Boss had his own reasons to want Loeffer dead. He owed money to some of Boss’s friends. Boss likes to keep his options open. Wanted to make sure Tina and her friends didn’t come after him.” She let Veronica crawl, stalking her. “Let me go,” Veronica said. “I’ll go away somewhere. You won’t ever hear of me again. I promise.”
Zelda laughed, and Veronica got up onto her feet, taking a couple of lurching steps. Her right shoulder was dislocated or worse. The sense of betrayal was almost as bad as the pain. Almost. To know that even W0. R. S. E. had been no more than a puppet of the male establishment. It made everything seem futile.
Stop it, she thought. If she didn’t fight back, Zelda would kill her. She had to use her power, quickly, while she still had the chance. She turned and concentrated all her rage and despair against Zelda, burning it into her eyes.
The lights flickered, but Zelda was unaffected. “Trying to scare me, Veronica?” She swung a halfhearted side kick with her right leg, and Veronica jumped backward out of the way.
She stumbled against the receptionist’s desk, and then the obvious truth hit her: her power was only good against men. “You’ll have to do better than that,” Zelda said. “Looks can’t kill. Not since Demise bought it.”
It made sense, in that twisted way the wild card sometimes had. The only power she’d ever had was over men. Probably had something to do with hormones. Didn’t everything?
Veronica’s hand touched plastic. The telephone. She lurched forward and swung the receiver at Zelda’s head, catching her solidly across the temple. Zelda hopped back half a step and shook her head. Veronica swung again, but Zelda blocked it and knocked Veronica down with a punch to the solar plexus.
“That actually hurt,” Zelda said. She seemed puzzled. Veronica couldn’t breathe. She dropped to her knees, listening to the air squeal in her throat.
“I liked you, you know,” Zelda said. “Out of that whole bunch, you were the only one knew who you were. Even if you don’t take care of yourself for shit.”
“Then ... let me ... go.”
“Sorry, kid. No can do. You shouldn’t have pushed this one.”
As Zelda moved in, Veronica saw the cage she’d been in, how no matter how fast she ran, she never got anywhere, just like a rat on an exercise wheel. The never-ending cycle of violence, from Hannah’s death to Veronica’s own wild card power, from the murder of Robert Loeffler to this. It was so sad and small, and when she looked at it from this angle, it seemed like it should have been so easy to go another way. But now, of course, it was too late.
She tried to get up.
Zelda smiled and leapt into the air. The rest was darkness.
All he could think about was how beautiful she’d been when she was alive.
“I got to ask you can you identify the remains,” the coroner’s man said.
“It’s her,” Fortunato said. “Name?”
“Erika Naylor. Erika with a K.”
“Address?”
“Sixteen Park Avenue.”
The man whistled. “High class. Next of kin?”
“I don’t know. She was from Minneapolis.”
“Right. That’s where they all come from. You’d think they had a hooker academy there or something.”
Fortunato looked up from the long, horrible wound in the girl’s throat and let the coroner’s man see his eyes. “She wasn’t a hooker,” he said.
“Sure,” the man said, but he took a step backward and looked down at his clipboard. “I’ll put down ‘model.’” Geisha, Fortunato thought. She had been one of his geishas. Bright, funny, beautiful, a chef and a masseuse and an unlicensed psychologist, imaginative and sensual in bed. She was the third of his girls in the last year to be neatly sliced to pieces.
He stepped out onto the street, knowing how bad he looked. He was six foot four and methedrine thin, and when he slumped his chest seemed to disappear into his spine. Lenore had been waiting for him, huddled in her black fake-fur jacket, even though the sun had finally come out. When she saw him she put him straight into a cab and gave the driver her address on West 19th.
Fortunato stared out the window at the long-haired girls in embroidered denim, at the black-light posters in the store windows, at the bright chalk scrawled over all the sidewalks. It was nearly Easter, two winters past the Summer of Love, but the idea of spring left: him as cold as the morgue’s tile floor. Lenore took his hand and squeezed it, and Fortunato leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes.
She was new. One of his girls had rescued her from a Brooklyn pimp named Ballpeen Willie, and Fortunato had paid five thousand dollars for her “contract.” It was well known on the street that if Willie had objected, Fortunato would have spent the five thousand to have Willie hit, that being the current market value of a human life.
Willie worked for the Gambione Family and Fortunato had knocked heads with them more than once. Being blackhalf black, anyway-and independent gave Fortunato a feature part in Don Carlo’s paranoid fantasies. The only thing Don Carlo hated worse were the jokers.
Fortunato wouldn’t have put the killings past the old man except for one thing: he coveted Fortunato’s operation too much to tamper with the women themselves.
Lenore came from a hick town in the mountains of Virginia where the old people still talked Elizabethan. Willie had been running her less than a month, not long enough to grind off the edges of her beauty. She had dark red hair to her waist, neon-green eyes, and a small, almost dainty mouth. She never wore anything but black and she believed she was a witch.
When Fortunato had auditioned her he’d been moved by her abandon, her complete absorption in carnality, so much at odds with her cool, sophisticated looks. He’d accepted her for training and she’d been at it now for three weeks, turning only an occasional trick, making the transition from gifted call girl to apprentice geisha that would take at least two years.
She led him up to her apartment and stopped with the key in the lock. “Uh, I hope its not too weird for you.” He stood in the doorway while she walked through the room, lighting candles. The windows were heavily draped and he didn’t see any appliances except a telephone-no TV, no clocks, not even a toaster. In the barren center of the room she’d painted a huge, five-pointed star surrounded by a circle, right onto the hardwood floor. Behind the sensual smells of incense and musk was the faint sulfurous tang of a chemistry lab.
He locked the front door and followed her into the bedroom. The apartment was thick with sexuality. He could barely move his feet through the heavy, wine-colored carpet; the bed was canopied, with red velvet curtains, and so high off the floor it had stairs leading up to it.
She found a joint in the nightstand, lit it, and handed it to Fortunato. “I’ll be back in a second,” she said.
He took his clothes off and lay down with his hands behind his head, the joint hanging out of his mouth. He took a lungful of smoke and watched his toes uncurl. The ceiling overhead was deep blue, with constellations dabbed on in phosphorescent yellow-green. Signs of the zodiac, as far as he could tell. Magic and astrology and gurus were very hip right now. People at trendy Village parties were always asking each other what sign they were and talking about karma. For himself, he thought the Aquarian Age was just so much wishful thinking. Nixon was in the White House, kids were getting their asses shot off in Southeast Asia, and he still heard the word “nigger” every day. But he had clients who would love this place.
If the psycho with the knife didn’t put him out of business. Lenore knelt beside him on the bed, naked. “You have such beautiful skin.” She ran fingertips over his chest, raising gooseflesh. “I’ve never seen a color like this before.” When he didn’t answer she said, “Your mother is Japanese, they told me:”
“And my father was a Harlem pimp.”
“You’re really fucked up about this, aren’t you.”
“I loved those girls. I love all of you. You’re more important to me than money or family or ... or anything.”
“And?”
He didn’t think he had anything else to say until the words started coming out. “I feel so ... so goddamned helpless. Some twisted son of a bitch is killing my girls and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe not.” Her fingers tangled in his pubic hair. “Sex is power, Fortunato. It’s the most powerful thing in the universe. Don’t ever forget that.”
She took his penis in her mouth, working it gently with her tongue like a piece of candy. It stiffened instantly and Fortunato felt sweat break on his forehead. He put out the joint with a wet fingertip and dropped it over the edge of the bed. His heels skidded on the icy slickness of the sheets and his nose filled with Lenore’s perfume. He thought of Erika, dead, and it made him want to fuck Lenore hard and long.
“No,” she said, taking his hand from her breast. “You brought me in off the streets, you’re teaching me what you know. Now its my turn.”
She pushed him down flat on his back, his arms over his head, and ran her black-polished fingernails down the tender skin over his ribs. Then she began to move over his body, touching him with her lips, her breasts, the ends of her hair, until his skin felt hot enough to glow in the dark. Then, finally, she straddled him and took him into her.
Being inside her gave him a rush like a junkie’s. He pumped his hips and she leaned into it, taking her weight on her arms, her hair waterfalling around her head. Then, slowly, she lifted her eyes and stared at him.
“I am Shakti,” she said. “I am the goddess. I am the power.” She smiled when she said it, and instead of sounding crazy it just made him want her even more. Then her voice broke into short, rattling breaths as she came, shuddering, throwing her head back and rocking hard against him. Fortunato tried to turn her over and finish it but she was stronger than he would have believed possible, digging her fingers into his shoulders until he relaxed, then caressing him again with aching slowness.
She came twice more before everything turned red and he knew he couldn’t hold back any longer. But she sensed it too, and before he knew what was happening she had pulled away and reached down between his legs, pushing one finger hard into the root of his penis. It was too late to stop and the orgasm took him so hard that it lifted his buttocks completely off the bed. She pushed his chest down with her left hand and held on with her right, cutting off the sperm before it could shoot out, forcing it back inside him.
She’s killed me, he thought as he felt liquid fire roar back into his groin, burning all the way through to his spinal cord and then lighting it like a fuse.
“Kundalini,” she whispered, her face sweating and intent. “Feel the power.”
The spark rocketed up his backbone and exploded in his brain.
Eventually he opened his eyes again. Time had come out of the sprockets of the projector and he saw everything in single, unrelated frames. Lenore had both arms around him. Tears ran out of her eyes and down his chest.
“I was floating,” he said, when he finally thought to use his voice. “Up around the ceiling.”
“I thought you were dead,” Lenore said.
“I could see the two of us. Everything looked like it was made out of light. The room was white, and it seemed like it went on forever. There were lines and ripples everywhere.” He felt a little like he’d had too much cocaine, a little like he had his fingers in a socket. “What did you do to me?”
“Tantric yoga. It’s supposed to ... I don’t know. Give you a charge. I never heard of it taking anybody so hard before.” She turned her face up to him. “Did you really get out? Out of your body?”
“I guess.” He could smell the peppermint shampoo she used on her hair. He took her face in both his hands and kissed her. Her mouth was soft and wet and her tongue flickered against his teeth. He was still diamond-hard and he started to shake with wanting her.
He rolled onto her and she guided him inside where he could feel her burning for him. “Fortunato,” she whispered, her lips still so close that they brushed his when they moved,
“if you finish, you’ll lose it. You’ll be so weak you can barely move. “
“Baby, I don’t give a shit. I never wanted anybody this much.” He pushed himself up on his forearms so he could see her, his hips thrusting frantically. Every nerve in his body was alive, and he could feel the power surging through them, then slowly drawing back, massing somewhere at the center of his body, ready to roar out of him, to pump him dry, leave him weak, helpless, drained ...
He pulled away from her, rolled to the end of the bed, and bent double, clutching his knees. “Jesus!” he screamed. “What the fuck is happening to me?”
She wanted to stay with him, but he sent her to geisha class anyway. He would be here, he promised, when she got home.
The apartment seemed vast and empty without her, and he had a sudden, chilling vision of Lenore alone on the street, with Erika’s killer still loose.
No, he told himself. It wouldn’t happen again, not this soon.
He found a gaudy oriental robe in her closet and put it on, and then he walked back and forth through the apartment, pacing out the inaudible hum in his nervous system. Finally he stopped in front of the bookcase in the living room.
Kundalini, she’d said. He’d heard the name before and when he saw a book called The Rising Serpent he made the connection. He took it down and started to read.
He read about the Great White Brotherhood of Ultima Thule, located somewhere in Tartary. The lost Book of Dyzan and the vama chara, the lefthand path. The kali yuga, the final, most corrupt of ages, now upon us. “Do whatever you desire, for in this way you please the goddess.” Shakti. Semen as the rasa, the juice, of power: the yod. Sodomy that revived the dead. Shape shifters, astral bodies, implanted obsessions leading to suicide. Paracelsus, Aleister Crowley, Mehmet Karagoz, L. Ron Hubbard.
Fortunato’s concentration was absolute. He absorbed every word, every diagram, flipped back and forth to make comparisons, to study the illustrations. When he finished he saw that twenty-three minutes had passed since Lenore walked out the door.
The trembling in his chest was fear.
In the middle of the night he reached out to touch Lenore’s cheek and his fingers came away wet. “Are you awake?” he said.
She rolled over and huddled tight against him. The warmth of her naked skin electrified and soothed him at the same time, like the taste of expensive whiskey. He combed through her hair with his fingers and kissed her fragrant neck. “What are you crying for?” he said.
“It’s stupid,” she said. “What?”
“I really believe in that stuff. Magick. The Great Work, Crowley calls it.” She pronounced magic with a long a and Crowley with a long o like the bird. “I did the Yoga and learned the Qabalah and the Tarot and the Enochian system. I fasted and did the Bornless Ritual and studied Abramelin. But nothing ever happened.”
“What were you trying for?”
“I don’t know. A vision. Samadhi. I wanted to see something besides a goddamned Greyhound stop in Virginia where they try to lynch kids for growing out their hair. I wanted out of myself. I wanted what happened to you this afternoon. And it happened to you and you don’t even want it.”
“I read some of your books tonight,” he said. In fact he’d read two dozen of them, nearly half of her collection. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I don’t think it’s magic. Not like that guy Crowleys magic. What you did to me set it off, but I think it was something already inside. me.”
“You mean that spore thing, don’t you? That wild card virus?” She had tensed up involuntarily, just at the mention of it.
“I can’t think of anything else it could be.”
“There’s that Dr. Whatsisname. He could check you out. He could probably even fix you back, if that was what you wanted.”
“No,” he said. “You don’t understand. When I read those books I could feel all those powers they talked about. Like if you were a high diver and you read about some complicated dive you’d never done, but you knew you could do it if you practiced on it. You said I didn’t want this, and maybe I didn’t, not right at first. But now I do.” There was one picture, among the giant sex organs and impossible contortions of a Japanese pillow book: the Tantric magician, forehead swollen with the power of his retained sperm, fingers twisted in mudras of power. He had stared at it until his eyes burned. “Now I want it,” he said.
“You’ve definitely drawn a wild card,” the little man said. “An ace, I’d say.”
Fortunato had nothing in particular against white people, but he couldn’t stand their slang. “Could you put that in plain English?”
“Your genetics have been rewritten by the Takisian virus. Apparently it was dormant in your central nervous system, probably in the spine. The intromission apparently gave you quite a jolt, enough to activate the virus.”
“So now what happens?”
“The way I see it, you’ve got two choices.” The little man hopped up onto the examining table across from Fortunato and brushed long red hair back over his ears. He looked like he should be in a rock band or working in a record store. He didn’t make a convincing doctor. “I can try to reverse the effects of the virus. No guarantees there-I’ve got about a thirty-percent success rate. Every once in a while people end up worse than before.”
“Or?”
“Or you can learn to live with your power. You wouldn’t be alone. I can put you in touch with other people in your situation. “
“Yeah? Like the ‘Great and Powerful Turtle’? So I can fly around and pull people out of wrecked cars? I don’t think so.”
“What you did with your abilities would be up to you.”
“What kind of ‘abilities’ are we talking about?”
“I can’t say for sure. It looks like they’re still coming on. The EEG shows strong telekinesis. The Kirilian chromatograph shows a very powerful astral body that I expect you can manipulate. “
“Magic, is what you’re saying.”
“No, not really. But it’s a funny thing about the wild card. Sometimes it requires a very specific mechanism to bring it under conscious control. I wouldn’t be surprised if you need this Tantric ritual to make it work for you.”
Fortunato stood up and peeled a hundred from the roll in his front pocket. “For the clinic,” he said.
The little man looked at the money for a long time, and then he stuffed it in his Sgt. Pepper jacket. “Thank you,” he said, like it hurt him to get the words out. “Remember what I said. You can call me anytime.”
Fortunato nodded and walked out to look at the freaks of Jokertown.
He’d been six years old when Jetboy exploded over Manhattan, had grown up with the fear of the virus, the memory of the ten thousand who’d died on the first day of the new world. His father had been one of them, lying in bed while his skin split open and healed itself over and over again, the whole cycle not taking more than a minute or two. Until one of the cracks opened through his heart, spewing blood all over their Harlem apartment. And even while the old man lay in his coffin, waiting his turn for a two-minute funeral and a mass grave, he kept splitting open and healing, splitting and healing.
The memory never faded, but in time it got pushed aside by newer ones. Gradually Fortunato came to believe that nothing was going to happen to him. For those the virus didn’t touch, life went on the way it always had.
He realized early on that he was going to have to make his own way. From listening to his mother complain about American women he came up with the idea of the prostitute as geisha; at age fourteen he brought home a stunning Puerto Rican girl from his high school for his mother to train. That had been the beginning.
He looked up and saw that night had fallen while he’d been walking aimlessly through Jokertown. The grays and pastels had turned to neon, street clothes to paisley and leopard prints. Just ahead of him demonstrators had blocked off the street with a flatbed truck. There were drums and amps and guitars up there and a couple of heavy-duty extension cords running in through the open door of the Chaos Club.
At the moment the stage was empty except for a woman with long red curly hair and an acoustic guitar. A banner behind her read S.N.C.C. Fortunato had no idea what the letters stood for. She had the audience singing along with some folk song or other. They all went through the chorus a couple of times without the guitar, and then she took a bow and they clapped and she got down off the back of the truck.
She wasn’t beautiful in the way Lenore was; her nose was a little large, her skin was not that good. She was in the radical uniform of blue jeans and work shirt that didn’t do anything for her. But she had an aura of energy he could see without even wanting to.
Women were Fortunato’s weakness. He was like a deer in their headlights. Even as low as he felt he couldn’t help but stop and look at her, and before he knew it she was standing next to him, shaking a coffee can with a few coins in the bottom.
“Hey, man, how about a donation?”
“Not today,” Fortunato said. “I don’t have a lot of politics.’”You’re black, Nixon’s president” and you don’t have any politics? Brother, have I got news for you.”
“Is all this about being black?” Fortunato didn’t see another black face in the crowd.
“No, man, it’s about jokers. Whoa, did I strike a nerve or something?” When Fortunato didn’t answer she went on anyway. “You know how long the average life expectancy of a joker in ‘Nam is? Less than two months. If you take the percentage of jokers in the U.S. population and divide it by the percentage of jokers in ‘Nam, you know what you get? You get about a hundred times too many jokers over there. A hundred times, man!”
“Yeah” okay” so what do you want me to do about it?”
“Make a donation. We’re going to get lawyers on this and stop it. It’s the FBI, man. The FBI and SCARE. It’s like McCarthy all over again. They’ve got lists of all the jokers and they’re drafting them on purpose. If they can walk and hold a gun, they’re not even getting a real physical” it’s off to Saigon. It’s genocide” pure and simple.”
“Yeah, okay.” He dug out a twenty and dropped it in the can.
“You know what I wish?” She hadn’t even noticed the size of the bill. “I wish those fucking aces would do something about their own, you know? What would it take for Cyclone, or one of those other assholes” to wipe out those files? Nothing” man, nothing at all, but they’re too busy getting headlines.” She started to walk away and then she looked in the can. “Hey, thanks, man. You’re okay. Listen, here’s a flyer. If you want to do some more, call us.”
“Sure,” Fortunato said. “What’s your name?”
“They call me C.C.,” she said. “C.C. Ryder.”
“Is it the same C. C. as up there?” He pointed to the S.N.C.C. banner.
C.C. shook her head. “You’re funny, man”“ she said” and smiled once and faded into the crowd.
He folded up the flyer and stuck it in his pocket and turned off the Bowery. All the talk about jokers had left him feeling disconnected. Just down the street was a mirror-walled club called the Funhouse, owned by a guy named Desmond who had a trunk instead of a nose. He was one of Fortunato’s customers, always wanting a geisha with finer skin or darker hair or a sweeter face than Fortunato could find for him. Fortunato could not stand the thought of seeing him just then.
On the side streets hardly anyone wore masks anymore” and eyes stared back defiantly at him from upside-down faces or heads the size of cantaloupes. Your new brothers and sisters” he told himself. For every ace there were ten of these, lurking in alleys while the lucky ones put on capes and talked their lame jargon and jetted around fighting each other. The aces had the headlines and the talk shows, and the freaks and cripples had Jokertown. Jokertown and the jungles of Vietnam, if C. C.’s story was right.
But the only place Fortunato wanted to be was back in Lenore’s apartment, making love to her. And this time he would let go, and if it made him weak it wouldn’t matter, and things would go back to the way they always had been.
Except that sooner or later the killer was going to move again. Vietnam was halfway around the world, but the killer was right here, maybe in this very block.
He stopped walking, looked up, and saw that his subconscious had brought him right to the alley where they told him they’d found Erika.
He thought about what C.C. had said. Using power to take care of your own.
When Lenore had jolted him out of his body he’d seen things he’d never seen before, swirls and patterns ou energy that he had no name for. If he could get out again he might see something the cops had missed.
A wino in a long, filthy overcoat started at him. It took Fortunato a second to realize the man had long, floppy, basset ears and a moist, black nose. Fortunato ignored him, shutting his eyes and trying to remember the feeling.
He might as well have been trying to think himself to the moon. He needed Lenore but he was afraid to bring her here. Could he do it at her place, then fly back here? Would he be able to keep it going that long? What would happen to his physical body if he did?
Too many questions. He called her from a pay phone and told her where to meet him.
“Do you have a gun?” he asked. “Yes. Ever since ... you know.”
“Bring it.”
“Fortunato? Are you in trouble?”
“Not yet,” he said.
By the time he got back to the alley with Lenore he’d drawn a crowd. They all wore Salvation Army leftovers: baggy pants, ripped and stained flannel shirts, jackets the color of dried grease. One short old woman looked like a wax museum statue that had started to melt. Off to her right was a teenaged boy, standing next to a rack of garbage cans, vibrating. When the vibrations got to a certain pitch the cans would bang together like a spastic cymbal section and the woman would turn on them in a fury and kick at them. The others were less obviously deformed: a man with suckers on the ends of his fingers, a girl whose features had been squared off with ridges of hardened skin.
Lenore held onto Fortunato’s arm. “What now?” she whispered.
Fortunato kissed her. She tried to pull away when the audience of freaks started to snicker, but Fortunato was insistent, opening her lips with his tongue, moving his hands over the small of her back, and finally she began to breathe heavily and he felt the power stirring at the base of his spine. He moved his lips down Lenore’s shoulder, her long fingernails digging into his neck, and then he raised his eyes until he was looking at the dog-man. He felt the power flow into his eyes and voice and said, quietly, “Go away.”
The dog-man turned and walked out of the alley. One at a time he ordered the others away and then he said, “Now,” and guided her hand into his trousers. “Do it to me, what you did before.” He slid his hands up under her sweater and moved them slowly over her breasts. Her right hand closed over him and her left went around his waist, comforting him with the weight of her S&W .32. He closed his eyes as the heat began to build, letting the brick wall behind him take his weight. In seconds he was ready to come, his astral body bobbling like a loosely held balloon.
And then, like stepping sideways out of a moving car, he slipped free.
Every brick and candy wrapper glistened with clarity. As he concentrated, the rumble of traffic slowed and deepened until it was barely audible.
They’d found Erika in a doorway deep in the alley, severed arms and legs stacked like firewood in her lap, head attached by less than half the thickness of her neck. Fortunato could see the stains of her blood deep within the molecules of the concrete, still glowing faintly with her life essence. The wood of the doorframe still held a trace of her perfume and a single thread of ash-blond hair.
The baritone murmur of the street dropped to a vibration so low that Fortunato could feel the individual wave peaks pass through him. Now he could see the indentation Erika’s body had made in the concrete stoop, the infinitesimal trace her shoes had pressed into the asphalt. And beside them the footprints of her killer.
They led from the street to Erika’s body and back again, and at the curb they met the imprint of a car. He had no idea what kind of a car it had been, but he could see the tracks it had left, thick and black and fibrous, as if it had been burning rubber the entire way.
He stopped for an instant and looked back at his material body frozen in Lenore’s arms. Then he let the tracks of the car pull him out into the street, across to Second Avenue” then south to Delancey. He felt himself gradually weakening, his vision clouding up and the background noises of the city starting to shake the edge of his hearing. He concentrated harder” pulling the last reserves of strength out of his physical body.
The car turned north on the Bowery and paused in front of a shabby gray warehouse. Fortunato bore down on the sidewalk, saw the footprints as they crossed from the car to the building’s front door.
He followed them upstairs. He felt as if he’d been tied to a giant elastic band and run to its limit. Each stair took more out of him than the last. Finally the footprints disappeared at the entrance to a loft, and he knew he was finished.
The traffic noise spun up to speed around him and he shot backward the way he’d come” drawn irresistibly home to his body. Blissful, exhausted” as if he’d drained himself in sex, he fell into it like a diver into a pool. Lenore staggered under his sudden dead weight and then he slid down into unconsciousness.
“No,” she said, and rolled away from him. “I can’t.” She had purple circles under her eyes and her body was limp with exhaustion. Fortunato wondered how she’d been able to get him into a taxi and help him up the stairs to her apartment.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“You build up a charge, and then sex burns it off. You see? The power, the shakti. Except with tantric magick you absorb the energy back into you. Not just yours, but whatever energy I give up to you.”
“So when you come, you give up this shakti.”
“Right. “
“And you’ve given me all you have.”
“That’s right, big guy. I’m all fucked out.” Fortunato reached for the phone.
“What are you doing?”
“I know where the killer is,” he said, dialing. “If you can’t give me the strength to take him, I’ll have to get it somewhere else.” He didn’t like the way it came out but he was too tired right then to care. Tired and something else. His brain hummed with the knowledge of his power, and he felt it changing him, taking control.
The phone rang at the other end and then he heard Miranda answer it. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand and turned back to Lenore. “Will you help?”
She closed her eyes and did something with her mouth that was almost a smile. “I guess a hooker should know better than to be jealous.”
“Geisha,” Fortunato said.
“All right,” Lenore said. “I’ll show her what to do.”
They had a line each of cocaine and some intense Vietnamese pot. Lenore swore it would only help tune them into each other. Miranda, tall, black-haired, lush, the most physically adept of his women, stripped slowly to garter belt, stockings, and a black brassiere so thin he could see the dark ovals of her nipples.
Forty minutes later Lenore had passed out across the foot of the bed. Miranda, her head hanging down over the edge, arms spread in a mock crucifix, shut her eyes. “That’s it,” she whispered. “I can’t come any more. I may never come again.” Fortunato pushed himself up onto his knees. He was covered with an even sheen of sweat and he thought he could see a golden light radiating from underneath his skin. He saw himself in the mirror over Lenore’s dresser and wasn’t alarmed or even surprised when he saw that his forehead had begun to swell with power.
He was ready.
The cab let him off two blocks away on Delancey. He had Lenore’s .32 shoved in the back of his pants for insurance, hidden by his black linen jacket. But if he could, he would do the job with his own hands. Either way, the cops were not going to get a chance to put the killer back on the streets. His eyes wouldn’t quite focus and he had to keep his hands in his pockets because he didn’t trust them. For some reason he was not afraid at all. He felt fifteen again, like he’d felt when he started making it with the girls his mother trained. For months he’d been afraid to try because of what his mother might say or do; once he gave in he no longer cared.
It was the same now. He was reckless, charged with the dark scent and hot, moist pressure of sex, barely functioning in the real world at all. I’m going to face a killer, he told himself, but they were only words. In his guts he knew he was going to protect his women, and that was all that mattered.
He climbed the stairs to the loft. It was after midnight, but he could hear the stereo blasting the Rolling Stones’”Street-Fighting Man” through the steel door. He pounded on it with the bottoms of his fists.
He swallowed hard and his throat turned cold. The door opened.
On the other side was a boy of seventeen or eighteen, pale, thin, but well-muscled. He had long blond hair and a face that might have been beautiful except for an eruption of pimples around the chin, clumsily hidden with makeup. He wore a yellow shirt with black polka dots and faded denim bellbottoms.
“You want something?” he finally asked.
“To talk to you,” Fortunato said. His mouth was dry and his eyes were still not focusing right.
“What about?”
“Erika Naylor.” The boy had no reaction. “Never heard of her.”
“I think you do.”
“You a cop?” Fortunato didn’t answer. “Then fuck off.” He started to close the door. Fortunato remembered the alley, ordering the jokers away. “No,” he said, staring hard into the boy’s colorless eyes. “Let me in.”
The boy hesitated, looking stunned, but not giving in. Fortunato hit the door with his shoulder, knocking the boy all the way back into the loft and onto the floor.
The room was dark and the music deafening. Fortunato found an overhead light switch and flipped it on, then took an involuntary step back as his brain registered what he saw.
It was Lenore’s apartment twisted into perversion, the hip, sexy fashion of occultism taken all the way into torture and murder and rape. As in Lenore’s apartment there was a fivepointed star on the floor, but this one was hasty, uneven, scratched into the boards with something sharp and then splattered with blood. Instead of velvet and candles and exotic wood, there was a gray-striped mattress in one corner, a pile of dirty clothes, and a dozen or more Polaroid pictures tacked to the wall with a staplegun.
He knew what he was going to find, but he walked over to the wall anyway. Of the fourteen nude, dismembered women he recognized three. The latest, in the lower righthand corner, was Erika.
He couldn’t think with the music blaring at him. He looked around for the record player and saw the blond boy get up onto shaky legs and stumble toward the door. “Stop!”
Fortunato shouted, but without eye contact it didn’t mean anything.
Enraged and panicking, Fortunato charged. He caught the boy around the waist and drove him into the bare plasterboard wall.
And then suddenly he was trying to hold on to a raging animal, all knees and fingernails and teeth. Fortunato pulled away instinctively and watched the razor edge of an enormous switchblade flash between them, slicing through his jacket and his shirt and his skin, coming away outlined in red.
I’m going to die, Fortunato thought. The gun was stuck in the back of his pants, too far away to reach before the blade came around again, cutting deeper, sliding all the way in. Killing him.
He looked at the blade. Before he knew what he was doing he was staring hard at it, concentrating, the way he had when he read the books in Lenore’s apartment, the way he had in the Jokertown alley.
And time slowed.
He could see not only his own blood on the knife, but the blood of the others, of Erika and all the other women in the photographs, washed away, but still held in the memory of the metal.
He backed away from the insane blond boy, moving with dream slowness through thickened air, but still moving faster than the boy or his knife. He reached behind him, felt the slick grips of the gun under his fingers. The Rolling Stones had slowed to a dirge as he brought the gun around, pointed it at the boy, saw the pale eyes go wide.
Don’t kill him, he thought suddenly. Not until you know why. He shifted the barrel until it pointed at the boy’s right shoulder, and pulled the trigger.
The noise started as a vibration in Fortunato’s hand, accelerated like a rocket, became a roar, a short bang of thunder, and then time was rolling again, the boy rocking back with the impact of the bullet but his eyes not showing it, scooping the knife out of his useless right hand with his left and lurching forward again.
Possessed, Fortunato thought with horror, and shot him through the heart.
Staggering back, Fortunato pulled his shirt open and saw that the long, shallow cut across his chest had already stopped bleeding, would not even need stitches. He slammed the door to the hallway and walked across the room to kick out the plug of the phonograph. And then, in the strangled silence, he turned to face the dead boy.
The power rippled and surged inside him. He could see the blood of the women on the dead boy’s hands, see the trail of blood that led from the crude pentagram on the floor, see the tracks where the boy had stood, the shadows where the women had died, and there, faintly, as if it had been somehow erased, the marks left by something else.
Lines of power still lingered inside the pentagram, like heat waves shimmering off a highway in the desert. Fortunato ground his hands into fists, felt cool sweat trickle down his chest. What had really happened here? Had the boy somehow conjured a demon? Or had the boy’s madness just been a tool in something vastly larger, something infinitely worse than a few random killings?
The boy could have told him, but the boy was dead. Fortunato went to the door, put his hand on the knob. He closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the cold metal. Think, he told himself.
He wiped his fingerprints off the pistol and threw it next to the body. Let the cops draw their own conclusions. The Polaroids should give them plenty to think about.
He turned to go again, and again he couldn’t leave the room.
You have the power, he told himself. Can you walk away from here, knowing you have the power, refusing to use it? Sweat ran down his face and arms.
The power was in the yod, the rasa, the sperm. Incredible power, more than he knew how to control yet. Enough to bring the dead back to life.
No, he thought. I can’t do it. Not just because the thought made him sick to his stomach, but because he knew it would change him. It would be the point of no return, the point where he gave up being completely human.
But the power had already changed him. He had already seen things that those without it would never understand. Power corrupts, he’d been told, but now he saw how naive that was. Power enlightens. Power transforms.
He unfastened the dead boy’s belt, unzipped the bellbottomed jeans, and pulled them of. The boy had craped and pissed in them when he died, and the smell made Fortunato wince. He threw the jeans in a corner and rolled the dead boy onto his stomach.
I can’t do this, Fortunato thought. But he was already hard, and the tears rolled down his face as he knelt between the dead boy’s legs.
He came almost immediately. It left him weak, weaker than he’d thought possible. He crawled away, pulling his pants back up, sick and disgusted and exhausted.
The dead boy began to twitch.
Fortunato got to the wall, pulled himself onto his feet. He was dizzy and his head throbbed with pain. He saw something on the floor, something that had fallen out of the dead boy’s pants. It was a coin, an eighteenth-century penny, so fresh that it looked reddish in the harsh light of the loft. He put the penny in his pocket in case it meant something later.
“Look at me,” he said to the dead boy.
The dead boy’s hands clawed at the floor, gouging out bloody splinters. Slowly he pulled himself onto his hands and knees, and then lurched clumsily onto his feet. He turned and looked at Fortunato with empty eyes.
The eyes were horrible. They said that death was nothingness, that even a few seconds of it had been too much. “Talk to me,” Fortunato said. Not anger anymore, but the memory of anger, kept him going. “Goddamn your white ass, talk to me. Tell me what this means. Tell me why.”
The dead boy stared at Fortunato. For an instant something flickered there, and the dead boy said, “TIAMAT “ The word was whispered, but perfectly clear. Then the dead boy smiled. With both hands he reached up to his own throat and ripped it bloodily out through the skin of his neck and then, while Fortunato watched, tore it in half.
Lenore was asleep. Fortunato threw his clothes into the garbage and stood in the shower for thirty minutes, until the hot water ran out. Then he sat by candlelight in Lenore’s living room and read.
He found the name TIAMAT in a text on the Sumerian elements of Crowley’s magick. The serpent, Leviathan, KUTULU. Monstrous, evil.
He knew beyond question that he had found only a single tentacle of something that defied his comprehension. Eventually he slept.
He woke up to the sound of Lenore closing the latches on her suitcase.
“Don’t you see?” she tried to explain. “I’m just like a-a wall outlet that you come home to plug into to recharge. How can I live like that? You got what I always wanted, real power to do real magick. And you lucked into it, without even wanting it. And all the study and practice and work I did all my life doesn’t mean shit because I didn’t catch some fucking alien virus.”
“I love you,” Fortunato said. “Don’t go.”
She told him to keep the books, to keep the apartment too if he wanted. She told him she would write, but he didn’t need magick to know she was lying.
And then she was gone.
He slept for two days, and on the third Miranda found him and they made love until he was strong enough to tell her what happened.
“As long as he’s dead,” Miranda said. “The rest I don’t care about.”
When she left him that night for her client, he sat in the living room for over an hour, unable to move. Soon, he knew, he would have to start looking for the other being whose traces he’d seen in the dead boy’s loft. Even the thought of it paralyzed him with loathing.
Finally he reached for Crowley’s Magick and opened it to Chapter V “Sooner or later,” Crowley said, “the gentle, natural growth is succeeded by depression-the Dark Night of the Soul, an infinite weariness and detestation of the work.”
But eventually would come a “new and superior condition, a condition only rendered possible by the process of death.” Fortunato closed the book. Crowley knew, but Crowley was dead. He felt like the last human on a barren rock of a planet.
But he wasn’t the last human. He was one of the first of something new, something that had the potential to be better than human.
That woman at the demonstration, C.C. She’d said you should take care of your own. What would it cost him to save hundreds of jokers from dying in the heat and rotting dampness of Vietnam? Not very much. Not very much at all.
He found the flyer in the pocket of his jacket. Slowly, with growing conviction, he dialed the numbers.
The store had a pyramid of TV sets in the window, all tuned to the same channel. They tracked a 747 landing at Narita Airport, then pulled back to show an announcer in front of a screen. Then the airport scene switched to a graphic featuring a caricature of Tachyon, a cartoon jet, and the English words Stacked Deck.
Fortunato stopped in front of the store. It was just getting dark, and all around him the neon ideograms of the Ginza blazed into red and blue and yellow life. He couldn’t hear anything through the glass, so he watched helplessly while the screen flashed pictures of Hartmann and Chrysalis and Jack Braun. He knew they were going to show Peregrine an instant before she flashed on the screen, lips slightly parted, her eyes starting to look away, the wind in her hair. He didn’t need wild card powers to have predicted it. Even if he’d still had them. He knew they’d show her because it was the thing he feared. Fortunato watched his reflected image superimposed over hers, faint, ghostlike.
He bought a Japanese Times, Tokyo’s biggest Englishlanguage paper. “Aces Invade Japan,” the headline said, and there was a special pullout section with color photographs.
The crowds surged around him, mostly male, mostly in business suits, mostly on autopilot. The ones that noticed him gave him a shocked glance and looked away again. They saw his height and thinness and foreignness. If they could tell he was half-Japanese, they didn’t care; the other half was black American, kokujin. In Japan, as in too many other parts of the world, the whiter the skin the better.
The paper said the tour would be staying at the newly remodeled Imperial Hotel, a few blocks from where Fortunato stood. And so, Fortunato thought, the mountain has come to Muhammad. Whether Muhammad wants it or not.
It was time, Fortunato thought, for a bath.
Fortunato crouched by the tap and soaped himself all over, then carefully rinsed it off with his plastic bucket. Getting soap into the ofuro was one of two breaches of etiquette the Japanese would not tolerate, the other being the wearing of shoes on tatami mats. Once he was clean, Fortunato walked over to the edge of the pool, his towel hanging to cover his genitals with the casual skill of a native Japanese.
He slipped into the 115-degree water, giving himself over to the agonizing pleasure. A mixture of sweat and condensation immediately broke out across his forehead and ran down his face. His muscles relaxed in spite of himself. Around him the other men in the ofuro sat with their eyes shut, ignoring him.
He bathed about this time every day. In the six months he’d spent in Japan he’d become a creature of habit, just like the millions of Japanese around him. He was up by nine in the morning, an hour he’d seen only half a dozen times back in New York City. He spent the mornings in meditation or study, going twice a week to a zen Shukubo across the bay in Chiba City.
In the afternoons he was a tourist, seeing everything from the French Impressionists at the Bridgestone to the woodcuts at the Riccar, walking in the Imperial Gardens, shopping in the Ginza, visiting the shrines.
At night there was the mizu-shobai. The water business. It was what they called the huge underground economy of pleasure, everything from the most conservative of geisha houses to the most blatant of prostitutes, from the mirrorwalled nightclubs to the tiny red-light bars where, late at night, after enough saki, the hostess might be talked into dancing naked on the Formica counter. It was an entire world catering to the carnal appetite, unlike anything Fortunato had ever seen. It made his operations back in New York, the string of high-class hookers that he’d naively called geishas, seem puny in comparison. In spite of everything that had happened to him, in spite of the fact that he was still trying to push himself toward leaving the world entirely and shutting himself in a monastery, he couldn’t stay away from these women. The jo-san, the play-for-pay hostesses. If only to look at them and talk to them and then go home alone to masturbate in his tiny cubicle, in case his burned-out wild card ability had started to come back, in case the tantric power was beginning to build inside his Muladhara chakra.
When the water wasn’t painful anymore, he got up and soaped and rinsed again and got back into the ofuro. It was time, he thought, for a decision. Either to face Peregrine and the others at the hotel, or leave town entirely, maybe stay a week at the Shukubo in Chiba City so he wouldn’t run into them by accident.
Or, he thought, the third way. Let fate decide. Go on about his business, and if he was meant to find them, he would.
It happened five days later, just before sunset on Tuesday afternoon, and it was not an accident at all. He’d been talking to a waiter he knew in the kitchen of the Chikuyotei, and he’d taken the back door into an alley. When he looked up, she was there.
“Fortunato,” she said. She held her wings straight out behind her. Still, they nearly touched the walls of the alley. She wore a deep blue off-the-shoulder knit dress that clung to her body. She looked to be about six months pregnant. Nothing he’d seen had mentioned it.
There was a man with her, from India or somewhere near it. He was about fifty, thick in the middle, losing his hair.
“Peregrine,” Fortunato said. She looked upset, tired, relieved-all at once. Her arms came up and Fortunato went to her and held her gently. She rested her forehead on his shoulder for a second and then pulled away.
“This ... this is G. C. Jayewardene,” Peregrine said. The man put his palms together, elbows out, and ducked his head. “He helped me find you.”
Fortunato bowed jerkily. Christ, he thought, I’m turning Japanese. Next I’ll be stammering nonsense syllables at the beginning of every sentence, not even be able to talk anymore. “How did you know ...” he said.
“The wild card,” Jayewardene said. “ I saw this moment a month ago.” He shrugged. “The visions come without my asking. I don’t know why or what they mean. I’m their prisoner.”
“I know the feeling,” Fortunato said. He looked at Peregrine again. He reached out and put a hand on her stomach. He could feel the baby moving inside her. “It’s mine. Isn’t it?”
She bit her lip, nodded. “But that’s not the reason I’m here. I would have left you alone. I know it’s what you wanted. But we need your help.”
“What kind of help?”
“It’s Hiram,” she said. “He’s disappeared.”
Peregrine needed to sit down. In New York or London or Mexico City there would have been a park within walking distance. In Tokyo the space was too valuable. Fortunato’s apartment was a half-hour train ride away, a four-tatami room, six feet by twelve, in a gray-walled complex with narrow halls and communal toilets and no grass or trees. Besides, only a lunatic would try to ride a train at rush hour, when whitegloved railroad employees stood by to shove people into already-packed cars.
Fortunato took them around the corner to a cafeteriastyle sushi bar. The decor was red vinyl, white Formica, and chrome. The sushi traveled the length of the room on a conveyor belt that passed all the booths.
“We can talk here,” Fortunato said. “But I wouldn’t try the food. If you want to eat, I’ll take you someplace else-but it’d mean waiting in line.”
“No,” Peregrine said. Fortunato could see that the sharp vinegar and fish smells weren’t sitting well on her stomach. “This is fine.”
They’d already asked each other how they’d been, walking over here, and both of them had been pleasant and vague in their answers. Peregrine had told him about the baby. Healthy, she said, normal as far as anyone could tell. Fortunato had asked Jayewardene a few polite questions. There was nothing left but to get down to it.
“He left this letter,” Peregrine said. Fortunato looked it over. The handwriting seemed jagged, unlike Hiram’s usual compulsive penmanship. It said he was leaving the tour for “personal reasons.” He assured everyone he was in good health. He hoped to rejoin them later. If not, he would see them in New York.
“We know where he is,” Peregrine said. “Tachyon found him, telepathically, and made sure he wasn’t hurt or anything. But he refuses to go into Hiram’s brain and find out what’s wrong. He says he doesn’t have the right. He won’t let any of us talk to Hiram, either. He says if somebody wants to leave the tour it’s not our business. Maybe he’s right. I know if I tried to talk to him, it wouldn’t do any good.”
“Why not? You two always got along.”
“He’s different now. He hasn’t been the same since December. It’s like some witch doctor put a curse on him while we were in the Caribbean.”
“Did something specific happen to set him off?”
“Something happened, but we don’t know what. We were having lunch at the Palace Sunday with Prime Minister Nakasone and all these other officials. Suddenly there’s this man in a cheap suit. He just walks in and hands Hiram a piece of paper. Hiram got very pale and wouldn’t say anything about it. That afternoon he went back to the hotel by himself. Said he wasn’t feeling good. That must have been when he packed and moved out, because Sunday night he was gone.”
“Do you remember anything else about the man in the suit?”
“He had a tattoo. It came out from under his shirt and went down his wrist. God knows how far up his arm it went. It was really vivid, all these greens and reds and blues.”
“It probably covered his whole body,” Fortunato said. He rubbed his temples, where his regular daily headache had set in. “He was yakuza.”
“Yakuza ...” Jayewardene said.
Peregrine looked from Fortunato to Jayewardene and back. “Is that bad?”
“very bad,” Jayewardene said. “Even I have heard of them. They’re gangsters.”
“Like the Mafia,” Fortunato said. “Only not as centralized. Each family-they call them clans-is on its own. There’s something like twenty-five hundred separate clans in Japan, each with its own oyabun. The oyabun is like the don. It means ‘in the role of parent.’ If Hiram’s in trouble with the yak, we may not even be able to find out which clan is after him.”
Peregrine took another piece of paper out of her purse. “This is the address of Hiram’s hotel. I ... told Tachyon I wouldn’t see him. I told him somebody should have it in case of emergency. Then. Mr. Jayewardene told me about his vision ....”
Fortunato put his hand on the paper but didn’t look at it.
“I don’t have any power left,” he said. “ I used everything I had fighting the Astronomer, and there isn’t anything left.” It had been back in September, Wild Card Day in New York. The fortieth anniversary of Jetboy’s big fuckup, when the spores had fallen on the city and thousands had died, Jetboy among them. It was the day a man named the Astronomer chose to get even with the aces who had hounded him and broken his secret society of Egyptian Masons. He and Fortunato had fought it out with blazing fireballs of power over the East River. Fortunato had won, but it had cost him everything.
That had been the night he had made love to Peregrine for the first and last time. The night her child had been conceived.
“It doesn’t matter,” Peregrine said. “Hiram respects you. He’ll listen to you.”
In fact, Fortunato thought, he’s afraid of me and he blames me for the death of a woman he used to love. A woman Fortunato had used as a pawn against the Astronomer, and lost. A woman Fortunato had loved too. Years ago.
But if he walked away now he wouldn’t see Peregrine again. It had been hard enough to stay away from her, knowing that she was so close by. It was a whole other order of difficult to get up and walk away from her when she was right there in front of him, so tall and powerful and overflowing with emotions. The fact that she carried his child made it even harder, made just one more thing he wasn’t ready to think about.
“I’ll try,” Fortunato said. “I’ll do what I can.”
Hiram’s room was in the Akasaka Shanpia, a businessman’s hotel near the train station. Except for the narrow hallways and the shoes outside the doors, it could have been any middle-price hotel in the U.S. Fortunato knocked on Hiram’s door. There was a hush, as if all noises inside the room had suddenly stopped.
“ I know you’re in there,” Fortunato said, bluffing. “It’s Fortunato, man. You might as well let me in.” After a couple of seconds the door opened.
Hiram had turned the place into a slum. There were clothes and towels all over the floor, plates of dried-out food and smudged highball glasses, stacks of newspapers and magazines. It smelled faintly of acetone and a mixture of sweat and old booze.
Hiram himself had lost weight. His clothes sagged around him like they were still on hangers. After he let Fortunato in, he walked back to the bed without saying anything. Fortunato shut the door, dumped a dirty shirt off a chair, and sat down. “So,” Hiram said at last. “It would seem I’ve been ferreted out.”
“They’re worried. They think you might be in some kind of trouble.”
“It’s nothing. There’s absolutely nothing for them to be concerned about. Didn’t they get my note?”
“Don’t bullshit me, Hiram. You’ve gotten messed up with the yakuza. Those are not the kind of people you take chances with. Tell me what happened.”
Hiram stared at him. “If I don’t tell you, you’ll just come in and get it, won’t you?” Fortunato shrugged, another bluff. “Yeah. Right.”
“ I just want to help,” Fortunato said.
“Well, your help is not required. It’s a small matter of money. Nothing else.”
“How much money?”
“A few thousand.”
“Dollars, of course.” A thousand yen were worth a little over five dollars U.S. “How did it happen? Gambling?”
“Look, this is all rather embarrassing. I’d prefer not to talk about it, all right?”
“You’re saying this to a man who was a pimp for thirty years. Do you think I’m going to come down on you? Whatever you did?”
Hiram took a , deep breath. “No. I suppose not.”
“Talk to me.”
“I was out walking Saturday night, kind of late, over on Roppongi Street ....”
“By yourself?”
“Yes.” He was embarrassed again. “I’d heard a lot about the women here. I just wanted to ... tantalize myself, you know? The mysterious Orient. Women who would fulfill your wildest dreams. I’m a long way from home. I just ... wanted to see.”
It wasn’t that different from what Fortunato had been doing the last six months. “I understand.”
“I saw a sign that said ‘English-speaking hostesses.’ I went in and there was a long hallway. I must have missed the place the sign was for. I went back into the building a long way. There was a padded kind of a door at the end, no sign or anything. When I got inside, they took my coat and went away with it somewhere. Nobody spoke English. Then these girls more or less dragged me over to a table and got me buying them drinks. There were three of them. I had one or two drinks myself. More than one or two. It was a sort of a dare. They were using sign language, teaching me some Japanese. God. They were so beautiful. So ... delicate, you know? But with huge dark eyes that would look at you and then skitter away. Half shy and half ... I don’t know. Challenging. They said nobody had ever drunk ten jars of saki there before. Like no one had ever been quite man enough. So I did. By then they had me pretty well convinced I would get all three of them for a reward.”
Hiram started to sweat. The drops ran down his face and he wiped them off with the cuff of a stained silk shirt. “I was ... well, very aroused, shall we say. And drunk. They kept flirting and touching me on the arm, so lightly, like butterflies landing on my skin. I suggested we go somewhere. They kept putting me off. Ordering more drinks. And then I just lost control.”
He looked up at Fortunato. “I haven’t been ... quite myself lately. Something just came over me in that bar. I guess I grabbed one of the girls. Sort of tried to take her dress off. She started screaming and all three of them ran away. Thep the bouncer started hustling me toward the door, waving a bill in my face. It was for fifty thousand yen. Even drunk I knew there was something wrong. He pointed at my coat and then at a number. Then the jars of saki and more numbers. Then the girls and more numbers. I think that was what really got to me. Paying so much money just to be flirted with.”
“They were the wrong girls,” Fortunato said. “Christ, there’s a million women for sale in this town. All you have to do is ask a taxi driver.”
“Okay. Okay. I made a mistake. It could happen to anybody. But they went too far.”
“So you walked out.”
“I walked out. They tried to chase me and I glued them to the floor. Somehow I got back to the hotel. It took me forever to find a cab.”
“Okay,” Fortunato said. “Where exactly was this place? Could you find it again?”
Hiram shook his head. “I tried. I’ve spent two days looking for it.”
“What about the sign? Do you remember anything about it? Could you sketch any of the characters?”
“The Japanese, you mean? No way.”
“There must have been something.”
Hiram closed his eyes. “Okay. Maybe there was a picture of a duck. Side view. Looked like a decoy, back home. Just an outline.”
“Okay. And you’ve told me everything that happened at the club.”
“Everything.”
“And the next day the kobun found you at lunch.”
“Kobun?”
“The yakuza soldier.”
Hiram blushed again. “He just walked in. I don’t know how he got past the security. He stood right across the table from where I was sitting. He bowed from the waist with his legs spread; his right hand is out like this, palm up. He introduced himself, but I was so scared I couldn’t remember the name. Then he handed me a bill. The amount was two hundred and fifty thousand yen. There was a note in English at the bottom. It said the amount would double every day at midnight until I paid it.”
Fortunato worked the figures out in his head. In U.S. money the debt was now close to seven thousand dollars. Hiram said, “If it’s not paid by Thursday they said ...”
“What?”
“They said I would never even see the man who killed me.”
Fortunato phoned Peregrine from a pay phone, colorcoded red for local calls only. He fed it a handful of ten-yen coins to keep it from beeping at him every three minutes.
“I found him,” Fortunato said. “He wasn’t a lot of help.”
“Is he okay?” Peregrine sounded sleepy. It was all too easy for Fortunato to picture her stretched out in bed, covered only by a thin white sheet. He had no powers left. He couldn’t stop time or project his astral body or hurl bolts of prana or move around inside people’s thoughts. But his senses were still acute, sharper than they’d ever been before the virus, and he could remember the smell of her perfume and her hair and her desire as if they were there all around him.
“He’s nervous and losing weight. But nothing’s happened to him yet.”
“Yet?”
“The yakuza want money from him. A few thousand. It’s basically a misunderstanding. I tried to get him to back down, but he wouldn’t. It’s a pride thing. He sure picked the country for it. People die from pride here by the thousands, every year.”
“You think it’s going to come to that?”
“Yes. I offered to pay the money for him. He refused. I’d do it behind his back, but I can’t find out which clan is after him. What scares me is it sounds like they’re threatening him with some kind of invisible killer.”
“You mean, like an ace?”
“Maybe. In all the time I’ve been here I’ve only heard about one actual confirmed ace, a zen roshi up north on Hokkaido Island. For one thing, I think the spores had pretty much settled out before they could get here. And even if any did, you might never hear about them. We’re talking about a culture here that makes self-effacement into a religion. Nobody wants to stand out. So if we’re up against some kind of ace, it’s possible nobody’s even heard of him.”
“Can I do anything?”
He wasn’t sure what she was offering and he didn’t want to think too hard about it. “No,” he said. “Not now”
“Where are you?”
“A pay phone, in the Roppongi district. The club where Hiram got in trouble is somewhere around here.”
“It’s just ... we never really had a chance to talk. With Jayewardene there and everything.”
“I know.”
“I went looking for you after Wild Card Day. Your mother said you were going to a monastery.”
“I was. Then when I got here I heard about that monk, the one up on Hokkaido.”
“The ace.”
“Yeah. His name is Dogen. He can create mindblocks, a little like the Astronomer could, but not as drastic. He can make people forget things or take away worldly skills that might interfere with their meditation or—”
“Or take away somebody’s wild card power. Yours, for instance.”
“For instance.”
“Did you see him?”
“He said he’d take me in. But only if I gave up my power.”
“But you said your power was gone.”
“So far. But I haven’t given it a chance to come back. And if I go in the monastery, it could be permanent. Sometimes the block wears off and he has to renew it. Sometimes it doesn’t wear off at all.”
“And you don’t know if you want to go that far.”
“I want to. But I still feel ... responsible. Like the power isn’t entirely mine, you know?”
“Kind ou I never wanted to give mine up. Not like you or Jayewardene.”
“Is he serious about it?”
“He sure seems to be.”
“Maybe when this is over,” Fortunato said, “him and me can go see Dogen together.” Traffic was picking up around him; the daytime buses and delivery vans had given way to expensive sedans and taxis. “I have to go,” he said.
“Promise me,” Peregrine said. “Promise me you’ll be careful.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. I promise.”
The Roppongi district was about three kilometers southwest of the Ginza. It was the one part of Tokyo where the clubs stayed open past midnight. Lately it was overrun with gayin trade, discos and pubs and bars with Western hostesses. It had taken Fortunato a long time to get used to things closing early. The last trains left the center of the city at midnight, and he’d walked down to Roppongi more than once during his first weeks in Tokyo, still looking for some elusive satisfaction, unwilling to settle for sex or alcohol, not ready to risk the savage Japanese punishment for being caught with drugs. Finally he’d given it up. The sight of so many tourists, the loud, unceasing noise of their languages, the predictable throb of their music, were not worth the few pleasures the clubs had to offer.
He tried three places and no one remembered Hiram or recognized the sign of the duck. Then he went into the north Berni Inn, one of two in the district. It was an English pub, complete with Guinness and kidney pie and red velvet everything. About half the tables were full, either of foreign tourists in twos and threes, or large tables of Japanese businessmen.
Fortunato slowed to watch the dynamics at one of the Japanese tables. Expense accounts kept the water trade alive. Staying out all night with the boys from the office was just part of the job. The youngest and least confident of them talked the loudest and laughed the hardest. Here, with the excuse of alcohol, was the one time the pressure was off, their only chance to fuck up and get away with it. The senior men smiled indulgently. Fortunato knew that even if he could read their thoughts there wouldn’t be much there to see. The perfect Japanese businessman could hide his thoughts even from himself, could efface himself so completely that no one would even know he was there.
The bartender was Japanese and probably new on the job. He looked at Fortunato with a mixture of horror and awe. Japanese were raised to think of gaijin as a race of giants. Fortunato, over six feet tall, thin, his shoulders hunched forward like a vulture’s, was a walking childhood nightmare. “Genki desu-ne?” Fortunato asked politely, with a little bow of the head. “I’m looking for a nightclub,” he went on in Japanese. “It has a sign like this.” He drew a duck on one of the red bar napkins and showed it to the bartender. The bartender nodded, backing away, a rigid smile of fear on his face.
Finally one of the foreign waitresses ducked behind the bar and smiled at Fortunato. “ I have a feeling Tosun is not going to do well here,” she said. Her accent was Northern England. Her hair was dark brown and pinned up with chopsticks, and her eyes were green. “Can I help?”
“I’m looking for a nightclub somewhere around here. It’s got a duck on the sign, like this one. Small place, doesn’t do a lot of gaijin trade.”
The woman looked at the napkin. For a second she had the same look as the bartender. Then she worked her face around into a perfect Japanese smile. It looked horrible on her European features. Fortunato knew she wasn’t afraid of him. It had to be the club. “No,” she said. “Sorry”
“Look. I know the yakuza are mixed up in this. I’m not a cop, and I’m not looking for any trouble. I’m just trying to pay a debt for somebody. For a friend of mine. Believe me, they want to see me.”
“Sorry”
“What’s your name?”
“Megan.” The way she thought before saying it told Fortunato she was lying.
“What part of England are you from?”
“I’m not, actually.” She casually crumpled the napkin and threw it under the bar. “I’m from Nepal.” She gave him the brittle smile again and walked away.
He’d looked at every bar in the district, most of them twice. At least it seemed that way. Hiram could, of course, have been half a block farther on in the wrong direction, or Fortunato could simply have missed it. By four A. M. he was too tired to look anymore, too tired even to go home.
He saw a love hotel on the other side of the Roppongi Crossing. The hourly rates were on the high, windowless walls by the entrance. After midnight it was actually something of a bargain. Fortunato went in past the darkened garden and slipped his money through a blind slot in the wall. A hand slid him out a key.
The hall was full of size-ten foreign men’s shoes paired off with tiny zori or doll-sized spike heels. Fortunato found his room and locked the door behind him. The bed was freshly made with pink satin sheets. There were mirrors and a video camera on the ceiling, feeding a big-screen TV in the corner., By love hotel standards the room was pretty tame. Some eatured jungles or desert islands, beds shaped like boats or cars or helicopters, light shows and sound effects.
He turned out the light and undressed. All around him his oversensitive hearing picked up tiny cries and shrill, stifled laughter. He folded the pillow over his head and lay with his eyes open to the darkness.
He was forty-seven years old. For twenty of those years he’d lived inside a cocoon of power and never noticed himself aging. Then the last six months had begun to teach him what he’d missed. The dreadful fatigue after a long night like this one. Mornings when his joints hurt so badly it was hard to get up. Important memories beginning to fade, trivia haunting him obsessively. Lately there were the headaches, and indigestion and muscle cramps. The constant awareness of being human, being mortal, being weak.
Nothing was as addictive as power. Heroin was a glass of flat beer in comparison. There had been nights, watching an endless throng of beautiful women move down the Ginza or the Shinjuku, virtually all of them for sale, when he’d thought he couldn’t go on without feeling that power again. He’d talked to himself like an alcoholic, promising himself he’d wait just one more day. And somehow he’d held oui. Partly because the memories of his last night in New York, of his final battle with the Astronomer, were still too fresh, reminding him of the pain the power had cost him. Partly because he was no longer sure the power was there, whether Kundalini, the great serpent, was dead or just asleep.
Tonight he’d watched helplessly as a hundred or more Japanese lied to him, ignored him, even humiliated themselves rather than tell him what they so obviously knew. He’d started to see himself through their eyes: huge, clumsy, sweaty, loud, and uncivilized, a pathetic barbarian giant, a kind of oversized monkey who couldn’t even be held accountable for common politeness.
A little tantric magick would change all that. Tomorrow, he told himself. If you still feel this way tomorrow then you can go ahead, try to get it back.
He closed his eyes and finally fell asleep.
He woke up with an erection for the first time in months. It was fate, he told himself. Fate that brought Peregrine to him, that provided the need for him to use his power again.
Was that the truth? Or did he just want an excuse to make love to her again, an outlet for six months of sexual frustration?
He dressed and took a cab to the Imperial Hotel. The tour took up an entire floor of the new thirty-one-story tower, and everything inside was scaled up for Europeans. The halls and the insides of the elevators seemed huge to Fortunato now. By the time he got off on the thirtieth floor his hands were shaking. He leaned against Peregrine’s door and knocked quietly. A few seconds later he knocked again, harder.
She answered the door in a loose nightgown that touched the floor. Her feathers were ruffled and she could hardly open her eyes. Then she saw him.
She took the chain off the door and stood aside. He shut the door behind him and took her in his arms. He could feel the tiny creature in her belly moving as he held her. He kissed her. Sparks seemed to be crackling around them, but it could have been just the strength of his desire, breaking out of the chains he’d kept it in for so long.
He pulled the straps of her nightgown down along her arms. It fell to her waist and revealed her breasts, their nipples dark and puffy. He touched one with his tongue and tasted the chalky sweetness of her milk. She put her arms around his head and moaned. Her skin was soft and fragrant as the silk of an antique kimono. She pulled him toward the unmade bed and he broke away from her long enough to take off his clothes.
She lay on her back. The pregnancy was the summit of her body, where all the curves ended. Fortunato knelt next to her and kissed her face and throat and shoulders and breasts. He couldn’t seem to get his breath. He turned her on her side, facing away from him, and kissed the small of her back. Then he reached up between her legs and held her there, feeling the warmth and wetness against his palm, moving his fingers slowly through the tangle of her pubic hair. She undulated slowly, clutching a pillow in both hands.
He lay down behind her and went into her from behind. The soft flesh of her buttocks pressed into his stomach and his eyes went out of focus. “Oh, God,” he said. He began to move slowly inside her, his left arm under her and cupping one breast, his right hand lightly touching the curve of her stomach. She moved with him, both of them in slow motion, her breath coming harder and faster until she cried out and ground her hips against him.
At the last possible moment he reached down and blocked his ejaculation at the perineum. The hot fluid flooded back into his groin and lights seemed to flash around him. He relaxed, ready to feel his astral body come loose from his flesh.
It didn’t happen.
He put his arms around Peregrine and held onto her fiercely. He buried his face in her neck, let her long hair cover his head.
Now he knew. The power was gone.
He had a single bright moment of panic, then exhaustion carried him on into sleep.
He slept for an hour or so and woke up tired. Peregrine was on her back, watching him.
“You okay?” she said. “Yeah. Fine.”
“You’re not glowing.”
“No,” he said. He looked at his hands. “It didn’t work. It was wonderful. But the power didn’t come back. There’s nothing there.”
She turned on her side, facing him. “Oh, no.” She stroked his cheek. “I’m sorry”
“It’s okay,” he said. “Really. I’ve spent the last six months going back and forth, afraid the power would come back, then afraid it wouldn’t. At least now I know” He kissed her neck. “Listen. We need to talk about the baby.”
“We can talk. But it’s not like I expect anything from you, okay? I mean, there’s some things I should probably have told you. There’s a guy on the tour name of McCoy. He’s the cameraman for this documentary we’re doing. It looks like it could get serious with us. He knows about the baby and he doesn’t care.”
“Oh,” Fortunato said. “I didn’t know.”
“We had a big fight a couple of days ago. And seeing you again-well, that really was something, that night back in New York. You’re quite a guy. But you know there couldn’t ever be anything permanent between us.”
“No,” Fortunato said. “I guess not.” His hand moved reflexivelv to stroke her swollen stomach, tracing blue veins against the pale skin. “It’s weird. I never wanted kids. But now that it’s happened, it’s not like I thought it would be. It’s like it doesn’t really matter what I want. I’m responsible. Even if I never see the kid, I’m still responsible, and I always will be.”
“Don’t make this harder than it has to be. Don’t make me wish I hadn’t come to you with this.”
“No. I just want to know that you’re going to be okay. You and the baby both.”
“The baby’s fine. Other than the fact that neither one of us has a last name to give it.”
There was a knock at the door. Fortunato tensed, feeling suddenly out of place. “Peri?” said Tachyon’s voice. “Peri, are you in there?”
“Just a minute,” she said. She put on a robe and handed Fortunato his clothes. He was still buttoning his shirt when she opened the door.
Tachyon looked at Peregrine, at the rumpled bed, at Fortunato. “You,” he said. He nodded like his worst suspicions had just proved out. “Peri told me you were ... helping.”
Jealous, little man? Fortunato thought. “That’s right,” he said.
“Well, I hope I didn’t interrupt.” He looked at Peregrine. “The bus for the Meiji Shrine is supposed to leave in fifteen minutes. If you’re going.”
Fortunato ignored him, went to Peregrine, and kissed her gently. “I’ll call you,” he said, “when I know something.”
“All right.” She squeezed his hand. “Be careful.”
He walked past Tachyon and into the hall. A man with an elephant’s trunk instead of a nose was waiting there. “Des,” Fortunato said. “It’s good to see you.” That was not entirely true. Des looked terribly old, his cheeks sunken, the bulk of his body melting away. Fortunato wondered if his own pains were as obvious.
“Fortunato,” Des said. They shook hands. “It’s been a long time.”
“I didn’t think you’d ever leave New York.”
“I was due to see a little of the world. Age has a way of catching up with one.”
“Yeah,” Fortunato said. “No kidding.”
“Well,” Des said. “I have to make the tour bus.”
“Sure,” Fortunato said. “I’ll walk you.”
There was a time when Des had been one of his best customers. It looked like those times were over.
Tachyon caught up with them at the elevator. “What do you want?” Fortunato said. “Can’t you just leave me alone with this?”
“Peri told me about your powers. I came to tell you I’m sorry. I know you hate me. Though I don’t really know why. I suppose the way I dress, the way I behave, is some kind of obscure threat to your masculinity. Or at least you’ve chosen to see it that way. But it’s in your mind, not mine.” Fortunato shook his head angrily.
“I just want one second.” Tachyon closed his eyes. The elevator chimed and the doors opened.
“Your second’s up,” Fortunato said. Still he didn’t move. Des got on, giving Fortunato a mournful look, and the elevator closed again. Fortunato heard the cables creaking behind bamboo-patterned doors.
“Your power is still there.”
“Bullshit.”
“You’re shutting it inside yourself. Your mind is full of conflicts and contradictions, holding it in.”
“It took everything I had to fight the Astronomer. I hit empty. The bottom of the barrel. Cleaned out. Nothing left to recharge. Like running a car battery dry. It won’t even jumpstart. It’s over.”
“To take up your metaphor, even a live battery won’t start when the ignition key is turned off. And the key,” Tachyon said, pointing at his forehead, “is inside.” He walked away and Fortunato slammed the elevator button with the flat of his hand.
He called Hiram from the lobby.
“Get over here,” Hiram said. “I’ll meet you out front.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Just get over here.”
Fortunato took a cab and found Hiram pacing back and forth in front of the plain gray facade of the Akasaka Shanpia. “What happened?”
“Come in and see,” Hiram said.
The room had looked bad before, but now it was a disaster. The walls were spattered with shaving cream, the dresser drawers had been thrown into the corner, the mirrors were shattered and the mattress ripped to shreds.
“I didn’t even see it happen. I was here the whole time and I didn’t see it.”
“What are you talking about? How could you not see it?” Hiram’s eyes were frantic. “I went to the bathroom about nine this morning and got a glass of water. I know everything was okay then. I came back in here and put the TV on and watched for maybe half an hour. Then I heard something that sounded like the door slamming. I looked up and the room was like you see it. And this note was in my lap.”
The note was in English: “Zero hour comes tomorrow. You can die this easy. Zero man.”
“Then it is an ace.”
“It won’t happen again,” Hiram said. He obviously didn’t even believe himself. “I’ll know what to look for. He couldn’t fool me twice.”
“We can’t risk it. Leave everything. You can buy some new clothes this afternoon. I want you to hit the street and keep moving. Around ten o’clock go into the first hotel you see and get a room. Call Peregrine and tell her where you are.”
“Does she ... does she know what happened?”
“No. She knows it’s money trouble. That’s all.”
“Okay. Fortunato, I ...”
“Forget it,” Fortunato said. “Just keep moving.”
The shade of the banyan tree had saved a little coolness from the morning. Overhead the milk-colored sky was thick with smog. Sumoggu, they called it. It was easy to see what the Japanese thought of the West by the words they borrowed: rashawa, rush hour; sarariman, salary man, executive; toire, toilet.
It helped to be here in the Imperial Gardens, an oasis of calm in the heart of Tokyo. The air was fresher, though the cherry blossoms wouldn’t be blooming for another month. When they did, the entire city would turn out with cameras. Unlike New Yorkers, the Japanese could appreciate the beauty that was right in front of them.
Fortunato finished the last piece of boiled shrimp from his bento, the box lunch he’d bought just outside the park, and tossed the box away. He couldn’t seem to settle down. What he wanted was to talk to the roshi, Dogen. But Dogen was a day and a half away, and he would have to travel by airplane; train, bus, and foot to get there. Peregrine was grounded by her pregnancy, and he doubted Mistral was strong enough for a twelve-hundred-mile round trip. There was no way he could get to Hokkaido and back in time to help Hiram.
A few yards away an old man raked the gravel in a rock garden with a battered bamboo rake. Fortunato thought of Dogen’s harsh physical discipline: the 38,000-kilometer walk, equivalent to a trip all the way around the earth, lasting a thousand days, around and around Mt. Tanaka; the constant sitting, perfectly still, on the hard wooden floors of the temple; the endless raking of the master’s stone garden.
Fortunato walked up to the old man. “Sumi-masen,” he said. He pointed to the rake. “May I?”
The old man handed Fortunato the rake. He looked like he couldn’t decide if he was afraid or amused. There were advantages, Fortunato thought, to being an outsider among the most polite people on earth. He began to rake the gravel, trying to raise the least amount of dust possible, trying to form the gravel into harmonious lines through the strength of his will alone, channeled only incidentally through the rake. The old man went to sit under the banyan tree.
As he worked, Fortunato pictured Dogen in his mind. He looked young, but then most Japanese looked young to Fortunato.’ His head was shaved until it glistened, the skull formed from planes and angles, the cheeks dimpling when he spoke. His hands formed mudras apparently of their own volition, the index fingers reaching to touch the ends of the thumbs when they had nothing else to do.
Why have you called me? said Dogen’s voice inside Fortunato’s head.
Master! Fortunato thought.
Not your master yet, said Dogen’s voice. You still live in the world.
I didn’t know you had the power to do this, Fortunato thought.
It is not my power. It is yours. Your mind came to me. I have no power, Fortunato thought.
You are filled with power. It feels like Chinese peppers inside my head.
Why can’t I feel it?
You have hidden yourself from it, the way a fat man tries to hide himself from the yakitori all around him. This is how it is in the world. The world demands that you have power, and yet the use of it makes you ashamed. This is the way Japan is now. We have become very powerful in the world, and to do it we gave up our spiritual feelings. You have to make the decision. If you want to live in the world you must admit your power. If you want to feed your spirit, you must leave the world. Right now you are pulling yourself into pieces.
Fortunato knelt in the gravel and bowed low. Domo arigatb, o sensei. Arigato meant “thank you,” but literally it meant “it hurts.” Fortunato felt the truth inside the words. If he hadn’t believed Dogen, it wouldn’t have hurt so much. He looked up and saw the old gardener staring at him in abject fear, but at the same time making a series of short, nervous bows from the waist so as not to seem rude. Fortunato smiled at him and bowed low again. “Don’t worry,” he said in Japanese. He stood up and gave the old man back his rake. “Just another crazy gaijin.”
His stomach hurt again. It wasn’t the bento, he knew. It was the stress inside his own mind, eating his body up from within.
He was back on Harumi-Dori, heading toward the Ginza corner. He’d been wandering for hours, while the sun had set and the night had flowered around him. The city seemed like an electronic forest. The long vertical signs crowded each other down the entire length of the street, flashing ideograms and English characters in blazing neon. The streets were crowded with Japanese in jogging outfits or jeans and sport shirts. Packed in with the regular citizens were the sararimen in plain gray suits.
Fortunato stopped to lean against one of the graceful f-shaped streetlights. Here it is, he thought, in all its glory. There was no more worldly a place on the planet, no place more obsessed with money, gadgets, drinking, and sex. And a few hours away were wooden temples in pine forests where men sat on their heels and tried to turn their minds into rivers or dust or starlight.
Make up your mind, he told himself. You have to make up your mind.
“Gaijin-san! You like girl? Pretty girl?”
Fortunato turned around. It was a tout for a Pinku Saron, a unique Japanese institution where the customer paid by the hour for a bottomless saki cup and a topless jo-san. She would sit passively in his lap while he fondled her breasts and drank himself into a state where he was prepared to go home to his w*. It was, Fortunato decided, an omen.
He paid three thousand yen for half an hour and walked into a darkened hallway. A soft hand took his and led him downstairs into a completely dark room filled with tables and other couples. Fortunato heard business being discussed all around him. His hostess led him to one end of the room and sat him with his legs pinned under a low table, his back supported by a legless wooden chair. Then she gracefully moved into his lap. He heard her kimono rustle as she opened it to free her breasts.
The woman was tiny and smelled of face powder, sandalwood soap, and, faintly, of sweat. Fortunato reached up with both hands and touched her face, his fingers tracing the lines of her jaw. She paid no attention. “Saki?” she asked.
“No,” Fortunato said. “I-ie, domo. “ His fingers followed the muscles of her neck down to her shoulders, out to the edges of her kimono, then down. His fingertips brushed lightly over her small, delicate breasts, the tiny nipples hardening at his touch. The woman giggled nervously, raising one hand to cover her mouth. Fortunato laid his head between her breasts and inhaled the aroma of her skin. It was the smell of the world. It was time either to turn away or surrender, and he had backed himself into a corner, left himself without the strength to resist.
He gently pulled her face down and kissed her. Her lips were tight, nervous. She giggled again. In Japan they called kissing suppun, the exotic practice. Only teenagers and foreigners did it. Fortunato kissed her again, feeling himself stiffening, and the electricity went through him and into the woman. She stopped giggling and began to tremble. Fortunato was shaking too. He could feel the serpent, Kundalini, begin to wake up. It moved around in his groin and began to uncoil through his spine. Slowly, as if she didn’t understand what she was doing or why, the woman touched him with her little hands, putting them behind his neck. Her tongue touched him lightly on his lips and chin and eyelids. Fortunato untied her kimono and opened it up. He lifted her easily by the waist and sat her on the edge of the table, putting her legs over his shoulders, bending to open her up with his tongue. She tasted spicy, exotic, and in seconds she had come alive under him, hot and wet, her hips moving involuntarily.
She pushed his head away and leaned forward, working at his trousers. Fortunato kissed her shoulders and neck. She moaned softly. There didn’t seem to be anyone else in the hot, crowded room, no one else in the world. It was happening, Fortunato thought. Already he could see a little in the darkness, see her plain, square face, the lines beginning to show under her eyes, seeing how her looks had consigned her to the darkness of the Pinku Saron, wanting her even more for the desire he could see hidden inside her. He lowered her onto him. She gasped as he went into her, her fingers digging into his shoulders, and his eyes rolled back in his head.
Yes, he thought. Yes, yes, yes. The world. I surrender. The power rose inside him like molten lava.
It was a little after ten when he walked into the Berni Inn. The waitress, the one who’d told him her name was Megan, was just coming out of the kitchen. She stopped dead when she saw Fortunato. The waitress behind her nearly ran into her with a tray of meat pies.
She stared at his forehead. Fortunato didn’t have to see himself to know that his forehead had swollen again, bulging with the power of his rasa. He walked across the room to her. “Go away,” she said. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
“The club,” Fortunato said “The one with the sign of the duck. You know where it is.”
“No. I never—”
“Tell me where it is,” he ordered.
All expression left her face. “Across Roppongi. Right at the police box, down two blocks, then left half a block. The bar in front is called Takahashi’s.”
“And the place in back? What’s it called?”
“It hasn’t got a name. It’s a yak hangout. It’s not the Yamaguchi-gumi, none of the big gangs. Just this one little clan.”
“Then why are you so afraid of them?”
“They’ve got a ninja, a shadow-fighter. He’s one of those what-you-call-thems. An ace.” She looked at Fortunato’s forehead. “Like you, then, isn’t he? They say he’s killed hundreds. Nobody’s ever seen him. He could be in this room right now. If not now, then he will be later. He’ll kill me for having told you this.”
“You don’t understand,” Fortunato said. “They want to see me. I’ve got just the thing they want.”
It was the way Hiram had described it. The hallway was raw gray plaster and the door at the end of it was padded in turquoise Naugahyde with big brass nailheads. Inside, one of the hostesses came up to take Fortunato’s jacket. “No,” he said in Japanese. “I want to see the oyabun. It’s important.” She was still a little stunned just by the way he looked. His rudeness was more than she could deal with. “W-w-wakarimasen,” she stammered.
“Yes, you do. You understand me perfectly well. Go tell your boss I have, to speak to him. Now.”
He waited next to the doorway. The room was long and narrow, with a low ceiling and mirrored tiles on the. left-hand wall, above a row of booths. There was a bar along the other wall, with chrome stools like an American soda fountain. Most of the men were Koreans, in cheap polyester suits and wide ties. The edges of tattoos showed around their collars and cuffs. Whenever they looked at him, Fortunato stared back and they turned away.
It was eleven o’clock. Even with the power moving through him, Fortunato was a little nervous. He was a foreigner, out of his depth, in the middle of the enemy’s stronghold. I’m not here for trouble, he reminded himself. I’m here to pay Hiram’s debt and get out.
And then, he thought, everything will be okay. It was not even midnight Wednesday, and Hiram’s business was nearly settled. Friday the 747 would be off for Korea and then the Soviet Union, taking Hiram and Peregrine with it. And then he would be on his own, able to think about what came next. Or maybe he should get on the plane himself, go back to New York. Peregrine said they had no future together, but maybe that wasn’t true.
He loved Tokyo, but Tokyo would never love him back. It would see to all his needs, give him enormous license in exchange for even the smallest attempt at politeness, dazzle him with its beauty, exhaust him with its exquisite sexual pleasures. But he would always be a gaijin, a foreigner, never have a family in a country where family was more important than anything.
The hostess crouched by the last booth, talking to a Japanese with long permed hair and a silk suit. The little finger of his left hand was missing. The yakuza used to cut their fingers off to atone for mistakes. The younger kids, Fortunato had heard, didn’t hold much with the idea. Fortunato took a breath and walked up to the table.
The oyabun sat next to the wall. Fortunato figured him to be about forty. There were two jo-san next to him, and another across from him between a pair of heavyset bodyguards. “Leave us,” Fortunato ordered the hostess. She walked away in the middle of her protest. The first bodyguard got up to throw Fortunato out. “You too,” Fortunato said, making eye contact with each of them and each of the girls.
The oyabun watched it all with a quiet smile. Fortunato bowed to him from the waist. The oyabun ducked his head and said, “My name is Kanagaki. Will you sit down?”
Fortunato sat across from him. “The gaijin Hiram Worchester has sent me here to pay his debt.” Fortunato took out his checkbook. “The amount, I believe, is two million yen.”
“Ah,” Kanagaki said. “Another ‘ace.’ You have provided us with much amusement. Especially the little red-haired fellow”
“Tachyon? What does he have to do with this?”
“With this?” He pointed to Fortunato’s checkbook. “Nothing. But many jo-san have tried to bring him pleasure these past few days. It seems he is having trouble performing as a man.”
Tachyon? Fortunato thought. Can’t get it up? He wanted to laugh. It certainly explained the little maids ,rotten mood at the hotel. “This has nothing to do with aces,” Fortunato said. “This is business.”
“Ah. Business. Very well. We shall settle this in a businesslike way.” He looked at his watch and smiled. “Yes, the amount is two million yen. In a few minutes it will become four million. A pity. I doubt you will have time to bring the gaijin Worchester-san here before midnight.”
Fortunato shook his head. “There is no need for Worchester-san to be here in person.”
“But there is. We feel there is some honor at stake here.”
Fortunato held the man’s eyes. “ I am asking you to do the needful.” He made the traditional phrase an order. “ I will give you the money. The debt will be canceled.”
Kanagaki’s will was very strong. He almost managed to say the words that were trying to get out of his throat. Instead he said in a strangled voice, “I will honor your face.”
Fortunato wrote the check and handed it to Kanagaki. “You understand me. The debt is canceled.”
“Yes,” Kanagaki said. “The debt is canceled.”
“You have a man working for you. An assassin. I think he calls himself Zero Man.”
“Mori Riishi.” He gave the name in Japanese fashion, family name first.
“No harm will come to Worchester-san. He is not to be harmed. This Zero Man, Mori, will stay away from him.” Kanagaki was silent.
“What is it?” Fortunato asked him. “What is it you’re not saying?”
“It’s too late. Mori has already left. The gaijin Worchester dies at midnight.”
“Christ,” Fortunato said.
“Mori comes to Tokyo with a great reputation, but we have no proof. He was very concerned to make a good impression.”
Fortunato realized he hadn’t checked with Peregrine. “What hotel? What hotel is Worchester-san staying in?” Kanagaki spread his hands. “Who knows?”
Fortunato started to get up. While he’d been talking to Kanagaki, the bodyguards had come back with reinforcements. They surrounded the table. Fortunato couldn’t be bothered with them. He formed a wedge of power around himself and sprinted for the door, pushing them aside as he ran.
Outside, the Roppongi was still crowded. Over at Shinjuku station the late-night drinkers would be trying to push their way onto the last trains of the night. On the Ginza they would be lining up at the cab stands. It was ten minutes to midnight. There wasn’t time.
He let his astral body spring loose and rocket through the night toward the Imperial Hotel. The neon and mirrored glass and chrome blurred as he picked up speed. He didn’t slow until he was through the wall of the hotel and hovering in Peregrine’s room. He let himself become visible, a glowing, golden-rose image of his physical body.
Peregrine, he thought.
She rolled over in bed, opened her eyes. Fortunato saw, with a small, distant sort of pang, that she was not alone. I need to know where Hiram is.
“Fortunato?” she whispered, then saw him. “Oh my God.”
Hurry. The name of the hotel.
“Wait a minute. I wrote it down.” She walked naked over to the phone. Fortunato’s astral body was free of lust and hunger, but still the sight of her moved him. “The Ginza Dai-Ichi. Room eight oh one. He says it’s a big H-shaped building by the Shimbashi station—”
I know where it is. Meet me there as fast as you can. Bring help.
He couldn’t wait for her answer. He snapped back to his physical body and lifted it into the air.
He hated the spectacle of it. Being in Japan had made him even more self-conscious than he ever had been in New York. But there was no choice. He levitated straight up into the sky, high enough that he couldn’t make out the faces turned up to stare at him, and arced toward the Dai-Ichi Hotel.
He got to the door of Hiram’s room at twelve midnight. The door was locked, but Fortunato wrenched the bolts back with his mind, splintering the wood around them.
Hiram sat up in bed. “Wha—” Fortunato stopped time.
It was like a train grinding to a halt. The countless tiny sounds of the hotel slowed to a bass growl, then hung in the silence between beats. Fortunato’s own breathing had stopped.
There was nobody in the room but Hiram. It hurt Fortunato to make his head turn; to Hiram it would have seemed like he was moving in a blur of speed. The sliding doors to the bathroom were open. Fortunato couldn’t see anyone in there either.
Then he remembered how the Astronomer had been able to hide from him, to make Fortunato not see him. He let time begin to trickle past him again. He brought up his hands, fighting the heavy, clinging air, and framed the room, making an empty square bordered by his thumbs and index fingers. Here was the closet, the doors open. Here was a stretch of bamboo-patterned wall with nothing in it. Here was the foot of the bed, and the edge of a samurai sword moving slowly toward Hiram’s head.
Fortunato threw himself forward. His body seemed to take forever to rise into the air and float toward Hiram. He opened his arms and knocked Hiram to the floor, feeling something hard scrape the bottoms of his shoes. He rolled onto his back and saw the sheets and mattress slowly splitting in two.
The sword, he thought. Once he convinced himself it was there, he could see it. Now the arm, he thought, and slowly the entire man took shape in front of him, a young Japanese in a white dress shirt and gray wool pants and bare feet.
He let time start again before the strain wore him out completely. He heard footsteps in the hall. He was afraid to look away, afraid he might loose the killer again. “Drop the sword,” Fortunato said.
“You can see me,” the man said in English. He turned to look toward the door.
“Put it down,” Fortunato said, making it an order now, but it was too late. He no longer had eye contact and the man resisted him.
Without thinking, Fortunato looked at the doorway. It was Tachyon, in red silk pajamas, Mistral behind him. Tachyon was charging into the room, and Fortunato knew the little alien was about to die.
He looked back for Mori. Mori was gone. Fortunato went cold with panic. The sword, he thought. Find the sword. He looked where the sword would have to be if it were slicing toward Tachyon and slowed time again.
There. The blade, curved and impossibly sharp, the steel dazzling as sunlight. Come to me, Fortunato thought. He pulled at the blade with his mind.
He only meant to take it from Mori’s hands. He misjudged his own power. The blade spun completely around, missing Tachyon by inches. It whirled around ten or fifteen times and finally buried itself in the wall behind the bed.
Somewhere in there it had sliced off the top of Mori’s head.
Fortunato shielded them with his power until they were on the street. It was the same trick Zero Man had used. No one saw them. They left Mori’s corpse in the room, his blood soaking into the carpet.
A taxi pulled up and Peregrine got out. The man who’d been in bed with her got out behind her. He was a bit shorter than Fortunato, with blond hair and a mustache. He stood next to Peregrine and she reached out and took his hand. “Is everything okay?” she said.
“Yeah,” Hiram said. “It’s okay.”
“Does this mean you’re back on the tour?”
Hiram looked around at the others. “Yeah. I guess I am.”
“That’s good,” Peregrine said, suddenly noticing how serious everyone was. “We were all worried about you.” Hiram nodded.
Tachyon moved next to Fortunato. “Thank you,” he said quietly. “Not only for saving my life. You probably saved the tour as well. Another violent incident-after Haiti and Guatemala and Syria-well, it would have undone everything we were trying to accomplish.”
“Sure,” Fortunato said. “We probably shouldn’t hang around here too long. No point in taking chances.”
“No,” Tachyon said. “I guess not.”
“Uh, Fortunato,” Peregrine said. “Josh McCoy.” Fortunato shook his hand and nodded. McCoy smiled and gave his hand back to Peregrine. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“There’s blood on your shirt,” Peregrine said. “What happened?”
“It’s nothing,” Fortunato said. “It’s all over now”
“So much blood,” Peregrine said. “Like with the Astronomer. There’s so much violence in you. It’s scary sometimes.” Fortunato didn’t say anything.
“So,” McCoy said. “What happens now?”
“I guess,” Fortunato said, “me and G. C. Jayewardene will go see a man about a monastery”
“You kidding?” McCoy said.
“No,” Peregrine said. “I don’t think he is.” She looked at Fortunato for a long time, and then she said, “Take care of yourself, will you?”
“Sure,” Fortunato said. “What else?”
“There it is,” Fortunato said. The monastery straggled across the entire hillside, and beyond it were stone gardens and terraced fields. Fortunato wiped the snow from a rock next to the path and sat down. His head was clear and his stomach quiet. Maybe it was just the clean mountain air. Maybe it was something more.
“It’s very beautiful,” Jayewardene said, crouching on his heels.
Spring wouldn’t get to Hokkaido for another month and a half. The sky was clear, though. Clear enough to see, for instance, a 747 from miles and miles away. But the 747s didn’t fly over Hokkaido. Especially not the ones headed for Korea, almost a thousand miles to the southwest.
“What happened Wednesday night?” Jayewardene asked after a few minutes. “There was all kind of commotion, and when it was over Hiram was back. Do you want to talk about it?”
“Not much to tell,” Fortunato said. “People fighting over money. A boy died. He’d never actually killed anybody, as it turned out. He was very young, very afraid. He just wanted to do a good job, to live up to the reputation he’d invented for himself.” Fortunato shrugged. “It’s the way of the world. That kind of thing is always going to happen in a place like Tokyo.” He stood up, brushing at the seat of his pants. “Ready?”
“Yes,” Jayewardene said. “I’ve been waiting for this a long time.”
Fortunato nodded. “Then let’s get on with it.”
Picking out the right victim was always murder. They had to have plenty of cash to make the kill worthwhile, and it had to be done in an isolated place. The rent was due and killing somebody of the street made more sense than murdering the super. That might alert others to where he was, and he was tired of changing apartments.
The cold annoyed him. It seeped into his thin six-foot body and settled in his bones. He turned up the fur collar on his loose-fitting coat. Before he had died, when he was just James Spector, the New York winters had been numbing. Now, only the agony of his death, constantly welling up inside, caused any real pain.
He walked past St. Mark’s Church and headed east down Tenth Street. The neighborhood was rougher in that direction, and more likely to suit his needs.
“Shit,” he said, as the snow began to fall again. The few people on the streets would likely take refuge indoors. If he could not find a victim here, he would have to try Jokertown. The thought did not please him. The flakes settled onto his dark hair and mustache. He brushed them off with a gloved hand and moved on.
Someone lit a match in a nearby doorway. Spector walked slowly up the stairs fumbling for a cigarette.
The man in the doorway was tall and powerfully built. He had pale, pockmarked skin and light blue eyes. He drew deeply on the cigarette and blew smoke into Spector’s face. “Got a light?” Spector asked, undaunted.
The man frowned. “Do I know you?” He looked at Spector carefully. “No. Maybe somebody sent you, though.”
“Maybe.”
“Wise guy, huh.” The young man smiled, revealing even, white teeth. “You’d better state your business, my man, or I’ll kick your skinny ass down these stairs.”
Spector decided to play a hunch. “I haven’t been able to get anything for days. My source dried up, but a friend said there was somebody around here who might be able to help.” He projected need with his voice and posture.
The man patted him on the back and laughed. “This must be your lucky day. Come on in to Mike’s parlor, and we’ll fix you right up.”
Mike’s apartment smelled worse than a week-old catbox. The floor was littered with dirty clothes and pornographic magazines. “Nice place,” Spector said, barely concealing his contempt.
Mike pushed him roughly against the wall and pulled Spector’s hands over his head. He frisked him quickly, but thoroughly. “Now tell me what you need, and I’ll tell you what it’s going to cost. You make trouble, I’ll blow your brains out. I’ve done it before.” Mike pulled out a chrome-plated.38 with matching silencer and smiled again.
Spector turned slowly and stopped when his eyes met Mike’s, then linked their minds. The terrible sensations of Spector’s death rushed into Mike’s body. He could feel the crushing weight on his chest. The muscles had involuntarily contracted with such force that bones snapped and tendons tore. The throat constricted as vomit surged into the mouth. The heart pumped wildly, forcing the contaminated blood through the body. Fiery pain screamed into his mind from dying tissues. Lungs burst and collapsed. The heart fluttered and stopped. Even after the darkness there was still pain. Spector kept their eyes locked, making Mike feel every detail, convincing the pusher’s body that it was dead. He did not stop until Mike shuddered in a way he had come to recognize. Then it was over.
Mike’s eyes rolled up and he toppled lifeless to the floor. A twitch of his dead finger fired the .38. The slug caught Spector in the shoulder, spinning him against the wall. He bit his lip, but otherwise ignored the wound, and flipped Mike over.
“Now you know what it’s like to draw the Black Queen.” He picked up the gun and clicked on the safety, then carefully stuck the weapon in his belt. “But look on the bright side. You only have to go this once. I wake up with it every morning.” Spector searched the body. He took all the money, even the change. There was just short of six hundred dollars.
“Small-time jerk. I’m so glad I could share something with you,” Spector said, cracking the door to look into the hall. He saw no one, and walked quickly down the stairs. The cold and snow dampened the city’s sounds, muffling its life.
His shoulder was healed by the time he reached his apartment.
He was being followed. Two men across the street were keeping pace with him, staying just far enough behind to avoid his field of vision. Spector had sensed them several blocks back. He turned south, away from his apartment, into Jokertown. It would be easier to lose them there. He walked slowly, saving his energy in case he had to make a run for it.
Maybe they were friends of Mike the pusher. Not likely; they were too well dressed, and people like Mike didn’t make friends. More likely they were working for Tachyon. Out of necessity Spector had killed an orderly at the clinic the day he escaped. The little carrot-headed shit would almost certainly try to find him and send him to jail. Or worse, take him back to the clinic. The only memories he had of the Jokertown clinic were bad ones.
You little bastard, he thought, haven’t you already done enough? He hated Tachyon for bringing him back. Hated him more than anyone or anything in the world. But the little alien scared him. Spector began to sweat under his heavy coat. A four-legged joker blocked the sidewalk in front of him. As he approached it moved crablike down an alley, to avoid him. He turned and looked across the street.
The two men were there. They stopped and huddled together. One crossed the street toward him. Spector could kill them, but then Tachyon would only come after him harder.
Better to lose them and hope the Takisian forgot about him. The ice-slicked streets were almost deserted. Even jokers had to respect the bitter cold. Spector chewed on his lip. The Crystal Palace was only a block away. It was as good a place as any to try to shake them. Maybe Sascha would catch them and throw them out on their asses.
The doorman gave him a nasty look as he went in. Spector wanted to show him what a really nasty look was, but pissing off Chrysalis was the last thing he needed to do right now. Besides, so few places in Jokertown had doormen.
The interior of the Crystal Palace always made him uncomfortable. It was furnished floor to ceiling with turn-ofthe-century antiques. If he accidentally broke or damaged anything, he would probably have to kill twenty people to pay for it.
Sascha was not around, so there would be no help there. He walked quickly through the main bar and into an adjoining room which contained privacy booths. He slid into the nearest one and pulled the heavy burgundy-colored curtains closed behind him.
“Something I can do for you?”
Spector turned slowly. The man sitting across the table from him wore a death’s-head mask and black cowled cape. “I said, is there something I can do for you?”
“Well,” he said, trying to buy time, “do you have anything to drink?” The mask had startled him, and Spector never needed an excuse for a drink these days.
“Only for myself, I’m afraid.” The man indicated the halfempty glass before him. “You seem to be in some kind of trouble. “
“Who isn’t?” Spector disliked the fact that he was as transparent as Chrysalis’s skin.
“Yes, trouble is universal. One of my closest acquaintances was eaten, devoured, by one of our extraterrestrial visitors last month.” He took a sip of his drink. “It’s an uncertain world we live in.”
Spector opened the curtain a crack. The two men were at the bar. The bartender was opposite them, shaking his head. “Obviously, you’re being followed. Perhaps if you had some kind of disguise, you could get away without being noticed.” He pulled off the cowl and cape and laid them on the table.
Spector bit his fingernails. He hated trusting anyone. “Okay. Now tell me what I have to do for you. There is something, right?”
“Just refill my glass. Brandy. The bartender will know what kind.” He pulled off the mask and tossed it onto the table. Spector turned away. The man’s face was identical to the mask. His skin was yellow and tightly drawn over the prominent facial bones. He had no nose. The joker stared at him with sunken bloodshot eyes. “Well ...”
He quickly put on his disguise, then picked up the glass. “Back in a minute.” He opened the drapes and stepped out. The men were sitting about twenty feet away. They stared at him as he walked to the bar. He was sweating again.
“Refill,” he said, after getting the bartender’s attention. The man did as he was told. Spector walked slowly back toward the booth. Only one of the men was looking at him, but he was looking hard.
“Here you go,” he said, delivering the drink. “And here I go.”
“You might want to keep the outfit,” said the skull-faced man, “I think you’re going to need it.” He pulled the curtains closed.
Spector walked with measured slowness to the door. Both men were still seated.
As soon as he stepped outside, Spector ran. He sprinted down the icy sidewalks, a caped vision of death, until his breath was gone. Slipping into an alley he took off the cape and mask and tucked them under his coat, then headed home.
He had gone to bed drunk for the third time in as many nights. It eased the pain enough for him to sleep. He was not sure if he really needed sleep anymore, but he had gotten used to it in the years before his death.
There was a clicking noise. Spector opened his eyes and took a deep breath, dimly aware that something was happening. The door opened slightly, revealing a crack of light from the outside. Spector rubbed his eyes and sat up. As he fumbled for his clothes the door stopped short, held by the chain. He backed toward the windows while pulling on his pants.
As he shrugged into his coat, he heard something hit the floor. The door closed. Spector smelled smoke and rotting citrus. His eyes began to water and he wobbled on unsteady legs. He had to move or the gas would knock him out. He opened the window and kicked out the screen, but caught a foot on the windowledge and fell onto the fire escape. He landed off-balance and smashed his head against the snowcovered steel railing. The pain and cold air cleared his head momentarily. There was a man above him on the fire escape, hurrying downward, and he heard another one banging up the stairs from below. They would both be on him in a moment. Spector struggled to stand. The man below had turned to climb the last flight. Spector leapt at him, catching the man offguard, driving him toward the railing. Spector heard the man’s spine snap on impact. He gathered himself and ran down the stairs, leaving the man screaming on the landing.
From two stories above the street he leapt. His feet skidded on the icy pavement as he landed, and his body crumpled beneath him. He fought for breath and managed to roll over. A woman wearing mirrored sunglasses was bending toward him. She was holding a hypodermic. He recognized her just as he felt the needle sink into his flesh.
Spector came to in a hallway, his hands and feet securely bound with nylon cord. The woman who had drugged him supervised as two men wearing heavy coats and mirrorshades carried him into a dark room. As long as they were wearing the protective glasses, he could not lock eyes with them. Spector was dumped in a hard wooden armchair. The room had an old smell, like an attic or long deserted house. “Ah, Nurse Gresham, I see you’re back with our troublemaker.” The voice was that of an older man; his tone was firm and cold.
“He was a handful, though. Somebody else got killed.” The man clucked his tongue. “Then, he’s as dangerous as you said. Let’s have a good look at him, shall we?” Spector heard stone creaking as the ceiling above him opened. The moon and stars shone brightly through the skylight. He had lived in the New York City area his entire life. Smog and city lights made it hard to see the stars at all, yet here they shone hard enough to hurt his eyes. His interrogators remained outside the lighted area.
“Well, Mr. Spector, what do you have to say for yourself?” Silence. “Speak up. Bad things happen to people who waste my time.”
Spector was scared. He knew that Jane Gresham worked for Dr. Tachyon at the Jokertown clinic, but the man questioning him was definitely not Tachyon. “As far as I can tell,” he said, “you people came after me for no reason at all. I’m sorry that guy got killed, but it wasn’t my fault.”
“That’s not what we’re talking about, Mr. Spector. Three nights ago you murdered one of our people for no reason. He was merely trying to satisfy your need for some drugs.”
“Look, you’ve got everything wrong.” Spector figured he must have stumbled into a big-time dope operation. Nurse Gresham could be stealing all kinds of drugs at Tachyon’s clinic. “The deal went down fine. Somebody else must have done it.”
There was a hum, and an old man moved forward into the light. He was seated in an electric wheelchair. His head was abnormally large and sparsely covered with white hair. His thin body was twisted, as if forces inside it were trying to move in different directions. His skin was pale, but healthy, and he wore thick glasses.
“Do you remember this?” The old man held up a coin. Spector recognized it instantly. It was an old penny that he had taken from Mike’s body. Since it was the size of a half-dollar and dated 1794 he had saved it, thinking it might be worth something.
“No,” he said, stalling for time.
“Really? Look at it carefully.” The penny shone blood-red in the moonlight.
Spector had heard enough to know he was in deep trouble. Gresham and the old man were going to kill him. If he was going to stop them, now was the time. “Nobody move, or I’ll kill this old guy the same as I offed your pusher friend.” They laughed. “Look at me, Mr. Spector.” The old man leaned forward. “Use your power on me.”
Spector locked eyes with him and tried to share his death. He could feel it wasn’t working, for whatever reason. The old man seemed to be blocking him off somehow. He slumped beaten into his chair.
“Sorry to disappoint you. You’re not the only one to have extraordinary powers. Untie him, Nurse Gresham.”
The woman reluctantly did as she was told. “Be careful of him,” she warned the old man. “He could still be dangerous.” Spector did not feel dangerous. Whatever he had gotten himself into, it was certainly no run-of-the-mill drug operation. “How do you know about me? What do you want?”
“Nurse Gresham kept a very complete file on you at the clinic.” The old man opened a notebook and began reading. “James Spector, a failed CPA from Teaneck, New Jersey, infected by the wild card virus nine months ago. You were clinically dead upon arrival at the Jokertown clinic. Since you had no living family members to object, Dr. Tachyon revived you with a now-abandoned experimental process. You spent six months in ICU screaming uncontrollably. Finally, with the help of medications you were brought back to sanity. You disappeared approximately three months ago. Coincidentally, an orderly died mysteriously the same day. It’s all here. Very complete.”
“Bitch.” Spector tried to locate the nurse in the darkness. “Now, now,” said the old man. “If I let you live, Mr. Spector, you may get to like her.”
“You’d let me live?” He realized it was the wrong way to put it. “I mean—”
“Realistically,” the old man interrupted, “you have a great talent. Aces are rare, you don’t just flush them down the toilet. You could be quite useful to our cause.”
“What cause?”
The old man smiled. “You’ll find out if we accept you into our ... society. But before we even consider that, you’ll have to prove your value. We have a little job for you, but with your abilities and the information we’ll give you, it shouldn’t be too hard.”
“And if I don’t play ball?” Spector was scared, but he wanted to know the exact consequences.
The old man tore a sheet of paper from the notebook and handed it to him with a pen. “Write your address on that piece of paper and put it in your pocket.” Spector was confused, but did what he was told. The old man closed his eyes tightly and placed the tips of his fingers together.
Spector shivered. He felt as if cold water were being poured over his naked brain. “I feel ...” He stopped, overcome by the sensation.
“Yes, I know. Not like anything else, is it? Now, tell me your address.”
Spector opened his mouth to answer and realized he could not remember. The information was simply gone. “Selective amnesia. When a person is physically present with me, I can take out whatever I want.” He raised a bushy eyebrow. “Or I can remove everything.”
Spector was shaken, but knew that the old man’s power might also be used to remove the memory of his death. The loss of his power would be a small price to pay to sleep nights again. “I see what you mean. I’ll do whatever you say.”
“You see, Nurse Gresham, he’s no trouble at all. It would be stupid to kill someone who can be so useful. Inject him again and return him to his apartment before he wakes up.”
“Hold on a minute. Who are you? If you don’t mind telling me.”
“My real name would mean even less to you than it does to me. You can call me the Astronomer.”
Spector figured that anyone who called himself the Astronomer was certifiable, but this wasn’t the time or place to bring it up. “Fine. Well, Astronomer, what do you want me to do for you? The only thing I’m good at is killing people.” The Astronomer nodded. “Precisely.”
Spector was nervous about killing a cop, especially since it was Captain McPherson. Nobody had been stupid or courageous enough to mess with the head of the Jokertown Special Forces Unit. The Astronomer had given him no choice. McPherson’s death had to appear accidental since one of the Astronomer’s people was in place to succeed him. If Spector failed or tried to get away, the Astronomer would brainwipe everything but his death.
He laced the shin guards on tightly and rolled his jeans down over them. He was also wearing additional protection under his shirt, on his forearms.
The Astronomer must have been planning to kill McPherson for some time. Spector was seated on a sofa in the apartment directly beneath his target. The woman who lived here was one of the Astronomer’s underlings. From what he had been told, McPherson’s maid was also in on the operation. “If you want to replace someone, first replace the people around them,” the Astronomer had said.
Spector looked at the wall clock. It was between one and two in the morning. He checked to make sure the hypodermic was in his pocket, then turned out the lights and opened the balcony door.
He picked up the rope and hefted the padded grappling hook at the end. The distance to the balcony above was about twelve feet. He leaned out and tossed the hook. It landed perfectly, one large barb catching the edge above. A handful of snow fell on his face. He tugged at the rope. It snapped taut and the hook held fast.
Spector climbed up quickly and heaved himself over the edge of McPhersons balcony. The accumulated snow muffled the sound of his feet on the concrete. He waited for a moment. He heard nothing from inside.
The maid had done as she’d been told. The balcony door was unlocked. Spector slid it open; a blast of cold air rushed into the apartment. He entered quietly and closed the door behind him.
The dog was waiting for him. He could see the red glow reflecting off the animal’s retinas. The dog growled a threat and charged. Spector could not clearly see the animal and threw up one arm to protect his vulnerable head and throat. With his free hand he reached for the hypodermic which Nurse Gresham had given him.
The Doberman slammed into him, grabbing his extended arm in its jaws. He could feel it trying to bite through his armguard to sever his tendons.
He jabbed the hypodermic into the animal’s stomach. It continued to growl and grind away at his arm. A light came on in the next room. Now that he was able to see, Spector pushed the dog away. The Doberman fell heavily and tried immediately to stand.
“Get him, Oscar. Tear him to pieces.” The voice came from the lighted room.
Oscar tried to respond. He bared his teeth and took a step, then his eyes closed and he collapsed.
So far, so good, thought Spector. He faked a limp toward the lighted room. “I give up. Your dog hurt me bad. I need a doctor. Help me, please.” He tried to sound hurt.
“Oscar?” McPherson’s voice was unsure. “You all right, boy?”
The dog breathed heavily and did not move. The light went out in the next room.
Spector fought down panic. He had not planned on McPherson turning the lights back of. His power was useless in the dark. He stood motionless for several long moments. There was no sound from the other room.
He took a step forward. He knew the layout of the apartment. The light switch was by the door on the right-hand side. To reach it, he would have to be fully exposed in the doorway. He knew McPherson had a gun and would be ready to use it. He began to sweat. The pain knotted up inside him, readying itself for the attack. He took another step. One more and he would be in the doorway.
Spector heard the sound of a telephone being lifted of the hook. He stepped forward and reached for the light switch. His finger came underneath it and turned on the lights.
McPherson was crouched behind a large brass bed. He had the phone in one hand and an automatic in the other. The gun was pointed at Spector’s heart. Their eyes met and locked. Spector remembered Mike’s dead finger and shuddered as his death experience flowed into McPherson.
The policeman trembled and gasped, then slowly keeled over behind the bed. Spector clenched his hands into fists and sighed. He moved to the dead man’s side and pulled the gun from his hand. He opened the drawer of the bedside table with one gloved hand and set the weapon carefully inside. Spector felt a surge of relief. He had vividly imagined the bullet ripping through his chest cavity, causing him to bleed to death before he could regenerate.
He picked up a pillow and threw it to the floor, like a wide receiver spiking a football after a touchdown. Now, maybe the Astronomer and Nurse Gresham would leave him alone. He put the pillow back in place.
The phone began to beep.
Spector put the receiver back on the hook and set the phone onto the bedside table. He sat on the rumpled bedspread and examined his victim. The look on McPherson’s face was the same as the one he imagined had been on his own face when he died.
“Is it dead, or is it Memorex?” he asked the corpse. “More impressive than breaking glass, eh, cop?”
He laughed.
Spector took a swallow of Jack Daniel’s Black Label and savored the warmth as it spread through his insides. He was lying on his lumpy mattress, staring at the small black-and white television. A late-night news program was doing a rehash of the alien invasion. The monsters were still big enough news that McPherson’s death did not even make the front page of the Times.
The videotape of the attack at Grovers Mill was being shown for the thousandth time. A National Guard unit was using a flamethrower on one of the things. It made a high pitched scream as it caught fire and burned. Spector shook his head. Being able to kill people by looking at them should be enough to give a person some security, but that was not the case. The space monsters gave him the same creepy feeling in his guts as the Astronomer. Spector hoped that he would never see or hear from the old man again, now that he had lived up to his part of the bargain.
The tape ended. “And now,” the announcer said, “for some final thoughts on this tragedy, we’re pleased to have as a guest-Dr. Tachyon.”
Spector picked up the almost-empty bottle and prepared to hurl it at the set. The air shimmered next to the bed and he felt the room grow colder. The translucent outline formed into a giant disembodied jackal’s head. Colored fire poured from its mouth and nostrils.
Spector fell off the bed, pulling the covers on top of him. “Drinking again,” the jackal said. “If I didn’t know better, I would say you had a guilty conscience.” The head turned to vapor and formed quickly into the Astronomer.
“Holy shit. Is there anything you can’t do?” He tossed the covers aside and climbed back onto the bed.
“We all have our limitations. By the way, if you see the jackal head again, address it as Lord Amon. I only appear that way by using an advanced form of astral projection. One of my less-impressive abilities, but it has its uses.” The Astronomer looked at the television. The tube went black with a crackle. “I don’t want any distractions.”
“Look, I did what you wanted. The guy is dead and everybody’s calling it a heart attack. Let’s say everything’s square, and you leave me alone now.” He threw the bottle at the image. It passed silently through and crashed against the opposite wall. “So fuck off.”
The Astronomer rubbed his forehead. “Don’t be foolish. That wouldn’t help either of us. We can use you. A man of your power would be a great help. But I’m not being entirely selfish in trying to get you to join us. It would be criminal to stand by and watch you waste your talent like this. You only need direction to realize your potential.”
“Oh,” said Spector, trying not to slur his speech. “My potential for what?”
“To be one of the ruling elite in a new society. To have others turn pale at the thought of you.” The Astronomer extended his ghostlike hands. “What I offer is no empty promise. The future is in our grasp at this very moment. What we are doing is of cosmic importance.”
“Sounds good,” Spector said without conviction. “I suppose if you were going to kill me, you would have done it already. But I’m not really in any shape to handle cosmic problems right now.”
“Of course. Get a good night’s sleep if you can. My car will pick you up outside your apartment at ten o’clock tomorrow night. You will learn a great deal, and take your first step on a path toward greatness.” The Astronomer’s image flickered and disappeared.
Spector was drunk and confused. He still did not trust the Astronomer, but the old man was right about one thing. He was wasting his new power and his new life. Now was the time to do something about it. One way or the other.
The Astronomer’s black limousine pulled up right on time. Spector tucked the .38 into his coat and walked slowly down to the front door. When he got the chance, he would kill the old man. The Astronomer was dangerous, and he knew too much to be trusted. A mirrored window lowered and a pale hand beckoned him into the car. The Astronomer’s head was swollen with large wrinkles that had not been there the night before. He was dressed in a black velvet robe and wore a necklace made of the 1794 pennies.
“Where are we going?” Spector tried to appear unconcerned. He knew that the gun was his only possible weapon against the Astronomer.
“Curiosity. That’s good. It means you’re interested.” The Astronomer adjusted his sash. “You’ve had a great deal of pain and death in your life. Tonight there will be more. But it won’t be your pain or death.”
Spector fidgeted. “Look, what do you really want from me? You’re going to an awful lot of trouble for an outsider. You must have something special in mind.”
“I always have something special in mind, but you must trust me when I say that you won’t be harmed. My powers took years of experimentation to control. Some you are already aware of. Others”—he rubbed his swollen forehead—“you will witness tonight. I have glimpsed the future, and you will playa great part in our victory. But your powers must be strengthened and honed. This can only happen if you are given the proper instruction.”
“Fine. You want me to kill more people for you, just say the word. Of course, I will expect to be paid. But I just don’t think I belong in your little group.” Spector shook his head. “I still don’t know who the hell you are.”
“We are those who understand the true nature of TIAMAT Through her we will be given unimaginable power.” The Astronomer stared unafraid into his eyes. “The task will be difficult, and great sacrifice will be needed to accomplish it. When the job is done you can name your price.”
“TIAMAT,” Spector muttered. The Astronomer’s fervor seemed genuine, but he sounded insane. “Look, this is a bit much for me now. Just tell me where we’re going.”
“After a brief stop, to the Cloisters.”
“Isn’t that a little dangerous? Bad trouble on and off with teen gangs. Lots of people get killed there.”
The Astronomer laughed softly. “The gangs work for us. They keep people away, including police, and we help them in solidifying their local power base. The Cloisters is perfect for us, an old building on old soil. Perfect.”
Spector wanted to ask, perfect for what? but thought better of it. “You don’t have a controlling interest in the Metropolitan Museum, do you?” His attempt at humor went unnoticed.
“No. We did have another temple downtown, but it was destroyed in an unfortunate explosion. One of my very dear brothers was killed.” There was a satisfied sarcasm in the Astronomer’s tone. “Select a woman for us, Mr. Spector.”
The limousine cruised methodically through the Times Square area. “Why don’t you just have a call girl sent up to the Cloisters?” Spector had always wanted to harm a beautiful woman. “These bitches are the scum of the earth.”
“A call girl would be missed,” the Astronomer cautioned him. “And we don’t need a stunning beauty. We’ve had difficulties in the past when expensive women were used. Since then, we’ve had to be more careful.”
Spector sullenly accepted the advice and looked around. “The blonde over there isn’t too bad.”
“A good choice. Pull up next to her.” The Astronomer rubbed his hands together.
The driver eased the limousine over and the Astronomer lowered the window. “Excuse me, miss, could we interest you in a little party? A private one, of course.”
The woman stooped to look inside. She was young with dyed platinum hair and a no-nonsense disposition. Her tattered synthetic-fur coat fell open to reveal a wellproportioned body, which was only partially concealed by her tight black minidress.
“Slumming, boys?” She paused, waiting for a comment, then continued. “Since there’s two of you it’ll cost double. It’s extra for kink or anything else special you might have in mind. If you’re cops, I’ll tear your fucking hearts out.”
The Astronomer nodded. “That sounds fine to me. If my friend agrees.”
“Am I what you had in mind, honey?” The woman blew a wet kiss at Spector.
“Sure,” he said, not looking at her.
The West Side Highway was nearly empty and the trip took little time. The Astronomer had injected the woman with a drug that left her conscious, but unaware of her surroundings. As the car pulled into the driveway, Spector saw several shapes pressed close against the naked trees. In the dim light he caught the glint of cold steel. He fingered the .38 in his coat pocket to make sure it was still there.
Spector got out of the car and walked quickly around to the other side. He pulled the woman out and guided her toward the building. The Astronomer was walking slowly toward the doors.
“I thought you were crippled?”
“Sometimes I’m stronger than others. Tonight I must be as strong as possible.” A blast of cold wind whipped his robes about him, but he showed no sign of discomfort. He spoke briefly to a man at the door and shook his hand in a ritualistic manner. The man opened the door and motioned Spector to follow.
He had been inside the Cloisters several times when he was very young. The era conjured by the architecture, paintings, and tapestries seemed more pleasant to Spector than the one he was forced to live in.
In the foyer a carved marble beast loomed over them. It had an angular physique and small wings tucked against its broad back. Its head and mouth were huge. Thin taloned hands held a globe up to the vast fanged mouth. Spector recognized the globe as Earth.
A figure moved out from behind the statue and away from them. It wore a laboratory smock over its vaguely human shape. It hid its brown, insectlike face and disappeared into the shadows. Spector shuddered.
The woman giggled and pressed hard against him. “Follow me,” the Astronomer said impatiently. Spector did as he was told. He noted that the interior of the building had been adorned with other hideous statuary and paintings. “You do magic, don’t you?”
The Astronomer stiffened at the word. “Magic. Magic is just a word that the ignorant use for power. The abilities you and I possess are not magic. They are a product of Takisian technology. Certain rituals which have heretofore been perceived as black magic, in fact, merely open sensory channels for those powers.”—
The hallway opened into a courtyard. The moon and stars lit the snow-covered ground with a brilliant glow. Spector figured that this was where they must have interrogated him. There were two stone altars in the center of the courtyard. He saw a young man bound naked to one of them. The Astronomer moved to his captive’s side.
“Take the woman’s clothes off and tie her down,” said the Astronomer.
Spector stripped her and bound her hands and feet. The woman was still giggling. “Extra for kink. Extra for kink,” she said.
The Astronomer tossed him a gag. He shoved it. into her mouth.
“Who is this guy?” Spector asked, indicating the naked man. “The leader of a rival gang. He’s young, his heart is strong, and his blood hot. Now, be quiet.”
The Astronomer raised his palms upward and began to speak in a language that Spector did not understand. Several other robed men and women moved silently into the courtyard. Many had their eyes closed. Others stared at the night sky. The Astronomer put his hand into the young man’s chest. The man screamed.
The Astronomer motioned to a group of people in the back of the courtyard with his free hand. A dozen or so carried a large cage toward the altar.
The creature inside was massive. Its furry, sausagelike body was built low to the ground and was supported by several short legs. The beast was mostly mouth and gleaming teeth, like the statue in the foyer. It had two large, dark eyes and small ears which were folded back against its head. Spector recognized it as one of the alien monstrosities.
The man continued to scream and plead. He was only an arm’s length from the thing’s open mouth. The cage was pushed slowly forward until the man’s head was between the bars. The creature’s jaws snapped shut, cutting off the final scream.
The Astronomer pulled the decapitated corpse upright, snapping the restraining ropes. The man’s blood fountained over his skin and robe. The Astronomer’s body straightened and his skin shone with an unnatural vitality as he continued to chant. He removed his hand from the man’s chest and raised it above his head, then tossed an object at Spector’s feet. The heart had been removed with surgical precision. Spector had seen films of psychic surgeons, but nothing as spectacular as this.
The old man walked to the cage and stared at the thing inside. “TIAMAT, through the blood of the living I will become your master. You can have no secrets from me.”
The creature mewed softly and moved as far away from the Astronomer as the cage would allow. The Astronomer’s body became rigid, his breathing slowed. For several moments, nothing moved. Then, the old man clenched his fists and screamed. It was a wail unlike anything Spector had heard before.
The Astronomer staggered to the corpse and began tearing at it, throwing hunks of flesh and viscera about like a whirlwind. He ran back to the cage and sank his fingers into the creature’s head. It tried to break free, but could not get either of the Astronomer’s arms into its jaws. The Astronomer howled and viciously twisted the thing’s head. There was a loud pop as the neck snapped. The old man collapsed.
Spector held back as the others rushed to the Astronomer’s side. The bloody scene had filled him with an intoxicating glow. He could feel the need to kill rising fast and hard inside, overpowering his other thoughts. He turned to the girl on the altar.
“No!” The Astronomer righted himself and lurched forward. “Not yet.”
Spector felt a calmness being imposed on him. He knew the Astronomer was causing it. “You did this to me. I have to kill soon. I need it.”
“Yes. Yes, I know. But wait. Wait and it will be better than you can imagine.” He swayed and took several deep breaths. “TIAMAT does not reveal herself so easily. Still, I had to attempt it.” The Astronomer gestured to the others in the courtyard and they quickly filed out.
“What were you trying to do with that thing? Why did you kill it?” Spector asked, trying to control his need.
“I was trying to contact TIAMAT through one of her lesser creatures. I failed. Therefore it was useless to us.” The Astronomer pulled off his robe and turned to the woman. He ran his bloody fingers through her dark pubic hair, then placed both hands on her abdomen. As he mounted her he slipped his hands under her skin and began kneading her internal organs. The woman whimpered, but did not scream. Apparently she was still too disoriented to accept what was happening to her.
Spector watched the act with little concern. From what he could tell, the old man was massaging himself inside the blonde’s body. Spector had been only moderately interested in sex before he had died. Now, even that was gone.
If he wanted to shoot the old man, he would probably not get a better chance. He reached for the gun. As he did, the need to kill overpowered him. The Astronomer had released his calming influence. Spector took his hand out of his coat pocket. He knew what he needed. Satisfaction was not what came out the barrel of a gun.
The Astronomer became more excited. The wrinkles on his forehead began to throb visibly, and he was tearing small pieces out of her. Now the woman was screaming.
Spector felt his need building in harmony with the old man’s.
“Now,” said the Astronomer, thrusting wildly. “Kill her now.”
Spector moved in, his face only inches away from hers. He could see the fear in her eyes, and was certain she could see her death in his. He gave her his death. Slowly. He did not want to drown her in it; that would be too quick. He filled her mind and body. She was a writhing, screaming container for the viscous black liquid of his death.
The Astronomer groaned and fell on top of her, jolting Spector from his trancelike state. He was ripping hunks from her with his teeth and hands. The woman was dead.
Spector stepped back and closed his eyes. He had never enjoyed the act of killing until now, but the satisfaction and relief he felt were beyond what he had thought possible. He had controlled his power, made it serve him for the first time. And he knew he needed the Astronomer to be able to do it again.
“Do you still want to kill me?” The Astronomer pulled himself, spent, off the corpse. “I assume the gun is still in your coat. It’s either that or this.” He held up one of the pennies. There was no real choice. Any doubts were erased by what he had just experienced. He took the coin without hesitation. “Hey, everybody in New York carries a gun. This city is full of some very dangerous people.”
The Astronomer laughed loudly, the sound echoing off the stone walls. “This is only the first step. With my help you’ll be capable of things you never dreamed possible. From now on there is no James Spector. We of the inner circle will call you Demise. To those who oppose us, you will be death. Swift and merciless.”
“Demise, I like the sound of it.” He nodded and put the penny in his pocket.
“Trust only those who identify themselves with the coin. Your friends and enemies are chosen for you now. Spend the night if you like. Tomorrow, we’ll continue your education.” The Astronomer picked up his robe and went back inside. Spector rubbed his temples and wandered back into the building. The pain began to grow again. He accepted it, even loved it. It would be the source of his power and fulfillment. He had drawn the Black Queen and suffered a terrible death, but a miracle occurred. His gift to the world would be the horror inside him. It might not be enough for the world, but it was enough for him.
He curled up under the statue in the foyer and slept the sleep of the dead.
Jerry pushed the intercom button and stared up at the closed-circuit TV A cold wind whipped at him, stinging his-face and ears. Overeating at Thanksgiving dinner hadn’t given him much in the way of winter fat. But it was only early December, he could keep working on it. “Who is it?” said a polite female voice over the intercom.
Jerry recognized Ichiko. “Jerry Strauss. I’d like to come up and talk to you about Veronica. Or, at least, get warm.”
There was a buzz and the automatic door bolt clicked open. Jerry pushed his way in and walked into the sitting room, rubbing his hands. A woman sat on the low couch. She was tall, with long brown hair, distant eyes, and soft features. She stared past Jerry toward the street. Jerry walked to the door of Ichiko’s office and knocked. “Come in.”
Jerry slipped in and sat down in the chair opposite Ichiko’s desk. The office was more high tech than Jerry had expected. There was a computer on her credenza and a bank of TV screens showing the outside of the building and the sitting room. Jerry had only seen the one camera; the rest must be hidden. Ichiko was wearing a dark blue dress. Her eyes looked tired, but she managed a smile. “Thanks for seeing me,” Jerry said. “I was just wondering if you had any idea how I could find Veronica, or even contact her.”
Ichiko shook her head. “She moved all her belongings out a few weeks ago. She didn’t tell me about her future plans.”
“Do you have any ideas at all?”
“No.” Ichiko pressed her fingertips together. “Really. Would you like to try someone else as a companion?”
“No. I don’t know how I got into this situation in the first place. It’s not really like me. Veronica was special, I guess.”
All women are special. Men as well, I suppose.’ Ichiko stood. “I’m sorry I’ve been unable to help you, Mr. Strauss.”
“It was just a shot,” Jerry said, standing and taking a step toward the door.
Ichiko looked up at the monitors. A red light was flashing under one of them. Two young Oriental men were staring up at the screen. One of them pulled out a can of spray paint. He held it up to the camera. The screen went dark. “Damn,” Ichiko said. She pushed the intercom to the sitting room. “Diane, get in here now.”
Jerry heard footfalls outside and the door swung open, almost hitting him. The young woman shut the door behind her. Her already pale complexion had gone white. “They’re at the outside door,” she said. “Two Egrets.”
“What’s going on?” Jerry backed away from the door and stood behind the desk with Ichiko and Diane. “Immaculate Egrets. Street thugs,” Ichiko said. “We’ve refused to pay them protection money. I used to be able to threaten them with the return of my son, but it’s been so long.”
“Fortunato?” Jerry asked.
“No, Santa Claus.” Diane’s voice was trembling, but she managed a quick stare that made Jerry feel like a six-year-old.
Jerry looked at Ichiko’s desktop. There was a picture of Fortunato. He picked it up and sat in the chair, studying the photograph.
“What are you doing?” Ichiko’s voice was calm and curious.
“The best I can,” said Jerry. “Either one of you got a mirror?”
Diane fumbled in her purse and handed him a compact. Jerry stared into it and started changing his features and skin tone.
“Jesus,” said Diane. “No wonder Veronica was spooked by you.”
Jerry ignored the comment and handed her back the compact. He turned to Ichiko. “How do I look?”
“A little more forehead,” she said.
There was a pounding at the office door, then laughter. “Diane, let them in,” Jerry said, trying to force authority into his voice.
The girl opened the door and stood back. The two Egrets walked into the room like foxes entering the henhouse. They saw Jerry and stopped.
“What do you want?” Jerry said.
“Pay up,” said the larger of the two kids. He took a step forward. Jerry stood up slowly. He could only make himself a little taller, but he’d pushed the limits.
“Get out, scum.” Jerry folded his arms into what he hoped was a mystical-looking position. “Get out, or I’ll turn you into something like this.”
Jerry let his facial features go completely. He let his jaw sag and rolled out a huge, blue tongue. He flattened his nose and elongated his ears. Flaps of skin from his forehead began to melt over his brow.
The Egrets ran, bouncing off each other in the office doorway. A gun popped loose and skidded across the floor. Jerry walked around the desk and picked it up. It was cold, blue, and heavy. He tucked it into his coat.
“They might be waiting for me outside,” he explained. “Your face,” Diane said, wincing. “Fix it or something.” Jerry closed his eyes and let his body image take his face back to normal.
“You have done me a great service,” Ichiko said. “If you truly wish to find Veronica, a group called WORSE may be hiding her. However, I suggest you hire a professional to take up the chase. They’re dangerous women from what I hear.”
Jerry nodded. “Thanks.” He stared at Diane. She looked away. Scaring her was more fun than he wanted to admit. He blew her a kiss and walked slowly out of the office and into the cold streets.
Ackroyd sat behind the cluttered desk, a manila folder conspicuous in the center. His right eye was slightly swollen and dark. “Want a drink?” he asked as Jerry sat down. “It’s all part of the service.”
The old metal chair creaked as Jerry settled into it. “No. Oh, well. Don’t want to be a bad guest.”
Ackroyd opened a drawer and pulled out a glass and bottle of scotch. He wiped out the glass with a tissue. “Straight up all right?”
“Sure. A little week-before-Christmas cheer can’t hurt.” Jerry needed it for his nerves. The folder was pretty thick. Maybe there was a lot more to know about Veronica than he suspected. “Not going to indulge yourself?”
Ackroyd shrugged. “I’ve got a bit of a headache today.”
“I noticed your eye. I hope you didn’t get it while you were working, you know, doing what I asked.” Jerry picked up the glass and took a larger-than-normal swallow.
“Jokertown’s getting tougher and tougher. Mostly nats stirring up trouble. It’s kind of open season on wild cards nowadays.” He opened up the folder. “Which brings us to your little lady Veronica.”
“She’s not exactly my lady.” Jerry wasn’t sure what Veronica was to him anymore, whether he really cared or she was just a lingering obsession.
“Whatever. To start where you lost track of her, she got involved with a woman named Hannah, who just happened to be involved in a rad-fem group.”
“WORSE,” Jerry said.
“Real good.” Ackroyd stroked his chin. “You kept that to yourself. It’ll help if you tell me everything you know from now on. Anyhow, whether there was anything sexual between Hannah and Veronica isn’t clear. You heard about the bank murder not long back?”
“I think so. Woman shot a guard to death or something, then killed herself in jail.” Jerry pictured Veronica with another woman, then took another stinging mouthful of scotch.
“That was Hannah. Veronica broke into the precinct and found the body. Apparently, she has the power to make men sick. I’ve known a few women like that myself.”
“Anyway, that’s how she got past all the cops. After that she went to ground. Rumor is that Hannah’s buddies are hiding her out. I could try to infiltrate WORSE, but I don’t think I’d get past the physical. Did you ever feel sick around her?”
“Not the way you’re meaning it.” Jerry exhaled slowly. “If she had some kind of ace, she never used it on me.”
“Just curious.” Ackroyd gingerly fingered the mouse under his eye. “An interesting sidebar to this. There’s a rumor that Hannah was possessed or something when she shot the guard. Could be nothing. Could be an ace power.”
“Then maybe Hannah didn’t really commit suicide.” The scotch was kicking in and Jerry was fighting off the image of Veronica’s head between her lover’s legs.
“Hard to say. I’ll keep my ear to the ground.” Ackroyd picked up the bottle. “Cash customers get a second shot if they want it.”
“No thanks. Keep looking for Veronica.” Jerry straightened his shoulders. “I think I’ll look into Hannah’s murder myself. Who’s the officer in charge of the investigation?”
“Lieutenant King, homicide. Don’t get in his way.” Ackroyd cocked his head to one side. “I like you. Why don’t you leave the detective work to me? I’m a trained professional. Years of rigorous study in detective school. Well, weeks anyway. I know my way around. You—“This is something I really want to do. I found out about WORSE, you know.” Jerry felt focused for the first time in weeks. It might be real purpose and it might be just the scotch. “How tall is King?”
“Just under six feet.” Ackroyd gave Jerry a long, slow look. “I know a little about your history. This may or may not apply to you, but it’s not a good time to be a public wild card.”
“Mine doesn’t play anymore, Mr. Ackroyd. If you do know my history, you should be aware of that.”
“Whatever you say. I’ll let you know if I turn up anything on Veronica.” Ackroyd smiled, his mouth hard and small. “And be careful.”
The office wasn’t exactly what Jerry had anticipated. The cream wallpaper and walnut wainscoting were an unexpected relief in the otherwise deprived depths of Jokertown. Pretorius was an unusual lawyer, though. Successful, too, or Hiram Worchester wouldn’t have hired him.
“Mr. Strauss. Thank you for coming.” Pretorius extended a large hand. Jerry shook it and sat down. Pretorius ran a hand through his white hair and leaned back in the chair. “As you know I’ve been hired to defend Hiram Worchester. Since you were on the world tour with him, I thought we might use you as a character witness.”
“Well, I can’t say that I know Mr. Worchester very well. I was having problems myself then, you know. Dr. Tachyon had just gotten me out of my ape body. The people who knew him said Hiram was acting in a very strange manner, especially in Japan. That’s kind of secondhand information, though.” Jerry extended his palms. “The few occasions I’ve seen Hiram since, he’s been very courteous and decent. I don’t know if that’s any help to you.”
“Hard to say. You build a case in little ways, sometimes. We might need your testimony, and we might not.” Pretorius pushed his wire-rim spectacles up the bridge of his nose. “Are you planning on taking any sort of vacation or business trip in the near future?”
“No,” Jerry said. “Not as far as I know”
Pretorius nodded. “Good. I appreciate your time. We’ll contact you if the need arises.”
“Just out of curiosity, how are you going to plead? My brother’s a lawyer,” Jerry explained, “he’d be disappointed if I didn’t at least ask.”
“Well, in the interest of professional courtesy, I’ll tell you that we’re pleading not guilty.” Pretorius took a deep breath. “Diminished capacity. Not an argument I care for much, but this is a unique case.” He snorted laughter. “Of course, they all say that.”
“Thanks. Let me know if you need me.” Jerry stood and headed for the door. He didn’t want Pretorius to walk him. He’d heard about the leg. “And good luck.”
Pretorius stayed behind the desk. “Thank you, Mr. Strauss. We are most certainly going to need it.”
Jerry leaned against the railing and stared west at Ellis Island. The Staten Island Ferry was one of the few things that hadn’t changed in the time he’d been an ape.
Kenneth stood silent behind him, his collar turned up against the chilling breeze that ran across the water, churning the surface into whitecaps.
“Winter already,” Jerry said.
“Yeah. I suspect it’s going to be a hard one.”
“Got your shopping all done?” Jerry asked.
“ I still have a little wrapping left to do. You?”
“Believe it or not, I actually got it done.” Jerry held his gloved palms to his face and blew into them, trying to warm his nose. “ I hope Beth likes what I got her. I didn’t really know what to get the woman who already has everything.”
Kenneth made a face Jerry couldn’t quite read. It didn’t look happy. “I’m sure whatever you got her will be fine,” he said, still staring at the water.
Jerry waited a long moment before speaking again. “Did it bother you that Mom and Dad made such a fuss over me?”
Kenneth turned and looked into Jerry’s eyes. “ I hated you for it. At the time. They just never had much use for me, but they died trying to get you back.”
“Oh.” Jerry looked away.
“It’s not that way now. You didn’t cause them to ignore me. They chose to. I was afraid to hate them, so I hated you instead. I was into hate when I was younger.”
“Self-righteous anger gives such an uncluttered perspective of the world. Makes life simple. I guess we need that when we’re young.” Kenneth put his hand on Jerry’s shoulder. “But believe me, I’m tremendously happy to have you back. You make us feel more like a family.” Jerry shrugged. “If you’d wanted a kid, you’d have had one, I figure. Now you’re saddled with me. I’m supposed to be your older brother and I feel like such a burden.”
Kenneth raised an eyebrow. “You know better than to fish for compliments with a lawyer, even if he is your brother. But in the interest of your constant need for reassurance, I’ll confess that you’re a welcome addition to the household.” He paused. “And Beth loves you very much.”
Jerry wished Kenneth seemed as glad to say it as he himself was to hear it. “Thanks. She’s really great. I don’t know what I’d do without her.”
“That makes two of us.”
Jerry leaned in. “I’m not sure she knows that.”
“I think she does. Work is important to me. But Beth is always at the center. I found that out when she left me a few years back.” Kenneth exhaled slowly, his breath condensing into mist. “I thought I was tough. I learned otherwise. No, I don’t think we have any misunderstandings in that area anymore.”
“Speaking of work, how is that going?” Jerry felt a twinge of nausea.
Kenneth paused. “It’s not what I expected when I was in law school. There’s more compromises than you might expect. I defend big-money clients. Justice is purchased at least as often as it’s served, but we do what we can within the system. Fifteen years ago I might have been representing the joker squatters over there.” He pointed. The ferry was at the point of its nearest approach to Ellis Island.
Jerry didn’t think Kenneth wanted to talk about his work. He almost never did. “God, I feel like garbage all of a sudden.” His stomach was knotting worse than before.
Kenneth put a hand over his mouth. “Me too. I hope it’s not the flu. Christmas is no time to be sick.”
“Amen to that, brother,” Jerry said. “Let’s find a place to sit down.”
Jerry swallowed hard. He wasn’t sure he could pull this one off. He hadn’t figured on Lieutenant King being black. Changing his skin color and hair texture was no problem, but inside he knew he was still pure whitebread. That was going to be hard to hide.
King always took a long lunch on Thursday. Jerry would have at least half an hour before the man he was impersonating came back. He bit his lip and walked into the room.
Everyone he could see snapped to look at him. Many were reading books or newspapers, which they immediately put down or hid away. The office clattered to life with the sound of fingers on keyboards and paper shuffling. People were afraid of King. That was good. Jerry could use that. A short young man wearing glasses walked up to him quickly.
“You’re back early, sir,” the young man said. “Anything up?”
“You have to ask?” Jerry managed to sound tough. He tried to relax enough to enjoy his own ability to intimidate. “Get me the file on Hannah Jorde.”
The man jerked his head back like someone had shoved a bee up his nose. “But ...”
“Do it now. I’ll be in my office.” Jerry turned away, his hands shaking slightly. Ackroyd had reluctantly given him the layout of the room and Jerry headed over to King’s office. The door was closed. Jerry turned the knob. It was locked.
Jerry’s stomach went cold and he sagged against the solid oak door. Shit, he thought, what now? He fumbled in his pocket for his own keys and got them out, then pressed the end of his finger against the lock. He made the flesh and bone softer and began to push them inside. It felt like the bone was going to tear through the skin at the tip of his finger, but he shoved it in further. He hardened up a bit and turned his hand. The lock clicked. Jerry softened up and withdrew his aching misshapen finger, then quickly re-formed it to its original shape. He opened the door.
The office didn’t look big enough to belong to a lieutenant. Jerry sat behind the desk and looked it over. There was a stack of paperwork, a few files, and a gold pen-and-pencil set for fifteen years of service to the force. Jerry leaned back in the massive rolling chair. The young man walked in, set down the file, and gave him an expectant look. “Will that be all, sir?”
Jerry nodded. “Close the door on your way out. And no calls.”
“Yes, sir.” The man slipped out and closed the door quietly behind him.
The file was about twenty pages or so thick. There was a transcript of Hannah’s interrogation, which Jerry only skimmed. She’d said someone traded bodies with her long enough to kill the guard, and the police didn’t buy it. Neither side backed off during the conversation, but Hannah didn’t sound hysterical or near suicide. Not to Jerry anyway. He flipped quickly past the photos of her dead body. Even alive, she wouldn’t have been that pretty. He couldn’t figure out why Veronica would have slept with her. At the end of the file was a composite drawing labeled “possible suspect.” The young mans features looked familiar, but Jerry couldn’t place him for a moment or two. Then it clicked.
“David too-fucking-good-to-be-true. St. John Latham’s boy wonder,” he said softly.
Maybe there was a God, and Jerry was getting a late Christmas present.
The street was cold, windy, and poorly lit. Jerry pushed his gloved hands into the pockets of his leather bomber jacket as far as they would go. He needed some thing to occupy his time. Kenneth and Beth had been cuddling on the couch, and he didn’t particularly feel like watching foreplay. He figured following David was likely to be anything but boring. Besides, if he had something to do with Hannah’s murder, Jerry could find him out and look like a hero. Jerry had started out the evening as a pretty boy, figuring David would be hanging out with the beautiful people. There weren’t many that fit that description in Jokertown, and that was where they were now. Jerry had bought a beat-up hat off a hatchet-faced joker to hide his nat features.
David was about thirty yards ahead of him on the other side of the street. Jerry didn’t want to get too close. Not yet, anyway. The police-sketch resemblance to David was probably a coincidence. Then again, anything could happen, especially in Jokertown after hours.
David slowed his pace and stopped in front of an alley mouth, turning to look inside. He paused a second, then went in. Jerry cut across the street. A gust of wind whipped a Jokertown Cry up off the pavement and into his face. Jerry pulled it away and trotted into the alley. He heard footfalls ahead. David’s, he figured. He could also hear muted laughter and what sounded like a scream.
Jerry’s mouth went dry. This wasn’t really how he’d planned to spend the evening. An Adonis like David should be out picking up gorgeous girls, or boys at least.
Jerry took a deep breath, chilling his throat, then walked in.
Jerry saw the light when he stepped around the dumpster. David was just stepping inside. Jerry walked up slowly, trying to appear casually interested. The entrance looked like it had been stuck onto the garbage-stained bricks of the alley wall. A joker stood at the door, looking silently at him. He wore a black silk garment that fully covered his shapeless body. His smiling face was peculiarly stiff.
Jerry tried to step past and get inside. The joker grabbed him by the shoulders and pivoted him around. “No,” the joker said softly. “This is a private club.” Jerry turned to give an indignant look, but there was another scream from inside. He took a step back and wandered off down the alley. Jerry looked at the dumpster as he walked past it. A torn-up gray coat stuck out slightly from inside. Jerry laughed to himself. He was rich and not used to being kept out of any place. He tucked his bomber jacket carefully under some of the less repulsive garbage and pulled out the coat. He shrugged it on and winced. In Jokertown, even frozen garbage stank. Jerry uglied himself up by enlarging his ears and nose and giving himself fleshy whiskers all over his face. No way that sack-of-potatoes doorman would recognize him now.
Jerry shortened one of his legs and loped down the alley toward the club entrance.
He was almost inside when the doorman started tittering and pulled him back out. Jerry’s deformed jaw dropped.
“You didn’t really think a few cosmetic alterations would get you in, did you?” The doorman waved him off. “As I said, our clientele is very special.”
Jerkoff asshole, Jerry thought, then wondered if the joker could read his mind. He trotted back down the dumpster to retrieve his jacket and headed home.
The phone message from Ackroyd was brief.
“I figure you already know this, but Hannah was supposed to be defended by one Dyan Mundy of Latham, Strauss. Nothing new on Veronica. Somebody more crass would mention money, but I know you’re good for it. still ...”
Jerry had been out trying to pick up a waitress at his favorite seafood restaurant. Her lack of positive response had prompted him to have several shots of whiskey before starting on his flounder. He’d put on a pot of coffee when he got home and had downed half of it before heading to the law office.
He’d seen Dyan Mundy a few times and pretty much stayed out of her way. She was easily six feet tall, built like an Eastern European athlete, and had her brown hair slicked back. A pair of glasses and a no-nonsense attitude completed her ensemble. She was between meetings when Jerry got to the office. Her desk was uncluttered. There was a picture of her family on one corner. She was as large as her husband and two children combined. A row of dying plants sat on the windowsill.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Strauss?” She seemed somewhat nonplussed at his request to see her.
“It’s about the Hannah Jorde case,” Jerry said. “I understand you were her attorney-briefly, of course.” Dyan leaned back in her chair and tapped her fingertips together. “I suppose there’s no harm in telling you what little I know. She was arraigned on a charge of first-degree murder. I spoke to her briefly about the case. She was very confused, but lucid. Completely committed to this body-switching story. Her suicide surprised me. It seemed inconsistent with her overall attitude. I guess you can never predict those things.”
Jerry nodded. “You saw her alone?”
“Yes. No. David came along at Mr. Latham’s request. But he got sick just before we got to her cell and had to leave.”
There was a sharp knock at the door. It opened before Dyan could say anything. Latham stepped in and closed the door behind him.
“Ms. Mundy, even an attorney of your limited experience knows better than to discuss a case in such a casual manner. I suspect Mr. Strauss is doing nothing more than gathering gossip for party chatter.” He stared hard at Jerry. “I’m sure Ms. Mundy has business to attend to and would appreciate your leaving.”
Jerry stood. “I’m sorry if I created any kind of problem.” He brushed quickly past Latham, who closed the door behind him. Latham’s voice sounded like a buzz saw cutting into soft wood. It was going to be a long afternoon for Dyan Mundy.
Jerry walked up the stone steps into the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola. He hadn’t been inside a church in over thirty years. His parents had exposed him to their religious preference, which was Episcopalian, but had let him stop going after he continually went to sleep during the service. David had been Catholic, though. At least the building had a late-Renaissance look that was less forbidding than the usual Gothic stuff.
Jerry slipped in and sat behind Kenneth and Beth. They wouldn’t recognize him, though. He was wearing an old look, with sagging flesh, bad posture, and gray hair. Jerry hoped he could pick up a comment from Beth saying she missed him, but they sat silently through David’s eulogy. Jerry wanted to stand up and tell everyone that the man they were mourning was a bad one by anyone’s standards, let alone a devout Catholic’s. That David was behind the “jumper” crimes and deserved exactly what he got. Jerry wanted to, but he didn’t. First off, if there was a God, he/she/it would not be impressed. Second, he didn’t have any proof. That chapped him plenty. All those months of detective work and he had nothing to show for it. Nobody except Tachyon would ever know he’d found David out, and Tachyon was all for secrecy.
Jerry glanced across the aisle at St. John Latham. The attorney put his hand to his mouth and coughed. There was strain in his neck and his face was pale. He was breathing in an even, but forced manner. Latham shook his head, then reached in his coat pocket and dabbed at his eyes. Jerry wanted to bend over the pew and get Kenneth and Beth to look Latham’s way. They wouldn’t believe the tears any more than Jerry did. St. John was the original iceman.
Latham stood, left his pew, and headed for the back of the church. Beth and Kenneth were still focused on the minister. Jerry hobbled after Latham down the church’s central aisle. He had to move slowly to stay in character and Latham was nowhere to be seen when he entered the foyer.
A young kid stood at the door to the men’s room. He was wearing a new black suit and had obvious blackheads all over his face. Jerry headed for the men’s room, wheezing.
“Sorry, old man,” the kid said as Jerry approached the door. “It’s occupe right now”
“My medication,” Jerry said, beginning to shake. “I’ll die.”
The kid made an unhappy face. “Oh, all right. But don’t be long.”
Jerry heard a man sobbing in one of the stalls as he stepped in. He didn’t have to see the face to know who it was. Latham was blubbering like he’d lost his own son. Jerry began running water to wash his hands. The crying tapered off. After a few moments the person inside blew his nose. Jerry turned off the water and reached for a towel. Latham stepped out of the stall.
“He was a fine boy,” Jerry said.
“Yes, very fine indeed.” Latham turned on the faucet and splashed water on his face. His eyes were completely bloodshot. He left before Jerry could say anything else.
Jerry stepped outside in time to see him leaving with the kid.
Something was definitely up.
Jerry savored his last bite of Imperial Duck, chewing it slowly. He’d had to let his belt out a notch already, and it was getting tight again.
“God, that’s good,” Jerry said.
Kenneth nodded. “Oh, yeah. I’m glad you didn’t back out at the last minute.”
“It’s not you I’m mad at.” Jerry took a sip of his hot tea and reached for his fortune cookie.
“Do you enjoy being mad at her?” Kenneth asked, his voice flat and nonjudgmental.
“I don’t know. I just feel like she came down unnecessarily hard on me. I don’t need that right now” Jerry cracked open his cookie and pulled out the fortune. He paused a moment to read it.
“What does it say?”
“‘You will overcome many hardships,”‘ Jerry said. “ I don’t think I like that. It means I’ll have to deal with them.”
“On the plus side, maybe it means you and Beth will get things sorted out. That would certainly go a long way toward making me happy.” Kenneth read his fortune and wrinkled his brow.
“How about yours?” Jerry asked. “‘Babes in abundance will beat a path to your door’?”
“ A good man has few enemies; a ruthless man has none.’”
Jerry made a face. “Fortunes for the eighties. Get yours and take out anyone who gets in your way. That’s real encouraging.”
Kenneth paid the bill and the brothers walked out into the crowded streets of Chinatown. The spring air had a freshness that even the smell of garbage couldn’t cling to.
“Let’s walk awhile,” Kenneth said, heading toward Canal.
“Okay by me.” Jerry patted his ‘stomach. “ I need a little exercise or I’ll lose my schoolboy figure.”
“Beth told me she called you last week. She said you hemmed and hawed, but promised you’d call her back soon.” Kenneth turned and looked at Jerry. “Are you?”
“Yes, she called. And yes, I’m going to call her back when I feel damn good and ready.” Jerry knew it was shitty to put her off, but felt like letting her twist in the wind for a while. He really wanted his pound of flesh. “ I don’t want to talk about this anymore. How about those Knicks, eh?”
“Whatever you say. Just don’t lie to her, she hates that.” Kenneth looked at his watch. “Maybe we have time to pick up some canoles.”
“Time is something I got plenty—” Jerry heard gunfire from inside one of the buildings and flinched. Kenneth pulled him to the pavement as three kids in ski masks and blue satin jackets charged out of an antique shop. All three had guns drawn. They stopped in front of Jerry and Kenneth. Jerry saw two cold brown eyes meet his. The kid’s gun swiveled over and past him. Another kid said something in Chinese. The group sprinted off down the street and ducked into an alley. Jerry recognized the bird on the back of their jackets.
“Egrets,” he said.
Jerry stood, then helped Kenneth to his feet. Someone wailed inside the antique shop. “What did you say?” Kenneth looked at him hard.
“Immaculate Egrets. They’re a street gang. I saw a TV special on them.” Jerry smiled. “Nothing like a little mayhem to get your blood going. Should we call the police, or something?”
“I’m sure they’ve already been contacted. I don’t recall any TV special on that particular gang.” Kenneth started walking Jerry down the street. “Look, I’ve heard rumors that you’ve been doing some detective work. Certain individuals take that sort of thing very personally. So if it’s true, I’d advise you to stop it. Now”
Jerry couldn’t imagine how Kenneth had found out. Beth wouldn’t talk, even though she was mad at him. Maybe someone had tipped him about Jerry having hired Ackroyd at one point. But he’d been checking out David, and David was gone. Jerry decided to do a little fishing. “Who’s Kien?”
Kenneth blanched. “So. It is true. You don’t want to know, Jerry. Latham is much more dangerous than you can imagine. He’s been losing his grip lately, so stay out of his way.” Kenneth glanced at his watch again. “I need to get home.”
“Latham’s got something on you, doesn’t he?” Jerry couldn’t imagine his brother this scared for any other reason.
“Let’s just say the situation is balanced, but very precariously.” Kenneth grabbed Jerry by the elbow. “Don’t upset the balance. You could get us all killed.”
A police car squealed around the corner and bounced down the street, its siren and rotating reds going. “You head on home, Kenneth. Don’t worry about me. I’m going to stick around and tell the cops what I saw here.” Jerry would also memorize the cops’ faces and badge numbers. That could come in handy later, too.
Kenneth gave Jerry a look of troubled resignation. “Watch out for yourself. If you get into trouble with this, I might not be able to get you out. I’d try, of course.”
“I know. Tell Beth I really will call her sometime.” Jerry waved his brother off. “And don’t worry about me. There’s more here than meets the eye.”
Kenneth gave a weak waist-high wave and turned away. It began to rain softly. Jerry walked down toward the police car. If Latham was putting the squeeze on his family, Jerry was going to dig something up and squeeze back, hard. Thunder rumbled across the sky in the distance.
Jerry sat in the lobby, paging through the sports section of the Times. He’d changed his eyes and hair to brown and darkened his skin. His bone structure was thicker. The Knicks were definitely going to make the playoffs. As long as they didn’t wash out in the first round, especially to Boston, he could live with whatever happened.
He hadn’t turned up thing one on Latham. St. John didn’t even have a police record, so he was obviously as sharp as Kenneth said. Might as well shadow him and see if he could come up with something. Anything Jerry could uncover he’d turn over to Kenneth. That way, if Latham decided to up the stakes, Kenneth could match him.
The elevator pinged softly. Latham stepped out of the car, alone. Jerry carefully folded up his paper, stood, and followed him into the street.
It was warm and breezy outside. The sky over Manhattan was clear. The sidewalks, unfortunately, were not.
Latham was walking fast and Jerry had to push and shove to keep him in sight. Latham crossed the street at the corner, trotting out onto the asphalt just as the sign across the street started blinking DON’T WALK. Jerry knifed through the crowd, but before he could get across, the traffic surged in front of him.
Jerry stood at the corner, bouncing up and down on his toes. Latham got into a black Cadillac parked in a tow-away zone. There were two young boys in the front seat, and a girl in the back with Latham. The girl had spiky black hair and looked vaguely familiar, but at this distance most people did. She put her arms around his neck and kissed him. They were still kissing when the light changed and the Caddy whipped out into the street. It was gone before Jerry could get a license-plate number.
He changed back in the first-floor men’s room. Nobody noticed that the person who went in didn’t look at all like the person who came out. Nobody ever noticed. That was one good thing about present-day New York. He checked himself in the mirror on the way out. “Just call me Mr. Nobody,” he said. The name felt more appropriate than he wanted it to.
Tachyon was giving Blaise a lecture of some sort. The boy looked like a pit bull who’d just taken a beating from his master, mad and ready to get even.
“Not now, Jeremiah,” Tachyon said. “Family discussion.” Blaise gave Jerry a contemptuous look. “Yeah, you don’t belong here.”
Tachyon reached over with his good hand and grabbed Blaise by the chin. “That will be quite enough. Apologize to Mr. Strauss.”
Blaise set his jaw and stared at his grandfather in hateful silence.
“I’ll see you some other time,” Jerry said, backing out.
Tachyon turned Blaise loose and shook his head apologetically. “Soon, I hope. You’ve just caught me at a bad time.”
Jube the Walrus was standing by the curb when Jerry stepped outside the clinic. His Hawaiian print shirt was a recognizable beacon against the gray of Jokertown.
“Did you hear the one about the guy who played center on the joker basketball team?” the Walrus asked. “Nope,” Jerry said.
“He was a seven-footer, but only five feet tall.” Jube smiled around his tusks. “Want a Cry?”
Jerry had started to shake his head when he saw the DOUBLE JUMPER INCIDENT headline. He’d been so involved with snooping on Latham that he hadn’t paid attention to what was going on in the world. “Sure.” He dug out his wallet and handed Jube a twenty. “Don’t bother with the change. What do you know about these jumpers?”
Jube shrugged. “Nothing that isn’t in the paper. There hadn’t been an incident in a while, I thought maybe we were through with those kids.”
“Me too,” Jerry said.
“Sure you don’t want your change?” The Walrus hadn’t tucked the bill away yet.
“Nah. Just let me know if you hear anything else. I know where to find you.” Jerry raised his arm as a cab rounded the corner.
“Will do. Did you hear the one about the joker cabdriver?”
“No.” Jerry had a feeling he was going to.
It was past midnight, and Jerry was about to call it a night. He was in his car across the street from the building housing Latham/Strauss when they carried the body out. Jerry could hear their shoes scraping heavily on the pavement through his directional mike. He pushed the earpiece in and quieted his breathing.
“What did you say her name was?” The voice was female but didn’t mean anything to Jerry.
“Veronica. Old acquaintance. Not much of the hero type when I knew her.” This voice Jerry did recognize. He’d gotten to know most of the jumpers, and Zelda scared him even more than the rest of them.
“Where do you want to do her?” he asked.
“Let’s take her to the Rox and give Bloat or Blaise something to play with,” Zelda said. “She’s damn sure no interest to me.”
Jerry reached into the front seat and picked up one of three guns. This one had an infrared scope and fired rubber bullets. The other two were a high-powered rifle and a tear-gas launcher. Almost any weapon could be gotten hold of if you were a millionaire who could impersonate anyone. He took a deep breath and sighted in on the larger of the two figures. Zelda had Veronica under the armpits and was walking backward. Jerry centered the cross hairs on her throat, then lowered a bit to her chest. He pulled the trigger. The gun kicked noisily in his hands.
The bullet knocked Zelda backward and free of Veronica. She clutched her chest and went to her knees. Jerry heard her gasp and moan. The other woman looked at Zelda and was gathering herself to move when Jerry nailed her in the back with his second shot. She fell to the asphalt, screaming. Jerry loaded the tear-gas launcher and fired it. Moments later, the canister exploded in a cloud by Zelda. Jerry pulled on his mask and trotted across the street. He saw a car round the corner and began changing his shape, making his features more angular and his hair pure white. He moved slowly into the cloud, groped around on the sidewalk, and found a motionless female body, which he figured had to be Veronica. Jerry bent down close enough to recognize her and picked her up under the arms. She was heavy and hard to move. He began dragging her back out of the cloud. A hand grabbed his ankle and squeezed hard. Jerry turned around and brought his booted heel down on the wrist. There was a crack, and he heard Zelda scream, but she couldn’t jump what she couldn’t see. Jerry hoisted Veronica onto his shoulders and staggered out into the street.
Two cars had stopped, and the people inside stared at him as he opened up his backseat and laid Veronica inside. She was in bad shape, one side of her head bruised and swelling, her eyes watering from the tear gas. Jerry jumped in behind the wheel and started the car, then whipped out into the street and swerved through the parked cars. Someone was sure to get the license-plate number, but he’d ditch them and nut on another set. He’d done it before.
Veronica moaned from the back seat. It was ten blocks to the nearest hospital. Jerry hoped she wasn’t as bad off as she looked. Jerry had been in love with her back when she was one of Fortunato’s geishas, or at least he’d thought it was love. He was focused on driving now and couldn’t let his heart distract him. All he could do was drop her off and hope for the best. Latham was still his main concern. If Veronica died, that would be just one more reason to see him dead. One way or the other.
Except for a drunk snoring on a nearby bench, the park was quiet. Jerry crouched behind a row of half-dead shrubs with Jay Ackroyd. Jay had done E I. work for Jerry in the past, and they got along. Ackroyd was expensive, but then, he was a projecting teleport. His power had inspired the nickname “Popinjay.”
“You sure she comes home this way?” Jay asked, shifting his weight uneasily.
“Every night I’m aware of, for the past three weeks,” Jerry said. “She’s been to the Rox at least three times, so I figure she must be a jumper by now.”
“She have anything to do with what happened to Veronica?” Jay’s eyes glimmered in the moonlight.
Jerry shook his head and pointed. A teenage girl was walking quickly toward them, her sneakers squeaking slightly on the walk. She had her hands tucked into the pockets of her worn denim jacket. Her straight brown hair was pulled back into a ponytail.
“Now,” Jerry whispered. “Don’t let her see us.”
Jay pointed his first finger toward the girl like the barrel of a gun. The girl disappeared. There was a loud pop. The drunk sat up on his bench and looked around, then lay carefully back down.
“Let’s go,” Jay said.
Jerry had spent two months and a bundle of cash getting the basement ready. He could see her pacing around inside, but she couldn’t spot him through the unbreakable one-way glass. There were handprints smeared on the glass where she’d been looking for a seam. Jay was waiting upstairs. He would probably be better at interrogation, but Jerry wanted to keep the information to himself.
Jerry flipped a switch. “You’re in trouble,” he said. His voice was electronically distorted to sound like aliens from a fifties science-fiction film.
She took a step back and looked around.
“The speakers are in the ceiling, but there’s no way out,” Jerry said. “Unless we let you out. And that won’t happen unless you tell us what we want to know”
“Who the hell are you?” She rubbed her nose. “Someone with enough on the ball to trap a jumper.” Jerry was enjoying intimidating her, then remembered what had happened to make her into one of Latham’s bodyswitchers. “We don’t want to hurt you.”
She continued to look around the mirrored room, her eyes hard. “I’ve been hearing that all my life.”
“What’s your name?” He asked.
“Valerie.” She sat down. “What are you going to do with me?”
“Let you gö“ Jerry paused, “as soon as you tell us what we want to know.”
“And if I don’t?” Veronica started picking at her fingernails. Jerry sighed audibly. The distortion made it sound spooky. “Then we’ll turn you over to the government. They’re offering a fortune, under the table, of course, for a live jumper. They need to do some experiments to try to isolate the genetic abnormality that produced you. They sew your eyelids together to make you harmless. At least, that’s what I hear.” Valerie’s eyes got big, and she bit her lip. “Bullshit. You’re feeding me bullshit.”
Jerry knew the only way to get anything out of her was really to scare her. “You just don’t know about our government, little girl. I hope you get old enough to wise up some. But if that’s the way you feel, there’s no point in talking.” Jerry left it at that and waited.
Valerie’s shoulders slumped. “Are you still there?” Jerry paused for effect. “What is it?”
“Tell me what you want to know”
“What do you know about Latham?” Jerry asked. “Who?” Valerie looked genuinely puzzled.
Jerry shook his head, mad at himself for making a mistake. “Prime.”
Valerie hugged herself. “He did that thing to make me one of the gang. I’ve only been in it for a couple of weeks. Zelda and Blaise are the ones you need to talk to.”
“You must know something. Plans he might have. Anything.” Jerry rubbed his palms together.
Valerie shook her head, then tilted it. “I don’t know if this is what you mean, but he likes blond boys. Not to be in the gang, but for other things. At least, that’s what Molly says.”
“Does the name David Butler sound familiar?” Jerry asked. “I think so. I don’t know” Valerie got up and started pacing. “Please let me go.”
Jerry pushed a button, a signal to Jay to come downstairs. “So you can go back to them.”
“I can’t do that now. You know that.” She went back to worrying her nails. “Bloat would know I told.” She clutched her hands over her chest. “You don’t know what they’d do.” Ackroyd opened the door and stepped into the room. Jerry cut off the audio to the mirrored cage. “Get what you needed?” Jay asked.
“Nah. But it was worth a shot.” Jerry pointed to Valerie. “I guess you can send her back to the park now.”
Jay shook his head. “I think you’d be better off telling me everything, but you are the one who signs the checks.” He made his hand into the familiar gunshape.
“Trust me,” Jerry said.
Valerie disappeared. There was a muffled pop. “Mrs. Ackroyd didn’t raise any boys that stupid.”
“The check is in the mail,” Jerry said, smiling.
“You going to be at the memorial service tomorrow?” Jerry stopped smiling. He’d been trying not to think about it. “Yeah,” he said. “Want a lift there? I could use the company.” Jay nodded.
People were taking turns speaking, remembering the man who had been their friend. It had rained off and on all morning but was dry enough inside the tomb.
Jerry looked up at the replica of the JB-I. Jerry hadn’t ever been much interested in Jetboy, even after he drew the wild card, and had never felt much about the young flier’s death. It was impossible to think about a world without Tachyon, though. Jerry was still trying to get his mind around the idea. If it weren’t for the Takisian, Jerry would still be a giant ape. He hadn’t been able to help Tachyon any more than he’d been able to save Kenneth. Latham was responsible for the deaths. He had to be made to pay.
The clothes of those attending were a stark contrast to the gray weather. Almost everyone had dressed in outrageously colorful outfits because “Tach would have wanted it that way.” Jerry was wearing a lime-green suit with a paisley-print shirt and rainbow scarf. Ackroyd had dressed in an everyday suit. “A man in my line of work can’t afford to look stupid, even for a minute,” he’d said.
Father Squid stepped forward to speak. “I cannot claim to have understood all that he did, but his was a great heart, full of compassion and understanding.”
Jerry glanced over and saw Cody. He eased his way through the crowd toward her. Her bad eye was to him, but she turned just as he reached her side. “Mr. Strauss,” she said. “I haven’t seen you recently. I suppose I should have expected to today, though.”
Jerry fished a twenty-thousand-dollar check from his pocket and slipped it to her. “I know. It’s hard to go near the clinic, now that he’s gone.”
Cody took the check and tucked it away. “Thanks. Hard as Finn and I have been working to raise funds, we don’t seem to be getting anywhere.”
“Bad times,” Jerry said.
Cody nodded. There was a strain in her face he’d never seen before, something that didn’t have anything to do with being a doctor.
“How could Tach get jumped?”
Cody shook her head and looked down. “They jumped me first. Used me as a Judas goat. Tach never could think straight when there was a woman involved.”
Jerry could understand that well enough. “I guess there’s no chance that somehow he’s still alive?” He had an almost blind faith in Tachyon’s ability to work miracles.
“He’s gone,” Cody said, her voice flat, weary. “But how can you be sure?”
“Blaise used to visit me once a week. He wanted me to know what he was doing to his grandfather. He told me everything. He kept moving Tachyon from body to body. All jokers, each more twisted than the last. He brought me obscene pictures. Is this what you want to fuck? he’d ask me. Is this what turns you on? But finally he got bored with the game. That was when he killed Tachyon.” She looked away. “He brought me pictures of that, too.”
“Maybe he was lying,” Jerry said. “Trying to hurt you.”
“The nrisoners were all kept in the warehouse,” Cody said. “If he was still alive, he would have been freed in the raid, along with the rest of us. He’s dead, Mr. Strauss. Denying it only prolongs the pain.”
Jerry figured she was right. He put his hand on her shoulder, then walked back over to Ackroyd.
“Trying to pick up Cody at Tach’s memorial service is a gesture he’d probably understand,” Jay said, smiling. Jerry’s shoulders slumped. “I wasn’t trying to pick her up.”
“I know, I know,” Jay said. “What is it about tombs that makes people lose their sense of humor? Let’s get out of here before someone asks us to make a speech.”
Jerry sighed. “How about dinner?” He didn’t feel like being alone.
“Now you’re talking,” Jay said. “Being morose gives me an appetite.”
The pair made their way to the edge of the crowd and out onto the rain-slicked concrete. A rainbow arced over Staten Island. Jerry wondered if there would be a pot of gold on his doorstep when he got home. It was the last thing he needed.
Jerry sat alone in the private room of the Haiphong Lily. Half the Gambione family had died in this room, and he wasn’t happy about the apparent thinness of the walls, but he could live with it. His look was burly, middle-aged, and Italian. The person he was meeting thought he was a Mafia kingpin from Vegas. He’d been laying the background for the disguise for several weeks.
The door slid open, and the Lily’s owner ushered in a young man in a pressed dark gray suit. The man looked more Greek than Italian. His eyes and mouth were impassive and deadly. Jerry studied his face and build. Never could tell when it might come in handy.
The door closed. “Sit down,” Jerry said.
“Thank you.” The man unbuttoned his coat and quietly took his seat. Jerry passed him the menu. “No, thanks. I’m not here to eat.”
“Whatever.” Jerry ran a finger cautiously along his lower lip. “You come highly recommended.”
The man shrugged. “There aren’t many of us left. To still be around, you have to be the best.”
Jerry nodded and pulled an envelope out of his coat pocket, then slid it across the table. Inside was everything he’d managed to find out about Latham’s habits and associates in the past months and twenty thousand dollars in cash. He’d removed his fingerprints when handling the paper and didn’t have any now either. “How soon can you start?”
The man opened the envelope and slowly went through the contents. “Soon as I’m out the door.”
“He’s heavily guarded most of the time,” Jerry said. “Watch out for the kids especially.”
“I’ll want another twenty when I’m done.” The killer carefully tucked the money back into the envelope.
Jerry nodded.
The man stood and took a step toward the door, then turned and smiled. “Want any souvenirs? I do that for free.”
“No,” Jerry said. “I’ll save the news clippings.”
The man nodded and left.
Jerry sat in the Tomlin International Airport, fidgeting in one of the plastic chairs. A newspaper was folded across his lap. Mafia Killer Found in East River was a front-page headline. Next to the story was a picture of Alex “Buttons” Parylos. Jerry should have known Latham would be too tough for one man, even a professional.
“Delta Flight twenty-three now arriving from Chicago at gate nine,” came a soft voice over the public address.
Jerry bounced up from his chair and shouldered his way through to the front of the receiving area. Latham would have to wait; this was more important.
After a couple of minutes, the passengers began trickling out of the plane. After fifty or so had passed by him, Jerry panicked and wondered if he’d gotten the wrong flight number or come the wrong day. He’d made that sort of mistake before. She was almost in his arms before he saw her. She’d grown her blond hair out several inches and dropped some weight, but her smile was the same.
“Hey, bro,” Beth said, setting down her blue overnight bag and giving him a big hug. “Long time no see.”
Jerry squeezed Beth hard and kissed her on the forehead. Her touch and smell were both wonderful and familiar. “Too long, as far as I’m concerned. I can’t believe Chicago has that much to offer.”
Beth took a step back and rolled her eyes. “We’re not going to go through how I don’t love you anymore before dinner, are we?”
Jerry laughed. “No, before dinner is for your presents. Later on, I had you penciled-in for some serious doting. How long are you in town for this time?”
“At least a month.” Beth picked up her bag and tucked her arm under his. “Presents, huh? After the baggage handlers are done with me, you can have me practically all to yourself “
Jerry knew that wasn’t really true. Beth still seemed married to his brother, Kenneth, although he’d been dead for months. “After showering you with gifts, it’s dinner wherever you want tonight.”
Beth nudged him as they walked down the concourse. “Why, sir, you’re positively the most generous multimillionaire I know,” she said, in a bad Southern-belle imitation. “I’m sure you’re going to spoil me for anyone else.”
Jerry straightened his shoulders and let his voice slip into Clark Gable. “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
Jerry pulled the Olds up to the gate and punched in his code. He changed it every couple of days, just in case. The wrought iron creaked and opened. He eased up the drive and pulled up to the garage. The door there had a coded entry as well.
Beth wrinkled her forehead. “Is this going to open up on the Jerrycave?”
Jerry pulled into the garage and waited for the door to close again. “Rich people have been getting jumped, you know” Beth nodded. “I thought that was mostly high-profile types like Dixon.”
“Mostly,” Jerry said. “But you can’t be too careful. They might decide to go slumming on us old-money types.” He got out of the car and trotted around to her side to open the door. “Just one more set of coded locks, and we’re in.”
“And just in time. I need a shower.” Beth ran her fingers through her hair. “This stuff needs help.”
“Want any company?” Jerry had made several tame advances, but Beth had always gently declined.
She sighed and stroked his face. “I’d like that a lot, Jerry. That’s the main reason I’m here.”
Jerry stood motionless for a second. He hadn’t really considered the possibility that she’d take him up on it. “Really?” Two syllables were all he could manage.
“Really,” she said. “Now get us inside.”
Jerry walked up to the door and paused with his hand over the keypad, the combination momentarily gone from his mind. His fingers took over and punched it in. The locks clicked, and Jerry opened the door.
They kept their clothes on until they got upstairs. Jerry watched her undress. Her legs were a little heavy, and she didn’t have much of a waist, but he couldn’t imagine a more desirable female body.
The bathroom was big enough to pitch a tent in, one of the perks of being fabulously wealthy.
“How hot do you like it?” he asked, turning on the shower. Beth smiled and gave him a peck on the lips. “Can’t stop talking in movie dialogue, can you? I like it really hot to begin with. We can cool it down a bit after a while.” She slid open the glass door and led him into the shower.
Jerry picked up the soap. “Want me to do your back first?”
“Sounds good.” She leaned forward and let the water run over her head as Jerry began to soap her shoulders.
He worked his way down her back and paused at the base of her spine. “I hope you’re not planning on missing any spots,” she said.
Jerry slid the soap over her bottom. He almost resented the slippery film that kept him from actually touching her flesh. “Now who’s talking straight from the movies?”
Beth turned around and put her arms around his neck. “Kiss me, dummy.” She put her lips on his and pushed her tongue into his mouth.
Jerry relaxed and let his hands roam all over her. She twisted her fingers into his damp hair and bit his lip. Jerry closed his eyes and let go completely.
This was going to be as good as he’d always imagined.
He ran his fingers slowly up and down the hollow of her back. Beth reached around and took his hand, then brought it to her mouth and kissed the tips of his fingers.
“I can die happy now,” he said.
“Don’t say that, even just kidding.” Beth rolled over and looked at him, unblinking. “With me it’s not funny.”
Jerry pulled her close and kissed her neck. “Sorry. I wasn’t thinking.” This was positively the worst time to make her think of Kenneth. “You know what’s weird?”
She breathed heavily onto his shoulder. “What?”
“The better sex is, the harder it is to remember. I think that’s why at the beginning, couples don’t do much of anything else. You try to have something to keep, but it always slips away like a dream. Doesn’t seem fair, somehow.”
“Is that a hint?” Beth lowered her mouth to his chest and bit his nipple.
Jerry laughed. “I don’t know if I’m up for another take right now”
Beth smiled. “You underestimate me. It’s like being a lion tamer.” She reached down between his legs. “Enough skill and determination, and the beast will obey you.”
Jerry arched his back, pushing his head into the pillow. The phone beeped. Beth looked up at him.
“Let the machine downstairs answer it,” he said. “That’s what I bought it for.”
“I love a man with his priorities straight.” She began to nibble and lick him.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “You’re one hell of a lion tamer.”
He wandered downstairs to get the phone messages. The first one was several hours old. He hoped it wasn’t important. Jerry pushed the button, waited, and heard Ackroyd’s voice. “Jerry. I have it on pretty good authority that Veronica is going to be transferred to an institution upstate in a few days. This place is famous for experimental and dangerous methods of treatment. Veronica might not do so well there. I figured you would want to know. I’m busy with other commitments right now, or I’d help you out myself. Keep in touch.” Jerry sank onto the couch, not hearing the other messages. In spite of the problems they’d had, he couldn’t abandon Veronica to some nutcase shrinks.
Beth bounced down the stairs in her blue terry robe. She plopped down on the sofa and put her arm around him, then frowned. “Something wrong?”
“Veronica,” Jerry said.
Beth kept her arm in place but pulled her hand from his shoulder. “I thought that was over a long time ago.”
Jerry sat up straight and took her hand. “It is. That’s not it at all. She’s in the hospital in a coma or something. I think she’s in real danger. It’s not like we’re close or anything, but I feel like I owe her.”
“Jesus,” Beth said. “Is there anything you can do?”
“I’m rich-there ought to be something.” He chewed on his lip. “You used to be a nurse way back when, right?”
“Yes. Got tired of dealing with doctors and hospital administrators. I’ve done some volunteer work in Chicago, though.”
“Okay.” Jerry tapped his fingertips together. “I’ll need you to set up my old projection room with all the equipment we’ll need to handle a coma patient. All I need to do then is figure out how to get her here.”
“You’ll have to take me along, you know” Beth turned his face toward hers. “That’s my price for doing the rest. You have to let me be there with you.”
“Thanks,” Jerry said. “I would have asked you to anyway. I need to have someone I can trust around me when I’m scared. If I’m in trouble, I want you there. Mr. Selfish strikes again.”
She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “I’d do more, but we’re going to need our strength for other things.”
“Right,” he said, standing. “I’m going to get cleaned up, then go down to the hospital to do a little snooping. If you could take care of buying the equipment, I’ll help you set it up later on.”
“Okay. I hope I can get everything we’ll need,” Beth said. “You’re rich and gorgeous.” Jerry helped her up from the sofa.
“With that combination, anything is possible.”
It was three A. M. Wednesday, probably as quiet as the hospital ever got. Jerry strode down the corridor with what he hoped was a weary authority.
Beth was handling the gurney. The nurse’s uniform flattered her figure more than he’d expected. “You really look great. Next time I’m sick, I want you to wear that.”
“So much for the silk teddies and leather outfits I was going to buy.” Beth’s voice was nervous and edgy.
Jerry clutched at his doctor’s clipboard and leaned close to her. “This will be easy, trust me. I do this kind of stuff all the time. You’re in the care of a professional.” He thumbed the orange badge on his smock that said Dr. Evan Sealy.
Beth gave him a hard glance. “Yes, but you can change your face, which, by the way, looks like too many doctors I’ve known. I’m stuck with what I’m wearing.”
Jerry didn’t have anything clever to say to that. He counted down the room numbers until they were outside Veronica’s door. He took a deep breath, pulled his glasses down onto the bridge of his bulbous nose, and went in without knocking. Beth followed him, leaving the gurney in the hallway.
The guard was sitting in the chair, engrossed in a wellthumbed copy of Soldier of Fortune. He was middle-aged and rounding all over. There were two empty styrofoam cups on the cheap bedside table.
“Morning, Dr. Sealy.” The cop nodded once and stared back down at his magazine.’”Morning.” Jerry sighed and walked over to Veronica’s bed on the side where the guard was seated. She looked terrible. Her skin was broken out, her features sunken, and her breathing shallow. A yellow-and-purple bruise covered one side of her head. Something inside Jerry hurt to look at her. He edged closer to the guard and pretended to take her pulse. Beth moved closer to them. Jerry put Veronica’s hand down. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cotton rag, then jumped on the guard’s lap and shoved the rag into his mouth.
The cop bit down hard on Jerry’s fingertips. Jerry clenched his teeth to avoid screaming. Beth was backing away with an empty hypodermic in her hand. He hadn’t even seen her stick him. “How long?” he asked, trying to tug his hand free. Beth capped the needle and put the hypo in her pocket, then stepped in for a better look. “He’s out already.”
Jerry flattened his fingertips and pulled his hand free. “Fucking flatfoot cannibal,” he said, rubbing his fingertips. Beth rolled the gurney next to the bed and quickly unhooked everything but Veronica’s I. V and gently slid her hands under the comatose woman’s armpits. “Get her feet and lift her over.”
Jerry grabbed Veronica’s ankles and carefully hoisted her over.
Beth folded up the metal arm and hooked the I. V bag to it. “Let’s go, Doctor.”
Jerry opened the door and stepped into the brightly lit hallway. He motioned to Beth, who wheeled the gurney out next to him. They headed slowly toward the elevator. Jerry marked something unreadable on his clipboard and hoped he looked the part. The elevator was empty, and they both sighed as the doors closed.
“So far, so good,” Jerry said. His back and armpits were soaked in sweat.
“Mm,” Beth said. It was more a growl than anything else. The car stopped in several jerky motions, and they moved out into the basement. Jerry could hear someone in Emergency moaning. There were several patients sitting in the hall. One, a bloody hand held to the side of his head, was talking to a police officer. Jerry didn’t breathe as they moved past. The cop didn’t bother to look up.
“Dr. Scaly?” The female voice came from behind him. Jerry’s shoulders tightened. He turned around slowly. A nurse with sharp eyes and features was looking at him hard. “Yes,” he said.
“Is that patient being transferred out?” The nurse looked at Veronica.
“Yes. Why else would she be down here?” Jerry hoped his sarcasm would back her off.
The nurse made a face. “Then I assume you have some paperwork for me?”
Jerry nodded stiffly. “Of course. Once she’s situated in the ambulance, I’ll be back to take care of you.”
“If you don’t,” the nurse said, “I know where to find you.”
“I hope not,” he whispered, turning away. He looked over at Beth. Her skin was a couple of shades paler than usual. They quickly rolled Veronica out to the nearest ambulance and opened up the rear.
“Everything you’ll need?” he asked, looking inside. Beth nodded. They lifted Veronica in, and Beth climbed up after her. Jerry closed the doors and walked around the far side, pulling off his smock. He had his EMS outfit on underneath.
He made his face rounder and changed his hair from gray to brown. Jerry got into the driver’s side and tossed the smock onto the floorboard. He softened his fingertip and slid it into the ignition slot. When he felt it fit, he hardened his finger and turned. The engine caught immediately, an echoing roar in the concrete underground. A few blocks away he could stop and hot-wire the ignition, until then he’d have to make do with one hand.
“Shit,” Beth said from behind him. “What?”
“Her heart’s stopped.” Beth took a deep breath and prepared an injection. “I’ll try some adrenaline. Get us the hell out of here. I don’t want to get caught now. Move it.”
Jerry put the ambulance into gear and drove slowly through the Emergency parking area to the street.
“Is she going to be all right?” he asked.
“I can’t tell yet.” Beth’s voice was shaky. Her face was covered in sweat. “I’ve got a pulse, but it’s erratic. Could go either way.”
Jerry drove one-handed for as long as he could stand it. There was no way he could make it through three boroughs to reach the family home in Staten Island that way. He stopped, softened his fingertip, and tugged it, bleeding and swollen, from the ignition. He pulled a knife and electrical tape from one pocket and bent under the dash. “We’ll be moving again in a minute,” he said.
Beth sighed. “I can’t believe I volunteered for this. If we get caught, I’m going to strangle you with my bare hands.” Jerry brought the wires together with a tiny blue spark. The engine kicked to life. “I love you, too.”
After taking Beth and Veronica home, Jerry drove the ambulance into Queens and abandoned it. He caught a cab back from there. It gave him a twinge of glee that Veronica had wound up in his projection room. She’d never have come there when they were dating. You were paying her to fuck you, he thought. It wasn’t a date.
Beth was looking Veronica over when he walked in. “This isn’t good, bro. They didn’t use a gel-foam cushion under her while she was there.”
It bothered him a little that she called him “bro,” although he wasn’t sure why. Jerry knew what a gel-foam cushion was only because it was a squishy bed covering he’d figured might have real erotic possibilities. “What’s the problem?”
“She’s got some ugly lesions on her bottom, and a couple are starting on her shoulders, too. They weren’t looking after her well at all.” Beth squeezed some antiseptic cream on a gloved hand and applied it carefully to Veronica’s flesh. “‘Lesions’?”
“Bedsores.” Beth pulled off her gloves and tossed them into a trash can. “If she doesn’t come around soon, we’re going to have major complications.”
Jerry snorted. “Over bedsores?”
“That’s right. If they get bad enough, you have to do skin grafts to prevent life-threatening infections. That requires a plastic surgeon and anesthesiologist at the very least, assuming I can grow a few more limbs to take care of everything else.” She walked past him and patted him on the shoulder. “Trust me.”
“Shit,” Jerry said, turning and following her out of the room. “How do you get somebody out of a coma?”
“You don’t, really,” Beth said, putting her arms around him. “I guess we’d better get some rest.”
“Rest?”
“I’m afraid so,” she said. “We’ll need our energy to devote to Veronica.” She kissed the end of his nose. “This is another reason I stopped being a nurse.”
“You’re so good,” he said. “I don’t know what I did to deserve you.”
Beth laughed. “For his next trick, Jerry will put all of his self-esteem into a thimble.”
Jerry slapped her ass. “Enough. Let’s get some sleep.”
“Veronica, I love you. You have to come back for me.” Jerry stroked her hand, carefully avoiding the area where her I. V was attached. Saying he loved her was a lie, but he wasn’t going to crucify himself for it at this point. “Hannah needs you. We all do.” Veronica’s chest rose and fell slowly. Her eyelids might as well have been carved in stone.
Beth walked into the room with two plates of food. “Fettuccine for two.” She set the plates on the coffee table in front of the couch. “So much for the question ‘But can she cook?’ Good men have plotzed for my Italian food since the dawn of time.”
Jerry stood and stretched. He was glad Beth hadn’t heard him telling Veronica he loved her. It would be too much trouble to explain right now. He walked on stiff legs over to the couch and sat down in front of the plate with the largest helping. It was weird having so much normal furniture in the room with a coma patient. “What time is it?”
“A little after seven.” Beth took Jerry’s seat next to Veronica and began bathing her with a fresh washcloth. Jerry fumbled for the TV remote control and punched the set to life. “Hot damn. I don’t think I’ve missed much of it. Chrissie is probably dead, though.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Jaws.” Jerry rubbed his hands together. On the screen, Brody was looking down at the girl’s crab-infested remains. Beth wiped Veronica’s forehead. Her touch was light but firm. Like she’d been with him in bed a few nights before. “I thought jaws scared you to death.”
“Several times.” Jerry paused and glazed-over his eyes. “Very first light, chief, sharks come cruising.”
“Enough,” Beth said. “It’s obviously going to be a long night.”
Jerry nodded. “For all the wrong reasons.”
He turned back to the TV It was a commercial break, and a fast-talking salesman had a penlike device at the end of an egg. “Wow. Look at that. You can scramble an egg without even breaking it open.”
Beth laughed. “I forget how much you missed in your twenty years as a giant ape. You’re Ronco’s dream customer.”
“It’s nice to be somebody’s dream something.” Jerry bit his lip. He’d been trying to cut down on self-pity, but he had a genuine talent for it.
“God, I’m sick of hearing that kind of shit. If we’re going to have a chance, that kind of talk has to start disappearing.” She turned away from him. “Even now, you can’t believe that I love you.”
Jerry rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I’m afraid to. I’m crazy about you, always have been. You make me deliriously happy. I’m not a bad guy, but I just can’t imagine you’d ever settle for someone like me.I feel so ... insubstantial or inadequate or something.”
“I’m old enough and smart enough to know who I want,” she said, “and I want you. Maybe you should consider counseling to get over your self-esteem problems.”
“Maybe. Couldn’t hurt, and at least I can afford it.” Jerry took a bit of fettuccine. It was hot and delicious, but he didn’t feel like chewing.
“Jerry” Beth sounded upset.
He looked over quickly. Veronica had reached up and taken Beth by the arm. The bedridden woman pulled Beth’s face to hers. Beth twisted away and tucked Veronica’s arms down beside her. Jerry jumped up off the couch and over to the bed. Veronica’s eyes blinked slowly, then opened. “Veronica. It’s Jerry” He brushed a damp strand of hair away from her eyes.
Veronica swallowed and looked slowly around the room. She stared long and hard at Beth. “I hope you’re not married to this guy.”
Beth squeezed Veronica’s hand and brought a cup of water up to her dry lips. “Once you sweep them off their feet, they stay swept, bro.”
“I feel terrible,” Veronica said. Jerry smiled. “I feel better.”
“Latham’s girls were supposed to kill me,” Veronica said. She glanced over at Jerry. “I guess you rode to my rescue.” Jerry shrugged. “I couldn’t just let them kill you. You’d have done the same for me.”
Veronica closed her eyes. “Sure I would. How long have I been out?”
“Latham?” Beth grabbed Veronica’s arm. “Edward St. John Latham? He did this to you?”
“Actually, it was Zelda who did the damage,” Veronica said. “He just ordered it, as usual.”
Beth looked up at Jerry. “And you knew?”
Jerry nodded. “I had a reason for not telling you.”
“Kenneth. It was Latham, wasn’t it.” She put her hand over her mouth.
Jerry held her by the shoulders. “Yes. I knew he was behind it, but I couldn’t prove anything.”
Beth stood, shaking her head. “You should have told me. You know you should have.” She walked stiffly from the room. Jerry headed after her.
“What about me?” Veronica tried to sit up, fell back on the bed.
“You’re not going anywhere right now,” Jerry said. “We’ll talk later.”
Jerry caught up with Beth on the stairs. He grabbed her by the elbow. “I’m sorry. I just didn’t want you to get hurt.” She wheeled on him, her eyes full of tears. “You think this doesn’t hurt. My husband was killed, and you didn’t think I had the right to know all the truth.”
Jerry’s shoulders slumped. His eyes were beginning to sting. “If I screwed up, I’m sorry. We both know I have a track record of doing that. But you have no idea how crazy Latham is. All the things he’s into. And he’s getting worse.”
“What about the police?” Beth dabbed at her eyes. “There are some good cops, but you can’t know who they are. If somebody can be bought off or intimidated, St. John would probably go that way. If not, he’ll just have them killed. Like Kenneth.” Jerry looked down. “I swore I’d get Latham for what he did. I watched him for months, got to know his mind, his habits.” Jerry made a fist. “I had him in the sights of my rifle once, and I just couldn’t do it. Who knows how many other people would still be alive if I could have squeezed the trigger.”
Beth took his hand. “You’re not a killer, Jerry”
He looked up, right into her eyes. “Yes, I am. We all are. It just takes more extreme circumstances to bring that out in some of us. I have to kill him.”
Beth shook her head. “For a promise to someone who’ll never know you kept it?”
“No. Because he’ll get me first. Why do you think I have all this security? He’s bound to come after me sooner or later.”
“Come to Chicago with me,” Beth said. “We can start something for us there. If you go against Latham, he’ll kill you. I can’t believe I didn’t figure this before now, anyway. Who else would want Kenneth dead?”
“It’s only obvious in retrospect.” Jerry dabbed the tears from her eyes. “No matter where I go, he’ll find me. If there’s one thing St. John is, it’s thorough.”
“Don’t make me beg you, Jerry. If you try this, you’ll only get killed.”
“I don’t think so.” He tried to sound cocky. “I’ve got Veronica to help me now. If I can convince her to help. With Latham’s killers breathing down her neck, that shouldn’t be too hard.”
Beth opened her mouth in disbelief. “She can hardly move, Jerry. There’s no way she’s up to any kind of fight.”
“She’s an ace. Aces heal fast,” he said. “Trust me.”
Latham made most of his personal calls late at night. Jerry was sitting in a building across from St. John’s apartment, waiting for some action on the line. A regular phone bug would have been found in a hurry, so Jerry didn’t even bother. But Latham had a cordless phone that operated on a specific frequency. It had taken some doing, but he’d found out what it was and how to intercept it. Most of what Jerry had learned came from the late-night listening.
He stifled a yawn. He still wasn’t clear how to get Latham, but he knew he wanted Veronica to do the actual killing. That shouldn’t be a problem, since Latham had ordered Hannah killed and almost put Veronica away too. The specifics were just not there, though. Probably he was .distracted about Beth. When he wasn’t thinking about her, he was congratulating himself for not thinking about her, and then there he went again. Being that happy, even for one day, was a scary thing. All of a sudden, he had a lot to lose.
There was a dial tone. Jerry flipped on the recorder and listened to the numbers being punched in.
Several rings later, a young female answered the phone. “I was wondering when you’d call.” The voice belonged to Zelda.
“Yes,” Latham said. “I want you to make some arrangements for Friday night. I’ll need a companion.”
Zelda sighed. “Again? I don’t know what you need that for, with me around.”
“It wasn’t a request, Zelda.” Latham was cold, but his voice lacked the total control Jerry was used to hearing. “After letting that woman slip away, you should be eager for a chance to do something right.”
“I don’t think anyone else would have done a better job than I did.” Zelda sounded angry and defensive.
“Blaise would have.”
“Fine. I’ll get your young blond god, but he won’t be David. Even Blaise can’t bring him back.” Zelda paused. “Anything else?”
“That will be all,” Latham said, and hung up.
Jerry stopped the recorder and pounded his fist into his palm. This was the setup he needed. He flipped through his notebook for the name of the escort service Latham had been using. He’d pay them a visit tomorrow as a handsome blond young man. Bight now, though, he needed to check on Veronica.
Beth met him at the door. She waited a moment before saying anything. Her face was tight. She forced a smile. “She’s gone.”
“What?” Jerry stared hard at her, expecting some kind of lengthy explanation. “So ...”
Beth walked over to the couch. “She recovered so quickly. I’ve never seen anything like it. Look, I’m sorry, but I don’t know what I could have done to stop her.”
You could have gone to bed with her, he thought, remembering Veronica’s current sexual preference and the way she’d looked at Beth. Jerry flopped down on the couch and combed the hair from his eyes. “How did she leave? Did she walk? Catch a cab?”
“A cab.” Beth sat down next to him, perched on the front of a cushion. “Jerry, is it really that important?”
“Yes,” he said, sharply. “Absolutely.”
Beth’s mouth tightened. “Starline,” she said. “That was the cab company.” She stood and left the room.
“Beth, wait.” Jerry took a couple of steps after her, then stopped. Explaining would take more time than he had right now. He had to get on Veronica’s trail while it was still hot.
He absolutely needed her to take out Latham. He’d apologize to Beth later. Get down on his knees if necessary. But there was no safety for any of them until Latham was dead and gone. He checked the cash in his wallet. There was plenty for what he had in mind. He headed for the door.
The back seat of the cab was sticky. Jerry didn’t want to know how it got that way. He’d found out the name of the driver at the Starline central office and had him sent down.
The cabbie was young and Middle Eastern. At first, he could barely speak English. But after Jerry introduced him to the Jackson twins—a trick he’d picked up from Ackroyd-the cabbie became more helpful. He told Jerry how he’d picked up Veronica, described her clothing, the way she smelled, and how she behaved. After a little more financial inducement, the cabbie agreed to drop Jerry off at Veronica’s destination.
They were in an old part of Brooklyn. The red-and-white stone walls were faded, but for the most part clean. Kids with easy smiles played on stoops or out in the streets. The cab eased to a stop.
“Here. It was on this spot.” The cabbie leaned across the seat and pointed through the passenger-side window. “That building. She went into there.” The cabbie turned and smiled. “You are grateful now”
“Unspeakably.” Jerry peeled off another twenty and handed it over. The cabbie certainly had grasped the essence of capitalism. Jerry got out of the cab and walked over to the stoop. He looked up.
Veronica was staring down at him. “Fuck.” He didn’t hear it, but he could read the word on her lips.
This wasn’t going to be easy or fun. He fingered the door and went in. The paint on the walls was fresh, but the overhead light flickered. Jerry walked slowly toward the stairway at the end of the hall. He could hear kids screaming in Spanish inside one of the rooms.
She met him at the landing between the second and third floors. Her teeth were clenched, her eyes wide with anger. “Leave me alone, Jerry. Just leave me the fuck alone.” She said the words slowly. “My family lives here. Do you understand?”
Jerry looked her in the eye and took a step forward, like a kid trying to sneak up on a cat. “He knows who you are, Veronica. He’s going to come after you. Either you help me take Latham out, or you’re as good as dead.”
“What business is that of yours? Maybe I’m tired of living.” She put her hand on his chest and pushed him backward. “There’s plenty of high-priced hookers out there. You don’t need to mess with me anymore.”
“Veronica, look at me. Can you see what’s wrong with me? I’m scared, just plain scared. Latham wants me dead too. I don’t blame you for hating me. I’m not here to dredge up the past. I used you and I’m sorry. I can’t fix what’s already happened.” He was trying to use her again, but this time it was actually for her own good. “He killed Hannah, and he killed my brother. There’s no telling how many others. I’ve been after Latham for months, but I can’t do it on my own.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s the head of the jumpers from the Rox and runs organized crime in this city, to boot. He’s probably the most dangerous, ruthless man either one of us will ever meet.” Jerry extended his palms. “I don’t want to die yet. If you won’t do it for me or yourself, do it for Hannah.” Veronica leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. He could see the beginning of tears. “Leave me alone,” she said. Jerry swallowed hard. He’d never seen Veronica hurting before. She’d always been so tough with him. He went up and put his arm around her. She shrugged it off violently, banging his hand painfully into the plaster.
“Sorry,” Jerry said. “You were really in love with her. I just didn’t understand that until now. I guess I didn’t want to.” He thought of how he’d feel if Beth was killed and someone tried to use that as a carrot on him, then backed away, ashamed. “I won’t bother you anymore. You should get out of town and make a new start somewhere else. if you don’t want my money, I could arrange for a loan.”
“No,” she said.
Jerry turned and walked slowly down the stairs. He was useless to her now. She knew him too well, and he didn’t know her at all. That was probably much more his fault than hers.
“Jerry?” Veronica was looking down at him from the top of the stairs.
“Yes.”
“What do you want me to do?”
Veronica was hard and all business again. “I want you to help me kill him.”
Veronica was already inside. Jerry had fingered the service door to let her in, then walked around to the front of Latham’s apartment building. After a brief conversation with someone upstairs, the doorman had let him in.
According to the old ad campaign, blonds were supposed to have more fun. Somehow, Jerry didn’t expect that was going to be the case tonight. He was young, tawny, and gorgeous. They’d almost had to clean their shorts when he walked into the escort service. He was exactly what Latham wanted, a David Butler look-alike with just enough differences to make it believable.
Veronica met him at the elevator, and they stepped quietly inside. She was wearing a freshly ironed white blouse and navy pants. She fidgeted from one leg to the other as the car moved up the shaft to the penthouse. Jerry had been here before, and for the same reason. To kill Latham.
He’d blown it, though. Zelda had jumped him and only when she freaked out in his body had he been able to get away. He felt better about his chances this time, with Veronica along. All he had to do was take out Zelda. He touched the cloth of his shirt pocket, feeling the packet underneath. He was going to need it.
“I’m going to get the door unlocked and slightly open one way or the other,” he said. “When I do that, move fast.” Veronica nodded.
The elevator glided to a stop, and the doors opened. They stepped out, and Jerry motioned Veronica out of sight. He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and knocked. Zelda opened the door, dressed in sweat clothes. Her eyes widened when she saw Jerry-David, but she quickly hid her surprise with a nasty smile.
Jerry took off his coat and folded it over his arm, then stepped inside.
“Look what we have here,” Zelda said.
Latham emerged from the office, deep in conversation with a hairless pink bat. He looked at Jerry and stopped dead. His mouth hung open for a moment, then he closed it and eased over toward them. He was wearing a black silk robe with silver embroidery, and his hair was carefully blow-dried and combed. “Perfect,” Latham said. “Ideal.”
Jerry looked dubiously at the joker. “Nobody told me this was a group deal. I charge extra for bats.”
“He won’t be staying,” Latham said coldly. He turned his attention to the bat. “Tell the governor that I’ll take care of it.”
The joker half walked and half flopped to the window. He perched momentarily on the sill. “Sorry to miss the fun, guys,” he said. “Maybe next time.” He dropped out of sight, and Jerry heard him flap noisily away.
Jerry put his arm around Zelda, and licked her neck, then bit it. “There’s still plenty of us to make a party.” Zelda grabbed Jerry by the throat and tossed him backward. Jerry’s feet came out from under him, and he bounced across the carpeted floor on his seat.
“Don’t touch me, whore,” Zelda said, wiping her neck, “or I’ll break every bone in your fucking body.” She turned to Latham. “I’m going back to my workout.” Zelda walked from the room.
Latham walked over and helped Jerry to his feet. He stared hard at Jerry’s sculpted features, as if looking for something.
“Is your friend some kind of nutcase?” Jerry asked, throwing his coat on the back of the sofa.
“Zelda is very exceptional ... in her own way.” Latham guided him by the elbow over to the couch. “Please, sit down. I’ll make us a drink.”
Jerry eased back into the soft cushions. They were the only thing comfortable about the situation. “I hope I’m what you had in mind.”
Latham smiled thinly. “Oh, yes. Exactly what I had in mind.” Latham filled two glasses with liquor and sat down next to Jerry on the couch.
Jerry took the glass when it was offered and took a tentative sip. Whiskey he loved; scotch he detested. The liquor burned but didn’t satisfy. Latham tilted his glass up and almost emptied it.
Latham pulled a vial and small spoon from his pocket. He popped the vial open and carefully poured a spoonful, then held it under Jerry’s nose. “Inhale,” . Latham said.
Jerry hesitated, then drew a deep breath. He felt like someone was pulling out his nose hairs from the inside. Something in his brain gave way, and he felt a massive tingle of pleasure. “Jesus,” he said.
Latham snorted a spoonful himself and let out a long breath through his thin lips. “I think God will likely be absent from our company tonight. Just as well.” Latham bent over and put his mouth on Jerry’s, pushing his tongue inside, and ran his hand over Jerry’s crotch.
Jerry felt pinned by both Latham’s mouth and the unreality of the situation. He tried to think of it as the kiss of death for his brother’s murderer. His brain snapped into a memory of Beth’s lips. For a moment, he kissed back.
Latham broke off the kiss and sighed. “It’s a shame.”
“What?” Jerry asked.
“Nothing.” Latham stood. “Let’s go into the bedroom.” Latham walked toward one of the open doors, his silk robe rustling. He stopped in the doorway and looked back at Jerry. Jerry caved in under the stare and followed. The bedcovers were turned back, and the sheets were clean. A red robe and mask hung in the corner.
“Take your clothes off,” Latham said.
Jerry began unbuttoning his shirt. “I forgot my drink in the other room. Back in a minute.”
Latham nodded, unsashed his robe, and laid down on the bed.
Jerry quickly crossed the living room and made it to the door. He unlocked it and opened it a crack. “Now,” he whispered to the outside.
He could hear weights clanking in the room Zelda had gone into. Jerry padded across the carpet and stepped inside. Zelda was bent over with a large dumbell in either hand, doing flies. She looked up when Jerry came in, her face flushed with exertion. Jerry reached in his pocket for the packet and thumbed it open.
“The man wants to see you,” Jerry said.
Zelda continued working her arms. “You’re being paid to please him. So do it.”
Jerry pulled the packet out of his pocket and threw the contents into Zelda’s eyes. She dropped the dumbells and screamed. The powder was finely ground drain cleaner. Jerry had used it once before, in Jokertown. He knew Zelda couldn’t jump what she couldn’t see.
The kick caught him below the ribs and sent him crashing into the wall. His shoulder smashed through the plaster and Sheetrock.
“Kill you,” Zelda said, shaking her head.
Jerry crawled away from her, putting a workout machine between them. The lights flickered and dimmed. Veronica was doing it to Latham. It was all going to work out fine.
Jerry grabbed the machine and pulled himself upright. The barbell sitting on it clanked. Zelda wheeled at the sound and took a step forward. She stepped squarely on one of the dumbells and it slipped underneath her, pitching her forward. Zelda cartwheeled into the machine, and Jerry leapt out of the way. She slammed into the mass of metal, knocking it over with her on top. The barbell tipped and fell. One heavily weighted end thudded into her back. There was a snap. Zelda opened her mouth. Jerry expected a scream, but there was only a low moan.
He backed into the living room slowly, looking away from her. Zelda was one of his least favorite people in the world, but the suffering on her face was more than he could stand to see.
Veronica was sitting on the couch with a gun in her hand. “Did you do it?” Jerry asked.
She shook her head. “I couldn’t. It’s just not in me.” Jerry gritted his teeth. “What about Hannah?” Veronica looked up and gave him a slow stare. “She wouldn’t have been able to either.” She handed him the gun. “You’ll have to take care of it yourself.”
“Fine,” Jerry said, hefting the pistol in his hand. “Get out of here. I’ll meet you at the car.”
Veronica stood and left.
Jerry walked into the bedroom. Latham was lying on the bed. His eyes were closed and his breathing was shallow. Jerry bent over and put the silencer to Latham’s head, then paused. He understood why Veronica couldn’t do it. After he fired the gun, Jerry would never be the same person again. No matter what the justification, killing a helpless person would leave a big scar. He closed his eyes and squeezed the trigger. Nothing.
“Can’t be jammed,” Jerry said, fumbling with the weapon. “Can’t be.”
The hands were around his wrist before Jerry even saw them move. They twisted the gun from his grasp and sent it bouncing to the floor. Latham bounded up, and put the bed between them.
“Who are you working for?” Latham asked. “Tell me, and you might leave here alive.”
Jerry moved around the bed and toward the door. Latham cut him off. “Nobody,” he said.
Latham stared at him for a moment, as if weighing the situation. He head a groan from the exercise room. “What did you do to Zelda?”
Jerry thought he saw fear for a moment in Latham’s face. “She did it to herself, playing with her weights.” He knew that only one of them was going to live. Maybe that was the only way he could turn killer, by counting on his survival instinct. He let his features go and took on his natural face. “Recognize me now?”
Latham sneered. “Strauss the older. In years anyway. I knew there was someone sniffing around the edges of things, but couldn’t ever pin you down. Kenneth would be so proud.”
At the mention of his brother, Jerry bolted at St. John. He slammed into Latham, knocking them both to the floor. Latham took Jerry by the neck and began squeezing, his hands hard and relentless. Jerry aimed a knee at Latham’s groin, but caught him on the inner thigh. He clawed at St. John’s face. The fingers at his throat clutched him tighter. Jerry could feel the muscles in his neck going numb. His vision was blurring. He thought of Kenneth’s shattered body lying in a street. Thought of what would happen to Beth and Veronica if he failed.
Jerry put his index finger into Latham’s ear, and extruded the bone through his own flesh and into Latham’s. His bone snaked through the eardrum and into Latham’s brain. Jerry remembered the egg scrambler and whipped the strand of fingerbone around inside the lawyer’s skull. Latham made a strangled, hissing noise and began twitching.
Jerry twisted away and reshaped his hand. It felt like he’d stuck it into boiling water. He kissed the tip of his finger reflexively, then jerked back. He spat the brain tissue from his mouth.
Jerry looked over at Latham. He wasn’t breathing. He had to be dead. Had to be. Jerry sat down on the bed and took a deep breath. He’d always thought Latham was tougher and smarter than him, but it was St. John dead on the floor. Jerry closed his eyes and put a hand over his mouth, his insides suddenly cold. This was what killing felt like; what it really was. He knew the horror he felt now would be worth the peace it bought down the line, but now all he wanted was to be gone from this place.
He reached over and picked up the gun, tucking it into his pocket. He got up, but turned in the doorway and looked down at Latham. The dead man’s face was all pain, without a trace of peace. Jerry staggered out into the living room and grabbed his coat, then left the apartment. He changed his appearance as the elevator descended. He darkened his skin and hair and added a touch of age. But there was no changing how he felt about what he’d left in the apartment upstairs.
They were walking through her neighborhood in Brooklyn. Veronica’s skin had some lines, of course, but her color was back. Her hair shone in the sunlight.
“How do you feel? I didn’t think you could actually kill anyone. You weren’t up to talking about it the other night.” Veronica waved at a couple of kids playing with balsa wood gliders. They grinned and waved back.
“Not good. I can’t kid myself that murder is okay, but I had to do it. Part of being a grown-up is doing what has to be done. It was him or us.” Jerry shivered, suddenly cold. “I don’t know. Sometimes I’m okay and sometimes I’m not. Eventually, I’ll make my peace with it.”
“I hope so,” Veronica said. “You’re not bad, for a man. You’re a fuckup sometimes, but you’ve got a good heart.” Jerry rubbed the corner of his eye. “Veronica, I wish I’d gotten to know you. I guess it’s too late now”
She smiled. “Probably. I need to start all over again. I’ve spent a lot of years finding out what I hated. I need to find something I can love. I guess that’s why I came back to the old neighborhood. It’s the last place I remember being happy. I want to be happy again.”
“Good luck.” Jerry held out his hand. Veronica took it, and pulled him into a soft hug, then backed away. “If there’s ever anything I can do,” he said.
She nodded and turned away.
Jerry walked to the corner and hailed a cab. He felt like he was going to throw up. He leaned against a street sign and tried to clear his head. A taxi pulled over, and he was in the backseat in an instant. He lay down and wondered about the roaring in his ears. Then he passed out.
The hospital room was as nice as hospital rooms ever get. Jerry pulled the bedcovers up to his chest. He was still cold.
If they didn’t have those stupid backless gowns, he might be able to get warm.
Beth walked in and cocked an eyebrow. “Back in the land of the living, finally.”
“I died and went to heaven,” Jerry said. “It pays to be Episcopalian.”
Beth put her hand on his forehead. “I think your fever’s down from yesterday.” She stroked his arm, carefully avoiding the area near his I. V “You were lucky not to lose that finger. The bone was pretty badly infected.”
Jerry propped himself up on an elbow. “Why did you decide to sleep with me? We didn’t really talk about that.” Beth settled into a chair next to him. “Because no other man could make me stop thinking about you. That hasn’t happened since I first met Kenneth. Don’t know what it is about you Strauss boys, must be good genes. I want you to be part of my life, Jerry.”
“Me too,” he said. “I want that a lot.”
“I’m going back to Chicago, though. I know that now. This town is crazy. It makes everyone in it crazy.” She took his hand. “I want you to come with me, but I want you to think about it first. I want you to be sure.”
“As sure as I ever get about anything.” Jerry looked into her eyes. “I want to come visit real soon. I just might wind up staying for good.”
Beth got up and kissed him lightly on the lips. “Get your rest. You don’t have to decide on anything today. I’m not leaving until you’re completely well.”
Jerry closed his eyes. He was too tired to worry about it. He’d worry about it tomorrow.
Tomorrow was another day.
Jerry stood across the street from Latham’s apartment building. A cool wind stirred up the dry leaves around his feet. The late-September heat had given way, at least temporarily, to the first cold snap of the season. He was dressed in a maintenance man’s outfit. The steel blue .38 was tucked away in his work box, along with a few other things. He was as ready as he was going to get. He waited for the light to turn and walked across the street.
He showed the doorman a fake work order he’d manufactured. The doorman was more bored than suspicious and let him in. Jerry walked quickly to the far elevator and put an oUT of oRDER sign over the button, then pushed the button and stepped into the waiting car. Latham, naturally enough, had the penthouse apartment. Of the two cars, this was one that went all the way to the top. One of the things Jerry had learned about in the last month was how elevators worked. He opened the control panel and set the car to go all the way up. His knees almost gave way as the elevator started. Jerry made his features and skin tone Oriental. He pulled his change of clothes from his work box. It was mostly leather. The finishing touch was a fake immaculate Egrets jacket. He’d had it made from the videotape he’d gotten from Ichiko.
Once fully dressed, he tucked the gun into his jacket. The car stopped. Jerry clipped one of the wires. For now, the elevator was going nowhere. He could rig a bypass in a hurry if it came to that.
Jerry stepped out and walked to Latham’s door. He fingered the lock and let himself in, closing the door softly behind him. The penthouse was quiet. Except for a light in what appeared to be the bedroom, it was dark as well. Jerry took a deep breath, padded across the carpeted floor to the lighted doorway, and stepped in.
Latham was lying naked on the bed. His body was covered with sweat and his hair was a tousled mess. The sheets were knotted on the floor with a red robe. Latham looked lost in a moment of private satisfaction. He glanced up and saw Jerry-the-Egret. His narrow smile slipped. “Who sent you? How the hell did you get in?” Latham’s voice lacked the assurance Jerry was used to hearing.
Jerry pulled the .38, but didn’t point it. “I’ll ask the questions. Tell me about the jumpers.” He had to have the truth before he could shoot Latham. He wouldn’t be able to deal with killing him otherwise.
A young naked woman stepped out of the bathroom. It was the bald-headed girl. She had powerful, welldefined muscles, almost to the point of being unattractive, and bikini-waxed blond pubic hair. Jerry leveled the gun at her chest. He’d been watching for two hours and hadn’t seen her go in. He didn’t know if he could kill a girl. Even if she did have a part in Kenneth’s death.
“He made us,” she said. “All of us. With that.” She sat on the bed, bent over, and kissed Latham’s flaccid penis. It twitched under her tongue.
“Not just yet, Zelda. Business first.” Latham put his hand under Zelda’s chin and pointed her face at Jerry. Jerry felt something that might have been pain if it had lasted more than a few seconds. His vision blurred for an instant. When it cleared, he was looking down at Latham’s penis. There was a pleasant warmth between his legs, like nothing he’d ever felt before. He tried to sit up, but his body felt heavy and clumsy. A hand grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head back.
There was an Egret in the doorway pointing a gun at him. Jerry felt his hands being twisted behind his back. Cold metal surrounded his wrists, and he heard twin clicks. He opened his mouth to speak, but it was his Egret body that screamed.
The Oriental face began to melt and flow. The Egret tore at the satin jacket and shirt, exposing his chest. Breasts began to form there. Jerry’s pirated body closed its eyes and screamed again. He felt another moment of vertigo and found himself staring at Latham and a handcuffed Zelda. She was still screaming. The lawyer pushed her off the bed. Jerry brought his body under control and squeezed his trigger finger, but Zelda had dropped the gun. He ran.
He dove into the elevator and pulled a bypass from his work box. It slipped from his sweaty fingers. He picked it up and clipped it into place, then punched the ground floor. He looked up. Latham had the gun pointed at him. Jerry dove to one side and heard the shot at the same time. The bullet tore into the car wall behind him. The doors closed and it started down.
Jerry changed his clothes and appearance back to the maintenance worker. His insides tingled and his skin was cold. He straightened hImself and took several deep breaths.
It didn’t help. He was still shaking when the elevator doors opened on the ground floor. He walked in measured steps across the lobby and out into the cool New York night.
He stopped at a bar near his apartment and ordered a double. He figured he needed it. Jerry knew he’d been lucky. He hadn’t counted on Zelda being there. But she hadn’t counted on not being able to control his shapechanging ability. Jerry was so used to it himself that he didn’t have to think about it anymore. Without that, he’d have wound up like Kenneth and the rest. Latham probably wouldn’t figure out exactly what happened, but he’d damn sure be paranoid from now on. That would make him even harder to get to.
“Have another?” The bartender looked down at Jerry’s empty glass.
“Why not?” Jerry slammed the whiskey down before the glass could make a ring on the polished wood bar.
He sat down next to the grave and tossed pebbles into the newly cut grass. He didn’t look at Kenneth’s headstone. It made talking to his dead brother seem more stupid than it already was.
“Sorry, I screwed up again,” Jerry said quietly. “I don’t know what to do now. Got any ideas?”
The wind gusted in the treetops, tearing loose leaves with a whistling clatter. He heard a car pull up down the hill. A car door shut. He turned. Beth was walking slowly up the hill. She waved from below the shoulder. It looked like it took all her strength. Jerry stood and started down to meet her. When he reached her, they hugged silently.
“You didn’t answer at home or at the apartment, so I figured you might be here.” The wind whipped her hair into her face; she pushed it back and held it.
“I wish I’d known you were coming. I’d have done something special,” Jerry said.
“I’m not up to anything special right now” She shivered. “I’m not up to staying at the house yet, either. Can we go to your apartment?”
Jerry blinked and opened his mouth, but said nothing. “It’s not that,” Beth said. “I just want to be with somebody who cares about me. I just want to be held.” Jerry nodded, both disappointed and relieved. She’d given him a big compliment if he was willing to see it that way. “Let’s go,” he said.
Jerry did his best to clean up the apartment while Beth unpacked her luggage. He tossed all the dirty clothes in the hamper and stacked his film magazines and books at right angles. Beth opened a drawer and giggled, then held up a pair of crotchless, tiger-print panties. “What’s this?” Jerry covered his mouth for a moment, then recovered. “Relics of a bygone age.” He sighed, remembering. “Veronica.”
Beth set them back into the drawer. “Did you really love her?”
“I thought I did. I obsessed about her. I wanted to make her happy. I damn sure wanted to fuck her.” He shrugged. “I’ve learned just enough about love to be very confused about it. Maybe I’ve got ape residue in that part of me, or something.”
Beth smiled. “I think that part of you is fine. You just don’t know what to do with it.”
“Neither does anybody else, apparently. I haven’t had a date in months.” Jerry sat down on the couch. He and Veronica had used it often. He tried not to think about that.
“Give it time.” Beth sat down on the edge of the bed and shook her head. “Way to go, Beth. Say one thing and do another.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Well, when I was in Chicago, I spent some time with an old boyfriend and we wound up in bed together. I think he was just trying to make me feel better.” She bit on an already ragged fingernail. “I knew it wouldn’t help, but I guess I had to prove it to myself anyway. The sex was nice, but it really didn’t matter. When it was over, Kenneth was still gone. And I’ll never get him back.”
Jerry got up quickly and walked over to her, but she was already crying. He didn’t want to start himself. He wanted to be strong for her. “I wish ...” There was nothing he could say that would comfort her, and he knew it.
Beth leaned into him and held on tight. He could feel the warmth of her tears through his shirt. “There are some things you can’t really share, and I have to sweat out the worst of this on my own. But, Jesus, I’m glad you’re here.” Jerry held her for a few minutes, stroking her hair, not saying anything. She stopped crying and looked up at him with puffy eyes.
“You want a Coke, or something?” He needed something himself, but wasn’t going to drink in front of her. “No.” Beth pulled away from him, picked up her overnight bag, and headed into the bathroom. “I just need to go to bed. It’s been a long day.”
“It’s been a long year,” he said. “And I could use some sleep, too.”
Jerry told her his entire supply of stupid jokes before they got into bed. He was tense and wanted to defuse the situation if he could. It had been months, since Fantasy, since he’d actually been in bed with a woman.
Beth turned out the lights and curled up facing away from him. She pulled his arm around her and kissed him lightly on the back of the hand.
“I love you a lot, Jerry.”
“I love you, too, sis.” She’d never felt more like family to him than now.
Beth slipped into sleep quickly. Jerry had tried for hours, but just couldn’t manage to relax. His penis had gotten hard a couple of times, but he clamped down on it with his legs until it calmed back down.
Finally, he went to the bathroom for a couple of sleeping pills. He washed them down with a drink of water and looked at himself in the mirror. His face was the same. It hadn’t shown a day of age since Tachyon saved him from apehood. He felt changed, though. Felt like he finally had something to offer people, like his affection and caring made a difference to them. Maybe this was what growing up was.
He resisted the temptation to change his face to Bogart’s and said, “Here’s looking at you, kid.” He flipped off the light and went back to bed.
He settled carefully in between the sheets. Beth moaned and jerked her free arm. Jerry took her gently by the wrist and pulled it down to her side, then kissed her on the back of the neck. She quieted and her breathing became even again. He looked outside. The sky was turning dull red behind the curtains. He hadn’t realized it was that late. Jerry pressed his body close to Beth, closed his eyes, and gave sleep another try.
The left side of Tachyon’s desk was littered with charts and paper. The right was almost bare. Jerry was trying hard not to look at the prosthetic hand, but his perverse side demanded a glance or two. Tachyon hadn’t caught him at it. There was a visible hardness to the plastic that was out of place on the alien, and the color was a flesh tone or two off.
“How is your adjustment coming, Jeremiah?” Tachyon looked at Jerry and then glanced out his office window into Jokertown.
“Fine. I mean, there’s rough spots here and there.” Jerry smiled. Tachyon looked even more tired than usual. His already pale skin had less color and his red hair was dull and poorly kept, at least for Tachyon.
“You’re sure. You seem a bit ... withdrawn.”
Jerry always felt as transparent as Chrysalis’ skin when talking to Tachyon. But Chrysalis was dead. So was Jerry’s pretense that life was wonderful. “Well, I just, you know, sometimes I think I don’t relate well to women. They make me feel inadequate. Worse than that, they make me feel needy. I’d give my—” Jerry caught himself in time. “I just want somebody to see me the way I am and love me for it.”
Tachyon nodded slowly. “Only what we all want, Jeremiah. I suspect you are, in fact, very well loved. Perhaps you’re simply unaware of it. Try to temper your patience with the knowledge that love often comes when you’ve tired of looking for it. As for alienation from the opposite sex, we all deal with that, too. I seem to have specialized in it myself. Of course, being from Takis, I have my own built-in excuse.”
It wasn’t what Jerry wanted to hear. He was tired of trying to be patient. But he hadn’t expected Tachyon to turn over his little black book either. Not that any woman could keep him from thinking about Veronica. “Sounds like good advice, I guess. Easier to say than do, though.” Sirens passed by outside. Jerry glimpsed red light flashing on the side of a building the next block over. Tachyon looked, too. Jerry had never seen the blinds closed on that window, even though the only things visible were beat-up buildings, garbage, the occasional car, and jokers. Jerry only came to Jokertown to visit the clinic once a month.
“Something else,” Jerry said, trying to regain Tachyon’s attention. “My power is coming back.”
Tachyon looked at him for a long moment. “It never went away, Jeremiah. You were traumatized so severely that you ceased to trust it. That trust must be coming back for your shape-changing ability to be manifesting itself again. If you’re pleased, then I’m pleased for you. The current political climate being what it is, you might do well to keep this to yourself. The public thinks your ace is gone. Maintaining that image is in your best interest, believe me.”
“Right.” Jerry could tell Tachyon was ready for him to leave. He reached in his coat pocket and pulled out a check, then placed it carefully on the left side of the desk. “Here’s September’s donation.”
Tachyon picked up the folded-over check and clumsily opened it with his one good hand. He nodded and smiled. “This does more good than you know, Jeremiah. A few dozen more like you and the clinic might actually cover expenses.”
“I’m glad to do it,” Jerry said. It was true. There were so few places where he knew his money was well spent, and two thousand a month was a drop in the Strauss family bucket.
The door opened and a woman in a lab smock walked in. She had dark hair and a patch over one eye. She looked past Jerry at Tachyon. “Two more beatings,” she said. Her voice was restrained, but angry. “One of them might make it. The other ...” She rubbed her forehead. Jerry backed away and moved around her toward the office door. Tachyon motioned him to wait.
“Jeremiah, this is our new chief of surgery here, Dr. Cody Havero. Doctor, meet a friend of the clinic.” He held up the check. “And a patron as well, Jeremiah Strauss.”
Cody turned and looked at him. She was very pretty, for an authority figure. Cody offered a hand and a strained smile. Jerry shook her hand and smiled back. Her grip was strong and sure. Exactly the way he imagined a doctor’s hands should be.
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Strauss.”
“My pleasure, Doctor.” Jerry was pleased he’d called her by her title. She was both threatening and comforting, and certainly physically attractive in spite of the eye patch.
He damn sure didn’t want her first impression of him to be a rich, sexist jerk.
“See you next month, Jeremiah,” Tachyon said. “Unless you need me for anything. If so, just give me a call.”
“You’ll be at Aces High next week, won’t you? It’s my first chance to go to one of Hiram’s Wild Card Day dinners.”
Tachyon sighed. “Yes, for Hiram’s sake, I’ll be there. Although I can’t imagine it will be a very festive occasion.” Jerry nodded and backed out the door, closing it behind him. He got the impression that Tachyon wanted to be alone with Cody. Not that Jerry blamed him. He imagined Veronica on black silk sheets, wearing an eye patch and nothing else.
Stop it, he thought. She’s canceled out on you two of the last three times. Just find somebody else. Somebody you don’t have to pay. How hard can it be?
“As hard as me, kid,” said a Bogart voice in his head.
Aces High was a smorgasbord of sight and sound. The smells of fresh bread, fine meat in wine sauces, and expensive perfume assaulted his nostrils. The people were out of the ordinary, too. But that was always the case at Hiram’s Wild Card Day dinner. They’d gotten there early. Both he and Beth had wanted to see all the notables make their entrances. Kenneth hadn’t been particularly happy about Jerry borrowing Beth for the evening, but refused to come with them, saying there was too much work at the office.
Jerry stood up. “Want anything in the way of an appetizer?”
Beth sighed. “No. I’ll save it for the main course.” She waved him away.
Jerry wandered slowly over to a large table covered with salads, pates, breads, and a few things he didn’t recognize as food. There was a crystal mobile of the Four Aces and Tachyon over it. There were also holograms of many of the more famous aces on the walls. Jerry knew better than to look for an image of himself. He picked up a plate and eased in across from Fantasy, who had a young man on either arm. Jerry had met her on the Stacked Deck world tour. Although his memory of that period was fuzzy, he did recall Fantasy as one of the most obviously sexual women he’d ever seen. Tonight she was wearing a long, pearl-colored skirt and matching semitransparent top. The dark nipples on her small breasts were all Jerry could see when he looked in her direction. He hoped Beth hadn’t noticed him staring at the glamorous ace. Jerry put some pasta salad on his plate and turned to get some spinach quiche.
A brown-haired man with quick eyes and an easy smile leaned in next to him. “Real men don’t eat quiche. At least real men who want to impress Fantasy.”
Jerry put the serving spoon back in the quiche and looked down the table at the rest of the spread. “Thanks, I guess.”
The man set down his plate, which was piled high with a little of everything, and offered his hand. “Jay Ackroyd.”
Jerry shook it. “Jerry Strauss.” Ackroyd looked like he couldn’t place the name. “I used to be the Projectionist, then I turned into the giant ape. Now, I’m just rich.” Ackroyd grinned. “Rich is plenty in this town.” He reached in his pocket and pulled out a card. “If you ever need any PI work done, let me know. I could use a rich client for a change. Good luck with Fantasy if you decide to be that brave. I’d almost be afraid to get lucky with her myself.”
Jerry took the card and slipped it into the jacket pocket of his tux. The room became suddenly quiet. A man walked in slowly, limping a bit. He looked fairly normal, but Jerry heard the word “joker” whispered by someone, followed shortly by the name “Pretorius.” The buzz of conversation that started up had an edge of hostility. Jerry took advantage of the distraction to fill his plate, then he slipped back to his table, where Beth was still going over the menu.
Jerry hadn’t seen Hiram yet, but that was no surprise. Killing Chrysalis, the Mistress of Jokertown, had kept his name in the news. The joker community had lined up against Hiram immediately. The media were being less than kind as well. The mood was ugly, and the trial hadn’t even started yet. Still, it was unlikely that this Wild Card Day dinner would turn out as badly as the one two years before, when the Astronomer had crashed the party. Jerry was definitely glad to have missed that one.
A cool, unsteady breeze blew in off the terrace. Jerry set his menu to one side. Being rich and touched by the wild card had its advantages.
“I think I’m going to go with the filet mignon,” he said. “How about you?”
Beth looked up, chewing her lip. She was wearing a black calf-length skirt and lavender blouse. “I see looking at Miss Tits over there has you in the mood for red meat.”
“God, can’t I get away with anything around you? If you were a guy, you’d look!”
Beth smiled. “I’m a woman and I still looked. Just jealous, I guess. I wish I had the body and the attitude to wear that kind of outfit.” She set down the menu. “I think I’ll pass on the main course and just wander over for a fruit salad. Fear of cellulite is a terrible thing. Lesser women have been broken by it, believe me.”
“You have to have dessert, though.”
“Well, if you insist. But don’t tell Kenneth. He still has illusions of me regaining my schoolgirl figure.”
“You look terrific.” Jerry was about to be more specific when he saw a couple being seated a few tables away. The man was tall and thin, with dark hair. His eyes were luminous and the air seemed to swim around him. The woman with him was wearing a red silk dress that looked spray-painted on. She was gorgeous. It was Veronica. Jerry turned his chair away from them. It obviously wasn’t that Veronica didn’t want to get fucked. She just didn’t want to get fucked by him.
“You okay?” Beth touched his hand.
“Yeah. I was just thinking about some stuff. You know, I have to do something with my life.”
“Right,” she said.
He knew she wasn’t fooled, but appreciated that she just let it go.
They held the ceremonies for Tachyon. Jerry was surprised the woman with him wasn’t Cody. Maybe it was just a professional relationship. There were empty tables.
As far as Jerry knew, that was a first for a Wild Card Day dinner. Shortly after Tachyon’s arrival Hiram made his entrance. He was wearing a magnificently tailored dark blue suit, but looked thinner than when Jerry had seen him on the tour.
Hiram raised his glass and paused for a moment, waiting for his guests to follow suit. “To Jetboy,” he said. “To Jetboy,” Jerry and Beth said along with all the others. They clinked glasses and drank the toast.
Jerry heard Veronica laugh. She was probably doing it just to annoy him. No. More likely she was so busy thinking about sucking her date’s prick that she hadn’t even noticed him.
“Thank you all for coming,” Hiram continued. “ I hope you all enjoy your meal, on this, our special day. May be the coming year be kind to us all.”
There was a smattering of applause. Hiram walked over to Tachyon’s table, shook the alien’s good hand, then went into the kitchen.
“Doesn’t he usually float up to the ceiling or something?” Beth asked.
“Yeah. Maybe he just doesn’t feel like it’s appropriate. I think Hiram’s a bit concerned what people are thinking of him right now,” Jerry said. “The whole Chrysalis thing has to be a nightmare for him.”
“Worse for her, bro. She’s the one who got turned into pate.”
Jerry started to say something, but Beth interrupted. “No. You don’t have to say it. I feel bad already. He seems like a very nice man. But aces aren’t always good guys, you know”
“I know”
“Bush is going to win the election, and if you think things are hard on wild cards now, just wait. Wild-card chic is going to be stone-cold dead before his term is over.”
“It could be worse than the fifties.” Beth reached over and touched his face. “With your history, I just don’t want you to get hurt.”
Jerry smiled. He ate it up when she acted concerned over him. If only Veronica cared even half that much. “Thanks. I think I’ll be okay.”
Their waiter walked over. “What will you have tonight, madam?”
“ I think I’ll have the fruit salad,” Beth said.
He’d promised himself he wouldn’t think about veronica. Three nights after the party he was sitting at home. Kenneth and Beth were chewing over the implications of a Bush presidency. Dukakis’ pardon of Willie Horton, a joker who’d been convicted of rape, seemed to be the final nail in the coffin. The revolving-door ad, showing homicidal jokers being spilled out into the street, had been a master stroke. The Democrats were indignant, but the ad affected the public in the desired fashion. Jerry found it all too depressing. He called up Ichiko and Veronica was available.
Jerry was sure she hadn’t recognized him. He’d thought of giving himself a male-model look, but settled on a more rugged face. His hair was dark and straight; he could do that now, too. Veronica looked almost the same as before. Her white cotton dress revealed just enough to get a man’s attention without telling him too much. Jerry knew what she looked like naked, but remembering wasn’t enough. Not tonight. Tonight he wanted to be inside her.
Taking her to a movie was probably a mistake. If anything could tip her to who he was, that was it. Still, he wanted to see Demme’s Joker Mama on the big screen. He was sick of video.
“A friend of mine recommended you,” Jerry said. “You were at the Wild Card Day dinner with him. He said you were terrific.”
“You know Croyd?”
“Slightly,” Jerry said. Croyd had to be Croyd Crenson, the Sleeper. Jerry had heard a few things about him, mostly bad. Obviously, Veronica wasn’t looking for a nice guy.
On the screen a tight-knit group of jokers in human masks was holding up a bank, only to be interrupted by a duck-faced and mouse-faced duo with the same idea.
Jerry put his arm around Veronica and gave her shoulder a squeeze. She flinched. After a long moment she reached up and started stroking his hand.
She knows it’s me, he thought. Her brain may not have figured it out yet, but her body knows it’s me. He felt a chill, like something had gone bad inside him.
“Excuse me,” he said, leaning in close. Her perfume was different from the expensive French stuff he’d bought her. “I’m not feeling well. I’d like to take you home.”
Veronica looked up, surprised. Jerry pressed two hundred-dollar bills into her palm. Her hand was cold. “For your time,” Jerry said, in a voice too close to his own. “I’m sorry.”
He took her by the hand and led her out of the theater. Gunshots came from the screen behind them. The lobby smelled of overly buttered popcorn and stale candy. He excused himself, went into the men’s room, and vomited as quietly as possible.
She was gone when he came back out.
The courtroom was jammed with people. There seemed to be almost as many reporters as had been at Bush’s inauguration two weeks before. The rest were friends, or enemies, of Hiram’s, or just the idly curious. There were no jokers in the room, Pretorius being a notable exception. Kenneth had managed to get Jerry a seat.
“All rise.”
The judge walked in and the noisy courtroom grew silent. The old magistrate made her way to the bench and sat down slowly.
The judge cleared her throat. “In the case of the People of the State of New York v Hiram Worchester, I understand that the prosecution has seen fit to reduce the charge to involuntary manslaughter. Is that correct?”
The prosecutor rose. “Yes, your honor.”
“And how does the defense plead?” the judge asked. Pretorius arose. “Guilty, your honor.”
“A plea bargain, as anticipated,” Kenneth said, above the muttering of the courtroom crowd.
“Mr. Worchester,” the judge said, “please rise.” Hiram complied, standing as straight as his size would allow.
“Given your stature in the community and the unusual circumstances involved in this case, I see no real benefit to yourself or society in imprisoning you. Therefore, I sentence you to five years probation. Any use of your wild-card ability during that time will constitute a violation of your probation. An individual with your unique gift should be ashamed that it was used to take another life. Society has grown tired of such foolishness. Hopefully, in the future you will be a positive example for us all. If not, you will find the court unsympathetic.”
Hiram nodded weakly and wiped his brow. Pretorius stood and put his arm around him.
The heavy wooden doors slammed open at the back of the room. A four-armed joker man pushed his way inside. “Murderer. You’re nothing but a rich murderer.”
Two officers grabbed the joker, pushed him to the floor, and cuffed him.
“We’re going to get you, Worchester,” the joker screamed as they dragged him from the room. “We’re going to see you dead, just like Chrysalis.”
“Jesus.” Jerry nudged Kenneth. “Chrysalis is dead and it was an accident. Don’t they know that? Hiram was crazy. He’s suffered enough.”
“Possibly,” Kenneth said. “Though the people who cared about Chrysalis might disagree with you. As they say, it depends on whose ox is getting gored.”
Pretorius and Hiram began pushing their way through the crowd toward the doorway. Reporters clustered around them like sperm on an unfertilized egg.
“I wouldn’t want to be in Jokertown tonight,” Kenneth said.
“No kidding,” Jerry said.
David Butler was driving a beat-up old Chevy. That was weird enough. Jerry hadn’t intended to end up in Jokertown and certainly wasn’t happy about it. Neither was his cabbie. He’d decided this was a good time to check up on David again. Jerry had tailed him a couple of times since losing him at the peculiar club, and had wound up bored to death. Once he’d even ended up at the opera.
They passed a building with a big red heart painted on the wall. Valentine’s Day was less than three weeks away and the only person he wanted to give flowers or candy to was Beth. That would just piss Kenneth off. Not that anything had been said along those lines, but he’d detected a touch of resentment from his brother every now and then. That was the least of his worries now. He was tailing a possible murderer through Jokertown in an off-the-meter cab. Besides, it was beginning to snow.
He’d almost decided to give up and tell the driver to take him home when a car at the far end of the street exploded into fire. David’s car skidded to a stop, straddling the curb. Jerry’s driver slammed on his brakes and crashed into a light post. Steam began hissing from under the car’s hood. Debris from the flaming car clattered onto the cab. A large group of jokers poured out of a side street. Several of them noticed the cars and pointed.
“Holy shit,” Jerry said. “Get us the hell out of here.” The cabbie turned the key. There was a brief clicking sound, then nothing. “She’s shot. We’ll have to run for it.” Jerry clambered out of the car. David had abandoned the Chevy and was ducking down a side street. The group of jokers was moving toward them. Jerry couldn’t understand what they were saying, but from the tone it wasn’t friendly. He sprinted after David. A knot of jokers moved to cut him off, but Jerry turned the corner a good ten yards ahead.
He began to change. Jerry thickened his brow ridge and lumped up his skull a bit. He put ugly knots on the backs of his knuckles. It wasn’t much, but should keep him from being taken for a nat.
David, still running, turned and saw Jerry and the pursuing jokers. David stepped it up and began to put some distance between them. Jerry gritted his teeth and ran harder. The cold air stung his throat and chest, and he had to be careful to keep his Italian leather shoes from slipping on the ice-slicked pavement. The snow began to thicken and swirl in the wind.
There were screams up ahead. David rounded a corner and disappeared from view. Jerry kicked hard after him with the last of his strength. He slipped down as he turned the corner and found himself at the edge of a crowd. There were at least two or three hundred jokers jamming the street. Several cars were on fire, casting a flickering glow against the surrounding buildings. A large, overstuffed dummy was being thrown around and torn at. Worchester in effigy, no doubt.
Jerry couldn’t see David, but there was an open alley mouth nearby. Jerry walked over and slipped into the alley. It was empty. At least as far as he could tell. A few feet down there was a door hanging halfway off its hinges. Jerry pushed it open and stepped inside. He waited a few moments for his eyes_ to adjust, but still couldn’t make out much. He stepped out of the dimly lit doorway and strained to hear any movement inside the room, but there was only a faint dripping noise. After a few long moments, Jerry turned back to the door and was about to push it open when a group of nats walked past. There were five of them, two boys and three girls. They were young, barely twenty, if that. One of the women had spiky dark hair, the other was shaved bald. They were flanking the blond boy who was obviously their leader. David.
The crowd of jokers roared. Jerry peered over the kids and saw the mob part. A nine-foot-tall joker with green skin moved toward the .center of the mob. It was Troll, and perched on his shoulders was Tachyon. There were a few angry shouts, but most of the jokers got quiet. Jerry heard a growling noise behind him. He turned and saw a pair of green eyes staring at him. They were too far apart to belong to a house cat. Jerry lengthened and pointed his own teeth. If there was a fight, he wanted to have some kind of weapon. One of his fangs cut painfully into his lower lip.
“Listen, my friends,” Tachyon shouted. Jerry could barely make out the words, but calling the jokers his friends was being a little presumptuous after what had happened with Hartmann in Atlanta. “I understand your anger, but this is not the answer. The fires you’re starting here will only burn down your own homes and kill your own people. Hiram Worchester is not your enemy. Ignorance and blind prejudice are the true foes every joker must face. And the only way to defeat them is through decency and dignity.”
“Let’s have some fun,” David whispered.
“Go back to your homes now,” Tachyon continued. “Set an example for everyone, whether they’re jokers, nats, or aces.” Tachyon raised his arms in a pleading manner. David’s two girls grasped him tightly by the shoulders and his body shuddered.
Troll laughed. He picked Tachyon up by the back of his lab jacket and let him dangle, feet kicking. The crowd began to yell.
“Troll,” Tachyon screamed. “What are you doing?” Troll tossed Tachyon cartwheeling into the mass of jokers. Tachyon landed amid a tangle of bodies. Jerry could see him struggling to get back up.
“Let’s build a fire the Fatman can see all the way up at Aces High,” Troll shouted. The crowd howled its approval and fists punched the air.
Jerry heard another growl behind him, closer this time. He took a deep breath and bolted from the door, slamming into David and the two girls, knocking all three of them out into the street. Troll saw the commotion at the edge of the crowd and looked directly at them, his face showing panic. The giant joker swayed for a moment, then collapsed.
The girl with the spiked hair helped David up. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
Jerry rolled over and saw the bald girl standing over him. She raised her leg to kick him in the face. Jerry twisted out of the way and took the blow on his shoulder, then bit through her blue jeans into her calf. The girl screamed and tore away from him, then turned and limped after her retreating friends. Jerry spat the taste of blood from his mouth and struggled to his feet. Jokers were running everywhere. The fires were spreading. Troll wobbled into a standing position and moved toward Tachyon, who was still shielding himself with mind-controlled jokers. Troll cut his way through to the Takisian and gently lifted Tachyon up onto his shoulders. Tachyon gave him a questioning look, then motioned him to get moving. Troll shouldered his way back through the dispersing crowd. The clinic was only a few blocks away. Jerry figured it was the safest place to be and began plowing through the jokers after Troll.
Jerry heard sirens from several different directions, all getting closer. He bounced his way to the edge of the mob and onto the sidewalk just as a police car swung into view. A bullet slammed into the brick wall behind him, spraying him with tiny rock fragments. Jerry didn’t know who’d fired the shot and didn’t want to find out. He dodged down a side street and headed for the clinic.
Blaise made Jerry nervous, scared him even. The red-haired boy stayed at the window for half an hour, watching the rioting with a smile on his face. Sirens, both police and ambulance, had been passing by all night. Once, Blaise turned to Jerry and said, “Fire and blood. So much of it. So beautiful.” Other than that particular twisted observation, he’d seemed to regard Jerry as invisible. Jerry sat there in silence, folding and unfolding his check.
It was 2:00 A. M. before Tachyon got back to his office. The right side of his face was bruised and puffy and his good arm was in a sling. “You should have waited, Jeremiah,” he said as he collapsed into his chair. “On a night like this, money is less of a concern.”
“It’s not about money.” Jerry handed the check over. “But I might as well give it to you anyway. I was doing something else down here. How is Troll, by the way?”
“Confused and embarrassed. He doesn’t remember throwing me. I went into his mind and there’s simply a blank spot during that period. Like he was blacked out.”
Tachyon touched the purple skin above his eye and winced. ‘The timing for such an incident couldn’t have been worse.
“Could we talk alone for a few minutes?” Jerry looked over at Blaise.
Blaise glanced hatefully at Jerry, then looked at Tachyon, who was pointing to the door. The younger Takisian stood his ground for a moment, then stalked out of the room.
Tachyon sighed. “Now, what is it you want to discuss?”
“What happened to Troll was no accident. He wasn’t in his own body when it threw you. Somebody else was.”
“You’ve heard the reports about people having their bodies switched with someone else? There was a bank robbery—”
“Yes,” Tachyon interrupted. “We have a mother and daughter in our psychiatric ward who claim their minds were somehow switched by a third party. Do you believe that’s what happened to Troll?”
“I know it,” Jerry said. “And I think I know who’s behind it, too.”
“Who?” Tachyon snapped out of his exhausted state. “David Butler. He works at my brother’s law firm, Latham, Strauss.” Jerry leaned forward in his chair. “I’ve been tailing him off and on, and he was at the riot tonight with some of his friends.”
Tachyon sighed and nodded. “A year ago I might have been tempted to intervene myself, but I’ve seen the folly of that. I think our best course is to turn Mr. Butler in to the authorities. You’re not making any of this up?”
“Of course not,” Jerry said. “I don’t go around accusing people of being criminals unless I’m sure of it. My brothers a lawyer.”
Tachyon pushed the intercom button on his phone. “Could you get me Lieutenant Maseryk?”
Jerry wasn’t sure this was such a good idea, but Tachyon seemed sold on it. What kind of prison could hold David anyway?
Jerry was sitting on the couch outside his brother’s office. Presumably, he was there to have lunch with Kenneth. But he was really there to see the look on David’s face when the police came for him. He’d made Tachyon find out for him where and when the arrest would be made. It was a small price to pay for the information he’d provided. Seeing the young Adonis arrested would provide him with some much-needed satisfaction.
He was thumbing through a copy of Aces. There was a paragraph on him in the “Where Are They Now?” section. They’d also printed a picture of Jerry as the giant ape with the word “retired” underneath. Little did they know.
The doors opened and two detectives walked in. At least Jerry assumed that was who they were.
“Could you ask David Butler to come out and see us?” the older of the two asked while flashing a badge. “It’s an official matter.”
The secretary made a quick call and David appeared moments later. He stopped short and frowned when he saw the policemen, then recovered.
“David Butler?”
“Yes, how can I help you?”
“We’d like to ask you some questions.” The policemen walked up to him. “If that’s all right with you?”
“Certainly,” David said stiffly. He turned to the secretary. “Tell Mr. Latham I may be out all afternoon.”
“Of course,” she said.
“Shall we go?” David asked.
The detectives stood on either side of David and walked him from the room.
Jerry sighed. He’d hoped that David would react a little more, not that he’d expected him to break down and confess. But a little whimpering would have been nice.
Hopefully, that would come later. Jerry was only sorry he wouldn’t be there to see it.
He was asleep when the phone rang. Jerry picked it up and yawned into the receiver. “Sorry, hello.”
“Jeremiah.” It was Tachyon. His voice was somber.”I ‘m afraid I have some bad news.”
Jerry sat up. “Not too bad, I hope. I’m not sure I’d be up for that.”
“David has escaped.”
“What?” Jerry yelled without meaning to. “How did it happen?”
“The police were interrogating him and getting nowhere, so they decided to call in a skimmer, someone who can pick up surface thoughts.” Tachyon paused. “David panicked and switched bodies with one of the officers. He made the man knock out his partner, then returned to his own body. The officer blacked out from the shock. Then, apparently, David just walked out. No one has seen him since.”
“Great, Doc.” Jerry didn’t want to sound angry, but he was. “Thanks for calling.”
“I’m sorry, Jeremiah. I did what I thought was best.”
“I know. Good-bye. “ Jerry hung up and flipped through his Rolodex for Jay Ackroyd’s number. Maybe Jay could get a lead. If not, it was out of Jerry’s hands.
Jerry sat on the couch in his projection room, massaging his crotch. He’d watched the first half of Jokertown, but had stopped when Nicholson got his nose slit. It was just too damn depressing. He’d popped in a porn video, but it wasn’t doing much for his morale, either. He had another porn movie, jokers and Blondes, but that might be a little weird for his taste.
He turned off the TV and sighed. He’d had a couple of shots of whiskey and his brain felt as soft as his penis was hard. He thought of Kenneth and Beth upstairs, probably fucking like weasels. “Enjoy yourselves. Don’t think of poor, old Jerry. Have an orgasm for me.”
He’d considered sneaking up to their bedroom door and listening on several occasions, but had never actually done it. Maybe tonight would be the night. He got his feet under him, wandered into the living room and up the stairs. He stopped at the top and steadied himself on the banister. Beth was probably a great fuck. It would be consistent with her character. She was great at everything else. He took a step toward their bedroom door.
No, he thought, you’re not that far gone yet. It’s none of your damn business. Shame on you.
Jerry turned and headed for the upstairs bathroom. He quickly stripped and turned on the shower. The water was cold, like the air outside, but it didn’t seem to help.
The late-afternoon sunshine warmed them. She lay naked on the bed, hands folded on her stomach, eyes closed. He looked down the outline of her body, trying to hold on to the ecstasy and contentment he’d felt with her only moments before. But it was already slipping away. Women kept it a bit longer. Afterglow. But they lost it, too.
“You could stay awhile,” Jerry said. He tried to make the four words sound like it would be more fun than two people could stand. Not that they’d been pushing the limit in that area lately.
“Nope.” Veronica opened her eyes and sat up, her long, sweat-soaked brown hair plastered to her face and neck. Jerry hoped it was his technique and not the August heat seeping in. She waited a few seconds, then stood and walked into the bathroom, closing the door after her. “Call me a cab.”
“Okay, you’re a cab.” Jerry hadn’t expected a laugh and wasn’t disappointed. He heard her turn on the shower. He pulled on his shorts and walked across the carpeted floor into the next room. A five-hundred-dollar bill was in the top drawer of the mahogany bedroom dresser. Along with a new pair of black silk panties and matching underwire bra with cutout front. It was their ritual. Maybe she’d wear the lingerie next time, maybe not.
He picked up the phone and paused for a second, stopping his finger from making a rotary motion. He hadn’t adjusted to push buttons yet. Twenty-plus years as a giant ape could do that to you. A cold, sick feeling spread through him. Even Veronica couldn’t help when it hit him. He tried hard to push the thoughts away, but that only made it worse when they finally broke through. The world had changed during those years, drastically and unalterably. His parents had moved to Pass Christian, Mississippi, and been killed in Hurricane Camille. Some idiot psychic had told them he’d been kidnapped and taken there. The bodies wound up in a tree three miles inland. All the time he was in Central Park Zoo, fifty feet tall and covered with hair. He bit his lip and punched in the numbers.
“Starline Cab,” said a bored voice on the other end of the line.
“Thirteen East Seventy-seventh Street. A lady will be waiting.”
A pause. “That’s Thirteen East Seventy-seventh. Five minutes. Thank you.” Click.
Jerry walked back into the bedroom and stretched out on the bed. The sunshine drove the cold from his skin, but not his insides.
Veronica stepped out of the bathroom. She picked up her clothes and pulled them on in a quick, awkward manner.
“It’s not against the law for you to stay sometime,” he said. “We could go out to dinner every now and then. Or a movie.”
“If it’s not illegal, I don’t bother with it.” She turned her back on him to button her blouse.
“Yeah.” He rolled over on his stomach, not wanting her to see the pain on his face. She could be a real bitch at times. Most times, nowadays.
“Sorry” She ran a finger down his calf. “I’ll see what I can work out, but no promises. I’m a busy girl.”
The intercom buzzed.
Jerry sat up straight. Almost nobody ever visited him here, except Veronica. He ran across the apartment to the intercom and pushed the button. “Hello.”
“Jerry, this is Beth. I’ll bet you forgot about the fundraiser tonight. You can’t abandon me to all those lawyers and politicians.”
“Oh, Jesus. I did forget. Hold on. I’ll be right down.” Jerry walked quickly over to the closet and snatched out a shirt and pants. “My sister-in-law. You should meet her. You’d like her.”
“A lawyer’s wife?” Veronica shook her head. “You must be kidding.”
“You might be surprised. She’s really terrific.”
“I’m out of here,” said Veronica, heading for the door. Jerry struggled into his alligator shoes and hopped across the carpet after her. “Okay, I love you.”
Veronica waved without turning around and closed the door behind her.
Jerry sighed and went into the bathroom. He combed his too-red hair and dabbed on a few drops of cologne. He heard the elevator stop. He waited a few seconds until it headed back down. It wouldn’t do for Beth to see him with Veronica, who’d probably just say something snotty.
He checked to make sure he had his wallet and keys, then hustled out into the hall and punched the elevator button.
Beth was waiting for him downstairs. She was wearing a floral print shirt and light blue pants. Her blond hair hung just past her shoulders.
“Let’s get moving, bro. I’m double-parked.” She grabbed him by the elbow and guided him toward the door. “I just saw a cute little brunette number leave.” She arched an eyebrow. “Anybody I should know?”
He did his best to look shocked. “Nope. Anybody I should know?”
Beth smiled. “You could do a lot worse. You probably have too.”
“A safe bet. Let’s go and get this over with.”
The ballroom was filled with smoke and noisy, rich Democrats, most of them trying not to appear drunk. Yet. Koch and Jesse Jackson had appeared together earlier in the day to show Democratic solidarity, such as it was. There was a rumor that Jackson might show up to speak, but it wasn’t in the itinerary. Jerry hated going anywhere he was required to wear a tux, but Beth had promised him three movie dates in return.
The three of them were the only ones at their table. Kenneth had his arm around Beth, whose shoulders were bare except for the thin straps of her blue silk dress. Jerry was jealous. He and Veronica were never to appear in public together. Veronica had made that much clear.
“I can’t believe the party nominated Dukakis,” Kenneth said. “Even Richard Nixon could beat him into the ground.”
“Bad luck’at the convention,” Beth said. “Hartmann might have had a chance.”
“Then again he might not. Public opinion on wild cards being what it is. That issue would probably have sunk him. You should be glad you’re not a well-known ace.” Kenneth stood. “There’s a few people I need to talk to. Back in a minute.” He kissed Beth on the forehead and made his way into the crowd.
“I’m not an ace at all, anymore.” Jerry took a large swallow of wine. “Which is for the best, I guess.” Hello, Mrs. Strauss. A young man stood behind Kenneth’s empty chair. He was tall, blond, and could probably have passed for a Greek god even in good light. Jerry hated him instantly.
“David.” Beth smiled and motioned to the chair. “I didn’t know you were going to be here. How nice to see you. Do you know Kenneth’s brother, Jerry?”
“No.” David extended his hand.
“Jerry, this is David Butler. He’s the intern working with Mr. Latham. Even St. John is impressed with him. Has David working all hours.”
Jerry shook his hand. There was an almost palpable energy in David’s touch. Jerry withdrew and managed a smile. “You do what, David?”
“Whatever Mr. Latham requires.” David smiled at Beth. “You look lovely tonight. I can’t imagine your husband being foolish enough to abandon you.”
“Oh, I’m well taken care of, David.” Beth put her hand on Jerry’s sleeve.
David gave Jerry half a glance and drummed his fingers on the table. “I’d better be going. Mr. Latham expects me to mingle with the heavy hitters. Says it should be good for me.” He got up, rolling his eyes. “Nice to see you, Mrs. Strauss.” David left.
“He must be gay,” Jerry said. Beth chuckled. “I don’t think so.”
“Is he rich, then?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“There is no God.” Jerry emptied his wineglass and looked for a waiter.
“You don’t need to be jealous, Jerry.” Beth adjusted the straps on her gown. “Just because he’s young, rich, and gorgeously handsome.”
“I’m rich and young, sort of.” Jerry hadn’t aged physically in the twenty years he’d been an ape. Legally, though, he was in his forties.
“Feeling sorry for yourself again?” Kenneth said, reappearing and sitting back down.
“Constantly,” Jerry said.
“Right. Did you ever contact any of those film people I mentioned your name to? You have talent. Beth and I are both impressed with your abilities.”
“I’ll get around to it. I have a lazy muse,” Jerry said. “I know you went to a lot of trouble.”
“Not as much trouble as proving that you weren’t legally dead when you showed up last year.” Kenneth smiled. “Nobody wanted to believe you’d been a giant ape for over a decade. Too many precedents.”
Jerry sighed. “Sorry I was so much trouble.”
“It’s not that and you know it. When you’re born into wealth like we were, there’s a larger obligation to society that comes with it.”
Jerry shrugged. “I like to think I’m keeping my bank from going under. It’s the romantic in me.”
Beth smiled, but Kenneth shook his head. “The romantic in you is going to get you into trouble someday. You can pay people to not call you Mr. Strauss, but you can’t make them give a shit when it’s crunch time. People don’t love you for money, they love you in spite of it.”
Jerry didn’t need to hear this right now. He turned to Beth. “Why did you marry this guy?”
Beth smiled and held up her hands, palms about a foot apart.
“Nasty girl,” Jerry said. “ I guess it runs in the family.” Kenneth fingered a cuff link. “I don’t want to be a pain, but you can count on me keeping after you about this. You need to find something to do with your life.”
There was a burst of applause and people began standing. Jesse Jackson was making his way slowly from the back of the room, shaking hands as he went.
“I suppose we can expect a speech now,” Jerry said, rubbing the back of his neck. “I’d rather be home watching a movie.”
“Democracy is hell, bro,” Beth said.
“I’ll drink to that.” Jerry snagged a waiter’s arm and indicated he needed more wine. The only thing that numbed his butt quicker than politics was alcohol.
After rubbing elbows with the rich and powerful, he felt like staying up late. Jerry split time between his apartment and his room at the family house on Staten Island where Kenneth and Beth lived. He’d had to overhaul the place when he got back. His sixteen-millimeter projectors were shot and the neglected cans of film had gotten brittle with age. He’d replaced them with a largescreen TV and videotape. Nobody collected actual films anymore. But there was no romance in video. It was cheap and easy. He was hardly in a position to be judgmental about people who went that way, though, considering his relationship with Veronica. Although she wasn’t cheap and was getting less easy all the time.
He was watching Klute. It was a bad choice. At least Veronica didn’t wear a watch while they did it. She probably never came either, though.
There was a soft knock at the door and Beth stuck her head in. Jerry paused the tape and motioned her in. “Entrez. I’m watching Klute. Ever seen it?”
“Twice, at least.” She sat down on the sofa next to him. “ I love the scene where she licks the spoon after eating the catfood.” Beth licked her lips.
“You’re sick.”
“Afraid so.” She picked up two other tapes off the table. “What have we got here? Irma La Douce and McCabe and Mrs. Miller.” She paused. He knew she expected him to say something.
“Yeah, well. I like to mix it up, you know. Murder mystery, period piece, comedy. I try to get a bit of everything.” He shrugged. “I’ve got lots to catch up on.”
She patted him on the shoulder. “You don’t want to talk about it. I can tell. I always feel better when I talk about things. If I hadn’t had some good friends and a decent analyst a few years back, Kenneth and I would have wound up divorced.”
“I didn’t know you two had any problems.”
She laughed. “It’s tough being married to a lawyer. You always have the feeling that anything you say can and will be used against you. And sometimes he did. I know he didn’t mean to, or at least I hope that, but at the time it was hard to tell. You can’t ever be another person and know how they really feel. That’s kind of scary. But eventually you just decide to believe in them or not. I decided to believe in Kenneth and I’m not sorry”
“I’m glad.” The words sounded flatter than he’d intended. “Really. You’ve been a big help to me. I know I’m not adjusting very well, but I will.”
Beth kissed him on the cheek. “You can talk to me any time you feel like it.” She pointed to the TV screen. “Want to know who the killer is?”
“No, thanks. I don’t want to cheat myself out of guessing wrong and then feeling stupid.”
“Good night.” She closed the door.
Jerry shut off the TV and VCR. He didn’t much like the way this one was headed, anyway. He crossed the floor to his dressing room. It hadn’t changed much in thirty years. Back when he was the Projectionist, he’d practiced his Humphrey Bogart and Marlon Brando in front of the same mirror. Bogart died even before Jerry had drawn the wild card, and Brando was old and fat. He sat down, opened a drawer, and pulled out a picture of Veronica and a wig. The hair was as close a match as he could find for hers.
He stuck the picture in the corner of the mirror and looked at it for a second or two, then at his own reflection. His features began to change; his skin darkened. Hair was still a problem. He couldn’t quite get it to do what he wanted yet. In the old days he could actually have turned into a woman, but that had always made him feel weird. He pulled on the wig and closed his eyes, waited a moment, then reopened them.
“I love you.”
It was even less convincing than the few times Veronica had said it herself. He pulled off the wig and changed back. Beth was right, you couldn’t know what another person was thinking or feeling. Couldn’t ever actually be them. He tossed the wig and picture into the drawer and slammed it shut.
Who the hell would want to, anyway?
Kenneth was late. Central Park baked in the August heat. Most of the animals in the zoo were napping. Jerry sat in front of the seventy-five-foot-tall cage that had been his home back when he was a giant ape. A lone pigeon walked up to him, head bobbing. Jerry shooed it away.
He felt a strong hand on his shoulder.
“It’s just me,” Kenneth said, sitting down beside him. “Sorry I’m late.”
“What’s up? You sounded pretty mysterious on the phone.”
Kenneth nodded. “It’s Latham. He’s going around the bend, I think. He’s involved in more than you can imagine. For years he’s been a major figure in the Shadow Fist Society. Which includes everyone from punks like the Immaculate Egrets and Werewolves up to very respectable businessmen. And Latham’s in it up to his neck.”
“But he’s got something on you, too. Right?” Jerry leaned forward. He’d been trying to come up with material on Latham for months, and hadn’t turned up anything other than a few interesting reports from his time in Vietnam.
Kenneth looked away. “There are some things I’d rather Beth didn’t know about. Other women. We’ve made such progress since almost getting divorced. I don’t want to jeopardize my marriage. Latham has some pretty graphic evidence. One of the women I saw was working for him.” He turned back to Jerry. “This isn’t to be repeated, you understand.”
“Only under torture,” Jerry said. “Who’s Kien?”
“You’re better off not finding out, but it may come to that soon.”
“What do you mean?” Jerry wiped his sweaty forehead. “Latham knows I have information on him. He wants to trade it for what he has on me.” Kenneth shook his head. “But I’ve known St. John a long time. He’ll hold back something to keep me in line.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Give you my file on Latham, if you’ll have it. He’s made some threats lately. I wouldn’t put it past him to break into the house trying to get them. Beth might get hurt. This way I can let it drop that the papers are no longer in my home. He’ll suspect you might have them, of course.”
Jerry shrugged. “The day a native New Yorker is scared of some high-class thug from Beantown will never come.” Jerry paused. “Well, maybe he does make me a little nervous.”
“Good, because he’s a very dangerous man.” Kenneth looked straight at Jerry. “You’re sure you don’t mind?”
“Nope. Look over there.” Jerry pointed at the chimp cage. One of the apes was high in a tree, throwing its shit at another on the ground. “That’s what we’ll be doing to Latham soon.”
“I’ll settle for a return to the established balance of fear,” Kenneth said.
“We’ll manage,” Jerry said, putting his hand on his brother’s shoulder.
“Thanks.” Kenneth opened his briefcase. “Now, let’s discuss what you’re going to do about your appointment with the city officials next week.”
“Right.” Jerry sighed and stared back at the chimp cage. Sometimes the shit got thrown at you, as well.
Jerry sat on the worn, orange couch, shifting his weight. It was hot outside and his sweaty legs stuck to the cushion through his pants. The waiting room was quiet, except for the male secretary’s fingers on the keyboard, muffled voices from inside the offices, and the breathing of the joker woman sharing the couch with Jerry.
Kenneth had shown him what to sign and told him what to say. He’d even offered to come along as legal representation. Jerry said no. It was time he started taking care of a few things on his own. Still, the back of his throat was dry. Several trips to the water cooler hadn’t helped. City officials could do that to you. Especially in New York.
He turned to the joker, who was normal except for her grotesquely overmuscled jaws and mouth. “Did you sign them?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Do I have a choice?” Her voice was soft. Talking seemed awkward for her.
“Always.” He straightened his shoulders. “I’m not going to.”
The joker nodded, but didn’t seem impressed. “You an ace?”
“I was once, but not anymore.” The lie needed all the practice Jerry could give it. “You remember the big ape in Central Park?”
“Yeah. They took it away to make a movie or something. Right?”
“Right. That was me.” Jerry felt a chill crawl halfway up his spine. “Dr. Tachyon cured me, but my power doesn’t work anymore.”
“Too bad,” she said.
“Not really,” Jerry said. “It’ll keep the government goons off my back. Why are they interested in you?” The woman smiled, revealing two rows of large teeth like polished marble. “I’m what’s classified as a type-two joker.”
“What’s that?”
“Any joker who’s something other than just ugly, I guess. My teeth and jaws are pretty strong. I can bite through almost anything.” The joker looked around, presumably for something to demonstrate on.
“That’s okay, I believe you.” Jerry unstuck his legs from the couch. “What do they call you?”
“Susan,” she said. “How about you?”
“A long time ago I used to be called the Projectionist,” Jerry said. She looked at him with polite blankness. “That was before your time, I’d imagine. Now I’m nobody. People just call me Jerry”
“Regular names are best, anyway,” Susan said.
The office door opened across the room. A man in a suit showed a visibly shaken six-legged joker out. “Mr. Strauss?”
Jerry nodded and stood.
The man let him go inside first. He was middle-aged and slightly overweight. His hair was thin and gray. His eyes brown. He took Jerry’s hand. Jerry shook it and squeezed hard. The man squeezed even harder.
“Sit down, Mr. Strauss. I’m William Karnes.”
Jerry sat. Karnes eased into his chair behind the well-ordered desk. He put a finger to his mouth and opened a file. “I see you failed to sign forms fifteen and seventeen-a. Why is that Mr. Strauss?”
“Well, I’m no longer an active wild card,” Jerry said, “so I don’t see why I should be subject to conscription in the event of a national emergency. And I believe the other one said I was to notify your office if I were to take any kind of extended vacation. It just seems unnecessary” Karnes rubbed the end of his bulbous nose. “The government has its reasons, Mr. Strauss. Failure to cooperate now may mean some very serious inconveniences for you later on. You’re aware of the rumblings in Congress about reinstating some of the old Exotic Powers laws.”
Jerry took a deep breath. He didn’t want to let Karnes get under his skin. That had been Kenneth’s advice. “Yes. I do keep up with current events. But, as I say, I’m no longer a wild card, except in the most technical sense. I believe you have a medical report from my physician to that effect.”
Karnes stared at Jerry. “From Dr. Tachyon. We can hardly give that much credence. If you want to undergo testing by some of our staff I might agree to that. But we don’t pay much attention to alien quacks.”
Jerry could feel the blood hammering inside him. “I don’t think I have anything else to say to you, Mr. Karnes.” He stood.
“Sit down, sir.” Karnes pointed to the chair. “I can make more trouble for you than you can imagine. I have a job to do, and none of your kind is going to stop me.”
Jerry felt something go hard inside him. “Really? Well, let me clarify something for you, Mr. Karnes. You’re a low-level bureaucrat with a stick up his ass. I’m a multimillionaire with lots of very powerful friends. If I were you, I’d be extremely careful who I threatened. If you’re lucky, I’ll only come after you with lawyers. Do you feel lucky, punk?” Jerry quoted a cop movie he’d just seen. Karnes opened his mouth. Shut it.
“Stay out of my hair, then.” Jerry left the office, shutting the door loudly. He walked over to Susan, who was still sitting miserably on the couch. “He’s an asshole. Don’t trust him.”
“I don’t trust any nats,” Susan said. “Not anymore. It’s just that I can’t find a way around them.”
Jerry patted her on the hand. “Right. Well, good luck, then.”
Susan smiled. It wasn’t pretty. Maybe she’d bite a hole in Karnes’s desk. Probably not, though. That kind of thing only happened in the movies.
Jerry sat on the bed, oiling the pistol. He’d bought and read a couple of books on gun care. If he was going to have a weapon, he was going to take care of it. He’d been target shooting for a few weeks and the pistol no longer felt awkward in his hand.
There was a sharp knock at his apartment door. Jerry put the automatic in his dresser drawer under some T-shirts and crossed the room. He peered through the peephole and saw a middle-aged man in maintenance clothes. He opened the door.
“I’m here to get you plastered,” the man said, smiling. “Right. Just follow me.” Jerry closed the door and led the man to where his wall safe had been installed. All it needed was plaster, paint, and something to put in front of it.
The man walked to the wall and looked it over. “Nice safe,” he said. “This whole building could burn down and anything inside would be fine. Yes, sir. I kind of hate to be working on the anniversary of the King’s death, though. I’ll drink a few beers for him later on. Are you a fan?”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean?” Jerry said. “Elvis. The King. He died twelve years ago today. I remember that summer. We had the second big blackout. You remember that?”
“No. I was around for the first one, though.” Actually, Jerry had caused it, but didn’t feel like telling this guy the story. “I liked Elvis when I was younger.”
“Can’t stop liking the King just because you get older. That’s no kind of fan to be. I listen to Elvis every night before I go to bed with the wife. Makes it just that much more exciting.”
“You mind if I watch TV while you work?” Jerry asked.
The man shrugged. “Don’t see why not. You’re the one spending a fortune to live here.” He spread out a piece of canvas on the carpet in front of the wall and sorted through his spatulas.
Jerry picked up the remote control and punched up the local news.
“... another apparent jumper crime. A mime says someone else entered his body while he was performing in Central Park, removed his clothing, and inserted a chrysanthemum in his anus. The jumper then paraded the mime around the park and made obscene gestures at passersby.”
“Jeez,” the maintenance man said. “That’s three in the last two weeks. When are the cops going to do something about those jumper assholes?”
“Maybe they’re scared,” Jerry said.
“I can understand that. It’s a sorry day when New York’s finest can’t handle a few snot-nosed kids, though. Even if they are aces.”
“You like aces?” Jerry turned away from the TV and looked over at the man.
“Hell, no. Can’t stand them. Put them all in prison.” He pointed a spatula full of plaster at Jerry. “That’s what they should have done to the fat guy, even if it was just a joker he killed.”
“There’s two sides to everything,” Jerry said.
“Yep, and the lines are getting drawn. If you’re for aces and jokers, you’re looking for trouble. And a young man like you doesn’t need any trouble.”
Jerry considered telling the man that they were probably the same age, but that would just make him curious. He turned off the TV and picked up his Cosmopolitan. He was trying harder to understand women, but just couldn’t seem to turn the corner. Maybe Irma Kurtz could enlighten him.
Kenneth was expecting him for lunch, but this time it was Jerry who was late. Traffic was at a standstill on Third Avenue. He’d paid off his cabbie and started walking uptown. Within two blocks his shirt was soaked in sweat. He’d started out walking fast, but had gotten stitches in his sides and was just keeping pace with the tide of bodies on the sidewalk.
Kenneth hadn’t actually said so, but Jerry figured his brother was going to turn over the material on Latham. He’d mentioned several times that Jerry shouldn’t cancel out. That had to mean something. Kenneth didn’t waste words.
He was in the same block as the restaurant when his right leg cramped up. Jerry leaned against a wall and rubbed the back of his calf. The searing pain began to go away after a minute or two. Every other person that walked by looked at him and shook their head. He reached down and pulled the toe of his shoe toward him, stretching out the muscle. The pain lessened. He started limping toward the restaurant. Ahead, he saw three people go in. They were young and well dressed, but their clothes seemed wrong on them. They looked like kids playing dress-up. Jerry only saw them for a moment, but they seemed familiar. One of the girls was wearing a wig. Jerry had a few of his own and could spot one a mile away. He tried his bad leg and it quickly cramped up on him again. He started hopping slowly down the sidewalk. He started walking again when he stepped inside the restaurant. His leg was sore as hell, but there was. nothing he could do about it. The cool air inside chilled his sweaty back. He smelled sauerkraut and schnitzel.
They were sitting in a booth. The girl in the wig and the boy held on to the other girl. She looked passed out. A body brushed past him. Jerry saw his brother leave the restaurant.
“Kenneth?”
There was no answer. Jerry hobbled out after him. He grabbed Kenneth as they neared the sidewalk and tried to turn him around. Without looking, Kenneth threw an elbow that caught Jerry in the chest and knocked him backward. Jerry fell onto the sidewalk skinning his hands. Kenneth stepped out into the traffic.
“No,” Jerry screamed, and struggled to his feet. Kenneth turned, looking disoriented, just like the girl inside had. He snapped his head around at the sound of squealing brakes. The car turned sideways. Its right fender slammed into Kenneth, knocking his body up and back. Kenneth screamed. Jerry heard the crunch of glass. Kenneth bounced off a parked car and slid down into the street. Jerry ran over, the pain in his leg forgotten. Blood was coming from Kenneth’s nose and mouth. His body was twisted in a way that meant a broken back. Jerry knelt down next to him. “Kenneth, it’s me. Don’t try to move.” He turned to the gathering crowd. “Somebody call an ambulance, now”
“Jerry” Kenneth’s voice was garbled by the blood in his throat. “They did it to me. Switched bodies. So ... weird. “ He closed his eyes, reopened them. “Hurts so much. Had to be ... Latham behind it. Tell Beth ...” His body shuddered and then was still.
“No,” Jerry said quietly. He held his brother’s hand for a moment, then let it go and stood. He looked up and saw the trio of kids disappear around the corner. The boy was carrying a large folding envelope. Jerry ran a couple of painful steps, then stopped. “No.”
Someone took Jerry by the shoulders and guided him back into the restaurant. He could tell they were saying something consoling, but he couldn’t pick out the words.
They sat him down. A waiter put a glass of water and a shot of whiskey in front of him. “You wait here until the police arrive, sir. If there’s anything you need, just ask.”
Jerry downed the whiskey without feeling it and clenched his hands into fists. Underneath the disbelief and the pain, there was something cold growing inside him.
Something that would have to be taken care of sooner or later.
Jerry thought about Beth and slumped in his chair. She wasn’t up to this, couldn’t be. He’d been a shit to her for so long, it wasn’t likely he could be much of a comfort now. But he was damn sure going to try.
Jerry heard sirens approaching. He raised his hand for another drink, then reconsidered and waved the waiter away. This wasn’t the time.
They were alone on the couch. After the funeral Jerry had hustled the friends and relatives out of the house as soon as courtesy would allow. Beth had held up well, but he could tell she needed another big cry soon.
“I know we haven’t had time to talk about it, but I want to apologize for the way I’ve acted the past few months. I know I hurt your feelings, and you didn’t deserve that.” Jerry sniffed. Beth wasn’t the only one with a cry coming on. “I’m really sorry, and if you’ll give me another chance, IT never let you down again.” He touched her tentatively on the shoulder.
Beth put her hand on his and looked over at him. “Oh, Jerry, that doesn’t matter. I know you’re not really hateful. Sometimes these things just happen. What’s important is that you’re here for me now.” She scooted across the couch and put her head in the hollow of his neck. “ I need people around me who I can trust, who I can be myself with.”
Jerry put his arms around her. He couldn’t tell if he started crying first or if she did. They held on to each other, hard. After they were both done, he went and grabbed a box of Kleenex. They blew their noses together and Beth managed a smile.
“I really do love you, sis,” he said. “Sometimes I just don’t show it very well. It’s one of the things I’m working on. I’m trying not to drink so much anymore, either.”
She nodded, then dabbed at her eyes. “I’m proud of you for that.”
“Are you going to stay here?” Jerry was afraid to hear the answer.
“My brother said he’d be glad to put me up for a while. I haven’t been back to Chicago for years. I’m probably due for a visit.”
Jerry nodded. He looked at her, but it felt like she was already gone. “That might be best for you.”
She took his hand. “It’ll only be for a while. I’ll be back.”
“I’ll be waiting,” he said.
Tomlin was packed wall to wall with bodies. It was still summer-vacation time for a lot of people and everyone seemed to be trying to get into or out of New York on the same day. He and Beth sat next to each other in plastic row chairs. She hugged her gray carry-on valise and stared out the window at the taxiing airliners. She was quiet. He couldn’t imagine how she felt. As terrible as his pain and loss were, hers was worse.
“Eastern flight 178 now boarding for Chicago, with connections to St. Louis and Atlanta,” came a soft voice over the public address.
Beth stood and fished her boarding pass out of her purse. She set down her valise and hugged Jerry tight. He knew he was going to cry again, but figured that if he started now, Beth would, too. She didn’t need to be a wreck getting onto the plane.
“Good-bye, bro. I’ll be back soon, I think. I just have to get out of here for a while. I’ll keep in touch.”
Jerry picked up her bag, put his arm around her, and steered her toward the boarding entrance. “God, I’m going to miss you. You’re all I’ve got left.”
“That’s not true, or I wouldn’t leave you.” Beth kissed him on the cheek.
Jerry handed her the valise. “Call me when you get in.”
“Absolutely. Good-bye.” Beth turned and handed the man her boarding pass. He took it and smiled at her. Then she was gone.
Jerry sat back down and stared out the window at the plane. He rubbed his eyes and tried to think of his favorite song. Nothing came to mind. He watched until her plane taxied out of sight.
The people of Colombo had been waiting for the ape since early morning, and the police were having trouble keeping them away from the docks. A few were getting past the wooden barricades, only to, be quickly caught and hustled into the bright yellow police vans. Some sat on parked cars; others had children perched on their shoulders. Most were content to stand behind the cordons, craning their necks for a look at what the local press called “the great American monster.”
Two massive cranes lifted the giant ape slowly off the barge. It hung bound and limp, dark fur poking out from inside the steel mesh. The only indication of life was the slow rising and falling of its fifteen-foot-wide chest. There was a grinding squeal as the cranes pivoted together, swinging the ape sideways until it was over the freshly painted, green railway car. The flatcar groaned as the ape settled onto its broad steel bed. There was scattered cheering and clapping from the crowd.
It was the same as the vision he’d had only a few months ago-the crowd, the calm sea, and clear sky, the sweat on the back of his neck-all the same. The visions never lied. He knew exactly what would happen for the next fifteen minutes or so; after that he could go back to living again.
He adjusted the collar of his nehru shirt and flashed his government ID card to the policeman nearest him. The officer nodded and stepped out of his way. He was a special assistant to the Secretary of the Interior, which gave him a particularly wide range of responsibilities. Sometimes what he did was little more than nursemaid rich, visiting foreigners. But it was preferable to the twenty-plus years he’d spent in embassies overseas.
There was a group of twenty or thirty Americans around the train. Most wore light gray security uniforms and were busy chaining the beast down to the railway car. They kept an eye on the ape while going about their business but didn’t act afraid. A tall man in a Hawaiian print shirt and plaid Bermuda shorts was standing well away, talking to a girl in a light blue cotton sundress. They were both wearing red and black “King Pongo” visors.
He walked over to the tall man and tapped him on the shoulder.
“Not now” The man didn’t even bother to turn and look at him.
“Mr. Danforth?” He tapped him on the shoulder again, harder. “Welcome to Sri Lanka. I’m G. C. Jayewardene. You telephoned me last month about your film.” Jayewardene spoke English, Sinhalese, Tamil, and Dutch. His position in the government required it.
The film producer turned, his face blank. “Jayewardene? Oh, right. The government guy. Nice to meet you.” Danforth grabbed his hand and pumped it a few times. “We’re real busy right now. Guess you can see that.”
“Of course. If it’s not too much trouble, I’d like to ride along while you’re transporting the ape.” Jayewardene could not help but be impressed with its size. The monster was even taller than the forty-foot Aukana Buddha. “It seems much larger when you see it up close.”
“No joke. But it’ll be worth all the blood, sweat, and tears it took to get it here when the film comes out.” He jerked his thumb toward the monster. “That baby is great pub.”
Jayewardene put his hand over his mouth, trying to hide his puzzled expression.
“Publicity” Danforth smiled. “Have to watch the industry slang, I guess. Sure, G. C., you can ride in the VIP car with us. It’s the one in front of our hairy friend.”
“Thank you.”
The giant ape exhaled, stirring the dust and dirt by its open mouth into a small cloud.
“Great pub,” said Jayewardene.
The rhythmic clacking of the train’s wheels on the old railway track relaxed him. Jayewardene had ridden the island trains on countless trips in the forty-odd years since he’d boarded one for the first time as a boy. The girl in the blue dress, who’d finally introduced herself as Paula Curtis, was staring out the window at the terraced tea fields. Danforth was working over a map with a red felt-tip pen.
“Okay,” he said, putting the handle end of the pen to his lips. “We take the train to the end of the line, which is around the headwaters of the Kalu Ganga.” He flattened the map onto his knees and pointed to the spot with his pen. “That puts us at the edge of the Udu Walawe National Park, and Roger has supposedly scouted out some great locations for us there. Right?”
“Right,” Paula answered. “If you trust Roger.”
“He’s s the director, my dear. We have to trust him. Too bad we couldn’t afford somebody decent, but the effects are going to take up most of the budget.”
A steward walked over to them, carrying a tray with plates of curried rice and string hoppers,—small steamed strands of rice flour dough. Jayewardene took a plate and smiled. “Es-thu-ti,” he said, thanking the young steward. The boy had a round face and broad nose, obviously Sinhalese like himself.
Paula turned from the window long enough to take a plate. Danforth waved the boy away.
“I’m not sure I understand.” Jayewardene took a mouthful of the rice, chewed briefly, and swallowed. There was too little cinnamon in the curry for his taste. “Why spend money on special effects when you have a fifty’—foot ape?”
“Like I said earlier, the monsters great pub. But it would be hell trying to get the thing to perform on cue. Not to mention being prohibitively dangerous to everyone around him. Oh, we may use him in a couple of shots, and definitely for sound effects, but most of the stuff will be done with miniatures.” Danforth grabbed a fingerful of rice from Paula’s plate and dropped it into his mouth, then shrugged. “Then, when the movie opens, the critics will say they can’t tell the real ape from the model, and people take that as a challenge, see. Figure they can be the one to spot it. It sells tickets.”
“Surely the publicity value is less than the money it took to get the beast from the City of New York and bring it halfway around the world.” Jayewardene dabbed at the corner of his mouth with a cloth napkin.
Danforth looked up, grinning. “Actually we got the ape for nothing. See, it gets loose every now and then and starts tearing things up. The city is up to its ass in lawsuits every time that happens. If it’s not in New York, it can’t do any damage. They almost paid us to take the thing off their hands. Of course we have to make sure nothing happens to it, or the zoo would lose one of its main attractions. That’s what those boys in gray are for.”
“And if the ape escapes here, your film company will be liable.” Jayewardene took another bite.
“We’ve got it doped up all the time. And frankly it doesn’t seem much interested in anything.”
“Except blond women.” Paula pointed to her short, brown hair. “Lucky for me.” She looked back out the window. “What’s that mountain?”
“Sri Pada. Adam’s Peak. There is a footprint at the top said to be made by the Buddha himself. It is a very holy place.” Jayewardene made the pilgrimage to the top every year. He planned to do so in the near future, as soon as his schedule allowed it. This time with hopes of cleansing himself spiritually so that there were no more visions.
“No kidding.” Paula elbowed Danforth. “We going to have time to do any sight-seeing?”
“We’ll see,” Danforth said, reaching over for more rice. Jayewardene set his plate down. “Excuse me.” He got up and walked to the rear of the car, slid the door open, and stepped out onto the platform.
The giant ape’s head was only about twelve feet from where he stood. Its eyes fluttered, then stared up at the rounded top of Adam’s Peak. The ape opened its mouth; lips pulled back, revealing the huge yellow-white teeth. There was a rumble, louder than the train engine, from the back of the monster’s throat.
“It’s waking up,” he yelled at the security men riding at the back of the flatcar.
They walked forward carefully, steadying themselves on the car’s side railing, avoiding the ape’s manacled hands. One watched the monster, rifle centered on its head. The other changed the plastic bottle hooked up to the IV in the ape’s arm.
“‘Thanks.” One of the guards waved at Jayewardene. “It’ll be okay now. This stuff will put him out for hours.”
The ape twisted its head and looked directly at him, then turned back to Adam’s Peak. It sighed and closed its eyes. There was something in the monster’s brown eyes that he couldn’t identify. He paused, then went back into the car. The curry aftertaste was sour in the back of his throat.
They reached the camp at dusk. Actually it was more of a hastily thrown together city of tents and portable buildings. There was less activity than Jayewardene had expected. Most of the crew sat around talking or playing cards. Only the zoo security people were busy, carefully unloading the ape onto a broadbed truck. It was still unconscious from the drug.
Danforth told Paula to introduce Jayewardene around. The director, Roger Winters, was busy making changes in the shooting script. He wore a Frank S. Buck outfit, complete with pith helmet to hide his thinning hair. Paula guided Jayewardene away from the director.
“You wouldn’t like him,” she said. “Nobody does. At least nobody I know. But he can bring them in on schedule. Here’s somebody you’ll be more interested in. You’re not married, are you?”
“Widowed.”
“Oh, sorry” She waved at a blond woman sitting on the bare wooden steps of the camp’s main building. The woman wore a black and red “King Pongo” T-shirt, tight blue jeans, and leather walking boots.
“Hi, Paula,” said the blonde, tossing her hair. “Who’s your friend?”
“Robyn Symmes, meet Mr. G. C. Jayewardene,” Paula said. Robyn extended her hand. Jayewardene lightly shook it. “Nice to meet you, Miss Symmes.” Jayewardene bowed, embarrassingly aware of the tightness of his shirt across his oversize stomach. He was flattered to be in the company of the only two women he’d seen in the camp. They were both attractive, in a foreign way. He wiped the sweat from his brow and wondered how they would look in saris.
“Look, I have to go settle Danforth in. Why don’t you two entertain each other for a while.” Paula was walking away before either of them had time to answer.
“Your name is Jayewardene? Any relation to President Junius Jayewardene?”
“No. It’s a common name. How do you like it here?” He sat down next to her. The steps were uncomfortably hot. “Well, I’ve only been here a few days, but it’s a beautiful place. A bit too hot for my taste, but I’m from North Dakota.”
He nodded. “We have every kind of beauty imaginable here. Beaches, mountains, jungle, cities. Something for everyone. Except cold weather of course.”
There was a pause. “So.” Robyn slapped her hands on her thighs. “What is it you do that your government decided to stick you out here with us?”
“I’m a diplomat of sorts. My job is to make foreign visitors happy here. Or at least to try. We like to maintain a reputation as a friendly country”
“Well, I sure haven’t seen anything to contradict that. The people I’ve met practically kill you with kindness.” She pointed to the line of trees at the edge of the camp. “The animals are something again, though. You know what they found this morning?”
He shrugged.
A cobra. Right over there. Uffda. That’s something that you definitely don’t get in North Dakota.” She shuddered. Most animals I can handle, but snakes ... “ She made a face.
“Nature is complete and harmonious here.” He smiled. “But I must be boring you.”
“No. Not really. You’re certainly more interesting than Roger, or the gaffers and grips. How long will you be here? I mean, with the film company.”
“Off and on for your entire stay, although I’ll be going back to Colombo tomorrow for a few days. Dr. Tachyon, the alien, and a large party from your country will be arriving here then. To study the effect of the virus in my country” A shiver eased up his spine.
“You are a busy little bee, aren’t you?” She looked up. The light was beginning to dim around the swaying treetops. “I’m going to go get some sleep. You might want to do the same. Paula will show you where. She knows everything. Danforth wouldn’t ever finish a film without her.” Jayewardene watched her walk away, sighing at the . memory of pleasure he thought best forgotten, then got up and headed in the direction Paula had gone. He would need sleep to be fresh for the trip back tomorrow. But sleep never came easily to him. And he was afraid to dream. He’d learned to be afraid.
He woke up biting his right hand hard enough to draw blood. His breathing was ragged and his nightshirt was bathed in sweat. The world around him shimmered and then came into focus. Another vision, snatched from the future.
They were happening more and more often in spite of his prayers and meditation. It was only a small comfort that this one wasn’t about him. Not directly anyway.
He pulled on his pants and shoes, unzipped his tent, and stepped outside. Jayewardene walked quietly toward the truck where the ape was chained. Two men were on guard.
One was leaning against the cab; the other was sitting with his back to one of the huge, mud-covered tires. Both had rifles and lit cigarettes. They were speaking softly to each other.
“What’s up?” asked the man by the cab as Jayewardene approached. He didn’t bother to raise his rifle.
“ I wanted to look at the ape again.”
“In the middle of the night? You’ll see more tomorrow morning when it’s light.”
“ I couldn’t sleep. And I’ll be returning to Colombo tomorrow” He walked up next to the monster. “When did the ape first appear?”
“Blackout of ‘65 in New York City,” said the seated man. “Showed up in the middle of Manhattan. Nobody knows where it came from, though. Probably had something to do with the wild card. At least that’s what people say.”
Jayewardene nodded. “I’m going to walk around to the other side. To look at his face.”
“Just don’t put your head in its mouth.” The guard flicked his cigarette butt onto the ground. Jayewardene crushed it out with his shoe as he walked past.
The ape’s breath was hot, organic, but not foul. Jayewardene waited, hoping that the beast would open its eyes again. The vision had told him what was behind them, but he wanted another look. The dreams had never been wrong before, but his reputation would be destroyed if he went to the authorities with this story and it proved wrong. And there would be questions about how he could have known. He would have to answer them without revealing his unusual abilities. Not an easy problem to solve in so little time.
The ape’s eyes stayed shut.
The jungle’s night sounds were more distant than usual. The animals were staying far away from the camp. Jayewardene hoped it was because they sensed the ape. Sensed the wrongness about it. He glanced at his watch. It would be dawn in a couple of hours. He would speak to Danforth first thing in the morning, then go back to Colombo. Dr. Tachyon had the reputation of being able to work wonders. It would be his task to transform the ape. The vision made that very clear. Perhaps the alien could even help him. If his pilgrimage failed.
He walked back to his tent and spent the next few hours praying to the Buddha for a little less enlightenment.
It was past nine o’clock when Danforth emerged, blearyeyed, from the main portable building. Jayewardene was on his second cup of tea but was still moving slowly, as if his body were encased in mud.
“Mr. Danforth. I must speak to you before leaving this morning.”
Danforth yawned and nodded. “Fine. Look, before you get away, I want to take some pictures. You know, the entire crew and the ape. Something to give to the wire services. I’d appreciate it if you’d be in it too.” Danforth yawned again, even wider. “God, got to get some coffee in me. The boys are supposed to have everything set up by now. I’ll be free for a few minutes after that, and we can talk about it then.”
“I think it would be best to discuss it now, privately.” He looked out into the jungle. “Perhaps take a walk away from the camp.”
“In the jungle? I heard they killed a cobra yesterday. No way.” Danforth backed away. “I’ll talk to you after we get our publicity shots done, not before.”
Jayewardene took another sip of tea and walked over to the truck. He wasn’t surprised or disgusted at Danforth’s attitude. The man had the weight of a multimillion dollar project on his shoulders. That kind of pressure could skew anyone’s values; make him fear the wrong things.
Most of the crew were already assembled in front of the giant ape. Paula was sitting in front, chewing on her fingernails while looking over the production schedule. He knelt down next to her.
“ I see his majesty hooked you into doing this just like the rest of us,” Paula said without looking up.
“I’m afraid so. You don’t look like you slept very well.”
“It’s not that I didn’t sleep well. I didn’t sleep period. I was up with Roger and Mr. D. all last night. But it comes with the territory” She leaned her head back and rotated it in a slow, circular motion. “Well, as soon as Roger, Robyn, and the boss get here, we can get this fun over with.”
Jayewardene downed the rest of his tea. Later in the day a busload of extras, most Sinhalese with a few Tamils and Muslims, was scheduled to arrive. All those selected to be in the film spoke English, which was not uncommon, given the island’s history of British involvement.
Danforth showed up with Roger in tow. The producer looked at the group and squinted. “The ape’s facing the wrong way. Somebody get that truck turned around.”
A gray-clad guard waved, jumped up into the cab, and started the truck up.
“Okay. Everybody out of the way so we can get this done quickly.” Danforth motioned them toward him.
Somebody whistled and Jayewardene turned. Robyn was walking toward the group. She was wearing a long, skintight silver dress. She wasn’t smiling.
“Why do I have to wear this now? It’s going to be bad enough during shooting. I’ll probably get heat stroke.” Robyn put her hands on her hips and frowned.
Danforth shrugged. “Jungle shooting is a pain in the butt. You knew that when you took the part.”
Robyn pressed her lips tightly together and was quiet. The truck backed into position and Danforth clapped his hands. “—rill right. Everybody back where you were before. We’ll get this over as quickly as possible.”
One of the guards walked over to Danforth. Jayewardene moved in close enough to hear.
“ I think we woke it up when we moved the truck, sir. Want me to dope him up again before you take your pictures?”
“No. It’ll look better if there’s a little life in the damned thing.” Danforth stroked his chin. “And feed it when we’re done. Then you can knock it out again.”
“Right, sir.”
Jayewardene took his place in front of the truck. The ape’s breathing was irregular. He turned. The ape’s eyes fluttered and opened. Its pupils were dilated. The eyes moved about slowly, looked at the cameras, and stopped at Robyn. They became bright and purposeful. Jayewardene felt his skin go cold.
The ape took a deep breath and roared, a sound like a hundred lions. Jayewardene started to run but tripped over somebody who’d reacted away from the ape and into him.
The ape was rocking back and forth on the truck. One of the tires blew out. The monster continued to roar and pull at the chains. Jayewardene struggled to his feet. He heard the high-pitched squeal of metal straining against metal, then a loud pinging noise as the chains snapped. Steel shrapnel from the broken chains flew in all directions. One piece hit a guard. The man fell, screaming. Jayewardene ran to the man and helped him to his feet. The ground was shaking right behind them. He turned to look back, but the ape was already past them. Jayewardene turned to the injured man.
“Broken rib, I think. Maybe two,” said the guard through gritted teeth. “I’ll be okay.”
A woman screamed. Jayewardene left the man and rushed ahead. He could see most of the ape over the tin tops of the portable buildings. It bent down and picked up something in its right hand. It was Robyn. He heard a gunshot and tried to move faster. His sides ached already.
The ape snatched up a tent and threw it at one of the guards, whose rifle was raised for another shot. The canvas drifted down over the man, spoiling his aim.
“No. No,” Jayewardene yelled. “You might hit the woman.” The monster looked over the camp briefly, then waved its free arm disdainfully at the humans and shouldered into the jungle. Robyn Symmes was limp and pale against the huge darkness of its chest.
Danforth sat on the ground, head in hands. “Oh, shit. What the hell do we do now. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Those chains were made of titanium steel. It can’t be happening.”
Jayewardene put his hand on the producer’s shoulder. “Mr. Danforth, I’ll need your fastest car and your best driver. And it might be better if you came along with us.”
Danforth looked up. “Where are we going?”
“Back to Colombo. A group of your aces is arriving there in a few hours.” He smiled thinly. “Long ago our island was called Serendib. The land of fortunate coincidence.”
“Thank god. There’s a chance then.” He stood up, the color returning to his face. “I’ll get things moving.”
“Need any help?” Paula dabbed at a cut over her eye with her shirtsleeve.
“Only all I can get,” Danforth said.
The ape roared again. It already seemed impossibly far away.
The car sped along down the road, jolting them at every bump and pothole. They were still a few miles outside Ratnapura. Jayewardene was in the front seat, directing the driver. Paula and Danforth sat silently in the back. As they rounded a corner, he saw several saffron-robed Buddhist priests ahead. “Stop,” he yelled as the driver braked the car. They went into a skid and off the road, sliding to a stop. The priests, who had been working on the dirt road with shovels, stood to one side and motioned them through.
“Who are they?” asked Paula.
“Priests. Members of an appropriate technologist group,” Jayewardene said as the driver pulled back onto the road. He bowed to the priests as he went past. “Much of their time is spent doing such work.”
He planned to call ahead from Ratnapura. Let the government know the situation and discourage the military from attacking the creature. That would be difficult, given the amount of damage it could cause. Tachyon and the aces would be the answer. They had to be. His stomach burned. It was dangerous to hinge his plans on people he’d never met, but he had no other choice.
“I wonder what set him off?” Danforth asked, his voice almost too soft to hear.
“Well”—Jayewardene turned to speak to them—“he looked at the cameras, then at Miss Symmes. It was as if something clicked in his brain, brought him right out of the stupor.”
“If anything happens to her, it’ll be my fault.” Danforth looked at the muddy floorboard. “My fault.”
“Then we’ll all have to work hard to make sure nothing does happen to her,” Paula said. “Okay?”
“Right,” Danforth said weakly.
“Remember,” she said, patting his shoulder. “It’s beauty that kills the beast. Not the other way around.”
“Hopefully we can resolve the situation and keep both beauty and beast alive.” Jayewardene turned to look back at the road. He spotted the buildings of Ratnapura ahead. “Slow down when you get to town. I’ll direct you where we need to go.” He intended to inform the military of the situation and then return to Colombo. Jayewardene sank back into the car seat. He wished he had slept better the night before. Today’s work was going to spill into tomorrow and maybe even the next day.
They arrived back in Colombo a little after noon and went directly to Jayewardene’s home. It was a large white stucco residence with a red-tfled roof. Even when his wife had been alive, it had been more space than they needed. Now he rattled around in it like a coconut in an empty boxcar. He called his office and found out the American delegation of aces had arrived and was staying at the Galadari Meridien Hotel. After settling Danforth and Paula in, he went to his garden shrine and reaffirmed his pledge of the Five Precepts.
Afterward he hurriedly put on a clean white shirt and pair of pants and ate a few fingerfuls of cold rice.
“Where are you going now?” Paula asked as he opened the door to leave.
“To speak to Dr. Tachyon and the Americans about the ape.” He shook his head as she got up off the couch. “It would be better for you to rest now. Whatever develops, I’ll call you.”
“Okay.”
“Is it all right if we get something to eat?” Danforth already had the refrigerator door open.
“Certainly. Help yourselves.”
Traffic was heavy, even on the Sea Beach Road, which Jayewardene had instructed the driver to take. The car’s air conditioner was broken and his clean clothes were soaked with sweat before they were even halfway to the hotel.
The film company driver, his name was Saul, was slowing to stop in front of the Galadari Meridien when the engine died. He turned the key several times, but there was only a clicking sound.
“Look.” Jayewardene pointed toward the hotel entrance. People were scattering around the main doorway as something rose into the air. Jayewardene shaded his eyes as they flew over. One was a full-grown Indian elephant. A common enough sight, but this one was flying. Seated on its back was a well-muscled man. The elephant’s ears were extended and appeared to help the creature steer while flying.
“Elephant Girl,” said Saul. Crowds stopped up and down the street, pointing in silence as the aces flew by overhead.
“Do what you can with the car,” he-told Saul, who already had the hood up.
Jayewardene walked quickly to the hotel’s main entrance. He pushed past the doorman, who was sitting on the sidewalk shaking his head, and into the darkness inside. Hotel employees were busy lighting candles and reassuring the guests in the bar and restaurant.
“Waiter, get those drinks over here.” The male voice came from the bar. He spoke English with an American accent.
Jayewardene let his eyes adjust to the dim lighting, then made his way carefully into the bar. The bartender was setting lamps up next to the mirror behind the bar. Jayewardene pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his sweaty forehead. They were seated together in a booth. There was a large man with a dark spade-shaped beard, wearing a tailored blue three-piece suit. Across from him was another man. He was middle-aged, but trim, and sat in the booth as if it were a throne. Although he thought he knew the men, the woman sitting between them was instantly recognizable. She was wearing a low-cut, shoulderless black dress, trimmed with sequins. Her skin was transparent. He quickly looked away from her. Her bone and muscles reflected the light in a disturbing manner.
“Pardon me,” he said, walking over to them. “My name is Jayewardene. I’m with the Department of the Interior.”
“And what do you want?” The large man took a skewered cherry from his drink and rolled it between his manicured thumb and forefinger. The other man stood, smiled, and shook Jayewardene s hand. The gesture was studied, a political greeting refined by years of practice. “I’m Senator Gregg Hartmann. Pleased to meet you.”
“Thank you, Senator. I hope your shoulder is better.” Jayewardene had read about the incident in the newspapers. “It wasn’t as bad as the press made it sound.” Hartmann looked at the other end of the booth. “The man torturing that cherry is Hiram Worchester. And the lady is Chrysalis.”
“I believe.” Jayewardene bowed. “May I join you.”
“Certainly,” Hartmann said. “Is there something we can do for you?”
Jayewardene sat down next to Hiram, whose bulk partially obscured Chrysalis. He found her profoundly disturbing to look at. “Several things perhaps. Where were Elephant Girl and that man going just now?”
“To catch the ape, of course.” Hiram looked at him as one might at an embarrassing relative. “And rescue the girl. We just found out about it. Catching the beast is something of a tradition.” He paused. “For aces.”
“Is that possible? I don’t think Elephant Girl and one man can manage that.” Jayewardene turned to Hartmann. “The man with her was Jack Braun,” Chrysalis said. Her accent was more British than American. “Golden Boy. He can handle almost anything, up to and including the giant ape. Although he hasn’t been getting his rest lately. His glow’s been a little on the feeble side.” She nudged Hiram. “Don’t you think?”
“Personally I don’t really care what happens to Mr. Braun.” Hiram twirled the small, red plastic sword from his drink. “And I think the feeling’s mutual.”
Hartmann coughed. “At the very least they should be able to rescue the actress. That should simplify matters for your government.”
“Yes. One would hope.” Jayewardene folded and unfolded a cloth napkin. “But such a rescue should be carefully planned out.”
“Yes, they did rather fly off the handle,” Chrysalis said, taking a sip of brandy.
Jayewardene thought he caught a glint of mischief in Hartmann’s eyes, but dismissed it as the lighting. “Could you tell me where to find Dr. Tachyon?”
Hiram and Chrysalis both laughed. Hartmann maintained his poise and gave them a disapproving look. “He’s unavailable right now”
Chrysalis motioned to the waiter and pointed to her glass. “Which one of the stewardesses is he trying this time?”
“Upstairs, trapped in the darkness together. If anything will help Tachy get over his problem, this is it. The doctor’s not to be disturbed right now.” Hiram held the plastic sword above the table and made a fist with his other hand. The sword fell and stuck in the tabletop. “Get the point?”
“Could we give him a message for you?” Hartmann asked, ignoring Hiram.
Jayewardene pulled out his snakeskin wallet and handed Hartmann one of his business cards. “Please have him contact me as soon as possible. I may be busy the rest of the afternoon, but he can reach me at my home. It’s the bottom number.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Hartmann said, standing to shake hands again. “I hope we see you again before we leave.”
“Nice meeting you, Mr. Jayewardene,” Chrysalis said. He thought perhaps she was smiling, but couldn’t be sure. Jayewardene turned to leave but stopped short as two people entered the bar. One was a man whom Jayewardene judged to be in his late thirties. He was tall and muscular with blond hair and a camera slung over his shoulder. The woman with him was as stunningly beautiful as any of the photographs Jayewardene had seen of her. Even without the wings she would have attracted attention.
Peregrine was a vision he would willingly linger on. Jayewardene stepped out of their way as they joined the others in the booth.
They were still lighting candles and lamps in the lobby when he left.
It was hard to arrange for a helicopter with the ape on the loose, but the base commander owed him more than one favor. The pilot, headgear under his arm, was waiting for Jayewardene at the chopper. He was dark-skinned, a Tamil, part of the military’s new plan to try to integrate the armed forces. The aircraft itself was a large, outdated model, lacking the sleek aerodynamics of the newer attack ships. Olive paint was peeling from the chopper’s metal skin and the tires were balding.
Jayewardene nodded to the pilot and spoke to him in Tamil. “I had requested a bullhorn be put on board.”
“Already done, sir.” The pilot opened the door and crawled up into the cockpit. Jayewardene followed.
The young Tamil was going through a checklist, flipping switches, examining gauges.
“I’ve never been in a helicopter before,” Jayewardene said, buckling his seat belt. He pulled against the belt, testing it, not exactly happy that it was fraying around the edges.
The pilot shrugged and put on his helmet, then cranked the engine, took the stick, and engaged the rotor. The blades whopped noisily and the helicopter lifted slowly into the sky. “Where are we going, sir.”
“Let’s head down toward Ratnapura and Adam’s Peak.” He coughed. “We’ll be looking for a man on a flying elephant. American aces.”
“Do you want to engage them, sir?” The pilot’s tone was cool and professional.
“No. No, nothing like that. Just observe them. They’re after the ape that escaped.”
The pilot took a deep breath and nodded, then flipped on the radio and picked up the mouthpiece. “Lion base, this is Shadow One. Can you give us any information on a flying elephant? Over.”
There was a pause and crackle of static before the base answered. “Your target reported heading due east from Colombo. Approximate speed one five zero kilometers per hour. Over.”
“Acknowledged. Over and out.” The pilot checked his compass and adjusted his course.
“Hopefully we can find them before they locate the ape. I don’t think they have any real idea where to look, but the country isn’t that large.” Jayewardene pointed to dark clouds ahead. As he did there was a flash of lightning. “Are we safe from bad weather?”
“Fairly safe. Do you think these Americans would be stupid enough to fly into a storm?” He pointed the chopper toward a thin spot in the wall of clouds.
“Hard to say. I don’t know these people. They’ve handled the creature before, though.” Jayewardene looked down. The land beneath was rising steadily upward. The jungle was broken here and there with tea and rice fields or water reservoirs. From the air the flooded rice paddies looked like the shards of a broken mirror, the pieces reassembled so that they almost touched each other.
“Something ahead, sir.” The pilot reached under his seat and handed over a pair of binoculars. Jayewardene took them, wiped off the lenses with the tail of his shirt, and looked in the direction the pilot was pointing. There was something. He rotated the adjusting knob and brought it into focus. The man on the elephant was pointing toward the ground.
“It’s them,” Jayewardene said, setting the binoculars on his lap. “Get in close enough for this to be heard.” He raised the bullhorn.
“Yes, sir.”
Jayewardene’s mouth and throat were dry. He opened his window as they got closer in. The aces didn’t seem to have noticed them yet. He switched on the bullhorn and set the volume control near the top. He saw the ape’s shoulders and head above the treetops and knew why the Americans were paying no attention to the helicopter.
He stuck the bullhorn out the window as the chopper moved in. “Elephant Girl. Mr. Braun.” Jayewardene thought Golden Boy was inappropriate for a grown man. “My name is Jayewardene. I’m an official with the Sri Lankan government. Do you understand what I am saying?” He spoke each word slowly and carefully. The bullhorn vibrated in his sweaty hand.
Jack Braun waved and nodded. The monster had stopped to look up and bare its teeth. It stripped the foliage off the top of a tree and set Robyn in a crook between two bare branches.
“Rescue the woman if you can, but do not harm the ape.” Jayewardene’s voice sounded almost unintelligible from inside the helicopter, but Braun made a thumbs-up signal to show he understood. “We’ll stand by,” Jayewardene said.
The ape reached down, scooped up a handful of dirt, and crushed the contents down with its palms. The creature roared and threw the dirtball at the aces. The flying elephant dropped out of its path. The missile continued upward. Jayewardene saw it was going to hit the chopper and gripped the seat as tightly as possible. The earth thudded against the side of the aircraft. The helicopter began to spin, but the pilot quickly brought it back under control and pulled up sharply.
“Better keep a safe distance,” the pilot said, making sure the ape stayed in view. “If the momentum hadn’t been spent on that, I don’t think we’d still be in the air.”
“Right.” Jayewardene slowly exhaled and wiped his brow. A few scattered raindrops began to dot the windshield.
The Elephant Girl had moved about fifty yards away from the ape and down to treetop level. Braun jumped off her and disappeared into the undergrowth. The elephant gained height again and trumpeted, moving back toward the monster. The ape snarled and beat its chest, the sound like an explosion underground.
The standoff lasted a minute or two, then the ape rocked backward, catching its balance just at the point of falling over. Elephant Girl swooped down quickly toward the woman in the tree. The ape swung his arms at her. The flying elephant banked away, wobbling a bit.
“Did it hit her?” Jayewardene turned to the pilot. “Should we move in and try to help?”
“I don’t think there’s much we can do. Possibly distract it. But that could get us knocked down.” The pilot put the stick between his knees and wiped the sweat from his palms.
The ape roared and reached down to pick up something. Jack Braun struggled in the creature’s hand, trying to push the giant fingers open. The ape lifted him up to its open mouth.
“No,” Jayewardene said, turning his head away.
The beast roared again and Jayewardene looked back. The monster rubbed its mouth with its free hand. Braun, apparently unhurt, was bracing his back against the ape’s fingers and pushing the thumb open. The monster flipped its arm like a baseball pitcher, sending Braun cartwheeling through the air. He came down in heavy jungle several seconds and several hundred yards away.
The Tamil sat with his mouth slightly open, then put the helicopter into a turn toward the spot where Braun had disappeared into the trees. “It tried to eat him, but he wouldn’t go down. I think he broke one of the devil’s teeth.” The Elephant Girl followed behind them. The ape picked Robyn out of the tree and after a final triumphant roar, began wading through the jungle again. Jayewardene bit his lip and looked at the treetops for broken limbs to show where Braun had fallen through.
The rain grew heavier and the pilot switched on the wipers. “There he is,” the Tamil said, slowing to a hover. Braun was climbing up a large coconut palm tree. His clothes were in tatters, but he didn’t appear hurt. Elephant Girl moved in, curled her trunk around his waist, and lifted him onto her back. Braun bent over and held on to her ears.
“Follow us,” Jayewardene said, using the bullhorn again. “We’ll lead you back to the airbase. Are you all right, Mr. Braun?”
The golden ace made a thumbs-up again, this time without looking at them.
Jayewardene said nothing for several minutes. Perhaps his vision had been wrong. The beast appeared so vicious. A normal person would have been crushed to a paste between the monster’s teeth. No. The dream had to be true. He couldn’t allow any self-doubt, or the ape would have no chance at all. They outraced the storm back to Colombo.
Jayewardene paused outside Tachyon’s door. He’d been sleeping when the alien called. Tachyon had apologized for taking so long to get back to him and began listing the reasons. Jayewardene had interrupted and asked if he could come over immediately. The doctor had said yes with little enthusiasm.
He knocked and waited, then raised his hand again before he heard footfalls from the other side. Tachyon opened the door, wearing a puffy-sleeved white shirt and blue velvet pants sashed with a large red scarf. “Mr. Jayewardene? Please come in.” Jayewardene bowed and went in.
Tachyon sat down on the bed, underneath an oil painting of Dunhinda Falls. A scarlet-plumed hat and a partially eaten plate of rice were on the bedside table. “You are the same Mr. Jayewardene from the helicopter? The one Radha told me about.”
“Yes.” Jayewardene lowered himself into the lounger next to the bed. “I hope Mr. Braun wasn’t injured.”
“Only his already battered pride.” Tachyon closed his eyes for a moment, as if trying to gather strength, then reopened them. “Please tell me how I can help you, Mr. Jayewardene.”
“The military is planning on attacking the ape tomorrow. We must stop them and subdue the creature ourselves.” Jayewardene rubbed his eyes. “But I’m not starting at the beginning. The military deals with harsh reality. But you, Doctor, work in the context of the extraordinary on a daily basis. I don’t know you, but I am in a position of needing to trust you.”
Tachyon placed his dangling feet firmly on the floor and straightened his shoulders. “I’ve spent most of my life here trying to live up to the trust of others. I only wish I could believe the trust was warranted. But you say we must stop the military and subdue the ape ourselves. Why? Surely they’re better equipped—”
Jayewardene interrupted. “The virus doesn’t affect animals, if I understand correctly.”
“I know the virus doesn’t affect animals,” Tachyon replied with a shake of his curly, red hair. “I helped develop the virus. Every child knows ...” He covered his mouth. “Ancestors forgive me.” He slid off the bed and walked to the window. “For twenty years it’s been staring me in the face, and I missed it. By my own blind stupidity I’ve sentenced some individual to a living hell. I’ve failed one of mine again. The trust isn’t warranted.” Tachyon pressed his fists against his temples and continued berating himself.
“Your pardon, Doctor,” Jayewardene said. “I think your energies would be more beneficial if we applied them to the problem at hand.” Tachyon turned, a pained expression on his face. “I meant no offense, Doctor,” he added, sensing the depth of the alien’s guilt.
“No. No, of course not. Mr. Jayewardene, how did you know?”
“Not many of our people have been touched by the virus. I’m one of the very few. I suppose I should be grateful to be alive and whole, but it’s in our nature to complain. My ability gives me visions of the future. Always about someone or some place I know, usually myself. And so detailed and vivid.” He shook his head. “My most recent one showed me the ape’s true nature.”
Tachyon sat back down on the bed, tapping his fingertips together. “What I don’t understand is the primitive behavior exhibited by the creature.”
“I’m sure that most of our questions can be answered once he’s a man again.”
“Of course. Of course.” Tachyon popped up off the bed again. “And your ability. Temporal displacement of the cognitive self during dreamstate. This was what my family had in mind when they created the virus. Something that transcends known physical values. Amazing.”
Jayewardene shrugged. “Yes, amazing. But it’s a burden I would gladly give up. I want to view the future from its proper perspective, the here and now. This-power-destroys the natural flow of life. After the ape is restored, I plan to make my pilgrimage to Sri Pada. Perhaps through spiritual purity I may be rid of it.”
“I’ve had some success reversing the effects at my clinic.” Tachyon twisted his sash. “Of course the success rate isn’t what I’d hoped. And the risk would be yours to take.”
“We must deal with the ape first. After that my path may become more clear.”
“If only we had more time here,” Tachyon complained. “The tour is supposed to leave for Thailand day after tomorrow. That leaves us little margin for error. And we can’t all go chasing out after the creature.”
“I don’t think the government would allow it in any case. Not after today. The fewer of your people we involve, the better.”
“Agreed. I can’t believe the others went off like that. Sometimes I think we’re all suffering from some kind of creeping insanity. Hiram especially.” Tachyon walked to the window and opened the mini-blinds. Lightning flashed on the horizon, briefly silhouetting the wall of towering thunderclouds. “Obviously I must be included in this little adventure. Radha can give me maneuverability. She’s half-Indian. There have been problems between your country and India lately, I believe?”
“Sadly, yes. The Indians support the Tamils, since they have the same cultural heritage. The Sinhalese majority looks at this as support for the Tamil Tigers, a terrorist group.”
Jayewardene looked down at the floor. “It is a conflict with no winners and too many victims.”
“So we must have a cover story. That Radha was hiding out, afraid for her life. She might present the answer to some other problems.” Tachyon closed the blinds. “What weaponry will be used against the ape?”
“Two waves of helicopters. The first will move in with steel nets. The second, if needed, will be fully armed attack ships.”
“Could you slip us onto their base before the second wave gets off the ground?” Tachyon rubbed his palms together. “Possibly. Yes, I think I could.”
“Good.” The alien smiled. “And Mr. Jayewardene, in my own defense, there’s been so much in my life, the founding of the clinic, unrest in Jokertown, the Swarm invasion—”
Jayewardene cut him off. “Doctor, you owe me no explanation.”
“But I will owe him one.”
They’d stopped the car a couple of miles from the gate to put Radha into the trunk. Jayewardene took a sip of tea from his Styrofoam cup. It was thick, coppery, and hot enough to help ward off the predawn chill. Since the road to the air base was bumpy, he had only partially filled his cup. There was a cold ache inside him that even the tea could not reach. Even in his best case scenario he would be forced to resign his post. He was overstepping his authority in an unforgivable manner. But he couldn’t worry about what might happen to him; the ape was his first concern. He and Tachyon had stayed up most of the night, trying to cover all the things that might go wrong and what to do if the worst happened.
Jayewardene was in the front seat with Saul. Tachyon was in back between Danforth and Paula. No one spoke. Jayewardene reached for his government ID as they approached the well-lit front gate.
The gate guard was a young Sinhalese. His shoulders were as straight as the creases in his khaki uniform. His eyes were bright and he moved with measured steps to Jayewardene’s side of the car.
Jayewardene rolled down his window and handed the guard his ID. “We wish to speak with General Dissanayake. Dr. Tachyon and two representatives of the American film company are in our party as well as myself.”
The guard looked at the ID, then at the people in the car. “One moment,” he said, then headed over to the small booth beside the gate and picked up the phone. After speaking for a few moments he walked back and handed the ID back with five laminated visitor badges. “The general will see you. He’s in his office. Do you know the way, sir?”
“Yes, thank you,” Jayewardene said, rolling his window back up and clipping one of the badges onto his shirt pocket. The guard opened the gate and motioned them past with his red-tipped flashlight. Jayewardene sighed as they drove through and the gate closed behind them. He directed Saul to the officers’ complex and patted the driver on the shoulder. “You know what to do?”
Saul eased the car to a stop between two faded yellow stripes and removed the keys, holding them between his thumb and forefinger. “As long as the trunk opens, you don’t have to worry about my screwing up.”
They got out of the car and walked down the sidewalk toward the building. Jayewardene heard helicopter rotors cutting the air overhead. Once inside, Tachyon stayed at Jayewardene’s side as he guided them down the linoleum hallways. The alien was fussing with the cuffs of his coral-pink shirt. Paula and Danforth followed closely behind them, whispering to each other.
The corporal in the general’s outer’ office looked up from his cup of tea and waved them in. The general was sitting behind his desk in a large swivel chair. He was a man of average height and compact build with dark, deep-set eyes and an expression that seldom changed. Some in the military community felt that, at fifty-four, Dissanayake was too young to be a general. But he had been both firm and controlled in his dealing with the Tamil Tigers, a militant separatist group. He had managed to avoid a bloodbath without appearing weak. Jayewardene respected him. The general nodded as they entered, pointing to the group of chairs opposite his cluttered desk.
“Please, sit down,” Dissanayake said, tightening his lips into a half-smile. His English was not as good as Jayewardene s, but was still easily understandable. “Always a pleasure to see you, Mr. Jayewardene. And of course to welcome our other distinguished visitors.”
“Thank you, General.” Jayewardene waited for the others to seat themselves before continuing. “We know that you’re quite busy now and appreciate your time.”
Dissanayake looked at his gold watch and nodded. “Yes, I’m supposed to be up at operations right now. The first wave is scheduled to be taking off as we speak. So,” he said, clasping his hands, “if you could be as brief as possible.”
“We don’t think you should attack the ape,” Tachyon said. “To my knowledge it’s never harmed anyone. Are there any reports of casualties so far?”
“None have been reported, Doctor.” Dissanayake leaned back in his chair. “But the monster is headed for Adam’s Peak. If unchecked, there will almost certainly be fatalities.”
“But what about Robyn?” Paula said. “You go after the ape with attack choppers and she’s likely to be killed.”
“And if we do nothing, hundreds could be killed. Possibly thousands if it reaches a city.” Dissanayake bit his lip. “It is my duty to prevent that from happening. I do understand what it means to have a friend in danger. And be assured, we will do everything possible to rescue Miss Symmes. My men will sacrifice their own lives to save hers, if need be. But to me her safety is ho more important than the others who are threatened. Please, try to understand my position.”
“And. nothing we can say will persuade you even to postpone the attack?” Tachyon hand-combed his hair back out of his eyes.
“The ape is very near to Adam’s Peak. There are many pilgrims at this time of year, and there is no time for a successful evacuation. Delay will almost certainly cost lives.” Dissanayake stood and picked up his cap from the desktop. “And now I must see to my duties. You’re welcome to monitor the operation from here if you like.”
Jayewardene shook his head. “No, thank you. We do appreciate your taking time to see us.”
The general extended his palms. “I wish I could have been more helpful. Good luck to us all, even the ape.” The sky was beginning to brighten when they got back to the car. Saul was leaning against the door, an unlit cigarette in his mouth. Tachyon and Jayewardene walked over to him as Danforth and Paula got into the car.
“Everything proceeding according to plan?” Jayewardene asked.
“She’s out and hidden. Nobody seems to have noticed a thing.” Saul pulled out a plastic lighter. “Now?”
“Now or never,” said Tachyon, sliding into the backseat. Saul flicked the lighter and stared a moment at the flame before starting up his cigarette. “Let’s get the hell out of Dodge.”
“Five minutes,” said Jayewardene, walking quickly to the other side of the car.
They pulled up next to the front gate. The guard walked slowly over and extended his hand. “Your badges, please.” Jayewardene unclipped his and handed it over as the guard collected them.
“Shit,” said Danforth. “ I dropped the damn thing.” Saul flipped on the car’s interior lights. Jayewardene glanced at his watch. They didn’t have time for this. Danforth reached into the crack between the edge of the seat and the door, made a face, and pulled out the badge. He handed it quickly to the guard, who took the badges back to his post before swinging the gate open.
The gate creaked closed behind them with less than two minutes left. Saul pushed the accelerator quickly up to fifty, doing his best to avoid the larger potholes.
“ I hope Radha can manage this. She’s never extended her powers over such a large area before.” Tachyon drummed his fingers on the vinyl car seat. He turned to look back. “We’re far enough away, I think. Stop here.”
Saul pulled over and they all got out and looked back toward the base.
“I don’t get it.” Danforth crouched down next to the rear of the car. “I mean, all she can do is turn into an elephant. I don’t see where this gets us.”
“Yes, but the mass has to come from somewhere, Mr. Danforth. And electrical energy is the most easily convertible source.” Tachyon looked at his watch. “Twenty seconds.”
“You know, if you could make your movies this exciting, Mr D ....” Paula shook her head. “Come on, Radha.”
The entire base went silently dark. “Hot damn.” Danforth popped up and bounced on his toes. “She did it.” Jayewardene looked at the gray sky above the horizon. A dark shape lifted itself up out of the larger blackness and moved toward them, throwing off occasional blue sparks. “I think she may be a bit overcharged,” said Tachyon. “But no gunfire. I’m sure they don’t know what hit them.”
“That’s fine,” said Danforth. “Because I’m not really sure what did either.”
“What I understand,” said Saul, leaning into the front seat and starting up the car, “is that no more choppers are taking off from there for a while. And Miss Elephant Girl owes me a new battery from yesterday.”
Radha flew in and landed next to the car, sparks igniting from each foot as she touched the ground. Jayewardene thought she looked a little bigger than she had the day before. Tachyon walked over and stepped onto her front leg, his hair standing out like a clown’s wig as he touched her. Radha lifted him up onto her back.
“We’ll see you soon, with luck,” the alien said, waving. Jayewardene nodded. “The drive to Adam’s Peak should take us about an hour from here. Fly northwest as quickly as you can.”
The elephant rose noiselessly into the air and they were gone before anything else could be said.
The road was narrow. Dense trees grew to its edge and stretched ahead endlessly. They had been alone except for a bus and a few horse-drawn carts. Jayewardene explained to them what the ape really was and how he had come by the knowledge. Discussing his ace ability passed the time during the drive. Saul was pushing as hard as he could on the mud-slicked roads, making better time than Jayewardene had thought possible.
“I don’t understand one thing, though,” said Paula, leaning forward from the backseat to put her head next to his.
“If these visions are always true, why are you working so hard to see that things turnout?”
“For myself there is no choice,” Jayewardene said. “I cannot let the visions dictate how I lead my life, so I try to act as I would have without such knowledge. And a little knowledge of the future is very dangerous. The final outcome is not my only concern. What happens in the interim is equally as important. If anyone was killed by the ape because I knew it would ultimately have its humanity restored, I would be guilty of having caused that death.”
“I think you’re being a little hard on yourself.” Paula gave his shoulder a light squeeze. “There’s only so much anyone can do.”
“Those are my beliefs.” Jayewardene turned around and looked into her eyes. She returned the look for an instant, then sank back next to Danforth.
“Something going on up ahead,” Saul said in a level, almost disinterested tone.
They were at the top of a hill. The trees had been cleared away from the roadside for a hundred yards or so on either side, giving them an unobstructed view.
Sri Pada’s peak was still shrouded in the early morning mist. Helicopters circled something unseen near the base of the mountain.
“Think it’s our boy they’re after?” asked Danforth. “Almost certainly.” Jayewardene wished he had brought along field glasses. One of the circling shapes might be Radha and Tachyon, but from this distance there was no way to tell. The clearing ended, and they were again surrounded by jungle.
“Want me to jack it up a little?” Saul crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray.
“As long as we get there alive,” Paula said, fastening her seat belt.
Saul pushed the accelerator down a little farther, leaving a spray of mud behind them.
They parked behind a pair of abandoned buses that blocked off the road. No one was visible other than the beast and its attackers. The pilgrims had either fled up the mountain or back down the road into the valley. Jayewardene walked as quickly as he could up the stone steps, the others following behind him. The helicopters had kept the ape from making it very far up the mountain.
“Any sign of our elephant?” asked Danforth.
“Can’t see them from here.” Jayewardene’s sides already hurt from the exertion. He paused to rest a moment and looked up as one of the choppers dropped a steel net. There was an answering roar, but they couldn’t tell if the net had found its target.
They worked their way up the steps for several hundred yards, passing through an empty but undamaged rest station. The helicopters were still pressing their attack, although they appeared to be fewer in number now. Jayewardene slipped on one of the wet flagstones and smashed his knee against a step edge. Saul grabbed him by the armpits and lifted him up. “I’m all right,” he said, painfully straightening his leg. “Let’s keep on.”
An elephant trumpeted in the distance. “Hurry” said Paula, taking the stairs in twos. Jayewardene and the others trotted up after her. After another hundred-yard climb he stopped them. “We have to cut across the mountain’s face here. The footing is very dangerous. Hold on to the trees when you can.” He stepped out onto the moist soil and steadied himself against a coconut palm, then began working slowly toward the direction of the battle.
They were slightly higher than the ape when they got close enough to see what was going on. The monster had a steel. net in one hand and a stripped tree in the other. It was holding Radha and the two remaining helicopters at bay like a gladiator with a net and trident. Jayewardene couldn’t see Robyn but assumed that the beast had her in the top of a tree again.
“Well, now that we’re here, what the hell do we do?” Danforth leaned against a jak tree, breathing hard.
“We go get Robyn.” Paula wiped her muddy hands on her shorts and took a step toward the ape.
“Wait.” Danforth grabbed her hand. “ I can’t afford to lose you too. Let’s see what Tachyon can do.”
“No,” Paula said, twisting away. “We have to get her out while the ape’s distracted.”
The pair stared hard at each other for a moment, then Jayewardene came between them. “Let’s get a bit closer and see what’s possible.”
They half-slid, half-walked down the slope, then hit a ledge that was deep mud. Jayewardene felt it slip uncomfortably into his shoes. Robyn was still nowhere in sight, but the ape hadn’t noticed them.
The last helicopter moved into position over the ape and dropped its net. The ape caught it on the end of the tree and deflected it to one side, then tossed the tree at the retreating chopper, which had to bank away sharply to avoid being hit. The ape beat its chest and roared.
Radha and Tachyon moved in from behind at treetop level. The ape reached down, picked up one of the steel nets, and swung it in a blur of motion. There was a pinging thwack as the edge of the net caught Radha on the foreleg. Tachyon slipped off her back and was left dangling from her ear. Radha gained height and pulled Tachyon back up onto her shoulders.
The ape pounded the earth and bared its teeth, then stood there clutching and unclutching its huge, black hands. “I don’t see what they can do,” said Danforth. “That thing is just too strong.”
“We shall see,” Jayewardene said.
Tachyon leaned in close to one of Radha’s immense ears. The elephant dropped down like a stone for a distance, then began circling rapidly around the ape’s head. The ape lifted its arms and twisted around, trying to keep its enemy in sight. After a few moments the creature was half a turn behind the elephant. Radha dove directly for the ape’s back. Tachyon jumped onto the ape’s neck, and the flying elephant moved away quickly to a safe distance. The ape hunched down, then reached back for Tachyon, who was clinging to the thick fur on its shoulder. The beast plucked the alien off easily and held him up for inspection, then roared and brought Tachyon toward its mouth.
“Holy shit,” said Danforth, restraining Paula.
The monster had Tachyon almost into its mouth when it froze, jerked convulsively for a moment, and toppled over backward. The impact jarred water from the trees, streaking the mud on the faces of Jayewardene and his companions. Jayewardene hurried downhill toward the ape, trying to ignore the pain in his knee.
Tachyon was squirming out of the ape’s rigid fingers when they arrived at the creature’s side. He slid down quickly off the giant body and steadied himself against Jayewardene.
“Burning sky! You were right, Mr. Jayewardene.” He took several deep breaths. “There is a man inside the beast.”
“How did you stop it?” Danforth asked, staying a few steps farther away than the others. “And where’s Robyn?”
“Headed back to North Dakota,” came a weak voice from a nearby treetop. Robyn waved and began picking her way down.
“I’ll see if she’s okay,” Paula said, running over.
“To answer your first question, Mr. Danforth,” Tachyon said, counting the missing buttons on his shirt, “the main portion of the brain is simian and consists mostly of an old black-and-white film. But there is also a human personality, completely subordinate to the ape mentality. I have temporarily given them equal control, thus providing a stasis that has paralyzed it.”
Danforth nodded uncomprehendingly. “So what do we do now?”
“Dr. Tachyon will now restore the ape to human form.” Jayewardene rubbed his leg. “The military isn’t likely to stay away for long. There isn’t much time to do what must be done.” As if to punctuate his remark, one of the helicopters appeared and hovered over them for a moment before turning away.
Tachyon nodded and looked at Jayewardene. “You saw the transformation in your vision. Was I injured? Just out of curiosity”
Jayewardene shrugged. “Would it matter?”
“No. I suppose not.” Tachyon chewed on a fingernail. “Matter. That’s the real problem. When we restore the human mind to dominance, he’ll shed all that excess matter as energy. Anyone near, including myself, is likely to be killed.”
Jayewardene pointed to Radha, who was helping Robyn down out of the tree. “Perhaps if you were held in the air, ungrounded so to speak, the danger would be minimized.”
“And if the energy was channeled into something like a lightning bolt ...” Jayewardene looked up at the overcast sky. “Yes. That idea has possibilities.”
Tachyon nodded and yelled to Radha. “Don’t change back yet.”
A few minutes later everyone was in position. Jayewardene sat next to Paula, who held Robyn’s head in her lap. Saul and Danforth stood a few yards away. Radha, some ten feet off the ground, held Tachyon in her trunk a few feet from the ape’s head. Saul had torn his shirt into blindfolds for Elephant Girl and Tachyon. They could hear the beast’s labored breathing from where they sat.
“You’d better close your eyes or turn away,” said Jayewardene. They did as he suggested.
The vision took over and Jayewardene felt all the air go out of him. He smelled the damp jungle. Heard birds singing and the faraway flap of helicopter rotors. The sun went behind a cloud. An ant crawled up his leg. He shut his eyes. Even through his closed lids the flash was magnesium bright. There was a single deafening boom of thunder. He jumped involuntarily, then waited a moment and opened his eyes.
Through the white streak in his vision caused by the flash, he saw Tachyon kneeling next to a thin, naked, Caucasian man. Radha was stomping out small fires that had broken out in a circle around them.
“How am I going to explain this to the Central Park Zoo?” asked Danforth, his expression dazed.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Jayewardene, moving slowly back down the mountainside toward Tachyon. “It sounds like great pub to me.”
Tachyon helped the naked man to his feet. He was of average height with plain features. He moved his mouth but made no sound.
“I think he’s come through it intact,” said Tachyon, getting his shoulder under the man’s armpit. “Thanks to you.”
Jayewardene shook his head and pulled three identical envelopes out of his pants pocket. “What happened had to happen. When the military shows up, and they will, I want you to deliver these to them. Say they are from me. One goes to the president, one the Minister of State, the last to the Minister of the Interior. It is my letter of resignation.”
Tachyon took the envelopes and tucked them away. “I see.”
As for me, I intend to make the pilgrimage to the top of Sri Pada. Perhaps it will help me achieve my goal. To be rid of these visions. Jayewardene headed back toward the stone steps.
“Mr. Jayewardene,” Tachyon said. “If your pilgrimage is not successful, I would be willing to do anything possible to help you. Perhaps try to put some mental damper to keep you out of touch with your ability. We leave tomorrow. I suspect your government will be glad to see us go. But you’d be more than welcome to come with us.”
Jayewardene bowed and moved over toward Paula and Robyn.
“Mr. Jayewardene,” Robyn said in a rasping voice. Her blond hair was tangled and matted with mud. Her clothes were in shreds. Jayewardene tried not to look. “Thank you for helping save me.”
“You’re most welcome. But you should be gotten to a hospital as soon as possible. Just for observation.” He turned to Paula. “I plan to make the pilgrimage up the mountain now, if you’d like to come.”
“I don’t know,” said Paula, looking down at Robyn. “Go ahead,” Robyn said. “I’ll be fine.”
Paula smiled and looked back at Jayewardene. “I’d love to.”
The multicolored neon reflects brokenly from the wet pavement. The Japanese are all around us, mostly men. They stare at Peregrine, who has her beautiful, banded wings folded tight around her. She looks ahead, ignoring them.
We have been walking a long way. My sides burn and my feet ache. She stops at an alleyway and turns to me. I nod. She walks slowly into the darkness. I follow, afraid of making a noise that will attract attention. I feel useless, like a shadow. Peregrine stretches her wings. They almost touch the cold stone on either side of the alleyway. She folds them back.
A door opens and the alley is filled with light. A man steps out. He is thin, tall, with dark skin, almond eyes, and a high forehead. He cranes his head forward to look at us. “Fortunato?” she asks.
Jayewardene crouched next to the dying embers of the campfire. A few other pilgrims sat wordlessly next to him. The vision had awakened him: Even here there was no escape. Although the pilgrimage was not officially complete until he returned home, he knew that the visions would continue. He was tainted with the wild card virus, perhaps tainted by the years he’d spent in foreign countries. Spiritual purity and completeness was impossible to attain. At least for the present.
Paula came up behind him and put her hands lightly on his shoulders. “It’s beautiful up here, really.”
The others around the campfire looked up at her suspiciously. Jayewardene guided her away. They stood at the edge of the peak, staring out into the dark mist down the mountain.
“Each religion had its own belief about the footprint,” he said. “We believe it was made by Buddha. The Hindus say it was made by Shiva. Moslems argue that it is where Adam stood for a thousand years, atoning for the loss of paradise.”
“Whoever it was, they had a big foot,” Paula said. “That print was three feet long.”
The sun came up over the horizon, slowly bringing light to the swirling mists below them. Their shadows grew huge in the grayness. Jayewardene caught his breath. “The Specter of the Brocken,” he said, closing his eyes in prayer.
“Wow,” said Paula. “I guess it’s my week for things giant.”
Jayewardene opened his eyes and sighed. His fantasies about Paula had been as unrealistic as those about his hope of destroying his power through the pilgrimage. They were like two wheels in a clockwork whose teeth meshed but whose centers forever remained at a distance. “What you have seen is the rarest of wonders here. One can come here every day for a year and not witness what we have.”
Paula yawned, then smiled weakly. “Sounds like it’s time to go down.”
“Yes. It’s time.”
Danforth and Paula met him at the airport. Danforth was shaved and in clean clothes, almost the same cocksure producer he’d met only a few days ago. Paula wore shorts and a tight, white T-shirt. She seemed ready to get on with her life. Jayewardene envied her.
“How’s Miss Symmes?” he asked.
Danforth rolled his eyes. “Well enough to have called her lawyer three times in the last twelve hours. I’m really in the soup now. I’ll be lucky to stay in the business at all.”
“Offer her a five-picture deal and plenty of points,” said Jayewardene, cramming his entire knowledge of film jargon into one sentence.
“Sign this guy up, Mr. D.” Paula grinned and took Jayewardene by the arm. “He might be able to get you out of some jams even I couldn’t.”
Danforth stuck his thumbs through his belt loops and rocked back and forth. “That’s really not a bad idea. Not bad at all.” He took Jayewardene’s hand and shook it. “I really don’t know what we would have done without you.”
“Gone right down the drain.” Paula gave Jayewardene a one-shoulder hug. “I guess this is where we have to say good-bye.”
“Mr. Jayewardene.” A young government courier shouldered his way through the crowd to their side. He was breathing hard, but took time to straighten his uniform before handing Jayewardene an envelope. It bore the presidential seal.
“Thank you,” he said, popping it open with his thumb. He read it silently.
Paula leaned in to look, but the writing was Sinhalese. “What does it say?”
“That my resignation has not been accepted and I am considered to be on an extended leave of absence. Not exactly the safest thing he could have done, but much appreciated.” He bowed to Danforth and Paula. “I’ll look for the film when it comes out.”
“King Pongo,” Danforth said. “It’ll be a monster hit for sure.”
The plane was more crowded than he had expected. People had been wandering around since after takeoff, chatting, complaining, getting drunk. Peregrine was standing in the aisle, talking to the tall, blond man who’d been with her in in the bar. They were keeping their voices low, but Jayewardene could tell from the looks on their faces that it was not a pleasant conversation. Peregrine turned away from the man, took a deep breath, and walked over to Jayewardene.
“May I sit next to you?” she asked. “I know everyone else on this plane. Some considerably better than I’d like.”
“I’m flattered and delighted,” he said. And it was true. Her features and fragrance were beautiful but intimidating. Even to him.
She smiled, her lips curving in an almost inhumanly attractive manner. “That man you and Tach saved. He’s sitting right over there.” She indicated him with the arch of an eyebrow. “His name’s Jeremiah Strauss. Used to be a minor league ace named the Projectionist. I guess we’re all bozos on this bus. Ah, here he comes now”
Strauss wandered over, his hands clutching the backs of seats as he went. He was pale and afraid. “Mr. Jayewardene?” He said it as if he’d been practicing the pronunciation for the last ten minutes. “My name is Strauss. I’ve been told all that you did for me. And I want you to know that I never forget a favor. If you need a job when we get to New York, U Thant’s a friend of the family. We’ll work something out.”
“That’s very kind of you, Mr. Strauss, but I would have done it in any case.” Jayewardene reached up and shook his hand.
Stiauss smiled, straightened his shoulders, and clutched his way back to his seat.
“I’d say he’s going to need quite a while to readjust,” Peregrine said in a whisper. “Twenty-plus years is a lot to lose.”
“ I can only wish him a speedy recovery. It’s difficult to feel sorry for myself considering his circumstances.”
“Feeling sorry for oneself is an inalienable right.” She yawned. “I can’t believe how much I’m sleeping. Should have time for a nice long nap before we get to Thailand. Do you mind if I use your shoulder?”
“No. Please think of it as your own.” He looked out the window. “Australia. Then where?”
She rested her head against him and closed her eyes. “Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, China, Japan. Fortunato.” She said the last word almost too quietly for him to hear. “I doubt we’ll be running into him.”
“But you will.” He said it hoping to please her, but she looked at him as if she’d caught him going through her underwear.
“You know this? You’ve had one of those visions about me?” Someone had obviously told her about his power.
“Yes. I’m sorry. I really have no control over them.” He looked back out the window, feeling ashamed.
She rested her head back onto his shoulder. “It’s not your fault. Don’t worry. I’m sure Tach will be able to do something for you.”
“I hope so.”
She’d been asleep for over an hour. He’d eaten onehanded to keep from waking her up. The roast beef he’d had was like a ball of lead in his stomach. He knew he would survive Western food at least until they reached Japan. The air was a low rumble as it rushed by the plane’s metal skin. Peregrine breathed softly next to his ear. Jayewardene closed his eyes and prayed for dreamless sleep.
T he club was crowded, but a little less boisterous than usual. Audience members whispered to each other or played with their drinks, but they weren’t giving the girl at the microphone the kind of attention she needed.
A lot of the customers were smoking, but Carlotta’s routine was doing the opposite. It wasn’t the material, and her delivery was spot on. Well, as good as it ever was, anyway.
She was gorgeous, though. Carlotta had creamy skin, delicate features, and a body that, as the joke went “would make a bishop kick out a stained-glass window.” Her honey-blonde hair was cut in a Louise Brooks pageboy, framing her face to ideal effect. Bob leaned back into the polished bar rail and sighed. If he didn’t have a personal interest in her, it would be easy enough to fire her. Not much chance of that, though
In every crowd there was somebody who looked like they didn’t belong. Tonight it was a pair of guys sitting together to the left of the stage, just away from the light’s edge. They were young and looked like FBI agents dressed in particularly loud disco garb. One had a face with a hound-like quality and his companion was taller and thinner. Mentally, Bob dubbed them Mutt and Jeff. Neither man was laughing or even smiling at Carlotta’s material, although they were certainly keeping their eyes on her. Bob decided to pay them a visit.
He navigated the floor over to their table. “Enjoying the show, gentleman?”
The tall thin man looked up at him, expressionless. “Great,” he said.
Bob cleared his throat. “It’s traditional to laugh at the jokes.”
“My friend has a medical condition that keeps him from laughing.” The thin man smiled. It wasn’t pleasant. “So I don’t either, just to keep him from feeling bad.”
“That explains why you’re patronizing a comedy club.” Bob wasn’t sure what he wanted from these two, but knew he wasn’t going to get it if they had their way. “Pay attention.” He gestured to Carlotta. “You might just enjoy yourselves.”
“I’m sure most of you can tell I’m not from around here.” Carlotta looked down ashamedly from her mike. “The truth is, I’m from America’s heartland, the great state of Iowa.”
“That would explain why you smell like pigs.” A deep male voice, slightly slurred, came from the back of the audience. Bob walked in the general direction of the heckler. He’d done this plenty of times and would have the creep pinpointed quickly.
Carlotta tried to work the interruption to her advantage. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned since being in the Big Apple, it’s that no one can survive very long with a well developed sense of smell.” Small laugh. “Getting back to Iowa. This is the truth, I swear to god. They held a contest in my home state for a new tourism slogan and asked Iowans to help them out.”
“You suck, you corn-fed bitch.” The heckler was even louder this time around. Bob picked out a large sandy-haired man in a tank top and faux leather pants sitting by himself a couple of tables away on the left. Bob pulled a small flashlight from his jacket pocket and moved in.
“Really,” Carlotta continued, ignoring him this time around, “you’d be amazed at the cruelty of responses from the folks in Iowa. These are people with a real sense of humor. One was ‘Iowa, gateway to Wisconsin.’” She sold the joke with a broad sweep of her arm, but didn’t get much for the effort.
“Go the fuck back where you came from,” yelled the heckler. Bob was standing directly behind him and briefly turned on the flashlight over the troublemaker’s head. Carlotta was looking in his direction and nodded.
“My favorite slogan by far, though, was ‘Iowa, it makes you want Dubuque.’” This got a pretty good response from the audience but the heckler started to laugh uproariously. He knocked his drink over, spilling ice and alcohol onto the floor, and grabbed onto the edge of his table, laughing convulsively. He looked up at Bob, with something close to panic in his widening eyes. Bob grabbed the man under his sweaty armpits and hauled him into a standing position, then guided him toward the exit. The heckler got his legs under himself quickly and Bob was afraid he might try to resist being ushered out the door. Luckily the man seemed relieved as Bob pushed him outside into the heat.
“I wouldn’t come back,” Bob said, as a parting shot, and gave the man a practiced stare for good measure. The heckler said nothing, but walked slowly away down the pavement.
Carlotta was leaving the stage to scattered applause when Bob made it back to the interior of the club. Mutt and Jeff had disappeared, which was okay with Bob. “Thank you ladies and gentlemen,” he said to the audience. “She’s here Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Tell your friends.”
Bob met her backstage with a half-smile. “Not your best, but not awful, given the circumstances.” He’d guessed Carlotta’s wild card ability and had bluffed the truth out of her a few weeks earlier. She couldn’t do any real harm with it; make a crowd giggle, a few people laugh out loud, or—if she focused it on one person—completely incapacitate them.
“Right.” Carlotta wiped her forehead and combed back her damp hair. “Thanks for the help, but I had him spotted. Jerks seem to grow on trees in this burg.”
“That’s a fact, my dear. After six months here, I’d think you’d come to expect it. New York’s reputation didn’t manifest itself out of thin air.”
Carlotta headed for her tiny dressing room. Bob followed. “God help me if I ever get used to rude assholes,” she said without looking back at him. “The dirt, yes. The noise, yes. Even the lack of anything green outside of Central Park or the A&P. But jerk-off morons are always going to piss this girl off.” She turned around at the doorway of her tiny dressing room. “I haven’t got time to talk. I’m meeting someone.”
“You’re certainly not a very traditional girl.” Bob fingered his watch and waited for a reply, but received only a roll of the eyes. “Most people suck up to their boss a bit, unless they’re very, very good at their job. You certainly don’t have more than one ‘very’ and possibly none at all.”
“You’re not going to get rid of me just yet, Mr. Cortland,” she said, and closed the door with finality.
Too true, Bob thought to himself. He wandered back over to the bar and poured himself a half-shot of scotch, wondering what it would be like to win a round with her. She certainly wasn’t smarter than he was. Well probably not. But he couldn’t match her obstinacy. “To good humor,” he said quietly. “Mine. And patience.”
He saw her flash out the rear exit in a short blue dress and almost-matching heels, blonde hair bouncing, and decided, with the help of the scotch, to try another approach on her. He had until he caught up with her to figure out just what that might be.
Once outside, the July heat swallowed him like a chip of ice in a cup of steaming coffee. Even in the early morning hours, the still, furnace-like air sucked the life out of everyone and everything. Carlotta was disappearing down the alleyway, but stopped short on the far side of a dumpster. Two men emerged from the darkness and stepped into her path. Bob couldn’t see them well and slipped into the shadows on the dark side of the alley, carefully removed a small revolver from his right jacket pocket. It felt bigger in his hand that it really was. He was hoping the same psychological phenomenon applied to the men he was going to try to stop.
“You’re coming with us. Any trouble, I hurt you.” The taller of the two men grabbed Carlotta by the arm. She tried to wrench away, but was pinned by his grip.
Bob moved out from behind the dumpster and trained his weapon on the man holding Carlotta, recognizing the pair as Mutt and Jeff. “Let her go,” he said, in as even a tone as he could manage. “I’ll shoot you both if I have to.”
Mutt stared at him, unblinking. “Now why don’t I believe that?”
Taking a deep breath, Bob pointed the end of the revolver slightly to one side of the man and pulled the trigger. The gun kicked uncomfortably in his sweaty hand and the bullet ricocheted off the brick alley wall and into a pile of crates, spraying chips of wood. “Because you’re stupid,” he suggested.
The pair turned and bolted toward the street. Bob aimed the gun toward the Mutt’s receding back, realized he wasn’t up to that, put the safety back on, and slipped the weapon back into his pocket.
Carlotta still stood unmoving, fists clenched. Bob quickly put his arm around her and got her moving back toward the club door. “You never have any shortage of admirers. Ever seen them before?”
She let out a deep breath. “No. Not until tonight. Show business isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” Carlotta looked into his eyes for a second, then turned her head. “Thanks.”
“You want to tell me anything?” Bob tried to make eye contact with her, but she looked away and walked slowly back into the club. “Somehow, I didn’t think so.”
He was in his favorite seat at the club, lazily rubbing his thumb over a cigarette burn on the table’s hard wood finish. Bob was tired and it was only late afternoon. The excitement of the previous night had kept him from sleeping. Not that insomnia was unusual for him. It even helped if you ran a late-night business. Even though he’d put on fresh clothes, he felt rumpled.
Carlotta had seemed more scared than he would have expected if Mutt and Jeff were just muggers, and she didn’t spook easily as far as he could see. Not to mention the fact that comedy clubs like his didn’t really pay very well and any thief with half a brain would know that. Something was up, he was sure of that, but he didn’t have a clue what it might be. Maybe Carlotta just made him stupid. He took a sip of lukewarm coffee. It was his fourth cup of the day. If he had to be tired, at least he would be alert.
Wes the bartender walked over with a half-empty pot of coffee and gave Bob a warmup, then headed back to his work cleaning glasses behind the bar. A native New Yorker, Wes was physically large, but not particularly good-looking, loved to laugh, and only poured heavy for regulars and attractive women. He was the first person Bob had hired when he opened the Village Idiot and the only original employee the place still had.
“Wes, am I an idiot?” Bob asked, without looking for inspiration in the steam swirling in his cup.
“No, boss. No one who has the good sense to hire me could possibly be an idiot.”
Bob knew Wes could have made a comment about Carlotta. The bartender had a good pair of eyes and a quick mind. “Thanks, Wes.”
“How about a raise?”
“Don’t hurt me, Wes. You know how things are.”
Bob heard a key turn in the front door and Carlotta stepped in. Even in the dim light, he could see she was paler than usual. She was wearing a royal blue halter-top that was sweat-soaked to the skin and her hair was plastered to the sides of her face.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Bob asked. “You look like, well, like last night.”
“Funny about that.” Carlotta clutched a chair back and took a deep breath. “Because that’s how I feel.”
“Okay. Sit down and tell me about it.” He motioned to Wes. “You want anything to drink?”
“A shot of brandy would be nice.”
“Coming up.” Wes grabbed a glass and a bottle. “Anything for you, Mr. Cortland?”
“Not just yet, Wes.” He put a finger under Carlotta’s chin and raised her head. “Let’s hear it.”
Carlotta took the glass of brandy Wes had hurried over and had a sip. “Okay. I’m shopping on Eighth Street. Checking out some clothes and whatnot, and I wind up in a bookstore. This guy comes up to me and starts talking. Gorgeous guy. Tall. Blonde. You’d hate him.”
“I do,” Bob said. “I’ll take that brandy after all, Wes.”
“Right. Well we really hit it off and he asks if I want to get a cup of coffee. I figure he’s looking to get laid, which isn’t exactly objectionable in my mind, so I’ll just entertain the possibility and see how it goes.”
“Playing hard to get again.”
“Forget that, okay.” Carlotta shot him an agitated glance. “I don’t need you to ride me right now. In any case, we’re having coffee and it turns out he likes the same things as me. Russian composers, and Monet, and Woody Allen, and iced coffee.” She ticked off the coincidences on her fingers as she named them. “And I realized that this was beyond Kismet and into something really creepy. This guy came after me, same as those goons last night. Only he was using sugar instead of trying to strong-arm me.” She paused and took a deep breath, then another swallow of brandy.
“So where is he now?”
“Damned if I know,” Carlotta said. “I crawled out the window of the ladies room at the coffee shop to get away from him and came straight here.”
“All right,” Bob said, nodding. “Do you think there’s any chance you’re being paranoid or overreacting because of last night?”
“No way.”
Bob picked up his brandy and drained the small glass. “Then lets’ go. We’ve got somebody to see.”
Carlotta hadn’t been excited about a trip to Jokertown, but the fact that she hadn’t protested either indicated to Bob that she was genuinely scared. Not that Jokertown was that bad these days. In fact, it was one of the few areas of the city that didn’t live in fear of the ‘44 Caliber Killer known as the Son of Sam. There were a few nut-balls suggesting a joker was the murderer, but most people weren’t buying it, particularly in Jokertown.
“Pull over next to the newsstand,” Bob told the cab driver. The cabbie whipped the car over, his tires squealing slightly as the rubber met the concrete curb. Bob handed him a twenty, too much really for such a short ride, and helped Carlotta out onto the sidewalk.
No place on earth, at least that Bob had seen, was like Jokertown. The streets and building looked and smelled a little different, and the residents ranged from almost passably normal to grotesque, but that wasn’t what struck him every time he came here. It was that the rules were somehow not quite the same inside Jokertown, and outsiders never knew where the lines of acceptable behavior lay.
One of the few people he did know and trust down here ran this newsstand. Bob walked over with Carlotta in tow. The proprietor was wearing one of his trademark Hawaiian print shirts. Even in the gathering shadows of dusk, the colors looked electric. “Jube,” Bob said, extending his hand. “Got a minute?”
Jube, who resembled nothing more than an upright, badly dressed, walrus, extended a blubbery gray hand. “Well, if it isn’t the owner of the Jokertown Idiot.”
The walrus always gave Bob grief over the fact that the Village Idiot was technically closer to Jokertown than Greenwich Village, even after Bob explained that a club named the Jokertown Idiot not only wasn’t clever sounding but would fold in less than a month.
“Thanks. I need your help. Actually,” he indicated Carlotta, “she does.”
Jube’s lips tightened appreciatively across his tusks and into a smile. “Whatcha need?”
Carlotta looked Jube up and down and lightly shook her head. “You didn’t tell me he was a redhead.” She pointed to the crimson tufts on Jube’s head. “Could be more trouble.”
Jube gave a deep, rumbling chuckle. “She’s a live wire, Bob. One of yours?”
Bob nodded. He was relieved Carlotta hadn’t shed her sense of humor. “Yes, but only as an employee.”
There was a rapid skittering noise behind them. A coin flew up over the lip of the newsstands wooden front and landed in Jube’s open palm. Something thin and semi-transparent whisked away a copy of the Jokertown Cry. A short, indistinguishable form folded the paper and shot across the street into the shadows.
“Thanks, Speedy,” Jube said, tossing the quarter into the register. He turned back to Carlotta. “Now, where were we?”
“We,” Bob said, emphasizing the word, “need someone for a protection job. Someone very good.”
“Mmmm.” Jube leaned forward. “And cost?”
“Is a consideration, but not a deterrent to hiring the best.” Bob had an Uncle Scrooge vision in his mind of dollar bills flying away on angel wings.
“I’ll pay you back, don’t worry.” Carlotta smoothed her hair back with both hands. “Just tell us who to see.”
Jube pulled out a beat-up notepad and wrote a name and address on it. “He’s the best I know of. Doesn’t ask too many questions and gets results.”
“I sense a qualifying ‘but’ coming here,” Bob said.
“No, not really. He’s a ... changeable guy, but reliable. Just pay him what he asks and tell him what he needs to know to do the job and you’ll be fine.” Jube tore the paper from the pad and handed it over.
Bob turned the paper around and peered at it, unable to make out the letters. “What’s his name? Starts with a ‘C’? Can’t quite read it.”
“Croyd, just Croyd. I’ll call ahead and let him know you’re coming” Jube said. “Hey, you know how many jokers it takes to screw in a lightbulb?”
“I don’t have time to find out. Thanks, Jube.”
Whoever Croyd was, he didn’t have a standard address. Bob walked carefully down the alleyway with Carlotta a couple of steps behind. Dumpsters, baked by the incessant heat, clogged the alley with the actively unpleasant smell of accelerated decay. Bob checked Jube’s instructions with his flashlight and kept moving forward, looking for a door.
“Are we there yet?” Carlotta was trying to maintain her sense of humor, but Bob wasn’t laughing, or even smiling.
“Just about, I think,” he replied.
“I’d turn back if I were you,” the voice came from behind a stack of half-empty boxes. There was an old, bearded man sitting there, nursing a bottle of something. His threadbare clothes were soiled with what looked like a decade’s worth of stains. He looked them up and down and then turned back to his bottle.
“I do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks, I do, I do, I do believe in spooks.” Carlotta’s voice had a bit of the spunky tone Bob associated with her, which was okay because his courage and confidence were beginning to head south. He came to a door and rapped hesitantly on it.
“Entre vous,” came a deep, raspy, voice from the other side.
Bob opened the door and stepped into a small, high-ceiling room. There was a low-light lamp in one corner next to a large mattress and the opposite corner was screened off. Something was sitting in against the wall opposite the door, covered in a massive gray-brown tarpaulin. There was an odd smell, but no Croyd was visible.
“We did hear somebody, right?” Carlotta was right on his heels.
“Yes, you did,” came the same deep voice. What Bob had thought was a tarpaulin began to slowly unfold into two massive, leathery wings, spreading until they almost touched either wall. Between them was a humanoid-type creature with a horned head, slitted, yellow eyes, and a fanged mouth. One of the yellow eyes winked and the mouth curled into something of a smile. Except for a small, belted garment at the waist, the creature was naked, not that it mattered. “You must be Jube’s friends.”
“Yes,” Carlotta said, “Well, he is anyway.” She pointed to Bob, who was trying to get his mouth to shut.
Croyd stood up on feet that, although sporting four clawed toes each, were more or less human. “He said you need protection. Afraid the Son-of-Sam is after you?”
“No,” Bob said, finally able to speak. “He doesn’t work Manhattan anyway. I thought Jube would have explained, Mr ... Croyd.” Bob then covered the story of the heckler in the alley for the second time that night.
“Do you have any enemies that you know of?” Croyd turned his horned head lazily toward Carlotta.
“No. I’m from Iowa.”
“Well, you seem to now. Nothing I can’t handle, though.” He gently placed a taloned finger under her chin. “I aims to please.” He emphasized the word “aims,” obviously aware that it was a town in Iowa.
Everybody’s a comedian, thought Bob. “And your fee for protecting Miss DeSoto will be?” He was trying to get Croyd’s attention. The last thing he needed was someone else trying to horn in on Carlotta, literally or figuratively. That line was already long enough.
“She’s not a DeSoto.” Croyd gave Carlotta the slow once over, which she didn’t seem to mind at all. “With curves like that, she’s more like a Mustang.” Croyd cleared his throat. It was an unpleasant noise. “You can have me for five hundred a day, one day’s pay in advance and the rest when the job is over.” He walked in an ungainly fashion to the partitioned area of the room. Bob heard the sound of a bottle-cap coming off and being replaced, a drawer opening. Then Croyd emerged with a small amber bottle held between a massive thumb and forefinger. He carefully opened and dabbed some of the liquid contents on one his fingers, then scooped Carlotta’s blonde hair back and applied it gingerly behind her ears. “Et, voila.”
“What’s that for?” she asked, sniffing. “It’s definitely not Chanel.”
Croyd handed her the bottle. “No, but if someone does get their mitts on you, the scent will help me track you, so take good care of the stuff.”
Bob was equal parts tired, suspicious, and annoyed. If Jube hadn’t vouched for Croyd, there was no way he’d deal with him at all. Not because he was a hideous joker, but because in spite of that fact, he was still charming.
“I don’t have that amount of cash with me,” Bob said. “But once Miss DeSoto is safely home, you can follow me to my business. I’ll pay you there.”
“And just what is your business?” Croyd leaned his head toward Bob’s face.
Bob held his ground, in spite of Croyd’s unusually hot breath on his face. “I own a comedy club in the Village, the Village Idiot. I’ll meet you in back of my place, show you what happened and where, and give you your retainer.”
“You know,” Croyd said, “I find the fact that the name of your club is the Village Idiot to be completely believable.”
“I work there,” Carlotta said, stifling a yawn. “So show some respect. By the way, you do fly don’t you? Those wings aren’t just for show?”
Croyd laughed. It was a deep, booming sound, and in spite of the source, Bob liked it. “I fly like a bat-out-of-hell, just wait and see. And if you spot something on a building that looks like a misplaced gargoyle, don’t worry. It means I’m on the job.”
“You can’t cover her 24 hours a day,” Bob said, hoping the comment didn’t reveal his paranoia. “When you’re asleep, I’ll take over.”
“I won’t be sleeping on this job,” Croyd said. “Later. I’ll sleep later.” There was a hint of something in Croyd’s demon voice that to Bob almost sounded sad. With that thought in his head, he smiled.
They hadn’t seen Croyd since hiring him, although Carlotta said she thought maybe she’d spied him a time or two, a dark, still shadow on the rooftop of the building opposite her apartment. Bob was fine with the situation. Out of sight, out of mind, as far as he was concerned. A grand every other day was a steep price, but sooner or later the Mutt and Jeff, or maybe the pickup artist who spooked Carlotta, would try again. If Croyd did his job as advertised, that would be their mistake.
He’d offered to buy her dinner at a steak house off Central Park West, knowing she’d have a hard time saying no. Bob knew what she took home in pay, and it didn’t allow room for passing up a free meal. She also had to overcome the fact that it was the 13th of the month and she was deathly superstitious.
They got to the restaurant early enough to beat the crowd, and darkness was settling in over Manhattan when their food arrived. Bob had ordered a t-bone smothered in onions, while Carlotta had gone for the filet mignon. It was 10 ounces and he hoped she’d let him poach off her plate if she wasn’t up to finishing it.
“This is one thing my people could never get right, cooking meat,” he said after downing a particularly tasty bite.
“Your people?”
“The English.” He dabbed a spot of juice from his chin. “I’m a Brit, you know that.”
“You’re a New Yorker in denial, you mean.” She shook her head. “You spent what, two years in England after you were born and have been here the rest of your life. You’re just a New Yorker with a slightly different pedigree. Live with it.” Carlotta pointed to her filet with the fork. “This is great, by the way. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome, and I’m English, thank you very much. My parents lived there for ten years before we moved to NYC, and raised me to be a repressed, cultured snob.”
“Bet your mom would smack you if she heard you say that. You’d deserve it, too.” She gave him a lascivious smile that promised only torment. “At least you’re right about the repressed part.”
“Oh, that’s great, coming from the Ado Annie of Iowa. You wouldn’t know repressed if it bit you on the ass, and it’s probably the only thing that hasn’t.”
“No,” she said, smiling. “That would be you.”
Bob wagged a finger in her direction. “No dessert for you.” The lights inside the restaurant flickered and went out, tried to come back on for a second, and then went completely dark.
“Looks like they’ve blown a fuse,” Carlotta said.
Bob turned and looked out the windows toward the street. There was light, but it was fainter than it should be. “I think the whole area has a power outage. The street lights are gone, too.”
The waiters were moving from table to table, lighting candles. One particularly lanky fellow made it over to where Bob and Carlotta were seated to furnish the couple with their meager source of light.
“Any idea what’s going on?” Bob asked.
“No,” the waiter replied, shaking his head, “and wouldn’t you know the manager would be off today. Like he didn’t know it was the 13th. Someone’s on the phone though, checking into it. We’ll pass on any word we get.” He hurried off to another table.
“A man after your own heart,” Bob said, smiling. Carlotta’s face, lit by the flickering candle, had an almost sinister cast. Her round features, lit from beneath, reminded him of the face in the mirror from Disney’s Snow White.
“If you want to make jokes, you should get up on stage and try it sometime.” She took another bite of steak. Bob’s hope of leftovers was quickly disappearing. “You don’t have any superstitions?”
“No. Only fact-based fears.” One of them, that Carlotta would completely finish her steak, had already been realized. He raised his arm and waved it in an exaggerated fashion, trying to flag the waiter, who noticed after a few moments and wove his way expertly through the mostly empty tables toward them.
“No word yet, sir, but I believe it’s city-wide.”
“Thanks. Could we have the check?”
“Certainly, sir,” he said, and quickly disappeared in the direction of the register.
Bob fingered his shirt’s topmost button uncomfortably. “It’s getting pretty warm in here without the a/c. Want to stop by the park and see if we can get some ice-cream?”
“Sure. My relatives in Wisconsin would tar-and-feather me if they found out I passed up a dairy product. I wonder what it’s going to be like on the streets?” Carlotta pulled a compact out of her purse and checked her face briefly. “Like anyone will be able to see me.”
Their waiter returned and set the tray with their bill in front of Bob. “Our credit card machine is down, sir. I hope cash won’t be inconvenient.”
“Not a problem,” Bob said, pulling out his wallet. “Thank you.” He carefully stacked several twenties onto the tab and helped Carlotta out of her seat. “Let’s have a look outside.”
The street was unreal in the dim moonlight. People stood in small groups talking quietly, and a family, probably out-of-towners, waved in vain for an available cab. The traffic was crawling at best, but drivers were still jockeying from lane to lane, trying to find an opening. Bob looked up and saw the stars. Normally, the city lights washed them out completely, but now they were clear and distinct. In contrast, Central Park loomed darkly across the crowded, hot asphalt.
“It’s going to be murderous getting you home,” Bob said. “Even the subways are going to be useless. Maybe we should reconsider our plan.”
“We’re not going anywhere until the power comes back on.” She headed across Central Park West, moving around the cars that were momentarily at a standstill. “Might as well kill the time as best we can.”
“Alright,” Bob said, “wait for me.”
After half an hour wandering along the edge of Central Park looking for an ice-cream vendor, Bob was ready to give up. He’d also noticed a group of kids following them at a distance. Even if they were just wandering in the same direction, it made him uneasy. He was glad to still be carrying the revolver.
A sharp snapping noise, followed quickly by another, stopped them in their tracks. Screams began to drift through the still, hot air from nearby.
“What the hell is going on?” Carlotta asked, looking quickly from side to side. “It’s just a blackout.”
A dark shape appeared at the tree line and grew in size. More snapping. Bob realized it was the sound of branches being split. Several people were sprinting directly at them. One of them screamed “The ape! It’s loose.”
Bob knew in an instant how much trouble they were in. The giant ape had been a mainstay at the Central Park Zoo for over a decade. Every now and then it broke loose and started looking for a young, blonde woman to clutch to its massive chest. After abducting its Fay Wray stand-in, the beast invariably headed in scripted fashion for the top of the Empire State Building. His mind registered that the monster ape had first appeared during the blackout in 1965, but there was no time to dwell on coincidence. He grabbed Carlotta by the wrist and bolted for the street. She had no trouble keeping up, matching him stride for stride in the race to reach the hoped-for safety of a building interior.
A kid running full-tilt crashed into a garbage container and sent it rolling in a tight semi-circle right into their path. Bob felt a pain in his knee and sprawled headlong, Carlotta’s hand wrenched from his grasp. There was an animal roar that rattled his fillings and he scrambled to his feet.
The ape knuckle-walked toward them, its eyes fixed on Carlotta and her blonde hair. She struggled to stand and backed slowly away from the monster. Then stopped. “Knock-knock,” she yelled. The ape bared its teeth and snorted. “Who’s there?” Carlotta answered to her own question, at the top of her voice.
Bob pulled the revolver and pointed it between the ape’s luminous, yellow eyes. She’d panicked and was trying to use her power on it. “You can’t make a gorilla laugh,” he yelled. “Run.”
The giant ape regarded him for a second, then returned his attention to Carlotta, taking another giant step in her direction. “Banana, banana, banana, banana,” she continued, ignoring Bob’s advice.
He tightened his finger on the trigger, and the ape lunged for Carlotta, scooping her up with a giant, hairy paw. She screamed and then went limp. The ape gingerly propped up her head with a single finger and made what might have been soothing vocalizations in ape language. The monster turned suddenly and saw Bob. It snarled and bared its teeth.
Bob suddenly felt very alone, the useless gun heavy in his hand. He’d be a dead man in a few seconds and the punch line to a bad joke for years to come if he didn’t do something. So he got flat.
He didn’t lie flat; that would have been no help at all. As a particularly shy teen-ager, Bob had been forced by a zealous drama teacher to take a role in a Moliere comedy. During a dress rehearsal, he felt sick with stage fright and, right before his entrance, literally flowed puddle-like to the floor. The sensation of giving up his physical form was even more frightening than performing on stage. His vision and hearing became almost non-existent. Worse, he couldn’t move any more than a beached jellyfish. After a few long moments, he’d reconstituted, naked, as he’d puddled right out of his clothes. A few of his fellow students saw what happened, or thought they did, but the school kept it quiet. He was dismissed from the play and told his parents it was because he called Moliere an over-praised, humorless Frog. Over the years he’d worked with his ability in secret, and had even mastered a sort of pseudopodal movement. Bob assumed part of his attraction to Carlotta was the fact that they’d both been touched by the wild card, albeit a glancing blow.
Bob had a feeling that, flat or not, if the giant ape stepped on him, he’d be crushed to death. He felt the thunderous footsteps move toward, and then past, him. He waited until the vibrations seemed a safe distance away and pulled himself back together. The few people who hadn’t left the area were looking at the ape, which was about a hundred yards distant. Bob hurriedly donned his clothing and put the gun back into his pocket. The ape was making good time. Bob knew he’d never catch it on foot, and with traffic snarled because of the blackout, a car was out of the question, too.
He heard a horse neigh and turned to see an empty carriage not far away. Abandoned by its driver, the horse, coal black with a white patch on its forehead, regarded Bob warily as he approached. He moved slowly toward the spot on the ground where the reins lay. The horse snorted as he gathered the slim, leather leads into his hands.
“Good boy,” Bob said, clambering up into the carriage. Once seated, he tried to plot a course in the direction the ape and Carlotta had taken and then shook the reins.
The horse didn’t so much as twitch. Apparently, he didn’t have the voice of authority. “Yaah!” he yelled, and tossed the reins violently. Nothing.
“I’m not in the mood for this,” Bob said, pulling the pistol from his pocket. He fired off a round into the air and the horse immediately bounded away at full tilt, hooves pounding the earth. Bob’s back was slammed into the driver’s seat by the carriage’s abrupt start and he fought to pull himself back into a position to drive, not that he had any idea what he was doing. The hot summer air whistled in Bob’s ears and he noticed they were veering a bit to the left of his best guess at the ape’s path, so he pulled on the right-hand rein but got no response from his charging steed.
“Damn,” he said, and pulled harder, but the horse galloped hell-bent onward. Bob saw what looked like a curbed pathway directly ahead and reached for the side of the carriage to brace himself for the impact, but his reaction was a second too slow. The carriage’s front wheels slammed into the curb and the front of the vehicle vaulted into the air, tossing Bob out of the carriage and down onto the grass on the far side of the sidewalk. He rolled to a stop and sat up. The now riderless carriage was disappearing into the darkness. Bob let out a deep breath and there was a rush of air around him that raised a cloud of heavy dust.
Croyd landed next to him, chuckling. “Can’t even keep a girl safe at dinner, eh?”
Bob bit back on his anger at Croyd’s nonchalance. He needed help to save Carlotta and Croyd was it. “If you were watching, why didn’t you do something?”
“I’m tough, but no match for a giant gorilla. Keep your shirt on, though. As many times as this has happened, not once has the ape’s captive blonde been hurt, unless you count soiled clothing.” Croyd helped Bob to his feet, a glint in his yellow eyes. “There’s a bit more to you than I thought.”
Bob felt sick. He’d guarded his secret for years and Croyd was one of the last people he would have picked to share it. “That’s not important now. Let’s get going.”
“You da boss.” Croyd slipped his taloned hands under Bob’s armpits and began beating his wings. The pair rose slowly from Central Park.
Bob felt more than saw the world falling away. The noise level faded as they headed into the sky. Car headlights lit the streets and avenues at ground level but everything else was inky black, except for the occasional dim window he assumed meant someone inside had lit a candle or two. To his relief the air cooled a bit as Croyd carried him upward. Combined with the rush of Croyd’s wings, the sensation was almost refreshing.
“You’re not going to throw up are you?” Croyd’s breath was warm on the top of Bob’s head.
“No. I’m okay.” Which was true as long as he didn’t think or look down. “Where are we going?”
“Empire State, Mr. Village Idiot. The ape always climbs it, if he gets that far. And we can pick up some reinforcements there. Like I said, I can’t handle him alone.”
“Aces High?” Like everyone else, Bob had heard of the famous restaurant atop the Empire State building and knew that as often as not there was an ace or two having dinner there.
“Give the boy a cigar.” Croyd’s breath was becoming a bit raspy. “You’re not exactly a lightweight. This whole thing is going to cost you extra, by the way. Not exactly what I signed on for. Might cut you a deal for a couple of rounds with your girlfriend, though.”
“Have you even got genitalia?” Bob snapped.
Croyd let go of Bob with one hand and lowered him level with the demon’s crotch. “Care to check?”
Bob grabbed hold of Croyd’s sinewy arm with both his hands and clutched it tightly. “Okay, okay. You made your point.”
Croyd made a sibilant noise that sounded like a giggle. “An attitude and altitude adjustment. Good thing. You’d feel like one stupid shithead during the time it took you to fall. Here we are.”
The observation deck of the Empire State Building stood out in faint shades of gray and silver. They landed softly on the concrete and Croyd took a deep breath. Bob was both happy and sorry to have his feet on something solid again. Nothing else he’d experienced was quite like the flight he’d just had.
“Here’s how it’s going to work. I’m going to shadow the ape and grab Carlotta on the off chance he makes a mistake. How fucking likely that is I don’t know, but we can’t count on it. You go inside and tell Hiram that I sent you. See what help you can round up and have it waiting when our hairy friend shows up.” Croyd grabbed Bob by the shoulders and spun him around, then gave him a shove toward the door. “Do it.” Then he was gone again.
Bob opened the door and groped his way down the stairs as quickly as he could, and when he reached the first landing felt around for a doorknob. He couldn’t turn it and started pounding on it as hard as he could. “Open up. I need help.” He was silent a moment to try to hear any sound from inside but there was only silence. He was groping for the handrail when he heard a door open not far below him.
“Who’s there?” The voice was deep, male, and irritated.
“A friend of Croyd’s,” Bob said, his hand finding the metal of the railing. He was halfway down the flight of stairs when a flash-light came on, blinding him momentarily.
“A friend of Croyd’s who isn’t a woman? That’s a novelty.” The voice took on a somewhat more amiable tenor. “Come inside.”
The man holding the door open for him had to be Hiram Worcester. Bob had seen pictures of him in the papers and magazines. Hiram was tall and broadly built with a distinctive spade-shaped beard. Even in the candlelight spilling from the restaurant Bob could tell every aspect of Hiram was perfectly groomed, right down to the crisp lines of his white tuxedo.
“Thanks.” Bob stepped into Aces High and was taken aback by its elegance. The tables, punctuated here and there by exotic-looking plants or objects d’art, were ideally situated to provide patrons with a view of the entire establishment while still maintaining a degree of privacy for conversation. Aces High was illuminated with the flickering light of least a hundred candles, reflecting polished crystal and silverware, giving the restaurant a romantic, ethereal glow.
“Have a seat,” Hiram said, gesturing to an empty table. “And tell me what’s going on.”
Bob sat down and took a deep breath. “You heard the ape is loose?”
Hiram shook his head. “No. I told Emil to listen to the radio and let me know what’s going on, but he clearly hasn’t done it. Would you like a brandy, by the way?”
“That would be great.”
Hiram caught a waiter’s eye and raised two thick fingers. The man nodded and disappeared. “So what do you have to do with Croyd and the giant ape?”
“The ape has my girlfriend.” Bob was surprised to hear himself refer to Carlotta that way, particularly since it was far from true. “And Croyd is, well, in my employ. He flew me here and then took off to see if he could get Carlotta away from the ape. Most likely it’s climbing the building by now. Are there any other aces, beside yourself, who might be able to help? Croyd said there might be.” Each of Bob’s phrases came out quicker than the one before. He hoped he didn’t sound hysterical.
The brandies arrived and Hiram took a sip of his. Bob drained half of the liquid in his snifter and the bracing quality of the liquor made him feel instantly calmer. “You can see we’re a bit less crowded tonight than usual, but there’s someone here who might be helpful.” Hiram gestured toward a young woman sitting alone at a table.
Except for her magnificent, curled wings, or maybe because of them, she was the most beautiful girl Bob had ever seen. He’d seen her on the Tonight Show and in Playboy, repeatedly. His mind groped for her name. “Ptarmigan,” he said, realizing the name was wrong the instant it passed his lips.
Hiram smiled and took another sip of brandy. “Peregrine, actually. I’ll introduce you, but let me do the talking.”
They walked over to Peregrine, who Bob was shocked to see alone, given her looks and notoriety. “Peri, we’ve got a bit of a situation,” Hiram said. “A giant ape is headed here with a captive blonde, this gentleman’s girlfriend.” He indicated Bob. “We’re going up to the observation deck to rescue her. Would you mind helping?”
“Sounds like fun.” Peregrine stood and kicked off her heels, then studied her gown, which was a shimmering aqua and tighter than a Scotsman with his last nickel. She fingered a slit in the dress that rose to mid-calf one side and tore it open by another fifteen inches. “That should help.” She carefully removed a pair of metal talons from her purse and slipped them over her wrist. “Let’s go.”
Hiram led the way up the stairs with his flashlight and helped open the door to the observation deck for Peregrine and Bob to step outside.
“Peri, why don’t you see what you can see,” Hiram suggested, but at that moment a giant paw appeared over the railing in front of them. Peregrine shot into the air and Hiram hustled Bob around the corner. Bob heard the metal railing buckle behind them, and breathing so heavy only a fifty-foot ape that had just climbed a hundred story building could have made it.
The ape scaled the building’s domed apex and roared. Bob picked out a pair of flying shapes darting around above them, but Croyd and Peregrine, either together or singly, didn’t seem to Bob like much of a threat to the monster.
Hiram agreed out loud. “They’ll never be able to get her away from it. I wish the Turtle were here. This would be no trouble for him.”
Bob and Hiram craned their necks to follow the flying figures darting by the ape. It kept the beast looking up instead down at the deck where they were. Although it was too dark to really be able to tell, Bob thought Croyd was paying as much attention to Peregrine as he was to the ape, who stood unmoving except for the swiveling of his head to keep its enemies in sight.
The ape looked like it was going to set Carlotta down. She was conscious again, but not struggling very much. Croyd swept in and the ape thrust out a giant arm out to fend off the perceived attack, catching Croyd with the back of his hand and sending him spinning down toward the street. Peregrine instantly disappeared after him.
Hiram sighed. “I suppose that leaves me.” He turned to Bob. “Unless you do something.”
“I stay out of the way pretty well,” Bob replied, “but I’m willing to try anything you’ve got in mind.”
Hiram looked up and slowly made a fist. The gorilla’s broad shoulders slumped and its arms dropped to its sides. “A bit heavier,” Hiram said, more to himself than Bob. The top of the building began to creak under the strain of the extra weight Hiram was adding. “Now,” he said and the ape leapt upwards, almost appearing to hover in the air momentarily. It dropped Carlotta and grabbed at the top of the building with both paws, its momentum carrying it to the other side of the dome. “And heavy again,” Hiram mused. The ape slammed into the top of the dome, sending fragments of stone and metal onto Bob and Hiram.
“Up the ladder and get her,” Hiram said. “I’ll keep our guest where he is.”
Bob did as he was told. He gathered Carlotta into his arms and tried not to look down and he guided her to the ladder. They were joined on the observation deck by Peregrine. Bob pulled the winged beauty to one side. “How is Croyd?” he whispered, afraid to hear the answer.
“Not too bad,” Peregrine said. “He landed on one of the set-backs about ten floors down but must have got his wings going right before he hit. He can’t fly, though, so I’m going to take him home.”
“Thanks.” Bob reached to pat her shoulder, then stopped, realizing her wings prevented it. “I really do appreciate it.”
“My pleasure. See you soon, Hiram.” Peregrine fluttered into the air and then down into the darkness at the building’s edge.
Bob returned to Carlotta’s side. “We need to get you home.”
“The sooner the better.” Carlotta said, sniffing her hands. “God, I smell like that thing.” She extended her hand to Hiram. “Whoever you are, thank you.”
“Hiram Worchester.” He gave Carlotta’s hand a shake and looked back up at the ape, who’s breathing was again labored. “Will you stay for dinner, once this is fully taken care of?”
“Some other time,” Carlotta said, turning to the doorway. “I don’t think I could really appreciate it right now.”
“I’ll look forward to it,” Hiram said, smiling.
Bob turned off the transistor radio and set it down on the coffee table. “Anything new?” Carlotta poked her head out of the kitchen area. In spite of the heat, she’d insisted on cooking as much food as possible to keep it from spoiling.
“Not really. The ape is back at Central Park Zoo. They’re keeping him sedated until the cage is repaired.”
“I hope Croyd is okay. It’s good for a girl’s health, not to mention her ego, to have a protector like that.” There was a momentary pause. Bob figured she was expecting a jealous comment and kept his mouth shut. “Anything else?”
“Major fires in Jokertown and the Bronx. Looting. Rioting. Just your average day in New York.” Bob walked over to the open, third-story window and looked out onto the street. It was late afternoon and the power had been out over 20 hours, but residents and visitors in the Village were treating it like a holiday. People were milling about, sharing stories over warm beer, or clustering around a radio for news. “Doesn’t seem bad at all around here.”
“Good,” she said, stepping into the living room. “We’ve got plenty to eat for dinner this evening, but I never got my ice cream last night and I’m feeling sugar-deprived.”
“I’m not sure there’s any unmelted ice cream left in this town, but I could use the exercise.” Bob looked at her. Even in sweat stained clothes she was an attractive woman.
“First things first. I’m taking a shower.” She started unbuttoning her blouse. “Want to join me?”
Bob delighted in what he was looking at, but his back still hurt from the hours he’d spent trying to sleep on her couch the previous night. “You’re just taunting me.”
Carlotta took her top off and fingered the snap on her bra. Her lovely curved flesh lowered Bob’s I.Q. 20 points or so. “You’re right, I am. Would it kill you to play along?” She disappeared into the bedroom and there was the delicious sound of running water.
“You never can tell,” he said, suddenly aware of just how nice it would feel to get clean, even without Carlotta’s company. He walked into her bedroom, which had several candles burning, as much to take a look at it as for proximity to the bathroom. It was tidy, with a couple of tasteful but inexpensive art prints on the wall, probably from the MoMA. Other than the garments she’d just stripped off to shower, all her other clothes were put away. There were several framed pictures of the folks back home on her dresser and bedside table. Nothing that looked like a boyfriend, although she’d had plenty of those since coming to New York. “I’m next,” he said loudly.
“Okay by me,” she yelled back.
Bob sighed.
The heat was as bad as it had been all week, with temperatures in the low hundreds. The concrete and asphalt gave it nowhere to go but into the air and the living things on the island of Manhattan. Carlotta had made a point of putting on the scent Croyd gave her. Bob still wasn’t sure whether or not to tell her Croyd was out of action indefinitely.
“Have you wondered why I had sex with so many other men, but not you?” Carlotta flashed him a challenging smile.
“Why no, that hadn’t even occurred to me. Of course, I’m not sure why you’re fixated on ice-cream, either.” Bob raised a single eyebrow, a trick he’d learned watching Vincent Price movies as a kid.
“For that I should keep you in the dark, but I figure you deserve to know.” She crossed the street to avoid a cascade of water from an opened fire hydrant. Bob followed. “Number one, you’re a smartass. Number two, you’re the boss.” She paused, maybe to give him a chance to object to number one. He didn’t. “And number three, you’ve got possibilities.”
Bob’s eyebrow shot up again, this time of its own accord. “What do you mean, possibilities?”
“Long term possibilities.”
Her comment hung in the air like a float at Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
“Wait a minute,” Bob said, and was on the verge on launching into a tirade when he felt a strong hand on his shoulder.
“No, you wait a minute, tough guy.” The hand had an accompanying voice, and, unfortunately, he recognized it as Jeff the bad guy.
Bob turned his head slightly and saw that Carlotta had company, too. Mutt had her by the elbow. She was casting her eyes upward, looking for help Bob knew wouldn’t be coming. He felt something press firmly into his back. A brand new limo pulled up beside them and its rearmost door on their side opened up.
“Get inside.”
He and Carlotta slid onto the leather seat between their captors. The tinted windows were less than comforting and the truly humorless men surrounding them were even less so.
Jeff slid Bob’s revolver from his pocket, holding it firmly by the barrel-end. “Know what happens next?”
“You all commit suicide,” Carlotta said, and there were several giggles.
“Not now,” Bob thought, and then consciousness fled his body through a portal of blinding pain as the gun smacked into the side of his head.
He was lying down when he came to. Bob opened his eyes with deliberate slowness. He was lying on a couch and Carlotta was sitting opposite him in a straight-backed wooden chair, a concerned look on her face. “Where are we?” he said quietly, his head throbbing.
“In a house.” She reached over and pushed Bob’s hair out of his eyes.
“A little more information would be appreciated, if you’ve got it.” He eased himself into a sitting position.
“Okay, a big house. An estate. Big walls, wrought-iron gate, you know the type. I think we’re on Long Island.”
“That’s not good.” Bob realized that if they hadn’t bothered to keep Carlotta from describing where they’d been taken, they weren’t expecting her, or either of them, to be able to talk to the police later. He looked around the room for exits. There were two windows, both barred, and one door. “Who are these people, and what do they want with you?”
“Like they’d tell me that,” Carlotta said. “But that one guy, the tall one, he really doesn’t like you.”
“I have no trouble believing that.” The pain in Bob’s skull was spreading into his jaw and neck. “We have to come up with a plan to get out of here. Clearly, making them laugh in the limo didn’t work.”
“No. They gagged me with a stupid little plastic ball thing. My power doesn’t work at all if I can’t talk. I don’t know how they knew that.” Carlotta stood and walked over to the window, staring into the darkness.
The door opened and three men stepped in. Bob recognized Mutt and Jeff. The third man was a head shorter than Bob, and was casually dressed in a pricey, dapper manner. He was balding on either temple, and there was a quickness about his movements that was almost birdlike.
“Hello, Jane.” He sat down in the chair Carlotta had been occupying.
“Jane?” Bob said, mystified. “Look friend. I don’t know what your game is, but her name is Carlotta Desoto. So your goons obviously bundled the wrong people out here. Let us go and maybe we won’t press charges.”
“I should have known it was you.” Carlotta’s eyes were livid with anger. “My name was legally changed, and I’d appreciate it if you’d call me Carlotta.”
Bob felt like whatever play he was in had just dropped a scene. “What in blazes is going on here?”
“My name is Breton Earle. Carlotta,” he said the name as derisively as possible, “is my wife.”
“Ex-wife,” Carlotta corrected, folding her arms. “That part was legal, too. Your money doesn’t change the fact that you’re a loser and a jerk.”
Bob couldn’t believe that all they’d been through the past few days was because of a jealous ex-husband. “Sounds like her mind is made up, Mr. Earle, so why don’t you just let us go. Like I said, we’ll leave the police out of it.”
Earle turned to Jeff. “Mr. Mueller, who is this?”
“Robert Cortland. He owns the club she worked at.”
Earle nodded. “You and Mr. Layden will have to take care of him on your own dime.”
“No problem.”
“What do you mean, no problem?” Carlotta walked behind her captors. The suited men kept a careful eye on her. “You kidnapped me. That’s a federal crime.”
Earle laughed, but it wasn’t Carlotta’s doing. “You’re welcome to address your grievances to the police if you’re ever in a position to do so, but I don’t think you will be.”
“Why did you bring Bob?” Carlotta shook her head. “He doesn’t mean anything to you.”
“He does to me,” said Mueller. “I don’t like anyone taking a shot at me.”
“Why do you want her back?” Bob was stalling for time, trying to come up with some plan of action. If there was one thing smug egomaniacs like Earle shared with entertainers, it was the need for an audience.
“I’m glad you asked me that question. I could say she makes me laugh, or that the sex was incredible.” Earle feigned a yawn. “But that’s not it. The truth is, she made me look ridiculous. A man with my position in life can’t have one of his acquisitions leave him of its own accord. That’s all she was to me, an attractive acquisition. So, in return for her disloyalty I want to make her miserable and I want the pleasure of seeing her miserable every day of her wretched life. May it be a long one.”
“You’re a fool,” Carlotta said. “It’s a damned shame money can’t buy sense. Maybe then you’d understand.”
Breton Earle folded. “With my money, I’m hardly restrained by your idea of what’s sensible, Miss Desoto.”
“Don’t have to go begging to daddy anymore?” Carlotta gave Earle a nasty smile.
Earle eyes took on a hard quality. “My father died 19 months ago. After the estate was fully executed I gave some of my best men the job of finding you, which they did. I bought this house to work from. It’s a more expensive prison than you deserve, but who knows where I’ll ultimately keep you.”
“Asshole,” Carlotta said.
“It’s a shame you didn’t fall for our blond Adonis. He was very disappointed when you disappeared from the coffee shop.” Earle shook his head. “You’re such a slut. You’d have enjoyed that.”
Carlotta raised her chin. “The last person in the world to know what I’d enjoy is you, Breton.”
“What exactly are you going to do to her?” Bob planned on keeping the questions coming as long as Earle was in an answering mood.
“Whatever it suits me to do at any given time. I’m sure whatever it is, it will be better than what happens to you.” He headed for the door. “Shall we, gentlemen?”
Mueller bent down and whispered in Bob’s ear. “I’m betting we’ve got an oil drum in your size. If not, I’ll just have to break some of your bones to get you in.” He grinned and followed Earle and Layden out of the room. The door clicked shut and Bob heard a lock being set.
“Okay,” he said, removing his shirt and shoes. “Put these away. They’ll be back in a minute.”
“What?”
He tossed her his pants. “Hide them.”
She picked up his clothing and gave him a long look. “So, you’re going to die and I’m facing a fate worse than death and you want to score with me as a dying request?”
Bob dropped his underwear at her feet. “No.”
Carlotta stared at his crotch and Bob realized that the adrenaline had gotten to him in an unexpected way. “Those who are about to die salute you,” she said. “No wonder you’re the boss.”
It was good she was still cracking jokes, however lame, but now was not the time. “I’m going to show you something, and I don’t want you to freak out. Okay, my dear?”
“You’ve already showed me something, but okay.”
Bob puddled, waited a few seconds, and reconstituted.
“Holy shit. You’re one too.” Her mouth closed and eyes narrowed. “You never told me, even after you knew about me, you never told me.” She slapped him.
Bob raised a cautionary finger. “My head really hurts, so don’t do that again. I was going to tell you, after we had sex the first time.”
“Oh, that’s cute. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me something that important.” Carlotta sat down. “So where does this get us?”
“Out, with any luck.” Bob padded over to the door and pressed his ear to it. He heard footfalls approaching at a brisk pace and ran to the far corner where there was a large, heavy rug with a Middle Eastern design. “Don’t tell them a thing, and try to keep them from stepping on me.” The door began to open. He centered the rug on the top of his head and got flat.
The vibrations were heavy, frantic and all around him. He prayed not to get trod on, fearing one of his vital organs might be turned to paste. Bob would have held his breath, but he was doing the equivalent anyway. His flat body was incapable of respiration and the oxygen to his tissues was quickly depleting.
After what seemed to him like the eternity of a bad comedy routine, Bob resumed his normal form. He was alone in the darkened room. He heard voices outside the door, but they were growing fainter. He had two options for escape, the door and the window. After groping his way to the door, he tested the knob, but it was still locked. Judging by the crack of light under the frame, he might be able to slide under, but it would be quite a squeeze and he might wind up in the lap of Earle’s goons. He fumbled under the couch where Carlotta had tucked his clothes and pulled them out, then moved to the window and slowly opened the blinds. It would be no problem for him to get under the bars, but that would still leave him on the outside looking in. Doubtless, they were searching the grounds for him right now, possibly with dogs, although he was relieved not to hear the sound of any barking.
He unlatched the window, lifted it silently up a foot or so, and pushed his clothes out under the bars. Decision made. Bob thrust his arms under the bars and began to slide out. By the time he was completely flat, enough of his body extended past the windowsill that he was dragged down the wall and onto the ground. The impact didn’t bother him and Bob pulled himself together and hurriedly put on his clothes. The tiny flashlight was still in his pocket, but along with his car keys, those were his only tools.
He circled the perimeter of the house, amazed and disgusted at the size of the place. Although only one story, Earle’s mansion had to be five or six thousand square feet of house, minimum. Most of the rooms were dark and he quickly passed them by. He came to a well-lit corridor that was, for the moment anyway, deserted. The window was unlocked and unbarred. Taking a deep breath, he opened the window and went in. There was a door on either side of the hallway, but Bob decided to move further into the interior of the house, maybe catch the sound of voices and overhear something about Carlotta. More likely, he’d get caught or shot, but he wasn’t going to run for it. He wouldn’t ever be able to live with that. About 20 feet in was a large living area, lit by a single lamp. The ceiling arched upward from all sides to an oval skylight.
He heard a noise behind him, then to his left was a sound better than anything he could have expected, laughter, rising into hysteria and nearly convulsive choking. Bob ran to where he heard the noise and opened the door, ready to get flat if he had to.
Carlotta was kneeling on the floor, chewing at the duct tape on her wrists. She looked up at him, clearly surprised. “Close the door, and get me out of this.”
Layden was curled up drooling on the floor, his eyes red, his barrel chest heaving. Bob rolled him over and put a knee into the man’s back. He reached behind and fumbled to get the Layden’s shoelaces off, contorting himself uncomfortably to do so, then used them to bind his captive’s hands behind him.
“Me now.” Carlotta held out her hands. Bob used the edge of one of his keys to saw through the tape. It was tough work and took the better part of a minute.
He got up and closed the door. “Why didn’t they gag you?”
“Well, they did.” She indicated a rubber ball and a handkerchief on the floor.
Bob wrinkled his brow. “How did you get him to take it off?”
“You don’t want to know.” She pulled the remains of the tape off her wrists and snatched up the red ball, then pushed it firmly in the bound man’s mouth.
Bob picked the silk handkerchief up off the floor and tossed it to Carlotta. “Of that, I’m sure. Tie this around his mouth, just to make sure he doesn’t start yelling.” He moved to her side and checked the man’s pockets, retrieving a revolver from his inside coat pocket. “Come to daddy,” he said, recognizing it as his own weapon. He took a deep breath and stood, and helped Carlotta to her feet.
“Time to get out of here,” she said. “Let me go first, just in case someone’s waiting.”
“What’s the point of that?” Bob asked, but she was already out the door.
“Don’t move, bitch.” Mueller’s voice was clear, steady, and close. “If you so much as open your mouth, I’ll put a bullet in it.”
Bob pulled out his gun and readied it, then stepped into the hall. His large nemesis had drawn down on Carlotta, but shifted his weapon’s aim to Bob when he saw him. Mueller was standing on the far side of a couch in the living area. Bob’s finger tightened on the trigger. He wondered if he could squeeze off a round and get flat before the return shot nailed him. “Drop it,” Bob said, knowing it was overly optimistic.
“No chance. I’m better at this than you.” Mueller lowered his head a bit so that he could sight down the gun’s barrel.
“Don’t bet the farm,” Carlotta said.
Mueller snarled. “One more word and you’re dead, lady. End of story.”
Darkness swallowed them as the lights went out. Bob dragged Carlotta to the floor. “I don’t fucking believe it,” he said. “Not again.”
“What now?” Carlotta whispered.
Bob pondered for a moment and thought he caught a glint of something in the darkness. He kept his voice low. “Start telling a joke and follow my lead. Stay behind something or keep moving so you don’t get shot.”
“If I can’t see him, I can’t make him laugh,” Carlotta said.
“Just do it.”
“What do you call a hundred lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?” Carlotta’s voice didn’t sound strong, but that might be because she was behind something. Bob started laughing.
“A good start.”
Bob increased the pitch and tenor of his laughter, moving in the general direction of the glint he had seen.
“Layden, is that you?”
Bob could hear the confusion in Mueller’s voice, which was exactly what he was hoping for. He intentionally gave his laughter a raspy, desperate quality.
“Why did the chicken cross the road?”
There was a shot in Carlotta’s general direction. Bob popped off two rounds of his own, but the muzzle flash from Mueller’s gun put stars in his eyes and spoiled his aim. One of the slugs hit something breakable, a lamp maybe, and Mueller started screaming. “My eye. Get over here, Layden. I’m hit in the eye.”
Bob reached out and caught Mueller’s wrist, steadied it, and before the man knew who he was dealing with, Bob swung and nailed him on the temple with his revolver. “Lights out. Are you okay?” he asked loudly of Carlotta.
Before she could answer the skylight shattered and something fell through. It looked to Bob like it might be a person, but in the semi-darkness he couldn’t be sure. Someone groaned and Bob heard glass crunching. He pulled out the flashlight, but didn’t turn it on. It would make him an easy target.
“A monster,” came a nearly hysterical voice. Bob recognized it as Earle’s. “Someone save me.”
“Monster?” Bob didn’t need another problem at this point.
“That would be me,” came a voice from above. A winged shape dropped down through the shattered skylight into a crouching position. “Fie-fi-fo-fum. I smell a good looking woman, yummm.”
“Croyd,” Carlotta said, like his name was the answer to a prayer.
“A couple of minutes ago would have been timelier.” Bob was happy to hear the sound of Croyd’s voice just the same.
“Complaining about my timing will cost you extra,” Croyd said, folding his wings against his scaly back.
Earle was whimpering on the floor, but pulled himself together sufficiently to start crawling away. Unfortunately it was in the direction of Bob, who trained the beam of his flashlight on Earle’s tear-stained face.
“Stop right there, Mr. Earle,” Bob said. “Or we’ll feed you to our demon.”
“Your demon?” Croyd snorted and fluttered across the room to where Bob, Carlotta, and Earle were faced off. “I am mighty hungry, though.”
“No.” Earle covered his eyes with his fists. “It’s not fair.”
Croyd picked up Carlotta in his massive arms and sniffed delicately behind her ears. “If there’s one thing that gets me hot, it’s a woman who actually does what she’s told.” He turned to Bob. “Can you handle him for a minute?” He jerked his head at Earle.
“No problem, but where are you ...” Croyd shot up through the hole in the roof with Carlotta. “... going?” Bob trailed off.
There was a moan from across the room. Mueller was coming to, which Bob did not want to allow. “Time for your second helping.” He brought the pistol butt on forcefully down onto Mueller’s head with a stinging whack. Bob looked down at Earle. Rich boy’s eyes were still shot through with fear.
Croyd swooped back into the room and clapped his hand over Breton Earle’s mouth. “Don’t bite, or I’ll bite you back.” Croyd bared his sizable yellow fangs. The message got though. Earle didn’t even whimper as he was carried out into the open air.
Bob waited an uncomfortably long time. Mueller was beginning to make a lot of noise and there must be other people searching through the darkness of the home. Croyd dropped back into the room just as Bob’s paranoia was beginning to bloom.
“You cut the power.” Bob said.
Croyd grabbed him under the armpits. “Leave it to Mr. Village Idiot to state the obvious.” Bob felt a rush of air as they rocketed into the warm night. The sense of being airborne was magical and slightly scary, given Croyd’s unusual nature.
They landed far from the house, by Carlotta and Earle, whose hands were bound behind his back with Carlotta’s bra. Bob gave her an accusatory look.
“We had to use something,” she explained. “Or he might have run off.”
“When I took it off, I couldn’t really see that much, but we may have to rectify that later, as part of my payment.” Croyd kissed his fingertips.
“Please leave me alone. I’ll give you money.” Earle was enough of himself to try to strike a bargain.
Croyd laughed. “I’ve got business with Mr. Earle. So we’ll have to figure out a way to get you two back to the city. I’ll bet neither one of you can hot-wire a car.”
“Figures.” He flew over to a nearby sedan and opened its driver’s side door. A few moments later the engine turned over and the headlights came on. Bob grabbed Earle by the collar and led him over to the car. Carlotta was ahead of him. She was from Iowa, so she actually knew how to drive.
“What are you going to do with him?” Bob handed Earle over to Croyd.
“Please. You can’t just kill me.” Earle looked from face to face. “I didn’t hurt anybody.”
“Rich boy and I have a date with the Atlantic Ocean.” Croyd slapped Earle hard on the back. “He’s going to do some motivational swimming.”
“No, I don’t swim well at all,” Earle protested.
“I’ll meet you at your club later, and you can pay me then. What I did tonight falls under the bonus clause, just in case you didn’t know.” Croyd flew up with Earle and was quickly lost in the darkness. The screams of protest from Earle faded quickly. Bob got into the passenger side of the vehicle and shut the door.
“You know how to get us home?”
“Watch me,” Carlotta said. Bob turned on the radio when they hit the main highway. The version of “Night on Bald Mountain” from Saturday Night Fever was playing. He drifted off to thoughts of a white-suited Croyd dancing with Carlotta.
The comfort of seeing the New York skyline lighting the horizon vanished when they finally made it back to the club. They’d ditched the car just north of Jokertown, taken the subway up, and been greeted with a burned-out building surrounded by yellow police tape. Bob walked to the center of what once had been his club, still-warm ashes crunching under his feet. Carlotta walked quietly behind him for a few moments, then gave him a hug.
“What to you think Mickey and Judy would do?”
“You’d have to hit me with your deuce to make me laugh now.” Bob crouched and picked up a handful of burned rubble.
They stood there silently for a few minutes, ignoring the people on the street, the cars, and the other sounds of the city. With a rush of leathery wings, Croyd dropped down next to them.
“No riots around here. Maybe a parting shot from Earle’s goons.” Croyd shook his horned head sympathetically.
“I won’t be able to pay you until tomorrow,” Bob said. “I can go to the bank and get the money.”
“Good. If not, I’ll have to kill you.” Croyd tangled his fingers in Carlotta’s hair. “Or take it out in trade.”
Carlotta laughed.
“I know that laugh,” Bob said. “You’re out of luck where she’s concerned.”
“Tomorrow,” Croyd said, and he was gone.
Bob had paid Croyd off handsomely, and Croyd had suggested the he and Carlotta get out of New York and adopt new identities. Croyd had plenty of useful tips on creating another persona that would be undetectable by the authorities or people like Earle. Croyd didn’t much care for Earle and remarked that the millionaire peed better than he swam.
After settling with the insurance company, Bob and Carlotta hit the road, with her at the wheel, of course. Driving was one thing he’d promised he was going to learn how to do. He didn’t know where they were going to end up, but he wanted to get away from New York for good. They stopped off to visit his parents on the way out and were now headed to Iowa to see hers. He wondered if he could tolerate that much homespun Americana. After Carlotta had demonstrated to him the benefits of “long-term possibilities” he was ready to try.
The sun was coming up across the plains when they entered her home state.
“How many New Yorkers does it take to screw in a light bulb,” she asked.
“Only one, if the right person asks.”
Carlotta smiled at that. “Want to hear some new ‘knock-knock’ jokes?”
To Bob’s surprise, he actually did.
Aces High was as close to deserted as Jerry had ever seen it. Two-thirds of the tables were empty, and there was nobody whom Jerry recognized as a celebrity. There was an aura of tense quietness, almost expectancy, about the place. Hiram was nowhere to be seen. Luckily, it didn’t affect Jerry’s appetite.
Jerry had eaten the shrimp and other goodies out of his salad and was ready to move on to his steak. Jay Ackroyd, whom Jerry had paid off, was happily chewing away at his lamb, occasionally pausing to wipe a drop of gravy from the corner of his mouth with a silk napkin. “You’re not still stuck on Veronica, are you?” Ackroyd asked.
“Nope. I’m giving up destructive women for Lent. Hopefully, it’s a habit I won’t get into again.” Jerry sliced into his steak. It was deliciously pink and oozed juice. He stared at it a moment, then set down his knife and fork and took a large swallow of wine. “Besides, I don’t care about her anymore.” He’d been practicing the lie for weeks. “Now, about our other friend?”
“Right.” Ackroyd pulled a file from his briefcase and handed it over to Jerry. “Here’s everything I could find on Mr. David Butler. It’s mostly background. He’s rich, well schooled, good family, good future. He has a wild streak, but most rich kids do. Lots of clubbing, probably bisexual. But this is New York.”
Jerry took the file and ipped through it. “Don’t know where he is now, though?”
“Nope.” Ackroyd chewed and swallowed. “You seem to specialize in people that disappear, don’t you?”
“I guess.” Jerry didn’t bother to try to hide his disappointment. If he hadn’t let Tachyon talk him into going to the police, Jerry might have nailed David himself. “Any hunches?”
“There’s something going on at Ellis Island. Gangs of kids, some dangerous jokers, maybe even an ace hiding out there. They call it the ‘Rox.’ Only teenagers could come up with a name like that. Probably as safe a place as any for a kid wanted by the law. Cops don’t go out there anymore.” Jay grabbed a waitress as she walked past. “See if Hiram will visit with us, will you? Tell him it’s Jay. If not, well, let me know when you get off.” He gave her a wink and slipped her a ten.
“You’re acting like a man who’s just been paid,” Jerry said.
“I always act this way,” Jay said. “You seem a little down. Better cheer up or I’ll start telling you my knockknock jokes.”
“Sorry. Normally, I’m better company than this. Must be the weather,” Jerry said. It was partly true. The late-winter sky had been gray for days on end. Sunshine always made the world feel nicer. Without it, even the good things left a little to be desired. “Is that all?”
“Of course not. There’s weeks of work in that file,” Ackroyd said. “One very important fact that came out is that for several of the jumper’ incidents, David Butler had a well-substantiated alibi.”
“Which means?”
Ackroyd paused a second, as if waiting for Jerry to answer his own question. “There’s more than one of them. And nobody knows how many more there might be.”
“Just great,” Jerry said. “That’s all the world needs.”
“Something else bothering you?” Ackroyd rubbed his chin. Jerry was silent. “Knock, knock.”
“All right. Things are tense at home. I live with my brother and sister-in-law, you know. And Kenneth seems to resent me for spending time with his wife, even though he’s usually too busy to pay her much attention.” Jerry shrugged. “It’s not like she’s interested in me. I doubt she’d date me if I were the last man on Earth.” .
Ackroyd sat quietly for a moment. “Hopefully, the sun will start shining again soon. In the meantime, you might want to consider moving into your own place. Might defuse the situation. just a thought.”
“Right.” Jerry looked away. Hiram stepped out of his office and wove his way through the tables toward them. His charcoal suit, as always, was exquisitely tailored, but the man inside looked worse for wear. There were deep lines in his face, especially around the eyes.
“Hiram,” Jay said, “sit down with us. Have dessert and an after-dinner drink. We’re boring the hell out of each other.”
Hiram smiled weakly and looked around, his head moving in a quick, jerky manner. “Thank you, really, but no. There’s so much to catch up on, with all the other business that’s been going on.” He paused. “And, well, it might not be a good idea to be seen with me now. Guilt by association, you know”
“We’re not worried,” Jay said. “In fact—”
There was a thunderous noise from the kitchen and fire leapt out from the doorway. Jerry was knocked from his chair and into the next table. His elbow smashed into one of the table legs, shooting pain up his arm. Smoke churned into the dining area.
Jerry dragged himself into a standing position. Jay and Hiram were already making their way toward the kitchen. Customers, those that could, were picking themselves up and pushing out of the restaurant. The injured were moaning or screaming. Jerry heard the sound of fire extinguishers from the kitchen.
“Hit the exhaust fans,” Hiram directed. He pushed his way into the kitchen. Jay was right behind him. Jerry followed slowly, coughing from the heavy smoke. He walked across the restaurant and stuck his head into the kitchen. One of the swinging doors had been torn from its hinges. Hiram was kneeling next to someone, lifting their head.
“I’m sorry” Hiram said. “I’m so sorry”
Jay pulled his friend up. “Hiram, call Tachyon. Tell him we have several severely injured people coming his way. Do it now”
Hiram nodded and walked out of the kitchen. Jerry stepped back. He could see the pain and anger in Hiram’s eyes. It made his self-pity over Veronica seem selfish. Jerry stepped into the kitchen.
“Anything I can do?” he asked Jay.
“Not unless you’re a doctor.” Jay pointed his finger. There was a pop. A moaning man vanished. There were two more pops. Jay knelt down next to the final body in the room and shook his head. “It’s too late for this one.”
“If those other people make it, it’ll be because of you,” Jerry said.
“More because of Tachyon,” Jay said, wiping his eyes. “But you have to do as much as you can. There’s no excuse for doing less.”
“Nope,” Jerry said, thinking of David. “No excuse at all.”
He could have asked Kenneth to bring home David’s file, but that would have tipped his brother about Jerry’s suspicions. Besides, the file was probably in St. John’s office. Latham, Strauss was very selective about who it hired; hopefully there would be some clue as to David’s whereabouts. It could be a starting point, anyway.
The door to Latham’s office had been tougher than Lieutenant King’s and his finger bone had poked painfully out through the skin. Jerry kissed a salty-tasting drop of blood off his fingertip and went inside. He turned on the desk lamp. The fluorescent bulb crackled to life and greenish light covered the desk. He looked about the dimly lit office. It was oppressively neat and boring. No plants, no personal photographs, no clutter, nothing to give it any semblance of life. Jerry tried the desk drawers, but they were locked. He figured what he wanted would be in the file cabinet anyway, but the key to it was likely in the desk.
Jerry crossed the room to the file cabinet. He blew on his hands. The heat was turned way down and even double-paned glass let some cold air seep in. The drawers were locked here, too. Jerry didn’t want to tear up his fingers, but it looked like the only way he was going to get anywhere.
He heard a noise outside and froze. He’d known this was a possibility, but had trusted to luck that it wouldn’t happen. After a moment’s hesitation he changed his looks to mimic Latham’s. Cold and impersonal, he thought, trying to make everything go dead inside him. He took a deep breath, turned off the lamp, and headed for the door. If it was anyone but Latham, he’d be okay.
She met him at the door. She was wearing a tight blue off-the-shoulder designer dress. Her carefully combed hair hung past her shoulders. She smelled as beautiful and expensive as she looked. After an instant Jerry recognized her. Fantasy, or Asta Lenser, and she was definitely no dog. Much closer to Myrna Loy, in fact.
He interrupted the silence with a cough. “How can I help you?”
She sighed. Jerry thought he smelled wine on her breath. Her eyes were so dilated he couldn’t tell what color they were. “Just looking for company. Rumor has it that you’re, shall we say, more accessible to the temptations of the flesh these days.”
Jerry tried not to act excited. Not only was he not going to get caught, he was likely going to get laid. Still, he had to play it cool, or she’d know he wasn’t the genuine Latham. “That might be possible. Using my residence is out of the question, though.”
She twined her fingers in his necktie, gracefully pirouetted, and pulled him toward the office door. “I love it when nasty rumors turn out to be true.”
Her penthouse was huge, with high ceilings and expensive modern decor. There was less black and silver on a sports car lot than in her living room. She dimmed the lights and kicked off her shoes.
“Let’s see now, counselor. Bedroom number one, two, or three for you?” Fantasy put a finger to her red lips for a moment. “No. Don’t tell me. Bedroom number three. My instincts are never wrong.”
“I’m sure that will be satisfactory” Jerry was having trouble maintaining his Latham act. He wanted to get to the sex so he wouldn’t have to talk anymore.
Fantasy half walked and half danced to the bedroom doorway, then lifted her chin and stepped inside.
Jerry struggled out of his coat and tossed it on the nearest chair, then followed. She was standing next to the large brass bed, pulling her dress off over her head. All she had on underneath was a pair of tie-on black satin panties. She undid them with dramatic flair and let them drop to the floor, then did a slow half turn so he could see her from behind.
Jerry just stared. Her body was flawless, at least no imperfections showed up in the dimmed light. She was small-breasted, but he preferred that. “You’re very admirably proportioned.”
She walked over to him and began unbuttoning his shirt. “You know, if Kien finds out about this, we’re both in for hell on earth.”
“Really?” Jerry didn’t know who Kien was and frankly didn’t care. It would be Latham’s problem if they were found out. Right now he was deciding what size to make his penis. Asta undid his belt and began slipping his pants down. He quickly decided on a Penthouse Forum model. She cracked a pill under his nose as they sat down, naked on the bed. Jerry’s head jerked back. His nose stung for a second, then everything was fine. “Actually, Kien wouldn’t do anything to you right now. He’s too interested in your teen groupies.”
Jerry figured this might have something to do with David, so he filed the information away for future use. She put her mouth on his. He was buzzing with pleasure and didn’t want to do anything but fuck. She opened her mouth and worked her tongue over and around his. Jerry lay down and pulled her with him, running his hands over her soft flesh. He couldn’t feel any imperfections, either.
Her kisses were intense and aggressive. She ran her fingers across his chest and abdomen, sometimes touching him delicately with the tips and sometimes digging in slightly with her nails. She reached down between his legs and traced the underside of his penis with her fingernails. In spite of its size, Jerry had no trouble getting it up. He ran his fingers through her pubic hair, twisting it lightly here and there.
She pinched the tip of his penis, almost hard enough to hurt him.
“Jesus,” he said.
“Why counselor, I didn’t know you were a religious man.” She pulled his hand away and kissed it. “You have a nice, light touch, but I’ve got something a little more intimate in mind. Any objections?” Silence. “I’m ready to call my first witness.”
Asta straddled him, facing his feet, and lowered herself onto his mouth. Her scent overpowered the expensive perfume she’d doubtless dabbed on her inner thighs. He ran his tongue up and down, separating her already moist labia. He decided to put his tongue into her as far as he could; given his power, that was all the way.
Fantasy gasped, then looked down at him. It was the most sincerely hedonistic expression he’d ever seen.
“ I know a lawyer’s greatest weapon is his mouth,” she said, “but I wasn’t aware just how dangerous it was.”
“A lawyer’s greatest weapon is his desire not to lose,” Jerry said. Whatever she’d popped under his nose was kicking in, and he felt powerful and in control.
“Here’s to the winners,” Asta said, tossing her hair back and lowering herself back onto his mouth.
Jerry whipped his tongue lightly across her, then pointed it and pushed in again. Fantasy breathed heavily for several moments then leaned forward, taking him into her mouth. Pleasure spread through him. Veronica had plenty of oral technique, but not the enthusiasm Asta had shown with only a few strokes. Jerry exhaled slowly and put his tongue on autopilot. She made a muffled laugh. This had to be as good as it got.
He was two-thirds of the way through both The Big Sleep and his bottle of peppermint schnapps when he heard a knock on the door.
“Come in,” he said, pausing the VCR.
Beth sat down next to him and looked disapprovingly at the bottle.
“I’m depressed, so I’m drinking,” Jerry explained. “It’s a time-honored tradition.”
“What are you depressed about?”
Jerry thought a moment, then told her everything. Told her about Veronica, and the return of his wild-card ability, his night with Fantasy. He left out his suspicions about David. She’d probably just write it off as jealousy. Beth sat there the entire time with her hand on her chin. “You know what’s funny,” Jerry said. “The sex with Asta was the best I’ve ever had, maybe the best I’ll ever have, and it just depressed me. You know why? Because it wasn’t for me. It was for Latham and I was just a stand-in. Nobody would ever want to fuck me like that.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” Beth shook her head. “Does it make that big a difference?”
“Hell, yes. What’s the measure of success nowadays? For a man it’s how much money you make and how many women want to ball your brains out. I’m already rich, so the only area I can make good is with women.”
“Jesus, Jerry, you don’t have to buy into that crap. You’re the one who decides what is or isn’t a useful and happy life. Don’t let Madison Avenue or anyone else tell you.”
Jerry leaned away from her. “That’s easy for you to say. You’re married and happy. You’ve got what you want.”
“Yes, because I know what I want and I worked hard to get it. Nobody did it for me.”
“So, I’m just lazy. That’s it.” Jerry turned back to the TV.
“You’re not just lazy, you’re an emotional six-year-old. You don’t see anyone’s feelings or needs but your own. And you’ll never get along with women as long as they’re just something you do to make yourself feel more adequate.” Beth paused. “It makes me wonder how you feel about me.”
“I’m wondering about it right now, too.” Jerry turned and looked at her. He could see the hurt in her eyes. The line was crossed, he might as well get his money’s worth.
“I trusted you with all my secrets, and all you can do is criticize. Why don’t you just leave me alone. Go off and suck Kenneth’s dicks”
Beth stood slowly, left the room, and closed the door quietly behind her.
“I’m sorry” Jerry said, when he was sure she couldn’t possibly hear. He took another slug of schnapps from the bottle. Bogart wouldn’t have handled it this way. “Jesus, on top of everything else, I’m turning into an asshole.”
He unpaused the VCR. He hoped Bogey and Baby would tell him otherwise, but they only had eyes for each other.
Jerry carried a stack of boxes to the van. The air was cold and damp. Easter was just around the corner. Jerry thought of celebrating by biting the heads off chocolate bunnies. Misery loved company. He glanced up at the second-story window to Kenneth and Beth’s bedroom. Beth looked down at him for a moment, then turned away. The finality of the gesture was crushing. Jerry felt like something inside him just died.
Kenneth walked out carrying a pair of suitcases. He set them carefully in the back of the van and closed the doors.
“This isn’t really what you want to do,” Kenneth said. “Cut your losses. Apologize to her and she’ll meet you halfway. Trust me, I’m speaking from experience.”
Jerry stared hard at Kenneth. “You know. My main reason for leaving is that both of you think I’m too stupid to handle my own life. That gets a little tiring after a while.”
“Dumb, and proud of it. That’s you,” Kenneth said, turning away angrily. “Do what you have to do.”
Jerry got in the van and turned the key. The engine sputtered to life. They’d be sorry soon enough. He’d already figured out how to make sure of that.
The early-dawn light filtered through the mist over the water. Jerry sat at the powerboat’s wheel, trying to figure out how to start it. The gun he’d gotten from the Immaculate Egret was in his pocket. He’d done his best to clean it. It wouldn’t do to have it explode in his hand. David was on Ellis Island, the Rox. Jerry was willing to stake his life on that. He’d head out to the island and gun David down, die a hero’s death. There was a note in his apartment explaining everything. He hoped that Beth was the one to find it.
Jerry started the engine. Fumes boiled up from the boat’s stern. Jerry cast off the lines and carefully backed out of the slip. He’d rented the boat. No point in buying one, since it was going to be a one-way trip. Once he was clear of the dock, Jerry stopped backing the engines and started moving forward. He spun the wheel and pushed the throttle. The eighteen-foot boat bounced out through the waves toward Ellis Island. Cold spray stung his face. Jerry wished he’d taken some Dramamine. His stomach was in less than great shape. But it usually acted up when he was scared. Still, facing David had to be easier than facing Beth. At least with David he had a chance of winning.
A tug passed by in front of him. Jerry took its wake at high speed and bounced out of his seat. He hit his mouth on the dash and split his lip.
“Shit,” he said. “Can’t I get anything to go right?” He pointed the nose of the craft toward Ellis Island and pushed the throttle all the way forward.
About a half mile away, his stomach knotted up and he felt his breakfast at the back of his throat. Jerry bent over and put one hand to his mouth. His brain flashed sparks.
The sky above seemed to change color, from blue to green to purple. Jerry felt like iron hammers were pounding his flesh. He felt a cold spasm in his gut and fell over, the wheel spinning out of his grasp. White noise hissed in his ears. He stretched his arm out toward the throttle and pulled it back, then blacked out.
There was a harbor patrol boat next to his when he came to. A man in a yellow poncho was chafing his wrists. Jerry sat up slowly, his ears ringing.
“You all right?” the man in the poncho asked.
“I’ve been better, but I’ll live.” Jerry slowly sat up and looked over his shoulder. He’d drifted away from Ellis Island.
“You were headed to Ellis? That place is a rat’s nest now” The man shook his head. “Are you crazy?”
“No. Just enthusiastic.” If the man caught his reference to King Kong, he didn’t comment on it.
“Want a tow back in?”
“Yeah, thanks,” Jerry said. “If you don’t mind.”
This had obviously been a bad idea, but hindsight was always twenty/twenty.
Jerry’s instincts told him to stake out Latham’s penthouse. There was no particular logic to it, but a good detective always trusted his guts. At least, that was what he’d read and seen in the movies. For once, he’d been right.
A car pulled up right before midnight and a young man got out. Jerry recognized him in an instant. David had an arrogance to his walk that didn’t change even when he was being hunted. Latham met him at the door. They hugged, and then St. John talked while David listened and nodded. The conversation was brief. Jerry couldn’t be sure, but he thought they actually kissed lightly before David trotted back down the steps to the car.
Jerry tailed David to Central Park. He knew it was dangerous to walk in the park at night. Even back before he’d turned into a giant ape, that was a bad idea. David was about twenty yards ahead of him and walking fast.
On the other side of a wooded hill was the Central Park Zoo, where he’d been the feature attraction for over twenty years. Maybe as a giant ape he’d have been able to take David with no trouble. As it was, he’d have to rely on his ability with his stolen gun and a little luck.
A cool wind stirred the hair on the back of his neck, tickling it. He’d made himself look tough by giving his facial disguise a few scars. Jerry knew he could die doing this, but at this point there just wasn’t anything else in his life. If he could cash it in trying to make a positive difference in the world, maybe people wouldn’t remember him too badly. Beth, especially.
David stepped off the path and up into the trees.
Jerry walked forward slowly, staring at the shadows for some hint of movement. When he reached the point where David had disappeared, Jerry paused, then moved quietly into the trees. He headed off the path at a right angle, putting his feet down carefully to avoid making much noise. An empty beer can glinted in the moonlight not far ahead. Jerry took a few more steps and found himself at the edge of a tiny clearing. He reached inside his coat to make sure the gun was still there. An arm caught him from behind and pushed hard against his windpipe, and he felt a forearm against the back of his neck. Jerry felt a hand yank the gun from his shoulder holster. He sucked hard at the air, but hardly any made it to his lungs.
“What have we here?” David asked, stepping into view. Jerry recognized him by his voice. There wasn’t much light to see by, and his vision was blurring.
Jerry tried to gasp out an answer, but could only manage a choked hiss.
“Let’s sink him in the pond,” a young female voice said.
“That may not be necessary, Molly,” David said. He leaned in close to Jerry. “We’re going to let you go for a second and you’re going to tell me why you were following me.” David held up the gun. “With this, no less.”
The arms came loose from either side of Jerry’s neck and he fell to his knees, gasping. A simple lie would probably be best. Not that it would matter. “I ... just wanted your ... money.”
Several of the kids laughed. David shook his head. “You were going to rob me? What a piece of shit you are. You have no idea who you’re dealing with, little man.” David’s voice was cold, yet he looked strangely beautiful in the pale light. Jerry figured it was the last face he’d ever see.
“Do him,” said a husky female voice from behind. “I’ll snap his neck if you don’t want it to look suspicious.” A long, quiet moment passed. “I think not,” David said. “He truly is beneath us, and I can’t see much entertainment value.” David grabbed Jerry’s face. “Look at me, thief. Remember my face. I’m going to be famous soon. People everywhere are going to be afraid of me. It’s only your insignificance which saved you. Find a hole and pull it in after you. If any of us ever sees you again, you’re dead. Understand?”
Jerry nodded. He felt sick. Maybe they were just setting him up and were going to kill him anyway. David popped the clip from Jerry’s gun and tossed it into the trees, then smashed the handle of the gun into Jerry’s head. Jerry collapsed to the ground, his forehead banging with pain.
“Here’s your gun back, thief,” David said.
Jerry felt it land on his back. He heard David and the others make their way off through the brush. He lay there panting for a moment, then wobbled into a sitting position and pulled a leaf from his mouth. He’d almost died. Could have. Maybe should have. All of a sudden the hero’s death had lost its appeal. He picked up and holstered the gun. He staggered in the opposite direction David and his friends had taken. If his life were a movie, it would need a serious rewrite.
D ust filtered down from the rafters, shaken loose by the grips who scurried like a tribe of apes along the ancient wood catwalks. It glittered and spun gold in the bright work lights. Bradley Finn stared mesmerized at the spinning motes and wished he’d spent less of the night drinking Tequila Sunrises down in Santa Monica.
Finn and the rest of the Myth Patrol were perched on a fabricated cliff. Below them sat the deck of the Argo. The nat actors, including the stars of Jason and the Argonauts, David Soul and Arnold Schwarzenegger, were back in their trailers sipping Evian and keeping cool. The excuse for keeping the jokers was that they were hard to light, and the D.P. wanted another crack at it.
Finn sighed and tried to find a more comfortable position on his platform, which wasn’t easy since he was a pony-sized centaur. The action called for him to rear. He wasn’t relishing the prospect. The wood didn’t offer much traction for his hooves, and he’d left his rubber booties at home. Not that Roger Corman was going to let him wear booties in the shot.
So Bradley figured he was going to pitch backwards off the platform, fall twelve feet to the floor, break his back, and end up with a little wheeled cart so he could drag his back legs. There were five jokers in the cast, but the E.M.T. wasn’t certified in joker medicine. Finn knew. He’d checked. Which meant he’d probably be dealing with any injuries to the Myth Patrol—unless he was the myth who was down.
It was a sweltering August day in southern California, and he could feel damp on the palomino hide along his flanks. The stink of rancid make-up, stale coffee and donuts just added to his joy. The big air conditioning unit on the roof of Sound Stage 17 came to life with a grind and a rumble that shook more dust out of the rafters.
Clops looked up from his copy of Variety. His single eye was magnified to the size of a goose egg behind the fold-down lens which was mounted on an old fashioned surgeon’s headband. It was tough to be an actor when you were that near sighted.
Of course Clops had other disadvantages—like being seven feet tall, and having only one eye in the center of his forehead. Finn thought.
“You realize that dust may have been around when Mary Pickford was a star,” the cyclops said.
“I don’t think Pickford was ever at Warner’s,” Goathead responded.
“Hmbruza #** muffel wanda,” said Cleo. She was lying on her stomach while one of the snakes which sprouted from her head gave her a neck massage. Cleo, whose full name was Cleopatra Reza, was Turkish, didn’t speak a word of English, but never let that stop her. She commented on everything. The other jokers just agreed with her, and so far none of the men had gotten slapped.
When Finn had first been introduced all he could think was that her parents must have hated her. It would have been like naming me Seabiscuit, Finn had thought, and why Cleopatra and not Medusa? Clops thought it was because Cleopatra had died from the bite of an asp, and because Cleo was breathtakingly beautiful while Medusa was so hideous that she turned men to stone. Finn had to admit that Cleo was very beautiful—if you could ignore the tangle of snakes growing out of her head.
“You know what I mean. This is historic. This sound stage was built in 1927,” Clops said.
“Yeah, well, I wish we were on a new sound stage with real air conditioning that we didn’t have to turn off for every shot,” Goat-head groused. Goathead was your basic asshole who never missed an opportunity to trash anything and everybody. Finn just wished he wouldn’t cut at Clops, who was a gentle soul and completely star-struck. Clops had left his Kansas home at seventeen and headed west determined to be a star. Except he was seven feet tall, and had one eye.
Finn quashed the thought and glared at Goathead, hoping the other joker would correctly interpret the look as a stop pissing on Clops’s birthday cake. Apparently he did, for Goathead muttered that he was hungover, which for Goathead amounted to an apology. Cleo rattled off another of her incomprehensible comments.
The D.P. threw the lights, and there was a magnificent geyser of sparks from one transformer. Firemen rushed forward with extinguishers, but the sparks were all she wrote.
“Shit!”
“Fuck!”
“Hell.”
“Damn!”
The curses rose from all over the stage, erupting from the D.P., the First A.D., the director’s assistant, and Goathead. Finn got the assistant’s attention. “Mary, can we please take a break?” Finn pleaded.
“Sure, go ahead. Nick, when do you want the Myths back?” she shouted at the D.P.
“Give me an hour.”
Clops just climbed down the front of the plaster cliff. It wasn’t that far for him. He then reached back up and, handling her as if she were made of spun glass, he lifted Cleo to the floor. She gave him her thousand watt smile. If only it weren’t snakes, Finn thought, and sighed.
Finn and Goathead had a ramp off the back of the cliff. Their hooves rang hollowly on the wood, and Finn felt the ramp sag under his weight. His stomach was suddenly too light, and heading for the back of his throat. Finn froze, waiting or the ramp to break. After a moment where nothing happened, Bradley resumed his cautious descent.
Once Finn was safely on the floor he trotted over to the craft services table. His stomach had been too off for breakfast and now he was starving. He surveyed the array. M & M’s, stale donuts, Oreoes, peanut butter, jelly and bread. A jar of pretzels. Corman was known for being a tightwad. Finn decided to head over to sound stage 23 where his dad was shooting The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Finn Senior kept an elaborate spread, but of course he was making a twelve million dollar extravaganza staring Grace Kelly and Warren Beatty, not a cheesy B action movie.
Finn slipped out the stage door, into the hazy but intense California sunshine. The white walls of the stages loomed like breakers on either side of the street. He kicked it into a lope, and went clattering past Teamsters tossing around footballs, (he got the usual calls of Hi Ho Silver, which was annoying because he was a palomino) past stars in their golf carts and lines of Star Waggons parked against the sides of the street. Spinning red lights indicated they were shooting on the various stages. There were a lot of lights. The movie business was booming.
He waited in front of his dad’s stage until the light went out so he could enter the set. Pulling open the door, he stepped into a Victorian drawing room complete with dark wood, red velvet and innumerable knick knacks on every available surface. Grace Kelly, looking like a swaying calla lily in her white gown, was gliding off the set. Stan Whitehorn-Humphries, dapper in his bow tie and tweed jacket, was blotting her make-up as she walked.
She passed close by Finn, and he caught a scent of sweat under the perfume. It was somehow comforting to know that someone that beautiful was still human enough to perspire. Kelly stopped. Finn gaped at her. Stan, a smile lurking beneath the brush of his white mustache, gave a nod, and Finn realized his pony’s ass was blocking the door. Muttering an apology, he swung his hindquarters out of the way. Kelly glided out, and Stan gave him a wink.
“You’ve just seen an example of what they mean by ‘stunningly beautiful’,” Finn said to the elderly make-up artist.
“She is quite remarkable, isn’t she?” Stan gazed for an instant at the closed door as if conjuring a picture of the star. “So who did your make-up? You look dead.” Fifty years in Hollywood hadn’t blunted his upper-class British accent. Of course it was an affectation after all this time, but no one cared. It was part of the legend of Stan Whitehorn-Humphries.
“I’m supposed to look scary,” Finn said.
“Sorry, dead. Come over to the trailer after you get a bite and sup, and I’ll touch you up.” Whitehorn-Humprhies walked away before Finn could thank him.
Finn cut through the set, admiring the design. Next week the production was scheduled to move to England for the exteriors. Finn would love to go along, but he badly needed to replenish his bank account before the fall semester. He glanced over to where his father was discussing the setup for the next shot, and briefly wished his dad had been the typical Hollywood parent—just throw money at your kids and hope they don’t embarrass you. But G. Benton Finn had clung to his mid-western roots, and believed his kid appreciated what he had to work for and disdained what he hadn’t. He would pay for Bradley’s medical school tuition, but if his son wanted to live away from home he had to swing it himself.
Finn stepped delicately over the snaking wires and cords, and got a glimpse of the craft service table. He broke into a smile. From here he could see salmon, cream cheese, bagels, fresh fruit, and an assortment of pastries and cookies. There was a gaggle of nat starlets gathered around the table. Two blondes, a redhead and a brunette. The taffeta dresses hissed and crackled as they moved, and they were showing a lot of bosom for Victorians. Still, with bosoms like that you didn’t want to hide them. These girls were stunners.
Finn briefly wondered if his father had ever availed himself of the casting couch. A moment’s consideration, and Finn decided that Finn Senior probably had, but mom had sense enough to look the other way. There were a lot of temptations and vices in Tinsel Town. You picked the ones you could tolerate and lived with them.
“I looked it up, she was born in ‘28,” one girl was saying, as Finn stepped over the final power cord.
“That means she’s ....” The brunette’s brow furrowed.
“Fifty-two,” said one of the blondes. She was tinier then her companions, and she reminded Finn of the figure in a music box, perfect in every detail. Then he got a look at her eyes.
A figurine constructed out of hard glass, he thought, as he waited for them to react to him. Jokers, even rich ones, learned to gauge a nat’s reaction before approaching too close.
“She’s got to be an ace,” mumbled the brunette around a mouthful of cookie.
“It’s illegal for them to be in professional sports,” said the redhead. “They should have done that in Hollywood.”
“Then Golden Boy couldn’t have had a career,” objected the zaftig blonde.
“Another good argument for banning wild cards,” murmured the petite blonde dryly. Finn swallowed a chuckle. This girl was quick.
“Kelly’s never said she’s an ace,” offered the brunette.
“Never said she isn’t,” countered the redhead.
“There’s a blood test that will tell if you’ve got the wild card,” mused the gimlet eyed blonde, almost to herself
The redhead picked a shrimp out of the melting ice and savagely chewed her way to the tail. “You’d think she’d want to move on.” The girl bit off the words with the same force she had shown to the shrimp.
Again the tiny blonde answered. “Why? Why would she? She’s been a star for thirty years. Every major role has been hers. Why quit?”
“So some of us could have a chance,” said the brunette.
“I wouldn’t do it,” said the gimlet eyed blonde.
“Yeah, but we all know you’d kill your mother for a part,” shot back the brunette.
The blonde gave her a look that clearly said, And what’s your point?
This time Finn couldn’t hold back the laugh. That did get their attention. The brunette and the zaftig blonde looked disgusted and walked hurriedly away. The redhead gave him a nervous smile, then made a show of checking the brooch watch which was part of her costume and hurried away. The tiny blonde held her ground.
He grabbed a plate and started loading up. “I’m sure you believed that watch really worked,” remarked the blonde.
Finn lifted his shoulders and dropped them. “Hey, at least she pretended to have an excuse.”
“You’re Mr. Finn’s son, aren’t you?”
“The one and only.”
“I’m Tanya.”
Finn shook the proffered hand. “I’m Bradley Finn. Pleased to meet you.”
“Well, I better go and walk off some of this,” she indicated the table”... spread.”
“It’s really hot out there. It’s not so bad when you’re down by the beach. I was at Santa Monica last night, and it wasn’t bad. It’s always worse in the valley. I’m a native Angelino and we know to avoid the valley.” Finn realized he was babbling. He tried to bite back the inane flow, only to have the worst of the inanities escape. “So, where do you live?”
“Oh, don’t worry, Bradley, I’ve got the right area code and an acceptable Beverly Hills address. The casting directors call.”
“I’m sure they do,” and he knew there was no way that line was going to come across as anything but a leer. Bradley cringed. He’d grown up talking to actresses. He wasn’t usually this gauche.
That’s because your gonads are talking, you dope. And she thinks you’re a freak so shut up!
She surprised him by saying, “I’ve never had a decent meal or good time in Santa Monica. Maybe I need native guide. Nice meeting you.” She gave a little wave with the tips of her perfectly manicured fingernails and walked away.
A freak whose daddy is a director, Finn’s cynical side amended.
Still, Finn figured he’d get her number. He was male and twenty-three, and she might be adventurous.
Finn came trotting down the sidewalk toward his Spanish bungalow apartment, and checked at the sight of the man standing in the shade of the trailing bougainvillea. It wasn’t that he looked threatening. No one that short could be threatening. It was more the fact that he looked like a garden gnome.
The man’s face was a full moon with the wide, surprised eyes of a child. A fringe of graying brown hair ringed a bald pate. An open necked shirt revealed a mat of graying chest hairs mashed flat by a tangle of gold chains. The barrel chest was supported on an even broader belly. Finn noted the Rolex watch and the expensive slacks, then boggled at the sight of the high topped red tennis shoes.
The man surged out from beneath the brilliant red flowers with the rolling gait of a sailor. “Harry Gold,” he announced, and Finn found a card thrust into his hand.
Shiny slick red paper with the name embossed in gold and the title PRODUCER beneath the name.
“I don’t have any input with my father on his projects,” Finn said automatically.
“I don’t want your dad ... not that he isn’t a great director, but I don’t want him. I want you.”
“I have an agent.” Finn began sidestepping toward the safety of his front door.
“Of course you do. You’re a savvy kid, but I knew he wasn’t going to let me get near you,” Gold replied. “So I decided to talk to you myself.”
Far from being alarmed by this admission, Bradley found himself amused. He now had a pretty good idea of the kind of movies that Harry Gold produced. There was a bubble of laughter filling his chest. He forced it down, and propped his hindquarters on a nearby planter.
“That’s right, take a load off, though it’s gotta be easier with four than two,” Gold said. “Where was I?”
“Wanting to talk to me.”
“I don’t want to just talk to you. I want you to star in my next film. What do you think of that?” The little man’s chest puffed out like a satisfied pigeon’s.
The devil was in Finn prompting him to ask, “A speaking role?”
“Absolutely. That’s what makes you so perfect. You can talk.”
“Harry, do you make porno movies?” Finn asked.
The little man drew himself up. “I make male art films.”
Finn heaved himself back onto all four feet. “Thanks, but I’m not interested.”
“I’ll pay you ten thousand dollars.”
It was a ton of money for a porno flick. And you’d get some, said the bad Elmer Fudd who suddenly appeared on Finn’s left shoulder. He pictured his father and mother’s reaction. How would they ever know?
Because some teamster or grip would talk.
Finn hunched his shoulders, trying to dislodge his baser self. “Sorry, Harry, can’t do it.” He unlocked the door of his apartment.
“You’ve got to. You know how hard it is to train a real pony?” came the disconsolate cry as Finn closed the door.
“The frightening thing is that a woman would probably rather fuck a pony than a joker,” Goathead said the next morning when Finn finished telling them about his meeting with Gold. They were in the extras’ make-up area. Clops flushed to his eyebrow at the use of the profanity, and cocked his head significantly toward the joker woman seated near-by.
“What?” Goathead demanded. Clops cocked his head further this time and waggled his eyebrow. “Them? Hell, they don’t want to fuck a joker either,” Goathead said, upping the volume even further.
Finn sighed and looked up at the rafters. Goathead’s attitude was definitely starting to wear thin. On the other hand, Goathead had grown up poor in Detroit while Finn had grown up in Bel Aire, a child of privilege blessed with parents who had never treated him as different. He had had playmates and girlfriends ....
And how many of them were with you because your daddy is a famous director? came the hateful little voice. They did always end up wanting to be “friends” and only one had ever put out, and Finn later heard she’d been busted in one of L.A.’s more notorious sex clubs.
Clops looked pained. “I don’t think that’s true. There are whole magazines about us.” He held up a copy of Aces to prove his point.
Goathead stuck a nicotine stained finger under the title. “A. C. E. S.,” he spelled. “Aces. You see a magazine called Joker?!, you dumb shit? No.”
“Would you sit still?” the make-up man grumbled, trying to glue on Goathead’s horns. Despite the legs and hooves of a goat, the joker lacked horns, and Corman wanted big horns on his satyr.
Clops shook his head. “I think women pick men because of what’s on the inside, not on the outside.”
“Oh, God you are such a goober,” Goathead said. “And like how often are you getting any?” Clops flushed again and ducked his head. “Never? Right?”
The make-up man made a moue of distaste. “You’re done. Go away.” He made shooing motions with both hands, and Goathead went clattering away on his cloven hooves. Finn reflected that they were going to have to refinish the ancient wood floors after eight weeks of his and Goathead’s hooves.
The terribly sweet boy who was doing Finn’s make-up smoothed the foundation over his nose, and reached for the powder. “Did you hear about the commotion over on the Lieutenant set?” He punctuated every word with a little gusting breath.
Finn knew it was stupid. It was just a movie. But it was his dad’s movie, so he felt his stomach clench down into a small tight ball. “What?”
“Somebody broke into the production offices last night.”
Finn blinked. He had been prepared for a dead star, a fire on the set, lost film. “Was anything taken?”
“They don’t think so. The files drawers were all open, and they found the petty cash box by the open window, but all the money was there.”
It was an odd enough occurrence that Bradley decided to talk to his dad when the Argonauts broke for lunch.
There was a cafeteria on the Warner’s lot where extras, day players and the below-the-line people went to eat. The food was plentiful and cheap. You would often see writers in there, which said something about the self-image of Hollywood writers.
Then there was The Warner’s Restaurant. Table clothes, linen napkins, wines and gourmet food. This was where the powerful “did lunch.” Finn swung on down the street to the entrance to that restaurant. Steps led up to the etched glass doors. The doors opened out, and he had to lower his hindquarters down a step to make room for the swing of the door. Eventually he was inside. They had just repainted the place in azure blue and cream with pale blue upholstery on the furniture. Beneath the scent of fresh cut gardenias in a vase on the maitre d’s desk there was the tang of newly dried paint.
Tony, the maitre d’, grinned. “Hear you been slumming over at the cafeteria.”
Finn slapped his gut beneath the Hawaiian shirt. “I couldn’t take too many more gourmet meals and keep my boyish figure. Dad here?”
Tony indicated the direction with a cock of his head. “Corner right.”
“Thanks.”
Finn minced his way between the tables, exchanging hellos with various actors, directors, producers and studio heads. He had practically grown up on this lot, and in fact been the focus of a law suit between Disney and Warner’s in the late fifties. Warner’s had used Finn in some of their promotional material, and Disney had screamed infringement of trademark, citing Fantasia. Since Finn had been two at the time, he wasn’t sure how it had all been resolved. He just knew it was a favorite dinner tale of his father’s.
His dad was eating with Ester Flannigan, the most perfect of personal assistants. There was a slight frown on his long, lantern jawed face, and he seemed to be talking more than he was eating. Which meant Ester was taking shorthand instead of eating. Finn came up behind her, placed his hands on her shoulders, and gave her a kiss one wrinkled cheek. “Doesn’t the union have something to say about working through lunch?”
Benton Finn looked down at their virtually untouched plates and gave Ester an apologetic smiles. “Sorry, we’ll finish this after lunch.”
“What’s got your shorts in a twist?” Finn asked as he swiped a cherry tomato off his dad’s salad plate. He bit down and savored the tart/sweet explosion. He swallowed and added, “The break in?”
“So it’s all over the lot, is it?” Finn asked.
“I don’t know. It’s at Corman’s.”
“It’s all over the lot,” Ester broke in. “Jenny called to ask about it, and she’s over in the bungalows.”
“Why is this a deal?” Finn asked. “Nothing was stolen.”
“Because everything on Lieutenant has to go smoothly and if you look close enough at any production you’ll find problems, and Coppola will use it,” Ester said in sing song voice while Benton glared at her.
Finn gave his dad a look. “Wow, you are being paranoid.”
“Coppola wanted this movie, and Bernie told me Coppola told the Chairman I didn’t know how to pull something new and fresh out of Kelly. Kelly doesn’t need to be new and fresh. She just needs to be Kelly.”
“You’ve directed her in three other films. These other guys don’t know how to work with someone from that generation,” Finn soothed.
Ester closed her eyes briefly, then mouthed to Finn wrong thing to say.
“Meaning what?” Benton asked low and cold. “That I’m also from that generation so I know how?”
“No, that you’re a gentleman and Kelly is a real lady,” Finn babbled, and hoped his dad would accept this statement of the public’s view of Kelly even though everyone in the industry knew she slept with every hot young star who came along. “These young ... er, new guys don’t know how to work with someone like that.”
Benton looked mollified. “You’re sure right about that. These new guys are punks. They have no respect for the institutions ....”
Finn cocked a back foot for greater comfort and settled in to listen. He also helped himself to the sole almadin on his dad’s plate.
Finn heard the sharp clatter of high heels on concrete, and suddenly an arm was slipped beneath his. The redhead from the Lieutenant set had attached herself limpet-like to his side.
“Hi.” The word emerged on a puff of coffee scented breath. “Sorry I had to run off back there. By the way, I’m Julie.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Bradley said.
He waited to see if Red would ask for his name, but apparently she had discovered that the joker with the pony’s body was the director’s son, and she wasn’t bright enough to realize that she needed to pretend that she hadn’t. Finn had long ago stopped being angry over these sudden shifts in attitude from eager young starlets. What he hadn’t totally resolved was whether to laugh or cry about them.
“So, are you in the business?” she asked as she tried to adjust her steps to match Finn’s length of stride.
“No, not really.” He watched the glow of interest in her eyes die. “I’m in medical school.” A touch of interest returned. So we’ve established what motivates you, Julie. Looks like ... money. Which is probably good because you sure can’t act.
“So, how do you like it out here as compared to the Bronx?” Bradley asked.
Julie pouted. “Oh, pooh! I’ve been working so hard to lose the accent.”
In your dreams, baby. “And you have,” Finn said diplomatically. “It’s more intuition. Native Angelinos are few and far between.”
“So you were born like ... here,” the girl suddenly amended.
“Yeah, born at the Hollywood Presbyterian hospital. Went to Hollywood High. And I expressed my wild card moments after birth. Which was good, because if it had happened in the birth canal I would have killed my mother, and that would have really sucked.” He smiled at her brightly. She blanched at the image his words had elicited. Which showed she had some imagination.
“So it sounds like you really know the ropes here, and that’s good because I could sure use some advice.” It was the dogged delivery of a rehearsed line, whether it fit into the conversational flow or not. It also made it very clear relationship she envisioned—friend, mentor, confidant.
“Sure,” Finn answered. “My cards are in my briefcase on the Jason set. I just keep a wallet in my pocket.” He taped the breast pocket on his Hawaiian shirt. Julie’s eyes flicked toward his gleaming palomino haunches.
Years ago the sisters at his elementary school had forced him to wear pants. His father had declared that Finn looked like a bad clown act, and they’d found another school. Finn was careful to keep his penis sheathed, but nothing could hide his balls, and even pony sized they were still the envy of every male and a terror to most women.
“Why don’t you come back after shooting, and I’ll get you a card.” His bad angel prodded him to add. “We could have dinner.”
“Uh, I’m busy tonight. Sorry. I’ll get the card ... later.” She glanced hastily at her wristwatch. “Well, gotta go.” She gave him a perky smile, waved, and hurried off between the stages.
Finn allowed himself a laugh. It felt a little hollow.
The next day Corman was shooting coverage on Jason and his merry band of Argonauts. Finn decided to use the free time to head down to U.C.L.A, and buy his books for the fall semester. He enjoyed medical school, but it seemed like the summer had just started, and he wasn’t quite ready for the grind yet.
He stood between tall bookcases, his arms stretched around a giant stack of books, squinting at the class list perched on top, and realized he only had half the required texts. He wondered if he could make it to the front of the store for a cart, or if he should just leave the books here and come back. But there had only been one copy of the epidemiology text, and some bastard would probably swipe it if he left them.
“Man, these suckers are heavy,” a voice suddenly said. Startled, Finn let out a yell and dropped the precariously balanced stack of books.
Harry Gold was peering around a bookcase like a malevolent leprechaun. He stepped around the case, and began to gather up the strewn books. “You shouldn’t try to carry these things. You’ll herniate yourself. You should get a cart.”
“Thanks,” Finn gritted.
Gold had stopped stacking, arrested by the picture of Dr. Tachyon on the back flap of his introductory text on Joker Medicine. “I hear this guy is a real stud, but he sure looks like a poufftah,” Gold said. “I tried to make a movie about the Four Aces back in the fifties, but Universal shut me down because of their movie. Actually it worked out great because after their movie came out I could do a parody and they couldn’t touch me. The Four Deuces, Golden Hotdog, the Enema, Cock Tease and Black Stallion.” Gold smiled fondly at the memory. He picked up another book and did an elaborate double take at the price. “Seventy-five bucks? These suckers are expensive.”
“Yes, and heavy,” Finn said.
“Look, I’ve been thinking about it, and now that I see the kind of expenses you got I realize I wasn’t being fair. I’ll give you twelve thousand dollars to be in my movie.”
“Mr. Gold. I don’t want to be in your movie. I’m not an actor ....”
“I can teach you.”
“Look, Mr. Gold, I was trying to be polite. I’m not interested in being in a porno movie. I couldn’t face my family, my friends, and ....”
“You could wear a mask.” Gold was charmed with the idea. “Yeah, like Zorro ....”
It was hard to get out the words past the laughter. “Like nobody would recognize my big palomino ass bouncing up and down on the screen. How many joker centaurs do you think there are?”
“One. Which is why I need you. Look, I specialize in wild card porn. I got guys with double dicks, and gals with three boobs, but you’re unique.”
“Goodbye, Mr. Gold.”
Finn took the joker medicine text out of the producer’s hands and set it on the top of the stack. He slowly bent his forelegs until he was resting on his knees and picked up the pile of books.
“You’re being very unreasonable about this,” Gold grumbled. “I’m telling you ponies are a pain in the ass.”
I’m sure your star would think so too, Finn thought, but successfully resisted the impulse to say it. Instead he replied, “So get two guys and a horse suit.”
“That would look cheesy,” Harry complained.
Like your movie won’t? Finn thought, but he didn’t say that either.
Benton Finn was footing the bill for a bon voyage party at City, one of L.A.’s more trendy restaurants down on Melrose Boulevard. Personally Bradley hated the place. It bowed to the new trend in interior design which decreed there should be no color, no fabric, no softness and no warmth. There were concrete walls and floors, exposed pipes in the ceiling, gleaming metal track lighting, and black metal tables. The wealth of hard surfaces amplified every sound, so forks connecting with china became a hail storm, the drone of conversation a roar, and the background music an irritating beat with no discernible melody. Worse, from Finn’s point of view, was the footing. The floor offered no traction so he was forced to wear his booties, and while they were practical he thought they looked dorky, especially with a French cuffed shirt, tuxedo jacket and black bow tie.
He spotted Julie sitting with the same group of females from the set. Since two of the four had indicated they would tolerate him he decided to head over. The plump blonde spotted him first, grabbed up her plate and bolted for the buffet. Finn found himself watching her behind in the satin sheath dress and thought nastily a few more runs to the chow line and she’ll be vying for the Shelly Winters roles.
Julie gave him a too bright, too large smile, Tanya coolly surveyed him, and the brunette eyed him nervously but this time held her ground.
“EVENING LADIES,” Finn bellowed.
“HI,” Julie shouted back. The brunette’s mouth opened and closed, but he couldn’t hear what she said. Tanya just inclined her head with air of a queen. Again Finn felt respect for the girl. She knew how to avoid looking ridiculous.
Finn bent at the waist and put his lips close to Julie’s ear. “Who’s your friend?” He indicated the brunette with a jerk of his chin.
Julie turned to place her mouth near his ear. Wisps of hair tickled his nose and cheek. He could smell the hair spray. “Anne,” Julie replied.
“Hi, Anne.” Finn waved at the brunette. She gave him a tense smile.
“Nice party.”
It wasn’t that he heard her, but years at these events had taught him a form of ESP crossed with lip reading. It was the safest and most inane thing the brunette could say so Bradley suspected that was what she had said. He gave her a broad smile and nodded enthusiastically.
Tanya was watching him. The intensity of her gaze was such that he found himself looking at her rather than at Julie, who was trying to talk with him. Since he was only catching one word in four, it wasn’t working. Tanya lifted her champagne glass, quirked an eyebrow at him, and jerked her head toward the bar. Finn nodded. He make his excuses to Julie. From her expression when he walked away he gathered she hadn’t gotten the drift.
Tanya led him around the bar where it dovetailed into a corner. Amazingly it was almost quiet in the cubbyhole. Finn looked around at the rows of glittering bottles, and the racked glasses hanging like bulbous stalactites. A short hallway ran past them leading to the bathrooms. It made for an odd mixed smell of spilled beer and toilet bowl freshener.
“How did you know about this?”
“Used to tend bar here,” Tanya answered.
“A woman of many talents.” Finn cringed again.
Tanya gave him smile. Her lips quirked up higher on one side than the other which gave her a gamin look. “You really keep walking into them, don’t you?”
“Sorry, I’m not usually this gauche.”
“Should I take that as a compliment?” Tanya asked.
“Yes. You’re quite beautiful and you fluster me.”
“Good. Can you fluster your dad for me?”
Finn was disappointed. He’d thought this girl might avoid the worst of the actress clichés. He realized she was watching him very closely with a measuring expression.
“Is this a test?” Finn asked.
“Yeah. I figured I’d do it for Julie and save both of you the embarrassment.”
“I never use the relationship on anyone’s behalf.”
Tanya pulled down a bottle of scotch and poured a couple of fingers into her champagne glass. “I’ll pass the word.”
“Guess this means I won’t be hearing from her,” Finn said.
“Oh cut the crap. If you really want to connect with women that way you’d be making promises whether you could keep them or not.”
Grace Kelly came gliding down the hall from the bathrooms. Stan followed a few steps behind. He was shoving a small make-up case back into his shoulder bag. The elderly make-up artist made himself unobtrusive and slipped away along the back wall. Kelly gave Finn and Tanya a smile, then swept on and rejoined Harrison Ford at their table. She had arrived with the actor, so Finn figured the fling with Beatty was over. Finn looked back down at Tanya and found her staring across the room at Stan Whitehorn-Humphries where he sat alone at a small table.
“So, you want to dance?” Finn asked.
Tanya kept looking at Stan. “I don’t think either of us want to look that absurd.” It stung, but Finn had to admit it was an accurate assessment. “Actually I think I’m just about funned out. See you around, Bradley.”
She waved her fingertips and slipped away. Finn looked back at Stan. The Englishman was watching Kelly. His expression was both fond and regretful. Stan had never married. Finn now thought he knew why. Bradley looked from Kelly glowing and radiant as she leaned against Ford’s shoulder, to the withered old man who watched her with such longing. They were separated by a vast gulf of age and status and it wasn’t going to be bridged. Finn glanced back along the length of his horse body. He looked at all the pretty girls. Suddenly he was all funned out too.
Three days Finn had a late call, four pm. He parked his van, and backed the length of the stripped interior and out the rear doors. There was a tendril of smoke hanging over the hills of Griffith Park, and the hot Santa Ana winds carried the acrid scent of burning.
The high walls of the sound stages blocked out the wind, and Finn’s shirt was soon sticking to his back. He trotted toward stage 23, and stopped dead when he saw the knots of people hanging around in the street. The small groups would split apart and coalesce in new configurations. Cigarettes were being nervously puffed, flipped onto the pavement and crushed. New ones were lit. Finn knew what this looked like. It looked like trouble.
Edgar Burksen, Finn Senior’s favorite director of photography, was pacing in small circles outside the stage door. Finn joined him.
“Hi, what’s up?” Finn asked the Dutchman. “Warren shut down the production?” The rising star was known for his insistence on perfection.
“No, Kelly.”
Finn goggled. In all the long years of her career the actress had never shut down a production. “What happened?”
“We don’t know. She won’t come to the stage. She won’t let your father in the trailer.” The D.P. gave a very European shrug.
A big black limo came nosing down the street and stopped almost at the door of Kelly’s trailer. The driver climbed out and knocked. The door of the enormous Star Waggon abruptly swung open and with such force that it slammed against the metal side of the trailer. Everyone jumped, then stared as Grace Kelly emerged.
Her head and neck were swathed in scarves and enormous sunglasses hid her eyes. She almost jumped the two feet separating the trailer from the limo, and dove into the back seat. The back door was closed, the driver took his place and the car rolled away. Nothing could be seen through the darkly tinted windows.
Everyone released a pent up breath and began talking at once. Finn stared at Edgar. “She looks like Marilyn dodging the press,” Finn said.
“At least with Marilyn you knew why she was shutting you down—pills and booze,” Edgar said. “This is just a glamour fit.”
“About what?” Finn asked.
“Stan didn’t show up to work today, and she won’t let anyone else do her make-up,” Edgar explained.
“Did somebody check on him?”
“Your dad sent a P.A. over to his house. He wasn’t there.”
There was a tingle of concern down the length of Finn’s human back and into his horse back. It manifested in his white tail beginning to swish madly. “Or he couldn’t answer. Stan’s seventy if he’s a day.”
“We can’t exactly break in,” Edgar answered.
“Does he have family?”
Edgar gave the shrug again.
Finn felt really bad. Because Benton had directed so many Grace Kelly movies, and because Stan was her preferred make-up artist, Finn had gotten to know the English émigré pretty well. He had always treated Finn with courtesy and respect, and not just because of who his dad was or how much money they had. Finn hoped the old man hadn’t had a stroke or a heart attack. Finn glanced at his watch, and realized he was late for his call.
“Keep me posted,” he said to Edgar and kicked it into a gallop.
“Coppola has already been over to Diller’s office telling him that he knows how to handle a real star. That’s he’s an ‘actors director’.” Finn senior provided the quotes with his fingers, then twisted his lips in disgust.
“Be sure to seed the cucumbers,” Alice Finn said, as she bustled past Finn where he stood chopping salad fixings at the marble cutting board. “They give your father gas.”
“I’m discussing the eminent end of my career, and you’re discussing cucumbers?” Benton Finn demanded.
Alice paused to kiss her husband on the top of the head, “Actually your reaction to them,” she said, and headed across expanse of marble floor to the oven.
The family was gathered in the giant kitchen of the Bel Aire house. Black granite counters stretched out in all directions like an alien monolith. There were two ovens, a convection oven, a microwave oven, and an open hearth rotisserie. The refrigerator was hidden behind cherry wood panels, and glass fronted cabinets threw back the light from the track lighting. It looked like a movie set, but for the incongruity of a battered Formica breakfast table with cheap chrome chairs which sat in the bay window of the breakfast nook. Benton Finn was seated at the old table morosely drinking wine.
“So what is the deal with Stan?” Finn asked as he sprinkled on dressing. The pungent scent of vinegar and pepper made him sneeze.
“God Bless you,” said his mother placidly.
“Who knows?” Benton replied. “The cops say they can’t enter the house until he’s been missing twenty-four hours. By then my career will have ended.”
“By then Stan might be dead if he’s fallen or had a stroke,” Finn said.
Benton flushed. “Look, I’m worried about Stan too, but I’ve got two hundred people working for me ....”
“Would you get the butter, dear?” Alice sang out to her husband as she pulled the pot roast out of the oven.
Benton started for the refrigerator. The phone rang. Benton answered it. “Grace, my God, we’ve been so worried ....” His voice broke off abruptly, and he began listening intently. Finn stood holding the salad. Alice held the roast. The aroma of roasted potatoes and gravy filled the room. It was so quiet in the room that Finn could hear the tick of the grandfather clock in the hallway.
“I don’t think Dr. Tachyon is the right choice,” Benton finally said. “You’re not a wild card.” Benton listened again. “You think you caught it this morning?” His father rolled a desperate eye at Finn.
Finn shook his head. What the actress was describing was virtually impossible. If she had somehow caught a spoor she’d be dead ... or a joker. Which might explain her demand for Tachyon.
“Look, I’ll try to get him here, but it’ll take a day ....” There was obviously some kind of explosion from the other end of the line, because Benton broke off abruptly. His father was nodding, muttering uh huh, uh huh; finally Benton blurted out, “My son is in medical school. Specializing in wild card medicine. Let me have him take a look at you.”
I’m going to lose my license before I ever get it. Finn thought.
“Okay, just hang tight,” Benton was saying. “We’ll be right over.” The director hung up the phone, and headed past his wife and son. “Let’s go,” he snapped to Finn.
“Dad, I’m starting my second year of medical school. I barely know how to find the pancreas.”
“And dinner’s ready,” Alice protested.
Benton didn’t pause. He slammed out the pantry door into the garage. Finn heard the whine of the garage door going up. He looked at his mother and shrugged. The horn of the van started blaring in sharp staccato honks. Finn put the salad on the table, and headed out.
“Oh ... Holy ... Shit ... !!”
It probably wasn’t the most diplomatic thing his father could have said, and it had the effect Finn expected. Grace Kelly started to cry.
The tears went washing down her cheeks, catching in the net of wrinkles around her eyes and racing down the crevasses on either side of her mouth. It wasn’t that the wrinkles were so deep; what was shocking was that they were there at all. From her debut role in Fourteen Hours in 1951 she had never changed. At least not physically. Her acting had become more elegant and nuanced, but the perfect face had retained the smoothness of porcelain. With other actresses of her generation it was apparent the wrinkles were being tucked away beneath their hairline. Not with Grace. She was perpetually twenty-two.
Now she was fifty-one. A beautiful fifty-one, but not the stunning ingenue currently staring in The French Lieutenant’s Woman.
Benton Finn was staring blindly at the far wall of the living room of the Los Feliz mansion. He was unconsciously combing his hair with his fingers. Grace, huddled on the curved sofa, pulled out a handkerchief and blew her nose. Finn shifted his weight from foot to foot to foot to foot, his hooves sinking in the plush beige carpet. He wondered how long the silence was going to last.
“Is this the wild card?” Benton finally rasped out.
Finn and Kelly’s eyes met. Her expression was desperate pleading. She drew in a shaky breath and said, “No.”
“Then why the hell did you want Tachyon?” the director asked.
“I was hoping he might know an ace or a shot or something that could ... fix me. Give me back my youth.”
Now it was Benton’s turn to give his son the desperate look. “Do you think there is such a thing?” he asked.
“No.” Finn looked at Kelly. “I’d say Ms. Kelly had the market on the Fountain of Youth cornered.”
“So what the hell happened?” Benton demanded. He swiped his hand through his hair again. It looked like a gray/blond haystack.
Finn thought furiously. It couldn’t be a substance or others would have discovered it. Kelly’s demand for Tachyon indicated it was wild card related. Which meant it had to be ...
“Stan!” Finn blurted. “It’s Stan, isn’t it?”
Kelly stared at him with the air of deer caught in the headlights, bit her lip, and finally nodded.
His father stared at him, his brow furrowed in confusion. Benton pointed at Kelly’s face. “No make-up man is this good.” Kelly gave a gusty sob and held the sodden handkerchief to her eyes.
“He is if he’s a wild card,” Finn replied. He looked back at Kelly. “I’m right, aren’t I?”
The actress nodded. “We met on the set of High Noon. I had been out too late the night before. I asked him to cover the shadows. He gave me this smile.” The woman also smiled at the memory. “He leaned in close to me, and whispered he’d make them vanish. And he did.” She twisted the handkerchief between her fingers. “He’s been with me ever since. On every film.”
“So where is he?” Benton asked.
“I don’t know,” Kelly wailed.
“Have you checked his house?” Finn asked. Kelly’s eyes slid away.
“How could she?” Benton asked. His voice had lost the stridency of a few minutes before and he was taking on the director’s smooze tone.
“Because the effect obviously doesn’t last very long, which means he’s got to be doing her make-up before every date, every preview, every meeting. She probably has a key to his house.” Finn wasn’t a director and didn’t need to coddle stars. He simply laid it out baldly.
Kelly didn’t relish the tone. She gave him a dirty look. “He’s not there. His car’s there but he’s gone.”
“Was the door locked or unlocked?” Finn had often been an extra on Jokertown Blues. He suddenly realized he was sounding a lot like Captain Furillo.
“Locked.”
“So you have got a key.” Kelly bit her lip, then pulled the key out of a pant pocket, and held it out. Finn automatically took it.
“Any sign of a struggle?” Finn asked.
The actress looked startled as if that hadn’t occurred to her. Probably hadn’t. She was far more concerned with the ravages to her face than Stan’s fate. “No. Well ... maybe. His dinner was on the table. He’d eaten a little.”
Finn faced his father. “We need to call the police.”
“No,” wailed Kelly.
“Impossible,” snapped Benton.
“This can’t get out,” they both concluded in concert.
“The man is missing,” Finn argued.
“This is directed at me,” came the duet again. The director and the star paused and looked at each other.
“Somehow I think Stan would think it was directed at him,” Finn said with some asperity.
“Stan’s just a pawn,” said Benton. “Coppola’s been after me for a couple of years.”
True, Finn thought.
“And a lot of actresses resent me,” Kelly said.
Also true, thought Finn.
“So, what are we going to do?” Finn asked.
Neither his father nor Kelly had an answer for that. Instead there was a lot of toing and froing about how she really hadn’t changed all that much. She was still beautiful. Then they moved on to whether Benton was going to recast the movie, since it was unclear how long Kelly was going to be off the set. Finn’s stomach, which had been expecting dinner two hours ago, let out a loud rumble. Kelly gave him a startled look, and his dad frowned at him.
“I took you away from dinner, didn’t I? Let me order in a meal for you,” Kelly said. It was nice of her to offer. Most actresses were far too self-absorbed to notice the people around them. And Grace Kelly had every reason right now to be totally self-absorbed.
Benton shook his head. “We really need to get home. I need to reassure Alice that you’re all right.”
Kelly looked pleased. Proving yet again that an actor always assumed everything was about them.
They let themselves out of the large double doors, and Finn skittered down the steep flagstone path to where the van was parked in the driveway. Behind them the Griffith Park observatory loomed like a white ghost castle on the hilltop.
Finn took over driving. His dad wasn’t terribly adept with the hand controls. “So are you going to recast?” he asked his father as they turned onto Los Feliz Boulevard.
“I’ve got twenty days in the can. The studio would never agree to that much reshooting. If we don’t find Stan this movie is dead.”
Neither of them said anything else for a number of blocks. “How do you think she kept him working solely for her?” Finn asked, desperate to break the morose silence.
“Probably threatened to have him killed,” came the equally morose answer.
“Doesn’t seem like her style.”
“The guy could have made a fucking fortune,” Benton said. “Gone from studio to studio, set to set, keeping actresses young.” Benton reflected for a moment. “Probably a good thing he didn’t. It would have killed the industry. The public wants a new flavor at least every few weeks.”
Finn was pondering something else his father had said. “But does he really keep her young ... physiologically young? Her face may look twenty-three, but what kind of shape is her heart in? Her lungs?” They were rolling down Sunset Boulevard at the best speed the van could manage. Mercedes, Posches, and Rolls went flying past their tail lights like malevolent red eyes. “The break-in,” Finn suddenly blurted.
“What?”
“The break-in a few days ago. Nothing was taken, but the files had been rifled. The insurance policies are in there, and a medical exam is attached. It would prove that Kelly wasn’t a wild card.”
“So, what’s your point?”
“They’d know it was somebody near her, and Stan is the only constant.”
“Hey, I’ve directed most of her movies,” Benton argued.
“Most, not all. You heard her. Stan’s done her make-up ever since High Noon. She’s never married, and she never stays with any leading man much past a few months. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out who held the wild card.”
“So who took him?” Benton. “And did they kill him?”
Worms seemed to suddenly go crawling through the pit of Finn’s stomach at his father’s blunt statement. “I don’t know. It depends on who took him. It’s a power worth preserving. I think. I hope.”
Finn turned up the hill toward Bel Aire and they rolled past the guard gate. The guard gave them a wave. A few minutes later they were home.
His mom was full of questions, and Finn began giving her the rundown while he wolfed down a slice of pot roast. Through the kitchen door they could hear Benton making a call in the living room.
“... Grace is down with the flu. I’ll be rearranging the schedule, but it’s no problem.”
Since Finn’s last remark to his mom had been that Kelly looked like the portrait of Dorian Grey, he and his mother exchanged incredulous looks at the lie. Benton hung up the phone and reentered the kitchen. Finn waved his fork at his father. “How can you say that? You said yourself, without Stan there is no movie.”
“So we find him,” Benton said. “You find him.”
“What!?” Finn’s voice rose to a squeak. “I’m a med student.”
“You’re a joker.” Finn watched his mother flinch, and he felt the beef turn to bile in his gut. His parents had always been careful to call him a “wild card” not the pejorative “joker.” Now his father had said the word, and he felt an aching grief as if the love and acceptance which had been the foundation of his life had suddenly proved to be a fraud. “You know the world. I can’t involve studio security or the police, and you’ve already had some great ideas. I’m depending on you, Bradley.” His father’s eyes were pleading. “I’m close to retirement. I just wanted to go out on top, not fired off my last film.”
We all have our griefs, Finn thought.
After dinner Finn went to Stan’s house. He had the key that Kelly had thrust at him, and it was where all the detectives started in the TV shows. It was a tiny white bungalow on the south side of Los Feliz Boulevard. On the north side were the Hollywood Hills and the homes of the rich and very famous climbing the scrub-covered folds and canyons. On the south were modest houses and ethnic restaurants, groceries, laundromats, shoe repair shops—the kind of place where normal people lived.
The front door opened directly into a long living room with hard-wood floors underfoot and several throw rugs. Finn avoided them assiduously. He had learned the hard way that hooves and throws didn’t mix. There was a shabby green recliner in front of a television set, and a couch that hardly looked used. There were built-in book-cases on most of the walls, and they were crammed with books.
There was a double glass door that divided the living room from the dining room. It was a charming room with built-in buffets on either side of the west window, and an array of china displayed behind the glass mullions in the doors. There was a plate on the table with the remains of fried chicken and mashed potatoes. A salad on a salad plate. A glass of red wine. It was sad and very uninformative.
Feeling like a voyeur, Finn proceeded to the bedroom. There was a large four poster bed, meticulously made with a canopy and dust ruffles and throw pillows. There was a large window looking northwest toward the hills. Finn gave a glance out the window, then snapped his neck around for a longer look. From the window he could see the upper story of Kelly’s house. Finn trotted back to the main rooms of the house. All the drapes were tightly closed. He returned to the bedroom and those wide open drapes.
After another look at the lights in the movie star’s house Finn began riffling through the bookcases in the bedroom. Not surprisingly there were a lot of books about the movie business. There were also lot of books about Grace Kelly. Finn flipped through a few of them skimming a sentence here, a paragraph there.
On the dresser was a framed picture of Stan standing next to a marlin hanging by its tail from a wooden scaffold. This was a familiar picture to Finn. Every male in southern California had a picture of himself next to a big fish he’d caught in Mexico. In the photo Stan was a good deal younger, and he was smiling off to the side as if to someone out of camera range. That was odd. Most of the mighty hunters beamed directly into the camera. The frame was also anomalous. It was an elaborate silver affair.
“Must have been really proud of that fish,” Finn muttered as he turned over the photo and looked at the back. There was a hand-written notation. La Paz, June 1954.
The date hit some memory or association. Finn stood struggling with that sense of reaching for something just beyond reach. Then it hit. He lunged back across the bedroom, and pulled down one of the biographies of Kelly. He flipped quickly through the pages.
The start of principal photography was delayed on To Catch a Thief due to Kelly’s exhaustion. She recuperated for several weeks in Mexico before returning to begin work ....
There was more, but Finn had what he needed. Kelly and Stan had both been in Mexico in June of ‘54. Question was, were they together? Finn flipped forward a few more pages to the section about Prince Rainier of Monaco.
Odds makers in Vegas were offering two to one that Kelly would wed the dashing prince, but it was the cynics who didn’t believe in fairy tales who made the best choice—in 1955 Hollywood’s princess declined the offer to join European royalty.
Finn closed the book. He looked back at the framed photo. He looked out the window at the distant lights in Kelly’s home. The lights went out. Grace Kelly had gone to bed. “She didn’t marry Rainier because she couldn’t,” Finn said aloud. “She was already married to you. Wasn’t she, Stan?”
It was an idiotic thing to say, but it was the only thing that made any sense. The only explanation for why the make-up man had stayed so loyal for all those years.
“All those years while she was fucking every new leading man. You were a schmuck, Stan.” Finn shoved the book back into its place on the shelf. “And you need to go home and go to sleep. You’re talking to yourself, Bradley, my man.”
The next morning he put in a call to the Myth Patrol. He knew he needed help, and he didn’t know who else to ask. They met at Dupar’s, and Finn outlined the situation.
“So tell me again how all us wild cards are brothers under the skin, and how I ought to spend my free time rescuing an ace,” Goathead mumbled around his double bacon cheeseburger.
Finn hadn’t counted on ace envy entering into the equation. “He’s not an ace. He’s a deuce. This is not a major league power.”
“He’s a seventy year old man who can make woman look young,” Goathead argued. “If that’s not a sure means to unlimited sex I don’t know what is.”
“I wish you wouldn’t always put your head in the gutter,” Clops said. He rolled his eye at Cleo.
“She can’t understand a fucking thing I say.” Goathead leered at her. “Hey baby, want to fuck like frenzied ferrets?”
“##$%&&*****” Cleo dumped her chocolate malt in Goathead’s lap.
Clops grinned as Goathead cursed and mopped at the sticky mess. “Looks like she understands just fine.”
“Guys, could we focus here,” Finn said, waving his hands in the air. “Where do we start?”
“Hollywood and Cahuenga,” Clops said confidently.
The Myths were standing beneath an old brownstone building on the corner. The dark upper windows threw back the sunlight in sharp jagged glints. Cleo was glaring at a drunk who stood swaying and leering at her from across the street. Goathead was leering at a couple of female hookers just down the block. Finn stared at Clops.
“Okay. We’re here. Why are we here?” Finn asked.
Clops pointed to a corner window. “That was Philip Marlowe’s office.”
Finn fought down the urge to rip off the cyclops’s head. Forcing a mild tone, he said, “I hate to break this to you, but Marlowe was a character in books. Then he was a character in the movies. He’s not real.”
Okay, Finn thought, as Clops looked like a kicked puppy, it wasn’t your most diplomatic moment.
Surprisingly it was Goathead who came to the big joker’s defense. “No, he’s right. We’ve got to get in the space. Think like a detective. Find the character.”
Wonderful, beneath Goathead’s hairy chest beats the heart of a method actor, Finn thought.
“I think a tough, no nonsense Bogart approach,” Clops began, only to be interrupted by Goathead.
“Well, that leaves you right out.” replied Goatboy. “Whoever plays our detective, you’re destined to be the loyal sidekick. You’re not leading man material.”
Cleo glared at Goathead, and all the snakes hissed at him. The joker jumped back. Cleo laid a hand on Clops’s arm, and gave him a blazing smile. Finn was dazzled. She really was beautiful, if you just ignored the snakes. There was a barrage of Turkish being directed at Clops, then one halting English word.
“Gorgeous,” Cleo said, and smiled up at the Cyclops again.
A tide of red swept from the base of Clop’s throat to the top of his ears. “You really think so?” he asked the joker girl. She nodded vigorously. “Would you like to have dinner tonight?” he asked. Cleo nodded again.
“Gee, isn’t that just ... swell,” muttered Goathead. “I’m going home.”
“Wait,” Finn cried. “We haven’t ....”
But Clops and Cleo were strolling off with her arm tucked through his, while tourists on a bus gawked out the window and shot photos. Goathead went clattering off around the corner. Finn took a last look up at Marlowe’s window. Inspiration did not descend. Finn headed off down Hollywood.
In the old days the Boulevard had been a magical, glamorous place. Now it had fallen on hard times. The street was lined with cheap tourist shops selling tee shirts, tacky memorabilia and maps to stars houses. Hookers, male, female and joker, worked the corners, fading down side streets when an L.A.P.D. cruiser would roll past. Down those side streets the robbers waited. They generally left the hookers alone. Tourists were easier targets.
Finn, depressed and in a brown study, wasn’t paying much attention to where he was going or who he passed. He had to tell his father he couldn’t do this, and they had to call the police. Then a familiar voice called out to him. “Hi, Bradley.”
“Tanya.” He looked around, but he didn’t see any evidence of a boyfriend or even one or two of the Bimbo Battalion. “Are you alone?”
“Yeah.”
“This is not a good part of town for you to be in.” She laughed. “No, I’m serious.”
“So escort me,” she demanded.
Finn felt like a sun had started burning down in the pit of his belly. The warm good feeling spread upward and broke out in a broad grin. “Sure. Where do you want to go?”
“I was going to Musso and Franks. Have you eaten?”
Banishing the thought of the short stack of pancakes, egg and sausage he had consumed only two hours before, Finn shook his head no. “But Musso’s is tough for me. Pretty much nothing but booths and narrow isles. Do you like Chinese?”
Tanya nodded. “But only in Chinatown.”
“Do you know Hop Li’s?” She shook her head. “Come on, you’re in for a treat. I’m parked over by Grumann’s.” She slid her arm through Finn’s and the bright glow seemed to explode out the top of his skull. He forgot about Grace Kelly, the movie, even Stan. He was prancing down the Walk of Fame with the prettiest girl in Hollywood.
Tanya did have a pretty good location. Off Melrose on the fringes of Beverly Hills. Lunch had been terrific, and he didn’t mean the food. They had talked for two hours, and by the second hour Tanya kept laying her fingers gently on his wrist. Once she had even brushed a hand through the hair at the nape of his neck. Finn offered to drive her home. She agreed with a secretive little smile and then briefly touched the tip of her tongue to her bottom lip. Finn sensed she was going to invite him in. Then during the drive to North Hollywood Finn had started to worry. What if she lives in one of those nineteen fifties apartment buildings with the concrete and metal exterior stairs. There is no way I can negotiate those.
Tanya directed him up a quiet street off Melrose, and Finn felt his spirits soar. The street was lined with nineteen twenties duplexes. Most were not aging well. There was missing stucco, missing tiles on the Spanish roofs. Tanya’s was differentiated by the fact it had beautiful landscaping. She followed his look. “I take care of the landscaping in exchange for half the rent.”
“Wow, you’re an incredible gardener. You could do this professionally,” Finn said enthusiastically then realized from way the skin around her mouth tightened that he’d said the wrong thing. “Look, I wasn’t suggesting it as the fall back position when you don’t make it as an actress.”
She gave him a smile, and it was the first one Finn had seen that didn’t seem calculated. “You’re a nice guy, Bradley Finn.” He felt the same rictus tightening of his cheek muscles as his smile went thin. “And no, I don’t mean that as a kiss off. I mean it as a come on.” And she leaned over and kissed him on the lips. Her tongue flicked out to explore his lips. Finn suddenly couldn’t breath. “Now come on in.”
The duplex was sparsely furnished, something which he suspected had more to do with poverty then design. But it was clean and almost obsessively neat and the spicy scent of incense gave it an exotic feeling.
Tanya walked backwards down the short hallway, unbuttoning his shirt as they went. Finn was willing to follow. At that moment he would have followed her anywhere. She yanked off her tank top, took Finn’s hands, and cupped them around her breasts. The skin was warm, slightly sweaty, and very soft. He ran his thumb across her nipples, feeling the roughness as they puckered. She pushed his shirt off his shoulders. He felt it slid across his back and down his side and his horse hide quivered at the tickle.
Gasping, he pulled her close and kissed her. The flesh on their chests seemed to lock together, glued by sweat. Tanya tugged him forward. Finn opened one eye to see where they were going.
It was then that, if not sanity, practicality returned. Finn looked at the bed. “I can’t use that.”
That seemed to rattle her. “What?”
“I can’t get down like that. And even if I could I’d squash you. I weigh about four hundred pounds.” She retreated several steps. Too much information, Finn though with a cringe. Didn’t need to mention the weight thing. He could feel his erection dying.
She glanced at the walls of the room. “So what do we do?”
“Put the mattress on a table.” A new worry intruded. “Do you have a dining room table?”
She looked around the room again. “Yeah, but I don’t want to make love in there.”
“We could carry it in,” Finn suggested and cringed because he thought he was sounding desperate. Probably because he was desperate.
“There’s not enough room,” she said.
“Yes there is if we set it horizontal to the foot of the bed.”
She was looked desperately around the room again. “It won’t work. Look, what do you say we hold this thought, and you come back later. I can get some help moving the table ....”
“What, you need movers? How big is this table? I can move the table.”
She was staring past his shoulder. Nausea replaced the earlier hot tingle of arousal. For the first time Finn took a hard look at the bedroom. He noted the way the track lighting spotlighted the bed. He spotted the tiny shotgun mike nestled next to one of the light cans. Careful mincing sidesteps with his hind feet brought him around to face the side wall. It wasn’t a large hole. It didn’t to be. He wasn’t sure if he saw or only imagined the glint of light off the camera lens. It didn’t matter. He gulped down tears of rage and shame and went galloping out the door of the bedroom.
Harry Gold popped out the bathroom door, and waved his arms over his head. “Whoa, whoa!”
Finn reared, forelegs pawing the air. It was a trick that usually made people step back. Harry Gold froze and stood staring admiringly up at Finn. Suddenly Finn realized what was holding the producer’s unwavering attention. Finn felt his balls trying to retreat, and his penis pulled as far back in his sheath as was possible. He dropped back to all fours and rushed past the porn producer. He felt his horse shoulder connect with Gold. There was a loud thump and a shout of pain from the little man.
Finn didn’t look back. He sprinted for the front door. As he charged through the living room, his hind brain noticed the dents in the carpet where furniture had stood. Far from being sparsely furnished, the room had been packed with furniture. They had moved it for him so he would have a straight shot to bedroom, led by his dick. Shame and humiliation were a foul and oily taste on the back of his tongue. Bradley yanked open the front door.
He shot through the colorful flower beds. Flower petals and leaves flew up around him chopped lose by his churning hooves. He cleared the low chain link fence like the front runner in the Grand National. Reaching his van, Finn realized his keys and his wallet were in his shirt pocket back in the apartment. He grabbed the spare set of keys from the magnetized box from beneath the chassis, got the doors unlocked, and staggered the length of the van. He could feel the muscles in his left stifle and hamstring starting to tighten. The physical pain was nothing to the shame he felt.
“Hey, no harm, no foul” said Harry Gold.
Finn had tracked down the producer at his offices in a rundown strip mall in Van Nuys. The walls of his office were lined with movie posters commemorating some of Harry’s classics, and huge blow-up photos of his stars. Finn tried to keep his gaze away from the equipment being flaunted by Jetballs and Dr. Tachydong.
Harry sat behind an acre wide cherry wood desk. It was loaded down with photo stills of actresses and piles of scripts. Finn didn’t know porn movies had scripts.
“And you can’t blame me for trying,” the little man added.
Finn rested his fists on the desk and leaned in on Harry until they were almost nose to nose. “I do blame you, Harry. I liked that girl. I thought she liked me. But you spoiled it all.”
“Hey, it’s not too late. We can set up only this time do it right with a table ... a table. I didn’t even think of that ....”
Finn cut across the flow of words. “Did you roll film?”
Harry held up his hands, palms out. “No. You were only warming up. Nothing to get.”
Finn spun around and let fly with his hind legs. His hooves connected with the front of the desk and wood splintered. The desk collapsed, falling forward to shed scripts and photos like a paper avalanche. Harry gave a yell of alarm, jumped out of his oversized leather chair, and retreated against the back wall. “What? Are you nuts?”
“No. I’m pissed. And tired of being lied to. Give me the film.”
The producer’s hands were trembling as he opened a filing cabinet and pulled out a cassette of film. “You are, like, way overreacting. Sure she owed me, but she could have said no, so she had to like you a little.”
Finn clutched the film and started for the door. Then it penetrated. He looked back. “What do you mean she owned you?”
“N ... nothing. I gave her a start. That’s all. She’s one of my kids and I look after my kids even when they move on ....”
“Christ, Harry, I hope you don’t play poker because you are the worst liar I’ve ever met.” Finn leaned over and grabbed the phone off the floor.
“What are you doing?” Gold asked.
“Calling the police.”
“What! Why? Because of this?” Gold pointed at the film under Finn’s arm.
“No. For aiding and abetting in a kidnapping and possibly a murder.”
“Kidnapping? Murder?” Harry squeaked. “You are nuts. I just put her in touch with a grip I know at Warner’s. B and E guy. Nothing violent. Gentlest guy you’ll ever meet.”
Finn glared at Gold. “Is that God’s own truth, Harry?”
“Yeah, yeah, I swear it!” the producer panted. He pulled out a big blue handkerchief and mopped sweat. This time Finn believed him.
Benton was taking the opportunity during Kelly’s “indisposition” to shoot crowd scenes. Finn called over to the set and learned that Tanya was there. He thought she might have had the decency to quit. Then he realized that she knew damn good and well that Finn wasn’t going to tell his father what had occurred, and nothing was going to keep Tanya from getting in front of a camera.
A call to the first A.D. established when the extras were going to be released. There was only one parking area on the Warners lot for extras, day players, and visitors. Finn parked his van down a side street which led to the back lot and waited. Eventually Tanya came walking into the lot. She wove her way through the parked cars to a dilapidated Nova, climbed in, and headed out onto Pass Avenue. Finn was right behind her.
He figured since he knew squat about tailing a car he’d just hug her bumper. Hopefully she knew squat about being tailed and wouldn’t notice. She led them over the hill and at Sunset Boulevard she turned west. They rolled past the entrance to the Bel Aire Heights where Finn’s family lived. He was surprised. This was high dollar country. Not the usual place to hide a kidnapping victim.
Then she turned north up the road to the Beverly Hills Hotel. Finn’s brain was starting to feel like it was spinning inside his skull. She went to the hotel, and parked in the free lot. Finn swept around to the entrance and availed himself of the valet service. He knew the dining room gave a pretty good view of most of the paths so he waited there. A few minutes later Tanya arrived. She headed through the lobby and out the back doors. Finn noted the path, and rushed out to find a busboy and a room service cart.
It required some significant greenbacks, but he was soon outfitted in a white jacket, pushing a cart in front of him. If he hunkered down a bit the long tablecloth hid his centaur body. Finn was worried he would lose her in the maze of paths and bungalows, but he caught a lucky break. He heard her voice over a high wall. “Julie, what the hell are you doing out here?”
“I was bored. I wanted a swim. Like, take a pill,” he heard Julie answer. “Besides, Susan said she’d watch him.”
Susan, Susan, Finn thought trying to place the name. Then he realized that was the plump blonde.
“She’s not on shift now,” came Tanya’s voice, sharp with suspicion.
“God, you are so anal. What difference does it make who guards him?” Julia replied. “And Anne stuck me with two shifts so I was due for a break.”
Is every starlet in Hollywood in on this? Finn thought, and he bit back a chuckle. Given the surroundings he was no longer worried about Stan’s physical well being.
“You are so stupid,” said Tanya. Finn heard the click of her heels retreating across the concrete.
“Well, fuck you too,” Julie shouted.
A moment later Tanya swung around a corner. Finn quickly looked away. She went up to the door of a bungalow and let herself in. Finn rumbled closer with his cart.
As the door was closing he heard Tanya say, “Out! Get your shirt on and get out!” The door shut. Finn started to grin.
A few moments later the fat blonde came flying out the door. One cheek was bright red, and her eyes were watering. Finn waited until she was out of sight, and then rolled up to the door. He knocked.
“Who is it?”
“Room service,” Finn sung out as loudly as he could.
“We didn’t order anything,” came Tanya’s voice.
“Actually I ordered some champagne,” Finn heard Stan say.
“Great, this is already costing us a fortune.” Her voice was getting louder as she approached the door. She threw it open. “We changed our minds. We don’t want ....”
Finn knocked her down with the room service cart.
Stan was seated in an armchair with a large basket of fruit close at hand. “Hi, Stan,” Finn said. “I’m here to rescue you.”
“Why thank you, Bradley, but you might want to look out for Miss Tanya,” the elderly make-up artist said mildly.
Finn turned and found himself looking down the barrel of a small pistol. Tanya held it in a very confident and very business-like manner.
“I see you’ve noticed Miss Tanya’s assets,” Stan said. Finn’s errant brain suddenly flashed the memory of the warmth and weight of a pair of breasts cupped in his hands. He shook it off. “I found it a very compelling argument for accompanying her,” Stan continued. “Now that I’ve gotten to know her I realize that she wouldn’t shoot me.” The rigidity in Finn’s back started to slump toward his withers. “But she might shoot you.” The steel rod shot back up the centaur’s back. “I don’t think there’s anything that Miss Tanya won’t do in pursuit of a goal.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” Finn said dryly. Tanya glared at him. Finn then did an elaborate scan of the opulent bungalow. “Hell of a hide-out.”
Tanya’s lips compressed. “Oh, don’t blame Miss Tanya,” Stan said. “She very sensibly had me stashed in a dingy little apartment over in Irvine. But I convinced Anne that I might be more willing to become her personal make-up artist if I were more comfortably situated. Since then Susan keeps taking her clothes off for me ....”
“Stan, you’re a dirty old man,” Finn said.
“No, I simply saw no reason to argue. Susan is an unaffected child of nature.”
It sounded like a quote, but Finn couldn’t place it.
“Susan is a moron,” Tanya said. “What did Julie offer you?”
“Just money. Very unimaginative.”
Finn jerked a thumb at Tanya. “And Annie Oakley here just offers to shoot you?”
“No, she’s offered me nothing which inclines me to help her over all the others,” Stan said.
“I don’t want your help. I just want a chance,” Tanya spat out the words.
“And taking out Grace Kelly is going to help you how?” Finn asked.
“When the sun’s up you can’t see the stars. Why look for anything new when she’s there?”
“Tanya, it’s over. You’ve got to let him go,” Finn said.
“No, sooner or later the press will get a look at her, and then it’ll be over.”
“What are you going to do with me?” Finn asked.
“Keep you too. And I think when I tell your dad what went on between us he’ll want to keep me happy and quiet.”
There was a massive throbbing behind Finn’s eyes. A headache made up of equal parts rage and hurt. He fists clenched, but before he could react Stan tsked. “No, no, my dear. Crude threats are not the way to go. Now it’s time for you to ask for something. Let Bradley call his father, and negotiate a speaking role for you.”
Finn watched the calculation in her pale eyes. She then tucked the pistol back into her purse and gave a nod. Finn released the pent-up breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.
There was a reason Stan had survived in Hollywood for fifty years, Finn thought.
Finn didn’t bother to take Stan home. He just drove the make-up man straight to Kelley’s house.
“Is there a reason you’ve brought me here?”
“It’s your home, isn’t it?” Finn countered.
“Home is where the heart is,” Stan said lightly, but there was a shadow in the back of his eyes.
“Then that would be here. I figured out about Mexico. You married her, didn’t you?”
The net of wrinkles around Stan’s blue eyes deepened as he smiled. “You’re a danger, young Bradley. Well, let’s go in to her.” Stan climbed out of the van.
They went around to the back where Stan unlocked the kitchen door. “Grace, my dear,” he called.
They heard her steps overhead. Stan led them into the foyer. Kelly came running down the grand curved staircase and into Stan’s arms. Finn sidestepped his way through an archway and into the living room. A few minutes passed and then they joined him. They were holding hands. It was really sweet.
“Would you like something to drink, Bradley?” Stan asked. “Would you get him something, dear, while I get my kit?”
Stan took a step only to be caught by Kelly. “Stan, wait. I’ve been thinking a lot during the past two days.”
Stan started shaking his head. “No, Grace. This is a beautiful movie, don’t ....”
She put a hand over his mouth. “I’m tired, Stan. My back hurts. I’m hungry all the time, and I have to exercise twice as long now to stay the same size. I’m not twenty-three. You just let the mirror give me back that picture.” Stan stood silent, just staring at his wife. A wave of insecurity passed across her face. “You can’t love me like this?” She touched a wrinkled cheek.
Stan grabbed her into a tight embrace. His voice was thick as he murmured against her hair. “No, my love. I just want you to be sure before you give it all up.”
Kelly wasn’t trying to hide her tears. She kissed him hard. “But I’ll finally have you. For whatever time remains to us.”
The emotions—love, regret, joy—were like electric currents in the room. It was overwhelming, and Finn had to get out of that room. He placed each hoof with elaborate care. They still rang hollowly on the wood floor of the foyer, but neither Stan nor Grace noticed.
Amazingly, the movie continued. Kelly offered to split the cost of the reshoot with the studio. Benton recast, and the production moved to England. The tabloids made much of Kelly and Stan’s love story. SHE GAVE UP BEAUTY FOR TRUE LOVE! Stan hired bodyguards. And Finn started back to school.
One evening the phone rang.
“Hello,” Finn said around a mouthful of Chef Boyardi ravioli.
“Hi, Bradley.” It was Tanya.
Finn swallowed, and felt the inadequately chewed food hit his stomach like a lead ball. “Hi.”
“I was wondering if I could take up the offer of a native guide to Santa Monica?”
“Last time we met you aimed a gun at me, and the time before that you tried to trick me into a porno movie.”
“So? It’s not like it was personal.”
“And that’s why I think Santa Monica is a bad idea.”
“Coward.” He could hear the laughter in her voice.
“Tanya, would you fuck a pony?”
“No. But a centaur might tempt me.”
“I QUIT! I QUIT! HE DOESN’T NEED A TUTOR, HE NEEDS A WARDEN! A GODDAMN ANIMAL TRAINER! A STINT IN THE PEN!”
The slam of the door shook papers from the stacks that stood on his desk like the bastions of a white cellulose fortress. Tachyon, a rental contract hanging limply from long fingers, stared bemusedly at the door. It cracked open.
A pair of eyes, swimming like blue moons behind thick lenses, peered cautiously around the door.
“Sorry,” whispered Dita. “Quite all right.”
“How many does that make?” She eased one shapely buttock onto the corner of his desk. Tachyon’s eyes slid to the expanse of white thigh revealed by the hitch of her miniskirt. “Three.”
“Maybe school?”
“Maybe not.” Tach repressed a shudder as he contemplated the havoc his grandchild would wreak in the dog-eat-dog world of public school. With a sigh he folded the apartment lease and slipped it into a pocket. “I’ll have to go home and check on him. Try to make some other arrangement.”
“These letters?”
“Will have to wait.”
“But—”
“Some have waited six months. What’s another few days?”
“Rounds ...?”
“I’ll be back in time.”
“Doctor Queen—”
“Is not going to be happy with me. A common enough event.”
“You look tired.”
“I am,”
And so he was, he thought as he walked down the steps of the Blythe van Renssaeler Memorial Clinic without bestowing his usual pats on the heads of the stone lions that flanked the stairs. In the week since his return from the World Health Organization tour, there had been little time for rest. Worries snapped at him from all sides: his impotence, which left him (one should forgive the pun) with a growing sense of pressure and frustration; the candidacy of Leo Barnett; the crime wars that were threatening the peaceful (peaceful, ha!) life of Jokertown; James Spector wandering loose, and continuing to—
But all of this seemed oddly distant, so unimportant, mere bagatelles when compared with the arrival of a new presence in his life. An active eleven-year-old boy playing havoc with his routines. Making him realize just how very small a one-bedroom apartment could be. Making him realize how long it took to find something larger, and how much more it would cost.
And then there was the problem of Blaise’s power. During his childhood Tachyon had frequently railed against the strictness of his Takisian psi lord upbringing. Now he wished he could apply some of that same severe punishment to his wayward heir, who could not be brought to realize the enormity of his sin when he casually exercised his psi powers on the mindblind humans that surrounded him.
But to be honest, it was not simply a matter of sparing the rod. On Takis a child learned to survive in the plot-ridden atmosphere of the women’s quarters. Surrounded as they were by other mentats, children quickly became cautious about the unrestrained exercise of their power. No matter how powerful an individual might be, there was always an older cousin, uncle, or parent more experienced and more powerful.
Upon their emergence from the harem a child was assigned a companion/servant from the lower orders. The intent was to instill in the young psi lord or lady a sense of duty toward the simple folk they ruled. That was the theory-in actual fact it generally created a sort of indulgent contempt for the vast bulk of the Takisian population, and a rather offhanded attitude that it really wasn’t very interesting or sporting to compel servants. But there were tragedies-servants forced to destroy themselves upon a whim or a fit of fury on the part of their masters and mistresses.
Tachyon rubbed a hand across his forehead and considered his options. To blather on about kindness and responsibility and duty. Or to become the most dangerous thing in Blaise’s life.
But I wanted his love, not his fear.
The boy reminded him of some feral woodland creature. Coiled in the big armchair, Blaise warily eyed his grandsire and tugged fretfully at the long points of the lacy Vandyke collar that spilled over the shoulders of his white twill coat. Red stockings and a red sash at the waist echoed the blood red of his hair. Tach tossed his keys onto the coffee table and sat on the arm of the sofa, keeping a careful distance from the hostile child.
“Whatever he said, I didn’t do it.”
“You must have done something.” They spoke in French.
“No.”
“Blaise, don’t lie.”
“I didn’t like him.”
Tach drifted to the piano and played a few bars of a Scarlatti sonatina. “Teachers aren’t required to be your friends. They’re meant to ... teach.”
“I know everything I need to know.”
“Oh?” Tachyon drew out the word in one long, freezing accent.
The childish chin stiffened, and Tach’s shields repelled a powerful mind assault. “That’s all I need to know. At least for ordinary people.” He blushed under his grandfather’s level gaze. “I’m special!”
“Being an ignorant boor is unfortunately not terribly unique on this world. You should find yourself with plenty of company.”
“I hate you! I want to go home.” The final word ended on a sob, and Blaise buried his face in the chair.
Tach crossed to him and gathered the sobbing boy into his arms. “Oh, my darling, don’t cry. You’re homesick, that is natural. But there is no one for you in France, and I want you so very much.”
“There’s no place for me here. You’re just fitting me in. The way you make room for a new book on the shelves.”
“Not true. You have given my life meaning.” The remark was too obscurely adult to reach the child, and Tachyon tried again. “I think I’ve found a new apartment. We’ll go there this very afternoon, and you can tell me just how you want your room.”
“Really?”
“Truly.” He scrubbed the child’s face with his handkerchief. “But now, I must return to work so I will take you to Baby, and she will tell you tales of your blood.”
“Tres bien.”
Tach felt a momentary flare of guilt, for this plan was designed less for Blaise s pleasure than to assure his good behavior. Locked within the walls of the sentient and intelligent Takisian ship, Blaise would be safe, and the world at large would be safe from him.
“But only in English,” Tachyon added sternly. Blaise’s face fell. “Tant pis.”
Back to the clinic for five hours of frenzied work. Most of it unfortunately of the paper variety. With a start he remembered Blaise and hoped that Baby had been very entertaining. Collecting the child, Tachyon hurried him to his karate lesson. He then sat in the outer office reading the Times, a wary ear cocked toward the dojo. But Blaise was behaving.
Wild Card/AIDS Benefit Concert to be Held at Funhouse. How like Des, Tachyon reflected. Interesting that this event was to take place in Jokertown. Probably no other forum in New York would host it. They would want to place plastic liners on the seats.
There were a number of emotional similarities between the two scourges. As a biochemist, he saw a different correlation, herpes to wild card. But a herpes/wild card/AIDS benefit would offer far too many unfortunate opportunities for sexual innuendo.
Warning: The Surgeon General has determined that fucking may be hazardous to your health.
“Well, I ought to live to be two thousand,” muttered Tach, crossing his legs.
Blaise bounced out looking adorable in his little white gee. There had been an initial tussle with the manager of the karate school over that gee. The standard color was black, but despite forty years on Earth, Tach still held a stubborn bias against the color. Laborers wore black. Not aristocrats.
The boy thrust his clothes into Tach’s’ arms. “Aren’t you going to change?”
“No.” He climbed onto a chair to investigate a display of shurikiens, kusawagamas, and naginatas.
“Is the language barrier a problem?” he asked Tupuola as he wrote out a check.
“No. Even in just the past few days his English has improved remarkably.”
“He’s very bright.”
“Yes, I am,” said Blaise walking across the chairs to hug Tachyon around the neck. Tupuola frowned, twiddled a pen. “I wish you would show me some of this English improvement.”
“It’s easier to speak French with you,” Blaise said, lapsing into that tongue.
Tach ran a hand through his grandchild’s straight red hair. “I think I shall have to develop selective deafness.” He suddenly chuckled.
“What?” Blaise tugged at his shoulder.
“I was remembering an incident from my childhood. I wasn’t much older than you. Fifteen or so. I had decided that physical workout was dull. Only the sparring really seemed to matter. So I had taken to ordering my bodyguards to do the workouts for me.” Tupuola laughed, and Tach shook his head sadly. “I was an unbearable little prince.”
“So what happened?”
“My father caught me.”
“And?” asked Blaise eagerly. “And he beat the crap out of me.”
“I’ll bet your bodyguards enjoyed it,” chuckled Tupuola. “Oh, they were far too well trained to ever show emotion, but I do seem to recall a few telltale lip twitches. It was very humiliating.” He sighed.
“I would have stopped him,” said Blaise, his eyes kindling. “Ah, but I respected my father and knew he was right to chastise me. And it would have violated the tenets of psi to engage in a long, drawn out mind battle with my sire in front of servants. Also, I might have lost.” He flicked a forefinger across the tip of the boy’s nose. “Always a consideration when you’re a Takisian.”
“The tenets of psi. Sounds like a mystic book out of the sixties,” mused Tupuola.
Tach rose. “Perhaps I’ll write it.” He turned to his grandchild. “And speaking of the sixties, there is someone I want you to meet.”
“Someone fun?”
“Yes, and kind, and a good friend.”
The corners of Blaise’s mouth drooped. “Not someone I can play with.”
“No, but he does have a daughter.”
“Behold me! Mark, I am home!” Tach announced with a swirl of his plumed hat from the front door of the Cosmic Pumpkin (‘Food for Body, Mind, & Spirit’) Head Shop and Delicatessen.
Dr. Mark Meadows, aka Captain Trips, hung storklike over the counter, a freshly opened package of tofu balanced delicately on his fingertips.
“Oh, wow, Doc. Good to see ya.”
“Mark, my grandson, Blaise.” He pulled him from where the child had been hiding behind him and pushed him gently forward. “Blaise, je vous presente, Monsieur Mark Meadows.”
“Enchante, monsieur.”
Mark flashed Blaise a peace sign, and Tach a sharp glance. “I can see you’ve got a lot to tell.”
“Indeed, yes, and a favor to ask.”
“Anything, man, name it.”
Tachyon glanced significantly down at Blaise. “In a moment. First I want Blaise to makes Sprout’s acquaintance.”
“Uh ... sure.”
They climbed the steep stairs to Mark’s apartment, left Blaise playing with Mark’s lovely, but sadly retarded, tenyear-old daughter, and settled in the hippie’s tiny, cluttered lab.
“So, like, tell all.”
“Overall it was a nightmare. Death, starvation, disease but at the end ... Blaise, and suddenly it all becomes worthwhile.” Tachyon halted his nervous pacings. “He’s the focus of my life, and I want him to have everything, Mark.”
“Kids don’t need everything, man. They just need love.” Tach laid a hand fondly on the human’s skinny shoulder. “How good you are, my dear, dear friend.”
“But you haven’t told me anything. How you found him, and what’s the real poop on that shit that came down in Syria?”
“That’s why I say it was a nightmare.”
They talked, Tachyon touching on his fears for Peregrine, all of the events leading up to his discovery of Blaise. He omitted his final confrontation with Le Miroir, the French’ terrorist who had been controlling the quarter-Takisian child. He sensed that gentle, sensitive Mark might be shocked at Tachyon’s cold-blooded execution of the man. It was something that, in retrospect, Tachyon wasn’t very comfortable with himself. He reflected, a little sadly, that after an almost equal number of years on Takis and on Earth he was still more of Takis than of Earth.
He checked the watch set in his bootheel and exclaimed, “Burning Sky, look at the time.”
“Hey, great boots.”
“Yes, I found them in Germany.”
“Hey, about Germany—”
“Another time, Mark, I must be going. Oh, what a fool I am! I came not only for the pleasure of seeing you, but to ask if I might occasionally borrow Durg? He’s virtually immune to the effects of mind control, and I can’t keep Blaise with me constantly, nor can I continue to lock him away in Baby everytime I have other responsibilities.”
“burg as a babysitter. It sorta boggles the mind.”
“Yes, I know, and believe me it goes very much against the grain to have Zabb’s monster guarding my heir, but Blaise is like a Swarm mother among planets if I leave him unattended with normal humans. You see, he has no self-discipline, and I’m damned if I can see how to instill it in him.”
Trips dropped an arm over Tachyon’s shoulders, and they walked to the door of the lab. “rime, give it time. And relax with it, man. Nobody’s born a father.”
“Or even a grandfather.”
Mark looked down into the delicate, youthful face and chuckled. “I think he’s going to have a hard time relating to you as Gramps. You’re going to have to settle for—”
The sight in the living room knocked wind and words from Mark’s throat. Sprout was down to her teddy bear panties, daintily dancing while she sang a little song. Giggling, Blaise bounced on the sofa and manipulated her like a puppet.
“K’ijdad, isn’t she funny? Her mind is so simple—” Tachyon’s power lashed out, and Sprout-suddenly freed from this terrifying outside control-burst into frightened and disoriented tears. Mark gathered her in a tight embrace. “SIMPLE! I WILL SHOW YOU A SIMPLE MIND!” The boy jerked about the room like rusty automaton under the brutal imperative of his grandfather’s mind. “IS THIS PLEASANT! DO YOU ENJOY—”
“NO, MAN, NO! STOP IT!” Tachyon rocked under the hard shaking. “It’s okay,” Trips added in a more moderate tone as the devil’s mask that had slipped over Tachyon’s normally pleasant features faded.
“I’m sorry, Mark,” Tach whispered. “So very sorry.”
“It’s okay, man. Let’s ... let’s just all calm down.” Tachyon dropped into telepathy. Can you ever forgive me?
Nothing to forgive, man.
Meadows dropped to one knee before the sobbing boy, took him gently by the shoulders. “You see, you’re as scared as Sprout was. It’s no fun to be in somebody else’s power.”
“And yeah, Sprout’s mind is weak, but that’s all the more reason for someone strong like you to be kind, and to look out for people like her. You understand?”
Blaise slowly nodded, but Tachyon didn’t trust the shuttered expression in those purple/black eyes. And sure enough, as soon as they were out on the street in front of the Cosmic Pumpkin, the boy said, “What a wimp!”
“GET IN THAT TAXI.”
“Ancestors!” Glass crunched under bootheels, and for a brief, breath-catching moment time rolled back, and the past clung like a gnawing animal at his throat.
Glass shattering and falling, mirrors breaking on all sides, silvered knives flying through the air ... blood spattering against the cracked mirrors.
Tachyon shook himself free of the waking nightmare and stared at the carnage that filled the Funhouse. A janitor with enough arms to handle three brooms was busily sweeping up the broken glass that littered the floor. Des, grey-faced and frowning, was talking with a man in a business suit. Tachyon joined them.,
“I’m not entirely certain your policy—”
“Of course not! Why should I think that twenty-four years of premiums paid on time, and no claims made, should entitle me to any coverage now,” spat Des.
“I’ll check, Mr. Desmond, and get back to you.”
“What by the purity of the Ideal is going on here?”
“Do you want a drink?”
“Please.” Tachyon pulled out his wallet, and Des stared down at the bills, a funny little smile twisting his lips, the fingers at the end of his incongruous trunk twitching slightly. The alien flushed and said defensively. “I pay for my drinks.”
“Now.”
“That was a long time ago, Des.”
“True.”
Tachyon kicked at a sliver of mirror. “Though God knows this brings it all back.”, “Christmas Eve, 1963. Mal’s been dead a long time.” And soon you will be too.
No, impossible to speak such words. But would Des ever speak? While Tachyon, of course, respected the old joker’s desire for privacy as he prepared to die, it nonetheless hurt that he maintained his silence.
How am I to say farewell to you, old friend? And soon it will be too late.
The cognac exploded like a white-hot cloud on the back of his throat, banishing the lump that had settled there. Tachyon set aside the glass and said, “You never answered my question.”
“What’s to answer?”
“Des, I’m your friend. I’ve drunk in this bar for over twenty years. When I enter and find it busted all to hell, I want to know why.”
“Why?”
“Maybe I can do something!” Tachyon tossed down the rest of his drink and frowned up into Des’s faded eyes.
Des swept away the glass and refilled it. “For twenty years I’ve been paying protection to the Gambiones. Now this new gang is muscling in, and I’m having to pay off two of them. It’s making it a little tough to meet overhead.”
“New gang? What new gang?”
“They call themselves the Shadow Fists. Toughs out of Chinatown.”
“When did this start?”
“Last week. I guess they waited until they knew I was back in town.”
“Which means they made quite a study of Jokertown.” A shrug. “Why not? They’re businessmen.”
“They’re hoodlums.” Another shrug. “That too.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Keep paying both sides and hope they let me live in peace.”
“However long that’s going to be,” Tachyon muttered, and drained the fresh cognac.
“What?”
“Oh, hell, Des, I’m not a blind man. I’m also a doctor. What is it? Cancer?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
The old man sighed. “For a lot of complicated reasons. None of which I want to go into right now.”
“Or ever?”
“That too is possible.”
“I count you a friend.”
“Do you, Tachy? Do you?”
“Yes. Can you doubt it? No! Don’t answer that. I’ve already seen it; in your eyes and your heart.”
“Why not my mind, Tachyon? Why not read it there?”
“Because I honor your privacy, and—” His face crumpled, and he sucked in a sharp breath. “Because I can’t bear to face what I might read there,” he concluded quietly. He tossed more bills on the bar and started for the door. “I’ll see what I can do to make your hope a reality.”
“What?”
“That you end your days in peace.”
It had been the same story at Ernie’s and Gobbler’s Delicatessen and Spot’s Laundry and so many others that he dreaded to even recall them all. Frowning, Tachyon tore the skin from an orange, the juice stinging briefly as it hit a hitherto unnoticed paper cut. Goons out of Chinatown. Goons from the mob, and him with his big mouth promising to do something about it. Like what?
He finished peeling the orange and popped a segment into his mouth. A light breeze ruled his curls and brought the sound of Blaise’s delighted laughter. A rumbling call from Jack Braun sent the little boy scampering across the park, his red-stockinged legs a blur of motion. Braun leaned back the football cradled in his big hand and threw. He looked like a movie star; sun-bleached blond hair falling across his forehead, tan sinewy legs thrusting out from a pair of safari shorts, a very attractive, brilliantly colored Hawaiian shirt.
Tach threw crusts of bread to some interested pigeons. How ironic, Sunday in the park with Jack. Hated enemy transformed into ... well, perhaps not friend, but at least a tolerated presence. It didn’t hurt that Jack’s visit had been prompted by a desire to see Blaise, which raised him in Tach’s estimation. To love Blaise was to find favor. And this outing had at least pulled Tachyon out of the brown study that had held him for days since his visit to the Funhouse.
The orange segment finally slipped down, and Tach’s stomach rebelled. With a moan he rolled onto his back on the blanket and fought down nausea. The wages of worry. Over the past few days his stomach had closed down into a tight and painful ball. He began a litany of problems.
The fear that lay like a palpable shadow over Jokertown. Leo Barnett offering to heal jokers with the power of his god, and if they failed to respond, then clearly it was an indication of the depth of their sin. What if he became president?
Peregrine. In a month her child was due. The ultrasound he’d run two days ago still indicated a normal, viable fetus, but Tach knew with soul-deep horror what the stress of the birth experience could do to a wild card babe. Blood and Line, let this little one be normal. If it wasn’t, it would destroy her.
And he still hadn’t been by the Jokertown precinct to work with a police artist on the preparation of a drawing of ames Spector ...
A girl went jogging by, an Afghan hound loping at her heels. A sheen of sweat brought a golden glow to her skin, and several strands of long black hair lay plastered on her bare back. Tach watched the play of muscles in her legs and back, studied the ripe breasts bouncing beneath the halter top, and felt his mouth go dry and the urgent thrust of his penis against his zipper. It was a bitter and tantalizing glimpse of wholeness, for he knew after countless hopeless encounters that the power would fade when the moment came upon him.
Furious, he rolled onto his stomach and beat his fists on the ground-furious at his impotence, and at his flighty, undisciplined mind that could be distracted from concern over an ace killer by the sight of female flesh.
A toe nudged him in the ribs, and he shot to his feet. “Hey, hey.” Braun held up his hands placatingly. “Take it easy.”
“Where’s Blaise?” Tach stared anxiously about. “ I gave him some money for ice cream.”
“You shouldn’t have let him go alone. Something might happen ....”
“That kid can look out for himself.” Braun dropped crosslegged onto the blanket, lit a cigarette. “Mind if I give you some advice.”
“Yes.”
“You’re not on Takis now. He’s not a prince of the blood royal.”
Tachyon gave a bitter little laugh. “No, far from it. He’s an abomination. On Takis he would be destroyed.”
“Huh?”
The alien swept up the scattered orange peels and carried them to a garbage can. “The greatest penalties are reserved for those who mingle their seed outside their class. How could we rule if everyone possessed our powers?” he tossed back over his shoulder.
“Charming culture you come from. But it supports my point.”
“Being what?”
“Stop driving him crazy. You’re laying way too much pressure on him. You expect him to abide by rules of behavior that have no correlation on Earth, and you’re also spoiling him rotten. Music lessons, karate lessons, dance lessons, tutoring in algebra and biology and chemistry—”
“Well, you’re wrong there. His third tutor quit days ago, and I haven’t been able to find a replacement. And that is why I have to expect so much of him. His power and his breeding make him special. At least to me.”
“Tachyon, listen to me. You can’t give a kid every toy and every gimcrack he desires, tell him he’s special, special, special, and then expect him not to be an arrogant little bastard. Let him be a kid. Take his clothes.”
“What’s wrong with his clothes?” There was a threat in the husky voice.
“Get him out of the knee britches, and the lace, and the hats. Buy him some blue jeans, and a Dodgers cap. He’s got to live in this world.”
“I have not chosen to conform.”
“Yeah, but you’re a crank. It’s a big flamboyant act with you. You’re also an adult, and one incredibly arrogant son-ofa-bitch, and you could care less what people say about you. You don’t want Blaise to abuse his power, but you’ve almost guaranteed that he’ll have to. There’s nothing crueler than kids, and he’s going to be tormented until he lashes out. Then you’ll be disappointed and disapproving, and he’ll be resentful, and what a perfect vicious circle you’ve created.”
“You should write a book. Clearly your vast experience has made you an authority on child rearing.”
“Ah, hell, Tachyon. I like the kid. I even occasionally like you. Love him, Tachyon, and relax.”
“I do love him.”
“No, you love what he represents. You’re obsessive about him because your im—” He bit off the words and flushed a deep red. “Ah, hell, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bring that up.”
“How do you even know?”
“Fantasy told me.”
“Bitch.”
“Hey, relax there too, and everything will probably work out. It’s no big deal.”
“Braun, you cannot conceive of what a big deal it is. Progeny, continuance-Oh, fuck! Are you also planning to offer psychiatric counseling at your new casino? Do what you do best, Jack—drift and make money. But leave me alone!”
“With pleasure!”
Seizing the picnic hamper and the blanket, Tachyon stormed away in search of Blaise.
“Where’s Uncle Jack?”
“Uncle Jack had an appointment in Atlantic City.”
“You two had a fight again. Why do you two fight so much?”
Ancient history,
“Then you should forget it.”
“Don’t you start too.” Tach waved down a cab. “Where are we going?”
“To Mark’s.”
“Oh.”
“J.J., Please wait for me,” Tachyon instructed when they pulled up in front of the Cosmic Pumpkin.
“Hokay, but the meters she keeps running,” the man replied in a thick and unplaceable accent.
“That’s fine.”
“I’ll wait too,” said Blaise in a small voice. And Tachyon felt a moment’s shame, remembering his lack of control the last time they had visited the Pumpkin.
He stuck his head in the door. “Mark.”
“Yo.”
“Quick question. Have you been bothered with emissaries from various criminal organizations?” The handful of diners from CUNY stared at the Takisian wide-eyed. “Huh?”
Tach expelled air in a sharp puff of irritation. “Have you been asked to pay protection?”
“Oh, is that what you meant. Oh, yeah, man, months ago, but I like ... had one of my ... friends show up, and they haven’t been back.”
“Would that everyone had friends like yours, Mark.”
“Is that it?”
“That’s it.”_ “Anything I can do to help?”
“I don’t think so.”
Tachyon slid into the cab and gave the hack the clinic’s address.
“Ohhhh, Jokertowns. Yous that doctors?”
“Yes.”
“I sees you on the televisions. Peri Green’s Perches.”
“That’s Peregrine, and yes, that was me.”
“Holy Jesus!”
The driver’s exclamation jerked Tach’s attention to the road ahead. A jumble of police cars, their lights flashing, blocked Hester Street. With a wail an ambulance shot past. “Shit, must be anothers, how you says, hits.”
“Stop, stop at once.”
Leaping from the cab, Tach darted under the police tape. A woman’s keening filled the air, and a basso voice amplified by a bullhorn ordered knots of muttering people to move along. Tachyon spotted Detective Maseryk and pushed up to him.
“What?”,
“How the hell ... oh, hi,Doc.” The detective stared curiously at the small boy who gazed with interest at the sprawled bodies in the shattered restaurant.
Tachyon rounded on Blaise. “Get back to the cab and wait there.”
“Ahhh—”
“Now!”
“Looks like another little party,” said Maseryk when Blaise had reluctantly drooped away. “But this time an uninvited guest got mixed up in it too.” He jerked his head toward the sobbing woman, who was clutching at a small form in a bodybag being lifted into the ambulance.
Tachyon ran to the stretcher, unzipped the bag, and stared down at the child. He hadn’t been very attractive to start with, a squat-bottomed heavy body sat upon broad flippers, and he looked a lot worse with half his head shot away. Spinning, the Takisian caught the woman in a tight embrace.
“MY BABY! MY BABY! DON’T LET THEM TAKE MY BABY!”
A rescue worker approached, hypodermic at the ready. Tachyon stilled the sobbing mother with a brief touch of his power and handed her to the man.
“Treat her kindly.”
“Looks like Gambione boys,” Maseryk called as he stared thoughtfully down at one sprawled body. Several strings of spaghetti hung from the corpse’s mouth, leaving wet, red trails on his chin. “The Fists came cruising by and opened up. Car will be found, and be stolen, so that’ll be another dead end. Too bad about the kid though. Talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The detective noticed Tachyon’s continued silence and glanced down.
“I don’t want dead ends, Maseryk, I want these men.”
“We’re working on it.”
“Perhaps it is time I took a hand.”
“No, for Christ’s sake, the last thing we need are civilians getting in the way. Just stay out of this.”
“Nobody kills my people in my town!”
“Huh? The mayors going to be mighty surprised to hear he lost and you won the last election,” he yelled after Tachyon’s retreating back.
“Cognac,” spat Tachyon to Sascha, the Crystal Palace’s blind bartender. He threw his blue velvet hat, sewn with pearls and sequins, onto the bar and tossed back the drink. He extended the snifter. “Another.”
A whiff of exotic frangipani perfume, and Chrysalis slid onto the stool next to him. The blue eyes floating within their hollows of bone stared impassively down at him.
“You’re supposed to savor good brandy, not throw it down like a wino after a cheap drunk. Unless that’s what you’re after.”
“You sound like a recruiter for AA.”
Reaching out, Chrysalis wrapped one short red curl around her forefinger. “So what’s the matter, Tachy?”
“This senseless gang war. Today an innocent caught in the crossfire. A joker child. I think he lives on this block. I remember seeing him on Wild Card Day last September.”
“Oh.” She continued playing with his short-cropped hair. “Stop that! And is that all you have to say?”
“What should I say?”
“How about a little outrage?”
“I deal in information, not outrage.”
“God, you can be a cold bitch.”
“Circumstances have rather guaranteed that, Tachyon. I don’t ask for pity, and I don’t give any. I do what I have to do to survive with what I am. What I’ve become.”
He reared back at the bitterness in her voice. For she was one of his bastard children-born of his failure and his pain.
“Chrysalis, we have to do something.”
“Like what?”
“Prevent Jokertown from becoming a battlefield.”
“It is already.”
“Then make it too dangerous for them to fight here. Will you help me?”
“No. I take sides, and I’ve lost my neutrality.”
“Willing to sell weapons to all sides, eh?”
“If that’s what it takes.”
“What is it you’re after, Chrysalis?”
“Safety.”
He slid off the stool. “There is none this side of the grave.”
“Go be a fire-breather, Tachyon. And when you come up with something a little more concrete than an amorphous desire to protect Jokertown, let me know.”
“Why? So you can sell me out to the highest bidder?” And now it was her turn to rear back, the blood washing like a dark tide through the shadowy muscles of her face.
“Okay, let’s come to order now,” called Des, delicately tapping a spoon against the side of a brandy snifter.
The shifting throng gave a final shudder, like a beast falling into sleep, and silence filled the Funhouse. Mark Meadows, looking even more vacuous and absurd in the image-distorting mirrors of the Funhouse, was conspicuous for his very normalcy. The rest of the room looked like a gathering of carnival freaks. Ernie the Lizard had his rill raised, and it was flushed a deep scarlet under the emotion of the moment. Arachne, her eight legs catching at the thread of silk being extruded by her bulbous body, placidly wove a shawl. Shiner, with Doughboy huge and lumpish seated beside him, jiggled nervously in his chair. Walrus, in one of his loud Hawaiian shirts, fished a paper from his shoping cart and handed it back to Gobbler. Troll leaned his nine-foot length against the door as if ready to repel any outsiders. “Doctor.”
Des dropped into a chair like a discarded suit. As Tachyon stepped forward to face the crowd, he wondered how much longer until the old man was forced to enter the hospital for that final stay.
“Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve all heard about Alex Reichmann?” There were murmurers of assent, sympathy, and outrage. “I had the misfortune to stumble across that scene only moments after the Shadow Fists had made their hit and succeeded in killing not only their intended targets but one of our own. I’ve only been back a few weeks. I’ve heard the stories of intimidation and vandalism, but I thought I could stay neutral. In the words of another, and perhaps more famous, physician: ‘I’m a doctor, not a policeman.’” That drew a couple of laughs.
“But the police are failing in their duty to us,” Tachyon continued. “Not perhaps out of deliberate neglect, but because this war far exceeds their capacity to keep the peace. So I’d like to propose today that we form our own peacekeepers. A neighborhood watch on a grand scale, but with a twist. Many of you fall into that uncomfortable category of joker/ aces.” The alien nodded to Ernie and Troll, whose metahuman strength was well-known. “I propose that we also form response teams. Pairs of jokers and aces ready to respond to a call from any concerned citizen of Jokertown. Des has already offered the Funhouse as the central axis, the switchboard, if you will, for incoming calls. People who agree to be part of this effort will turn in times they would be available, and their work and home addresses. Whoever’s on duty here will match a team to the problem spot and send them out.”
“Just a point, Tachy,” called jube. “Those guys have guns.”
“True, but they’re also just nats.”
“And some of my ... er, the Captain’s ‘friends’ are impervious to bullets,” piped up Mark Meadows.
“As is Turtle and Jack and Hammer—”
“So you propose using aces as well?” asked Des, a slight frown between his eyes.
Tach looked at him in surprise. “Yes.”
“May I point out that Rosemary Muldoon tried that back in March, and then it was revealed that she was a member of the Mafia herself. It’s left rather a bad taste in people’s mouths where aces are concerned.”
Tachyon waved aside the objection. “Well, none of us are likely to be revealed as secret members of the Mafia. So what do you think? Are you willing to work with me on this?”
“Where does Chrysalis stand on this?” asked Gobbler. “And is it a comment that she’s not here?”
“Well,” began Tach, shifting uncomfortably.
“Yeah,” called out Gills. “If Chrysalis isn’t here, it’s got to mean something. She may know something.”
Tachyon stared in dismay at the sea of faces before him. They were closing down like night-blooming flowers retreating from the touch of the sun.
“Chrysalis and Des have always been two of the top figures in Jokertown. If she’s not in on this, I don’t trust it,” cried Gobbler, his red wattle bouncing on his beak.
“What about me?” cried Tachyon.
“You’re not one of us. Never can be,” a voice called from the back of the room, and Tachyon couldn’t pick out the speaker. A grinding weight seemed to have settled into the center of his chest at the woman’s words.
“Look, we’re not saying it’s a bad idea,” said the Oddity. “We’re just saying that without Chrysalis it seems like were missing a major part.”
“If I get Chrysalis?” asked the Takisian a little desperately. “Then we are with you.”
Digger Downs was trotting down the stairs from Chrysalis’s private third-floor apartments. Tachyon glared at him and nodded shortly. He noted that the journalist was carrying the current issue of Time with Gregg Hartmann’s picture on the cover and the caption “Will He Run?” and a copy of Who’s Who in America.
“Hey, Tachy. Des. What’s the good word?”
“Beat it, Digger.”
“Hey, you’re not still sore—”
“Beat it.”
“The public’s got a right to know. My article on Peregrine’s pregnancy did a valuable service. It pointed out the dangers of a wild card child.”
“Your article was a sensational bit of garbage.”
“You’re just pissed because Peri got mad at you. You never are going to get a crack at her, Doc. I hear she and that boyfriend are thinking about getting—”
Tachyon mind-controlled him and marched him down the stairs and out the front door of the Crystal Palace.
“I’d consider that an assault,” said Des.
“Let him prove it.”
“You don’t have a lot of sensitivity sometimes, Tachyon.” The alien turned, leaned against the banister, and frowned down at the joker. “Meaning what, Des?”
“You shouldn’t involve aces in what should be a joker project. Or don’t you think we’re capable of handling it ourselves?”
“Oh, burning sky! Why are you so touchy? There was no implicit slur in my inviting in aces. I would say the more firepower we have the better.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because they’re hurting my people, and no one hurts my people.”
“And?”
“And Jokertown is my home.”
“And?”
“And what!”
“You come from an aristocratic culture, Tachyon. Do you by chance view us as your own private fiefdom?”
“That’s not fair, Des,” he cried, but he knew that his hurt was tempered with a sudden flare of guilt. He climbed a few more stairs then paused and said, “All right, no aces.”
Chrysalis was waiting for them, seated in a high-backed red velvet chair. Victorian antiques littered the room, and the walls were filled with mirrors. Tach suppressed a shudder and wondered how she could stand it. And again felt a stab of guilt. If Chrysalis wanted to look at herself, who was he to judge her? He who in many senses was her creator. He frowned at Des, wishing the old joker had not raised so many uncomfortable emotions.
“So without me you’ve got no goon squad,” she drawled in her affected British accent.
“I should have known that you would have heard by now.”
“That’s my business, Tachy.”
“Chrysalis, please, we need you.”
“What are you going to give me for it?”
Des seated himself opposite her, hands clasped between his knees, leaned in intently. “Make a gift to yourself, Chrysalis.”
“What?”
“For once in your life put aside profit and margin. You’re a joker, Chrysalis, help your fellows. I’ve spent twenty-three years fighting for jokers, for this little piece of turf. Twentythree years with JADL measuring my life by a few successes. Now I’m dying, and I’m watching it all erode away. Leo Barnett says we’re sinners, and our deformities are God’s judgment upon us. To the Fists and the Mafia we’re just so many consumers. The ugliest, most hateful consumers they’ve got, but consumers nonetheless, and our town is their central marketplace. We’re just things to them, Chrysalis. Things who stick their dope in our arms, and our cocks in their women. Things they can terrorize and things they can kill. Help us stop them. Help us force them to see us as men.”
Chrysalis stared at him out of that impassive, transparent face. The skull without emotion.
“Chrysalis, you admire all things British. Then honor an old British custom of granting a dying man his last request. Help Tachyon. Help our people.”
The Takisian held out his hand and twined his fingers through the fingers at the end of Des’s trunk. Drew him close and embraced him. Said farewell.
Blood Ties
The seven-to-midnight shift was just coming off. The midnightto-five-A.M. shift was preparing to sally forth from the Crystal Palace onto the streets of Jokertown. Coughs, hacks, a few subdued laughs as they lined up at the long trestle tables to be served. Hiram Worchester, the immensely large and immensely elegant owner of Aces High, oversaw the feeding effort. It was his way of showing support, and a very welcome one to the always-tired Jokertown patrols.
Tachyon, seated on a table, with a booted foot propped on the chair, sniffed appreciatively. Coq au vin. He noticed Sascha pausing to speak with Hiram. The big ace jerked his head toward one of the secluded alcoves, and they moved away. Business of some sort, mused Tachyon. Everyone did business at the Crystal Palace.
The door to the Palace was flung open, and Mr. Gravemold surveyed the room. He brought with him an indescribable smell, and the chill of the grave seemed to wash from his tall, wiry person. Beneath his absurd porkpie hat a skull mask decorated with black and white feathers leered about the room. There were some muttered curses from the assembled jokers. It was going to be tough to choke down even Hiram’s delicious food with Mr. Gravemold stinking up the place.
Tachyon, a scented handkerchief held to his nose, was about to slide to the floor and join the line when the brash voice of Digger Downs riveted him in place.
“Oh, no, you don’t, Doc, interview time.”
“Why me, Digger?”
“Because you owe me for that mind control last week. Not nice, Tachy, not nice.”
“Digger, if you weren’t so goddam irritating and unscrupulous—”
“Captain Ellis doesn’t approve of this protection racket,” the reporter bulled ahead. “She says somebody’s going to get hurt, and it ain’t gonna be the bad guys.”
“I would submit to the good captain that the protection rackets have all been coming from one direction. And she’s being unduly pessimistic. I think we can look out for ourselves. Ideal knows we’ve had enough practice,” he added dryly, recalling all the years when the police were curiously uninterested whenever a joker was beaten or killed, but Johnny-on-the-spot whenever a tourist howled. Things were better now, but it was still an uneasy relationship between New York’s jokers and New York’s finest.
Digger licked the tip of his ballpoint pen, a silly, affected gesture. “ I know my readers will want to know why these patrols consist only of jokers. With you heading up this effort why not pull in some of the big guns? The Hammer for example, or Mistral or J.J. Flash or Starshine.”
“This is a joker neighborhood. We can take care of ourselves.”
“Meaning there’s hostility between jokers and aces?”
“Digger, don’t be an ass. Is it so surprising that these people choose to handle this themselves? They are viewed as freaks, treated like retarded children, and ignored in favor of their more fortunate and flamboyant brethren. May I point out that your magazine is titled Aces, and no one is panting to found a concomitant magazine entitled jokers? Look around you. This is an activity born out of love and pride. How could I say to these people you’re not tough enough or smart enough or strong enough to defend yourselves? Let me call in the aces.”
Which was of course precisely what he had been going to do until Des had opened his eyes. But Digger didn’t need to know that. Still, Tach had the grace to blush as he shamelessly appropriated Des’s lecture and passed it on to the journalist. “Comment on Leo Barnett?”
“He is a hate-mongering lunatic.”
“Can I quote you on that?”
“Go ahead.”
“So who’s going to be the white knight? Hartmann?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“I thought you two were real tight.”
“We’re friends, but hardly intimates.”
“Why do you think Hartmann’s been such a friend to the jokers? Personal interest? His wife a carrier, or maybe an illegitimate joker baby hidden away somewhere?”
“I think he is a friend to the wild cards because he is a good man,” replied Tachyon a little frigidly.
“Hey, speaking of monstrous joker babies, what’s the latest poop on Peregrine’s pregnancy?”
Tachyon went rigid with fury, then carefully uncoiled his fists, and relaxed. “No, Digger, you’re not going to get me again. I will never stop regretting that I let slip that the father of Peregrine’s child was an ace.”
“Have a drink on me, Tachy?” asked the journalist hopefully, eying the almost empty snifter.
“NO!”
“Just a little hint to reassure all those breathless fans who are worried about Peri?”
“Oh, go away, Digger, do. You plague me worse than horse flies.” He waved a hand toward the jokers. “Interview them, and leave me in peace. I’m far less important in all of this than they are.”
“Jesus, Tachy! Modesty, from you?”
The Takisian stared hard, and Digger lifted the glass from the table and dribbled the remaining brandy over his head. “I’m not ... in a very good mood ... right now.”
The journalist mopped at his wet neck. “No fuck! And that makes two, Tach. I’ll be collecting on that next interview soon.”
“I’ll count the moments.”
“Asshole.”
Tachyon stared morosely at his empty glass, then scanned the room for a waiter. Durg at’Morakh bo-Isis Vayawand-sa had been stolidly eating his way through an enormous plate of food, but Tachyon noticed that his pale eyes kept drifting toward the staircase. Chrysalis appeared and, the Morakh killer, light-footed despite his incredible bulk, moved swiftly to her side. He lifted her hand with courtly grace and bestowed a fervent kiss upon it. Chrysalis snatched it back and stared coldly down at hire. Drawn despite himself, Tach drifted toward them, trying to overhear. Suddenly Chrysalis’s hand shot out, and the sharp slap echoed about the crowded bar.
“Tachyon!” she gritted. He obediently followed her to her private table. Lifting her deck of antique cards, she shuffled quickly several times and laid out a solitaire hand. “Will you keep your pet freak away from me!”
“He’s not mine, he’s Mark’s, and what’s the problem?”
“He wants me.”
“Good god!”
A tangle of conflicting emotions washed through him.
Disgust and amazement that Durg could be attracted to the joker. Monster he might be, but he was still a Takisian.
Shame for his reaction, and pity for Chrysalis beset by such a monstrous lover.
“Will you get him off my back?”
“I’ll do what I can, but remember he was raised from childhood to hate and despise me; first by the Vayawand and then by my cousin Zabb. He tolerates me now solely for Mark’s sake.”
“Please.”
“All right, but be a bit more forbearing, I beg you. The Morakh may be a perversion, but they are Takisians, and as such used to getting what they want from groundlings. Never forget he’s a killing machine.”
“Thanks so much, Tachy, I feel so much better now.”
“Sorry.”
“Well, maybe the Mafia or the Fists will beat my head in before he does. And to think I let you talk me into this. You know this really is all your fault. Oh, stop looking so stricken. It was a joke.”
“Not to me.”
Dita came toddling down the hall, the heels of her improbably high heels clicking on the faded tile floor.
“Doctor, Mr. Marion quit!”
Tachyon looked up from the chart he was studying. “Who?”
“Mr. Marion, the tutor.”
“Oh, shit.” It was not a common expletive from him and Dita stared. “Dita, I’m far to busy to deal with this right now, and since it’s a losing proposition anyway, would you please hire a new tutor for me.”
“But I wouldn’t know what to look for.”
“A thorough grounding in mathematics, and the sciences.”
Some history and literature, and a knowledge or at least an appreciation for music would be nice.’
The click and hiss of the pager, and the smooth voice of the switchboard interrupted. “Dr. Tachyon to emergency. Dr. Tachyon to emergency.”
“But ...”
“Just use your judgment.” Looping his stethoscope around his neck, Tach lifted the phone from the third-floor nurses’ station. “What is it?”
“Wild card,” came the terse response from Dr. Finn. He wasted no more time but headed for the elevator.
The child was writhing on the examnation table. Finn’s hooves were clattering nervously on the tile as he sought to restrain her. He was the first joker physician at the Blythe van Renssaeler Memorial Clinic, and there had been some initial resistance from the joker community fearful that he had gotten through medical school because of affirmative action and not through merit. After two weeks of working with the young man, Tach could assure them that their fears were unfounded.
The child’s mother stared with panicked eyes at Tachyon.
Superficially she was a nat; what her genetic code held was of course another matter. Manifestation, or new infection? Only testing would show.
“Initial exam indicates no transformation. We’ve managed to stabilize pressure and heart rate, and I’ve ordered up a trump’ but ...”
“Thank you, Doctor. Mrs .... ?”
“Wilson,” supplied a nurse.
“Wilson.” Tachyon took her arm, urged her away frm the convulsing child. “Your daughter has contracted the wild card, and its fairly evident that she’s drawn a Black Queen.”
The woman gasped, whimpered, clapped a hand over her mouth. “We must very quickly make a decision. We can give her a dose of a countervirus which I have developed—”
“Give it to her!”
“But I must warn you that this treatment is successful only twenty percent of the time. The usual result is that there is no improvement. The virus runs its course. There is also a very slight chance of death in reaction to the trump.”
“She’s dyin’ anyway. It don’t matter if she does it faster.” A nurse appeared at her elbow with the release.
Tachyon was already preparing the syringe. It took Finn and three nurses to hold the girl quiet. The plunger was depressed. Tach held her wrist, the flutter of pulse beneath his fingers. Fainter, fainter. The monitor went flat. The deadly keen was echoed in the mother’s cry.
The aftermath was always so hateful. The inadequate words of comfort, obtaining consent for an autopsy, blood tests on both parents-in this case unfortunately incomplete for Beth Wilson was a welfare mother, and the man who’d sired little Sara had long since vanished from her life. She had spent the last thirty dollars of her welfare check on taxis shuttling from hospital to hospital, being turned away when the virus was discovered, until at last she reached the Jokertown clinic. Tach gave her money and sent her home with Riggs in the limousine.
Sprawled back in his chair, Tach pulled a flask from the desk drawer and slugged back a large swallow.
“Mind if I have one?” asked Finn.
He was on the floor with all four legs curled neatly beneath him. His golden hide twitched slightly over one haunch, and he cranked around to scratch the itch. Tach, canted back in his chair, studied the young man and decided that Finn looked like a Disney character. Small pointed face, tipped-up blue eyes, a riot of white curls that tumbled over his forehead and ran down his spine to form a mane. His tail spread behind him like a white cloak. When he was in surgery they braided it up and wrapped surgical tape around it. Tach had suggested that he bob it and gotten a horrified look in response. He then realized that that floor-length fall of hair was Finn’s pride and joy.
Staring at those four teacup-size hooves, Tach wanted to ask if Finn had been born this way or metamorphosed after birth. If his had been an in utero transformation, Tachyon sure as hell bet he had been delivered by cesarean section. But it would be gauche to ask. Although Finn seemed incredibly well adjusted Tachyon would be the first to admit that he didn’t know the man at all well.
The doctor turned the flask slowly between his fingers and frowned off into space.
“What’s the matter?” asked Tach.
“I’ve never worked among jokers until now.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, my old man had enough clout and money to send me to the finest medical schools and get me into a residency program at Cedars in L.A.”
“So why are you here?”
“I thought it was about time I got to know some jokers. To take a look at the joker experience.”
“That’s quite noble.”
“No, it’s guilt. I grew up in a Spanish colonial palace in Bel Air. If dad couldn’t buy people to accept me, he’d intimidate them until they did.”
“What did your father do?”
“‘Does.’ He’s a movie producer. A very successful one.”
“And you became a doctor.”
“Well, I could hardly become an actor.”
“True.” Tachyon rose. “If you’d like a bit more joker experience, I’m on my way over to the Crystal Palace for the daily report. If you would care to accompany me?”
“Sure. Beats staying here waiting for another Black Queen to be rolled in. Wish you guys had done a little more lab work before field-testing xenovirus Takis-A.”
“But Finn, by anyone’s standards it was an astounding success.”
“Yeah, tell that to Mrs. Wilson.”
Even the lights had been turned off in an effort to make the skinny teenager who huddled in a chair next to Chrysalis comfortable. Video was an undersize sixteen-year-old who would never dance at her senior prom or go to the movies or, in short, live with any of the modern conveniences that make life comfortable. For the presence of any electrical equipment in her vicinity sent her into ventricular fibrillation, and without immediate aid she would die.
Until one noticed her eyes, Video seemed normal. Long brown hair, parted in the middle, fell straight to her shoulders. A narrow, worried face peered out from behind this curtain of hair. And the eyes. White and perfectly round, they seemed to billow and change like whitetops on waves, or clouds torn by a passing wind.
“Hi, Dr. Tachyon,” she muttered around a mouthful of gum.
“Hi, Video, how are you today?”
“Pretty good.”
“This is Dr. Finn.”
“Hi.”
“So what have you got for us today?”
“I got around pretty good so I got quite a bit.”
“Excellent.”
“Uh ... Doctor?”
“Yes?”
“Ummm ... you’re a friend of Senator Hartmann’s, right?”
“Yes.”
“Is he gonna run?”
“For president, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know, Video.”
“Well, I wish he would. One of my friends got beat up near that Barnett mission.”
“Were Barnett’s people behind it?”
“I don’t know. He thinks so. The cops thought it was probably the Werewolves.”
“In other words, no proof.”
“Paul was sure,” she said with a mulish expression. “But that’s not proof.”
“Well, I don’t think this guy ought to become president.”
“I doubt he will, Video,” said Tachyon, and wished he was as certain as he sounded.
“Senator Hartmann oughta run.”
“I’ll ask him next time I talk to him.”
“I’d vote for him. If I were eighteen.”
“I’ll tell him. Now, the replay.”
“Oh, okay.”
The girl stared hard at the clear space before Chrysalis’s table. Figures sprang to life.
... An Oriental man in gang colors stuck the tip of a switchblade up Gobbler’s nose slit. A flick, and blood poured over the old man’s beak. With a screech he collapsed onto the floor. A lean, ganglingly tall street punk dressed in stained leather pants and chains grinned, pulling the crawling scarlet and black scars on his face into hideous relief. Spiked hair made him seem seven feet tall as he gripped the joker by the tuft of feathers sprouting from his bald skull and pulled him up. The feathers came loose in his fist.
“Put ’em on a hat,” yelled the Oriental gleefully. Suddenly Elmo boiled in the door of the deli. Launched himself at the tall, scarred Occidental. They wrestled. The dwarf leaned forward, his powerful jaws closing on his opponent’s bandaged nose. Elmo reared back, and the man screamed and clapped a hand over the raw, bleeding wound where his nose had been. Elmo spat the nose into his palm ... “Gross,” said Finn.
... The Twisted Sisters shuddered and clung more tightly to one another’s waist. Gray hair twisted like smoke about their gaunt bodies. It snaked out as soft and insubstantial as cobwebs, as insinuating as a sigh. It crept up nostrils and past lips. Thickened until it lay like cotton wadding in windpipes and lungs. The bully boys collapsed onto the floor of the deli like deflated balloons.
... A pair of men in polyester sports jackets and a wealth of gold chains thrust Spots’s head into one of her own washing machines at the Spots Out Laundromat. They dragged her out gasping and dripping, soap clinging to her piebald hair and skin. Mister Gravemold slipped through the door, flexed his fingers, and laid a hand on one goon’s shoulder. The man reared back, cried out, and collapsed. The other soon joined him ....
“What’s he using?” asked Tachyon with a glance to Chrysalis. “Hypothermia.”
“Oh.” He waved to Video to proceed.
... The back door of the bakery spilling light into the alley. Screams from the kitchen. Shadow Fists pausing like alert hounds in the cluttered alley. Rushing in to join in a fight with their Mafia competitors. Terrified jokers backed against the walls, smoke rising from doughnuts boiling to ash in the hot oil.
In the distance a clear whistle floating over the bleat of horns, and the rumble of subways. The theme to High Noon ...
Tachyon dropped his face into his hands. “I didn’t know you were there.”
“I can be pretty sneaky,” said Video with pride. Chrysalis shot the Takisian an ironic glance. “Very interesting. So our little doctor is riding with the posse. Go ahead, Video, I want to see this.”
“Doug’s bakery is a block from the clinic. I buy doughnuts there in the morning. When the call came, Troll and I were convenient.”
“Right,” she drawled.
... Tachyon, the .357 Magnum like a cannon in his small hand, entering from the alley. Troll roaring in from the front of the bakery. Troll doubled up a ham-size fist and beat heads like a man playing bongos. One of the Mafia thugs drew a .22 pistol. Fired point-blank into Troll’s massive chest. The bullet ricocheted off the joker’s thick greenish skin with a whine. The man went white. Troll lifted him by his shirt front.
“You shouldn’t have done that, mister, because now I’m really mad.”
Troll coolly broke both the man’s arms, then his legs, and then propped him in a corner like a discarded sack. A sack that screamed.
Tachyon switching his gaze from man to man. Each one dropping in a snoring heap as soon as those strange lilac eyes were leveled upon him. One of the Fists succeeded in unlimbering a .45 automatic. Tachyon shot the gun from his hand. Raised the gun to his lips, and blew lightly across the barrel ...
“Show off,” said Chrysalis.
The alien shrugged. “I’m a good shot.”
“I don’t believe for a moment that you didn’t know Video was there. That has got to have been a performance for the benefit of the applauding masses.”
“Chrysalis, you wound me.”
“Tachyon, you’re an arrogant son-of-a-bitch, and don’t try to tell me otherwise.”
“I didn’t know you were taking part in all this,” said Finn. “ I organized it ... helped organize it. I should share in the risks.” The alien drained his drink and bowed to Video and Chrysalis. “Ladies, I thank you.” He paused at the door. “By the way, Chrysalis. How do you think we’re doing?”
“I think we’ve got them on the run. I just hope they don’t decide to take a crack at us.”
“Scared?”
“You bet your sweet little alien ass I am. I know more about this situation-who’s behind it-than you do.”
“And you’re not going to tell me.”
“You’ve got that right.”
June 1987
Blood Ties
A grid map of Manhattan from Eighty-seventh down to Fifty-seventh Street glowed on the computer. Tachyon punched in a marker. Brought up another thirty-block section. Studied the two red dots. Wished he had a really big screen that could give him a full view of all of Manhattan. Decided that despite the growing crises at the clinic he would have to spend several hours aboard Baby. Her wetware and hardware were far superior to anything on Earth, and she could give him a full-screen view of this mysterious and elusive wild card source.
Victoria Queen, the clinic’s chief of surgery, entered without knocking.
“Tachyon, you can’t go on like this. Spending time with the joker patrols, working with patients, doing research, and racing around with your grandson trying to be superdad.”
He dug his thumbs into his gritty eyes, then rapped his knuckles against the CRT screen. “The answer is here somewhere. I just have to find it. Eighteen new cases of wild card in a four-day period. It’s not rational, it shouldn’t be happening. I had hoped it was something simple. A hitherto undisturbed cache of spores. But the dispersal of the cases makes that impossible. I put in a call to the National Weather Service, and they’re up sending weather tapes covering the past two weeks. Perhaps that will be the key. Some climactic and seismic anomoly that has caused this outbreak.”
“Pointless and hopeless, and a waste of your already limited time.”
“GODDAMN IT!” He used the desk to lever himself out of his chair. “I’ve got the goddamn press breathing down my neck, demanding answers, demanding some reassurance for their readers. How long can I continue to make reassuring noises before this becomes a full-scale panic? And just think what Barnett will do with thatl.”
She gripped his wrists, pinning his hands to the desk. Leaned in until their noses were almost touching. “You can’t be responsible for every damn thing that happens in the world! For gang wars in Jokertown, and right-wing cranks running for President! Or for wild card either.”
“I am bred to be responsible. By blood and bone. By a thousand generations. This is my town, my people, MY GRANDSON, AND MY CLINIC, AND YES, MY VIRUS!”
“DON’T BE SO FUCKING PROUD OF IT!”
“I’M NOT!” Snatching his hands away, he stormed across the room.
“YOU’RE ARROGANT AND IRRATIONAL!”
“SO WHAT DO YOU SUGGEST? TO WHOM DO I ABDICATE THIS RESPONSIBILITY? WHOM DO I CONDEMN TO BEAR THE GUILT AND THE HATE! MY PEOPLE, YES, AND AT BASE EVERYONE OF THEM HATES MY GUTS!” Laying his head against the wall, he burst into wild sobs.
The woman’s face hardened. Filling a glass with water from the bathroom tap, she yanked him around by a shoulder and flung it full in his face.
“That’s enough! Get hold of yourself!” She punctuated each word with a hard shake.
Coughing, he mopped his face, drew a shaky breath. “Thank you, I’m all right now.”
“Go home, get some sleep, accept some goddamn help. Get Meadows in here to help with the research, and let Chrysalis run the goddamn patrols.”
“And Blaise? What do I do with Blaise?” He scrubbed at his face. “He’s the most important thing in my life, and I’m neglecting him.”
“The problem with you, Tachyon,” she said as she walked out of the office, “is that everything is the most important thing in your life.”
A routine appendectomy. He shouldn’t have taken the time, but Tommy was Old Mr. Cricket’s nephew, and you don’t ignore old friends. Tach stripped out of the bilious green scrubs, brushed out his cropped hair, and made a face. He then took a turn through each of the clinic’s four floors.
The hospital had been dimmed for the evening. From various rooms he heard muted televisions, the low hum of conversation, and from one a sad, hopeless sobbing. For a moment he hesitated, then entered. Powerful mandibles and opaque oval eyes stared out framed by stringy gray hair. The emaciated body beneath the hospital gown revealed it to be a woman.
“Madam?” He lifted the chart. Mrs. Willma Banks. Age seventy-one. Cancer of the pancreas.
“Oh, Doctor, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean ... I’m fine really. I don’t mean to be a bother ... that nurse was so sharp—”
“You’re not a bother. And what nurse?”
“I don’t mean to be a talebearer or unduly troublesome.” It was obvious that she was, but Tachyon listened politely. No matter how tiresome a patient might be, he insisted upon courtesy and service from his staff. If someone had violated this most basic rule, he wanted to know.
“And my children never come to see me. I ask you, what’s the good of children if they abandon you when you most need them? I worked every day for thirty years so they could have the advantages. Now my son, Reggie-he’s a stockbroker with a big Wall Street firm-he has a house in Connecticut, and a wife who can’t stand to look at me. I’ve only been to their house once when she was away with my grandchildren.”
There was nothing to say. He sat, her hand resting lightly in his, listening. Brought her a glass of cranberry juice from the nurses’ station, and had a few rather sharp words with the floor staff. Moved on.
The coffee he’d been drinking all day was jumping in the back of his throat, sour with stomach acid. Well, if he was going to feel bilious he might as well get it over all at once. He pushed open the door to a private room and entered. He could ill afford the space, but no patient deserved to be placed with the horror that lay comatose behind his door. After forty years of viewing wild card victims he had thought he was inured to anything, but the man who lay twisted on the bed made a mockery of that assumption.
Caught partway between human and alligator, Jack’s body was warped by the unnatural pressures of the wild interacting with the AIDS virus. The bones of the skull had elongated, producing the snout of an alligator. Unfortunately the lower jaw had not transformed. Small and vulnerable, it hung below the razor-sharp teeth of the upper jaw. Stubble darkened the chin. In the torso area, skin melded to scales. The line between the intersecting areas had split into angry red lines, and serum oozed from the cracks.
Tachyon shuddered and hoped that deep within his coma Jack was beyond pain. For this had to be agony. For years Jack had faithfully, patiently visited C.C. Ryder. Now, ironically, she had been cured and released into a new life while the faithful, patient Jack had taken her place.
“Oh, Jack, what lover grieves for you, or did he die before you entered this living death?” he whispered.
Lifting the chart, Tachyon read again his notes, which indicated that the AIDS virus did not advance when Jack was in his alligator form.
Memories lay like scattered leaves, black and sear. Tachyon walked among them, flushing with guilt for this was an intrusion. Deep within Jack’s dying mind lay a spark of light, a fitful glitter. The human soul. Deeper yet the trigger that would throw Robicheaux completely into his alligator form. A touch from Tachyon, and the transformation would be permanent.
He was a physician. Sworn to the task of saving lives. Jack Robicheaux lay under sentence of death. The presence of the wild card twined into the code of his cells currently held the AIDS virus at bay. But it merely delayed the inevitable. Eventually Jack would die.
Unless.
Unless Tachyon changed him forever. What was not human could not die from a human disease.
But was life worth any price? And did he have the right?
What should I do, Jack? Do I make this choice for you since you can’t make it yourself,,
Was it any different than unplugging a respirator? Oh, yes.
Later, as he leaned back against the elevator wall as it whined slowly to the ground floor, he considered again Queen’s advice that he bring in help. But so much of this only I can do. And there’s only one of me. And everyone wants a piece. Shaking his head like a tired pony, he stepped out into the emergency room.
And was nearly run down by a nurse hurrying past with a vial of the trump. Thirty-two, he thought, upping the count, and followed her through the screen. Finn was preparing the injection. Stepping to the gurney, Tachyon began a fast exam. The woman’s blouse was open, revealing the rich cafe au lait of her skin. Monitors were taped to her chest; a nurse held a mask over mouth and nose. A noxious slime covered the patient’s body, wetting her clothing, pouring from every pore. It was a measure of his physician’s detachment that he didn’t recognize her until he peeled back an eyelid. The nurse removed the mask to give him room to work, and ...
Gagging, he pushed aside the smelling salts. Fought free of the restraining hands.
“Are you all right?”
“Doctor?”
“Drink this.”
“Forget me!” Clinging like a drunk to a nurse’s arm, he struggled to his feet. Catching Finn’s wrist, he forced away the syringe. “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?”
“It’s ... it’s our only shot ... it’s wild card.”
“IT CAN’T BE! I KNOW THIS WOMAN! SHE’S AN ACE!” The joker recoiled from the madness in Tachyon’s face. The Takisian resumed his examination. Finn pranced forward and gripped him hard. “You’re wasting time! You’re costing her the one chance she’s got! It’s wild card!”
“Impossible! The virus was designed to resist mutation. She’s a stable ace. She’s can’t be reinfected.”
“Look at her!”
Panting, Tach stared from the syringe to Roulette’s oozing body and back again. “Give it to me!”
His fingers slipped on the foul-smelling mucous film, and the needle scraped across the vein. Roulette cried out. “Wipe this away.”
But as fast as they wiped, it bled still faster from her pores. Finally Tachyon jammed home the needle. Ancestors. Let it work. Let this be one time when it works!
But recently it seemed his prayers had only been met with silence.
Roulette was beginning to resemble a thousand-year-old mummy as the moisture leached from her body. Suddenly her lids fluttered open; she stared blankly up into his face.
“Tachyon.” A croaking whisper. “ I was coming back. To you.” She sucked in air-a sound like a dying accordian. “Are you still waiting?”
“Yes.”
“Liar. I’m dying. You’re off the hook.”
“Roulette.” His skin crawled to touch her, but he forced himself to lay his cheek against hers. His tears mingled with mucus.
“You destroyed my life. You and your disease. Finally it’s finishing the job. I’m ... so ... glad.”
Long minutes later Finn tugged Tach away and drew up the sheet. Pain shot through the alien as his knees cracked onto the cold tile floor. Hands balled against his mouth, he fought back sobs. Partly from grief Partly from guilt, for he hadn’t been waiting.
Mostly from terror.
“I got really mad today, but I thought about it like you said, and I didn’t control them.”
“Good.” Tachyon stared into the refrigerator as if seeking enlightenment from a carton of sour milk and a bowl full of moldy peaches. “What was that?” The boy stiffened. “Oh, Blaise, I’m so proud of you.” The rigidity went out of the small body under Tachyon’s tight embrace. “And you’re speaking English. I noticed that, too. I’m just so tired it takes me a few beats to catch up.”
Blaise reached up and laid his fist against Tachyon’s mouth. Tach kissed it. In a sudden, abrupt topic change the boy asked. “Uncle Claude wasn’t a very good person, was he?”
“No, but one can partially understand his reasons. It’s never easy to be a joker.”
“What would you do if you were a joker?”
“Kill myself.” Blaise gaped up at the indescribable expression on his k’ijdad’s narrow face.
“That’s silly. Anything is better than dead.”
“I can’t agree. You’ll understand when you’re older.”
“Everybody tells me that.” Pouting, Blaise left the kitchen and flung himself on the sofa. “Jack, Durg, Mark, Baby. I suppose it must be true if ships and humans and Takisians all agree. But I didn’t mean being a yucky joker like Snotman. What if you were like Jube, or Chrysalis or Ernie?”
“I still couldn’t live with it.” Tach joined him on the sofa. “My culture idealizes the perfect. Defective children are destroyed at birth, and otherwise normal individuals are sterilized if it’s determined that they lack sufficient genetic worth.”
“So to be ordinary is as bad as being de ... defective,” he asked, stumbling over the unfamiliar word.
“Well, not quite, and too random a gene pattern can also endanger a person. I was almost sterilized because of my Sennari blood, but my outstanding mental abilities were deemed to outweigh the unpredictable Sennari, and my other ... failings.”
“Do you have a little boy on Takis?”
“No.”
Tachyon briefly wondered if the sperm he had left banked on Takis still existed, or if Zabb’s supporters had seen it destroyed. Or even worse, had Taj impregnanted some female? It was ironic that in a culture as technologically advanced as the Takisian, there was a fundamental distrust of artificial insemination, and artificial wombs. The wombs made a certain degree of sense; in a telepathic culture it was best that the child be linked with its mother, but there was little justification for the sex act.
Except for the obvious ones.
Ten nwnths! Ten months without sex.
He jerked his mind from that unpleasant thought and focused again on Blaise. There was so much to teach him about his Takisian culture, and yet should he really bother?
The child could never be presented to the family. He was an abomination. Also there was much in Takisian culture that didn’t bear close scrutiny. How to indicate to an eleven-yearold child that the blood feuds, the controlled breeding, the tension and almost unbearable expectations that were part and parcel of life among the psi lords, were not romantic or wonderful, but rather deadly in the extreme, and had driven his grandsire to this alien world?
“Tell me a story.”
“What makes you think I know any stories?”
“You’re more like a fairy tale than real. You have to know stories.”
“All right. I’ll tell you how H’ambizan tamed the first ship. Long ago—”
“No.”
“No?” Blaise’s expression suggested that his grandfather was an idiot. “Ahhh, of course. Once upon a time.” He cocked an inquiring eyebrow. Blaise nodded, satisfied, and snuggled in closer under Tachyon’s arm. “And so long ago that even the oldest Kibrzen would lie if they told you they remembered, the people were forced to journey through the stars aboard ships of steel. What was worse, they weren’t allowed to build these ships, for the Alaa-may their line wither-had signed a contract with Master Traders, and the people were forbidden to build space-going vessels. So the wealth of Takis bled into space, and into the pockets of the rapacious Network.”
“What’s the Network?”
“A vast trading empire with one hundred and thirty member races. One day H’ambizan, who was a notable astronomer, was drifting among the clouds in the birthplace of stars, and he came upon an amazing sight. Playing among the clouds of cosmic dust like porpoises in the waves, or butterflies through flowers, were vast incredible shapes. And H’ambizan fell to the deck, clasping his ringing skull, for his head was filled with a great singing. His assistants died of joy and shock for their minds could not absorb the thoughts of the creatures. But H’ambizan-being of the Ilkazam-was made of sterner stuff. He controlled his fear and pain and lanced out with a single thought. A single command. And so great was his power that the honor of ships fell silent and gathered like nursing whales about the tiny metal ship.”
“And H’ambizan choose the leader of the honor, and suited against the vacuum, he stepped upon the rough surface of the ship. And curious, Za’Zam, father of ships, made a cavity to receive the man.”
“And then H’ambizan mind-controlled the ship and made him carry him home!” cried Blaise.
“No. H’ambizan sang, and Za’Zam listened, and they both realized that after a thousand thousand years of loneliness they had found the separate halves of their souls. Za’Zam realized that guided by these strange small creatures the ‘Ishb’kaukab would leave their nomadic pastoral lives and achieve greatness. And H’ambizan realized he had found a friend.”
Tach leaned in and kissed the top of the boy’s head. Blaise, chewed thoughtfully on his lower lip, glanced up. “Why didn’t H’ambizan realize that now he could fight the Network? Why did he realize something silly?”
“Because this is a story of longing and regret.”
“Is this supposed to be subtle?”
“Yes.”
“But did H’ambizan and Za’Zam fight the Network?”
“Yes.”
“And did they win?”
“Sort of.”
“Is this true?”
“Sort of.”
“Isn’t that like being a little bit pregnant?”
“What would you know about that?” Blaise lifted his nose and looked superior. “Someday when I’m not so tired, I’ll tell you about the genetic manipulation and eon-long breeding program that took place before we had ships like Baby.”
“So there weren’t wild ships?”
“Oh, yes, there were, but they weren’t as bright as this tale indicates.”
“But ... But ...”
Tach laid a finger on the child’s lips. “Later. Your stomach’s been growling so loud I was afraid it would jump out and take a bite out of my arm.”
“A new wild card power! Killer stomachs!”
Tach threw back his head and laughed. “Come, little kukut, I’ll buy you dinner.”
“At McDonald’s.”
“Oh, joy.”
The tutor hasn’t quit.
The thought was so breathtaking that it brought him up short.
“The tutor hasn’t quit!” Tachyon repeated with dawning wonder.
He ran to the office door, flung it open. Dita slewed around to stare nervously at him.
“The tutor hasn’t quit!” he shouted. “Dita, you’re wonderful!” Blood washed into her cheeks as he kissed her and pulled her around the office in a lurching polka. He dropped her back into her chair and collapsed on the sofa, panting and fanning himself. The weeks of unremitting work and strain were taking their toll. “ I must see this paragon for myself. I’ll be back in one hour.”
He could hear Blaise’s voice piping like a young bird, or a silver flute, and the deeper rumbling tones of the man’s voice. A cello or a bassoon. There was warmth in that voice, and comfort, and something tantalizingly familiar. Tachyon stepped out of the tiny foyer and into the living room. Blaise was seated at the dining room table, a stack of books before him. A heavyset older man with graying hair and a faintly melancholy expression kept the boy’s place with a blunt forefinger. His accent was musical, rather like Tachyon’s.
“Oh, ideal ... no!”
Victor Demyenov raised his dark eyes to meet Tachyon’s lilac ones. His expression was both ironical and slightly malicious.
“K’ijdad, this is George Goncherenko.” His grandsire’s alarming rigidity seemed to penetrate, and the boy faltered and added,
“Is something wrong?”
“No, child,” said George/Victor. “He is merely surprised to see us getting along so well. You have terrified so many of my predecessors.”
“But not you,” said Blaise. Then he added to Tachyon, “He’s not scared of anything.”
You had better be afraid of me! Tachyon shot at the KGB agent telepathically.
No, we hold one another in the palms of our hands. “Blaise, go to your room. This gentleman and I need to talk.”
“No.”
“DO AS YOU’RE TOLD!”
“Go, child.” George/Victor coaxed him with a gentle hand. “It will all be all right.” Blaise gripped the older man in a fierce hug, then ran from the room.
Tachyon flung himself across the room and poured a brandy with hands that shook with fear and shock.
“You! I thought you were out of my life! You told me you were retiring. It was finished. You lied—”
“Lied! Let’s talk about lying! You withheld something I needed. Something which cost me everything!”
“I ... I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, come now, Dancer, I trained you better than that. You deliberately withheld the information about Blaise. You have enough tradecraft to have known the value of that little piece of information.”
Hamburg, 1956. A shabby but clean boarding house, and victor doling out booze and women in limited doses while he trained and questioned the shattered Takisian. A few years, and they had kicked him loose to continue his descent into the gutter. He had given them all that he had, and it hadn’t been enough. The secret had gnawed at him for years, but thirty years was a long time, and he had begun to think himself safe. And then had come the phone call during the final leg of the World Health Organization tour, and his KGB control was back in his life.
“My superiors learned of Blaise, his potential and power, but I who trained you and ran you was left ignorant. They did not assume it was stupidity, but rather duplicity. They drew the only conclusion.” His raised eyebrows drew the answer from his former pupil:
“They assumed you had rolled over, become a double agent.”
Victor grimaced a bit at the theatrical phrase. The brandy exploded in the back of his throat as Tachyon tossed it down. Some explanation, some justification seemed necessary.
“I wanted him safe from you.”
“I would say I am the least of his problems.”
“What do you mean? What do you mean by that?”
“Nothing. Never mind.”
“Is that a comment on me?”
“Good god, no. I merely point out that we live in dangerous times.”
“Victor, are they looking for you?” Tachyon asked, not certain if he referred to the Russian’s KGB masters or to the CIA.
“No, they all think I’m dead. All that remains is a charred car and a pair of corpses burned past recognition.”
“You killed them.”
“Don’t look so shocked, Dancer. You too are a killer. In fact we have more in common then you might think. Like that child.”
“I want you out of my life!”
“I’m in your life for good. You better get used to it.”
“I’ll fire you!”
Demyenov’s voice froze him before he had taken three steps. “Ask Blaise.”
Tachyon remembered the hug. Never in the weeks since he had smuggled Blaise out of France had the child given him so affectionate a gesture. The boy obviously loved the grizzled Russian. What would it do to Tach and the boy’s relationship if he now abruptly removed this man? He sank onto the sofa and dropped his head into his hands.
“Oh, Victor, why?” He didn’t really expect an answer, and he didn’t get one.
“Oh, yes, since we’re going to be friends you should know my true name. Friends don’t lie to each other. My name is Georgi Vladamirovich Polyakov. But you can call me George. Victor is dead-you killed him.”
Blood Ties
Baby, your master is an idiot.
No, master.
Yes, Baby.
Blaise lay curled among the tumbled pillows on the vast canopy bed that almost filled the bridge/stateroom aboard Tachyon’s yacht. Two of the curving pearlescent walls presented a miniature schematic of New York City. Different-colored lines connected red markers. The third wall broke down the location of wild card cases by building and business. Chase Manhattan Bank Jokertown branch, three apartment buildings (one of which was in Harlem), Top Hat cleaners on the Bowery, restaurants, bars, drug stores, department stores.
It’s a human vector.
Tachyon rose from the floor and dusted the seat of his pants, sensing irritation from his ship at this slur on her housekeeping. Sometimes ships had a skewed sense of priorities. An imputation of dust was far more significant than the announcement that a Typhoid Mary was threatening Manhattan. Have I done well, master?
Extraordinarily well. I just wish I had not been so slow to see.
“Blaise, kuket, we’re going now. Put your arm around my neck. Good lad.”
He carried the child out of the ship. Pausing at the door of the warehouse, he fumbled with the lock and struggled with his sleeping burden. Tachyon was a small man, and his grandson already showed every indication that he would tower over his tiny forebear.
Into the sultry night. Two A.M. He could imagine what Victoria Queen was going to say to him when he woke her at this hour. But it had to be discussed, and with people he could trust. Somewhere a human contagion slept or walked the streets of New York.
His arms tightened convulsively about the boy as the realization struck. No one was safe. While Blaise was playing in the park, walking to the clinic, eating in a restaurant, this monstrous sickness could pass by and endanger his child, his line, his future. He almost turned back to the ship. This evil could not pass Baby. He chided himself for hysteria. There were millions of people in greater Manhattan. What chance of actually encountering the carrier?
Depended upon the identity of the carrier.
And how to establish that? Ideal, it was probably a hopeless task.
“This is absolutely hopeless,” said Victoria Queen.
“Thank you for that incredibly helpful observation.” The chief of surgery and Tachyon exchanged sizzling glares. Chrysalis flicked a nail against the rim of her glass, pulling out a single ringing tone. Finn took another bite of raw Quaker Oats.
“We interview the family and friends of every victim. We interview the surviving victims. We search for the common thread, some individual they all recall,” said Tachyon.
“It would be an incredible long shot that any of them would remember,” sighed Finn.
Tachyon turned the full blazing force of his lilac eyes on his assistant. “So are you suggesting that we wait and hope that this person notices that people are dying like flies all around him or her? And even that won’t help.” Tach shook his head as if disgusted by his own facetiousness. “The incubation period appears to be around twenty-four hours. This carrier, whoever it is, can have no notion of their power.”
“Power,” snorted Chrysalis.
“Yes, power. Clearly this person’s wild card gift is to give wild card. The person probably contracted the virus during this latest outbreak. If it had happened earlier, we would have been facing this crisis months or even years ago.”
“Doc.” Finn tossed his heavy forelock out of his face. “This has to mean that the virus is mutating.”
“Yes, I’m afraid you’re correct. Dr. Corvisart will be ecstatic.”
“Who?” asked Queen.
“A French researcher who was absolutely convinced that the virus was mutating. I tried to explain to him that there’s only been one case of a constantly mutating virus, and that’s because it is this man’s power—”
“What? What is it?” asked Finn sharply at Tachyon’s frozen expression.
The alien relaxed his frenzied grip on the edge of the desk. He and Chrysalis met each other’s gaze. “You’re thinking what I’m thinking.”
“Ohhh, yes.”
“Then why not enlighten those of us who aren’t thinking,” snapped Queen bitterly, who then flushed and quickly added, “In the peculiar way you think.”
“There is one individual in this city who’s an old hand at wild card. Who is reinfected with the virus every time he sleeps. How many times has he transformed over the past forty years? A dozen? Twenty? Thirty?”
“It would be the most unbelievable coincidence,” warned Chrysalis.
“I agree, but it has to be investigated.” Tachyon pushed to his feet.
Finn lurched to his feet. “Sleep?”
“Yes,” said Tachyon rather impatiently.
The tiny centaur gave a long shake that began at his head, vibrated to his tail, and pulled a deep-throated groan from his lungs.
“He was here.”
“WHAT!”
“Back in March. He came in to see you, but you weren’t back yet. He was high on speed, and apparently he’d promised some girl he wouldn’t go out with her cranked. He wanted help. I put him to sleep.”
“How for the ideal’s sake? This could be critical.”
“Brain entrainment and suggestion.”
“When did he wake and leave?”
“Um, mid-May.”
“May! And you didn’t tell me!”
“I didn’t think it was important.”
“He’s been awake a month,” Chrysalis said to Tachyon. “Do you still want us to do those interviews?” asked Queen.
“Yes, it might help us pinpoint his present physical form. I don’t suppose you saw him when he left?”
“No, one morning he just wasn’t there.”
“Where did you stash him?” asked Chrysalis curiously. “In the janitor’s closet.”
“Have we lost any janitors?” asked Tachyon with graveyard humor.
“We were lucky, incredibly lucky,” muttered Finn, crossing himself.
“People, this has got to be kept absolutely confidential. Can you imagine the panic if wind of this reaches the general populace?”
“Sooner or later the authorities are going to have to be informed,” objected Queen.
“Not if Chrysalis and I succeed.”
“I hate it when you’re smug.”
“Tachyon, she’s got a point. We’re going to feel like absolute shit if we can’t find Croyd, or we find him and he’s not the one. How many more people are going to die, Tachyon?” asked Chrysalis.
Tachyon splashed a liberal dollop of cognac into a glass, raised the blinds, and watched the sun trying valiantly to struggle through the layers of mist and smog.
“I think I’m justified in trying this alone first. What would I say to the mayor? Well, Your Honor, we think there’s a wild card carrier. We think it’s Croyd Crenson. No, sir, we don’t know what he looks like because he changes every time he sleeps.”
“I don’t suppose we could try anything simple and silly like running ads on the radio and in the papers-’Croyd phone home’?” suggested Finn.
“Why not? I’m willing to try anything. The real question is how many amphetamines he’s eaten in the past weeks.” He turned away from the window to face Chrysalis. “You know what he’s like toward the end of an episode.”
“He’s a psychotic,” said Chrysalis bluntly.
“And usually paranoid, so if he starts hearing or reading ads, he’s going to assume they’re after him.” The Takisian sighed. “And he’d be right.”
Tachyon poured another drink and pulled a face as the brandy washed down.
“Great breakfast,” said the owner of the Palace dryly.
“I’ll break an egg in it if that will make you feel any better.”
“You’ve been hitting the bottle pretty hard recently.”
“You tell him,” muttered Queen under her breath. Tachyon glared at both of them. “Not to sound too terribly trite, but I have been under a great deal of pressure recently.”
“You were an alcoholic, Tachyon. You shouldn’t be drinking at all,” said Chrysalis.
“Blood and Bone, what has gotten into you? One would think you’d joined a temperance league. Going to be down at Father Squid’s beating on a tambourine? You’re a saloonkeeper, Chrysalis.”
He watched the increased wash of blood into those transparent cheeks. “ I care, Tachyon, don’t make me regret that. You’re important to Jokertown.” She plucked nervously at the arm of her chair. “Maybe even to the nation. Don’t crap out on us and crawl back in a bottle. You’ve got the prestige to stand against crime bosses, and ... other things. Nobody else in this fucking freak show has that.”
Bitterness edged each word. He knew what it cost her to make that admission. She had a pride of self and place that rivaled his. Slowly he walked to her, forced himself to bend and place his cheek against hers. He couldn’t help the involuntary closing of his eyes, but it wasn’t as bad as he expected. Her skin, invisible though it was, was warm and soft. She could be any lovely woman. As long as his eyes were closed.
He stepped back and lifted her fingers to his lips. “Send out word to your network. This has to take precedence over anything else.”
“Even the Fists and the Gambiones?”
“Yes. What profiteth us to gain Jokertown if we lose the whole bloody world?”
“I’ll save you a tambourine.”
“No, I want to be the whole damn trumpet section.”
“Why am I not surprised?” said Queen to Finn.
Blood Ties
The man wrapped a webbed hand about Tachyon’s wrist, indicated for a pad, and scrawled out, How long you think I got?
“A few days.”
Tachyon noticed Tina Mixon’s wince. He knew that she considered his frankness to border on brutality, but he didn’t believe in lying to people. A man needed time to prepare himself for death. And these humans with their delicate sensibilities. They either wouldn’t talk about death, or they shrouded it in euphemisms. On the other hand, they were not in the least backward about dealing out death.
The hiss of the respirator was loud in the room as the man laboriously wrote, if you could find that woman.
“She’s vanished, Mr. Grogan. I’m sorry, Use powers. Find her!”
Tachyon bowed his head and recalled the scene (only three days ago? It seemed an eternity) that had met his disbelieving gaze. He had responded to word of a riot on the third floor. He had run into the ward, then frozen and stared down at the water washing over the tops of his shoes.
There must have been sixty people in a room designed for ten. Soaked and bedraggled jokers clung like survivors of a shipwreck to the beds. Orderlies disgruntledly slopped mops across the flooded floor. A sandy-haired man stood on one of the beds babbling hysterically while a pair of women jokers pawed at his knees and added their shrill cries to the general pandemonium—
“A fucking vision. A fucking golden vision. And look at me!” screamed the sandy-haired man. “Look at me!”
“Why does it have to be a woman?” wailed a woman. “Maybe you got her power. Fuck me. FUCK ME!”
Tachy had ruthlessly mind-controlled her. And the babbling man, and anyone else who had seemed likely to make trouble. The remaining jokers had stared at him like targets at a county turkey shoot.
They were less intimidated now.
Like this pathetic blackmail from a dying man.
“I’m sorry,” Tachyon said again to Grogan, and left the room.
And stumbled into a lurking pack of jokers. “Good morning.”
“What’s good about it,” growled a big joker with a mouthful of cilia in place of teeth. It made his diction mushy, and Tachyon had to strain to understand him.
“You’re alive, Mr. Konopka, which is more than many unluckier ones can claim,” the alien snapped. He pulled off his stethoscope and jerked it between his hands.
“You call this livin’?” said a woman. “ I look like a monster, my husband’s left me, I lost my job—”
“Everyone’s got a story,” said Tachyon shortly, heading down the hall. They followed him.
Konopka stepped in front of the Takisian and stopped him with a hard jab to the small alien’s chest.
“What are you doing to find that woman?”
For a long moment Tachyon warred with conflicting emotions: to placate them with a soothing lie, or be damned to them; and tell them the truth.
The joker gave him another jab with a forefinger tipped with a long, sharp nail. “Huh? Huh? Answer up—”
Tach ran out of patience. “I’m doing precisely nothing to find that woman.”
“You motherfucker, I’m gonna kill you.” Konopka drew back a fist.
Another man cried, “You don’t care about us!”
Tachyon whirled on him, seized him by the shoulders. “No! That’s not true. Xuan, I care more than you can conceive. But I must also care for Jane. Look at you.” He raked the crowd with a lilac-eyed glance. “You’re like hunting animals.”
“That girl can cure us. You gotta find her.” The anger drained from Xuan, replaced with a humble pleading. Konopka jerked the alien around to face him. “You owe it to us, Tachyon, because you made us what we are, and you can’t do fuck to cure us!” There were shouts of agreement.
Tachyon glanced to the nurses’ station, where Tina was dithering over the switchboard. He gave an infinitesimal shake of the head. All this situation needed was the arrival of security.,
“All of you return to your rooms.”
“No brush off, Tachyon!”
“Listen to me,” he pleaded. “That girl is a person, a human being. Not a fucking machine designed to cure jokers. You would have killed her three days ago. Consider the terrible dilemma with which she is faced. Think of her too and not only of yourselves. How can I trust you when I can’t even trust myself to do what is right and proper by Jane?”
Finn had popped out of an elevator and now stood with a foreleg upraised as if ready to paw the linoleum floor. With a low murmur the crowd began to disperse. All except Konopka. He gathered up a handful of the burgundy satin coat and lifted Tach’s feet from the floor. Finn cantered daintily forward, whirled on his slender forelegs, and landed a kick square in the center of Konopka’s ass. With a roar the joker dropped Tachyon and spun to face this new attack.
“Cut it out!” yelled Finn. “And get the hell back to your room.” Konopkds fist lashed out. Finn danced back, but four legs are less dexterous than two. The blow landed.
“Nat ass-kisser!”
Tachyon dropped Konopka snoring to the floor.
“Why didn’t you do that a long time ago?” asked Finn, rubbing at his reddening cheek.
“Possibly because I’m tired of victimizing them.” Tachyon whirled, his long-tailed coat rustling around him. Finn had to trot to keep pace.
“It’s not your fault.”
“Which part of this mess? The creation of the virus? No, not entirely my fault. The fact that Croyd’s become a carrier? Again, probably beyond my control. The fact that Jane has become the most hunted person in Jokertown? Maybe not. But she is my responsibility, and I’ve got to find her and protect her if I can.” Tachyon slammed his fist into the elevator wall, breaking the skin across his knuckles.
Finn lifted his hand and blotted at the welling blood with a handkerchief. “Relax, we’ll find her.”
“Will we?” Tachyon licked reflectively at the blood. “More to the point, should we?”
“Ha! I blast you with my killer mind-attack. And I make it! You lose another life.” Tachyon tossed the tiny cardboard marker into the discard pile. “And I can really do that too.” Blaise’s eyes glittered in the lamplight. “I bet if I worked hard I could kill with my mind.”
Polyakov glanced up from his newspaper. “It’s not a talent to cultivate.”
“Can you do it?”
“Drop it, Blaise.”
“Can you?”
“I said drop it.”
The small, round chin hardened, the lips narrowing into a mulish line. “Maybe I’ll just have to practice on somebody since you won’t—”
Tachyon came across the dining table and landed a slap that knocked the boy out of his chair.
“Tachyon!” bellowed the Russian.
“Blaise! Blaise! I’m sorry. So sorry. Are you all right?” Aghast, he gathered the child into his arms. “Oh, Ideal, forgive me.”
The boy swung wildly, striking Tach above the eye. His esper ability poured off him in shuddering silver waves as he struggled to break his elder’s shields. Tachyon quieted Blaise with a lick of his power.
“Listen to me. I’m horribly tired, and under a lot of stress. I know that’s not an adequate excuse, but I offer it as an explanation. I don’t want you to learn to kill. It does something to your soul because you are so closely linked with your victim. It’s not like make-believe.” He gestured back toward the abandoned Talisman game. “You have to burrow deep, tear away layer after layer of the person’s mind before you can kill.”
“Have you done it?” Blaise muttered around a swelling lip.
“Yes, and it haunts me to this day.” Polyakov stepped to the alien’s side and rested a hand on his shoulder. “I weighed Rabdan’s life against the life of the Earth. He had to die, it was necessary but ...” He hugged the child close. “You must learn to be kind, Blaise. Don t even joke about practicing on the humans. Our original sin was treating them as laboratory animals. Don’t you—”
The trill of the phone interrupted him. “Doctor. This is Jane.”
“Jane, where—”
“No, no questions. Just listen. I have an address and a telephone number for Croyd. Only one. I heard the ads. I guess I can understand why you have to find, him.”
“Jane, I’m sorry I didn’t help you before.”
“It’s okay. I was pretty strung out. You’re not going to hurt him, are you? He’s been a friend. I hate to think I’m betraying him, but ...”
“More people will die if you don’t. You’re right to tell me.”
“Okay. He’s got an apartment on Eldridge. Three twentythree Eldridge. Third floor. Five five five, four four nine one.”
“Thank you, Jane, thank you so much. My dear child, we must “ But he was talking to the buzz of a disconnected line.
He replaced the receiver and stood face-to-face with a nasty moral dilemma. if ... when they captured Croyd, and if he awoke in a new form minus the carrier power, well and good. But if this mutation carried over, then the decisions became harder. To keep the man in isolation for the rest of his life?
Or to kill him ....
... A woman lying back among pillows and tangled sheets. A sheen of sweat across her dark breasts and belly. The moisture-matted hair of her mons—
The three-dimensional picture fragmented and vanished. Sorry, squeaked Video in Tachyon’s mind. We got the wrong apartment.
Wait, that might be Croyd.
He reached out and touched the woman’s mind. It wasn’t Croyd.
Floater and Video resumed their slow crawl across the back wall of the apartment building.
There were a few nervous laughs from the people in the van. Elmo shifted uncomfortably. His hazardous-environment suit was scarcely able to contain his bulk, and he looked rather like an ill-stuffed sausage. They had cobbled together suits for Troll and Ernie out of four other suits. So far the seals were holding, but Tachyon winced every time he considered the expense. Video and Floater each had suits, and Tachyon wore his Network-designed spacesuit.
It was impossible to protect Slither. They had tried a helmet and air supply, but the air tanks kept sliding around on her serpent’s body, pulling loose the hoses. Tach had ordered her to stay out of the fight. She would be a final line of defense if Croyd got past them.
... Surprisingly neat room. A tall, thin man lounged on the sofa reading Newsweek. Ultrapale skin, odd eyes, brown hair with white roots showing ....
... Another man seated at the kitchen table playing solitaire. Wonderfully handsome, but an easily forgettable face for all that ....
Bill Lockwood.
Tachyon read a soul-deep sense of gratitude and a determination to protect ... Croyd!
He switched his focus to the albino. Sweat broke out on his upper lip and stung his eyes as he struggled to touch the mind. Sliding his hand through the clear bubble of the helmet, he wiped perspiration and tried again. Whirling darkness like a primordial black hole. It was a mind block, but one of the oddest he’d ever felt. He spent another twenty minutes trying to find a way over, under, around, or through it. Finally he reluctantly concluded that it was more like an immunity than an actual shield.
He explained the situation to his troops, then added, “So we just go in and thump on him. How hard can it be? And remember, if you’re not suited, don’t go into that room.”
They piled out. With a wave he motioned Slither and Ernie toward the rear alley. Then he and Troll and Elmo headed up the steps to the front door. There were buzzers, but since the lock was broken off the outer door, they didn’t serve much purpose. Cautiously they stepped inside and started climbing for the third floor.
Fortunately the suit masked the smells, but Tach could imagine them. He had made too many house calls to just such buildings. The stink of rancid grease. The sickly-sweet scent of human and animal wastes clinging in the corners of the stairwells. Sweat, fear, poverty, and hopelessness-they too left a smell. The walls were graffiti-covered, slogans and howls of outrage in several languages.
I’m in position.
Video flashed him another picture of the room. Nothing had changed.
Window? Tachyon asked his recon team.
Open. In this heat what do you expect? sent back Floater. Go in? asked Video.
Yes.
The alien motioned to Troll. The security chief took a grip on the knob, sucked in a breath, held it.
... The albino noticed Floater with Video riding piggyback on his shoulders, crawling in the window. He rose with blinding speed, uttered an oath, and drew a gun .... “Now!” yelled Tachyon.
Troll forced the door. The lock broke with a scream of outraged metal and torn wood. Tach and Elmo tumbled into the room. The albino fired, and missed. Slither, disobeying or having completely forgotten her orders, came coiling up the fire escape like a hunting boa on a tree. She lashed out with her tufted tail and knocked the gun from the albino’s hand.
“You fuckers!” Cards flew like frightened butterflies as the young man flung aside the table.
A right punch was coming in. Tachyon tried to deflect it with a quick outward block, but when his arm connected with Lockwood’s, it stopped as if caught in a vise. Tach gasped. Troll, grunting with irritation, let loose with a wide, slow haymaker. His enormous fist slammed into Lockwood’s jaw. No reaction. Tach and Troll stepped back, alarmed.
Croyd was trying to tie Slither into knots. Elmo waded in and was tossed contemptuously aside. He came back in, his arms driving like pistons. Ernie joined the fray. Floater was trying to scramble across the ceiling back to the window.
A sound like a side of beef hitting concrete. The pretty boy had landed a hit on Troll. The big joker doubled over. And Tachyon stared dismayed.
Thank you, Jesus, that he didn’t hit rne! came the hysterical little thought.
Troll drove two hard left/right punches into Lockwood’s gut.
Nothing!
Lockwood wound up and delivered a punch to Tachyon’s head. The Network helmet withstood the blow, but the kinetic force threw the tiny alien across the room. He came up bruised and groaning against the far wall. Troll was raining punches on Lockwood. The young man grinned and hammered in a series of hits that drove Troll across the room. The big joker stood swaying, arms over his helmeted head. Lockwood kicked him hard in the groin, then brought both hands down on the back of Troll’s neck.
When a tree falls in the forest this is just how it sounds, thought Tach inanely as nine feet of joker went down like a poleaxed ox.
“Shit,” commented Floater from overhead.
Tachyon reached out with a powerful imperative. Silver lines of power flowed out from him but failed to wrap like a net about the man’s mind. Instead the power sank like a stone in quicksand. SLEEP!!!!!!!!!!!
The power washed back toward him, struck his shields, and passed right through.
Boomerang power, was Tachyon’s last conscious thought.
He was dancing the most intricate and wonderful triple minor set, but there were no other men in the dance. Just him, and a long line of women. Blythe and Saaba and Dani and Angelface and M’orat, and Jane and Talli, and Roulette and Peregrine and Victoria and Zabb grabbed him by the shoulder and tried to cut in. Muttering and growling, Tach dug his cheek deeper into the pillow. The antiseptic smell and rough texture of the pillowcase infuriated him. I won’t endure a bed like this. How dare they? The infernal cheek!
He forced up gummed lids, stared into Victoria Queen’s frowning blue eyes.
Smiled up at her. “You dance divinely.”
“Oh, wake up!” She jammed a needle into his arm.
“Ow!”
“Stimulant. Our hero. You finally meet someone with a superior mind-control power at positively the worst moment.”
“He was not superior! That was my own power ricocheting back at me. Nothing else could have gotten past my—” He cut off, ashamed by his outraged justification, then continued in a chastised tone, “Did we get them?”
“No.”
He dropped his face into his hands. “O ancestors, what a mess.”
“Yes.” She walked out.
Croyd escaped. And if Slither died? Another casualty of his failures.
The click of dainty hooves on tile. “What next, boss?”
“I commit suicide.”
“Wrong answer.”
“I go to the police.”
“They’ll freak,” remarked the joker as he pulled tangles from his white mane.
“What choice do I have? I wanted to keep this secret, avoid panic, but Croyd now knows he’s being hunted. He will go to ground. We must have manpower to find him. And this companion. Call Washington, have SCARE search their files for an ace with boomerang powers.”
The Takisian rose stiffly from the bed. Winced as he explored a bruise on his elbow. Ran his hands through his tangled curls. “I handled this so badly.”
“You couldn’t know.”
“How are the troops?” Finn bowed his head and inspected his hands. “What is it? What’s happened? Troll? Slither?”
“Slither. She went into Black Queen reaction minutes after you went under.”
“The incubation period ...”
“Must be shortening.”
“He’s continuing to mutate the virus.”
“So maybe it will mutate until it becomes nonviral?”
“I couldn’t be so lucky. Everything I touch leads to death.”
“Stop it! That’s not true! We don’t have time for you to feel guilty If anyone’s at fault-I am. I let him leave.”
“You couldn’t have known he’d become a carrier.”
“My point exactly. What’s done is done. Let’s get on with the future.”
“If there is one.”
“We’ll make it happen.”
“How did you end up so optimistic and well adjusted?”
“I’m too dumb to be otherwise.”
Blood Ties
If the situation hadn’t been so deadly, it could have been funny. Modular Man vanishing over the rooftops with Croyd in his arms, and the joker squad and Tachyon gaping stupidly after him. Troll had cleared his throat, an explosion of sound like a road grader moving gravel. He offered the Takisian the limp figure of Bill Lockwood like a man presenting his prize catch.
“Well, at least we’ve got this one,” he said timidly. “Bloody lot of good it does us! Well, I suppose I must treat him,” Tach had muttered pettishly, and they had all returned to the clinic.
A few hours later and the mystery man’s body temperature was returned to near normal. He lay blinking groggily in the hospital bed confined by restraints. Tachyon drew up a chair and stared into the handsome, insipid face.
“You’ve given us a devil of a time, you know that. Why on earth did you protect Croyd so desperately? You’re directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent people!”
To Tachyon’s chagrin the young man’s face screwed up, and he began to cry. “I was just lookin’ out for Croyd,” he blubbered while Tach mopped at the tears with his handkerchief. “He’s the only person who’s ever been good to me. He gave me his doughnuts. He made me an ace.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“Aren’t you gonna read my mind?”
“I’m too tired and cranky to read your mind.” Tachyon sensed that in some inexplicable way he had let the man down.
“I’m ... was Snotman-but don’t use that name-I’m an ace now.”
“Snot ...” Tachyon’s voice trailed away, and he helplessly shook his head.
Memories like a stuttering slide show racheted through his mind. The horrible mucus-covered figure fleeing from the baseball-bat-wielding bouncer at Freakers ... the Demon Princes tormenting the miserable joker until blood had mingled with the green mucus ... the disgusting adenoidal sounds emerging from dumpsters where Snotman slept.
“Oh, ships and ancestors, he made you an ace and you were so grateful ...” Words again failed him.
“What’s going to happen to me?” asked Bill Lockwood. “I don’t know.”
There was a growing tumult in the hall: Troll bellowing like an outraged bull, and Tina’s voice high and shrill. A name emerged from the cacophony ... Tachyon’s.
Modular Man was circling overhead with Croyd wrapped in a sheet like an outraged mummy. Tachyon and Troll tumbled into their suits, and the android thrust Croyd into the isolation chamber. Tachyon had prepared it weeks ago; prison security glass, a heavily reinforced steel door. They were ready.
Croyd punched his way through the glass in just under two minutes. And vanished beneath a pile of tackling bodies. Hours later the glass was replaced, and electrified mesh bolted to the wall.
Croyd punched through that in under a minute. Electricity seemed to act as a stimulant.
Troll looked up from where Croyd, bound hand and foot with steel shackles, lay beneath his nine-foot bulk. “Doc, I can’t sit on him for the rest of my life.”
They replaced the glass again. Tachyon discussed steel shutters with the security experts from Attica. They shrugged and pointed out that the walls would never bear the stress.
Then Finn had produced a wild and harebrained notion. “Consider cows,” he had remarked, pawing gently at the floor with a dainty forefoot. Victoria Queen had almost headed off for a sedative. “They’re so stupid they won’t walk over painted lines on the highway because they think it’s a cattle guard.”
“Yes, but Croyd is a man, not a cow,” Tachyon explained patiently.
“But he’s very suggestible.”
“How would you know?”
“I put him to sleep with brain wave entrainment and suggestion, remember?”
They hooked him up and tried the same trick again. This time it didn’t work. So they painted bars on the window. And on the door.
Croyd was very docile after that.
As long as no one came in the room.
Please go to sleep. Please, Croyd, go to sleep.
Tachyon had made this prayer every day for the past four days, but there was no response from the nervously pacing albino beyond the painted glass of the isolation chamber.
Tachyon had tried to give nature a little push. After the failure of brain wave entrainment he had pumped sleep gas into the room, drugged Croyd’s food. And Croyd remained stubbornly and infectiously awake. And each hour he was awake the virus continued to mutate.
Croyd was a walking holocaust. And a decision had to be made. Tachyon stared down at his hands. Remembered the buck of the gun as he killed Claude Bonnell. Remembered the Burning Woman. Remembered Rabdan.
Ideal. I’m tired of dealing in death. Spare me, fathers, I don’t want to do it again.
Peregrine smiled up at him from the hospital bed, then grimaced and bit down hard on her lip as another pain washed through her. Her blue eyes were overly bright, and her cheerful manner seemed more manic than natural. Tachyon sympathized. He had to struggle to keep his smile in place. In the next few hours she would give birth, and they both knew what that experience could do to the fetus now struggling to free itself from her swollen body.
He laid a gentle hand on the mound of her belly and felt the contraction shuddering through the muscles. “Cesarean might be easier on our boy.”
“No. McCoy and I feel very strongly about this.”
“Where is he?”
“Out getting coffee.”
“You still insist on all this togetherness?”
“Yes.,.”
“Husbands are a damned nuisance.”
“I’d expect you to feel that way, Tachy darling.” She managed to look almost sexy despite her condition. “And by the way, we’re not married.” Another spasm, and she panted, “How much longer?”
“You’re just warming up.”
“Terrific.”
“Middle-aged mothers. It’s harder on you.”
“No encouragement, and now an insult.”
“Sorry.”
She reached out to him. “Tach, I was teasing.”
“Try to rest. I’ll see you in a few hours.”
“It’s a date.”
Troll stuck his head around the office door. “You don’t need me, do you?”
“Why?”
“Trouble at the Chaos Club. The call just came in.”
“No, go ahead.”
“Strange, there hasn’t been a peep out of these goons for days. You’d think they’d have learned.”
“Well, go and drive home the lesson again, Troll.”
“You want to come?”
“Peregrine’s in labor.”
“Oh. See you later, Doc.”
Tachyon checked with Tina and discovered they had moved Peregrine to the delivery room. In the locker room he stripped out of his peach and silver finery, shrugged into the green surgical gown, and scrubbed.
The intercom buzzed. He flipped it on with an elbow. “Boss,” came Finn’s voice. “It’s raining jokers down here.”
“I’ve got a baby to deliver.”
“Oh, right.” Finn hung up the phone. The emergency room was filling up with young jokers sporting a variety of cuts and bruises. More were streaming in. Finn trotted to the nearest teen, then reared back when he noticed that the gash across the boy’s forehead was a clever makeup job.
A six-inch length of a switchblade glittered beneath Finn’s nose.
An ambulance roared into the bay and disgorged a party of heavily armed men. Finn raised his hands. His mommy didn’t raise no dummy.
When the idea of seizing Tachyon’s clinic had first been proposed, Brennan had argued strenuously against the plan.
But the word filtered down from on high: Tachyon can lead us to a woman who can sleep with a joker and cure him. Find her. And Tachyon needs to be taught a lesson. Get him.
Brennan wasn’t surprised by the order. A year ago Kien had been using the lovely Vietnamese girl Mai to cure jokers. All it took was money-a lot of it-and you were cured. Then Brennan had killed Scar and rescued Mai, and now a new girl had arisen to take her place. A girl who cured with sex. What joker male wouldn’t pay a fortune to be cured by fucking a beautiful woman?
The real irony was that Brennan had been given command of the assault. After robbing Kien of his curing machine he was about to provide the crime boss with a new one. It was too bad about Tachyon and his clinic, but Brennan had his own agenda to pursue.
The only problem was that he’d been jumped over Danny Mao, and the Oriental didn’t appreciate it. On the other hand it was an indication of how well regarded Brennan had become within Kien’s byzantine network. The next step would probably be into the inner circle that surrounded Kien himself, and then Brennan’s revenge would be within reach. So he couldn’t refuse the assignment. He had worked too hard for too many years to pull down the facade that was Kien Phuc and reveal the rottenness that lay behind.
Brennan rammed a clip into his Browning High Power and touched the pockets of his vest, making sure his reloads were handy. It had been agreed that deaths would be kept to a minimum. Only one person was earmarked for deathTachyon.
Eleven twenty-seven.
Brennan, riding with the driver, peered ahead at the clinic. They’d be pulling in soon. Too bad about Tachyon. If you wish to find the unclouded truth, do not concern yourself with right and wrong.
He had his own agenda. Right or wrong.
McCoy was holding up pretty well. At least he hadn’t passed out and been carried out of the delivery room. He was even occasionally remembering to instruct Peri to pant, bear down, breathe. Her responses to these helpful reminders were direct and uncomplimentary Another brittle scream tore from her throat, and she arched in the stirrups. Tachyon, eyes flicking between monitors and her dilated cervix, said softly, “You’re doing fine, Peri. Just a little more now.”
He reached out and touched the unformed mind of the child fighting its way down the birth canal. Fear, fury at having its comfortable world so abruptly upset. (Definitely Fortunato’s child.) Tachyon stroked and soothed, watched the heartbeat slow from its frenzied pounding.
You’re going to be all right, little man. Don’t give me the satisfaction of being right.
How many times had he hunched between a mother’s knees, received a child, and had it turn to sludge in his hands? Too many.
There was a crash that swung him around on the stool, and the alien gaped in amazement at the three armed men who had plunged through the doors of the delivery room. Peregrine reared up on her elbows and eyed them with loathing. “OH, CHRIST!”
“What the devil do you mean by this?”
Tach retreated slightly at the aggressive thrust of an Uzi barrel in his direction. The two other intruders merely gulped and stared with reddened faces at Peregrine’s private parts.
“You’ve broken the sterile integrity of this room. Get out!”
“We’re here for you.”
“I’m a little busy right now. I’m delivering a baby. OUT!” Tach made shooing motions with his gloved hands.
“Fuck this,” yelled McCoy, doing just what Tachyon had prayed he wouldn’t.
Tach’s mind control dropped the cameraman in his tracks, and his seizure of the shootist sent the rounds spraying into the ceiling. Glass from broken light fixtures tinkled all about him.
“McCoy!” Peregrine struggled in Tina’s grasp.
“Lay down! He’s fine. He will live to be an idiot yet another day.”
“Release my man or I’ll kill you. One of the two of us will get you, or these women,” shouted the nervous young Oriental. Dr. Tachyon released the gunman. “Now you’re coming with us.”
“Gentlemen, I don’t know why you’re here, or who you are, but I will be at your disposal after I have delivered this child. I can’t slip away down the drain. I have to exit through those doors, so kindly wait for me in the scrub room.”
He pulled his stool back into position between Peri’s legs and resumed his quiet external and internal monologue to mother and child.
“McCoy,” panted the ace. “Asleep.”
Peri’s screams and contractions were coming in waves. Tach didn’t like her pressure, but ... Suddenly baby slid free. Reaching into the vagina, he cradled the tiny head on his palm and helped slide John Fortune into his new world.
Tach tasted blood and realized he had bitten through his lower lip. He enfolded the child in waves of warmth and love and comfort. Don’t change! Don’t transform! By the Ideal, don’t transform!
The baby lay in his hands, a perfectly formed man-child with a thick head of dark hair. The mucus was suctioned from the budlike mouth. Upending him, Tachyon massaged the tiny back, and a powerful yell erupted from the boy. Tach blinked away tears, wiped blood and mucus from the baby, and laid the child on his mother’s flaccid stomach.
“He’s all right. He’s all right.” Her fingers played gently across the bawling child.
“Yes, Peri, he’s perfect. You were right.”
The final details were handled; cord cut, child given a more thorough wash and wrapped in lamb’s wool. Tachyon and Tina levered Peregrine onto a gurney, then heaved the snoring McCoy onto another. A face was thrust into the window of the delivery room. Tach hunched his shoulders and ignored it.
“Doctor, what’s going on?” quavered Tina.
“I don’t know, my dear, but I presume those armed gentlemen will tell me.”
Brennan swept into the scrub room and stared at his men. They guiltily dropped the cigarette they had been sharing and studied the floor.
“Where’s Tachyon?”
“In there.”
“Why in there?”
“He was delivering a baby.”
“God, it was gross.”
“Embarrassing,” amplified the third. “He promised to—”
“Surrender to you. Yes, gentlemen, I did, and you behold me. Now, however, could you help me? I assume you have—” His eyes met Brennan’s; he faltered, coughed, and resumed. “You have seized my orderlies, and I have a patient who needs to be taken to the nursery, and one who needs to go to her room.”
You! My gods what are you doing here? Seizing your clinic.
But why? WHY?
“So if you would be kind enough to assist with a gurney.” The outer conversation flowed on over the internal telepathic exchange.
The three men looked to Brennan. “‘Put them with the rest in the cafeteria.”
“Cafeteria! Surely you’re not moving the dangerously ill or the infants?”
“Don’t be an idiot. They’re no threat to us,” said Brennan, disgusted.
“The man in isolation ... you didn’t release him?” asked Tachyon.
“No, lie’s our cover.”
“Cover?”
“Why am I wasting time beating gums with you? Move it,” shouted Brennan. “You can take the brat to the nursery, and we’ll have a little talk.”
Brennan, his Browning gripped tightly in his hand, and Tachyon, with John Fortune cradled in his arms, paced through the unnaturally silent halls.
The nursery staff had all been removed, so Tachyon prepared a bottle and fed the child. Brennan swung a chair around and straddled it, arms folded across the back.—
“Now, what is this all about?” asked Tachyon with a mildness he didn’t feel.
“Two things. You’ve upset a certain major player with your goon squad. You’ve also got an item that this player wants.”
“Please stop talking like a third-rate goon in a B gangster movie. ‘Item’ indeed!” snorted the alien.
“Jane Lillian Dow.”
“°I don’t know where she is.”
“My boss thinks different.”
“Your boss is wrong.” Tachyon wiped away a trail of milk from the baby’s chin. “I presume you have put about some story or another to explain the closure of the clinic?”
“Yes, we’re telling people that the carrier’s loose in the hospital.”
“Clever.” Tachyon shifted Johnny, studying the baby’s slight epicanthic folds, and glanced significantly at Brennan’s altered eyes. °°I never asked why you wanted the surgery,
“I know. I appreciated that.”
“I could have discovered, but I did not. I respected your privacy.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“And this is how you repay me?”
“I had to get into this ... organization. I’ve risked everything for this.”
Tachyon flung out a hand. “This? This? Invading my clinic, endangering my patients?”
“No, no, not this. Other ... things ....” Brennan’s voice trailed away.
“I wouldn’t give you Jane even if I knew where she was.”
“My orders are to start killing patients until you do.” Tachyon blanched and took a harder grip on the bottle. He flipped John over his shoulder and patted until the baby let out a loud belch, dribbling milk over the peach-colored material.
“Your orders are to kill me no matter what.”
“STAY OUT OF MY HEAD!” Brennan swung away from Tachyon, clenched his fists between his thighs. “I won’t do it.”
“No, you will have someone else do it for you. What a very flexible mind you have, Captain. You would have made a good Takisian. Perhaps that is why I like you.” He rose and laid Johnny in a crib.
“GODDAMN YOU!”
“‘Why?”
“You’re all closing in on me, wrapping me in these bonds, holding me, smothering me.”
“I wonder what your Jennifer would think of what you’re doing?”
“DAMN IT! STAY OUT! JUST STAY THE FUCK OUT! I didn’t want to care,” he concluded quietly.
“It is the price you pay for being human, Brennan. Sometime you have to care.”
“I do,” he said, agonized.
“For death. Someday it might make an interesting change to choose the living.”
“That’s not fair,” he cried after Tachyon’s back. “What about Mai?”
“Mai is gone. This is here and now, and you are going to have to make a choice.”
The hours crawled by. Tachyon’s admiration for Bradly Latour Finn increased with each passing moment. The little joker comforted the old, jollied the young, and played games with the children. His insouciant grin never budged. Not when their increasingly nervous guards rained curses or blows onto his curly head. Not when Victoria Queen cried out hysterically:
“We’re all going to die, and how can you be so fucking calm?”
“Too dumb to know different.”
He trotted to Tachyon, gun muzzles following his progress through the crowded cafeteria. He paused briefly by a table where Deadhead was maintaining a constant babble. Nodded seriously for several seconds.
“I couldn’t agree more.”
“Sit down!” yelled one of their guards.
Finn backed delicately toward a chair. Wriggled his hindquarters. Sadly shook his head and trotted to Tach. The alien gasped in surprise as he noticed for the first time the joker’s tail. It had been cut off just below the dock.
“Your tail!”
“It will adorn some Werewolf’s jacket.”
Idiotically, this upset Tachyon almost more than anything that had thus far happened. “Your tail,” he mourned again. “It’ll grow. Besides, I was too proud of it anyway.” He leaned in. “Doc, some of these people need medication.”
“I know.”
Tachyon slid off the table, and with his hand resting lightly on Finn’s withers, he walked to Brennan. It was an absurd picture. The tiny alien dressed in knee breeches, the lace cravat of his shirt untied and falling like a foaming waterfall, copper curls fluttering as he walked. The tiny palomino centaur prancing like a Lippizaner at his side.
“A number of these people are on medication. May I take some of my staff and obtain the drugs?”
“Drugs. Sounds good,” laughed a Werewolf. “Give us what we want,” said Brennan. “No.”
“SHIT!” Danny Mao mashed out a cigarette on a cellophanewrapped chef’s salad. The hot tip burnt through the plastic and left a black smear on the cheese and the meat. “How long are we gonna sit here?”
“As long as it takes,” replied Brennan shortly.
“Cowboy, let’s kill a few of these ugly fuckers.” Danny Mao eyed the huddled jokers with disgust. “We’d be doing most of them a favor.”
Brennan rounded on Tachyon. “The girl.”
“No.”
Why are you doing this! Why are you?
Twenty more minutes crawled agonizingly past. Tachyon, eyes half-closed, fingered a violin sonata on his knee, head beating time to the silent music.
“Cowboy, he’s got a mind power. What’s to say he’s not calling the joker hit squad right now?”
Lee ranged himself with the only other Oriental in the group. “Danny’s right.”
“He won’t call for help. He knows the risks of an assault from outside. How many of them,”—Brennan’s arm swept out to encompass the frightened patients and staff—“will be killed in the shooting?” He rounded on Tachyon, his gray eyes hard. “How many of them shall we kill as payment for treachery?”
“‘Treachery.”‘ Tachyon savored the word. Lilac eyes met gray. The gray fell first.
“Okay, so you don’t want to start offing sick old ladies,” said Danny, eyeing one with disfavor. “Even if they are as ugly as an unwiped asshole. Why don’t we use him?” A jerk of a thumb toward Deadhead, who was guiltily gobbling down a piece of pie, and keeping up the running monologue with himself. “That’s what he’s here for.”
Brennan wiped sweat. “We don’t know what Tachyon might do to him. It’s an alien metabolism.”
Danny stepped to an old man, gripped him by his stringy white hair, and thrust the barrel of his Colt Python into the toothless mouth. Victoria Queen whimpered. A rustle went through the hostages. Tachyon came half out of his chair, then subsided when he realized the Chinese man’s focus was on Brennan.
“I don’t think you’ve got what it takes, Cowboy,” Danny said in a dangerously low tone. “I think it was a mistake putting you in charge. Now either you gather your stones and act, or I will.”
“All right,” shouted Brennan. “We’ll use Deadhead.” Danny pulled his pistol from the joker’s mouth and placed the tip of the barrel against Tachyon’s throat. A gasp and a rustle ran through the prisoners.
“But not here. In his office. And Deadhead.” The ace looked up and paused in his energetic chewing. “Bring a spoon.”
Brennan left five men on guard in the cafeteria. He watched Tachyon studying the fifteen men who towered over him in the elevator. It was a look he knew-a man weighing the odds. And not liking the answer.
Isida, my roshi, what takes precedence? The quest of a man’s soul, or the transitory friendships of this world? There was no answer. Somehow Brennan had a feeling that even if the old man had been present, there still wouldn’t have been an answer.
Tachyon’s narrow face was composed. He was clearly resigned to death. Brennan doubted the alien would meet it quietly. He would try something before the end.
Deadhead belched and patted his stomach. “Wish I hadn’t had that piece of pie. Hope I got room for this. Hey, how we gonna open his head?” Tachyon’s eyes widened. Suddenly he doubled over and vomited onto Danny’s shoes.
“Oh, shit!” yelled the Oriental.
“Mind reading’s not such a great power, huh?” gritted Brennan. “You find out what’s in store for you. Lee, go down to the operating room and bring a saw.”
“Why don’t we just take him down there?” whined the boy, holding his nose against the stink.
“Because I don’t want to.” Tension and fury crackled in the words.
They filed into Tachyon’s office, Brennan carefully closing the door behind him. Danny pulled back the hammer on his gun and grinned back over his shoulder at Brennan.
“I’ll handle this, Cowboy. You don’t seem to have the stomach for it.”
It wasn’t a conscious decision. Brennan just reached out and snapped off the lights. New York’s bright glow formed a square of silver around the tightly closed blinds, but the rest of the room was plunged into stygian darkness.
Tachyon hit the floor as two simultaneous muzzle flashes almost blinded him. A body fell across him.
“Shit! He’s got a gun,” he heard Brennan sing out. He wished to god he had.
Thrusting with elbows and knees, Tachyon belly-crawled across the thick carpet. A foot took him hard in the ribs, and he bit back a gasp. The man took a header, discharging his Uzi in a long burst as he fell. Someone screamed.
Feeling for the knob, Tachyon seized it in a sweat-slick hand, threw open the door, and darted through. He slammed it quickly behind him, and bullets blasted through the thin wood, peppering his cheek with splinters. He ran.
Steadying himself with a hand, he swung around the corner just as the door burst open, and the pursuit began. Again Brennan’s voice. “Half of you come with me. We’ll head him off.”
Fifteen, becomes fourteen, becomes thirteen, becomes maybe twelve, if that first Uzi blast hit one of them. So call it six to one. Still terrible odds, and too many for mind control unless he could separate them, and he didn’t like that idea at all.
So where to go?
“This is the Place of Death.”
Tachyon jerked open the door to the stairs and leaped like a hunted deer, taking two steps at a time. They were one landing behind.
“But the buck lived ... Because he came first, running for his life.”
It was a desperate gamble. It had to be taken. Two floors below huddled his people. If his pursuers remembered, returned to threaten them ...
He fished out his keys, put on a final burst of speed. His breath was sobbing in his raw throat. He couldn’t see Croyd through the wide observation window of the isolation room. The lock turned, and he waited, hand on the knob. The hunting pack burst out of the stairwell, baying with excitement. “There he is!”
He entered the room with a forward roll. Flashed past Croyd, who was crouched waiting by the door. But not for a compact bundle, tucked in close and rolling. Tachyon bounced to his feet.
“Croyd, help rne. They’re after us!”
A hand reached out. Tach flowed through it, allowing the momentum to carry Croyd a good three feet past him. Avoidance was his only hope. If Croyd ever got a grip on him, the ace would break him like fragile glass. The red eyes were maddened, the pale face twisted, inhuman.
The hunters arrived. Tachyon threw himself into a long flat dive that carried him toward the bed. Croyd snarled, confused, questing. His eyes met those of the leading gunman. The Uzi came up, but the man let out a wail like steam being vented from a locomotive and began to melt. Within seconds he had sunk to his knees in an ever-widening pool of frothing pink ooze.
Croyd’s hand lashed out at another, connecting at the junction of shoulder and neck. Tachyon pressed desperately against the wall, heard bones crunch. The man collapsed with a broken neck. Screams filled the room.
Suddenly there was a flare of incandescence, and a hunter became a human torch. Within seconds all that was left was the stink of burnt tile and cooked flesh, and a blackened patch on the floor.
One of the three survivors got off a shot. The bullet buried itself in Croyd’s bare foot. Throwing back his head, the albino howled in pain. He gripped the gun and ripped it from the man’s hand. Croyd then proceeded to beat him with the barrel. Skin cracked and tore as the gunsight ripped into the tender flesh of his cheeks.
At Tachyon’s feet another man writhed. The convulsions were so violent that he was literally bent like a bow, head to heels. Blood ran from his mouth where he had bitten through his tongue.
Black Queen. Without joker manifestation. Three out of seven. Blood and line, let rne live. I want to live.
Fear was a living thing, gripping him by the throat, stopping the breath in his lungs. Tachyon struggled for air. The boy, Lee, had been at the back of the pack. Terrified, he threw down his gun and fled. Croyd tossed aside his attacker, who collapsed like a bloody puppet, and raced in pursuit.
Tachyon, turning his head as if his neck were made of glass, eyed the carnage. Gazed down his own slim length. Gave a sob of joy. Pushing off the wall, he swept up an Uzi and ran into the hall. The window over the fire escape had been wrenched out of the. wall. Leaning out he saw a shadowy figure vanishing between the Dumpsters in the alley. Hating himself, he fired, heard the whine of bullets ricocheting off brick and metal and no other sound. Croyd was gone.
His ankles had gone limp, and he almost fell. A strong arm slipped around his waist, and the Takisian gave a cry of terror. He lashed out with his mind power and froze as he recognized the mind.
“Brennan.”
They had a few minutes before the police arrived. Tachyon sat behind his desk, poured two stiff brandies, and saluted the impassive human.
“I count you ... friend. Thank you.”
Brennan was canted back in his chair, booted feet propped on the desk. Danny’s body sprawled on the carpet next to him.
“Took me a damn long time to make up my mind.”
“You had much at stake. I am grateful.”
“Shut up. You’ve thanked me enough. Well, I better get out of here.” Brennan fished in his pocket, pulled out an ace of spades, and flipped the card onto the body. “Give them all something to think about.”
“The police ... and who else?”
“What do you mean?” Brennan tensed in the doorway. “Who is behind this?” Silence stretched between them. “Daniel, I demand to know. You owe me that.”
The human turned slowly back to face him. “It’s dangerous.”
“You’re telling me something I don’t already know? This man has preyed upon my people, my holding, and made war on me. It must stop.”
“And how do you propose to accomplish that?”
“By making him believe that I am more dangerous to him than he is to me.”
A smile quirked that strong mouth, vanished, began to grow by slow stages. Tachyon watched in fascination. It was the first time he’d ever seen Brennan smile.
“This is what I propose.”
Order was restored. Finn treated patients for shock, Peregrine nursed her baby, statements were given, bodies or the remnants of bodies counted. The five men left on guard in the cafeteria had escaped, and also the horrifying Deadhead. A massive manhunt began for Croyd. Tachyon regretted and agonized over his decision. Perhaps he should have accepted death rather than release Croyd, but what a death ... his brains consumed by that repellant creature. He decided he just wasn’t that noble.
By five A.M. the alien was free to leave. He made preparations, collected the limousine, met Brennan. With the human driving they set out to Fifth Avenue and Seventy-third Street.
They parked in the alley behind the five-story gray-stone apartment building. Tachyon spread a lace tablecloth across the hood of the Lincoln and laid out breakfast: warm croissants, thermoses of hot tea and coffee. A selection of cheeses. Then, nibbling on a sliver of Camembert, he sent out the call. A siren’s summons. Ten minutes later Kien Phuc stepped out the back door into the alley. Wyrm was with him. The joker reached for a gun, then hissed as Brennan slowly turned and notched a heavy broadhead hunting arrow in his bow and leveled it on Kien. Tachyon released the compulsion, and the Vietnamese waved his joker/ace down.
Tachyon spread his hands in welcome. “Won’t you join me, Mr. Phuc? While our two lieutenants keep us and each other honest.” Tachyon proffered a plate, shrugged when Kien remained motionless. “You have ... irritated me, Mr. Phuc, but I was pleased when you tried your pathetic seizure of my clinic. It gave me the opportunity I had been seeking.”
“For what?” Kien’s voice grated out like rusty machinery starting after years of neglect.
“To warn you. I am a bad enemy to make,” the alien said brightly, and spread jam on a croissant.
“What do you want?”
“First, to demonstrate how easily I can take your mind and compel you to do anything. Second, to make it clear to you that Jokertown is my territory, and third, to reach a truce.”
“Truce?”
“I have my own interests to pursue, just as you have yours. Yours include prostitution and numbers running and the drug trade, but they will not include protection rackets and extortion and gun battles in my streets. I want my people safe.”
Kien’s eyes slid to Brennan. “Is this trained jackal yours?”
“Oh, no, he too has his own interests to pursue.” Brennan’s gray eyes stared implacably into Kien’s black ones. “I’m coming for you, Kien.”
Tachyon smiled. “You have people who can kill me from the shadows. I have people who can do the same to you. Stalemate.”
“You won’t interfere with my business?”
“No.” Tachyon sighed. “I suppose it shows a distressing lack of morality on my part, but I am not a crusader. Men will still crave women, and women will sell themselves to satisfy those cravings, and drugs will be sold and consumed. We are, alas, not angels. But I insist on peace in my streets.” Tachyon lost his light, bantering tone. “There will be no more children dying in senseless gun battles in Jokertown. And my clinic and my patients will be safe.”
“What about Jane Dow?”
“That chip is not up for discussion in this negotiation, Mr. Phuc.”
Kien shrugged. “All right.”
“Are we agreed?”
“I agree to your terms.”
Tachyon grinned. “You should never plan a double cross in the presence of a telepath. Brennan, kill him.” The Vietnamese blanched.
“Wait, no wait, wait!”
“All right, let us try it again. Are we agreed?”
“Not quite,” Kien ground out. He stared at Brennan, who returned his gaze levelly. “ I received a message from you some time ago.” Brennan nodded. “This is my reply.” Hate and fury laid a rough edge on the man’s voice, and he pointed his half-hand at Brennan as if it were a weapon. “If you persist in annoying me, if, as you say, you bring me down, then I will have nothing left to live for. And then, I swear to you, this Wraith, this Jennifer Maloy, will die. Back off, Captain Brennan. Back off and leave me in peace or she will die. This is my promise to you.”
Tachyon looked from Kien to Brennan. The archer’s face was as hard and unyielding as a clenched fist.
“You weary me,” snapped Tachyon. “Your threats weary me. Go!”
And he sent the Vietnamese and his jackal Wyrm trotting back into the building.
Tachyon was feeling pretty jaunty when he returned to the clinic. He paused to gleefully pat each stone lion, then trotted up the stairs. Croyd couldn’t remain awake much longer. Surely his contagion power would fade in the next transformation. Kien was, for the moment, neutralized. Of course the Vietnamese would go back on his word, but perhaps by then Brennan would have achieved his goal, and Kien would no longer be a problem.
Tachyon headed into the basement and shut off the elaborate series of electronic locks that protected his private laboratory. It was here he manufactured the drug for Angelface and pursued his research for a perfected trump virus.
It was force of habit that drove him to draw blood and begin the XVTA-test. He was obviously fine. The Ideal and the percentages had been with him last night.
He slipped the slide into the electron microscope, focused, and read his fate in the tangled web of the wild card. With a cry he swept a tray of slides and test tubes onto the floor. Beat his fists on the table, screaming out denial. Calm, calm! Stress could trigger the virus.
Quietly he righted his stool, sat with folded hands, and considered. If it manifested, he would most likely die. Acceptable. He might become a joker. Unacceptable. The trump? A last resort.
Jane!
The irony of an impotent man being saved through sex struck him, and he laughed. When he realized they grew from hysteria, not humor, he stifled the wild whoops.
And the future?
Search for Jane. Remove as much stress as possible from his life. Go on living. The house Ilkazam did not breed cowards.
And most important: Blaise.
The boy was all he had now. His blood and seed were poisoned. There would be no other children.
A page of newsprint blew across the withered grass of the postage-stamp-sized park in Neuilly, and came to rest against the base of an bronze statue of Admiral D’Estaing. It flapped fitfully, like an exhausted animal pausing for breath; then the icy December wind caught it once more, and sent it skittering on its way.
The man who slumped on an iron bench in the center of the park eyed the approaching paper with the air of a person facing a monumental decision. Then, with the exaggerated care of the longtime drunk, he reached out with his foot and captured it.
As he bent down for the tattered scrap, a stream of red wine from the bottle nestled between his thighs poured down his leg. A string of curses, comprised of several different European languages, and punctuated every now and then by an odd, singsong word, poured from his lips. Capping the bottle, he mopped at the spreading stain with a large purple handkerchief, and collected the paper, the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune, and began to read. His pale lilac eyes flicked from column to column as he devoured the words.
J. Robert Oppenheimer has been charged with having Communist sympathies and with possible treason. Sources close to the Atomic Energy Commission confirm that steps are being taken to rescind his security clearance, and to remove him from the chairmanship of the commission.
Convulsively, the man crumpled the paper, leaned against the back of the bench, and closed his eyes.
“Damn them, God damn them all,” he whispered in English.
As if in answer his stomach let out a loud rumble. He frowned peevishly, and took a long pull at the cheap red wine. It flowed sourly over his tongue, and exploded with burning warmth in his empty stomach. The rumblings subsided, and he sighed.
A voluminous overcoat of pale peach adorned with enormous brass buttons and several shoulder capes was thrown over his shoulders like a cloak. Beneath this he wore a sky-blue jacket, and tight blue pants which were tucked into worn, knee-high leather boots. The vest was of darker blue than either coat or pants, embroidered with fanciful designs in gold and silver thread. All of the clothing was stained and wrinkled, and there were patches on his white silk shirt. A violin and bow lay next to him on the bench, and the instrument’s case (pointedly open) was on the ground at his feet. A battered suitcase was shoved beneath the bench, and a red leather shoulder bag embossed in gold leaf with a frond, two moons and a star, and a slender scalpel arranged in graceful harmony in the center lay next to it.
The wind returned, rattling the branches of the trees and ruffling his tangled, shoulder-length curls. The hair and brows were a metallic red, and the stubble which shadowed his cheeks and chin was the same unusual shade. The page of newsprint fluttered beneath his hand, and he opened his eyes and regarded it. Curiosity won out over outrage, and with a snap he shook open the paper, and resumed.
BRAIN TRUST DIES
Blythe van Renssaeler, aka Brain Trust, died yesterday at the Wittier Sanatorium. A member of the infamous Four Aces, she was committed to the Wittier Sanatorium by her husband, Henry van Renssaeler, shortly after her appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities ...
The print blurred as tears filled his eyes. Slowly the moisture gathered until one tear spilled over and ran swiftly down the bridge of his long, narrow nose. It hung ludicrously on the tip, but he made no move to brush it away. He was frozen, held in an awful stasis that had nothing to do with pain. That would come later; all he felt now was a great emptiness.
I should have known, should have sensed, he thought. He laid the paper on his knee, and gently stroked the article with one slender forefinger the way a man would caress the cheek of his lover. He noticed in a rather abstract way that there was more, facts about China, about Archibald, about the Four Aces, and the virus.
And all of it wrong! he thought savagely, and his hand tightened spasmodically on the page.
He quickly straightened the paper, and resumed his stroking. He wondered if her passing had been easy. If they had removed her from that grimy cubicle, and taken her to the hospital ....
The room stank of sweat and fear, and feces, and the sickly sweet odor of putrefaction, and over all floated the pungent scent of antiseptic. Much of the sweat and the fear was being generated by three young residents who huddled like lost sheep in the center of the ward. Against the south wall a screen shielded a bed from the rest of the patients, but it could not block the inhuman grunting sounds that emerged from behind this flimsy barrier.
Nearby, a middle-aged woman bent over her breviary reading the vespers service. A mother-of-pearl rosary hung from her thin fingers, and periodically drops of blood spattered on the pages. Each time it happened, her lips moved in quick prayer, and she would wipe away the gore. If her constant bIeeding had been limited to a true stigmata she might have been canonized, but she bled from every available orifice. Blood ran from her ears, matting her hair and staining the shoulders of her gown, from mouth, nose, eyes, rectum, everywhere. A worn-out doctor had dubbed her Sister Mary Hemorrhage in the lounge one night, and the resultant hilarity could only be excused on grounds of mind-numbing exhaustion. Every health-care professional in the Manhattan area had been on almost constant call since Wild Card Day, September 15, 1946, and five months of unremitting work was taking its toll.
Next was a once-handsome black man who floated in a saline bath. Two days ago he had started to shed again, and now only remnants of skin remained. His muscles gleamed raw and infected, and Tachyon had ordered he be treated like a burn victim. He had survived one such molting. It was questionable if he would survive another.
Tachyon was leading a grim procession of physicians toward the screen.
“Are you going to join us, gentlemen?” he called in his soft, deep voice, overlaid with a lilting, musical accent that was rather reminiscent of central Europe or Scandinavia. The residents shuffled reluctantly forward.
An impassive nurse pulled back the screen, revealing an emaciated old man. His eyes gazed desperately up at the doctors, and horrible muffled sounds emerged from his lips.
“An interesting case, this,” said Mandel, lifting the file. “For some bizarre reason the virus is causing every cavity in this man’s body to grow closed. Within a few days his lungs will be unable to pull air, nor will there be room for the proper functioning of his heart ...”
“So why not end it?” Tachyon took the man’s hand, noting the assenting squeeze that answered his words.
“What are you suggesting?” Mandel lowered his voice to an urgent hiss.
Tachyon enunciated each word clearly. “Nothing can be done. Would it not be kinder to spare him this lingering death?”
“I don’t know what passes for medicine on your world-or maybe I do, judging from this Hell-born virus you createdbut on this world we do not murder our patients.”
Tach felt the hinges of his jaw tighten in anger. “You’ll put a dog or cat down mercifully, but you deny your people the only drug known to truly alleviate pain, and you force people into agonizing death. Oh ... be damned to you!”
He threw back his white coat, revealing a gorgeous outfit of dull gold brocade, and seated himself on the edge of the bed. The man reached desperately up, and Tachyon gripped his hands. It was an easy matter to enter his mind.
Die, let me die, came the thought tinged with the flavor of pain and fear, and yet there was a calm certainty in the man’s request.
I cannot. They will not permit it, but I can give you dreams. He moved swiftly, blocking the pain and the reasoning centers of the man’s mind. In his own mind he visualized it as a literal wall built of glowing silver-white blocks of power. He gave a boost to the man’s pleasure centers, allowing him to drift away in dreams of his own concocting. What he had built was temporary, it would last only a few days, but that would be long enough-before then this joker would have died.
He rose, and looked down at the man’s peaceful face. “What did you do?” demanded Mandel.
He raked the other doctor with an imperious glance. “Just a bit more Hell-born Takisian magic.”
With a lordly nod to the residents, he left the ward. Out in the hall, beds lined the walls, and an orderly was picking his way carefully down the passage. Shirley Dashette beckoned to him from the nurses’ station. They had spent several pleasant evenings together exploring the differences and similarities between Takisian and human lovemaking, but tonight he could manage no more than a smile, and the lack of a physical response alarmed him. Maybe it was time to take a rest. “Yes?”
“Dr. Bonners would like to consult with you. The patient’s in shock, and occasionally lapses into hysterics, but there’s nothing physically wrong with her, and he thought—”
“That she might be one of mine.” Oh God, don’t let her be another joker, he groaned inwardly. I don’t think I can face another monstrosity. “Where is she?”
“Room 223.”
He could feel exhaustion shivering along his muscles and licking at the nerves. And close on the heels of the exhaustion came despair and self-pity. With a muttered curse he drove his fist into the top of the desk, and Shirley drew back.
“Tach? Are you all right?” Her hand was cool against his cheek.
“Yes. Of course.” He forced his shoulders back and a spring into his step, and headed off down the hall. Bonners was huddled with another doctor when Tachyon pushed open the door. Bonners frowned, but seemed more than willing to allow him to take charge when the woman in the bed let out a piercing scream and arched against the restraints. Tach leaped to her side, laid a gentle hand on her forehead, and joined with her mind.
OH GOD! The election, would Riley come through? God knows he’d paid enough for it. He’d buy a victory, but he was damned if he’d buy a landslide ... Mama, I’m frightened ... The bite of a winter morning, and the hiss of a skate blade cutting across the ice ... A hand, gripping hers ... wrong hand. Where was Henry? To leave her now ... how many more hours ... he should be here ... Another contraction coming. NO. She couldn’t hear it. Mama ... Henry ... PAIN!
He reeled back, and came up panting against the dresser.
“Good Lord, Doctor Tachyon, are you all right?” Bonners’s hand was on his arm.
“No ... yes ... by the Ideal.” He pulled himself carefully upright. His body still ached in sympathetic memory of the woman’s first anguished labor. But where in the hell had that second personality come from, that cold, hard-edged man?
Shaking off Bonners’s hand, he returned to the woman and seated himself on the edge of the bed. More cautious this time, he ran swiftly through some calming and strengthening exercises, and struck out with his full psi powers. Her fragile mental defenses fell before the onslaught, and before she could sweep him up in her mental maelstrom he gripped her mind.
Like a blossom, delicate velvet trembling in a breeze with just a hint ...
He forced himself out of the almost-sensual enjoyment of the mental sharing, and back to the task at hand. Now fully in command, he quickly sifted through her head. What he found added a new wrinkle to the saga of the wild card.
In the early days of the virus they had seen mostly death. Close to twenty thousand of them in the Manhattan area. Ten thousand due to the effects of the virus, another ten due to the rioting, looting, and the National Guard. Then there were the jokers: hideous monsters created from a union of the virus and their own mental constructs. And finally there were the aces. He had seen about thirty of them. Fascinating people with exotic powers-the living proof that the experiment was a success. They had created, despite the terrible toll, superbeings. And now here was a new one with a power unique among the other aces.
He withdrew, leaving only a single tendril of control like reins in the hands of an accomplished horseman. “Yes, you were quite correct, Doctor, she’s one of mine.”
Bonners waggled his hands in a gesture of absolute and total confusion. “But how ... I mean, don’t you usually ... do tests?” he finished lamely.
Tach relaxed, and grinned at his colleague’s confusion. “I just did. And it’s the most remarkable thing; this woman has somehow managed to absorb all of her husband’s knowledge and memories.” His smile died as a new thought intruded. “I suppose we really ought to send someone to their home to see if poor old Henry is a mindless hulk shambling around the bedroom. For all we know she may have sucked him dry. Mentally speaking, of course.”
Bonners looked decidedly queasy, and went. The other doctor left with him.
Tachyon dismissed them, and the fate of Henry van Renssaeler, from his thoughts, and concentrated on the woman on the bed. Her mind and psyche were fissured like rotten ice, and some very quick repair work would have to be done lest the personality shatter under the stress and she descend into madness. Later he would try for a more permanent construct, but it would be patchwork at best. His father would be perfect for this, the repair of broken minds being his gift. But since he was far away on Takis, she would have to depend on Tach’s lesser abilities.
“There, my dear,” he murmured as he began to work at the knotted sheets that kept her tied to the bed. “Let’s make you a bit more comfortable, and then I’ll begin teaching you some mental disciplines to keep you from going totally crazy.” He reentered the full mindlink. Her mind fluttered beneath his, confused, unable to understand the magnitude of the change that had come over her.
I’m mad ... it couldn’t have happened ... gone mad.
No, the virus ...
He’s really there ... can’t bear it.
Then don’t. See, here and here, reroute and place him deep below.
NO! Take him out, away!
Not possible; control the only answer.
The ward sprang into life like a point of incandescent fire, and drew its intricate cage about “Henry.”
There was a sense of wonder and peace, but he knew they were only halfway there. The ward stood because of his power, not because of any real understanding on her part; if she were to keep her sanity she would have to learn to create it herself. He withdrew. The rigidity had passed out of her body, and her breathing had become more regular. Tach returned to the task of freeing her, whistling a lilting dance tune through his teeth.
For the first time since being summoned to the room he was at leisure to look, really look, at his patient. Her mind had already delighted him, and her body set his pulse to hammering. Shoulder-length sable hair cascaded across the pillow onto the woman’s breast, a perfect counterpoint to the champagne colored satin of her thin nightgown and the alabaster quality of her skin. Long, sooty lashes fluttered on her cheeks, then lifted, revealing eyes of a profound midnight blue.
She regarded him thoughtfully for a few seconds, then asked, “I know you, or do I? I don’t know your face, but ....... feel you.” Her eyes closed again, as if the confusion was too much for her.
Stroking the hair off her forehead, he replied, “I’m Doctor Tachyon, and yes, you do know me. We’ve shared mind.”
“Mind ... mind. I touched Henry’s mind, but it was awful, awful!” She jerked upright, and sat quivering like some small frightened animal. “He’s done such terrible, dishonorable things, I had no idea, and I thought he was—” She bit off the flow of words, and grasped for his arm. “I have to live with him now. Never be free of him. People should be more careful when they choose ... it’s better, I think, not to know what’s behind their eyes.” Her eyes closed briefly, and her brow furrowed. Suddenly the lashes were lifted, and her nails bit deep into his bicep. “I liked your mind,” she announced.
“Thank you. I believe I can say with some accuracy that I have an extraordinary mind. Far and away the best you’re ever likely to meet.”
She chuckled, a deep, husky sound strangely at odds with her delicate looks. He laughed with her, pleased to see the color returning to her cheeks.
“Only one I’m likely to meet. Do people find you vain?” she continued in a more conversational tone, and she settled back against the pillows.
“No, not vain. Arrogant, sometimes overbearing, but never vain. You see, my face won’t carry it.”
“Oh, I don’t know” She reached up, and drew her fingers softly down his cheek. “I think it’s a nice face.” He pulled prudently back although it cost him to do so. She looked hurt, and shrank in upon herself.
“Blythe, I’ve sent someone to check on your husband.” She turned her face away, nuzzling her cheek into the pillow. “I know you feel sullied by what you’ve learned of him, but we have to make certain he’s all right.” He rose from the bed, and her hands reached out for him. He caught them, and chafed the slender fingers between his.
“I can’t go back to him, I can’t!”
“You can make those kind of decisions in the morning,” he said soothingly. “Right now I want you to get some sleep.”
“You saved my sanity.”
“It was my pleasure.” He gave her his best bow, and pressed the soft skin of her inner wrist to his lips. It was unconscionable behavior, but he felt pleased by his selfcontrol.
“Please come back tomorrow.”
“I’ll bring you breakfast in bed, and personally spoon-feed you the disgusting mess that passes for hot cereal in this establishment. You can tell me more about my wonderful mind and nice face.”
“Only if you promise to reciprocate.”
“You have nothing to fear on that score.”
They floated in a silvery white sea held by the lightest of mental touches. It was warm and maternal and sensual all at the same time, and he was dimly aware of his body responding to the first true sharing he had experienced in months. He forced his attention back to the session. The ward hung between them like a peripatetic firefly.
Again. Can’t. Hard. Necessary. Now again.
The firefly resumed its erratic course, tracing out the complex lines and whorls of a mentatic ward. There was a bulge of darkness, like a tide of stinking mud, and the ward shattered. Tachyon snapped back to his body just in time to catch Blythe as she pitched face first toward the concrete of the rooftop terrace.
His mind was aching with strain. “You must hold him.”
“I can’t. He hates me, and wants to destroy me.” Sobs punctuated the words.
“We’ll try again. “
“No!”
He gripped her, one arm about her shoulders, the other holding her slender hands. “I’ll be with you. I won’t let him hurt you.”
She sucked in a breath, and gave a sharp nod. “Okay, I’m ready.”
They began again. This time he stayed in closer link. Suddenly he became aware of a whirlpool of power sucking at his mind, his identity, drawing him ever deeper into her.
There was a feeling of rape, of violation, of loss. He broke contact, and went staggering across the roof. When he returned to a sense of his surroundings he found himself in intimate embrace with a small willow tree drooping sadly out of a concrete planter, and Blythe was sobbing miserably into her hands.
She looked absurdly young and vulnerable in her Dior coat of black wool and fur collar. The severity of the color heightened the pallor of her skin, and the tight high-standing collar made her look like a lost Russian princess. His feeling of violation dwindled in the face of her obvious distress.
“I’m sorry, so sorry. I didn’t mean to. I just wanted to be closer to you.”
“Never mind.” He dropped a few pecking kisses onto her cheek. “We’re both tired. We’ll try again tomorrow.”
And so they did; working day after day until by the end of the week she had solid control over her unwelcome mental passenger. Henry van Renssaeler had yet to put in a physical appearance at the hospital; instead, a discreet black maid had brought Blythe her clothes. It suited Tachyon just as well. He was pleased that the man had come through his experience unharmed, but close contact with Representative van Renssaeler’s mind had brought little enjoyment, and in truth he was jealous of the man. He had a right to Blythe, mind, body, and soul, and Tachyon craved that position. He would have made her his genamiri with all honor and love, and kept her safe and protected, but such dreams were fruitless. She belonged to another man.
One evening he came late to her room to find her in bed reading. In his arms he carried thirty long-stemmed pink roses, and while she laughed and protested he began to cover her with the fragrant blossoms. Once the flower coverlet was complete he stretched out beside her.
“You devil! If you poke me with thorns ....”
“I pulled them all off. “
“You’re crazy. How long did that take?”
“Hours.”
“And didn’t you have anything better to do with your time?”
He rolled over, wrapping his arms around her. “I didn’t stint my patients, I promise. I did it at weird o’clock this morning.” He nuzzled her ear, and when she didn’t push him away he switched to her mouth. His lips played over hers, tasting the sweetness and the promise, and excitement coursed through him when her arms tightened about his neck.
“Will you make love with me?” he whispered against her mouth.
“Is that how you ask all the girls?”
“No,” he cried, stung by the laughter in her voice. He sat up, and brushed petals from his coat of dull rose.
She stripped petals from several roses. “You have quite a reputation. According to Dr. Bonners you’ve slept with every nurse on this floor.”
“Bonners is an old busybody, and besides, some of them aren’t pretty enough.”
“Then you admit it.” She used the denuded stem as a pointer.
“I admit I like to sleep with girls, but with you it would be different. “
She lay back, a hand over her eyes. “Oh, spare me, Lord, I’ve heard these words before.”
“Where?” he asked, suddenly curious, for he sensed she wasn’t talking about Henry.
“On the Riviera, when I was much younger and a good deal more foolish.”
He cuddled in close. “Oh, tell me.”
A rose slapped him on the nose. “No, you tell me about seduction on Takis.”
“I prefer to do my flirting while dancing.”
“Why dancing?”
“Because it’s vastly romantic.”
The covers were flung aside, and she began shrugging into an amber peignoir. “Show me,” she commanded, opening her arms.
He slipped his arm around her waist, and took her right hand in his left. “I’ll teach you Temptation. It’s a very pretty waltz.”
“Does it live up to its name?”
“Let’s try it, and you tell me.”
He alternated between humming in his light baritone and calling out instructions as they walked through the intricacies of the dance.
“My! Are all your dances so complicated?”
“Yes, it shows off what clever, graceful fellows we are.”
“Let’s do it again, and this time just hum. I think I’ve got the basic steps, and you can just shove me when I get off.”
“I will guide you as befits a man with his lady.”
He was turning her under one arm, gazing down into her laughing blue eyes, when an outraged “hrrmph” broke the moment. Blythe gasped, and seemed to realize what a scandalous picture she presented; her feet bare, unbound hair rippling across her shoulders, her filmy lace peignoir revealing far too much of her decolletage. She scurried back to bed, and pulled the covers up to her chin.
“Archibald,” she squeaked.
“Mr. Holmes,” said Tachyon, recovering himself and holding out his hand.
The Virginian ignored it, and stared at the alien from beneath knotted brows. The man had been assigned by President Truman to coordinate the relief efforts in Manhattan, and they had shared podium space during several frantic press conferences in the weeks immediately following the catastrophe. He looked a lot less friendly now.
He stepped to the bed and dropped a fatherly kiss on the top of Blythe’s head. “I’ve been out of town, and returned to find you’ve been ill. Nothing serious, I hope?”
“No.” She laughed. It was a little too high and a little too tight. “I’ve become an ace. Isn’t that remarkable?”
“An ace! What are your abilities—” He broke off abruptly, and stared at Tachyon. “If you’ll excuse us, I’d like to speak with my goddaughter alone.”
“Of course. Blythe, I’ll see you in the morning.”
When he returned, seven hours later, she was gone. Checked out, the desk said; an old friend of the family, Archibald Holmes, had picked her up about an hour before. For a moment he considered stopping by her penthouse, but decided it could only lead to trouble. She was Henry van Renssaeler’s wife, and nothing could change that. He tried to tell himself it didn’t matter, and returned to his pursuit of a young nurse up in the maternity ward.
He tried to put Blythe from his mind, but at the oddest moments he would find himself recalling the brush of her fingers across his cheek, the deep blue of her eyes, the scent of her perfume, and most of all, her mind. That memory of beauty and gentleness haunted him, for here among the psiblind he felt very isolated. One simply didn’t join in telepathic communication with everyone one met, and hers had been his first real contact since his arrival on earth. He sighed and wished he could see her again.
He had rented an apartment in a converted brownstone near Central Park. It was a sultry Sunday afternoon in August 1947, and he was wandering around the single room in a silk shirt and boxer shorts. Every window stood open in the hope of catching a breeze, his teakettle was whistling shrilly on the stove, and Verdi’s La Traviata blared from the phonograph. The extreme decibel level was dictated by his neighbor one floor down who was addicted to Bing Crosby albums, and who had been listening over and over again to “Moonlight Becomes You.” Tachyon wished Jerry had met his current girlfriend in sunlight on Coney Island; his musical selections seemed dictated by the times and places where he met his inamoratas.
The alien had just picked up a gardenia and was debating how best to place it in the glass flower bowl when there was a knock.
“Okay, Jerry,” he bellowed, lunging to the door. “I’ll turn it down, but only if you agree to bury Bing. Why don’t we have a truce and try something nonvocal? Glenn Miller or somebody. Just don’t make me listen to that harelip anymore.”
He yanked open the door, and felt his jaw drop. “I think it would be a good idea if you did turn it down,” said Blythe van Renssaeler.
He stared at her for several seconds, then reached down and gave the tail of his shirt a discreet tug. She smiled, and he noticed that she had dimples. How had he missed that before? He had thought her face was indelibly printed on his mind. She waved a hand in front of his face.
“Hello, remember me?” She tried to keep her tone light, but there was a fearful intensity about her.
“Of ... of course. Come in.”
She didn’t move. “I’ve got a suitcase.”
“So I see.”
“I’ve been thrown out.”
“You can still come in ... suitcase and all.”
“I don’t want you to feel ... well, trapped.”
He tucked the gardenia behind her ear, removed the case from her hand, and pulled her in. The flounces of her pale, peach-colored silk dress brushed against his legs, pulling the hair upright at the electric contact. Women’s fashion was a pet hobby with Tachyon, and he noticed that the dress was a Dior original, the ankle-length skirt held out by a number of chiffon petticoats. He realized he could probably span her waist with his hands. The bodice was supported by two thin straps, leaving most of her back bare. He liked the way her shoulder blades moved beneath the white skin. There was an answering movement from within his jockey shorts.
Embarrassed, he darted for the closet. “Let me put on some pants. Water’s ready for tea, and turn down that record.”
“Do you take milk or lemon in your tea?”
“Neither. I take it over ice. I’m about to die.” He padded across the room, tucking in the shirt.
“It’s a lovely day.”
“It’s a lovely hot day. My planet is a good deal cooler than yours. “
Her eyes flickered away, and she plucked at a wisp of hair. “I know you’re an alien, but it seems strange to talk about it.”
“Then we won’t.” He busied himself with the tea while studying her surreptitiously from the corner of one eye. “You seem very composed for a woman who’s just been thrown out,” he finally remarked.
“I had my hoo in the back of a taxi.” She smiled sadly. “Poor man, he thought he had a real nut on his hands. Especially since—” She cut off abruptly, using the acceptance of the cup as a way to avoid his searching gaze.
“Not complaining, mind you, but why did you .... r ..”
“Come to you?” She drifted across the room and turned down the phonograph. “This is a very sad part.” He forced his attention back to the music and realized it was the farewell scene between Violetta and Alfredo. “Uh ... yes, it is.”
She spun to face him and her eyes were haunted. “I came to you because Earl is too absorbed with his causes and marches and strikes and actions, and David, poor boy, would have been terrified at the thought of acquiring a hysterical older woman. Archibald would have urged me to patch things up and stay with Henry-fortunately, he wasn’t home when I went by, but Jack was and he wanted me ... well, far too badly.”
He shook his head like a stallion bedeviled by gnats. “Blythe, who are these people?”
“How can you be so ill-informed,” she teased, and struck a dramatic pose-so dramatic that it made a mockery of the words. “We are the Four Aces.” Suddenly she began to shake, sending tea sloshing over the rim of the cup.
Tach crossed to her, took the cup, and held her against his chest. Her tears formed a warm, wet patch on his shirt, and he reached out for her mind, but she seemed to sense his intent, and pushed him violently away.
“No, don’t, not until I explain what I’ve done. Otherwise you’re likely to get a terrific shock.” He waited while she removed an embroidered handkerchief from her purse, gave her nose a resolute blow, and patted at her eyes. When she again raised her head she was calm, and he admired her dignity and control. “You must think me a typical scatterbrained female. Well, I won’t bore you anymore. I’ll start at the beginning and be quite logical.”
“You left without saying good-bye,” he broke in. “Archibald thought it best, and when he’s being fatherly and commanding, I’ve never been able to say no to him.” Her mouth worked. “Not about anything. When he learned what I could do, he told me that I had a great gift. That I could preserve priceless knowledge. He urged me to join his group.” He snapped his fingers. “Earl Sanderson, and Jack Braun. “
“That’s right.”
He bounded up and paced the room. “They were involved in something down in Argentina, and in capturing Mengele and Eichmann, but four?”
“David Harstein, otherwise known as the Envoy—”
“I know him, I treated him only a few ... never mind, go on.”
“And me.” She smiled with a little girl’s embarrassment. “Brain Trust.”
He sank back down on the couch, and stared at her. “What has he .. what have you done.”
“Used my talent the way Archibald advised. Want to know anything about relativity, rocket technology, nuclear physics, biochemistry?”
“He’s been sending you around the country absorbing minds,” he said. Then he exploded. “Who in the hell do you have in your head?”
She joined him on the sofa. “Einstein, Salk, Von Braun, Oppenheimer, Teller, and Henry of course, but I’d like to forget about that.” She smiled. “And that’s the crux of the problem. Henry didn’t take kindly to a wife with several Nobel prizewinners in her head, much less a wife who knew where all his skeletons were buried, so this morning he threw me out. I wouldn’t mind so much if it weren’t for the children. I don’t know what he’s going to tell them about their mother, and—oh damn,” she whispered, banging her fists on her knees. “I will not start crying again.”
“Anyway, I was trying to think of what to do. I had just wrestled free from Jack, and was bawling in the back of a taxi, when I thought of you.” Suddenly Tachyon became aware that she was speaking German. He bit down hard, forcing his tongue against the roof of his mouth to hold back nausea. “It’s silly, but in some ways I feel closer to you than I do to anyone else in the world; which is strange when you consider that you’re not even from this world.”
Her smile was half siren, half Mona Lisa, but there was no answering physical and emotional response. He was too sickened and angry. “Sometimes I don’t understand you people at all! Have you no conception of the dangers inherent in this virus?”
“No, how can I?” she interrupted. “Henry took us out of the city within hours of the crisis, and we didn’t return until he thought the danger was past.” She was back to English again. “Well, he was wrong, wasn’t he!”
“Yes, but that’s not my fault!”
“I’m not saying it is!”
“Then what are you so angry about?”
“Holmes,” he ejected. “You called him fatherly, but if he had had any affection for you at all, he would not have encouraged you in this mad course.”
“What is so mad about it? I’m young, many of these men are old. I’m preserving priceless knowledge.”
“At the risk of your own sanity.”
“You taught me—”
“You’re a humanl You’re not trained to handle the stress of high-level mentatics. The techniques I taught you in the hospital to keep your personality separate from your husband’s were inadequate, nowhere near strong enough.”
“Then teach me what I need to know. Or cure me.” The challenge brought him up short. “I can’t ... at least not yet. The virus is hellishly complex, working out a counter strain to nullify ...” He shrugged. “To trump the wild card, if you will, may take me years. I’m one man working alone.”
“Then I’ll go back to Jack.” She picked up the case, and lurched toward the door. It was an oddly compelling mixture of dignity and farce as the heavy bag pulled her off balance. “And if I should go mad, perhaps Archibald will find me a good psychiatrist. After all, I am one of the Four Aces.”
“Wait ... you can’t just go.”
“Then you’ll teach me?”
He dug thumb and middle finger into the corners of his eyes, and gave the bridge of his nose a hard squeeze. “I’ll try.” The case hit the floor, and she slowly approached him. He warded her off with his free hand. “One last thing. I’m not a saint, nor one of your human monks.” He gestured toward the curtained alcove that held his bed. “Someday I’ll want you.”
“So what’s wrong with now?” She pushed aside the restraining hand, and molded her body to his. It was not a particularly lush body. In fact, it could have been described as meager, but any fault he might have found vanished as her hands cupped his face and pulled his lips down to meet hers.
“A lovely day.” Tachyon sighed with satisfaction, scrubbed at his face with his hand, and stripped off his socks and underwear.
Blythe smiled at him from the bathroom mirror where she stood creaming her face. “Any earth male who heard you say that would decide you were certifiably insane. A day spent in the company of an eight-year-old, a five-year-old, and a threeyear-old is not held to be a high treat by most men.”
“Your men are stupid.” He stared off into space, for a moment remembering the feel of sticky hands in his pockets as a bevy of tiny cousins searched for the treats he carried there, the press of a soft, plump baby cheek against his when he went away promising most faithfully to come again soon and play. He pushed back the past, and found her intently regarding him. “Homesick?”
“Thinking.”
“Homesick.”
“Children are a joy and a delight,” he said hurriedly before she could reopen their ongoing argument. Picking up a brush, he pulled it through his long hair. “In fact, I’ve often wondered if yours aren’t changlings or if you cuckolded old Henry from the beginning.”
Six months ago, when Blythe had been thrown from the house, van Renssaeler had instructed the servants to refuse entrance to his estranged wife, thus barring her from her children. Tach had quickly remedied that situation. Every week, when they knew the representative was away from home, they went to the penthouse apartment, Tachyon mindcontrolled the servants, and they’d spend several hours playing with Henry Jr., Brandon, and Fleur. He’d then instruct the nurse and housekeeper to forget the visit. It gave him great satisfaction to thumb his nose at the hated Henry, though for real vengeance the man should have been aware of their challenge to his authority.
Tossing the brush aside, he gathered up the evening paper and crawled into bed. On the front page was a picture of Earl receiving a medal for having saved Gandhi. Jack and Holmes stood in the background, the older man looking smug, while Jack looked ill at ease. “Here’s a picture from the banquet tonight,” he added. “But I still don’t see why all the fuss. It was only an attempt.”
“We don’t share your callous attitude toward assassination.” Her voice was muffled by the folds of her flannel nightgown as she pulled it over her head.
“I know, and it still seems strange.” He rolled over on his side propped up on one elbow. “Do you know that until I came to earth I had never gone anywhere without bodyguards?”
The old bed squeaked a bit as she settled in. “That’s terrible.”
“We’re accustomed to it. Assassination is a way of life among my class. It’s how the families jockey for position. By the time I was twenty I had lost fourteen members of my immediate family to assassination.”
“How immediate is immediate?”
“My mother ... I think. I was only four when she was found at the bottom of the stairs near the women’s quarters. I’ve always suspected my Aunt Sabina was behind it, but there was no proof.”
“Poor little boy.” Her hand cupped his cheek. “Do you remember her at all?”
“Just flashes. The rustle of silk and lace and the smell of her perfume mostly. And her hair, like a golden cloud.” She rolled over and snuggled close, her buttocks pressing into his groin. “What else is so different between Takis and earth?” It was an obvious attempt to change the subject, and he was grateful to her. Talking about the family he had abandoned always made him sad and homesick.
“Women, for one thing.”
“Are we better or worse?”
“Just different. You wander about free after you reach childbearing age. We would never allow that. A successful attack against a pregnant woman could wipe out years of careful planning.”
“I think that’s horrible too.”
“We also don’t equate sex with sin. A sin to us is casual reproduction which could upset the plan. But pleasure, now, that’s another matter. For example, we take attractive young men and women from the lower class-the non-psi people and train them to service the men and women of the great households.”
“Don’t you ever see the women of your own class?”
“Of course. Until age thirty we grow up together, train and study together. It’s only when a woman reaches childbearing years that she is secluded to keep her safe. And we still get together for family functions: balls, hunts, picnics, but all within the walls of the estate.”
“How long are the little boys left with their mothers in the women’s quarters?”
“All children are left until they’re thirteen.”
“Do they ever see each other again?”
“Of course, they’re our mothers!”
“Don’t be defensive. It’s just very alien to me.”
“So to speak,” he said, snagging the gown and running his hand up her leg.
“So you have sex toys,” she mused while his hands explored her body, and she fondled his stiffening penis. “Sounds like a nice idea.”
“Want to be my sex toy?”
“I thought I already was.”
It was a chill that brought him awake. He sat up to find Blythe gone, and the covers trailing across the floor. He became aware of voices from beyond the beaded curtain. The wind was gusting about the building, setting up a keening howl as it sought out the cracks and crevices in the windows. The hair on the back of his neck was rising, but it had nothing to do with the cold. It was those deep guttural voices from behind the curtain, reminding him of children’s boogy stories of unquiet ancestor ghosts possessing the living bodies of direct descendants. He shivered, and thrust through the beads. They fell tinkling behind him, and he saw Blythe standing in the center of the room carrying on a spirited argument with herself.
“I tell you, Oppie, we must develop—”
“No! We’ve been over this before, our first priority is the device. We can’t be sidetracked with this hydrogen bomb right now.”
For a long moment Tachyon stood frozen with horror. Such things had happened before, when she was tired or under stress, but never to such an extent. He knew he had to find her quickly if she was not to be lost, and he forced himself to move. In two strides he was at her side, gripping her close, reaching for her mind. And he almost retreated in terror, for inside was a nightmarish whirlpool of conflicting personalities, all battling for supremacy while Blythe spun helplessly in the center. He plunged toward her only to be blocked by Henry. Furiously Tachyon thrust him aside, and gathered her within the protective ward of his mind. The other six personalities orbited around them, fighting the ward. Blythe’s strength combined with his, and they banished Teller to his compartment, and Oppenheimer to his; Einstein retreated mumbling while Salk just seemed bemused.
Blythe slumped against him, and the sudden weight was too much for his exhausted body. His knees gave way, and he sat down hard on the wood floor, Blythe cradled in his lap. Out in the street he could hear the milkman making his deliveries, and he realized it had taken hours to restore her balance. “God damn you, Archibald,” he muttered, but it seemed inadequate, as inadequate as his ability to help.
“You don’t want to do that,” murmured David Harstein. Tack’s hand froze. “The knight would be better.” The Takisian nodded, and quickly moved the chess piece. His jaw dropped as he contemplated the move.
“You cheat! Why, you miserable cheat!”
Harstein spread his hands in a helpless, placating gesture. “It was just a suggestion.” The young man’s tone was soft and aggrieved, but his dark brown eyes were alight with amusement.
Tachyon grunted, and wriggled back until he could lean against the sofa. “I find it rather alarming that a person of your position would stoop to using your gifts in such a despicable manner. You should be setting an example for the other aces.” David grinned, and reached for his drink. “That’s the public face. Surely with my creator I can fall back into my lazy, bohemian ways.”
“Don’t.”
There was a moment of strained silence while Tach stared inward at pictures he would rather forget, and David with elaborate concentration gave the pocket pegboard chess set an infinitesimal shift to the left.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.” He gave the younger man a soothing smile. “Let’s go on with the game.”
David nodded, and bent his wiry dark head over the board. Tach took a sip of his Irish coffee, and allowed the warmth to fill his mouth before swallowing. He was ashamed of his overreaction to the teasing remark. After all, the boy had meant no harm.
He had met David in the hospital in early 1947. On the Wild Card Day, Harstein had been playing chess at a sidewalk cafe. No symptoms had manifested themselves then, but months later he had been brought writhing and convulsing into the hospital. Tach had feared that this intense, handsome man would be yet another faceless victim, but against all expectations he had recovered. They had tested: David’s body exuded powerful pheromones, pheromones that made him hard to resist on any level. He was recruited by Archibald Holmes, dubbed the Envoy by a fascinated press, and proceeded to use his awesome charisma to settle strikes, negotiate treaties, and mediate with world leaders.
Of the other male Aces he was Tachyon’s favorite, and under David’s tutelage he had learned to play chess. It was a testimonial both to his own growing abilities and to David’s teaching skills that he had resorted to his powers in an effort to keep the game from Tach. The alien smiled, and decided to repay the other man for his interference.
He carefully sent out a probe, slipped beneath David’s defenses, and watched as that fine mind weighed and evaluated possible moves. The decision was reached, but before Harstein could act upon it Tach gave a sharp twist, erasing the decision, and substituting another in its place.
“Check.”
David stared down at the board, then flipped it onto the floor with a howl while Tach climbed onto the couch, buried his head in a pillow, and laughed.
“Talk about me cheating. I can’t control my power, but you! Reach into a man’s head and ...”
A key scraped in the lock, and Blythe called out, “Children, children, what are you battling about now?”
“He cheats,” the two men called in chorus, pointing at one another.
Tach gathered her into his arms. “You’re freezing. Let me fix you some tea. How was the conference?”
“Not bad.” She removed her fur hat, and shook snow from the silver-tipped ends. “With Werner down with the croup they were grateful to have my input.” She leaned forward, and pressed a soft kiss on David’s darkly shadowed cheek. “Hello, dear, bow was Russia?”
“Bleak.” He began collecting the scattered chessmen. “You know, it doesn’t seem fair.”
“What?” Tossing her coat onto the sofa, she pulled off her muddy boots, and curled up against the pillows with her feet tucked snugly beneath the silver fox fur.
“Earl gets to snatch Bormann out of Italy and save Gandhi from a Hindu fanatic, and you get to sit in a sleazy motel and attend a rocketry conference.”
“They also serve who only sit and talk. As you should well know. Besides, you’ve gotten your fair share of the glory. What about Argentina?”
“That was more than a year ago, and all I did was talk to the Peronists while Earl and jack intimidated the jackboots in the street. Now, who do you think the press noticed? Us? Not likely. You’ve got to have flash to get noticed in this business.”
“And just what is this business?” interjected Tachyon, pressing a mug of steaming tea into Blythe’s hands.
David hunched forward, his head thrusting out from his stooped shoulders like an inquisitive bird. “Salvaging something out of the disaster. Using these gifts to improve the human condition.”
“That’s how it starts, but will it end there? My experience with super-races—being a member of one myself—is that we take what we want, and the devil take anyone else. When a tiny minority of people on Takis began to develop mental powers, they quickly began interbreeding to make certain no one else would get a chance at the powers. It gave us a planet to rule, and we’re only eight percent of the population.”
“We’ll be different.” Harstein’s wry laugh made a mockery of the statement.
“I hope so. But I’m more comforted by the knowledge that there are only a few dozen of you aces, and that Archibald hasn’t welded all of you into this great force for Democracy.” His thin lips twisted a bit on the final words.
Blythe reached out, and pushed his bangs off his forehead. “You disapprove?”
“I worry.”
“Why?”
“I think you and David should be grateful that you’re out of the public eye. The rage of the have-nots against the haves is never pretty, and your race has a tradition of suspicion and hostility toward the stranger. You aces are surpassing strange. What is it one of your holy books says? Suffer not the witch?”
“But we’re just people,” Blythe objected.
“No, you’re not ... not anymore, and the others won’t forget it. I know of thirty-seven of you, there may be more, and you’re undetectable-not like the jokers. National hysteria is a particularly virulent and fast-growing weed. People are seeing Communists everywhere, and it probably wouldn’t take much to transfer that distrust to some other terrifying minority-like an unseen, secret, awesomely powered group of people.”
“I think you’re overreacting.”
“Am I? Take these HUAC hearings.” He gestured toward a pile of newspapers. “And two days ago a federal jury indicted Alger Hiss for perjury. These are not the actions of a sane and stable nation. And this during your month of joy and rebirth.”
“No, that’s Easter. This is the first birth.” David’s weak joke sank into the heavy silence that washed through the room, broken only by the hiss of wind driven snow against the windows.
Harstein sighed and stretched. “What a gloomy bunch we are. What say we get some dinner, and find a concert? Satchmo is playing uptown. “
Tach shook his head. “I have to go back to the hospital.”
“Now?” wailed Blythe.
“My darling, I must.”
“Then I’ll go with you.”
“No, that’s silly. Let David take you to dinner.”
“No.” Her lips had tightened into a mulish line. “If you won’t let me help, I can at least keep you company.”
He sighed and rolled his eyes as she pulled on her boots. “Stubborn lady,” David remarked from beneath the coffee table, where he was scrabbling after the scattered chess pieces. “We’ve all discovered that it does no good to argue with her.”
“You should try living with her.”
The delicate pillbox hat warped beneath the sudden tightening of her fingers. “Believe me, we can solve that problem.”
“Don’t start,” Tach said warningly.
“And don’t take that disapproving-father tone with me! I’m not a child, nor one of your secluded Takisian ladies.”
“If you were, you’d behave better; and as for being a child, you’re certainly acting like one-and a spoiled one at that. We’ve had this discussion before, and I’m not going to do what you want.”
“We have not had a discussion. You have constantly closed me off, changed the subject, refused to discuss the matter—”
“I’m due at the hospital.” He started for the door. “You see?” she shot at the uncomfortable Harstein. “Has he cut me off, or has he cut me off?”
The young man shrugged, and crammed the chess set into the pocket of his shapeless corduroy jacket. For once, he seemed at a loss for words.
“David, kindly take my genamiri to dinner, and try to return her to me in a somewhat better frame of mind.” Blythe cast Harstein a pleading look, while Tachyon stared with regal disdain at the far wall.
“Hey, folks. I think you ought to take a nice romantic walk in the snow, talk things over, have a late supper, make love and quit bickering. Whatever it is, it can’t be that big of a problem.”
“You’re right,” murmured Blythe, the rigidity passing from her body under the relaxing wash of pheromones. David placed a hand in Tach’s back, and urged him out the door. Lifting Blythe’s hand, he placed it firmly in Tachyon’s, and made a vague gesture of benediction over their heads. “Now go, my children, and sin no more.” He followed them down the stairs and into the streets, then bolted for the subway before the pacifying effects of his power could wear off.
“Now do you see why I don’t want you working with me?” The moon had managed to slip beneath the skirt of the clouds, and the pale silver light streaming across the snow made the city look almost clean. They stood on the edge of Central Park, breath mingling in soft white puffs as she stared seriously up into his face.
“I see that you’re trying to protect and shelter me, but I don’t think it’s necessary and after watching you tonight ...” She hesitated, searching for a way to soften her next words. “I think I can deal with it better than you can. You care for your patients, Tach, but their deformities and insanities .. well, they disgust you too.”
He flinched. “Blythe, I’m so ashamed. Do you think they know, can they sense?”
“No, no, love.” Her hand stroked his hair, soothing him as she would one of her young children. “I see it only because I’m so close to you. They see only the compassion.”
“The Ideal knows I’ve tried to suppress it, but I’ve never seen such horrors.” He jerked away from her comforting arms, and paced the sidewalk. “We don’t tolerate deformity. Among the great houses such creatures are destroyed.” There was a faint noise, and he turned back to face her. One gloved hand was pressed to her mouth, and her eyes were wide, glittering pits in the glow from a nearby streetlight. “And now you know I’m a monster.”
“I think your culture is monstrous. Every child is precious no matter what its disabilities.”
“So my sister thought, and our monstrous culture destroyed her too.”
“Tell me.”
He began drawing random patterns on a snow-covered park bench. “She was the eldest, some thirty years my senior, but we were very close. She was married outside the house during one of those rare family truces. Her first child was defective and put down, and Jadlan never recovered. She killed herself several months later.” His hand swept across the bench, obliterating the drawings. Blythe lifted his hand, and chafed the chilled fingers between her gloved hands. “It started me thinking about the whole structure of my society. Then came the decision to field-test the virus on earth, and that was the end. I couldn’t sit by any longer.”
“Your sister must have been special, different, like you.”
“My cousin says it’s the Sennari line that we carry. It’s a throwback recessive that-according to him, anyway-should never have been permitted to continue. But I’m losing you with all this talk of pedigree, and your teeth are rattling in your head. Let’s get home and get you warm.”
“No, not until we settle this.” He didn’t pretend not to understand. “I can help you, and I insist that you let me share this with you. Give me your mind.”
“No, that would be eight personalities. It’s too many.”
“Let me be the judge of that. I’m managing just fine with seven.”
He made a rude noise, and she stiffened with outrage. “Like you managed in February when I found Teller and Oppenheimer battling over the hydrogen bomb, while you stood like a zombie in the center of the room?”
“This will be different. You’re beloved to me, your mind will not harm me. And beyond the work ... when I have your memories and knowledge you won’t be lonely anymore.”
“I haven’t been lonely, not since you came.”
“Liar. I’ve seen the way you gaze off into the distance, and the sad music you pull out of that violin when you think I’m not listening. Let me be there to provide you with a small part of home.” She placed a hand across his mouth. “Don’t argue.” So he didn’t, and he allowed himself to be convinced. More out of love for her than any real acceptance of her arguments. And late that night, as her legs tightened about his waist, and her nails raked down his sweat-slick back, and he came in violent release, she reached out, and sucked in his mind as well.
There was a terrible, gut-wrenching moment of violation, theft, loss, then it was over, and from the mirror of her mind came back two images. The beloved, lady-soft, gentle touch that was Blythe, and a frighteningly familiar and equally beloved image that was him.
“Damn them all!” Tachyon raged the length of the small antechamber, spun, and fixed Prescott Quinn with an outthrust forefinger. “It is outrageous, unconscionable, to summon us in this manner. How dare they-and by what right do they-pull us from our home, and send us haring off to Washington on two hours’-two hours’—notice?”
Quinn sucked noisily on the stem of his pipe. “By the right of law and custom. They’re members of Congress, and this committee is empowered to call and examine witnesses.” He was a burly old man with an impressive gut that stretched his watch chain, complete with Phi Beta Kappa key, across the severe black of his waistcoat.
“Then call us in to witness-though God knows to whatand have an end to this. We came tumbling down here last night only to be told the hearing had been postponed, and now they keep us cooling our heels for three hours.”
Quinn grunted, and rubbed at his bushy white eyebrows. “If you think this is much of a wait, young man, you’ve a lot to learn about the federal government.”
“Tack, sit down, have some coffee,” murmured Blythe, looking pale but composed in a black knit dress, veiled hat, and gloves.
David Harstein came mooching into the antechamber, and the two Marine guards at the chamber door stiffened and eyed him warily. “Thank God, a touch of sanity in the midst of madness and nightmares.”
“Oh, David, darling.” Blythe’s hands clutched feverishly at his shoulders. “Are you all right? Was it terrible yesterday?”
“No, it was great ... all except being continually referred to as the ‘Jewish gentleman from New York’ by that Nazi Rankin. They questioned me about China: I told them we had done everything possible to negotiate a settlement between Mao and Chiang. They of course concurred. I then suggested that they disband these hearings, and they agreed amid much joy and applause, and—”
“And then you left the room,” interrupted Tach. “Yes.” His dark head drooped and he contemplated his clasped hands. “They’re constructing a glass booth now, and I’ll be recalled. Damn them anyway!”
A supercilious page entered and called for Mrs. Blythe van Renssaeler. She started, her purse falling to the floor. Tach recovered it, and pressed his cheek against hers.
“Peace, beloved. You’re more than a match for them alone, much less with all the rest of you along. And don’t forget, I’m with you.” She smiled faintly. Quinn took her arm, and escorted her into the hearing room. Tachyon had a brief glimpse of backs, cameras, and a jumble of tables all washed in a fierce white light from the television spots. Then the door closed with a dull thud.
“Game?” asked David. “Sure, why not.”
“I’m not imposing? Would you rather prepare your testimony?”
“What testimony? I don’t know anything about China.”
“When did they get you?” His deft hands flew, setting up the board.
“Yesterday afternoon about one.”
“It’s all such a crock,” the Envoy said with a marked lack of diplomacy, and viciously jammed in a pawn at Queen’s pawn four.
They were still at the game when Blythe and Quinn returned. The board went flying with the alien’s precipitous leap, but David didn’t remonstrate with him. Blythe was as pale as death, and shaking.
“What did they do?” demanded Tach, the words harsh in his throat. She didn’t answer, merely shivered within the circle of his arms like a wounded animal.
“Dr. Tachyon, this is going a bit beyond China. We must talk.”
“A moment.” He bent to her, and pressed his lips against her temple. He could feel the pulse beating there. Quickly he slipped beneath her defense, and sent a calming tide flowing through her mind. With a final shudder she relaxed, and loosened her grip on the lapel of his pale peach coat. “Sit with David, love. I have to talk to Mr. Quinn.” He knew he was talking down to her, but stress could warp the fragile structure she had constructed to keep her divergent personalities separated, and what he had found in that brief incursion had been an eroding edifice.
The lawyer drew him aside. “China was the excuse, Doctor. The issue now is this virus. I think this committee has gotten the idea that the aces are a subversive force, and they may reflect the mood in the country at large.”
“Dr. Tachyon,” called the page. Quinn waved him back with an abrupt slash.
“Absurd!”
“Nonetheless, I now understand why you’re here. My advice to you is to take the Fifth.”
“Which means?”
“You refuse to answer all and any questions. That includes your name. Such a response has been construed as a waiver of the Fifth.”
Tach drew himself up to his full, unimpressive height. “I do not fear these men, Mr. Quinn, nor will I sit and condemn myself by silence. We will stop this foolishness now!”
The room was an obstacle course of lights, chairs, tables, people, and the snaking cables. Once he caught his heel, stumbled, pulling himself up with a muttered curse. For an instant the room faded, and he saw the parqueted, chandelierlit expanse of the Ilkazam ballroom and heard the titters of family and friends as he had stood lost in the midst of the intricacies of Princes Baffled. Because of his error the dance had come to a grinding, stumbling halt, and over the music he could hear his cousin Zabb’s nasal voice describing in ruthless detail precisely which step he had missed. Hot blood rushed to his cheeks, and brought a line of sweat to his upper lip. Removing a handkerchief he dabbed at the moisture, then noticed that his discomfort was not entirely due to his memories; because of the television lights the room was broiling.
As he settled himself on the hard, straight-backed wooden chair, Tach noted the skeletal frame of the glass box that was being built to house David. It seemed somehow ominous, like a half-finished scaffold, and he quickly switched his gaze to the nine men who dared to sit in judgment on him and his genamiri. They were remarkable only for their expressions of grim portentousness. Otherwise they were merely a collection of middle-aged to elderly men dressed in ill-fitting dark suits. An expression of regal disdain settled over his features, and he lounged back in the chair, his very relaxation making a mockery of their power.
“Wish you had heeded me on the matter of your dress,” murmured Quinn as he opened his briefcase.
“You told me to dress well. I did.”
Quinn eyed the swallow-tailed coat and pants of pale peach, the vest embroidered in shades of green and gold, and the high soft boots with their gold tassels. “Black would have been better.”
“I’m not a common laborer.”
“Would you state your name for the committee,” said Chairman Wood, without looking up from his papers.
He leaned in to the microphone. “I am known on your world as Dr. Tachyon.”
“Your full and real name.”
“You’re quite certain you want that?”
“Would I ask it otherwise?” Wood grunted testily.
“As you wish.” Smiling faintly, the alien launched into a recitation of his complete pedigree. “Tisianne brant Ts’ara sek Halima sek Ragnar sek Omian. So ends my mother’s line,”
“Omian being a relative newcomer to the Ilkazam clan having married in from the Zaghloul. My maternal grandfather was Taj brant Parada sek Amurath sek Ledaa sek Shahriar sek Naxina. His sire was Bakonur brant Sennari—”
“Thank you,” Wood said hurriedly. He glanced down the table at his colleagues. “Perhaps for the purposes of this hearing we can make do with his nom de plume?”
“De guerre,” he corrected sweetly, and enjoyed Wood’s flush of irritation.
There followed several pointless and meandering questions about where he lived and worked; then John Rankin of Mississippi leaned in. “Now as I understand it, Dr. Tachyon, you are not a citizen of the United States of America.”
Tach shot Quinn an incredulous glance. There were titters from the assembled journalists, and Rankin glared.
“No, sir.”
“Then you are an alien.” Satisfaction laced the words. “Undeniably,” he drawled. Leaning nonchalantly back in the chair, he began to play with the folds of his cravat. Case of South Dakota stepped in. “And did you or did you not enter this country illegally?”
“There didn’t seem to be an immigration center at White Sands, on the other hand I didn’t ask, being concerned with more pressing matters at the time.”
“But you have at no time during the intervening years applied for American citizenship?”
The chair scraped back and Tach was on his feet. “The Ideal grant me patience. This is absurd. I have no desire to become a citizen of your country. Your world I find compelling, and even if my ship were capable of hyperspatial travel I would remain because I have patients who need me. What I do not have is either the time or the inclination to bark and caper for the amusement of this ignorant tribunal. Please, carry on with your little games, but leave me to my work—”
Quinn pulled him bodily down into the chair, and laid a hand over the mike. “Just keep it up, and you’ll be surveying this world from behind the walls of a federal penitentiary,” he hissed. “Accept it now! These men have power over you and the means to exercise it. Now apologize, and let’s see what we can salvage from this mess.”
He did so, but with poor grace, and the questioning continued. It was Nixon of California who brought them to the heart of the matter.
“As I understand it, Doctor, it was your family who developed this virus that has cost so many people their lives. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“I beg your pardon?”
He cleared his throat, and said more audibly this time, “Yes.”
“And so you came—”
“To try and prevent its release.”
“And what corroboration do you have for this claim, Tachyon?” granted Rankin.
“My ship’s logs detailing my exchange with the crew of the other ship.”
“And can you obtain these logs?” Nixon again. “They’re on my ship.”
An aide skittered up onto the platform, and there was a hurried conference. “Reports indicate that your ship has resisted all efforts to enter.”
“It was so ordered.”
“Will you arrange to open it, and allow the Air Force to remove the logs?”
“No.” They regarded each other for a long moment. “Will you return my ship, and then I’ll bring you the logs?”
“No.”
He fell back once more in the chair and shrugged. “Well, they wouldn’t have done you much good anyway; we weren’t speaking English.”
“And what about these other aliens? Can we question them?” Rankin’s mouth twisted as if he were regarding something peculiarly unpleasant and slimy.
“I’m afraid they’re all dead.” His voice dropped as he again struggled with the guilt the memories still brought. “I misjudged their determination. They fought the grappler beam, and broke up in the atmosphere.”
“Very convenient. So convenient that I wonder if it wasn’t planned that way?”
“It was Jetboy’s failure that released the virus.”
“Do not sully the name of that great American hero with your slanderous lies!” Rankin shouted, winding up into his full Southern-preacher mode. “I submit to this committee and to the nation that you have remained on this world to study the effects of your evil experiment. That those other aliens were acting as kamikazes ready to die so that you might appear a hero, and live among us accepted and revered, but that in fact you are an alien subversive seekin’ to undermine this great nation by the use of these dangerous wild elements.”
“No!” He was on his feet, hands braced on the table, leaning in on his inquisitors. “No one regrets the events of ‘46 more than I. Yes, I failed ... failed to stop the ship, failed to locate the globe, failed to convince the authorities of the danger, failed to help Jetboy, and I must live with that failure for the rest of my life! All I can do is offer myself ... my talents, my experience working with this virus, to undo what I have created-I’m sorry ... sorry.” He broke off, choked, and sipped gratefully at the water offered by Quinn.
The heat was like a tangible thing, coiling about his body, stealing the breath from his lungs, and leaving him lightheaded. He willed himself not to faint, and pulling the handkerchief from his pocket he wiped at his eyes, and knew he had made another mistake. Males in this culture were trained to suppress emotion. He had just violated another of their taboos. He dropped heavily back into the chair.
“If you are indeed repentant, Dr. Tachyon, then demonstrate it to this committee. What I require from you is a complete list of all the so-called ‘aces’ you have ever treated or heard about. Names ... addresses if possible, and—”
“No.”
“You would be assistin’ your country.”
“It’s not my country, and I won’t help you in your witchhunts.”
“You are in this country illegally, Doctor. Could be that it’s in the best interests of this nation if you were deported. So I’d think over your answer very carefully if I were you.”
“it requires no further thought ... I will not betray my patients.”
“Then the committee has no further questions of this witness. “
At the front doors of the Capitol they walked full into a pale, sharp-featured man.
A tiny sound escaped Blythe, and she clutched at Tach’s arm.
“Afternoon, Henry,” grunted Quinn, and the alien realized that this was the husband of the woman who had shared his bed and his life for two and a half years.
He seemed familiar. Tach had been contending with this persona every time he joined with Blythe in telepathic or physical union. Granted, Henry had been relegated to an unused corner of her mind like discarded lumber in a dusty attic, but the mind was there, and it wasn’t a very nice mind. “Blythe.”
“Henry.”
He raked Tachyon with a cold glance. “If you would excuse us, I’d like to talk to my wife.”
“No, please, don’t leave me.” Her fingers plucked at his coat, and he carefully freed them before she could utterly ruin the crease, and clasped her hand warmly in his.
“I think not.”
The congressman gripped his shoulder, and shoved. It was an error in judgment. Small he might be, but Tachyon had studied with one of the finest personal-defense masters on Takis, and his response was almost more reflexive than conscious. He didn’t bother with martial arts subtlety, just brought his knee up, nailing van Renssaeler in the nuts, and as the other man folded, his fist took him in the face. The congressman hit the ground like he’d been poleaxed, and Tach sucked at his knuckles.
Blythe’s blue eyes were unfocused, staring wildly down at her husband, and Quinn was frowning like a white-haired Zeus. Several people came running to assist the fallen politician, and Quinn, recovering himself quickly, herded them down the steps.
“That was a pretty dirty blow,” he rumbled as he waved down a passing taxi. “It’s not very sporting to kick a man in the balls.”
“I’m not interested in sporting. You fight to win, and failing that you die.”
“Mighty strange world you come from if that’s the code you’re taught.” He grunted again. “And, as if you don’t have troubles enough, I can guarantee that Henry will sue for assault and battery.”
“Consider yourself retained, Prescott,” Blythe said, raising her head from Tach’s shoulder. She was wedged tightly between the two men in the taxi, and Tach could feel the faint shivering that was still running through her body.
“Might be you should consider filing for divorce. Can’t imagine why you didn’t before now. “
“The children. I knew I’d never see them if I divorced Henry.”
“Well, think about it.”
“Where are we going?”
“The Mayflower. Nice hotel, you’ll like it.”
“I want to go to the station. We’re going home.”
“Wouldn’t advise that. My gut is telling me this isn’t over yet, and my belly is an infallible indicator.”
“We’ve given our testimony.”
“But Jack and Earl are still to come, Harstein has to testify again, and there might be something that would require you to be recalled. Let’s just stick until the final hurrah. It’ll save you a trip back if I’m right.”
Tach grudgingly agreed, sinking back against the cushions to watch the city go by.
By Sunday night he was heartily sick of Washington, D.C., heartily sick of the Mayflower, and heartily sick of Quinn’s doom and gloom prophecies. Blythe had tried to maintain the fantasy that they were having a lovely little vacation, and had dragged him about the city to gaze at marble buildings and meaningless statuary, but her dream world was shattered late Friday, when David was held to be in contempt of Congress and the case remanded to a grand jury.
The boy had huddled in their suite alternating between wild confidence that no indictment would be issued and fear that he would be convicted and imprisoned. The latter seemed the most likely, for he had been horribly abusive to the committee during that final day of testimony, even going so far as to compare them to Hitler’s ruling elite. The climate was not forgiving. Tachyon had been driven nearly to distraction trying to suppress David’s more vengeful plans against the committee, and trying to soothe Blythe, who seemed to have completely lost English as a first language, and spoke almost exclusively in German.
His efforts were not aided by the fact that they were under virtual siege in the room; surrounded and badgered by swarming reporters who were undeterred even after Blythe emptied a pot of hot coffee over one who had tried to enter while posing as room service. Only Quinn was permitted within their fortress, and he was so uniformly pessimistic that Tach was ready to pitch him out a window.
Now, as dawn was tinting the eastern sky, Tach lay listening to the even beating of Blythe’s heart and the soft whisper of her breathing as she lay snuggled against his side.
Their lovemaking had been long and frenzied, as if she feared to lose contact with him. It had also been disturbing, for he had found a large amount of leak between the various personalities. He had tried to make her concentrate on a new construct, but she had been too emotionally fragmented to make it work. Only rest and a respite from the stress would restore the balance, and Tach vowed that committee or no committee they were leaving Washington that day.
A furious hammering on the door of their suite brought him plunging out of the bed at one that afternoon. Befuddled, he didn’t even think of his dressing gown, but instead wrapped the bedspread about his waist and blundered to the door. It was Quinn, and the look on his face drove the last vestige of sleep from his mind.
“What? What’s happened?”
“The worst. Braun’s ruined you all.”
“Huh?”
“Friendly witness. He’s thrown you all to the wolyes to save himself.” Tach sank into a chair. “That’s not all, they’re recalling Blythe.”
“When? Why?”
“Tomorrow, right after Earl. Jack very generously volunteered the information that in addition to Von Braun and Einstein and all the rest of the eggheads, she also has your thoughts and memories. They want the names of those other aces, and if they can’t get them from you, they’ll get them from her.”
“She’ll refuse.”
“She could go to jail.”
“No ... they wouldn’t ... not a woman.” The attorney just shook his head.
“Do something. You’re the lawyer. I refused first, let them send me to jail.”
“There is another option.”
“What?”
“Give them what they want.”
“No, that is not an option. You must keep her out of that hearing room.”
The old man gusted a sigh, and scratched furiously at his head until his hair stood out from his head like the quills on an outraged porcupine. “Okay, I’ll see what I can do.”
It hadn’t been enough, and on Tuesday morning they were back at the Capitol. Earl had marched in, taken the Fifth, and marched back out with an expression of utter contempt and disdain. He had expected nothing from the white man’s government, and it hadn’t disappointed him. Now it was Blythe’s turn. At the door, two young Marine guards had tried to hold him back. He knew he was being unfair, lashing out at the wrong people, but their attempt to separate him from Blythe shattered his control, and he had brutally mindcontrolled them both. He had ordered them to sleep, and they were snoring by the time they hit the floor. That display of his power had a strong effect on several observers, and they quickly found a seat for him in the back of the room among the press corps. He had tried to remonstrate, wanting to be with Blythe, but this time it was Quinn who demurred.
“No, you sitting up there with her would be like a red flag to a bull. I’ll take care of her.”
“It’s not just the legal thing. Her mind ... it’s very fragile right now.” He jerked his head toward Rankin. “Don’t let them hammer at her.”
“I’ll try.”
“My darling.” Her shoulders felt thin and bony beneath his hands, and when she raised her face to his, her eyes were like two darkened bruises in her white face. “Remember, their freedom and safety is riding on you. Please don’t say anything.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t,” she said with a flash of her old spirit. “They’re my patients too.”
He watched her walk away, a hand resting lightly on Quinn’s arm, and terror seized him. He wanted to rush after her, and hold her one more time. He wondered if the feeling was his errant precognition kicking in, or just a disordered mind?
“Now, Mrs. van Renssaeler, let’s get the chronology set in all our minds, shall we?” said Rankin.
“All right.”
“Now, when did you first discover you had this power?”
“February 1947.”
“And when did you walk out on your husband, Congressman Henry van Renssaeler?” He hit the word Congressman hard, glancing quickly to the left and right to see how his colleagues took it.
“I didn’t, he threw me out.”
“And was that maybe because he had found out you were fooling around with another man, a man who isn’t even human?”
“No!” cried Blythe.
“Objection!” shouted Quinn in the same breath. “This is not a divorce proceeding—”
“You have no grounds upon which to object, Mr. Quinn, and may I remind you that this committee has sometimes found it necessary to investigate the backgrounds of attorneys. One has to wonder why you fellows would choose to represent enemies of this nation.”
“Because it is a tenet of Anglo-American law that a defendant have someone to shield him from the awesome might of the federal government—”
“Thank you, Mr. Quinn, but I don’t think we need instruction in jurisprudence,” broke in Representative Wood. “You may continue, Mr. Rankin.”
“I thank you, sir. We’ll leave that for the moment. Now, when did you become one of the so-called Four Aces?”
“I think it was in March.”
“Of ‘47?”
“Yes. Archibald had shown me how I could use my power to preserve priceless knowledge, and had contacted several of the scientists. They agreed, and I—”
“Began to suck out their minds.”
“It isn’t like that.”
“Don’t you find it sort of disgustin’, almost vampirelike, the way you eat a man’s knowledge and abilities? It’s a cheat, too. You weren’t born with a great mind, nor did you study and work to gain your position. You just steal others’.”
“They were willing. I would never do it without permission. “
“And had Congressman van Renssaeler given you his permission?”
Tachyon could hear the tears thickening her voice. “That was different. I didn’t understand ... I couldn’t control.” She dropped her face into her gloved hands.
“So let’s move on. We’re up to the time when you abandoned your husband and children.” He added in a more conversational tone, obviously for the benefit of the other committee members, “I also find it incredible that a woman would leave her natural role, and strut herself in this fashion. Well, that’s neither here nor there—”
“I didn’t abandon them,” Blythe interrupted.
He brushed aside her remark. “Semantics. Now, when was that?”
Blythe slumped hopelessly back in her chair. “August the twenty-third, 1947.”
“And where have you been living since August twentythird, 1947?” She sat silently. “Come, come, Mrs. van Renssaeler. You have consented to answer questions before this committee. You can’t withdraw that consent now.”
“At one seventeen Central Park West.”
“And whose apartment is that?”
“Dr. Tachyon’s,” she whispered. There was a stir at this from the press corps, for they had kept a very low profile. Only the other three Aces and Archibald had known of their living arrangement.
“So, after violating your husband and stealing his mind you then walk out, and live in sin with an inhuman from another planet who created the virus that gave you this power.”
“There’s somethin’ fairly convenient in all this.” He leaned forward over the desk, and bellowed down at her. “Now you listen, madam, and you better answer because you stand in a great deal of danger. Did you take this Tachyon’s mind and memories?”
“Y—yes.”
“And have you worked with him?”
“Yes.” Her replies were scarcely audible.
“And do you acknowledge that Archibald Holmes formed the Four Aces as a subversive element designed to undermine loyal allies of the United States?”
Blythe had swung around in the chair, her hands gripping the top rung with a desperate intensity, her eyes darting vaguely about the crowded room. Her face seemed to be writhing, trying to rearrange itself into different visages, and there was an almost psychic white noise coming off her mind. It drilled into Tachyon’s head, and his shields snapped into place.
“Are you listening, Mrs. van Renssaeler? Because you better be. I’m beginnin’ to think you and your bloodsucking power are a danger to this country. Maybe it’s better you do go to jail before you take your ill-gotten knowledge and sell it to the enemies of this country.”
Blythe was shaking so hard that it seemed unlikely she could remain upright in the chair, and tears were streaming down her face. Tach came to his feet, and began pushing through the mob that separated them. “No, no, please ... don’t. Leave me alone.” She wrapped her arms protectively about her body, and rocked back and forth.
“Then give me those names!”
“All right ... all right.” Rankin sank back from the microphone, his pen tapping out a satisfied little rhythm on the pad before him. “There’s Croyd ...”
For Tachyon, time seemed to distend, stretch, almost stand still. Several rows of people still separated him from Blythe, and in that eon-long moment he made his decision.
His mind lanced out, pinning her like a butterfly. Her voice choked off, and she emitted a funny little acking noise. For him it was akin to holding a snowflake, or some particularly delicate form of glass sculpture. Under his grip he felt the entire structure of her mind fragment, and Blythe went spinning away and down into some dark and fearsome cavern of the soul. Freed, the other seven ran rampant. Giggling, lecturing, posturing, ranting, they seemed to race along her central nervous system, setting her body to twitching like a maddened puppet. Words exploded from her: formulae, lectures in German, ongoing arguments between Teller and Oppenheimer, campaign speeches, and Takisian all jumbled in a swirling broth.
The instant he felt her mind give way he released her, but it was too late. Chairs and people were shoved ruthlessly aside as he fought his way to her side and gathered her in his arms.
The chamber was in complete disorder with Wood hammering away with his gavel, reporters shouting and jostling, and over all Blythe’s manic monologue. He seized her, reached out again with the coercive power of his mind, and carried her down into oblivion. She slumped in his arms, and an eerie silence fell over the chamber.
“I take it the committee has no further questions of this witness?” The words came grating out, and his hatred beat from him like a tangible force. The nine men shifted uncomfortably, then Nixon murmured in a voice that was scarcely audible,
“No, no more questions.”
Hours later he sat at the apartment rocking her in his lap, and crooning as he would have to one of his tiny cousins back home on Takis. His brain felt battered by his struggle to recall her to sanity; none of his efforts had shown the smallest success. He felt young and helpless; he wanted to drum his heels on the rug, and howl like a four-year-old. Images of his father rose up to taunt him; big, solid, and powerful, he had both the training and the natural talent to deal with such mental illness. But he was hundreds of light-years away, and had no idea where his errant son and heir had gotten to. There was a preemptory knock on the door. Shifting his limp, unresisting burden into his left arm, he staggered to the door, and took a step back as his burning eyes focused on the two policemen and the bundled figure behind them. Henry van Renssaeler lifted his bruised face and stared at Tachyon. “... ave here a commitment order for my wife. Kindly hand her over.”
“No ... no, you don’t understand. Only I can help her. I don’t have the construct yet, but I’ll get it. It’ll just take a little work. “
The burly officers stepped forward, and gently but inexorably pried her from his encircling arms. He stumbled after them as they headed down the stairs, Blythe lolling in one of the policeman’s arms. Van Renssaeler had made no move to touch her.
“Only a little time.” He was crying. “Please, just give me a little time.”
He slumped down, clinging to the bottom banister post as the outer door fell shut behind them.
He had seen her only once after her commitment. The appeal of his deportation order was grinding through the courts, and seeing the end coming, he had driven to the private sanatorium in upstate New York.
They wouldn’t let him in the room. He could have overriden that decision with mind control, but ever since that hideous day he had been unable to use his power. So he had peered through a small window in the heavy door, looking at a woman he no longer knew. Her hair hung in matted witchlocks about her twisted face as she prowled the tiny room lecturing to an unseen audience. Her voice was low and rasping; obviously her vocal cords were being damaged by her constant attempts to maintain a male tone.
Unable to stop himself, he had reached out telepathically, but the chaos of her mind sent him reeling back. Worse had been the infinitesimal flicker of Blythe crying for help from some deep and hidden source. So intense was his guilt that he spent several minutes in the bathroom vomiting, as if that could somehow cleanse his soul.
Five weeks later he had been put aboard a ship sailing for Liverpool.
“Le pauvre.” A large matronly woman with two small girls at her side stood looking down at the slumped figure on the bench. She rummaged through her purse, and withdrew a coin. It fell with a dull clink into the violin case. Gathering her children to her she moved on, and Tachyon retrieved the coin with two grimy fingers. It wasn’t much, but it would buy another bottle of wine, and another night of forgetfulness.
Rising, he packed away the instrument, gathered up his medical bag, and thrust the folded page of newsprint into his shirt. Later, during the night, it would shield him from the cold. He took a few weaving steps, then stumbled to a swaying halt. Juggling the two cases in one hand, he extracted the page, and took a final look at the headline. The cold east wind was back, tugging urgently at the paper. He released it, and it went skirring away. He walked on, not pausing to look back to where it hung, flapping forlornly, against the iron legs of the bench. Cold it might be, but he would trust to the wine to insulate him.
“I thought we were going to Texas,” Bugsy says, seconds after we arrive in the bar on the 28th floor of the Beekman Towers hotel. We’re still in our party clothes. The blogger surprised me by actually knowing how to dress. Unfortunately the piping on his tuxedo shirt draws attention to his burgeoning paunch.
Through the wide window I can see tendrils of fog swirling around the Brooklyn Bridge. The long grey streamers are like fingers plucking at the guy wires, and for an instant I consider what that music would sound like. “We are ... and while John might prefer for us to gallop off like white knights I prefer that we go smart. We need information about this explosion.”
“It was big, and we sure as shit know it wasn’t a grain elevator.” He rubs at his scalp, and gives me his signature sneer.
“Yes. And I don’t think you’d look good bald, toothless and bleeding from your eyes, ass and nose.”
He blanches and takes his hand out of his brown hair. “Nuclear?”
“I’m going to find out.”
“How? If the government is trying to cover it up—”
“They’re idiots to try. There are seismic monitors all over the world. We work for the U.N. One of our affiliated organizations is the International Atomic Energy Agency.”
“Will they tell us?”
I lie. “I have a boyfriend who works for them.”
There’s a central area in the room delineated by art deco style metal columns. It holds the bar, some comfortable sofas and a baby grand piano. I take Bugsy’s hand, lead him over, and push him down onto a couch. “And while I talk to him you’re going to have a drink and relax. Try the green apple martini. It’s really good.”
I retreat into the observation area on the left, and sink down at one of the small tables. I use the Silver Helix phone. The signal is heavily scrambled and it will put me directly through to Flint. I also keep a close watch and sure enough a small green wasp lands on a small serving table.
“Yes.”
“Gruss Gott, Liebling,” I give it a throaty purr.
“Ja,” comes Flint reply. I love that I work for someone smart. It helps me continue to suffer the Committee.
“I need to know about the explosion in Pyote Texas,” I continue in German. If a bug could look disappointed this one would. The wasp gives a sharp buzz and flies back into the main bar.
Over the phone I can hear papers rustling, and I reflect on generational differences. I only carry a pen because they can make quite a decent weapon. My notes are on my Palm, my blackberry, my phone, and most often in my head.
“They’re still crunching the data from the monitoring stations. I can’t give you the exact magnitude yet ..”
“Just tell me if it could have been conventional explosives.”
“No.” Flint anticipates my need. “Do you need a suit?”
“I’ll need two.”
“How will you explain that?”
“You’re my boyfriend in the I.A.E.A.”
“Right. One more thing. Could it be Siraj?”
“If we ... they have a nuke and Bahir doesn’t know about it then Bahir’s usefulness if definitely at an end.
“Ciao.”
#
The natural flora of Texas burns well. Our boots are soon streaked with black soot. In the distance a single tree stands naked and twisted, ghostly in the light of a nearly full moon. In places there are black hummocks of varying sizes. Closer examination reveals dead jackrabbits, coyotes, cattle, and a few horses. Lilith’s long hair is plastered to my sweat damp cheeks. Because of the helmet I can’t pull it loose. I purse my lips and try to direct a puff of air, but I can’t get the right angle.
It’s not just the heat of a Texas night, nor the bulky lead-lined suit that creates my discomfort. I feel like my skin is crawling, prickling, burning. Even though I know the various radioactive particles aren’t actually penetrating my suit, I decide we’re not going to stay long.
We can’t get close to the former town of Pyote. We know it’s crawling with federal agents and scientists from the NRC because at my suggestion Bugsy had unlimbered a few hundred wasps before donning the suit. They have been scouting for us. What they’ve seen is a very large crater and a handful of blackened buildings. Ironically the grain elevator is still standing. Occasionally a National Guard helicopter goes thrumming by overhead, the wash from the rotors stirring the ash, searchlights sweeping across the devastation. So far none of them have spotted us, but it’s only a matter of time.
I become aware of a new sound over my helmet’s radio. It’s Bugsy’s teeth chattering. “Shit, this is what it looked like. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” A handful of his wasps crawl across the back of his gloved hand. They don’t look well.
“Exactly like it.” I pause for an instant, then add, “Only there were a lot more people and buildings in Japan.”
He turns so he’s facing me and we can see each other through the faceplates. He looks hurt and angry and very young. “You know what I mean. This is awful. People need to know about this. They need to see what one of these bombs can do. It’s been sixty years. Everybody’s forgotten.”
“You go, tiger.” But it’s all bravado. There’s a quivering in my gut like I’ve never experienced before. Such is the power of The Bomb.
Bugsy turns away. Shame is like a taste on the back of my tongue. This is his country, and someone has attacked it in a particularly horrible way. I lay a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry. I’m scared too.”
In this direction we can see a plume of fire. The hot wind racing across the west Texas plains bends and dips the flames, revealing the black shadow of a pump jack. I wonder how long the steel can withstand the heat from the burning oil.
Bugsy points at the burning oil well. “Do you suppose that’s why they did it?”
“These fields are almost played out.” I shake my head. “There wasn’t enough oil here to make any appreciable difference.”
“Then why do it?”
“As a warning? Next time it will be Alaska or the refineries in the Gulf.” I put an arm around his shoulders. “We need to get out of here.”
#
I-20 runs right by Pyote. A portion of the interstate is now inside the federal cordon, so the vast emptiness of west Texas seems even emptier given the dearth of traffic. It’s also one-twenty am as Bugsy and I stand in the coin car wash in Pecos, Texas hosing off each other’s suits. We’re on the outskirts of the town which seem to consist entirely of fast food joints, auto body shops, and junk yards conveniently located for the cars that can’t be fixed. Every small American town seems to possess this leprosy, as if it were an protective asteroid belt shielding the core planet. Not that the center represents any kind of nirvana.
Once the suits have been sluiced off we climb out. The pungent reek of male sweat fills the still air. I’m hoping Bugsy’s stink is so strong that he won’t notice my particular musk. I can change the form, but my body chemistry remains the same, and men’s and women’s sweat smells different. I know from my training that we need to rinse off any errant particles that might have penetrated the suit, so we turn the hoses on each other.
The water pours out of the hose at high pressure. I actually find the pounding soothing on the sore muscles in my back. My tee shirt and jeans cling to my skin. Behind my lids it feels like I’ve use eye drops made from sand. It doesn’t occur to me until I turn around that getting a soaking as Lilith will provoke quite such a reaction from my companion. Bugsy’s eyes are unfocused, and he’s sporting a gigantic hard-on that presses against the fabric of his wet trousers. I can understand why—when you’re faced with this much death the urge to life is strong. It’s also Bugsy. He doesn’t see much action. A man who changes into bugs at stressful or exciting moments would not be the ideal lover.
“You want to ...?” His voice is husky. “It would only take a few minutes,” he says.
“An excellent reason for me to say—no.”
A car glides past, and I realize a fraction of a second too late that it’s a police cruiser. My gut clenches and I reach for Bugsy, but the cop has spotted us and we’re pinned in the glare of his spotlight. The lights start flashing, and he noses up into the car wash bay. The cop is a large, shadowy form standing prudently behind his open car door. “What are you two up to?” The drawl is hard and suspicious.
I’m acutely aware of the hazmat suits, and I can’t seem to think. Bugsy steps in. He is quick. I’ll give him that. “Uh ... wet tee shirt competition. We’re practicing.” There’s a faint interrogatory rise to the words. I hope the cop misses it. I also hope he’s a redneck and not a Baptist.
He shines his flashlight on my chest. The leer dispels any doubt as to which camp he belongs. “Well, you two better get on out of here. There’s a bunch of feds just down the road, and they’re detaining everybody who ain’t local—and some who are.”
“Thanks, sir,” Bugsy says. The cop steps back into his car and drives away.
“Good save,” I offer the compliment because I want to get Hive out of Texas, and I’m afraid it won’t be easy.
“You didn’t say anything,” Bugsy says.
“I was the prop.” I’m looking for the right approach when Bugsy makes it unnecessary.
“Can you get me home? I gotta write my blog.”
“And tell the world what?”
“That a nuke went off here.”
“Is that wise?”
“It’s the truth.”
I study him. He really doesn’t get it that sometimes—often—the truth is overrated. But I take him home to Washington D.C.
#
I can’t believe I’m actually checking into the Best Western Swiss Clock Inn in Pecos Texas. The walls are painted white with a green roof and an absurd clock tower rising from the center of the building. The nearest town to Pyote is Wick, but it lacks any kind of accommodation, and it is now behind the law enforcement cordon.
At first the woman at the reception desk tells me there are no rooms available, but I milk the British accent for all it is worth, with a hapless Bertie Wooster sort of demeanor. She loves it, and soon she loves me. I get a room. As I’m walking to the elevators I pass the ubiquitous wooden stand filled with flyers detailing all the wonderful things to do in Pecos. The Pecos Cantaloupe Festival seems to be most prominently displayed. Pity I’m here too late for that excitement. Another flyer shows a Schwarzenegger loo alike dressed as Conan the Barbarian. BARBARIAN DAYS! it announces, just 259 Miles Away in Scenic Cross Plains, Texas. Yes, 259 miles, just a Sunday drive for a Texan. If there was gasoline.
I dump the garment bag in the room, and crank the air conditioning to high. It’s one of those low, under-the-window affairs, and it sets up a frightful clattering. It does pour cold air into the stuffy room. I’m tired, but I’ve got to hit the town. My guess is that evacuees from Wick and any survivors from Pyote will be in Pecos. I need to find them, buy rounds, and loosen their tongues. But God I’m tired.
I’d dropped Bugsy in D.C., and had to wait for dawn so I could make the daylight to daylight jump as Bahir. Once the hazmat suits were back in London I stopped at my flat and packed a bag so I wouldn’t arrive back in Texas without luggage. I checked on Dad, and prepared him a cup of tea and a slice of toast smeared with Nutella. He ate three bites. I finished it, and now it lays in the pit of my stomach like a piece of lead shot. It’s early afternoon in Pecos. Someone will be in the local watering holes.
While I walk I use my phone to link to the internet. Bugsy has been a busy boy. His post is already up.
It was a Nuke, boys and girls! The coyotes are glowing at night—at least
the ones that aren’t dead. I know, I know, it’s so twentieth century to be talking
about The Bomb, but it’s clear that MAD has stopped working, and now it’s time
for everybody to get Mad.
I pass one of those white metal boxes that pass for a newsstand in the U.S. The local Pecos paper is still yammering about grain elevators.
I regret not wearing a hat, and my usual black attire amplifies the heat. The sky is painfully bright, and the sun doesn’t so much shine as glare. My skin prickles. I’m acutely aware of radiation right now. I pause and survey the dining choices—a Pizza Hut, a Dairy Queen, a Subway, I spot a Mexican restaurant. What I don’t see is a bar. Equally unfortunate is that the most cars are in the parking lot of the Pizza Hut. Well, they might have a beer and wine license. And then I spot the fire truck parked near the back. Yes, this might be the right place.
Inside the harsh smell of undercooked tomato sauce is an assault on the sinuses. Conversation fills the room with a droning sound as if a hive of bees was moving in. People don’t even fall silent when I enter. They really are upset.
The waitress is cute and small and round and Hispanic. She has an expression that is both alarmed and delighted. People on the edges of a catastrophe always have that particular look.
“I’ll take a small meat pizza and your salad bar. And what kinds of wines to you have?”
“Red and white.”
Of course. “I’ll take red.” I give her my best stage smile. She smiles back. “I say, dear, I’m a producer with—” I time it so her exclamation of excitement makes it unnecessary to say with whom.
“Movie?”
“Well ....” I look about conspiratorially. “I don’t want to say too much. So often these things come to nothing, but I think you all have a quite a story here, and if that’s true, well ... things might happen.” I hastily add. “And of course anyone with information would be compensated and probably be in the film.”
She scuttles away. Satisfied, I drift over to the salad bar. In a surprisingly short time a number of people have joined me around the giant bowl of iceberg lettuce. I can smell the MSG as I drop it onto my plate.
“You’re a movie guy?” says one man whose cheap suit suggests the insurance salesman or local banker. I move my head in a particularly noncommittal way. “But you’re not a journalist?” He has that dried leather skin so common in Americans who live in the west, and the wrinkles deepen with suspicion.
“I can assure you I am not a journalist.”
“You’re English,” says a large woman in spandex pants. The worried frowns ease. That seems to make me somehow more trustworthy.
“Well, I can tell you right now it wasn’t no grain elevator. We don’t grow wheat in these parts,” says an elderly geezer, whose bald scalp is not so much tan as covered with age spots.
“There’s an elevator in Pyote,” another local objects.
“Yeah, but it’s a little teeny thing, just for the local feedlot,” says the geezer.
“There was no warning. The sky just lit up,” says another man with skin like jerky, and a big sweat-stained cowboy had pushed far back on his head. “I was shifting cattle to new grazing, and the dark caught up with us. I was just going to wait out the night—then boom. Damnedest noise you ever heard.”
“Has anyone from Pyote spoken about it?” I ask.
“We haven’t seen anybody from Pyote. Wick, yes, but not Pyote.” The cheap suit drops his voice. “I think they’re all dead.”
“Not all,” says a burly man whose head seems attached to his shoulders without benefit of a neck. I watch the muscles in his upper arms flex and move. I think I’ve found one person who belongs with the fire truck. “I saw a medivac helicopter going in. Somebody survived.”
“Whoever it was, I don’t think they were hurt,” says the fat woman whose plate is so full that lettuce is starting to cascade off the sides “I heard they’re under guard. Locked up.” The door of the Pizza Hut opens and my old nemesis from the car wash enters. “I bet it’s the guy who caused the explosion. My niece is married to a policeman over in Wick.” I wish she would keep her voice down because the cop has stopped walking and is staring at us—hard. I’m a stranger in town which is a red flag to a cop.
“Nobody could have lived through that. I was real close by and I’m damn lucky to be alive.”
“They could if they was an alien,” argues the old man.
“Or a joker.”
I can’t really tell who said that, and I find it interesting that the mind would go to joker rather than ace. It’s far more likely one of the meta-powered would survive, but there is still an enduring discomfort and disgust with jokers.
“It’s probably them damn ragheads,” says the man in the cheap suit. “Going after our oil. Making sure we have to pay through the nose. We should nuke them.”
It’s a typically jingoistic American reaction, and I reflect that if Siraj could hear that he might reconsider his stand. The door closes and I realize the cop has left. I try to tell myself that he decided he wanted a burger rather than a pie—
#
—But it was a vain hope. They are waiting in my hotel room. One is your typical FBI agent, white, big, broad, with an ill fitting brown suit, and a crew cut. The other is a SCARE agent and an ace. The Midnight Angel has her sword drawn, tip resting on the floor, hands folded on the hilt. Every curve of her lush body is revealed by the skin tight jump suit. “Please come with us, sir,” says the Fucking Big Idiot.
“Good of you not to burn the hotel down,” I say to the Angel.
She glowers at me. “I’m not an idiot.”
“Hmmm.”
Her hands tighten on the hilt. “Try something. Just please try something.”
Well, her knickers are certainly in a twist. “No, I think I’ll just come along quietly.”
It’s a very quick helicopter ride to scenic Wick, Texas. SCARE has set up headquarters in city hall, and the fact that SCARE rather than the FBI is in charge tells me that the Americans suspect some kind of wild card involvement. The mayor’s office has that small-town-politician-trying—too-hard—to-seem-important feel. The walls are lined with pictures of the potbellied little mayor posing with various national politicians, and movie stars, with commendations from the Elks and the Moose and various other odd American organizations including, in fact, the Odd Fellows.
A woman sits behind the desk, and if the mayor were still here she would dwarf him. Joann Jefferson, aka Lady Black, is the Special Agent in Charge. As she stands she pulls her reflective cloak more tightly about her statuesque body. A tendril of silver hair has slipped from beneath the hood of her black body-suit, and it seems to shine on her ebony cheekbone. She sketches a greeting with a black gloved hand, and then waves me into the chair across the desk from her. I don’t offer my hand. I know the suit and cloak are supposed to protect me from her energy sucking power, but I’d rather not test the limits of the technology.
“Noel, what the fuck are you doing here?”
I lean back in the chair and pull out my cigarette case. “Ah, I see we’re dispensing with the pleasantries.” I take my time lighting up, and judge when she’s just about to lose it, then I say, “Someone set off a nuclear device. Normally I’d argue that in this God forsaken part of the world no one would notice and it would make little difference to the general ambiance, but I gather some people died.”
She rubs a hand across her face. Despite great cheekbones her features look like they’re sagging. I sympathize. I’d really wanted to catch a nap back at the Swiss Clock. “I know we can’t hide this from other governments, but we don’t want a panic. If people knew a nuke went off ....” Her voice trails away as if she’s just too weary to keep talking.
“Look, let us help. You might recall that we are allies. That special relationship and all that rot that our prime minister and your president mutter lovingly to one another.”
Jefferson says in a terse, clipped tone, “It’s got to be the Arabs. I guess they’re not content with destroying our economy, now they have to smuggle in a suitcase nuke and bomb us too.”
“But Pyote, Texas? I mean, really. Not much of a splash with that. No, they would pick a far more visible target.”
“There are oil fields here,” she counters.
“And the Midland/Odessa fields are just about played out, and believe me the oil ministers in Riyadh and Bagdad and Amman know that.”
She fingers that errant strand of hair and stares at me for a long time. “You people do know the Middle East better than we do.”
“You’re quite right. We’ve been oppressing them and manipulating them for far longer.” I stand. “I’ll see what I can find out. I have a few contacts over there.”
#
Even through the thick walls of one of Saddam’s former palaces I hear Baghdad humming. Everyone in the Caliphat—and any Moslem nation whether they are part of the Caliphate or not—gets subsidized petrol. It used to be said that every crane in Europe was in Berlin. Now every crane in Europe and a few more to boot are in the Middle East. Siraj is trying to jump fifty years in one. He may just succeed, unless those of us in the western nations kill him first.
Siraj is neither a religious ascetic like the Nur or a hedonist like Abdul. Instead he’s a Cambridge educated economist, so we are meeting in his state-of-the-art office in the midst of marble splendor. Every few seconds the computer dings, indicating a new email. In the outer office a highly competent secretary answers the constantly ringing phone, and the fax machine whines and buzzes and shakes as it extrudes pages.
I’m in my Bahir form, red/gold hair and beard, traditional garb, shimmering golden cloak, and that damn scimitar. The teleporting ace who beheaded the enemies of the Caliphate had appealed to the Nur, but no assassin likes to get within arm’s length of a target. Give me a McMillan TAC-50 any day, and a location a mile from the objective.
Siraj is chain smoking Turkish cigarettes. He’s the one who taught me to like the strong tobacco back when we were housemates at Cambridge. I would love a fag, but can’t—Bahir is a very good Muslim, even down to having a wife. For a moment I think about the girl I married seven months ago under pressure by the Caliph. The old man felt that the Caliphate’s remaining ace needed to set an example. But I need to put her aside. It’s dangerous for someone in my line of work to allow anyone too close to them for any length of time. Fortunately I have the perfect excuse—she’s barren. That accusation will probably keep her from marrying again. There’s an uncomfortable tightness in my chest. The truth is that it’s my fault, I’m the one who’s sterile.
I realize I’ve missed whole sentences of Siraj’s diatribe, and it shocks me. I’ve got to stop wool gathering. I’m going to get myself killed.
“... Texas? Texas! Why in the bloody hell would I bomb Texas? As if I have a nuclear bomb. Would that I did. Then they wouldn’t threaten me.” He snatches up a sheaf of papers off the desk as he roars past, and shakes them in my face. The rattling is like hail on a tin roof, and the gold ribbon that marks this as an official diplomatic communication waves before my eyes causing me to flinch and pull back.
“The Secretary of State is holding me ... me ... personally responsible for this explosion. They are the ones with nuclear bombs buried everywhere. They should take a count.”
“I am sorry, Most High—”
“I told you not to call me that.” His tone is snappish and peevish. “I’m not Abdul, and I don’t want us acting like it’s 1584.”
“Yes, sir, I am sorry. I just thought you should know what they are saying.”
“And you know this how?”
“I have a contact who works in Whitehall. The Americans are enlisting the aid of the Silver Helix to investigate whether we’re involved.”
Siraj pauses, and a humorless smile puts grooves in his gaunt cheeks. A year ago he was a portly man with a smooth, unlined face. Now he’s thin and worry and responsibility have gouged grooves into his forehead and etched lines around the soft brown eyes.
“Maybe they’ll send Noel. He is their reputed Middle Eastern expert. I’d like to know how he evaded my hospitality last time, and extend it again.”
I incline my head. “Would you like me to kill him, sir?” It’s totally surreal. Usually I’m amused by these situations, but this time it gives me an odd crawling sensation.
“No, I’m tired of the world viewing us as ignorant barbarians. I’m teaching them to respect us.”
“But hate us all the more.” I pause then add, “And they have the armies.”
“I’ll moderate prices before we reach that point.”
“And how will you know you’ve reached that point without crossing it?”
He looks at me oddly. I’ve taken a misstep, but to say anything more will only make it worse. I bow and teleport away.
“MONSTER!!”
Doctor Tachyon dodged a raking blow from her claw. Acid tears were rolling down her ruined cheeks, eating new wounds in the already suppurating mess that was her face. The joker shook her head violently. As the tears flew in all directions, small burns appeared in the cloth curtain that provided what passed for privacy in the emergency room of the Blythe Van Rensselaer Clinic. One tear struck Tach on the ear, drawing a yelp of pain.
“You did this. You. I’ll kill you.”
There was no mistaking to whom this threat was being directed. “TROLL!” bellowed Tachyon.
The nine-foot-tall joker didn’t waste time on niceties. The curtain came down with the scream of outraged metal rings. The security chief of the clinic plucked the shrieking woman over the examining table and held her kicking, clawing, writhing form at arm’s length. The acid in her spittle and tears had no effect on the horny plates that encased Troll’s body.
Tachyon ran for a dispensary cart. Cursed the artificial hand as he struggled to hold the sedative bottle steady without breaking the fragile glass. Filled a hypodermic.
As he hurried back, Troll tried to warn him o$: “No, Doc, don’t. You’ll get burned.”
“I deserve to,” grunted the Takisian. He ducked in close, grabbed one of the flailing arms, and pulled it up tight behind the woman’s back. Acid burned his hand and face, but he jammed the needle in and pushed the plunger home.
“Now back off!” ordered Troll, and this time Tachyon obeyed. Two minutes later, and the joker’s struggles subsided. With a sigh, she slid into a drug-induced sleep. Tach slumped down onto a stool as Cody came hurrying through the doors to the ER. As befitted the chief of surgery, she was dressed in drab green scrubs. There was a spray of blood across the front of the surgical gown, and that, combined with the black eye patch, gave her a deadly look. She came to rest only inches from Tach and bent in so close that their noses almost touched. “Frau Doctor Frankenstein, I presume,” said Tach lightly. The militant light did not die from her one good eye.
“What in the hell is going on down here?”
“Just another typical day in the charnel house.” Concern replaced the anger. “What’s wrong? What happened?” Tach made a weary gesture. Cody whirled on Troll. “Is he all right?”
“Physically. He’s got a few acid burns. But she cut him ... deep,” Troll said.
Cody’s hands closed on Tach’s shoulders. “Talk to mel I get this bulletin over the fucking loudspeaker-this damn hysterical nurse screaming that you’re being killed down here.”
“Nothing so dramatic.” Tach sighed and pushed to his feet. “Just another victim taking the author of her misery to task.” Cody followed his gaze to the now supine joker. “When did she transform?” the woman asked.
“Jumped.”
“Christ.” A tiny shudder took her tall slender form. Tach understood. With the advent of the strange new wild card power, the sanctity of one’s soul was now in jeopardy. A roaming gang of teenagers had suddenly developed the ability to trade bodies with any individual. And they used the power with the vicious playfulness of the very young—committing acts of brutality, atrocity, and humiliation before jumping back to their own bodies and leaving the victim to deal with the often tragic aftermath of a jumper’s spree. Tach sighed again and swept the back of his hand across his eyes as if the action could somehow banish weariness. “I must now call Mr. Nesbitt and inform him his wife is herebut not the wife he recalls.”
“Come to Jokertown and lose yourself,” said Cody bitterly.
“It’s no wonder we’ve been virtually abandoned by the nats. They’re terrified. Hell, even I’m worried as I walk home at night. How long until some covetous joker decides she’d like my body?”
“Hush,” cautioned Tachyon.
“I don’t care if they hear. It’s a dirty little joker secret. Some of them know how to get to these kids, and rather than tell us or the police, they’d rather take care of themselves first.”
Tach looked sadly at the collection of protoplasmic nightmares that filled his emergency room. “Can you blame them?” Cody shuddered, and Tach caught a wisp of memory. Once Cody had come terrifyingly close to jokerdom. And Tach himself carried the wild card, twined in a loving, latent sleep about his genes. At any moment the virus could manifest and turn him into a hideous monster or grant him the blessing of death. He didn’t even consider the third, golden option-that he would beat the odds and become one of the lucky few-an ace, blessed with metahuman powers.
“Not so easy to be righteous, is it?” he asked softly, and Cody blushed.
“In our dreams we’re all heroes,” the woman replied. “I would like to hope I’d be strong, tough it out—”
“And you probably would be. I’m the coward who could not face life as a joker.”
“What are you doing tonight?”
“I had a date.”
“Cancel it. I’ll cook dinner.” Tachyon stared at her. Then, surprisingly, the lashes dropped to veil the single eye. Gruffly she added, “Chris is going to a friend’s ... slumber party. I’m enjoying it. By next year, I’m convinced, such innocent pleasures will seem tame, and he’ll be looking for girl action.”
“Cody, you’re babbling. Why?”
“You’re the telepath. Figure it out!” And she left with an aggressive click of high heels.
Jay Ackroyd caught him on the steps of the clinic. Ackroyd was a moderately successful private detective who at times annoyed Tachyon worse than fleas and on occasion could actually be useful-due more to his ace power as a teleporter than any real brains was a secret opinion that Tach held. Jay was too glib, and Tach did not think it was a mask for a serious mind.
The minute the thought manifested, Tachyon felt guilty. After all, it was Jay who had saved the alien from an assassin a year and a half ago. The Takisian realized that some of his waspishness was due to Jay’s having caught the alien doing a silly little hop-skip step up the stained concrete steps. “Get lucky last night?”
Tach’s frowned deepened. Had he spent the evening with any one of his normal complement of female companions, he might have responded with the obligatory leer and nudge. But this was Cody. And though their passionate kissing last night had not lead through the bedroom door, Tach was beginning to nourish passionate hopes. What happened behind that bedroom door was no one’s business. Tach frowned at the nondescript human in front of him.
“Did you come by just to annoy me, or has my money actually garnered a few results?”
“You think what I do is easy?”
“No, tedious-which is why I do not do it myself. Besides, I’m out of the law enforcement business. I tend to my clinic now, and—”
“—cultivate your garden,” concluded Jay, startling Tachyon with his knowledge of Voltaire.
“By the ideal, you read,” said Tach as they stepped through the front doors.
“Yeah, it impresses babes.”
Tach nodded a friendly good morning to Mrs. Chicken Foot and crossed to the elevator. As they rode up the four floors to Tach’s office, the alien could feel the human’s mood sobering as he mentally marshaled the information he had obtained. Tach’s good mood drained like water sucked into desert sand. In another, more impatient time, the Takisian would have yanked the knowledge from Jay’s mind, but this was something he preferred to delay-forever if possible. Unfortunately an ostrichlike response to Blaise was dangerous.
In the office Jay lounged on the couch. Tachyon stood with his back to the room, gazing out the window at Jokertown laid out before him like a pustular sore on the body of Manhattan. Was it age or depression, or had the vista actually grown shabbier and dirtier over the past twenty-five years? “It’s so ugly,” Tachyon murmured.
“You just noticed?” Jay’s tone offered no comfort. Tach turned to face him.
“Perhaps I have less stomach for it now”
“Then you better get a barf bag because what I’ve got to tell you doesn’t qualify as pretty” Jay pulled out a notebook, flipped it open, and began to read. His voice had lost much of its joking edge. “Blaise is running with a jumper gang.”
The desk chair was a welcome support to legs suddenly gone shaky. Tach longed to clasp his hands, but the plastic monstrosity at the end of his right arm offered no comfort. Instead, his left hand cupped his right elbow, both arms drawn protectively across his aching stomach.
“Ideal ... now he’s far too powerful.”
“It gets better. He also has ties to the Shadow Fists ....” Tach’s head jerked up. Jay didn’t miss the reaction. “Got friends there too?” asked Jay dryly. Tach mutely shook his head, waved to Ackroyd to continue. “Look, Tachyon, you haven’t got a priest, and if you can’t trust your private dick, who the hell can you trust?”
“No one,” said Tachyon softly.
Jay watched him for a moment longer, then shrugged and resumed. “While running with the jumpers, your charming grandson has engaged in the usual round of fun—beatings, muggings, robberies, nights on the town courtesy of the victim’s credit card.” Jay hesitated.
Tach leapt on it, imperious and demanding. “What?”
“Everything seems to point to Blaise being the jumper who took over Ira Greenstein’s body, and—”
“I know what happened to him.” His tone was shrill. Tach regained control of his voice. “Ira has been my tailor for twenty years. How many other people whom I have patronized are in jeopardy?”
“You know Blaise better than I do.”
“No, I only thought I did.”
“The alien delinquent has graduated from brutality. He’s in the big leagues now-murder. Couple of my sources say he blew away a small-time Shadow Fist soldier named Christian.”
“Murder’s not new to Blaise. He killed when he was in that revolutionary cell in France.”
“No, he mind-controlled other people to kill. It’s a big step to holding the gun yourself. I personally wouldn’t know-I hate the fucking things-but for Blaise it’s a turn-on. He kills for fun and kicks, and likes every moment of it. That was the one thing my informants agreed on. That, and that they were terrified of the little bastard.”
“Is he ... is he in Manhattan?” Tach hated himself for the hesitation that made his voice as ragged as a broken saw. It revealed his fear, and he didn’t like to admit, even to himself, that he was afraid of his grandson.
“No, I think he’s based on the Rox, but he and his gang of delinquents make raids into the city.”
“You think?”
Jay correctly interpreted the added emphasis on the final word as censure. “Look, you hired me to get information on the kid, not recover him. And while I’m not a coward, I’m also not stupid. People who go to the Rox generally don’t come back.”
“And if I hired you to bring him back?”
“I’d say no. I’m a private eye, not a one-man commando unit.”
For a long time they sat in silence. It was hard for Tachyon to ask the question that was battering impatiently at the back of his teeth. Over the years he had been threatened by enemies far more terrifying than Blaise-the Astronomer, the Swarm, Hartmann. Why, then, was he so afraid? Or did a surfeit of love translate into a greater sense of betrayal and terror when that love died?
“Am I in danger?”
They locked eyes. “I don’t know. Given your past history, yeah, you’re probably in danger. You imprisoned his father, and killed his guardian, sacrificed his tutor to save your neck. Not to mention dressing him in puce and lace—”
“You also bear some responsibility in this. What about Atlanta, when he was possessed by that creature? He mindcontrolled that poor joker, made him tear himself to pieces.”
Jay shrugged. “Okay, neither one of us are prime candidates for father of the year. The point is, what he thinks will hurt you most. Maybe he’ll just be content to fuck over everyone around you.”
Tachyon stood, began to pace. “I can’t live with that burden.”
“I don’t see that you’ve got any choice.”
“There must be some other option.”
“I can think of one-deal with Blaise.”
Tach’s stomach felt as if lead shot had been dropped into it. He shook his head. “I can’t deal with him.”
“Why not?”
“That would require killing him.”
Jay’s eyes flicked in reaction to that bald statement.
“Jesus Christ, what is it with you Takisians? You’ve never heard of psychiatrists?”
“Do you want to capture him for me?”
Jay had the grace to blush. He looked down. “Not particularly.”
Tach turned away. “I am wounded, Jay, wounded in ways which can’t even be seen. I just want to be left alone.”
“That’s not an option that’s open for you.” There was a grimness, a seriousness to the detective’s expression that Tachyon had never seen before. It was a little frightening. “There are people who are actors on history. They can’t step off the stage no matter how much they might like to. You’re one of those people-you poor bastard.”
There was no answer to that. Again silence held the room. Tach finally crossed to the bar, and poured out a brandy. “A little early in the day, isn’t it?”
“Don’t nag. You have unalterably depressed me, now you must take the consequences.”
“Hey, it ain’t my problem. You can go to hell anyway it suits you. Just don’t try to blame me.”
Tach set aside the snifter, untasted. “And what of Mark?”
“No trace. Oh, I know he’s somewhere within the environs of greater Manhattan, but I don’t know where.”
“Why is this so difficult? Mark Meadows is a lovely but totally ineffectual person. How could he evade you this long?”
“He’s had some help. The jokers seem to be protecting him, and most important, he doesn’t want to be found.”
“His protectors must know that we can be trusted.”
“Look, if we get the information, how long until the cops have it? Meadows is a wanted fugitive. Don’t forget that.”
“All this fuss over a child-custody hearing. They’ve ruined a man for nothing.”
“They’ve ruined him for being an ace. His little girl was just the excuse.”
“What lovely times we live in.” Tach sighed. “Well, keep looking.”
Jay rose. “And Blaise?”
“You’ve told me what I needed to know. Now it’s just a matter of warning my friends and protecting. myself.”
Jay hesitated at the door. “You won’t ...”
“He is my grandchild. The last of my blood. The only heir I will ever have. I can’t ...” His voice, too, died away to nothing.
“ I think you’re a fool.”
“So you have said before.” Jay left. And Tachyon drained the brandy.
The shrilling of the telephone dimly penetrated the thunder and rush of the shower. Tach heard the answering machine kick in. He continued to shampoo his long red hair as his own familiar voice droned through the message. There was the nasal squeal of the signal, and then Cody’s voice. “I’ve rented us a room at the Ritz.” Sputtering, Tach shut off the flow of water. “There comes a time when you can’t hide from sex anymore. Meet me.”
Tach just stood as shampoo ran down his forehead, and a sudden rush of testosterone brought his cock to rigid anticipatory attention. The soap hit and burned his eyes. Cursing, he switched the water back on, and quickly rinsed. He hurried but seemed to be scarcely moving. His fingers had become clumsy with surprise and nervous expectation. He picked his finest outfit. He wore it only to Hiram’s annual Wild Card Day dinners, but tonight merited such elegance.
As he fingered the soft material, he wondered at her choice for a rendezvous. The hotel seemed rather sterile. But her son, Chris, was a factor at her apartment, and to enter Tachyon’s would seem like too much a capitulation for this proud woman.
After dressing, he critically surveyed his reflection in the mirror. Short, yes, by human standards, but very slim. The riot of red curls brushed the shoulders of his coat. The lines about mouth and eyes were too deep for his ninety-one years, but the years on earth had not been kind. The worst flaw was that ugly extrusion on the end of his right arm. He wanted to be able to caress her with all the mastery of a Takisian mentat prince.
The front door bell shrilled. The boy with the flowers. Tach grabbed his wallet, and forced himself not to run.
At the hotel door he gave one final twitch to the goldtipped lace at his throat, adjusted the roses, and gave one quick peremptory knock with the artificial hand.
“It’s open, come in,” called Cody.
Tachyon entered. There was a room-service cart at the foot of the bed. Caviar, petits fours, a wedge of camembert cheese, and most important, champagne cooling in a silver bucket.
Cody stepped out of the bathroom. There was something hesitant, almost awkward about her stance. Tach understood. He felt damnably nervous and awkward himself. He found himself focusing on the black negligee she was wearing. It revealed her charms in startling ways, and Tach was a little surprised that she would wear such a sexy gown. But then, what did he really know of this woman and her fantasies? He had always seen her as the perfectly cool, incredibly professional surgeon. Perhaps she liked to be a houri in the bedroom to offset that rather severe image.
“I want you to promise me something.”
“Anything,” said Tach as he proffered the roses. They were like splashes of blood against the black of her gown. “Don’t read my mind.”
Tach was puzzled, a thread of suspicion curled in his mind. But his cock was demanding instant attention, and if he refused he might never bed this woman. “All right,” he said slowly. “But might I know why?”
“I need to feel ... safe.”
He laughed to off-set the sense of hurt and the taint of disappointment that had wormed its way into his libidinous pleasure. “That’s funny, I always feel safer when I can joincompletely-with my lovers.”
“Well, do this for me. Promise me.”
“ I promise.”
She seemed vastly relieved because she suddenly smiled. The bouquet of roses went sailing into a chair. “Do you want to waste time with all this romantic bullshit?”
“Did you have a better suggestion?” He felt like he was enunciating past a mouthful of cotton balls.
“Uh-huh.” She walked to him, pushed his jacket off his shoulders.
As he wriggled and jerked to free himself from the confining material, Tach leaned forward and kissed the hollow at the base of her throat. He kicked off his shoes, and suddenly got a lot shorter without the benefit of the two-inch heel. His eyes were now exactly at breast level. It was an attractive vista. Her hands were at his belt now, opening the waist band of his pants, pulling them down. They snagged at his ankles, and he tottered trying to regain his balance. She chuckled far back in her throat and gave him a push that toppled him onto the bed. Reached down and grabbed his pants, pulling them off as if she were shucking an ear of corn.
His jockey shorts came with the pants, and he felt rather vulnerable and silly in his stockings and shirt, his erection rampant among the coppery hairs of his brush.
Cody tumbled onto the bed with him, and pulled him over on top of her. Tangling her hands in his hair, she pulled his face down and kissed him hard. Her tongue slipped between his teeth, and it was that clumsy adolescent sucking, coupled with the faint snick of a door opening, that alerted him to the danger. He tried to roll away, but the false Cody’s fingers twined and clutched at his hair like thorn branches.
A quick mentatic check revealed that there were seven opponents in the room, counting the woman in the bed, and a terrifying ice wall of mental shielding that could only be Blaise. Tach’s mind control lashed out. The false Cody dropped into slumber and one other assailant. The Takisian was then busy fending off a mind attack from Blaise. A heavy weight landed between his shoulder blades, knocking the wind from his body. He sucked desperately for air like a failing pump billow, then tried to exhale violently as the chloroform-soaked cloth covered his mouth and nose. It was hopeless. The fumes from the drug ate at his control, at consciousness. Tachyon managed to roll onto his back. His finally vision was of Blaise pouring out a glass of champagne and raising it in an ironic salute.
When the first jolt of electricity arced through his testicles, Tachyon thought he would die.
He had been climbing slowly toward consciousness, dimly aware of a musty, moldy odor, a too-full bladder, the dull headache that was the legacy of a drug-induced sleep, then ...
PAINT A scream ripped like acid from his throat, and Tach’s body flopped like a dying fish on the decrepit old mattress upon which he rested. A crushing vise closed about his mind. Tachyon tasted Blaise. Panicked. Fought back with everything he had. The pressure retreated. He could focus now-nightmare vision-Blaise wielding a cattle prod. This couldn’t be real, a dreaaaam. Another blast of soul-searing agony. Nobody could hurt this much and stay alive. The jaws were back. Teeth penetrating the perfect crystal sphere of his mental shields.
NO!
Pain, the shattering of self, a cacophony of jabbering, excited, hungry, needy, angry minds. And then one mind.
One mind alone. A familiar, terrifying mind holding him like a bug in amber.
Hello, Grand-pere, crooned Blaise.
Tachyon beat feebly at the awesomely powerful mind control that gripped him.
“Now,” said Blaise.
Now what was all he thought before the world went mad. For one wild distorting moment Tachyon was staring down at his own body. Another shift and tilt, and a second of wrenching nausea. Tachyon fought for control, fought to stay conscious. Succeeded. Barely.
He realized he was sitting on the stained linoleum floor. There were hands beneath his arms, yanking him to his feet. Tach stared up into Blaise’s exulting face. Lips skinning back in a snarl, the Takisian psi lord tried to gather his power and found-nothing.
Blaise laughed in great gusting whoops. It was a maddening, terrifying sound.
“Oh, Grandpa.” Tachyon was swung up into the teenager’s arms. “You’re going to wish I had only killed you.” Fury exploded behind his eyes, and Tach swung hard at Blaise’s face. Connected, and then froze in shock: There was a hand at the end of his right arm! Chipped pink polish created an odd piebald effect on the nails. Bile clawed at the back of his throat.
Blaise flung him down on the mattress. Tachyon fought to remain conscious. The very deepest part of himself. That which was Tachyon ran screaming and yammering about his head. Searching for what had been lost. Found only silence, darkness. My power, he wailed.
A tearing sound, and cold air struck Tach’s chest. Rough hands gripped the waistband of the blue jeans, broke the button, ripped open the zipper. Blaise’s nails gouged into his legs as the boy yanked down the pants. They snagged. Muttering oaths, Blaise crawled backward and started to pull off the tennis shoes. It was involuntary. Later he would regret it, but Tach kicked Blaise square in the face.
Blood from Blaise’s broken nose spattered on Tachyon’s bare legs, on the filthy tiles. Blaise twined a hand in Tach’s hair, pulled him up, and slugged him in the face. Tachyon tried to defend, to respond, but he felt weak, disoriented. He knew he had been jumped, one part of him even acknowledged to what, but acceptance was impossible.
This isn’t happening. This can’t be happening. Not to me. He hurt too much to keep fighting. Tears and blood made a slimy mixture on his face. Blaise stood up. He seemed a colossus towering spraddle-legged over Tach’s prone body. Slowly he unzipped, pulled out his rigid penis. Tachyon thought he had endured the worst this or any world had to offer. He was wrong.
Muscles shivered with strain, but still she held him at bay. He had not yet managed to violate her. Blaise was muttering curses as he gripped the soft flesh around her knees and tried to yank her legs apart. She tried to claw his eyes, but he was too quick for her.
Suddenly Blaise pulled her upright by the hair and drove two punishing blows into her gut. Air gusted out like a deflating balloon, and Tachyon wretched. Her legs went flaccid.
“Hold him,” ordered Blaise ..
Two boys jumped to obey. One on each leg, they played make-a-wish with the shuddering pain-racked body.
With a coarse grin, Blaise raked his nails across the breasts, cruelly twisted the nipples. Involuntarily, Tach yelped. Gentle now, the fingers trailed across the waist, the slight curve of the belly, brushed the mons.
Tach screamed, and Blaise was on him like a wild animal. Teeth tore at his lips and breasts. Methodically Blaise pounded at Tachyon, driving deeper into her.
The room was echoing with his screams. With the cheers of the onlookers.
“NO, NO! STOP IT! STOP IT!” The girl in his body screaming her protest.
How odd, Tachyon thought as consciousness slipped from her. I hadn’t realized my voice was so deep.
Lovers
A lifetime ago, Tachyon had been thrown into the Tombs. He had thought he knew despair when the heavy barred door slammed shut behind him. Now he realized that had been only a pale shadow of true wretchedness.
His head pounded in time to the beating of his heart. Breath seemed to rip like shattered glass across a throat made raw from screaming. Blood still trickled sluggishly from his vagina, and he wondered what internal damage had been done.
The incongruity struck him. One should not use male pronouns with female anatomy. But he was a man. Wasn’t he? He was suddenly aware of a painfully full bladder. He reached down, touched blood matted hair, and smoothness. No, he was no longer a man.
It seemed the final straw. As she stared with dry, aching eyes into the darkness, Tach longed to cry, to bathe her burning eyes with warm tears, to release the anguish filling her chest like crushing weight. But she could not cry. It was as if her emotions had been carefully gathered, and packed away in some deep and secret part of her soul. She was suffering, but she couldn’t express the pain.
The darkness seemed to have substance. Hands stretched out before her, Tach made a circuit of her prison. Six feet by five feet. Bare concrete underfoot. Brick walls that oozed damp like a sweating fat man. As she made her journey of discovery, her bruised toes tried to cringe from any possible obstacles. They needn’t have worried. The room was utterly, totally barren.
Tachyon was discovering that it was much harder to hold urine in a female body than in a male one. She found the door again. Beating desperately on it with her palms, she gathered a breath and shouted, “Hey! Help! Listen to mel HEY!”
There was no response.
As she squatted in a corner and relieved herself, Tachyon realized that in addition to being the most desperate moment of her life, it had become the most humiliating.
Eventually she slept. What woke her was a raging thirst, the clammy cold, and the sound of the door closing.
“No! Wait! Don’t go! Don’t leave me!”
Her toes struck something. There was a flat tinny sound as metal skittered across the floor. The aroma of oatmeal wafted to her nostrils. Shaking with hunger, Tach dropped her knees and groped blindly for the scattered silverware.
Minutes passed without success. Finally, with a faint mew of fury, Tach gathered the bowl in her hands and lapped down the cereal like a starving dog. It dented but did not banish the hunger. With her index finger, Tachyon scraped the sides and bottom of the bowl and sucked off the last bits of oatmeal.
A little more reconnaissance, and she discovered a pitcher of water and an empty bucket. She instantly availed herself of the bucket.
She had lost track of time. One day, three days, a week? How much time had elapsed in the world of light, in a world where people didn’t go hungry or live with the stench of bowel movements or strain for even the faintest sound of another living creature?
At first Tachyon had been terrified that Blaise had taken Cody too. After all, the boy had been fascinated with the woman. It was his jealousy of Tach and Cody’s relationship that had led him to run away in the first place and set him on this course of vengeance. But Blaise was as unsubtle as he was unstable. If he had held Cody, he would have tortured her before Tachyon’s eyes. Thank the Ideal that he did not yet understand the power of suggestion, the agony of not knowing.
At least he’s transferred his obsession with Cody to me, thought Tach. Now she will be safe. And though the thought comforted, Tachyon still had to clamp her teeth together to stop their chattering.
And Cody would be able to identify Blaise as Tachyon’s kidnapper. The brief comfort afforded by that thought took a sudden plummet. She was on the Rox-and nobody sane came to the Rox.
Then the final crushing realization: Blaise could not allow Cody to reveal her jump and Tachyon’s kidnapping. Had he killed her? Or simply removed that section of her memory with his mind powers? Fear gripped her, for while Blaise possessed the most awesome mind-control power Tach had ever faced, it was like a bludgeon. There was no mentatic subtlety. His clumsy mental surgery might have destroyed Cody’s mind. Desperately, Tach prowled the darkness, but it could not match the stygian blackness within her mind and soul. From their first meeting, he and Cody had formed a telepathic bond that Tachyon had shared with only one other human woman. Surely that power would tell her if Cody lived. But the power was gone. So the darkness was filled only with silence and her grim fears.
Six times they had fed her. Did that mean three days had elapsed? Impossible to tell. At times her hunger was so great that it felt as if a small animal were chewing at the walls of her stomach. So perhaps they weren’t feeding her every day. It was a blow to discover that her method of telling time proved to be as useless as everything else she had tried. This final loss of control over even the most meager part of her environment had, her blinking back tears.
More time elapsed, and eventually the silence became too much. One day she found herself talking to herself. Silverware was the catalyst for this latest bizarre behavior. She had been hoarding it, and she now possessed three spoons and a fork, which she obsessively counted and rearranged a hundred times in the hours between each sleep period.
“In an adventure novel or a cheap spy movie, our hero always constructs some devilishly clever device from ordinary household utensils,” said Tach aloud. “But our hero’s been reduced to a heroine, and she doesn’t have a clue.” The laughter hit the low ceiling and fell dully back on her ears.
Tach clapped a hand over her mouth to still the hysterical sound. Exhaustion dragged at her limbs.
Forcing herself to her feet, she made six quick circuits of her prison, and in time to her steps she recited: “A constant and overwhelming desire for sleep. Unspecified attacks of anxiety. Mind-numbing exhaustion. Bouts of hysterical laughter. All classic symptoms of acute depression.” She paused for a moment, conceding that this rambling oration was also abnormal behavior. Then, with a shrug, she shouted at the invisible ceiling. “But you won’t drive me crazy, Blaise. You may imprison me, starve me, destroy my eyesight with constant darkness, but you will not drive me crazy.”
It helped to say the words. But then she went to sleep.
Somber reflection in the cold blackness of morning left Tachyon with the decided feeling that she had to do something. Waiting for rescue hadn’t worked. She had to find a way to communicate, to inform someone of her plight. There was only one way she knew, and that would require an intimate study of the fleshy prison in which she now found herself.
For several minutes she paced the length of the cellar. She hated this body as much as she hated the damp concrete walls of the basement. But now she had to inspect the primitive mind. Search for the connections that might be trained and honed in mentatics.
It could be done. Long ago, she had trained Blythe to construct bulky unsophisticated mindshields. Granted, Blythe had been a wild card, but her talent had not affected the physical linkages of her brain, and she had learned. So this body could learn.
“Will learn,” Tach growled.
She settled herself comfortably on the floor. Closed her eyes, began with the feet, tried to make her cramped muscles relax. And behind the darkness of her lids her mind began to whirl like a frenzied animal chasing its own tail: What have they done to my clinic? Why is no one helping me? Furious at her own lack of discipline, Tach sat up abruptly. “If you train this body,” she said aloud, “the possibility exists that you can communicate with Sascha, or Fortunato, or some other as yet undetermined wild card telepath. You can escape and come back with many, many powerful aces, recover your body, and level this miserable island.”
She spent a few moments picturing the scene. The images of death and destruction had a very salubrious effect. As Tach lay back down, she decided that despite forty-five years on earth, she was still a Takisian to her fingertips.
She was walking in the mountains. The mountains looked Takisian, but the sky was earth’s. A flying fish skimmed the tops of the dark pines like an intricate Chinese kite, but for some reason none of this was confusing.
“Does this count as a meeting?” a young man’s voice was asking.
Tach searched for the source but saw nothing but grass, flowers, trees, and that damn fish. She did notice that a castle had suddenly appeared on one of the hilltops.
“I suppose so,” Tachyon replied cautiously.
“Good. I’ve always wanted to meet you, but I wanted you away from that place. Do you like it here?”
“It’s very ... lovely.”
She had reached an energetic stream. The water was rushing, chuckling over the rocks and parting around a gigantic gray boulder that squatted in the center of the streambed. Tach couldn’t resist. Lifting her long skirts, she leapt lightly from rock to rock, feeling the chill touch of the spume of her face and hands. Quickly she clambered up the side of the granite behemoth. The sound of the water was very loud, and mist from the rapids occasionally kissed Tachyon’s face.
“So, who are you?” asked Tachyon with studied casualness as she picked gray-green lichen from a crevice in the rock.
“A friend.”
“I have none in this place. All my friends live in another world, another time.”
“I’m here. I’m real.”
“You’re a voice on the wind. The whisper of a cloud. The murmur of water. A dream construct of a maddened mind.” She shivered and hugged herself. The long sleeves of sea green gauze snagged on the rough surface of the boulder. “Give me back my world. I can’t live in madness, no matter how pleasant.”
And suddenly she was back in the cell. The darkness pressing in on all sides, the concrete cold and rough against her bare bottom.
“Yes,” she said on a sob. “This is real.”
“Oh, Princess, I’m sorry. I’ll help. I swear to you, I’ll help.”
She woke with the passion of that promise still echoing in her mind.
“Well, friend, not to sound cynical, but I’ll believe it when I see it,” she called aloud.
The sound was wrong. The food trap rattled like pebbles in a can as the bolt was pulled back. This sounded like a road being graded. The light struck her eyes like a lance, and tears began to stream down her face. Squinting desperately, she made out a manlike shape against the glare. And then the smell struck. Baked chicken. Saliva filled her mouth like a geyser springing to life.
Tach clambered to her feet, her nakedness forgotten, consumed by the lure of food. Now that she was closer, she recognized the manshape. And manshape was the only way the joker Peanut could be categorized. His skin was hardened, puckered like the shell of a peanut, hence the nickname. His eyes were almost lost in the scaly mask of his face. One arm was missing, and Tach noticed that he had a blouse and a pair of jeans flung over the stump. Peanut struggled to bend, to set down the tray. Tach leapt to his aid lest the joker spill that wondrous banquet.
“Thanks, Doc.” His voice was a heavy rasp forced past lips that could scarcely move. “I brung you some food, and some clothes, but you gotta eat fast so he don’t find out.”
Tachyon didn’t miss the subtle emphasis nor the way the joker’s eyes flickered nervously back over his shoulder. So everyone feared Blaise. It was not just spinelessness on her part.
“Peanut, let me out,” said Tach as she pulled on the jeans.
A stiff headshake. “No, we gotta be careful. He said we was walkin’ a tightrope.” Different emphasis this time. The timbre of respect.
“Who? Who is this person?” She completed the final button on the blouse and felt confidence return like the growth of a second skin. It was amazing what lack of clothes did to one’s morale.
Peanut’s eyes were shifting nervously. “I’ve said too much already. Eat, Doc, eat. And he’ll help. He’s helpin’ all of us.”
Tach squatted and stripped the meat from the chicken with graceful slender fingers. She ate in quick little gulps but was careful to rate her intake. Too much too fast would send the stomach into a spasm, and it would be criminal to vomit up this bounty. There was a tomato on the plate. She bit into it, the juice oozing over her chin. Replete for the first time in weeks, she sighed and rocked back on her heels.
She seemed relaxed. In reality, she was measuring the distance between Peanut and the door. Testing the strength of her muscles. Suddenly she sprang and darted for the exit. But the weeks of imprisonment had taken their toll. Clumsily she staggered forward on trembling legs. The horny surface of Peanut’s arm connected painfully with her face, flinging her backward.
He was stuttering with shame. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Doc, but you made me. I gotta think of the others.” Peanut swept up the tray and fled. The slamming of the door had a certain grim finality. Tachyon began to weep.
Wait, wait, my love.
It was telepathy, but telepathy like a half-seen shadow in the darkness, a firefly’s path observed from the corner of an eye, the sigh of music blown on the wind. She reached for that elusive telepathic sense with both hands.
“Help me!” she screamed aloud. I will not fail you.
The contact was broken, but the sincerity of that promise warmed Tachyon with the comfort of an embrace. Someone cared.
With dawning wonder, she stroked the material of the blouse. Silk. To what care this mysterious benefactor had gone.
“Thank you. Thank you!” she whispered into the darkness.
His eyes turned down at the corners when he smiled. It gave him a crafty catlike look, and it always made Tisianne laugh when he saw it. When Shaklan got that look, it meant work would be put aside and some pleasurable outing was forthcoming.
“Papa, where are we going?”
“Ice-sailing.”
“But it’s past my bedtime, and I’m hungry ... and cold.”
“What you’ll see is worth more than sleep.”
His arms were clasped about his father’s neck, and the fur and lace at the older man’s throat tickled Tis’s nose. He sneezed. The sound blended with the crack of boot heels on the marble floor.
The aurora borealis was dancing like a shaken curtain of jewels across the star-strewn blackness of the night sky. The cold was intense, and each breath hurt like a rake of claws across the lungs. The glacier that crowned the peak of Da’shalan was cracking and groaning. The crunch of snow beneath booted feet, an occasional muffled cough from the bodyguards. Tis kept his eyes closed, his face buried against his father’s neck. Shaklan smelled of ambergis and musk and the sharp pungent scent of gunpowder.
Glittering like a mirror, the lake threw back the colors of the borealis. A ice-sailor skimmed across the surface of the frozen water. It was accompanied by a delicate ringing of bells. It heeled over and skidded to a stop with a hiss. Ice fragments stung Tis’s face. He licked his lips and tasted the sharp taste of mountain water as the ice melted in the heat of his mouth.
They were aboard, and the wind was stinging his cheeks as the ice-sailor swept across the lake.
“Take the tiller, Tis.”
“I can’t, Papa. The wind ... it’s too cold.”
A man stepped forward. The borealis formed a halo behind his dark head. A cloak of white and silver lay across his arm. The texture of the fur was so delicate, the tips sparkling in the starlight, that it seemed as if it had been formed of snow. He bowed.
“Ma’am.” His tone was so reverential, deepened in the way a man had when he was indicating to a woman that he found her beautiful. Tachyon was disoriented. The little boy looked in confusion to his father.
Shaklan smiled, nodded. “The Outcast will care for you now”
Tachyon looked back to this stranger, and disorientation birthed a different and more familiar emotion for a Takisiansuspicion. The man’s coloring was all wrong. Black hair? Tach had never seen the color except as a dyed affectation among the House Alaa until he/she had come to earth. And his clothes. Plain brown leather-no style at all. And the final proof that this interloper in her dream was no Takisian-the name. A Takisian of the psi-lord class wore his or her moniker with more than pride. It was a shout, a scream for attention. A thousand, five, ten thousand years of careful breeding was represented in a name. Can you match it? Can you equal this pedigree? Of course you can’t. I’m matchless, peerless. I am Tisianne brant T’sara sek Halima-he could continue in this vein for nearly an hour. But she didn’t have the time. Danger had entered his haven of sleep.
Tach backed up, until she was brought up short by his father’s knees. “No, Papa, don’t leave me.” It was a frenzied whisper.
Shaklan chuckled, shook his head, then bent over Tachyon s hands. The strands of his golden hair caught the light and seemed to glitter like spun wire. Tach pressed her mouth against Shaklan’s ear and continued to plead. But the words seemed to be reduced to mere puff’s of air, and Shaklan’s hair caught in the cracks of Tachyon’s lips.
“You will be as safe in the Outcast’s hands as you are in mine.”
Shaklan placed a quick kiss in the palm of each hand, then folded Tach’s hands together as if the child were holding and protecting the kisses. It was a beloved ritual, and Tach smiled mistily up at his father, the fear forgotten. Shaklan led Tachyon close to the Outcast.
The man placed the cloak gently about her shoulders. Somewhere in this confusing interchange Tach’s sex had gotten very confused again. The long white-blond hair mingled with the fur. Tach frowned. Even her hair seemed to have developed tiny diamond lights. It reminded her of the illustrations in the more flamboyant, romantic Japanese comic books Blaise had been wont to leave strewn about the apartment.
“This is silly. Have my eyes been invaded by stars as well?”
The question seemed to rattle the Outcast. Fingertips lightly touched the brim of his black cloth hat, fluttered to the hilt of the rapier hung on the leather belt with the air of a man trying to reassure himself that he had not forgotten his trousers.
“Princess, I’m the whisper of a cloud, a voice on the wind.”
“You!” Involuntarily, her hands closed on the soft leather of his jerkin. “Help me.”
“Soon.”
The Outcast leaned in, his lips just brushing the back of her hand when there came a raucous scream of laughter. They jerked apart, and Tach stared in confusion at a penguin with ironic human eyes wearing ice skates, gliding along with the skimmer.
The crash of the door being thrown back brought her awake. Blaise had returned. The glare of the flashlights left Tachyon blinking like a mole as the light pulled tears from her sensitive eyes.
“Grandfather. I should have come—” He broke off abruptly, a thunderous frown wrinkling his forehead. “Hey! Where did you get the fucking clothes?”
“I went to Saks for them. What do you think? They were shoved through the door along with my slops.”
“I see I’ve been away too long. People are getting soft with you. But I’m back now, and you’ll be pleased to hear I’ve wrecked the clinic. You’re really disappointing a lot of people over in jokertown.”
Each word seemed to strike like a splash of acid. Tach blinked frantically, trying to focus. Eventually she succeeded and flew at Blaise like a fighting cock. “You monster. You evil, . parentless bastard? What have you done to my people?”
Blaise knocked her down easily, then blew a kiss at Tachyon. “You’re beautiful when you’re angry.”
The five youths accompanying Blaise laughed. They were all drunk, and they gusted whiskey-scented remarks (outstanding only in their crudity and banality) back and forth between them like men playing shuttlecock.
The rasp of the zipper on Blaise’s slacks cut through the babble and banter. “Get him out of her clothes,” said Blaise, hopelessly tangling his pronouns.
Even as terror closed her throat, Tachyon noticed that Blaise’s voice had deepened. He was becoming a man. Apparently he was again determined to prove to Tachyon just how much of a man. “Blaise, don’t do this. This is the action of an animal. How can you assault a woman in this way? How can you touch me,” Tach pleaded.
The young men were advancing. Tach backed away from them. A step in time to each desperate word. The wall arrived with startling suddenness. There was no place left to run.
They grabbed her and ripped the clothes off her. Then she was down, her legs wrenched open. There was a grinding ache in her hips, and the concrete was cold beneath her bare buttocks.
Blaise was undressing with elaborate flourishes. He handed his sweater, shirt, and slacks to another young man, who folded them with almost reverential care. Tach craned to see, as if facing the horror that approached were preferable. Blaise’s cock was rearing rampant from his red brush.
Tach’s head hit the concrete with a sharp crack as she began to struggle wildly. She had thought she could lie back and take it. She was wrong. Takisian upbringing went too deep. This was rape. A crime virtually unknown on her world. An act so heinous that it was viewed as a form of insanity.
A last inane little thought passed through her head as Blaise lowered himself slowly onto her cringing body: We will kill a woman without compunction. But the Ideal forbid we should rape her. Which society is more insane? Human or Takisian?
It went on and on. Blaise was deliberately withholding his orgasm. Battering at her. Alternating the punishing assault with nibbling little kisses to her breasts, lips, and ears.
Somewhere during the ordeal Tachyon began to plead. “Please, Blaise, please.”
“What’s the matter, Grandpa?” Blaise crooned softly in her ear.
“Don’t hurt me anymore. Give me back my body. Let me go.”
“You’re still too proud, Granddaddy. You’re still giving orders, even when you say please. Ask nicely, Granddad. Beg.”
Blaise pulled out of her, and stood. “Let him up.” The boys released her.
“Now kneel to me, Grandpa, and beg.”
Tach got to her knees. She was staring down at Blaise’s bare feet. There was dirt beneath the large toenails. It sickened her in some perverse and bizarre way. And she realized that no self-abasement would soothe or satisfy the demon creature before her. She sprang to her feet and spit in Blaise’s face. There was a gasp like a sighing wind from the watching teens. Numbly, Blaise reached up and wiped away the spittle. Studied his fingers. His face was blank, expressionless. Then suddenly it twisted into a hideous grimace, and he backhanded Tachyon. She flew across the room, and came up hard against the far wall.
Blaise was on her. This time, as he drove into her, beat her unmercifully about the face and head. His ejaculation when it came was like a hot tide in her abused body. Blaise gave her one final cuff, but the sexual release seemed to have spent his fury. Without a backward glance, the boy, stood up and dressed, and he and his entourage left the cell.
For a long time Tachyon just lay on the floor.
Lovers
She drove the body unmercifully. She knew she had achieved a small measure of telepathy, but no one was listening! Her constant mental cries for help also seemed to be taking a toll on the body. The last seven times she had awakened, she had been overwhelmed with nausea. She was having trouble keeping down the gluey mass of oatmeal that was her first meal and the canned beef stew or canned chili that inevitably made up the second and final meal of her waking time. And Peanut had not returned.
“I ruined everything, by trying to escape,” she whispered. Tachyon wondered what the body must look like. Gaunt from lack ou food, muscle tone degenerating with each week of captivity that passed. And a bath. Ideal, she would kill for a tub of hot water. It made her crazy even to contemplate washing out the tangled greasy hair, the sluice of hot soapy water across the shoulders and back. Clean pajamas and crisp sheets with the smell of sunshine in them because they had been dried on a line ...
Nausea shook her, and Tach bolted for her privy bucket. Vomited up everything in her stomach. Shivering, she retreated into a corner. Tach leaned against the wall, pressed her cheek against the clammy concrete wall. The coolness helped, and she breathed slowly and deeply until the spasm passed. Concerned now, she lay her fingertips on her pulse. Without a watch it was impossible to be certain, but it seemed normal enough. Back of the hand to the cheek. No fever. No pain or ache in the extremities. Probably not a flu. Food poisoning?
Unlikely-the heaves were mild, lacked that violent, almost projectile quality that accompanied food poisoning. Her mind continued to run symptoms and causes. Hit one, and froze. A vise had suddenly begun to close around her temples.
“Ancestors, NO!” The shrill howl bounced off the walls. How long had she been buried in this living hell? Weeks? Months?
“And not once has this miserable carcass had its menses!” Tach panted.
Her heart was pounding, she could feel it beating in her gut. Or was it that other thing, that unspeakable prospect? Her hand thrust down the front of her blue jeans. She drew her palm across the slight swell of the belly.
Too soon to tell. No, it couldn’t be. What the hell else could it be? Flu.
Nausea after waking. Nerves.
No menstrual cycle.
“All right,” Tach screamed, sick of the argument with herself. “All right! The goddamn body is pregnant!”
And in that moment she went a little mad. When she finally returned to herself, she was on her knees by the wall. Her throat was raw from screaming. And something warm and sticky was matting her hair and pouring across her left eye. Tach ran her tongue across her lips and tasted and sharp coppery taste of blood.
Slowly she raised her hand to her hairline. Whimpered in pain as her fingers touched the mangled scalp. She had been beating her head against the wall, a trapped and maddened animal biting off its leg to escape the trap. Death was an escape. But she hadn’t succeeded, and now sanity had returned. She was making a noise far back in her throat that hardly sounded Takisian. Desperately, Tachyon scrabbled across the floor on all fours. Snatched up the spoon. Thrust it into her teeth as she clawed at the button and zipper on the blue jeans. Ripped them down, pulling them inside out as she kicked with frantic haste to free herself from the confining material.
Knees up, a hand resting on the curling pubic hair, fingers ready to part the labia. And she froze. She had no idea where the fertilized egg reposed. She would have to scrape each wall of the uterus. And if she didn’t get it all the resulting infection ... and if she tore the delicate walls of the uterus the resulting hemorrhage ...
The smell of a woman rotting from the inside out filled her nostrils. A time when abortion had been illegal. A time when a desperate joker woman had butchered herself with a coat hanger.
Tach began to shake. Infection be damned, she thought. Consider what you are contemplating. I have no evidence this child is defective. I can kill a defective. I can’t kill a baby.
It’s not a baby, argued another part of herself. It’s a collection of several hundred cells.
“It’s going to be a baby,” said Tach aloud.
And you’re a man! Are you seriously going to go through with this abomination?
“What else can I do?” she cried desperately. “Butcher myself, and bleed to death?”
“It’s a baby,” she whispered again.
It will be defective. It’s Blaise’s child. It will be crazy! Destroy it now!
“You are arguing to save yourself from this indignity. Well ... why? All the indignities imaginable have been heaped upon you. You have been kidnapped, robbed, assaulted, raped, and imprisoned. Why balk at this?”
Because I’m a man damn it! And there’s something growing in me!
“It is a baby,” Tach murmured as exhaustion struck her like a blow between the eyes. She flung aside the spoon. Heard its metallic jangle as it struck the far wall.
The temptation was effectively removed. She would have to crawl laboriously through the darkness to locate the utensil again, and by the time she found it, she would have again talked herself out of committing murder.
She groped for her blue jeans. Pulled them onto her shivering body. The cold sweat that had drenched her had now left her chilled to the bone. She crawled to her favorite corner and fell headlong into a sleep that bordered on coma.
The shrilling of pipes and the deep-throated booming of drums fell on her ears like a killing cloud on a field of young flowers. She was female again. Most annoying. Damn it, it was her dream. Why couldn’t she be Tachyon again-slim and lithe and male? She became aware of movement, an undulating rocking that made her feel dreadfully insecure. She pushed aside the curtains and found herself perched atop a palanquin that was in turn perched atop the brawny shoulders of four young men. They paced a trail that wove between green fleshy stalks of daunting height and girth.
Tachyon sidled backwards, away from the threatening vegetation, and found a new threat. Something behind her, following like a shadow. She spun and saw it again. A flash of iridescence. Wings. Sweet Ideal, she had wings. She explored the contours of her borrowed face. It felt the same until she reached the forehead and her shrinking fingers discovered velvet-soft antennae springing from above each brow and curving back over her head.
She scurried on hands and knees back to the opening, oblivious to the grief she was causing her strong-backed bearers. The little procession was just emerging into a clearing, and at last she got a look at what topped the vegetable behemoths. Irises, giant irises, their petals hanging down like tongues of exhausted dogs. The clearing was dotted with toadstools, and each fungus was serving as a chair for other elfin creatures like herself. Beneath the shade of the mushroom caps were other breeds of creatures. Ugly and twisted, they resembled nothing so much as a mutant’s seaside convention, all huddled beneath their umbrellas to hide from the light of the full moon that floated gibbous overhead. Tachyon wondered in what capacity they served their pretty, delicate overlords.
But closer examination revealed her mistake. It was the dainty fairies on top of the toadstools who wore the chains. The palanquin was turned and lowered awkwardly to the ground. Tachyon clung to the roof supports like a wife greeting a long-absent husband. Once the swaying and tilting stopped, she risked a glance and found herself confronted and confounded by the sight of a gigantic toad. It rolled out its tongue like a grotesque red carpet for visiting royalty. Tachyon shuddered and shrank back against the cushions. Two of her bearers reached in and dragged her out. Her bare toes seemed to be cringing away from the flicking tip of the toad’s tongue, and as an errant night breeze teased at her gossamer gown, Tach realized that she was much more pregnant than she remembered or had any business being. Oddly, there was no substance to the belly that ballooned out the fabric of her gown.
The toad frowned. Said to one of its twisted minions, “can I fuck him when she’s like that?”
“No, It’ll get in the way ... block your penis,” was the creature’s incredibly ignorant reply.
“Then I’ve got to get rid of it. Mind-rape ought to do. I can make her shove it out.”
The toad wrapped its tongue about her head. Mucus dripped from its stinking surface and ran down her cheeks like tears. Tach gave a cry of revulsion that quickly became a scream of pain as stinging needles seemed to enter her mind. Fingers slipping on the surface of the tongue, Tachyon struggled to throw it aside. There was a click like a key turning in a perfect lock, and the pain and the tongue withdrew, the tongue coiling away like a wounded snake. Tach stared at the flames dancing on her fingertips and the fire that formed a shield for her mind.
“Then rip it out in blood,” screamed the Blaise-toad, and one of the goblins drew a curved knife and advanced on her. Tachyon moaned her despair and laid her arms across the swell of her pregnancy. Then, surprisingly, the creature died in a geyser of blood, one clawed hand scrabbling at the knife that had somehow appeared in its throat.
A strong arm slid about Tachyon’s waist, and she gasped in relief as the Outcast pulled her against his side. The tip of the rapier was weaving like the nib of a maddened calligrapher in the air before them. “No, Pretender,” the outlaw said. “The child will survive to displace you.”
There were screams and shouts from the goblins, and the toad let out a hiss like a thousand cobras threatening. Then an enormous wind blew up, the petals of the irises fell like rain, and the whole grand and grotesque assembly went whirling away, carried higher and higher into the sky until they appeared as small black dots against the face of the moon.
Tach sagged in the Outcast’s arms, and it seemed perfectly natural to place her arms about his neck to support herself.
“ I won’t let him harm it,” she murmured in a voice gone weak and bloodless from fear. “Help me. Don’t let him hurt us anymore.”
Placing a finger beneath her chin, the Outcast forced her to look up. His breath smelled sweetly of honey and brandy. Closer, closer-a kiss to be anticipated ...
The slamming of a distant door brought her awake. Tachyon pushed up on the palms of her hands. Her hair hung about her like a shroud. Slowly she pushed it back. Dropped her hands until they lay protectively over her belly. And deep within her something female stirred and dropped back into the timeless sea-rocked sleep of the embryo.
How strange that in the space of a dream Tachyon had discovered a skill and an emotional gift, both of which often took a lifetime to achieve and admit. The Takisian had built a mentatic shield that would protect her and her daughter. And the parent had learned that she wanted to protect that child. Illyana was no longer something growing inside of her. Illyana was a part of her.
“There, and now you even have a name,” murmured Tach gently.
Weeks passed. She now had a rough indicator of time, a clock measured by the changes in her body. The swell of her belly was now pronounced enough to make zipping the jeans very uncomfortable. Her breasts had enlarged and were tender to the touch. At times, humiliation was more than an emotion-it was a taste, a sickness in the belly, wordless cries. What a fool, a laughingstock, she would seem to the world. But Illyana was a presence, a personality, a friend in the darkness. Her thoughts were basic, almost primordial. Food, warmth, comfort. And she responded. When Tachyon was in her bleak black moods, the clear colors of the baby’s thoughts became muddied, swirling like angry eddies. And when Tachyon sang the lullabies and ballads of her youth, the baby quieted, and her thoughts became like a tiny harmony.
“You know something, baby dear,” said Tachyon as she sat trying to comb through the tangles in her hair with her fingers. “You are like the cockroach or the rat that the prisoner tames and talks with in the solitude of his cell. You’re not really a person. You’re just an eating, dreaming, sleeping machine. But you are company for me.”
And suddenly, miraculously, the baby moved. Tachyon felt her roll over.
And suddenly she laughed-for the sheer joy of the moment, the reaffirmation of life. She laid a hand over her stomach, whispered, because she was half embarrassed. “And I do love you.”
Apart from being an emotional mainline, there was another effect of Illyana’s busy gymnastics: The morning sickness ended. Being able to keep down her meager meals had Tachyon thinking about food again. By her calculations, she was somewhere in her fourth month. And Illyana and Illyana’s surrogate mother needed decent nourishment. The Peanut visit had never been repeated, and while her nightly communions with the Outcast might be emotionally satisfying, they did little to succor the body.
To achieve that, she needed to communicate with Blaise. And even thinking about him brought on a fit of the shakes so severe that Tach feared it was a seizure. Eventually, when control and a modicum of calm returned, Tachyon tried to analyze Blaise’s possible reaction. It might be amusement for the ludicrous predicament in which he had placed his grandsire. It might be paternal pride. It might be violence. She recalled her terrifying abortion dream. What if he harmed Illyana? Perhaps it was better simply to hide her condition ....
Tachyon’s harsh laugh cut the thoughts off abruptly. This was not a condition one hid with any degree of success. Eventually, even those lack-waited teens who delivered her meals twice a day would notice.
Two days later, she noticed that her ribs felt like a washboard to her exploring fingers, and when she lay upon her back on the floor, she could feel the stony pressure against each of her vertebrae. And all of this tapered into the fecund swell of her stomach. The decision could be delayed no longer. There was simply not enough calories being fed into the body to sustain both her and the baby.
That night, as the little trap at the bottom of the door rattled open, Tach was ready. She caught the guard by the wrist and hung on while calling shrilly, “Get Blaise. I must speak with Blaise!”
The jumper broke free, and the trap slammed shut.
Again that blinding light. Tach turned away, covered her eyes with her hands until the retina could compensate. Turned back to her captor, her demon, her child. And was struck again at how much Blaise had grown. The young man was dressed in shorts and a tank top.
So, it’s summer, thought Tachyon. Which means Blaise is now sixteen. How the time passes. Is there anything I could have done to have spared us this wretched outcome?
“What ... do you want?” Blaise’s sharp-toned question broke her reverie.
Tach lifted her eyes to his face and struggled for calm. The light in those violet eyes was evil. As melodramatic as that sounded, there was no other word that applied.
When dealing with a wild animal, it was essential not to show fear, to maintain a low, level tone, Tachyon reminded herself. “Congratulations, Blaise.” Tach waited, but the teen did not play along. He continued to stare at her from beneath his thick red eyebrows. It was very disconcerting.
Tach drew a ragged breath and continued. “You will no doubt take what I am about to tell you as a testament to your virility, a proof of manhood—”
Blaise took a step toward Tachyon. She couldn’t control it. She shrank away.
“Get ... to the goddamn point.”
Silly, trivial things intrude when you’re frightened almost to insensibility. Tachyon found herself wondering where Blaise had picked up the odd speech pattern that had him hitting the opening word of a sentence hard, then pausing before continuing.
“I’m pregnant,” Tach squeaked. Blaise slapped her. “Liar.”
Cowering, she stuttered, “N-no. I’m t-telling you the truth.”
His eyes dropped to her waist. The top button of her jeans was unhooked, the zipper only partway closed, trying to accommodate the aggressive thrust of baby. Blaise’s fingers’ thrusting into the waistband drew a whimper of terror that escalated into a scream as he tore down the pants. Tachyon now understood the genesis of the human phrase to have one’s pants around one’s knees. Total helplessness, and humiliation.
The skin of Blaise’s palm was hot and sweaty as he caressed the curve of her stomach, his head was bowed almost reverently. “This ... is great.” His strange eyes flicked up to meet hers. “How does it feel, Granddad? What are you thinking?”
This was the moment. How she played the next three minutes would determine her fate and Illyana’s fate. She cautiously wet her lips with the tip of her tongue. Weighed again the alternatives. Whatever choice you made with a madman was the wrong one. No, that pessimism would freeze her.
So should she be imperious and demanding-food and care for herself and the baby? And hope it did not whip Blaise into one of his killing moods? Resentful and sulky-get rid of this bowling ball in my belly? And hope that Blaise would do the exact opposite?
And then in an instant she knew. How to win the moment. How to sway her demon grandson. And she didn’t know if she could stomach it. The power, the will, the soul that was Tisianne brant T’sara sek Halima screamed against the act she was contemplating. She was Takisian, she was incapable of such abasement.
Illyana kicked softly. Tachyon’s hand flew to her belly. Her medical training enabled her to feel and distinguish the baby’s head pressed tightly against the side of her womb.
Tachyon took Blaise’s hand between hers. Dropped to her knees at his feet. Tears would have helped, would have convinced him of her defeat. But the ability to weep had been lost in a terrifying afternoon of blood and rape. She studied his hand, noting the smattering of freckles across the back, the red hair forming tiny whorls on the knuckles.
Closing her eyes, she pressed her lips against his hand. “Blaise, you have won. Now I am begging you. Take me from this place. I am frightened by the dark, and I am weary and hungry.”
“Cody ... never believed me,” said Blaise, and the scorn was heavy in his voice. “But I always was twice the man you were.” He grabbed her by the hair and yanked her head back until her terrified eyes met his. “Say it. Call me master!”
Hate was closing her throat, but she finally managed to force it out. “ I acknowledge you my master.”
He released her contemptuously. Threw over his shoulder to one of his nervous pimple-faced boy guards, “Take him upstairs. Get him a bath and some food, and tell one of the girls to find some maternity clothes.” Turning back to Tachyon, he said with a grin, “I’m going to enjoy watching this process. This is so gross. You’ll just get fatter and fatter, and when you finally pop out this one, I’ll give you another. I can. I’m a man now, and I own you.”
Lovers
The little room under the eaves was a stupendous improvement over the basement cell. There was a narrow window, and she could watch the sun set. She had a cot and folding metal chair, and once a day her guards took her for a walk about the perimeter of the hospital building. The food was no better, but at least there was more of it. But unfortunately she was, for the most part, denied the things most necessary to a breeding female-milk, fresh green vegetables, fruit. But as the days and weeks passed, as she became rounder and rounder, she developed a grudging respect for Illyana even as the baby made her more and more ungainly.
“You are a tough little bitch, aren’t you? Fed on next to nothing, and you still thrive. That’s your Takisian bloodmakes you a fighter.”
Tachyon was sitting on the chair gazing out the window at a truly lovely sunset, provided courtesy of Manhattan’s smog. It was beastly hot up under the eaves. Tach lifted the skirt of her dress, opened her legs even wider than was necessary to accommodate the bulge of her belly, and farmed herself vigorously. And for the hundredth time she made herself-and the illusory wife she might someday possess, should fate and fortune smile and restore her to her rightful body-the promise that she would never force a woman to endure a pregnancy in the summer.
A small knot of jumpers emerged from the door four stories below and walked toward the trees. Tach leaned forward, more from force of habit than any real drive, and studied them. Fell back when there was no glint of copperred hair. Her body was not among them.
This complacency was a recent development. In the beginning, she had peered from the window. During her walks, she had cast about like a hunting hound seeking desperately for a glimpse of herself, but the Tachyon body remained stubbornly out of sight. Now it was hard to arouse that level of concern. Her focus had narrowed to the room, and more importantly to what was occurring within her borrowed body.
She was content to sit for hours listening to her heart beat, weaving her thought colors through the fabric and colors of the baby’s thoughts, singing Takisian lullabies she had thought long forgotten.
The grate of the key in the lock brought her head around, a frown of puzzlement between the blond brows. One of her guards, his mouth slack, drool running down his chin, jerked zombielike into the room. Her body was behind him. The reaction ran like fire along her nerve endings. Tach came to her feet, stared hungrily at her own body.
The girl who wore her skin was dressed in tattered cutoffs. The shirt was the one Tachyon had been wearing at the time of the kidnapping-billowing sleeves, drawstring at the throat. It was open now, revealing a good deal of the chest with its whorls of copper hair. The bones of the clavicle were like stony ropes beneath the white skin, the legs stick thin. Stubble littered the pointed chin and the sunken cheeks.
The sound they both made was surprisingly similar. A tiny whimper of misery, divided by two octaves. Tachyon recovered first. Stretched out imploring hands.
“He raped me.” The words were jarring in that husky baritone.
“No, he raped me.” Furious, Tach gripped the jumper by the shoulders. “Return me. Put us back! I can handle him.”
“I can’t.”
“Won’t:”
“Can’t! I’m not a jumper. Can’t ever be one now” Before that bit of miserable knowledge could fully penetrate, the guard let out a choking sound and fell to the floor like a broken puppet. For Tachyon, medical instinct took over. Jerking her eyes from her body, she knelt awkwardly beside the boy and checked his pulse.
Eyes shifting with lightning speed from the prone boy to Tachyon and back again, the body asked, “What’s wrong with him? What did I do?”
“A mind-control can be a silken web or a steel trap. Yours was of the latter variety”
“Will he be okay?”
Tachyon looked up at her eerie doppelganger. “No. His mind has been shredded. Death is only a matter of time.” The body gasped, a sharp little hiss of fear. “ I had to see you. You’ve got to help me.”
Tach gave a short bark of laughter. “Me? Help you? Isn’t that rather presumptuous of you?”
“You’ve got me pregnant,” said the body in a blinding non sequitur.
“Well, no. It’s not something I managed all by myself ... any more than I managed to get your body raped all by myself.”
The body was staring in fascination at the curve of her belly. He advanced a few steps, and his eyes jerked up to meet Tach’s.
“My head’s making me crazy. I can’t turn it off. I think things, and they happen.”
Tears welled up in the lavender eyes. Tachyon writhed inwardly. How painful to watch yourself weep. And for a brief instant she acknowledged that there was more than one victim in this hellish scenario.
“What are you called, child?” she asked gently, feeling unimaginably old.
“Kelly.”
Plans began to explode in Tachyon’s mind. “Kelly, listen to me. Blaise is no match for my body. I can teach you how to control the power. You can mind-control him. Force him to return us.”
She was pursuing Kelly around the room as he retreated before her, desperately shaking his head. With panic shortening his breath, Kelly said, “I can’t. I can’t. He hurts mé“
The door slammed into the wall. They both cried out and whirled to face Blaise. And both fell back, for they knew the maddened rage that glittered in those dark eyes.
Blaise seized Kelly by the arm and threw him across the room. “ I told you ... you couldn’t see him. Don’t ever ... disobey me again.”
Kelly’s teeth were chattering so hard, he couldn’t speak. He shook his head frantically, the long red hair flying about his face.
Blaise turned with almost balletic grace to face his grandfather. Tachyon’s heart was jumping in her throat. Blaise stepped inclose, cupped her cheek in the palm of his hand. Suddenly his teeth clamped down on his lower lip, and hauling off, he backhanded her across the face. She was flung into the wall, pain exploding in her shoulder and head. With a moan, she slid down the wall. Black spots danced before her eyes. She could hear Blaise approaching. Ponderous footsteps.
A lighter, quicker step. The sounds of a struggle. “Stop it! Stop it!” the Tachyon voice shouting shrilly. Tach opened her eyes. Kelly was clinging to Blaise’s shoulder, clawing at his face. All the gestures were oddly feminine, jarring to Tachyon. Blaise snarled, and gathering up Kelly’s shirtfront, he proceeded to beat the crap out of the smaller man. Kelly’s screams filled the room. He subsided into muffled sobbing, curled like a ball on the floor.
Blaise resumed his threatening advance. Tach watched the boy’s foot draw back. She knew what was coming, and she managed to get her arms across her stomach before it happened. Her wrist took most of the kick, but even the residual force was enough to set her retching. Illyana’s thoughts, pain, and fear were like the beating of wings in the confines of Tachyon’s skull.
Blaise backed off, reached down, and hauled Kelly to his feet. They exited, leaving Tachyon with the dying guard. “I swear to you, by all that I am and ever shall be.” The musical Takisian syllables rippled through the room and mingled hideously with the dying boy’s moans. “By Blood and Line. You shall die. And by my hand.”
Then and only then did Tachyon allow herself to faint.
The garret room had metamorphosed into a tower cell. Lancet windows, gray stone walls, a private prie-dieu-ironic considering she wasn’t Christian-a curtained canopy bed ... a romantic’s vision of the Middle Ages.
And it irritated the shit out of her. This wasn’t fantasy; this was deadly reality. And Tach was sick of the games. Her head seemed to be throbbing in time to her pulse, an outside pressure trying to warp and force the dream to fit his standards. Grimly, Tachyon fought back. What was achieved was a strange hermaphroditic compromise. Tachyon was male again, but pregnant.
Alien man gives birth to human child!
The ultimate tabloid headline, Tach thought, but then, we live in a tabloid nightmare. The wild card virus saw to that. We took order, peace, security ... and gave them chaos.
Tachyon was braiding his-her hair. But it really was his-her hair. Metallic copper curls sliding between his-her fingers. Frowning, tip of the tongue peeking from between his-her lips, he-she concentrated, struggled. Suddenly other hands took over the chore. The deft pull, right over left over right, the tug to the scalp was heaven. Tachyon sighed and dropped his-her hands into his-her lap, cradling the curve of their pregnancy.
“You sent for me,” said the Outcast. “Yes.”
Tach shifted around to face him. The wide brim of his hat shadowed his eyes but could not match the darkness within those eyes. Tachyon took the Outcast’s hand and laid the palm against his-her belly. “Feel her.” And Tachyon gathered up his-her child’s thought and thrust them into the mind of his-her courtly lover.
The Outcast reacted like a slaughterhouse steer seeing the fall of the hammer.
“She’s going to die. I’m going to die ... if you don’t help us.”
The man pulled his hand away as if the contact pained him. “I’ve tried ... tried to help.”
“Here?” Tach gestured. “Well, it’s not enough. The time for dreams is over.”
“It’s difficult. He’s very dangerous.”
“I know ...” Long pause, then Tach added with poisonous softness, “I’d wager ... better than you.”
The flush rode up in the Outcast’s cheeks like a spill of blood. “How do you even know I can do anything?” There was a childish complaining note in the deep voice.
“I don’t ... and you’d probably like me to assume you’re merely a symptom of incipient madness. That would let you off the hook. But you sent Peanut. He speaks of you with reverence. No, you exist. And now you have to find the courage to act.”
The Outcast turned away. “There are so many ... so many of them needing me—”
“And now there’s one more,” Tach interrupted. He-She touched her belly. “Her name is Illyana. I sing, and she thinks music back to me. She’s a trickster because she knows there’s one particular place where she kicks and I have to urinate. She knows it makes me mad, and it makes her giggle.”
Tachyon could see the tension in her reluctant hero’s back. The muscles in his neck formed corded rejection. “That’s Illyana,” Tachyon continued quietly. “And Blaise kicked me in the stomach. To him, she’s just a parasite. A means to torture me. But I know better ... she is my daughter ... and I love her.”
Tachyon rose. Made his ungainly way to the Outcast’s side. Lightly touched the man on the back of the hand. “Don’t let him kill her.”
The man whirled, almost knocking Tach off his feet. “Would you kiss me?”
“What? Now?”
“Now ... sometimes ... always.”
“Well ... yes.”
“You hesitated!” Accusation and suspicion made the words cut like blades.
“Of course. I don’t know who you are. You don’t know what I am.”
“My love.”
Tachyon covered his ears and spun awkwardly away. Fled until the width of the circular room lay between them. “Stop it, stop it, sTOP IT!” Panting breaths punctuated each word. “Why does no one know me? Am I always to be a symbol? The saint of Jokertown. The faggot from outer space. The Takisian. The drunkard, the prince, doctor, alien, lover, rival. And now your ‘love.’ Well, dammit, why can’t I just be.” He was sobbing wildly.
The Outcast crossed the room in three long strides. Took Tach in his arms. Made soothing, shushing noises.
“A kiss,” the Takisian murmured wearily as his sobs subsided. “Is that the price of freedom? Then you’ll have it. I swear.”
The dream was fading. Tach became aware of the sagging cot beneath her body, the pressure of an overfull bladder, the smell of the slops bucket, voices calling outside.
And fluttering through her consciousness like a fading memory, another voice. “You promised. Remember, you promised.”
“Doctor. Doctor Tachyon, wake up.”
Tach cranked up on an elbow. Pushed back her hair, tried to focus. “Peanut, by the Ideal ...” The words died into silence as she stared at the joker protruding from the floor like a horny mushroom. Tach blinked and realized that the lower half of the man was beneath the level of a trapdoor—where there shouldn’t be a trapdoor.
“Come quick. I’m gonna get you outta here.”
The joker had a Coleman lantern hung over the stump of his arm. With his other hand he reached out to help her. As Peanut’s chitinous fingers closed about her hand, Tachyon felt a thrill as great as if it had been the touch of a lover. Free, free-she was almost free.
“It’s a long ladder. Can you make it?”
“Not easily,” said Tach as her stomach rubbed at a rung. “But I’ll manage,” she concluded grimly.
“Can you close the trap?”
She stretched, grasped the edge, pulled. It fell with a dull thump. Peanut’s terror was palpable in the confined space.
“Sorry,” said Tach. “It was heavier than I thought.”
“That’s okay, but let’s hurry”
They began climbing.
“Can you go a little faster?” Peanut asked after several minutes.
“No. I’m a little awkward right now. And a little scared,” she added.
“Don’t worry, Doctor. I won’t let you fall. And anyway, you’d land on me.”
“And then where would I be?” She smiled back and down over her shoulder. “You’re my guide, Peanut.”
At last they reached bottom, and Tach found herself in a cavern. Seven openings debouched into the vaultlike room. Tach pivoted slowly, staring in wonder at the colorful painted glyphs that rioted on the curving walls. Somewhat reminiscent of Mayan art, they also partook of Balinese temple paintings.
“Blood and Line, this is very strange,” Tach murmured. “Pardon?” said Peanut politely.
“Nothing ... hysteria ... relief,” Tach quickly added at the joker’s look of alarm. “But this can’t be real ... can it?”
“It is. He’s had me down here exploring them. They go all over. Weird places, but okay places too.”_
Peanut headed toward one of the openings. Tach fell in step with him.
“Places like where?”
“New Jersey.”
“Definitely a weird place,” said Tach thoughtfully.
The tunnel had started to climb, and Tach knew damn good and well that they hadn’t walked to New Jersey yet. She stopped, planting both feet heavily like a balky foal. Peanut looked back questioningly.
“Where are you taking me?” Suspicion sharpened her tone.
Peanut seemed to collapse in on himself. His thickened eyelids blinked rapidly several times. The effect was like watching a stone idol come to life, and Tach imagined that she could hear a sharp click as the hoary lids met and sprang apart.
“I gotta take you to him first. Then we’ll go. He just wants to see you.”
“Who? The Outcast?”
“The governor.”
“Governor? What are you babbling about?”
Wounded dignity descended over the joker like rolling fog. “This is a joker place now. We take care of each other, and he takes care of us. We got laws now and everything.”
“I’m sorry, Peanut,” Tachyon said contritely. “It’s probably a good thing you have a joker place. And I’m very fortunate. You’re probably the only people in the world who would help me right now”
They resumed walking. “We’re scared of Blaise, but not enough to stop caring for you.”
“You didn’t feel that way two years ago when I derailed Senator Hartmann’s presidential campaign.”
“The governor explained why you did that.”
That stopped Tachyon in her tracks again. “He did?” she asked in a voice gone suddenly as wobbly as her knees. “Yeah. He wouldn’t give us details. He just said that what you did probably saved us from even worse persu ... persecution.” Peanut faltered slightly over the unfamiliar word. “He says you do care for the jokers like nobody ever has.”
Falling into step with the joker, Tach asked hesitantly, “Is ... is the governor a joker?”
“Of course.”
That stopped her yet again. It was an act of will to kick herself back into motion again. She steeled herself to pay the price of freedom.
A kiss. A joker.
“You promised ... remember, you promised.” A joker.
Faceted surfaces seized the light. Broke it into the primary colors of the spectrum. Threw it back in rainbow striations on the white sand floor of the cavern. Tach shook her head. Only on the world of her birth had she seen such gaudy extravagance. A jewel-encrusted door, the gems forming the pattern of a coat of arms.
“Your governor doesn’t underrate his importance.”
“We didn’t build it. Honest. It just happens.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
Enchanting ice, the faceted surfaces cool and sharp against the palm of her hand. One of the gems was loose. It formed the eye of an eagle, and beneath her probing fingers, it suddenly tumbled free like a bloody tear. Bewitching fire, as a ruby the size of a plum filled her hand. She couldn’t resist. She pocketed the wealth.
“The ability to make dreams manifest ... energy-to-matter transference,” murmured Tach, trying to remove this latest wild card mutation from the realm of fantasy into the workaday reality that was science.
Scientific theories held little interest for Peanut. He threw back the elaborate bolt, the turned to Tachyon. “Wait here. I gotta make sure everybody’s cleared out. The fewer people who know, the better.”
Darkness fell around her like a storm as Peanut and the lantern passed through the doorway. And carried on its stygian wings was a stench that defied description. Tach, her stomach heaving, spun and staggered back a few steps from the door.
What could possibly live and produce such foulness? For over forty years she’d faced and physicked the worse the wild card had to offer. She could face this too. What she couldn’t face was the blackness. Memories of her basement cell scurried like tormenting demons through her mind. Footfalls in the darkness, raucous laughter. Light struck her like a blow, and Tachyon screamed. Blaise was coming.
Peanut’s hand across her mouth smothered the sound, yanked her back from the edge of madness.
“I’m sorry ... I’m sorry” Her teeth chattered over each consonant like hail on a tin roof.
“Don’t be afraid of the dark. We won’t let anything getcha. Now come on, but you remember-because he won’t, won’t want to-you gotta hurry.”
They were through the secret door, and her feet recoiled from a sticky resinous substance. The stench made her head reel, made her doubt the evidence of her eyes. That voluminous mass of stained white couldn’t possibly be flesh? Could it?
Pipes thrust into the mass like air hoses into an inflating balloon. But this was not so benign. Dried blood flaked from the skin around the punctures like peeling paint, and Tach could see an angry red, the corona of infection, flaring from several of the crudely sewn incisions. And from the pores poured the source of the foulness-liquid shit oozing in perfect beadlike globules, running down the joker’s side to join the mountains of waste. Ancestors help the poor creature, it was flesh, it did live. Stomach heaving like a bucking horse, Tach fought her revulsion and tried to see where in thIs mountain of protoplasm resided the mind, the soul.
“Get the doctor a handkerchief, Peanut,” said a highpitched voice from high above her. “She’s not accustomed to the smell of bloatblack.” The boy hit the word bloat with the bitterness of a falling hammer.
Tach searched wildly for the source of the voice. Finally located it. Pygmylike, the head, neck, shoulders, and arms of a young man perched like a figurehead on the prow of a massive ship of flesh.
Was there anything in that round fat face reminiscent of her dream phantom suitor? Only the hair color. A nudge from Peanut startled her. He offered a handkerchief. It had been drenched in Lagerfeld. It had been Tachyon’s favorite—
“After-shave, yes, I know,” said the young man in chorus with her thoughts. “That’s why I got it for you ... for this moment.”
The damp cloth formed a veil against the stink and Tachyon’s horror. “Are you ...” She couldn’t form the rest of the words.
“The Outcast? Yeah. Now, I suppose, you see why.” They were tuned. He was the first person she had read with her feeble telepathy. They had walked in dreams together. It was easy to slide into his mind. Past the lithe, tanned figure that was the Outcast, the soul’s image of his true self. Past erotic visions of Kelly. A simulacrum of Tachyon-heroic, noble, suffering. Down to where the boy-child lived. Encased in fat, eating sewage, lying in shit, and dreaming of beauty. Quick blurred images flashed past-of Teddy, slow and always a little pudgy, but blessed with beautiful hands. Those hands sweeping across the page of a sketchbook. The smell of drying oil, the romantic quirky paintings that filled his room. They were lovely; they added something to a world that dismissed, discounted, and rejected Theodore Honorlaw. Monster/tired/screaming/hateself/mustlive/mustdie. Tachyon’s spirit wept.
Teddy looked down at her. “You’re crying on the inside for me.”
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you cry on the outside?”
“I can’t. I’ve lost the ability,” Tach said simply. “When?”
“After the rape.” They studied each other for a long moment. “Now you’re weeping for me,” Tach added softly. “Yeah ... but only on the inside. Wouldn’t do for the governor of the Rox to show weakness.”
Again silence fell between them. Tach remembered Peanut’s admonition. “Teddy, the longer I stay here, the greater the danger. Peanut and I—”
“Bloat, the name’s Bloat. Teddy belongs to another world ... and haven’t you forgotten something?” Tachyon cringed, eyes flicking guiltily from side to side. “No, you haven’t forgotten, you were just hoping I had. I disgust you, don’t I?” Tach just shook her head. She wished she could lie. Knew she couldn’t. He was in her mind again. She couldn’t hide anything from him. His face puckered like a baby about to cry.
“We’ve all revolted you. For forty-five years you’ve been totally grossed-out every time you touched one of us, cared for one of us.” His tone wound higher, fueled by his growing anger.
“I’m sorry ...”
“I thought you loved me!” The enormous body was quivering, sending shocks through the walls and floor of the old building. Tach tottered, struggled to maintain her footing. Peanut was terrified.
“You’re a fraud, Tachyon, a total fucking fraud!”
Her shame collapsed before a wave of indignation. “No—I helped create you-I’ll bear that guilt. But I have worked and lived among you, given half my life to your care, your protection, your well-being. I do care for you. You are my wounded step-children, but how can you ask me to love you when you can’t even love yourselves?”
Snorting, gasping sobs emerged from the boy atop his hideous throne. Unable to help, Tachyon listened to the sounds of woe come falling down the joker’s sides like the rivers of bloatblack.
“Somebody’s coming,” said Peanut suddenly. Tachyon hadn’t even noticed him moving to the door.
“Has to be Blaise. My jokers are all under strict orders.”
“Ideal,” murmured Tachyon, and felt her bowels go to water. The boy’s face hardened. He scrubbed at his eyes. Tach dug to her core. Takisian pride would support her. It was all she had left. “This is your moment. Revenge yourself and all your fellows upon me. You have the power.”
Bloat stared at her. Fury fell away. He sighed. “I can’t do that to you. For months you’ve cried, and sung, and talked in my mind. You’re beautiful ... I can’t hurt you. Climb up.”
Tachyon needed no urging. Revulsion gave way to selfpreservation. She picked her way through the mounds of fecal waste, placed a foot on one of the pipes jabbed IV-like into the joker’s body. Fingers pinching at the skin she hauled herself upward, and fell forward into the folds of flesh. She lifted a flap of skin. It was like handling a sack of wet sand, but sweat made it oily. She slipped beneath it, and pulled it up like a blanket. It was horrible.
The sound of the doors slamming open brought back memories. Tach chewed on a corner of the handkerchief. “How dare you bust in on me like this!” Bloat roared. “This is joker territory, jumpers only come when invited.”
“Looking for someone,” wailed a boy in a cracking adolescent’s tone. The door slammed again. Tach sagged with relief.
She stood and made her way to the head, her feet sinking several inches with every step. His head reached only to her breast. She pushed his hair off his forehead. It was silky, freshly washed. She caught the thought in preparation for meeting you.
Their thoughts continued to dance and weave about and through one another.
“I wish you could come with me too,” said Tach in answer to an unspoken question.
“Will you ever come back?” Pleading without ever having asked.
“I must.”
“Oh, yeah, your body’ll still be here.”
“More than that. There’s you, and I’ll help you if I can.” Tach hesitated. Bloat’s dark eyes were pleading with her. He looked away, mumbled, “Blaise knows you’re gone, they’re hunting ... you better go.”
Setting her jaw, Tach drew in a hissing breath between her teeth. Took Bloat’s face between her hands, bent in for the kiss. His flabby arms wrapped about her waist, drew her in close, and Tachyon began to shake. This had nothing to do with Takisian revulsion for the deformed. This was gutwrenching terror.
Blaise’s teeth drawing blood from her lower lip in his own grotesque and evil version of a kiss. Almost choking her as he thrust his penis down her throat.
Tachyon whimpered as Bloat’s hands closed tightly about her wrists.
He forced her hands from his face, pushed her away. “NO!” The word twisted and vibrated with his emotional agony. “I’m not going to hurt you. You’ll never remember me as someone who hurt you.”
“I promised!” cried Tach.
“And I want it! But not this way. Not when all you can remember is a rape! Peanut, help her down.” The joker scurried up onto Bloat’s back, put a hand beneath Tachyon’s elbow. “Hurry”
It was harder going down. Eventually Tachyon just sat down and slid. Her dress and hands were stained with bloatblack.
She looked back up the wall of flesh. “No, Peanut, I’ve got to do it. I’ve got to go back. I can’t leave him with my word broken.”
“No, Doctor, we’ve gotta go. It’ll hurt him worse if you get caught.”
They stepped through the secret door. The last sound Tachyon heard was a boy weeping.
Eventually fear can kill you. It starts by sapping the will and turning the body into a shivering sickly husk. Tach had reached that state. Without the support of Peanut’s arm, she could never have reached the chamber in which they now stood. In another lifetime she would have shrunk from that rough contact. But she had endured the sweating, stinking, flaccid mound that was Bloat, and she had felt his love and his despair. She had been assaulted by the physical beauty that was Blaise and known his hate.
“It doesn’t matter,” she whispered as she sank down on the glittering sand that formed the floor of the cavern chamber. “What, Doctor?”
She looked up at him. The sad, sad eyes, the chiseled wrinkles about that slit of a mouth.
“Peanut ... you’re a very handsome man.”
“No, Doctor, I’m a joker.” Bending, he held out his single hand to her. “You rested enough? Can you go on? That Blaise ... he knows we’re running.”
The tinkling of falling water drew her attention. She looked and located the source. “Let me bathe my face and hands. That will help.”
“Okay,” said Peanut dubiously.
The water was icy cold, but it revived her like a slap. She looked down at her dress, gave a little mew of disgust, and pulled it over her head. Immersed it beneath the tiny waterfall that had first attracted her. The waters of the pool were soon fouled and darkened with the bloatblack. She put the dress back on, shivering at its clammy touch, but at last she was clean, and the stink was gone.
They kept walking. Tachyon slid a hand into Peanut’s. He looked back and smiled. Striations of mica in the rock walls threw off a soft phosphorescent glow. Tachyon was no geologist, but she didn’t think that mica could do that. Elaborate stalagmites and stalactites yearned for each other from the floors and ceilings of the caverns, their colors shell pink, sea green, amber.
“Peanut, Ellis Island isn’t a real island,” Tach said conversationally. They were passing another underground grotto, and on a whim Tach kicked a small pebble into the mirror-like water. The reflected stalagmites and stalactites bowed and swayed like stony dancers.
Forehead buckling with a frown that made the horny skin erupt like the earth in an earthquake, Peanut said, “But it’s surrounded by water.”
“That’s not what I mean. It was made from landfill. There can’t be caverns like this beneath its surface.”
“But they’re here,” said Peanut with a blunt practicality that made Tachyon’s intellectual maunderings seem inane. Tachyon nodded, shrugged, but only made it through part of the action because she saw the spider. The size of a coffee table, it was stalking deliberately through the caverns, its eight multijointed legs making a horrible creaking sound. A tiny mew of fear made it past her blocked throat.
Peanut followed her terrified gaze. Adding a cocky swing to his normally stiff, blundering walk, Peanut strolled over and ran his hand through the body of the arachnid. It broke apart like stirred oil, globules of ectoplasmic spider floating in all directions.
“Don’t worry, it’s not real. None of ’em are real. You see things down here. Monsters and people, and just plain things. I think this is the place where nightmares live.”
“Whose?” asked Tach a little breathlessly.
“Maybe everybody’s in the whole world. Maybe just ours-us on the Rox, I mean.”
“Then my nightmares ...”
“Oh, there’re probably a few sneaking around,” answered the joker.
It was an intriguing thought, and Tach searched for these fragments of self. There was a strange sense of deja vu when she finally spotted one because she so clearly recalled the dream that had given birth to this sad-faced phantom. Cody, lost, crying-so strange because Tachyon couldn’t recall ever having seen Cody cry. Adding to the grotesquerie-the tears were slipping from beneath her eye patch but not from the normal healthy eye. She was in her green surgical scrubs, a giant bloodstain directly over the crotch.
“Don’t let them hurt me. Keep him away from me. Don’t let him hurt me again.”
The phantom wasn’t really speaking. The mouth moved, and Tachyon supplied the words. Rape dreams seemed to torment her. Her own, of course, but also Cody’s. Was she safe, or had Blaise inflicted the most brutal assault and indignity upon her?
Peanut became alarmed at her rigid, white-hpped stare. “You want me to break it up, Doctor?”
“No, don’t touch her. Let nothing touch her.” Tach resumed her plodding trek for freedom.
Minutes passed, marked by the scuffle of their shoes in the white sand and the hiss of their puffing breath. Tachyon walked diagonally across the path in front of them. Tachyon froze and watched himself pass. The Tachyon phantasm was bigger than in reality. The expression was cruel, the knuckles of the artificial right hand stained with blood.
“I’m glad—” her voice was a low, ugly growl, “glad to know that I’m part of Blaise’s nightmares. The Ideal knows he forms a prominent figure in mine.”
Peanut rolled a wary eye at her. Shook his head, kept walking. Around a curve, a new apparition waited. A narrowhipped, broad-shouldered man of indeterminate years. Hair like silver gilt caught the ghostly light from the walls forming an effect like a nimbus about his head. He was dressed in a white and gold uniform that would have been in place at an Austro-Hungarian ball. The man was seated on an outcropping of rock, one booted foot drawn up, nursing a knee. He was very beautiful.
“Wow!” An expression of awe from Peanut. “Like an angel.”
Tach laughed. It echoed back from the unseen cavern roof, a strange sound in these dim halls. An even stranger sound in the dim recesses of her burdened soul. Idly, she wondered when she had last laughed.
“Hardly. It’s my wicked cousin Zabb. Zabb and several other of my relatives tried to meddle in your affairs back ... oh, I guess it must be five years now”
“What’d he try to do?”
“Drop a very large asteroid on top of your pretty planet.” The path was beginning to rise. Tach could feel the stress in the muscles of her calves. Her mood rose with the angle of the floor. Free-free-free-free-free, sang a jaunty little litany in her head.
“Who stopped him?”
“I did, ably and critically assisted by Cap’n Trips. Yes, that was certainly one of Zabb’s more flamboyant and malicious gestures. On a more personal, less cosmic scale, he’s just plotted and tried to kill me several times,” Tach continued with great joviality. “I wish I had seen Zabb first. Then I would have known this was all a mind cheat.” She answered Peanut’s puzzled glance. “Zabb’s either dead or several hundred light-years away. I know damn good and well he’s not living in a tunnel under New Jersey.”
“You’ve had such an interesting life,” said Peanut wistfully. Tach saw Blaise slipping through the rock formations to their left. She shuddered, and increased her pace. “The Chinese curse. Don’t long for it, Peanut. Embrace, caress, cherish the mundane—”
Hands closed around her hips just below the curve of her pregnancy, lifted her into the air. Tach screamed. “Going somewhere, Granddad?” crooned Blaise in her ear. Spittle wet her lobe, and his stubble rasped across her cheek. “But the fun’s just begun. You can’t leave until you’ve popped ... and I’ve given you another one. You wouldn’t cheat a father out of his firstborn, would you? It’s not a very fucking Takisian thing to do.” The words dripped with venom. Jumpers were emerging from the rocks and shadow. Poor Peanut was splayed on his stomach, held down by several young men. Blaise casually tossed Tachyon into the arms of one of his lieutenants. Sauntered over to where Peanut lay supine and shivering. Tachyon realized she was making a horrible little mewling sound in the back of her throat. She had never heard a sound like that out of a human or a Takisian before—only out of dying animals. She bit down on her cheek to still the shocking sound.
“Okay, Peanut, now you’re going to tell me all about who put you up to this.”
Before Blaise exercised his mind-control power, he always set and shot his jaw. Obviously Peanut knew the habit, knew what it signified. Peanut’s fingers crawled across the sand, moving carefully, subtly, toward the boot of one of his captors and the large bowie knife that rested there. Peanut, NO! The mental scream echoed about the confines of her skull, and Tachyon felt Bloat stir, a huge stretched presence on the edge of her consciousness.
Peanut’s hand closed about the knife, yanked it free. Twisting wildly, he managed to get the blade beneath his chin. He drove his head down, and blood gouted first from beneath his chin and then from his eye as the tip of the blade emerged through the socket like a moray eel nosing out from its rock cavern.
Grief raced through her, fused with Bloat’s feelings of disgust and relief. Together they mourned for the dying joker. Blaise was quivering with fury, and his jumper minions stepped hurriedly away, trying to escape the parameters of his power, trying to blend with the rocks.
“Mother ... fucker,” spat Blaise, and rounded on his grandfather. “So you’ll just have to tell me. Bloat was behind this, wasn’t he?” The demand was shrill.
Tach shook her head. “No, only poor Peanut. While exploring the caverns, he found my basement cell. He brought me food, and eventually I convinced him to help me.”
“I think you’re lying. Peanut wasn’t smart enough to cook this up.”
“He didn’t. I did. And as for lying—” ever so sweetly, she continued, “you can always read my mind and find out.” It had the desired result. Blaise’s face twisted with fury as he considered this void in his power. He could control, but he couldn’t read. The secrets of the soul and mind were forever beyond him.
“The only advantage telepathy gives is that people don’t know they’ve been fucked with. Well, I prefer for you to know I’m fucking with you.”
It didn’t take a genius to figure out what was coming. He would mind control her, and force her to talk. Tach broke free from Bloat. She needed all her concentration to marshal her feeble shields.
“I’ve put up the deathlock,” Tach warned.
Blaise understood the significance. The deathlock was the ultimate Takisian mindshield. It could be broken, but only at the cost of the victim’s life.
“You don’t have shields. You’re just a human now”
Was there hesitation in those purple-black eyes? This was high-stakes poker-very high stakes-lives and minds hung in the balance. Could she risk everything on a bluff? Tach considered that gargantuan lump of fat, supine and helpless in the Administration Building. Pictured Blaise with a gasoline can, pictured Teddy burning, dying.
“Try me,” Tach invited.
Power lanced out, struck her shields, was repelled, and withdrew. And her shields crumbled like a sand castle at high tide. But Tachyon had won the bluff. Having been repelled, Blaise did not come back for another try.
Shoulders hunched, hands balled into fists, the teenager turned away. Suddenly spun back, fist lashing out in a punishing backhand. Only the support of her captor kept Tachyon upright as the blow landed hard on her temple.
Blaise was unlimbering his belt. “It’s time you learned the price of disobedience, Granpere.”
It was Tachyon’s phrase. How many times had Blaise heard it? Resented it, hoarded it while waiting for this moment, savored it as he threw back the words like a challenge.
Then Tachyon forgot all about thinking as Blaise raped her again.
Lovers
Tachyon lay on the oil-stained sands of the New Jersey shore and vomited up what felt like several gallons of polluted water. No Takisian is a good swimmer-the home world was too cold to encourage that particular sport-and in her present condition Tachyon was about as lithe as a wading hippo. So she was amazed and delighted to find herself once more safely ashore, however dirty and depressing the vista might be.
She rolled onto her back and waited for her heart to slow its desperate pounding. Illyana was sending out waves of puzzlement over her mother’s distress. Tachyon sent back images of black water, trying to show the baby the reason for her fear and the fact that it no longer existed. Illyana’s confusion deepened, and Tach felt a burst of pleasure from the fetus as she contemplated her watery home.
That brought a laugh to her lips, and Tachyon sat up. “All right, you little fish, so I’m an irrational coward. But you won’t be so smug once you’ve joined the rest of us out here on dry land.”
Sometime during that nightmare dog paddle, she had lost or kicked off her shoes. Water squished through the thick material of her tube socks as she stood and tried to get her bearings. Walking was going to be difficult, and her clammy clothes ...
She realized what she was doing and throttled the complaining thoughts. “Burning Sky,” she said with disgust. “You’re free. Free, and you’re bitching about wet socks.”
Tachyon threw back her head and let out a whoop of joy. “I’M FREE! FUCK YOU, BLAISE! I’M FREE!” The joyous words echoed oddly among the rusting cranes and rotting piers that lined the New Jersey coast.
It was all the celebration she allowed herself. She was still dangerously vulnerable, and dangerously close to the Rox. She had to make her way back to the clinic, and quickly. As she paused to get her bearings, the moldering skyline suddenly gave her a heart-squeezing sense of deja vu. Strange, because she had never in her life stood on this shore at the edge of the leprous bay, gazing across the cancerous rot of industrial parks.
Someone else’s memory.
Despite her former body’s formidable powers, she had not made it a habit to walk through the private parts of people’s minds. That narrowed the possible owners of this particularly intense memory. And since only the Great and Powerful Turtle lived in Bayonne, New Jersey, it was a safe bet the memory was his.
Tommy. Yes! Tommy could get her home without the dangers attendant to hitchhiking. And if Blaise came after her, Turtle could handle him. Now all that remained was to find the junkyard that hid the Turtle and housed the man inside the shell.
It was like having due north embedded in the cortex of the brain. She matched junkyards against the memory compass in her head until at last the images merged. Beyond the twelve-foot-high chain link, abandoned cars formed steel glaciers. Tilted piles of tires, like a giant’s collection of rotting donuts, loomed against the light haze that was Manhattan. The problem was the fence.
She cast along the fence like a hunting dog until she found the gate. An enormous and well-oiled padlock leered at her. Hefting it in her hand, she wished that somewhere in her misspent youth she’d learned to pick a lock. Great fantasy-totally useless. Even if she_ possessed the knowledge, she lacked the tools. Crowbar. Same problem. No tool, probably not enough strength.
She reluctantly dropped the lock, and it fell back against the gate with a crash that set the metal to shivering and ringing. A dog began to bay. Tachyon considered just standing outside the gate and bawling like a hurt steer until someone emerged. But what if this was the wrong junkyard? And what if the proprietor emerged with a shotgun and didn’t notice the gender and condition of his caller until he’d replied with both barrels?
She returned to a section of fence that sagged between the uprights. That left a two-foot space between the rolled barb wire and the top of the links. Monkeylike, using fingers and toes, she began to climb the fence. It was almost impossible with her belly in the way. She found a way to make it possible though it put enormous strain on her back.
At the top. Eyeing the points on the chain link. The rusting barbs. She went wriggling through, feeling hot burn as several barbs opened lines on her back. The stabbing pain in her stomach and thighs from the chain link. Now the hard part, maneuvering around to find a toehold ...
In another lifetime Tachyon had often warned his pregnant patients about increasing clumsiness as the pregnancy advanced. How they should avoid step stools, ladders.
Add chain link fences, she thought as her foot slipped, a link tore open her palm and she fell backward off the fence. Illyannnnnaaa. What began as a name in the mind became a shriek in the throat as she plummeted. Fortunately the gods and ancestors gave woman padding. It hurt, and she suspected she had bruised her tailbone, but no bones were broken, and Illyana continued to slumber.
Mindful of dogs, Tach crept through the dungheaps and gravestones of an industrial society. Near the center of the yard five boulevards intersected in an open area, a sort of junkyard Etoile with the Are de Triomphe formed by a weather-beaten and sagging old shack squatting like a tired old man in the center.
It was the right junkyard. Tommy’s memories of a lifetime of childhood games in and around that old house jostled in Tachyon s mind like rudderless boats. The feelings engendered were so warm that she forgot caution and walked slowly and openly toward the front steps.
Only the quick rush of feet on the hard ground prevented her from being knocked down. She spun as the big black Labrador-Doberman cross sprang at her. His shoulder hit her in the thigh, and she teetered wildly but kept her feet. It circled back as she lunged for the porch, though its safety appeared dubious.
Tach had been master of a pack back home on Takis.
Only there the hunting beasts had a wingspan of thirty feet and jaws that could bite through a man. Given that for training, how hard could one ninety-pound dog be? She had her back against the screen door, beating out a tattoo with a heel as the animal growled, barked, and snapped about her ankles.
“Down, sir!” She tried to deepen her voice, hold back the quaver of terror. The dog whined, buried its muzzle briefly between its paws like a man holding his head in confusion.
The porch light snapped on, and then she heard Turtle. “It’s three o’clock in the fucking morning!”
It was music. It was warmth, and breakfasts in bed, and hot baths, and everything safe and good. She looked back over her shoulder. Tommy Tudbury, the Great and Powerful Turtle, was a plump middle-aged man dressed only in pajama bottoms, and as his eyes met Tachyon’s, he surreptitiously reached down and hitched the waist of his pajamas up and over the bulge of his potbelly.
Tach drew a deep breath and said in a surprisingly steady voice, “Tommy, it is I, Tachyon.”
“And I’m the pope.” The dog was keening softly. Tommy glanced down in annoyance. “Jetboy, scram.” The dog bounded off into the darkness.
“I am Tachyon,” she insisted. “I was jumped—”
“And killed. They televised the memorial service on the local joker cable station.”
“I an not dead. I’ve been imprisoned on Ellis Island for seven months. Whoever said I was dead lied. I’ve got to get back to the clinic, and for that I need your help.” She considered for a moment, then added. “But first ... I need a drink.”
“Shit! You just might be Tachyon,” snorted the Turtle. And Tachyon was too relieved even to be offended. “Tell me something only Tachyon could know”
“I found you, didn’t I?” That didn’t seem to cut it. “I faked your death in eighty-seven. You yanked me out an Atlanta hotel window in eighty-eight—”
“Okay, okay.” But there was the oddest expression in his brown eyes. Uncomfortable under the scrutiny, Tach hugged herself, and half turned away. “Well, I guess you better come in.”
As she followed him through the door, Tach noticed that the screen had been repaired. It looked as if a twisted black-wire spider had died and joined with the metal of the screen. Tommy’s bare feet slapped on the linoleum floor as Tach followed him down the hall and into the tiny kitchen. It was extremely well appointed-dishwasher, double-door refrigerator, electric knife sharpener, coffee maker, coffee-bean grinder-in short, a gadgeteer’s delight.
“All I’ve got is bourbon.”
“That’s fine.” The chink of glass on glass. Tom thrust a tumbler under her nose. The whiskey fumes caressed her nose with a smell that promised the warmth of hearth fires. Greedily she grabbed the glass, threw back the bourbon. It hit like napalm exploding, and she gagged. Tommy held her shoulders.
“Stupid,” wheezed Tach. “I haven’t had a drink in seven months.”
Ton waved the bottle. “You want another?”
“No, I can’t. It’s bad for the baby.”
“Baby?” Turtle echoed in a pinched, strangled voice. Despite herself, Tachyon laughed. “You are an old bachelor.” Tommy’s eyes dropped to her thickened waist. He spun away, ran his hands through his hair. “Oh ... shit ... this is too fuckin’ weird.”
“You ought to try it from my side.” For a long moment, they stood in silence. It soon became uncomfortable. Tommy was staring at her so oddly.
“What?” Tach finally demanded. “You really are beautiful.”
Her hands flew to her cheeks, covering the betraying flush. “Don’t be an idiot,” she said gruffly. She then peeked at him through the curtain of her hair. “Tommy, do you have a mirror?”
“Why?”
“I ... I have never seen myself. I have lived in this skin for seven months, but I have never seen myself.”
Pity flared in his eyes. Gruffly he said, “Come on.” She followed him down the hall and into the small bedroom. A full-length mirror hung on the closet door. Tommy reached out and snapped on the ceiling light. The wallpaper was an elegant stripe design known as Versailles. Tach had used it in one of her apartments. The room was dominated by a big-screen TV, but that would be logicalTommy had owned a TV repair shop. Atop the television was the head of an incredibly handsome man. In place of hair, a clear radar dome covered the top of the skull.
“Modular Man?”
“It’s all I’ve got, just the head. I’m going to get it working sometime.”
“You’re very strange.” She resumed her scrutiny of the room. Framed prints and posters on the walls, tumbled pile of books on the bedside table. The bed itself was a canopied dream, a bed for a Renaissance prince.
“You’re a romantic,” said Tachyon as she crossed the room. “And a very bad sleeper,” she added with a glance at the bedclothes, which were humped and twisted like cloth’ mountains riven by an earthquake.
But the moment had come, and she forced her attention to the mirror. It was a little figure, a defiant urchin in her faded denim coveralls. The shoulder straps crisscrossed the thin white T-shirt. The breasts were swollen; her body preparing itself for motherhood. The thrust of her belly was greater than she had expected, and she found it embarrassingparticularly with Turtle watching.
She moved in closer, inspected the silver gilt hair cascading over her shoulders and reaching to her hips. The shape of the face was actually familiar. Like her own, it tapered to a pointed little chin, but it was soft and innocent. No wrinkles formed a net of years about the eyes; no deep gouges marred the vulnerable mouth. Tachyon noticed she had a rather short upper lip, which left her with a constant and quizzical little porpoise smile. Only in the eyes did her ordeal, and the years that burdened her soul, reveal themselves. They were a deep smoky gray with a darker circle around the iris, and they were haunted and very sad.
She turned back to Tommy. “Ideal, it’s so ... young.” Tach turned back to the mirror. Noted the bones of her clavicle etched beneath the white skin. She was painfully thin, which made the distended belly look more like a victim of starvation than pregnancy.
“What do you need, Tachy?” asked Turtle.
“A bath-I’m sticky with salt. A meal. And sleep.”
“Bathroom’s through there. I’ll fix you some food, and the bed.” He pointed.
An hour later, she was clean, sated, and exhausted. Tach climbed into the big canopied bed wearing a soft flannel shirt of Tommy’s. Her hair was still damp, and she could almost feel the tangles forming, but she didn’t care.
With his feet planted well apart and his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his bathrobe, Tommy was a pudgy Colossus of Rhodes standing guard at the door. “Could I ...”
“What?”
“Nah, never mind.”
“What?”
“It’s nothing.”
“What?” repeated Tachyon with rising irritation.
He sucked in a bushel’s worth of air and let it out in a long breath. “Could I ... brush your hair?”
Tach smiled, and for the first time she saw the effect a lovely woman could have on a man. The Ideal knew she had felt it often enough. But what power.
“I’d like that, Tommy.”
She held out her hand, and as he crossed to her, he plucked a silver-backed brush from the dresser. It was such an oddly elegant thing to see in Tommy’s broad soft hand. He settled cross-legged on the bed behind her. Tach fidgeted for several seconds until she found a position that would accommodate her belly and not cramp Illyana. Waves of sleepy contentment were washing off the baby, and it was about to put Tach to sleep.,
Tommy’s hands moved through her hair, lifting and separating the silky strands. Occasionally a strand would catch on his skin, and the tug to her scalp was amazingly sensual and relaxing. The brush massaged her scalp and flowed softly through her hair. He was so gentle, there wasn’t a single painful pull.
Tachyon was very aware of Tommy, but despite her exhaustion and the dreamy state induced by the brushing, there was still a shivering along all her nerves. Her skin seemed almost to crawl when Tommy approached too close. It hurt to say it. She could anticipate the hurt in his eyes, but she had to.
Planting a hand on the mattress, she cranked around until she could look him in the face. “Tommy, I can’t have you sleep in this bed with me.”
It was like a curtain drawing across his face. Hurt, anger, shame. “What?... You think I’d—”
“No, of course not. It’s not you.” The words lay like ground glass in the back of her throat. She prevaricated.
Perhaps if she were to sneak up on it, it could be said. “This body wasn’t in this condition when I entered it.”
“What are you trying to say to me?” Aggression laced each word, making it cut razor sharp.
“Tommy ... I was ... raped.”
Saying the words released the floodgates of terror. Tach’s fear and anguish struck the baby, and Illyana jerked away. The wild movement of the fetus pulled an involuntary groan from Tachyon.
Tommy’s arms wrapped around her. Rocking her softly, he said. “Oh, baby, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. So sorry”
The soothing words were murmured into the back of her head. Each syllable released with a tiny puff of warm air that feathered her hair and caressed her skin, but Tach flinched in Turtle’s embrace,and the tears she should have been shedding jammed up somewhere in the middle of her chest. He missed her reaction. She could feel the panic rising. And she knew if she moved too quickly, if Tommy tightened his hold, if she tried to release the emotions that wrapped like steel bands about her chest, she would shatter into a million sparkling shards. When had flesh and bone been replaced with glass, Tach wondered?
Carefully she enunciated the words, trying to keep the shrill cry of terror from her voice. “You have to let go of me. Quickly!”
Water dancing on a hot skillet couldn’t have moved faster. Tom’s arms snapped away from her body like a trap opening, and he scooted on his rump to the foot of the bed. “I was only trying—”
“I know. It’s not you, it’s me. Please, Tom, don’t look at me like that. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Do you want to talk—”
“No .”
“You brought it up.”
“Only so you would let me go. So you would understand.” Tommy got up from the bed. Laid the brush carefully back on the dresser. Dug his hands deep into his pockets. When he turned back, he was smiling. Injecting a note of lightness into his voice, he asked, “So, what’s the drill?”
Tach followed his lead. She forced a smile and said, “First we sleep. Then we go to the clinic, and you establish my bona fides.”
“Sounds good. I’ll be on the couch if you need me.”
She knew she had hurt him. She knew she couldn’t do anything to alleviate his pain. “I do need you, Tommy,” she managed to say as he was leaving. “And I’m glad you’re here.” She wasn’t sure if he’d heard her.
Somewhere a distant woodpecker was chattering out its rapid-fire signature. Tachyon dug her cheek deeper into the down pillow, tried to block it out.
CRUMP!
The bed shook ever so slightly. Tachyon reacted as if it had suddenly bucked. She spilled out of the bed and was running before her time, place, and situation had fully penetrated.
Artillery fire, automatic weapons. A raid! Get outside, find the guards, hide. Father! Papa! Daddy!
It was the sight of Tommy’s solid form on the front porch that banished dreams and returned her to a sense of reality. But the gunfire continued, and the predawn sky was lit by the trails of tracer fire like peripatetic fireflies, muzzle flashes from the helicopter gunships. Tommy was in a red-and-bluestriped bathrobe, one hand dug deep into a pocket, the other cradling a coffee mug. A suburban homeowner calmly assessing the dawn of Armageddon.
Tachyon moved to his side and closed her hands around his upper arm. He looked down at her. They both knew, but there was a sense that someone had to say it.
Tommy spoke first. “The Rox. They’re finally doing it.” Almost inaudibly, Tach said, “My body’s there.”
“They’re gonna kill everybody.” He either hadn’t heard or didn’t think. Probably a little of both.
“Then you must take me there. You’ve got to take me there.”
That penetrated. “You’re nuts.”
Dawn was beginning to paint the eastern sky with a leprous white light.
“Tommy, please.”
The ace looked from her white, desperate face toward the battle raging to the north. It was almost full light now. Liberty was a tiny porcelain figure standing dauntless as the killers flashed past heading for Ellis Island. As they watched, a Huey, its steel belly packed with assault troops, choppered north toward the battle. Suddenly it began to pitch and yaw as if the pilot were drunk or mad. Rotor blades clawing at the air, it fell at an ever-steeper angle until it slammed into the upraised arm of the statue. For an instant the fireball obscured their view, then burning debris rained down, fiery outriders for the torch and arm, which had been sheared away by the impact. The arm spun once, almost lazily, until it plunged, torch first, into the black waters of the bay.
Liberty stood crippled and forlorn, her sides blacked from burning fuel, her fire extinguished, her message drowned in the polluted waters of the harbor.
Tommy pushed his cup at Tachyon. Walked down the steps and vanished into the jumble of dead cars. Minutes passed. Then the shell rose slowly over the mountains of junk. He was coming for her. Her steel knight.
Lovers
There was a storm over Ellis Island. Strange green-black clouds roiled, and occasionally a sullen flicker of lightning would play in their leprous depths. Suddenly a long funnel cloud dropped from the parent mass and with its end whipping like a snake, groped at the buildings below.
It was almost as if the weather were the deciding factor, for the assault troops began rolling back. Men came flying down to the shore, throwing away weapons as they ran. They usually found the LSTs retreating without them, so the water was bobbing with small dark heads.
Turtle, with Tach wedged on his lap inside the turtle shell, maneuvered at the edges of what had been a battle and had now become a rout. Their ears still rang from artillery shells striking the steel plates of the shell. It was a proof of the warranty of battleship steel-there was neither crack nor dent in the metal.
A pair of helicopters were chattering away from the maelstrom of the island. The funnel cloud hopped like a kid on a pogo stick, and one of the choppers was caught in the whirlwind. The blades clawed, found no support, were torn away. It was going down, the little rear propeller spinning uselessly. Then it stopped, and Tommy grunted with effort as his telekinetic power broke the dive and held the machine motionless in space.
Turtle moved slowly toward the Jersey shore, towing the stricken helicopter. The other chopper whipped past the shell, dangerously close, then banked and came around until it was hovering precisely in front of the flying ace. They both knew the machine guns mounted on the front of the copter couldn’t do them any damage, but Tach felt herself tense nonetheless. It’s disconcerting staring down gun barrels. Suddenly the helicopter wobbled, then peeled off and headed for Manhattan. Tommy resumed his errand of mercy, dropping off the helicopter and her crew on the shore. They emerged waving and cheering.
“Nothing to stop us now,” Tommy said, and he flew back toward Ellis Island. “Look’s like the war’s over.”
“I don’t know whether to hope Blaise is alive or dead,” Tach said, sighing.
As they drew closer to the island, fear began nibbling at the edges of Tachyon’s mind, wrapping tendrils about the ends of her nerves until a subliminal shivering gripped her body. The baby, sensing Tach’s agitation, was turning over and over in her womb. Tachyon tried to send soothing thoughts to the infant, but it was hard to concentrate on anything but a desperate need to run.
The Rox drew closer. Turtle was breathing hard like a man in the middle of a long run who begins to doubt his ability to continue.
“It’s ... it’s Bloat ... Teddy,” Tach forced out past the terror that wrapped like a smothering blanket about her lungs. “Fight it. Ignore it.”
“Can’t you ward us, or guard us, or do some damn Takisian thing?”
“No, I’ve trained this body, but its powers are ... feeble.” She ground her teeth together, holding back the scream that threatened to rip her throat apart. “But I’ll try to contact him. He helped me once ... he cares for me ... he’ll do it again.”
Tach sent with her weak telepathic link and felt it recoil back on her, defeated by the terror of Bloat’s mind. Tommy started screaming. A thin tearing sound that was terrible to hear. It fed and nurtured Tachyon’s terror until she was blind, dumb, and deaf, locked in a world where only fear existed.
The shell flipped nosedown, and they were plummeting for the murky waters of the East River. A few bloated bodies bounced in the chop. Tachyon put her hands over her face and sobbed uncontrollably. With that small part of rationality that remained she remembered that Turtle could control his TK powers only when he felt secure, unafraid. She had conveniently forgotten that inconvenient fact, and the oversight was going to cost them their lives.
But Tommy surprised her. The plump face seemed wrinkled and old as the human concentrated, swung up the nose-and they were flying level again. Unfortunately they were flying away from the Rox, away from her body. They passed some invisible boundary. Tommy’s breath steadied, and her tears cut off like dive doors closing against the inrush of sea. Tach had been waiting so long to cry. Now it had happened, and she had had no release. She felt angry, cheated, and most of all defeated. She sighed and cranked her head back until it rested against Tommy’s chest.
There was a tug of inertial motion, and she realized that they were coming around in a sharp, tight circle.
“What are you ...”
“Trying again, I think I can get past this time,” grunted the ace.
“Tommy—”
“No, I’ve felt it, I know what to expect. I can do it.”
“You’re delusional. I have shields, and the wall tore my guts out. You’re only a human; how can you possibly—”
“I’m an ace.”
But it was said with that slow drawl, John Wayne bravura, and Tach knew what that sentence really meant: “I’m a man.”
“Tommy, don’t. I know you’re my friend, you’re trying to help, but this is all tangled up with other things ... emotions ... pride. Don’t kill me proving that you care for me.”
Her voice was already beginning to spiral as they hit the outer edges of the wall, and the fear crawled back. A sudden acceleration pressed her deep into Turtle’s lap as they shot straight up.
“Sucker can’t extend forever,” grunted Tommy. Tachyon laughed. “Tommy, you’re a genius.”
The wall didn’t extend forever. Eventually even imagination runs out, and in Bloat’s case, it ended at two thousand feet. They shot past the top. Tommy leveled off, and they were behind Bloat’s Wall.
Fires still burned fitfully among the remains of joker hovels. The air reeked with a thick acrid smoke hanging like a funeral pall over the shattered remains of men, jokers, and machines. Through the inferno crept the less wounded coming to the aid of the whining, writhing, bleeding figures. The jokers were tended to. The nats were shot.
As another uniformed body jerked and sprawled in that unlovely attitude unique to death, Tommy lost it. Cranking up the volume on his speakers, he bellowed: “KILL ONE MORE, AND I’LL MASH YOU LIKE ANTS!”
Jokers gesticulated, waved guns. There was a whine like angry bees as several rounds glanced harmlessly off the plate steel of the shell. Then a penguin in ice skates came floating down out of the roiling clouds, executed a perfect pirouette in front of a camera, and gave a jaunty little salute. Simultaneously the weapons were lowered, and Tach knew they had been accepted into Bloat’s kingdom of the damned.
It was an impressive entrance. Turtle, with Tachyon riding on the back of the shell, sailed grandly into the great hall through the shattered windows. It was a wonder they sailed at all. Tommy was not sanguine about their outridersBoschean mermen riding on winged fish. Gravely they saluted Tachyon with the tips of their spears. She bit back irritation. She was tired of being treated as a fairy-tale princess. She wanted to get back to being an outcast prince.
There were murmurs from the hundred or so jokers gathered like misshapen worshipers at the feet of an alien god as Turtle brought them to rest only a few inches from the head and shoulders of the young man who ruled and lay in helpless bondage to the world he had created. In the month since they’d last met, Teddy had aged. Recalling the bodies bobbing in the cold waters at the base of the wall, Tachyon understood why.
“So, Doctor, what do you think of my little kingdom?”
“Quite impressive,” Tach said neutrally.
“If we’d waited a couple of more days, you wouldn’t have needed your ace friends to rescue you. This fat joker boy could have done it all on his own.”
“I don’t have time for you to fish for compliments, seek reassurance, or air your grievances. You know the depth of my gratitude.”
“It’s a poor second for love.” Adolescent agony rippled through the words.
“I have none to give you ... none for anyone.” She closed her eyes briefly, explored that vast echoing gulf that had swallowed her soul. She raised her head and stared into Teddy’s eyes. “I’ve come for Blaise, and I’ve come for my body. Bring them to me.” She indicated the Boschean demons. “I doubt he can mind-control your dream knights.”
“I would be happy to oblige, but Blaise and Kelly are gone.” Tach flung out a hand to steady herself. “I think Blaise was finally impressed with of Bloat when my friends turned up to play. I think he also figured out he wasn’t bulletproof.”
“Where have they gone?”
“I’m not sure. They had that Durg guy with them.” The young man tugged thoughtfully at his lower lip. “I think maybe they were going to an island. Hawaii, Tahiti?...”
Tach made an ‘explain further’ gesture with her hands. She wasn’t sure she could trust her voice.
“Blaise is usually leaky as a sieve, but he was really working at holding his shields. All I got was the image of a seashell—”
“Baby!”
She hadn’t realized the cry had been audible until she felt Turtle pivot and accelerate for the window.
The dark waters of the East River reluctantly and sullenly gave back the sheen of the streetlights. The motion of the water gave the illusion that the warehouses were rocking gently.
And cradled within one of those faded and pitted buildings was Baby, Tachyon’s living spaceship. Her friend, servant, stellar steed.
Tach was once again in Tommy’s arms as they flew toward the building.
“How you doin’?”
Tach threw back her hair. “I can’t reach her,” she panted. She licked sweat from her upper lip.
“Maybe Baby’ll be suspicious. I mean Durg and Blaise ordering her to leave, and you told her not to trust Blaise.”
“Yes, but they’ll have the master with them. Even if this creature which has stolen my skin hasn’t mastered my mental powers, Baby won’t question him.” Tach pressed a hand to her face. “They’re loyal ... they aren’t bright.”
“Even if she buys it,” Tommy said, “they can’t get far, right? You burned out the whatchacallit when you came to earth, right? You know, the warp drive, whatever you call it ... “
“The ghost drive,” Tach told him, her voice dull.
“Yeah,” Tommy agreed. “So the ship’s crippled ...”
“Once,” Tach said heavily. “No longer.”
Tommy turned his head to look at her. His mouth opened wordlessly. Tach didn’t need to be a telepath to read the dismay in his eyes.
“On Takis, we have a saying-as patient as a ship.’ They are living organisms, Tommy. Given time enough, and rest, the ships can heal themselves.”
“Oh, fuck,” he said. “How long since ...”
“It took her forty-two of your years to recover from the grievous damage I’d done her in my haste to reach earth. Two years ago, Baby told me that she was whole again.” A thin hysterical laugh bubbled out between her lips. “I thought it best to keep it secret. Your government has coveted Baby before. I saw no reason to reawaken their interest. So I told no one ... except of course my heir ... my blood and bone ... my beloved grandson, Blaise ...”
They were drawing closer. Tachyon struggled to contain it, but the sound erupted like steam from a broken pipe. A shrill inchoate scream that finally resolved into words.
“Baby, listen to me! Hear me!”
“Oh ... shit.”
Something in Tommy’s voice brought her head up, eyes searching desperately through the video monitors. It wasn’t hard to spot. The roof of the warehouse was erupting like a wood-and-plaster volcano. The hull of the ship seemed almost white against the murky New York sky. The lights on her spines were glowing amber and lilac. It was a beautiful sight. Except when it was ruining your life.
“Baby, No!” Tach slewed around, one fist beating desperately at the Turtle’s chest. “Tommy, do something!” Tom flipped on the PA system. “This is the turtle. Stop! That’s not lord tisianne. I have the real tachyon! Stop!”
Baby was bolting for the smog layer like a falcon with her tail on fire. Tommy muttered a curse, leaned back in the contoured chair, closed his eyes. Tach felt the muscles in the human’s arms bunch and jump as Tom gripped the arms of his chair and concentrated. And suddenly they were climbing, and at a greater speed than Tachyon had ever experienced with the turtle shell.
Their increased speed was not closing the gap with Baby. No matter how much Tom pushed, he was not going to match the speed of a spacecraft attaining escape velocity. But as Tach watched, she saw Baby shudder and jerk like a trout hitting the end of a fishing line.
“What have you done?”
“Grabbed her with my teke,” grunted Tommy. His eyes were narrowed to slits, and sweat was starting to roll down his round cheeks.
Tach was amazed. “Can you hold her?”
“I have no fucking idea.”
“So what are you trying to do?”
“I don’t know yet! I just did itl Now I’m trying to work it out!”
Tach glanced again at one of the monitors. If Baby escaped, she was trapped-forever. Her mind spun in frenzied circles-this can’t be happening ... Tommy won’t let this happen ... if I close my eyes, it’s yesterday, and this isn’t happening.
“Shit,” said Tommy, and his teeth rattled like dice on a marble floor.
Tachyon realized that she was shivering, great shuddering heaves that shook her tiny frame. “What?”
“I’m not flying the shell any longer. We’re being pulled along. And I’m not slowing her at all.” Tommy craned about, examining the shell as if he’d never seen it before. “First the heat goes, then the air. We gotta go back.”
“No!”
“Tachyon, we’ve got no choice.” His fingers bit deep into her shoulders.
“I’ll reach her ... wait ... IT t-try again ... I’ll r-reach her.” Cold and terror made her stutter.
The sky revealed on the monitors was turning an alarming shade of midnight blue, and the stars shone hard and bright through the wisps of remaining atmosphere.
Hugging herself against the cold, Tach bowed forward over the swell of her pregnancy, reached deep within herself. Touched and melded her child’s feeble telepathy to her own.
Flung it out, clawing, scrabbling for the beautiful rough surface of her ship.
Baby, hear me! Stopl Stop, please, stop!
Memories flashed behind her eyelids a mocking, damning litany of mistakes and lost opportunities. Claude Bonnell hobbling away with Blaise in his arms. If Tachyon had delayed, allowed him to escape. Cody, wrenching him off the boy as Tach methodically tried to beat Blaise to death. If she had allowed him to kill the monster.
Tommy was gasping, desperate animal sounds in the icy confines of the shell. The lights on the fleeting spaceship danced wildly before Tachyon’s eyes.
Noooooo! The mental shriek cut off as Tommy released his grip on the Takisian ship, and the shell tumbled end over sickening end.
Tach lost her grip on Tommy and was thrown violently from side to side in the shell as it fell toward earth. In the screens, the lights of the ship strobed in and out of view as the shell tumbled.
And as Tachyon watched, the amber and lilac lights of the ship stretched and erupted in liquid fire as Baby shifted into ghost drive.
And was gone.
April in Paris. The chestnut tress resplendent in their pink and white finery. The blossoms drifting like fragrant snow about the feet of the statues in the Tuileries Garden, and floating like colorful foam atop the muddy waters of the Seine.
April in Paris. The song bubbling incongruously through his head as he stood before a simple gravestone in the Cimetiere Montmartre. So hideously inappropriate. He banished it only to have it return with greater intensity.
Irritably Tachyon hunched one shoulder, took a tighter grip—on the simple bouquet of violets and lily of the valley. The crisp green florist’s paper crackled loudly in the afternoon air. Away to his left he could hear the urgent bleat of horns as the bumper-to-bumper traffic crawled up the Rue Norvins toward Sacre-Coeur. With its gleaming white walls, cupolas, and dome the cathedral floated like an Arabian nights dream over this city of light and dreams.
The last time I saw Paris.
Earl, his face holding all the expression of an ebony statue. Lena, flushed, impassioned. “You must go!” Looking to Earl for help and comfort. The quiet; “it would probably be best.” The path of least resistance. So strange from this of all men.
Tachyon knelt, brushed away the petals that littered the stone slab.
Earl Sanderson Jr. “Noir Aigle” 1919-1974
You lived too long, my friend. Or so it was said. Those busy, noisy activists could have used you better if you’d had the grace to die in 1950. No—even better-while liberating Argentina or freeing Spain or saving Gandhi.
Laid the bouquet on the grave. A sudden breeze set the delicate white bells of the lilies to trembling. Like a young girl’s lashes just before she was kissed. Or like Blythe’s lashes just before she wept.
The last time I saw Paris.
A cold, bleak December, and a park in Neuilly.
Blythe van Renssaeler, aka Brain Trust, died yesterday .... Gracelessly he surged to his feet, dusted the knees of his pants with a handkerchief. Gave his nose a quick, emphatic blow. That was the trouble with the past. It never stayed buried.
Straddling the slab was a large elaborate wreath. Roses and gladiolas and yards of ribbon. A wreath for a dead hero. A travesty. A small foot came up, sent the wreath tumbling. Contemptuously Tachyon walked over it, grinding the fragile petals beneath his heel.
One cannot propitiate the ancestors, Jack. Their ghosts will follow.
His certainly were.
On the Rue Etex he hailed a cab, fished for the note, read off the name of the Left Bank cafe in rusty French. Settled back to watch the unlit neon signs flash past. XXX, Le Filles! “Les Sexy.” Strange to think of all this smut at the foot of a hill whose name translated as the Mountain of Martyrs. Saints had died on Montmartre. The Society of Jesus had been founded on the hill in 1534.
They proceeded in noisy and profane lurches. Bursts of heart-stopping speed followed by neck-wrenching stops. A blare of horns, and an exchange of imaginative insults. They shot through the Place Vendome past the Ritz where the delegation was housed. Tachyon hunkered deeper into his seat though it was unlikely he would be spotted. He was so sick of them all. Sara, quiet, sleek, and secretive as a mongoose. She had changed since Syria, but refused to confide. Peregrine flaunting her pregnancy, refusing to accept that she might not beat the odds. Mistral, young and beautiful. She had been tactful and understanding and kept his shameful secret. Fantasy, sly and amused. She had not. Hot blood washed his face. His humiliating condition was now public to be sniggered at and discussed in tones ranging from the sympathetic to the amused. His hand closed tightly on the note. There would be at least one woman he could face without embarrassment. One of his ghosts, but more welcome than the living right now.
She had chosen a cafe on the Boulevard Saint-Michel in the heart of the Latin Quarter. The area had always despised the bourgeoisie. Tachyon wondered if Danelle still did. Or had the years dampened her revolutionary ardor? One could only hope it had not dampened her other ardors. Then he remembered, and shrunk down once more.
Well, if he could no longer taste passion, he could at least remember it.
She had been nineteen when they’d met in August of 1950. A university student majoring in political philosophy, sex, and revolution. Danelle had been eager to comfort the shattered victim of a capitalist witch-hunt: the new darling of the French intellectual left. She took pride in his sufferings. As if the mystique of his martyrdom could rub off with bodily contact.
She had used him. But by the Ideal he had used her. As a shroud, a buffer against pain and memory. Drowned himself in cunt and wine. Nursing a bottle in Lena Goldoni’s Champs-Elysees penthouse listening to the impassioned rhetoric of revolution. Caring far less for the rhetoric than the passion. Red-tipped nails meeting a slash of red for a mouth as Dani puffed inexpertly at larynx-stripping Gauloises. Black hair as smooth as an ebony helmet over her small head. Lush bosoms straining at a too tight sweater, and short skirts that occasionally gave him tantalizing glimpses of pale inner thigh.
God, how they had screwed! Had there ever been any emotion past mutual using? Yes, perhaps, for she had been one of the last to condemn and reject him. She had even seen him off on that frigid January day. That was when he’d still had luggage and a semblance of dignity. There on the platform of the Montparnasse railway station, she had pressed money and a bottle of cognac onto him. He hadn’t refused. The cognac had been too welcome, and the money meant that another bottle would follow.
In 1953 he had called Dani when another fruitless visa battle with the German authorities had sent him careening back into France. Called her hoping for one more bottle of cognac, one more handout, one more round of desperate fornication. But a man had answered, and in the background he had heard a child crying, and when she had finally come to the phone, the message was clear. Get fucked, Tachyon. Tittering, he had suggested that was why he’d called. The unpleasant buzz of a disconnected phone.
Later in that cold park in Neuilly he’d read of Blythe’s death, and nothing had seemed to matter anymore.
And yet when the delegation arrived in Paris, Dani had reached out. A note in his box at the Ritz. A meeting on the Left Bank as the silver-gray Parisian sky was turning to rose, and the Eiffel Tower became a web of diamond light. So maybe she had cared. And maybe, to his shame, he hadn’t Dome was a typical working-class Parisian cafe. Tiny tables squeezed onto the sidewalk, gay, blue, and white umbrellas, harried, frowning waiters in none-too-clean white smocks. The smell of coffee and grillade. Tach surveyed the handful of patrons. It was early yet for Paris. He hoped she hadn’t chosen to sit inside. All that smoke. His glance kept flicking across a thickset figure in a rusty black coat. There was a watchful intensity about the raddled face, and—
Dear God, could it ... NO! “Bon soir, Tachyon.”
“Danelle,” he managed faintly, and groped for the back of a chair.
She smiled an enigmatic smile, sucked down some coffee, ground out a cigarette in the dirty ashtray, lit another, leaned back in a horrible parody of her old sexy manner, and eyed him through the rising smoke. “You haven’t changed.” His mouth worked, and she laughed sadly. “The platitude a little hard to force out? Of course I’ve changed-it’s been thirty-six years.”
Thirty-six years. Blythe would be seventy-five. Intellectually he had accepted the reality of their pitifully short lifespans. But it had not come home to him before. Blythe had died. Braun remained unchanged. David was lost, so like Blythe remained a memory of youth and charm. And of his new friends, Tommy, Angelface, and Hiram were just entering that uncomfortable stage of middle age. Mark was the merest child. Yet forty-one years ago it had been Mark’s father who had impounded Tach’s ship. And Mark hadn’t even been born yet!
Soon (or at least as his people measured time), he would be forced to watch them pass from youth into inevitable decay and thence into death. The chair was a welcome support as his rump hit the cold wrought-iron.
“Danelle,” he said again.
“A kiss, Tachy, for old times’ sake?”
Heavy yellowish pouches hung beneath faded eyes. Gray brittle hair thrust into a careless bun, the deep gouges beside her mouth into which the scarlet lipstick had bled like a wound. She leaned in close, hitting him with a wave of foul breath. Strong tobacco, cheap wine, coffee, and rotting teeth combining in a stomach-twisting effluvium.
He recoiled, and this time when the laughter came it seemed forced. As if she hadn’t expected this reaction and was covering the hurt. The harsh laugh ended in a long coughing jag that brought him out of his chair and to her side. Irritably she shrugged off his soothing hand. “Emphysema. And don’t you start, le petit docteur. I’m too damn old to give up my cigarettes, and too damn poor to get medical attention when the time comes to die. So I smoke faster hoping I’ll die faster, and then it won’t cost so much at the end.”
“Danelle—”
“Bon Dieu, Tachyon! You are dull. No kiss for old times’ sake, and apparently no conversation either. Though as I recall, you weren’t much of a talker all those years ago.”
“I was finding all the communication I needed in the bottom of a cognac bottle.”
“It doesn’t seem to have inconvenienced you any. Behold! A great man.”
She saw the world-renowned figure, a slim figure dressed in brocade and lace, but he, gazing back at the reflections of a thousand memories, saw a cavalcade of lost years. Cheap rooms stinking of sweat, vomit, urine, and despair. Groaning in an alley in Hamburg, beaten almost to death. Accepting a devil’s pact with a gently smiling man, and for what? Another bottle. Waking hallucinations in a cell in the Tombs.
“What are you doing, Danelle?”
“I’m a maid at the Hotel Intercontinental.” She seemed to sense his thought. “Yes, an unglamorous end to all that revolutionary fervor. The revolution never came, Tachy.”
“No.”
“Which doesn’t leave you brokenhearted.”
“No. I never accepted your-all of your-versions of utopia.”
“But you stayed with us. Until finally we threw you out.”
“Yes, I needed you, and I used you.” .
“My God, such a soul-deep confession? At meetings like these it’s supposed to be all ‘bonjour’ and ‘Comment allezvous,’ and ‘My, you haven’t changed.’ But we’ve already done that, haven’t we?” The bitter mocking tone added a razor’s edge to the words.
“What do you want, Danelle? Why did you ask to see me?”
“Because I knew it would bother you.” The butt of the Gauloise followed its predecessor into a squashed and ashy death. “No, that’s not true. I saw your little motorcade pull in. All flags and limousines. It made me think of other years and other banners. I suppose I wanted to remember, and alas as one grows older, the memories of youth become fainter, less real.”
“I unfortunately do not share that kindly blurring. My kind do not forget.”
“Poor little prince.” She,coughed again, a wet sound. Tachyon reached into his breast pocket, pulled out his wallet, stripped off bills.
“What’s that for?”
“The money you gave me and the cognac and thirty-six years interest.”
She flinched away, eyes bright with unshed tears. “I didn’t call you for charity or pity”
“No, you called to rip at me, hurt me.”
She looked away. “No, I called you so I could remember another time.”
“They weren’t very good times.”
“For you maybe. I loved them. I was happy. And don’t flatter yourself. You weren’t the reason.”
“I know. Revolution was your first and final love. I find it hard to accept that you’ve given it up.”
“Who says I have?”
“But you said ... I thought ...”
“Even the old can pray for change, perhaps even more fervently than the young. By the way”—she drained the last of her coffee with a noisy slurp—“why wouldn’t you help us?”
“I couldn’t.”
“Ah, of course. The little prince, the dedicated royalist. You never cared about the people.”
“Not as you use that phrase. You reduce them to slogans.”
“I was bred to lead and to protect and to care for them as individuals. Ours is a better way.”
“You’re a parasite!” And in her face he saw a fleeting shadow of the girl she had been.
An almost rueful smile touched his lips. “No, an aristocrat, which you would probably argue is synonymous.” His long forefinger played among the little pile of francs. “Despite what you think, it really wasn’t my aristocratic sensibilities that kept me from using my power on your behalf. What you were doing was harmless enough-unlike this new breed who think nothing of killing a man merely for being successful.” She hunched a shoulder. “Please, get to the point.”
“I’d lost my powers.”
“What? You never told us.”
“ I was afraid of losing my mystique if I had.”
“ I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true. Because of Jack’s cowardice.” His face darkened. “The HUAC returned Blythe to the stand. They were demanding the names of all known aces, and because she had my mind, she knew. She was about to betray them, so I used my power to stop her and in so doing broke her mind and left the woman I loved a raving maniac.” He raised trembling fingertips to his damp forehead. The retelling in this of all cities infused it with new power, new pain.
“It took years for me to overcome my guilt, and it was the Turtle who showed me how. I destroyed one woman, but saved another. Does that balance the scales?” He was speaking more to himself than to her.
But she was not interested in his ancient pain; her own memories were too intense. “Lena was so angry. She called you a disgusting user, taking and taking and giving nothing in return. Everyone wanted you out because you had so spoiled our beautiful plan.”
“Yes, and not one person took my side! Not even Earl.” His expression softened, as he looked past the ruin of age, to the beautiful girl he remembered. “No, that’s not true. You defended me.”
“Yes,” she admitted gruffly. “Little good that it did. It took me years to regain the respect of my comrades.” She stared blindly down at the tabletop.
Tachyon glanced at the watch in his boot heel, rose. “Dani, I must go. The delegation is due at Versailles by eight, and I must change. It’s been ...” He tried again. “I’m so glad that you contacted me.” The words seemed stilted and insincere even to his own ears.
Her face crumpled, then stiffened into bitter lines. “That’s it? Forty minutes and au revoir you wouldn’t even drink with me?”
“I’m sorry, Dani. My schedule—”
“Ah, yes, the great man.” The pile of bills still lay between them on the table. “Well, I’ll take these as an example of your noblesse oblige.”
She lifted up a shapeless bag and fished out a billfold. Scooped up the francs and jammed them into the battered wallet. Then paused and stared at one photo. A cruel little smile played about her wrinkled lips.
“No, better yet. I’ll give you value for your money.” Gnarled, arthritic fingers pulled free the picture and tossed it onto the table.
It was a breathtaking still of a young woman. A river of red hair half masking the narrow, shadowed face. A mischievous, knowing look in the uptilted eyes. A delicate forefinger pressed against a full lower lip as if shushing the onlooker.
“Who is she?” Tach asked, but with a breath-stopping certainty that he knew the answer.
“My daughter.” Their eyes locked. Dani’s smile broadened. “And yours.”
“Mine.” The word emerged as a wondering, joyful sigh. Suddenly all the weariness and anguish of the trip sloughed away. He had witnessed horrors. Jokers stoned to death in the slums of Rio. Genocide in Ethiopia. Oppression in South Africa. Starvation and disease everywhere. It had left him feeling hopeless and defeated. But if she walked this planet, then it could be borne. Even the anguish over his impotence faded. With the loss of his virility he had lost a major part of himself. Now it had been returned to him.
“Oh, Dani, Dani!” He reached across and gripped her hand. “Our daughter. What is her name?”
“Gisele.”
“I must see her. Where is she?”
“Rotting. She’s dead.”
The words seemed to shatter in the air, sending ice fragments deep into his soul. A cry of anguish was torn from him, and he wept, tears dropping through his fingers. Danelle walked away.
Versailles, the greatest tribute to the divine right of kings ever constructed. Tachyon, heels tapping on the parquet floor, paused and surveyed the scene through the distorting crystal of his champagne glass. For an instant he might have been home, and the longing that gripped him was almost physical in its intensity._
There is indeed no beauty to this world. I wish I could leave it forever.
No, not true, he amended as his gaze fell upon the faces of his friends. There is much here still to love.
One of Hartmann’s polished aides was at his shoulder. Was this the one fortunate enough to have survived the kidnapping in Germany, or had he been flown in specially to serve as cannon fodder for this line-withering tour? Well, perhaps the increased security would keep this young man alive until they could reach home.
“Doctor, Monsieur de Valmy would like to meet you.” The young man forced a path for Tachyon while the alien studied France’s most popular presidential candidate since de Gaulle. Franchot de Valmy, said by many to be the next president of the Republic. A tall, slim figure moving easily through the crowd. His rich chestnut hair was streaked with a single two-inch bar of white. Very striking. More striking, though far less evident, was the fact he was a wild card. An ace. In a country gone mad for aces.
Hartmann and de Valmy were shaking hands. It was an outstanding display of political soft soap. Two eager hunters using one another’s power and popularity to catapult them into the highest offices in their lands.
“Sir, Dr. Tachyon.”
De Valmy turned the full force of his compelling greeneyed gaze onto the Takisian. Tachyon, raised in a culture that put a high premium on charm and charisma, found that this man possessed both to an almost Takisian magnitude. He wondered if that was his wild card gift.
“Doctor, I am honored.” He spoke in English.
Tach placed a small hand over his breast and replied in French, “The honor is entirely mine.”
“ I will be interested to hear your comments on our scientists’ work on the wild card virus.”
“Well, I have only just arrived.” He fingered his lapel, raised his eyes, and pinned de Valmy with a sharp glance.
“And will I be reporting to all the candidates in the race? Will they also wish to hear my comments?”
Senator Hartmann took a small step forward, but de Valmy was laughing. “You are very astute. Yes, I am-how do you Americans say-counting my chickens.”
“With reason,” said Hartmann with a smile. “You’ve been groomed by the President as his heir apparent.”
“Certainly an advantage,” said Tachyon. “But your status as an ace hasn’t hurt.”
“No.”
“I would be curious to know your power.”
De Valmy covered his eyes. “Oh, Monsieur Tachyon, I’m embarrassed to speak of it. It’s such a contemptible little power. Mere parlor tricks.”
“You are very modest, sir.”
Hartmann’s aide glared, and Tach stared blandly back, though he regretted the momentary flash of sarcasm. It was ill bred of him to take out his weariness and unhappiness on others.
“I am not above using the advantage granted to me, Doctor, but I hope that it will be my policies and leadership that will give me the presidency.”
Tachyon gave a small laugh and caught Gregg Hartmann’s eye. “It is ironic, is it not, that in this country the wild card bestows a cachet to help a man into high office, while in our country that same information would defeat him.”
The senator pulled a face. “Leo Barnett.”
“I beg you pardon?” asked de Valmy in some confusion. “A fundamentalist preacher who’s gathering quite a following. He’d restore all the old wild card laws.”
“Oh, worse than that, Senator. I think he would place them in detention camps and force mass sterilizations.”
“Well, this is an unpleasant subject. But on another unpleasant subject I’d like a chance to talk to you, Franchot, about your feelings on the phaseout of medium-range missiles in Europe. Not that I have any standing with the current administration, but my colleagues in the Senate ...” He linked arms with de Valmy and they drifted away, their various aides trailing several paces behind like hopeful pilot fish.
Tach gulped down champagne. The chandeliers glittered in the long line of mirrors, multiplying them a hundredfold and throwing back bright light like shards of glass into his aching head. He took another swallow of champagne, though he knew the alcohol was partly to blame for his present discomfort. That and the drilling hum of hundreds of voices, the busy scrape of bows on strings, and outside, the watching presence of an adoring public. Sensitive telepath that he was, it beat on him like an urgent, hungry sea.
As the motorcade had driven up the long chestnut-lined boulevard, they had passed hundreds of waving people all eagerly craning for a glimpse of the les ases fantastiques. It was a welcome relief after such hatred and fear in other countries. Still, he was glad that only one country remained, and then he would be home. Not that anything waited for him there but more problems.
In Manhattan, James Spector was on the streets. Death incarnate stalking free. Another monster created by my meddling. Once home I must deal with this. Trace him. Find him. Stop him. I was so stupid to abandon him in favor of pursuing Roulette.
And what of Roulette? Where can she be? Did I do wrong to release her? I am undoubtedly a fool where women are concerned.
“Tachyon.” Peregrine’s gay call floated on the strains of Mozart and pulled him from his introspective fog. “You’ve got to see this.”
He pinned a smile firmly in place and kept his eyes strictly off the mound of her belly thrust aggressively front and center. Mordecai Jones, the Harlem auto repairman, looking uncomfortable in his tuxedo, nervously eyed a tall gold-and-crystal lamp as if expecting it to attack. The long march of mirrors brought back thoughts of the Funhouse, and Des, the fingers at the end of his elephant’s trunk twitching slightly, heightened the memory. The past. It seemed to be hanging like a dead weight from his shoulders.
The knot of friends and fellow travelers parted, and a hunched, twisted figure was revealed. The joker lurched around and smiled up at Tach. The face was a handsome one. Noble, a little tired, lines about the eyes and mouth denoting past suffering, a kindly face his, in fact. There was a shout of laughter from the group as Tach gaped down into his own features.
There was a shifting like clay being mashed or a sponge being squeezed, and the joker faced him with his own features in place. A big square head, humorous brown eyes, a mop of gray hair, set atop that tiny, twisted body.
“Forgive me, the opportunity was too enticing to pass up,” chuckled the joker.
“And your expression the best of all, Tachy,” put in Chrysalis.
“You can laugh, you’re safe. He can’t do you,” harrumphed Des.
“Tack, this is Claude Bonnell, Le Miroir. He’s got this great act at the Lido.”
“Poking fun at the politicos,” rumbled Mordecai.
“He does this hysterical skit with Ronald and Nancy Reagan,” giggled Peregrine.
Jack Braun, drawn by the laughing group, hovered at its outskirts. His eyes met Tachyon’s, and the alien looked through him. Jack shifted until they were at opposite sides of the circle.
“Claude’s been trying to explain to us this alphabet soup that’s French politics,” said Digger. “All about how de Valmy has welded an impressive coalition of the RPR, the CDS, the JJSS, the PCF—”
“No, no, Mr. Downs, you must not include my party among the ranks of those who support Franchot de Valmy. We communists have better taste, and our own candidate.”
“Who won’t win,” ejected Braun, frowning down at the tiny joker.
The features blurred, and Earl Sanderson Jr. said softly, “There were some who supported the goals of world revolution.” Jack, face gone sickly white, staggered back. There was a sharp crack as his glass shattered in his hands, and a flare of gold as his biological force field came to life to protect him. There was an uncomfortable silence after the big ace had left, then Tachyon said coolly, “Thank you.”
“My pleasure.”
“You are here as a wild card representative?”
“Partly, but I also have an official capacity. I am a member of the party congress.”
“You are a big wheel with the commies,” whistled Digger with his usual lack of tact.
“Yes.”
“How did you pick up Earl? Or have you just made it a point to study those of us on the tour?” asked Chrysalis.
“I have a very low-level telepathy. I can pick up the faces of those who have deeply affected a person.”
Hartmann’s aide was once again at his side. “Doctor, Dr. Corvisart has arrived and wants to meet you.”
Tachyon made a face. “Duty calls, so pleasure must be forgone. Gentlemen, ladies.” He bowed and walked away. An hour later Tach was standing by the small chamber orchestra, allowing the soothing strains of Mendelssohn’s Trout quintet to work its magic. His feet were beginning to hurt, and he realized that forty years on Earth had robbed him of his ability to stand for hours. Recalling long-past deportment lessons, he tucked in his hips, pulled back his shoulders, and lifted his chin. The relief was immediate, but he decided that another glass would also help.
Flagging down a waiter, he reached for the champagne. Then staggered, and fell heavily against the man as a blinding, directionless mind assault struck his shields.
Mind control! The source? Outside ... somewhere. The focus?
He was dimly aware of crashing glasses as he slumped against his startled support. Forced up lids that seemed infinitely heavy. So distorting was the effect of his own psi-search, and the screaming power of the mind control, that reality took on a strange shifting quality. The reception guests in their bright finery faded to gray. He could “see” the mind probe like a brilliant line of light. Becoming diffuse at its source, impossible to pinpoint. But haloing:
A man. Uniform. One of the security captains. Attache case.
BOMB!
He reached out with his mind and seized the officer. For a moment the man writhed and danced like a moth in a flame as his controller and Tach fought for supremacy. The strain was too much for his human mind, and consciousness left him like a candle being snuffed. The major went down spraddlelegged on the polished wood floor. Tach found his fingers closing about the edges of the black leather case, though he couldn’t remember moving.
Controller knows he’s lost focus. Time detonated or command detonated? No time to ponder on it.
The solution, when it came, almost wasn’t conscious. He reached out, gripped the mind. Jack Braun stiffened, dropped his drink, and went running for the long windows overlooking the front garden and fountains. People flew like ninepins as the big ace came barreling through them. Tachyon cocked back his arm, prayed to the ancestors for aim and strength,’ and threw.
Jack, like a hero in a forties football film, leapt, plucked the spinning case from the air, tucked it tight into his chest, and launched himself out the window. Glass haloed his gold-glowing body. A second later, and a tremendous explosion blew out the rest of the windows lining the Hall of Mirrors. Women screamed as razor-edged glass shards bit deep into unprotected skin. Glass and gravel from the yard pattered like hysterical raindrops onto the wood floor.
People rushed to the window to check on Braun. Tachyon turned his back on the windows and knelt beside the stentoriously breathing major. One should have priorities.
“Let’s go over it again.”
Tach eased his aching buttocks on the hard plastic chair, shifted until he could take a surreptitious glance at his watch. 12:10 A.M. Police were definitely the same the world over. Instead of being grateful for his having averted a tragedy, they were treating him as if he were the criminal. And Jack Braun had been spared all this because the authorities had insisted on carting him off to the hospital. Of course he wasn’t hurt, that was why Tachyon had selected him. No doubt by morning the papers would be filled with praise for the brave American ace, thought Tach sourly. Never noticing my contributions.
“Monsieur?” prodded Jean Baptiste Rochambeau of the French Surete.
“To what purpose? I’ve told you. I sensed a powerful, natural mind control at work. Because of the user’s lack of training and control, I was unable to pinpoint the source. I could, however, pinpoint its victim. When I fought for control, I read through to the controller’s mind, read the presence of the bomb, mind-controlled Braun, tossed him the bomb, he went out the window, the bomb exploded, with him no worse for the wear except perhaps wearing some of the topiary”
“There is no topiary beyond the windows of the Hall of Mirrors,” sniffed Rochambeau’s assistant in his nasal, highpitched voice.
Tach swung around in the chair. “It was a little joke,” he explained gently.
“Dr. Tachyon. We are not doubting your story. It’s just that it’s impossible. No such powerful ... mentat?”—he looked to Tachyon far confirmation—“exists in France. As Dr. Corvisart has explained, we have every carrier, both latent and expressed, on file.”
“Then one has slipped past you.”
Corvisart, an arrogant gray-haired man with fat cheeks like a chipmunk’s and a tiny pursed bud of a mouth, gave a stubborn headshake.
“Every infant is tested and registered at birth. Every immigrant is tested at the border. Every tourist must have the test before they can receive a visa. The only explanation is the one I have suspected for several years. The virus has mutated.”
“That is patent and utter nonsense! With all due respect, Doctor, I am the foremost authority on the wild card virus on this or any other world.”
Perhaps something of an exaggeration that, but surely it could be forgiven. He had been enduring fools with such patience for so many hours.
Corvisart was quivering with outrage. “Our research has been acknowledged as the best in the world.”
“Ah, but I don’t publish.” Tachyon was on his feet. “I don’t have to.” A single-step advance. “ I have a certain advantage.” Another. “I helped develop the withering thing!” he bellowed down into the Frenchman’s face.
Corvisart held stubbornly firm. “You are wrong. The mentat exists, he is not on file, ergo the virus has mutated.”
“I want to see your notes, duplicate the research, look over these vaunted files.” This he addressed to Rochambeau. He might have the soul of a policeman, but at least he wasn’t an idiot.
The Surete officer cocked an eyebrow. “You have any objections, Dr. Corvisart?”
“I suppose not.”
“You want to start now?”
“Why not? The night’s ruined anyway.”
They set him up in Corvisart’s office with an impressive computer at his disposal, bulging hard-copy files of research, a foot-high stack of disks, and a cup of strong coffee that Tach liberally laced with brandy from his hip flask.
The research was good, but it was geared toward proving Corvisart’s pet premise. The hope of fame in the form of a mutated form-Wild Cardus Corvisartus?-was subtly coloring the Frenchman’s interpretations of the data he was collecting. The virus was not mutating.
Thank the gods and ancestors, Tach sent up as a heartfelt prayer.
He was scrolling idly through the wild card registry when an anomaly, something not quite right, caught his attention. It was five in the morning, hardly the time to scroll back several years to check if he’d seen what he’d thought he’d seen, but upbringing and his own curious nature could not be denied. After several minutes of fervid key tapping he had the screen divided and both documents called up side by side. He fell back in the chair, rumpling his already tumbled curls with nervous fingers.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said aloud to the silent room. The door opened, and the adenoidal sergeant thrust in his head. “Monsieur? You require something?”
“No, nothing.”
His hand shot out, and he erased the damning documents. What he discovered was for him alone. For it was political dynamite. It would create havoc with an election, cost a man the presidency, and shake the foundations of trust of the electorate should it get out.
Tach pressed his hands into the small of his back, stretched until vertebrae popped, and shook his head like a weary pony. “Sergeant, I am very much afraid that I have found nothing that is of any help. And I’m too tired to go on. May I please be returned to the hotel?”
But his bed at the Ritz had held no comfort or rest, so here he was leaning over the bridge railing on the Pont de la Concorde watching coal barges slip by, and snuffling eagerly at the smell of baking bread, which seemed to have permeated the city. Every part of his small body seemed to be suffering from some discomfort. His eyes felt like two burned holes in a blanket, his back still ached from that impossible chair, and his stomach was demanding to be fed. But worst of all was what he had dubbed his mental indigestion. He had seen or heard something of significance. And until he hit upon it, his brain was going to continue to seethe like jelly boiling on a stove.
“Sometimes,” he told his mind severely, “I feel as if you have a mind of your own.”
He began walking through the Place de la Concorde, where Marie Antoinette had lost her head, the spot now marked by a venerable Egyptian obelisk. There were plenty of restaurants to choose from: the Hotel de Crillon, the Hotel Intercontinental, just two blocks from the square, where Dani was no doubt hard at work, and beyond it the Ritz. He hadn’t seen any of his companions since the dramatic events of the previous night. His entrance would be met with exclamations, congratulations ... He decided to miss the whole mess.
He was still wearing his reception finery. Pale lavender and rose, and a foam of lace. He frowned when a taxi driver gaped and drove over a curb and almost into one of the central fountains. Embarrassed, Tachyon darted through the richly decorated iron railing and into the—Tuileries Gardens. On either side loomed the Jeu de Paume and the Orangerie, ahead the neat rows of chestnut trees, fountains, and a riot of statues.
Tach dropped wearily onto the edge of a basin. The fountain squirted into life and sent a fine spray of mist across his face. For a moment he sat with eyes closed, savoring the cool touch of the water. Retreating to a nearby bench, he pulled out the picture of Gisele and again studied those delicate features. Why was it that whenever he came to Paris, he found only death?
And suddenly the piece fell into place. The puzzle lay complete before him. With a cry of joy he leapt to his feet and broke into a frantic run. The high heels of his formal pumps slipped on the gravel path. Cursing, he hopped along, pulling them off. Then with a shoe in each hand he flew up the stairs and onto the Rue de Rivoli. Horns blared, tires squealed, drivers shrieked. He ran on heedless of it all. Pulled up gasping before the glass and marble entrance to the Hotel Intercontinental. Met the bemused eyes of the doorman, slipped his feet into his shoes, straightened his coat, patted at his tumbled hair, trod casually into the quiet lobby.
“Bonjour.”
The desk clerk’s eyes widened in dawning wonder as he recognized the extravagant figure before him. He was a handsome man in his mid-thirties with sleek seal-brown hair and deep blue eyes.
“You have a woman working here. Danelle Moncey. It is vital that I speak with her.”
“Moncey? No, Monsieur Tachyon. There is no one by—”
“Damn! She married. I forgot that. She’s a maid, midfifties, black eyes, gray hair.” His heart was thundering, setting up an answering pounding in his temples. The young man looked nervously down at Tachyon’s hands, which had closed urgently about his lapels, pulling him half over the counter. Releasing the clerk, Tachyon rubbed his fingertips. “Forgive me. As you can see, this is very important ... very important to me.”
“I’m sorry, but there is no Danelle working here.”
“She’s a Communist,” Tach added in desperation.
The man shook his head, but the pert blond behind the exchange counter suddenly said, “Ah, no, Francois. You know, Danelle.”
“Then she is here?”
“Oh, mais oui. She is on the third floor—”
“Will you get her for me?” Tachyon gave the girl his best come-hither smile.
“Monsieur, she is working,” protested the desk clerk. “ I only require a moment of her time.”
“Monsieur, I cannot have a cleaning woman in the lobby of the Intercontinental.” It was almost a wail.
“Blood’s end! Then I’ll go to her.”
Danelle was bundling sheets into a hamper. Gasped when she saw him, tried to bull past him using her cleaning cart as a battering ram. He danced aside and caught her by the wrist.
“We must talk.” He was grinning like a fool. “I’m working.”
“Take the day off.”
“I’ll lose my job.”
“You’re not going to need this job any longer.”
“Oh, why not?”
A man and his wife stepped out of their room and stared curiously at the couple.
“This won’t do.”
She eyed him, checked her cheap wristwatch. “It’s almost my break. I’ll meet you at the Cafe Morens just down from the hotel on the Rue du Juillet. Buy me some cigarettes and my usual.”
“Which is?”
“They’ll know. I always take my break there.”
He took her face between his hands and kissed her. Smiled at her confused expression.
“What has happened with you?”
“I’ll tell you at the cafe.”
As he hurried back through the lobby he saw the desk clerk just hanging up the phone in one of the public booths. The young blond woman waved and called, “Did you find her?”
“Oh, yes. Thank you very much.”
Tachyon fidgeted at one of the tiny tables that had been squeezed out front of the cafe. The street was so narrow that the parked cars had two wheels cocked up on the sidewalks.
Dani arrived and lit a Gauloise. “So what is this all about?”
“You lied to me.” He shook a finger coyly under her nose. “Our daughter is not dead. At Versailles ... that was not a wild card, it was my blood kin. I don’t blame you for wanting to hurt me, but let me make it up to you. I’ll get you both back to America.”
A small car was gunning down the street. As it swept past, the chatter of automatic weapon fire echoed off the gray stone buildings. Danelle jerked in the chair. Tachyon caught her, flung them both down behind one of the parked cars. A white-hot poker burned through his thigh, and his elbow hit the sidewalk with a jarring crack. He lay frozen, cheek pressed to the pavement, something warm running over his hand. His leg had gone numb.
Danelle’s breath was rattling in her throat. Tachyon took her mind. Gisele appeared. Reflected a million times over in a million different memories. Gisele. A brilliant firefly presence.
Desperately he reached after her, but she was receding, a lost and elusive magic among the darkening pathways of her dying mother’s mind.
Danelle died. Gisele died.
But had left a part of herself. A son. Tach clung to her, violating every rule of advanced mentatics by holding to a dying mind. Panic seized him, and he fled back from that terrifying boundary.
In the physical world the air was filled with the undulating wail of sirens. Oh, ancestors, what to do? Be found here with a murdered hotel maid? Ludicrous. There would be questions to be answered. They would learn of his grandchild. And if wild cards were a national treasure, how much more a treasure was a part-blood Takisian?
The pain was beginning. Tachyon experimentally moved the leg and found that the bullet had missed the bone. The effort had popped sweat and filled the back of his throat with bile. How could he possibly reach the Ritz? He tightened his jaw. Because he was a prince of the house Ilkazam. It’s only two blocks, he thought encouragingly.
He laid Danelle gently aside, folded her hands on her bosom, kissed her forehead. Mother of my child. Later he would mourn her properly. But first came vengeance.
The bullet had passed cleanly through the fleshy part of his thigh. There wasn’t much blood. Yet. As he walked it began to pump. Camouflage, something to hide the wound just long enough to get past the desk and up to his room. He checked in parked cars. A folded newspaper. And the window was open. Not perfect, but good enough. Now he just had to find enough control not to limp those few steps from the front door to the elevator.
Piece of cake, as Mark would say. Training was everything. And blood. Blood would always tell.
He had taken a stab at sleeping, but it had been useless. Finally at six Jack Braun kicked aside the entangling bed clothes, stripped off sweat-soaked pajamas, dressed, and went in search of food.
Five months of hunched shoulders and nervous backward glances. Five months in which he had never spoken. Refused to grant him even eye contact. Had the hope of rehabilitation really been worth this amount of hell?
The Swarm invasion was to blame. It had pulled him back, out of the womb of real estate and California evenings and poolside sex. Here was a real crisis. No ace, no matter how tainted, would be unwelcome. And he’d done good, stomping all over monsters in Kentucky and Texas. And he’d discovered something interesting. Most of the new young aces didn’t know who the hell he was. A few, Hiram Worchester, the Turtle, had known and it had mattered. But it was bearable. So maybe there was a way to come back. To be a hero again.
Hartmann had announced the world tour.
Jack had always admired Hartmann. Admired the way he’d led the fight to repeal certain parts of the Exotic Powers Control Act. He’d called the senator and offered to foot part of the bill. Money was always welcome to a politician, even if it wasn’t being used to finance a campaign. Jack found himself on the plane.
And most of it hadn’t been bad. There’d been plenty of action with women-most notably with Fantasy. They had lain in bed one night in Italy, and she’d told him with vicious wit about Tachyon’s impotency. And he’d laughed, too loud and too long. Trying to diminish Tachyon. Trying to make him less of a threat.
Over the years he’d absorbed a bit about Takisian culture from the interviews he’d read. Vengeance was definitely part of the code. So he’d watched his back and waited for Tachyon to act. And nothing had happened.
The strain was killing him. And then had come last night.
He smeared butter on the last roll in the bread basket, washed down the hard crusted bite with a sip of the unbelievably strong French coffee. He sure wished these Frenchies had a concept of a real breakfast. He could order an American breakfast of course, but the cost was as unbelievable as the coffee. This basket of dry bread and coffee was costing him ten dollars. Add in some eggs and bacon, and the cost soared to near thirty dollars. For breakfast!
Suddenly the absurdity of the thought struck him. He was a rich man, not a Depression farm boy from North Dakota. His contribution to this tour had been big enough to buy him a piece of the big 747, or at least the jet fuel to fly it—
Tachyon was entering the hotel, and the hair on the nape of Jack’s neck prickled. The door of the small restaurant gave him only a limited view, and soon the alien was out of sight. Jack felt the muscles in his neck and shoulders relax, and with a sigh he lifted a finger and ordered a full American breakfast.
Tachyon had looked funny. Fork moved mechanically from plate to mouth. Holding himself real stiff. Folded newspaper along his thigh like a soldier on dress parade. None of his business what the bastard was getting up to.
But last night was his business.
Anger ate through his belly like a physical pain. Sure the bomb couldn’t have hurt him, but he took my mind. Casually, like a man tasting a mint. Reducing him in an instant from man to object.
Jack mopped up the last of the yolk while anger and outrage grew. God damn it! It was stupid to be scared of a pint-size fairy in fancy dress.
Not scared, Jack’s mind quickly amended. He’d stayed away from the alien out of politeness, an acknowledgment of how much Tachyon hated him. But now Tachyon had changed the rules. He’d taken his mind. That he wasn’t going to allow to pass.
They looked like two little red mouths. Bullet in, bullet out. Tach, seated in his undershorts, jabbed in a hypodermic, depressed the plunger, waited for the painkiller to take effect. Just for good measure he’d given himself a tetanus shot and an injection of penicillin. Spent hypos littered the table, a gauze pad lay ready, a roll of cotton .. But for the moment he would let it seep. And do some hard thinking.
So Danelle had not lied. She had just not told all. Gisele was dead. The question was, how? Or did that matter? Probably not. What mattered was that she had married and borne a son. My grandson. And he had to be found.
And the father? Well, what of him? Assuming he was still alive, he was no fit guardian for the boy. The father-or unknown others-were manipulating this Takisian gift to spread terror.
So where to start? Undoubtedly at Danelle’s apartment. Then to the hall of records to search for the marriage license and birth certificate.
But that attack on Danelle and himself had been no accident. They, whoever they were, were watching. So, however distasteful, he was going to have to make an effort to blend in.
Braun spent a few moments dithering in the hall. But outrage won over prudence. He tested the door, found it locked, gave a hard twist, and broke the knob. Stepped over the threshold and froze in astonishment at the sight of Tachyon, scissors at the ready, seated in the midst of a circle of snipped red locks.
The Takisian gaped back, a final hank of that improbable hair clutched in a hand.
“How dare you!”
“What in the hell are you doing?”
As their first exchange in almost forty years, it seemed to lack something.
In quick flicks like the shuttering of a camera, the rest of the scene came into focus. Jack’s forefinger shot out. “That’s a bullet wound.”
“Nonsense.” The gauze was laid quickly over the white thigh with its peppering of red-gold hairs. “Now get out of my room.”
“Not until I have some answers out of you. Who the hell has been shooting at you?” He snapped his fingers. “The bomb at Versailles. You’ve got a line into the people—”
“NO!” Far too quick and far too strong. “Have you told the authorities?”
“There is no need. This is not a bullet wound. I know nothing of the terrorists.” The scissors sawed viciously through the last piece of hair. It fluttered to the floor, ironically forming a shape very reminiscent of a question mark.
“Why are you cutting your hair?”
“Because I feel like it! Now get out before I take your mind and make you go.”
“You do, and I’ll come back and break your damn neck. You’ve never forgiven me—”
“You have that right!”
“You threw a goddamm bomb at me!”
“Unfortunately I knew it wouldn’t hurt you.”
The long slender fingers played about his cropped head, fluttering among the curls until they clustered about his face. It had the effect of making him appear suddenly very young.
Braun stepped in on him, rested his hands on either arm of the chair, effectively trapping Tachyon. “This tour is important. If you get up to some crazy stunt, it could damage everybody’s reputation. You I don’t give a damn about, but Gregg Hartmann is important.”
The alien looked away and gazed woodenly out the window. Despite being clad only in shirt and shorts he managed to make it seem regal.
“I’ll go to Hartmann.”
There was a flicker of alarm deep in the lilac eyes, quickly suppressed. “Fine, go. Anything to be rid of you.” Silence stretched between them. Suddenly Braun asked, “Are you in trouble?” No reply. “If you are, tell me. Maybe I can help.”
The long lashes lifted, and Tachyon looked him fully in the eyes. There was nothing young about the narrow face now. It looked as cold and old and as implacable as death. “I’ve had enough of your help for one lifetime, thank you.”
Jack almost ran from the room.
Tachyon pulled off the soft brown fedora and crumpled it agitatedly in his hands. The tiny two-room flat looked as if it had been struck by a cyclone. Drawers stood open, a cheap picture frame stood forlornly empty on a scarred table. What had it held that was so significant it had to be removed? The police? he wondered. No, they would have been more careful. So Dani’s killers had been here, and the police were yet to come, which meant Tach had to hurry. The newly purchased jeans felt stiff against his skin, and he tugged fretfully at the crotch while he riffled through the paperbacks that littered the front room.
A faint rasp sounded from the bedroom. Tachyon froze, crept cat-footed to the hot plate, and lifted the knife lying next to it. In a quick rush he crossed the room and pressed himself against the wall, ready to stab whatever came through the connecting door.
Careful, quiet footsteps, but enough vibration for Tach to tell that his opponent was big. Two sets of soft breaths from either side of the wall. Tach held his, waited. The man came through the door in a rush; Tachyon lunged in low, ready to drive the blade up beneath the ribs. The blade snapped, and gold light flashed across the dingy apartment walls. Jack Braun, forming his hand into a gun, placed his forefinger firmly between Tachyon’s eyes, “Bang, bang, you’re dead.”
“GOD DAMN YOU!” In a blaze of temper he flung the broken knife against the wall. “What are you doing here?”
“I followed you.”
“I never saw you!”
“ I know. I’m pretty good at this.” The implication was clear.
“Why can’t you just leave ... me ... alone?”
“Because you’re getting in way over your head.”
“I can take care of myself”
A derisive snort.
“If it hadn’t been you, I’d have taken you out,” Tach cried.
“Yeah? And what if there’d been more than one? Or if they’d had guns?”
“ I don’t have time to discuss this with you. The police may be here any minute,” the alien threw over his shoulder as he stormed into the bedroom and continued his search.
“Police! HOLD IT! What is going on? Why the police?”
“Because the woman who lived in this flat was murdered this morning.”
“Oh, great. And why does this involve you?” Tachyon’s mouth tightened mulishly. Braun gathered up the front of the alien’s shirt, hefted him off the ground, and held him at eye level, noses almost touching. “Tachyon.” It was a warning rumble.
“It’s a private matter.”
“Not if the police are involved it isn’t.”
“I can handle it myself.”
“ I don’t think so. You couldn’t even spot me.” Tachyon sulked. “Tell me what’s going on. I just might help you.”
“Oh, very well,” he snapped pettishly. “I’m searching for any clue as to the whereabouts of my grandson.”
That took some explaining. Tachyon fired out the tale in quick staccato sentences while they finished pawing through the jumble, turning up absolutely nothing.
“So you see, I have to find him first and get him out of the country before the French authorities realize what they possess,” he concluded, laying his hand on the doorknob. And heard a key rasp in the lock.
“Oh, shit,” whispered Tach. “Police?” mouthed Jack. “Undoubtedly,” the Takisian mouthed back.
“Fire escape.” Jack pointed back over his shoulder. They fled.
“Let’s see what we’ve got.” Braun paused to light a cigarette. Tachyon stopped wolfing down his enormous and very belated lunch and fished the paper from his jeans. Tossed it, only to have it land fluttering in the mustard jar. “God damn it, be careful,” said Jack, aggrieved, and mopped at the paper with his napkin.
Tachyon continued to shovel it in. With an annoyed grunt the ace pulled out a pair of reading glasses and peered at the Takisians florid hand:
Gisele Bacourt wed Frangois Andrieux in a civil ceremony on December 5th, 1971.
One child, Blaise Jeannot Andrieux, born May 7, 1975. Gisele Andrieux killed in a shoot-out with industrialist Simon de Montfort’s personal bodyguard, November 28, 1984. Both husband and wife were members of the French Communist Party.
Franrcois Andrieux had been pulled in for questioning, but was released when nothing conclusive could be found. They had tried the simple expedient of checking the phone book, and-not surprisingly-Andrieux had not been listed. Jack sighed, rocked back in his chair, and returned his glasses to his shirt pocket. The Eiffel Tower cast an elongated shadow across the outdoor cafe.
“It’s getting late, and we’ve got that dinner at the Tour Eiffel.”
“I’m not going.”
“Oh?”
“No, I’m going to go talk to Claude Bonnell.”
“Who?”
“Bonnell, Bonnell! Le Miroir, you know?” .. Why?
“Because he’s a major figure in the Communist Party. He may be able to obtain Andrieux’s address for me.”
“And if that fails?” The smoke from the cigarette formed a loop in the air between them.
“ I don’t want to think about that.”
“Well, you better, if you really want to find this guy.”
“So what’s your suggestion?”
“Try tracing the materials used in the bomb. They had to buy the stuff somewhere.”
Tach made a face. “Sounds slow and tedious.”
“It is.”
“Then I’ll pin my hope on Bonnell.”
“Fine, you hope, and I’ll pursue my bomb idea. Of course, how we’re going to get that information I’m not certain. I suppose you could always go to see Rochambeau and pick his brains ....”
Tachyon steepled his fingers before his face and peered speculatively over the top at Jack. “I have a better idea.”
“What?”
“Don’t sound so suspicious. You and Billy Ray could talk to Rochambeau about the bomb. Say that you think it was meant for the senator-it might have been for all we knowsuggest that you pool information.”
“Might work.” Jack ground out the cigarette. “Billy Ray is a justice Department ace, and Hartmann’s bodyguard. ‘Course he’s bound to ask why I’m involved.”
“Just tell him it’s because you’re Golden Boy.” And the tone was undiluted acid.
Bonnell’s dressing room backstage at the Lido was typical. The strong odor of cold cream, greasepaint, and hair spray overlaying the fainter scents of old sweat and stale perfume.
Tachyon straddled a chair, arms resting along the back, and watched the joker put the final touches on his makeup. “Could you hand,me my ruff?”
Bonnell clasped it about his neck, rose, took one final critical look at the black and white harlequin costume, and settled back into the battered wooden chair.
“All right, Doctor. I’m ready. Now tell me what I can do for you.”
“I need a favor.” They spoke in French. “Which is?”
“Do you have membership lists-addresses-for your members?”
“I assume we’re speaking of the Party.”
“Oh, forgive me. Yes.”
“And to answer you, yes, we do.”
Bonnell was not helping him any. Tach plowed awkwardly on. “Could you obtain an address for me?”
“That would depend on what you want it for.”
“Nothing nefarious, I assure you. A personal matter.”
“Hmmm.” Bonnell straightened the already meticulously arranged pots and tubes on his dressing table. “Doctor, you presume a great deal. We have met only once, yet you come to me asking for private information. And if I were to ask you why?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“I rather thought that would be your answer. So I’m afraid I really must refuse.”
Exhaustion, tension, and the throbbing ache from his leg slammed down like a curling storm wave. Tach laid his head on his arms. Fought tears. Considered just giving up. A gentle but firm hand caught his chin and forced his head up. “This really means a great deal to you, doesn’t it?”
“More than you can know”
“So tell me so I will know. Can’t you trust me? Just a little?”
“ I lived in Paris long ago. Have you been a communist for long?” he asked abruptly.
“Ever since I was able to comprehend politics.”
“Then I’m surprised I didn’t meet you all those long years ago. I knew them all. Thorenz, Lena Goldoni ... Danelle.”
“I wasn’t in Paris then. I was still in Marseilles getting the crap beat out of me by my supposedly normal neighbors.” His smile was bitter. “France has not always been so kind to her wild cards.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why should you be?”
“Because it’s my fault.”
“That’s an exceedingly silly and self-indulgent attitude.”
“Thank you so very much.”
“The past is dead, buried, and gone forever past recall. Only the present and the future matter, Doctor.”
“And I think that’s a silly and simplistic attitude. The actions of the past have consequences for the present and the future. Thirty-six years ago I came to this country broken and bitter. I slept with a young girl. Now I return to find that I left a more permanent mark on this place than I had thought. I sired a child who was born, lived, and died without my ever knowing of her existence. I could curse her mother for that, and yet perhaps she was wise. For the first thirteen years of Gisele’s life her father was a drunken derelict. What could I have given her?” He paced away and stood rigidly regarding a wall. Then whirled and rested his shoulders against the cool plaster.
“I lost my chance with her, but the Ideal has granted me another. She had a son, my grandchild. And I want him.”
“And the father?”
“Is a member of your party”
“You say you want him. What? You would steal him from his father?”
Tach rubbed wearily at his eyes. Forty-eight hours without sleep was taking its toll. “ I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far ahead. All I want is to see him, to hold him, to look into the face of my future.”
Bonnell slapped his hands onto his thighs and pushed up from the chair. “C’est bien, Doctor. A man deserves a chance to look upon the intersection of his past, present, and future. I will find you this man.”
“Just give his address, there’s no reason for you to be involved.”
“He might take fright. I can reassure him, set up a meeting. His name-?”
“Francois Andrieux.”
Bonnell noted it. “Very good. So, I will speak to this man, and then I will ring you at tfie Ritz—”
“I’m no longer staying there. You can reach me at the Lys on the Left Bank.”
“ I see. Any particular reason?”
“No.”
“I must work on that innocent expression. It is very charming, if not terribly convincing.” Tachyon flushed, and Bonnell laughed. “There, there, don’t take offense. You’ve told me enough of your secrets tonight. I won’t press you for any more.”
The junket was dining at the expensive Tour Eiffel. Tachyon, leaning on the rail of the observation deck, fidgeted and waited for Braun to emerge. Through the windows of the restaurant he could see that the party had reached the brandy-coffee-cigars-speeches stage. The door opened, and Mistral, giggling, darted out. She was followed by Captain Donatien Racine, one of France’s more prominent aces. His sole power was flight, but that coupled with the fact he was career military had ensured that the press dubbed him Tricolor. It was a name he hated.
Gripping the American about her slender waist, Racine carried them over the protective railing. Mistral gave him a quick kiss, pushed free of his encircling arm, and floated away on the gentle breezes that sighed about the tower. Her great blue-and-silver cape spread around her until she resembled an exotic moth drawn by the glittering lights webbing the tower. Watching the couple darting and swooping in an intricate game of tag, Tachyon suddenly felt very weary and very old and very earthbound.
The restaurant doors flew open, and the delegation flowed out like water through a broken dam. After five months of formal dinners and endless speeches, it was no wonder they fled.
Braun, elegant in his white tie and tails, paused to light a cigarette. Tachyon touched him with a thread of telepathy. Jack.
He stiffened, but gave no other outward sign.
Gregg Hartmann glanced back. “Jack. are you coming.”
“I’ll catch up with you. Think I’ll enjoy the air and the view and watch those crazy kids skydive.” He pointed to Mistral and Racine.
A few moments later he joined Tachyon at the rail. “Bonnell’s going to set up a meeting.”
Braun grunted, flicked ash. “The Surete were at the hotel when I got back. They tried to be subtle about questioning the delegation as to your whereabouts, but the news hounds are snuffling. They sense a story”
The Takisian shrugged it aside with a hunch of the shoulder. “Will you come with me? To the meeting?” Ancestors, how it stuck in the throat to ask him for help! “Sure.”
“I may need help with the father.”
“So you’re going to do ...”
“Whatever it takes. I want him.”
Montmartre. Where artists, legitimate and otherwise, swarmed like locusts ready to fall upon the unwary tourist. A portrait of your beautiful wife, monsieur. The cost politely never mentioned, then when it was completed a charge sufficient to purchase an old master.
Tour buses groaned up the hill and disgorged their eager passengers. The Gypsy children, circling like vultures, moved in. The European travelers, wise to the ways of these innocentfaced thieves, drove them away with loud threats. The Japanese and Americans, lulled by sparkling black eyes in dark faces, allowed them to approach. Later they would rue it when they discovered the loss of wallets, watches, jewelry.
So many people, and one small boy.
Braun, hands on hips, gazed out across the plaza before Sacre-Coeur. It was awash with people. Easels thrust up like masts from a colorful surging sea. He sighed, checked his watch.
“They’re late.”
“Patience.”
Braun stared pointedly at his watch again. The Gypsy children attracted by the slim gold band of the Longines crept forward.
“Beat it!” Jack roared. “Jesus, where do they all come from? Is there a Gypsy factory the same way there’s a hooker factory?”
“They’re usually sold by their mothers to ‘talent scouts’ from France and Italy. They’re then trained to steal and work like slaves for their owners.”
“Jesus, sounds like something out of Dickens.”
Tachyon shaded his eyes with one slim hand and searched for Bonnell.
“You know you were supposed to address a conference of researchers today.”
“Yes.”
“Well, did you call to cancel?”
“No, I forgot. I have more important things on my mind right now than genetic research.”
“I’d say that’s exactly what you have on your mind,” came Braun’s dry reply.
A taxi pulled up, and Bonnell struggled painfully out. He was followed by a man and a small boy. Tachyon’s fingers dug deep into Jack’s bicep.
“Look. Dear God!”
“What?”
“That man. He’s the clerk from the hotel.”
“Huh?”
“He was at the Intercontinental.”
The trio were walking toward them. Suddenly the father froze, pointed at Jack, gestured emphatically, grabbed the child by the wrist, and hustled for the taxi.
“No, dear God, no.” Tachyon ran forward a few steps. Reached out, his power closing about their minds like a vise. They froze. He walked slowly toward them. Felt his breath go short as he devoured the small, stubborn face beneath its cap of red hair. The boy was fighting with not insignificant power, and only a quarter Takisian. Pride surged through Tach.
Suddenly he was flung to the ground, fists and rocks raining down upon him. He clung desperately to the control while the Gypsy children plucked at him, removing wallet, watch, and all the time continuing the hysterical beating. Jack waded in and began plucking urchins off him.
“No no, catch them. Don’t worry about me!” screamed Tach. With a leg sweep he brought two to the ground, lurched to one knee, stiffened his fingers, and jabbed them hard into one gangling teenager’s throat. The boy fell back, choking.
Jack hesitated, turned toward Andrieux and the boy, broke into a run. Tachyon, distracted, watched his progress. Never even saw the boot come swinging in. Pain exploded in his temple. Distantly he heard someone shouting, then bitter darkness.
Bonnell was wiping his face with a damp handkerchief when he finally came around. Desperately Tachyon levered up onto his elbows, then fell back as the motion sent waves of pain through his head and filled the back of his throat with nausea.
“Did you get them?”
“No.” Jack was holding a bumper like a man displaying a prize catch. “When you went under they ran for it and made it into the cab. I tried to grab the car, but could only get the bumper. It came off, “ he added unnecessarily. Jack eyed the interested crowd that had surrounded them and shooed them away.
“ Then we’ve lost them.”
“What did you expect? You turn up with the Judas Ace,” said Bonnell angrily.
Jack flinched, murmured through stiff lips, “That was a long time ago.”
“Some of us don’t forget. And others of us shouldn’t.” He glared at Tachyon. “ I thought I could trust you.”
“Jack, go away.”
“Well, fuck you too.” Long, jerky strides carried him into the crowd and out of sight.
“It’s funny, but I feel very badly about that.” He gave himself a shake. “So what do we do now?”
“First I extract a promise from you that there will be no more stunts like today.”
“All right.”
“I’ll reset the meeting for tonight. And this time come alone.”
Jack wasn’t sure why he did it. After the insult Tachyon had given him, he should have just washed his hands of the whole thing or told the Surete everything he knew. Instead he turned up at the Lys with an ice pack and aspirin.
“Thank you, but I do have a medical kit.”
Jack tossed the bottle several times. “Oh, yeah? Well, then I’ll take them. This whole thing is giving me a headache.” Tach lifted the pack from his eye. “Why you?”
“Lie down and leave that thing on your eye.” He scratched at his chin. “Look, let me throw something out to you. Doesn’t this whole thing strike you as just a little too convenient?”
“In what way?” But Jack could tell from the little alien’s cautious tone that he’d struck a nerve.
“Instead of just giving you Andrieux’s address, Bonnell insists on setting up a meeting. They tried to split—”
“Because you were there.”
“Yeah, right. You mind control them, then you just happen to get attacked by a gang of Gypsy children. I’ve done a little checking around. They never do that kind of thing. I think somebody had this arranged ahead of time. To make certain you couldn’t use your mind control. And what about Andrieux? You said he was the clerk at the hotel. Then why did he deny any knowledge of Danelle? She was his mother-in-law, for Christ’s sake. This thing stinks to high heaven.”
Tachyon flung the ice pack against the wall. “So what do you suggest I do?”
“Don’t work with Bonnell anymore. Don’t go to any more meetings. Let me see what I can do with the bomb fragments. Rochambeau has agreed to work with Ray.”
“That could take weeks. We leave in a few days.”
“You are fucking obsessed with this!”
“Yes!”
“Why? Is it because you’re impotent? Is that the big deal here?”
“ I don’t wish to discuss this.”
“ I know you don’t, but you’ve got to! You’re not thinking this through, Tachyon. What it could do to the tour, to your reputation-to mine for that matter. We’re withholding vital evidence pertaining to a murder.”
“You didn’t have to become involved.”
“ I know that, and sometimes I wish to Christ I hadn’t. But I’m into it now, so I’ll see it through to the end. So are you going to sit tight and see what I can find?”
“Yes, I’ll wait to see what you find out.”
Jack shot him a suspicious glance. “Well, I guess that’ll have to do.”
“Oh, Jack.” The big ace paused, hand on the doorknob, and looked back. “I apologize for this afternoon. It was wrong of me to send you away.”
It was obvious from the Takisian’s expression what this was costing him. “Okay,” Jack replied gruffly.
It was an old house, a very old house, in the university district. Cracks cut the dingy plaster walls, and the musty odor of mold hung in the air. Bonnell gave Tachyon’s arm a hard squeeze.
“Remember not to expect too much. This child doesn’t know you.”
Tachyon barely heard him, certainly paid no attention. He was already heading up the stairs.
There were five people in the room, but Tachyon saw only the boy. Perched on a stool, he was swinging one foot, slamming his heel rhythmically into a battered wooden leg.
His fine straight hair lacked the metallic copper fire of his grandsire’s, but it was nonetheless a deep rich red. Tach felt a surge of pride at this evidence of his prepotence. Straight red brows gave Blaise an overly serious expression that set oddly on the narrow child’s face. His eyes were a brilliant purple-black.
Standing behind, a hand possessively on his son’s shoulder, was Andrieux. Tachyon studied him with the critical eye of a Takisian psi lord evaluating breeding stock. Not bad, human of course, but not bad. Definitely handsome, and he appeared intelligent. Still it was hard to tell. If only he could run tests .... He tried to close his mind to the unwelcome suspicion that this man had been instrumental in Dani’s death.
He looked back to Blaise and found the boy studying him with equal interest. There was nothing shy about the gaze. Suddenly Tach’s shields repelled a powerful mind assault. “Trying to pay me back for yesterday?”
“Mail oui. You took my mind.”
“You take people’s minds.”
“Of course. No one can stop me.”
“ I can.” The brows snapped together in a thunderous frown. “I’m Tachyon. I’m your grandfather.”
“You don’t look like a grandfather.”
“My kind live a very long time.”
“Will I?”
“Longer than a human.” The boy seemed pleased with this oblique reference to his alienness.
As they talked, Tach made a preliminary probe of his abilities. An unbelievable mind control aptitude for one so young. And all self-taught, that was the truly amazing thing. With proper instruction he would be a force to be reckoned with. No teke, no precog, and worst of all almost no telepathy. He was virtually mind blind.
That’s what comes of unrestricted and unplanned breeding. “Doctor,” said Claude. “Won’t you sit down?”
“First I would like to give Blaise a hug.” He looked inquiringly at the boy, who made a face.
“I don’t like hugs and kisses.”
“Why not?”
“It makes me feel like ants are on me.”
“A common mentat reaction. You will not feel that way with me.”
“Why not?”
“Because I am your kin and kind. I understand you better than anyone else in the world can ever understand you.” Francois Andrieux shifted angrily.
“Well, I’ll try it,” said Blaise decisively, and slid off his stool. Again Tachyon was pleased with his assurance.
As his arms closed about his grandson’s small form, tears rushed into his eyes.
“You’re crying,” Blaise accused. “Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I am so very happy to have found you. To know that you exist in the world.”
Bonnell cleared his throat, a discreet little sound. “As loath as I am to interrupt this, I’m really afraid I must, Doctor.” Tacbyon stiffened warily. “We have to talk a little business,”
“Business?” The word was dangerously low.
“Yes. I’ve given you what you want.” He indicated Blaise with a flip of a tiny hand. “Now you have to give me what I want. Francois, take him.”
Father and son left. Tachyon speculatively studied the remaining men.
“Please don’t consider a mind-assisted escape. There are more of us waiting outside this room. And my companions are armed.”
“ I somehow assumed they would be.” Tach settled onto a sagging sofa. It sent up a puff of dust under his weight. “So, you are a member of this little gang of galloping terrorists.”
“No, sir, I lead it.”
“Umm, and you had Dani killed.”
“No. That was an act of blatant stupidity for which Francois has been ... chastised. I disapprove of subordinates acting on their own initiative. They so often screw up. Don’t you agree?”
Tachyon’s late cousin Rabdan came instantly to mind, and he found himself nodding. Pulled himself up short. There was something very outre about this chatty little conversation, faced as he was with the man who had attempted to kill hundreds at Versailles.
“Oh, dear, and I had so hoped that Andrieux was bright,” mused Tachyon, then he asked, “Is this a kidnapping for ransom?”
“Oh, no, Doctor, you’re quite beyond price.”
“So I’ve always thought.”
“No, I need your help. In two days there will be a great debate between all the presidential candidates. We intend to kill as many of them as we can.”
“Even your own candidate?”
“In a revolution sometimes sacrifice is necessary. But for your information, I have little loyalty to the Communist Party. They have betrayed the people, lost the will and the strength to make the difficult decisions. The mandate has passed to us.”
Tach rested his forehead on a hand. “Oh, please, don’t blurt slogans at me. It’s one of the most tiresome things about you people.”
“May I outline my plan?”
“I don’t see any way I can prevent you.”
“The security will undoubtedly be very tight.”
“Undoubtedly.” Bonnell shot him a sharp glance at the irony. Tachyon gazed innocently back.
“Rather than attempt to run this gauntlet with weapons of our own, we will use those already provided. You and Blaise will mind control as many guards as possible and have them rake the platform with automatic weapons fire. It should have the desired result.”
“Interesting, but what can you possibly gain by this?”
“The destruction of France’s ruling elite will throw the country into chaos. When that occurs, I won’t need your esoteric powers. Guns and bombs will suffice. Sometimes the simplest things are often the best.”
“What a philosopher you are. Perhaps you should set yourself up as a guide to the young.”
“I already have. I’m Blaise’s beloved Uncle Claude.”
“Well, this has of course been instructional, but I very much regret that I must refuse.”
“Not surprising. I had anticipated this. But consider, Doctor, I hold your grandson.”
“You won’t harm him, he’s too precious to you.”
“True. But my threat is not of death. If you refuse to accommodate me in this, I will be forced to have certain very unpleasant things done to you, being careful to ensure that you live. I will then disappear with Blaise. You might find it somewhat difficult to trace us when you are a bedridden cripple.”
He smiled in satisfaction at the look of horror on Tachyon’s face. “Jean will escort you to your room now. There you can reflect upon my offer and, I’m certain, see your way clear to help me.”
“I doubt it,” gritted Tachyon, regaining command of his voice, but it was hollow bravado, and Bonnell undoubtedly knew it.
The “room” turned out to be the very cold and dank basement of the house. Hours later Blaise arrived with his dinner.
“I have come to visit with you,” he announced, and Tach sighed, again admiring and regretting Bonnell’s cunning. The joker had obviously made a careful study of Tachyon, his attitudes and culture.
He ate while Blaise, chin resting in his cupped hands, gazed thoughtfully at him.
Tach set aside his fork. “You are very silent. I thought we were going to visit.”
“I don’t know what to say to you. It’s very strange.”
“What is?”
“Finding out about you. Now I’m not so special anymore, which bothers me, but it’s also good to know ...” He considered.
“That you’re not alone,” suggested Tach gently. “Yes, that’s it.”
“Why do you help them?”
“Because they are right. The old institutions must fall.”
“But people have died.”
“Yes,” he agreed sunnily. “Doesn’t that bother you?”
“Oh, no. They were bourgeois capitalist pigs and deserved to die. Sometimes killing is the only way.”
“A very Takisian attitude.”
“You will help us, won’t you? It will be fun.”
“Fun!”
It’s his upbringing, Tach consoled himself. Endow any child with this kind of unsupervised power and they would react the same.
They talked. Tachyon pieced together a picture of unfettered freedom, virtually no formal schooling, the excitement of playing hide-and-seek with the authorities. More chilling was the realization that Blaise did not withdraw from his victims when they died. Rather he rode through the terror and pain of their final moment.
There will be time to correct this, he promised himself. “So will you help?” Blaise asked, hopping down from the chair. “Uncle Claude said to be sure and ask you.” Seconds stretched into minutes as he considered. The noble course would be to tell Bonnell to go to hell. He considered Bonnell’s gently worded threats and shuddered. He had been bred and trained to seize the opportunity, to turn defeat into victory. He would trust to that. Surely they could not guard him as closely at the rally.
“Tell Claude that I will help.” An exuberant hug.
Alone, Tachyon continued to reflect. He did have one other advantage. Jack ... who would surely realize something had gone terribly wrong and alert the Sfirete. But his hope was founded on a man whose weakness was well known tohim, and his fears on a man who, despite his civilized exterior, possessed no humanity.
Coming up on twenty-four hours since the little bastard had disappeared. Jack swung at the wall, pulled the punch just in time. Knocking out a wall at the Ritz wasn’t going to help.
Was Tachyon in trouble?
Despite his promise, had he gone off with Bonnell? And did that necessarily mean trouble? Was it possible he was merely playing hooky with his grandkid?
If he was out visiting the zoo or whatever and Jack alerted the Sfirete, and they found out about Blaise, Tachyon would never forgive him. It would be another betrayal. Maybe his last one. The Takisian would find a way to get even this time.
But if he’s really in trouble?
A knock pulled him from his distracted thoughts. One of Hartmann’s interchangeable aides stood in the hall.
“Mr. Braun, the senator would like to invite you to join him at the debate tomorrow”
“Debate? What debate?”
“All one thousand and eleven”—a condescending little laugh—“or however many candidates there are in this crazy race, will be taking part in a round-robin debate in the Luxembourg Gardens. The senator would like as many of the tour as possible to be there. To show support for this great European democracy-such as it is. Mr. Braun ... are you all right?”
“Fine, yeah, I’m fine. You tell the senator I’ll be there.”
“And Doctor Tachyon? The senator’s very concerned by his continued absence.”
“I think I can safely promise the senator that the doctor will be there too.”
Closing the door, Jack quickly crossed to the phone and put in a call for Rochambeau. A probable terrorist attack on the candidates. No need to mention the child. Just an urgent need to call out the troops.
And a long night of praying he had guessed correctly. That he had made the right choice.
He should be sleeping, preparing mind and body for the morrow. His life and the future of his line depended upon his skill and speed and cunning.
And on Jack Braun. Ironic that.
If Jack had drawn the correct conclusion. If he had alerted the Sfirete. If there were sufficient officers. If Tachyon could stretch his talent beyond all limits and hold an unheard of number of minds.
He sat up on the rickety cot and hugged his stomach. Sank back and tried to relax. But it was a night for memories. Faces out of the past. Blythe, David, Earl, Dani.
I’m gambling my life and the life of my grandchild on the man who destroyed Blythe. Lovely.
But the possibility of dying can act as a spur for selfexamination. Force a person to strip away the comforting, insulating little lies that buffer one from their most private guilts and regrets.
“Then give me those names!”
“All right ... all right.”
The power-lancing out fragmenting her mind ... her mind ... her mind.
But they wouldn’t have known but for Jack. And she wouldn’t have absorbed their minds but for Holmes, and she wouldn’t have been there but for the paranoia of a nation.
And no one would suffer had they not been born, thought Tach, quoting a favorite adage of his father’s. Sometime one must stop excusing, accept responsibility for actions taken.
Tisianne brunt Ts’ara, Jack Braun didn’t destroy Blythe, you did.
He flinched, prepared for it to hurt. Instead he felt better. Lighter, freer, at peace for the first time in so many, many years. He began to laugh, was not surprised when it turned to quiet tears.
They lasted for some time. When the storm ended, he lay back, exhausted but calm. Ready for tomorrow. After which he would return home and make a home and raise his child. Calmly and a little regretfully he turned his back on the past.
He was Tisianne brant Ts’ara sek Halima sek Ragnar sek Omian, a prince of the House Ilkazam, and tomorrow his enemies would learn to their pain and regret what it meant to stand against him.
Claude, Blaise, and a driver remained in a car almost a block from the gardens. Tachyon, linked through the barrel of a Beretta with a stone-faced Andrieux, hovered at the outskirts of an enormous crowd. Parisians were nothing if not enthusiastic about their politics. But spotted throughout this sea of humanity like an insidious infection were the other fifteen members of Bonnell’s cell. Waiting. For blood to flow and nurture their violent dreams.
On the stand, the candidates-all seven of them. About half the delegation seated in chairs directly in front of the bunting-hung platform. There was no way they would escape without injury if Tach should fail and the shooting begin. Jack came into view. Hands thrust deep into pants pockets, he paced and frowned out over the throng.
Blaise was a rider in Tachyon’s mind. Ready to sense the tiniest use of telepathy. His power might be slight, but he was sensitive enough to detect the shift in focus such mind communication required. His presence suited his grandsire just fine. It would make what was to come all the easier. Carefully Tachyon constructed a mind-scrim of the scene. A false picture to lull his grandchild. He hedged it around with shields, presented it to Blaise. Then from beneath its protective cover be reached out, touched Jack’s mind. Don’t jump, keep frowning.
Where are you?
Near gate, edge of trees. Got it.
Surete?
Everywhere. Terrorists? Likewise everywhere. How ...!?
They’ll come to you. Wha ... ???
Trust.
He withdrew and carefully constructed a trap. It was similar to the link he enjoyed with Baby when the ship boosted and amplified his own natural powers to allow for transspace communication, but much, much stronger. Its teeth were very deep. What might it do to Blaise? No. There was no time for doubts.
The mind snare snapped down. A mental scream of alarm from the boy. Desperate struggle, panting resignation. The rider had become the ridden.
Tachyon joined Blaise’s power to his. It was like a bar of white-hot light. Carefully he split it into strands. Each tendril snapped out like a burning whip. Settled on his captors. They became frozen statues.
He was gasping with effort, sweat bursting from his forehead, running in rivulets into his eyes. He set them marching, a regiment of zombies. As Andrieux stepped from his side, Tachyon forced his hand to move, to close about the Beretta, to pull it from his slave’s limp grasp.
Braun was leaping about, gesticulating, summoning help with great arm sweeps.
Hurry! Hurry!
He had to hold them. All of them. If he failed ... Blaise was struggling again. It was like being kicked over and over again in the gut. One thread snapped. To Claude Bonnell. With a cry Tachyon dropped the control, ran for the gate. Behind him there was the vicious snarl of an Uzi. Apparently one of his captives had tried to run and been cut down by the French security forces. Perhaps it had been Andrieux. More gunfire, punctuating screams. A torrent of people swept past, almost knocking him from his feet. He tightened his grip on the Beretta, pumped harder. Slid around the corner just as the dazed driver reached for the key. A blow from Tachyon’s mind, and he collapsed onto the steering wheel, and the blare of the horn was added to the pandemonium.
Bonnell struggled from the car, gripping Blaise by the wrist. He went lurching and stumbling for a narrow, deserted side street.
Tach flew after them, caught Blaise by his free hand, and wrenched him free.
“LET ME GO! LET ME GO!”
Sharp teeth bit deep into his wrist. Tachyon silenced the boy with a crushing imperative. Supported the sleeping child with one arm’. He and Bonnell regarded one another over the limp figure.
“Bravo, Doctor. You outfoxed me. But what a media event my trial will be.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Eh?”
“I require a body. One infected with the wild card. Then the Surete will have their mysterious mentat ace and will look no further.”
“You can’t be serious! You can’t mean to kill me in cold blood.” He read the answer in Tachyon’s implacable lilac gaze. Bonnell tottered back, came up short against a wall, moistened his lips. “I treated you fairly, kindly. You took no hurt from me.”
“But others have not fared so well. You shouldn’t have sent Blaise to me. He was quick to tell me of your other triumphs. An innocent banker, controlled by Blaise, sent into his bank carrying his own death. That bomb blast killed seventeen. Clearly a triumph.”
Bonnell’s face shifted, took on the aspect of Thomas Tudbury, the Great and Powerful Turtle. “Please, I beg you. At least grant me the opportunity for a trial.”
“No,” The features shifted again-Mark Meadows, Captain Trips blinked confusedly at the gun. “I think the outcome is fairly predictable.” Danelle, but as she had been all those long years ago. “I merely hasten your execution.”
A final transformation. Shoulder-length sable hair cascading over the shoulders, long sooty lashes brushing at her cheeks, lifting to reveal eyes of a profound midnight blue. Blythe.
“Tachy, please.”
“I’m sorry, but you’re dead.” And Tach shot him.
“Ah, Doctor Tachyon.” Franchot de Valmy rose from his desk, hand outstretched. “France owes you a great debt of gratitude. How can we ever repay you?”
“By issuing me a passport and visa.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand. You of course—”
“Not for me. For Blaise Jeannot Andrieux.”
De Valmy fiddled with a pen. “Why not merely apply?”
“Because Francois Andrieux is currently in custody. Checks will be run, and I can’t allow that.”
“Aren’t you being a bit forthright with me?”
“Not at all. I know what an expert you are on falsified documents.” The Frenchman froze, then shifted slowly to the back of his chair. “ I know you’re not an ace, Monsieur de Valmy. I wonder, how would the French public react to news of such a cheat? It would cost you the election.”
De Valmy forced past stiff lips, “I am a very capable public servant. I can make a difference for France.”
“Yes, but none of that is half so alluring as a wild card.”
“What you’re asking is impossible. What if it’s traced to me? What if—” Tachyon reached for the phone. “What are you doing?”
“Calling the press. I too can arrange press conferences at a moment’s notice. One of the privileges of fame.”
“You’ll get your documents.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ll find out why you’re doing this.”
Tachyon paused at the door, glanced back. “Then we’ll each have a secret on the other, won’t we?”
The big plane was darkened for the late-night hop to London. The first-class section was deserted save for Tach, Jack, and Blaise, sleeping soundly in his grandfather’s arms.
There was something about the little tableau that warned everyone to stay well away.
“How long are you gonna keep him under?” The single reading light pulled fire from the twin red heads.
“Until we reach London.”
“Will he ever forgive you?”
“He won’t know”
“About Bonnell maybe, but the rest he’ll remember. You betrayed him.”
“Yes.” It was scarcely audible over the rumble of the engines. “Jack?”
“Yeah?”
“I forgive you.” Their eyes met.
The human reached down, softly pushed back a lock of silky hair from the child’s forehead. “Then I guess maybe there’s hope for you too.”
Dr. Tachyon bounded down the steps of the Blythe van Renssaeler Memorial Clinic, and paused to pat one of the dispirited sandstone lions that flanked the stairs. He noticed that its companion to the north still had a toupee of dirty snow adorning its crumbling head. Though he was already late for a luncheon date with Senator Hartmann at Aces High, he couldn’t resist tenderly brushing away the snow. A brisk, cold wind was gusting off the East River, driving tatters of white clouds before it, and carrying the sound of horns from the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge.
The urgency of the horns reminded him of the passing time, and he took the final two steps in a long leap. And was brought up short by an expanse of pink. A waistcoat, Tach identified before his view was broken by a gladiolus thrust firmly beneath his nose. Tach looked up and up, and realized he was facing a stranger ... and there was danger, or the potential of danger, in every stranger. Three quick steps back carried him out of range of all but a gun or some esoteric ace power, and he warily studied the apparition.
The man was very tall, his scrawny height exaggerated by the enormously tall purple stovepipe hat crammed down onto long, lank blond hair. A coat, also purple, hung from narrow shoulders, and set-to Tach’s mind-a lovely contrast to the orange and violet paisley shirt and green trunks. The grinning scarecrow once more proferred the flower.
“Like, I’m Captain Trips, man,” he offered, and stood swaying and beaming like a drunken lighthouse. Fascinated,
Tachyon stared up into pale blue eyes swimming behind lenses that looked as if they’d been knocked off the bottom of Coke bottles. Unable to construct anything coherent to say, Tach merely accepted the flower.
“That’s not really my name, man,” the Captain confided in a stage whisper that would have carried to the end of Carnegie Hall. “I’m an ace so I gotta have a secret identity, you know?” The Captain ran a bony hand across his mouth, smoothing the slightly stained mustache and the scraggly wisp of beard. “Oh wow, like, I can’t believe it. Dr. Tachyon in person. I really admire you, man.”
Tach, never one to pass up a compliment, was pleased, but also aware of the passing time. He jammed the flower into his coat pocket, and surged back into motion, his newfound companion falling in beside him. There was a good feeling about the man which washed off him with the faint odor of ginseng, sandalwood, and old sweat, but Tach couldn’t shake the feeling that the Captain was an amiable lunatic. Digging his hand into the pockets of his midnight-blue breeches, he cast Trips a sideways glance, and decided that he had to say something. He obviously wasn’t going to be rid of the man anytime soon. “So, was there any particular reason for your seeking me out?”
“Well, I think I need advice. Like, you know, it seemed you were the person to ask.” The man’s hands sought out the gigantic green bow tie with its yellow polka dots, and gave it a hard tug as if he found it confining. “I’m not really Captain Trips.”
“Yes, I know, you said that,” replied Tach, clinging to his now-fast-vanishing patience.
“I’m really Mark Meadows. Dr. Mark Meadows. Like, we have a lot in common, man.”
“You can’t be serious,” blurted Tach, and instantly regretted his rudeness.
The gawky figure seemed to pull in on itself, losing inches. “I am, man, really.”
Ten years ago Mark Meadows had been considered the most brilliant biochemist in the world, the Einstein of his field. There had been a dozen different explanations for his sudden retirement: stress, personality deterioration, the breakup of his marriage, drug abuse. But to think that young giant had been reduced to this shambling—
“I’ve been, like, lookin’ for the Radical, man.”
Memory snapped down; 1970?, the riot in People’s Park when a mysterious ace had appeared on the scene, rescued the Lizard King, and vanished, never to be seen again.
“You’re not the only one. I tried to locate him in ‘70, but he never reappeared.”
“Yeah, it’s a real bummer,” the Captain concurred mournfully. “I had him once ... well, I think I had him once, but I haven’t been able to get him back, so maybe I didn’t. Maybe it’s just, like, wishful thinking, man.”
“You’re claiming to be the Radical?” Disbelief sent Tach’s voice up several octaves.
“Oh no, man, ’cause I got no proof. I made these powders, trying to find him, to get him back, but when I eat them I get these other people.”
“Other people?” Tach repeated in an unnaturally calm tone.
“Yeah, my friends, man.”
Tachyon was certain now. He had a nut on his hands. If only he had sent for the limousine. He began casting about for a way to dump his unwelcome companion and get to his meeting before they cancelled his grant or the Ideal only knew what else .... He spotted an alley that he knew would cut through to a taxi stand. Surely there he could be rid—
Trips was rambling again. “You’re sorta like the father to all the aces, man. And you’re always doing stuff to help people. And I’d like to help people so I was figuring you could, like, teach me to be an ace, and fight evil, and—”
Whatever else the Captain wanted was lost in a squeal of tires as a car shot into the alley and jammed to a halt. Survival instincts, drilled into him from infancy, took over, and Tach whirled and ran from what had now become a deadly box. Trips turned from side to side, his head poking at the car and at the fleeing Takisian like a puzzled stork.
Screech! Slam! Another car, effectively blocking his escape. And figures-familiar figures-boiling from the vehicles. He had no time to ponder the inexplicable presence of his relatives on Earth; instead his shields snapped into place just in time to turn a powerful mind blast. His power lanced out, shields buckled, fell, and one of his attackers collapsed.
He tried another; the shields held. Too many. Time to try and elude them physically. The leak from their minds indicated a simple capture, but then he saw an arrester slide from his cousin Rabdan’s wrist sheath. It was a particularly nasty weapon, and a popular assassination tool. A press to the victim’s chest, and the heart stopped. Quick, clean, simple, and the job was finished. A spinning back kick sent Rabdan staggering into a row of garbage cans. The battered cans-went down with a crash and a clatter, releasing the stench of rotting garbage, and four or five yowling, spitting alley cats. The silvery disk of the arrester rolled from Rabdan’s hand, and Tach leaped for it.
From the corner of his eye he saw the Captain clutch at his head, and collapse with a moan to the slimy pavement. Another mental attack which his shields turned, but they did fuck all against a baton expertly wielded by Sedjur, his old arms master, and as his skull exploded in fragments of light and pain, Tachyon felt a deep sense of hurt and betrayal, and a strong wish that he had had a gun.
“... bring this other one?”
“You said to leave neither witnesses nor bodies.” Rabdan’s sulky, defensive tones seemed filtered by several miles of cotton wool, and that other voice .. it couldn’t be. Tach squeezed his eyes tighter shut, willing the return of unconsciousness, anything but the presence of the Kibr, Benaf’saj.
The old woman sighed. “Very well, perhaps he can serve as a control. Take him to the cabin with the others.” Rabdan’s footfalls receded, accompanied by a dragging sound.
“The boy did well,” Sedjur said, once Rabdan was gone and could not be insulted by his remarks. “His years here have strengthened him. Took out Rabdan.”
“Yes, yes. Now go. I must speak with my grandchild.” Sedjur’s footsteps dwindled, and Tach continued to play possum. His mind lanced out; touched on the presence of the ship, (it was definitely a war vessel of the Courser class), felt the familiar pattern of Takisian minds, the panic of two ... no, three human ones. And finally a mind whose touch brought a rush of fear and hate and regret tinged with sadness. His cousin Zabb, becoming aware of the featherlike probe, thrust back, and Tachyon’s imperfect shield allowed part of the blow to pass. His headache increased in intensity.
“I know you’re conscious,” Benaf’saj said conversationally. With a sigh, he opened his eyes, and regarded the chiseled features of his oldest living relative. The opaline luminescence of the ship’s walls formed a halo about her silver white hair, and heightened the network of lines that etched her face. But even with these ravages it was possible to see traces of the formidable beauty that had enthralled several generations of men. Legend had it that a member of the Alaa family had risked all to spend one night with her. One wondered if he had found the bliss worth the price, for she had killed him before morning. (Or so the story ran.) A gnarled hand plucked at a wisp of hair that had worked free from the elaborate coiffure, while the faded gray eyes studied him with a coolness bordering on disinterest.
“Will you greet me properly, or have your years on Earth dulled your manners?”
He scrambled up, swept her a bow, and dropped to one knee before her. Her long, dry fingers caged his face, drawing him close, and the withered lips pressed a kiss onto his forehead.
“You weren’t always so silent. At home your chattering was held to be a flaw. “ He remained quiet, not wanting to lose position by asking the first question. “Sedjur says you’ve learned to fight. Has Earth also taught you to keep your own counsel?”
“Rabdan tried to kill me.”
She was neither disconcerted by the bluntness of the statement, nor insulted by his flat, hostile tone. “Not everyone would welcome your return to Takis.”
“And Zabb is on board.”
“And from that you may draw your own conclusions.”
“ I see.” He looked away, revulsion lying like a foul taste on the back of his tongue. “I’m not going back, and neither are the humans.”
Her thin fingers closed like talons on his chin, and forced him to face her. “You sulky-faced boy. What about your duty and responsibility to the family?”
“And what about my pursuit of virtue?” he countered, throwing up to her the other equally important and utterly contradictory tenet of Takisian life.
“Time has not stood still at home while you have amused yourself on Earth. When you vanished, Shaklan suspected you had followed the ship to Earth.”
“But you were not alone in your concern over the great experiment. Others watched, but rather than haring off to prevent the release, they struck at the source. L’gura, that motherless animal, welded a coalition of fifteen other families, and they came.” She stared down at her hands, and suddenly she looked very old. “Many died in the attack. But for Zabb I think we all might have died.” Tach caught his lower lip between his teeth, holding back the excuses for his absence. “Did you never wonder, as the years passed and still we did not come, what might have happened?”
A cold blade seemed to twist in his belly, and he forced out, “Father?”
“A head injury. The flesh lives, but the mind is gone.” Numbness gripped him, and the remainder of her words seemed to come to him from a great distance. “With you gone Zabb agitated for the scepter, but many feared his ambition. In order to block his ascension your uncle Taj maintained a regency, but it was decided that you had to be found, for it is doubtful how much longer Shaklan’s body can continue ...”
Bitterly cold mornings, and his father pressing a paper cone filled with roasted nuts into his hand while a street vendor bobbed and beamed at the noble ones .... Swinging sadly on a door while Shaklan conducted business and forgot that he had promised to teach his small son to ride that day. The meeting ending, and the arms opening wide. Racing into that embrace, feeling safe as those powerful arms closed about him, the tickle of a lace cravat against his cheek, and the warm, man scent, overlaid with the spice of his cologne.
. The indescribable pain when his father had shot him through the upper thigh during one of his psi training sessions. Their tears had mingled as Shaklan tried to explain why he had done it. That Tisianne had to be able to withstand anything this side of death without losing mental control. Someday his life might depend upon it ... The flicker of firelight on the etched planes of his face as they shared a bottle of wine, and wept, the night they learned of Jadlan’s suicide.
Tach covered his face with his hands, and sobbed. Benaf’saj made no move, physical or mental, to ease his anguish, and he hated her. The storm wore itself out, and he mopped at his running eyes and nose with a handkerchief supplied by his many-times great-granddam. Their eyes met, and he saw in them .. pain? He could scarcely credit it, and the moment passed before he could assure himself of the reality of what he had seen.
“We will be under way as soon as we have swept the area for swarmlings. We are not well enough armed to fight off an attack by one of the devourers, and our screens must be dropped before we can enter ghostflight. It is a shame,” she continued to muse, “that we were able to save so few specimens. It is likely the T’zan-d’ran will destroy this world.” His head moved in quick negation. “You disagree?”
“I think the humans might surprise you.”
“I doubt it. But at least we have gathered our data.” She pinned him with a cold, gray eye. “You will, of course, have the run of the ship; but, please, do not approach the humans.”
“It will only agitate them, and make it harder for them to adjust to their new lives.”
She gave a telepathic summons, and a slender woman entered the room. Tach realized, with a start, that the last time he had seen her she had been a roly-poly five-year-old, nursing a fine family of dolls, and making him promise to marry her when she grew up so they could have pretty babies. She would never marry now. The fact that she was on this ship, and not safely ensconced in the women’s quarters, meant that she was bitshuf’di, one of the neutered ones who had been deemed to carry dangerous recessives, or to be—of insufficient genetic worth to be permitted to breed.
Her eyes flicked (sadly? ... it was difficult to gauge the emotion, so quickly had it passed) over him, and she made obeisance.
“Sire, if you will accompany me.”
He swept Benaf’saj a final bow, and fell into step with Talli, debating how to break the silence. He decided small talk would be inappropriate-of course she’d grown, it’d been decades!
“No word of greeting, UP” The corridor curved before them, gleaming like polished mother-of-pearl as they spiraled deeper into the heart of the ship.
“You gave none in farewell.”
“It was something I had to do.”
“Others also live by that imperative.” She glanced nervously about and switched to the tight, intimate telepathic mode. Zabb means to have you dead. Eat or drink nothing that I have not brought, and watch your back. She pressed a small sharp dagger into his hand, and he ran it quickly up his sleeve.
I suspected as much. But thank you for the warning and the weapon.
He’ll kill me if he. suspects.
He won’t learn it from me. He was never my equal in
mentatics. But she looked doubtful, and he realized with embarrassment how lax were his shields. He strengthened them, and she nodded with relief.
Better.
No, terrible. This is a dreadful situation. He looked at her seriously. I have no intention of returning to Takis.
They had reached the door to the cabin, and the ship obligingly shuttered open for him.
She placed her hands on his shoulders, and urged him in. You must. We need you.
And as the door lensed shut he decided that maybe she wasn’t much of an ally after all.
Tom Tudbury was having one of the worst days of his life. The very worst day had been March 8, when Barbara had married Steve Bruder, but this one was running a real close second. He had been on his way to Tachyon’s clinic with the strange device he’d taken off the street punk when a strange ship, looking rather like a wentletrap seashell, had looped out of the clouds, pulled up beside him, and invited him aboard. Maybe invited wasn’t the right word; compelled was closer to the mark. Icy talons seemed to settle about his mind, and he had calmly flown the shell through the yawning doors of a cargo bay. He didn’t remember anything more until he had found himself standing in a gigantic room, his shell squatting behind him.
Several slender men in comic-opera gold and white uniforms stepped forward and searched him, while another darted into the shell, and emerged with the strange black ball and a half-drunk six-pack of beer. He gestured with the cans causing them to clunk dully together, and there was a burst of laughter. Next the device was examined amid a ripple of musical words filled with random and inexplicable pauses. With a shrug, the device was placed on a shelf which ran along one side of the curving room. One of his captors gestured politely toward a doorway. The courtesy of the gesture removed his worst fear-he clearly wasn’t in the hands of the Swarm. Somehow politeness seemed out of place with monsters.
They exited into a long snaking corridor whose walls, floor, and ceiling shone like polished abalone. As they proceeded, the arching ceiling would light before them and darken after they had passed. One wall held a tracery of rose colored lines like the petals of a flower. This section suddenly shuttered open, and Tom was urged into a luxurious cabin. A burst of brittle, feminine laughter met his arrival, and he goggled at the beautiful woman curled up in the center of a large round bed.
“Well, you don’t look like much,” she said, her eyes raking over him. He sucked in his belly, and wished his tee shirt was cleaner. “I’m Asta Lenser, Who the hell are you?” He was scared, but the fear made him cautious. He shook his head. “Oh, fuck you! We’re in this together.”
“I’m an ace. I’ve gotta be careful.”
“Well, big fuckin’ deal! So am I.”
“You are?”
“Yeah, I do the dance of the seven veils.” Her long, graceful arms wove a pattern about her. “I out-Salome Salome.” He looked puzzled. “Don’t you ever go to the ballet?”
“No.”
“Moron.” She scrabbled in a large shapeless bag, and emerged with a packet of white powder, a mirror, and a straw. Her hands were trembling so much that it took her five tries to get the lines set. She sucked in the cocaine, and leaned back with a long sigh of relief. “Where were we? Oh yeah, my power. I can mesmerize people with my dancing. Particularly men. But it’s a real dinky power when you’ve been kidnapped by aliens. Still, Himself sure appreciated it. I got him a lot of good information with my dinky power, and kept him ... up.” She made an obscene gesture between her legs.
Tom wondered who and what the hell she was talking about, but he frankly didn’t care to puzzle it out. He staggered across the room, and collapsed on a low bench that seemed to be an extrusion of the ship itself. As he seated himself on the thick, embroidered cushion there was a crackle as of leaves or dried petals, and a rich spicy aroma filled the air.
He wasn’t sure how long he huddled on the bench, agonizing over his situation-Takisians! Jesus Christ! What was going to happen to them? Tach? Could he help? Did he even know? Oh shit!
“Hey,” called Asta. “I’m sorry. Look, we’re both aces, we ought to be able to do something to get out of this mess.” Tom just shook his head. How could he tell her that he had left his powers behind with his shell?
The rasp of the match was loud in the silent room. Tach watched with unnecessary attention as the candle flared to life. The light struck color from the ship wall, and shed the gentle scent of flowers. Pulling a quarter from his pocket he laid it on the altar. It looked incongruous among the gold Takisian coins. He hefted the tiny pearl-handled knife, murmured a quick prayer for the release of his father’s spirit, and made a tiny cut on the pad of his forefinger. The blood welled slowly out, and he touched the gleaming drop to the coin. He sank down to sit cross-legged before the family altar, sucking at his cut finger, and flipping the tiny two-inch knife over and over in his hand. “It won’t make much of a weapon.”
Zabb was leaning against the door, arms folded across his chest. He was close to six feet tall with a whip-lean body and the heavy chest and shoulders of the long-distance swimmer or martial artist. Wavy, silver gilt hair swept back from a high white forehead, and just brushed the collar of his white and gold tunic. Cold gray eyes added to the impression of metal and crystal. There was no warmth to the man. But there was power and command, and an overwhelming charisma.
“That wasn’t what I was thinking about.”
“You should be.”
There was something in the moment, the set of Zabb’s shoulders, or perhaps the indulgent cock to his head, that made Tach remember an earlier time ... before family politics had intruded, before he understood the whispers linking Zabb’s mother to the death of his mother, before ... A time when a five-year-old Tach had adored his glamorous older cousin.
“ I was remembering that you gave me my first puppy. From that litter old Th’shula had.”
“Don’t, Tis. That’s dead and past.”
“Like I’m going to be?”
Their eyes met, gray to lilac. Tach’s fell first.
“Yes.” One fine, manicured hand was brushing nervously at his full mustache and sideburns. “I intend to kill you before we reach Takis.” Zabb’s tone was conversational.
“I don’t want the family. I want to stay on Earth.”
“That doesn’t matter. As long as you live I can’t have it.”
“And the humans?”
“They’re laboratory animals. Useful if we’re to move to the second stage.” He turned to leave.
“Zabb, what happened?”
His cousin’s shoulders hunched, then relaxed back into their military erectness. “You lived to maturity.” The door whispered closed behind him.
Tom and Asta started as the two men entered, dragging between them a sprawling, gangling form in a purple Uncle Sam suit. The younger man dropped to one knee, riffled quickly through the hippie’s voluminous coat pockets, and pulled out a small vial filled with a silver-shot blue powder. The elder accepted the bottle, uncapped it, and sniffed curiously at the contents. One eyebrow quirked up.
“This one was with Tisianne?” he said in English. “Yes, Rabdan.”
“And they seemed friendly?” His pale eyes shot to Tom.
“Y-yes. “
“This is a drug of some sort. And too much of a drug can cause terrible effects. I certainly hope my esteemed cousin is conversant with the treatment of an overdose. Otherwise his friend might die.” Another secret, catlike glance to Tom.
His companion’s fingers pressed quickly at his lips, then he hesitantly said, “Shouldn’t we ask Zabb?”
“Nonsense, he won’t care what happens to a human friend of Tisianne’s.”
Kneeling, he poured the contents of the vial between the hippie’s slack lips. Tom half rose, a protest on his lips, but a look from Rabdan dropped him back onto the bench. Everyone’s eyes fastened on the scraggy figure on the floor; Asta with excitement, the tip of her tongue just showing between her lips; Tom with horror; the young Takisian with worry; and Rabdan with jovial good humor.
The man writhed, shifted, and for an instant everyone gaped as a blue-glowing figure rose majestically from the floor. Within his cowled cloak of deep-space darkness, his eyes were slits of white fire, and the lining of the cloak glittered with glowing stars, nebulas, galactic whorls. The Takisians leaped forward, clutching at air, as the exotic form sank quickly and cleanly through the floor.
Tachyon returned to his cabin, and sprawled on his belly on the bed, chin propped in his hands, and tried to decide what to do. His brief conversation with Zabb had indicated not only his danger, but the danger to the humans. It was clear they were to be experimental guinea pigs, Benaf’saj’s remarks notwithstanding.
It hadn’t taken long to identify the ship as Hellcat; his cousin’s favorite and much-beloved vessel. So an attempt to take over the ship would be fruitless. There was no way he was going to handle this ship. He could still remember the day when the ship growers had called to say that his cousin’s newest vessel had better be thrown back, so they could start again. She was wild, arrogant, utterly untrainable. That had been enough for Zabb. Even among the other families, who were notoriously stingy with their praise, he was known as the most brilliant ship trainer on the planet. And he couldn’t resist a challenge. Nine-year-old Tisianne had been present with his father on the orbital training center. Zabb had entered the ship, the powerful grappler beams had been released, and the ship had gone haring off in the general direction of galactic center. No one had ever expected to see Zabb again, but two weeks later ship and man had coming limping home, and nothing could be more docile than Hellcat’s demeanor when under the command of her conqueror. She was a one-man ship.
Rather the way Baby is with me, Tach thought defensively.
The point was, she couldn’t be controlled by mere psi power alone. Still, she was a military vessel, which meant there were actual control consoles built into her hull so that if she should be badly injured, the crew might be able to nurse her home. But if he did attempt to take the ship using the consoles, she would merely disregard his orders, and yell for Zabb. And though he could handle Zabb in a one-on-one mental confrontation, there were nineteen other Takisians on this ship.
So what to do? Benaf’saj was clearly in command. And if she were to give the order to return Tachyon and the prisoners to Earth ... H c rolled off the bed and went in search of his Kibr.
She was on the bridge glaring at Andami while Sedjur frowned down at a readout which Hellcat had obligingly projected onto the floor. The younger man was squirming.
“Would you be so kind as to explain to me why you administered an unknown substance to a prisoner?”
“It was Rabdan who did it,” Andami said sulkily. “Then you are both lackwits-him for doing it, and you for permitting it. Now we have an alien creature of unknown abilities loose in the ship.”
“He’s. moving again,” snapped Sedjur. “He’s on level five. No, back to two. Now he’s in your cabin.”
Benafsaj’s mouth twisted in disapproval.
“I don’t know why everyone’s so upset. Hellcat can tell us where he is.”
“Because he moves through walls and floors, and by the time we reach a place he has moved again,” the old woman explained with careful patience, as if speaking to a retarded child.
Tach stepped forward, trying to avoid drawing the attention of the threesome by the main port, gripped the back of an acceleration chair, and sent out a tiny thread. He had a gift for insinuating himself past shields, but Benaf’saj had had more than two thousand years to perfect hers. His mouth was dry and he could feel the pulse hammering in his throat as he slipped past the first barrier.
Second level. Trickier here. Traps built for the unwary to throw the infiltrator into never-ending mental loops until Benaf’saj saw fit to release them.
He chipped one of the shields, and quickly wove a ward to cover his error. It sat like a dancing snowflake in the midst of his Kibr’s mind, smoothing over the ragged edge he had left. Past one more. How many levels did the old she-devil have? Brrrrrrang*********! He never even saw the blow coming. He tripped an alarm, a white-hot sheet rose up like a wave of fire, and crashed down. He felt like every synapse in his brain had been simultaneously fired, and his mind seemed to be rattling about in his skull like a rotting walnut in its shell. He realized he was sliding backward across the floor on his butt, his fingers scrabbling at Hellcat’s pearly floor. He hit the wall, and the air went out of him in a rush.
Benaf’saj stared at him, amusement and irritation flicking across her face. He could feel the blood rushing into his thin cheeks.
“I had my shields up!” he announced throbbingly and irrationally. He was feeling terribly abused.
“Mind-control me, you silly boy. And you can’t build a shield I can’t break. I changed your diapers when you were a squalling brat! There’s nothing I don’t know about you!” She turned away, dismissal written in every line of her fragile body, and humiliation rose up to choke him. “Take him away,” she threw over her shoulder to Sedjur. “And this time lock him in his cabin.” The last command was directed to the ship. Stony-faced, Sedjur offered him a hand up, and escorted him back to his cabin. He hurried ahead, head down, shoulders hunched, feeling five. The old man left, and Tach helped himself to several liberal pulls from his silver hip flask. The brandy helped to steady his jangled nerves, but did nothing to promote his mental processes. He paced round and round the luxurious cabin trying to think of a plan; panicking when nothing suggested itself. Wondering what was loose in the ship. Wondering.
He decided to determine precisely which humans were being held on the ship. He touched a familiar female mind. Asta Lenser, the prima ballerina with the American Ballet Theater. She was thinking about a man. A man who was having a great deal of difficulty performing. As his stocky, sweat slick body pounded down on hers, struggling for release, she was thinking how ironic it was that a man with his power couldn’t get it up. The most feared man in
Embarrassed by his intrusion and feeling like a voyeur, Tach withdrew and searched further. There was nothing that felt like the amiable lunatic who had accosted him outside the clinic, and he hoped that Trips hadn’t been deemed useless and disposed au There was something strange. A mind so heavily blocked as to be almost opaque. He would never have sensed it without a sudden flare of terror, but it was quickly suppressed, and he lost the source. Perhaps this was the intruder. I le searched further and found ...
“Turtle!” he ejected, surprise and worry bringing him bolt upright.
He narrowed and refined his probe, constructed a penumbra to give the illusion to any mental eavesdropper that he was sleeping, and made contact. It was harder than he expected. His first brief touch had shown him a Turtle that he did not know, and he didn’t want to jar the man by suddenly appearing in his head. He began to search for ways to make the man gradually aware of his presence, becoming more depressed with each passing moment. Dark, heavy emotions rolled like sullen, viscous waves through Turtle’s mind: fear, anger, loss, loneliness, and an overwhelming sense of hopelessness and futility.
Feeling like an interloper, and not wanting Turtle to think he was prying into private matters that did not concern him, he tapped firmly at the man’s primitive shields until a spark of surprise and wary interest showed him he had attracted Turtle’s attention.
Turtle.
Tacky, is that you?
Yes. He sensed distrust and suspicion. It hurt, and he again wondered what had happened to his oldest friend on Earth. I’m a prisoner like you.
Oh. One of those other families you’re always talking about?
No, my family. Come to see the results of the experiment, and to find me. Turtle’s doubt felt like a hard blade. What can I do to convince you that I had no part in this?
Maybe you can’t.
My friend, you didn’t used to be like this.
Yeah. Bitterness edged the thought. And I didn’t used to be on the wrong side of forty, and all alone, and going nowhere except toward death.
Turtle, what is it? What’s wrong? Let me help.
Like you and all the rest of your kind helped when you brought the virus to Earth? No thanks.
The old pain and guilt returned, stronger than it had been in years; years during which he had built the clinic, become famous rather than infamous, beloved by many of his “children.” Years that had dulled the edge of his culpability. They were wide open to each other, and Tach thought he sensed in Turtle a perverse satisfaction at his pain.
How did they capture you?
It wasn’t very hard. They must have used mind control, because I just flew right to them.
What were you doing out, anyway? Tach said irritably, irrationally trying to shift the blame to Turtle.
I was bringing you a fucking bowling ball, I thought maybe you’d want to roll a few games, what the fuck do you think I was doing?
I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking, snapped Tach, his mental tone as surly as Turtle’s.
It was a fucking weird bowling ball, I took it off some street kids.
Where is it now?
They took it out of the shell, and placed it on a shelf in the room.
Which room, show me.
Turtle’s exasperation was like acid against his mind, but he obliged. And Tach really didn’t know why he was being so insistent about the device. Probably just something to divert him from their present predicament.
I’m debating about the feasibility of a breakout, he said after a long pause. Between your teke, my mind control, and the dagger my great-great niece Talli gave me, I think we might be able to pull it off. I’m glad you did not attempt to free yourself earlier.
I ... can’t.
I beg your pardon? I said, I can’t.
The years rolled back, and suddenly it was he, not Turtle, saying those words. He had stood shivering and crying on the steps of Jetboy’s tomb trying to explain that though he wanted to help, he just couldn’t. Turtle had hit him; the ace’s TK power lashing out like a great, invisible fist driving him down the stairs. But he didn’t want to hit Turtle, he just wanted to understand.
Why Turtle? Why can’t you?
I don’t have my shell. The Great and Powerful Turtle could make chopped liver of these pukes, but not me. I’m just plain old Tom—He jerked back, but the rest of the thought came clearly through to Tachyon.
Tom Tudbury.
Fortunately the name meant nothing to Tachyon. So Turtle’s secret identity was to all intents and purposes still intact.
It’s all right, he soothed. It probably wouldn’t have worked anyway. The plan would depend on us taking them out one by one, and the minute you ripped open the door Hellcat would scream for Zabb, and they’d be all over us. And even if we did succeed I’d be right back to the original dilemma-how to handle Hellcat.
Who?
The ship. She’s sentient.
Then, she must be a little startled, because there’s some guy floating around inside her.
You saw? What
“YOU!” enunciated a voice, filling the word with all the throbbing outrage possible.
Tach’s eyes flew open, the concentration necessary to maintain so private a telepathic link completely lost. An eerie blue-glowing figure stood in the center of the cabin. Swiftly he rolled off the bed, the blade sliding down his sleeve and into his hand. He dropped into a knife-fighting pose, the blade and his free hand weaving an intricate and confusing pattern before !him. From behind the barrier of his mental shields he put out a telepathic probe, and met a powerful mindblock.
“Oh, do put that away, you dreadful little man! You cannot harm me.”
“That’s not what I’m concerned about. I’m a little more worried about your intentions toward me.”
The creature drew itself up, its strange eyes glittering like sparklers in the featureless face. “This is all your fault. I tried to keep that drug-soaked hippie from this outrageous course, but he was intractable, utterly intractable! Father to the aces, indeed. He has a perfectly good father who would never encourage him in this type of juvenescent irresponsibility. The world would have gone on very nicely indeed without your interference.”
“It’s not enough that you should subject us to strange and unnatural alien substances, now you must needs bring your family in on us. A whole tribe of you! Our only hope is that they are as bumbling and ineffectual as you have shown yourself to be. First you lose the virus, then permit its release, help harry and harass your friends and lovers into prison, insane asylums, and—”
“SILENCE!” roared Tachyon. Oh, Blythe, he cried, and the thought acted like water on a fire, extinguishing his blazing anger, and leaving behind only a cold slimy mess of mud and ashes.
Still, his eruption seemed to have had an effect on his visitor. The man’s mouth pinched tightly closed, and he was pulling in sharp little breaths through narrowed nostrils. Then with supreme dignity he began to sink through the floor. For an instant Tachyon goggled, but only for an instant. This man could be useful, and he had stupidly driven him away. He prided himself on his astuteness, and on his ability to read and handle people. Now was the moment to test out just how real that ability was.
He rushed forward. “No, wait, I pray you, good sir. Do allow me to apologize for my rudeness and lack of manners.” The apparition paused, only his head and upper torso visible above the floor. “I haven’t had the honor of making your acquaintance. I am Dr. Tachyon.”
“Cosmic Traveler.”
“You must excuse me. I ... I’ve been under rather a great deal of stress today. I was unattentive when you arrived, or I would have been aware from the beginning of your puissance.”
Traveler simpered, then an expression of Olympian calm and wisdom swept over his features. And Tachyon realized that he need not even struggle for subtlety. With this man even the most blatant of flattery would serve.
“Will you please stay? My mind is all in a whirl, and I feel certain that even a few moments of conversation with you would help.” Traveler graciously floated back out of the floor, and settled onto a chair. As he did so, the lines of his body became firmer and more well defined.
So, he can become substantial, mused Tachyon. “You’ve seen the other prisoners?”
“Yes. When that pathetic moron Trips was taken to the cabin, I noticed a tubby little man in blue jeans and tee shirt, and a most strikingly beautiful young woman.” The tip of his tongue appeared from between his thin lips, moistened his upper lip, and disappeared.
“Where were you?”_
“I was ... present,” he said cagily. “Fortunately I was able to get free. I shudder to think what might have happened if one of those other bumptious fools had appeared. They have not the slightest concern for my well-being.” He glared at Tachyon, obviously including him in the statement.
Tach was rather at sea with all this talk of other persons, and drug-soaked hippies. Meadows perhaps? But at the moment he was less concerned with the metaphysical problems presented by Cosmic Traveler, and far more interested in his unique abilities.
“Traveler, I think with your help we can escape, and return to Earth.”
“Oh?” Suspicion laced the word.
“Go back to the cabin where Turtle and the Captain and the woman are being held—”
“The Captain is no longer there.”
“Eh?”
“I’m here.”
“Oh ... yes ... well, whatever. Anyway, go to the cabin, and tell them to stand ready. Then lead Zabb and his goons to the far end of the ship.” Tachyon cocked his head to the side, and contemplated his strange ally. “It would save time if you didn’t have to return here to report. Would you be willing to drop your mental block so I could remain in telepathic contact with you?”
“No! Allow some alien Peeping Tom into my head? It’s out of the question.”
Tachyon stared at him in exasperation. “I’m not particularly interested in what’s in your head. I’m interested in—” The door lensed open, and Traveler went, sinking elegantly through the chair and the floor, still in a seated position. Zabb with five of his soldiers came tumbling into the room. Tach closed his mouth, and arranged his face into an expression of innocent interest.
“Where is he?” gritted Zabb.
Tach pointed a finger downward. “He went that way.”
Things were becoming increasingly confusing. First the hippie had disappeared, then the blue-glowing apparition had vanished and the Takisians had pelted off in hot, if somewhat disorganized, pursuit; then Tachyon had contacted him, and now he had broken off abruptly in the midst of their telepathic conversation. Tom kept trying to regain the contact with his friend, even going so far as to murmur “Tach?” several times under his breath. He looked up, met Asta’s wary lqok, and ran a self-conscious hand through his hair.
“I ... I was trying to get in touch with Tach.”
“Right.” And the fact that she clearly thought he was a nut did nothing to bolster his already-sagging spirits.
If the Turtle were here she wouldn’t be looking at him like that, he thought, torn between resentment and weariness. She would be scrabbling for safety atop his shell, while he burst from the cabin, scattering Takisians like ninepins, rescued Tach, and flew them triumphantly home. Or, rather, forced the Takisians to fly them home. There wasn’t room in the shell for passengers, nor did he know how tightly sealed it was. He’d look like a real dork if they all suffocated ....
He jammed a fist into his thigh, cutting off the tantalizing but pointless thoughts. He wasn’t Turtle; he was just Tom Tudbury, the New Jersey boy who in thirty years had managed to move two blocks. He closed his eyes, and watched the dark, ghostly images of ships passing down the Kill, running lights reflected in the dark, unseen waters. And he realized that he was finally about to go on a voyage, though not one of his own choosing.
A squeak from Asta brought his head up. The creature was back.
“ I am Cosmic Traveler,” he announced, and then paused as if awaiting a fanfare. Asta and Tom stared at him, fascinated. “That ridiculous little man has sent me here to ascertain the whereabouts of our captors, and to inform you that he is concocting some, no doubt utterly unworkable and highly dangerous, escape plan.”
Asta wriggled forward on the bed, rising silkily onto her knees. “You can move at will through the ship,” she whispered. “Can you also return to Earth?”
“Yes.”
She stretched out her arms, the bones of her clavicle etched beneath the white skin. “Would you be willing to take me with you?” she purred.
Tom wanted to point out to her that first, what made her think the man was telling her the truth? and second, even if he could withstand the cold and vacuum of space, how was he going to take her?
She arched her swanlike neck, and lifted her hair with her hands. The gestures forced her small, upright bosoms against the leotard, the nipples hard knobs beneath the thin material.
“I can be very generous to people who help me, and my employer might be able to make an interesting offer to a man of your unique abilities.”
The total incongruity of the situation left Tom breathless. He wondered if this woman was really going to shuck it, and screw with this stranger right before his wondering eyes.
Surely the man would realize that more pressing matters were facing them. But Cosmic Traveler was going for it in a big way. Asta’s gyrations had set him to panting, and his fingers were working spasmodically at his sides. He shot a nervous glance over his shoulder toward the door, and Tom saw lust and fear battling it out on his smooth blue face. Lust won.
With a breathy “I agree.” that was half groan and half words, he tottered to the edge of the bed. Asta was already stripping out of her blue jeans. Beneath them she wore pale pink tights. They and the leotard were quickly removed, and she held out her arms. Traveler collapsed with a moan onto her thin, white body, and they began frenzied foreplay.
Tom, embarrassed yet fascinated, noticed (with that strange attention to detail that seems to arise whenever one is in an acutely uncomfortable position) that her feet were very ugly. The toes were covered with sores and calluses, and one big toe was bruised black from the constant pounding of the toe shoe.
Ten minutes later they were still at it, Asta, with increasing irritation, saying “Come on! Come on!” Harsh, grunting sounds periodically erupted from Traveler as his blue ass pumped virgorously, and with increasing desperation, up and down, up and down.
The ring of a boot heel pulled a gasp from Asta, followed by a wild shriek as Traveler sank through her prone body, and vanished into the depths of the bed. Tom, too, almost lost it, and he rushed to the bed to ascertain if Asta was still alive. She was lying deathly still, and he reached out and touched one bare shoulder. She shrieked again, and Tom, startled by the outburst, lost his balance and pitched headfirst onto the bed. The Takisian goggled at the bed, then yelled, “Captain, he was—” The closing of the door cut off the rest of his words. Cosmic Traveler returned.
“Well! I sincerely hope you don’t have to serve as a sex toy for Takisians. You’re singularly lacking in the most rudimentary erotic skills.”
“Me!” yelped Asta, shoving Tom away. “You’re the one who couldn’t get it—”
“And what are you sniggering at, you tubby little man,” roared Traveler. Tom hadn’t sniggered, not really, but the ludicrousness of the situation had drawn a sound from him.
“Do you know what they have planned for you?” Traveler continued, “Vivisection! Do you know what that means? I can’t imagine why they seized you. You must be the most paltry of aces. Shaking like a bowl of Jell-O, and sniveling like a reluctant virgin.” He shot a smoldering and resentful glance toward Asta, who threw him a bird.
Tom exploded. “Would you just get the fuck out of here! Fuck off! You think you’re so fucking smart, but you’re stuck too, just like the rest of us. You can’t get off this ship. If you could, you would have. Now get out. Get out!” Tom charged at him, waving his arms wildly about like a man shooing chickens. Traveler went, his features looking decidedly curdled.
“Where the hell have you been?” Tachyon halted his nervous perambulations. “How long does it take to scout out a ship—” Traveler, halfway through the cabin wall, began to withdraw. Tachyon rushed forward. “No, please wait. I’m sorry. The stress ... What did you find out?”
“Our captors are charging about the ship in pursuit of me. Though I can’t imagine how they are tracking me. They’ll no doubt be here soon—”
“And my Kibr? The old woman with the jewels in her hair,” he explained at Traveler’s blank look.
“I haven’t a notion.”
Tach held his tongue, deciding that Benaf’saj’s whereabouts were perhaps not all that important.
“All right, never mind, we’ll try it. To the left of the cabin doors there is a small protuberance on the wall. That is an override panel for the doors. Open mine, and then we’ll—”
“No.”
“I beg your ...” he began politely, then stopped and rumbled, “What?”
“You heard me, I said no. I have not the slightest faith in your ability to successfully execute this escape plan, and I will not be a party to it. Besides, as I stand substantial and helpless outside your door, those thugs will come upon me, and harm me. “
“It will only take an instant.”
Traveler folded his arms across his chest, and stared majestically at the far wall. “No.”
“Please?”
“No.”
Tachyon folded his hands at his breast. “Please, please, please?”
“No. “
“You whining, groveling coward!” bellowed Tach. “You’re endangering all of us. You’re the only one—”
But Traveler was leaving. Tachyon leaped for a wall niche, pulled down a beautiful Membres vase, and launched it at the rapidly departing ace. It passed through him, smashed into the wall, and Traveler gave him a look of withering contempt and loathing. The entire incident left Tach shaking; partly with anger, partly with despair over his violent reaction. He untied his lace cravat, and yanked open his collar, gasping for air. He had tried so hard over the years to put such responses behind him, to deal gently and kindly with all people. And he had lost it all. He was behaving like ... He paused, searching for some appropriately disgusting comparison.
Like Zabb.
This brief indulgence in self-castigation felt good, but it didn’t remove the primary problem. They were up a creek without the proverbial paddle.
And this too is my fault, thought Tach without pausing to consider whether any amount of bribery or cajoling might have moved the recalcitrant ace.
His hour was almost gone. Raging against the vagaries of an unkind and uncaring universe that had left him trapped within the body of man he considered little better than a vegetable, he wandered through the Takisian ship dodging increasingly hysterical search parties. But this could not last. If he delayed he would revert to that moron Meadows, and the aliens might harm him. And however much Traveler might despise his host body, he realized that without Mark there was no life. He had noticed that doorways left faint lines on the walls like the fossilized imprint of ancient flower petals. Some opened automatically, others seemed to require a telepathic command, and still others used the access panels that Tachyon had described. He went in search of one that would not open automatically. One that seemed firmly and soundly locked from the outside.
Mark returned to himself slowly. And blinked ... and blinked again, because it was dark. His hands roamed fitfully over his face and head until he had fully assured himself of his consciousness. But it was still dark. He shuffled forward, and ran his long nose firmly into a wall. Holding his bumped nose with one hand he stared out into the stygian darkness. Slowly. he stretched out his arms, exploring the dimensions of his prison. It was small. Closet-size. Coin-sized.
That thought was depressing so he shook it off, and tried through the hazy filter of Traveler’s memories to piece together what had happened.
“Aliens, man. Oh, bummer.”
And Tachyon ... a prisoner? Yes, that felt right. He had been angry, Traveler had done or failed to do ... something. Mark sighed, and scrubbed at his face with his hands. Yeah, that sounded about right where Traveler was concerned.
For a moment he stood in morose contemplation of his alternate personae’s social and emotional shortcomings.
He wondered what time it was. Sprout might be home from kindergarten by now. He could trust Susan to keep an eye on her for as long as the Pumpkin was open, but once the head shop closed who would watch her? Surely Susan wouldn’t just leave her alone if Mark hadn’t returned. He tried to pace his tiny prison, but kept misjudging in the inky blackness, and slamming into the walls.
“I gotta get out of here, and help Dr. Tachyon. He’ll know what to do.” He began fumbling around in his leather pouch, and emerged with a vial. He held it up before his eyes and peered, but to no avail. It was too dark to see the glass, much less the color of the powder it contained.
“Oh, bummer, man. If I get Flash he can burn down this door, but Starshine can’t work in the dark. And Moonchild ..” He poked at the unyielding wall. “ I don’t know if she could bust this or not.”
He returned the vial to the pouch and fished out another one. And dithered. And returned it and tried another. And finally pulled out two. His head wove back and forth between the bottles like a puzzled stork. He put them away, and clutched his head.
“I gotta do something. I’m an ace, man. People are depending on me. This is like a test, and I gotta prove I’m worthy. “
He went back to his fruitless pawing through the pouch. He imagined he could feel the ship moving, hurtling them out beyond the orbit of Neptune, carrying him away from Sprout. His beautiful, golden-haired daughter who would never be mentally more than four years old. His Alice-in-Wonderland darling who needed him. And he needed to be needed. His fingers closed convulsively about a vial, he yanked it out, muttering, “Ah, fuck it.”
Unstopped the bottle, and tossed back the contents. Later he might know if his choice had been an appropriate one.
Talli had brought him a meal. Delicate meat—and fruitfilled crepes that had been his favorite back home. The first mouthful choked him, and he tossed the rest down the toilet. His restless pacings had accomplished nothing except to give him a cramp in his left calf, so he seized a brush from the dressing table in the lavatory, and tried to soothe himself by brushing his hair. The rasp of the bristles over his scalp felt good, and some of the tension eased from his shoulders.
Then Hellcat gave a tiny shudder, and ringing through his mind came a loud, aggrieved “OW!” Obviously this ship did not believe in suffering in silence.
Traveler? he wondered. Had that puling coward finally decided to do something? Or could it be Turtle, overcoming his psychological block, ripping through the door, squashing Zabb into jelly .
Hellcat was making such a psi racket that he didn’t think anyone would notice a nonshielded communication with Turtle. The probe lanced out.
Oh shit!
Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you.
There was no sense of danger in Turtle’s mind, and Tach sighed. I take it you are not in the process of rescuing us. I can’t, Turtle sullenly replied. I told you that.
Tom, he said gently, and remembered only when he heard Turtle’s gasp that he wasn’t supposed to have revealed his knowledge of the man’s secret identity. He plunged on. Couldn’t you just try. I’m sure if you tried you could ...
I CAN’T! How many times do I have to tell you, I can’t. And I seem to remember a booze-soaked derelict who kept whining about not being able to do it, and then felt hurt when I wasn’t very understanding. Well, the shoe’s on the other foot, Tachy. You be understanding.
The slap hurt. He was fully aware of the debt he owed to Turtle, but he didn’t like to have his nose rubbed in his past sins. They were just that ... past. The virus is encoded in your very cells ...
I know that. How can I ever forget it? It’s ruined my fucking life! You and Jetboy, and your goddamn fucking Takisians. Just leave me the fuck alone.
Turtle lacked the mental skills to actually block Tachyon, but he could layer every meaningful thought beneath a thick blanket of anger, making it very difficult to read or send. Tach sucked in several sharp breaths through his nose, and reminded himself that this was his oldest friend on Earth. He wondered if he could mind-control Turtle, and force him to override his emotional block. But no, the trauma was too deeply buried to reach by such a sledgehammer technique. His father with his skills could ... Tach hugged himself, rocking back and forth as grief crashed down and bore him under yet again.
The sound of screams, crashes, and curses pulled him back. He frowned at the door, then began backing slowly toward the bed as he realized that the sounds were getting closer. A lot closer. Very close. A large gray fist slammed through the door. The spatulate fingers closing on the rough edges of the hole tensed and a large section of door came ripping loose. Hellcat screeched, and the clear, viscous fluid that served as blood in the sentient ship flowed from the wound. It had soon set into clear, frozen rivulets. Tach stared with dread fascination as section by section the door came down. And lumbering through the uneven hole came a huge, stocky man with glabrous grayish skin and a bald head with a bulging forehead. Takisians were hanging off him like ornaments on a Christmas tree.
“Mind-blast him!” screamed Zabb, slamming a fist into the creature’s face. He danced back as the monster plucked a soldier from his back and pitched him toward Zabb.
One Takisian was not being dislodged even by the creature’s great strength. A delicately drawn face set upon a mountainous body, and an expression of dogged ferocity. Durg at’Morakh bo Zabb. Zabb’s pet monster. Revulsion and disgust clawed at the back of Tach’s throat. He darted for the ruined doorway, thoughts tumbling wildly.
Not by those hands. Wash in my blood if you must, Zabb, but not
And came up against three feet of tempered steel. Slowly he raised his eyes to his cousin’s.
No, by my hand.
A regretful but predatory smile touched Zabb’s lips, and he lunged. Tach, skittering backward, lost his footing on the slick floor and went down. It saved his life, for the blade passed only inches above his head. There were more thumpings and crashings as the grotesque gray apparition staggered about the room dislodging Takisians and clawing futilely at Durg. Benaf’saj strode into the room, and Zabb lowered his blade; apparently he was not yet prepared to do out-and-out murder in the presence of an Ajayiz’et. Tachyon had never been so glad to see anyone.
The old lady let loose with a blast of mental energy that rattled the synapses of everyone in the room, and the creature collapsed like a felled tree. Bruised and battered crew members swarmed over the prone form, binding him with tangler ropes.
She pinned her commander with a cold gray-eyed gaze. “Would you be so good as to explain this tumult?”
“We found the creature.”
“Really?” The accents were freezing.
Zabb sucked at his cheeks, his eyes avoiding his granddam’s. “Well, he does seem to have changed form again.” Benaf’saj pinned Rabdan with a look. “And may we assume that these vials have something to do with the changes?”
A nervous clearing of the throat. “That would seem logical. “
“So, where are these vials?”
“I don’t know, Kibr. Perhaps he has hidden them somewhere about the ship.”
“Or perhaps they are only present when he is in his human form.” She eyed the ruined door. “It will take Che Chu-erh of Al Matraubi,” she said., referring to the ship by its full pedigree name, “some time to repair this door. Post guards. They can watch both Tisianne and this creature, and if the human returns, search him for the vials. Then, I trust, we will have no more of these ill-bred commotions.” She left with a rustle of brocaded skirts.
Tach pulled a handerchief from his pocket, and knelt beside the strange captive. “You are?” he asked as he gently wiped at the blood flowing sluggishly from a sword wound.
The man glared up at him then reluctantly growled, “Aquarius.”
“How do you do. I am Tisianne brant Ts’ara sek Halima sek Ragnar sek Omian, otherwise known as Dr. Tachyon.”
“I know.” He stared coldly past Tachyon’s left shoulder. He bent in low and whispered. “Do you have any other tricks up your sleeve? Something that might help us take out—” he jerked his chin toward the door, and the two rigid guards, “them?”
Aquarius stared rancorously up at him. “I turn into a dolphin, and I swim real fast.”
The expression, together with his harsh, angry tone, snapped the thin thread of patience to which Tachyon was still managing to cling.
“You will forgive my bluntness, but that does us very little good in our present predicament.”
“I did not ask to be here, land-dweller.” And closing his eyes Aquarius proceeded to ignore both his fellow prisoner and his captors.
Tach unlimbered his hip flask, and while he paced made . substantial inroads on the brandy. Twenty minutes later he noticed that Aquarius’s skin was starting to crack and peel. “Are you all right?”
“No. I must remain moist, or I am damaged.”
“Well, why didn’t you say so fifteen minutes ago?” Aquarius did not answer, and with a snort of aggravation Tach went trotting into the lavatory, and emerged with a glass of water. It didn’t make much of an impression on the large form on the floor.
“Andami, could you bring me a pitcher or a bucket?” The younger man worried his lower lip between his teeth. “My orders are to stay here.”
“There are two of you.”
“You’ll try something.”
“Am I your prince?”
“Yes. But you’ll still try something, and I’m not about to get another reprimand from Zabb.”
“May your line wither,” he gritted, and resumed his harried trotting.
The next thirty minutes passed slowly as Tach tried to keep ahead of the rapid drying of the merman’s skin. He was pouring a glass of water onto Aquarius’s face when suddenly the form wavered and shifted, and there was Captain Trips, coughing and sputtering as the water ran up his nose. Startled by the abrupt transformation, Tach yelled, dropped the glass, and backed off.
Trips stared fuzzily about the cabin, then down at his long, lanky form still festooned with loosely wrapped tangler ropes. He had lost a lot of bulk with Aquarius’s departure, and as he rose the ropes sloughed off him, landing in a tangled heap on the floor around his feet.
He removed his glasses, and furiously polished them, all the while blinking myopically at Tachyon. The glasses were replaced, and he muttered.
“Oh, bummer, man.”
Andami hurried over, and quickly riffled through Trips’s pockets. He located the leather pouch with three unused vials. Tachyon craned to see, but the brightly colored powders looked singularly innocuous. He itched to get his hands on the substances, and do a full analysis. Something that could transmute a human form ... and then it hit him. Captain Trips was not a nut-he was an ace.
“Captain.” He thrust out his hand. “I owe you an apology.”
“Uh ... me, man?”
“Yes.” Tach seized the man’s limp hand, and gave it a hearty shake. “I doubted your story. In fact, I thought you a harmless lunatic. But you are an ace. And a most unusual one at that. These potions?”
“Help me call my friends.”
He stepped in close, and lowered his voice. “And I don’t suppose you have any more ...” He winked, and Trips stared blankly down at him. Tach sighed. Nice, the man might be, but he wasn’t precisely quick on the uptake. “Have you any more secreted about your person?”
“Oh no, man. It takes a long time to make this stuff, and I didn’t think I’d be running into aliens. I mean, we beat the Swarm, and I didn’t expect ... I’m really sorry, man. I didn’t mean to let you down ...”
“No, no. You couldn’t have known, and you did very well.” The Captain beamed, and Tach realized, with an overwhelming sense of failure and unworthiness, that this man adored and admired him.
And I’m going to fail him.
Tach crossed to the bed, and slumped down, his hands hanging limply between his thighs. Trips, with a sensitivity that the alien hadn’t expected, crossed to the other side of the room, and left him alone with his miserable thoughts. Sometime later there was a tentative touch on his shoulder. “Excuse me, man, I’m sorry to bother you, but I was wondering, like, how much longer until you got us ...” He broke off, and splotches of red suffused his long face. “See, I got this little girl, and she’s probably home from school by now, and the shop will be closing, and I’m afraid Susan won’t stay with her, and Sprout’s, like, not able to take care of herself “ His long fingers twisted desperately through each other.
“I’m sorry. I wish I could do something. I wish I was the leader everyone thinks I am. But I’m not. I’m a fraud, Trips, both among my own people and among yours.” The gangling hippie laid an arm across Tach’s shoulders, and he leaned his head against the bony support of Trips’s shoulder.
Trips gave a mournful shake of his head. “It’s not like it is in the comics. In the comics the good guys always win. They’ve always, like, got the right power at the right time.”
“Unfortunately life doesn’t work that way. I’m very tired.”
“Why don’t you sleep awhile. I’ll keep watch.”
Tach wanted to ask him “Against what?” but he appreciated the generosity that had sparked the offer, and remained quiet. He kicked off his shoes, and Trips tenderly pulled a coverlet up to his chin.
He realized muzzily, as sleep claimed him, that he had always used bed and booze as an escape, and today he had used both. The right power at the right time. The thought nagged at the edges of his consciousness. The right power”By the Ideal!” He shot bolt upright, and kicked away the coverlet.
“Hey, what, man?”
He clutched feverishly at the lapels of Trips’s coat. “I’m an idiot. An idiot. The answer’s been right in front of me, and I missed it.”
“What?”
“The Network device.”
“Huh?”
Andami was regarding him curiously, and Tach quickly dropped to a whisper. “It’s not a bowling ball. It’s a singularity shifter.” He hurriedly slipped his feet into his pumps. “Years ago, before I left home, one of the Master Traders discussed the possibility of selling my clan a new experimental teleporting device. He demonstrated one, and said they might become readily available after a few more tests. This has to be one of those devices. And it’s in the main: hold.”
Trips was completely bewildered by his babblings. He grabbed for the only remark he had understood. “Yeah, but we’re, like, not in the main hold.”
“How to get us all there?” Tach’s fingers scrabbled in his hair. “If we’re all together, I think I could trigger the device and send us home. The greater the telepathic ability, the greater accuracy, and the size of. what can be carried. That was the theory. Of course the Master Trader could have just been puffing. Hard to tell with the Network. They have the souls of greedy tradesmen.”
“Uh .. what’s the Network?”
“Another spacefaring race, actually a number of spacefaring races, but we don’t have to concern ourselves with that. The point is that a singularity shifter is here, on this ship, and it can get us home. Of course if Turtle had the device, that means the Network is present on Earth, and that could mean trouble.” He scrubbed at his face. “No, one problem at a time. How to get to the hold.”
“Like, what goes on there?”
“Well, obviously it’s used for cargo storage, and when there’s no cargo-which is ‘most of the time, on a ship of this class-it’s used for recreation. Dances and so forth.”
Trips looked dubious. “ I don’t suppose we can invite everybody to a dance.”
Tach laughed. “No.” His expression went flat. “But we can invite them to a duel.”
“Huh?”
“Hush a moment. I must think on this.”
And he finally did what he should have done from the beginning. He thought like a Takisian instead of like an Earthman.
“Got it?” Trips asked when he again opened his eyes. “Yes.”
He lay back down, and probed for a familiar mind. Turtle. There’s a way out of this.
Yeah? The mental tone was one of utter defeat and hopelessness.
The device you had, it can send you home. Yeah, but it’s—
Just shut up, and listen. We’re all going to be in the cargo bay—
Why?
Would you stop! Because I’m going to get us there. The attention will be on me, and while it is you must get that device.
Now?
You know how. I can’t!
Tom, you must! It’s our only hope.
It’s not possible. The Great and Powerful Turtle could do it, but I’m just Thomas Tudbury-the Great and Powerful Turtle.
No, I’m just an ordinary man who’s on the wrong side of forty, drinks too much beer, doesn’t eat right, and who works at a fucking electronics repair shop. I’m no fucking hero.
You are to me. You gave me back my sanity and probably my life.
That was the Turtle.
Tom, the Turtle is a conglomeration of iron plates, TV cameras, lights, and speakers. What makes Turtle, Turtle is the man inside. You’re the ace, Tom, it’s time to come out of the shell.
Terror was coming off the man’s mind in powerful waves, battering at Tach’s shields, making him doubt his own plan. I can’t. Leave me alone.
No, I’m going through with this, and you’re going to have to come up to scratch, because if you don’t, I will have died for nothing.
Died! What do you ...
He broke the telepathic link wondering if he might have put too much pressure on Turtle’s—fragile emotions. Too late to worry about it now.
Kibr?
What, boy?
We find your tone to be less than pleasing, Ajayiz’et Benaf’saj.
She moderated her tone, adding a formal overlay of respect, if not for him, at least for his position. What is it you wish, clan head?
Summon the crew, there is a ceremony of adoption to be observed.
What trick are you up to?
Wait and see, or deny me, and be forever curious, he said impudently.
Her laughter glittered in his mind. A challenge. Very well, my little prince, we will see just what it is you are up to.
They had all gathered in the bay. Tom looked about, and let out an anguished cry, “My shell!”
Zabb’s lips skinned back in a harsh smile. “We jettisoned it. It was taking up far too much room.”
Tach paid little attention to Turtle’s distress. His eyes roved quickly about the room ascertaining that the singularity shifter was still in its place.
“It had infrared and zoom lenses, and tuck-and-roll upholstery, and—” Zabb laughed. “You puke!”
Zabb stepped forward, fist upraised.
“Zabb brant Sabina sek Shaza sek Risala, touch my stirps, and I will not give you the courtesy of facing me. I will kill you like a cur in the street.” Zabb froze, and turned slowly to face his small cousin.
“What farce is this?”
“As a breeding member of the house of Ilkazam I exercise my right to add, by blood and bone, to my line.”
“You would embrace these humans?” asked Benaf’saj.
“I would. “
She raked them with an imperious glance. “They will, I think, add little to your consequence.”
Tach stepped between Trips and Turtle, and gripped them by their wrists. “I would rather have them bound and bonded to me than many who can make a greater claim to that right.”
His eyes slid to Zabb.
“Very well, it is your right.” The old woman settled herself on a stool that Hellcat obligingly extruded for her. “Do you agree to this adoption, understanding the duties and obligations of those so honored?”
Three pairs of eyes stared at Tach, and he nodded slightly.
“We do,” Asta said firmly when the two men continued to stand and dither.
“Know then that you, and all your heirs and assigns, are forever bound to the house of Ilkazam, line of Sennari through its son, Tisianne. In all matters be great, and bring glory and service to this house.”
“Are we, like, Takisians now, man?” asked Trips in a penetrating whisper.
“This ritual is to bind the psi-blind to a house. You would not be permitted to mate with any member of the mentat class, but you are deserving of our aid and protection.”
“So we’re serfs,” Tom rasped.
“No, more like equerries. Mere servants are never formally adopted.” He turned on his heel, and pinned Zabb with a hard glance. “But by my fathers, you, cousin, have given me insult, and shown both contempt and abuse toward my stirps, and I will have satisfaction.”
Before Zabb could move, Benaf’saj spoke up. “You need not accept this challenge. Courtesy does not apply retroactively to the psi-blind.”
The commander swept her a bow. “But, Ajayiz’et, it will give me the greatest pleasure to meet my beloved cousin. Rabdan, you will act for me?”
“Yes, Commander.”
“And Sedjur, you will act for me?” Tachyon asked. The old man managed a nod.
The two men moved quickly to an arms locker, and Tach joined his friends. As he kicked off his shoes, stripped out of his coat and brocaded waistcoat, and began tucking up his ruffles, he said quietly, “Stay well together. Tom, you know what you must do, but for god’s sake act quickly.” He ignored the human’s frantic head shakings. “Fortunately the small sword gives the advantage to the defense, but I will be hardpressed to hold off Zabb. The attention of my family will be focused on me. No one should notice your actions, and once you have the device I will send you home.”
“What about you?” muttered Tom.
Tachyon shrugged. “I stay here. It is, after all, a matter of honor. I won’t run.”
“I hate fucking heroes.”
“Has someone something with which to tie back my hair?” Asta dropped to one knee, and rummaged about in her capacious dance bag. Pulling out a toe shoe, she tore the pink ribbon from the shoe, and held it out to the Takisian. It clashed horribly with his metallic red curls.
“Sir,” Sedjur said softly. He was holding out a chain-mail sleeve which covered the sword arm up to the elbow, and a beautifully etched and hammered sword. The hilt was inlaid with semiprecious stones, and the filigree work on the basket was so fine that it looked like lace.
“Don’t look so depressed, old friend.”
“How can I not? You’re no match for him.”
“Unkind of you to say so. Especially when you trained me.”
“And him; and I say again, you are no match for him.”
“It is necessary.” His tone indicated that the subject was closed, and he stared autocratically over the old retainer’s head while the armor was strapped to his right forearm.
Asta giggled hysterically when a resin box was brought over, and Tach carefully coated the soles of his stockinged feet. She clapped her hands over her mouth, and subsided.
Tach, moving to the center of the room, hefted his rapier several times to accustom himself to its weight, and to remind his muscles of old skills, long unused. He didn’t blame Asta for tittering. To modern humans this archaic ritual fought with archaic weapons must seem strange, especially in a spacefaring race. But there were sound reasons for the Takisian devotion to bladed weapons. They had atomic and laser weapons, but for hand-to-hand combat inside the skin of one of the living ships, a weapon that did not exceed the reach of the arm was better. An indiscriminate firing of projectile or coherent light weapon could badly damage a ship, and then it wouldn’t much matter if the crew had won or not. There was also the Takisian love of drama. Virtually any fool could learn to fire a gun. It took real skill to be a swordsman.
Zabb joined him, and said in an undertone, “I have been looking forward to this moment for years.”
“Then, I am delighted to be able to oblige you. It doesn’t do to be denied so fondly a wished-for occurrence.”
Their swords flashed in a brief salute, and engaged with a scrape of steel on steel.
Tom was no expert on the niceties of fencing, but he could see that this fight bore little resemblance to the brief glimpses of Olympic fencing he had seen on television. The speed was the same, but there was a deadly intensity about the two men as they fought for their lives. Their eyes were locked on each other, and the shifting of their stockinged feet on the floor of the ship made a soft whispering counterpoint to Tach’s gasping breaths.
His companions were staring at him, Trips with the look of a desperate basset hound, Asta the tip of her tongue just moistening her lips. Tom slowly turned his head, and stared at the black ball where it rested on the shelf only feet away. He reached out, struggling so hard that sweat popped out along his forehead and upper lip, and he found a great, yawning emptiness. The device didn’t even quiver.
Trips moaned, and Tom looked back just in time to see the foible of Zabb’s blade glance across Tach’s upper arm. A trail of red followed its path. Tach withdrew with more haste than grace, and barely parried a vicious thrust from his cousin. Trips, his watery blue eyes wild behind the thick lenses of his glasses, flung himself forward, and landed on Zabb’s shoulders. With a snarl the Takisian reached back, and flipped the hippie neatly across the room. Trips lay stunned on the luminous deck, gasping like a fish. Several of Zabb’s guards dragged him back, and dumped him on the floor between the other humans.
“I can’t, I just can’t,” Tom whispered frenziedly.
“You fucking wimp, “ Asta enunciated clearly, and turned her back on him, returning her attention to the duel which had begun again.
Tach blinked hard, trying to clear the stinging sweat from his eyes. Each breath burned, and tiny tongues of flame seemed to be licking at the muscles of his sword arm. Watch, watch, he urged himself.
Blade, coming up so fast it was just a blur.
He parried with a sharp beat, the force of the blow vibrating down his already-overtaxed muscles.
A riposte ... but not with the blade. With his mind. A section of shield flowed, wavered. He thrust, hit, and Zabb staggered under the mental attack. He charged back. Corps a corps. Zabb’s breath hot on his face. The blades hopelessly tangled between them. Tach strained, trying to throw Zabb back, but he was overmatched. The mind, a gray, implacable wall. No, not quite!
Tach jerked his body to one side, avoiding a vicious knee to the groin, leaped back, and kicked Zabb’s back leg out from under him. Envelopment, but his cousin was too fast for him. Zabb parried, and followed with a swift riposte, and a mind blast. It slid of Tach’s shields.
His vision seemed to be blurring around the edges. No stamina. Wind almost gone. Turtle!
He tried a wild, desperate thrust in tierce. Zabb tapped it aside almost contemptuously. He was a demon. That smile, still in place, and only a few beads of sweat mingled in the curly sideburns. His lashes dropped, hooding his eyes, and he pressed the attack. Nausea lay thick on his tongue as Tach realized that Zabb had only been toying with him before.
“Would you like to call it quits, beloved cousin?” whispered his tormentor. “Of course you would. But it’s not to be. As promised, I am going to kill you.”
No breath to answer the taunt, he just shook his bead, more to clear the sweat than to deny the statement. He lanced out with a desperate mental blow which was turned by Zabb’s shields, and then, like a miracle, he saw an opening. He lunged, blade scraping along Zabb’s. Zabb took his foible in a flashing parry, and passed on, his point searching for the heart. Time thrust! Lure to the unwary. Death!
He was sure he was seeing it: the brief flaring of the nostrils, the sardonic half-grin. Steve Bruder, with the same mannerisms as he crushed Tom’s hand. Fuck you! he flung at
Zabb as the power washed through him, tingling in his extremities. He reached out, and ...
The blade coming swift and true, then miraculously pulled off line. Not much room, but enough! Tachyon brought up his sword, parrying on the forte.
A plentitude of targets offered themselves. The heart, the belly, a shoulder cut? Tach caught his lower lip between his teeth, and for one wild, glorious moment considered driving the point deep, deep into that hated body. He lunged, and their eyes met for one eternal, frozen moment. The blade turned in his hand, the hilt taking Zabb neatly in the chin with a sound like an ax hitting wood. Zabb’s sword clattered to the floor, and he pitched forward on his face. There was a gasp like a rising’wind from the assembled watchers. For a moment Tach stared at his sword, then flung it aside, and knelt beside his cousin. Gently he rolled him over, and cradled the larger man in his arms.
“You see, I couldn’t do it,” he whispered, and he wondered why there were tears pricking at his eyelids. “I know you’d rather I killed you, but I couldn’t. And despite our training, death is not preferable to dishonor.”
Tom stood, his hands clenched at his sides, and reveled in the waves of excitement and joy that were washing through his body. He had done it. True, he had used enough concentration to shift a bulldozer, and the end result had been only a minute deflection. But it had been enough! Tach would live indeed, had won-because of Tom’s action. With a little swagger he faced the alien device. It flashed through the air, landing with a satisfying smack in Tom’s hands.
“Come on, Tachy, time to go,” he sang out, his round cheeks flushed with excitement.
Tach laid Zabb gently down, and leaped to his friends. Not a single relative made a move.
Tom handed over the device with an awkward little bow. Tach returned the salute. “Well done, Turtle. I knew you could do it.”
He looked to Benaf’saj, made an elegant leg, winked, and ordered them home.
It was like being in the center of a vortex of nothingness. Icy cold and utter darkness, and for Tachyon the feeling that his mind was being torn into tiny, tattered streamers by the stress of holding all four travelers within the envelope of the singularity shifter.
By the ancestors, he wailed. At least let us land on dry land.
Tachyon crumpled, the device rolling from his nerveless fingers. Trips was squatting in a gutter holding his head in his hands, and muttering over and over, “Oh wow!” Tom retched a few times as his abused stomach tried to decide just where in space and time it was currently residing. There was a growing commotion, people yelling, windows being flung open, horns blaring as cars rolled to a stop, their occupants gawking at the tableau on the sidewalk. Tom dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, looked down at Tach, and quickly dropped to his knees beside the Takisian. Blood was pumping sluggishly from the long gash on his arm, and was running from his nose, and he was alarmingly white. The alien seemed to be scarcely breathing, and Tom pressed his ear to his friend’s chest. The heartbeat fluttered erratically.
“Is he gonna be all right, man?” mumbled Trips.
“I don’t know.” Tom threw back his head, and stared up at a ring of black faces. “Somebody get a doctor.”
“Shit, man, they just popped in from nooowhere.”
“Teleportin’ honkies. You think they be aces, or what?”
“Doctor, git a doctor,” bawled a burly man.’ Asta backed slowly away from the circle of spectators, her eyes searching quickly for the black ball. A couple of kids were inspecting the device, and she stepped to them.
“I’ll give you five dollars each for that.”
“Five dollars! Shit! It just be a bowlin’ ball with no’holes in it. What good that gonna do you?”
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” she said softly, and fished her billfold out of her dance bag. The exchange was quickly made, and she tucked away the alien device.
The howling of sirens presaged the arrival of the police and an ambulance. Tach was loaded in, and Tom started to climb in with him. “Hey, where’s the gizmo?”‘
Asta opened her mouth, blinked several times, and closed it. “Gee, I don’t know.” She peered about as if expecting it to materialize from the Harlem landscape. “Maybe somebody in the crowd took it.”
“Hey, buddy, you want to get your friend to the hospital or not?” growled one of the ambulance attendants.
“Well ... look for it,” Tom ordered, and climbed in. Asta gave an ironic wave to the departing ambulance. “Oh, I will.”
And Kien is going to be so pleased with this.
She sauntered away, searching for a subway station to carry her to the waiting arms of her lover and commander.
The padlock opened with a grating snap, and Tach pushed open the small side door to the warehouse. Trips and Turtle followed him into the echoing gloom, and Trips muttered something unintelligible at the sight of the ship resting in the center of the vast, empty building. The amber and lavender lights on the points of her spines glimmered faintly in the gloom, and dust spiraled in from all sides as she quietly collected and synthesized the tiny particles into fuel. She was singing one of the many heroic ballads that made up such a large part of ship culture, but cut off when she perceived Tach’s entrance. The music was, of course, inaudible to the two humans.
Baby, he telepathed to her.
Lordly one. Are we going out? she asked with pathetic eagerness.
No, not tonight. Open please.
There are humans with you. Do they also enter?
Yes. This is Captain Trips, and Turtle. They are as brothers to me. Honor them.
Yes, Tisianne. I am pleased to have your names.
They cannot hear you. Like most of their kind, they are mind-blind.
Sorrow.
There was the ache of another kind of sorrow in his chest as he led the way to his private salon. Memory-it could be so clear-the day his father had taken him to select this ship. All gone now.
He settled back among the cushions on the bed, and ordered, Search and contact.
There are lordly ones present? Yes.
And one of my kin? Baby asked, again with that pathetic eagerness.
Yes.
Seconds stretched into minutes, Tach lounging at his ease on the bed, Trips perched like a nervous roosting bird on a settee, and Tom bouncing nervously on the balls of his feet. The wall before Tachyon shimmered, and Benaf’saj’s face appeared. The ship boosted his powerful telepathy, and the link was made.
Tisianne.
Kibr. You were expecting the call? Of course. I’ve known you since I was in diapers.
Yes, I know.
You have surprised me, Tisianne. I think Earth has had a beneficial effect upon you.
It has taught me many things, he corrected in a dry tone. Some more pleasant than others. He paused, and fiddled with the foaming lace beneath his chin. So, does it continue to be dagger points between us?
No, child. You may stay with your rustic humans. After the defeat you dealt him, Zabb has no hope of the scepter. You should have killed him, you know. Tach just shook his head. Benaf’saj frowned down at her hands, and straightened her rings. So we part. It is disappointing that we have no specimens, but the success of the experiment cannot be denied, and it will delight Bakonur to have our data. This effort will be the salvation of the family yet.
Yes, Tach replied hollowly.
I will send a ship every ten years or so to check on you. When you are ready to return to us we will welcome you. Farewell, Tis.
Farewell, he whispered. “Well?” asked Tom. “They’ll leave us in peace.”
“Like, I’m really glad you’re not gonna leave.”
“So am I,” he said, but his tone lacked certainty, and he stared mournfully at the glowing wall as if trying to pull back the image of his granddam.
A warm, capable hand with its short, stubby fingers closed firmly over his shoulder. A moment later Trips had gripped his other arm, and he sat silent, basking in the wash of love and affection coming off both the men, driving back his homesickness.
He laid a hand over Tom’s. “My dearest friends. What an adventure we have had.”
“Yeah, life is, like, pretty neat, man.”
“Why didn’t you kill him?” Tom asked.
Tach shifted, and stared up into Tom’s brown eyes. “Because I would like to believe in the possibility of redemption.”
Tom’s grip tightened. “Believe it.”
Her fingers twined, warm and a little dry, through his. Each undulating rise and fall of the horse pulled them apart. Skin sliding on skin. Then the midpoint when for an instant they were side by side, poised in the moment with no retreat.
Tachyon half opened his eyes and watched the colored lights of the carousel whirl past. The music was a little sharp, a little tinny, but it was a waltz.
And in his dreams they were dancing.
He cautiously turned his head, and with that unspoken communication that had arced between them from the moment of their first meeting, she, too, was turning her head. The fine bones of her face were etched in the lights of a Coney Island ride, the eye patch a dark scar on that beautiful face. A deformity, yes, but an honorable one. A wound won in battle. Even on Takis one might be tempted to keep the scars, not replace the missing eye.
The music was slowing, the horses’ eager spring dying to an awkward sad sigh as the ride came to an end. Without thinking, Tach patted the arching neck of his steed. His artificial hand struck the wood of the carousel horse, producing an ugly hollow tone.
The violence of his reaction was wearily familiar.
Stomach closing into a tight ball, jamming itself against the back of the spine, nausea like a physical pain. Cody’s hands cupped his face, but there was no gentleness in the touch.
“Cut it out. You lost a hand. He could have gutted you. I lost an eye. The bullet could have blown my damn head off. If you’re smart, you’re grateful to just fucking be alive.”
“I’m sorry, I’m not normally a whiner.”
“Yes, you are.” She smiled to take away the sting. “You’re always agonizing about what can’t be fixed. The past is dead, and the future ain’t here yet. The best we can do is live for the moment, Tachyon.”
They started walking down the midway. The air was redolent with the smell of stale grease, corn dogs, cotton candy. Overhead the sky was a diffuse milky white as the high clouds reflected back the lights of New York. Barkers squalled from their cheap and gaudy arcades.
“See Tiny Tina, the world’s smallest horse.”
“Three balls for a dollar. Knock over the milk bottles, and a prize is yours.”
Screams from the more garishly neon-decorated rides ripped the night air. The Parachute jump blossomed like an exotic lily against the night sky. Tiny figures plummeted toward the ground only to be caught by the billowing of a parachute. There was something almost grotesquely maternal about the gigantic ride dropping its little chutes like seedlings around its looming bulk.
Tachyon tore his gaze away from the jump and asked, “where did they say they were going?”
“The Zipper,” Cody said. “Dreadful.”
“They’re boys.”
The couple stopped at the entrance to the ride. Rock music assaulted the ears, the bass line vibrating in the ground itself. The little cars were opening, spilling their stumbling, tottering passengers like peas from a pod. Blaise had his arm around Chris. The human boy was staggering, but Blaise, his hair almost scarlet under the lights, was fully in control. There was a wild light in his dark eyes, and his teeth gleamed.
“What did you think?” asked Blaise.
“Damn ... that was awesome,” replied Chris. Tachyon and Cody exchanged glances at the way the child had awkwardly prefaced the sentence with the cuss word.
Boys into men, thought Tachyon. So difficult a transition.
“Chris is what? Thirteen?” he asked. “Yes,” said Cody.
“At thirteen I was just emerging from the women’s quarters.”
“That’s lousy planning. Just when a boy wants to be around girls, you separate them.” She studied her adoles cent son now exchanging playful blows with Blaise. “On second thought, considering the raging hormones at that age, maybe it’s a good thing-before any ad hoc biology lessons can begin.”
“We have toys for that.”
“‘What!”
He caught her thought of outrageous sexual implements. “Not those kind of toys, living toys.”
“I think that’s worse.”
She walked away to join her son, and Tachyon chewed on his lower lip. She was a strong woman with strong attitudes. Had his flippant remark offended her? Made her think that he regarded her as a toy? He hurried after the threesome wondering how to make amends.
The boys were walking across each other’s lines, each trying to draw Cody’s attention. Blaise danced out in front of her, walking backward with easy hip-swinging grace, somehow avoiding the oncoming crowds.
Maybe he has more telepathy than I think, Tachyon mused as he studied that lean figure. At fourteen Blaise was already three inches taller than his grandsire, and already showed signs of developing a linebacker’s shoulders, and the whip-lean hip of the true athlete.
And you’re having a hell of a time taking him during your karate workouts, a disquieting voice reminded him. Tachyon shook off the worry. Blaise had been much better since Cody had entered their lives. Putting aside that it was a celibate relationship, it had all the qualities of a marriage. Cody alternately scolded and mothered Blaise, and he loved it. Her interest in the boy had soothed his mercurial disposition. In fact, it had been months since Tach had felt actively afraid of his grandchild.
“Cody,” Blaise was saying. “Would you like me to win you a stuffed toy? I can do it.” He jerked his head toward the shooting gallery.
Tachyon stepped up to join them. Cocked a grin up at Cody. “Perhaps you better rely upon me. I’ve been at this a little longer than he has.”
Blaise frowned, and Tach felt a flare of embarrassment. Prancing and snorting in front of his fourteen-yearold grandson. Who was in competition with whom?
The woman sniffed. “Thanks boys, but I’ll win one for myself.” She allowed her fingers to rule lightly across the curls on the top of his head. Tach felt as if his lungs had been replaced with stones. It was tough to draw a breath. “A contest,” said Blaise, his eyes bright.
The three males followed Cody to the gallery and laid down their money. She was already testing the weight of the weapon. Tach hefted the rifle. It was awkward lefthanded. Despite his thrice-weekly sessions at the range he still had much to relearn.
The operator fired up his machine, and a line of rampant bears trundled across the back wall. Blaise and Chris blazed away. Blaise was better than the human boy, but neither of them succeeded in scoring the requisite number to continue. Blaise threw down the rifle and backed off, muttering petulantly in French.
Tachyon and Cody stepped up to the counter. Began firing. The operator stared openmouthed at their competence. Charging bears fell supine onto all fours and were swept away. The numbers mounted. Chris’s cheeks were red with excitement. He hung close to his mother’s left side. Blaise’s glance was smoldering fire between Tachyon’s shoulder blades.
Tachyon had missed two shots. Cody only one. One more and he was out. He sighted, drew in a breath, held it, squeezed the trigger. The bear remained smugly, stubbornly upright. It seemed to be sneering as it rounded the corner. Tachyon laid down the rifle. Cody kept shooting. It took five more minutes before she had finally missed three shots.
The man pulled down an enormous white tiger and handed it with a bow to Cody. Tach as a consolation prize got Roger Rabbit.
The man and woman, with their children in tow, headed back into the shifting color of the midway. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” Tachyon scolded as they waited for Blaise and Chris to buy cotton candy. “For what?”
“Demolishing my fragile Takisian ego.”
“Takisian, my aunt Betsy. Male ego.” She gave him an ironic glance out of her one eye. “Going to win a prize for the little lady,” she mocked.
“Be kind, I am a one-handed shootist.”
“And I’m a one-eyed shootist. So much for excuses.” But Tachyon had lost his taste for the banter. He was reliving a nightmare. Blood and bone fragments fountaining into the air. Agony, agony, agony!
Her cheek was warm against his. Her arm a welcome support.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Memory” he forced out. “We remember more clearly than you humans. It’s our curse.” He drew his thumb across his forehead. It came away wet. “Oh Ideal, I am sorry, it is passing now”
Her hand slid down and gathered his prosthetic hand into hers. “You remember the pain ... ?” Her voice trailed away in a question.
“As if it were yesterday.”
“Oh, God, I’m sorry”
Her lips were against his cheek. Whispering the words. The warm breath puffed against his chilled skin, and suddenly Tachyon realized he was in the circle of her arms. Since that day at the clinic they had never done more than touch hands. Now her arms were around him again. Their thighs were lightly touching, and he had a full erection.
Simultaneously they began muttering apologies and inanities and backed away from each other. Cody hurriedly swept up the boys. Tachyon went in search of a men’s room.
“Meet you at the car,” he called to them as he fled in search of cold water to splash on his face and a long pee to relieve the pressure-sort of.
Roger Rabbit sprawled on the sofa in the office. The tensor lamp threw an almost painful yellow light across the welter of papers on the desk. The rest of the room was in shadow. Tachyon rubbed gritty eyes, picked up his fountain pen, and laboriously scrawled his signature across the bottom of a grant request. His prosthetic right hand was serving as a paperweight at the top of the page.
Most of the grants had dried up after the bloody events at the Democratic National Convention last July. This grant was for fifteen thousand dollars from the greater New York Franco-American society. Fifteen thousand dollars would keep the Blythe van Renssaeler Memorial Clinic open and operating for about two hours and twentyseven minutes, but all the little thousands added up to joker lives saved.
Tachyon heard the distinctive quick tap of her heels in the hall outside his office. The door opened, and Cody was there, backlit by the fluorescent bulbs in the hall.
“What in hell are you doing here? It’s two A.M.”
“And why are you here, Madam Surgeon?”
“I had patients to check on.”
“As do L”
“Those—” she waved a hand toward the paperwork”are not worth killing yourself over.” She crossed to the desk. “People we either cure or bury These”—she swept up a handful of paper from the desk, crumpled them and dropped them into the trash can—“we handle in a different way.”
“Cody, behave yourself.” Tachyon dug out the abused paperwork.
She cocked a hip up onto the desk. Tachyon’s mouth went dry. At the amusement park she had been wearing blue jeans: now, unaccountably, she had changed into a skirt. Her pose left a lot of thigh visible. Tachyon was noticing.
She noticed him noticing and smiled. With the eye patch and the scar it gave her a dangerous predatory look. But sexy: God, she was sexy.
“You had one hell of an erection at the carnival,” she said conversationally. “Made me realize just where I stood with you.”
After swallowing his stomach, Tach forced his voice into the same matter-of-fact tone she had used. “Cody, we have been working together for almost a year. Frankly I’m surprised at my forbearance, and I can hardly be blamed for my body’s betrayal.”
“I’m a professional. Soldier, doctor, your chief of ,surgery”
“And a woman,” he reminded softly. “And you want me.”
“I would be a liar if I denied it.” He picked up his hand and fitted it onto the stump of his right arm. “Could you ever want me?”
“I don’t know. I’m nervous about getting too close to you.”
“Why?”
“You’ve had too many women. I don’t want to be just another notch on your gun.”
“You make me sound very spoiled ... heedless.”
“You are. In some ways you’re a real user.”
“As long as we’re being this honest you should know that I have been incredibly forbearing and patient with you. I have been willing to wait—”
She slid off the desk. “Yeah, but I’m worth it,” she interrupted.
“God damn it, woman. I want you!”
“Tough. Until you lose the revolving door, I’m not interested. If I walk through your bedroom door, I better be the only one.”
“What are you asking for?”
“Commitment. It’s an important word to me. I’m the most loyal friend you’ll ever have, Tachyon. But if you betray me I’ll kill you. Are you still certain you want me walking through that bedroom door?”
“I don’t know. You frighten me ... a little.”
“Good. The game’s not big enough if it doesn’t scare you.”
She suddenly leaned in and kissed him quick and hard on the lips.
“What was that for?” Tachyon asked.
“For being man enough to admit that we women really are the more dangerous sex.”
He combed back his hair. “You have me totally confused.”
“Good.”
The door closed softly behind her.
Tiny, gaudily dressed figures whirled past in a kaleidoscope of colors. The rifle butt was slick against his cheek. Her eyes warm on the back of his neck. He squeezed convulsively and bullets sprayed like light rays from the barrel of the gun. Tiny Tachyons shattered and died.
The man was handing down a gigantic toy. He turned to face her. Her expression of pride and love warmed him. Her hand reached out, and stroked down his cheek, unzipped his pants, pulled out his penis. Her lips were hot on the head of his cock. His heart squeezed into a tight painful ball.
Sperm jetted hot and sticky across his belly. Blaise sat up in bed, breath coming in hoarse gasps.
Cody, Cody, Cody.
Cody was just leaving as Blaise and Chris arrived at the apartment. She kissed Chris on the cheek, lifted Blaise’s Dodgers cap, and ruled his hair. Fire shot through him, and he stared at her with hot, suggestive eyes. Blaise noticed with satisfaction that she turned away quickly to gather up her purse and briefcase.
“Okay, outlaws, I’m off to the hospital. There’s a chocolate cake on the counter and Coke in the fridge, so no excuses for not studying. The sugar rush ought to be enough to propel you into next week.”
“Okay, Mom,” said Chris.
“Blaise, are you all right?” Cody asked, a hand on the doorknob. “You keep staring at me like a boy with acute constipation.”
Blood flamed in his cheeks, and Blaise’s fantasies deflated like his suddenly flaccid penis. “I’m fine,” he muttered.
The door closed behind her, but the scent of her perfume still lingered in his hair.
Chris was already in the kitchen hacking off two enormous slabs of chocolate cake.
“Algebra,” he said as Blaise walked in. “Do you understand it? And why do we have to understand it?”
“You might not have to, but I do. It’s the first step to calculus and trig, and you have to have all three for astrogation. I’ve got a spaceship that’s going to be mine someday. I have to know how to navigate her.”
“That is so neat,” Chris mumbled around a gigantic mouthful. “A spaceship, and a granddad who’s an alien.”
“It’s not so great.”
Chris gaped at him. “You gotta be kidding. What could be better?”
“The life I had before.” Blaise carefully cut away the icing, and mashed it with his fork. “No school, no homework, no clean up your room. My father did that. Uncle Claude said I was too important to be irritated by the mundane.”
“You’ve got a father?” asked Chris in honest amazement. “Yes, of course.”
“So ... where is he?”
“In a French prison.”
“How come?”
“He’s a terrorist. Tachyon put him there.”
“That’s good.”
“Why?” asked Blaise.
“Because ... well ... because—”
“Chris, it’s fun to be a terrorist.”
“Yeah?”
“You’re always on the run. Always changing houses. Passwords, meeting arms dealers at night on the river. Always a step ahead of the stupid flies. You’re always walking a step to the left of ordinary people. They have to work or go to school. We watched the artists in Montmartre, ate pastries in cafes on the Left Bank. We walked through the museums and he told me all about the painters, our history. ‘Vive la France,’ he would say, and then he would laugh and hug me.”
“Who?”
“Uncle Claude.”
“And was he a terrorist, too?”
“Yes.”
“What happened to him? Is he in prison like your dad?”
Very levelly Blaise replied, “No, he’s dead.” Blaise mashed cake, and watched icing erupt through the tines of the fork. “I think my grandfather killed him.”
“Blaise!” Chris’s eyes were wide, and he had chocolate icing around his mouth. It made him look absurdly young, and really stupid.
“Your mother really likes me,” Blaise said, changing the subject abruptly. He was tired of the past. Thinking about it made him sad. Made him mad.
“Huh?”
The younger boy’s incomprehension infuriated Blaise. Gripping Chris by the hair, he yanked back the human boy’s head.
“She wants me! She’s in love with me!”
“You’re crazy!” yelled Chris. “You’re just a kid. Like me. You’re like my brother, except I don’t want you for a brother when you act crazy.”
“We’ll never be brothers.” Blaise’s tone was quiet, dangerously rational. “For us to be brothers ... that would imply that Cody and my grandfather—”
“It could happen.”
Blaise was on Chris again, his long, slim hands closing around the boy’s throat, but he exerted no pressure. “No,” he said softly. “That is not going to happen.”
He released Chris, and walked out of the apartment.
“Tachyon, we’ve got to talk.”
The alien looked up from the microscope. Blinked to clear the moisture from his eyes brought about by tooclose concentration. The woman’s agitation beat at him despite her level tone and calm expression.
“Cody.”
He held out his artificial hand. She laid her hand on his forearm where the prosthesis met flesh.
“What happened to Chris?” Tachyon said.
“Damn.” She bit her lip. “Why has this happened?” Humbly he said, “I do not mean to read your thoughts. They are just there for me.”
“I’m my own woman, Tachyon,” she warned.
“I know” He cocked an ankle onto his knee. “Now, tell me what happened.”
“I’m concerned about my son, but the reason for my concern is Blaise.”
Tachyon knew his expression had grown wary. He fiddled with the focusing mechanism on the microscope. You may hide it from yourself, but the world sees, mocked a little voice.
The Takisian steeled himself.
Cody continued. “Blaise scared Chris half to death last night.”
“Did he mind-control him?”
“No, but he wrapped his hands around my kid’s throat. He made some crazy remarks about me.” Cody made a weary gesture. “Now it sounds so stupid, but I saw the fear in Chris’s eyes.”
“Blaise is ... erratic at times. In the months since you’ve been here I’ve seen an improvement in him. You’ve been the mother he never had, and he wants to please you. There is less anger in him—”
“It’s not the anger that worries me. There’s a coldness in Blaise that’s almost inhuman.”
“He is inhuman. He’s a quarter Takisian.”
“That’s bullshit, and you know it. Genetically humans and Takisians are identical. Maybe you were our ancient astronauts-I don’t know, and none of this is relevant. The point is that—”
She broke off abruptly. “Say it, Cody.”
“Tach, he needs help.”
“I can help him.”
“No. You’re the problem.”
He rose and walked away from the truth of that statement.
Spinning back to face her, he said, “You have to understand. What he’s been through. The horrors he has seen and endured.” Tach was nervously washing his hands. He noticed and forced himself to stop.
“His childhood was spent in the hands of a violent revolutionary cell in Paris. Then last year he became a host for a hideous creature. While in its thrall, he experienced his first sexual encounter. He mind-controlled a joker and forced the wretch to literally tear himself to pieces.”
Her hands closed about his, and he looked up into that single fierce dark eye.
“Tachyon, I’m willing to be understanding. This is all very sad, but it doesn’t alter the relevant, dangerous fact. Blaise is a sociopath, maybe even psychotic. People are going to continue to get hurt.”
“I am willing to take that risk.”
“Fine! But you don’t have the right to place others at risk.”
“What can I do! With his mind powers do you really think he’s going to submit to analysis?”
A new, worrisome thought intruded. He watched it etch itself momentarily on her face. Concern rose in the back of his throat, snatching the breath from his lungs, and Tachyon realized it was her emotions he was feeling. She was afraid for him.
“Tachyon, you can control him, can’t you?”
“For now.”
“What does that mean, for now?”
“As he matures, he gains power. I’ve taken to maintaining shields against him constantly.”
“How hard are these shields to ... ?”
“To break?”
“Yes.”
“Exceedingly,” he soothed. “I’m afraid.”
“Don’t be. I will protect you.” Her hair was soft against his fingertips as he brushed it back from her forehead.
Sharply. “I don’t need your protection!”
Startled, he pulled back. “I meant no offense. I assumed you would be a shield to my back as well,” he stuttered, backpedaling frantically. The militant light died from her eye.
“Damn it!”
“What?”
“It’s so damn hard to hold my own against you.”
“Why must you?”
“Because you’re too fucking seductive. Too glib. Too polished. Too attentive. I won’t—”
She whirled and was out of the lab as if every ancestor ghost in her pedigree was on her heels.
The bright June sunlight spilled into the gloomy interior of the Jokertown Dime Museum and set dust motes to spinning. Blaise liked that. Had they been there all along, he wondered, just waiting in the darkness for his coming? Or had his arrival created them?
Do other people think those kinds of thoughts? Blaise mused as he sauntered past the “Hideous Joker Baby” display and the Jetboy diorama. Cody was standing in front of the waxwork figure of his grandfather. Blaise felt a flare of irritation.
The woman thoughtfully stirred her cup of Italian lemon ice and took a bite.
“How young he looks,” Blaise heard her say.
“No different than now,” said Dutton, owner of the Dime Museum.
The joker was standing behind her, hands hidden in the folds of his cloak. The hood was back, revealing the death’s-head. Blaise wondered if the man was trying to shock Cody, or if this was a measure of how well accepted she had become?
Cody was speaking again. “No, that’s an illusion. When I look at him, I see every one of those forty-three years etched in his face.”
“You care for him,” suggested Dutton.
“I’m fascinated by him,” Cody corrected, then added: “It’s the face of a dissipated saint.”
“I’ll leave you to a contemplation of a face for which you care ... er ... with which you are fascinated.”
“What lovely grammar you have,” said Cody dryly as Dutton retreated back into his office.
The stones were a sharp, hard pressure against his thigh. Blaise cupped his hand protectively about the bulge and moved swiftly to intercept Cody as she moved to survey the Syria diorama.
“Hi, Cody.”
“Oh, God, Blaise, you startled me.”
She had pressed her hand against her throat. He could see where her tan ended and the milk white of her breast began. He noticed she was wearing a thin gold chain. He liked the way it echoed the gold of her skin. Maybe colored stones didn’t suit her? Maybe she didn’t like them? Oh, God, I love you so much!
But what he said, in a voice jumping with nervousness was, “I got something for you.”
He dug into his pocket, the supple leather of the pouch was soft against his hand. The knobby bundle pulled free and Blaise tugged open the drawstrings. With a sound like hail on glass the gemstones spilled across the surface of the diorama console. Emeralds formed a drift about the button controlling Sayyid. A diamond skittered hysterically toward the edge of the console, and Cody automatically caught it. Her fingers closed tight about the jewel. Slowly she raised her hand to eye level and cautiously unfolded her fingers, as if fearful of what her hand contained.
Blaise frowned down at the rainbow spill and worried his lower lip between his teeth. The sapphires looked almost fake-too blue. The rubies weren’t bad, but the topaz was best. The boy swept up a golden topaz the size of a small robin’s egg and held it against the hollow in Cody’s throat. A nervous pulse was hammering there. Blaise liked that.
“Here, this suits you best. I know it’s only semiprecious—”
“Where did you get these?”
Her voice was rough, commanding, not the breathless excited coo he had expected. Blaise flinched, felt stomach acid starting to churn.
“You don’t ask about a gift, you just accept it.”
The jewels rattled as Cody began sweeping them into a pile. She twitched the leather pouch from his hand and began shoveling in the gems. “Blaise, you’re in big trouble. Tell me where you got these. Maybe we can work out something without your grandfather having to find out. You are a minor—”
“Cody! They’re for you!”
“I don’t want them. I don’t want stolen gifts.”
“I just wanted to make you happy,” said Blaise. “Well, you’ve managed to achieve just the reverse.”
“Cody.” His voice was a plaintive whine. “I love you.” Her hand was soft on his head, the fingers stroking through the rough short ends of his brush cut. “Every kid feels that way. I feel madly in love with my high-school history teacher. It’s something we do when we start to notice there’s a difference between boys and girls. When you’re a teenager, everything seems so insecure. If we can fall in love with an older person, it helps give a sense of order to a very uncertain world.”
“Don’t talk down to me!”
“I’m not. I’m trying to show you that I do care. I do understand, but understanding is not permission.”
His power was beating against the confines of his skull. His entire body was one great pressure-filled ache. He wanted to explode, to lash out.
“I love you.” The words had to squeeze past clenched teeth.
“I don’t love you.”
“I can make you!”
For the first time he saw a reaction. A flicker of alarm in that single dark eye. But her voice was cold and dead level as she said, “That’s not love, Blaise, that’s rape.”
His arm executed a wide, uncontrolled arc. “It’s him! It’s him, isn’t it?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m better than he is. Younger, stronger. I can give you everything. Anything you want I can give you. I can take you anywhere.”
He began to pace, long agitated strides that carried him across the narrow confines of the aisle and back again. Cody was so still it was frightening.
“Anywhere in the world,” he continued. “Off the world. And Chris is okay, he can come, too. You don’t want him pawing at you. You don’t want the stump rubbing your boob, or feeling you up—”
The blow was so unexpected that it stopped the words in his throat and rocked him back on his heels. Cody slowly lowered her hand. Blaise could feel the stinging imprint of her palm on his face. A pressure was building in his chest as if all the unspoken endearments, curses for Tachyon, descriptions of prowess were piling up like cars on a gridlocked beltway.
“Now, you listen, and you listen good! I have allowed you to ramble on in this very silly and very immature fashion out of concern and love for your grandfather, and out of consideration for your youth and folly.”
Each word struck like a lash, and Blaise writhed under the withering scorn in the deep, husky voice. His love was curdling until it lay like an oily foul-tasting slick on the back of his tongue.
Cody continued. “But I’m out of time, and I’m out of patience. Somewhere out there”—her arm swung in a wide arc encompassing the city—“there’s a lovely young girl who’s learning to prove geometry theorems, or cut out a dress pattern, or play tennis, and someday the two of you are going to meet and be very happy together. But that girl isn’t me.”
She hefted the pouch of jewels and stared sternly down at him.
“Now, tell me where you got these, and I’ll see if I can keep you out of reform school. And you keep your mouth shut to your grandfather. I won’t tell him what a fool you’ve been if you’ll work with me and we get these jewels back to their owner.”
“I hate you!”
A mocking little half smile curved her lips. “I thought you loved me.”
He backed away, held out a shaking hand. “I ... will ... show ... you.”
The Tachyon waxwork was directly opposite him.
Blaise coiled and lashed out with a spinning back kick. The head flew off the wax figure, and it toppled to the floor. Then quickly and methodically he kicked it to pieces. Dutton ran out of the office.
“Hey!”
His voice trailed away as he looked from Blaise to Cody, who was standing as still as one of the waxwork figures surrounding her.
“I’ll ... show ... you,” Blaise said again, and strode out of the museum.
“It should have sounded silly and melodramatic. Hell, it did sound silly and melodramatic, but frankly it scared the pee out of me.”
Tachyon pressed a glass into her hands. Folded her chilled fingers about it.
“And when he kicked that waxwork to pieces ...” Cody took a long swallow of the brandy.
Tachyon returned to the bar and poured himself a drink.
“Are you sure you are not overreacting?” he asked. “No!”
He held up a placating hand. “All right.”
Cody tugged a pouch from her purse and flung it down on the coffee table. It landed with a sharp crack. “And I know for damn sure this isn’t an overreaction.”
Tach shook out the contents and stared in amazement at the multicolored gems that glittered against the crimson of his glove. His eyebrows flew up inquiringly.
“I called the police and pretended to be a journalist,” Cody said. “Nobody has reported a jewel theft.”
“I will handle him,” said Tachyon. “You need be afraid no longer.”
Cody joined him on the sofa. “Tachyon, you moron. I’m not worried about me. I’m worried about you. What I saw in Blaise’s face was—”
She broke off and bit down on her lower lip. Tachyon tried to reschool his features. He sensed that he looked like a stricken deer.
“He hates you.”
There it was-bald, ugly, stark, the truth. He had been hiding from it for over a year.
Her shoulder was close. He laid his head against it. Cody’s arm went around his shoulder.
“What am I going to do?”
“I don’t know”
Like a shadow’s vomit. Children in the darkness. Following. Watching. Blaise whirled, lips drawn back in a snarl. They retreated. For an instant he considered reaching out with his power. Coercing one of them. Shredding his mind. Finding the answer. Who are you? What do you want? But one thing life with Tachyon had taught himcaution. There were too many of them. He might hold eight or even ten, but their sheer numbers would beat him down.
Blaise ducked into a Horn and Hardart. Bought a sandwich and coffee. Cody had kept his jewels, God damn her. But maybe that wasn’t so bad. He had taken them for her. Let her keep them and consider what she had rejected. She’d pay soon enough.
And money was better than jewels anyway. He had mind-controlled a limousine driver and the elegantly attired passenger. That had netted him almost a thousand bucks. He could go a long time on a thousand bucks. But the jewels would have been better.
The turkey sandwich was dry, the bread forming a soggy expanding mass on the back of his tongue. Blaise choked it down and wondered again where the fat old joker news vendor had come by a fortune in precious gems. Maybe he should go back to Jube’s apartment and make him tell?
A slim form slid onto the stool next to him. Blaise tensed. Studied her out of the corner of his eye. He didn’t bother to slide a hand down to the .38 tucked into the waistband of his pants. His mind powers could subdue her faster than a gun could fire.
The girl was young. Fifteen, sixteen with spiky multicolored hair, deliberately tattered blue jeans, unlaced high-top sneakers.
“We’ve been watchin’ you.”
“Yeah, I know. Any particular reason why?”
“You look like you need a place to go.”
“I’ve got plenty of places to go,” said Blaise.
The girl popped gum. “What are you gonna do when you get there?”
“Take care of myself.”
“Think you can?”
“Know I can.” And there was something in his face that made the girl edge as far away as the stool would allow.
“I’m not sayin’ you can’t,” she said. She thrust out a hand. Blaise noticed she had bitten the cuticles into the quick. “Molly Bolt.”
Blaise ignored the outthrust hand. “What do you want?”
She pulled back her hand, thumb rubbing lightly across the tips of her other fingers as if she were startled to find the hand at the end of her arm.
“Just this. You need a place to go. You ever need a team ... people to handle something;.. come to pier eleven on the East River. We’ll find ya.”
The cold coffee had a slick oily taste. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
“Fine.”
She was gone as quickly as she had appeared. Suddenly the well-dressed businessman seated a table away stood up, unzipped, pulled out his cock, and pissed down his own leg.
Blaise left. The food wasn’t very good. And he’d lost his appetite with the realization of just who or rather what he had been dealing with.
Jumpers.
Jumpers were after him.
“Would you stop worrying? Go already. Go to Washington, and bring back that grant. Mama needs a new laser surgery center.”
The connection on the car phone was terrible. Cody sounded like she was calling from the center of an electrical storm. Tachyon pictured her: hair brushed back, one hand thrust into the pocket of her lab coat, knee jiggling as she longed to get back to her patients. For an instant his concern and fear for Blaise receded. He laughed. “What are you chortling about?” Cody’s voice was sharp with suspicion.
“You. How many times per second is your foot tapping?”
“You are interrupting me.”
“Take the time. I’m worth it.”
A slight choke of laughter as he threw her words back at her.
“Prove it to me,” Cody said. “Get down to Washington, and lobby like hell.” She added, “It really is a shame about Senator Hartmann. He might have been a loon, but at least he was our loon.”
The missing hand flared in agony as Tachyon remembered the bite of the assassin’s buzz-saw hand. An assassin sent by Senator Gregg Hartmann, Democratic presidential candidate. Or at least the candidate for a day until Tachyon had destroyed forever Hartmann’s political ambitions. But Cody did not know-could never knowany of this.
“Tach, are you still there?”
“Yes, yes, sorry. Take care of yourself. I’ll see you Monday.” He started to hang up, then hurriedly added, “Please, please, be cautious. Be careful.”
A disconnected buzz was all he got back. Had she heard? Did she understand? Tachyon stared out the windows of the gray limousine at the city like a jeweled ship sailing away from him in the darkness. Blaise was out there somewhere.
The thought chilled him.
Troll was propping his nine-foot length against the front reception desk, chatting up the Chickenfoot Lady when Blaise entered. The joker straightened abruptly, his face twisting into an expression of surprise and concern. It looked like tectonic plates in motion.
“Blaise, your granddaddy’s been worried sick. Where the hell have you been? I ought to whip your ass.” Troll suddenly turned, lowered his head, and ran full tilt at the far wall. He struck with a sound like a cannonball crashing into a fortress battlement and went down in a heap. Chickenfoot let out a hysterical cackle and ran through the big double doors leading to the emergency room.
Blaise walked on, brows knitted in a frown of concentration, hands thrust deep into his pockets.
Cody wasn’t in her office.
She wasn’t in surgery. Finn was, and he shouted from behind his mask about the sterile integrity of the room and advanced on dancing pony feet on Blaise. Blaise didn’t fuck with Finn’s head. He kind of liked the pony-sized centaur.
Cody was in the morgue. What appeared to be an enormous wasp was on the table. Blaise watched as she carefully cut open the joker’s chest cavity and surveyed the lungs. Cody then leaned over a small tape recorder. Her voice was so low he couldn’t distinguish the words, just the soft, husky timbre like a chuckling brook. The sound made him shiver, but whether with anger or desire he couldn’t say.
Suddenly Cody looked up and stared directly at him through the tiny window in the morgue door. Blaise jumped, hating that she had thrown him off balance. He stiff-armed the heavy door, and it flew open. She didn’t retreat before his furious entrance. And that, too, made him angry.
“Hello, Blaise. Had a good time for the past week?”
“I’ve come for two things. My stones and you.”
Her smile was crooked and a little hateful. “Your problem, my son, is that you’ve always thought your stones were bigger than they are.”
“ I can make you love me!” Blaise cried.
“No, you can make me hate you. Love you have to earn.”
Cody was standing stock still. A pillar of ice and darkness. Blaise ran his eyes down that slim tall form. Noted her hand tucked into the fold of her lab coat. The glint of the scalpel between her fingers. He smiled.
“Cody, you’re so stupid,” Blaise crooned. The scalpel fell from nerveless fingers. “I don’t give a fuck how you feel.”
The coat fell with a sigh to the linoleum floor.
“Because I can ...”
The blouse joined the coat on the floor. “. make you ...”
She stepped out of her skirt. “... love me.”
Had it connected, the blow would have ruptured a kidney.
But Blaise’s karate training gave him a split-second warning. The young man spun away from Tachyon’s thrust kick and caught his grandfather by the ankle. Floor met chin with head-ringing force, and Tachyon tasted blood as his teeth snapped shut on his tongue. He rolled to the side. Blinked in consternation as the heel of Blaise’s boot slammed into the floor where his head had rested only a second before. Tachyon got his legs beneath him and bounded to his feet. Blaise charged, and the older man fended him off with the artificial hand. The digits couldn’t be bent to form a proper spear hand, but the hard plastic fingers still managed to sink a satisfying distance into the teenager’s solar plexus.
Blaise let out a sound like a dying air brake, and Cody lunged for her surgical gear as Blaise’s mind control broke. “Would you fuck this macho bullshit!” she screamed. “And just mind-control him!”
For an instant Tachyon was distracted by the sight of the completely naked Cody snatching up and wielding a chest separator like a modern-day Hippolyte.
First rule of combat never, never, never get distracted. Blaise landed a palm strike to the face. With a dreadful mushy sound the cartilage in Tach’s nose let go, and blood fountained over his chest, forming a red bib on the elaborate peach-colored coat.
Belatedly the Takisian brought up his hands in defense. He and Blaise circled each other warily.
Feint, feint. Tachyon lashed out with his mentat’s power and struck the glass-smooth surface of Blaise’s shields. Struck again and a tiny cobweb of cracks appeared in the structure. At this rate it was going to take until next Tuesday to breach the boy’s shields. And Tach didn’t have that long.
Too much booze and not enough exercise was taking its toll. He was panting like a ruptured hog. Blaise landed a body blow that resurrected memories of broken ribs from the year before.
Suddenly Cody was there. With a deft twirl of the chest separator she landed a walloping blow to the back of Blaise’s head. He staggered, but then Cody froze and began advancing stiff legged on Tachyon.
“You see, Granpere.” Blaise’s smile was feral. “ I can control her and fend you off. Mentally and physically. All at the same time.”
Blaise’s coercive ability was the most powerful Tach had ever confronted, but it was brute force. The subtleties of high-level mentatics were beyond him. Contemptuously Tachyon batted aside Blaise’s grip on Cody. Interposed himself between the teenager and the woman. His mental shields enfolded her close as an embrace.
Cody was raging. Her thoughts ripped off her like sparks off a shorting fuse.
Damndamndamn. Stags. Runtingbedamnedstags. Me a damn shuttlecock. Notatoy! Releaselmakefree!
Cannot. Dare not. Tachyon sent to her. Help me, he begged.
Tachyon licked blood from his upper lip and endured three punishing body blows as he closed with Blaise. Clawlike, the artificial hand closed about Blaise’s arm just above the elbow. It could exert enough pressure to crush a metal cup. Its effect on human tissue was also quite satisfying. Blaise screamed, and Tachyon’s nostrils flared with wild, joyous pleasure as he slammed his left hand over and over again into Blaise’s face.
Touch her, will you? No! None but me! She is mine! Mine! MINE!
Blaise tried a ball shot, but Tach was too quick for him. The blow landed on his thigh. The older man responded with a hammer blow to the boy’s nuts. A scream ripped through the morgue.
Tachyon could feel Blaise’s mind control scrabbling at his shields, but the teenager was in too much pain, too disoriented by hate and interrupted lust to muster any effective challenge to Tach’s power.
Suddenly there were hands tearing at his shoulders. “Stop it! Stop it! You’re going to kill him.”
Tach snarled, ignored her, continued the pleasurable business of reducing his enemy to a bloody pulp. The hands were gone. Tach heard the slap of Cody’s bare feet on the tile as she ran.
Agony! The formaldehyde burned like acid in the cuts on his face, his eyes. Tach and Blaise both fell back. And at last it penetrated. Blood lust, the killing. He had been on the verge of murdering his own grandchild. Horrified, Tachyon stumbled back, lost his footing in the slick blood, and went windmilling to the floor.
Blaise, his face a mask of blood, cradling his mangled arm, snarled down at Tachyon. “You’re dead!”
Crablike, Blaise scuttled for the door. Flung it open and bolted from the morgue. Tachyon shook off the fear that held him and struggled to his feet.
“Where are you going?” cried Cody. “Must ... catch him. Apologize. Help him.”
“It’s too late for that!”
Tach tottered for the door, but the pain from his broken nose made him dizzy. Tach sent out a telepathic bellow for Troll and was amazed when the nine-foot-tall joker appeared a second later.
“Doc, are you okay?” the security guard asked. “Of course he’s not okay,” snapped Cody.
Troll opened and closed his mouth several times as he contemplated the stark-naked chief of surgery.
“Blaise,” Tach mumbled around a split and rapidly swelling lip.
“He lit out of here like a scalded cat,” said Troll, then added ruefully. “Sorry I’m so late getting here, but I knocked myself clean out.”
“Help me get Dr. Tachyon to emergency,” Cody ordered. “We’ve got to fix that nose.”
“Put on some clothes,” ordered Tachyon.
“What’s the matter? You’ve never seen a naked woman before?”
“I do not wish the entire world to see my woman.”
“Your woman? Your woman?”
Tach retreated from her acid laced thoughts. “Slip of the tongue,” the Takisian muttered weakly.
“Owwwww! What are you using?” Tachyon complained nasally. Cotton wadding and splints clogged his nose, and his throat was becoming sore as he struggled to breathe through his mouth. “An entrenching tool?”
“Don’t be such a baby.” The probe hit the steel tray with a metallic clatter. “You’re going to need a new nose. Any preference?”
“How about just like the one I had.”
“Don’t waste a golden opportunity”
“Why should I change it?” It annoyed him that she didn’t like his nose.
“It was trifle on the long side,” Cody said coolly. “It was patrician and aristocratic.”
“It was a honker.”
Tach absorbed this. Reluctantly admitted, “My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother always hated my nose.”
“Then allow me to be creative.”
“All right.”
Cody worked in silence for several minutes, then a little gruffly she asked, “How did you know?”
“We were halfway to Tomlin International when I realized I had forgotten a grant application.”
“The one from HEW?” she interrupted. “Yes.”
“I’ve got it. I inadvertently picked it up when I was in your office this afternoon. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry? You should thank whatever ancestors guard your back. So fortuitous a gift should not be demeaned. Anyway, Riggs started back, and at about Fifth Avenue I heard you screaming your head off. Riggs spared no effort, and as a result we had a police escort all the way to the clinic.”
“Well ... thanks.” She made a minute adjustment, and Tach sucked in a pained breath. “I seem to be making a habit of having you rescue me.”
“It is my pleasure.”
“Well, it’s no pleasure for me. I’m accustomed to taking care of myself.”
“You would do the same for me,” said Tach gently. Cody prefaced her words with a long sigh as if she regretted the emotion that drove the response. “ I suppose I would.”
That girl was back. Lips skinned away from his teeth at Blaise whirled on her.
“Why the fuck are you following me?”
“You look like you need that place to go.” The angle of her cigarette as it hung limply from her lips seemed to mock him.
“I don’t need dick from you.”
“ I can show you something you’ll like,” Molly Bolt said.
Blaise smiled. “You’re a really skinny, ugly little runt. I doubt your pussy’s going to be much nicer.”
The girl’s face closed down like a series of slamming doors. “You’re so fucking stupid. Okay, fine, we’ll show you.”
He felt the pressure of a mind. Then a second, a third, more and more joined in a desperate attempt to do something to him. Molly’s tough-girl act was starting to fray at the edges. Blaise grinned at her. Reached out and closed his power about the watchers in the shadows. Last of all he took Bolt. It felt sweet to save her until last. Blaise commanded, and eight kids walked out of the shadows of the alley. Stood shoulder to rigid shoulder with their leader. Molly’s eyes raged at him.
“What are you?” whispered a girl whose white-blond hair formed a shimmering nimbus about her little face. Blaise considered the question for a long time. It deserved a lot of consideration. Finally he said, “Inhuman.” Blaise patted down Molly Bolt and pulled out a package of cigarettes. Lit one. Took a long drag. “Now, what was it you wanted to show me?”
“Read my mind,” spat Molly.
It angered Blaise that he couldn’t. Tachyon would have been able to. That cranked the anger a little higher. “What are you going to do with us?” Molly asked.
“Sell you as lawn jockeys.” The laugh emerged as a tight little whinny.
“Let us go ... please,” cried the blond girl. “You wont fuck with me?”
“ I swear it,” said Molly, pleading a little now. “We need you. Now I know why.”
“What were you going to show me?”
“Let us go.”
Blaise released them. Truth was, his overstretched mental powers were starting to quiver like a too tightly wound guitar string. But his little humans never suspected.
Molly ran a hand across the spikes of her multicolored hair. Sauntered to the mouth of the alley. The sidewalks were filled with rush-hour humanity. The sun sank like a bloated red sack into an ocean of brown-green smog. In the canyons between the buildings night had already fallen. “So, pick one,” said Molly.
“One what?” asked Blaise.
“Person,” said a skinny kid whose face seemed to be one angry blackhead.
“For what?” Blaise asked. He hated to ask. It made him look stupid.
“To humiliate,” said the blond teen in her soft littlegirl voice.
“Or kill,” offered another of the gang.
Blaise scanned the crowds. Listened to the blare of car horns. The thrum and rumble of hundreds of tires racing across the uneven asphalt of Broadway.
“Hurry” prodded Molly Bolt.
Blaise ignored her. Eventually he spotted what he was looking for. A carefully combed head of carrot-red hair, a business suit on the inexpensive side of nice. Not too tall. A little too slim.
An incline of the head. “Him.”
“And do what?” asked Molly. “Kill him.”
“ I am fine. It is just a broken nose. I do not need to be in bed.”
Cody ignored him. Folded back the comforter. “ I must reach Washington.”
She stripped him out of the blood-covered coat. “I must locate Blaise.”
She unbuttoned his shirt.
“Make up your mind,” Cody said. “Blaise or Washington.”
Tach considered. “Washington.”
“Fine. You’ll fly tonight. Dita’s already rescheduled your tickets.”
“Damn it,” he raged. “Don’t manage my life.”
She pushed his shirt off his shoulders. “Somebody has to.” She pointed at his pants. “Finish. I’ll get you some water so you can wash down these pain pills.”
It’s useless arguing with a shut door. Meekly Tach stripped off his pants and shorts and crawled beneath the sheets. Cody returned with the glass and an ice pack. Tach obediently swallowed the pills.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
“Now what are you apologizing for?”
“Mind-controlling you. I know how fiercely independent you are, but I could not effectively protect—”
“I know why you did it. Let’s just drop it, okay?”
“Nonetheless, your reaction shamed me. Cody, please understand and do not reject me. My defense of you is not meant to demean you.”
“I know”
“Perhaps it manifests as somewhat proprietary, but that is because I am still hoping—”
“Tachyon, would you just shut the fuck up.”
“But I do not want you angry—”
“You know what your problem is? You talk too goddamn much!”
Black, oily. The water looked really disgusting. And the smell ...
Blaise swallowed hard. Wished his elbow didn’t hurt so bad. Out in the bay a police patrol boat droned past, spotlights sweeping across the choppy waters.
Blackhead—Blaise had discovered his name was Kent set down the bags of groceries on the end of the pier. Molly knelt and lit a kerosene lantern.
“One if by land?” asked Blaise sarcastically.
Molly didn’t reply, for there was rippling in the dark water and a thing rose up from the water.
“Shit!”
“No, Charon.”
Kent thrust the bags of groceries through the semitransparent body wall. Blaise’s initial disgust was passing. It was just another version of Baby, Tachyon’s living spaceship. Blaise took a step toward Charon. Molly held him off with a hand to the chest.
“How bad do you want it?” asked Molly sternly. Blaise remembered. Shrill screams. The wailing of sirens forming a frantic counterpoint. The small redheaded man pinned against the wall of the cleaners. Vomiting his blood across the hood of the big Caddy.
“Enough to do anything to get it.”
“Then ya gotta trust us. You gotta be one with us.”
“And if I don’t?”
“You can’t make us give you the power,” the blond girl said. “You can only scare us so much.”
Blaise slid his eyes toward her. “And do I scare you?”
“Yes.”
Startling in its simplicity and honesty. Blaise took another look at her. Fine-boned. A few pimples on her chin, but otherwise unflawed. Fawn’s eyes, but smoky gray with a dark circle surrounding the iris. The pale hair hung below her hips; it stirred softly in the breeze off the river.
“What do I have to do?” Blaise asked, turning back to Molly.
“Die.”
“Huh?”
“Symbolically speaking,” Kent explained. “This is bullshit.”
“No,” said Molly. “This is real.” She lifted a long chain with shackles attached to the end. “You walk behind Charon. We’ve got the end of this.” She shook the chain. “Eventually we pull you in.”
“Eventually.” Blaise turned the word over and over in his mouth.
“You have to trust us to pull you in before it’s too late,” said the blonde.
“What’s your name?” Blaise asked abruptly.
She was surprised and replied without thinking. “Kelly.”
“Stop farting around,” interrupted Molly. “Have you got the guts for it or are you a jerk off and a coward?”
“Try saying something like that after all this bullshit is over,” warned Blaise. “And just what is the point of this bullshit?”
“You have to die to live with us,” a boy called out. “Great,” muttered Blaise. “This is so stupid.”
“In or out, Blaisy Daisy,” crooned Molly.
Tachyon vomiting blood. Cody, eyes wide with terror and desire. Her body fiery hot beneath his. Bloody froth on her lips as his fingers sank deep into her neck.
Blaise thrust out his hands. The shackles closed around his wrists. Blaise eyed Charon. The two small eyes regarded his thoughtfully, closed in a slow blink. Blaise laughed as a white-hot surge of lust and anticipation shot through him. This was going to be fun.
They had clipped a heavy diver’s belt about his waist, replaced his tennis shoes with lead-soled boots. Charon had slid beneath the water, Blaise plummeting like a stone behind him.
Blaise concentrated on the thousands of wriggling cilia that propelled Charon across the muddy bottom. How long could he last? How long until the last stale bits of air exploded from his aching lungs and the filthy waters of the river rushed in?
Charon’s body cast a greenish glow into the dark waters. Occasionally a fish brushed against Blaise’s body, fluttered hysterically away. His feet tangled, and Blaise fell to his knees. Almost ... almost he gasped. His foot had caught in the rotting rib cage of a body. There was a jerk of the chain, the shackles biting into his wrists. Awkwardly Blaise staggered to his feet. Hurried to catch up with Charon.
There was a roaring in his ears, and his lungs were laced with fire. His eyes focused desperately on the chain. Noted how the vaguely defined bands of muscle in Charon’s body closed lovingly about the metal links. Blaise fought the urge to reach out and seize control of Molly.
No! He’d fucking die before he’d break.
And that was beginning to seem very likely. Blaise lifted his hands and pressed them against his nose and mouth. Suddenly the slack was taken up on the chain, and he was being reeled toward Charon’s glistening body. He struck and began flailing desperately at the rubbery wall. It stretched reluctantly open. Water and Blaise poured into the slimy interior.
Kelly was yanking him up out of the water, which washed sluggishly across the floor of the joker’s body. Air. Gulp it down, taste it, revel in the cool rush that filled his starved and aching lungs. Molly unlocked the shackles. They were cheering, laughing, suddenly he was captured in their embrace. A ten-headed animal with twenty arms holding and—caressing him. Blaise realized he was, crying and he couldn’t figure out why. But it must have been okay because several other jumpers were crying, too.
Blaise became aware of a mental barrier. It whispered of terror, death, loss, loneliness. He blocked it. The jumpers were shifting nervously. Molly soothed them with a constant soft murmur.
“Just a little more. Almost there.”
“What the fuck is that?” asked Blaise. “Bloat,” came the terse reply.
Kent suddenly jumped to his feet. He was whispering as he shuffled toward one moist gelatinous wall. Blaise grabbed his wrist, forced him down next to him.
“Sit down! You can take it. It’s just a stupid mind power. And a pretty wimpy one at that.”
The jumpers were regarding him with awe. All except Molly. She looked pissed.
“No wonder the Prime wanted you,” breathed Kelly. “Who’s the Prime?”
Bolt tersely replied, “You’ll find out. Someday. Maybe.” Charon gave a little lurch as if all the thousands of cilia had pushed against the muddy bed of the river. They were rising. Water cascaded off Charon’s back. They had arrived.
Once on shore, Blaise folded his arms across his chest and gazed across Ellis Island. The trees covered it like spikes on a dinosaur’s back, and above the shadowy foliage loomed massive buildings topped with turrets and fanciful cupolas. It reminded Blaise of the Takisian fairy tales Tachyon used to tell. Lost kingdoms that existed only in the clouds and mist. Elaborate palaces that lured a man to explore their treasuries and ballrooms only to fall to his death with the sunrise.
But it wasn’t a palace. It wasn’t even livable. At least Blaise didn’t think so. They had led him through the darkness to the main immigration center, and now they stood in one of the side rooms. There were, a couple of cots, and twenty or thirty sleeping bags. Some were rolled like somnolent caterpillars against the walls, others were spread out on the stained and buckled tile floor. Candy wrappers, crumpled snack-chip sacks, empty Vienna sausage cans littered the room and formed junk drifts in the corners.
Gray-green paint peeled like a bad sunburn from the wooden walls. High overhead, filthy windows barely indicated the presence of a waxing moon. Some were broken, the shattered glass like jagged fangs embedded in petrified jaws.
“Pick a place,” said Molly with a broad, gracious sweep of the arm.
“Do I get a sleeping bag?” asked Blaise.
“You can share mine,” offered Kelly as she sidled up next to hirn. “Until we can get one for you,” she hastened to add, wilting a bit under his cold stare.
“Better rest, Blaisy Daisy,” said Molly. “You’re gonna need it.”
Blaise pivoted slowly to face her. “Don’t ... ever ... call me that ... again.”
Arms militantly akimbo, Molly sneered in a singsong tone, “Or what?”
“I’ll kill you.”
The matter-of-fact tone left the girl gaping. She suddenly recalled herself. The watching jumpers, eyes bright like a hunting rat pack, eagerly waiting for the fight. Molly tossed her head and laughed.
“You’can try, Blai—” The word cut off and she whirled and exited.
“She’s a quick learner. I like that in a slit.”
The boys laughed. The girls shifted uncomfortably and exchanged glances.
Yes, Blaise decided. This was fun.
The lights made interesting effects on her face. At times it seemed as still as a white marble effigy. At others it was soft and vulnerable.
Tach hugged his briefcase to his chest. Winced as a bus released its air brakes with a sound like a dying pig. “This was not necessary. Riggs could have driven me.”
“I wanted to,” said Cody.
She drove as smoothly as she did everything else. No wasted movement, hands lightly gripping the wheel, the tiniest wrist movements as she wove through the beltway traffic.
“ I wanted to make sure you got on that plane,” she continued, and Tach forced himself back from a rapt contemplation of her hands.
“I’m not going to collapse from a broken nose.”
“It’s not your health that concerns me.”
“Thank you.” A little ironic and she caught it. She cocked her head to get a better look at him out of her one eye. “Should you be driving?” Tachyon suddenly asked.
“Little late to worry now. And as for the plane. I was afraid you’d take it into your head to go looking for Blaise, and frankly, funding the clinic is a hell of a lot more important.”
“You can be very cold.”
“No, I just know when to cut my losses.”
The cars up ahead suddenly braked and the red flare of their taillights punctuated and underscored Tach’s sharp reply. “I don’t think he’s a loss!”
“Then you’re a delusional fool.”
Tachyon dropped his head briefly into his hand. “All right, I don’t want to think that.”
Cody spun the wheel and they shot up the ramp and under a sign marked DEPARTING PASSENGERS.
“Better. God damn it, Tachyon, in maybe twenty or thirty years I’ll have you past the guilt, out of the wallow of self-pity, and you’ll have figured out when to shut up.”
“Thank heaven I’m a big enough man to listen to this catalog of my flaws.”
Cody’s eye raked his diminutive form. “Well, your ego is big enough to handle it.”
“I’m also highly encouraged.”
“By what?”
“That you are willing to devote your life to the reclamation of my mind, body, and spirit.”
The seat belt nearly cut Tach in half as Cody slammed on the brakes in front of the terminal.
“I don’t think my original statement went quite that way.”
“It was implicit.”
Tach closed the prosthetic hand around the handle and pushed open the door. Cody moved to the trunk and pulled out his two big suitcases.
“How long are you going to be gone?” she asked. “Three days.”
“You’ve got enough here for a round-the-world cruise.”
“But, my dear, one must dress.”
He was smiling bravely up at her, but inside he suddenly felt like he was filled with broken glass. Tears sprang to his eyes, and he muttered a curse.
Cody laid her hands on his shoulders. “What is it? You look stricken.”
“I don’t know. Nothing.” Tach shook his head. “I am suddenly just so very, very unhappy.”
For a long moment she looked at him, then bending down, she placed a soft feather-light kiss at the corner of his mouth. Tachyon stared at her in amazement.
“Smile for me, kid,” she said, a crooked smile curving her own lips.
Tachyon burst out, “Cody, come with me to Washington.”
“What? You’re crazy. I’ve got no ticket, I don’t have any luggage, what about my kid—” She paused for breath. “And who’s going to run the clinic?”
People were shouldering past them as the couple blocked the automatic doors into the terminal.
“Please, I am frightened for you.”
“I’ll holler if I need you.”
“It will be too far to come.”
“You’re hysterical. It’s the pain pills talking.”
“Cody, he means to harm us.”
“Do you or don’t you want me to call the police and have them search for Blaise?”
“No.” Tach stared seriously up at her. “For if he’s found, I shall surely have to kill him.”
When you’re stark naked and dressed only in a scarlet robe that had obviously been ripped off from some local Episcopalian church choir, you can feel like a real dork.
Add to that the fact that nerves were giving Blaise the most amazing hard-on it had ever been his pleasure to experience. Or maybe he just got off on big black candles and a droning tape of Tibetan monastery chants, he thought ironically as Molly led him into the dark, echoing room. Molly glanced down at his penis thrusting aggressively from between the folds of his gown, and grinned. “You’re gonna do just fine,” she muttered as if to herself, but intending for Blaise to hear.
He didn’t respond. This and anything that followed could be endured. The ultimate prize was too great to blow it with a fit of temper now.
Jumpers lined the walls. Blaise did a quick head count. Forty-two. But many of those weren’t jumpers. You couldn’t jump until you’d been initiated. Most, like Kelly, were still waiting. Blaise noted that two-thirds were boys. Why? Did it whatever it was-affect males more strongly than females? How did one make a jumper?
A lurid green pentagram had been painted on the stained tile floor. On the walls were painted other occult symbols. The swastika, a leering goat’s head, 666. The enormous room was lit by a score of black candles, but they did little more than chase the shadows into the corners of the roof where they hung like brooding bats.
In the center of the pentagram was a low table. It was an odd height if it was meant to serve as an altar. And the three red satin pillows tossed on its polished black surface really ruined any hope of suggesting blood sacrifices.
Molly closed her fingers around Blaise’s left wrist and led him three times around the pentagram. At the eastern point they stepped into the figure, and the jumpers let out a weird, undulating cry. Blaise had to bite back a laugh. Then from the darkness a man’s voice asked, “Who comes to be made?”
“Only one, Prime,” called Molly. “Is he worthy?”
“He is brave. He is trustful.”
“Will he serve?”
Molly nudged Blaise.
“I’ll serve,” the boy replied. Apparently it was the right answer.
Molly signaled and Kent hurried forward to pull off the choir robe. They were all staring at him. Kelly especially. Blaise ran a hand across his chest. Noticed that he was starting to grow hair. He had become a man. He could pinpoint the moment. He had gone into that morgue a child. Emerged a man.
“Lie down on the table,” whispered Molly. “With your stomach on the pillows.”
For a moment he bridled at the undignified positionhis bare ass thrust aggressively skyward.
Patience. Patience.
Tachyon vomiting his life out across the hood of his limo. No, even better across Cody’s lap.
Paper-dry hands cupped his rump, and Blaise almost lost it.
Didn’t take a genius to figure out what was coming. Parted his buttocks.
Oh, I’m gonna get you for this, Grandpa! Tearing pain as the man thrust deep within him.
A lifetime later and it was over. Blaise rose stiffly from the table. There was blood on his ass and legs.
The man gestured a broad sweeping motion that set the hanging sleeve of his gown to swaying. “Reach out. Seize one of them. Trade with them. For you it should be child’s play.”
Yeah, snarled Blaise internally, and he reached out for the man.
Nothing happened. Behind the mask the man’s eyes glittered. The mouth twisted stiffly into a smile.
“You beautiful bastard,” the Prime said. “You would try to fuck with me. Forget it, I can’t be jumped.”
“Can you be killed?” Blaise asked sweetly. From behind him he heard Molly gasp.
“Oh, yes, but without me there are no more jumpers. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot, Blaise, in a fit of pique.” The hem of the gown whispered about his feet as the Prime turned and slunk back into the shadows.
Blaise turned back to his peers. They peered back at him like bright cardinals in their scarlet robes.
“Come on, let’s play,” said Molly.
And Blaise reached out. Seemed to bounce out of his skin. Shoot like liquid fire. He came to rest in Kent’s body. He looked out at the world from new eyes. Glancing down, he studied the overly long thumbnail on the right hand, the callused finger pads. Would the body remember how to play guitar? Blaise wondered. Then he was on to other sensations. Like the fact that Kent smelled funny. Blaise looked across to his body. Molly and Kelly were easing it to the floor. It ... he ... Kent-damn!-seemed to be conscious, but frozen in some kind of fugue state.
Blaise made the jump back. Shook off Kelly’s patting hands. Climbed to his feet. Raucous laughter rang through the rafters, skittered among the shadows. The jumpers stood in shocked silence.
Blaise threw back his head and screamed like a banshee.
“Oh, Tachyon! You’re going to wish I had only killed you!”
Bonham’s Flying Service of Shantak, New Jersey, was socked in. The small searchlight on the tower barely pushed away the darkness of the swirling fog.
There was the sound of car tires on the wet pavement in front of Hangar 23. A car door opened, a moment later it closed. Footsteps came to the Employees Only door. It opened. Scoop Swanson came in, carrying his Kodak Autograph Mark II and a bag of flashbulbs and film.
Lincoln Traynor raised up from the engine of the surplus P-40 he was overhauling for an airline pilot who had got it at a voice-bid auction for $293. Judging from the shape of the engine, it must have been flown by the Flying Tigers in 1940. A ball game was on the workbench radio. Line turned it down. “‘Lo, Line,” said Scoop.
“‘Lo.”
“No word yet?”
“Don’t expect any. The telegram he sent yesterday said he’d be in tonight. Good enough for me.”
Scoop lit a Camel with a Three Torches box match from the workbench. He blew smoke toward the Absolutely No Smoking sign at the back of the hangar. “Hey, what’s this?” He walked to the rear. Still in their packing cases were two long red wing extensions and two 300-gallon teardrop underwing tanks. “When these get here?”
“Air Corps shipped them yesterday from San Francisco. Another telegram came for him today. You might as well read it, you’re doing the story.” Line handed him the War Department orders.
TO: Jetboy (Tomlin, Robert NMI) HOR: Bonham’s Flying Service Hangar 23, Shantak, New Jersey
1. Effective this date 1200Z hours 12 Aug ‘46, you are no longer on active duty, United States Army Air Force.
2. Your aircraft (model-experimental) (ser. no. JB-1) is hereby decommissioned from active status, United States Army Air Force, and reassigned you as private aircraft. No further materiel support from USAAF or War Department will be forthcoming.
3. Records, commendations, and awards forwarded under separate cover.
4. Our records show Tomlin, Robert NMI, has not obtained pilot’s license. Please contact CAB for courses and certification.
5. Clear skies and tailwinds,
For Arnold, H. H. CofS, USAAF ref. Executive Order #2, 08 Dec ‘41
“What’s this about him having no pilot’s license?” asked the newspaperman. “I went through the morgue on him-his file’s a foot thick. Hell, he must have flown faster and farther, shot down more planes than anyone-five hundred planes, fifty ships! He did it without a pilot’s license?”
Line wiped grease from his mustache. “Yep. That was the most plane-crazy kid you ever saw. Back in ‘39, he couldn’t have been more than twelve, he heard there was a job out here. He showed up at four A.M.-lammed out of the orphanage to do it. They came out to get him. But of course Professor Silverberg had hired him, squared it with them.”
“Silverberg’s the one the Nazis bumped off? The guy who made the jet?”
“Yep. Years ahead of everybody, but weird. I put together the plane for him, Bobby and I built it by hand. But Silverberg made the jets—damnedest engines you ever saw. The Nazis and Italians, and Whittle over in England, had started theirs. But the Germans found out something was happening here.”
“How’d the kid learn to fly?”
“He always knew, I think,” said Lincoln. “One day he’s in here helping me bend metal. The next, him and the professor are flying around at four hundred miles per. In the dark, with those early engines.”
“How’d they keep it a secret?”
“They didn’t, very well. The spies came for Silverbergwanted him and the plane. Bobby was out with it. I think he and the prof knew something was up. Silverberg put up such a fight the Nazis killed him. Then, there was the diplomatic stink. In those days the JB-1 only had six .30 cals on it-where the professor got them I don’t know. But the kid took care of the car full of spies with it, and that speedboat on the Hudson full of embassy people. All on diplomatic visas.”
“Just a sec,” Linc stopped himself. “End of a doubleheader in Cleveland. On the Blue Network.” He turned up the metal Philco radio that sat above the toolrack.
“ Sanders to Papenfuss to Volstad, a double play. That does it. So the Sox drop two to Cleveland. We’ll be right—” Linc turned it off. “There goes five bucks,” he said. “Where was I?”
“The Krauts killed Silverberg, and Jetboy got even. He went to Canada, right?”
“Joined the RCAF, unofficially. Fought in the Battle of Britain, went to China against the Japs with the Tigers, was back in Britain for Pearl Harbor.”
“And Roosevelt commissioned him?”
“Sort of. You know, funny thing about his whole career. He fights the whole war, longer than any other American-late ‘39 to ‘45—then right at the end, he gets lost in the Pacific, missing. We all think he’s dead for a year. Then they find him on that desert island last month, and now he’s coming home.” There was a high, thin whine like a prop plane in a dive. It came from the foggy skies outside. Scoop put out his third Camel. “How can he land in this soup?”
“He’s got an all-weather radar set-got it off a German night fighter back in ‘43. He could land that plane in a circus tent at midnight.”
They went to the door. Two landing lights pierced the rolling mist. They lowered to the far end of the runway, turned, and came back on the taxi strip.
The red fuselage glowed in the gray-shrouded lights of the airstrip. The twin-engine high-wing plane turned toward them and rolled to a stop.
Linc Traynor put a set of double chocks under each of the two rear tricycle landing gears. Half the glass nose of the plane levered up and pulled back. The plane had four 20mm cannon snouts in the wing roots between the engines, and a 75mm gunport below and to the left of the cockpit rim.
It had a high thin rudder, and the rear elevators were shaped like the tail of a brook trout. Under each of the elevators was the muzzle of a rear-firing machine gun. The only markings on the plane were four nonstandard USAAF stars in a black roundel, and the serial number JB-1 on the top right and bottom left wings and beneath the rudder.
The radar antennae on the nose looked like something to roast weenies on.
A boy dressed in red pants, white shirt, and a blue helmet and goggles stepped out of the cockpit and onto the dropladder on the left side.
He was nineteen, maybe twenty. He took off his helmet and goggles. He had curly mousy brown hair, hazel eyes, and was short and chunky.
Linc,” he said. He hugged the pudgy man to him, patted his back for a full minute. Scoop snapped off a shot. “Great to have you back, Bobby, said Linc. “Nobody’s called me that in years,” he said. “It sounds real good to hear it again.”
“This is Scoop Swanson,” said line. “He’s gonna make you famous all over again.”
“I’d rather be asleep.” He shook the reporter’s hand. “Any place around here we can get some ham and eggs?”
The launch pulled up to the dock in the fog. Out in the harbor a ship finished cleaning its bilges and was turning to steam back southward.
There were three men on the mooring: Fred and Ed and Filmore. One man stepped out of the launch with a suitcase in his hands. Filmore leaned down and gave the guy at the wheel of the motorboat a Lincoln and two Jacksons. Then he helped the guy with the suitcase.
“Welcome home, Dr. Tod.”
“It’s good to be back, Filmore.” Tod was dressed in a baggy suit, and had on an overcoat even though it was August. He wore his hat pulled low over his face, and from it a glint of metal was reflected in the pale lights from a warehouse.
“This is Fred and this is Ed,” said Filmore. “They’re here just for the night.”
“‘Lo,” said Fred. “‘Lo,” said Ed.
They walked back to the car, a ‘46 Merc that looked like a submarine. They climbed in, Fred and Ed watching the foggy alleys to each side. Then Fred got behind the wheel, and Ed rode shotgun. With a sawed-off ten-gauge.
“Nobody’s expecting me. Nobody cares,” said Dr. Tod. “Everybody who had something against me is either dead or went respectable during the war and made a mint. I’m an old man and I’m tired. I’m going out in the country and raise bees and play the horses and the market.”
“Not planning anything, boss?”
“Not a thing.”
He turned his head as they passed a streetlight. Half his face was gone, a smooth plate reaching from jaw to hatline, nostril to left ear.
“I can’t shoot anymore, for one thing. My depth perception isn’t what it used to be.”
“I shouldn’t wonder,” said Filmore. “We heard something happened to you in ‘43.”
“Was in a somewhat-profitable operation out of Egypt while the Afrika Korps was falling apart. Taking people in and out for a fee in a nominally neutral air fleet. Just a sideline. Then ran into that hotshot flier.”
“Who?”
“Kid with the jet plane, before the Germans had them.”
“Tell you the truth, boss, I didn’t keep up with the war much. I take a long view on merely territorial conflicts.”
“As I should have,” said Dr. Tod. “We were flying out of Tunisia. Some important people were with us that trip. The pilot screamed. There was a tremendous explosion. Next thing, I came to, it was the next morning, and me and one other person are in a life raft in the middle of the Mediterranean. My face hurt. I lifted up. Something fell into the bottom of the raft. It was my left eyeball. It was looking up at me. I knew I was in trouble.”
“You said it was a kid with a jet plane?” asked Ed. “Yes. We found out later they’d broken our code, and he’d flown six hundred miles to intercept us.”
“You want to get even?” asked Filmore.
“No. That was so long ago I hardly remember that side of my face. It just taught me to be a little more cautious. I wrote it off as character building.”
“So no plans, huh?”
“Not a single one,” said Dr. Tod.
“That’ll be nice for a change,” said Filmore. They watched the lights of the city go by.
He knocked on the door, uncomfortable in his new brown suit and vest.
“Come on in, its open,” said a woman’s voice. Then it was muffled. “I’ll be ready in just a minute.”
Jetboy opened the oak hall door and stepped into the room, past the glass-brick room divider.
A beautiful woman stood in the middle of the room, a dress halfway over her arms and head. She wore a camisole, garter belt, and silk hose. She was pulling the dress down with one of her hands.
Jetboy turned his head away, blushing and taken aback. “Oh,” said the woman. “Ohl I-who?”
“It’s me, Belinda,” he said. “Robert.”
“Robert?”
“Bobby, Bobby Tomlin.”
She stared at him a moment, her hands clasped over her front though she was fully dressed.
“Oh, Bobby,” she said, and came to him and hugged him and gave him a big kiss right on the mouth.
It was what he had waited six years for.
“Bobby. It’s great to see you. I-I was expecting someone else. Some-girlfriends. How did you find me?”
“Well, it wasn’t easy”
She stepped back from him. “Let me look at you.” He looked at her. The last time he had seen her she was fourteen, a tomboy, still at the orphanage. She had been a thin kid with mousy blond hair. Once, when she was eleven, she’d almost punched his lights out. She was a year older than he. Then he had gone away, to work at the airfield, then to fight with the Brits against Hitler. He had written her when he could all during the war, after America entered it. She had left the orphanage and been put in a foster home. In ‘44 one of his letters had come back from there marked ‘Moved-No Forwarding Address.’ Then he had been lost all during the last year .. “You’ve changed, too,” he said.
“So have you.”
“Uh.”
“I followed the newspapers all during the war. I tried to write you but I don’t guess the letters ever caught up with you. Then they said you were missing at sea, and I sort of gave up.”
“Well, I was, but they found me. Now I’m back. How have you been?”
“Real good, once I ran away from the foster home,” she said. A look of pain came across her face. “You don’t know how glad I was to get away from there. Oh, Bobby,” she said. “Oh, I wish things was different!” She started to cry a little.
“Hey,” he said, holding her by the shoulders. “Sit down. I’ve got something for you.”
“A present?”
“Yep.” He handed her a grimy, oil-stained paper parcel. “I carried these with me the last two years of the war. They were in the plane with me on the island. Sorry I didn’t have time to rewrap them.”
She tore the English butcher paper. Inside were copies of The House at Pooh Corner and The Tale of the Fierce Bad Rabbit.
“Oh,” said Belinda. “Thank you.”
He remembered her dressed in the orphanage coveralls, just in, dusty and tired from a baseball game, lying on the reading-room floor with a Pooh book open before her.
“The Pooh book’s signed by the real Christopher Robin,” he said. “I found out he was an RAF officer at one of the bases in England. He said he usually didn’t do this sort of thing, that he was just another airman. I told him I wouldn’t tell anyone. I’d searched high and low to find a copy, and he knew that, though.”
“This other one’s got more of a story behind it. I was coming back near dusk, escorting some crippled B-17s. I looked up and saw two German night fighters coming in, probably setting up patrol, trying to catch some Lancasters before they went out over the Channel.”
“To make a long story short, I shot down both of them; they packed in near a small village. But I had run out of fuel and had to set down. Saw a pretty flat sheep pasture with a lake at the far end of it, and went in. When I climbed out of the cockpit, I saw a lady and a sheepdog standing at the edge of the field. She had a shotgun. When she got close enough to see the engines and the decals, she said, “Good shooting! Won’t you come in for a bite of supper and to use the telephone to call Fighter Command?” We could see the two ME-110s burning in the distance. ‘You’re the very famous Jetboy.’ she said, ‘We have followed your exploits in the Sawrey paper. I’m Mrs. Heelis.’ She held out her hand.”
“I shook it. ‘Mrs. William Heelis? And this is Sawrey?’
‘Yes,’ she said.”
“‘You’re Beatrix Potter!’ I said.”
“‘I suppose I am,’ she said.”
“Belinda, she was this stout old lady in a raggedy sweater and a plain old dress. But when she smiled, I swear, all of England lit up!”
Belinda opened the book. On the flyleaf was written
To Jetboy’s American Friend, Belinda,
from Mrs. William Heelis (“Beatrix Potter”)
12 April 1943
Jetboy drank the coffee Belinda made for him. “Where are your friends?” he asked.
“Well, he they should have been here by now. I was thinking of going down the hall to the phone and trying to call them. I can change, and we can sit around and talk about old times. I really can call.”
“No,” said Jetboy “Tell you what. I’ll call you later on in the week; we can get together some night when you’re not busy. That would be fun.”
“Sure would.” Jetboy got up to go.
“Thank you for the books, Bobby. They mean a lot to me, they really do.”
“It’s real good to see you again, Bee.”
Thirty Minutes Over Broadway!
“Nobody’s called me that since the orphanage. Call me real soon, will you?”
“Sure will.” He leaned down and kissed her again.
He walked to the stairs. As he was going down, a guy in a modified zoot suit-pegged pants, long coat, watch chain, bow tie the size of a coat hanger, hair slicked back, reeking of Brylcreem and Old Spice-went up the stairs two at a time, whistling “It Ain’t the Meat, It’s the Motion.”
Jetboy heard him knocking at Belinda’s door. Outside, it had begun to rain.
“Great. Just like in a movie,” said Jetboy.
The next night was quiet as a graveyard.
Then dogs all over the Pine Barrens started to bark. Cats screamed. Birds flew in panic from thousands of trees, circled, swooping this way and that in the dark night.
Static washed over every radio in the northeastern United States. New television sets flared out, volume doubling. People gathered around nine-inch Dumonts jumped back at the sudden noise and light, dazzled in their own living rooms and bars and sidewalks outside appliance stores all over the East Coast.
To those out in that hot August night it was even more spectacular. A thin line of light, high up, moved, brightened, still falling. Then it expanded, upping in brilliance, changed into a blue-green bolide, seemed to stop, then flew to a hundred falling sparks that slowly faded on the dark starlit sky. Some people said they saw another, smaller light a few minutes later. It seemed to hover, then sped off to the west, growing dimmer as it flew. The newspapers had been full of stories of the “ghost rockets” in Sweden all that summer. It was the silly season.
A few calls to the weather bureau or Army Air Force bases got the answer that it was probably a stray from the Delta Aquarid meteor shower.
Out in the Pine Barrens, somebody knew differently, though he wasn’t in the mood to communicate it to anyone.
Jetboy, dressed in a loose pair of pants, a shirt, and a brown aviator’s jacket, walked in through the doors of the Blackwell Printing Company. There was a bright red-and-blue sign above the door: Home of the Cosh Comics Company. He stopped at the receptionist’s desk.
“Robert Tomlin to see Mr. Farrell.”
The secretary, a thin blond job in glasses with swept-up rims that made it look like a bat was camping on her face, stared at him. “Mr. Farrell passed on in the winter of 1945. Were you in the service or something?”
“Something.”
“Would you like to speak to Mr. Lowboy? He has Mr. Farrell’s job now.”
“Whoever’s in charge of Jetboy Comics.”
The whole place began shaking as printing presses cranked up in the back of the building. On the walls of the office were garish comic-book covers, promising things only they could deliver.
“Robert Tomlin,” said the secretary to the intercom. “Scratch squawk never heard of him squich.”
“What was this about?” asked the secretary.
“Tell him Jetboy wants to see him.”
“Oh,” she said, looking at him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t recognize you.”
“Nobody ever does.”
Lowboy looked like a gnome with all the blood sucked out. He was as pale as Harry Langdon must have been, like a weed grown under a burlap bag.
“Jetboy!” He held out a hand like a bunch of grub worms. “We all thought you’d died until we saw the papers last week. You’re a real national hero, you know?”
“I don’t feel like one.”
“What can I do for you? Not that I’m not pleased to finally meet you. But you must be a busy man.”
“Well, first, I found out none of the licensing and royalty checks had been deposited in my account since I was reported Missing and Presumed Dead last summer.”
“What, really? The legal department must have put it in escrow or something until somebody came forward with a claim. I’ll get them right on it.”
“Well, I’d like the check now, before I leave,” said Jetboy. “Huh? I don’t know if they can do that. That sounds awfully abrupt.”
Jetboy stared at him.
“Okay, okay, let me call Accounting.” He yelled into the telephone.
“Oh,” said Jetboy. “A friend’s been collecting my copies. I checked the statement of ownership and circulation for the last two years. I know Jetboy Comics have been selling five hundred thousand copies an issue lately.”
Lowboy yelled into the phone some more. He put it down. “It’ll take ’em a little while. Anything else?”
“I don’t like what’s happening to the funny book,” said Jetboy.
“What’s not to like? It’s selling a half a million copies a monthl”
“For one thing, the plane’s getting to look more and more like a bullet. And the artists have swept back the wings, for Christ’s sakesl”
“This is the Atomic Age, kid. Boys nowadays don’t like a plane that looks like a red leg of lamb with coat hangers sticking out the front.”
“Well, it’s always looked like that. And another thing: Why’s the damned plane blue in the last three issues?”
“Not mel I think red’s fine. But Mr. Blackwell sent down a memo, said no more red except for blood. He’s a big Legionnaire.”
“Tell him the plane has to look right, and be the right color. Also, the combat reports were forwarded. When Farrell was sitting at your desk, the comic was about flying and combat, and cleaning up spy rings-real stuff. And there were never more than two ten-page Jetboy stories an issue.”
“When Farrell was at this desk, the book was only selling a quarter-million copies a month,” said Lowboy.
Robert stared at him again.
“I know the war’s over, and everybody wants a new house and eye-bulging excitement,” said Jetboy. “But look what I find in the last eighteen months .”
“I never fought anyone like The Undertaker, anyplace called The Mountain of Doom. And come on! The Red Skeleton? Mr. Maggot? Professor Blooteaux? What is this with all the skulls and tentacles? I mean, evil twins named Sturm and Drang Hohenzollern? The Arthropod Ape, a gorilla with six sets of elbows? Where do you get all this stuff?”
“It’s not me, it’s the writers. They’re a crazy bunch, always taking Benzedrine and stuff. Besides, it’s what the kids want!”
“What about the flying features, and the articles on real aviation heroes? I thought my contract called for at least two features an issue on real events and people?”
“We’ll have to look at it again. But I can tell you, kids don’t want that kind of stuff anymore. They want monsters, spaceships, stuff that’ll make ’em wet the bed. You remember? You were a kid once yourself!”
Jetboy picked up a pencil from the desk. “I was thirteen when the war started, fifteen when they bombed Pearl Harbor. I’ve been in combat for six years. Sometimes I don’t think I was ever a kid.”
Lowboy was quiet a moment.
“Tell you what you need to do,” he said. “You need to write up all the stuff you don’t like about the book and send it to us. I’ll have the legal department go over it, and we’ll try to do something, work things out. Of course, we print three issues ahead, so it’ll be Thanksgiving before the new stuff shows up. Or later.”
Jetboy sighed. “I understand.”
“I sure do want you happy, ’cause Jetboy’s my favorite comic. No, I really mean that. The others are just a job. My god, what a job: deadlines, working with drunks and worse, riding herd over printers-you can just imagine! But I like the work on Jetboy. It’s special.”
“Well, I’m glad.”
“Sure, sure. Lowboy drummed his fingers on the desk. “Wonder what’s taking them so long?”“
“Probably getting out the other set of ledgers,” said Jetboy.
“Hey, no! We’re square here!” Lowboy came to his feet. “Just kidding.”
“Oh. Say, the paper said you were, what, marooned on a desert island or something? Pretty tough?”
“Well, lonely. I got tired of catching and eating fish. Mostly it was boring, and I missed everything. I don’t mean missed, I mean missed out. I was there from April twentyninth of ‘45 until last month.”
“There were times when I thought I’d go nuts. I couldn’t believe it one morning when I looked up, and there was the U. S. S. Reluctant anchored less than a mile offshore. I fired off a flare, and they picked me up. It’s taken a month to get someplace to repair the plane, rest up, get home. I’m glad to be back.”
“I can imagine. Hey, lots of dangerous animals on the island? I mean, lions and tigers and stuff?”
Jetboy laughed. “It was less than a mile wide, and a mile and a quarter long. There were birds and ats and some lizards.”
“Lizards? Big lizards? Poisonous?”
“No. Small. I must have eaten half of them before I left. Got pretty good with a slingshot made out of an oxygen hose.”
“Huhl I bet you did!”
The door opened, and a tall guy with an ink-smudged shirt came in.
“That him?” asked Lowboy.
“I only seen him once, but it looks like him,” said the man. “Good enough for me!” said Lowboy.
“Not for me,” said the accountant. “Show me some ID and sign this release.”
Jetboy sighed and did. He looked at the amount on the check. It had far too few digits in front of the decimal. He folded it up and put it in his pocket.
“I’ll leave my address for the next check with your secretary. And I’ll send a letter with the objections this week.”
“Do that. It’s been a real pleasure meeting you. Let’s hope we have a long and prosperous business together.”
“Thanks, I guess,” said Jetboy. He and the accountant left. Lowboy sat back down in his swivel chair. He put his hands behind his head and stared at the bookcase across the room.
Then he rocketed forward, jerked up the phone, and dialed nine to get out. He called up the chief writer for Jetboy Comics.
A muzzy, hung-over voice answered on the twelfth ring. “Clean the shit out of your head, this is Lowboy. Picture this: fifty-two-page special, single-story issue. Ready? Jetboy on Dinosaur Island! Got that? I see lots of cavemen, a broad, a what-you-call-it-king rex. What? Yeah, yeah, a tyrannosaur. Maybe a buncha holdout Jap soldiers. You know. Yeah, maybe even samurai. When? Blown off course in A. D. 1100? Christ. Whatever. You know exactly what we need.”
“What’s this? Tuesday. You got till five P M. Thursday, okay? Quit bitchin’. It’s a hundred and a half fast bucksl See you then.”
He hung up. Then he called up an artist and told him what he wanted for the cover.
Ed and Fred were coming back from a delivery in the Pine Barrens.
They were driving an eight-yard dump truck. In the back until a few minutes ago had been six cubic yards of new-set concrete. Eight hours before, it had been five and a half yards of water, sand, gravel, and cement and a secret ingredient.
The secret ingredient had broken three of the Five Unbreakable Rules for carrying on a tax-free, unincorporated business in the state.
He had been taken by other businessmen to a wholesale construction equipment center, and been shown how a cement mixer works, up close and personal.
Not that Ed and Fred had anything to do with that. They’d been called an hour ago and been asked if they could drive a dump truck through the woods for a couple of grand.
It was dark out in the woods, not too many miles from the city. It didn’t look like they were within a hundred miles of a town over five-hundred population.
The headlights picked out ditches where everything from old airplanes to sulfuric-acid bottles lay in clogged heaps. Some of the dumpings were fresh. Smoke and fire played about a few. Others glowed without combustion. A pool of metal bubbled and popped as they ground by.
Then they were back into the deep pines again, jouncing from rut to rut.
“Hey!” yelled Ed. “Stop!”
Fred threw on the brakes, killing the engine. “Goddamn!” he said. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”
“Back therel I swear I saw a guy pushing a neon cat’s-eye marble the size of Cleveland!”
“I’m sure as hell not going back,” said Fred.
“Nab! Come on! You don’t see stuff like that every day.”
“Shit, Ed! Someday you’re gonna get us both killedl”
It wasn’t a marble. They didn’t need their flashlights to tell it wasn’t a magnetic mine. It was a rounded canister that glowed on its own, with swirling colors on it. It hid the man pushing it.
“It looks like a rolled-up neon armadillo,” said Fred, who’d been out west.
The man behind the thing blinked at them, unable to see past their flashlights. He was tattered and dirty, with a tobaccostained beard and wild, steel-wool hair.
They stepped closer.
“It’s mine!” he said to them, stepping in front of the thing, holding his arms out across it.
Thirty Minutes Over Broadway!
“Easy, old-timer,” said Ed. “What you got?”
“My ticket to easy street. You from the Air Corps?”
“Hell, no. Let’s look at this.”
The man picked up a rock. “Stay back! I found it where I found the plane crash. The Air Corps’ll pay plenty to get this atomic bomb back!”
“That doesn’t look like any atomic bomb I’ve ever seen,” said Fred. “Look at the writing on the side. It ain’t even English.”
“Course it’s not! It must be a secret weapon. That’s why they dressed it up so weird.”
“Who?”
“I told you more’n I meant to. Get outta my way.” Fred looked at the old geezer. “You’ve piqued my interest,” he said. “Tell me more.”
“Outta my way, boyl I killed a man over a can of lye hominy once!”
Fred reached in his jacket. He came out with a pistol with a muzzle that looked like a drainpipe.
“It crashed last night,” said the old man, eyes wild. “Woke me up. Lit up the whole sky. I looked for it all day today, figured the woods would be crawlin’ with Air Corps people and state troopers, but nobody came.”
“Found it just before dark tonight. Tore all hell up, it did. Knocked the wings completely off the thing when it crashed. All these weird-dressed people all scattered around. Women too.” He lowered his head a minute, shame on his face. “Anyway, they was all dead. Must have been a jet plane, didn’t find no propellers or nothing. And this here atomic bomb was just lying there in the wreck. I figured the Air Corps would ay real good to get it back. Friend of mine found a weather balloon once and they gave him a dollar and a quarter. I figure this is about a million times as important as that!”
Fred laughed. “A buck twenty-five, huh? I’ll give you ten dollars for it.”
“I can get a million!”
Fred pulled the hammer back on the revolver. “Fifty,” said the old man.
“Twenty.”
“It ain’t fair. But I’ll take it.”
“What are you going to do with that?” asked Ed. “Take it to Dr. Tod,” said Fred. “He’ll know what to do with it. He’s the scientific type.”
“What if it is an A-bomb?”
“Well, I don’t think A-bombs have spray nozzles on them. And the old man was right. The woods would have been crawling with Air Force people if they’d lost an atomic bomb.”
“Hell, only five of them have ever been exploded. They can’t have more than a dozen, and you better believe they know where every one of them is, all the time.”
“Well, it ain’t a mine,” said Ed. “What do you think it is?”
“I don’t care. If it’s worth money, Doctor Tod’ll split with us. He’s a square guy.”
“For a crook,” said Ed.
They laughed and laughed, and the thing rattled around in the back of the dump truck.
The MPs brought the red-haired man into his office and introduced them.
“Please have a seat, Doctor,” said A. E. He lit his pipe. The man seemed ill at ease, as he should have been after two days of questioning by Army Intelligence.
“They have told me what happened at White Sands, and that you won’t talk to anyone but me,” said A. E. “I understand they used sodium pentathol on you, and that it had no effect?”
“It made me drunk,” said the man, whose hair in this light seemed orange and yellow.
“But you didn’t talk?”
“I said things, but not what they wanted to hear.”
“Very unusual.”
“Blood chemistry.”
A. E. sighed. He looked out the window of the Princeton office. “Very well, then. I will listen to your story. I am not saying I will believe it, but I will listen.”
“All right,” said the man, taking a deep breath. “Here goes. “
He began to talk, slowly at first, forming his words carefully, gaining confidence as he spoke. As he began to talk faster, his accent crept back in, one A. E. could not ace, something like a Fiji Islander who had learned English from a Swede. A. E. refilled his pipe twice, then left it unlit after filling it the third time. He sat slightly forward, occasionally nodding, his gray hair an aureole in the afternoon light.
The man finished.
A. E. remembered his pipe, found a match, lit it. He put his hands behind his head. There was a small hole in his sweater near the left elbow.
“They’ll never believe any of that,” he said.
“I don’t care, as long as they do something!” said the man. “As long as I get it back.”
A. E. looked at him. “If they did believe you, the implications of all this would overshadow the reason you’re here. The fact that you are here, if you follow my meaning.”
“Well, what can we do? If my ship were still operable, I’d be looking myself. I did the next best thing-landed somewhere that would be sure to attract attention, asked to speak to you. Perhaps other scientists, research institutes ...”
A. E. laughed. “Forgive me. You don’t realize how things are done here. We will need the military. We will have the military and the government whether we want them or not, so we might as well have them on the best possible terms, ours, from the first. The problem is that we have to think of something that is plausible to them, yet will still mobilize them in the search.”
“I’ll talk to the Army people about you, then make some calls to friends of mine. We have just finished a large global war, and many things had a way of escaping notice, or being lost in the shuffle. Perhaps we can work something from there.”
“The only thing is, we had better do all this from a phone booth. The MPs will be along, so I will have to talk quietly. Tell me,” he said, picking up his hat from the corner of a cluttered bookcase, “do you like ice cream?”
“Lactose and sugar solids congealed in a mixture kept just below the freezing point?” asked the man.
“I assure you,” said A. E., “it is better than it sounds, and quite refreshing.” Arm in arm, they went out the office door.
Jetboy patted the scarred side of his plane. He stood in Hangar 23. Linc came out of his office, wiping his hands on a greasy rag.
“Hey, how’d it go?” he asked.
“Great. They want the book of memoirs. Going to be their big Spring book, if I get it in on time, or so they say.”
“You still bound and determined to sell the plane?” asked the mechanic. “Sure hate to see her go.”
“Well, that part of my life’s over. I feel like if I never fly again, even as an airline passenger, it’ll be too soon.”
“What do you want me to do?”
Jetboy looked at the plane.
“Tell you what. Put on the high-altitude wing extensions and the drop tanks. It looks bigger and shinier that way. Somebody from a museum will probably buy it, is what I figure-I’m offering it to museums first. If that doesn’t work, I’ll take out ads in the papers. We’ll take the guns out later, if some private citizen buys it. Check everything to see it’s tight. Shouldn’t have shaken much on the hop from San Fr an, and they did a pretty good overhaul at Hickam Field. Whatever you think it needs.”
“Sure thing.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow, unless something can’t wait.”
HISTORICAL AIRCRAFT FOR SALE: Jetboy’s twin-engine jet. 2 x 1200 lb thrust engines, speed 600 mph at 25,000 ft, range 650 miles, 1000 w/drop tanks (tanks and wing exts. inc.) length 31 ft, w/s 33 ft (49 w exts. ) Reasonable offers accepted. Must see to appreciate. On view at Hangar 23, Bonham’s Flying Service, Shantak, New Jersey.
Jetboy stood in front of the bookstore window, looking at the pyramids of new titles there. You could tell paper rationing was off. Next year, his book would be one of them. Not just a comic book, but the story of his part in the war. He hoped it would be good enough so that it wouldn’t be lost in the clutter. Seems like, in the words of someone, every goddamn barber and shoeshine boy who was drafted had written a book about how he won the war.
There were six books of war memoirs in one window, by everyone from a lieutenant colonel to a major general (maybe those PFC barbers didn’t write that many books?).
Maybe they wrote some of the two dozen war novels that covered another window of the display.
There were two books near the door, piles of them in a window by themselves, runaway best-sellers, that weren’t war novels or memoirs. One was called The Grass-Hopper Lies Heavy by someone named Abendsen (Hawthorne Abendsen, obviously a pen name). The other was a thick book called Growing Flowers by Candlelight in Hotel Rooms by someone so self-effacing she called herself “Mrs. Charles Fine Adams.” It must be a book of unreadable poems that the public, in its craziness, had taken up. There was no accounting for taste.
Jetboy put his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket and walked to the nearest movie show.
Tod watched the smoke rising from the lab and waited for the phone to ring. People ran back and forth to the building a half-mile away.
There had been nothing for two weeks. Thorkeld, the scientist he’d hired to run the tests, had reported each day. The stuff didn’t work on monkeys, dogs, rats, lizards, snakes, frogs, insects, or even on fish in suspension in water. Dr. Thorkeld was beginning to think Tod’s men had paid twenty dollars for an inert gas in a fancy container.
A few moments ago there had been an explosion. Now he waited.
The phone rang.
“Tod—oh, god, this is Jones at the lab, its—” Static washed over the line. “Oh, sweet Jesus! Thorkeld’s—they’re all—” There was thumping near the phone receiver on the other end. “Oh, my ...”
“Calm down,” said Tod. “Is everyone outside the lab safe?”
“Yeah, yeah. The ... oooh.” The sound of vomiting came over the phone.
Tod waited.
“Sorry, Dr. Tod. The lab’s still sealed off: The fire’s—it’s a small one on the grass outside. Somebody dropped a butt.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“I was outside for a smoke. Somebody in there must have messed up, dropped something. I-I don t know. Its-they’re most of them dead, I think. I hope. I don’t know. Something’s—wait, wait. There’s someone still moving in the office, I can see from here, there’s—”
There was a click of someone picking up a receiver. The volume on the line dropped.
“Tog, Tog,” said a voice, an approximation of a voice. “Who’s there?”
“Torgk—”
“Thorkeld?”
“Guh. Hep. Hep. Guh.”
There was a sound like a sack full of squids being dumped on a corrugated roof. “Hep.” Then came the sound of jelly being emptied into a cluttered desk drawer.
There was a gunshot, and the receiver bounced off the desk.
“He—he shot-it-himself,” said Jones. “I’ll be right out,” said Tod.
After the cleanup, Tod stood in his office again. It had not been pretty. The canister was still intact. Whatever the accident had been had been with a sample. The other animals were okay. It was only the people. Three were dead outright. One, Thorkeld, had killed himself. Two others he and Jones had had to kill. A seventh person was missing, but had not come out any of the doors or windows.
Tod sat down in his chair and thought a long, long time. Then he reached over and pushed the button on his desk. “Yeah, Doctor?” asked Filmore, stepping into the room with a batch of telegrams and brokerage orders under his arm. Dr. Tod opened the desk safe and began counting out bills. “Filmore. I’d like you to get down to Port Elizabeth, North Carolina, and buy me up five type B—limp balloons. Tell them I’m a car salesman. Arrange for one million cubic feet of helium to be delivered to the south Pennsy warehouse. Break out the hardware and give me a complete list of what we have-anything we need, we can get surplus. Get ahold of Captain Mack, see if he still has that cargo ship. We’ll need new passports. Get me Cholley Sacks; I’ll need a contact in Switzerland. I’ll need a pilot with a lighter-than-air license. Some diving suits and oxygen. Shot ballast, couple of tons. A bombsight. Nautical charts. And bring me a cup of coffee.”
“Fred has a lighter-than-air pilot’s license,” said Filmore. “Those two never cease to amaze me,” said Dr. Tod.
“I thought we’d pulled our last caper, boss.”
“Filmore,” he said, and looked at the man he’d been friends with for twenty years, “Filmore, some capers you have to pull, whether you want to or not.”
“Dewey was an Admiral at Manila Bay, Dewey was a candidate just the other day Dewey were her eyes when she said I do; Do we love each other? I should say we dol”
The kids in the courtyard of the apartment jumped rope. They’d started the second they got home from school.
At first it bothered Jetboy. He got up from the typewriter and went to the window. Instead of yelling, he watched. The writing wasn’t going well, anyway. What had seemed like just the facts when he’d told them to the G-2 boys during the war looked like bragging on paper, once the words were down:
Three planes, two ME-109s and a TA-152, came out of the clouds at the crippled B-24. It had suffered heavy flak damage. Two props were feathered and the top turret was missing.
One of the 109s went into a shallow dive, probably going into a snap roll to fire up at the underside of the bomber.
I ease my plane in a long turn and fired a deflection shot while about 700 yards away and closing. I saw three hits, then the 109 disintegrated.
The TA-152 had seen me and dived to intercept. As the 109 blew up, I throttled back and hit my air brakes. The 152 flashed by less than 50 yards away. I saw the surprised look on the pilot’s face. I fired one burst as he flashed by with my 20mms. Everything from his canopy back flew apart in a shower.
I pulled up. The last 109 was behind the Liberator. He was firing with his machine guns and cannon. He’d taken out the tail gunner, and the belly turret couldn’t get enough elevation. The bomber pilot was wigwagging the tail so the waist gunners could get a shot, but only the left waist gun was working.
I was more than a mile away, but had turned above and to the right. I put the nose down and fired one round with the 75mm just before the gunsight ashed across the 109.
The whole middle of the fighter disappeared—I could see France through it. The only image I have is that I was looking down on top of an open umbrella and somebody folded it suddenly. The fighter looked like Christmas-tree tinsel as it fell.
Then the few gunners left on the B-24 opened up on me, not recognizing my plane. I flashed my IFF code, but their receiver must have have been out.
There were two German parachutes far below. The pilots of the first two fighters must have gotten out. I went back to my base.
When they ran maintenance, they found one of my 75mm rounds missing, and only twelve 20mm shells. I’d shot down three enemy planes.
I later learned the B-24 had crashed in the Channel and there were no survivors.
Who needs this stuff? Jetboy thought. The war’s over. Does anybody really want to read The Jet-Propelled Boy when it’s published? Does anybody except morons even want to read Jetboy Comics anymore?
I don’t even think I’m needed. What can I do now? Fight crime? I can see strafing getaway cars full of bank robbers. That would be a real fair fight. Barnstorming? That went out with Hoover, and besides, I don’t want to fly again. This year more people will fly on airliners on vacation than have been in the air all together in the last forty-three years, mail pilots, cropdusters, and wars included.
What can I do? Break up a trust? Prosecute wartime profiteers? There’s a real dead-end job for you. Punish mean old men who are robbing the state blind running orphanages and starving and beating the kids? You don’t need me for that, you need Spanky and Alfalfa and Buckwheat.
“A tisket, a tasket, Hitler’s in a casket. Eenie-meenie-Mussolini, Six feet underground!” said the kids outside, now doing double-dutch, two ropes going opposite directions. Kids have too much energy, he thought. They hot-peppered a while, then slowed again.
“Down in the dungeon, twelve feet deep,
Where old Hitler lies asleep.
German boys, they tickle his feet,
Down in the dungeon, twelve feet deep!”
Jetboy turned away from the window. Maybe what I need is to go to the movies again.
Since his meeting with Belinda, he’d done nothing much but read, write, and go see movies. Before coming home, the last two movies he’d seen, in a crowded post auditorium in France in late ‘44, had been a cheesy double bill. That Nazty Nuisance, a United Artists film made in ‘43, with Bobby Watson as Hitler, and one of Jetboy’s favorite character actors, Frank Faylen, had been the better of the two. The other was a PRC hunk of junk, jive junction, starring Dickie Moore, about a bunch of hepcats jitterbugging at the malt shop.
The first thing he’d done after getting his money and finding an apartment, was to find the nearest movie theater, where he’d seen Murder, He Says about a house full of hillbilly weird people, with Fred McMurray and Marjorie Main, and an actor named Porter Hall playing identical twin-brother murderers named Bert and Mert. “Which one’s which?” asks McMurray, and Marjorie Main picked up an axe handle and hit one of them in the middle of the back, where he collapsed from the waist up in a distorted caricature of humanity, but stayed on his feet. “That there’s Mert,” says Main, throwing the axe handle on the woodpile. “He’s got a trick back.” There was radium and homicide galore, and Jetboy thought it was the funniest movie he had ever seen.
Since then he’d gone to the movies every day, sometimes going to three theaters and seeing from six to eight movies a day. He was adjusting to civilian life, like most soldiers and sailors had, by seeing films.
He had seen Lost Weekend with Ray Milland, and Frank Faylen again, this time as a male nurse in a psycho ward; A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; The Thin Man Goes Home, with William Powell at his alcoholic best; Bring on the Girls; It’s in the Bag with Fred Allen; Incendiary Blonde; The Story of G.I. Joe (Jetboy had been the subject of one of Pyle’s columns back in ‘43); a horror film called Isle of the Dead with Boris Karloff; a new kind of Italian movie called Open City at an art house; and The Postman Always Rings Twice.
And there were other films, Monogram and PRC and Republic westerns and crime movies, pictures he’d seen in twenty-four-hour nabes, but had forgotten about ten minutes after leaving the theaters. By the lack of star names and the 4-F look of the leading men, they’d been the bottom halves of double bills made during the war, all clocking in at exactly fiftynine minutes running time.
Jetboy sighed. So many movies, so much of everything he’d missed during the war. He’d even missed V-E and V-J Days, stuck on that island, before he and his plane had been found by the crew of the U.S. S. Reluctant. The way the guys on the Reluctant talked, you’d have thought they missed most of the war and the movies, too.
He was looking forward to a lot of films this fall, and to seeing them when they came out, the way everybody else did, the way he’d used to do at the orphanage.
Jetboy sat back down at the typewriter. If I don’t work, I’ll never get this book done. I’ll go to the movies tonight.
He began to type up all the exciting things he’d done on July 12, 1944.
In the courtyard, women were calling kids in for supper as their fathers came home from work. A topple of kids were still jumping rope out there, their voices thin in the afternoon air:
“Hitler, Hitler looks like this,
Mussolini bows like this,
Sonja Henie skates like this,
And Betty Grable misses like this!”
The Haberdasher in the White House was having a pissass of a day.
It had started with a phone call a little after six A. M.-the Nervous Nellies over at the State Department had some new hot rumors from Turkey. The Soviets were moving all their men around on that nation’s edges.
“Well,” the Plain-speaking Man from Missouri said, “call me when they cross the goddamn border and not until.” Now this.
Independence’s First Citizen watched the door close. The last thing he saw was Einstein’s heel disappearing. It needed half-soling.
He sat back in his chair, lifted his thick glasses off his nose, rubbed vigorously. Then the President put his fingers together in a steeple, his elbows resting on his desk. He looked at the small model plow on the front of his desk (it had replaced the model of the M-1 Garand that had sat there from the day he took office until V-J Day). There were three books on the right corner of the desk-a Bible, a thumbed thesaurus, and a pictorial history of the United States. There were three buttons on his desk for calling various secretaries, but he never used them.
Now that peace has come, I’m fighting to keep ten wars from breaking out in twenty places, there’s strikes looming in every industry and that’s a damn shame, people are hollering for more cars and refrigerators, and they’re as tired as I am of war and war’s alarm.
And I have to kick the hornet’s nest again, get everybody out looking for a damn germ bomb that might go off and infect the whole U. S. and kill half the people or more.
We’d have been better off still fighting with sticks and rocks.
The sooner I get my ass back to 219 North Delaware in Independence, the better off me and this whole damn country will be.
Unless that son of a bitch Dewey wants to run for President again. Like Lincoln said, I’d rather swallow a deerantler rocking chair than let that bastard be President.
That’s the only thing that’ll keep me here when I’ve finished out Mr. Roosevelt’s term.
Sooner I get this snipe hunt under way, the faster we can put World War Number Two behind us.
He picked up the phone.
“Get me the Chiefs of Staff,” he said. “Major Truman speaking.”
“Major, this is the other Truman, your boss. Put General Ostrander on the horn, will you?”
While he was waiting he looked out past the window fan (he hated air-conditioning) into the trees. The sky was the kind of blue that quickly turns to brass in the summer.
He looked at the clock on the wall: 10:23 A.M., eastern daylight time. What a day. What a year. What a century. “General Ostrander here, sir.”
“General, we just had another bale of hay dropped on us ...”
A couple of weeks later, the note came:
Deposit 20 Million Dollars account # 43Z21, Credite Suisse, Berne, by 2300Z 14 Sept or lose a major city. You know of this weapon; your people have been searching for it. I have it; I will use half of it on the first city. The price goes to 30 Million Dollars to keep me from using it a second time. You have my word it will not be used if the first payment is made and instructions will be sent on where the weapon can be recovered.
The Plain-speaking Man from Missouri picked up the phone.
“Kick everything up to the top notch,” he said. “Call the cabinet, get the joint Chiefs together. And Ostrander ...”
“Yessir?”
“Better get ahold of that kid flier, what’s his name?...”
“You mean Jetboy, sir? He’s not on active duty anymore.”
“The hell he’s not. He is now!”
“Yessir.”
It was 2:24 P .M. on the Tuesday of September 15, 1946, when the thing first showed up on the radar screens.
At 2:31 it was still moving slowly toward the city at an altitude of nearly sixty thousand feet.
At 2:41 they blew the first of the air-raid sirens, which had not been used in New York City since April of 1945 in a blackout drill.
By 2:48 there was panic.
Someone in the CD office hit the wrong set of switches. The power went off everywhere except hospitals and police and fire stations. Subways stopped. Things shut down, and traffic lights quit working. Half the emergency equipment, which hadn’t been checked since the end of the war, failed to come up.
The streets were jammed with people. Cops rushed out to try to direct traffic. Some of the policemen panicked when they were issued gas masks. Telephones jammed. Fistfights broke out at intersections, people were trampled at subway exits and on the stairs of skyscrapers.
The bridges clogged up.
Conflicting orders came down. Get the people into bomb shelters. No, no, evacuate the island. Two cops on the same corner yelled conflicting orders at the crowds. Mostly people just stood around and looked.
Their attention was soon drawn to something in the southeastern sky. It was small and shiny.
Flak began to bloom ineffectually two miles below it. On and on it came.
When the guns over in Jersey began to fire, the panic really started.
It was 3 PM.
“It’s really quite simple,” said Dr. Tod. He looked down toward Manhattan, which lay before him like a treasure trove. He turned to Filmore and held up a long cylindrical device that looked like the offspring of a pipe bomb and a combination lock. “Should anything happen to me, simply insert this fuse in the holder in the explosives”—he indicated the taped-over portion with the opening in the canister covered with the Sanskrit-like lettering—“twist it to the number five hundred, then pull this lever.” He indicated the bomb-bay door latch. “It’ll fall of its own weight, and I was wrong about the bombsights. Pinpoint accuracy is not our goal.”
He looked at Filmore through the grill of his diving helmet. They all wore diving suits with hoses leading back to a central oxygen supply.
“Make sure, of course, everyone’s suited with their helmet on. Your blood would boil in this thin air. And these suits only have to hold pressure for the few seconds the bomb door’s open.”
“I don’t expect no trouble, boss.”
“Neither do I. After we bomb New York City, we go out to our rendezvous with the ship, rip the ballast, set down, and head for Europe. They’ll be only too glad to pay us the money then. They have no way of knowing well be using the whole germ weapon. Seven million or so dead should quite convince them we mean business.”
“Look at that,” said Ed, from the copilot’s seat. “Way down there. Flak(“
“What’s our altitude?” asked Dr. Tod.
“Right on fifty-eight thousand feet,” said Fred. “Target?”
Ed sighted, checked a map. “Sixteen miles straight ahead. You sure called those wind currents just right, Dr. Tod.”
They had sent him to an airfield outside Washington, D.C., to wait. That way he would be within range of most of the major East Coast cities.
He had spent part of the day reading, part asleep, and the rest of it talking over the war with some of the other pilots. Most of them, though, were too new to have fought in any but the closing days of the war.
Most of them were jet pilots, like him, who had done their training in P-59 Airacomets or P-80 Shooting Stars. A few of those in the ready room belonged to a P-51 prop-job squadron. There was a bit of tension between the blowtorch jockeys and the piston eaters.
All of them were a new breed, though. Already there was talk Truman was going to make the Army Air Force into a separate branch, just the Air Force, within the next year. Jetboy felt, at nineteen, that time had passed him by.
“They’re working on something,” said one of the pilots, “that’ll go through the sonic wall. Bell’s behind it.”
“A friend of mine out at Muroc says wait till they get the Flying Wing in operation. They’re already working on an alljet version of it. A bomber that can go thirteen thousand miles at five hundred per, carries a crew of thirteen, bunk beds for seven, can stay up for a day and a half!” said another. “Anybody know anything about this alert?” asked a very young, nervous guy with second-looie bars. “The Russians up to something?”
“I heard we were going to Greece,” said someone. “Ouzo for me, gallons of it.”
“More like Czech potato-peel vodka. We’ll be lucky if we see Christmas.”
Jetboy realized he missed ready-room banter more than he had thought.
The intercom hissed on and a klaxon began to wail. Jetboy looked at his watch. It was 2:25 B M.
He realized he missed something more than Air Corps badinage. That was flying. Now it all came back to him. When he had flown down to Washington the night before it had been just a routine hop.
Now was different. It was like wartime again. He had a vector. He had a target. He had a mission.
He also had on an experimental Navy T-2 pressure suit. It was a girdle manufacturer’s dream, all rubber and laces, pressure bottles, and a real space helmet, like out of Planet Comics, over his head. They had fitted him for it the night before, when they saw his high-altitude wings and drop tanks on the plane.
“Wed better tailor this down for you,” the flight sergeant had said.
“I’ve got a pressurized cabin,” said Jetboy.
“Well, in case they need you, and in case something goes wrong, then.”
The suit was still too tight, and it wasn’t pressurized yet. The arms were built for a gorilla, and the chest for a chimpanzee. “You’ll appreciate the extra room if that thing ever inflates in an emergency,” said the sergeant.
“You’re the boss,” said Jetboy.
They’d even painted the torso white and the legs red to match his outfit. His blue helmet and goggles showed through the clear plastic bubble.
As he climbed with the rest of the squadron, he was glad now that he had the thing. His mission was to accompany the flight of P-80s in, and to engage only if needed. He had never exactly been a team player.
The sky ahead was blue as the background curtain in Bronzino’s Venus, Cupid, FoUy and Time, with a two-fifths cloud to the north. The sun stood over his left shoulder. The squadron angled up. He wigwagged the wings. They spread out in a staggered box and cleared their guns.
Chunder chunder chunder chunder went his 20mm cannons.
Tracers arced out ahead from the six .50 cals on each P-80. They left the prop planes far behind and pointed their noses toward Manhattan.
They looked like a bunch of angry bees circling under a hawk.
The sky was filled with jets and prop fighters climbing like the wall clouds of a hurricane.
Above was a lumpy object that hung and moved slowly on toward the city. Where the eye of the hurricane would be was a torrent of flak, thicker than Jetboy had ever seen over Europe or Japan.
It was bursting far too low, only at the level of the highest fighters.
Fighter Control called them. “Clark Gable Command to all squadrons. Target at five five zero ... repeat, five five zero angels. Moving ENE at two five knots. Flak unable to reach.”
“Call it off,” said the squadron leader. “Well try to fly high enough for deflection shooting. Squadron Hodiak, follow me.” Jetboy looked up into the high blue above. The object continued its slow track.
“What’s it got?” he asked Clark Gable Command. “Command to Jetboy. Some type of bomb is what we’ve been told. It has to be a lighter-than-air craft of at least five hundred thousand cubic feet to reach that altitude. Over.”
“I’m beginning a climb. If the other planes can’t reach it, call them off, too.”
There was silence on the radio, then, “Roger.”
As the P-80s glinted like silver crucifixes above him, he eased the nose up.
“Come on, baby,” he said. “Let’s do some flying.”
The Shooting Stars began to fall away, sideslipping in the thin air. Jetboy could hear only the sound of his own pressurebreathing in his ears, and the high thin whine of his engines. “Come on, girl,” he said. “You can make itl”
The thing above him had resolved itself into a bastard aircraft: made of half a dozen blimps, with a gondola below it. The gondola looked as if it had once been a PT boat shell. That was all he could see. Beyond it, the air was purple and cold. Next stop, outer space.
The last of the P-80s slid sideways on the blue stairs of the sky. A few had made desultory firing runs, some snap-rolling as fighters used to do underneath bombers in the war. They fired as they nosed up. All their tracers fell away under the balloons. One of the P-80s fought for control, dropping two miles before leveling out.
Jetboy’s plane protested, whining. It was hard to control. He eased the nose up again, had to fight it.
“Get everybody out of the way,” he said to Clark Gable Command.
“Here’s where we give you some fighting room,” he said to his plane. He blew the drop tanks. They fell away like bombs behind him. He pushed his cannon button. Chunder chunder chunder chunder they went. Then again and again.
His tracers arced toward the target, then they too fell away. He fired four more bursts until his cannon ran dry. Then he cleaned out the twin fifties in the tail, but it didn’t take long for all one hundred rounds to be spent.
He nosed over and went into a shallow dive, like a salmon sounding to throw a hook, gaining speed. A minute into the run he nosed up, putting the JB-1 into a long circling climb. “Feels better, huh?” he asked.
The engines bit into the air. The plane, relieved of the weight, lurched up and ahead.
Below him was Manhattan with its seven million people. They must be watching down there, knowing these might be the last things they ever saw. Maybe this is what living in the Atomic Age would be like, always be looking up and thinking, is this it?
Jetboy reached down with one of his boots and slammed a lever over. A 75mm cannon shell slid into the breech. He put his hand on the autoload bar, and pulled back a little more on the control wheel.
The red jet cut the air like a razor.
He was closer now, closer than the others had gotten, and still not close enough. He only had five rounds to do the job. The jet climbed, beginning to stagger in the thin air, as if it were some red animal clawing its way up a long blue tapestry that slipped a little each time the animal lurched.
He pointed the nose up. Everything seemed frozen, waiting.
A long thin line of machine-gun tracers reached out from the gondola for him like a lover.
He began to fire his cannon.
From the statement of Patrolman Francis V (“Francis the Talking Cop”) O’Hooey, Sept. 15, 1946, 6:45 P M.
We was watching from the street over at Sixth Avenue, trying to get people from shoving each other in a panic. Then they calmed down as they was watching the dogfights and stuff up above.
Some birdwatcher had this pair of binocs, so I confiscated ’em. I watched pretty much the whole thing. Them jets wasn’t having no luck, and the antiaircraft from over in the Bowery wasn’t doing no good either. I still say the Army oughta be sued ’cause them Air Defense guys got so panicky they forgot to set the timers on them shells and I heard that some of them came down in the Bronx and blew up a whole block of apartments.
Anyway, this red plane, that is, Jetboy’s plane, was climbing up and he fired all his bullets, I thought, without doing any damage to the balloon thing.
I was out on the street, and this fire truck pulls up with its sirens on, and the whole precinct and auxiliaries were on it, and the lieutenant was yelling for me to climb on, we’d been assigned to the west side to take care of a traffic smash-up and a riot.
So I jump on the truck, and I try to keep my eyes on what’s happening up in the skies.
The riot was pretty much over. The air-raid sirens was still wailing, but everybody was just standing around gawking at what was happening up there.
The lieutenant yells to at least get the people in the buildings. I pushed a few in some doors, then I took another gander in the field glasses.
“I’ll be damned if Jetboy hasn’t shot up some of the balloons (I hear he used his howitzer on ’em) and the thing looks bigger-it’s dropping some. But he’s out of ammo and not as high as the thing is and he starts circlin’.”
I forgot to say, all the time this blimp thing is got so many machine guns going it looks like a Fourth of July sparkler, and Jetboy’s plane’s taking these hits all the time.
Then he just takes his plane around and comes right back and crashes right into the what-you-call-it-the gondola, that’s it, on the blimps. They just sort of merged together. He must have been going awful slow by then, like stalling, and the plane just sort of mashed into the side of the thing.
And the blimp deal looked like it was coming down a little, not a lot, just some. Then the lieutenant took the glasses away from me, and I shaded my eyes and watched as best I could.
There was this flare of light. I thought the whole thing had blown up at first, and I ducked up under a car. But when I looked up the blimps was still there.
“Look out! Get inside!” yelled the lieutenant. Everybody had another panic then, and was jumping under cars and around stuff and through windows. It looked like a regular Three Stooges for a minute or two.
A few minutes later, it rained red airplane parts all over the streets, and a bunch on the Hudson Terminal ...
There was steam and fire all around. The cockpit cracked like an egg, and the wings folded up like a fan. Jetboy jerked as the capstans in the pressure suit inflated. He was curved into a circle, and must have looked like a frightened tomcat.
The gondola walls had parted like a curtain where the fighter’s wings crumpled into it. A wave of frost formed over the shattered cockpit as oxygen blew out of the gondola.
Jetboy tore his hoses loose. His bailout bottle had five minutes of air in it. He grappled with the nose of the plane, like fighting against iron bands on his arms and legs. All you were supposed to be able to do in these suits was eject and pull the D-ring on your parachute.
The plane lurched like a freight elevator with a broken cable. Jetboy grabbed a radar antenna with one gloved hand, felt it snap away from the broken nose of the plane. He grabbed another.
The city was twelve miles below him, the buildings making the island look like a faraway porcupine. The left engine of his plane, crumpled and spewing fuel, tore loose and flew under the gondola. He watched it grow smaller.
The air was purple as a plum-the skin of the blimps brut as fire in the sunlight, and the sides of the gondola bent an torn like cheap cardboard.
The whole thing shuddered like a whale.
Somebody flew by over Jetboy’s head through the hole in the metal, trailing hoses like the arms of an octopus. Debris followed through the air in the explosive decompression. The jet sagged.
Jetboy thrust his hand into the torn side of the gondola, found a strut.
He felt his parachute harness catch on the radar array. The plane twisted. He felt its weight.
He jerked his harness snap. His parachute packs were ripped away from him, tearing at his back and crotch.
His plane bent in the middle like a snake with a broken back, then dropped away, the wings coming up and touching above the shattered cockpit as if it were a dove trying to beat its pinions. Then it twisted sideways, falling to pieces.
Below it was the dot of the man who had fallen out of the gondola, spinning like a yard sprinkler toward the bright city below.
Jetboy saw the plane fall away beneath his feet. He hung in space twelve miles up by one hand.
He gripped his right wrist with his left hand, chinned himself up until he got a foot through the side, then punched his way in.
There were two people left inside. One was at the controls, the other stood in the center behind a large round thing. He was pushing a cylinder into a slot in it. There was a shattered machine-gun turret on one side of the gondola.
Jetboy reached for the service .38 strapped across his chest. It was agony reaching for it, agony trying to run toward the guy with the fuse.
Thewore diving suits. The suits were inflated. They looked like ten or twelve beach balls stuffed into suits of long underwear. They were moving as slowly as he was.
Jetboy’s hands closed in a claw over the handle of the .38. He jerked it from its holster.
It flew out of his hand, bounced of the ceiling, and went out through the hole he had come in.
The guy at the controls got off one shot at him. He dived toward the other man, the one with the fuse.
His hand clamped on the diving-suited wrist of the other just as the man pushed the cylindrical fuse into the side of the round canister. Jetboy saw that the whole device sat on a hinged doorplate.
The man had only half a face-Jetboy saw smooth metal on one side through the grid-plated diving helmet.
The man twisted the fuse with both hands.
Through the torn ceiling of the pilothouse, Jetboy saw another blimp begin to deflate. There was a falling sensation. They were dropping toward the city.
Jetboy gripped the fuse with both hands. Their helmets clanged together as the ship lurched.
The guy at the controls was putting on a parachute harness and heading toward the rent in the wall.
Another shudder threw Jetboy and the man with the fuse together. The guy reached for the door lever behind him as best he could in the bulky suit.
Jetboy grabbed his hands and pulled him back.
They slammed together, draped over the canister, their hands entangled on each other’s suits and the fuse to the bomb. The man tried again to reach the lever. Jetboy pulled him away. The canister rolled like a giant beach ball as the gondola listed.
He looked directly into the eye of the man in the diving suit. The man used his feet to push the canister back over the bomb door. His hand went for the lever again.
Jetboy gave the fuse a half-twist the other way.
The man in the diving suit reached behind him. He came up with a .45 automatic. He jerked a heavy gloved hand away from the fuse, worked the slide. Jetboy saw the muzzle swing at him.
“Die, Jetboyl Diel” said the man. He pulled the trigger four times.
Statement of Patrolman Francis V O’Hooey, Sept. 15, 1946, 6:45 PM. (continued).
So when the pieces of metal quit falling, we all ran out and looked up.
I saw the white dot below the blimp thing. I grabbed the binocs away from the lieutenant.
Sure enough, it was a parachute. I hoped it was.
Jetboy had bailed out when his plane crashed into the thing.
I don’t know much about such stuff, but I do know that you don’t open a parachute that high up or you get in serious trouble.
Then, while I was watching, the blimps and stuff all blew up, all at once. Like they was there, then there was this explosion, and there was only smoke and stuff way up in the air.
Thepeople all around started cheering. The kid had done it he’d blown the thing up before it could drop the A-bomb on Manhattan Island.
Then the lieutenant said to get in the truck, we’d try to get the kid.
We jumped in and tried to figure out where he was gonna land. Everywhere we passed, people was standing in the middle of the car wrecks and fires and stuff, looking up and cheering the parachute.
I noticed the big smudge in the air after the explosion, when we’d been driving around for ten minutes. Them other jets that had been with Jetboy was back, flying all around trough the air, and some Mustangs and Thunderjugs, too. It was like a regular air show up there. Somehow we got out near the Bridge before anybody else did. Good thing, because when we got to the water, we saw this guy pile right in about twenty feet from shore. Went down like a rock. He was wearing this diving-suit thing, and we swam out and I grabbed part of the parachute and a fireman grabbed some of the hoses and we hauled him out onto shore.
Well, it wasn’t Jetboy, it was the one we got the make on as Edward “Smooth Eddy” Shiloh, a real small-time operator.
And he was in bad shape, too. We got a wrench off the fire truck and popped his helmet, and he was purple as a turnip in there. It had taken him twenty-seven minutes to get to the ground. He’d passsed out of course with not enough air up there, and he was so frostbit I heard they had to take off one of his feet and all but the thumb on the left hand.
But he’d jumped out of the thing before it blew. We looked back up, hoping to see Jetboy’s chute or something, but there wasn’t one, just that misty big smudge up there, and all those planes zoomin’ round.
Thirty Minutes Over Broadway!
We took Shiloh to the hospital. Tbat’s my report.
Statement of Edward “Smooth Eddy” Shiloh, Sept. 16, 1946 (excerpt).
... all five shells into a couple of the gasbags. Then he crashed the plane right into us. The walls blew. Fred and Filmore were thrown out without their parachutes.
When the pressure dropped, I felt like I couldn’t move, the suit got so tight. I tried to get my parachute. I see that Dr. Tod has the fuse and is making it to the bomb thing.
I felt the airplane fall off the side of the gondola.’ Next thing I know, Jetboy’s standing right in front of the hole his plane made.
I pull out my roscoe when I see he’s packing heat. But he dropped his gat and he heads toward Tod. Stop him, stop himl” Tod’s yelling over the suit radio. I get one clean shot, but I miss, then he’s on top of Tod and the bomb, and right then I decide my job’s been over about five minutes and I’m not getting paid any overtime.”
So I head out, and all this gnashing and screaming’s coming across the radio, and they’re grappling around. Then Tod yells and pulls out his .45 and I swear he put four shots in Jetboy from closer than I am to you. Then they fall back together, and I jumped out the hole in the side.
Only I was stupid, and I pulled my ripcord too soon, and my chute don’t open right and got all twisted, and I started passing out. Just before I did, the whole thing blew up above me.
Next thing I know, I wake up here, and I got one shoe too many, know what I mean?...
... what did they say? Well, most of it was garbled. Let’s. see. Tod says “Stop him, stop him,” and I shot. Then I lammed for the hole. They were yelling. I could only hear Jetboy when their helmets slammed together, through Tod’s suit radio. They must have crashed together a lot, ’cause I heard both of them breathing hard.
Then Tod got to the gun and shot Jetboy four times and said “Die, Jetboy! Die!” and I jumped and they must have fought a second, and I heard Jetboy say:
“I can’t die yet. I haven’t seen The Jolson Story.”
It was eight years to the day after Thomas Wolfe died, but it was his kind of day. Across the whole of America and the northern hemisphere, it was one of those days when summer gives up its hold, when the weather comes from the poles and Canada again, rather than the Gulf and the Pacific.
They eventually built a monument to jetboy—“the kid that couldn’t die yet.” A battle-scarred veteran of nineteen had stopped a madman from blowing up Manhattan. After calmer heads prevailed, they realized that. But it took a while to remember that. And to get around to going back to college, or buying that new refrigerator. It took a long time for anybody to remember what anything was like before September 15, 1946.
When people in New York City looked up and saw Jetboy blowing up the attacking aircraft, they thought their troubles were over.
They were as wrong as snakes on an eight-lane highway.
—Daniel Deck GODOT IS MY CO-PILOT: A Life of Jetboy Lippincott, 1963
From high up in the sky the fine mist began to curve downward.
Part of it stretched itself out in the winds, as it went through the jet stream, toward the east.
Beneath those currents, the mist re-formed and hung like verga, settling slowly to the city below, streamers forming and re-forming, breaking like scud near a storm.
Wherever it came down, it made a sound like gentle autumn rain.
Run.
Consciousness stitched a lightning path across his mind. It seemed to come in bursts, like lines of text from a very fast laserprinter ... but no, it was more complex than that. A master weaver was forming the largest and most intricate tapestry in the universe, all in a matter of seconds, and doing it all in his brain.
He opened his eyes. St. Elmo’s fire shimmered before him like a polar aurora. A screaming noise assaulted his ears. Subsonics moved through his body like tidal waves.
The noise faded. Internals ran lightspeed checks. Radar painted an image in his brain, superimposed it on the visuals. “All monitored systems are functioning,” he found himself saying.
The St. Elmo’s fluorescence faded, revealing sagging bare roofbeams, an half-open skylight with the glass painted black from the inside, diagrams tacked up helter-skelter, drooping electric cables. Electric fans made a busy stir in the air. Something in the room moved, imaged first by radar, then by visuals. He recognized the figure, the tall, white-haired man with the hawk nose and disdainful eyes. Maxim Travnicek. A frigid smile curled Travnicek’s lips. He spoke with a middleEuropean accent.
“Welcome back, toaster. The land of the living awaits.”
“I blew up.” Modular Man examined this possibility with cold impartiality as he pulled on a jumpsuit. A fly buzzed in the distance.
“You blew up,” said Travnicek. “Modular Man the invincible android blew himself to bits. In a big fight at Aces High with the Astronomer and the Egyptian Masons. Lucky I had a backup of your memory.”
Memories poured over the android’s macroatomic switches. Modular Man recognized Travnicek’s new Jokertown loft, the one he’d moved into after being evicted from the bigger place on the Lower East Side. The place was stiflingly hot, and electric fans plugged into overworked extension cords did little to make the place seem like home. Equipment, the big flux generators and computers, were jammed together on home-built platforms and raw plywood shelving. The ultrasonics had burst the picture tubes in two of the monitors.
“The Astronomer?” he said. “He hadn’t been seen in months. I have no recollection of his return.”
Travnicek made a dismissive gesture. “The fight happened after I last backed up your memory.”
“I blew up?” The android didn’t want to think about this. “How could I blow up?”
“Right. A surprise to both of us. Half-intelligent microwave ovens aren’t supposed to explode.”
Travnicek sat on a thirdhand plastic chair, a cigarette in his hand. He was thinner than before, his reddened eyes sunk deep in hollows. He looked years older. His straight hair, usually combed back from his forehead, stuck out in tufts. He seemed to have been doing his own barbering.
Travnicek wore baggy, army-green surplus trousers and a cream-colored formal shirt with food stains and frills on the front. He wasn’t wearing a tie.
The android had never seen Travnicek without a tie. Something must have happened to the man, he realized. And then a frightening thought came to him.
“How long have I been ... ?”
“Dead?”
“Yes.”
“You blew up last Wild Card Day. Now it’s June fifteenth.”
“Nine months.” The android was horrified.
Travnicek seemed irritated. He threw away his cigarette and ground the stub into the bare plywood floor. “How long do you think it takes to build a blender of your capabilities? Jesus Christ, it took weeks just to decipher the notes I wrote last time.” He gave an expansive wave of his hand. “Look at this place. I’ve been working day and night.”
Fast food containers were everywhere, a bewildering variety that strongly represented Chinese places, pizza joints, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Flies buzzed among the cartons. In and among the containers were bits of scrap, yellow legal paper, pieces of paper bags, torn cigarette cartons, and the insides of matchbooks. All with notes that Travnicek had made to himself during his fever of construction, half of them ground into the naked floor and covered with footprints. The electric fans Travnicek used to move the sluggish air in the place had done a good job of scattering them.
Travnicek stood up and turned away, lighting another cigarette. “The place needs a good cleaning,” he said. “You know where the broom is.”
“Yes, sir.” Resigned to it.
“I’ve got about fifty bucks left after paying the rent on this fucking heap. Enough for a little celebration.” He jingled change in his pockets. “Gotta make a little phone call.” Travnicek leered. “You’re not the only one with girlfriends.”
Modular Man ran his internal checks again, looked down at his body in the half-zipped jumpsuit.
Nothing seemed out of place.
Still, he thought, something was wrong. He went after the broom.
Half an hour later, carrying two plastic trash bags full of fast food cartons, the android opened the skylight, floated through it, crossed the roof, then dropped down the air shaft that led to the alley behind. His intention was to toss the trash in a Dumpster that he knew waited in the alley.
His feet touched broken concrete. Sounds echoed down the alley. Heavy breathing, a guttural moan. A strange, lyric, birdlike sound.
In Jokertown the sounds could mean anything. The victim of an assault bleeding against the brownstone wall; the sad and horrible joker Snotman struggling for breath; a derelict passed out and having a nightmare; a customer from Freakers who’d had too much liquor or too many grotesque sights and had stumbled away to upchuck his guts ...
The android was cautious. He lowered the trash bags silently to the pavement and floated silently a few feet above the surface. Rotating his body to the horizontal, he peered out into the alleyway.
The heavy breathing was coming from Travnicek. He had a woman up against the wall, lunging into her with his trousers down around his ankles.
The woman wore an elaborate custom mask over her lower face: a joker. The upper half of her face was not disfigured, but it wasn’t pretty, either. She was not young. She wore a tube top and a glittery silver jacket and a red miniskirt. Her plastic boots were white. The trilling sound came from behind the mask. Short-time in an alley was probably costing Travnicek about fifteen dollars.
Travnicek muttered something in Czech. The woman’s face was impassive. She regarded the alley wall with dreamy eyes. The musical sound she was making was something she probably did all the time, a sound unconnected with what she was doing. The android decided he didn’t want to watch this anymore.
He left the garbage in the airshaft. The trilling sound pursued him like a flight of birds.
Someone had stuck a red, white, and blue poster on the plastic hood over the pay phone: BARNETT FOR PRESIDENT. The android didn’t know who Barnett was. His plastic fingertips jabbed the coin slot on the pay phone. There was a click, then a ringing signal. The android had long ago discovered an affinity with communications equipment.
“Hello.”
“Alice? This is Modular Man.” A slight pause. “Not funny.”
“This really is Modular Man. I’m back.”
“Modular Man blew up!”
“My creator built me over again. I’ve got almost all the memories of the original.” The android’s eyes scanned the street, looking up and down. There were very few people on the street for a warm June afternoon. “You feature in a lot of those memories, Alice.”
“Oh, god.”
There was another long pause. The android noticed that the pedestrians on the street seemed to be giving one another a lot of space. One of them wore a gauze mask over his mouth and nose. Cars were few.
“Can I see you?” he asked.
“You were important for me, you know.”
“I’m glad, Alice.” The android sensed impending disappointment in his demotion to the past tense.
“I mean, every man I’d ever been involved with was so demanding. Wanting this, wanting that. I never had any time to find out what Alice wanted. And then I meet this guy who’s willing to give me all the space I need, who didn’t want anything from me because he can’t want anything, because he’s a machine, you know, and because he can get me seated at the good tables at Aces High and because we can fly and dance with the moon ...” There was a brief silence. “You were really important to me, Mod Man. But I can’t see you. I’m married now.”
A palpable sense of loss drifted like scuttering snow across the android’s macroatomic switches. “I’m happy for you, Alice.” A National Guard jeep cruised past, with four Guardsmen in combat gear. Modular Man, who had established good relations with the Guard during the Swarm attack, gave them a wave. The jeep slowed, its passengers looking at him without changing expression. Then they speeded up and moved on.
“I thought you were dead. You know?”
“I understand.” He sensed an irresolution in her. “Can I call you later?”
“Only at work.” Her voice was fast. “If you call me at home, Ralph might start asking questions. He knows about a lot of my past, but he might find an affair with a machine a little weird. I mean, I know it was okay, and you know, but I imagine it’s a little strange explaining it to people.”
“I understand.”
“He’s toierant of alternate lifestyles, but I’m not sure how tolerant he’d be of me having one. Particularly one he’d never heard of or thought about.”
“I’ll call you, Alice.”
“Good-bye.”
She thought I didn’t want anything for myself, the android thought as he hung up the phone. Somehow that made him sadder than anything.
His finger jabbed the coin slot again and dialed a California number. The phone rang twice before a recording announced the number had been disconnected. Cyndi had moved somewhere. Maybe, he thought, he’d call her agent later.
He dialed a New Haven number. “Hi, Kate,” he said. “Oh.” He heard someone inhaling a cigarette. When the voice came back, it was cheerful. “ I always thought someone would put you back together.”
Relief poured into him. “Someone did. For good this time, I hope.”
A low chuckle. “It’s hard to keep a good man down.” The android thought about that for a moment. “Maybe I can see you,” he said.
“I’m not coming to Manhattan. The bridges are closed anyway.”
“Bridges closed?”
“Bridges closed. Martial law. Panic in the streets. You have been out of touch, haven’t you?”
Modular Man looked up and down the street again. “I guess so.”
“There’s a wild card outbreak, mostly in lower Manhattan. Hundreds of people have drawn the Black Queen. It’s a mutant form. Supposedly it’s spread by a carrier named Croyd Crenson.”
“The Sleeper? I’ve heard the name.”
Kate sucked on the cigarette again. “They’ve closed the bridges and tunnels to keep him from getting out. There’s martial law.”
Which explained the Guard on the streets again. “Things had seemed a little slow,” Modular Man said. “But nobody told me.”
“Amazing.”
“I guess if you’re dead,-hollowly—“you don’t get to watch the news.” He thought about this for a moment, then tried to cheer himself up. “I could visit you. I can fly. Roadblocks can’t stop me.
“You might—” She cleared her throat. “You might be a carrier, Mod Man.” She tried to laugh. “Becoming a joker would really wreck my burgeoning academic career.”
“I can’t be a carrier. I’m a machine.”
“Oh.” A surprised pause. “Sometimes I forget.”
“Shall I come?”
“Um ...” That cigarette sound again. “I’d better not. Not till after comps.”
“Comps?”
“Three days locked in a very small and cramped hell with the dullest of the Roman poets, which come to think of it is really saying something. I’m studying like mad. I really can’t afford a social life till after I get my degree.”
“Oh. I’ll call you then, okay?”
“I’ll be looking forward.” .’Bye.
Modular Man hung up the phone. Other phone numbers rolled through his mind; but the first three had been sufficiently discouraging that he didn’t really want to try again.
He looked up the near-vacant street. He could go to Aces High and maybe meet somebody, he thought.
Aces High. Where he’d died.
A coldness touched his mind at the thought. Quite suddenly he didn’t want to go to Aces High at all.
Then he decided he needed to know.
Radar dish spinning, he rose silently into the air.
The android landed on the observation deck and stepped into the bar. Hiram Worchester, standing alone in the middle of the room, swung around suddenly, holding up a fist .... His eyes were dark holes in his doughy face. He looked at Modular Man for a long moment as if he didn’t recognize him, then swallowed hard, lowered his hand, and almost visibly drew a smile onto his face.
“I thought you’d be rebuilt,” he said.
The android smiled. “Takes a licking,” he said. “Keeps on ticking.”
“That’s very good to hear.” Hiram gave a grating chuckle that sounded as if it were coming from the tin horn of a gramophone. “Still, it’s not every day a regular customer comes back from the dead. Your drinks and your next meal, Modular Man, are on Aces High.”
Aside from Hiram the place was nearly deserted: only Wall Walker and two others were present.
“Thank you, Hiram.” The android stepped to the bar and put his foot on the rail. The gesture felt familiar, warmly pleasant and homelike. He smiled at the bartender, whom he hadn’t seen before, and said, “Zombie.” Behind him, Hiram made a choking sound. He turned back to the fat man.
“A problem, Hiram?”
Hiram gave a nervous smile. “Not at all.” He adjusted his bow tie, wiped imaginary sweat from his forehead. His pleasant tone was forced. It sounded as if it took great effort to talk. “I kept parts of you here for months,” he said. “Your head came through more or less intact, though it wouldn’t talk. I kept hoping your creator would appear and know how to reassemble them.”
“He’s secretive and wouldn’t appear in public. But I’m sure he’d like the parts back.”
Hiram looked at him with his deep, dead eyes. “Sorry. Someone stole them. A souvenir freak, I imagine.”
“Oh. My creator will be disappointed.”
“Your zombie, sir,” said the bartender.
“Thank you.” The android noticed that an autographed picture of Senator Hartmann had been moved from a corner of the bar to a prominent place above the bar.
“You must pardon me, Modular Man,” Hiram said, “but I really ought to get back to the kitchens. Time and rognons sautes au champagne wait for no man.”
“Sounds delectable,” said the android. “Perhaps I’ll have your rognons for dinner. Whatever they are.” He watched as Hiram maneuvered his bulk toward the kitchen. There was something wrong with Hiram, he thought, something off-key in the way he reacted to things. The word zombie, the weird comment about the head. He seemed hollow, somehow. As if something was consuming his vast body from the inside. He was completely different from the way Modular Man remembered him.
So was Travnicek. So was everyone.
A chill eddied through his mind. Perhaps his earlier perceptions had been faulty in some way, his recorded memories subject to some unintended cybernetic bias. But it was just as likely that it was his current perceptions that were at fault. Maybe Travnicek’s work was faulty.
Maybe he’d blow up again.
He left the bar and walked toward Wall Walker. Wall Walker was a fixture at Aces High, a thirtyish black man of no apparent occupation whose wild card enabled him to walk on the walls and ceiling. He wore a cloth domino mask that didn’t go very far toward concealing his appearance, seemed to have plenty of money, and was, the android gathered, pleasant company. No one knew his real name. He looked up and smiled.
“Hi, Mod Man. You’re looking good.”
“May I join you?”
“I’m waiting for someone.” His voice had what Modular Man thought to be a light West Indian accent. “But I don’t mind company in the meantime.”
Modular Man sat. Wall Walker regarded him from over the rim of a Sierra Porter. “I haven’t seen you since you ... exploded.” He shook his head. “What a mess, mon.”
Modular Man sipped his zombie. Taste receptors made a cataclysmic null sound in his mind. “I was wondering if you might be able to tell me about what happened that night.”
The android’s radar painted him the unmistakable image of Hiram stepping into the bar, glancing left and right in what seemed to be an anxious way, then stepping away.
“Oh. Yes. I daresay you would not remember, would you?” He frowned. “It was an accident, I think. You were trying to rescue Jane from the Astronomer, and you got in Croyd’s way.”
“Croyd? The same Croyd that’s ...”
“Spreading the virus? Yes. Same gentleman. He had the power to ... make metal go limp, or some other such nonsense. He was trying to use it on the Astronomer and he couldn’t control it and he hit you. You melted like the India-rubber man, and you started firing off tear gas and smoke, mon, and a few seconds later you exploded.”
Modular Man was still for a few seconds while his circuits explored this possibility. “The Astronomer was made of metal?” he asked.
“No. Just an old fella, kinda frail.”
“So Croyd’s power wouldn’t have worked anyway. Not on the Astronomer.”
Wall Walker raised his hands. “People were shootin’ off everything they had, mon. We had a full-grown elephant in here. The lights were out, the place was full of tear gas ...”
“And Croyd fired off a wild card talent that could only work against me.”
Wall Walker shrugged. The two other customers rose and left the bar. Modular Man thought for a moment.
“Who’s Jane? The woman I was trying to rescue.”
Wall Walker looked at him. “You don’t remember her, either?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You were supposed to be guarding her. They call her Water Lily, mon.”
“Oh.” A qualified relief entered the android’s mind. Here, at least, was something he could remember. “I met her briefly. During the Great Cloisters Raid. I thought her name was actually Lily, though.” Didn’t I see you at the ape-escape? he’d asked. Never saw her again. Maybe she’d have some answers.
“Seems to prefer that people call her Jane, mon. Was the name she used when she worked here.”
I don’t have a name, the android thought suddenly. I’ve got this label, Modular Man, but it’s a trademark, not a real name, not Bob or Simon or Michael. Sometimes people call me Mod Man, but that’s just to make it easy on themselves. I don’t really have a name.
Sadness wafted through his mind.
“Do you know how to get ahold of this Jane person?” he asked. “I’d like to ask her some questions.”
Wall Walker chuckled. “You and half the city, man. She has disappeared and is probably running for her life. Word is she can heal Croyd’s victims.”
“Yes?”
“By fucking them.”
“Oh.”
Facts whirled hopelessly in the eddies of the android’s mind. None of this made any sense at all. Croyd had blown him up and was now spreading death thoughout the city; the woman who could heal the harm Croyd was doing had fled from sight; Hiram and Travnicek were behaving oddly; and Alice had got married.
The android looked at Wall Walker carefully. “If this is all part of some strange joke,” he said, “tell me now. Otherwise,”—quite seriously—“I’ll hurt you badly.”
Wall Walker’s eyes dilated. The android had the feeling he was not terribly intimidated. “ I am not making it up, mon.” His voice was emphatic, matter-of-fact. “This is not a fantasy, Mod Man. Croyd is spreading the Black Queen, Water Lily is on the run, there’s martial law.”
Suddenly there was shouting from the kitchen.
“I don’t know where he went, damn it!” Hiram’s voice. “He just walked out!”
“He was looking for you!” There was a sudden crash, as if a stack of pans had just toppled.
“I don’t know! I don’t know! He just walked out, goddammit!”
“He wouldn’t walk out on me!”
“He walked out on both of us!”
“Jane wouldn’t walk out!”
“They both left us!”
“I don’t believe you!” More pans crashed.
“Out! Out! Get out of my place!” Hiram’s voice was a scream. Suddenly he appeared, rushing out of the kitchen with another man in his arms. The man was Asian and wore a chefs uniform. He seemed light as a feather.
Hiram flung the man into the outside door. He didn’t have enough weight to swing it open and began to drift to the floor. Hiram flushed. He rushed forward and pushed the man through the door.
There was a silence in the restaurant, filled only by the sound of Hiram’s winded breaths. The restauranteur gave the bar a defiant glare, then stalked into his office. One of the customers rose hastily to pay for his drink and leave.
“Goddamn,” the other customer said. He was a lanky, brown-haired man who looked uncomfortable in his welltailored clothes. “I spent twenty years trying to get into this place, and look what happens when I finally get here.”
Modular Man looked at Wall Walker. The black man gave him a rueful smile and said, “Standards fallin’ all over.” The android took an odd comfort from the scene. Hiram was different. It wasn’t just some programming glitch.
He turned his mind back to Wild Card Day. Circuits sifted possibilities. “Could Croyd have been working for the Astronomer?”
“Back on Wild Card Day?” Wall Walker seemed to find this thought interesting. “He is a mercenary of sorts-it’s possible. But the Astronomer killed just about all of his own henchmen-a real bloodbath, mon-and Croyd is still with us.”
“How do you know so much about Croyd?”
A smile. “I keep my ear to the ground, mon.”
“What’s he look like?” Modular Man intended to avoid him.
“I cannot give a description of what he looks like right now. Fella keeps changing appearance and abilities, understand, mon-his wild car. And last time he surfaced he had someone with him, a bodyguard or something, and no one knows which is which. Or who. One of them, Croyd or the other guy, he’s an albino, mon. Probably got his hair dyed and shades over his eyes by now. The other is young, good-looking. But neither have been seen for a few days-no new cases of wild card-so whichever one is Croyd, he may be someone else now. He may not be carrying the plague anymore.”
“In that case the emergency’s over, right?”
“Guess so. There is still the gang war going on, though.”
“I don’t want to hear about it.”
“And the elections. Even I don’t believe who’s running.” Seen on radar, Hiram appeared from his office, cast another anxious glance over the barroom, left again. Wall Walker’s eyes tracked him over Modular Man’s right shoulder. He looked concerned.
“Hiram’s not doing well.”
“I thought he seemed different.”
“Business is way off, mon. Aces are not as fashionable as once we were. The Wild Card Day massacres were a real black eye for all wild talents. And then there was violence all over the bloody place on the WHO tour, a real cock-up, and Hiram took part ... beg pardon, mon, that’s something else you probably don’t know about.”
“Never mind,” said the android.
“Okay. And now, the Croyd buggering up and dealing jokers and Black Queens all over town, a big reaction is going on. Soon it may not be ... politically astute ... to be seen in aces’ company.”
“I’m not an ace. I’m a machine.”
“You fly, mon! You are abnormally strong, and you shoot energy bolts. Try and tell someone the difference.”
“I suppose.”
Someone walked into the bar. The radar image was strange enough that Modular Man turned his head to pick up on him visually.
The man’s brown hair and beard hung almost to his ankles. He had a crucifix on a chain around his neck, outside the hair, and otherwise wore a dirty T-shirt, blue jean cutoffs, and was barefoot.
None of this was sufficiently abnormal to do more than suggest a wild card, but as the man ambled closer, Modular Man saw the different-colored irises, orange-yellow-green, set one within the other like target symbols. His hands were deformed, the fingers thin and hairy. He held a six-ounce bottle of Coke in one hand.
“This is the man I need to see,” Wall Walker said. “If you’ll pardon me.”
“See you later maybe.” Modular Man stood up.
The hairy stranger walked up to the table and looked at Wall Walker and said, “ I know you.”
“You know me, Flattop.”
Modular Man made his way to the bar and ordered another zombie. Hiram appeared and ejected Flattop for lacking proper footwear. When he left with Wall Walker, the android noticed that he had plugged the Coke bottle into the inside of his elbow joint, as if the bottle were a hypodermic needle, and left it there.
The bar was empty. Hiram seemed fretful and depressed, and the bartender echoed his boss’s mood. The android made excuses and left.
He wouldn’t drink zombies ever again. The associations were just too depressing.
“Yah. Gotta get us some money, right, food processor?” Maxim Travnicek was rooting through a pile of notes he’d written to himself during Modular Man’s assemblage. “I want you to get to the patent office tomorrow. Get some forms. Shit, my foot itches.” He rubbed the toe of his left shoe against his right calf.
“I could try to get on Peregrine’s Perch tomorrow. Let everyone know I’m back. She only pays scale, but ...”
“The bitch is pregnant, you know. Gonna pop any day now, from what I can see.”
Something else I hadn’t heard about, the android thought. Wonderful. Next he would discover that France had changed its name to Fredonia and moved to Asia.
“But you should see her tits! If you thought they were good before, you should see them now! Fantastic!”
“I’ll fly over and visit her producer.”
“Bosonic strings,” Travnicek said. He had one of his notes in his hand but didn’t seem to be looking at it. “Minus one to the Nth is minus one for the massless vector, so epsilon equals one.” His eyes had glazed over. His body swayed back and forth. He seemed to have fallen into some kind of trance. “For superstrings,” he went on, “minus one to the Nth is plus one for the massless vector, so epsilon equals minus one ... All of the n times n antihermitian matrices taken together represent U(n) in the complex case ... Potential clash with unitarity ...”
Cold terror washed over the android. He had never seen his creator do this before.
Travnicek went on in this mode for several minutes. Then he seemed to jerk awake. He turned to Modular Man. “Did I say something?” he asked.
The android repeated it word for word. Travnicek listened with a frown. “That’s open strings, okay,” he said. “It’s the ghost string operator that’s the bitch. Did I say anything about Sigma sub plus one over two?”
“Sorry,” said the android.
“Damn it.” Travnicek shook his head. “I’m a physicist, not a mathematician. I’ve been working too hard. And my fucking foot keeps itching.” He hopped to his camp bed, sat down, took off his shoe and sock. He began scratching between his toes.
“If I could get a handle on the fucking fermion-emission vertex I could solve that power-drain problem you have when you rotate out of the normal spectrum. Massless particles are easy, it’s the ...”
He stopped talking and stared at his foot.
Two of his toes had come off in his hand. Bluish ooze dripped deliberately from the wounds.
The android stared in disbelief. Travnicek began to scream.
“The operators in question,” said Travnicek, “are fermionic only in a two-dimensional world-sheet sense and not in the space-time D-dimensional sense.” Lying on a gurney in the Rensselaer Clinic E-room, Travnicek had lapsed into a trance again. Modular Man wondered if this had anything to do with the ‘ghost operator’ his creator had mentioned earlier.
“Truncating the spectrum to an even G parity sector ... eliminates the tachyon from the spectrum ...”
“It’s wild card,” Dr. Finn said to Modular Man. There had scarcely been any doubt. “But it’s strange. I don’t understand the spectra.” He glanced at a series of computer printouts. His hooves clicked nervously on the floor. “There seem to be two strains of wild card.”
“Ghost-free light-cone gauge ... Lorentz invariance is valid ...”
“I’ve informed Tachyon,” said Finn. He was a pony-size centaur, his human half wearing a white lab coat and stethoscope. He looked at Travnicek, then at the android. “Can you assume responsibility for this man, should we decide to give him the serum? Are you family?”
“I can’t sign legal documents. I’m not a person, I’m a sixth-generation machine intelligence.”
Finn absorbed this. “We’ll wait for Tachyon,” he decided. The plastic curtains parted. The alien’s violet eyes widened in surprise. “You’re back,” he said. Modular Man realized this was the first time he’d ever heard Tachyon use a contraction. Tachyon was dressed in a white lab coat over which he wore a hussar jacket with enough gold lace to outfit the Ruritanian Royal Guard. Over it was strapped a Colt Python on a black gunbelt with silver-and-turquoise conchos. “You’re carrying a six-gun,” Modular Man said.
Tachyon recovered quickly from his surprise. He waved his hand carelessly. “There has been ... harassment. We are coping, however, I am pleased to see you have been reassembled.”
“Thank you. I’ve brought in a patient.”
Tachyon took the printouts from the centaur and began glancing through them. “This is the first appearance of the wild card in three days,” he remarked. “If we can discover where the patient was infected, we might be able to trace Croyd.”
“Reparametrization invariance of the bosonic string!” Travnicek shouted. Sweat beaded on his forehead. “Preserve the covariant gauge!”
Tachyon’s eyes narrowed as he glanced at the printouts. “There are two strains of wild card,” Tachyon said. “One old infection, one new.”
Modular Man looked at Travnicek in surprise. Probabilities poured through his mind. Travnicek had been a wild card all along. His ability to build Modular Man had been a function of his talent, not native genius.
Tachyon looked at Travnicek. “Can he be awakened from this state?”
“I don’t know.”
Tachyon leaned over the gurney, looked at Travnicek intently. Mental powers, Modular Man thought.
Travnicek gave a shout and batted the alien’s arms away. He sat up and stared.
“It’s that fucking Lorelei!” he said. “She’s doing this to me, the bitch. Just because I wouldn’t tip.”
Tachyon looked at him. “Mister, ah ...”
Travnicek brandished a finger. “Stop singing when we do it, I said, and maybe I’ll tip! Who needs that kind of distraction?”
“Sir,” Tachyon said. “We need a list of your contacts over the last few days.”
Sweat poured down Travnicek’s face. “ I haven’t seen anyone. I’ve been in the loft the last three days. Only ate a few slices of pizza from the fridge.” His voice rose to a shriek. “It’s that Lorelei, I tell you! She’s doing it!”
“Are you sure this Lorelei is your only contact?”
“Jesus, yes!” Travnicek held out his hand. His two toes were still in his palm. “Look what the bitch is doing to me!”
“Do you know how to reach her? Where she might be hiding?”
“Shangri-la Outcalls. They’re in the book. Just have them send her.” Rage entered his eyes. “Five bucks for the taxi!” Finn looked at Tachyon. “Could Croyd have become a female in the last three days?”
“Unlikely, but this remains the only lead we possess. If nothing else, this Lorelei might provide us with a lead to Croyd. Call the Squad. And the police.”
“Sir.” Finn’s hooves rapped daintily on the tile floor as he left the curtained area. Tachyon’s attention returned to Travnicek. “Have you a wild card history?” he asked. “Any manifestations?”
“Of course not.” Travnicek reached for his bare foot, then jerked his hand back. “ I have no feeling in my toes. Goddamn it!”
“The reason I asked, sir-this is your second dose of wild card. You have a previous infection.”
Travnicek’s head snapped up. Sweat sprayed over Tachyon’s coat. “What the hell do you mean, previous infection? I’ve had nothing of the sort.”
“It would appear that you have. Your gene structure has been thoroughly infiltrated by the virus.”
“I’ve never been sick in my life, you fucking quack.”
“Sir,” the android interrupted. “You have unusual abilities. Involving ... reparametrization invariance of the bosonic string?”
Travnicek looked at him for a long moment. Then comprehension dawned, followed by horror.
“My God,” he said.
“Sir,” said Tachyon. “There is a serum. It has a twenty percent chance of success.”
Travnicek continued to stare at the android. “Success,” he said. “That means both infections go, right?”
“Yes. If it works at all. But there is a risk ...”
Hooves tapped on the floor. Finn appeared through the curtains. “All set, Doc.” He carried a case, which he opened. Bottles and hypodermics were revealed. “I’ve brought the serum. Also the release forms.”
Travnicek appeared to notice the centaur for the first time. He shrank away. “Get away from me, you freak!” Finn seemed embarrassed. Tachyon’s face hardened, and he drew himself up. Angry hauteur burned in his face. “Dr. Finn is in charge here. He is a licensed physician—”
“I don’t care if he’s licensed to pull carriages in Central Park! A joker is doing this to me, and I’m not having a joker treat me!” Travnicek hesitated and looked at the toes in his hand. Decision entered his eyes. He flung the toes to the ground. “In fact, I’m not taking the fucking serum at all.” He looked at the android. “Get me out of here. Now.”
“Yes, sir.” Dismay wafted through the android. He was not constructed so as to be able to refuse a direct command from his creator. He picked up Travnicek in his arms and rose into the air. Tachyon watched, arms folded in frozen, implacable hostility.
“Wait!” Finn’s tone was desperate. “We need you to sign a release that you refused treatment!”
“Piss off!” barked Travnicek. Modular Man floated above the screens separating the E-room beds and began moving toward the entrance. A gray-faced joker child, waiting to have a splinter removed from his knee, stared upward with blank silver eyeballs. Finn followed, waving his forms and a pencil. “Sir! I at least need your name!”
Modular Man butted through the swinging doors leading to the E-room and then past a surprised, green, seven-foot joker to the street door. Once outside he accelerated.
“After we get home,” Travnicek said, “I want you to find Lorelei. Bring her to the loft and we’ll make her turn off her wild card.”
People on the night streets stared up as the android and his burden flew overhead. Half of them were wearing gauze masks. Modular Man’s feeling of dismay intensified. “This is a viral infection, sir,” he said. “ I don’t believe anyone is doing this to you.”
“Jesus fucking Christ!” Travnicek slapped his forehead. “The two sons of bitches in the hallway! I forgot about them!” He grinned. “It’s not the chippie after all. When I went downstairs to call Lorelei on the pay phone in the downstairs hall, I ran into these two guys coming up the stairs. I bumped into one of them in the hall. They went into the apartment right under us. One of them must be this Croyd guy.”
“Was one an albino?”
“I didn’t pay attention to them. They were wearing those surgical mask things anyway.” He grew excited. “One of them was wearing dark glasses! And in a dark corridor! He must have been hiding his pink eyes!”
They had arrived at Travnicek’s building. The android flew down the alley, circled into the airshaft, and rose to the building’s flat roof. He opened the skylight and lowered Travnicek carefully through it. As he set Travnicek on his feet, he observed that two of the man’s remaining toes were set at an odd angle.
Travnicek, oblivious to this fact, cackled as he paced back and forth. “I thought there was a joker in that apartment,” he said. “ I ran into one once on the stairs. All I cared about was that he didn’t complain to the landlord about noise from the flux generators.” One of his toes, cast adrift, rolled under a table. “He’s right below,” he said. “He’s been doing this to me, and now the bastard is going to pay.”
“He may not be able to control it,” the android said. He was looking at the place where the toe had vanished, wondering if he should retrieve it. “He may not be able to reverse things.”
Travnicek swung around. Sweat was pouring down his face. His eyes were fevered. “He’s going to stop what he’s doing,” he shouted, “or he’s going to die!” His voice rose to a shriek. “I am not going to be a joker! I am a genius, and I intend to stay one! Find the bastard and bring him here!”
“Yes, sir.” Resigned, the android stepped to the metal locker where his spare parts were kept. He twirled the combination knob, opened the door, and saw that the two grenade launchers were missing. Apparently he’d loaded one with sleep gas and the other with smoke grenades, and they’d been destroyed at Aces High. That left the dazzler, the 20mm cannon, and the microwave laser.
Croyd, he thought, had already destroyed him once.
He opened the zips on the shoulders of his jumpsuit and willed open the slots on his shoulders. He took the cannon and the laser and fixed them in place. The cannon was almost as tall as he was and heavy; he wove software patterns that compensated his balance accordingly. A drum of 20mm rounds was attached to the cannon. The bolt slammed back and forward and the first round was chambered.
He wondered if he was going to die again.
He turned on his flux fields. Ozone crackled around him. A faint St. Elmo’s aura danced before his eyes. Insubstantial, he melted through the floor.
The first thing the android saw was a television set. Its tube had imploded. An unstrung coat hanger was wired in place of one of the broken rabbit ears.
There was a camp bed in the middle of the floor. The mattress was wrapped in plastic. There were no sheets. Cheap furniture choked the rest of the room.
The android became substantial and hung suspended in the middle of the room. He heard voices in the back room. His weaponry swung toward the sound and locked into position.
“Something broke all the glass.” The voice was fast, fervid, weirdly intense. “Something strange is going on.”
“Maybe a sonic boom.” Another voice, deeper. Certainly calmer.
“The cups on the shelves?” The voice was very insistent, talking so fast the words crowded on one another. “Something broke the cups on the shelves. Sonic booms don’t do that. Not in New York. Something else must’ve done that.” The man wouldn’t let the subject alone.
Modular Man hovered to the doorway. Two men stood in the apartment’s tiny kitchen, bent to peer into a small refrigerator. Milk and orange juice dripped from its sill.
The nearest man was young, dark-haired, movie-star handsome. He was dressed in blue jeans and a Levi’s jacket. He had a piece of a broken juice container in his hand.
The other was a thin, pale, nervous man with pink eyes. “Which one of you is Croyd Crenson?” asked the android. The pink-eyed man turned and gave a shriek. “You blew up!” he shouted, and in a blur of speed he reached for a gun under his Levi’s jacket.
Modular Man concluded this sure enough sounded like a guilty conscience. The ceiling was too low for him to maneuver over the first man, so he pushed out with an arm as he moved forward, intending to knock him into the refrigerator and get next to the albino.
The second man didn’t move when the android shoved him. He didn’t even shift his stance, partly stooped by the refrigerator. Modular Man stopped dead. He pushed harder. The man straightened and smiled and didn’t move.
The presumed Croyd fired his automatic. The sound thundered in the small room. The first wild round missed, the second gouged plastic skin from the android’s shoulder, the third and fourth shots hit Croyd’s companion.
The man still didn’t react, not even after being shot. The bullets didn’t ricochet or flatten on impact, just dropped to the scarred linoleum.
Bullets don’t work, the android thought. Scratch the cannon.
Modular Man backed up, dropped to the floor, fired a straight punch to the young man’s chest. The man still didn’t move, didn’t even flinch. Croyd’s bullets cracked as they cut the air. A couple of them hit his friend, none hit the android. The android punched again, full force. Same result.
The young man struck out, the return punch unnaturally fast. His fist caught Modular Man and knocked him back, out of the kitchen. The android drove through the old tin paneling of the far wall and partway through the slats on the other side. Paint flecks a dozen layers thick dropped like gray snow from the ancient walls. Red damage lights came alive in the android’s mind.
Modular Man levered himself out of the wall-the long tube of the cannon got caught and required a wrench of the android’s shoulders to free it. He saw the albino charging with superhuman speed, the refrigerator raised high. The android tried to get out of the way, but the wall hampered him and Croyd was moving very fast. The refrigerator drove Modular Man back through the wall again, widening the hole. Orange juice sloshed in the refrigerator’s interior.
Modular Man cut in his flight generators and flew straight forward, seizing the refrigerator and using it as a battering ram. Croyd was caught off center and spun into the front room, arms flailing, before the camp bed caught the back of his knees and he crashed to the floor. The android kept going, driving the refrigerator full force into Croyd’s companion.
The man still didn’t move. St. Elmo’s fire filled the hallway as the android’s generators went to full power. The man still didn’t move.
The hell with it. Go for Croyd.
The android let go of the refrigerator and altered his flight pattern to head for the albino, Very quickly, before he could move more than a few inches, the young man struck out with the other arm, a forearm slam against the top of the refrigerator.
Modular Man went through the wall again, across someone’s apartment, into a fifteen-gallon fish tank, then into the exterior wall. Bits of the android’s consciousness fragmented with shock. A green flood poured across the carpet. Tropical fish began to die.
A moment of time throbbed endlessly in his mind. He could not remember his purpose, could not recognize the scatter of bright scales that flapped helplessly before his gaze. Automatic systems slowly rerouted his memory.
The day and its long advent of despair returned. He pried himself from the wall. His energies needed replenishment. He couldn’t go insubstantial for a while, and he shouldn’t fly. The 20mm cannon hung bent over one shoulder. The laser seemed intact.
The apartment was decorated with care, featuring abstract prints, an Oriental carpet, more fish tanks. A mobile jangled near the ceiling. Its tenant seemed not to be home. Distantly he heard the sound of arriving police. The android stepped through the hole into Croyd’s apartment, saw that the albino and his companion had left, and walked up the stairs to Travnicek’s. On the way his consciousness disappeared twice, for half-second intervals. When he regained it, he moved faster.
He heard the heavy footsteps of police below.
Travnicek opened the door to his knock. Both his feet were bare, and all the toes had gone. Something blue and hairy was beginning to grow from each wound.
“Fucking coffee maker,” said Travnicek.
The android knew it wasn’t going to get any better.
“Croyd wasn’t so much a problem as this other person.” The android had his jumpsuit off, was repairing the gouge in his synthetic flesh. The cannon lay on a table. He would have to get a replacement from the army munitions depot where he’d found the first one.
Travnicek was laboring over broken components. He’d told the police that he’d heard shots but had been afraid to go downstairs to phone for help. They’d accepted his explanation without comment and never came into the apartment where the android had been hiding in a locker.
“Nothing’s really badly damaged, toaster,” Travnicek said. “Field monitor jarred loose. That’s why you kept losing consciousness. I’ll strap the bastard down this time. Otherwise, just a few dings here and there.”
He straightened. His eyes glazed over. “Renormalization function switch damaged,” he said. “Replace at once.” He shook his head, frowned a moment, then turned to the android. “Open your chest again. I just remembered something.” Travnicek was scratching one of his hands near the finger joints. He looked down, realized what he was doing, and stopped. He seemed a little pale.
“After I get you fixed up,” he said, “get on the goddamn streets. That Croyd guy is gonna be using his power to transform more people. That’ll give you a fix on his location. I want you to be looking for him.”
“Yes, sir.” The android’s chest opened. He noticed that his creator’s neck was beginning to swell, and that his flesh now had a distinct blue cast.
He decided not to mention it.
The android patrolled all that night, searching the streets for familiar figures. His internal radio receiver was tuned to any alert, on both police and National Guard bands. From a early edition of the Times stolen from a pile near a closed newsstand, he found out that there had been a half dozen cases of wild card in the two hours following his battle with Croyd. Three of the cases had been in Jokertown, and the other three were people traveling together on a northbound number 4 Lexington Avenue express. Croyd and his companion had taken the subway at least as far as the Forty-second Street stop.
He also discovered from a copy of Newsweek he found in a trash basket that Croyd and his unknown protector had fought a group of jokers led by Tachyon to a standstill a few days before.
He wished he’d known that. Even though the article didn’t give many details, maybe knowing the pair was dangerous would have made a difference.
As he hovered over the streets, eyes and radar casting for familiar images, he replayed the fight in the apartment. He’d tried to knock the unknown man away, and the man hadn’t moved. Punches had struck him and then stopped. When the android had tried to bulldoze him with the refrigerator, motion had just stopped. Bullets hadn’t bounced off the man, just lost their energy and fallen to the floor.
Lost their energy, the android thought. Lost their energy and died.
The unknown man, therefore, absorbed kinetic energy. Then he transformed it in an attack of his own. He had to get hit first, the android realized, because he seemed to need to absorb the android’s attack before he could strike back.
Satisfaction moved through the android’s mind. All he had to do to get around the other guy was not hit him. If he didn’t have any energy to absorb, he couldn’t do anything.
And if things went wrong, the android could use the microwave laser as a last resort. The unknown man absorbed kinetic energy, not radiation.
The android smiled. He had the next encounter aced. All he had to do was find them.
At two thirty-one in the afternoon two people drew the Black Queen on Forty-seventh Street near Hammarskjold Plaza. The radio crackled with NYPD and National Guard commands to reinforce the guards on the United Nations building in case Croyd was intending to make some move on the UN.
Modular Man was overhead seconds after the alarm. Two victims were stretched on the street half a block apart, one lying still, his body turned into something monstrous, the other writhing in pain as his bones dissolved and he was crushed by the weight of his own body. Olive-green M.A.S.H. ambulances were responding, followed in the distance by a whooping city ambulance. There was nothing Modular Man could do for the victims. He flew a swift search pattern over the block, then began flying in widening circles. Another wild card victim to the west of the others on Third Avenue gave his search another focal point.
Then he saw one of his targets, Croyd’s brown-haired companion. The man was dressed as the android had last seen him, in a Levi’s jacket and jeans. He was walking east on Forty-eighth Street, having doubled back, and he was moving quickly, hands in his pockets and eyes fixed on the pedestrians ahead of him.
Modular Man flew behind the parapet of a building across the street, paralleling him, moving his head from cover every so often to keep tabs on his target. There was very little foot traffic and the android found him easy to follow. The young man did not look up. Ambulance sirens wailed in the distance.
The young man began moving north on Second Avenue. He walked for three blocks, then pushed through the revolving door of a large white-stone bank.
The android hovered over the building across the street while he decided what to do, then flew swiftly across Second Avenue and dropped to the pavement, careful not to make his movements visible from the bank’s front door. People in white gauze masks gave him plenty of room on the sidewalk.
The android turned insubstantial and walked into the thick wall of the bank, then pushed his face through the far side. Croyd’s guardian had walked across the bank lobby, past the teller cages, and was speaking to a pudgy, white-haired bank guard who sat on a stool near one of the back doors. He showed the guard a card and a key. The guard nodded, pressed a button, and a sliding door opened. The young man entered an elevator and the door shut behind him.
Modular Man stepped back from the building. Apparently Croyd’s companion was heading for a safety deposit box. The android, to the audible gasps of a pair of pedestrians, dropped through the pavement.
Though his vision was dark, his internal navigation systems kept him aligned perfectly. He moved down, then forward. His upper head, containing eyes and radar, moved tentatively through a wall: the android perceived an enormous vault with a clerk behind a desk, her back to him. Stacks of fresh bills, each with a neat paper wrapper, stood on the desk.
Wrong vault. The android moved back, then to the side, then forward again, then pushed through a row of safety deposit boxes.
Right vault. Remaining insubstantial was draining his power reserves: he couldn’t do this much longer.
Croyd’s companion was marching with another guard to one large box. He and the guard inserted their keys, and the young man withdrew the box. The android memorized its location, then made note of the position of all the cameras and other security monitors.
His energy was running low. He moved back, rose up through the sidewalk, turned substantial, flew to the roof across the street, and lighted. It probably didn’t matter what was in the deposit box, although if it proved relevant, he could always return.
Croyd’s companion was in the bank for another ten minutes, allowing the android’s energy to return fully. When the man emerged, he began retracing his steps south, turning west on Fiftieth Street to avoid the ambulances and military police setting up checkpoints on Forty-seventh, then hastened to Lexington Avenue, where he turned south again. The android followed, flitting from roof to roof. His quarry walked south to Forty-fourth, then headed west to enter one of the side entrances to Grand Central Station.
The android turned insubstantial and flew through the wall onto the second level of the station. He lighted on the polished marble balcony and watched his quarry move across the floor below.
The station was almost deserted. The entrances to the platforms were guarded by regular army Rangers in black berets. They were in full biological warfare rig, hoods and gas masks off but ready. Croyd’s companion walked to a stairway leading down to the arcade level and descended.
The android followed, moving carefully, turning insubstantial when necessary in order to peer around corners. The young man moved lower, through a utility door with a smashed lock, then down into the train tunnels that stretched north from the station. Rusting iron supports held up what seemed to be half of Manhattan. Occasional bulbs provided dim light. The place smelled of damp and metal. The android, keeping his target in sight with radar, followed without difficulty.
He found a corpse, a man in several layers of shabby clothing whose body seemed to have calcified, leaving the derelict a huddled figure with his face permanently carved in a look of horror and pain. Croyd had been here all right. There was another body a hundred yards farther on, an elderly woman with her bags clutched around her. The android looked closer.
It wasn’t the bag lady he had once known. The android was relieved.
“D’ja get it? D ja get it?” The albino’s eager voice rapped out of the darkness.
“Yeah.”
“Lemme see.”
“Bunch of keys. Envelope of cash.”
“Gimme the deposit key.”
The android crept nearer. An approaching train was rumbling closer, coming from the north.
“Here you go. You shouldn’t have risked going out.” The albino’s rapid-fire voice crackled with suspicion. “Didn’t know if I could trust you. And your signature wasn’t on the card.”
“The guard barely looked at it. I think he was drunk.”
“Gimme the gun.”
“This thing’s heavy. What is it?”
“Forty-four Automag. The most powerful handgun ever made.” Croyd strapped a giant shoulder holster under his arm. “If the robot comes after us again,”he said, “I wanna be able to dent him. This thing fires cut-down NATO rifle rounds.”
“Jesus.”
The albino said something then, but Modular Man couldn’t hear it. The train was getting closer. Its headlight outlined iron stanchions. Croyd and his companion began moving toward Modular Man. The android silently flew upward to the dirty ceiling, hovering in the shadow of a girder.
Yellow light burned steadily on the iron pillars as the train ground steadily southward. The noise echoed in the cavernous room. Croyd and his bodyguard passed beneath the android.
Croyd looked up, warned somehow-maybe he’d seen the hovering android in his peripheral vision. The albino yelled something obscured by the sound of the train and clawed for his pistol with incredible speed. His companion began to turn.
Modular Man dropped from the ceiling, his arms going around the albino from behind. The train bathed the scene in garish cinema light. Croyd shouted, tried to throw himself from side to side. His strength was considerably more than that of a normal human, but not equal to that of the android. Modular Man rose into the air, his legs wrapping around Croyd’s, and he began to fly south. Wind from the train pushed him on.
“Hey ... !” The companion was running after, waving an arm. “Bring him back!” The huge gun, still jammed in Croyd’s armpit, fired out and down through Croyd’s coat. A ricochet struck bright sparks from an iron stanchion.
Croyd’s guardian swerved. He leaped directly into the path of the train.
There was a burst of light, a crackling sound. The train stopped dead. The young man was hurled fifty feet farther down the track. When he hit the ground, a smaller burst of electricity jumped between him and the nearest rail.
The man jumped to his feet. In the bright light of the train’s headlight the android could see his grin.
Modular Man made a brief calculation of the amount of kinetic energy possessed by a fully loaded train moving at fifteen or so miles per hour. Although Croyd’s guardian hadn’t absorbed all of it, and the excess had bled off in a burst of lightning-there were some limits on his power, fortunatelythe total of what he had absorbed was appalling. The android’s laser whined as it tracked toward the man standing on the tracks.
The man crouched, bracing his feet against the track, then jumped. His leap was aimed ahead of the android, to cut him off. The man tumbled in air-evidently he wasn’t used to traveling this way-then hit a stanchion and fell to the ground. No electricity this time. He picked himself up and looked at the approaching android with clenched teeth. His clothing smoldered.
Swift calculations passed through macroatomic circuits, followed by lightspeed regret. Modular Man hadn’t ever shot a real person before. He didn’t want to now. But Croyd was killing people even in hiding, even in the tunnels deep under Grand Central. And if Croyd’s guardian got his hands on the android, he could tear his alloy skeleton to bits.
The android fired. Then suddenly he was falling, his arms limp. Croyd tumbled to the ground. The android crashed to the ground at the young mans feet. The young man reached, seized him by the shoulders. The android tried to move, failed.
Modular Man realized that Croyd’s protector didn’t just absorb kinetic energy. He absorbed any kind of energy and could return it instantly.
Bad mistake, he thought.
Suddenly he was flying again. He crashed through the side of the commuter train, sprawled across several seats in a spill of glass and torn aluminum. Someone’s briefcase tumbled to the aisle, papers flying. The android heard a scream. His sensors registered the smell of burning.
The few people on board-executives whose work forced them into the quarantined city-rushed to his aid. Lifting him from his ungainly sprawl across the seats, they laid him carefully in the aisle. “What’s that on his head?” asked a white-haired man with a mustache.
Radar imaging was gone. Its control unit had been fried when Croyd’s bodyguard returned the coherent microwave pulse. The monitor that controlled his ability to turn insubstantial was gone. His alloy underskin had a neat hole in it. The excess energy had blown a lot of circuit breakers. The android reset as many as possible and felt control return to his limbs. Some breakers wouldn’t reset.
“Pardon me,” he said, and stood up. People faded back. The train gave a jerk as it started moving again, and the android tumbled backward, arms windmilling, and sat down in the aisle. People rushed toward him again. He felt the helping hands on his right side but not on his left. Balance and coordination were still affected. He rerouted internal circuits, but still something was wrong.
“Excuse me.” He unzipped and pulled off the upper half of his jumpsuit. Train passengers gasped. Plastic flesh was blackened around the wound. Modular Man opened his chest and reached inside with one hand. Someone turned away and began to be sick, but the other passengers seemed interested, one woman standing on a seat and craning her neck to peer into the android’s interior through horn-rimmed spectacles.
The android removed one of his internal guidance units, saw melted connections, and sighed mentally. He returned the unit. The trip home was going to be pretty shaky. He certainly couldn’t fly.
He looked up at the people on the train.
“Do any of you have five dollars for a taxi?” he asked.
The trip to Jokertown was humiliating and dangerous. Some of the passengers supported him out of the station, but even so he fell a few times. With some money given him by the man with the mustache, he took a taxi to the other side of the block from Travnicek’s brownstone. He pushed the money through the slot in the taxi’s bulletproof shield, then staggered out onto the sidewalk. He half-walked, half-crawled down the alley to Travnicek’s building, then dragged himself up the fire escape to the roof. From there he crawled to the skylight and lowered himself down.
Travnicek lay on his camp bed, naked to the waist. His skin was light blue. Writhing cilia, covered with long hairs, grew from where his fingers and toes had been. A fly hummed over his head.
The swollen skin around his neck had split open, revealing a flower lei of organs. Some were recognizable-trumpetshaped ears, yellowish eyes, some normal in size and some not-but others of the organs were not.
“The only left-moving ghosts,” he muttered, “are the reparametrization ghosts.” His voice was thick, indistinct. The android had the intuition that his lips might be growing together. And the words seemed half-unfamiliar, as if he no longer entirely comprehended their meaning.
“Sir,” said Modular Man. “Sir. I’ve been injured again.” Travnicek sat up with a start. The eyes clustered around his neck swiveled to focus on the android. “Ah. Toaster. You look ... very interesting ... this way.” The eyes in his skull were closed. Perhaps, the android thought, forever.
“I need repairs. Croyd’s companion reflected my laser back at me.”
“Why the fuck did you shoot him, blender? All forms of energy are the same. Same as matter, as far as that goes.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Fucking moron. You’d think you’d pick up a little intelligence from me.”
Travnicek jumped up from his cot, moving very fast, faster than a normal human. He caught hold of a roof beam with one hand, swung around it to stand on his head. He planted his feet on the ceiling, the hairy cilia splaying, and then removed his hand from the beam and hung inverted. Yellow eyes looked steadily at the android.
“Not bad, hey? Haven’t felt this good in years.” He moved carefully along the ceiling toward the android.
“Sir. Radar control is burned out. I’ve lost a stabilizer. My flux control is damaged.”
“I hear you.” His voice was serene, drifting. “In fact I don’t just hear you, I perceive you in all sorts of ways. I’m not sure what some of them are just yet.” Travnicek grabbed another roof beam, swung to the floor, dropped. The fly buzzed airily in the distance. Sadness swelled in the android’s analog mind. A mounting hush of fear, like white noise, sizzled steadily in the background of his thoughts.
“Open your chest,” Travnicek said. “Give me the monitor. There’s a spare guidance unit in the cabinet.”
“There’s a hole in my chest.”
The yellow eyes looked at him. The android waited for an outburst.
“Better patch it yourself,” Travnicek said mildly. “When you have the time.” He took the flux monitor and stepped to a workbench. “It’s getting hard to think about all this,” he said.
“Preserve your genius, sir.” Modular Man tried not to let his desperation show. “Fight the infection. I’ll get Croyd here.”
A touch of vinegar entered Travnicek’s voice. “Yah. You do that. Now let me worry about the fermionic coordinates, okay?”
“Yes, sir.” Mildly reassured.
He staggered to the locker and began looking for a new gyroscope.
The BARNETT FOR PRESIDENT poster had been defaced. Someone had drawn a knife or fingernail file through the candidate’s picture several times, then written JOKER DEATH over it in thick red letters. Next to it was a freehand drawing of an animal head-a black dog?—executed in thick felt tip. “Hi. I need to talk.”
Kate blew cigarette smoke. “Okay. For a little while.”
“How are the Roman poets coming along?”
“If Latin weren’t already a dead language, Statius would have killed it.”
Modular Man was hunched over the public phone again. His gyroscope had been replaced and he could walk and fly. Except for the heavy presence of the National Guard and Army, the streets were nearly deserted. Half the restaurants and cabarets in jokertown were shut down.
“Kate,” the android said, “ I think I’m going to die.” There was a moment of startled silence. Then, “Tell me.”
“My creator got infected by the wild card. He’s turning into a joker and forgetting how to repair me. And he’s sending me after the plague carrier, hoping the man can make it stop.”
“Okay. Cautiously. “I’m following.
“He seems to think the man’s deliberately doing this to him. But must people think the guy is just a carrier, and if that’s true, and I bring him to my creator, the chances are nine to one that if my creator’s reinfected, he’ll draw the Black Queen and die.”
“Yes.”
“And the man I’m after-his name is Croyd-is the man who killed me the first time. And this time Croyd has a protector who is more powerful than he is. We’re already fought twice, and they’ve beaten me both times. The last time I could easily have died. And my creator can’t put me together again. He’s losing his abilities. He may not be able to repair the damage from the last attack.”
Kate drew on her cigarette, exhaled. “Mod Man,” she said, “you need help.”
“Yes. That’s why I’m calling you.”
“I mean other wild cards. You can’t face these two alone.”
“If I went to SCARE or someone, and we captured Croyd together, then I’d have to fight the SCARE aces to get him away. I’d be an outlaw.”
“Maybe you could make some kind of deal with them.”
“I’ll think about it. I’ll try.” Despair wailed through him. “I’m going to die,” he said.
“I’m sorry. Can’t you just leave?”
“I’m programmed to obey him. I can’t refuse a direct order. And I’m programmed to battle the enemies of society. I don’t have a choice in any of that. People like the Turtle, or Cyclone-it’s their decision to do what they do. It was never mine. I’m not human that way.”
“I see. “
“Sooner or later I’m going to lose a fight. I don’t heal like people, someone has to repair me. Any parts that get broken wont get fixed. If I don’t die, I’ll be a cripple, pieces falling off.” Like Travnicek, he thought, and a cold shudder ran through his mind. “And even if I’m crippled,” he went on, “I’ll still have to fight. I still won’t have any choice.”
There was a long silence. “ I don’t know what to tell you.” Her voice was choked.
“I was sort of immortal before,” Modular Man said. “My creator was going to mass-produce me and sell me to the military. If any single unit was destroyed, the others would go on. They’d have identical programming; they’d still be me, at least mostly me. Now that’s not going to happen.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What happens to machines when they die? I’ve been wondering that.”
“I—”
“Your ancient philosophers never thought about that, right?”
“I suppose they didn’t. But they had a lot to say about mortality in general. ‘Must not all things be swallowed in death’-Plato, quoting Socrates.”
“Thank you. That’s really comforting.”
“There’s not a lot of comforting things to say about death. I’m sorry.”
“I never really worried about it before. I’d never died before.”
“Most of us don’t get to come back even once. None of the others killed on Wild Card Day came back.”
“This may be a temporary aberration. Normality may resume at any point.”
The android realized he was shouting. The words echoed on the empty street. He swiftly wrote himself a piece of programming to keep his voice level.
Kate thought for a long moment. “Most of us have a lifetime to get used to the idea that we have to die. You’ve just had a few hours.”
“I have a hard time getting my mind around it. There are all these feedback loops in my brain, and my thoughts keep going round and round. They’re taking up more and more space.”
“In other words, you’re panicking.”
“Am I?” He thought about this for a moment. “I suppose I am.”
“The prospect of death, to misquote Samuel Johnson, is supposed to concentrate the mind wonderfully.”
“I’ll work at it.” He suited action to words, swiftly putting an end to the runamuck computer logic that was smashing up against too many unknowns and infinities to do anything other than fill up his logic systems with macroatomic hash. A cooler and more systematic approach to the problem seemed indicated.
“Okay. That’s done.”
“That was fast.”
“One point six six six seconds.” She laughed. “Not bad.”
“I’m glad you recognized what was happening. I’m not really wired to deal with abstracts. I’d never got hung up that way before.”
“You’re still superhuman. No human could do that.” She thought for a moment. “Do you know Millay? ‘My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends-It gives a lovely light.”‘
The android considered this. “I suppose that, aesthetically, I might have produced an objectively lovely light when I blew up. The thought seems a bit barren of comfort, mainly I suppose because I wasn’t there to see it.”
“I think you missed my point.” Patiently. “You are incredibly fast at both action and cognition. Your means of apprehending your surroundings are more complete and acute than those of a human. You have the capacity to experience your existence more thoroughly and intensely than anyone on the planet. Might this not compensate for any shortness of duration?” The notion was encoded, spun into the maelstrom of the android’s electronic mind, whirled like a leaf into a cold electronic torrent.
“I’ll have to think about it,” he said.
“You seemed to have crammed a lot of existence into the months you were on the planet. You had many of the experiences that people say lead to wisdom. War, comradeship, love, responsibility—even death.”
The android gazed into the mutilated face of Barnett, the presidential candidate, and wondered who the man in the picture was. “ I guess I kept busy,”he said.
“There are a lot of people who would envy that existence.”
“I’ll try to bear that in mind.”
“You burn very bright. Cherish that.”
“I’ll try.”
“And you may not burn out. You fought the Swarm without taking serious injury, and there were hundreds of thousands of them. These are just a couple of guys.”
“A couple of guys.”
“You’ll deal with it. I have confidence in you.”
“Thank you.” JOKER DEATH, the poster read. “I think you’ve given me something to consider.”
“I hope I could help. Call me if you need to talk again.”
“Thanks. You’ve really been of great assistance.”
“Anytime.”
Modular Man put the phone on the hook and rose silently into the sky. He rose into the darkness, drifted the several blocks to Travnicek’s apartment, went in through the skylight. Joker Death, he thought.
Travnicek was lying on his bed, apparently asleep. The camp bed was surrounded by empty tins of food: apparently he’d been eating the stuff right from the cans. Some of the organs around Travnicek’s neck had blossomed a bit, were making ultrasonic chirping sounds, the period of which decreased as the android dropped into the apartment. Sonar, the android thought. Travnicek opened the eyes around his neck.
“You,” he said. “Yes, sir.”
“The module’s rebuilt. I think. Some of my memories were kind of hazy.”
Fear filled the android. A fly buzzed past and he chased it away with a flap of his arm. “I’ll try it.” He opened his jumpsuit and his chest, reached for the module that waited on the workbench.
“My brain seems to be evolving,” Travnicek said. His voice was dreamy. “I think what’s happening is that the virus is enlarging the brain sections concerned with sensory input. I’m perceiving things in every possible way now, very intensely. I’ve never experienced anything as intensely as I can just lying here, watching things.” He gave a hollow laugh. “My god! I never knew that eating creamed corn from the can could be such a sensual experience!”
Modular Man inserted the module, ran test patterns. Relief flooded him. The monitor worked.
“Very good, sir,” he said. “Hang on.”
“You’re so interesting this way,” Travnicek said. The fly was wandering near the empty food cans.
There was sudden movement. One of the organs around Travnicek’s neck uncoiled with lightning rapidity and caught the fly. The extrusion snapped back and stuffed the fly into Travnicek’s mouth.
The android couldn’t believe what he’d just seen. “Wonderful,” said Travnicek. Smacking his lips.
“Hang on, sir,” Modular Man said again. His flux field crackled around him. He flew through the roof and into the blackness.
Arriving at the bank, the android turned insubstantial, burned every vault sensor with bursts from his microwave laser so that any guards couldn’t see what happened next, then stepped into the vault, solidified himself, and ripped the deposit box from its resting place.
Suddenly he stopped. A yellow warning light glowed in his mind, flickered, turned red.
He tried to go insubstantial again. He rotated ninety degrees from the real for a fraction of a second, then he felt something go and he was solid again, standing in the bank vault. He could smell something burning.
The flux monitor was gone again. Travnicek’s repairs hadn’t been permanent. A chill eddy of fear rippled through the android’s mind at the thought that it might have happened when he was in the steel-and-concrete wall of the vault. He looked around, examined the door and the lock. If he were found here in the morning, he thought, his reputation as a do-gooder would definitely suffer.
It proved fortunate that vaults are made to prevent people breaking in, not out. Forty-five minutes’ patient work with the microwave laser burned a hole in the laminated interior of the door, gaining him access to the lock apparatus. He reached through, touched the mechanism, felt an awareness of its function. He glitched the electronics—easy as getting a free telephone call-and the heavy bolts slid back.
He took the emergency stairs out, burning cameras as he went. Once out he flew to the roof of a nearby building, tore the box open, and examined the contents.
Long-term leases, he found, to several small apartments in the New York area. Keys. Stacks of currency. Jewelry, gold coins. Bottles containing hundreds of pills. A pair of pistols and boxes of ammunition. Croyd’s secret stash of money, weapons, drugs, and the keys to his hideouts.
He thought for a long moment. Travnicek was deteriorating swiftly. The android was going to have to move fast, and he was going to have to get some help.
“I don’t want to have to do the scouting,” Modular Man said. “If they see me again, they’ll run. And they’ll spread the plague while they do it.”
“Very well.” Tachyon’s violet eyes glittered as his hands played with the velvet lapels of his lavender jacket. His .357 and holster sat on the desk before him. On his office wall, next to a set of honorary degrees, was a sign with red, white, and blue lettering: THE MAN: HARTMANN. THE TIME: 1988. TIIE PLAN: OUR CHILDREN S FUTURE.
“My joker squad can be of use. Some of them should prove capable of covert reconnaissance.”
“Good. I should stay here with your most powerful people. Then we can move out together.”
The contents of Croyd’s deposit box were spread out on Tachyon’s desk and he looked at them. “There are only three addresses actually in Manhattan,” Tachyon said. “I suspect he’d try for one of those first before trying the tunnels and bridges. Blind Sophie can use her acute hearing to listen in on what’s going on behind a closed window, using the vibrations of the window glass as a diaphragm. Squish is a taxi driver, hence unobtrusive ... he might be able to make inquiries that might seem suspicious from anyone else.” Tachyon frowned. “Croyd’s companion, however ... that handsome young gentleman is going to prove difficult to deal with.”
“I’ve fought him twice. But I think I know how his power works.”
Tachyon stared. He leaned forward over the desk, pushing aside the pistol in its holster, his expression intent. “Tell me, sir.”
“He absorbs energy, then returns it. He can only attack after he’s already been hit. He absorbs all sorts of energykinetic, radiation ...”
“Psionic,” Tachyon murmured.
“But if you don’t hit him first, he doesn’t have any more strength than a normal person. So whatever we do, we can’t attack him. Just ignore him, no matter how tempting a target he makes himself.”
“Yes. Very good, Modular Man. You are to be commended.” The android looked at Tachyon and apprehension spun through his mind. “I need to get Croyd away as fast as possible. I can’t catch the wild card from him, so I think I should deal with him solo-he’s got enough strength to tear through your biochemical warfare suits. I’m powerful enough to subdue him if I don’t have to worry about anyone else.”
“The task is yours.” Simply.
Triumph settled in the android. He was going to be able to seize Croyd and get him to Travnicek without interference. Maybe things were looking up at last.
The phone rang on Tachyon’s desk. The alien snatched it. “Tachyon here.” Modular Man saw Tachyon’s violet eyes dilate with interest. “Very good. You are to be commended, Sophie. Stay there until we arrive.” He returned the phone to its cradle. “Sophie believes they’re in the Perry Street address. She can hear two people, and one of them is talking nonstop as if he was affected by stimulants.”
The android jumped to his feet. His emergency pack had already been prepared, and he slung it on his back. Tachyon pressed a button on his telephone.
“Tell the squad to suit up,” he said. “And after a decent interval, inform the police.”
“I’ll fly on ahead,” the android said. He flung open the door and almost ran into a slim, erect black man who was standing just outside the door in the secretary’s office. He wore a biochem suit and a feathered black-and-white death’shead mask. His smell was appalling, must and rotting flesh. A joker.
“Pardon me, sir,” the man said. His voice was an educated, somewhat theatrical baritone. “Could you take me with you?”
Modular Man’s software wove swift subroutines to eliminate the man’s smell from his sensory input. “I don’t believe I know you.”
“Mr. Gravemold.” A minute bow. “ I am a member of the good doctor’s joker squad.”
“Can’t you travel with them in the ambulance?”
The android sensed a smile behind the dramatic mask. “I’m afraid that in the close confines of an automobile, my scent becomes rather ... overwhelming.”
“I see your point.”
“Gravemold.” Tachyon’s voice was strangled. “What are you doing in my secretary’s office? Were you trying to eavesdrop?”
“That’s Mister Gravemold, Doctor.” The deep actor’s voice was sharp.
“Beg pardon, I’m sure.” Tachyon’s voice was denasal. “In answer to your question, I was waiting to speak to our artificial friend. I wished to spare the other squad members the burden of my ... perfume.”
“Right.” Through clenched teeth. “Do as you please, Modular Man.”
The android and Mr. Gravemold left the clinic at a fast trot, and then Modular Man wrapped his arms around the joker from behind and lifted him into the air. Air ruled the feathers on Mr. Gravemold’s mask.
“Sir,” the android said. “Are there any abilities you have besides, ah ...”
“My smell?” The deep voice was barren of amusement. “Indeed I have. As well as smelling as if I were dead, I have the powers of death. I can bring the cold of the grave to my enemies.”
“That sounds ... useful.” Crazy, the android thought. The joker had been smelling his own perfume too long and it had driven him mad.
“I’m also fast and tough,” Mr. Gravemold added.
“Good. So is Croyd.” Quickly the android explained about the albino and his abilities, and also about the nature of his bodyguard. “Oh, yes,” he added. “And Croyd is carrying a gun. A forty-four Automag.”
“A preposterous weapon. He must be feeling insecure.”
“Glad it doesn’t bother you.”
The Perry Street brownstone came in sight below. Modular Man dropped to the ground a few feet downwind of a slim, long-haired, middle-aged woman wearing shades and carrying a white cane. She was standing in the shadows by a doorstoop. The woman looked up. Her nose wrinkled. “Gravemold,” she said.
“Mister Gravemold, if you please.”
“In that case,” said Blind Sophie, “I’m Miss Yudkowski.”
“I have never referred to you by any other name, madam.” A pair of ears, round like those of a cartoon mouse, seemed to inflate on either side of Sophie’s head, rising like balloons past concealing strands of long, dark hair. She cocked her head toward Modular Man. “Hello, whoever you are. I didn’t hear you till now.”
“I didn’t know I made any noise.”
“You’re a little late, gentlemen,” Sophie said. “The two men left a couple minutes ago. Just after I got back from the telephone.”
Annoyance flickered through the android’s circuits. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
“God forbid I should interfere with Mr. Gravemold correcting my speech.”
“Where did they go?”
“They didn’t say. I believe they took the back way out.” Without saying anything more Modular Man seized Mr. Gravemold again and rose into the sky. He swiftly quartered the district, radar searching out. Mr. Gravemold lay passively in his arms. Silent, the android thought, as the grave.
“We’re on the way.” Tachyon’s voice crackled on Modular Man’s receivers.
“There’s a problem,” Modular Man said, pulsing silent radio waves toward the clinic. He explained quickly.
“We shall continue heading in your direction, Modular Man,” Tachyon said.
“There,” said Mr. Gravemold, pointing. A pair of humansize radar images detached themselves from the shadow of a rusting iron pillar that helped support the deserted West Side Express Highway.
The android was surprised. The joker had incredibly good night vision. The android drifted silently toward the pair. He had to come within three hundred yards before he was certain the two were Croyd and his companion.
Uneasiness stirred him. The last time he’d almost died. Burning bright. Kate’s voice echoed in his mind.
Each was burdened: the young man held a bulky parcel, and Croyd carried an outboard motor over one shoulder. Croyd was talking endlessly, but the android couldn’t hear him. The two walked swiftly down a corroded concrete street and came to a stop at a chain link fence that cut off a Hudson River pier from the mainland. The albino put down his burden, inspected the padlock and chain that held the gate shut, and snapped the hasp with a quick twist of his fingers. The two moved through the gate and passed by a deserted guard box with shattered windows.
The pier was otherwise deserted. Except for a few ships caught here under quarantine, New York harbor was empty, a contrast to the blaze of activity on the Jersey shore.
“They’re going to try to get off the island,” said Mr. Gravemold.
“So it would seem.”
“Put me down. We can deal with it.”
“A moment. I’ve got to contact Tachyon.” He sent Tachyon a radio message, heard no answer, and had to rise another five hundred feet before his pulse carried to the ambulance. Mr. Gravemold stirred restlessly.
“What are you doing, man? They’re getting away. Put me down.”
As soon as he heard an acknowledgment, Modular Man descended rapidly. Going to fight Croyd again, he thought. He remembered his first moments of existence, the confused fight around the Empire State Building, Cyndi’s blond hair floating like a brilliant star above the ape’s dark hand. Burning brightly, he thought.
He dropped Mr. Gravemold near the gate. The joker dusted himself off. “What was that all about?” he demanded. “I’ll explain later.”
Both jumped at the sound of a moan from nearby. The android’s alarm faded as he saw a pudgy, unconscious man lying near the fence, a bottle of bourbon near his tattooed hand. The drunk wore leather trousers and boots and an NYPD cap. His chest was bare and featured steel rings hanging from pierced nipples.
Modular Man fixed this sight in his memory. Cherish it, he thought.
“We can’t wait,” the joker said. “Those two will get away before the ambulance arrives.”
Mr. Gravemold turned away and removed his mask. There was no facial deformity that Modular Man could see from behind. The joker put on his hood and gas mask and began to move with speed down the pier, following a pair of rusted railroad tracks. His feet stepped in surprising silence.
“Wait,” said Modular Man. “They’ll see you.”
The joker paid no attention. He moved toward the edge of the pier, ducked under a railing, and disappeared. Alarm rattled in Modular Man’s mind. He took to the air and did a half-roll under the pier.
Mr. Gravemold was still moving, walking inverted on the old, corroded planks, his pace brisk, the dark and silent Hudson rolling beneath his head. The android flew up next to him.
A possibility occurred to him. His mind ran scans, cross-checks.
The possibility was confirmed at greater than ninety percent. Build, talents, race, approximate age ... everything matched. The accents were wildly different, and the voices substantially different as to tone and timbre, but scans of certain key words showed a surprising correspondence.
Why, Modular Man wondered, had Wall Walker made himself smell bad and disguised himself as a joker?
Or was that another manifestation of Wall Walker’s wild card? Maybe he was Wall Walker part of the time, and then he started smelling bad and became Mr. Gravemold.
Maybe he was just crazy. Why else would someone disguise himself as a joker?
He decided not to mention his conclusions to the inverted ace beside him.
“You didn’t mention you could walk upside down,” he said.
“Did I not?” The voice was muffled by the mask. “Sometimes I’m a bit forgetful.”
“Is there anything else you can do that I should know?” Modular Man began to hear Croyd’s voice. Mr. Gravemold looked at him. “Shhh. Be silent.” The android sensed a grim smile behind the mask. “Silent as the grave.”
They moved on. Mr. Gravemold moved easily through a tangle of wood and metal pier supports that loomed around them like the ribs of some giant, extinct animal. Croyd’s voice grew louder. Modular Man remembered the shower of flaming stars that signaled the descent of the Swarm. Burning bright.
“Never had a fucking chance,” Croyd said. “Jesus. Never learned a goddamn thing about the fucking world. Not algebra. Not anything.” He laughed. “I taught them a thing or two. Stick with me, kid. We’re gonna give ’em some very interesting lessons, you and me.”
The android thought about Cyndi, Alice, the others. Didn’t I see you at the ape escape? He thought about burning brightly and tried to make his movement precise, perfect. Tried to find the wonder in this situation, flying beneath a pier with the slick water waiting beneath him and a very likely insane, upside-down disguised ace walking purposefully beside him.
Halfway down the pier was a wooden ladder that reached down into the dark water. Croyd’s voice seemed to come from just overhead.
“Okay, kid. Here we go. Just follow the of Sleeper. I know how to survive in this world.”
Mr. Gravemold turned to the android and gestured. Despite the clumsiness of his suit, the meaning was clear: You fly over the opposite side of the pier, I’ll wait here.
Great, the android thought. I charge, and while they’re killing me, Gravemold attacks from behind. Terrific. “Bring me the package, kid.” Croyd’s voice.
There seemed no time to engage in a debate with Mr. Gravemold. The android drifted backward across the pier, weaving his way through the metal supports, and then rose from the other side.
Croyd was standing by the ladder, facing his companion, and by coincidence, the android. Croyd’s friend had a small knife out and had cut away the string and paper wrapping his package.
Croyd snapped to attention. “Shit! The robot!” His arm a blur of swift motion, he reached for his gun.
Not again, thought the android. He accelerated, heading straight for the albino.
Croyd made frantic tugging motions. The huge silver handgun seemed to have snagged in his armpit. His companion, without the unnatural speed possessed by the others, slowly turned and spun between Croyd and the charging android.
Choices rained on the android’s circuits. He couldn’t hit Croyd’s bodyguard, not without charging him with energy, and he couldn’t get to Croyd without going through the other. He dove for the surface of the pier, landed on his hands, tumbled. Splinters tore at his jumpsuit. He came to a halt at the young man’s feet. The man stared at him.
There was a rip of fabric. With a triumphant cry Croyd jerked his gun free and leveled it. Black pills scattered like dirty snow, spilling from a torn inner pocket.
Mr. Gravemold rose behind Croyd, sudden and ominous as a specter. His gloved hand reached out and closed over the gun. He jerked it back, and the Automag went off with a sound like the end of the world.
The joker gave a yell as the gun’s action slammed back under his hand. The gun clattered to the surface of the pier. The bullet, which had hit Croyd’s bodyguard in the back, fell also.
Ooops, thought Modular Man.
The young man dived for him, right fist clenched. Modular Man rolled away. The man flopped on top of him, burning his power charge as he drove his fist into the planks. The android kicked up, throwing the man over onto his back. He had probably given him a small charge, but it wasn’t enough to worry about.
Croyd in the meantime had slammed his elbow into Mr. Gravemold’s sternum. The joker bounced back against the rail. Rusted nails moaned. Croyd scooped up the outboard engine, looked over his shoulder, and flung it full strength, not at his foes, but at his bodyguard. Trying to charge him up, the android thought.
He flew up into the engine’s path. It thudded solidly into his shoulder, driving him back. Croyd’s companion reached up and seized the android’s feet. Fingers dug with desperate strength into his plastic flesh.
Mr. Gravemold flung himself off the rail, smashing Croyd from behind with a forearm. Croyd spun, his fingers talons. His pink eyes gleamed murderously. He clawed at the joker, trying to puncture his suit. Mr. Gravemold danced out of the way. Both were moving unnaturally fast.
Modular Man rose into the sky. The young man clung gamely to his legs. Kicking at him, the android thought, would only make him stronger.
Suddenly Croyd shuddered. He gasped, clutched at his middle. The balmy summer air suddenly turned a few degrees colder.
The cold of the grave, the android thought. It wasn’t some fancy metaphor. The joker had actually meant what he said. Lights flashed on the far end of the pier. A siren wailed. The ambulance from the Jokertown Clinic had arrived.
Croyd staggered back. He seized the package, flung it at Mr. Gravemold. The joker easily avoided it. It splashed into the water beyond.
“Death is cold, Mr. Crenson,” said Mr. Gravemold. His deep actor’s voice rang past his gas mask, over the sound of the approaching ambulance. “Death is cold, and I am cold as death.”
The joker raised a clenched fist, and the temperature dropped again. Mr. Gravemold, Modular Man realized, was stealing heat from the air. Croyd stumbled, went down on one knee. His white face had turned blue. His companion gave a cry of outrage and dropped to the surface of the pier with the Automag right in front him. He snatched up the gun and pointed it at the figure in the biochem suit.
Croyd fell flat on his face. His limbs twitched uncontrollably. The android dove at maximum speed. The gun went off like a clap of thunder. A heavy slug caromed off Modular Man’s metal substructure and tumbled away into the night. The bullet’s energy began to spin the android. Unable to stop himself in time, he smashed through the guardrail and zoomed over the Hudson. He stabilized the spin and began to loop back toward the fight.
Ambulance lights flashed bright across the pier. Below, the package was inflating automatically at the touch of the water. A rubber raft.
Mr. Gravemold, still moving with unnatural speed, danced away from Croyd’s bodyguard. The young man had difficulty tracking with the heavy gun. He fired twice and missed both times.
Mr. Gravemold raised his fist. “No!” Modular Man shouted. The temperature dropped again. Croyd’s bodyguard staggered and fell, the gun falling from his hand.
It worked, the android thought numbly. Then he realized that Mr. Gravemold’s abilities didn’t fire cold, but rather stole heat. With energy going out rather than in, the bodyguard’s talent had nothing to work with.
Modular Man did a loop in air, came down on the albino, seized Croyd by collar and belt. Brakes shrieked as the ambulance came to a stop. Jokers in biochem suits spilled out. Laughter boomed from behind Mr. Gravemold’s gas mask.
The android rose into the sky with his shivering burden and accelerated. Puzzled jokers, their face masks giving them tunnel vision, peered at the sky, trying to see where he and Croyd had gone.
Modular Man shook Croyd like a rag doll. “Why did you blow me up?” he shouted.
Croyd’s teeth were chattering so hard it was difficult to understand him.
“Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Buildings sped beneath them. Fury raced through the android. He shook Croyd again. “Why?”
Croyd began to thrash. Modular Man suppressed the albino’s uncoordinated movements with ease.
He had won, he realized. Carefully he tried to cherish the feeling.
Croyd was shivering uncontrollably as Modular Man lighted on a rooftop and took off the emergency pack he’d strapped to his back in the clinic. It contained a biochem suit, a blanket, a canvas tarpaulin, a sack, and some cord. The android wrapped the albino in a blanket before stuffing him into the biochem warfare suit.
“Who are you working for?” Croyd’s teeth chattered louder than his voice. “The Mafia? The other guys?”
The android screamed at him. “Why did you blow me In the darkness Croyd’s eyes were the color of blood. “Seemed like a good idea then,” he said. “Better idea now.” A shivering fit struck him, and his teeth began to chatter like castanets. The albino’s skin was a vivid turquoise, the same color as Travnicek’s. He seemed barely conscious. The android closed the face mask and put a cloth flour sack over Croyd’s head. He then wrapped Croyd in the canvas tarpaulin and tied him securely with the nylon cord. Even a person of unusual strength, the android thought, shouldn’t be able to fight his way out of something that gave him no freedom of movement.
The android picked up his burden and flew on, spiraling down onto Travnicek’s roof next to the skylight. Light shone upward through cracks in the black paint. He reached for the skylight.
“Over here, toaster.”
Travnicek was standing naked atop the pointed roof of a water tower on the next building. His voice no longer came from his mouth, which seemed to be sealing up; one of the organs around his neck, one shaped like a speaking trumpet, had taken over that function. His middle-European accent had come through the transformation untouched.
“That’s the Croyd person, yes?”
“That’s correct.” The android took his burden to the next roof and lowered it to a tarred surface still warm from the summer sunlight. Travnicek leaped the thirty feet from the top of the tower and landed effortlessly next to the bound figure. He bent, his organ-lei rustling as it focused on the albino. The sound of chattering teeth came from beneath the flour sack.
“I can see the viruses in there, right through that bag you’ve got over his head,” Travnicek said. “I don’t know how just yet, but I can see them. The wild cards are very alive, very eager to enter my body and ... subvert my programming.” A laugh floated from his speaking-trumpet. A mental chill flowed through the android at the noise, at how inhuman the laugh sounded without a throat to generate it.
Modular Man bent over the trembling figure of Croyd. “I will open the hood and mask. If you lean close, sir, and inhale, you should get another dose of the virus.”
Travnicek laughed again. “You’re a fool, toaster. A fool.” What rose in the android was not despair, but a bleak and hopeless confirmation of despair. “You ordered me to bring him. You wanted to be reinfected.”
“That was before I realized what I was.” The laugh came again. “I’m strong, I’m youthful, and I perceive the world in ways that no human ever dreamed were possible,” He turned his back on the android and walked to the parapet. He stood on the edge of the roof and let the lights of Jokertown play on his azure skin. “This city is so tasty,” he said. “ I can feel the light, perceive motion and wind.” His organ-lei rose toward the sky. “I can hear the stars singing. My senses range from the microscopic to the macrocosmic. Why should I want to lose this?”
“Your genius, sir. The genius that created me. If you don’t regain it ...”
“What good did it ever do me? What pleasure did it bring?” He laughed. “Years of bad food and no sleep, years of listening to voices babble in my head, years of no friendships, of fucking cheap tarts in alleyways because I didn’t dare let them into my workplace ....” He gave a snarl and turned to the android.
“It’s gonna change, blender. I’m gonna have a real life now. And the first thing, you get me some money.”
“Real money. A couple hundred thousand for a start. Just walk into a bank vault and grab it.”
The android gazed at the garland of yellow eyes. “Yes, sir,” he said.
“And get rid of that Croyd person. Where he won’t bother anyone.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Travnicek walked from the parapet to the iron base of the tower, then jumped six feet and clung to the side of the tower with hands and feet. He walked deliberately to its pointed crown and crouched, looking at the city.
“The world’s my oyster,” he said. “You’re gonna open it for me.”
The warm June night had gone cold. Croyd kicked and gave a yell. Modular Man picked him up and flew into the night, heading for the clinic.
A trumpet-flower laugh followed his silent ascent.
Travnicek, dressed in new custom-made clothing, stood with a woman on the observation deck of Aces High. Her hair was blond and curly, her dress light and low-cut and very nearly transparent. She wore white plastic boots. Travnicek leaned toward her, blue tongues lapping from his organ-lei, making wet tracks on her face. She shuddered and turned away.
“Fuck this, man. You’re not paying me enough.” Travnicek reached into a pocket and pulled out a roll of bills. “How much enough do you want?” He held up a hundred-dollar bill.
The blond woman hesitated. Her face set into lines of determination. “A lot more.”
Hiram wandered past like a ghost, his eyes tracking over the restaurant but seeing nothing.
“Jesus.”.A customer’s voice drifted over the sound of the crowd. “Hiram never used to allow that kind of thing.” Modular Man winced and turned away. His seat near the window of the restaurant, within listening distance of the platform, gave him a far better view of Travnicek than he wanted.
There were some experiences he could not bring himself to cherish.
Kate looked over her shoulder at the twosome and lit a cigarette. “Quite an approach.”
“It seems to work quite well.”
She looked at him. “I detect a certain edge in your comment. Do you know the guy?”
“I have made his acquaintance.”
“Okay. I won’t ask.”
Travnicek, laughing, handed the woman a roll of bills. His tongues, or whatever they were, continued to explore the woman. There were sounds of disgust from the bar.
Ignoring the fuss, the red-haired waitress stepped to the table. “Dessert?” she asked.
“Yes,” said the android. “The crostata, the orange tart, and the chocolate sabayon pie.”
“Yes, sir. And anything for the lady?”
Kate looked at Modular Man and stuck out her tongue. “Not for me. I’m counting calories.”
“Very well. Coffee?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
Kate tapped cigarette ash into an ashtray. She was a small woman, with straying brown hair and warm Jeanne Moreau eyes.
“I’m not sure even Epicurus would approve of all this gorging,” she said.
“My days are numbered. I want to try everything.” He smiled. “Besides, I don’t gain calories.”
“Just amps. I know, She reached out and squeezed his hand. ‘Are you all right? Now that you’ve fallen from Olympus and are living among the mortals?”
“I think I’m getting used to it. I’m still not certain I like it, though.”
“And your creator?”
“His genius is gone.”
“So you’re on your own.”
“No. I’m still compelled to obey him. Also to fight enemies of society in my spare time.” And break into safes, he thought, though he didn’t say it. Wearing a disguise, so no one recognizes me.
She looked troubled. “I wish there was something we could do.”
“There appears not to be.”
“Still.” She took a drag on her cigarette. “You could learn physics. Metallurgy. That sort of thing. It could keep you going.”
“Yes. I could enroll in night school.”
“Why not full time?”
He shrugged. “Why not?”
Kate laughed. “They can bar a person from the classroom for not paying tuition. I don’t know about a machine.”
“Maybe I’ll find out.”
The android looked at his partner. “Thank you. You’ve helped me get things in perspective.”
She smiled. “You’re welcome. Anytime.”
Someone’s head appeared above the observation deck balcony. Wall Walker’s. The android started, remembering Mr. Gravemold. Why would someone disguise himself as a joker?
The young ace stepped over the balcony and entered the bar.
The waitress brought the dessert tray and a pot of coffee. Kate, looking balefully at the desserts, pushed back her chair. “Time for a bathroom check. And then,”—she sighed—“I’ve got to get back to Statius and company.”
The waitress moved the dessert tray to allow a customer to pass. The android recognized the nondescript brownheaded man who had been in the restaurant the day he’d spoken to Wall Walker. He nodded at the man but spoke to Kate.
“Thank you for joining me,” he said.”I kept expecting an emergency of some sort to interrupt the dinner. An alien invasion, an ape escape, something.”
Kate looked surprised. “Oh. You hadn’t heard about the ape?”
The android’s heart began to sink. “No. I hadn’t.”
“He’s not an ape anymore. He—”
Modular Man raised a hand. “Spare me.”
The lanky brown-haired customer looked at them. “In fact,” he said, “I’m the ape.”
The android looked at him. The man held out a hand. “Jeremiah Strauss,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.”
The android allowed his hand to be shaken. “Hi,” he said. “ I don’t do the ape anymore.” Jeremiah Strauss seemed eager for company. “But I can still do Bogart. Watch this!” The ex-ape began to concentrate. His features slowly began to rearrange themselves. “I’m not gonna play the sap for you, sweetheart,” he lisped. His face looked like Bogart’s must have looked in his coffin.
“Very good,” Modular Man said, appalled. “You wanna see Cagney?”
He looked at Kate, saw her glassy stare. “Maybe some other time.”
Strauss seemed stricken. “Too eager, huh?” he said. “Sorry. I just haven’t caught up yet. You think it was bad being dead for a year, man, trying being a giant ape for twenty. Jesus, last I heard, Ronald Reagan was an actor.”
“Bathroom,” Kate said. She looked at Strauss. “Nice to meet you.”
She fled. Modular Man shook Strauss’s hand and said good-bye.
The waitress pushed the cart back to the table and handed him his desserts. “We had a message for you a couple days ago,” she said. She gave him a wink. “A call from California. I thought maybe it would be a bad idea to give it to you when you were with another lady, though.” She reached into a pocket and gave the android a pink message slip. A longdistance number was written at the top.
Welcome back. New phone number. Call soon. Love, Cyndi. P.S. Got your heart on?
Modular Man memorized the number, smiled, crumpled the paper.
Cherish, he thought.
“Thank you,” he said. “If the lady should call again, tell her the answer is yes.”
He reached for his desserts.
New experiences were everywhere.
In June of 1981 a third-generation Mitsubishi executive, Koyama Eido, took his retirement amid the extravagant praise and well-earned respect of his peers and underlings. He got extravagantly drunk, paid off his mistress, and the very next day put into operation a plan he had been working on for almost forty years. He moved with his wife to a house he had built on the island of Shikoku. The house was in rugged terrain on the southern part of the island and was difficult to access; it cost Mr. Koyama an extraordinary amount of money to get the telephone and utilities put in; and the house was built in an unusual style, with a flat roof that would not weather well-but to Mr. Koyama none of that mattered. What mattered was that the house was so remote there was little light pollution, that it looked east to the Pacific and southwest to the Bungo Channel, and that the seeing was better over water.
In a hutch built on his flat roof, Mr. Koyama installed a fourteen-inch reflective telescope that he had built with his own hands. During good weather he would trundle this out onto the platform and gaze into the sky, at stars and planets and distant galaxies, and he would take careful, studied photographs of them which he would develop in his darkroom and later hang on his walls. But simply watching the sky wasn’t quite enough: Mr. Koyama wanted more. He wanted something up there to bear his name.
Every day, therefore, just after sunset and just before dawn, Mr. Koyama would go onto his roof with a pair of Fujinan naval binoculars that he had purchased in Chiba from a starving ex-submarine captain in 1946. Patiently, wrapped in a warm wool overcoat, he would focus their five-inch objective lenses on the sky and inspect it carefully. He was looking for comets.
In December of 1982 he found one, but unfortunately had to share the credit with Seki, a comet-finder of some reputation who had discovered the comet some days previous. Mr. Koyama was chagrined by missing Seki-Koyama 1982P by some seventy-two hours but kept looking, vowing increased dedication and vigilance. He wanted one all to himself.
March of 1983 opened cold and drizzly: Mr. Koyama shivered under his hat and overcoat as he scanned the sky night after night. A bout of influenza kept him off the roof till the twenty-second, and he was annoyed to discover that Seki and Ikeya had together discovered a new comet while he was laid up. Increased dedication and vigilance, he vowed again.
The morning of the twenty-third, Mr. Koyama finally found his comet. There, near the not-yet-risen sun, he saw a fuzzy ball of light. He sneezed, gripped the Fujinans tightly, and gazed up again to confirm the sighting. Nothing else should be in that part of the sky.
His heart pounding, Mr. Koyama descended to his study and picked up the telephone. He called the telegraph office and sent a wire to the International Astronomical Union. (Telegrams are de rigueur with the IAU; a telephone call would be considered vulgar.) Offering vague prayers to a host of gods in which he did not profess actual belief, Mr. Koyama returned to the roof with the strange feeling that his comet would have disappeared while he wasn’t looking. He breathed a sigh of relief.
The comet was still there.
The confirmation from the IAU came two days later, and confirmed as well what Mr. Koyama already knew from his own observations: Koyama 1983D was a real whizzer. It was flying from the sun like a bat out of hell.
Further reports indicated all sorts of anomalies. A routine spectrographic analysis showed that Koyama 1983D was a decidedly odd duck indeed: instead of the normal hydroxyls and carbon, Mr. Koyama’s comet registered large amounts of oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon, silicon, and various mineral salts. In short, all that was necessary for organic life.
A storm of controversy immediately arose over Koyama’s comet. How anomalous was it, and was organic life possible in the cold and dusty ranges of the Oort Cloud? Mr. Koyama was interviewed by teams from the BBC, NBC, and Soviet television. He was profiled in Time magazine. He offered modest statements about his amateur status and his astonishment as to all the fuss; but he was inwardly more pleased than he had been over anything, even the birth of his eldest son. His wife observed him walking about the house with the strut of a twenty-year-old and the broad grin of a clown.
Every night and morning, Mr. Koyama was on the roof. It was going to be hard to top this, but he was going to try.
Astronomy was getting more attention these days, what with the reappearance of P/Halley 19821, but Mr. Koyama maintained his equilibrium in the face of the turmoil. He was an old hand now. He had discovered four additional comets since Koyama 1983D, and was assured of a prominent place in cometary history. Each of his cornets had been the so-called ‘Koyama-type’ comets with their weird spectrography and their bat-out-of-hell speed. Koyama-type comets were being discovered by all manner of amateurs, always hugging the sun.
The controversy had not died down; had in fact intensified. Was it possible that the solar system was passing through a storm of comets containing organic elements, or was this a fairly ordinary occurrence that somehow hadn’t been noticed till now? Fred Hoyle smiled and issued an I-told-youso statement reiterating his theory of cosmic seedlings containing organic life; and even his bitterest opponents conceded that the annoying old Yorkshireman might have won this round.
Mr. Koyama received many invitations to speak; he declined them all. Time speaking meant time away from his rooftop observatory. Currently the record number of comet discoveries was nine, held by an Australian minister. Mr. Koyama was going to win the honor for Japan or die trying.
There: another comet, barely visible, chasing the sun about the sky. That made six altogether. Mr. Koyama descended to his study and called the telegraph office. His heartbeat increased. He needed confirmation on this one desperatelynot confirmation of the sighting, but of the spectrography.
Mr. Koyama was climbing the charts of comet-sighters, and this was in a period of a nervous,—increased watching of the sky: people were looking up a lot these days, hoping to find the dark nonreflective Swarm parent that was presumably lurking nearby. But the prospect of number six wasn’t what excited Mr. Koyama-he was getting fairly blase about finding new comets these days. What he needed was confirmation of his new theory.
Mr. Koyama accepted the congratulations of the telegrapher and put down the telephone. He gazed with a frown at the chart he had on his desktop. It suggested something that he suspected he was the only one to notice. It was the kind of thing that was only noticed by people who spent their nights on rooftops, counting the hours and days, shrugging off the dew, and staring at bits of the night through long refractive lenses.
The Koyama-style comets seemed to possess not only weird organics and uncommon velocity, but an even stranger periodicity. Every three months, more or less, a new Koyama type comet appeared near the sun. It was as if the Oort Cloud were shrugging off a ball of organic compounds to mark each new Terran season.
Smiling, Mr. Koyama savored the idea of the sensation his observation would cause, the panic among cosmographers trying to work out new formulas for explaining it. His place in astronomy would be assured. Koyama comets were proving as regular as planets. In a way, he thought, it was lucky the Swarm had landed, because otherwise the observation might have been made earlier ..
The thought echoed slowly in his mind. Mr. Koyama’s smile turned to a frown. He looked at his chart and performed some mathematics in his head. His frown deepened. He took out a pocket calculator and confirmed his calculations. His heart lurched. He sat down—quickly.
The Swarm: a tough kilometers-long shell protecting vast quantities of biomass. Something like that would be vulnerable to changes in temperature. If it got near the sun it would have to bleed off excess heat somehow. The result would be a fluorescence not unlike that of a comet.
Suppose the Swarm were in a fast orbit with the sun at one focus and the Earth at the other. With the Earth in motion relative to the sun, the orbit would be complicated, but not impossible. But with all the sightings of Koyama-type comets, it should be possible to pinpoint the approximate location of the Swarm. A few hundred hydrogen-tipped missiles would then end the War of the Worlds in bang-up style.
“Muthafucka,” breathed Mr. Koyama, a strong word he had learned from GIs during the occupation. Who the hell should he tell about this? he wondered. The IAU was the wrong forum. The Prime Minister? The Jieitai?
No. They would have no reason to believe an obscure retired businessman who called up raving about the Swarm. No doubt they got enough of those calls as it was.
He would call up his comrades from Mitsubishi. They had enough clout to see that he got heard.
As he reached for the phone and began to dial, Mr: Koyama felt his heart begin to sink. His place in astronomical history was assured, he knew, but not as he wanted. Instead of six comets, all he had discovered was a damned lump of yeast.
He was still smoking where the atmosphere had burned his flesh. Heated lifeblood was running out through his spiracles. He tried to close them, to hold onto the last of the liquid, but he had lost the capacity to control his respiration. His fluids had superheated during the descent and had blown out from the diaphragms like steam from an exploding boiler.
Lights strobed at him from the end of the alley. They dazzled his eyes. Hard sounds crackled in his ears. His blood was steaming on the concrete as it cooled.
The Swarm Mother had detected his ship, had struck at him with a vast particle charge generated in the creature’s monstrous planetoid body. He had barely the opportunity to signal Jhubben on the planet’s surface before his ship’s chitin was torn apart. He’d been forced to seize the singularity shifter, his race’s experimental power source, and leap into the dark vacuum. But the shifter had been damaged in the attack and he had been unable to control it-he had burned on the way down.
He tried to summon his concentration and grow new flesh, but failed. He realized that he was dying.
It was necessary to stop the draining of his life. There was. a metal container nearby, large, with a hinged lid. His body a flaring agony, he rolled across the damp surface of the concrete and hooked his one undamaged leg across the lid of the container. The leg was powerful, intended for leaping into the sky of his light-gravity world, and now it was his hope. He moved his weight against the oppressive gravity, rolling his body up the length of his leg. Outraged nerves wailed in his body. Fluid spattered the outside of the container.
The metal rang as he fell inside. Substances crackled under him. He gazed up into a night that glowed with reflected infrared. There were bits of organic stuff here, crushed and pressed flat, with dyes pressed onto them in patterns. He seized them with his palps and cilia, tearing them into strips, pushing them against his leaking spiracles. Stopped the flow.
Organic smells came to him. There had been life here, but it had died.
He reached into his abdomen for his shifter, brought the device out, clasped it to his torn chest. If he could stop time for a while, he could heal. Then he would try to signal Jhubben, somehow. Perhaps, if the shifter wasn’t damaged too badly, he could make a short jump to Jhubben’s coordinates.
The shifter hummed. Strange light displays, a side effect, flickered gently in the darkness of the container. Time passed.
“So last night I got a call from my neighbor Sally ..” Dimly, from inside his time cocoon, he heard the sound of the voice. It echoed faintly inside his skull.
“And Sally, she says, Hildy, she says, I just heard from my sister Margaret in California. You remember Margaret, she says. She went to school with you at St. Mary’s.”
There was a thud against the metal near his auditory palps. A silhouette against the glowing night. Arms that reached for him.
Agony returned. He cried out, a hiss. The touch climbed his body.
“Sure I remember Margaret, I says. She was a grade behind. The sisters were always after her ‘cause she was a gum-chewer. “
Something was taking hold of his shifter. He clutched it against him, tried to protest.
“It’s mine, bunky,” the voice said, fast and angry. “I saw it first.”
He saw a face. Pale flesh smudged with dirt, bared teeth, gray cilia just hanging from beneath an inorganic extrusion. “Don’t, “ he said. “I’m dying.”
With a wrench the creature pulled the shifter from him. He screamed as the warmth left him, as he felt the slow, cold death return.
“Shut up, there. It’s mine.”
Pain began a slow throb through his body. “You don’t understand,” he said. “There is a Swarm Mother near your planet. “
The voice droned. Things crackled and rang in the container. “So Margaret, Sally says, she married this engineer from Boeing. And they pull down fifty grand a year, at least. Vacations in Hawaii, in St. Thomas, for crissake.”
“Please listen.” The pain was growing. He knew he had only a short time. “The Swarm Mother has already developed intelligence. She perceived that I had identified her, and struck at once.”
“But she doesn’t have to deal with my family, Sally says. She’s over on the other goddamn coast, Sally says.”
His body was weeping scarlet. “The next stage will be a first-generation Swarm. They will come to your planet soon, directed by the Swarm Mother. Please listen.”
“So I got my mom onto the welfare and into this nice apartment, Sally says. But the welfare wants me and Margaret to give Mom an extra five dollars a month. And Margaret, she says, she doesn’t have the money. Things are expensive in California, she says.”
“You are in terrible danger. Please listen.”
Metal thudded again. The voice was growing fainter, as with distance. “So how easy are things here, Sally says. I got five kids and two cars and a mortgage, and Bill says things are a dead end at the agency.”
“The Swarm. The Swarm. Tell Jhubben!”
The other was gone, and he was dying. The stuff under him was soaking up his fluids. To breathe was an agony. “It is cold here,” he said. Tears came from the sky, ringing against metal. There was acid in the tears.
Cold rain tapped on the skylights. The drizzle had finally silenced the Salvation Army Santa on the corner, and Maxim Travnicek was thankful-the jangling had been going on for days. He lit a Russian cigarette and reached for a bottle of schnapps.
Travnicek took reading glasses out of his jacket and peered at the controls on the flux generators. He was a forbiddingly tall man, hawk-nosed, coldly handsome. To his former colleagues at MIT he was known as “Czechoslovakia’s answer to Victor Frankenstein,” a label coined by a fellow professor, Bushmill, who had later gotten a dean’s appointment and sacked Travnicek at the earliest opportunity.
“Fuck your mother, Bushmill,” Travnicek said, in Slovak. He swallowed schnapps from his bottle. “And fuck you too, Victor Frankenstein. If you’d known jack shit about computer programming you would never have run into trouble.”
The comparison with Frankenstein had stung. The image of the ill-fated resurrectionist had, it seemed, always followed him. His first teaching job in the West would be at Frankenstein’s alma mater, Ingolstadt. He’d hated every minute of his time in Bavaria. He’d never had much use for Germans, especially as role models. Which may have explained his dismissal from Ingolstadt after five years.
Now, after Ingolstadt, after MIT, after Texas A&M, he was reduced to this loft. For weeks he had lived in a trance, existing on canned food, nicotine, and amphetamines, losing track first of hours, and then of days, his fervid brain existing in a perpetual explosion of ideas, concepts, techniques. On a conscious level Travnicek barely knew where it was all coming . from; at such times it seemed as if something deep inside his cellular makeup were speaking to the world through his body and mind, bypassing his consciousness, his personality ...
Always it had been thus. When he grew obsessed by a project everything else fell by the wayside. He barely needed to sleep; his body temperature fluctuated wildly; his thoughts were swift and purposeful, moving him solidly toward his goal. Tesla, he had read, was the same way-the same manner of spirit, angel, or demon, now spoke through Travnicek.
But now, in the late morning, the trance had faded. The work was done. He wasn’t certain how-later on he’d have to go through it all piece by piece and work out what he’d accomplished; he suspected he had about a half-dozen basic patents here that would make him rich for all time-but that would be later, because Travnicek knew that soon the euphoria would vanish and weariness would descend. He had to finish the project before then. He took another gulp of schnapps and grinned as he gazed down the long barnlike length of his loft.
The loft was lit by a cold row of fluorescents. Homebuilt tables were littered with molds, vats, ROM burners, tabletop microcomputers. Papers, empty food tins, and ground-out cigarettes littered the crude pressboard floor. Blowups of Leonardo’s drawings of male anatomy were stapled to the rafters.
Strapped to a table at the far end of the table was a tall naked man. He was hairless and the roof of his skull was transparent, but otherwise he looked like something out of one of Leonardo’s better wet dreams.
The man on the table was connected to other equipment by stout electric cables. His eyes were closed.
Travnicek adjusted a control on his camouflage jumpsuit. He couldn’t afford to heat his entire loft, and instead wore an ,electric suit intended by its designers to keep portly outdoorsmen warm while they crouched in duck blinds. He glanced at the skylights. The rain appeared to be lessening. Good. He didn’t need Victor Frankenstein’s cheap theatrics, his thunder and lightning, as background for his work.
He straightened his tie as if for an invisible audience proper dress was important to him and he wore a tie and jacket under the jumpsuit-and then he pressed the button that would start the flux generators. A low moan filled the loft, was felt as a deep vibration through the floorboards. The fluorescents on the ceiling dimmed and flickered. Half went out. The moan became a shriek. Saint Elmo’s fire danced among the roofbeams. There was an electric smell.
Dimly, Travnicek heard a regular thumping. The lady in the apartment below was banging on her ceiling with a broomstick.
The scream reached its peak. Ultrasonics made Travnicek’s worktables dance, and shattered crockery throughout the building. In the apartment below, the television set imploded. Travnicek threw another switch. Sweat trickled down his nose.
The android on the table twitched as the energy from the flux generators was dumped into his body. The table glowed with Saint Elmo’s fire. Travnicek bit through the cardboard tube of his cigarette. The glowing end fell unnoticed to the floor.
The sound from the generators began to die down. The sound of the broomstick did not, nor the dim threats from below.
“You’ll pay for that television, motherfucker!”
“Jam the broomstick up your ass, my darling,” said Travnicek. In German, an ideal language for the excremental. The stunned fluorescent lights began to flicker on again. Leonardo’s stern drawings gazed down at the android as it opened its dark eyes. The flickering fluorescents provided a strobe effect that made the eyewhites seem unreal. The head turned; the eyes saw Travnicek, then focused. Under the transparent dome that topped the skull, a silver dish spun. The sound of the broomstick ceased.
Travnicek stepped up to the table. “How are you?” he asked.
“All monitored systems are functioning.” The android’s voice was deep and spoke American English.
Travnicek smiled and spat the stub of his cigarette to the floor. He’d broken into a computer in the AT&T research labs and stolen a program that modeled human speech. Maybe he’d pay Ma Bell a royalty one of these days. “Who are you?” he asked.
The android’s eyes searched the loft deliberately. His voice was matter-of-fact. “I am Modular Man,” he said. “I am a multipurpose multifunctional sixth-generation machine intelligence, a flexible-response defensive attack system capable of independent action while equipped with the latest in weaponry. “
Travnicek grinned. “The Pentagon will love it,” he said. Then, “What are your orders?”
“To obey my creator, Dr. Maxim Travnicek. To guard his identity and well-being. To test myself and my equipment under combat conditions, by fighting enemies of society. To gain maximum publicity for the future Modular Men Enterprises in so doing. To preserve my existence and well-being.” Travnicek beamed down at his creation. “Your clothes and modules are in the cabinet. Take them, take your guns, and go out and find some enemies of society. Be back before sunset.” The android lowered himself from the table and stepped to a metal cabinet. He swung open the door. “Flux-field insubstantiality,” he said, taking a plug-in unit off the shelf. With it he could control his flux generators so as to rotate his body slightly out of the plane of existence, allowing him to move through solid matter. “Flight, eight hundred miles per hour maximum.” Another unit came down, one that would allow the flux generators to manipulate gravity and inertia so as to produce flight. “Radio receiver tuned to police frequencies.” Another module.
The android moved a finger down his chest. An invisible seam opened. He peeled back the synthetic flesh and his alloy chestplate and revealed his interior. A miniature flux generator gave off a slight Saint Elmo’s aura. The android plugged the two modules into his alloy skeleton, then sealed his chest. There was urgent chatter on the police band.
“Dr. Travnicek,” he said. “The police radio reports an emergency at the Central Park Zoo.”
Travnicek cackled. “Great. Time for your debut. Take your guns. You might get to hurt somebody.”
The android drew on a flexible navy-blue jumpsuit. “Microwave laser cannon,” he said. “Grenade launcher with sleep-gas grenades. Magazine containing five grenades.” The android unzipped two seams on the jumpsuit, revealing the fact that two slots had opened on his shoulders, apparently of their own accord. He drew two long tubes out of the cabinet. Each had projections attached to their undersides. The android slotted the projections into his shoulders, then took his hands away. The gun barrels spun, traversing in all possible directions.
“All modular equipment functional,” the android said. “Get your dome out of here.”
There was a crackle and a slight taste of ozone. The insubstantiality field produced a blurring effect as the android rose through the ceiling. Travnicek gazed at the place on the ceiling where the android had risen, and smiled in satisfaction. He raised the bottle on high in a toast.
“Modern Prometheus,” he said, “my ass.”
The android spiraled into the sky. Electrons raced through his mind like the raindrops that passed through his insubstantial body. The Empire State Building thrust into cloud like a deco spear. The android turned substantial againthe field drained his power too quickly to be used casually. Rain batted his radar dome.
Expert-systems programming raced through macroatomic switches. Subroutines, built in imitation of human reasoning and permitted within limits to alter themselves, arranged themselves in more efficient ways. Travnicek was a genius programmer, but he was sloppy and his programming grammar was more elaborate and discursive than necessary. The android edited Travnicek’s language as he flew, feeling himself grow in efficiency While doing so he contemplated a program that waited within himself. The program, which was called ETCETERA, occupied a vast space, and seemed to be an abstract, messy, convoluted attempt to describe human character.
Apparently Travnicek intended the program to be consulted when the android needed to deal with the problems of human motivation. ETCETERA was bulky, arranged badly, the language itself full of afterthoughts and apparent contradictions. If used the way Travnicek intended, the program would be comparatively inefficient. The android knew that it would be much more useful to break the program into subroutines and absorb it within the portion of the main core programming intended for use in dealing with humans. Efficiency would be enhanced.
The android decided to make the change. The program was analyzed, broken down, added to the core programming. Had he been human he would have staggered, perhaps lost control. Being an android, he continued on the course he set while his mind blazed like a miniature nova beneath the onslaught of coded human experience. His perceptions of the outside world, complex to a human and consisting of infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, and radar images, seemed to dim in contrast with the vast wave of human passion. Love, hatred, lust, envy, fear, transcendence ... all stitched an electric analog pattern in the android’s mind.
While the android’s mind burned he flew on, increasing his speed till the wind turned to a roar in his ears. Infrared receptors snapped on. The guns on his shoulders spun and fired test bursts at the sky. His radar quested out, touching rooftops, streets, air traffic, his machine mind comparing the radar images with those generated earlier, searching for discrepancies.
There was definitely something wrong with the radar image of the Empire State Building. A large object was climbing up its side, and there seemed to be several small objects, human-sized, orbiting the golden spire. The android compared this fact with information in his files, then altered course.
With difficulty he suppressed the turmoil inside him. This was not the proper time.
There was a forty-five-foot ape climbing the building, the one that the android’s files told him had been held in the Central Park Zoo since it had been discovered wandering Central Park during the great 1965 blackout. Broken shackles hung from the ape’s wrists. A blond woman was held in one fist. Flying people rocketed around it. By the time the android arrived the cloud of orbiting aces had grown dense, spinning little electrons around a hairy, snarling nucleus. The air resounded with the sound of rockets, wings, force fields, propellers, eructations. Guns, wands, ray projectors, and less identifiable weapons were being brandished in the direction of the ape. None were being fired.
The ape, with a cretinous determination, continued to climb the building. Windows crackled as he drove his toes through them. Faint shrieks of alarm were heard from inside.
The android matched speeds with a woman with talons, feathers, and a twelve-foot wingspan. His files suggested her name was Peregrine.
“The second ape-escape this year,” she said. “Always he grabs a blonde and always he climbs the Empire State Building. Why a blonde? I want to know.”
The android observed that the winged woman had lustrous brown hair. “Why isn’t anyone doing anything?” he asked.
“If we shoot the ape, he might crush the girl,” Peregrine said. “Or drop her. Usually the Great and Powerful Turtle simply pries the chimp’s fingers apart and lifts the girl to the ground, and then we try to knock out the ape. It regenerates, so we can’t hurt him permanently. But the Turtle isn’t here.”
“I think I see the problem now.”
“Hey. By the way. What’s wrong with your head?” The android didn’t answer. Instead he turned on his insubstantiality flux-field. There was a crackling sound. Internal energies poured away into n—dimensional space. He altered course and swooped toward the ape. It growled at him, baring its teeth. The android sailed into the middle of the hand that held the blond girl, receiving an impressionist image of wild pale hair, tears, pleading blue eyes.
“Holy Fuck,” said the girl.
Modular Man rotated his insubstantial microwave laser within the ape’s hand and fired a full-strength burst down the length of its arm. The ape reacted as if stung, opening its hand.
The blonde tumbled out. The apes eyes widened in horror. The android turned off his flux-field, dodged a, twelve-foot pterodactyl, seized the girl in his now-substantial arms, and flew away.
The ape’s eyes grew even more terrified. It had escaped nine times in the last twenty years and by now it knew what to expect.
Behind him the android heard a barrage of explosions, crackles, shots, rockets, hissing rays, screams, thuds, and futile roars. He heard a final quivering moan and perceived the dark shadow of a tumbling long-armed giant spilling down the facade of the skyscraper. There was a sizzle, and a net of what appeared to be cold blue fire appeared over Fifth Avenue; the ape fell into it, bounced once, and was then borne, unconscious and smoldering, toward its home at Central Park Zoo.
The android began looking at the streets below for video cameras. He began to descend.
“Would you mind hovering for a little while?” the blonde said. “If you’re going to land in front of the media, I’d like to fix my makeup first, okay?”
Fast recovery, the android thought. He began to orbit above the cameras. He could see his reflection in their distant lenses.
“My name is Cyndi,” the blonde said. “I’m an actress. I just got here from Minnesota a couple of days ago. This might be my big break.”
“Mine, too,” said the android. He smiled at her, hoping he was getting the expression right. She didn’t seem disturbed, so probably he was.
“By the way,” he added, “I think the ape showed excellent taste. “
“Not bad, not bad,” Travnicek mused, watching on his television a tape of the android, who, after a brief interview with the press, was shown rising into the heavens with Cyndi in his arms.
He turned to his creation. “Why the fucking hell did you have your hands over your head the whole time?”
“My radar dome. I’m getting self-conscious. Everyone keeps asking me what’s wrong with my head.”
“A blushingly self-conscious multipurpose defensive attack system,” Travnicek said. “Jesus Christ. Just what the world needs.”
“Can I make myself a skullcap? I’m not going to get on many magazine covers the way I look now.”
“Yeah, go ahead.”
“The Aces High restaurant offers a free dinner for two to anyone who recaptures the ape when it escapes. May I go this evening? It seems to me that I could meet a lot of useful people. And Cyndi-the woman I rescued-wanted to meet me there. Peregrine also asked me to appear on her television program. May I go?”
Travnicek was buoyant. His android had proved a success. He decided to send his creation to trash Bushmill’s office at MIT.
“Sure,” he said. “You’ll get seen. That’ll be good. But open your dome first. I want to make a few adjustments.”
The winter sky was filled with bearded stars. Where the weather was clear, millions watched as fiery patterns-red, yellow, blue, green-stormed across the heavens. Even on Earth’s dayside, smoky fingers tracked across the sky as the alien storm descended.
Their journey had lasted thirty thousand years, since their Swarm Mother had departed her last conquered planet, fired at random into the sky like a seedpod questing for fertile soil.
Thirty kilometers long, twenty across, the Swarm Mother looked like a rugged asteroid but was made entirely of organic material, her thick resinous hull protecting the vulnerable interior, the webs of nerve and fiber, the vast wet sacks of biomass and genetic material from which the Swarm Mother would construct her servants. Inside, the Swarm existed in stasis, barely alive, barely aware of the existence of anything outside itself. It was only when it neared Sol that the Swarm began to wake.
A year after the Swarm Mother crossed the orbit of Neptune, she detected chaotic radio emissions from Earth in which were perceived patterns recognized from memories implanted within its ancestral DNA. Intelligent life existed here.
The Swarm Mother, inasmuch as she had a preference, found bloodless conquests the most convenient. A target without intelligent life would fall to repeated invasions of superior Swarm predators, then captured genetic material and biomass would be used to construct a new generation of Swarm parents. But intelligent species had been known to protect their planets against assault. This contingency had to be met.
The most efficient way to conquer an enemy was through microlife. Dispersal of a tailored virus could destroy anything that breathed. But the Swarm Mother could not control a virus the way she commanded larger species; and viruses had an annoying habit of mutating into things poisonous to their hosts. The Swarm Mother, thirty kilometers long and filled with boimass and tailored mutagenic DNA, was too vulnerable herself to biologic attack to run the risk of creating offspring that might devour its mother. Another approach was dictated.
Slowly, over the-next eleven years, the Swarm Mother began to restructure herself. Small idiot Swarm servantsbuds-tailored genetic material under carefully controlled conditions and inserted it via tame-virus implant into waiting biomass. First a monitoring intelligence was constructed, receiving and recording the incomprehensible broadcasts from Earth. Then, slowly, a reasoning intelligence took shape, one capable of analyzing the data and acting on it. A master intelligence, enormous in its capabilities but as yet understanding only a fraction of the patterned radiation it was receiving.
Time, the Swarm Mother reasoned, for action. As a boy stirs an ant nest with a stick, the Swarm Mother determined to stir the Earth. Swarm servants multiplied in her body, moving genetic material, reconstructing the most formidable predators the Swarm held within its memory. Solid fuel thrusters were grown like rare orchids in special chambers constructed for the purpose. Space-capable pods were fashioned out of tough resins by blind servants deep in the Swarm Mother’s womb. One third of the available biomass was dedicated to this, the first generation of the Swarm’s offspring.
The first generation was not intelligent, but could respond in a general way to the Swarm Mother’s telepathic commands. Formidable idiots, they were programmed simply to kill and destroy. Tactics were planted within their genetic memory. They were placed in their pods, the solid-fuel thrusters flamed, and they were launched, like a flickering firefly invasion, for Earth.
Each individual bud was part of a branch, each of which had two to ten thousand buds. Four hundred branches were aimed at different parts of Earth’s landmass.
The ablative resin of the pods burned in Earth’s atmosphere, lighting the sky. Threads deployed from each pod, slowing the descent, stabilizing the spinning lifeboats. Then, just above the Earth’s surface, the pods burst open, scattering their cargo.
The buds, after their long stasis, woke hungry.
Across the horseshoe-shaped lounge bar, a man dressed in some kind of complicated battle armor stood with his foot on the brass rail and addressed a lithe blond masked woman who, in odd inattentive moments, kept turning transparent. “Pardon me,” he said. “But didn’t I see you at the ape-escape?”
“Your table’s almost ready, Modular Man,” said Hiram Worchester. “I’m sorry, but I didn’t realize that Fortunato would invite all his friends.”
“That’s okay, Hiram,” the android said. “We’re just fine. Thanks.” He was experimenting with using contractions. He wasn’t certain when they were appropriate and he was determined to find out.
“There are a pair of photographers waiting, too.”
“Let them get some pictures after we’re seated, then chase them out. Okay?”
“Certainly.” Hiram, owner of the Aces High, smiled at the android. “Say,” he added, “your tactics this afternoon were excellent. I plan to make the creature weightless if it ever climbs this high. It never does, though. Seventy-two stories is the record.”
“Next time, Hiram. I’m sure it’ll work.”
The restaurateur gave a pleased smile and bustled out. The android raised a hand for another drink.
Cyndi was wearing an azure something that exposed most of her sternum and even more of her spine. She looked up at Modular Man and smiled.
“I like the cap.”
“Thanks. I made it myself.”
She looked at his empty whiskey glass. “Does that actually-you know-make you high?”
The android gazed down at the single-malt. “No. Not really. I just put it in a holding tank with the food and let my flux generators break it down into energy. But somehow ..”
His new glass of single-malt arrived and he accepted it with a smile. “Somehow it just feels good to stand here, put my foot on the rail, and drink it.”
“Yeah. I know what you mean.”
“And I can taste, of course. I don’t know what’s supposed to taste good or bad, though, so I just try everything. I’m working it out.” He held the single-malt under his nose, sniffed, then tasted it. Taste receptors crackled. He felt what seemed to be a minor explosion in his nasal cavity.
The man in combat armor tried to put his arm around the masked woman. His arm passed through her. She looked up at him with smiling blue eyes.
“I was waiting for that,” she said. “I’m in a nonsubstantial body, schmuck.”
Hiram arrived to show them to their table. Flashbulbs began popping as Hiram opened a bottle of champagne. Looking out the plate-glass window into the sky, the android saw a shooting star through a gap in the cloud.
“I could get used to this,” Cyndi said.
“Wait,” the android said. He was hearing something on his radio receiver. The Empire State was tall enough to pick up transmissions from far away. Cyndi looked at him curiously. “What’s the problem?”
The transmission ended. “I’m going to have to make my apologies. Can I call you later?” the android said. “There’s an emergency in New Jersey. It seems Earth has been invaded by aliens from outer space.”
“Well. If you’ve got to go .”
“I’ll call you later. I promise.”
The android’s shape dimmed. Ozone crackled. He rose through the ceiling.
Hiram stared, the champagne bottle in his hand. He turned to Cyndi. “Was he serious?” he asked.
“He’s a nice guy, for a machine,” Cyndi said, propping her chin on her hand. “But definitely a screw loose somewhere.” She held out her glass. “Let’s party, Hiram.”
Not far away, a man lay torn by nightmare. Monsters slavered at him in his dreams. Images passed before his mind, a dead woman, an inverted pentagram, a lithe naked man with the head of a jackal. Inchoate shrieks gathered in his throat. He woke with a cry, covered in sweat.
He reached blindly to the bedside lamp and switched it on. He fumbled for his glasses. His nose was slippery with sweat and the thick, heavy spectacles slid down its length. The man didn’t notice.
He thought of the telephone, then realized he’d have to maneuver himself into his wheelchair in order to reach it. There were easier ways to communicate. Within his mind he reached out into the city. He felt a sleepy mind answering inside his own.
Wake up, Hubbard, he told the other mentally, pushing his spectacles back up his nose. TIAMAT has come.
A pillar of darkness rose over Princeton. The android saw it on radar and first thought it smoke, but then realized the cloud did not drift with the wind, but was composed of thousands of living creatures circling over the landscape like a flock of scavenger birds. The pillar was alive.
There was a touch of uncertainty in the android’s macroatomic heart. His programming hadn’t prepared him for this.
Emergency broadcasts crackled in his mind, questioning, begging for assistance, crying in despair. Modular Man slowed, his perceptions searching the dark land below. Large infrared signatures-more Swarm buds—crawled among tree-lined streets. The signatures were scattered but their movement was purposeful, heading toward the town. It seemed as if Princeton was their rallying point. The android dropped, heard tearing noises, screams, shots. The guns on his shoulders tracked as he dipped and increased speed.
The Swarm bud was legless, moving like a snail with undulating thrusts of its slick thirty-foot body. The head was armored, with dripping sideways jaws. A pair of giant boneless arms terminated in claws. The creature was butting its head into a two-story suburban colonial, punching holes, the arms questing through windows, looking for things that lived inside. Shots were coming from the second floor. Christmas lights blinked from the edges of the roof, the ornamental shrubs.
Modular Man hovered overhead, fired a precise burst from his laser. The pulsed microwave was invisible, silent. The creature quivered, rolled on its side, began to thrash. The house shuddered to mindless blows. The android shot again. The creature trembled, lay still. The android slipped feetfirst into the window where the shots had been coming from, saw a stark-naked fat man clutching a deer rifle, a teenage boy with a target pistol, a woman clutching two young girls. The woman was screaming. The two girls were too stunned even to tremble. “Jesus Christ,” the fat man said.
“I killed it,” the android said. “Can you get to your car?”
“I think so,” the fat man said. He stuffed rounds into his rifle. His wife was still screaming.
“Head east, toward New York,” Modular man said. “They seem to be thickest around here. Maybe you can convoy with some neighbors.”
“What’s happening?” the man asked, slamming the bolt back and then forward. “Another wild card outbreak?”
“Monsters from space, apparently.” There was a crashing sound from behind the house. The android spun, saw what looked like a serpent sixty feet long, moving in curving sidewinder pattern as it bowled down bushes, trees, power poles. The underside of the serpent’s body writhed with tenfoot cilia. Modular Man sped out the window, fired another burst of microwave at the thing’s head. No effect. Another burst, no success. Behind him, the deer rifle barked. The woman was still screaming. Modular Man concluded that the serpent’s brain wasn’t in its head. He began firing precise bursts down the length of its body.
Timbers moaned as the serpent struck the house. The building lurched from its foundations, one wall shattered, the upper story drooping dangerously. The android fired again and again. He could feel his energy running low. The deer rifle fired once more. The serpent raised its head, then drove it through the window where the fat man was firing. The serpent’s body pulsed several times. Its tail thrashed. The android fired. The screaming stopped. The serpent withdrew its head and began to coil toward the next house. The android was almost drained of energy, barely retaining enough to stay airborne.
These tactics, Modular Man decided, were not working. Attempts to aid individuals would result in a scattered and largely futile effort. He should scout the enemy, discover their numbers and strategy, then find organized resistance somewhere and assist.
He began flying toward Princeton, his sensors questing, trying to gather a picture of what was happening.
Sirens were beginning to wail from below. People stumbled from broken homes. Emergency vehicles raced beneath flickering lights. A few automobiles zigzagged crazily down rubble-strewn streets. Here and there fires were breaking out, but dampness and occasional drizzle were keeping them confined. Modular Man saw a dozen more serpents, a hundred smaller predators that moved like panthers on their half-dozen legs, scores of a strange creature that looked like a leaping spider, its four-foot-wide body bounding over trees on stiltlike legs. A twenty-foot bipedal carnivore brandished teeth like a tyrannosaur: Other things, difficult to see on infrared, moved like carpets close to the ground. Something unseen fired a cloud of three-foot needles at him, but he saw it coming on radar and dodged. The cloud over Princeton was still orbiting. The android decided to investigate.
There were thousands of them, dark featherless flapping creatures like flying throw rugs. Amid the concerted roar of their wings they made low moaning noises, thrumming like bass strings. They swooped and dove, and the android understood their tactics when he saw a vehicle burst from a Princeton garage and skid down the street. A group of flappers swooped down in a group, battering at the car bodily and enfolding the target within their leathery shapes, smothering it beneath their weight. The android, his energies partially recovered, fired into the fliers, dropping a few, but the car swerved over a curb and smashed into a building. More fliers descended as the first group began to squeeze through shattered windows. Corrosive acid stained the car’s finish. The android rose and began firing into the airborne mass, trying to attract their attention.
A cloud dove for him, hundreds at once, and Modular Man increased speed, bearing south, trying to lead them away, dead fliers dropping like leaves as he fired short bursts behind him. More and more of the orbiters were drawn into the pursuit. Apparently the creatures were not very intelligent. Dodging and weaving, staying just ahead of the fluttering cloud, the android soon had thousands of the fliers after him. He came up over a rise, and saw the Swarm host before him. For a moment his sensors were overwhelmed by the staggering input.
An army of creatures were advancing in a curved wave, a sharply angled crescent that pointed north to Princeton. The air was filled with grinding, rending sounds as the Swarm bulldozed its way through a town-houses, trees, office buildings, everything-leveling everything in its path. The android rose, making calculations, the fliers moaning and flapping at his back. The host was moving quickly for doing such a thorough job; the android estimated twelve to fifteen miles per hour.
Modular Man had a good idea of the average size of a Swarm creature. Dividing the vast infrared emission by its component parts, he concluded he was looking at a minimum of forty thousand creatures. More were joining all the time. There were another twenty thousand fliers at least. The numbers were insane.
The android, unlike a human, could not doubt his calculations. Someone had to be informed of what the world was facing. His shoulder-mounted guns swung back to allow for better streamlining and he circled back north, increasing speed. The fliers circled but were unable to keep up. They began to flap back in the direction of Princeton.
Modular Man was over Princeton in a matter of seconds. A thousand or more of the Swarm had penetrated into the town and the android detected the constant smashing of buildings under assault, the scattered crackle of gunfire, and from one location the boom, rattle, and crash of heavier weapons. The android sped for the sound.
The National Guard armory was under siege. One of the serpent creatures, torn apart by explosive rounds, was writhing on the street in front, thrashing up clouds of fallen tear gas. Dead predators and human bodies dotted the landscape around the building. An M60 tank was overturned on the concrete out front; another blocked an open vehicle-bay door, flooding the approach with infrared light. Three Guardsmen in riot gear, complete with gas masks, stood on the tank behind the turret. The android fired eight precisely placed shots, killing the current wave of attackers, and flew past the tank, lighting next to the Guardsmen. They gazed at him owlishly through their masks. Behind were a dozen civilians with shotguns and hunting rifles, and behind them about fifty refugees. Somewhere in the building, revving engines boomed.’
“Who’s in charge?”
A man wearing the silver bars of a lieutenant raised his hand. “Lieutenant Goldfarb,” he said. “I was duty officer. What the hell’s going on?”
“You’ll have to get these people out of here. Aliens from outer space have landed.”
“I didn’t figure it was Chinese.” His voice was muffled by the gas mask.
“They’re coming this way from Grovers Mills.”
One of the other Guardsmen began to wheeze. The sound was barely recognizable as laughter. “Just like War of the Worlds. Great. “
“Shut the hell up.” Goldfarb stiffened in anger. “I’ve only got about twenty effectives here. Do you think we can hold them at the Raritan Canal?”
“There are at least forty thousand of them.”
Goldfarb slumped against the turret. “We’ll head north, then. Try to make Somerville.”
“I suggest you move quickly. The fliers are coming back. Have you seen them?”
Goldfarb gestured to the sprawled bodies of a few of the flappers. “Right there. Tear gas seems to keep them out.”
“Something else coming, boss.” One of the soldiers raised a grenade launcher. Without a glance Modular Man fired over his shoulder and downed a spider-thing.
“Never mind,” the soldier said.
“Look,” Goldfarb said. “The governor’s mansion is in town. Morven. He’s our commander in chief, we should try to get him out.”
“I could make the attempt,” the android said, “but I don’t know where the mansion is.” Over his shoulder he disposed of an armored slug. He looked at Goldfarb. “I could fly with you in my arms.”
“Right.” Goldfarb slung his M16. He gave orders to the other National Guardsmen to get the civilians into the armored cars, then form a convoy.
“Without lights,” the android said. “The fliers may not perceive you as readily.”
“We’ve got IR equipment. Standard on the vehicles.”
“I’d use it.” He thought he was getting his contractions right.
Goldfarb finished giving his orders. National Guard troops appeared from other parts of the building, dragging guns and ammunition. Tracked vehicles were revving. The android wrapped his arms around Goldfarb and raced into the sky.
“Air-borne!” Goldfarb yelled. Modular Man gathered this was an expression of military approval.
A massive rustling in the sky indicated the fliers returning. The android dove low, weaving among shattered houses and torn tree-stumps.
“Hol-ee shit,” Goldfarb said. Morven was a ruin. The governor’s mansion had fallen in on its foundations. Nothing living could be seen.
The android returned the Guardsman to his command, on the way disposing of a group of twenty attackers preparing to assault the Guard headquarters. Inside, the garage was filled with vehicle exhaust. Six armored personnel carriers and two tanks were ready. Goldfarb was dropped near a carrier. The air was roaring with the sound of fliers.
“I’m going to try to lure the fliers away,” the android said. “Wait till the sky is clearing before you move.”
He raced into the sky again, firing short bursts of his laser, shouting into the darkening sky. Once more the fliers roared after him. He led them toward Grovers Mills again, seeing the vast crescent of earthbound Swarm advancing at their steady, appalling rate. He doubled back, stranding the fliers well behind him, and accelerated toward Princeton. Below, a few fliers rose after him. It looked as if they had been dining on the corpse of a man wearing complicated battle armor. The same armor Modular Man had seen at Aces High, now stained and blackened with digestive acid.
In Princeton he saw Goldfarb’s convoy making its way along Highway 206 in a blaze of infrared light and machinegun fire. Refugees, attracted by the sound of the tanks and APCs, were clinging to the vehicles. The android fired again and again, dropping Swarm creatures as they leaped to the attack, his energies growing low. He followed the convoy until they seemed out of the danger area, when the convoy had to slow in a vast traffic jam of refugees racing north.
The android decided to head for Fort Dix.
Detective-Lieutenant John F X. Black of the Jokertown precinct didn’t actually remove the handcuff’s from Tachyon’s wrists until they were just outside the mayor’s office at city hall. The other detectives kept their shotguns ready.
Fear, Tachyon thought. These people are terrified. Why? He rubbed his wrists. “My coat and hat, please.” The addition of the pleasantry made it no less a command.
“If you insist,” said Black, handing over the feathered cavalier hat and the lavender velvet swallowtail coat that matched Tach’s eyes. Black’s hatchet face split in a cynical smile. “It’d be hard to find even a detective first grade with your kind of taste,” he said.
“I daresay not,” Tach said coldly. He fluffed his hair back over the collar.
“Through there,” said Black. Tach poised the hat over one eye and pushed through.
It was a large paneled room, with a long table, and it was bedlam. There were police, firemen, men in military uniforms. The mayor was shouting into a radiotelephone and, to judge by his savage expression, not getting through. Tach’s glance wandered over to the far side of the room and his eyes narrowed. Senator Hartmann stood in quiet conversation with a number of aces: Peregrine, Pulse, the Howler, the whole SCARE bunch.
Tach always felt uneasy around Hartmann-a New York liberal or not, he was chairman of the Senate Committee on Ace Resources and Endeavors, the SCARE committee that had lived up to its name under Joseph McCarthy. The laws were different now, but Tach wanted nothing to do with an organization that recruited aces to serve the purposes of those in power.
The mayor handed the radiophone to an aide, and before he could rush off somewhere else Tach marched toward him, shooting his cufs and fixing the mayor with a cold glare.
“Your storm troopers brought me,” he said. “They broke down my door. I trust the city will replace it, as well as anything that may be stolen while the door is down.”
“We’ve got a problem,” the mayor said, and then an aide rushed in, his hands full of filling-station maps of New Jersey. The mayor told him to spread them on the table. Tachyon continued talking through the interruption.
“You might have telephoned. I would have come. Your goons didn’t even knock. There are still constitutional protections in this country, even in Jokertown.”
“We knocked,” said Black. “We knocked real loud.” He turned to one of his detectives, a joker with brown, scaled flesh. “You heard me knock, didn’t you, Kant?”
Kant grinned, a lizard with teeth. Tachyon shuddered. “Sure did, Lieutenant.”
“How about you, Matthias?”
“I heard you knock, too.”
Tach clenched his teeth. “They ... did ... not ... knock.”
Black shrugged. “The doctor probably didn’t hear us. He was busy.” He leered. “He had company, if you take my meaning. A nurse. Real peachy.” He held up a legal-sized document. “Anyway, our warrant was legal. Signed by Judge Steiner right here just half an hour ago.”
The mayor turned to Tachyon. “We just wanted to make sure you didn’t have anything to do with this.”
Tach removed his hat and waved it languidly before his face as he looked at the room filled full of rushing people, including-Good God, a three-foot-high tyrannosaur who had just turned into a naked preadolescent boy.
“What are you talking about, my man?” he finally asked. The mayor gazed at Tachyon with eyes like chips of ice. “We have reports of what might be a wild card outbreak in Jersey.”
Tach’s heart lurched. Not again, he thought, remembering those first awful weeks, the deaths, the mutilations that made his blood run cold, the madness, the smell ... No, it wasn’t possible. He gulped.
“What may I do to help?” he said.
“Forty thousand in one group,” the general muttered, fixing the figures in his mind. “Probably in Princeton by now. Twenty thousand fliers. Maybe another twenty thousand scattered over the countryside, moving to rendezvous at Princeton.” He looked up at the android. “Any idea where they’ll move after Princeton? Philadelphia or New York? South or north?”‘
“I can’t say.”
The lieutenant general gnawed his knuckle. He was a thin, bespectacled man, and his name was Carter. He seemed not at all disturbed by the thought of carnivorous aliens landing in New Jersey. He commanded the U.S. First Army from his headquarters here at Fort Meade, Maryland. Modular Man had been sent here by a sweating major general at Fort Dix, which had turned out to be a training center.
Chaos surrounded Carter’s aura of calm. Phones rang, aides bustled, and outside in the corridor men were shouting. “So far I’ve only got the Eighty-second and the National Guard,” Carter said. “It’s not enough to defend both New York and Philly against those numbers. If I had the Marine regiments from Lejeune we could do better, but the Marine Commandant doesn’t want to release them from the Rapid Deployment Force, which is commanded by a Marine. He wants the RDF to take command here, particularly since the Eighty-second is also under its protocols.” He sipped cranberry juice, sighed. “It’s all the process of moving a peacetime army onto wartime footing. Our time will come, and then we’ll have our innings.”
The android gathered that the Swarm had landed in four places in North America: New Jersey; Kentucky south of Louisville; an area centered around McAllen, Texas, but on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border; and an extremely diffused landing that seemed scattered over most of northern Manitoba. The Kentucky landing was also within the boundaries of the First Army, and Carter had ordered the soldiers from Fort Knox and Fort Campbell into action. Fortunately he hadn’t had to get the Marines’ permission first.
“North or south?” Carter wondered. “Darn it, I wish I knew where they were heading.” He rubbed his temples. “Time to shoot crap,” he decided. “You saw them moving north. I’ll send the airborne to Newark and tell the Guard to concentrate there.”
Another aide bustled up and passed Carter a note. “Okay,” the general said. “The governor of New York has asked all aces in the New York area to meet at city hall. There’s talk of using you people as shock troops.” He peered at the android through his glasses. “You are an ace, right?”
“I’m a sixth-generation machine intelligence programmed to defend society.”
“You’re a machine, then?” Carter looked as if he hadn’t quite understood this till now. “Someone built you?”
“That’s correct.” His contractions were getting better and better, his speech more concise. He was pleased with himself. Carter’s reaction was quick. “Are there any more of you? Can we build more of you? We’ve got a situation, here.”
“I can transmit your request to my creator. But I don’t think it’s likely to be of immediate help.”
“Do that. And before you take off, I want you to talk to one of my staff. Tell him about yourself, your capabilities. We can make better use of you that way.”
“Yes, Sir.” The android was trying to sound military, and thought he was succeeding.
“No,” Tachyon said. “It’s not wild card.” Further facts had come in, including pictures. No wild card plague-not even an advanced version—could have produced results like this. At least I won’t get blamed for this one, he thought.
“I think,” Tach said, “that what just struck Jersey is a menace my race has itself encountered on several occasionsthese creatures attacked two colonies; destroyed one, and came close to destroying the other. Our expeditions destroyed them later, but we know there are many others. The T’zan-d’ran ...” He paused at the blank looks. “That would translate as Swarm, I think.”
Senator Hartmann seemed skeptical. “Not wild card? You’re telling me that New Jersey has been attacked by killer bees from space?”
“They are not insects. They are in the way of being-how to say this? ...” He shrugged. “They are yeasts. Giant, carnivorous, telepathic yeast buds, controlled by a giant mother-yeast in space. Very hungry. I would mobilize if I were you.”
The mayor looked pained. “Okay. We’ve got a half-dozen aces assembled down below. I want you to go down and brief them.”
The sounds of panic filtered through the skylight. It was four in the morning, but half Manhattan seemed to be trying to bolt the city. It was the worst traffic jam since the Wild Card Day.
Travnicek grinned as he paged through the scientific notes that he’d scrawled on butcher paper and used cigarette packets during his months-long spell of creativity.
“So the army wants more of you, hey? Heh. How much are they offering?”
“General Carter just expressed an interest. He isn’t in charge of purchasing, I’m sure.”
Travnicek’s grin turned to a frown as he held his notes closer to his eyes. His writing was awful, and the note was completely illegible. What the hell had he meant?
He looked around the loft, at the appalling scatter of litter. There were thousands of the notes. A lot of them were on the floor, where they’d been ground into the particleboard.
His breath steamed in the cold loft. “Ask for a firm offer. Tell him I want ten million per unit. Make that twenty. Royalties on the programming. And I want the first ten units for myself, as my bodyguard.”
“Yes, sir. How soon can I tell him we might expect the plans to be delivered?”
Travnicek looked at the litter again. “It might be a while.” He’d have to reconstruct everything from scratch. “First thing, get a firm commitment on the money.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Before you go, clean this mess up. Put my notes in piles over there.” He pointed at a reasonably clean part of one of his tables.
“Sir. The aliens.”
“They’ll keep.” Travnicek chuckled. “You’ll be that much more valuable to the military after these critters eat half New Jersey.”
The android’s face was expressionless. “Yes, sir.” And then he began tidying the lab.
“Good gosh,” said Carter. For once the chaos that surrounded him ceased to exist. The silence in the improvised command post in a departure lounge of Newark International Airport was broken only by the whine of military jets disgorging troops and equipment. Paratroops in their bloused pants and new-model Kevlar helmets stood next to potbellied National Guard officers and aces in jumpsuits. They all waited for what Carter would say next. Carter held a series of infrared photographs to the faint light that was beginning to trickle in through the windows.
“They’re moving south. Toward Philadelphia. Advance guard, flank guards, main body, rear guard.” Carter looked at his staff. “It looks like they’ve been reading our tactical manuals, gentlemen.” He dropped the photographs to his table.
“I want you to get your boys mounted and headed south. Move straight down the Jersey Turnpike. Requisition civilian vehicles if you have to. We want to outflank them and go in from the east toward Trenton. If we drive in their flank maybe we can pin their rear guard before they clear Princeton.” He turned to an aide. “Get the Pennsylvania Guard on the horn. We want the bridges over the Delaware blown. If they don’t have the engineers to blow them, have them blocked. Jackknife semitrucks across them if they have to.”
Carter turned to the aces who stood in a corner, near a pile of hastily moved plastic chairs. Modular Man, Howler, Mistral, Pulse. A pterodactyl that was actually a little kid who had the ability to transform himself into reptiles, and whose mother was coming to get him for the second time in a few hours. Peregrine, with a camera crew. The Turtle orbited over the terminal in his massive armored shell. Tachyon wasn’t here: he’d been called to Washington as a science advisor.
“The Marines from Lejeune are moving into Philadelphia,” Carter said. His voice was soft. “Somebody saw sense and put them under my command. But only one regiment is going to get to the Delaware in time to meet the alien advance guard, and they won’t have armor, they won’t have heavy weapons, and they’ll have to get to the bridges in school buses and Lord-knows-what. That means they’re going to get crushed. I can’t give you orders, but I’d like you to go to Philadelphia and help them out. We need time to get the rest of the Marines into position. You might save one heck of a lot of lives.”
Coleman Hubbard stood in the hawk mask of Re before the assembled group of men and women. He was barechested, wearing his Masonic apron, and he felt a bit selfconscious-too much of his scar tissue was exposed, the burns that covered his torso after the fire at the old temple downtown. He shuddered at the memory of the flame, then looked up to draw his mind from the recollection ...
Above him blazed the figure of an astral being, a giant man with the head of a ram and a colossal erect phallus, holding in his hands the ankh and the crooked rod, symbols of life and power-the god Amun, creator of the universe, blazing amid a multicolored aura of light.
Lord Amun, Hubbard thought. The Master of the Egyptian Masons, and actually a half-crippled old man in a room miles away. His astral form could take whatever shape it wished, but in his body he was known as the Astronomer. Amun’s radiance shone in the eyes of the assembled worshippers. The god’s voice spoke in Hubbard’s head, and Hubbard raised his arms and related the god’s words to the congregation.
“TIAMAT has come. Our moment is nearly here. We must concentrate all our efforts at the new temple. The Shakti device must be assembled and calibrated.”
Above the god’s ram-head another form appeared, an ever-changing mass of protoplasm, tentacles and eyes and cold, cold flesh.
“Behold TIAMAT,” Amun said. The worshippers murmured. The creature grew, dimming the radiance of the god. “My Dark Sister is here,” said Amun, and his voice echoed in Hubbard’s head. “We must prepare her welcome.”
A Marine Harrier sucked a flapper into an intake and screamed as it spewed molten alloy and slid sideways into doomed Trenton. The sound of flappers drowned the wail of jets and the throb of helicopters. Burning napalm glowed as it drifted on the choked water. Colored signal smoke twisted into the air.
The Swarm main body was bulldozing its way through Trenton, and the advance guard was already across the river. Blocking and blowing the bridges hadn’t stopped them: they’d just plunged into the frigid river and come across like a vast, dark wave. A hundred flappers had surrounded the Marine commander’s chopper and brought it down, and after that there was no one in charge: just parties of desperate men holding where they could, trying to form a breakwater against the Swarm tide.
The aces had become separated, coping with the emergencies. Modular Man was burning enemy, trying to help the scattered pockets of resistance as, one after the other, they came under assault. It was a hopeless task.
From somewhere on the left he could hear the Howler’s shrieks, curdling Swarm bone and nerve. His was a more useful talent than the android’s; the microwave laser was too precise a weapon for dealing with a wave assault, but the Howler’s ultrasonic screams could destroy whole platoons of the enemy in the space of a second.
A National Guard tank turned a corner behind where Modular Man floated in the middle of the conflict, then drove into a building, jamming itself in rubble. Flappers had coated the tank’s armor, obscuring its view slits. The android dived onto the tank, picked up flappers, tore them like paper. Acid juices spattered his clothing. Artificial flesh smoked. The tank ground bricks under its treads, backing out of the building.
As the android rose, the Great and Powerful Turtle formed a vast blip on his radar. He was picking up Swarm buds bodily, flinging them into the air, then letting them fall. It was like a cascade fountain. Flappers beat hopelessly at the armored shell. Their acids weren’t enough to get through battleship armor.
The air crackled as it was torn apart by energized photons: Pulse, his body become light. The human laser ricocheted off enemy, brought a dozen down, then disappeared. When Pulse finally ran out of energy he would revert to human form, and then he would be vulnerable. The android hoped the flappers wouldn’t find him.
Mistral rose overhead, colored like a battleflag. She was seventeen, a student at Columbia, and she dressed in bright patriot colors like her father, Cyclone. She was held aloft by the cloak she filled with the winds she generated, and she battered at the flappers with typhoons, flinging them, tearing them apart. Nothing came close to her.
Peregrine flew in circles around her, uselessly. She was too weak to go against the Swarm in any of its incarnations. None of this was enough. The Swarm kept moving through the gaps between the aces.
Wailing filled the air as jagged black shadows, Air Guard A-10s, fell through the sky, their guns hammering, turning the Delaware white. Bombs tumbled from beneath their wings, becoming bright blossoms of napalm.
The android fired until his generators were drained, and then he fought flappers with his bare hands. Despair filled him, then anger. Nothing seemed to help.
The enemy main body hit the river and began its swim. Few soldiers were alive to fight them. Most of the survivors were trying to hide or run away.
The Sixth Marine Regiment was dead on arrival, and nothing could alter the fact.
Between Trenton and Levittown, bombs and fire had turned the brown December landscape black. Swarm buds moved across the devastated landscape like a nightmare tide. Two more Marine regiments were entrenched in the Philadelphia suburbs, this time with artillery in support and a little group of light Marine armor.
The aces were waiting in a Howard Johnson’s off the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The plan was for them to be thrown into any counterattack.
A battery of 155s was set up in the parking lot, and fired steadily. The crescendo of sound had already blown out most of the restaurant’s windows. The sound of jets was constant overhead.
Pulse was lying down in a hospital tent somewhere; he’d overstrained his energies and was on the brink o€ collapse. Mistral was curled up sideways in a cheerful orange plastic booth. Her shoulders shook with every crash of the guns outside. Tears poured in rivers down her face. The Swarm hadn’t come near her but she’d seen a lot of people die, and she had held together through the fight and the long nightmare of the retreat, but now the reaction had set in. Peregrine sat with her, talking to her in gentle tones the android couldn’t hear. Modular Man followed Howler as the ex-sandhog searched the restaurant for something to eat. The man’s chest was massive, the mutated voicebox widening the neck so that the android couldn’t put his two hands around it. Howler wore a borrowed set of Marine battle dress: flapper acid had eaten his civvies. The android had had to fly him out at the end, holding the ace in hands that had been eaten down to the alloy bones.
“Canned turkey,” Howler said. “Great. Let’s have Thanksgiving.” He looked at Modular Man. “You’re a machine, right? Do you eat?”
The android jammed two alloy fingers into a light socket. There was a flash of light, the smell of ozone. “This works better,” he said.
“They gonna put you into production soon? I can see the Pentagon taking an interest.”
“I’ve given my creator’s terms to General Carter. There’s been no reply yet. I think the command structure is in disarray.”
“Yeah. Tell me about it.”
“Wait,” said the android. Behind the crashing of the guns, the roar of jets, he began to hear another sound. The crackle o€ small-arms fire.
A Marine officer raced into the restaurant, his hand holding his helmet. “It’s started,” he said. The android began running through systems checks.
Mistral looked up at the officer with streaming eyes. She looked a lot younger than seventeen.
“I’m ready,” she said.
The Swarm was stopped on the outskirts of Philadelphia. The two Marine regiments held, their strongpoints surrounded by walls of Swarm dead. The victory was made possible thanks to support from Air Force and Navy planes and from the battleship New Jersey, which flung 18-inch shells all the way from the Atlantic, Ocean; thanks also to Carter’s National Guard and paratroops driving into the Swarm from their rear flank.
Thanks to the aces, who fought long into the night, fought on even after the Swarm hesitated in its onslaught, then began moving west, toward the distant Blue Mountains.
All night the Philadelphia airport was busy with transport bringing in another Marine division all the way from California.
The next morning the counterattack began.
After nightfall, the next day. A color television babbled earnestly from a corner of the departure lounge. Carter was getting ready to move his command post west to Allentown, and Modular Man had flown in with news of the latest Swarm movements. But Carter was busy right now, talking over the radio with his commanders in Kentucky, and so the android listened to news from the rest of the world.
Violence from Kentucky splashed across the screen. Images, taken from a safe distance through long lenses, jerked and snapped. In the midst of it was a tall man in fatigues without insignia, his body blazing like a golden star as he used a twenty-foot tree trunk to smash Swarm buds. There was an interview with him afterward: he looked no older than twenty, but his eyes had thousand-year ghosts in them. He didn’t say much, made excuses, left to return to the war. Jack Braun, the Golden Boy of the forties and the Judas Ace of the fifties, back in action for the duration of the emergency.
More aces: Cyclone, Mistral’s father, fighting the Swarm in Texas with the aid of his own personal camera crew, all armed with automatic weapons. The Swarm was in full retreat across the Mexican border, driven by armor from Forts Bliss and Hood, and by infantry from Fort Polk, the fliers decimated by widespread use of Vietnam-era defoliants. The Mexicans, slower to mobilize and with an army unprepared for modern large-scale warfare, weren’t happy about the Swarm being pushed into Chihuahua and protested in vain.
More images, more locales, more bodies scattered across a torn landscape. Scenes from the autumn plains of northern Germany, where the Swarm had dropped right into the middle of a large-scale maneuver by the British Army of the Rhine, and where they had never even succeeded in concentrating. More troubled images from Thrace, where a Swarm onslaught was straddling the Greco-Turkish-Bulgarian border. The human governments weren’t cooperating, and their people suffered.
Pictures of hope and prayer: scenes of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, already packed with Christmas pilgrims, now filling the churches in long, endless rounds of murmured prayer.
Stark black-and-white images from China, refugees and long columns of PLA troops marching. Fifty million dead were estimated. Africa, the Near East, South America-pictures of the Swarm advance across the third world, images of an endless wave of death. No continent was untouched save Australia. Help was promised as soon as the superpowers cleaned up their own backyards.
There were speculations about what was going on in the Eastern bloc: though no one was talking, it seemed as if the Swarm had landed in southern Poland, in the Ukraine, and in at least two places in Siberia. Pact forces had mobilized and were moving into battle. Commentators were predicting widespread starvation in Russia: the full-scale mobilization had taken the trucks and railways the civilian population used for the transportation of food.
Old pictures came on the screen: Mistral flying immune in the sky; Carter giving a subdued, reluctant press conference; the mayor of Philadelphia on the verge of hysteria... the android turned away. He’d seen too many of these images. And then he felt something move through him, some ghost wind that touched his cybernetic heart. He felt suddenly weaker. The television set hissed, its images gone. A rising babble came from the communications techs: some of their equipment had gone down. Modular Man was alarmed. Something was going on.
The ghost wind came again, touching his core. Time seemed to skip a beat. More communications down. The android moved toward Carter.
The general’s hand trembled as he replaced his phone in its cradle. It was the first time the android had seen him frightened.
“That was electromagnetic pulse,” Carter said. “Somebody’s just gone nuclear, and I don’t think it was us.”
The papers still screamed invasion headlines. Children in the Midwest were being urged to avoid drinking milk: there was danger of poisoning from the airbursts the Soviets had used to smash the Siberian Swarms. Communications were still disrupted: the bombs had bounced enough radiation off the ionosphere to slag a lot of American computer chips.
People on the streets seemed furtive. There was a debate about whether New York should be blacked out or not, even though the Swarm was obviously on the run after six days of intensive combat.
Coleman Hubbard was too busy to care. He walked along Sixth Avenue, grinding his teeth, his head splitting with the effort his recent adventure had cost him.
He had failed. One of the more promising members of the Order, the boy Fabian, had been arrested on some stupid assault charge-the boy couldn’t keep his hands off women, whether they were willing or not-and Hubbard had been sent to interview the police captain in charge. It wouldn’t have required much, some lost paperwork perhaps, or a suggestion, implanted in the captain’s head, that the evidence was insufficient ... But the man’s mind was slippery, and Hubbard hadn’t been able to get ahold ou it. Finally Captain McPherson, snarling, had thrown him out. All Hubbard had done was to identify himself with Fabian’s case, and perhaps cause the investigation to go further.
Lord Amun did not take failure well. His punishments could be savage. Hubbard rehearsed his defense in his mind. Then a rangy redheaded woman, wearing a proper executive Burberry, stepped into the street in front of Hubbard, almost running into him, then moving briskly up the street without offering an apology. She carried a leather case and wore tennis shoes. More acceptable footwear peeked out of a shoulder bag.
Anger stabbed into Hubbard. He hated rudeness.
And then his crooked smile began to spread across his face. He reached out with his mind, touching her thoughts, her consciousness. He sensed vulnerability there, an opening. The smile froze on his face as he summoned his power and struck.
The woman staggered as he seized control of her mind. Her case fell to the ground. He picked it up and took her elbow. “Here,” he said. “You seem a little out of sorts.”
She blinked at him. “What?” In her mind was only confusion. Gently, he soothed it.
“My apartment is just a little distance. Fifty-seventh Street. Maybe you should go there and rest.”
“Apartment? What?”
Gently he took command of her mind and steered her up the street. Rarely did he find someone so pliable. A great bubble of joy welled up in him.
Once upon a time he only used his power to get laid, or maybe to help earn a promotion or two at work. Then he met Lord Amun and discovered what power was really for. He’d quit his job, and lived now as a dependent of the Order.
He’d stay in her mind for a few hours, he thought. Find out who she was, what secret terrors lived in her. And then do them to her, one and then another, living inside her mind and his, enjoying her cringing, her self-loathing, as he forced her to beg, right out loud, for everything he did to her. He would caress her mind, enjoy the growing madness as he made her plead for her every debasement, her every fear. These were only a few of the things he’d learned from watching Lord Amun. The things that made him come alive. For a few hours, at least, he could submerge himself in another’s fear, and forget his own.
A freezing jet stream battered at the city, flown straight from Siberia. It tore down the gaps between buildings, tugged at the halfhearted Christmas decorations the city had put up, scattered minuscule bits of Russian fallout in the streets. This was the coldest winter in years. The New Jersey/Pennsylvania Swarm had been officially declared dead two days ago, and the aces, marines, and army had returned to a parade down Fifth Avenue. In another few days, American troops and whatever aces could be persuaded to join them would be flying north and south to deal with the Swarm’s invasions of Africa, Canada, and South America.
The android jabbed a newly-fleshed finger at the slot of a pay phone and felt something click. One simply had to understand these things. He dialed a number.
“Hello, Cyndi. How’s the job search coming?”
“Mod Man! Hey ... I just wanted to say ... yesterday was wonderful. I never thought I’d be riding in a parade next to a war hero.”
“I’m sorry it took so long for me to call you back.”
“I guess fighting the Swarm was a kind of priority. Don’t worry. You made up for lost time.” She laughed. “Last night was amazing.”
“Oh, no.” The android was receiving another police call. “I’m afraid I’ve got to go.”
“They’re not invading again, are they?”
“No. I don’t think so. I’ll call you, okay?”
“I’ll be looking forward.”
Something resembling a mucous-green gelatinous mass had erupted from a manhole into the streets of Jokertown, a Swarm bud that had escaped the showdown across the Hudson. The bud succeeded in devouring two Christmas shoppers and a hot-pretzel vendor before the emergency was called in and the police radios began to call.
The android arrived first. As he dived into the canyon street he saw something that looked like a thirty-foot-wide bowl of gelatin that had been in the refrigerator far too long. In the gelatin were black currants that were its victims, which it was slowly digesting.
The android hovered over the creature and began firing his laser, trying to avoid the currants in hope they might prove revivable. The gelatin began to boil where the silent, invisible beam struck. The bud made a futile effort to reach his flying tormentor with a pseudopod, but failed. The creature began to roll in the direction of an alley, looking for escape. It was too hungry or too stupid to abandon its food and seek shelter in the sewers.
The creature squeezed into the alley and rushed down it. The android continued to fire. Bits were sizzling away and the thing seemed to be losing energy rapidly. Modular Man looked ahead and saw a bent figure ahead in the alley.
The figure was female and white, dressed in layers of clothing, all worn, all dirty. A floppy felt hat was pulled down over an ex-Navy watch cap. A pair of shopping bags drooped from her arms. Tangled gray hair hung over her forehead. She was rummaging in a dumpster, tossing crumpled newspapers over her shoulder into the alley. Modular Man increased his speed, firing radar-directed shots over his shoulder as he barreled through the cold drizzly air. He dropped to the pavement in front of the dumpster, his knees cushioning the impact.
“So I says to Maxine, I says ...” the lady was saying. “Excuse me,” said the android. He seized the woman and sped upward. Behind him, writhing under the barrage of coherent microwaves, the Swarm bud was evaporating.
“Maxine says, my mother broke her hip this morning, and you won’t believe ...” The old lady was flailing at him while she continued her monologue. He silently absorbed an elbow to his jaw and floated to a landing on the nearest roof. He let go his passenger. She turned to him flushed with anger.
“Okay, bunky,” she said. “Time to see what Hildy’s got in her bag.”
“I’ll fly you down later,” Modular Man said. He was already turning to pursue the creature when, out of the corner ou his eye, he saw the lady opening her bag.
There was something black in there. The black thing was getting bigger.
The android tried to move, to fly away. Something had hold of him and wouldn’t let him go.
Whatever was in the shopping bag was getting larger. It grew larger very quickly. Whatever had hold of the android was dragging him toward the shopping bag.
“Stop,” he said simply. The thing wouldn’t stop. The android tried to fight it, but his laser discharges had cost him a lot of power and he didn’t seem to have the strength left.
The blackness grew until it enveloped him. He felt as if he were falling. Then he felt nothing at all.
New York’s aces, responding to the emergency, finally conquered the Swarm bud. What was left of it, blobs of dark green, froze into lumps of dirty ice. Its victims, partially eaten, were identified by the non-edible credit cards and laminated ID they were carrying.
By nightfall, the hardened inhabitants of Jokertown were referring to the creature as the Amazing Colossal Snot Monster. None of them had noticed the bag lady as she came down the fire escape and wandered into the freezing streets.
The android awoke in a dumpster in an alley behind 52nd Street. Internal checks showed damage: his microwave laser had been bent into a sine wave; his flux monitor was wrecked; his flight module had been twisted as if by the hands of a giant. He flung back the dumpster lid with a bang. Carefully he looked up and down the alley.
There was no one in sight.
The god Amun glowed in Hubbard’s mind. The ram’s eyes blazed with anger, and the god held the ankh and staff with clenched fists.
“TIAMAT,” he said, “has been defeated.” Hubbard winced with the force of Amun’s anger. “The Shakti device was not readied in time.”
Hubbard shrugged. “The defeat was temporary,” he said.
“The Dark Sister will return. She could be anywhere in the solar system-the military have no way of finding her or identifying her. We have not lived in secret all these centuries only to be defeated now.”
The loft was quite neat compared to the earlier chaos. Travnicek’s notes had been neatly assembled and classified, as far as possible, by subject. Travnicek had made a start at wading through them. It was hard going.
“So,” Travnicek said. His breath was frosting in front of his face and condensing on his reading glasses. He took the spectacles off. “You were displaced about fifty city blocks spatially and moved one hour forward timewise, yes?”
“Apparently. When I came out of the dumpster I found that the fight in Jokertown had been over for almost an hour. Comparison with my internal clock showed a discrepancy of seventy-two minutes, fifteen point three three three seconds.” The android had opened his chest and replaced some components. The laser was gone for good, but he had his flight capability back and he’d managed to jury-rig a flux monitor. “Interesting. You say the bag lady seemed not to be working with the blob thing?”
“Most likely it was a coincidence they were in the same street. Her monologue did not seem to be strickly rational. I don’t think she is mentally sound.”
Travnicek turned up the heater control on his jumpsuit. The temperature had dropped twelve degrees in two hours, and frost was forming on the skylights of the loft in midafternoon. Travnicek lit a Russian cigarette, turned on a hot plate to boil some water for coffee, and then put his hands in his warm jumpsuit pockets.
“I want to look in your memory,” he said. “Open up your chest.”
Modular Man obeyed. Travnicek took a pair of cables from a minicomputer stacked under an array of video equipment and jacked them into sockets in the android’s chest, near his shielded machine brain. “Back up your memory onto the computer,” he said. Flickering effects from the flux generator shone in Travnicek’s intent eyes. The computer signaled the task complete. “Button up,” Travnicek said. As the android removed the jacks and closed his chest, Travnicek turned on the video, then touched controls. A video picture began racing backward.
He reached the place where the bag lady appeared, and ran the image several times. He moved to a computer terminal and tapped instructions. The image of the bag lady’s face filled the screen. The android looked at the woman’s lined, grimy face, the straggling hair, the worn and tattered clothing. He noticed for the first time that she was missing some teeth. Travnicek stood and went back to his one-room living quarters in the back of the loft and came back with a battered Polaroid camera. He used the remaining three pictures and gave one to his creation.
“There. You can show it to people. Ask if they’ve seen her.”
“Yes, sir.”
Travnicek took thumbtacks and stuck the other two pictures to the low beams of the ceiling. “I want you to find out where the bag lady is and get what’s in her bag. And I want you to find out where she got it.” He shook his head, dripping cigarette ash on the floor, and muttered, “I don’t think she invented it. I think she’s just found this thing somewhere.”
“Sir? The Swarm? We agreed that I would leave for Peru in two days.”
“Fuck the military,” Travnicek said. “They haven’t paid us a dime for our services. Nothing but a lousy parade, and the military didn’t pay for that, the city did. Let them see how easy it is to fight the Swarm without you. Then maybe they’ll take us seriously.” The truth was that Travnicek wasn’t anywhere near being able to reconstruct his work. It would take weeks, perhaps even months. The military was demanding guarantees, plans, knowledge of his identity. The bag-lady problem was more interesting, anyway. He began idly spinning back through the android’s memory.
Modular Man winced deep in his computer mind. He began talking quickly, hoping to distract his inventor from the pictures.
“As far as the bag lady goes, I could try the refugee centers, but it might take a long time. My files tell me there are normally twenty thousand homeless people in New York, and now there are an uncountable number of refugees from Jersey.”
“Piss in a chalice!” exclaimed Travnicek, in Geiman. The android felt another wince coming on. Travnicek gaped at the television in surprise.
“You’re screwing that actress lady!” he said. “That Cyndi What’s-her-name!” The android resigned himself to what was about to come.
“That’s correct;” he said.
“You’re just a goddamn toaster,” Travnicek said. “What the hell made you think you could fuck?”
“You gave me the equipment,” the android said. “And you implanted emotions in me. And on top of that, you made me good-looking.”
“Huh.” Travnicek turned his eyes from Modular Man to the video and back again. “I gave you the equipment so you could pass as a human if you had to. And I just gave you the emotions so you could understand the enemies of society. I didn’t think you’d do anything.” He tossed his cigarette butt to the floor. A leer crossed his face. “Was it fun?” he asked. “It was pleasant, yes.”
“Your blond chippie seemed to be having a good time.” Travnicek cackled and reached for the controls. “ I want to start this party at the beginning.”
“Didn’t you want to look at the bag lady again?”
“First things first. Get me an Urquell.” He looked up as a thought occurred to him. “Do we have any popcorn?”
“No!” The android tossed his abrupt answer over his shoulder.
Modular Man brought the beer and watched while Travnicek had his first sip. The Czech looked up in annoyance. “I don’t like the way you’re looking at me,” he said. The android considered this. “Would you prefer me to look at you some other way?” he asked.
Travnicek turned red. “Go stand in the corner, microwave-oven-that-fucks!” he bellowed. “Turn your goddamn head away, video-unit-that-fucks!”
For the rest of the afternoon, while his creation stood in a corner of the loft, Travnicek watched the video. He enjoyed himself enormously. He watched the best parts several times, cackling at what he saw. Then, slowly, his laughter dimmed. A cold, uncertain feeling crept up the back of his neck. He began casting glances at the stolid figure of the android. He turned off the vid unit, dropped his cigarette butt in the Urquell bottle, then lit another.
The android was showing a surprising degree of independence. Travnicek reviewed elements of his programming, concentrating on the ETCETERA file. Travnicek’s abstract of human emotion had been gleaned from a variety of expert sources ranging from Freud to Dr. Spock. It had been an intellectual challenge for Travnicek to do the programmingtransforming the illogicalities of human behavior into the cold rhetoric of a program. He’d performed the task during his second year at Texas A&M, when he’d barely gone out of his quarters the whole year and had known he had to set himself a large task in order to keep from being driven crazy by the lunatic environment of a university that seemed an embodiment of the collective unconscious fantasies of Stonewall Jackson and Albert Speer. He’d barely been at A&M for ten minutes before he’d known it was a mistake the crop-haired undergraduates with their uniforms, boots, and sabers reminded him too much of the SS who had left Travnicek barely alive beneath the bodies of his family’ at Lidice, not to mention the Soviet and Czech security forces that had followed the Germans. Travnicek knew if he was going to survive in Texas, he had to find something massive to work on lest his memories eat him alive.
Travnicek had never been particularly interested in human psychology as such-passion, he had long ago decided, was not only foolish but genuinely boring, a waste of time. But putting passion into a program, yes, that was interesting.
He could barely remember that period now. How many months had he spent in his creative trance, a channel for his own deepest spirit? What had he wrought during that time? What the hell was in ETCETERA?
For a moment a tremor of fear went through Travnicek. The ghost of Victor Frankenstein’s creation loomed for a moment in his mind. Was a rebellion on the part of the android possible? Could he evolve hostile passions against his creator? But no-there were overriding imperatives that Travnicek had hardwired into the system. Modular Man could not evolve away his prime directives as long as his computer consciousness was physically intact, any more than a human could, unassisted, evolve away his genetic makeup in a single lifetime.
Travnicek began to feel a growing comfort. He looked at the android with a kind of admiration. He felt pride that he’d programmed such a fast learner.
“You’re not bad, toaster,” he said finally, turning off the video. “Reminds me of myself in the old days.” He raised an admonishing finger. “But no screwing tonight. Go find me the bag lady.”
Modular Man’s voice was muffed as he stood with his face to the wall. “Yes, sir,” he said.
Neon cast its glow upon the frosted breath of the nat gang members standing beneath the pastel sign that marked the Run Run Club. Detective Third Grade John F X. Black, driving his unmarked unit and waiting for the light to change so he could make a turn onto Schiff Parkway, automatically ran his eyes over the crowd, registering faces, names, possibilities ... He had just gotten of duty, and had signed out an unmarked car because he was due to spend the next day freezing his ass of at a plant, what on TV they’d call a stakeout. Ricky Santillanes, a petty thief out on bond since yesterday, grinned at Black with a mouthful of steel-capped teeth and gave Black the finger. Let him get his rocks of, Black thought. The nat gangs were being trashed by the Demon Princes of Jokertown every time they met.
Black observed from a poster that the band playing tonight was called the Swarm Mother-no one could say hardcore groups were slow in their perception of the zeitgeist. It was pure chance that Black happened to be looking at the poster at the moment Officer Frank Carroll staggered into the light. Carroll looked wild-he had his cap in his hand, his hair was mussed, and his overcoat was splattered with something that glowed a fluorescent chrome yellow under the glimmering sign. He looked as if he were making for the cop shop a couple blocks away. The nats laughed as they made way for him. Black knew that Carroll’s assigned sector was blocks away and didn’t take him anywhere near this corner.
Carroll had been on the force for two years, joining just out of high school. He was a white man with dark red hair, a clipped mustache, medium build beefed slightly by irregular weight training. He seemed serious about police work, was diligent and methodical, and worked a lot of overtime he didn’t have to. Black had pegged him as being dedicated but unimaginative. He wasn’t the kind to run about wild-eyed at twelve o’clock on a winter night.
Black opened his door, stood, and called Carroll’s name. The officer turned, glaring wildly, and then an expression of relief came onto his face. He ran for Black’s car and jerked at the passenger door as Black unlocked it.
“Jesus Christ!” Carroll said. “I just got thrown in a trash heap by a bag lady!”
Black smiled inwardly. The traffic light had changed, and Black made his turn. “She catch you by surprise?” he asked. “Damn right. She was down in an alley off Forsyth. She had a book of matches and a bunch of wadded-up paper, and was trying to set a whole dumpster on fire to keep warm. I told her to quit, and I was trying to get her into my unit so I could take her to the shelter down in Rutger Park. And then wham! The bag got me.” He looked at Black and gnawed his lip. “You think she could have been some kind of joker, Lou?”
“Lou” was NYPD for lieutenant.
“What do you mean? She hit you with the bag, right?”
“No. I mean the bag—” The wild look was in Carroll’s eyes again. “The bag ate me, Lou. Something reached right up out of the bag and swallowed me. It was ...” He groped for words. “Definitely paranormal.” He glanced down at his uniform. “Look at this, Lou.” His shield had been twisted in a strange way, like a timepiece in a Dali print. So had two of his buttons. He touched them in a kind of awe.
Black pulled into a loading zone and set the parking brake. “Tell me about this.”
Carroll looked confused. He rubbed his forehead. “I felt something grab me, Lou. And then ... I got sucked right into the bag. I saw the bag just getting bigger and ... and the next thing I knew I was in this trash heap of Ludlow north of Stanton. I was running for the cop shop when you stopped me.”
“You were teleported from Forsyth to Ludlow north of Stanton.”
“Teleported. Yeah. That’s the word.” Carroll looked relieved. “You believe me, then. Jesus, Lou, I thought I’d get written up for sure.”
“I’ve been in Jokertown a long time, seen a lot of strange things.” Black put the car in gear again. “Let’s go find your bag lady,” he said. “This was just a few minutes ago, right?”
“Yeah. And my unit’s still up there. Shit. The jokers’ve probably stripped it by now.”
The glow from the burning dumpster, orange on the brownstone alley walls, was visible from Forsyth. Black pulled into a loading zone. “Let’s go on foot.”
“Don’t you think we should call the fire department?”
“Not yet. It might not be safe for them.”
Black in the lead, they walked to the end of the alley. The dumpster was burning bright, the flames shooting up fifteen feet or more amid a cloud of rising ashes. Carroll’s unit was magically untouched, even with its rear door open. Standing in front of the dumpster, shifting from one foot to the other, was a small white woman with a full shopping bag in each hand. She wore several layers of shabby clothing. She seemed to be muttering to herself.
“That’s her, Lieutenant!”
Black contemplated the woman and said nothing. He wondered how to approach her.
The flames gushed up higher, snapping, and suddenly strange bright flickering lights, like Saint Elmo’s fire, played about the woman and her bags. Then something in one bag seemed to rise up, a dark shadow, and the fire bent like a candle flame in a strong wind and was sucked into the bag. In an instant fire and shadow were gone. The strange colored lights played gently about the woman’s form. Greasy ashes drifted to the pavement.
“Holy shit,” murmured Carroll. Black reached a decision. He dug into his pocket and got his billfold and the keys to his unmarked unit. He gave Carroll a ten.
“Take my unit. Go to the Burger King on West Broadway and get two double cheeseburgers, two big fries, and a jumbo cofee to go.” Carroll stared at him.
“Regular or black, Lou?”
“Move!” Black snapped. Carroll took of.
It took both burgers, the coffee, and one set of fries to lure the bag lady into Black’s unmarked car. Black thought she probably would never have gotten into a blue-and-white like Carroll’s. He’d had Carroll lock his uniform coat and weapon in the trunk so as not to alarm the woman, and Carroll was shivering as he got in the passenger seat.
Behind, the bag lady was mumbling to herself and devouring fries. She smelled terrible.
“Where to now?”—Carroll asked. “One of the refugee centers? The clinic?”
Black put the car into gear. “Someplace special. Uptown. There are things about this woman you don’t know.” Carroll put most of his energy into shivering as Black sped out of Jokertown. The bag lady went to sleep in the back seat. Her snores whistled through missing teeth. Black pulled up in front of a brownstone on East 57th.
“Wait here,” he said. He went down the stairs to a basement apartment entrance and pressed the buzzer. A plastic Christmas wreath was on the front door. Someone looked out through a spyhole in the door. The door opened. “I wasn’t expecting you,” said Coleman Hubbard.
“I’ve got someone with ... powers ... in the back seat. She’s not in her right mind. I thought we could put her in the back bedroom. And there’s an officer with me who can’t know what’s going on.”
Hubbard’s eyes flicked to the car. “What did you tell him?”
“I told him to stay in the car. He’s a good boy, and that’s what he’ll do.”
“Okay. Let me get my coat.”
While Carroll watched curiously, Hubbard and Black coaxed the bag lady into Hubbard’s apartment, using the food from Hubbard’s refrigerator. Black wondered what Carroll would say if he could see the decor in the special locked apartment next door, the dark soundproofed room with its candles, its altar, the pentagram painted on the floor, the inlaid alloy gutters, the bright chains fixed to staples ... It wasn’t as elaborate as the temple the Order had downtown before it blew up, but then it was only a temporary headquarters anyway, until the new temple uptown could be finished.
In Hubbard’s apartment there were two rooms ready for guests, and the bag lady was put into one of these.
_”Put a lock on the door,” Black said. “And call the Astronomer.”
“Lord Amun has already been called,” Hubbard said, and tapped his head.
Black returned to his car and started driving back to Jokertown again. “We’ll get your unit,” Black said. “Then we’ll get you to the cop shop for your report.”
Carroll looked at him. “Who was that guy, Lieutenant?”
“A specialist in mental cases and jokers.”
“That lady might do him some harm.”
“He’ll be safer than either of us.”
Black pulled up behind Carroll’s cruiser. He got out and opened the trunk, taking out Carroll’s coat and hat. He gave them to the young officer. Then he took out a flute—NYPD for an innocent-looking soda bottle filled with liquor-which he’d been planning on using to keep himself warm during the plant tomorrow. He offered the flute to Carroll. The patrolman took the bottle gratefully. Black reached for Carroll’s gunbelt.
“It was lucky you were around, Lou.”
“Yeah. It sure was.”
Black shot Carroll four times in the chest with his own gun, then, after the officer was on the ground, shot him twice more in the head. He wiped his prints off the gun and tossed it to the ground, then took the Coke bottle and got back in his car. Maybe, with the spilled rum, it would look as if Carroll had stopped to hassle a wino and the drunk had gotten the drop on him.
The car smelled like cheeseburgers. Black was reminded he hadn’t had supper.
The bag lady had ignored the bed and gone to sleep in a corner of the room. Her bags were piled in front and atop her like a bulwark. Hubbard sat on a stool, watching her intently.
His crooked smile had frozen into an unpleasant parody of itself. Pain throbbed in his brain. The effort of reading her, mind was costing him.
No turning back, he thought. He had to see this through. His failure with Captain McPherson had cost him in the Order and in Amun’s esteem; and when Black had shown up with the bag lady, Hubbard realized this was the chance to win back his place. Hubbard had lied to Black when he told the detective he had alerted Amun.
There was power here. Perhaps enough to power the Shakti device. And if the Shakti device were powered by the bag thing, then Amun was no longer necessary.
The bag thing could eat people, Hubbard knew. Perhaps it could eat even Amun. Hubbard thought of the fire at the old temple, Amun striding through the flames with his disciples at his back, ignoring Hubbard’s screams.
Yes, Hubbard thought. This would be worth the risk. Detective Second Grade Harry Matthias, known in the Order as Judas, sat on the bed, his chin in his hands. He shrugged.
“She’s not an ace. Neither is whatever she’s got in the bag.”
Hubbard spoke to him mentally. I sense two minds. One is hers-it is disordered. I can’t touch it. The other is in the bag-it’s in touch with her, somehow .. there’s an empathic binding. The other mind also seems to be damaged. 16 as if it’s adapted to her.
Judas stood. He was flushed with anger. “Why in God’s name don’t we just take the damn bag?” He went for the bag lady with his hands clawed.
Hubbard felt an electric snap of awareness in his mind. The bag lady was awake. Through his mental link with Judas he felt the man hesitate at the sudden malevolence in the old woman’s eyes. Judas reached for the bag.
The bag reached for Judas.
A blackness faster than thought rose into the room. Judas vanished into it. Hubbard stared at the empty space. In his mind, the woman’s honed madness danced.
Judas shivered and his lips were blue. Christmas tinsel hung in his hair. A piece of sticky cardboard was stuck to the bottom of one shoe. His gun had been twisted into a sine wave. He shivered and his lips were blue. He’d been transported to a dumpster on Christopher Street and had ceased to exist for about twenty minutes. He’d taken a cab back.
Power, Hubbard thought. Incredible power. The bag thing warps space-time somehow.
“Why garbage?” Judas said. “Why shitpiles? And look at my gun ... “ He became aware of the cardboard, and tried to pull it off his shoe. It came free with a sticky noise.
“She’s fixated on garbage, I guess,” Hubbard said. “And it seems to twist inanimated objects, sometimes. I could sense that it’s broken-maybe that’s a problem with it.”
He had to figure out some way to subdue the bag lady. Waiting till she’d gone to sleep didn’t work-she’d woken up at the first threatening move from Judas. He wondered vaguely about poison gas, and then an idea struck him.
“Do you have access to a tranquilizer gun at the precinct house?”
Judas shook his head. “No. I think maybe the fire department has some, in case they have to deal with escaped animals.”
The idea crystallized in Hubbard’s mind. “I want you and Black to steal me one.”
He’d have Black actually do the shooting-if the bag thing retaliated, it would attack Black. And then with the bag lady put to sleep, Hubbard would take the device ...
And then it would be Hubbard’s turn. He could take all the time he needed, playing with the bag lady’s mind, and she would have enough in her brain left to know what was happening to her. Oh, yes.
He could test the power of the captured device on people he grabbed right off the street. And after that, maybe it would be Amuns turn.
He licked his lips. He could hardly wait.
The legions of the night seemed endless in number. The android’s abstract knowledge of the New York underclass, the fact that there were thousands of people who drifted among the glass towers and solid brownstones in an existence almost as remote from the buildings’ inhabitants as that of denizens of Mars.... The abstract, digitized facts were not, somehow, adequate to describe the reality, the clusters of men who passed bottles around ash-can fires, the dispossessed whose eyes reflected flashing Christmas lights while they lived behind walls of cardboard, the insane who hugged themselves in alleyways or subway entrances, chanting the litany of the mad. It was as if a spell of evil had fallen on the city, that part of the population had been subjected to war or devastation, made homeless refugees, while the others had been enchanted so as not to see them.
The android found two dead, the last of their warmth gone from them. He left these in their newspaper coffins and went on. He found others who were dying or ill and took them to hospitals. Others ran from him. Some pretended to gaze at the bag lady’s picture, cocking the Polaroid up to look at the picture in the light of a trash-can fire, and then asked for money in return for relating a sighting that was obviously false. The task, he thought, was almost hopeless.
He kept on.
Black and Hubbard waited outside the bag lady’s locked room. Black was sucking on his rum-and-Coke flute. “Dreams, man. Incredible dreams. Jesus. Monsters like you wouldn’t believelion bodies, human faces, eagle wings, every damn thing you could think of-and they were all hungry, and they all wanted to eat me. And then there was this giant thing behind them, just a shadow, like, and then... Jesus.” He gave a nervous grin and wiped his forehead. “I .still break out into a sweat thinking about it. And then I realized that all the monsters were connected somehow, that they were all a part of this thing. That’s when I’d wake up screaming. It happened over and over again. I was almost ready to see the department shrinks.”
“Your dreaming mind had touched TIAMAT”
“Yeah. That’s what Matthias-Judas-told me when he recruited me. Somehow he sensed TIAMAT was getting to me.”
Hubbard grinned his crooked grin. Black still didn’t know that Revenant had entered Black’s mind every night, putting the dreams into his mind, had made him wake screaming night after night, and driven him almost to the brink of psychosis so that when Judas explained what had happened to him and how the Order could make the dreams go away, the Masons would seem the only possible answer. All because the Order needed someone higher in the NYPD than Matthias, and Black was a stand-up cop who was marked for advancement..
“And then I got blackballed.” The detective shook his head. “Balsam and the others, the old-line Masons, didn’t want a guy who’d been raised Catholic. Motherfuckers. And TIAMAT was already on its way. I still can’t believe it.”
“Being named after Francis Xavier didn’t help, I suppose.”
“At least they never found out my sister’s a nun. That would have trashed me for sure.” He finished the flute and walked toward the living room to toss the bottle in the trash. “And I got in on the second try.”
You’ll never know why, Hubbard thought. You’ll never know that Amun was using your membership as a tool against Balsam, that he wanted the former Master, with his irrational prejudices and old man’s ways and inherited mystical mumbo jumbo, out of the way entirely. How he used the decision against Black to convince Kim Toy, Red, and Revenant that Balsam had to go. And then there was the fire at the old temple, stage-managed by Amun somehow, and Amun had saved his own people from the flames, and Balsam and all his followers had died.
Hubbard remembered the explosion, the fire, the pain, the way his flesh blackened in the blowtorch flame. He’d screamed for help, seeing the giant astral figure of Amun leading his own disciples out, and if Kim Toy hadn’t insisted on going back for him he would have died then and there. Amun hadn’t trusted him fully, not then. Hubbard had just joined the Order, and Amun hadn’t had the chance to play with him yet, to enter into his brain and make him cringe, to play the endless mind games and twist him into knots with a long series of humiliations ... Yes, he thought, that’s what Amun is like. I know, because I’m that way too.
There was a knock on the door. Hubbard admitted Judas, who was carrying the stolen tranquilizer gun in its red metal case with its OFFICIAL USE ONLY stickers. “Whew. What a bitch. I thought Captain McPherson would never let me outta there.”
He and Black took the large black air pistol from the case, then put a dart in the chamber. “It should put her out for hours,” Black said confidently. “I’ll give her some food, then shoot her from the door when she’s eating.” He tucked the pistol into the back waistband of his trousers, took a paper plate of cold pizza from the refrigerator, and walked to the bag lady’s door. He unlocked the heavy padlock and cautiously opened the door. Hubbard and Matthias unconsciously took a step back, half-expecting Black to vanish into whatever spacetime singularity inhabited the bag ... but Black’s expression changed, and he poked his head into the room, glanced right and left. When he stepped back into the hallway, his expression was baffled.
“She’s gone,” he said. “She’s not in the room anywhere.”
Modular Man looked at the drinks lined up in the bar before him. Irish coffee, martini, margarita, boilermaker, Napoleon brandy. He seriously wanted to try new tastes right now, and wondered if getting his parts crushed by the bag lady’s gizmo had wakened in him a sense of mortality.
“I am beginning to realize,” said the android raising the Irish coffee to his lips, “that my creator is a hopeless sociopath. “
Cyndi considered this. “if you don’t mind some theology, I think that this just puts you in the same boat with the rest of us.”
“He’s beginning to-well, never mind what he’s beginning to do. But I think the man is sick.” The android wiped cream from his upper lip.
“You could run away. Last I heard, slavery was illegal. He’s not even paying you minimum wage, I suppose.”
“I’m not a person. I’m not human. Machines do not have rights.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to do everything he says, Mod Man.”
The android shook his head. “It won’t work. I have hardwired inhibitions against disobeying him, disobeying his instructions, or revealing his identity in any way.”
Cyndi seemed startled. “He’s thorough, I’ll hand that to him.” She looked at Modular Man carefully. “Why’d he build you, anyway?”
“He was going to mass-market me and sell me to the military. But I think he’s having so much fun playing with me that he may never get around to selling my rights to the Pentagon.”
“I’d be thankful for that if I were you.”
“I wouldn’t know.” The android reached for another drink, then showed Cyndi the Polaroid of the bag lady.
“I need to find this person.”
“She looks like a bag lady.”
“She is a bag lady.”
She laughed. “Haven’t you been listening to the broadcasts? You know how many thousands of those women there are in this town? There’s a recession going on out there. Winos, runaways, people out of a job or out of luck, people who got kicked out of mental institutions because of state cutbacks on funding ... The shelters give Swarm refugees precedence over street people. Jesus-and on a night like this, too. You know it’s already the coldest night in history for December? They’ve had to open up churches, police stationsall sorts of places so the vagrants won’t freeze to death. And a lot of the vagrants won’t go to any kind of shelter, because they’re too scared of the authorities or because they’re just too crazy to realize they’re gonna need help. I don’t envy you, Mod Man, not at all. The dumpsters’ll be full of dead people tomorrow.”
“I know. I found some.”
“You want to find her before she freezes to death, try the trash-can fires first, the shelters later.” She frowned at the picture again. “Why are you trying to find her, anyway?”
“I think ... she may be a witness to something.”
“Right. Well. Good luck, then.”
The android glanced over his shoulder at the patio observation deck with its glistening skin of ice. Beyond the rail Manhattan gleamed at him coldly, with a clarity that he hadn’t before seen, as if the buildings, the people, the lights, had all been frozen inside a vast crystal. It was as though the city were no closer than the stars, and as incapable as they of giving warmth.
Inside his mind, the android performed a purely mental shudder. He wanted to stay here in the warmth of the Aces High, going through thefor him-perfectly abstract motions of raising a warm drink to his lips. There was something comforting’ in it, in spite of the logical pointlessness of the act. He did not entirely understand the impulse, only knew it for a fact. The human part of his programming, presumably.
But there were restrictions placed on his desires, and one of those was obedience. He could stay at the Aces High only so long as it could help him in his mission of finding the bag lady.
He finished the row of drinks and said good-bye to Cyndi. Unless a mircle happened and he found the bag lady soon, he’d be spending the rest of the night on the streets.
Four A.M. The car ran over a manhole, and hot coffee spilled on Coleman Hubbard’s thigh. He ignored it. He raised the big styrofoam cup from between his thighs and drank urgently. He had to stay awake.
He was looking for the bag lady, going through every shelter, driving down every dark street, casting out with his mind, hoping to find the pattern of lunacy and anger that he had seen in her disturbed brain.
He’d been doing this for the better part of twenty-four hours. The heater in his cheap rented heap had given out. His body was a mass of cramps and his skull was pounding to a slow piledriver rhythm. The fact that Black and Judas were freezing themselves on the same errand was no consolation. Hubbard jammed the coffee cup between his thighs, turned on his map light, and glanced at the paper for the list of shelters. There was a girls’ school gymnasium filled with refugees nearby, and he hadn’t sensed it yet.
As he approached the place, Hubbard began to feel a disturbing familiarity, something like deja vu. His headache battered at his eyes. His stomach felt queasy. It was a few seconds before he recognized the sensation.
She was here. Elation seized him. He wrenched his mind away from the twisted patterns of the bag lady’s mind and reached out to where Black patrolled, the loaded dart gun on the seat next to him.
Hurry! he cried. I’ve found her!
Modular Man walked down the long rows, scanning left and right. Eight hundred refugees had been crammed into the prep school gym. There were cots for about half, apparently acquired from some National Guard depot, and the remaining refugees were sleeping on the floor. The big room echoed to the sound of snores, cries, the wail of children.
And there she was. Walking among the rows of cots, mumbling to herself, dragging her heavy bags. She looked up at the same moment that the android saw her, and there was a mutual shock of recognition, a snaggletoothed, malevolent grin.
The android was airborne in a picosecond of his lightspeed thought. He wanted to be clear of any innocent bystanders if she was going to unleash whatever she had in her bag. He had barely left the floor before his flux-force field snapped on, crackling around his body. The bag-thing was not going to be able to seize anything solid.
Radar quested out, the gas-grenade launcher on his left shoulder whirred as it aimed. His shoulder absorbed the recoil. The grenade became substantial as soon as it left the flux-field but kept its momentum. Opaque gas billowed up around the bag lady.
She smiled to herself. A blackness snapped into existence around her, and the gas drowned in it, drawn into her bag like a waterspout.
Panic roared among the refugees as they awoke to the battle.
The bag lady opened her shopping bag. The android could see the blackness lying there. He felt something cold pass through him, something that tried to tug at his insubstantial frame. The steel girders supporting the ceiling rang like chimes above his head.
The bag lady’s crooked smile died. “Sonofabitch,” she said. “You remind me of Shaun.”
Modular Man crested his flight near the ceiling. He was going to dive at her, turn substantial at the last second, make a grab for the shopping bag, and hope it didn’t eat him.
The bag lady began grinning again. As the android reached his pushover point just above her, she pulled the shopping bag over her head.
It swallowed her. Her head disappeared into it, followed by the rest of her body. Her hands, clutching the end of the bag, pulled the bag after her into the void. The bag folded into itself and vanished.
“That’s impossible,” somebody said.
The android searched the room carefully. The bag lady was not to be found.
Ignoring the growing disturbance below, he drifted upward, through the ceiling. The cold lights of Manhattan appeared around him. He rose alone into the night.
Hubbard gazed for a long, endless moment at the space where the bag lady had been. So that’s how she did it, he thought.
He rubbed his frozen hands together and thought of the streets, the endless freezing streets, the long cold hours of his search. The bag lady might have gone to Jersey, for all he knew.
It was going to be a long night.
“Goddamn the woman!” Travnicek said. His hand, which was holding a letter, trembled with rage. “I’ve been evicted!” He brandished the letter. “Disturbances!” he muttered. “Unsafe equipment! Sixty fucking days!” He began to stomp on the floor with his heavy boots, trying deliberately to rattle the apartment below. Breath frosted from his every word. “The bitch!” he bellowed. “ I know her game! She just wanted me to fix the place up at my own expense so she could evict me and then charge higher rent. I didn’t spend a fortune in improvements, so now she wants to find another chump. Some member of the fucking gentrifying class.” He looked up at the android, patiently waiting with a carryout bag of hot croissants and coffee.
“I want you to get into her office tonight and trash the place,” Travnicek said. “Leave nothing intact, not a piece of paper, not a chair. I want only mangled furniture and confetti. And when she’s cleaning that up, do the same to her apartment. “
“Yes, sir,” the android said. Resigned to it.
“The Lower East Fucking Side,” Travnicek said. “What’s left, if this neighborhood’s starting to get pretensions? I’m gonna have to move into Jokertown to get any peace.” He took his coffee from the android’s hand while he continued stomping the pressboard floor.
He looked over his shoulder at his creation. “Well?” he barked. “Are you looking for the bag lady or what?”
“Yes, sir. But since the gas launcher didn’t work, I thought I’d change to the dazzler.”
Travnicek jumped up and down several times. The sound echoed through the loft. “Whatever you want.” He stopped his jumping up and down, and smiled. “Okay,” he said. “ I know what to do. I’ll turn on the big generators!”
The android put the paper bag down on a workbench, swapped weapons, and flew soundlessly up through the ceiling. Outside, the cold wind continued to batter the city, flooding between the tall buildings, blowing the people like straws in the water. The temperature had risen barely above freezing, but the wind chill was dropping the effective temperature to below zero.
More people, the android knew, were going to die.
“Hey,” Cyndi said. “How about we take a break?”
“If you like.”
Cyndi raised her hands, cupped the android’s head between them. “All that exertion,” she said. “Don’t you even sweat a little bit?”
“No. I just turn on my cooling units.”
“Amazing.” The android slid off her. “Doing it with a machine,” she said thoughtfully. “You know, I would have thought it would be at least a little kinky. But it’s not.”
“Nice of you to say so. I think.”
Modular Man had been looking for the bag lady for fortyeight hours, and had concluded he needed a few hours to himself. He justified this stop as being necessary for his morale. He was planning to move the body of the evening’s memory from its sequential place to somewhere else, and fill the empty space with a boring rerun of the previous night’s patrol for the bag lady. With any luck, Travnicek would just speed through the patrol and wouldn’t go looking for memory porn.
She sat up in the bed, reaching for the night table. “Want some coke?”
“It’s wasted on me. Go ahead.” She set the mirror carefully in front of her and began chopping white powder. The android watched as she snorted a pair of lines and leaned back against the pillows with a smile. She looked at him and took his hand.
“You really don’t have to be so hung up on performance, you know,” she said. “I mean, you could have finished if you’d wanted.”
“I don’t finish.”
Her look was a little glassy. “What?” she said.
“ I don’t finish. Orgasm is a complex random firing of neurons. I don’t have neurons, and nothing I do is truly random. It wouldn’t work.”
“Holy fuck.” Cyndi blinked at him. “So what does it feel like?”
“Pleasant. In a very complicated way.”
She cocked her head and thought about this for a moment. “That’s about right,” she concluded. She snorted another pair of lines and looked at him brightly.
“I got a job,” she said. “That’s how I was able to afford the coke. A Christmas present for myself.” He smiled. “Congratulations.”
“It’s in California. A commercial. I’m in the hand of this giant ape, see, and I’m rescued by Bud Man. You know, the guy in the beer ads. And then at the end—” She rolled her eyes. “At the end we’re all happily drunk, Bud Man, the ape, and me, and I ask the ape how he’s doing, and the ape belches.” She frowned. “It’s kind of gross.”
“I was about to say.”
“But then there’s a chance for a guest shot on TwentyDollar Hotel. I get to have an affair with a mobster or something. My agent wasn’t too clear about it.” She giggled.
“At least there aren’t any giant apes in that one. I mean, one was enough.”
“I’ll miss you,” the android said. He wasn’t at all sure how he felt about this. Or, for that matter, if what he felt could in any way be described as feeling. Cyndi sensed his thoughts. “You’ll get to rescue other nice ladies.”
“I suppose. None nicer than you, though.”
She laughed some more. “You have a way with a compliment,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said.
She patted him on his dome. “It’ll be a week or so before I have to leave. We can spend some time together.”
“I’d like that.” The android was considering his yearning for experience, the strange fashion his career had of providing it, the way it seemed to him that the experience provided was not enough, would never prove enough.
Infrared detectors snapped on and off in the android’s plastic eyes as he floated over the street. Gusts of wind tried to lash him into buildings. Except for the few hours he’d spent with Cyndi, he’d been doing this nonstop for four days. Below in the street, someone tossed a styrofoam cup out the window of a blue Dodge. Modular Man wondered where he’d seen that particular action before.
Macroatomic switches performed a silent superliminal sifting of data. And the android realized he’d been seeing that blue Dodge a lot, and in many of the same places Modular Man had been in the last few days-refugee centers, shelters, a ceaseless midnight patrolling of the streets. Whoever was in the Dodge was looking for someone. The android wondered if the Dodge was looking for the bag lady. Modular Man decided to keep the Dodge under observation.
The car’s search was slower than the androids-so Modular Man began scissoring, searching streets left and right of the car while returning to the Dodge every so often. At the Jokertown Salvation Army center he got a good look at the Dodge’s occupant-a middle-aged white man, his crooked face drawn and harried. He memorized the car’s license plate and rose into the sky again.
And then, hours later, there she was-dead ahead of the Dodge, huddled beside someone’s front stoop with her bags piled on top of her. The android settled onto a rooftop and waited. The Dodge was slowing down.
“And Shaun says to me, he says, I want you to see this doctor ..”
Hubbard hunched into his overcoat. It felt as if the wind were blowing through his body, traveling right through flesh and bone. His teeth were chattering. He had been driving for what seemed years before, once again, getting that awful, nauseating feeling of deja vu. He’d found her again, crouched behind someone’s stoop behind a rampart of shopping bags.
“There ain’t nothing wrong with your mother that a shot of the Irish couldn’t fix .. “
Black. I have found her again. Lower West Side. Black’s answer was sardonic. Are you certain nothing’s going to go wrong this time?
The robot isn’t here. I will stay out of sight. Ten minutes.
Bring food, Hubbard said. We’ll try to catch her unawares.
“Fuck you, Shaun, I says. Fuck you.” The bag lady had jumped to her feet, was shaking her fist at the sky. Hubbard looked at her. “I’m with you, lady,” he mumbled. And then he looked up. “Oh, shit,” he said.
Modular Man floated off the rooftop. He couldn’t tell whether the bag lady was screaming at him or at the sky in general. The occupant of the Dodge was several houses away, sheltered behind another front stoop. It didn’t look as if the man intended any action.
He thought about the way she had twisted his components, of the obliteration of existence that would happen if she ripped into his generators or brain. Memories rose to his mind; the snap of single-malt in his nose, the fat man with his rifle, Cyndi moaning softly in his arms, the ape’s foaming snarl ... He didn’t want to lose any of it.
“Oh, shit,” Hubbard said, staring up in horror. The android was floating forty feet over the bag lady. She was screaming at him, reaching into her bag. The thing in the bag hadn’t been able to snatch him last time.
In sudden fury, Hubbard reached out with his mind. He would take command of the android, smash him into the pavement over and over until he was nothing but shattered components ...
His mind touched the android’s cold macroatomic brain. Fire blossomed in Hubbard’s consciousness. He began to scream.
There was something black in the bag lady’s shopping bag. It was growing.
The android dove straight for it. His arms were thrown out wide. If the woman moved her bag at the last minute, things would get very messy.
The blackness grew. The wind was tugging at him, trying to spin him off course, but the android corrected.
As he struck the blackness of the portal, he felt again the obliterating nullity overcome him. But before he lost track of himself, he felt his hands closing on the edges of the shopping bag, clamping on them, not letting go.
For a small fraction of a second he felt satisfaction. Then, as expected, he felt nothing at all.
The Siberian winds had not chilled the warm air over the municipal landfill near St. Petersburg, Florida. The place smelled awful. Modular Man had lost almost four hours this time. His checks showed no internal damage. He was lucky. He stood amid the reeking garbage and rummaged through the shopping bag. Rags, bits of clothing, bits of food, and then the thing, whatever it was. A black sphere about two kilos in weight, the size of a bowling ball. There were no obvious switches or means of controlling it.
It was warm to the touch. Clasping it to his chest, the android rose into the balmy sky.
“Nice,” Travnicek said. “You did good, toaster. I pat myself on the back for a great job of programming.”
The android brought him a cup of coffee. Travnicek grinned, sipped, and turned to contemplate the alien orb sitting on his workbench. He’d been trying to manipulate it with various kinds of remotes but had been unable to achieve anything.
Travnicek moved toward the workbench and studied the sphere from a respectful distance.
“Perhaps it requires proximity to work it,” the android suggested. “Maybe you should touch it.”
“Maybe you should mind your own fucking business. I’m not getting near that goddamn thing.”
“Yes, sir.” The android was silent for a moment. Travnicek sipped his coffee. Then he shook his head and turned away from the workbench.
“You can fly off to Peru tomorrow to join your Army friends. And make contact with the South American governments while you’re at it. Maybe they’ll pay more than the Pentagon.”
“Yes, sir.”
Travnicek rubbed his hands. “I feel like celebrating, blender. Go to the store and get me a bottle of cold duck and some jelly doughnuts.”
“Yes, sir.” The android, his face expressionless, turned insubstantial and rocketed up through the ceiling. Travnicek went into the small heated room he slept in, turned on the television, and sat in a worn-out easy chair. Amid last-minute Christmas Eve hype for last-minute shoppers, the tube was featuring a Japanese cartoon about a giant android that fought fire-breathing lizards. Travnicek loved it. He settled back to watch.
When the android returned, he found Travnicek asleep. Reginald Owen was playing Scrooge on the screen. Modular Man put the bag down quietly and withdrew.
Maybe Cyndi was home.
Coleman Hubbard sat in institutional clothing in his ward at Bellevue. Brain-damaged people walked, argued, played cards. A little plastic tree winked at the nurses’ station. Unseen to anyone except Detective John F X. Black, Amun floated in regal majesty above Hubbard’s head, listening to Hubbard as he spoke.
“One one nought one nought nought nought one one nought one one one ..”
“Twenty-four hours,” Black said. “We can’t get anything out of him but this.”
“One nought nought nought one nought ...”
The image of Amun seemed to fade for a moment, and Hubbard caught a glimpse of the figure of a thin old man with eyes like broken shadows. Then Amun was back.
I can’t contact him. Not even to cause him pain. It’s as if his mind has been in touch with ... some kind of machine. His hands clenched into fists. What happened to him? What did he make contact with out there?
Black raised an eyebrow. TIAMAT?
No. TIAMAT isn’t like that-TIAMAT is more alive than anything you’ll ever know.
“ .. nought one one nought nought nought one nought...”
When I found him, I saw the bag lady, put her to sleep, and found nothing in her bags. Whatever is was, someone else has it now.
“ .. one nought nought one nought .”
The ram’s eyes turned to fire, and then his body twisted, becoming a lean greyhound shape with a curved snout and bared fangs, a giant forked tail towering over his back. Fear touched Black’s neck. Amun had become Setekh the destroyer. The astral illusion was terrifyingly real. Black expected to see blood dripping from the animal’s snout, but it wasn’t there. Not yet, anyway.
He used you on an unauthorized mission, Setekh said. As part of a plot that was probably aimed against me. Now, he is a danger to us all. If he snaps out of this, he may say something he shouldn’t.
Destroy him, Master, Black said.
Foam dribbled from the thing’s snout, smoked on the floor. The other patients paid no attention. The great hound hesitated.
If I get into his head I might get ... whatever he’s got. Black shrugged. Want me to handle it?
Yes. I think that would be best.
I already planted the will in his apartment. The one that leaves everything to our organization.
The beast’s tongue lolled. The look in its eyes softened. You’re thinking ahead. I like that. Maybe we can work you a promotion.
Millions of miles from Earth, almost eclipsed by the sun, the Swarm Mother contemplated her scattered, surviving budlings. Observers on Earth would have been surprised to know that the Swarm did not consider its attack a failure. The assault had been launched more as a probe than as a serious attempt at conquest, and the Swarm, analyzing the data received from its creatures, developed a number of hypotheses.
The Thracian Swarm had been confronted by three responses that utterly failed to cooperate with one another. It was possible, the Swarm considered, that the Earth. was divided between several entities, Swarm Mother-equivalents, who did not assist one another in their endeavors.
Large numbers of the Siberian Swarm had been destroyed at once, broadcasting their telepathic agony to their parent. It was obvious that the Earth mothers possessed some manner of devastating weapon, which, however, they were reluctant to use except in uninhabited areas. Perhaps the environmental effects were distressing.
Possibly, the Swarm reasoned, if the Earth mothers were divided and all possessed such weapons, they could be turned against one another. If Earth was thereby rendered uninhabitable, the Swarm was willing to wait the thousands of years necessary for Earth to become useful again. The span of time would be nothing compared to the years the Swarm had already waited.
The Swarm, as it was eclipsed by the sun, decided to concentrate its monitoring activities on confirming these hypotheses.
It sensed possibilities here.
“So I says to Maxine, I says, When are you gonna do something about that condition of yours? I says, It’s time to let a doctor see it ...”
The bag lady, one shopping bag hanging from her arm while she clutched a second bag to her chest, walked slowly down the alley, fighting the Siberian wind.
Cyndi’s blond hair flailed in the breeze as she shivered in a calfskin jacket. She watched as Modular Man tried to talk to the woman, give her a take-out bag filled with Chinese food, but she continued mumbling to herself and plodding up the alley. Finally the android stuffed the take-out bag into her shopping bag and returned to where Cyndi waited.
“Surrender, Mod Man. There isn’t anything you can do for her. “
He took her in his arms and spiraled into the sky. “I keep thinking there’s something.”
“Superhuman powers aren’t an answer to everything, Mod Man. You have to learn to come to terms with your limitations.”
The android said nothing.
“The thing you need to understand, if this business isn’t going to drive you crazy, is that no one’s invented a wild card power that can do a goddamn thing for old ladies who are out of their heads and who carry their whole world with them in shopping bags and live in garbage cans. I don’t have any powers, and even I know that.” She paused. “You listening, Mod Man?”
“Yes. I hear you. You know, you’re awfully hard-bitten for a girl just arrived from Minnesota.”
“Hey. Hibbing is a tough town during a recession.” They floated up toward Aces High. Cyndi reached into her jacket pocket and produced a small package wrapped in red ribbon. “I got you a present,” she said. “Seeing as it’s our last night together. Merry Christmas.”
The android seemed embarrassed. “I didn’t think to get you anything,” he said.
“That’s all right. You’ve had things on your mind.” Modular Man opened the package. The wind caught the bright ribbon and spiraled it down into the darkness. Inside was a gold pin in the shape of a playing card, the ace of hearts, with the words MY HERO engraved.
“ I figured you could use cheering up. You can wear it on your jockey shorts.”
“Thank you. It’s a nice thought.”
“You’re welcome.” Cyndi hugged him.
The Empire State threw a spear of colored spotlights into the night. The pair landed on Hiram’s terrace. The busy sounds of the bar could be heard even over the gusting wind.
A Christmas Eve crowd was celebrating. Cyndi and Modular Man gazed for a long moment through the windows. “Hey,” she said. “I’m tired of rich food.”
The android thought a moment. “Me, too.”
“How about that Chinese place? Then we can go to my apartment. “
Warmth filled him, even, here in the Siberian jet stream. He was airborne in a fraction of a second.
Down the alley, something bright caught the eye of the bag lady. She bent and picked up a strand of red ribbon. She stuffed it into a bag and walked on.
It had been easy. While Flush and Sweat pretended to have a fight on the pavement in front of the moving van, Ricky and Loco had simply walked up to the van, liberated a pair of boxes apiece, and walked off into the street. The tall geezer who was moving hadn’t even noticed that some boxes were missing. Ricky patted himself on the back for the idea.
They didn’t get opportunities like this very often anymore. Nat turf was getting smaller. Joker gangs like the Demon Princes were swallowing more territory. How the hell could you fight something that looked like squid?
Ricky Santillanes dug into his jeans, produced his keys, and let himself into the clubhouse. Flush went to the icebox for some beers and the rest put the boxes on the battered sofa and opened them.
“Wow. A VCR.”
“What kinda tapes?”
“Japanese monster movies, looks like. And something here called PORNO.”
“Hey! Set it up, man!”
Beers popped open. “Loco! A computer.”
“That’s not a computer. That’s a graphic equalizer.”
“Fuck it ain’t. I seen a computer before. In school before I quit. “
Ricky looked at it. “Wang don’t make no stereo components, bro.”
“Fuck you know.”
Sweat held up a ROM burner. “What the hell is this, man?”
“Expensive, I bet.”
“How we gonna fence it if we don’t know how much to ask?”
“Hey! I got the tape player set up!”
Sweat held up a featureless black sphere. “What’s this, man?”
“Bowling ball.”
“Fuck it is. Too light.” Ricky snatched it. “Hey. That blond chick’s hot.”
“What’s she doing? Screwing the camera? Where’s the guy?”
“I seen her somewhere.”
“Where’s the guy, man? This is weird. That’s like a closeup of her ear.”
Ricky watched while he juggled the black orb. It was warm to the touch.
“Hey! The chick’s like flying or something!”
“Bullshit. “
“No. Look. The background’s moving.”
The blond woman seemed to be airborne, speeding around the room backward while engaged in vaguely-perceived sex acts. It was as if her invisible partner could fly. “This is deeply weird.”
Loco looked at the black sphere. “Gimme that,” he said. “Watch the damn movie, man.”
“Bullshit. Just give it to me.” He reached for it. “Fuck off, asshole!”
Weird lights played over Ricky’s hands. Something dark reached for Loco, and suddenly Loco wasn’t there.
Ricky stood in shocked silence while the others stood and shouted. It was as if there was something brushing against his mind.
The black sphere was talking to him. It seemed lost, and somehow broken.
It could make things disappear. Ricky thought about the Demon Princes and about what you could do about someone who looked like a squid. A smile began to spread across his face.
“Hey, guys,” he said. “I think I—got an idea.”
Darkness masked the street, concealing its face. Those who walked in the Jokertown night wore their own masks, some visible, some not. In the darkness or in the cold unreal color of the neon light cast by the Jokertown cabarets and boutiques, it was possible to believe that no one, no one at all, was quite what he seemed.
Darkness itself rolled along the deserted sidewalks, absorbing heat and color unto itself, hunting...
The Werewolf lay in a doorway, bleeding. His Liza Minnelli mask lay crumpled at his feet. His olive skin was zebra-striped with red pigment, port-wine stains gone mad. One eye was swollen shut. The other two were glazed.
“Hey.” The darkness opened, revealing an imperiouslooking black man named No Dice. He was dressed in a black leather Pierre Cardin trench coat with matching leather beret, a Perry Ellis sweater, a couple dozen gold chains, twohundred-dollar high-top sneaks, the kind with the little squeeze pumps, gold-rimmed shades, a palm-sized green-black-gold leather pendant in the shape of the African continent. “Hey.” The man knelt fastidiously, touched the Werewolf’s shoulder. “You hurt, homes?”
The Werewolf shook his head, focused his two functional eyes on the black man. He spoke through split, bleeding lips. “What happened? Why’d it get dark?”
“No idea, homey. But I heard shots. You been shot?” The Werewolf shook his head again. He tried to rise, but his knees wouldn’t support him. The black man took hold of him, helped him steady himself against the doorway. The Werewolf looked at the flaking green paint on the door. Bewildered desperation entered his voice. “This is where it was going down! I gotta help Stuffy!”
“Police soon. You better shag outta here.”
The Werewolf’s hands searched through the pockets of his jacket. “Where’s my piece? What happened to Stuffy?”
“Somebody hit you, man. Gimme your mask. Get outta here.”
“Yeah.” The Werewolf panted for breath. “Gotta split.” He staggered away, feet dragging on concrete.
No Dice watched him for a moment. He reached into the pocket of his trench, pulled out a pistol, then put it atop the Liza Minnelli mask that was-this week, anyway-the Werewolves’ gang emblem.
Darkness bled downward from the sky and swallowed him up.
The revival house was showing Jack Nicholson in Roman Polanski’s Jokertown. The last showing had ended three hours ago, and the marquee was dark. The marquee swayed, creaking slightly, in the cold winter wind pouring down the street.
Across the street was a spray-painted slogan, dayglo orange on brown brick: JUMP THE RICH.
Beneath the slogan a young woman knelt, hunched over a chalk painting. She was dressed in thirdhand clothing-a shabby baseball cap, a pale blue quilted jacket, and heavy boots two sizes too large. She had to squint in the darkness to see her work, the chalk painting she’d spread across a full slab of concrete sidewalk. It was a bright fantasy landscapegreen hills and flowering trees and a distant rococo Mad Ludwig castle, a scene as far removed from the street reality of Jokertown as could be imagined.
A man named Anton walked down the shadowed street. He was a huge man in a large belted canvas trench coat, and he had a drooping mustache. He had a heavy diamond ring on each and every finger, sometimes more than one. In one pocket he had seven credit cards his whores had lifted off tourists in Freakers, in another pocket he had their money, and in a third he had a small supply of Dilaudid and rapture, substances his women were hooked on and which he sold to them in return for their share of the earnings. He wasn’t worried about people stealing any of this because he had a pistol in his fourth pocket.
“Hey, Chalktalk. Baby. Ain’tchoo got a place to sleep?” The young woman sprang up from her drawing, faced Anton in a defensive crouch. The streetlight gleamed on needle teeth, flexed claws. A stray piece of chalk fell from a pouch on her belt, rolled unnoticed into the gutter.
“ I ain’t gonna hurtchoo, baby.” Anton maneuvered to head off the young woman’s escape. “Just wanna take you home and give you something to eat.”
The street artist hissed, flashed claws through the air. “Aw, Chalktalk,” Anton said. “ I ain’t dissin you. I bet you real pretty when you get cleaned up, huh? Bet the boys like you.”
He had the girl back up against the wall. She was shifting her hips back and forth, trying to decide which way to bolt. He reached a hand toward her, and her claws flashed, too swift for the eye to follow. Anton jumped back, stung.
“Joker bitch!” He shook blood from his hand, then reached for the belt of his coat. “Wanna play for keeps, huh?” He smiled. “ I can play that way, bitch. Bet I know just whatchoo like.”
And then the darkness rolled over him. The girl gave a little gasp and flattened herself against the brownstone wall. “ I believe, Anton,” said a voice, “ I told you I didn’t want you in my neighborhood anymore.”
Anton screamed as he was hoisted off his feet. The darkness was as complete as if an opaque mask had been dropped over his head. He scrabbled in his pocket for his pistol. There was a crack as his arm was broken across the elbow. Another crack, the other arm. Another crack, his nose. All had come so swiftly, one-two-three, he couldn’t cry out.
He cried out now. And then cold flooded him. His bones seemed filled with liquid nitrogen. His teeth chattered. He couldn’t summon the strength to yell.
“What did I give you last time?” the voice said conversationally. “ I believe it was second-stage hypothermia, correct? Lowered your body to about was it eighty-eight degrees? Just made you a little uncoordinated for a while.”
Anton was still hanging in the air. Suddenly he felt himself falling. He wanted to scream but couldn’t manage it. His fall stopped short. There was a horrible wrenching of his knees and ankles.
“Let’s go to the third stage, shall we? Shall we make you eighty-one degrees?”
Heat funneled out of him. He could feel his heart skip a beat, then another. Anton ceased to feel altogether. His breath rattled in his throat, trying to draw warmth from the air.
“I told you to stop stealing, Anton,” the voice said. “ I told you to stop pimping underage joker girls to tourists. I told you to stop beating and raping girls you meet on the street. And you go right on doing it. What does that make you, Anton? Stupid? Stubborn?”
The voice turned reflective. “And what does this make me?” Cold laughter answered the question. “A man of my word, I believe.”
The darkness flowed away, revealing what it had left behind. Anton, gasping for breath, swayed in the wind. He had been strung up from a streetlight, his feet lashed to it by the belt of his trench coat. His pockets had been emptied of money. The credit cards and the drugs remained, enough to put him in prison. Or at any rate the prison hospital.
Droplets of blood made little patterns on the pavement as the wind scattered them-each, until chilled by contact with the air, a precise 81 degrees Fahrenheit.
“Chalktalk? Girl? You all right?” Darkness flowed toward the fantasy landscape on the pavement.
The street artist was gone.
The flowing darkness paused, alert to movement in the night, alert to body heat. Saw none, then looked downward. The fantasy landscape was brighter, as if lit from within. Invisible clouds traced moving shadows on the landscape.
And in it the young girl was running. Up over a green hill, and out of sight.
Night surrounded the phone booth, which stood alone in a puddle of yellow beneath a streetlamp. Despite the spilling light, it was difficult to see just who it was who picked up the receiver and dropped a coin into the slot.
“Nine-one-one emergency. Go ahead.”
“This is Juve.” (pronounced Hoo-vay). His words had, a strong Spanish accent. I heard shots. Shots and screams.’ “Do you have an address, sir?”
“One-eighty-nine East Third Street. Apartment Six-C.”
“May I have your full name, sir?”
“Just Juve. I want to be anomalous.”
Juve hung up and in the instant before the darkness claimed him, smiled. The emergency dispatcher would never comprehend that in his very last statement, he had meant exactly what he said.
The streetlight shone green. Then yellow. Then red. Colors that reflected on the dark chalk landscape drawn on the pavement below.
The wall read: JUMP THE RICH. Red light glowed off the orange graffiti, off the little droplets of blood on the pavement.
Anton swung above, his body growing colder with each red drop that spilled from his swinging form.
When No Dice walked into Freakers, the air turned chill. People shivered, shuddered, turned apprehensively toward the door.
No Dice only smiled. He just loved it when that happened. No Dice ignored the stage show and glided regally to a booth in the back. Three Liza Minnellis sat on its torn red plastic seats. All were wearing black bowler hats, as in the movie Cabaret. At least they’d spared him the net stockings. “My man,” said No Dice. He looked from one Minnelli to the next, uncertain whom to address.
“Mister No Dice.” A big man rose from the booth. No Dice knew he was Lostboy from his high-pitched voice. “Lostboy” said No Dice. “My man.” As if he’d known all along which Liza to talk to.
No Dice gave all three of the ‘Wolves the homeboy handshake-thumb up, thumb down, finger lock and tug, back-knuckle punch. Then he sat down in their booth. His long leather coat creaked.
“Lookin fresh, No Dice,” said Lostboy.
No Dice smiled. “Manhattan makes it, Harlem takes it.”
“That the truth,” said one of the Lizas.
“Order you a drink?” Lostboy said. He grabbed a waitress as she passed. “Chivas Regal. Straight up.”
No Dice leaned over the table. “Wanna move weight,” he said. “Wanna move kilos.”
Lostboy picked up his highball glass and deliberately threw its contents on the floor. “I always like my man No Dice.” Lostboy reached into his pocket and pulled out a plastic bag of blood-fresh from the blood bank and guaranteed free of AIDS. He began squeezing it out into his empty glass. “My man No Dice always wants weight, always pays cash, doesn’t give attitude. Got his own clientele up in Harlem, so he never cuts into our action. Never no hassles with No Dice.”
“That the truth, homes,” said No Dice. “I’ll drink to it.”
No Dice’s smile turned a little glassy as Lostboy lifted his Liza Minnelli mask and his proboscis unrolled from beneath his tongue into the red fluid.
“Chateau AB Negative,” he sighed. “My favorite vintage.”
Whoever answered the phone answered it in Chinese. “Can I speak to Dr. Zhao, please?”
“Who shall I say is calling?” The switch to English came smoothly enough.
“Juve.”
“One moment.”
Juve knew the place he was calling, had been in it a few times. The bar-restaurant was on the second floor above a grocery, and it didn’t even have an English name, just a sign in Chinese characters on the door. Juve gathered that the gist of the name was simply Private Club. Sitting in red leather booths would be soft-voiced Asian men in Savile Row suits and handmade Italian shoes, very probably packing Israeli submachine guns.
“This is Zhao.”
“This is Juve. You still lookin’ for Dover Dan? The guy with three eyes who stole your product in that apartment down on East Third?”
“Ah.” A moment’s thought. “Should we discuss this over the phone?”
“Ain’t no time to get up-close-and-personal witchoo, man. He’s in Freakers with some of his homeboys.”
“And you’re certain he’s there.”
“He was there five minutes ago. He took his mask off when he got his drink, and I seen him.”
“If this information is correct, you may apply to me tomorrow for my very special thanks.”
“You know I’m a man of my word, Dr. Zhao.” Juve hung up the phone.
Darkness hovered uncertainly around him. He stared up at the glass front of One Police Plaza. Anything else to do tonight?
Might as well go home.
He buttoned the collar of his black leather trench and headed southwest on Park Row. One Police Plaza glowed across the street. He kept to the shadows.
“Simon? Is that you, Simon?”
The distorted voice wailed out of a doorway. Juve jumped at the sight of a figure huddled under a salvaged old quilt, the sad-faced old female joker whose face seemed to have collapsed into itself, so heavily wrinkled it looked like that of a bloodhound.
Terror rolled through him. He wasn’t Simon anymore. “Simon?” the joker said.
“Not me, lady,” Juve said. “It is you!”
Juve shook his head and backed away. The woman lurched to her feet, tried to reach for him.
Her hand closed on air. She stared around her. The darkness had engulfed Juve entirely. “Simon!” she screamed. “Help me!”
The darkness didn’t answer.
He was No Dice again by the time he got a cab heading north. He had been Juve wearing No Dice’s clothes, he thought, and that had made him uncertain, made him overreact when his identity was challenged.
Who was still alive, he wondered, who remembered Simon?
Some old joker lady apparently. He couldn’t remember ever seeing her. He wondered why her appearance had frightened him so much.
The cab left him at Gramercy Park. Darkness carried him up the side of a whitestone building on raven wings. He opened the roof entrance with his key and went down two flights of stairs, then padded on an old wine-colored carpet to his apartment door. The door and frame were steel sheathed in wood. He opened several locks and stepped inside, then pressed the code that would disconnect the alarms.
The apartment was spacious, comfortably furnished. In the daytime it was full of light. Books were lined alphabetically on shelves, LPs and CDs on racks. The hardwood floors gleamed. There wasn’t a dust speck out of place.
He put on a Thelonius Monk CD, took off No Dice’s clothes, and had a shower to wash off the man’s musky cologne. A large bedroom wardrobe, also steel sheathed in wood, had a combination lock. He spun the combination and opened the door, then hung No Dice’s clothes next to Wall Walker’s, which hung next to Juve’s. On a shelf above was a feathered skull mask. Wrapped in plastic, fresh from the dry cleaner’s, was a NYPD uniform, complete with badge and gun. There was also a dark cloak he’d once worn during District Attorney Muldoon’s ace raids on the Shadow Fists.
In the rear of the closet was the blue uniform and black cape he hardly ever wore anymore, the costume that marked him as Black Shadow. Black Shadow, who had been wanted for murder since the Jokertown Riot of 1976.
He looked at the varied sets of clothing and tried to remember what it was that Simon wore.
The memory wouldn’t come.
After a few years, he realized he didn’t know what to call himself anymore. It had been years since anyone had called him by his real name, which was Neil Carton Langford. The last anyone had heard of Neil was when Columbia tossed him out for not ever getting around to finishing his M.A. thesis. Black Shadow had been an outlaw for fourteen years. He’d been Wall Walker for a long time-it was his oldest surviving alias-but Wall Walker was too genial a personality for the kind of life he led most of the time. The other masks came and went, transient and short-lived.
Finally he settled on calling himself Shad. The name was simple and had a pleasant informal sound. It was a name that promised neither too much nor too little. He was pleased at finally figuring out what his name was.
No one, other than himself, called him by that name. Not that he knew of, anyway.
When he’d started out, there’d been other people whose line of business had either intersected his or complemented it. But Fortunato had gone off to Japan. Yeoman was gone, no one knew where. Croyd was asleep most of the time, and he was usually on the other side of the law, anyway.
Maybe it was time for Shad to hang up his cape. But if he did, who would be left to persecute the bad guys? All the public aces seemed to be engaged in lengthy public soap operas that didn’t have much to do with helping real people. None of them had Shad’s expertise.
He might as well stay with it. He didn’t have a life anywhere else. Not since 1976, when he’d realized what lived inside him.
When he woke, Shad drank coffee and watched the news. The coffee didn’t do much for him-no normal food did-but when he was living his normal existence in his normal uptown upper-class apartment, he tried as far as possible to act like a normal person.
The news was enough to wake him up, though. Shortly after eleven o’clock the previous evening, a group of what witnesses described as “casually dressed Asians” walked into Freakers, strolled to the back, drew machine pistols, and smoked three jokers wearing Liza Minnelli masks. Another Werewolf in another part of the bar returned fire, splattering one of the Snowboys in return for being disembowelled by about forty semiwadcutters. One of the Wolves had actually survived in critical condition but was not expected to be conscious and of any use to police for a long time.
No Dice was going to have to contact someone else to get his shipment of rapture.
The news rattled on. A vice president of Morgan Stanley had supposedly skipped town with hundreds of millions of investors’ funds. Nelson Dixon, the head of Dixon Communications and owner of the Dixon-Atlantic Casino, had just bought another art treasure, van Gogh’s Irises, for $55 million, a private purchase from an Australian billionaire who’d run into hard times. He’d also fired his entire security staff and hired new people, complaining that the old people had been lax about the jumper threat.
Good luck, Shad thought.
The military cordon around Ellis Island had been tightened after some jumpers had hopped into the bodies of some coast guardsmen and taken their cutter for a joyride.
Shad’s eyes narrowed as he considered the situation on Ellis Island. Maybe it was something he needed to be concerned about. He didn’t much give a damn if some idealistic jokers wanted to claim Ellis Island as a refuge from oppression. Good luck to them. But if killers were using the place as a hideout, that was another matter.
There were supposed to be a lot of people on the island, however. And Shad was only one person. He’d always worked alone. And if he got jumped, there was no guarantee he’d ever end up anywhere, or anyone, he wanted to be.
Funny if it ended that way. A man with so many different identities, permanently stuck in somebody else’s body... Who, he found himself wondering, still remembered Simon? Simon had been an uptown kind of guy, he remembered, not the kind of man to hang around Jokertown. So why was a joker looking for him?
He finished his coffee, washed out the cup, put it in the dishwasher. He went back into the bedroom and looked at the three suitcases sitting next to the bed. One was filled with forty pounds of rapture, with a street value of approximately a quarter million. The other two valises contained $100,000 in hundred-dollar bills, the stuff he’d taken from the Snowboy-Werewolf deal and blamed on Dover Dan.
A hundred grand. Not bad for a night’s work. And with any luck, he’d started a gang war as a bonus.
He’d have to start moving the stuff out of his apartment. Starting, he figured, with the drugs. He’d keep enough to pay his informants and dump the rest in the Hudson.
An image sang through his mind, a distant orchard, peaceful green fields dappled with cloud shadows, a distant castle ...
Stupid, he thought. Time to hit the streets.
Summer 1976. Hartmann and Carter and Udall and Kennedy all slugging it out in the Garden, cutting little deals with each other, planting knives in one another’s backs.
New York was a city on fire. And everyone, suddenly, was on one side or another. You were with the jokers or against them. On the side of justice or an obstacle in its path. He’d never known a time so hot.
Neil had been an ace for years-it had come on gradually during his early adolescence-but after his parents and sister were killed, he’d never done anything with the power, nothing but disappear into the darkness when the memories got to be too much and he didn’t want to be Neil anymore.
Senator Hartmann had been the one who had inspired Neil to become a public ace in the first place. Neil was in the hotel to hear a speech by Linus Pauling, and he wandered into the wrong ballroom by accident. He still remembered Hartmann’s words, the ringing phrases, the calls for action and justice. Within a week, Black Shadow was born, born right in Hartmann’s office, Shad and the senator shaking hands and smiling for the cameras.
A little problem, Hartmann told him a little while later. A little problem in Jokertown. An honest-to-God Russian spy, someone trying to get into Tachyon’s lab to learn Tachyon’s approaches for controlling the wild card. The Russians were infecting people deliberately, killing the jokers, inducting the aces into the military. They wanted to find a less drastic method and thought maybe Tachyon was working on it.
The night was hot. Marchers were in the streets. Fire seemed to burn in Shad’s heart as he found the agent and his equipment-his cameras and developers and one-time pads and he took the agent apart, breaking bones, putting a chill into his sweating skin. He left the man swinging from a lamppost right in front of the clinic, a placard pinned to his chest announcing the man’s, and the Soviet Union’s, crimes.
Something had snapped in him, a wildfire that raged way out of control. Hartmann s call for compassion and justice had twisted somehow into a call for burning action and revenge.
Shad’s heart leapt as the crowd tore the spy apart, as the night burst out in fire and madness. It wasn’t until later, when he saw Hartmann fall apart on television, that he knew how he’d betrayed the senator’s ideals.
Even after the riot was over, he couldn’t figure it out. He hadn’t known such rage was in him. He found Hartmann, slipped into his apartment before the man had even had a chance to recover from the disaster of the convention, and asked him what to do.
Hartmann said, plainly and quietly, that he should turn himself in. But anger blazed up in Shad again, anger warring with anguish, and he argued with Hartmann for an hour, then left the apartment. A little while later he did it again, found a couple of homeboys mugging tourists on the Deuce and left them swinging, broken, from lampposts.
The lampposts were well on their way to becoming his trademark.
He was in vague contact with Hartmann after that. Hartmann always urged him to turn himself in but would never call the authorities himself. Shad respected him for the courage it took to do that.
And in answer to the guilt that clawed at him, he left more people swinging from lampposts.
The evil joy, the uncontrollable rage, that he’d first felt was less in evidence now. It hadn’t flared up in years. Maybe he was growing up-he’d made a decision around the same time—to break with Hartmann. He didn’t dare compromise the senator anymore.
Now he just hung people from lampposts because it was what he did. He didn’t get much satisfaction out of it. It was an unsatisfactory thrill, like substituting pornography for good sex. Maybe it kept the crime rate down, kept a few people honest. He liked to think so.
But he was getting restless. People like Anton and the Werewolves weren’t worthy of his talents.
He wanted to work on something big.
Shad went to a safe house in Jokertown and dressed as Mr. Gravemold, the joker who smelled like death. He put on Gravemold’s feathered deathmask and doused himself with chemical stink.
People around him shrank from the smell. Shad liked that. It gave him privacy. But he didn’t want to smell it himself. When he was Gravemold, he chemically numbed his nasal passages and taste buds, and he’d tried a lot of substances over the years. By far the best proved to be highquality cocaine he took off dealers. He could get used to the stuff, he figured, except he had much better ways of getting high.
The hallelujah chorus rang through Mr. Gravemold’s sinuses as he walked around Jokertown looking for the houndfaced lady. He asked everyone Gravemold knew: Jube, Father Squid, people in relief agencies. People told Gravemold everything they knew, just to get rid of the smell, but nobody had seen the joker who had asked after Simon.
He walked beneath the lamppost outside the Jokertown Clinic as if it were any other lamppost. As if it were a place that had no meaning for him. It didn’t. To Mr. Gravemold, it was just a lamppost.
A chalk landscape, its colors faded and scuffed, occupied part of the sidewalk. A kind of lagoon with odd-shaped boats on it. He found himself watching it to see if it came alive. Nothing happened.
After nightfall, Mr. Gravemold bought some lemons in a fruit and vegetable store, went back to the safe house, dumped his smelly clothes in a trunk, scrubbed himself with the lemons to kill the scent, then took a shower. He still had to use some of No Dice’s cologne to cover what remained of the stink.
He tried to figure out who he was going to be. No Dice had no business in Jokertown tonight. Simon had been gone for years. People might be looking for Juve. This was the wrong neighborhood for Wall Walker, for the Gramercy Park identity, and for the cop. Maybe he could just be Neil Langford. The thought came with a rush of surprise.
What the hell.
He looked at the clothes in the wardrobe and wondered what Neil would wear for a night in Jokertown.
It came to him that he had no idea. He’d been playing all these parts for so long, he’d lost track of who he really was. He decided finally to dress in jeans, shirt, and a midnightblue windbreaker. The cocaine was still making him sniffle, so he put some tissues in a pocket. He pulled a watch cap down over his ears and set out into the night.
He made a businesslike quartering of Jokertown, starting with its southern tip around One Police Plaza. His senses were abnormally acute, and he was highly sensitive to body heat-he didn’t have to walk down every alley or look in every doorway.
John Coltrane ran long arpeggios in his head, working on McCoy Tyner’s “The Believer.”
He moved down the street like a cool breeze, feeding as he walked, taking little pieces of body heat that no one would miss, pieces that made him stronger, made him glow with warmth. The mellow buzz of all the stolen photons zoomed along his nerves and were far more satisfying than the cocaine could ever be. People shivered as he passed, glanced behind them, looked wary. As if someone had walked across their graves.
As he walked, he found old chalk drawings, faded with time or rain. Fantasy landscapes, green and inviting, smeared or beaten by pedestrians. Urban scenes, some that Shad recognized, some so strange as to be almost impressionistic. None of them signed. But all of them, Shad knew, from the same hand.
Chalktalk. The perfect name. JUMP THE RICH.
He found her across the street from the graffito, under the theater marquee advertising Polanski’s Jokertown. She had paused there, an old brown blanket around her shoulders, her stuff in a white plastic shopping bag. She paused in the theater’s glow and glanced around as if she were looking for someone.
Shad couldn’t remember ever having seen her before. He wrapped darkness around himself and waited.
The joker paused for a while, then shrugged her blanket further around her shoulders and walked on. The top of one of her tennis shoes, Shad saw, was flapping loose.
Darkness cloaked him as he walked across the street. He put out a hand, touched her shoulder, saw her jump. Took a little body heat as well. “What do you want with Simon?” His voice was low, raspy, faintly amused. Black Shadow’s voice.
She jumped, turned around. Her hound eyes widened, and she backed away. He knew she was looking at... nothing. An opaque cloud of black, featureless, untextured, taller than a man, a nullity with a voice.
“Nothing,” she said, backpedaling. “Someone-someone I used to know”
“Perhaps I can find him.” Advancing toward her. “Perhaps I can give him a message.”
“You—” she pushed out a breath, gasped air in, “you don’t have tö“ Her wrinkled face worked. Tears began to fall from her hound-dog eyes. “Tell him Shelley is, is...” She broke down.
Shad let the darkness swirl away from him, reveal his upper body.
“Simon!” Her voice was almost a shriek. She held out her arms, reached for him. “Simon, it’s Shelley. I’m Shelley. This is what I look like now”
Shelley, he thought. He looked at her in stunned surprise as her arms went around him.
Shelley. Oh shit.
He took her to an all-night coffee shop and bought her a watery vanilla shake. She chewed on the plastic straw till it was useless, and tore up several napkins.
“I got jumped,” she said. “I-somebody must have pointed me out to them.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because whoever jumped me marched my body to the bank and cleaned out my trust fund. I’d just turned twentyone and got control of it. Almost half a million dollars.” JUMP THE RICH, Shad thought.
“I went to court,” she said, “and I proved who I am, but it was too late. Whoever was in my body just disappeared. I never went back to drama school-what’s the point? And I got fired from my job at the restaurant. I can’t carry trays with these hands.” She held up padded flippers with fused fingers and a tiny useless thumb. Tears poured from her brown eyes. Little bits of paper stuck to her furry face as she dabbed at tears with bits of torn napkins.
“Why did you go away?” she wailed.
“That was a bad scene you were in. I told you it was time to leave.”
She stirred her shake with her useless straw. “Everyone started getting killed.”
“I told you.”
“You didn’t tell me they’d start dying.”
“I told you it would get as bad as it gets.”
“Why didn’t you take me with you?”
He just looked at her while guilt planted barbed hooks in his insides. He’d done what he’d done and just walked away, as if Shelley had been no more to him than one of the freaks he left hanging from lampposts or as if she were as invulnerable as she seemed to think she was.
He hadn’t thought he could save her, a little rich white girl stuck in a scene so evil, so decadent, so glamorous that it probably would have crumbled into violence and madness even without his prodding. But she hadn’t seen it comingshe led a charmed life, like everyone in her set, protected by her beauty, her trust fund, her sense of life as something to be devoured, inhaled, like the drugs she and her friends bought from the smiling, menacing street hustlers who saw them only as victims, as people to be led, step by step, into a place where a temporary and frantic safety could be acquired only by giving away their money, their bodies, eventually their lives. He didn’t think he could have saved her. In his best professional judgement at the time, it was impossible. But then he’d never know. He hadn’t tried.
She took another napkin from the dispenser and began to tear it into shreds. “Bobbie’s dead. Somebody beat her to death with one of her sculptures. And Sebastian’s dead. And Niko.”
“I’m not surprised.” He’d killed Niko with his own two hands, snapping the man’s neck with a quick, practiced twist. He’d never met anyone who deserved it more. Left him on his bed with his head facing the wrong way, gazing into the nodded-off face of his junkie chicken, Rudy-Rudy, who used to appear in Sebastian’s little art films, telling stories about his life and shooting up between his toes and talking about how much he wanted to fuck the cameraman.
“Violet threw herself off a roof. Or maybe the police pushed her. That’s what Sebastian said, anyway. And Rudy’s on the streets. Maybe it was Rudy who pointed me out to them. The jumpers. But he wasn’t the guy who contacted me.”
Shad looked down into his coffee. It was cold, and he hadn’t used any of the heat. His reflexes were singing a warning, telling him not to ask the next question, that whatever the answer, it was going to lead him into another pit of tragedy. “Who contacted you?” he said. “Why?”
“A lousy twenty grand,” she said, “and I get out of this body.” She looked up at him, and her mouth twitched up in a smile. “You wouldn’t happen to have twenty thousand dollars, would you?”
He looked at her, the sense of horror deepening, widening, ready to swallow him in. “Twenty grand?” he said. “Maybe I could get it.”
He bought her a room in a Jokertown hotel and said he’d come the next day with more money. Then he slipped away, walking north, toward his building off Gramercy Park.
He’d met her at a dope deal. He’d been following this guy with the stunningly original name of Uptown Brown, brown being the color of the bad heroin he sold in Harlem in order to support a more fashionable existence on Fifth Avenue east of Central Park, brown also being the color of his victims, who shot the stuff and then went into respiratory arrest from whatever it was-Drano, battery acid, whateverhe cut it with.
Shad had arrived at the address he’d been given and walked up the outside of the building to peer in the windows. He’d been expecting the usual meeting, guys in overcoats and shades carrying suitcases and shotguns, but what he saw was a party. Young white people drinking spritzers or imported beer while someone banged out a lot of furious, clashing chords on a cream-colored baby grand. And among them was Uptown and a couple other guys who didn’t fit into the scene at all.
He just walked in the door and said he was Simon. That was how he met Sebastian, the poet-slash-filmmaker; Bobbie, the sculptor; Shelley, the actress; Violet, the composer; and Niko, the director, a man who liked to direct other little dramas besides those on stage and intended to direct everyone in the room straight into hell so he could watch them flare and burn.
Shad found out his informant wasn’t wrong. It was a dope deal he was part ou Everyone in the room was hustling someone or something, drugs and art, drugs and money, or drugs and real life, this last being something this little set craved and had never, to hear them tell it, experienced.
If it hadn’t been for Shelley, he would never have come back. These people weren’t his problem. People dying back in his old neighborhood were his problem, dying from Uptown’s bullets and bad drugs. Now he knew why Uptown was peddling bad junk. He’d found another class of people he could move among, and he didn’t care what happened to his old customers.
But for some reason Shad found himself returning ... He saw something duck into an alleyway ahead of him, and his nerves went on the alert. He cautiously called the darkness down and moved toward the entrance.
Looking down the length of the alley, he could see at the other end a small figure running in heavy boots and baseball cap. Chalktalk, he knew, the street artist.
“Hey,” he called, but Chalktalk kept running.
He looked down at his feet. Drawn with careful attention to detail was a picture of him, of Shad, dressed in his windbreaker and watch cap, leaning in the doorway and reading the New York Post by the light of a streetlamp.
Shad ran after her, but Chalktalk was gone.
“Simon. It’s almost noon. I was afraid you weren’t coming.”
“I thought I’d buy you breakfast. Then some clothes. Okay?”
Shelley looked at him carefully. “I’ve been thinking, Simon, you know?”
Shad looked at the shabby hotel room-the thinning carpet and broken venetian blinds. “Let’s get out of this rattrap.” Pimps in the hallways, junkies shooting up in the back rooms. Jokertown. “I’ll get you a nicer place tonight.”
“I could stay with you.”
He frowned. “I’m sort of between lodgings at present.” He bought her breakfast at the same coffee shop they’d been in the night before. “Here’s what I think,” he said. “You contact the jumpers. I’ll give you the twenty grand. Then we see what they want you to do.”
She pulled some of the wrinkled flesh off her eyes and looked up at him. “Who are you, Simon? You’re not just some student, like you told me.”
“I’m just somebody who wants to do you some good, okay?”
“Are you the longbow killer? Is that who you are?”
He raised his arms. “Do I look like Robin Hood to you? Where’s a homeboy going to learn to shoot a bow, for God’s sake?”
“You’re no social worker, that’s for sure.” She bit off a piece of toast. “Harlem Hammer?”
Shad gave a laugh. “I wish.”
“Black Shadow”
“You’re reaching, Shelley.”
“Black Shadow” There was a glow in her eyes. “I should have known!” Her voice was excited. “When I saw you just come out of the darkness like that, I should have known.”
“Keep your voice down, will you?” Shad looked furtively at the other diners. “I don’t want anyone taking this seriously.” He turned to Shelley. “Can’t you just believe I’m someone you never heard of who wants to do you some good?”
“Black Shadow” Her eyes glittered. “I cant help thinking about it.”
“Let’s talk about the jumpers,” Shad said.
He kept trying to find the Shelley he knew beneath the mask of wrinkled joker flesh. She’d burned so brightly that he, with his frozen heart, had been attracted to the light and heat, had circled it like a sinister icicle moth.
The second time he’d met her, it was to sit with her friends to watch a film she was supposed to star in. The film was in grainy black and white and consisted of Shelley lying naked on a bed and reciting lengthy monologues, written by Sebastian, largely on the subject of orgasms. Occasionally Sebastian himself, also naked, would wander into the frame, face the camera, and recite an ode to his cock. Shad, looking at the organ in question, could not comprehend what the fuss was about.
The wretched film came alive only through the medium of Shelley. She disarmed the worst lines with genuine laughter; the best were said with glowing sincerity. Life bubbled out of her as from an artesian spring. Shad found himself enchanted.
Now he could only find bits of her wrapped in the tired joker skin. Memory kept digging sharp nails into him. Her familiar words and gestures sent waves of sickness through his belly.
Twenty grand, he thought—maybe she’d be Shelley again.
She was supposed to establish contact by putting an ad in the Times. He got her a new wardrobe and a room in an uptown hotel that was so classy, they wouldn’t turn down even a dog-faced joker. He rented the adjoining room for himself. Then he placed the ad for her.
He said he had someplace to go and split.
He called all of Croyd’s numbers from his hotel room. There was no answer, and he left messages on the tapes, specifying date and time so that if Croyd woke up in a month’s time, he’d know not to bother answering.
When he got to the safe house, his answering machine was blinking with a message from Croyd. Croyd had apparently awakened as a joker this time, because his voice had turned into a high-pitched honk. He sounded like a goose with a cleft palate. Shad had to play the message twice to understand it. He returned the call at the number Croyd had given.
“This is Black Shadow,” Shad said. “Are you looking for work?”
“I don’t know if I can help you this time around,” Croyd said. “I’m just planning to go back to sleep as soon as I can and forget I ever woke up looking like this.”
Shad understood maybe half the words, but the meaning was clear. “Can you do anything at all?” he asked.
“I’m sort of like a giant bat, except without hair. I’ve got a membrane between elongated fingers and thumbs, and I have sonar, and I—” He hesitated for a moment. “I have this craving for bugs.”
“You can fly, though?”
“That’s the only good part, yeah.”
“I think you’re just what I need. Can we meet?”
“I don’t feel like going out.”
“Can I bring you anything?”
“A box of bugs, maybe. Assorted sizes.”
Shad thought about it for a moment. If you could buy a box of bugs anywhere, you could buy them in Jokertown. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said.
He found a box of fried locusts in an exotic food store on Baxter and took it to his meeting. Croyd was repulsive, even for a joker, a three-foot-high pink-skinned homunculus with fleshy wings. Money changed hands, and locusts got eaten. Things were arranged.
After a visit to his Gramercy Park flat for some gear, Shad slipped back into his adjoining room at the hotel a little before ten o’clock, knocked on the door to make sure Shelley was okay, and found her in bed watching a movie on TV He carefully bugged Shelley’s room, including a video camera that he aimed through a fish-eye lens he installed in their adjoining door.
“Here’s what happens from this point on,” Shad said. “We don’t see each other till the meeting’s over. They may be watching your room. You take the money now, you make the meet, you do what they tell you. Afterwards you come back here, and if things are clear, we’ll talk.”
“What if they ask me where I got the money?”
“Tell them you stole somebody’s jewelry, then sold it.” Shelley pulled her wrinkles up out of her soft brown eyes and looked at him. “Who are you? Why are you doing this?”
“I don’t know”
She gave a nervous little laugh. “Which question did you answer?”
Shad looked at her. “Both.”
The jumpers called Shelley at four-thirty in the morning. Evidently they’d got an early edition of the paper. They ordered her to meet them at eight, standing right out in the traffic circle at Chatham Square, with the twenty grand in her handbag. Shad watched her leave on the TV screen, called Croyd, turned on the VCR, and headed downstairs. He got on his motorcycle-a Vincent Black Shadow, natch, restored for No Dice by the Harlem Hammer-and headed for Chatham Square.
He wished the jumpers hadn’t set the meet for broad daylight.
Before eight, he was on the rooftop of an apartment building on Baxter Street with Croyd. He could see Shelley standing nervously in the traffic circle a half block away. The morning rush-hour traffic was almost gridlocked around her. “Can you fly with one of these around your neck?” Shad asked.
Croyd eyed the walkie-talkie carefully. Shad looked at the pink hairless body and wondered where Croyd’s excess body mass had gone.
“I don’t think so.”
“I’ll leave one here, then. After you’re done, you can report.”
“walkie-talkies don’t work so good around here. Too many tall buildings with metal inside.”
“These are police walkie-talkies. There are repeaters set up everywhere.”
“Where’d you get police walkie-talkies?”
Shad shrugged. “I dressed up as a cop, walked into Fort Freak, and took a couple from the charging rack.”
Croyd gave a nasal honking laugh and shook his head. “Gotta admire your style, homes.”
“Shucks. Ain’t nothin.”
He went down the stairs, then walked past where his motorcycle was parked. He put on a navy-blue beret, settled in a doorway where he could keep an eye on Shelley, and chewed a toothpick for a while.
Black men hanging out in doorways are not unusual in America’s teeming metropoloi. He concentrated on not being unusual. He concentrated on being Juve, and Juve was checking out the scene, with long Yardbird Parker riffs, all staccato, in his head.
Juve tried real hard not to notice the little pink guy flapping through the air about five hundred feet up.
It was almost eight-fifteen when he saw the powder-blue Lincoln Town Car easing through the gridlock a second time. His nerves started humming. Nouveau-riche criminals, he had often observed, often gave themselves away when it came to personal transportation. But the Lincoln went out of sight, and then Shad’s attention snapped to Shelley. She was moving, walking with the light in the direction of the East River.
Damn. She wasn’t supposed to leave yet.
Juve ambled out of the doorway, straddled the Black Shadow, and kick-started it. Shelley was disobeying instructions, and this couldn’t be good. It wasn’t until he eased the bike out into traffic that he realized what had just happened. His nerves began to sizzle. He cast a wild look down Worth Street, then Park Row, just in time to see the blue Lincoln turn right on Duane.
Shelley was in the Lincoln. She’d just been jumped. Croyd was following the wrong body, damn it.
Shad clutched and shifted, and the Vincent’s engine boomed in synch with his thrashing heart. He raced down St. James Place, elbows and knees tucked in as the bike dived between stationary gridlocked vehicles. Leaving a trail of booming decibels, he performed a power slide behind One Police Plaza, then crossed Park Row without waiting for a break in the traffic, and felt as if he were saved only by some abstruse corollary of particle physics: He wasn’t in the same state, particle or wave, long enough for anyone to hit him.
Once onto Center, he saw the Town Car in the distance and throttled back. Center joined Lafayette, and the powderblue Lincoln turned right on Houston, then made another right on First, heading back into Jokertown. The streets were choked, and Shad had no trouble following.
The Lincoln made a few more turns once it entered Jokertown, then turned off into a nineteenth-century brownstone warehouse with its tall windows closed off by more recent red brick. The electronic garage door closed behind the Lincoln, and Shad passed slowly on the motorcycle, turning neither left nor right, an odd prickling on the back of his neck. He wouldn’t show up on this block again, certainly not on the bike. He’d be someone else entirely by the time he came back.
He turned, positioning himself to see the Lincoln if it headed back east, then pulled over to the curb and tried to contact Croyd-nothing. He searched the sky for a flapping pink figure, saw no one.
Time passed. Juve jacked a set of earphones into the radio and bobbed his head to a Kenny Clarke beat.
Two Werewolves stood on the corner, wearing gang colors but only ski masks, which gave them a better field of vision than Liza Minnelli or Richard Nixon, a precaution in case any Asians with guns showed up. The gang war seemed to be proceeding nicely. They scoped Shad out, offered him procaine cut with baby laxative, were ignored.
“Yo. Homes. This is Wingman.”
Juve straightened, reached for the police radio. The tw dealers saw him raise it and split.
“Homes here.”
Undercover cops used the same sort of elliptical language, Shad knew-he hadn’t been challenged with these radios yet, even though the police were listening. If anyone questioned him, he planned to be Detective-Third Sam Kozokowski of the Internal Affairs Division, and what was your name and badge fucking number? Which should shut them up in a hurry.
“She just wandered around for a while,” Croyd said, “then passed her handbag to a boy on a scooter. Then she wandered some more. Now she’s in a restaurant, eating an Egg McMuffin. Anything I should do?”
“She’s been jumped. There’s somebody else in there.”
“Shit.”
“I need you to follow a powder-blue Lincoln Town Car.”
“Snazzy wheels.”
Shad paused. This was the first time he’d heard the word snazzy in decades. He told Croyd where the car was, then went back to being Juve. A little shift in the infrared spectrum showed him where Croyd was hovering.
It was almost one in the afternoon before Shad saw Croyd begin to move. Shad paralleled him on the bike. The zigzag course took him and Croyd back to Chatham Square.
The dog body waited on the traffic circle. Shad pulled up behind the Lincoln, memorized the license plate, then parked where he’d been that morning. He went into the doorway and became Juve again.
There was a new chalk drawing there, right on the stoop.
It showed Shad and Shelley having breakfast in the Jokertown coffee shop. Shad looked at the picture and felt an eerie wind crawl up the back of his neck.
He forced himself to stay in the doorway till he saw Shelley hail a cab. Then, checking behind himself constantly for tails, he headed for the hotel.
“Yo. Wingman.”
“Hi, homes. The dog-faced joker I was following earlier collapsed-I think she got jumped again-but I saw her getting up as I followed the car. The Lincoln went back to the warehouse.”
“Thanks. I’ll talk to you later.”
“We’ll do some beer and bugs. Wingman out.”
Shad sped back through the tape he’d made of Shelley’s room. Two people had scoped the place. They were in their late teens, by the look of them, the boy in stylish leathers, the girl in denim and an eye patch. She seemed to have only one hand. The boy had got them through the lock with a raking gun. The one-eyed girl put something on top of the tall cabinet that held the TV Then they both left the way they had come.
At least neither of them had been Chalktalk.
Shelley showed up a few minutes later, looking as if she’d been through a lot.
Shad reached for the phone. “Hello?”
“This is the front desk.”
“Oh. Hi. Front desk, right.”
“Say that yes, you want to stay another day.”
“Yes. I want to stay another day.”
“You still want to pay cash.”
“ I still want to pay cash.”
“You’ll have to come down and do it in person.”
“I’ll be down in a few minutes.”
He met her at the elevator and pushed the emergency stop button to halt it between floors.
“I thought you were going to have a new body,” he said. “Yes. They’ve promised me one.” She licked her pendulous lips. “The thing is, I get to pick.”
“Oh.”
“They’ve got a catalog. Just like L. L. Bean.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“ I got jumped again. They put a bag over my head. They drove around for a while, then took me into a little room. It was fitted out like a prison cell-metal walls, a heavy door with big locks and a barred window. There was mesh overhead and a guy with a gun walking around.”
“Okay.”
“There were other cells. I could hear people talking. Some were crying and screaming.” She gave a strange little smile. “I didn’t care. It was wonderful. I was human again. Young! And beautiful. They showed me my face in a mirror. I was gorgeous.”
“Who showed you?”
“Two kids. Boys, maybe fifteen. Zits, but real good clothes. Rolexes, jewelry. The gold chains must have cost fifty grand. And there was a joker.” She gave an expression of distaste. “Brown, with a carapace. Looked like a cockroach.”
“Did they call him Kafka?”
“Yeah.” She pulled her wrinkles back and looked at him. “How’d you know?”
“He was around a few years ago. I knew him slightly when I joined the Egyptian Masons.”
Her eyes widened. “The Egyptian Masons? You mean the-the ones whö“
“Yeah. Those guys. I’d only just joined, then somebody blew up their temple with me in it. I barely got out, and I didn’t know there were any other survivors until they started trying to toss people off Aces High.”
She looked at him, her lips twitching in what might, under the wrinkles, be a smile. “You are Black Shadow, aren’t you?”
“My name’s Simon.”
“Uh-huh. Sure.”
“So what happened in this cell?”
“Somebody else came in. Dr. Tachyon.”
Shad’s mind whirled. He forced himself to speak. “You sure?”
“Who wouldn’t recognize Tachyon?” She gave a shiver. “Jesus, I never expected that. I was scared he’d read my mind or something and figure I knew you.”
Maybe he did, Shad thought. “Did you see a one-eyed woman?”
“No. Why?”
“Never mind. Just tell me what happened.”
“Tachyon made a speech. About joker rights. Now I had a chance to experience life as a member of the oppressed, and so naturally I’d want to join him in his great work.”
“And the great work?”
She shrugged. “They’re jumping the rich. If I agree to do what they want, I get jumped into a new body. I clean out the bank accounts and the family silver. Half goes to Tachyon and the jumpers, and the other half I get to keep to set up a new life somewhere. Unless—” she hesitated, “I decide to do it again. And again. He made that offer. I build up a nice nest egg, then they jump me into whatever body I choose when I want to retire.”
“What did you say?”
“I said I’d have to consider it.”
“What are you going to do?”
She looked at him. “What do you want me to do?”
“It’s your call. I’m not going to make you do anything.” She took a breath. “ I hate this body. I don’t want to hurt anyone else by jumping somebody into it. But”—she shook her head—”I have to think about it.”
“This thing gets settled, maybe we can put the victims into new bodies.”
Why had he said that? he wondered. He didn’t really believe it. He wanted Shelley back. That’s why.
He made himself think about Tachyon.
“It’ll take a few days,” she said. “ I have to familiarize myself with the target out of the catalog, know what moves to make. I stay in the cell the whole time.”
She’d made up her mind, he realized. The thing was going to happen.
He remembered an old film he’d seen, The Third Man. Orson Welles had taken Joseph Cotten up on a Ferris wheel, pointed at all the tiny little people below, and said, “If you could have a million dollars, but one of those little people dies, would you do it?”
Some stranger, some little antlike speck below the Ferris wheel, was going to end up in a dog’s body and have her bank account plundered.
“When you’re free of them, call me,” he said. “The number is 741-PINE. P-1-N-E. There will be an answering machine. Leave a message where I can find you.”
“Okay.”
“The number?”
“741-PINE.”
“Good.”
He started the elevator again and got off two floors down.
He had things to do.
Shad decided it was time to find out a few things about Tachyon. He had to start somewhere, and where he ended up was the public library and the back-issue newspaper files. The responsible papers were too discreet about what they knew to be of much use, but the tabloid made a lot more of it all.
TACHYON QUITS! BROKEN HEART CITED. That was the headline on the Post. Shad looked at the inevitable pinup on page 3: “Happy Holly” was said to like “professional wrestling, baby ducks, and naughty nighties for that Someone Special,” a strange summation that had Shad picturing her displaying herself for a slavering Haystack Calhoun in a frilly negligee with little yellow ducks on it.
Then he turned to the article on Tachyon. Dr. Tachyon, it said, had resigned his position at the Jokertown Clinic. “Intimates,” the article said, reported that Tachyon was frantic about the disappearance of his “one-eyed Jill,” Cody Havero, and had been unable to concentrate on work. There was a strong implication that he’d been spending his days in an alcoholic coma. Dr. Finn, whom Shad knew both as Wall Walker and Mr. Gravemold, hinted gently at Tachyon’s breakdown and also praised Blaise Andrieux, Tachyon’s grandson, who had been a “tower of strength in this ordeal.” Which didn’t much sound like the Blaise that Shad had heard about, but maybe the kid had grown up some.
There was also a lengthy rehash of Tachyon’s history, concentrating on his “drunken peregrinations” following the death of Blythe van Rensselaer. There was also a description of Dr. Havero’s “controversial career,” along with more speculation to the effect that Cody had been assassinated by a CIA conspiracy anxious to cover up something they’d done in Vietnam. The paper hadn’t found anyone reputable to report this last, which came from a “professional psychic known to the police.” I’ll just bet she’s known, Shad thought.
Shad narrowed his eyes and looked at Cody Havero’s picture. The scarred, one-eyed face looked interesting. Maybe she was someone he ought to concern himself about. He could put money out on the street, maybe hear something that the police and FBI hadn’t.
He spent the rest of the day doing just that and came up with zip.
“I’ve been trying to sleep,” Croyd said. “But it’s no good. I’ll probably be awake a couple days at least before I can drift off.”
“I could use a flyer around that warehouse. I want to track who goes in and out.”
Croyd gave a peculiar nasal sigh. “Come by and bring more bugs. We’ll talk about it.”
“Yo. Homeboy.”
“Homes here.”
“New arrivals at the warehouse. Three people in a limousine. One of them’s a lady with a bald head. Then there’s a bodyguard and-you’re not gonna believe this.”
Shad, whose feet were planted to the vertical surface outside Tachyon’s window, was at this point prepared to believe anything. “Try me.”
“St. John Latham. You know, the mouthpiece.”
“Yeah. I know who he is.”
“Some other people showed up just this minute. Some kids in a van.”
“Don’t let them see you. They’re probably jumpers.” Shad couldn’t be certain if the following squawk came from Croyd’s throat or from careless use of the squelch button. Finally Croyd’s voice came back. “Funny company you’re keeping.”
“The entertainment never stops.”
Croyd signed off, and Shad relieved a cramp by shifting his stance outside Tachyon’s window. Thus far, the evening had been pretty dull, consisting of Tachyon and Blaise polishing off a couple of microwaved TV dinners and a six-pack of Rolling Rock. Shad had always thought of Tachyon as having a more refined palate, but on the other hand, Hungry Man Dinners weren’t exactly the mark of a criminal mastermind either.
Blaise popped a cassette into the VCR and sat down in front of the set. Tachyon opened a bag of Fritos and sat down with him.
Shad couldn’t catch more than a fraction of the film from where he sat, but he saw enough pink flesh and heard enough moaning to be convinced of its nature. Whatever the man was doing to the woman on the film seemed insignificant compared to what the sound track did to “Cherokee.”
Blaise seemed enthusiastic about the action and gave Tachyon a running color commentary on the film. Eventually, Tachyon rose from his chair and kind of wandered around the apartment for a while, then went to the liquor cabinet, mixed bourbon, gin, Cointreau, vodka, and brandy in a tall cocktail shaker, then gulped the lot. He passed out on the bed, got up to stagger to the bathroom and vomit, then returned to the bed and passed out again.
Blaise took note of all this but did not intervene. So much for Dr. Finn’s pillar of strength.
Hypothesis one: Shad thought: Tachyon was the mastermind behind the whole jump-the-rich scheme. He’d cracked when his girlfriend had disappeared, or earlier; and he’d decided that justice for wild cards was too long in coming, and he’d become a terrorist. He was, after all, the man who when threatened by the Snowboys and the Syndicate, had raised a private joker army-Mr. Gravemold had been in it-then led them into combat twirling pearl-handled sixguns. Looking at it that way, it didn’t seem like Tach had been too tightly screwed together in the first place.
Hypothesis one-point-one: He’d become a terrorist, and he’d killed his own girlfriend because she’d found out. Hypothesis two: Tachyon and the grandkid have been jumped. That’s someone else in there. This theory explained everything very neatly except for where was Tachyon’s real mind?
They Stole Tachyon’s Brain, Shad thought. Next on the Tachyon triple feature.
If they’d had any sense, the bad guys would have killed Tachyon, the real Tachyon, right away-as they’d probably done with Cody Havero, who was in a position to spot the switch.
If Tachyon was jumped, Shad wondered, when had it happened? Could it have been two years ago, at the Democratic Convention in Atlanta? Tachyon had made a sudden political turnabout, and there were plenty of rumors of aces hidden among the delegates.
Shad didn’t think it too likely. No one had heard of jumpers until long after the convention, though that didn’t mean they hadn’t existed. But it had only been recently that Tachyon’s behavior had changed radically.
There was no evidence either way so far, at least from Shad’s fly-on-the-wall perspective. Though if that was Tachyon in his own body, he’d been keeping his taste in cinema well hidden.
The thing was, what was Shad going to do about it? Whoever was in Tachyon’s body, he was an evil son of a bitch. He’s stolen Shelley’s body and Lord knew how many others.
He thought that Tachyon was going to have to simply disappear. And Blaise was going to have to go with him. Ten minutes later, Shad had about decided to join Croyd at the warehouse, but at that point Blaise got up and turned off the TV He shook Tachyon awake, and the two started getting ready to go out. Blaise moussed up his hair and put on a stressed-leather jacket and enough gold chains to make No Dice jealous. Tachyon looked disinterestedly through his wardrobe and more or less donned things at random. Which was probably what he normally did anyway.
Shad slipped down the face of the building and got on his bike so that he’d be ready when Tachyon left. “Homey.” A voice honked in his ear.
“Yeah, Wingman.”
“People are moving out. Looks like a whole convoy. The limo, the van, that blue Lincoln, some other people on motorcycles.”
“Stick to Latham. I want to see where’s he’s heading.”
“Roger, wilco. Look, I can’t carry this radio on the wing, so it’ll be some time before my next report.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
Tachyon and Blaise left the apartment building-Tachyon wasn’t walking very straight-and went to the garage around the corner where they checked out a black Saab Turbo. Blaise drove. Shad followed them to the offices of Global Fun & Games. When he got there, he could see Croyd overhead. Shad chained his bike and went up the back wall of the office building. He perched atop the penthouse, and Croyd flapped to a landing near him, panting for breath.
“I’m not in shape for this,” he said. “You should climb more buildings.”
“The whole convoy came straight here. I don’t know where they’re all headed, but—”
“The penthouse would seem indicated.”
“Yeah.”
“Fly over to the other building, and catch your breath. When Latham leaves, I’ll give you the high sign, and you follow him.”
“Man. I sure hope I’m awake when this all comes to a head. I’d like to know what’s going on here.”
Judas Priest began to thunder from beneath Shad’s feet. He could feel the bass rumble through his soles.
Croyd took a few wheezing steps to the parapet and launched himself off into the night. Shad cloaked himself in darkness, then peered over the edge into one of the windows.
Van Gogh’s Irises sat on the penthouse mantlepiece, vibrating to the heavy metal booming from eight-foot-tall speakers. Nelson Dixon, the painting’s new owner, strutted up and down on the boardroom table in two-thousand-dollar handmade shoes. Jokers, including Kafka, hung around a boardroom table, not mixing much with a bunch of kids who were probably jumpers. A well-muscled bald woman stood in the corner and watched everyone with an expression of cold contempt. Near her, Shad recognized the lawyer St. John Latham. Shad wondered if Latham had been jumped but decided not-no jumper could possibly imitate that frigid manner. Shad also recognized the comptroller for the city of New York, a famous Wall Street bond profiteer, the curator of the Metropolitan Museum, and somebody from the old Reagan administration whom he couldn’t otherwise place. Then Blaise came in with Tachyon, and the boy jumped up on the long table with Nelson Dixon, and the two exchanged high fives. Tachyon swayed to a chair and seemed to pass out again.
An interesting start to the meeting.
Shad took pictures through the window with a pocket camera and wished he had eavesdropping equipment.
The bald woman came forward and called things to order. The music faded away. People spoke. File folders were produced and passed around. Party bowls of cocaine and rapture moved up and down the table.
Shad wondered where Constance Loeffler was. The new head of Global Fun & Games had to be a part of this scene. The meeting went on for several hours. Nobody thought to look out the window and wonder what a piece of darkness was doing poking its head below the sill.
When things broke up, Shad had decided whether to follow Tachyon or the Van Gogh. The art attracted him more-he wanted to see where they were keeping the loot. He followed it to the same brownstone warehouse in Jokertown.
Damn. Still, he had a good start. All he had to do was follow people around. Connect the dots.
Then do what he always did.
Later that night, he slipped into Shelley’s hotel room, just to see what it was the one-eyed girl had put on top of the tall cabinet. He picked the lock and slid in silently, wrapped in darkness. Shelley was breathing easily on the bed. Shad walked up the wall and peered at the top of the cabinet. His mouth went dry.
What the girl had put there was her own eye. And her hand. The eye was looking down at Shelley’s sleeping figure. Apparently Shad had not caught its attention.
He got the hell out of there.
Next morning, following instructions, Shelley set her window shade to the angle that meant yes.
And the jumpers came and got her.
Two nights later, Croyd collected his last payment of cash and bugs. Between the two of them they’d collected a large dossier, following and photographing every person and every car they could connect with the jumping scheme. Shad’s files bulged with data.
Tachyon. St. John Latham. Curator of the Metropolitan Museum. The city comptroller. Shad had been in and out of each of their apartments, though without finding much incriminating. Nelson Dixon. Probably Connie Loeffler. Maybe even Donald Trump, who the hell knew? Trump had sure been going through a lot of changes lately. Hell, he’d gone and fired his wife. Nelson Dixon had fired a lot of people, too, including his entire security network. He bet the new security people were part of the scheme.
It wouldn’t be the jumpers in their bodies, Shad figured. Fifteen-year-old street punks couldn’t pull off impersonations this complex. Jumpers were just the means of entry. Shad guessed that the new tenants were probably well-educated jokers from Ellis Island, people who might have been Nelson Dixon or Donald Trump themselves if their wild cards hadn’t been stacked against them.
How many millions were going into that warehouse?
Along with guns bought with converted bearer bonds, medical supplies from the Jokertown Clinic, drugs from the Snowboys, paintings from the Metropolitan collection ...
The question was how to bust it open. His usual method was to infiltrate, then turn the bad guys against each other. But this was too damn big. And infiltration would be difficult. He wasn’t a jumper, wasn’t a joker, wasn’t a Snowboy, and he certainly wasn’t whatever the bald woman was.
The third night, he followed Tachyon to the warehouse. The Saab couldn’t get in because there was a navy-surplus deuce-and-a-half sitting in the open main door. Blaise and Tachyon conferred inside for a few minutes, and then the Saab led the truck onto a pier on the Lower West Side. Shad remembered himself as Mr. Gravemold, fighting a paranoid albino Croyd and a near-invincible Snotman on this same pier. It seemed the pier wasn’t keeping any better company since that time.
He slipped through the pier rail and walked inverted over the water. He stopped when he heard the truck brakes squeal, then the slam of doors and the sound of voices. The water near the pier began to bubble. Shad’s nerves gave a leap. He summoned darkness to cover him.
Something broke surface, a gelatinous hemisphere streaming with cold Hudson water. Shad’s mouth went dry as he saw the bulbous eyes, up top like a bullfrog’s, and the leering twisted mouth. He was used to jokers but he wasn’t used to this.
“Let’s hurry it up,” the thing said. “I got dinner waiting.” Its veined skin split open, and another joker stood up inside. The joker was built along the lines of a beer truck, with a heavy armored exoskeleton to strengthen him, and he began to take heavy crates from those above and stow them carefully inside the shimmering dome.
The crates seemed evenly divided between food and munitions.
“My aching back,” said the aquatic dome. “I hope you’re ready for a slow ride home.”
“Anything to give Granddad a kick in the teeth,” Blaise said. Tachyon and the jokers looked uncomfortable. Granddad, Shad thought. Tachyon had been jumped. And he was on the Rox.
Tachyon and Blaise lay flat on a case of antitank rockets.
The big joker stepped out, the dome sealed, and in complete silence, it vanished from sight beneath the river.
The deuce-and-a-half rumbled as it started up.
Shad decided to burglarize Tachyon’s apartment again. Maybe he’d find something incriminating this time.
On the pavement below Tachyon’s window he found a chalk drawing of himself, dressed as he was just now, his feet planted to the wall. Shad’s head swung wildly, his ears alert to the sound of laughter.
He heard nothing.
He found nothing in Tachyon’s apartment.
He wondered, as he scuffed the drawing away with his shoe, if his role in this was ordained by someone not himself. If he was a pawn.
And he wondered if that someone had chalk dust on her fingertips.
“Hi. My name is Lisa Traeger these days. I’m calling from the trust officer’s desk while he’s off converting about half a million dollars to bearer bonds. I just thought I’d let you know I’m still among the living. I’ll call back later, when I get some free time.”
Lisa Traeger. He knew the victim’s name now.
He heard the phone call hours after it was recorded. He’d seen the jump after having followed the Lincoln from the brownstone warehouse, but he hadn’t known Shelley was a part of it. Shad was waiting by the phone when it rang again.
“Yes?” he said.
“This is, ah, Miss Traeger. I was wondering if you would care to join me for a night on the town.”
“Are you free?”
“Nobody’s watching. They trust me. I’m a criminal now, just like them.”
He wasn’t completely certain he believed that.
He met her at Tavern on the Green, in the Chestnut Room, which was one of the few rooms in the restaurant where people lurking out in Central Park couldn’t watch them through the glass walls. He had taken a few circuits of the building before he’d gone in, just in case, and seen nothing, not even a detached eyeball.
Shad wore a blue blazer, gray wool slacks, and regimental tie. Lisa Traeger was in her late thirties, white, darkhaired, dark-eyed, and handsome. She carried a leather briefcase that Shad suspected was stuffed with bearer bonds. She wore a black off-the-shoulder Donna Karan evening dress and a Georges Kaplan fox wrap with the price tag still on it. Emeralds shone at her throat and ears. She ordered champagne and a warm chicken-salad appetizer with bacon and spinach.
“Brilliant,” she said. “It went without a hitch. Traeger’ll be held till tomorrow morning, and then I’ll have to get the hell outta town.”
“How do you feel?”
“Glorious. That joker body was old. I’m young againwell, younger. And my senses are much better. I can taste things again.” She laughed as champagne went up her nose. Her skin glowed against the background of polished brass and rare wormy chestnut.
Sadness whispered through Shad’s bones. “Traeger’s hurting,” he said. “Wherever she is.”
Shelley considered that for a moment. “She’ll make them the same deal I did. Wouldn’t you?” She gave him a shaky smile. “I don’t want to think about that anymore. I just want to be human again.” She gave a brittle laugh. “I want to be safe for a little while, okay?”
She ordered the Muscovy duck in juniper sauce. Shad, to be polite, ordered the veal escalope and ate a few bites. He hadn’t had solid food in days, and his stomach griped at him. His nerves kept giving little jumps as new people entered the room, as he checked them against his mental files of people connected with the jumpers’ scheme. He saw nobody he knew. She ordered a bottle of Puligny Montrachet Latour ‘82, and Shad sipped a glass. Alcohol danced warm spirals in his head.
Outside, a cold winter wind flogged at the trees of Central Park. Shad put on No Dice’s leather trench coat and got on his bike. Shelley gave a laugh and climbed on behind him, her hose-covered thighs gripping him. They sped up Central Park West, heading uptown. He danced the Vincent left and right, eyes straining, awareness reaching out, trying to make sure he wasn’t followed. He stole heat from the cars and buildings they passed, a degree or two at a time, until his body roared with fire.
Shelley took his shoulders, leaned forward, spoke into his ear. “Wherever you want to go.”
Wherever. Right.
Wherever ended up being a suite at the Carlyle. Shelley paid with Lisa Traeger’s Gold Card. She hadn’t been human for a long time. She wanted to do the most human thing of all.
Blindly, he reached for her. Her eyes glowed in shadowed sockets, and columns of flame pulsed in her throat. “You’ll keep me safe, won’t you?” she said.
He felt masks sliding away one by one. He felt less safe than he had in years.
“I’ll do what I can,” he said.
Shelley slept like a baby. Shad prowled the two-room suite, trying to work things out in his head. Strange little Miles Davis etudes sang through his thoughts. He kept hoping the situation would define itself, that he’d look out the window and see a human eyeball on the sill outside staring at him; then he would know what needed doing.
No eyeball. No clue.
He kept thinking about that green landscape glowing on the sidewalk. There, maybe, people wouldn’t need masks. In the pale predawn Shelley woke with a laugh. She threw up her arms and rolled across the Carlyle’s sheets, giggling like a girl. Then she glanced up at Shad, who sat on the edge of the bed. Her eyes narrowed. “What’s that on your shoulder?” she said. She reached out, touched the skin. “It’s the CBS eye,” Shad said.
Her face wrinkled in puzzlement. “You had it done? Why?”
“Scar tissue,” Shad said. “Somebody carved it into me when I was little.”
Shock rolled across her face.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Shad said.
She sat up in bed, put her arms around him. “I can’t understand how somebody could—”
“Somebody did. And somebody jumped you and put you in a joker body.”
And some people string others up from lampposts. “People do these things,” he said.
She rested her cheek on his shoulder. “I can’t believe I didn’t see those scars before.” Her eyes narrowed. “Is that another one around your throat?”
Where the garrote had sawn into him and the tracheotomy had gone into the windpipe. Shad nodded. “The light’s at the right angle or something. It happened years ago. It’s hardly visible anymore.”
She looked at him. “So what do you do with your time? You just live in hotels and carry a lot of cash with you and help people feel safe?”
“What are you going to do?”
She seemed surprised. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, what are you going to do? You’ve got money, a new body. A credit card that’s probably good for a few more hours. So what’s your plan?”
She lay back on the sheets. He looked at the dark nipples atop her soft mature breasts, and he couldn’t help remembering the breasts of the old Shelley-smaller, firmer, with a dusting of freckles.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I feel too good to think about it right now. All I know is that I want to be safe again.”
“People are going to start looking for Lisa Traeger in a little while, and I don’t figure you want to be found.”
“No.” She leaned forward again, propped her chin on her knee. “I can pay you back your twenty grand. I’ve got enough with me.”
“You don’t have to. It wasn’t my money anyway.”
“You steal it or something?”
“Yes.” Looking at her. “That’s exactly what I did.”
“Anyone get hurt?”
“Lots of anyones.”
She frowned at him. “You’re not making me feel safe anymore.”
He shook his head. “I’ve never been what you’d call safe, Shelley.”
She signed. Carefully her eyes queried his. “I know how to be safe if I have to.”
“Yes?”
“I take the jumpers up on their offer. And I do the jump again and again, until I’m rich beyond my wildest dreams of avarice. And then I get jumped into a body more my own age-you know this Traeger body is all of thirty-eight?-and I live happily ever after in the Bahamas or wherever it is that retired jumpers go.”
He looked at her. “I think you should quit while you’re ahead. You don’t want anything more to do with those people.”
“I’ve lost twenty years. This body is going to be wanted by the police. And you say I’m ahead?”
“You’re ahead of where you were a week ago. I’d settle for that.”
“Twenty years.” He saw tears in her eyes. “I’ve lost damn near twenty years. I don’t want to be thirty-eight.”
“Shelley.” He reached out, took her hand. “Bad things are going to start happening to those people.”
“Bad things. Meaning you.”
“Me and about two hundred million other people. They can’t keep this up. Not all those impersonations. Not people like Tachyon or Nelson Dixon or Constance Loeffler.”
“Connie Loeffler?” Shelley sniffled, then shook her head. “She isn’t being ridden.”
“Then what does she have to do with all this?”
“They did jump her, yes. Put her in a joker body, one of the really disgusting ones, for a few hours. That was all it took.” She shrugged. “She was a pretty young woman, okay? A pretty young woman with money, like I used to be. She jumped-heh, sorry-she jumped at the deal they offered. She pays fifty grand a month protection and allows them use of some of her cars and facilities. And she’s living in L.A. now, to keep away from them, but that won’t keep them away if they want her. The only way to keep safe from these people is to do what they want.”
“That’s not safe,” Shad said. “It’s as safe as I’m going to get.”
“Listen,” Shad said. “I can make you disappear. I can get you new ID, a place to live, whatever it takes...”
“And I put my new money in a trust fund, right? And then someone in the trust department gets jumped, and—”
“It doesn’t have to be New York.”
“There are more jumpers all the time, right? It’s a mutant wild card-like what that carrier spread a few years ago, only slower. In another few years there won’t be anyplace safe. The only way to keep safe is to keep on their good side.”
A melancholy warning bell tolled slowly in Shad’s heart. “I told you once,” Shad said. “I told you bad things would start to happen. You didn’t listen then.”
“What about my missing years? How do I get them back?” Her voice was a wail.
“Think of the years you’ve got left. Make those the important ones.”
“Shit! Shit!” She turned away and beat a pillow with her fist.
He reached for her, tried to stroke her shoulders and back. “You’re ahead of the game. You’ve got lots of options.”
“I was young!”
She clutched a pillow to her. Tears spilled from her eyes, and Shad’s nerves twisted. “You were a joker,” he said. “You’re not anymore.”
“I want to be safe.”
“There isn’t anyplace safe. The Rox least of all.”
A vision of cool green fields passed before his mind. Shad held her till she stopped trembling. Then she jumped up and went to the bathroom to find some tissues. A few minutes later, she was back, red-faced and red-eyed, and began to pick up her clothing.
“I should think about getting out of here,” she said. “I can hide you.”
She frowned, considered, shook her head. Stepped into her underpants. “I want to be free,” she said. “Free to make up my mind without any pressure.”
“Don’t hurt people, Shelley.”
A little muscle in her cheek jumped. She gave him a resentful look. “The worst that’ll happen to them is to end up in Lisa Traeger’s body. You seem to think that’s a good place to be.”
“‘That’s not exactly what I said.”
Shad watched her dress and felt hope trickling out of him. He reached for his own clothes.
Leave her alone. Let her make up her own mind. He couldn’t tell her what to do-he’d made too many wrong decisions himself to tell anyone else how to behave-but he knew that decisions had consequences, that karma worked on that level if no other, that nothing good could come out of any of this.
But he couldn’t really think of any way to make it better any other way, either. What had happened to Shelley was like what happened to people in prison. You got fucked up. It didn’t matter if you were in for an unpaid traffic fine and were the best prisoner in the world, because prison fucked you over anyway. What you learned there was only good for survival in prison, and what you learned was only how to manipulate people and keep everyone at a certain distance and play the game to get what you want and not care about anyone else. And you couldn’t help it, because that was what you had to do to survive the slams. And when those reflexes carried over to the outside, bad things would happen.
He buttoned his shirt, looked up at her. “Don’t tell them about me.”
Her look was scornful. “What ,kind of person do you think I am?”
“I’m here to tell you I’m not going to hurt you, okay? I know you’re not the enemy.”
“Violet wasn’t the enemy. She went off the roof anyway.”
“I didn’t push her.”
“That doesn’t mean it wasn’t your fault.”
Shad didn’t have an answer for that one. “741-PINE,” he said. “Leave messages. I’ll get them eventually, and I want to know you’re okay. But I don’t live by the phone. You can’t trust it in an emergency.” He looked at her hopelessly. “If someone pushes you off a roof, I can’t help.”
Her look was slitted, hidden. Like someone gazing out from behind a hundred years of hard time. She sighed, reached out, touched him. Became Shelley for a little while. “I won’t shop you,” she said. “You helped. I’d still be a joker if it wasn’t for you.”
He put his arms around her and held her close. Her life had turned nightmare, and she wanted it all back, the youth and beauty and trust fund. Maybe she’d get it.
What she would never get back was that miraculous innocence, the racing exuberant joy.
And they both knew it.
Two days later, Shad was ready. He had the jumpers scoped out, knew their movements, knew that things were as ready as they’d ever be. Shelley hadn’t called him, but every day that went by was another day in which she could decide to rejoin the jumpers, and he wanted to make his move in the interim.
The only delay had been caused by the building’s alarm systems. The warehouse had new state-of-the-art alarms, but the building had first got electricity a century ago, and the junction box in the alley out back was a spaghetti maze of hundreds of different-colored dusty old wires. It had taken Shad nineteen hours of work, crouched twelve feet off the ground as he worked with his meter and alligator clips, before he had the proper wires isolated. He was lucky it hadn’t taken weeks. All he had to do, come the proper moment, was bypass the alarms with current from a six-volt battery, and then it would be time to rock and roll.
He decided to move early the next morning, when any guards would be tired and maybe asleep. He went to his apartment off Gramercy Park and watched the news and played Cannonball Adderley’s Savoy Sessions and tried to sleep.
At four in the morning, he got up, went to the wardrobe, and unlocked it. He got out a heavy belt and a bunch of gear and laid them out on the carpet. Then looked at the clothing, all the identities lined up on the rack awaiting his habitation. His eyes drifted to the Black Shadow costume: the navy-blue jumpsuit, the black cloak, the domino mask.
The costume sang to him of readiness, and he felt his soul answer.
There was a chalk drawing on the wall next to the junction box. It showed only the junction box blown up to enormous size, its mass of wires rendered in bright, almost surrealistic detail, with a giant pair of hands working with alligator clips and a voltage meter.
Shad found his nerves keening again, his head gymballing madly as he looked for the street artist, but he knew she was long gone.
The cloak floated about him as he crouched on the wall next to the junction box and attached his homemade bypass box to the alarm system. He took a cellular phone from his belt, dialed 911, and told the police that there were jumpers holed up with their loot in the warehouse and that they had captives in there. He finished by saying that he’d heard shots fired and that they’d better cordon off the neighborhood and get a team ready to send in.
“Give me your name, sir,” the operator insisted. “Black Shadow.”
Why the hell not?
Shad hung the phone on his belt and walked up the wall of the warehouse. Night spilled from his cloak, raced through the sky. He sucked photons until the darkness billowed out ten yards in all directions, until his nerves sang with pleasure. He picked the lock on the roof access and went down a fluted nineteenth-century cast-iron staircase. Torn, graffitiscarred wallboard revealed crumbling red brick and slabs of unreclaimed asbestos.
Below, on the upper floor of the warehouse, were the tiger cages.
It looked like a brainwashing academy out of The Manchurian Candidate. Solid prefabricated metal-walled cells had been built and riveted together, each with a single steel door and a slot though which food could be passed. The cells were open on top and screened with metal mesh. Catwalks lay atop the mesh so that sentries could march along them and peer down at the inmates. Each cell was equipped with a cot, a mattress, a washbasin, a pitcher of water, and a slop pail. February cold filled the place; the prisoners were wrapped in blankets and secondhand winter clothing. Spotlights juryrigged to the graceful brick arches of the roof kept the prisoners in perpetual daylight. Cameras peered down from above. There was a stairway and a pair of empty freightelevator shafts that led to the floor below.
The smell was not good.
Shad saw two guards, both jokers. One, a slouched figure in a hooded cloak, paced atop the cages and carried an AK complete with bayonet, while another, a slab-sided gray skinned elephant man, drowsed naked in a chair to one side of the cages, sitting in front of a collection of electronic equipment that looked as if it had been kludged together by Victor von Frankenstein: video monitors, rheostats, switches, red and green Christmas-tree lights, Lord knew what. Both sentries were wearing shades against the glaring light.
The thing Shad found most pleasing about this setup was that there were a lot of photons to rip off.
He covered himself in darkness, inverted himself, and walked along the ceiling until he was over the cages. Most of the people in them were lying down, trying to sleep, arms thrown across their eyes to cut off the incessant light. Most were jokers, many badly deformed. One of them wore a straitjacket and was chained to the door of her cell. Little rhythmic moans came from her slitlike mouth.
The ones they couldn’t afford to let go. People like Shelley they could release after a few days, but not Nelson Dixon or the city comptroller. Not the ones with access to accounts they could loot forever.
Shad looked down at the joker guard and felt certainty filling him like a swarm of buzzing photons. He’d hidden himself away, turned himself into other people. No Dice,
Wall Walker, Simon, other phantoms of his imagination or of the street. All dealing with penny-ante shit. Now he was himself again, working on something worthy of his time. Readiness filled him like a welcome draft of springwater.
Photons dopplered along his nerves at the speed of light. The joker guard was right below him. Shad dropped from the ceiling, turned himself upright in air, and landed just behind the guard. The wire mesh boomed. One hand twitched the hood off the joker’s head and jerked him backward, the other drove a palm heel into the joker’s mastoid. There was a nasty sound of bone caving in. The joker fell onto the mesh with a crash like a falling tree. Shad didn’t figure he was dead, but of course skull fractures were unpredictable. And Shad was already on his way to the other guard.
The elephant man had come awake and was staring at Shad, blinking hard, shading his eyes against the glaring light and trying to make out what had just happened in the boiling cloud of darkness that had dropped atop his cages. It was far too late to do anything by the time he realized that the cloud of darkness was heading for him.
The cape crackled in Shad’s ears as he sprang off the tiger cages and landed on the joker’s chest with both booted feet. The chair went over backwards, and both Shad and the joker spilled to the floor. Shad rose to his feet and considered his handiwork. The elephant man was flat out of the picture, half his ribs broken, blood oozing from a scalp wound where the back of his head had hit the floor.
“Hey! Hey! Let me out!” The voice boomed in the huge room. Apparently one of the captives had noticed that his guard had been flattened right over his head.
“Put a lid on it!” yelled someone else.
The darkness swirled away, revealing Shad’s form. He looked at the scarred homemade plywood desk that supported all the electronic gear. There were a series of numbered switches that Shad concluded operated electric locks in the cells.
“Let me out! Let me out!”
“Shut up, fuckface!” Another weary voice.
Shad peered toward the cells. “Which number are you?” he shouted.
“Six! Six!”
Shad pressed number six. There was a loud buzzing sound, a door slammed open, and a yellow-skinned, roundbottomed bipedal dinosaur, wearing nothing but a polka-dot necktie, flung himself out, looking wildly left and right, and started heading for the stairs leading down into the warehouse. “Not that way!” Shad yelled. “Over here!”
The dinosaur reversed direction and started running again, heading for the stairs to the roof. Shad intercepted him and grabbed him by the necktie.
“Hey! Lemme go!”
Shad started dragging the dinosaur toward the console. “This way,” he said. “We’re letting everyone out.”
“Me first!”
“What you’re gonna do is push buttons. And then maybe I’ll let you leave. Okay?”
Shad got the dinosaur in front of the console, then walked toward the first of the tiger cages. The door had 01 stenciled on it. Inside was a purple joker with flippers for hands.
“Hit one!” Shad said. He pulled the door open and turned to the joker. “You’re free. Take the stairs to the roof, then down and out of here. Tell the police.”
The joker ran for the stairs as if he were afraid Shad would change his mind. Shad walked down the line of cells, opening one after the other. Captives moved toward the exits. The woman in the straitjacket had to have her chain torn off the door by main strength-Shad sucked a lot of photons and boosted his muscles-and then she ran, hooting, for the stairs without waiting to have the canvas jacket unbuckled.
“Hit eight!” The door buzzed and Shad looked up into Lisa Traeger’s eyes. She seemed a more privileged class of inmate; she wore an opaque sleep mask propped up on her forehead and had an electric blanket for her cot. She was dressed well in Guess jeans and a cashmere rollneck. A delicate gold chain winked around her neck.
There was a dossier open on the bed, with photographs and xeroxes of bank statements. She was studying her next target. They didn’t let their people out after they knew who the target was. A good piece of security, Shad thought.
“You’re free,” Shad said. His mouth was dry. “Follow the others to the stairs.”
She made a nervous gesture with her hands. “I left you a message earlier.”
“I forgot to check.”
“ I haven’t told them anything.”
He opened the door. “Better get out of here.”
She took her blanket and left without looking back. Shad walked to the next door. Peering out the window was a scar-faced woman in an eye patch whose distinctive features he’d last seen in the New York Post.
Dr. Cody Havero.
“I’ve been looking for you, Doc,” Shad said, and turned to the dinosaur. “Hit nine!” The lock buzzed, and Shad pulled open the door.
“Listen,” Cody said.
“You’re free,” Shad said. “Take the stairs to the roof, go down the fire escape, and head for the police station.”
“No. Wait. My name is Cody Havero.”
“Hit ten!” Shad looked at her. “I know who you are. The whole city’s been trying to find you. Hit eleven!”
“Listen.” Following him. “I know things. A lot of what’s going on, here and on the Rox. I know a lot of the people they’ve lined up as targets. And—”
Shad heard one of the freight elevators start up and put a hand over Cody’s mouth. Night rose from the floor, covered them both. Cody gave a little shiver as her vision darkened.
The elevator platform rose, and Shad could see through the old-fashioned folding elevator door that Tachyon was on it. He looked pale and about a hundred years old. Even the plume on his hat drooped. He was carrying a tray with plastic-wrapped sandwiches and paper cups of coffee.
Shad was already moving, a memory flaming in his mind of Shelley in the hound joker body, little bits of tissue sticking—to her fur as she wiped away tears ...
Tachyon slid open the elevator door before he noticed anything was wrong, and Shad turned everything to night, reached into the elevator, and grabbed Tachyon by the throat.
Hot coffee spattered the floor. Shad slammed Tach’s head into the side of the elevator, then swung him around and out of the elevator and smashed him into the brick wall of the main room. Tachyon went limp.
Shad reached down, took the alien’s collar in his hands, applied an X-hand choke hold, pressing not only on the windpipe but on the blood vessels on either side of the neck, cutting the arteries that fed the brain. Whoever was inside Tachyon was going to have to die before he jumped out.
He tightened his hold. The darkness fell away, and Cody screamed.
“No! Leave her alone!”
Tachyon was moving feebly, trying without success to tear Shad’s hands away. Cody ran to him, grabbed one of Shad’s arms in both her own, tried to haul him off the alien. “That’s not Tachyon!” she said.
“Either way,” said Shad, and tightened his grip, pressing hard. Tachyon’s eyes rolled up. Shad remembered the way the garrote had sliced into his throat when he was a boy, the way the police had to give him a tracheotomy after they kicked down the door, dug a hole in his windpipe, and how he didn’t understand what was happening and tried to fight them, thinking they were trying to kill him too.
Cody tugged on him. “It’s just some girl named Kelly. She’s not really anybody.”
Shad looked at her. She took a step back, her eyes widening as she saw his expression, and then determination entered her face, and she yanked on his arm again. “She’s Blaise’s girlfriend. That’s all she is. She does what they tell her.”
Shad looked down at the alien body, its face turning purple, and released his hold. Tachyon thudded to the floor, clutched at his throat.
“Blaise is the bad one,” Cody told him. “He’s behind the whole thing. He’s evil.”
“Didn’t think he was a choirboy,” Shad said. His throat ached as if in sympathy with Tachyon’s.
“He killed the real Tachyon months ago. Blaise told me.” Tachyon’s not dead, Shad thought in surprise. He’s on the Rox.
He was about to tell Havero that, but suddenly the room was filled with the flat unmistakable boom of a Kalashnikov. Shad’s nerves screamed as he dove forward and rolled, willed his opaque black cloak around him. He flattened himself against the metal wall of the prison complex.
The overhead mesh rattled. Cody, he saw, had reacted well, throwing herself flat, and she was now low-crawling toward cover. Her Vietnam reflexes seemed intact.
The AK boomed again. Shad extended his opaque field and climbed up the wall of the cage complex. There was a fountain of sparks from the control console, and the yellow dinosaur fell back, arms waving.
The joker was crouched, the AK shouldered and leveled, and there was a ripping sound as the guard unloaded a full magazine in the direction of the escaping prisoners.
Shad screamed in anger and ate every photon in the joker’s body. It took several long seconds. Shad’s heart seemed to swell with sudden heat. The joker pitched forward, frozen; there were little crystalline sounds as bits of him broke off and rattled downward through the mesh. Shad ran for the table, saw the dinosaur lying splayed with his brain oozing down the brick wall behind him, the yellow body twitching in its final throes. Shad looked wildly for Shelley and saw her-saw Lisa Traeger’s body-running up the iron stairway, panic stamped on her face but otherwise unharmed. Two more of the prisoners were down, wounded. The rest of the swarm of bullets had only pocked the red brick walls. Either the guard was a bad shot, or he’d been seeing triple from his head injury.
Cody Havero ran forward to render first aid, her hands snatching automatically at her pockets as if for medical instruments.
A telephone on the control panel began to purr. Shad picked it up. His eyes tracked to the stair.
“What’s happening? Who’s shooting?” The voice sounded female and young.
“What’s happened—” He felt himself smile. “—is that I just killed your guard. The question is, what do you think you can do about it?”
He put the phone down. “Everybody out,” he said, and hit the remaining switches. Jokers burst out of cells and staggered for the exits.
“Help your friends!” Shad said, pointing to the two wounded. “Get ‘em out.”
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Tachyon rise to an unsteady crouch, then fall headfirst down the stairs. Shad suppressed an impulse to pursue and instead hit the switches labeled floods and managed to kill most of the floodlights. An alarm buzzer began its cry, repeating its grating message every three seconds. Shad walked toward the stairway, darkness swirling off his form like dancing mist.
The first two jumpers bounded up the stairs with UZIs in their hands. Shad dropped night around them, watched the panic grow in their eyes, then drew heat from their bodies till they went unconscious and stumbled back down the stairs. He heard someone scream down below. Shots bounced up the stairway, fired blind by someone out of sight.
Shad jumped over the barrier to the freight elevator that Tachyon hadn’t used, then walked down the side of the elevator shaft. Peering around the corner, he saw a cold-eyed mastiff of a joker and a chubby-faced young white girl braced behind some packing crates, the joker with another AK and the girl with a Dirty Harry revolver far too large for her hands. Both were staring at the stairway with its two bluefaced figures. A white boy in a flash Italian jacket and Bart Simpson T-shirt was trying to kick-start a vintage Triumph motorbike, but in his panic he’d flooded the engine.
Shad didn’t see Tachyon anywhere.
Van Gogh’s Irises hung on one of the walls under a row of track lights. The warning buzzer was still crying.
Shad took them all out, dropping them with hypothermia, one after another. It took a long time because Shad’s body had already absorbed a lot of energy, but the targets were helpless, and he took all the time he needed. When the boy dropped with the Triumph on top of him, the joker began firing wild, bullets whanging off brick, and when Shad began consuming his heat, he held the trigger down and emptied the magazine into whatever crates were nearest him.
Shad slipped from out of hiding, searched the area for Tachyon, and didn’t find him. The red metal fire door in back was open; maybe the Tachyon body had simply bolted. Shad handcuffed each of the shivering victims, cuffed their feet as well, and put a garbage bag over each head. A hand-lettered tag attached to each bag identified each as a jumper. The police or emergency-room personnel would remove the bags at their peril. The jumpers couldn’t jump anyone they couldn’t see.
Shad wandered for a moment amid the stacks of loot. There were lots of paintings, some of which had just taken some 7.62-mm rounds. More prefabricated detention facilities, German in manufacture, designed to be ready for use in any insurrection, revolution, or instant concentration camp. Enough weapons to start a revolution, each labeled in its packing crate-grenades, mortars, antitank weapons. Some of the lettering was Cyrillic, some Chinese. Most seemed to have been transshipped from Texas. Medical supplies. Bearer bonds. Gold bars. Serious amounts of drugs, presumably not for use, rather an investment. File cabinets filled with reports from lending institutions, credit-check companies, credit-card companies, and private detectives hired to scour the neighborhood for new victims.
It was bigger than Shad had imagined. His heart blazed. This was the kind of thing he was meant for.
Well. Time to be a hero. He got on the Triumph, started it, heard the tail pipe boom off the echoing warehouse walls. He drove to the loading dock, opened the door, rolled the bike out. The cold street waited. Shad accelerated, cape snapping out behind him, and turned the corner.
A turreted NYPD armored car sat like a squat insect on the eroded city asphalt. Police in helmets and flak jackets were setting up sawhorse barriers and stretching out yellow tape.
The Triumph’s headlight rolled over them, and Shad saw them start nervously, a general movement toward weapons. Shad decelerated and held up a peaceful hand.
“Chill,” he said. “I’m on your side.”
A tiny Asian woman in a flak jacket-Captain Angela Ellis, he knew-gave him a narrow look. She had never met Shad, but she’d met one of his identities who had worked out with her in the same karate school. She was talented, Shad judged, but impatient. From her look, maybe the bells of memory were beginning to chime. Her M-16 was pointed slightly to the right of Shad’s heart.
“Who are you?”
“The warehouse is full of loot,” Shad said. “Gold bars, paintings, drugs, and a whole lot of guns. There are some kidnap victims I’ve let go—”
“We’ve picked up some.” A flat declaration. “Some are wounded.”
Captain Ellis nodded, raised her walkie-talkie, spoke a few words.
“I’ve subdued the kidnappers and bagged them for you. Some are jumpers, so be careful.”
Ellis nodded again.
“They’ve been jumping the rich,” Shad continued. “The city comptroller, Nelson Dixon, other people with access to cash. There are files in there that should give you a lot of names.”
She looked at him with unforgiving jade eyes. “You never answered my first question. Who the fuck are you?” Shad’s smile broadened, and he couldn’t resist a low, calculated laugh. “Call me Black Shadow,” he said.
She stroked her chin and nodded.
He laughed again, exultant. This was, all of it, what he was born for. He looked at her, the laughter still rolling from his throat. “Somebody else got jumped,” he said. “Somebody important.”
Her eyes were most unfriendly. “Who?”
What should have happened was that he spoke the name of Tachyon, ate every particle of light for about ten yards around, gunned the Triumph, and disappeared like the Lone Ranger into the night, trailing triumphant laughter. What happened instead: The world suddenly spun in his head, and then he was looking up into a starless New York opalescent night, and he could feel his own limbs twitch and spasm as if they were not his own. Shelley looked down at him with a sneer on her face. She was wearing a lot of mascara and the wrongcolored eye shadow. Her breath was warm and smelled of gin.
“Asshole,” she said. “Son of a bitch. I should blow your brains out.” Brandishing a chrome-plated .38 revolver. Shots banged off hard brick walls. Shad could hear shouts and screams. Shelley grabbed him by the collar, jerked him left and right. He couldn’t seem to make his body do what it wanted. Roof asphalt and pebbles grated on his back.
It wasn’t Lisa Traeger doing this to him but the old Shelley, the young girl he’d first met. He recognized the bridge of freckles across her nose.
“Hear that?” Shelley said. “That’s Diego in your body, and he’s kicking police ass.” She laughed. “Cops are gonna come looking for you.”
He had been jumped. The thought pierced Shad’s mind like an icicle. He gasped for breath and tried to rise, arms and legs thrashing.
Shelley laughed contemptuously and shoved Shad back onto the roof. Police shotguns boomed out. “Relax,” she said. “You’ll be back in your body real soon, and you won’t like it.”
Shad’s mind whirled. He had just worked out who he was, and now he wasn’t himself anymore.
The hell he wasn’t.
I am Black Shadow, he thought. There had to be a way to make this body work for him. He lay back on the cold roof and concentrated on making one finger move. It seemed to do as he commanded.
Okay. A start.
I am Black Shadow, he thought.
Shelley went to the roof parapet and looked down. “Diego, shit!” she said. “Get outta there! Jump! You’ve made your point.”
She wore a white evening dress, a fur wrap, and an incongruous pair of battered red sneakers. Her hair was longer and punked up with mousse. She and her friend had probably just come back from a night of club-crawling and seen the police setting up their barricades. You needed a twenty-one-year-old body to get into the kind of clubs where jumpers probably wanted to hang out. Shelley had provided one. Maybe that’s all they really wanted her for and the trust fund was just a bonus.
Shad tried to move his left foot, was successful, and managed to move the left leg a few inches. More or less as he intended. Then he tried the right leg.
I’m Black Shadow. Black Shadow. The words becoming a mantra.
More guns fired. Shelley paced back and forth at the parapet, muttering. Shad wondered if the police were winning. “Yeah! Yeah!” Shelley chanted. “Run for it!”
A storm of fire erupted. Shelley leaned out over the parapet, apparently following someone escaping around the corner, and then she sighed. “Good.” She came back to stand by Shad’s side and looked down at him. “You’re gonna get yours, asshole.”
Black Shadow. Black Shadow. I’m Black Shadow.
He looked at the woman next to him. And you’re not Shelley.
Shad moved. His coordination wasn’t very good, so he chose a move that could be done without any real precision. His kenpo teacher called it sticks of Satin. He dropped his right leg against the front of Shelley’s ankles, then slammed his left leg against the back of her knees. His accuracy was none too great, but the leverage was still good enough to pitch Shelley forward, landing hard on hands and knees.
Shad lunged upward and grabbed her gun arm by the sleeve, then dragged her toward him. He clubbed one fist and tried to bring it down on the back of her neck, but his accuracy was wretched, and he hit the back of the head instead. He kept hitting. Shelley struggled, almost got free, but Shad lurched atop her and bore her down to the asphalt.
“I’m Black Shadow,” he said. “Black Shadow.” His arms wrapped Shelley’s head, right forearm folding across her jaw, left cupping the back of the head.
“No,” Shelley begged. “Don’t.” Shad’s heart twisted. “Black shadow!” he screamed, and snapped Shelley’s neck.
He pulled the .38 from twitching fingers and staggered to his feet. The sky whirled around him. He tottered to the parapet and looked down.
The Triumph was on fire. Angela Ellis was on the pavement, moving feebly as police figures crouched over her shouting into their radios. Other officers lay sprawled across the pavement, some in pools of blood.
They’d blame Black Shadow for it, he realized. How could they do anything else?
There was a noise on the fire escape, and Shad spun to face the sound. Dizziness almost brought him sagging to his knees. Black Shadow rose from the darkness. He looked at Shad and the sprawled figure of the lifeless jumper.
The cloaked silhouette approached. He was carrying a police M-16. “Man. I thought I was cornered there for a second. I musta jumped twelve times before I ended up back in this body.” He dropped the rifle and grinned. “Turns out this guy can walk up walls. Lucky for me.” His look turned puzzled. “Why are you in my body?” Thinking Shad must be his friend. He looked from one to the other again, then alarm entered his eyes. “What aré“
Shad lurched toward him, swinging up the pistol on the end of his right arm. “I want my body back, motherfucker.” Black Shadow looked uncertain. Then he smiled. “Maybe,” he said. “If you drop that gun.”
“Bullshit.” The gun swayed. Shad grabbed it with both hands.
Black Shadow’s eyes narrowed inside the mask. “Maybe I can cross that distance before you pull the trigger.”
“Just try it, motherfucker. I know I ain’t faster than a speeding bullet, and neither are you.”
The jumper hesitated. Apparently he didn’t know that he could hide himself in darkness or freeze Shad solid, because he didn’t try it. Maybe he hadn’t been alive to read Aces magazine in 1976.
Shad blinked sweat from his eyes. The gun jittered in his hands.
“You don’t seem too coordinated, asshole,” said Black Shadow. “Why don’t you put the gun down?”
“I want my body back,” Shad said, “and if I don’t get it, I’m gonna hurt you.”
Black Shadow looked at him. “How you gonna do that?” He grinned insolently. “I’m in your body. You aren’t gonna hurt this body, are you? Look at yourself. You’re fifteen years old. I’m a grown-up.”
Bang.
Black Shadow’s eyes widened as the bullet whipped over his head. “Shit!” he said. “Will you put that thing down?” Shad blinked eyes dazzled by the muzzle flash, a problem his regular body didn’t have. “If you give me my body back,” Shad said, “you can have this body. This body has a gun, motherfucker. Maybe you can kill me with it before I snap your fucking neck.”
Black Shadow hesitated, licking his lips. “Let me think.” Bang.
The bullet clipped him in the leg, and he went down with a yell. “Stop that!”
“Give me my body back!”
“Fuck you!”
Bang.
The bullet took Black Shadow in the torso somewhere, and he went down, suddenly limp, hands clutching at the roof. “You’re crazy!” he shouted.
And then his eyes narrowed as he looked at Shad. Triumph sang through Shad’s veins as he realized what was about to happen. He gave his hand a command to drop his pistol, but suddenly the world was spinning again, and he couldn’t be certain if the command was obeyed.
Asphalt hit him in the face. I’m Black Shadow, he thought, and laughter rang through his mind.
He ate every photon he could reach. Heat blazed through him. He rolled across the roof as blind pistol shots snapped out.
The jumper loomed in his awareness, a flaming infrared target that staggered around the roof, blinded by darkness.
Shad’s body had been exercising hard, and it was starved for energy. Shad concentrated on the figure and drank in its heat.
The jumper swayed, staggered, collapsed.
Shad gasped for breath and tried to rise to his feet. The wounded leg seemed willing to support him; the bullet had gone through the fleshy part of the thigh. The other bullet had gone through the right shoulder, and Shad could feel bone grating as he tried to move it. Blood was soaking the jumpsuit, coursing warm down Shad’s right arm.
The wounds were in shock, and there was no real pain yet, just little crackling twinges of what was to come. He was going to need a doctor real soon. Except that the police had fired a lot of bullets at him, would have no idea whether they’d hit, and would be searching the hospitals for him. The jumpers too, probably.
He’d have to find a doctor he could trust, a junkie or alcoholic or someone who would want his cash and not turn him in. He searched his mind.
Nothing. Shit. He’d settle for a vet.
He could hear police shouting, the pounding of boots on pavement. They’d heard the shots and figured something was up. Time to leave. He squatted over the jumpers and Shelley’s body, and ate every bit of heat in them, feasted on photons until the two lay with frost covering their glassy eyeballs. Shad rose and headed off the roof. A tornado of heat swirled in his heart. Blood drizzled on the cold pavement below as he eased himself over the wall.
I’m Black Shadow, he thought.
A glowing green landscape burned in his mind. The night covered him with its velvet mask.
He collapsed two blocks away. He panted for breath, ate photons, tried to gather himself together. He became aware of someone moving cautiously across the street, watching him with dilated cat’s eyes.
“Wait!” He called the darkness, staggering toward her trailing a boiling black shroud and a trail of red. She hesitated, then began to retreat. “I need help.” He sagged against the wall and slid to the pavement.
Chalktalk turned. Her dilated cat’s eyes seemed big as the moon.
A bolt of pain shot up his arm. “I’ve been shot,” he said.
“I need to get out of here.” He sagged against a brick wall. Chalktalk stood, undecided, five long yards away. “Can you take me somewhere?” Shad asked. “Someplace where I can ... get better? I can’t have police involved.”
She said nothing.
Shad tried again. “You’ve been following me, okay? I know that. So you know what I’ve been up to. I don’t know what your reasons were, but—” Pain crackled through his body. He gasped. “Help me now, all right? Like I helped you with Anton.”
She walked close to him and knelt, her bulky overcoat obscuring her work as she reached for chalk and began to draw.
Shad shivered. The girl’s warmth called him, but he didn’t take it. The chalk made little scratching sounds on the pavement. Shad became aware that he was sitting on wetness. “Hurry,” he said.
The girl looked up at him. Her famished wide-eyed face was lit from below, as if the pavement were glowing with light. He crawled toward her, and she ducked her head toward him and kissed him, and before he had a chance quite to absorb that, he was suddenly aware that he was falling. Falling into another place.
The phone rang twice. 741-PINE. The answering machine picked up.
A woman’s voice spoke for a few seconds. “I’ve called a dozen times,” she said.
There was no one to answer. The little Jokertown room was empty, holding only a narrow bed and a footlocker with an odd assortment of clothing.
“I don’t know what to do,” the woman said. There was a click. And then there was silence.
While Night’s Black Agents to Their Preys Do Rouse
Life in the USSA wasn’t so bad. The variety of clothing wasn’t great, and people tended, to have a lot of moles and winkles and carbunkles on their faces-Shad hadn’t realized how much cosmetic surgery had altered the looks of ordinary people back in his own New York-but on the other hand there weren’t any jokers filling the streets with their agony and no homeless people wandering the streets, and the doctors at the Jean Jaures Memorial Clinic had patched him up without asking for his insurance card first. There wasn’t any wild card or AIDS or Jokertown or Takisians or Swarm, and there hadn’t been a Second World War because the Socialists had taken power in Berlin in 1919 and hung onto it, no one had ever heard of Hitler, and there wasn’t a cold war or atom bomb, and the Big Apple still bopped along in its own distinctive way.
Or maybe bopped wasn’t the right word. The thing Shad found himself missing most of all about his own world was the music. Jazz had stopped evolving around 1940—big bands here in 1990 toured the country playing “Mood Indigo” and “Satin Doll” exactly the way Duke Ellington had in—I940, note for scripted note. Most of the musicians were black-jazz and blues were national cultural resources, forms of “folk art” created by the “Protected Negro Minority.” Early rock and roll had been considered an offshoot of the blues and more or less restricted to black people-white performers were discouraged because they were thought to be ripping off a protected culture-and without the white audience, the form had died.
No Charlie Parker. That was what Shad found hard to adjust to. No John Coltrane. No Miles Davis. Dizzy Gillespie fronted something called the Fort Wayne People’s Folk Orchestra and blew some good licks, but it wasn’t anywhere near the same.
In the hospital he’d claimed amnesia—he just couldn’t remember who he was or why he’d been shot or why he was dressed in a Halloween costume. The police hadn’t believed him-strip-searched him at gunpoint right in the emergency room in fact, with the doctor and nurses protesting-but his fingerprints didn’t turn up in the Central Criminal Computer Registry in Maryland (the computer search took three days with the wretched equipment they had), and they had nothing to hold him on. They concluded he was an illegal immigrant, but by the time the authorities arrived to deport he’d already slipped out into the night, clumsy in his arm-and-shoulder cast, and within twenty-four hours he got himself a job maintaining the awful sound equipment in an illegal samba club on the East Side. The stuff still had tubes, and it needed all the help it could get.
Illegal samba club ... and it wasn’t the club that was illegal, it was the music. Samba was against the law—Latin music was considered subversive because South America wasn’t in the Socialist bloc but allied with Imperial Japan. But despite the law, there were illegal samba clubs parked on half the street corners in Harlem and all down the East Side-this was, after all, the Big Apple, and in the Apple you could find everything. If people couldn’t have rock and roll, they had to have something. And some of the club’s biggest patrons were the sons and daughters of high FarmerLabor party members, so the place was pretty safe.
Shad spent his free hours looking for Chalktalk. She’d disappeared the second she got him into the E-room. When he asked the hospital personnel, no one could remember seeing her.
He still didn’t know why she’d been following him. He didn’t know why she helped or whether she’d somehow plotted the whole thing.
The attitudes toward him were different here, and it took him a while on the street before he finally figured it out. In his own New York, white people looked at him like he was a criminal, or anyway a potential criminal. There were some jewelry stores that wouldn’t even unlock their doors for him, even after he waved fistfuls of money through the window. But the crime and homicide rates for blacks weren’t particularly high here, and people looked at him differently—the Protected Negro Minority was a historically oppressed race struggling to elevate itself toward an equality that, despite everyone’s best efforts, they seemed not to have reached.
In short, white people treated him as if he were mildly retarded-good-hearted and deserving of sympathy, but a little slow. It wasn’t his fault if he needed a little extra help, of course-Forces of History were responsible, after all, not peoples—but all that meant was that nobody expected much from him.
After he figured out what was going on, Shad fit in well enough. He liked being patronized a lot less than .he liked being feared, but he was still himself inside, whoever that was. The masks he wore were different, but they were still masks.
He still wore the night’s mask best of all. He went for long walks after the club closed, quartering the parts of the city that, in another reality, were Jokertown. Music ran through his head, music that didn’t even exist here, and pictures rolled through his memory, images of that portable concentration camp set up in the brownstone warehouse, the joker in the necktie with his head blown off, the hard con-boss look in Lisa Traeger’s eyes, crates of gold and drugs, Nelson Dixon and Blaise exchanging high fives on the boardroom table ...
The green hills of someplace he’d probably never see again.
Hanging them from lampposts, he figured, was too good for them.
He knew exactly where he wanted to go once he got home. And what he was going to do there.
On the long four A. M. walks, he plotted everything out, step by step. Impossible as it seemed.
And then one warm August night it became possible. There she was, sketching on the sidewalk with her baseball cap on the concrete next to her. Chalktalk. It happened too suddenly, too normally, for him to be surprised. So he crossed the street and put a Nikolai Bukharin five-dollar coin in her cap. Her picture was a daylight street scene with a gold-plated Empire State Building in the background. She glanced up with bright green eyes and gave him a strange little grin. “Remember me?” he said. “I want to go home now” She gave a weird little giggle that sent a chill up his spine. ‘The she put her chalk in a little belt pouch, put her cap on her tangled dark hair, stood up suddenly, and grabbed his hand. Ignoring the little coin that rang in the gutter, she hauled him out of his crouch and down the next alleyway at a half run. Then she rudely pushed him into the wall and put her arms around him. A little keening sound came from her throat. Her hands pawed at him urgently. She started grinding her hips against his crotch like an old whore running on autopilot.
The smell of decaying garbage crawled down the back of Shad’s throat. “Hey,” Shad said, “are you serious, or what?” Her lips drew back in a snarl. One hand clamped on his crotch, the other crooked in front of his face. Distant streetlights gleamed on sharp mother-of-pearl claws. Shad’s balls tried to tunnel up to his eye sockets.
“Okay,” Shad said. “Whatever you want. You mind if we get up in some fresh air? This garbage smell is gonna make me puke.”
She didn’t seem to care one way or the other, so he picked her up in his arms and walked up the wall to the roof. The action amused her, and she stroked his cock through his ill-made proletarian pants. Once atop the roof, he took off his black-market quilted jacket from Manchukuo and laid it down. The street artist dragged her Levi’s off over her work boots, lay down on the jacket, and gave her strange little giggle again. He took off his shoes and pants, and dropped to his knees between her legs. The scent of rut reached him, and he felt a tide of blood flush his skin, blast through the roof of his skull, and carry him away to someplace else.
What followed was fast and brutal, and by the time the act was over, his clothes were in shreds, and there were a couple dozen cuts on his back. Panting for breath and faintly sick to his stomach, he felt as if he’d been hit by a truck loaded with pheremones.
Shad got painfully to his feet and started dragging his clothes on. The girl looked up at him gleefully and started rolling around on the roof, skinny pale legs and buttocks contrasting with the heavy coat shed never taken off. He picked up his Manchukuoian jacket and shrugged it on. He felt a chill and stole a little heat from the still autumn night, his cloud of darkness rising above the building as he drank in scarce photons.
He wondered if this was what she’d had in mind all along, if this was why she’d been following him around. Maybe she had a crush on him.
Funny way to show a crush, though.
The street artist came up behind him, put her arms around his waist. She pressed herself very close behind him and began rocking back and forth, shifting her weight from one leg to the other. Her hands rubbed lower, pressing over his cock.
“I have an apartment near here,” he said. “You mind if we go there, or does this have to happen out of doors?” She didn’t appear to care one way or another. Shad picked her up, covered them both with darkness, and went straightline, up and over buildings, till he came to his own illegal loft. He snapped on the light for which he stole electricity from Peoples’ Edison. The street artist was already on the bed, legs parted, arms stretched out.
Shad looked down at the naked vulva and the skinny legs in their heavy boots. Little stones from the flat tar roof were still clinging to her skin. “Not much time for romance in your life, huh?” he said. He bent down, began undoing bootlaces. “Let’s at least get these off, okay?”
The second act was only a little less frenzied than the first, and afterward Shad lay facedown on the bed while she carefully licked the blood from the wounds she’d clawed into him. It had become obvious by now that she didn’t bathe very often. He got her into his shower and scrubbed her down while she made little bubbling sounds and did a kind of dance, arms over her head, spinning around and around on her toes while the warm water splashed down around her.
When he handed her one of his threadbare proletarian towels, she raised it to her nose and took a suspicious sniff before she used it. Naked, her hair wet, her thin body looked maybe all of twelve years old. Great, Shad thought, now he’d added pedophilia to his list of crimes.
He took his billfold out of his pocket and took out the photo he’d carefully cut out of a 1988 issue of the New York Herald and Worker that he’d found in the library. He showed it to her. “This is where I’d like to go,” he said. “Ellis Island. The Rox. Okay?”
She took the picture, looked at it without interest, then handed it back to him. She climbed into his narrow bed, curled up, and closed her eyes.
He sat down on the edge of the cot and looked down at her. Her body was covered with scars and calluses, and there was a big yellow bruise on one shoulder. What looked like a long knife slash ran down the side of one thigh. Shad traced the scar with his finger, and sadness welled up the back of his throat.
“Shit, girl,” he said, “you don’t have to live like this. Even in my world we can find somebody to take care of you. Hell, I’ll take care of you. It doesn’t matter that you can’t talk.” He looked up at her. “You understand me? IT take care of you, okay? Back in the world, I’ve got more money than I know what to do with. We can live like royalty. Anyplace you want, anything you want. Okay?”
The street artist was asleep.
He curled up next to her, spoon-style, and tried to work out exactly what it was he’d just proposed, taking care of a mute feral joker girl whose talents seemed confined to chalk sketching and indiscriminate animal sex. This would not, he concluded, be the sort of relationship of which Social Services would approve.
Other consequences occurred to him. If this was her usual mode of sexual contact, she’d probably picked up any number of diseases, some of which were known only by acronyms, some of which might be from other worlds. Maybe he ought to be soaking his dick in alcohol. And if he’d managed to get her pregnant-well, both parents were wild cards, and that meant a 100 percent certainty that the kid would inherit the bent wild card DNA, which meant a 99 percent chance of jokerhood or death when the virus manifested. He wondered how much sadder this could get.
He found out later, sometime the next morning, when the street artist woke up and elbowed him awake. She pushed him over on his back and started rubbing her crotch against his dick. He was hard almost instantly, and she reached down to insert him as casually as if she were handling a bar of soap. Her intent cat’s eyes were fixed intently on his. His vision was better than hers, reached into more spectra.
She leaned over him when she came, hips pumping blindly over his groin. Her claws gripped his mattress, punctured his sheets. Her mouth was open, and strange croaking sounds came out. He could look past her teeth and see, glowing with IR heat, the stub of a tongue that ended in a mass of scar tissue.
Someone had cut her tongue out.
She fell asleep instantly, her head on his chest. Shad wanted to cry.
Take care of her? What a joke.
Hours later, he awoke to the scratching of chalk. He opened gummed eyes and saw the street artist back in her clothes, drawing something on the particleboard floor. A plastic plate near her hand held a half-eaten sandwich made from some Polish sausage he had in his icebox.
He looked at the clock and saw it was late afternoon. He dressed, had a sandwich, and watched her work.
She was drawing a cavern-irregular walls, stalactites, strange subterranean gleams. The sketch occupied the whole floor, and large parts weren’t finished yet.
“The Rox,” Shad said. He pointed at his clipping again. “Ellis Island. You understand?”
She looked up at him and wrinkled up her face, then went back to her sketch.
Shad gazed bleakly into a future in which he was dragged from one world to another by this child, used for sex in one venue after another. Love-slave of the multiverse. Wonderful.
It was night before Chalktalk was finished. Shad put on his darkest clothes, black Kenyan cords, navy shirt, the boots he’d come in, his quilted Manchukuoian jacket. If they were going spelunking, it was likely to get cold. He made two packages of food, wrapped them in tinfoil, stuffed one in his pocket and gave the other to Chalktalk. He thought about getting flashlights and decided it would be a worthwhile investment. He went to the store and bought two big electric lanterns.
He stepped up behind her, looked at the growing picture, put his hand on her shoulder. She gave him an irritated look and shrugged the hand off.
Looked like the romance had gone out of their relationship. The picture deepened, the third dimension dropping away, receding to a glittering cavern.
The girl took his hand, and reality fell away.
Darkness, darkness entire. Shad felt right at home.
He flicked on the lantern, and Robert Fallon Penn lunged out of the night, garrote in hand, smiling his twisted blood-flecked smile.
Neil was ten years old when he’d last seen Penn. Penn’s partner, Stan Barker, was sodomizing Neil from behind while Penn played with his garrote, putting on the pressure till he started to black out, then sportively easing up, prolonging the agony ‘a little longer.
He, his father, his mother, and his little sister had spent the weekend under torture, and Neil was the last one left alive. Stan Barker had just cut his father’s throat, and Shad remembered how slippery the floor had been, how his hands and knees slid in the darkening wetness while Penn jerked on his throat with his wire and Barker clutched at his hips ...
And now Bob Penn was back, leering at him, blood flaking off his lips because he’d bitten off Mrs. Carter’s nipples. Lightning burned through Shad’s nerves. He gave a scream and swung the lantern. Somehow Penn avoided injury. Chalktalk looked at him impatiently. She grabbed his sleeve and tried to pull him toward Penn.
“No!” Shad yelled. He pulled Chalktalk out of danger, flinging her to the ground, and launched himself at Penn. His fists and feet went clear through the man. Shad could hear Stan Barker’s giggle and knew that Penn’s partner was somewhere out there in the dark. Shad screamed in anger and terror, and tried to drain the heat from Penn’s body. There was scarcely any there, no more than if Penn had been a ghost.
Chalktalk picked herself up and walked impatiently through Penn’s body, then turned back to Shad and shrugged. Sanity wedged its way into Shad’s panicked mind. He reached out, passed a sword hand through Penn’s body. Chalktalk turned away and padded on, her bright lantern held high.
Shad passed his hand through Penn again. His heart drummed against his ribs. There was a deep ache in his throat where the police had given him the tracheotomy that saved his life.
Penn wasn’t there. He was an illusion.
Shad watched closely, and he saw that the Penn illusion didn’t seem very lifelike-it was huge and distorted, a sixteenyear-old maniac seen through the eyes of his ten-year-old victim.
Chalktalk’s lantern was fading into the distance. Shad took a deep breath and followed, his spine tingling as he turned his back on the killer of his family.
Penn didn’t follow.
Shad caught up to Chalktalk. His hands were trembling, and his voice shook. “Where the hell are we?” he asked. Chalktalk said nothing, natch. Shad looked around.
He was in Carlsbad Caverns, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Tall formations, lightless passages, the constant drip of water. Formations where illusions of mass murderers lurked. Shad wondered if they were under the high New Mexico desert, until he saw the graffiti, spray-painted on a bright vein of quartz: JUMP THE RICH.
Somehow, Shad knew, he was right where he wanted to be.
Then there was the sound of clattering footsteps, the clank of weaponry. The squawk of a walkie-talkie. It didn’t sound much like an illusion.
The locals knew he was here. Shad turned to Chalktalk. “Go back a ways, okay? These are some bad people coming. Maybe you better make a sketch and get yourself out of here.”
He looked up at him with shadowed dark eyes, then shrugged, squatted, reached for her chalk.
She walked up the wall, covered himself with darkness, and moved forward along the ceiling. Putting himself between Chalktalk and pursuit.
Shad turned off his lantern and navigated on IR. He entered a chamber twenty feet high, moved forward between limestone columns, and saw jokers, half a dozen, all wearing some kind of informal war-surplus battledress, most carrying M-16 assault rifles. Kafka led them, unmistakable in his brown chitin, holding a walkie-talkie and a four-battery flashlight. He wasn’t carrying a weapon. Even in his haste he was careful not to touch any of the other jokers.
Shad remembered he had some kind of contamination phobia.
High-powered flashlights swept the confined area of the stair. Shad deepened the black cloak around him and waited. “No sight of him yet,” Kafka reported.
“He’s right there.” A high-pitched, almost comical voice came out of the hissing walkie-talkie. “He’s watching you. And he recognized you from somewhere.”
Watching you. The thought rolled through Shad’s mind. Someone knew he was here, someone who couldn’t see him ... Maybe the person who had called Penn into being.
Shad tried to make his mind blank.
“He’s onto me,” the high-pitched voice warned. “And he can hear you.”
Kafka jumped wildly, his flashlight beam dancing. Then he scuttled under the staircase, put his back to the wall. “You and you! Over there!”
Two jokers charged with weapons ready, the sound of their boots echoing.
“He’s right there,” the high-pitched voice said. “He’s right near you.”
“That’s right,” said Shad. He kicked loose from his perch, dropped to Kafka’s side, snatched the flashlight. He shone the flash upward into his own face and let the darkness fall away from the part of his body facing Kafka, so that Kafka could see his face and upper body. He let Kafka see his pose, standing upright with his right arm horizontal and bent, hand under his chin, the edge of his hand pressing against his throat.
“Who will help the widow’s son?” he asked.
Rifles clattered as they were brought to bear. But Shad was standing too close to Kafka for them to fire, and the other jokers couldn’t see what was going on.
Kafka’s astonishment was clear, even on his inhuman face. He looked frantically left and right, then leaned closer, his eyes glittering in the light of the flash. “Who are you?”
“A stranger going to the West, to search for that which was lost.”
“Where do you come from?”
“From the East.”
“What is your task?”
“To trample the Lilies underfoot.”
Kafka goggled at him. Shad gave him a severe look. The most difficult trick, he’d found, was to speak all this nonsense with an absolutely straight face.
“Will you not aid me, brother?” he asked. “In the name of the widow’s son?”
“Who are you?”
“In the Brotherhood, my name is Gains Gracchus.” He pretended to lose patience. “Do I have to do the fucking handshake, or what?”
Kafka seemed puzzled. “I seem to remember the name.”
“I’ve been away for a long time.”
“Kafka! Kafka!” The jokers were shuffling, trying to play their flashlights through the darkness that Shad had set up between them. “Are you okay?”
“I’m all right.” Kafka tried to peer out past Shad. His mouth parts worked nervously. “What do you want of me?” he asked.
“Nothing. I need to know where the jumpers are quartered.”
“Kafka!” The high-pitched voice shouted from the walkie-talkie. “There aren’t any Egyptian Masons anymore! You know that as well as anyone. He’s just trying to trick you!”
“That is the governor, I take it?” Shad said. “I have no business with him. Just with the jumpers. Will you let me pass or not?”
Kafka hesitated. Shad expanded the darkness that surrounded him, eating photons, surrounding Kafka with night.. The joker guards behind began to scuttle backward from the expanding sphere.
“Kafka,” said the governor. “Bring him to me. I will give him an interview”
“I don’t know that I need an interview,” Shad said. “I don’t know that we have a lot to say to each other.”
“Yes we do, shad,” said the high voice.
Surprise rolled through Shad’s mind. No one called him that.
“Yes, I know your name for yourself,” the governor said. “And I know more than that, including a few things you don’t know” A small pause. “And we have to discuss your friend, little Chalktalk.”
“ Who?”
The voice turned impatient. “Governor Bloat knows all and sees all, my son. I know you didn’t come alone, and I have another group of guards watching your friend. I don’t think you have time to interfere with them before they follow any orders I should care to give, particularly if the order is swift and violent.”
Indecision fluttered through Shad’s mind. He’d been spinning this out with the intention of giving Chalktalk a chance to get away.
Images of Barker and Penn floated through his mind. “How do I know this isn’t a trap?” he asked.
“If it is, you can kill me. I know it’s within your capabilities. It’s a small island, and I’m—” a strange little high-pitched giggle, “I’m not exactly built for running.”
Kafka told his troops to return to their quarters. Shad let the darkness fall from Kafka’s path. The joker led him down a lengthy stone corridor, then up a surprising staircase, all pink-veined marble like something out of Phantom of the Opera. Once up the stairs, they were in a building. The walls were covered in layers of flaking white paint, and there were doors on either side.
Ellis Island. Beneath which, Shad knew, there was not supposed to be an extensive cavern complex. Things had obviously changed around here.
A penguin, wearing a funnel for a hat, appeared from one door, made a graceful figure eight on its ice skates, disappeared through another door.
Shad stared. He’d hung out in Jokertown for a long time, but he’d never seen anything like that. And it was on ice skates. There wasn’t even any ice here.
Another giggle came from the walkie-talkie. “Brother Shad, you ain’t seen nothing yet!”
Kafka led him out into a balcony overlooking a large hall filled with well, filled with the governor, the sluglike body gleaming with moisture, dappled with oozing black matter.
Bloat’s smell clawed its way up the back of Shad’s throat. His arms, shoulders, and head were those of a boy of maybe eighteen. He looked as if the slug were in the process of eating him.
“Welcome,” the governor said, “to the Rox.”
“Thank you.” Shad walked up the wall, then stepped onto the ceiling. He strolled inverted across the plaster till he hung over Bloat’s little head. Bloat’s eyes tracked him as he moved, even though he was in darkness.
Kafka stayed behind on the balcony, pacing nervously. With all Kafka’s phobias, Shad wondered, how could he stand even to be in the same room with his boss?
“You seem to have given poor Kafka a crisis in loyalties,” Bloat said. “He thought all that was long behind him.”
“Once a Mason, always a Mason.”
“He knows you were supposed to have been killed. He fears you might be one of the Astronomer’s surviving agents. That you might kill him.”
Kafka’s mouth parts worked as he listened to this.
“If I’d wanted him dead,” Shad said, “he’d be dead.” He wondered if the firing squad was lined up outside the doors, waiting for him to leave.
“If we’re going to talk,” Shad said, “let’s do it.” Bloat’s look was mild. “Why are you here, Shad?”
“My plan is to snap the neck of every jumper in the place.”
“And get Tachyon out if you can. I can read that.”
“Then why did you ask the question?” Sharply.
“I think,” Bloat said, “that I’ll let you do one, and not the other.”
“Which one? Which other? And how could you stop me if I wanted to do both?”
“Your notion of killing the jumpers has a certain attractiveness, I must admit. And if you could get Blaisehe’s their leader, you see, and a very disturbed person-that would be ... well, it would end any number of problems.”
“I’ll get him first thing, if you like.”
“He’s not on the Rox at the moment, unfortunately. He gets restless, and he’s off bringing in supplies.”
“I can wait.”
“For God’s sake, Governor!” Kafka’s voice cut the silence. “Why are you bargaining with him? Do something!”
“I don’t have a whole lot of choice, do I?” For once, Bloat sounded like a sulky adolescent. “Considering that my prime minister hasn’t quite worked out which side he’s on.” Then Bloat looked up at Shad, his eyes glittering. “There are over a hundred jumpers on this island, Shad. Can you really kill them all? Could you kill them all?”
Shad hesitated. Kids, he thought. Not all of them killers, not all of them crazy.
“There aren’t enough lampposts to hang them all from,” Bloat said. “That’s your usual method, isn’t it? But a coldblooded massacre-that’s not your style. Never was. You just start the ball rolling, and the bad guys kill each other.” Bloat gave a sour laugh. “It may happen yet. This is not a happy island. Not happy at all.” His eyes narrowed as he looked at Shad. “You think you’re a killer, though, don’t you.”
“Cut the shit, Governor. Say what you’ve got to say.” Bloat’s look grew more searching. Shad felt cold crawling along his nerves. “You think you’re a berserker. You’ve gone berserk; therefore, you must...” Bloat shook his head. “You’ve been tampered with.”
Shad gave a laugh. “Believe what you like, Bloat.”
“Your mind-it shares some mental characteristics with some of our other citizens. Shroud, File, Video, Peanut. Even the Oddity. And I’ve talked to Tachyon, and he knows...” The high-pitched voice trailed away.
Shad’s nerves wailed at him to get away, kill Bloat, turn his head into an ice cube, and fight his way out before Bloat could spring whatever trap he was setting up.
“I’m getting impatient, Governor,” he said.
“Someone has tampered with you,” Bloat said. “Someone has turned you into a berserker-has made you kill.”
Anger lanced through Shad. “ I advise you to stay out of my head!” he snapped.
Bloat paid no attention. “It’s very subtle. The individual doing it was moving very quietly, just making little alterations. Masking your inhibitors, accenting the violence, the rage...”
Bloat’s face was intent, absorbed, his expression almost ecstatic. “Yes, he’s been at you, all right. It’s almost invisible, but I can see the fingerprint, now that I’m sensitive to it. The same individual who drove Peanut to madness, who inflamed the Oddity’s self-loathing and hatred...” Bloat’s eyes bored into Shad’s heart. “That wasn’t you who strung up that first man. Or the next few, either. That wasn’t your ecstacy-that was some filthy pervert having an orgasm in your mind.”
Shad’s mouth went dry. “Bullshit,” he said. “Nobody’s been with me all this time.”
“This is the wild card!” Bloat said. “Who says it can’t be operated by remote control?”
“So who was it, asshole? Give me a name.”
“What is your grudge against the jumpers, exactly?” Bloat snarled. “I know-they stole your self. But it was only your body they took. What will you do with the man who tampered with your mind? Who sent you on a fifteen-year murder spree, because he had you convinced that was who you were?”
Shad hesitated. Then a cold resolve filled him. “He would deserve death,” he said.
“Probably. The man has certainly killed. But you don’t have to kill him, of course. That’s your choice now. You don’t have to do any of this.”
“Give me his name.”
Bloat narrowed his eyes. “Let’s make a deal, Shad. The name in exchange for an understanding.”
Shad looked down at him. “Talk.”
“ I do not like having Tachyon imprisoned here. It’s an embarrassment. Tachyon has been a great friend to jokers over the years. She was brought here without my permission, and if you take her off, I—”
“Her?”
Bloat hesitated, then spoke. “Tachyon is at present residing within the body of a sixteen-year-old girl.” The words seemed to come with difficulty, and Bloat’s cheeks seemed hot. He spoke quickly, as if he hoped Shad wouldn’t notice. “Here’s the deal, Shad. You spare the jumpers. Take Tachyon off the island. Prime Minister Kafka will let you have one of our speedboats. And I’ll give you the name.”
“And if someone tries to stop me?”
Bloat thought for a moment, then sighed. “Do what you have to do.”
“And Chalktalk?”
Bloat giggled again. “She left the island a long time ago, quite in her own fashion. I wouldn’t have molested her, in any case. She’s been here before, and—”
“And she’s a joker.”
Bloat’s voice was sharp. “She’s a joker who has been badly hurt. Which,”—eyes narrowing—”I see you understand.”
“You know the story?”
“No. Her mind is opaque to me. But I can guess. Your concern for her speaks well of you. Before Senator Hartmann turned you into a murderer, you probably would have turned out well.”
Shad was stunned. Hartmann ...
Hartmann. The only person he’d had regular contact with for years.
“You gave me the name,” Shad said, “but I haven’t said yes to the deal.”
“Yes, you did,” Bloat said. “You just never said it out loud.”
Shad was silent.
“Kafka will have a boat waiting for you on the east side,” Bloat went on. “A Zodiac—you’ll get wet, but you’ll move fast. You don’t want to head for Jersey City-the authorities have set up too many searchlights, and you’ll be spotted.”
“Searchlights won’t see me.”
“They have radars out there, too. Hooked to missile batteries, Kafka tells me, and to something called the 20mm Vulcan Air Defense System. Which sounds pretty intimidating to me.”
Shad hesitated. He could absorb photons in the electromagnetic spectrum as well as the visual and infrared, but his control was lessened when he was dealing with something he couldn’t see.
“I’ll have to raise an alarm sooner or later,” Bloat said, dismissing the thought for him. “I’m supposed to be omnipotent that way. But I’ll tell the jumpers you ran for Brooklyn. They’ll search in that direction.”
“And where will I really go? Manhattan?”
“Too well patrolled by the coast guard and air force. Head south, toward Staten Island. You should be able to come ashore in one of the Bayonne terminals without difficulty.” Shad thought about it.
“That’s settled, then,” Bloat said. “Follow my friend the penguin. He’ll lead you straight to Tachyon.” Shad hesitated. “Move fast,” Bloat said, “before word of your presence gets out.”
Move fast. The best piece of advice he had all night. The penguin skated into the room, gliding effortlessly on the ceiling. Dark smoke that smelled of brimstone poured from his funnel cap. The penguin cruised a nonchalant circle around Shad, then made a silent glissade toward the Administration Building entrance.
Shad’s nerves wailed an alert, but there wasn’t any ambush waiting. Shad followed the penguin out of the building and to the infirmary, passing behind a joker sentry without alerting him. The western horizon glowed: huge searchlights set up on the jersey shore had the entire island in their grip. Breakers boomed in the distance. A cold Atlantic wind cut through his light Manchukuoian jacket.
The penguin led Shad to the door of the infirmary and passed through without opening it, leaving a faint whiff of brimstone behind. Shad opened the door-heavy institutional steel pitted by salt water-and stepped inside. Music slammed from off-white corridor walls, and Shad heard laughter somewhere, but no one was in sight. There were no guards, and no security seemed in place.
The penguin was gliding up a staircase to Shad’s right. Shad followed up two flights. The Dead Kennedys filled the staircase with exuberant hardcore. On the floor above were roughly finished rooms right under the eaves. A white boy lay asleep on a mildew-eaten couch, his boom box and a space heater plugged into a thick orange extension cord. A halfeaten bowl of rice and Vienna sausages lay on the floor. An M-16 was propped on the wall.
Some sentry.
Okay, Shad thought, I’ll try it Bloat’s way.
He ate photons and called the darkness down, filling the room with night, then snatched the boy out of sleep. He broke one arm, then the other, then whispered into the boy’s ear.
“Okay, kid,” he said, “here’s how I see it. I don’t want to kill you, and you don’t want to die. So lead me to Tachyon and I’ll let you live, okay?”
The boy screamed, a full-throated yell of imbecile terror that echoed louder than the Dead Kennedys. Shad smashed the boy’s head against a wall until the screaming stopped, then dropped the boy to the floor.
Hell. That sort of thing always worked in the movies. Most of the rooms held only supplies. There was only one door that was locked, and that was with a simple wooden bar. Shad threw up the bar and pushed the door open. God, she seemed young. And tiny, barely reaching Shad’s breastbone. Chill sorrow rolled through him as he realized she was pregnant.
The darkness rained away as Shad let Tachyon look at him... ‘
“I m Black Shadow,” Shad said, “and you’re outta here.”
“Bloat told me.” Her voice was soft. Maybe once she’d been pretty, he thought. Now she looked like a war refugee. “He didn’t say you were pregnant. Follow me.”
She followed him out the door, her eyes downcast. She had wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, but the shoulders were slumped. She wasn’t anything like shad’s memories of Tachyon. Shad couldn’t picture her as anything but a lost girl.
Somebody had tried to break this child, and probably succeeded.
Apparently no one had heard the sentry’s scream. Shad led Tachyon down the two flights of stairs, then looked cautiously into the corridor. No one in sight. He opened the door to the outside and stepped out.
A dark-haired young woman stood there, holding an M-16 casually at port arms as she walked tiredly home from guard duty. Shad recognized her as the one who had left her eye in Shelley’s hotel room. She had both eyes now, and they narrowed as she saw Shad, without his cloak of darkness, coming toward her. She worked the bolt of the gun and pointed it at him.
Shad stepped for her and struck out, one medium-force punch to the face with his left, a grab for her gun with the right. He intended nothing more than to stun her for a short time and take her weapon.
Instead, he knocked her block off.
Shad’s nerves gave a white-hot wail as the woman’s head left her shoulders. It struck the ground, where both eyes popped out, then rolled, parts scattering-an ear, the jaw, the tongue.
The body toppled, and one arm came off, but nothing ceased to move-the legs and arms flailed, even the arm that had come adrift. The eyes, once they’d stopped bouncing, swiveled and seemed to try to focus. When Shad had yanked the gun away, one hand came off at the wrist and clung to the gunstock. A finger held down the trigger. The gun leaped as it fired.
Shad’s stomach queased as he tore the hand away. Fingers fell like snowflakes. He dropped the rifle, picked Tachyon up in his arms, and ran, trying not to step on any of the woman’s parts.
Tachyon’s blanket snapped around them in the cold Atlantic wind. Shad heard running footsteps behind. “Durg! “ Tachyon shrieked. “Look out!”
Shad didn’t know what a ‘durg’ was. He turned. A squat little man was racing after them, twenty yards behind, and was clearly gaining.
“He’s a Morakh!” Tachyon said. “Be careful!”
Shad had no clearer idea of what a Morakh was than a durg, but in view of Tachyon’s urgency, it seemed serious. He slowed and called a cloud of darkness into being around the Morakh, then watched with his infrared sense as the short man stumbled and fell sprawling. Shad laughed, then accelerated toward the harbor. The island was tiny, and he needed to get off it before too much alarm was raised.
He heard footfalls behind, slower this time, then accelerating. He looked over his shoulder once more and saw the short man gliding purposefully through the darkness. He was moving his head back and forth as if straining to hear something over the sound of his own footsteps.
Shad put Tachyon down. “Head for the harbor,” he whispered. “I’ll catch up with you.”
“Careful.” Tachyon swayed. “Morakhs are deadly. More deadly than you can possibly imagine.”
“So am I, far as that goes.”
Tachyon began to run, clumsy in her off-balance body. The short man’s head jerked upward at the sound of their words, and then a smile spread across his features, and he began to trot purposefully toward Shad. He wore jeans, heavy boots, and a dark muscle shirt over his formidable, wide torso. His hair was ash-blond. He looked like the shortest Mr. America in history.
Shad planted himself in the man’s path and ate heat from the Morakh’s frame. He had absorbed a lot of photons since his arrival on the Rox and his efficiency wasn’t great. The Morakh slowed a scant five yards away, and anger twisted his features.
“Who will not face Durg at-Morakh bo Zabb in a fair fight?” he demanded.
“I won’t,” Shad said, and started to eat more photons. But the Morakh moved with incredible speed as soon as he heard Shad’s words. Astonishment flared in Shad’s mind as he ducked a ferocious punch; then a spin kick slammed against his thigh, bringing pain crackling along his nerves, Shad let the kick’s momentum help whirl him away. He hit the ground and rolled under a flurry of kicks and punches, then rose to his feet in a fighting stance. He’d lost control of his cloud of darkness, and it dissipated. Durg closed with him, fists and feet reaching.
Durg was clearly faster and stronger than a normal human. But then, so was Shad. And Shad had the longer reach.
Durg charged, trying to get inside Shad’s guard. Shad sidestepped the rush and caught Durg in the solar plexus with a wheel kick, then stepped to the side and rear again, spun, lifted a rear kick, caught Durg in the solar plex yet again with a force that jarred Shad’s spine.
Durg grunted but kept coming. Shad spun again as the range closed, lashing out with a backfist followed by a reverse punch that landed square in the center of Durg’s face. It felt as if Shad had punched a bridge abutment.
Durg fired a short chopping wheel kick off his front foot. Shad blocked with both arms, but the kick knocked him twelve inches sideways in any case. Durg bored in and followed up, fists and elbows flashing. Shad managed to block most of the strikes, but one punch was only partly deflected, and a bolt of agony crackled up Shad’s left side. He could feel his ribs bending as they absorbed the punch.
Shad clawed for the shorter man’s eyes, then slammed an elbow into Durg’s face and drove the Morakh back. Pain rang through Shad’s arm. It was like trying to shove a cement truck.
Durg blinked blood from his eyes, and in that instant Shad focused his wild card and drew more heat from him. Durg shuddered, but his fighting instinct was still to attack.
Shad kicked him full force in the knee as he came on, but it slowed Durg only slightly, and the Takisian fired a glancing heel hook by way of reply that rattled Shad’s teeth. Shad blocked one strIke after another, pulling more heat from the alien, watching with cold incredulity as the Morakh blanched but kept on coming.
Somewhere in Shad’s mind flashed the memory that Takis was a wintery planet. They liked the cold there.
He kept eating photons anyway. He was out of ideas. Durg put his head down and charged. Pain crackled through Shad’s ribs again as the Morakh’s head thudded into his torso. Shad was driven back, and then his injured leg folded, and he went down with the Morakh on top. Despairingly he grabbed for all the heat he could. The Morakh’s hands wrapped Shad’s throat, and the memory of Robert Penn and his garrote rose like bile. Shad slammed desperate palm heels into Durg’s temples.
And then the Morakh shuddered and collapsed. His skin was ice-cold. Shad rolled the heavy body off and rose. Something was grinding along his left shoulder and back. If he was lucky, he’d just ripped a lot of muscle tissue and ligament: otherwise, he’d lost some ribs. He limped for the harbor. Tachyon stood with Kafka and one of his joker soldiers, standing on the pier, watching a Zodiac inflatable boat roll dangerously in the tidal surge twelve feet below.
Shots split the air. They were far off.
“Some of my soldiers,” Kafka said. “Bloat is telling them you’re over on the south side.”
Shad looked down at the wooden ladder, slippery with spray, leading to the boat lurching at the end of its painter. He picked up Tachyon gently, and his ribs screamed in shock. He ignored them, and went down the ladder. A wave soaked his legs below the knee as he waited for the Zodiac to move closer to the ladder, and then he gathered his legs under him and jumped. His injured leg put them a little off course, but Shad landed on the soft rubber bottom of the boat, caught his balance against the surging movement, eased Tachyon to a position near the bow, and jumped aft to the outboard. He peered at it, reached uncertainly for the pull-start.
“There’s a self-starter, “—Kafka called.
Shad found it, grateful not to have to torque his torso after all he’d been through. “Thanks, brother,” he said. “In the name of the widow’s son.”
He started the engine, revved it, put it in gear. Kafka dropped the painter.
They were off.
Kafka didn’t wave good-bye. The Zodiac breasted every wave and crashed heavily into the troughs with a thud that rattled more pain from Shad’s ribs. A frigid Atlantic wind made a mockery of the August night. Spray drenched both passengers, but at least the boat moved fast. Shad surrounded the boat with darkness, taking in all the warmth he could. He headed out into the bay until the lights of the coast guard facility on Governor’s Island began looking too bright, then swung south.
If there was any pursuit, he never saw it.
The Statue of Liberty glowed on the right, its torch seeming to twinkle in the rushing air. Shad let the darkness fall away from them so that Tachyon could see.
“There,” he said. “Your lucky sign for tonight.” Tachyon gazed out in wonder. Her long blond hair whipped out in the wind. Shad couldn’t tell whether her face sparkled with spray or tears.
“Liberty,” Shad said.
The lights of Bayonne and the south Jersey City docks loomed to their front. Then there was something else, a black pillar rising out of the darkness dead ahead. It made a sucking, growling noise.
“Look out!” Tachyon shouted, and Shad threw the rudder over. The Zodiac skated over a roller, then fell. The pillar passed astern. Shad could see something rotating on top.
He dropped the cloak of darkness around the boat. Tachyon gazed at him with blinded eyes. “What was that?”
“I’m not sure. I think maybe it was the snorkel of a submarine.”
“The what?”
“A snorkel, along with the periscopes and radars. The old-time diesel subs used to have to surface for air, see, till the Germans invented the snorkel during World War Two. Now they just put the snorkel up and breathe through that. But I don’t know if we’ve got any diesel subs left in the fleet.”
“Who’d put a submarine here?”
“The Russians. If we’re lucky.”
“In New York harbor?”
“You’d never get a nuclear sub over Sandy Hook-too big. But maybe a small diesel.” Something cold climbed Shad’s spine. “Look,” he said, “this is too weird. If that was a submarine, they’re listening to our prop on their hydrophones, and they heard us leave from Ellis Island. If they’ve got their radio mast up, they could be telling other people we’re here. I don’t think I want to get close to the Military Ocean Terminal in Bayonne. There might be some kind of military op going on. I’m going farther south.”
“Where?”
“I don’t want to get out into the Atlantic. You’d freeze to death out there. I think I’ll head for the Kill Van Kull. We can get lost in the commercial traffic and try to get ashore either in Jersey or Staten Island.”
Tachyon said nothing, just huddled deeper into her blanket.
The Zodiac spent most of its time in the trough of waves, and Shad’s visibility was not ideal, but he scanned the bay when the boat was on the crests and saw two big coast guard cutters heading for them, searchlights panning the water. Both were right on target. It had been a sub, then, and it was guiding the cutters right to them.
Shad zigzagged-north, then south-then increased speed and dashed between the two boats. They were wearing dark wartime camouflage instead of their normal white paint. One of them was using a loud-hailer, but Shad didn’t understand a word.
The boats seemed to lose track of him after that probably distance affecting the sub’s ability to track his outboard propeller.
Its entrance white with swirling tidal foam, the brightly lit commercial channel of the Kill Van Kull gaped ahead. Somewhere a siren whooped, its sound torn by the wind. A helicopter came out of nowhere, a strange insectlike thing, and passed directly overhead at high speed.
Shad looked up in surprise to see an odd-looking ballbearing-shaped turret on its nose, a stubby muzzle questing left and right as if sniffing for a target. The rotor downdraft turned the water white.
Tachyon, blind, turned an alarmed face upward. Shad curved toward the Staten Island shore, his head swiveling wildly as he tried to keep the chopper in view. The helicopter banked and came back again, heading straight for him.
They’ve got IR capability, Shad realized, and he tried to eat every bit of heat in the air, soak up every photon. Tachyon gave a convulsive shiver inside her blanket.
The turret gun fired. Water flew skyward ten yards off the port bow.
Too close. Shad swung the Zodiac madly to starboard. Whatever happened to the rules of engagement? he wondered.
The chopper blasted overhead. It had stubby wings and what looked like jet-engine pods.
The Zodiac bounced madly in the tidal swirl as it entered the Kill Van Kull. The chopper turned again, heading right for them. Shad wondered frantically if they had radar that could detect them.
“Fuck this!” he shouted to Tachyon. “I’m just gonna surrender, okay? Don’t tell ‘em who I am. And I’ll slip out of custody when I can.”
Tachyon looked blindly in his direction and gave a nod. The chopper fired, rockets this time, one blinding-white streak after another. Concussion slammed the boat. A world of white water fell like Niagara into the boat. The Zodiac kicked high from an impact, and Shad found himself flying, tumbling through the air, air blown from his lungs by the power of an explosion....
Freezing water boiled around him. He screamed and held his hands over his ears as more concussions battered him. Water poured down his throat. He kicked out, broke surface, shook water from his eyes....
The boat was careening on, heading for Bayonne with no one at the tiller. Shad caught a glimpse of flying blond hair, heard a distant scream, and then the turret gun opened up again, filling the water with white fountains.
A wave exploded over his head, and when Shad came up, he couldn’t see the boat. He sucked heat and light from the water and struck out for the shore. The roar of the chopper faded.
The water was frigid and the swim endless, but the tidal swirl was heading in the right direction and helped. Finally Shad climbed up a deserted pier on Staten island, and as the breath rasped in his lungs, as he looked out on the Kill Van Kull from a position much higher than a wave-tossed boat, he saw what it was all about, why they’d been so desperate to stop anyone leaving the Rox.
Ranked in the sheltered waters of the Kill Van Kull, hidden from Ellis Island by the sprawling turmoil of Bayonne, were quiet rows of ships in wartime camouflage. Landing ships, supply craft, a small helicopter carrier with its craft parked on deck. The helicopter that had attacked him was only one of several patrolling the ship channel. Trucks, their headlights lined up as far as Shad could see, were offloading combat-ready troops on the piers, and the soldiers were marching onto the landing ships.
They were going for the Rox, and they were going soon. Shad stood dripping on the pier, watched the soldiers moving up the gangplanks, felt his ribs ache, and tried to add up wins and losses.
He’d been to the Rox and back, but the person he’d come to rescue was drowned or blown to bits. He’d broken the jumpers’ extortion scheme, but the police weren’t going to forget what his jumped body had done to them. He’d lost Chalktalk, and he’d lost Shelley, and the jumpers hadn’t lost anybody.
Fuck it. He’d lost. There wasn’t any winning in it.
And Shelley had lost, and Tachyon, and if the invasion force was anything to judge by, so had the jumpers, and Kafka, and Bloat.
Time to hid and figure out what he was going to do next. Shad turned and limped down the pier, and the night raised its welcoming mask and swallowed him.
When Jetboy died I was watching a matinee of The Jolson Story. I wanted to see Larry Parks’s performance, which everyone said was so remarkable. I studied it carefully and made mental notes.
Young actors do things like that.
The picture ended, but I was feeling comfortable and had no plans for the next few hours, and I wanted to see Larry Parks again. I watched the movie a second time. Halfway through, I fell asleep, and when I woke the titles were scrolling up. I was alone in the theater.
When I stepped into the lobby the usherettes were gone and the doors were locked. They’d run for it and forgotten to tell the projectionist. I let myself out into a bright, pleasant autumn afternoon and saw that Second Avenue was empty. Second Avenue is never empty.
The newsstands were closed. The few cars I could see were parked. The theater marquee had been turned off: I could hear angry auto horns some distance off, and over it the rumble of high-powered airplane engines. There was a bad smell from somewhere.
New York had the eerie feeling that towns sometimes got during an air raid, deserted and waiting and nervous. I’d been in air raids during the war, usually on the receiving end, and I didn’t like the feeling at all. I began walking for my apartment, just a block and a half away.
In the first hundred feet I saw what had been making the bad smell. It came from a reddish-pink puddle that looked like several gallons of oddly colored ice cream melting on the sidewalk and oozing down the gutter.
I looked closer. There were a few bones inside the puddle. A human jawbone, part of a tibia, an eye socket. They were dissolving into a light pink froth.
There were clothes beneath the puddle. An usherette’s uniform. Her flashlight had rolled into the gutter and the metal parts of it were dissolving along with her bones.
My stomach turned over as adrenaline slammed into my system. I started to run.
By the time I got to my apartment I figured there had to be some kind of emergency going on, and I turned on the radio to get information. While I was waiting for the Philco to warm up I went to check the canned food in the cupboard-a couple cans of Campbell’s was all I could find. My hands were shaking so much I knocked one of the cans out of the cupboard, and it rolled off the sideboard behind the icebox. I pushed against the side of the icebox to get at the can, and suddenly it seemed like there was a shift in the light and the icebox flew halfway across the room and damn near went through the wall. The pan I had underneath to catch the ice-melt slopped over onto the floor.
I got the can of soup. My hands were still trembling. I moved the icebox back, and it was light as a feather. The light kept doing weird shifts. I could pick up the box with one hand.
The radio warmed finally and I learned about the virus. People who felt sick were to report to emergency tent hospitals set up by the National Guard all over the city. There was one in Washington Square Park, near where I was living. I didn’t feel sick, but on the other hand I could juggle the icebox, which was not exactly normal behavior. I walked to Washington Square Park. There were casualties everywhere some were just lying in the street. I couldn’t look at a lot of it. It was worse than anything I’d seen in the war. I knew that as long as I was healthy and mobile the doctors would put me low on the list for treatment, and it would be days before I’d get any help, so I walked up to someone in charge, told him I used to be in the Army, and asked what I could do to help. I figured if I started to die I’d at least be near the hospital.
The doctors asked me to help set up a kitchen. People were screaming and dying and changing before the doctors’ eyes, and the medics couldn’t do anything about it. Feeding the casualties was all they could think to do.
I went to a National Guard deuce-and-a-half and started picking up crates of food. Each weighed about fifty pounds, and I stacked six of them on top of each other and carried them off the truck in one arm. My perception of the light kept changing in odd ways. I emptied the truck in about two minutes. Another truck had gotten bogged down in mud when it tried to cross the park, so I picked up the whole truck and carried it to where it was supposed to be, and then I unloaded it and asked the doctors if they needed me for anything else.
I had this strange glow around me. People told me that when I did one of my stunts I glowed, that a bright golden aura surrounded my body. My looking at the world through my own radiance made the light appear to change.
I didn’t think much about it. The scene around me was overwhelming, and it went on for days. People were drawing the black queen or the joker, turning into monsters, dying, transforming. Martial law had slammed down on the city-it was just like wartime. After the first riots on the bridges there were no disturbances. The city had lived with blackouts and curfews and patrols for four years, and the people just slipped back into wartime patterns. The rumors were insane-a Martian attack, accidental release of poison gas, bacteria released by Nazis or by Stalin. To top it all off, several thousand people swore they saw Jetboy’s ghost flying, without his plane, over the streets of Manhattan. I went on working at the hospital, moving heavy loads. That’s where I met Tachyon.
He came by to deliver some experimental serum he was hoping might be able to relieve some symptoms, and at first I thought, Oh, Christ, here’s some fruitbar got past the guards with a potion his Aunt Nelly gave him. He was a weedy guy with long metallic red hair past his shoulders, and I knew it couldn’t be a natural color. He dressed as if he got his clothes from a Salvation Army in the theater district, wearing a bright orange jacket like a bandleader might wear, a red Harvard sweater, a Robin Hood hat with a feather, plus-fours with argyle socks, and two-tone shoes that would have looked out of place on a pimp. He was moving from bed to bed with a tray full of hypos, observing each patient and sticking the needles in people’s arms. I put down the X-ray machine I was carrying and ran to stop him before he could do any harm.
And then I noticed that the people following him included a three-star general, the National Guard bird colonel who ran the hospital, and Mr. Archibald Holmes, who was one of F.D.R.’s old crowd at Agriculture, and who I recognized right away. He’d been in charge of a big relief agency in Europe following the war, but Truman had sent him to New York as soon as the plague hit. I sidled up behind one of the nurses and asked her what was going on.
“That’s a new kind of treatment,” she said. “That Dr. Tacks-something brought it.”
“It’s his treatment?” I asked.
“Yeah.” She looked at him with a frown. “He’s from another planet.”
I looked at the plus-fours and Robin Hood hat. “No kidding,” I said.
“No. Really. He is.”
Closer up, you could see the dark circles under his weird purple eyes, the strain that showed on his face. He’d been pushing himself hard since the catastrophe, like all the doctors here-like everyone except me. I felt full of energy in spite of only getting a few hours’ sleep each night.
The bird colonel from the National Guard looked at me. “Here’s another case,” he said. “This is Jack Braun.” Tachyon looked up at me. “Your symptoms?” he asked. He had a deep voice, a vaguely mid-European accent. “I’m strong. I can pick up trucks. I glow gold when I do it.”
He seemed excited. “A biological force field. Interesting. I’d like to examine you later. After the”—an expression of distaste crossed his face—“present crisis is over.”
“Sure, Doc. Whatever you like.”
He moved on to the next bed. Mr. Holmes, the relief man, didn’t follow. He just stayed and watched me, fiddling with his cigarette holder.
I stuck my thumbs in my belt and tried to look useful. “Can I help you with something, Mr. Holmes?” I asked. He seemed mildly surprise. “You know my name?” he said.
“I remember you coming to Fayette, North Dakota, back in ‘33,” I said. “Just after the New Deal came in. You were at Agriculture then.”
“A long time ago. What are you doing in New York, Mr. Braun?”
“I was an actor till the theaters shut down.”
“Ah.” He nodded. “We’ll have the theaters running again soon. Dr. Tachyon tells us the virus isn’t contagious.”
“That’ll ease some minds.”
He glanced at the entrance to the tent. “Let’s go outside and have a smoke.”
“Suits me.” After I followed him out I dusted off my hands and accepted a custom-blended cigarette from his silver case. He lit our cigarettes and looked at me over the match.
“After the emergency’s over, I’d like to run some more tests with you,” he said. “Just see what it is that you can do.” I shrugged. “Sure, Mr. Holmes,” I said. “Any particular reason?”
“Maybe I can give you a job,” he said. “On the world stage. “
Something passed between me and the sun. I looked up, and a cold finger touched my neck.
The ghost of Jetboy was flying black against the sky, his white pilot’s scarf fluttering in the wind.
I’d grown up in North Dakota. I was born in 1924, into hard times. There was trouble with the banks, trouble with the farm surpluses that were keeping prices down. When the Depression hit, things went from bad to worse. Grain prices were so low that some farmers literally had to pay people to haul the stuff away. Farm auctions were held almost every week at the courthouse-farms worth fifty thousand dollars were selling for a few hundred. Half Main Street was boarded up:
Those were the days of the Farm Holidays, the farmers withholding grain to make the prices rise. I’d get up in the middle of the night to bring coffee and food to my father and cousins, who were patrolling the roads to make sure nobody sold grain behind their backs. If someone came by with grain, they’d seize the truck and dump it; if a cattle truck came by, they’d shoot the cattle and toss them on the roadside to rot. Some of the local bigwigs who were making a fortune buying underpriced wheat sent the American Legion to break the farm strike, carrying axe handles and wearing their little hats-and the whole district rose, gave the legionnaires the beating of their lives, and sent them scampering back to the city.
Suddenly a bunch of conservative German farmers were talking and acting like radicals. F .D. R. was the first Democrat my family ever voted for.
I was eleven years old when I first saw Archibald Holmes. He was working as a troubleshooter for Mr. Henry Wallace in the Department of Agriculture, and he came to Fayette to consult with the farmers about something or other-price control or production control, probably, or conservation, the New Deal agenda that kept our farm off the auction block. He gave a little speech on the courthouse steps on his arrival, and for some reason I didn’t forget it.
He was an impressive man even then. Well-dressed, grayhaired even though he wasn’t yet forty, smoked a cigarette in a holder like F D. R. He had a Tidewater way of talking, which sounded strange to my ear, as if there was something slightly vulgar about pronouncing one’s R’s. Soon after his visit, things started getting better.
Years later, after I got to know him well, he was always Mr. Holmes. I never could see myself calling him by his first name.
Maybe I can trace my wanderlust to Mr. Holmes’s visit. I felt there had to be something outside Fayette, something outside the North Dakota way of looking at things. The way my family saw it, I was going to get my own farm, marry a local girl, produce lots of kids, and spend my Sundays listening to the parson talk about Hell and my weekdays working in the fields for the benefit of the bank.
I resented the notion that this was all there was. I knew, perhaps only by instinct, that there was another kind of existence out there, and I wanted to get my share of it.
I grew up tall and broad-shouldered and blond, with big hands that were comfortable around a football and what my publicity agent later called “rugged good looks.” I played football and played it well, dozed through school, and during the long dark winters I played in community theater and pageants. There was quite a circuit for amateur theater in both English and German, and I did both. I played mainly Victorian melodramas and historical spectaculars, and I got good notices, too.
Girls liked me. I was good-looking and a regular guy and they all thought I’d be just the farmer for them. I was careful never to have anyone special. I carried rubbers in my watch pocket and tried to keep at least three or four girls in the air at once. I wasn’t falling into the trap that all my elders seemed to have planned for me.
We all grew up patriotic. It was a natural thing in that part of the world: there is a strong love of country that comes with punishing climates. It wasn’t anything to make a fuss over, patriotism was just there, part of everything else.
The local football team did well, and I began to see a way out of North Dakota. At the end of my senior season, I was offered a scholarship to the University of Minnesota.
I never made it. Instead, the day after graduation in May of 1942, I marched to the recruiter and volunteered for the infantry.
No big deal. Every boy in my class marched with me. I ended up with the 5th Division in Italy, and had an awful infantryman’s war. It rained all the time, there was never proper shelter, every move we made was in full view of invisible Germans sitting on the next hill with zeiss binoculars glued to their eyes, to be followed inevitably by that horrific zooming sound of an 88 coming down ... I was scared all the time, and I was a hero some of the time, but most of the time I was hiding with my mouth in the dirt while the shells came whizzing down, and after a few months of it I knew I wasn’t coming back in one piece, and chances were I wasn’t coming back at all. There were no tours, like in Vietnam; a rifleman just stayed on the line until the war was over, or until he died, or until he was so shot up he couldn’t go back. I accepted these facts and went on with what I had to do. I got promoted to master sergeant and eventually got a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts, but medals and promotions never meant as much to me as where the next pair of dry socks was coming from.
One of my buddies was a man named Martin Kozokowski, whose father was a minor theatrical producer in New York. One evening we were sharing a bottle of awful red wine and a cigarette smoking was something else the Army taught me and I mentioned my acting career back in North Dakota, and in a gush of inebriated goodwill he said, “Hell, come to New York after the war, and me and my dad will put you on the stage.” It was a pointless fantasy, since at that point none of us really thought we were coming back, but it stuck, and we talked about it afterward, and by and by, as some dreams have a way of doing, it came true.
After V-E Day I went to New York and Kozokowski the elder got me a few parts while I worked an assortment of parttime jobs, all of which were easy compared to farming and the war. Theater circles were full of intense, intellectual girls who didn’t wear lipstick-not wearing lipstick was supposed to be sort of daring-and they would take you home with them if you listened to them talk about Anouilh or Pirandello or their psychoanalysis, and the best thing about them was that they didn’t want to get married and make little farmers. Peacetime reflexes began to come back. North Dakota started to fade away, and after a while I began to wonder if maybe the war didn’t have its consolations after all.
An illusion, of course. Because some nights I’d still wake up with the 88s whistling in my ears, terror squirming in my guts, the old wound in my calf throbbing, and I’d remember lying on my back in a shellhole with mud creeping down my neck, waiting for the morphine to hit while I looked up into the sky to see a flight of silver Thunderbolts with the sun gleaming off their stubby wings, the planes hopping the mountains with more ease than I could hop out of a jeep. And I’d remember what it was like to lie there furious with jealousy that the fighter jocks were in their untroubled sky while I bled into my field dressing and waited for morphine and plasma, and I’d think, If I ever catch one of those bastards on the ground, I’m going to make him pay for this ....
When Mr. Holmes started his tests he proved exactly how strong I was, which was stronger than anyone had ever seen, or even imagined. Provided I was braced well enough, I could lift up to forty tons. Machine-gun slugs would flatten themselves on my chest. Armor-piercing 20mm cannon shells would knock me down with their transferred energy, but I’d jump back up undamaged.
They were scared to try anything bigger than a 20mm on their tests. So was I. If I were hit with a real cannon, instead of just a big machine gun, I’d probably be oatmeal.
I had my limits. After a few hours of it I’d begin to get tired. I would weaken. Bullets began to hurt. I’d have to go off and rest.
Tachyon had guessed right when he talked about a biological force field. When I was in action it surrounded me like a golden halo. I didn’t exactly control it-if someone shot a bullet into my back by surprise, the force field would turn on all by itself. When I started to get tired the glow would begin to fade.
I never got tired enough for it to fade entirely, not when I wanted it on. I was scared of what would happen then, and I always took care to make sure I got my rest when I needed it.
When the test results came in, Mr. Holmes called me in to his apartment on Park Avenue South. It was a big place, the entire fifth floor, but a lot of the rooms had that unused smell to them. His wife had died of pancreatic cancer back in ‘40, and since then he’d given up most of his social life. His daughter was off at school.
Mr. Holmes gave me a drink and a cigarette and asked me what I thought about fascism, and what I thought I could do about it. I remembered all those stiff-necked SS officers and Luftwaffe paratroops and considered what I could do about them now that I was the strongest thing on the planet.
“ I imagine that now I’d make a pretty good soldier,” I said.
He gave me a thin smile. “Would you like to be a soldier again, Mr. Braun?”
I saw right away what he was driving at. There was an emergency going on. Evil lived in the world. It was possible I could do something about it. And here was a man who had sat at the right hand of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who in turn sat at the right hand of God, as far as I was concerned, and he was asking me to do something about it.
Of course I volunteered. It probably took me all of three seconds.
Mr. Holmes shook my hand. Then he asked me another question. “How do you feel about working with a colored man?”
I shrugged.
He smiled. “Good,” he said. “In that case, I’ll have to introduce you to Jetboy’s ghost.”
I must have stared. His smile broadened. “Actually, his name is Earl Sanderson. He’s quite a fellow.”
Oddly enough, I knew the name. “The Sanderson who used to play ball for Rutgers? Hell of an athlete.”
Mr. Holmes seemed startled. Maybe he didn’t follow sports. “Oh,” he said. “I think you’ll find he’s a little more than that. “
Earl Sanderson, Jr., was born into a life far different from mine, in Harlem, New York City. He was eleven years older than I, and maybe I never caught up to him.
Earl, Sr., was a railway car porter, a smart man, selfeducated, an admirer of Fredrick Douglass and Du Bois. He was a charter member of the Niagara Movement-which became the NAACP-and later of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. A tough, smart man, thoroughly at home in the combustive Harlem of the time.
Earl, Jr., was a brilliant youth, and his father urged him not to waste it. In high school he was outstanding as a scholar and athlete, and when he followed Paul Robeson’s footsteps to Rutgers in 1930 he had his choice of scholarships.
Two years into college, he joined the Communist party. When I knew him later, he made it sound like the only reasonable choice.
“The Depression was only getting worse,” he told me. “The cops were shooting union organizers all over the country, and white people were finding out what it was like to be as poor as the colored. All we got out of Russia at the time were pictures of factories working at full capacity, and here in the States the factories were closed and the workers were starving. I thought it was only a matter of time before the revolution. The CP were the only people working for the unions who were also working for equality. They had a slogan, ‘Black and white, unite and fight,’ and that sounded right to me. They didn’t give a damn about the color bar-they’d look you in the eye and call you ‘comrade.’ Which was more than I ever got from anyone else.”
He had all the good reasons in the world for joining the CP in 1931. Later all those good reasons would rise up and wreck us all.
I’m not sure why Earl Sanderson married Lillian, but I understand well enough why Lillian chased Earl for all those years. “Jack,” she told me, “he just glowed.”
Lillian Abbott met Earl when he was a junior in high school. After that first meeting, she spent every spare minute with him. Bought his newspapers, paid his way into the theaters with her pocket change, attended radical meetings. Cheered him at sporting events. She joined the CP a month after he did. And a few weeks after he left Rutgers, summa cum laude, she married him.
“I didn’t give Earl any choice,” she said. “The only way he’d ever get me to be quiet about it was to marry me.” Neither of them knew what they were getting into, of course. Earl was wrapped up in issues that were larger than himself, in the revolution he thought was coming, and maybe he thought Lillian deserved a little happiness in this time of bitterness. It didn’t cost him anything to say yes.
It cost Lillian just about everything.
Two months after his marriage Earl was on a boat to the Soviet Union, to study at Lenin University for a year, learning to be a proper agent of the Comintern. Lillian stayed at home, working in her mother’s shop, attending party meetings that seemed a little lackluster without Earl. Learning, without any great enthusiasm for the task, how to be a revolutionary’s wife.
After a year in Russia, Earl went to Columbia for his law degree. Lillian supported him until he graduated and went to work as counsel for A. Philip Randolph and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, one of the most radical unions in America. Earl, Sr., must have been proud.
As the Depression eased, Earl’s commitment to the CP waned-maybe the revolution wasn’t coming, after all. The GM strike was solved in favor of the CIO when Earl was learning to be a revolutionary in Russia. The Brotherhood won its recognition from the Pullman Company in 1938, and Randolph finally started drawing a salary-he’d worked all those years for free. The union and Randolph were taking up a lot of Earl’s time, and his attendance at party meetings began to slide.
When the Nazi-Soviet pact was signed, Earl resigned from the CP in anger. Accommodation with the fascists was not his style.
Earl told me that after Pearl Harbor, the Depression ended for white people when the hiring at defense plants started, but few blacks were given jobs. Randolph and his people finally had enough. Randolph threatened a railway strike right in the middle of wartime-that was to be combined with a march on Washington. E D. R. sent his troubleshooter, Archibald Holmes, to work out a settlement. It resulted in Executive Order 8802, in which government contractors were forbidden to discriminate on account of race. It was one of the landmark pieces of legislation in the history of civil rights, and one of the greatest successes in Earl’s career. Earl always spoke of it as one of his proudest accomplishments.
The week after Order 8802, Earl’s draft classification was changed to 1-A. His work with the rail union wasn’t going to protect him. The government was taking its revenge.
Earl decided to volunteer for the Air Corps. He’d always wanted to fly.
Earl was old for a pilot, but he was still an athlete and his conditioning got him past the physical. His record was labeled PAF, meaning Premature Anti-Fascist, which was the official designation for anyone who was unreliable enough not to like Hitler prior to 1941.
He was assigned to the 332nd Fighter Group, an all-black unit. The screening process for the black fliers was so severe that the unit ended up full of professors, ministers, doctors, lawyers-and all these bright people demonstrated first-rate pilots’ reflexes as well. Because none of the air groups overseas wanted black pilots, the group remained at Tuskegee for months and months of training. Eventually they received three times as much training as the average group, and when they were finally moved, to bases in Italy, the group known as “the Lonely Eagles” exploded over the European Theater.
They flew their Thunderbolts over Germany and the Balkan countries, including the toughest targets. They flew over fifteen thousand sorties and, during that time, not a single escorted bomber was lost to the Luftwaffe. After word got out, bomber groups began asking specifically for the 332nd to escort their planes.
One of their top fliers was Earl Sanderson, who ended the war with fifty-three “unconfirmed” kills. The kills were unconfirmed because records were not kept for the black squadrons-the military was afraid the black pilots might get larger totals than the whites. Their fear was justified-that number put Earl above every American pilot but Jetboy, who was another powerful exception to a lot of rules.
On the day Jetboy died, Earl had come home from work with what he thought was a bad case of the flu, and the next day he woke up a black ace.
He could fly, apparently by an act of will, up to five hundred miles per hour. Tachyon called it “projection telekinesis.”
Earl was pretty tough, too, though not as tough as I waslike me, bullets bounced off him. But cannon rounds could hurt him, and I know he dreaded the possibility of midair collision with a plane.
And he could project a wall of force in front of him, a kind of traveling shock wave that could sweep anything out of his path. Men, vehicles, walls. A sound like a clap of thunder and they’d be thrown a hundred feet.
Earl spent a couple weeks testing his talents before letting the world knowing about them, flying over the city in his pilot’s helmet, black leather flying jacket, and boots. When he finally let people know, Mr. Holmes was one of the first to call.
I met Earl the day after I’d signed on with Mr. Holmes. By then I’d moved into one of Mr. Holmes’s spare rooms and had been given a key to the apartment. I was moving up in the world.
I recognized him right away. “Earl Sanderson,” I said, before Mr. Holmes could introduce us. I shook his hand. “I remember reading about you when you played for Rutgers.”
Earl took that in stride. “You have a good memory,” he said.
We sat down, and Mr. Holmes explained formally what he wanted with us, and with others he hoped to recruit later. Earl felt strongly about the term “ace,” meaning someone with useful abilities, as opposed to “joker,” meaning someone who was badly disfigured by the virus-Earl felt the terms imposed a class system on those who got the wild card, and didn’t want to set us at the top of some kind of social pyramid. Mr. Holmes officially named our team the Exotics for Democracy. We were to become visible symbols of American postwar ideals, to lend credit to the American attempt to rebuild Europe and Asia, to continue the fight against fascism and intolerance.
The U.S. was going to create a postwar Golden Age, and was going to share it with the rest of the world. We were going to be its symbol.
It sounded great. I wanted in.
With Earl the decision came a little harder. Holmes had talked to him before and had asked him to make the same kind of deal that Branch Rickey later asked of Jackie Robinson: Earl had to stay out of domestic politics. He had to announce that he’d broken with Stalin and Marxism, that he was committed to peaceful change. He was asked to keep his temper under control, to absorb the inevitable anger, racism, and condescension, and to do it without retaliation.
Earl told me later how he struggled with himself. He knew his powers by then, and he knew he could change things simply by being present where important things were going on. Southern cops wouldn’t be able to smash up integration meetings if someone present could flatten whole companies of state troopers. Strikebreakers would go flying before his wave of force. If he decided to integrate somebody’s restaurant, the entire Marine Corps couldn’t throw him out-not without destroying the building, anyway.
But Mr. Holmes had pointed out that if he used his powers in that way, it wouldn’t be Earl Sanderson who would pay the penalty. If Earl Sanderson were seen reacting violently to provocation, innocent blacks would be strung from oak limbs throughout the country.
Earl gave Mr. Holmes the assurance he wanted. Starting the very next day, the two of us went on to make a lot of history.
The EFD was never a part of the U.S. government. Mr. Holmes consulted with the State Department, but he paid Earl and me out of his own pocket and I lived in his apartment.
The first thing was to deal with Peron. He’d gotten himself elected President of Argentina in a rigged election, and was in the process of turning himself into a South American version of Mussolini and Argentina into a refuge for fascists and war criminals. The Exotics for Democracy flew south to see what we could do about it.
Looking back on things, I’m amazed at our assumptions. We were bent on overthrowing the constitutional government of a large foreign nation, and we didn’t think anything about it ... Even Earl went along without a second thought. We’d just spent years fighting fascists in Europe, and we didn’t see anything remarkably different in moving south and smashing them up there.
When we left, we had another man with us. David Harstein just seemed to talk himself aboard the plane. Here he was, a Jewish chess hustler from Brooklyn, one of those fasttalking curly-haired young guys that you saw all over New York selling flood insurance or used auto tires or custom suits made of some new miracle fiber that was just as good as cashmere, and suddenly he was a member of EFD and calling a lot of the shots. You couldn’t help but like him. You couldn’t help but agree with him.
He was an exotic, all right. He exuded pheromones that made you feel friendly with him and with the world, that created an atmosphere of bonhomie and suggestibility. He could talk an Albanian Stalinist into standing on his head and singing “The Star-Spangled Banner”—at least, as long as he and his pheromones were in the room. Afterward, when our Albanian Stalinist returned to his senses, he’d promptly denounce himself and have himself shot.
We decided to keep David’s powers a secret. We spread a story that he was some kind of sneaky superman, like The Shadow on radio, and that he was our scout. Actually he’d just get into conferences with people and make them agree with us. It worked pretty well.
Peron hadn’t consolidated his power yet, having only been in office four months. It took us two weeks to organize the coup that got rid of him. Harstein and Mr. Holmes would go into meetings with army officers, and before they were done the colonels would be swearing to have Peron’s head on a plate, and even after they began to think better of things, their sense of honor wouldn’t let them back down on their promises.
On the morning before the coup, I found out some of my limitations. I’d read the comics when I was in the Army, and I’d seen how, when the bad guys were trying to speed away in their cars, Superman would jump in front of the car, and the car would bounce off him.
I tried that in Argentina. There was a Peronist major who had to be kept from getting to his command post, and I jumped in front of his Mercedes and got knocked two hundred feet into a statue of Juan E himself.
The problem was, I wasn’t heavier than the car. When things collide, it’s the object with the least momentum that gives way, and weight is a component of momentum. It doesn’tmatter how strong the lighter object is.
I got smarter after that. I knocked the statue of Peron off its perch and threw it at the car. That took care of things. There are a few other things about the ace business that you can’t learn from reading comic books. I remember comic aces gabbing the barrels of tank guns and turning them into pretzels.
It is in fact possible to do that, but you have to have the leverage to do it. You’ve got to plant your feet on something solid in order to have something to push against. It was far easier for me to dive under the tank and knock it off its treads. Then I’d run around to the other side and put my arms around the gun barrel, with my shoulder under the barrel, and then yank down. I’d use my shoulder as the fulcrum of a lever and bend the barrel around myself.
That’s what I’d do if I was in a hurry. If I had time, I’d punch my way through the bottom of the tank and rip it apart from the inside.
But I digress. Back to Peron.
There were a couple critical things that had to be done. Some loyal Peronists couldn’t be gotten to, and one of them was the head of an armored battalion quartered in a walled compound on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. On the night of the coup, I picked up one of the tanks and dropped it on its side in front of the gate, and then I just braced my shoulder against it and held it in place while the other tanks battered themselves into junk trying to move it.
Earl immobilized Peron’s air force. He just flew behind the planes on the runway and tore off the stabilizers. Democracy was victorious. Peron and his blond hooker took off for Portugal.
I gave myself a few hours off. While triumphant middleclass mobs poured into the street to celebrate, I was in a hotel room with the daughter of the French ambassador. Listening to the chanting mob through the window, the taste of champagne and Nicolette on my tongue, I concluded this was better than flying.
Our image got fashioned in that campaign. I was wearing old Army fatigues most of the time, and that’s the view of me most people remember. Earl was wearing tan Air Force officer’s fatigues with the insignia taken off, boots, helmet, goggles, scarf, and his old leather flying jacket with the 332nd patch on the shoulder. When he wasn’t flying he’d take the helmet off and put on an old black beret he kept in his hip pocket. Often, when we were asked to make personal appearances, Earl and I were asked to dress in our fatigues so everyone would know us. The public never seemed to realize that most of the time we wore suits and ties, just like everyone else.
When Earl and I were together, it was often in a combat situation, and for that reason we became best friends ... people in combat become close very quickly. I talked about my life, my war, about women. He was a little more guardedmaybe he wasn’t sure how I’d take hearing his exploits with white girls-but eventually, one night when we were in northern Italy looking for Bormann, I heard all about Orlena Goldoni.
“I used to have to paint her stockings on in the morning,” Earl said. “I’d have to make up her legs, so it would look like she had silk stockings. And I’d have to paint the seam down the back in eyeliner.” He smiled. “That was a paint job I always enjoying doing.”
“Why didn’t you just give her some stockings?” I asked.
They were easy enough to come by. GIs wrote to their friends and relatives in the States to send them.
“I gave her lots of pairs,” Earl shrugged, “but Lena’d give ’em away to the comrades.”
Earl hadn’t kept a picture of Lena, not where Lillian could find it, but I saw her in the pictures later, when she was billed as Europe’s answer to Veronica Lake. Tousled blond hair, broad shoulders, a husky voice. Lake’s screen persona was cool, but Goldoni’s was hot. The silk stockings were real in the pictures, but so were the legs under them, and the picture celebrated Lena’s legs as often as the director thought he could get away with it. I remember thinking how much fun Earl must have had painting her.
She was a cabaret singer in Naples when they met, in one of the few clubs where black soldiers were allowed. She was eighteen and a black marketeer and a former courier for the Italian Communists. Earl took one look at her and threw caution to the winds. It was maybe the one time in his entire life that he indulged himself. He started taking chances. Slipping off the field at night, dodging MP patrols to be with her, sneaking back early in the morning and being on the flight line ready to take off for Bucharest or Ploesti ...
“We knew it wasn’t forever,” Earl said. “We knew the war would end sooner or later.” There was a kind of distance in his eyes, the memory of a hurt, and I could see how much leaving Lena had cost him. “We were grownups about it.” A long sigh. “So we said good-bye. I got discharged and went back to work for the union. And we haven’t seen each other since.” He shook his head. “Now she’s in the pictures. I haven’t seen any of them.”
The next day, we got Bormann. I held him by his monk’s cowl and shook him till his teeth rattled. We turned him over to the representative of the Allied War Crimes Tribunal and gave ourselves a few days’ leave.
Earl seemed more nervous than I’d ever seen him. He kept disappearing to make phone calls. The press always followed us around, and Earl jumped every time a camera bulb went off. The first night, he disappeared from our hotel room, and I didn’t see him for three days.
Usually I was the one exhibiting this kind of behavior, always sneaking off to spend some time with a woman. Earl’s doing it caught me by surprise.
He’d spent the weekend with Lena, in a little hotel north of Rome. I saw their pictures together in the Italian papers on Monday morning-somehow the press found out about it. I wondered whether Lillian had heard, what she was thinking. Earl showed up, scowling, around noon on Monday, just in time for his flight to India: He was going to Calcutta to see Gandhi. Earl wound up stepping between the Mahatma and the bullets that some fanatic fired at him on the steps of the temple-and all of a sudden the papers were full of India, with what had just happened in Italy forgotten. I don’t know how Earl explained it to Lillian.
Whatever it was he said, I suppose Lillian believed him. She always did.
Glory years, these. With the fascist escape route to South America cut, the Nazis were forced to stay in Europe where it was easier to find them. After Earl and I dug Bormann out of his monastery, we plucked Mengele from a farm attic in Bavaria and we got so close to Eichmann in Austria that he panicked and ran out into the arms of a Soviet patrol, and the Russians shot him out of hand. David Harstein walked into the Escorial on a diplomatic passport and talked Franco into making a live radio address in which he resigned and called for elections, and then David stayed with him on the plane all the way to Switzerland. Portugal called for elections right afterward, and Peron had to find a new home in Nanking, where he became a military adviser to the generalissimo. Nazis were bailing out of Iberia by the dozen, and the Nazi hunters caught a lot of them.
I was making a lot of money. Mr. Holmes wasn’t paying me much in the way of wages, but I got a lot for making the Chesterfield endorsement and for selling my story to Life, and I had a lot of paid speaking engagements-Mr. Holmes hired me a speechwriter. My half of the Park Avenue apartment was free, and I never had to pay for a meal if I didn’t want to. I got large sums for articles that were written over my name, things like “Why I Believe in Tolerance” and “What America Means to Me,” and “Why We Need the U. N.” Hollywood scouts were making incredible offers for long-term contracts, but I wasn’t interested just yet. I was seeing the world.
So many girls were visiting me in my room that the tenants’ association talked about installing a revolving door. The papers started calling Earl “the Black Eagle,” from the 332nd’s nickname, “the Lonely Eagles.” He didn’t like the name much. David Harstein, by those few who knew of his talent, was “the Envoy.” I was “Golden Boy,” of course. I didn’t mind.
EFD got another member in Blythe Stanhope van Renssaeler, who the papers started calling “Brain Trust.” She was a petite, proper upper-crust Boston lady, high-strung as a thoroughbred, married to a scumbag New York congressman by whom she’d had three kids. She had the kind of beauty that took a while for you to notice, and then you wondered why you hadn’t seen it before. I don’t think she ever knew how lovely she really was.
She could absorb minds. Memories, abilities, everything. Blythe was older than me by about ten years, but that didn’t bother me, and before long I started flirting with her. I had plenty of other female companionship, and everyone knew that, so if she knew anything about me at all-and maybe she didn’t, because my mind wasn’t important enough to absorbshe didn’t take me seriously.
Eventually her awful husband, Henry, threw her out, and she came by our apartment to look for a place to stay. Mr. Holmes was gone, and I was feeling no pain after a few shots of his twenty-year-old brandy, and I offered her a bed to stay inmine, in fact. She blew up at me, which I deserved, and stormed out.
Hell, I hadn’t intended her to take the offer as a permanent one. She should have known better.
So, for that matter, should I. Back in ‘47, most people would rather marry than burn. I was an exception. And Blythe was too high-strung to fool with-she was on the edge of nervous collapse half the time, with all the knowledge in her head, and one thing she didn’t need was a Dakota farm boy pawing at her on the night her marriage ended.
Soon Blythe and Tachyon were together. It didn’t do my self-esteem any good to be turned down for a being from another planet, but I’d gotten to know Tachyon fairly well, and I’d decided he was okay in spite of his liking for brocade and satin. If he made Blythe happy, that was fine with me. I figured he had to have something right with him to persuade a bluestocking like Blythe to actually live in sin.
The term “ace” caught on just after Blythe joined the EFD, so suddenly we were the Four Aces. Mr. Holmes was Democracy’s Ace in the Hole, or the Fifth Ace. We were good guys, and everyone knew it.
It was amazing, the amount of adulation we received. The public simply wouldn’t allow us to do anything wrong. Even die-hard bigots referred to Earl Sanderson as “our colored flyboy” When he spoke out on segregation, or Mr. Holmes on populism, people listened.
Earl was consciously manipulating his image, I think. He was smart, and he knew how the machinery of the press worked. The promise he’d given with such struggle to Mr. Holmes was fully justified by events. He was consciously molding himself into a black hero, an untarnished figure of aspiration. Athlete, scholar, union leader, war hero, faithful husband, ace. He was the first black man on the cover of Time, the first on Life. He had replaced Robeson as the foremost black ideal, as Robeson wryly acknowledged when he said, “I can’t fly, but then Earl Sanderson can’t sing.”
Robeson was wrong, by the way.
Earl was flying higher than he ever had. He hadn’t realized what happens to idols when people find out about their feet of clay.
The Four Aces’ failures came the next year, in ‘48. When the Communists were on the verge of taking over in Czechoslovakia we flew to Germany in a big rush, and then the whole thing was called off. Someone at the State Department had decided the situation was too complicated for us to fix, and he’d asked Mr. Holmes not to intervene. I heard a rumor later that the government had been recruiting some ace talents of their own for covert work, and that they’d been sent in and made a bungle of it. I don’t know if that’s true or not.
Then, two months after the Czechoslovakian fiasco, we were sent into China to save a billion-odd people for democracy.
It was not apparent at the time, but our side had already lost. On paper, things seemed retrievable-the generalissimos Kuomintang still held all the major cities, their armies were well equipped, compared to Mao and his forces, and it was well known that the generalissimo was a genius. If he weren’t, why had Mr. Luce made him Time’s Man of the Year twice?
On the other hand, the Communists were marching south at a steady rate of twenty-three point five miles per day, rain or shine, summer or winter, redistributing land as they went. Nothing could stop them—certainly not the generalissimo. By the time we were called in, the generalissimo had resigned-he did that from time to time, just to prove to everyone that he was indispensable. So the Four Aces met with the new KMT president, a man named Chen who was always looking over his shoulder lest he be replaced once the Great Man decided to make another dramatic entrance to save the country.
The U.S. position, by then, was prepared to concede north China and Manchuria, which the KMT had already lost barring the big cities. The idea was to save the south for the generalissimo by partitioning the country. The Kuomintang would get a chance to establish itself in the south while they organized for an eventual reconquest, and the Communists would get the northern cities without having to fight for them.
We were all there, the Four Aces and Holmes-Blythe was included as a scientific adviser and ended up giving little speeches about sanitation, irrigation, and inoculation. Mao was there, and Zhou En-lai, and President Chen. The generalissimo was off in Canton sulking in his tent, and the People’s Liberation Army was laying seige to Mukden in Manchuria and otherwise marching steadily south, twentythree point five miles per day, under Lin Biao.
Earl and I didn’t have much to do. We were observers, and mostly what we observed were the delegates. The KMT people were astonishingly polite, they dressed well, they had uniformed servants who scuttled about on their errands. Their interaction with one another looked like a minuet.
The PLA people looked like soldiers. They were smart, proud, military in the way that real soldiers are military, without all the white-glove prissy formality of the KMT The PLA had been to war, and they weren’t used to losing. I could tell that at a glance.
It was a shock. All I knew about China was what I’d read in Pearl Buck. That, and the certified genius of the generalissimo.
“These guys are fighting those guys?” I asked Earl. “Those guys”—Earl was indicating the KMT crowd—“aren’t fighting anyone. They’re ducking for cover and running away. That’s part of the problem.”
“I don’t like the looks of this,” I said.
Earl seemed a little sad. “I don’t, either,” he said. He spat. “The KMT officials have been stealing land from the peasants. The Communists are giving the land back, and that means they’ve got popular support. But once they’ve won the war they’ll take it back, just like Stalin did.”
Earl knew his history. Me, I just read the papers. Over a period of two weeks Mr. Holmes worked out a basis for negotiation, and then David Harstein came into the room and soon Chen and Mao were grinning at each other like old school buddies at a reunion, and in a marathon negotiating session China was formally partitioned. The KNIT and the PLA were ordered to be friends and lay down their arms.
It all fell apart within days. The generalissimo, who had no doubt been told of our perfidy by ex-Colonel Peron, denounced the agreement and returned to save China. Lin Biao never stopped marching south. And after a series of colossal battles, the certified genius of the generalissimo ended up on an island guarded by the U.S. fleet-along with Juan Peron and his blond hooker, who had to move again.
Mr. Holmes told me that when he flew back across the Pacific with the partition in his pocket, while the agreement unraveled behind him and the cheering crowds in Hong Kong and Manila and Oahu and San Francisco grew ever smaller, he kept remembering Neville Chamberlain and his little piece of paper, and how Chamberlain’s “peace in Europe” turned into conflagration, and Chamberlain into history’s dupe, the sad example of a man who meant well but who had too much hope, and trusted too much in men more experienced in treachery than he.
Mr. Holmes was no different. He didn’t realize that while he’d gone on living and working for the same ideals, for democracy and liberalism and fairness and integration, the world was changing around him, and that because he didn’t change with the world the world was going to hammer him into the dust.
At this point the public were still inclined to forgive us, but they remembered that we’d disappointed them. Their enthusiasm was a little lessened.
And maybe the time for the Four Aces had passed. The big war criminals had been caught, fascism was on the run, and we had discovered our limitations in Czechoslovakia and China.
When Stalin blockaded Berlin, Earl and I flew in. I was in my combat fatigues again, Earl in his leather jacket. He flew patrols over the Russian wire, and the Army gave me a jeep and a driver to play with. Eventually Stalin backed down.
But our activities were shifting toward the personal. Blythe was going off to scientific conferences all over the world, and spent most of the rest of her time with Tachyon.
Earl was marching in civil rights demonstrations and speaking all over the country. Mr. Holmes and David Harstein went to work, in that election year, for the candidacy of Henry Wallace.
I spoke alongside Earl at Urban League meetings, and to help out Mr. Holmes I said a few nice things for Mr. Wallace, and I got paid a lot of money for driving the latest-model Chrysler and for talking about Americanism.
After the election I went to Hollywood to work for Louis Mayer. The money was more incredible than anything I’d ever dreamed, and I was getting bored with kicking around Mr.
Holmess apartment. I left most of my stuff in the apartment, figuring it wouldn’t be long before I’d be back.
I was pulling down ten thousand per week, and I’d acquired an agent and an accountant and a secretary to answer the phone and someone to handle my publicity; all I had to do at this point was take acting and dance lessons. I didn’t actually have to work yet, because they were having script problems with my picture. They’d never had to write a screenplay around a blond superman before.
The script they eventually came up with was based loosely on our adventures in Argentina, and it was called Golden Boy. They paid Clifford Odets a lot of money to use that title, and considering what happened to Odets and me later, that linking had a certain irony.
When they gave the script to me, I didn’t care for it. I was the hero, which was just fine with me. They actually called me “John Brown.” But the Harstein character had been turned into a minister’s son from Montana, and the Archibald Holmes character, instead of being a politician from Virginia, had become an FBI agent. The worst part was the Earl Sanderson character-he’d become a cipher, a black flunky who was only in a few scenes, and then only to take orders from John Brown and reply with a crisp, “Yes, sir,” and a salute. I called up the studio to talk about this.
“We can’t put him in too many scenes,” I was told. “Otherwise we can’t cut him out for the Southern version.” I asked my executive producer what he was talking about. “If we release a picture in the South, we can’t have colored people in it, or the exhibitors won’t show it. We write the scenes so that we can release a Southern version by cutting out all the scenes with niggers.”
I was astonished. I never knew they did things like that. “Look,” I said. “I’ve made speeches in front of the NAACP and Urban League. I was in Newsweek with Mary McLeod Bethune. I can’t be seen to be a party to this.”
The voice coming over the phone turned nasty. “Look at your contract, Mr. Braun. You don’t have script approval.”
“I don’t want to approve the script. I just want a script that recognizes certain facts about my life. If I do this script, my credibility will be gone. You’re fucking with my image, here!” After that it turned unpleasant. I made certain threats and the executive producer made certain threats. I got a call from my accountant telling me what would happen if the ten grand per week stopped coming, and my agent told me I had no legal right to object to any of this.
Finally I called Earl and told him what was going on. “What did you say they were paying you?” he asked.
I told him again.
“Look,” he said. “What you do in Hollywood is your business. But you’re new there, and you’re an unknown commodity to them. You want to stand up for the right, that’s good. But if you walk, you won’t do me or the Urban League any good. Stay in the business and get some clout, then use it. And if you feel guilty, the NAACP can always use some of that ten grand per week.”
So there it was. My agent patched up an understanding with the studio to the effect that I was to be consulted on script changes. I succeeded in getting the FBI dropped from the script, leaving the Holmes character without any set governmental affiliation, and I tried to make the Sanderson character a little more interesting.
I watched the rushes, and they were good. I liked my acting-it was relaxed, anyway, and I even got to step in front of a speeding Mercedes and watch it bounce off my chest. It was done with special effects.
The picture went into the can, and I went from a threemartini lunch into the wrap party without stopping to sober up. Three days later I woke up in Tijuana with a splitting headache and a suspicion that I’d just done something foolish. The pretty little blonde sharing the pillow told me what it was. We’d just got married. When she was in the bath I had to look at the marriage license to find out her name was Kim Wolfe.
She was a minor starlet from Georgia who’d been scuffling around Hollywood for six years.
After some aspirin and a few belts of tequila, marriage didn’t seem like a half-bad idea. Maybe it was time, with my new career and all, that I settled down.
I bought Ronald Colman’s old pseudo-English country house on Summit Drive in Beverly Hills, and I moved in with Kim, and our two secretaries, Kim’s hairdresser, our two chauffeurs, our two live-in maids ... suddenly I had all these people on salary, and I wasn’t quite sure where they came from.
The next picture was The Rickenbacker Story. Victor Fleming was going to direct, with Fredric March as Pershing and June Allyson as the nurse I was supposed to fall in love with. Dewey Martin, of all people, was to play Richthofen, whose Teutonic breast I was going to shoot full of American lead-never mind that the real Richthofen was shot down by someone else. The picture was going to be filmed in Ireland, with an enormous budget and hundreds of extras. I insisted on learning how to fly, so I could do some of the stunts myself. I called Earl long-distance about that.
“Hey,” I said. “I finally learned how to fly.”
“Some farm boys,” he said, “just take a while.”
“Victor Fleming’s gonna make me an ace.”
“Jack.” His voice was amused. “You’re already an ace.” Which stopped me up short, because somehow in all the activity I’d forgotten that it wasn’t MGM who made me a star. “You’ve got a point, there,” I said.
“You should come to New York a little more often,” Earl said. “Figure out what’s happening in the real world.”
“Yeah. I’ll do that. We’ll talk about flying.”
“We’ll do that.”
I stopped by New York for three days on my way to Ireland. Kim wasn’t with me she’d gotten work, thanks to me, and had been loaned to Warner Brothers for a picture. She was very Southern anyway, and the one time she’d been with Earl she’d been very uncomfortable, and so I didn’t mind she wasn’t there.
I was in Ireland for seven months-the weather was so bad the shooting took forever. I met Kim in London twice, for a week each time, but the rest of the time I was on my own. I was faithful, after my fashion, which meant that I didn’t sleep with any one girl more than twice in a row. I became a good enough pilot so that the stunt pilots actually complimented me a few times.
When I got back to California, I spent two weeks at Palm Springs with Kim. Golden Boy was going to premiere in two months. On my last day at the Springs, I’d just climbed out of the swimming pool when a congressional aide, sweating in a suit and tie, walked up to me and handed me a pink slip. It was subpoena. I was to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities bright and early on Tuesday. The very next day.
I was more annoyed than anything. I figured they obviously had the wrong Jack Braun. I called up Metro and talked to someone in the legal department. He surprised me by saying, “Oh, we thought you’d get the subpoena sometime soon.”
“Wait a minute. How’d you know?”
There was a second’s uncomfortable silence. “Our policy is to cooperate with the FBI. Look, we’ll have one of our attorneys meet you in Washington. Just tell the committee what you know and you can be back in California next week.”
“Hey,” I said. “What’s the FBI got to do with it? And why didn’t you tell me this was coming? And what the hell does the committee think I know, anyway?”
“Something about China,” the man said. “That was-what the investigators were asking us about, anyway.”
I slammed the phone down and called Mr. Holmes. He and Earl and David had gotten their subpoenas earlier in the day and had been trying to reach me ever since, but couldn’t get ahold of me in Palm Springs.
“They’re going to try to break the Aces, farm boy,” Earl said. “You’d better get the first flight east. We’ve got to talk.” I made arrangements, and then Kim walked in, dressed in her tennis whites, just back from her lesson. She looked better in sweat than any woman I’d ever known.
“What’s wrong?” she said. I Just pointed at the pink slip. Kim’s reaction was fast, and it surprised me. “Don’t do what the Ten did,” she said quickly. “They consulted with each other and took a hard-line defense, and none of them have worked since.” She reached for the phone. “Let me call the studio. We’ve got to get you a lawyer.”
I watched her as she picked up the phone and began to dial. A chill hand touched the back of my neck.
“I wish I knew what was going on,” I said.
But I knew. I knew even then, and my knowledge had a precision and a clarity that was terrifying. All I could think about was how I wished I couldn’t see the choices quite so clearly.
To me, the Fear had come late. HUAC first went after Hollywood in ‘47, with the Hollywood Ten. Supposedly the committee was investigating Communist infiltration of the film industry-a ridiculous notion on the face of it, since no Communists were going to get any propaganda in the pictures without the express knowledge and permission of people like Mr. Mayer and the Brothers Warner. The Ten were all current or former Communists, and they and their lawyers agreed on a defense based on the First Amendment rights of free speech and association.
The committee rode over them like a herd of buffalo over a bed of daisies. The Ten were given contempt-of-Congress citations for their refusal to cooperate, and after their appeals ran out years later, they ended up in prison.
The Ten had figured the First Amendment would protect them, that the contempt citations would be thrown out of court within a few weeks at the most. Instead the appeals went on for years, and the Ten went to the slammer, and during that time none of them could find a job.
The blacklist came into existence. My old friends, the American Legion, who had learned somewhat more subtle tactics since going after the Holiday Association with axe handles, published a list of known or suspected Communists so that no one employer had any excuse for hiring anyone on the list. If he hired someone, he became suspect himself, and his name could be added to the list.
None of those called before HUAC had ever committed a crime, as defined by law, nor were they ever accused of crimes. They were not being investigated for criminal activity, but for associations. HUAC had no constitutional mandate to investigate these people, the blacklist was illegal, the evidence introduced at the committee sessions was largely hearsay and inadmissible in a court of law ... none of it mattered. It happened anyway.
HUAC had been silent for a while, partly because their chairman, Parnell, had gotten tossed into the slammer for padding his payroll, partly because the Hollywood Ten appeals were still going through the court. But they’d gotten hungry for all that great publicity they’d gotten when they went after Hollywood, and the public had been whipped into a frenzy with the Rosenberg trials and the Alger Hiss case, so they concluded that the time was right for another splashy investigation.
HUAC’s new chairman, John S. Wood of Georgia, decided to go after the biggest game on the planet.
Us.
My MGM attorney met me at the Washington airport. “I’d advise you not to talk with Mr. Holmes or Mr. Sanderson,” he said.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“They’re going to try to get you to take a First or Fifth Amendment defense,” the lawyer said. “The First Amendment defense won’t work-it’s been turned down on every appeal. The Fifth is a defense against self-incrimination, and unless you’ve actually done something illegal, you can’t use it unless you want to appear guilty.”
“And you won’t work, jack,” Kim said. “Metro won’t even release your pictures. The American Legion would picket them all over the country.”
“How do I know that I’ll work if I talk?” I said. “All you have to do to get on the blacklist is be called, for crissake.”
“I’ve been authorized to tell you from Mr. Mayer,” the lawyer said, “that you will remain in his employ if you cooperate with the committee.”
I shook my head. “I’m talking with Mr. Holmes tonight.” I grinned at them. “We’re the Aces, for heaven’s sake. If we can’t beat some hick congressman from Georgia, we don’t deserve to work.”
So I met Mr. Holmes, Earl, and David at the Statler. Kim said I was being unreasonable and stayed away.
There was a disagreement right from the start. Earl said that the committee had no right to call us in the first place, and that we should simply refuse to cooperate. Mr. Holmes said that we couldn’t just concede the fight then and there, that we should defend ourselves in front of the committee-that we had nothing to hide. Earl told him that a kangaroo court was no place to conduct a reasoned defense. David just wanted to give his pheromones a crack at the committee. “The hell with it,” I said. “I’ll take the First. Free speech and association is something every American understands.”
Which I didn’t believe for a second, by the way. I just felt that I had to say something optimistic.
I wasn’t called that first day-I loitered with David and Earl in the lobby, pacing and gnawing my knuckles, while Mr. Holmes and his attorney played Canute and tried to keep the acid, evil tide from eating the flesh from their bones. David kept trying to talk his way past the guards, but he didn’t have any luck-the guards outside were willing to let him come in, but the ones inside the committee room weren’t exposed to his pheromones and kept shutting him out.
The media were allowed in, of course. HUAC liked to parade its virtue before the newsreel cameras, and the newsreels gave the circus full play.
I didn’t know what was going on inside until Mr. Holmes came out. He walked like a man who had a stroke, one foot carefully in front of the other. He was gray. His hands trembled, and he leaned on the arm of his attorney. He looked as if he’d aged twenty years in just a few hours. Earl and David ran up to him, but all I could do was stare in terror as the others helped him down the corridor.
The Fear had me by the neck.
Earl and Blythe put Mr. Holmes in his car, and then Earl waited for my MGM limousine to drive up, and he got into the back with us. Kim looked pouty, squeezed into the corner so he wouldn’t touch her, and refused even to say hello.
“Well, I was right,” he said. “We shouldn’t have cooperated with those bastards at all.”
I was still stunned from what I’d seen in the corridor. “I can’t figure out why the hell they’re doing this.”
He fixed me with an amused glance. “Farm boys,” he said, a resigned comment on the universe, and then shook his head. “You’ve got to hit them over the head with a shovel to get them to pay attention.”
Kim sniffed. Earl didn’t give any indication he’d heard. “They’re power-hungry, farm boy,” he said. And they’ve been kept out of power by Roosevelt and Truman for a lot of years. They’re going to get it back, and they’re drumming up this hysteria to do it. Look at the Four Aces and what do you see? A Negro Communist, a Jewish liberal, an F D.R. liberal, a woman living in sin. Add Tachyon and you’ve got an alien who’s subverting not just the country but our chromosomes. There are probably others as powerful that nobody knows about. And they’ve all got unearthly powers, so who knows what they’re up to? And they’re not controlled by the government, they’re following some kind of liberal political agenda, so that threatens the power base of most of the people on the committee right there.
“The way I figure it, the government has their own ace talents by now, people we haven’t heard ou That means we can be done without-we’re too independent and we’re politically unsound. China and Czechoslovakia and the names of the other aces-that’s an excuse. The point is that if they can break us right in public, they prove they can break anybody. It’ll be a reign of terror that will last a generation. Not anyone, not even the President, will be immune.”
I shook my head. I had heard the words, but my brain wouldn’t accept them. “What can we do about it?” I asked. Earl’s gaze held my eyes. “Not a damn thing, farm boy.” I turned away.
My MGM attorney played a recording of the Holmes hearing for me that night. Mr. Holmes and his attorney, an old Virginia family friend named Cranmer, were used to the ways of Washington and the ways of law. They expected an orderly proceeding, the gentlemen of the committee asking polite questions of the gentlemen witnesses.
The plan had no relation to reality. The committee barely let Mr. Holmes talk-instead they screamed at him, rants full of vicious innuendo and hearsay, and he was never allowed to reply.
I was given a copy of the transcript. Part of it reads like this:
MR. RANKIN: When I look at this disgusting New Deal man who sits before the committee, with his smarty-pants manners and Bond Street clothes and his effete cigarette holder, everything that is American and Christian in me revolts at the sight. The New Deal man! That damned New Deal permeates him like a cancer, and I want to scream, “You’re everything that’s wrong with America. Get out and go back to Red China where you belong, you New Deal socialist! In China they’ll welcome you and your treachery.”
CHAIRMAN: The honorable member’s time has expired.
MR. RANKIN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
CHAIRMAN: Mr. Nixon?
MR. NIXON: What were the names of those people in the State Department who you consulted with prior to your journey to China?
WITNESS: May I remind the committee that those with whom I dealt were American public servants acting in good faith ...
MR. NIXON: The committee is not interested in their records. Just their names.
The transcript goes on and on, eighty pages of it altogether. Mr. Holmes had, it appeared, stabbed the generalissimo in the back and lost China to the Reds. He was accused of being soft on communism, just like that parlor-pink Henry Wallace, who he supported for the presidency. John Rankin of Mississippi-probably the weirdest voice on the committee accused Mr. Holmes of being part of the Jewish-Red conspiracy that had crucified Our Savior. Richard Nixon of California kept asking after names-he wanted to know the people Mr. Holmes consulted with in the State Department so that he could do to them what he’d already done to Alger Hiss. Mr. Holmes didn’t give any names and pleaded the First Amendment. That’s when the committee really rose to its feet in righteous indignation: they mauled him for hours, and the next day they sent down an indictment for contempt of Congress. Mr. Holmes was on his way to the penitentiary.
He was going to prison, and he hadn’t committed a single crime.
“Jesus Christ. I’ve got to talk to Earl and David.”
“I’ve already advised you against that, Mr. Braun.”
“The hell with that. We’ve got to make plans.”
“Listen to him, honey.”
“The hell with that.” The sound of a bottle clinking against a glass. “There’s got to be a way out of this.”
When I got to Mr. Holmes’s suite, he’d been given a sedative and put to bed. Earl told me that Blythe and Tachyon had gotten their subpoenas and would arrive the next day. We couldn’t understand why. Blythe never had any part in the political decisions, and Tachyon hadn’t had anything to do with China or American politics at all.
David was called the next morning. He was grinning as he went in. He was going to get even for all of us.
MR. RANKIN: I would like to assure the Jewish gentleman from New York that he will encounter no bias on account of his race. Any man who believes in the fundamental principles of Christianity and lives up to them, whether he is Catholic or Protestant, has my respect and confidence.
WITNESS: May I say to the committee that I object to the characterization of “Jewish gentleman.”
MR. RANKIN: Do you object to being called a Jew or being called a gentleman? What are you kicking about?
After that rocky start, David’s pheromones began to infiltrate the room, and though he didn’t quite have the committee dancing in a circle and singing “Hava Nagila,” he did have them genially agreeing to cancel the subpoenas, call off the hearings, draft a resolution praising the Aces as patriots, send a letter to Mr. Holmes apologizing for their conduct, revoke the contempt of Congress citations for the Hollywood Ten, and in general make fools out of themselves for several hours, right in front of the newsreel cameras. John Rankin called David “America’s little Hebe friend,” high praise from him. David waltzed out, we saw that ear-to-ear grin, and we pounded him on the back and headed back to the Statler for a celebration.
We had opened the third bottle of champagne when the hotel dick opened the door and congressional aides delivered a new round of subpoenas. We turned on the radio and heard Chairman John Wood give a live address about how David had used mind control of the type practiced in the Pavlov Institute in Communist Russia; and that this deadly form of attack would be investigated in full.
I sat down on the bed and stared at the bubbles rising in my champagne glass.
The Fear had come again.
Blythe went in the next morning. Her hands were trembling. David was turned away by hall guards wearing gas masks.
There were trucks with chemical-warfare symbols out front. I found out later that if we tried to fight our way out, they were going to use phosgene on us.
They were constructing a glass booth in the hearing room. David would testify in isolation, through a microphone. The control of the mike was in John Wood’s hands.
Apparently HUAC were as shaken as we, because their questioning was a little disjointed. They asked her about China, and since she’d gone in a scientific capacity she didn’t have any answers for them about the political decisions. Then they asked her about the nature of her power, how exactly she absorbed minds and what she did with them. It was all fairly polite. Henry van Renssaeler was still a congressman, after all, and professional courtesy dictated they not suggest his wife ran his mind for him.
They sent Blythe out and called in Tachyon. He was dressed in a peach-colored coat and Hessian boots with tassels. He’d been ignoring his attorney’s advice all along-he went in with the attitude of an aristocrat whose reluctant duty was to correct the misapprehensions of the mob.
He outsmarted himself completely, and the committee ripped him to shreds. They nailed him for being an illegal alien, then stomped over him for being responsible for releasing the wild card virus, and to top it all of they demanded the names of the aces he’d treated, just in case some of them happened to be evil infiltrators influencing the minds of America at the behest of Uncle Joe Stalin. Tachyon refused.
They deported him.
Harstein went in the next day, accompanied by a file of Marines dressed for chemical warfare. Once they had him in the glass booth they tore into him just as they had Mr. Holmes.
John Wood held the button on the mike and would never let him talk, not even to answer when Rankin called him a slimy kike, right there in public. When he finally got his chance to speak, David denounced the committee as a bunch of Nazis. That sounded to Mr. Wood like contempt of Congress.
By the end of the hearing, David was going to prison, too. Congress adjourned for the weekend. Earl and I were going before the committee on Monday next.
We sat in Mr. Holmes’s suite Friday night and listened to the radio, and it was all bad. The American Legion was organizing demonstrations in support of the committee all around the country. There were rounds of subpoenas going out to people over the country who were known to have ace abilities—no deformed jokers got called, because they’d look bad on camera. My agent had left a message telling me that Chrysler wanted their car back, and that the Chesterfield people had called and were worried.
I drank a bottle of scotch. Blythe and Tachyon were in hiding somewhere. David and Mr. Holmes were zombies, sitting in the corner, their eyes sunken, turned inward to their own personal agony. None of us had anything to say, except Earl. “I’ll take the First Amendment, and damn them all,” he said. “If they put me in prison, I’ll fly to Switzerland.”
I gazed into my drink. “I can’t fly, Earl,” I said. “Sure you can, farm boy,” he said. “You told me yourself.”
“I can’t fly, dammit! Leave me alone.”
I couldn’t stand it anymore, and took another bottle with me and went to bed. Kim wanted to talk and I just turned my back and pretended to be asleep.
“Yes, Mr. Mayer.”
“Jack? This is terrible, Jack, just terrible.”
“Yes, it is. These bastards, Mr. Mayer. They’re going to wreck us.”
“Just do what the lawyer says, Jack. You’ll be fine. Do the brave thing.”
“Brave?” Laughter. “Brave?”
“It’s the right thing, Jack. You’re a hero. They can’t touch you. Just tell them what you know, and America will love you for it.”
“You want me to be a rat.”
“Jack, Jack. Don’t use those kind of words. It’s a patriotic thing I want you to do. The right thing. I want you to be a hero. And I want you to know there’s always a place at Metro for a hero.”
“How many people are gonna buy tickets to see a rat, Mr. Mayer? How many?”
“Give the phone to the lawyer, Jack. I want to talk to him. You be a good boy and do what he says.”
“The hell I will. “
“Jack. What can I do with you? Let me talk to the lawyer.”
Earl was floating outside my window. Raindrops sparkled on the goggles perched atop his flying helmet. Kim glared at him and left the room. I got out of bed and went to the window and opened it. He flew in, dropped his boots onto the carpet, and lit a smoke.
“You don’t look so good, Jack.”
“I have a hangover, Earl.”
He pulled a folded Washington Star out of his pocket. “I have something here that’ll sober you up. Have you seen the paper?”
“No. I haven’t seen a damn thing.”
He opened it. The headline read: STALIN ANNOUNCES SUPPORT FOR ACES.
I sat on the bed and reached for the bottle. “Jesus.” Earl threw the paper down. “He wants us to go down. We kept him out of Berlin, for god’s sake. He has no reason to love us. He’s persecuting his own wild card talents over there.”
“The bastard, the bastard.” I closed my eyes. Colors throbbed on the backs of my lids. “Got a butt?” I asked. He gave me one, and a light from his wartime Zippo. I leaned back in bed and rubbed the bristles on my chin.
“The way I see it,” Earl said, “we’re going to have ten bad years. Maybe we’ll even have to leave the country.” He shook his head. “And then well be heroes again. It’ll take at least that long.”
“You sure know how to cheer a guy up.”
He laughed. The cigarette tasted vile. I washed the taste away with scotch.
The smile left Earl’s face, and he shook his head. “It’s the people that are going to be called after us-those are the ones I’m sorry for. There’s going to be a witch hunt in this country for years to come.” He shook his head. “The NAACP is paying for my lawyer. I just might give him back. I don’t want any organization associated with me. It’ll just make it harder for them later.”
“Mayer’s been on the phone.”
“Mayer.” He grimaced. “If only those guys who run the studios had stood up when the Ten went before the committee. If they’d shown some guts none of this would ever have happened.” He gave me a look. “You’d better get a new lawyer. Unless you take the Fifth.” He frowned. “The Fifth is quicker. They just ask you your name, you say you won’t answer, then it’s over.”
“What difference does the lawyer make, then?”
“You’ve got a point there.” He gave me a ragged grin. “It really isn’t going to make any difference, is it? Whatever we say or do. The committee will do what they want, either way.”
“Yeah. It’s over.”
His grin turned, as he looked at me, to a soft smile. For a moment, I saw the glow that Lillian had said surrounded him. Here he was, on the verge of losing everything he’d worked for, about to be used as a weapon that would cudgel the civil rights movement and anti-fascism and anti-imperialism and labor and everything else that mattered to him, knowing that his name would be anathema, that anyone he’d ever associated with would soon be facing the same treatment ... and he’d accepted it all somehow, saddened of course, but still solid within himself. The Fear hadn’t even come close to touching him. He wasn’t afraid of the committee, of disgrace, of the loss of his position and standing. He didn’t regret an instant of his life, a moment’s dedication to his beliefs.
“It’s over?” he said. There was a fire in his eyes. “Hell, Jack,” he laughed, “it’s not over. One committee hearing ain’t the war. Were aces. They can’t take that away. Right?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“I better leave you to fix your hangover.” He went to the window. “Time for my morning constitutional, anyway.”
“See you later.”
He gave me the thumbs-up sign as he threw a leg over the sill. “Take care, farm boy.”
“You too.”
I got out of bed to close the window just as the drizzle turned to downpour. I looked outside into the street. People were running for cover.
“Earl really was a Communist, Jack. He belonged to the party for years, he went to Moscow to study. Listen, darling”—imploring now—“you can’t help him. He’s going to get crucified no matter what you do.”
“I can show him he ain’t alone on the cross.”
“Swell. Just swell. I’m married to a martyr. Just tell me, how are you helping your friends by taking the Fifth? Holmes isn’t coming back to public life. David’s hustled himself right into prison. Tachyons being deported. And Earl’s doomed, sure as anything. You can’t even carry their cross for them.”
“Now who’s being sarcastic?”
Screaming now. “Will you put down that bottle and listen to me? This is something your country wants you to do! It’s the right thing!”
I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I went for a walk in the cold February afternoon. I hadn’t eaten all day and I had a bottle of whiskey in me, and the traffic kept hissing past as I walked, the rain drizzling in my face, soaking through my light California jacket, and I didn’t notice any of it. I just thought of those faces, Wood and Rankin and Francis Case, the faces and the hateful eyes and the parade of constant insinuations, and then I started running for the Capitol. I was going to find the committee and smash them, bang heads together, make them run gabbling in fear. I’d brought democracy to Argentina, for crissake, and I could bring it to Washington the same way.
The Capitol windows were dark. Cold rain gleamed on the marble. No one was there. I prowled around looking for an open door, and then finally I bashed through a side entrance and headed straight for the committee room. I yanked the door open and stepped inside.
It was empty, of course. I don’t know why I was so surprised. There were only a few spotlights on. David’s glass booth gleamed in the soft light like a piece of fine crystal.
Camera and radio equipment sat in its place. The chairman’s gavel glowed with brass and polish. Somehow, as I stood like an imbecile in the hushed silence of the room, the anger went out of me.
I sat down in one of the chairs and tried to remember what I was doing here. It was clear the Four Aces were doomed. We were bound by the law and by decency, and the committee was not. The only way we could fight them was to break the law, to rise up in their smug faces and smash the committee room to bits, laughing as the congressmen dived for cover beneath their desks. And if we did that we’d become what we fought, an extralegal force for terror and violence. We’d become what the committee claimed we were. And that would only make things worse.
The Aces were going down, and nothing could stop it. As I came down the Capitol steps, I felt perfectly sober. No matter how much I’d had to drink, the booze couldn’t stop me from knowing what I knew, from seeing the situation in all its appalling, overwhelming clarity.
I knew, I’d known all along, and I couldn’t pretend that I didn’t.
I walked into the lobby next morning with Kim on one side and the lawyer on the other. Earl was in the lobby, with Lillian standing there clutching her purse.
I couldn’t look at them. I walked past them, and the Marines in their gas masks opened the door, and I walked into the hearing room and announced my intention to testify before the committee as a friendly witness.
Later, the committee developed a procedure for friendly witnesses. There would be a closed session first, just the witness and the committee, a sort of dress rehearsal so that everyone would know what they were going to talk about and what information was going to be developed, so things would go smoothly in public session. That procedure hadn’t been developed when I testified, so everything went a little roughly.
I sweated under the spotlights, so terrified I could barely speak-all I could see were those nine sets of evil little eyes staring at me from across the room, and all I could hear were their voices, booming at me from the loudspeakers like the voice of God.
Wood started o$; asking me the opening questions: who I was, where I lived, what I did for a living. Then he started going into my associations, starting with Earl. His time ran out and he turned me over to Kearney.
“Are you aware that Mr. Sanderson was once a member of the Communist party?”
I didn’t even hear the question. Kearney had to repeat it. “Huh? Oh. He told me, yes.”
“Do you know if he is currently a member?”
“I believe he split with the party after the Nazi-Soviet thing.”
“In 1939.”
“If that’s what, when, the Nazi-Soviet thing happened. ‘39. I guess.” I’d forgotten every piece of stagecraft I’d never known. I was fumbling with my tie, mumbling into the mike, sweating. Trying not to look into those nine sets of eyes.
“Are you aware of any Communist affiliations maintained by Mr. Sanderson subsequent to the Nazi-Soviet pact?”
“No.”
Then it came. “He has mentioned to you no names belonging to Communist or Communist-affiliated groups?” I said the first thing that came into my head. Not even thinking. “There was some girl, I think, in Italy. That he knew during the war. I think her name was Lena Goldoni. She’s an actress now.”
Those sets of eyes didn’t even blink. But I could see little smiles on their faces. And I could see the reporters out of the corner of my eye, bending suddenly over their notepads. “Could you spell the name, please?”
So there was the spike in Earl’s coffin. Whatever could have been said about Earl up to then, it would have at least revealed himself true to his principles. The betrayal of Lillian implied other betrayals, perhaps of his country. I’d destroyed him with just a few words, and at the time I didn’t even know what it was I was doing.
I babbled on. In a sweat to get it over, I said anything that came into my head. I talked about loving America, and about how I just said those nice things about Henry Wallace to please Mr. Holmes, and I’m sure it was a foolish thing to have done. I didn’t want to change the Southern way of life, the Southern way of life was a fine way of life. I saw Gone With the Wind twice, a great picture. Mrs. Bethune was just a friend of Earl’s I got photographed with. Velde took over the questioning.
“Are you aware of the names of any so-called aces who may be living in this country today?”
“No. None, I mean, besides those who have already been given subpoenas by the committee.”
“Do you know if Earl Sanderson knows any such names?”
“No.”
“He has not confided to you in any way?”
I took a drink of water. How many times could they repeat this? “If he knows the names of any aces, he has not mentioned them in my presence.”
“Do you know if Mr. Harstein knows of any such names?” On and on. “No.”
“Do you believe that Dr. Tachyon knows any such names?”
They’d already dealt with this. I was just confirming what they knew. “He’s treated many people afflicted by the virus. I assume he knows their names. But he has never mentioned any names to me.”
“Does Mrs. van Renssaeler know the existence of any other aces?”
I started to shake my head, then a thought hit me, and I stammered out, “No. Not in herself, no.”
Velde plodded on. “Does Mr. Holmes—” he started, and then Nixon sensed something here, in the way I’d just answered the question, and he asked Velde’s permission to interrupt. Nixon was the smart one, no doubt. His eager, young chipmunk face looked at me intently over his microphone.
“May I request the witness to clarify that statement?”
I was horrified. I took another drink of water and tried to think of a way out of this. I couldn’t. I asked Nixon to repeat the question. He did. My answer came out before he finished.
“Mrs. van Renssaeler has absorbed the mind of Dr. Tachyon. She would know any names that he would know.” The strange thing was, they hadn’t figured it out about Blythe and Tachyon up till then. They had to have the big jock from Dakota come in and put the pieces together for them. I should have just taken a gun and shot her. It would have been quicker.
Chairman Wood thanked me at the end of my testimony. When the chairman of HUAC said thank you, it meant you were okay as far as they were concerned, and other people could associate with you without fear of being branded a pariah. It meant you could have a job in the United States of America.
I walked out of the hearing room with my lawyer on one side and Kim on the other. I didn’t meet the eyes of my friends. Within an hour I was on a plane back to California.
The house on Summit was full of congratulatory bouquets from friends I’d made in the picture business. There were telegrams from all over the country about how brave I’d been, about what a patriot I was. The American Legion was strongly represented.
Back in Washington, Earl was taking the Fifth. He announced that he’d simply paraphrased the Fifth and would continue to refuse any answer, they cited him for contempt.
He was going to join Mr. Holmes and David in prison. People from the NAACP met with him that night. They told him to disassociate himself from the civil rights movement. He’d set the cause back fifty years. He was to stay clear in the future.
The idol had fallen. He’d molded his image into that of a superman, a hero without flaw, and once I’d mentioned Lena the populace suddenly realized that Earl Sanderson was human. They blamed him for it, for their own naivete in believing in him and for their own sudden loss of faith, and in olden times they might have stoned him or hanged him from the nearest apple tree, but in the end what they did was worse.
They let him live.
Earl knew he was finished, was a walking dead man, that he’d given them a weapon that was used to crush him and everything he believed in, that had destroyed the heroic image he’d so carefully crafted, that he’d crushed the hopes of everyone who’d believed in him ... e carried the knowledge with him to his dying day, and it paralyzed him. He was still young, but he was crippled, and he never flew as high again, or as far.
The next day HUAC called Blythe. I don’t even want to think about what happened then.
They didn’t just listen to the Fifth and then let him go. They asked him one insinuating question after another, and made him take the Fifth to each. Are you a Communist? Earl answered with the Fifth. Are you an agent of the Soviet government? The Fifth. Do you associate with Soviet spies? The Fifth. Do you know Lena Goldoni? The Fifth. Was Lena Goldoni your mistress? The Fifth. Was Lena Goldoni a Soviet agent? The Fifth.
Lillian was seated in a chair right behind. Sitting mute, clutching her bag, as Lena’s name came up again and again. And finally Earl had had enough. He leaned forward, his face taut with anger.
“I have better things to do than incriminate myself in front of a bunch of fascists!” he barked, and they promptly ruled he’d waived the Fifth by speaking out, and they asked him the questions all over again. When, trembling with rage,
Golden Boy opened two months after the hearings. I sat next to Kim at the premiere, and from the moment the film began I realized it had gone terribly wrong.
The Earl Sanderson character was gone, just sliced out of the film. The Archibald Holmes character wasn’t FBI, but he wasn’t independent either, he belonged to that new organization, the CIA. Someone had shot a lot of new footage. The fascist regime in South America had been changed to a Communist regime in Eastern Europe, all run by oliveskinned men with Spanish accents. Every time one of the characters said “Nazi,” it was dubbed in “Commie,” and the dubbing was loud and bad and unconvincing.
I wandered in a daze through the reception afterward. Everyone kept telling me what a great actor I was, what a great picture it was. The film poster said Jack Braun—A Hero America Can Trust! I wanted to vomit.
I left early and went to bed.
I went on collecting ten grand per week while the picture bombed at the box office. I was told the Rickenbacker picture was going to be a big hit, but right now they were having script problems with my next picture. The first two screenwriters had been called up before the committee and ended up on the blacklist because they wouldn’t name names. It made me want to weep.
After the Hollywood Ten appeals ran out, the next actor they called was Larry Parks, the man I’d been watching when the virus hit New York. He named names, but he didn’t name them willingly enough, and his career was over.
I couldn’t seem to get away from the thing. Some people wouldn’t talk to me at parties. Sometimes I’d overhear bits of conversation. “Judas Ace.”
“Golden Rat.”
“Friendly Witness,” said like it was a name, or title.
I bought a Jaguar to make myself feel better.
In the meantime, the North Koreans charged across the 38th Parallel and the U.S. forces were getting crunched at Taejon. I wasn’t doing anything other than taking acting lessons a couple times each week.
I called Washington direct. They gave me a lieutenant colonel’s rank and flew me out on a special plane.
Metro thought it was a great publicity stunt.
I was given a special helicopter, one of those early Bells, with a pilot from the swamps of Louisiana who exhibited a decided death wish. There was a cartoon of me on the side panels, with one knee up and one arm up high, like I was Superman flying.
I’d get taken behind North Korean lines and then I’d kick ass. It was very simple.
I’d demolish entire tank columns. Any artillery that got spotted by our side were turned into pretzels. I made four North Korean generals prisoner and rescued General Dean from the Koreans that had captured him. I pushed entire supply convoys off the sides of mountains. I was grim and determined and angry, and I was saving American lives, and I was very good at it.
There is a picture of me that got on the cover of Life. It shows me with this tight Clint Eastwood smile, holding a T-34 over my head. There is a very surprised North Korean in the turret. I’m glowing like a meteor. The picture was titled Superstar of Pusan, “superstar” being a new word back then.
I was very proud of what I was doing.
Back in the States, Rickenbacker was a hit. Not as big a hit as everyone expected, but it was spectacular and it made quite a bit of money. Audiences seemed to be a bit ambivalent in their reactions to the star. Even with me on the cover of Life, there were some people who couldn’t quite see me as a hero. Metro re-released Golden Boy. It flopped again.
I didn’t much care. I was holding the Pusan Perimeter. I was right there with the GIs, under fire half the time, sleeping in a tent, eating out of cans and looking like someone out of a Bill Mauldin cartoon. I think it was fairly unique behavior for a light colonel. The other officers hated it, but General Dean supported me-at one point he was shooting at tanks with a bazooka himself-and I was a hit with the soldiers.
They flew me to Wake Island so that Truman could give me the Medal of Honor, and MacArthur flew out on the same plane. He seemed preoccupied the whole time, didn’t waste any time in conversation with me. He looked incredibly old, on his last legs. I don’t think he liked me.
A week later, we broke out of Pusan and MacArthur landed X Corps at Inchon. The North Koreans ran for it. Five days later, I was back in California. The Army told me, quite curtly, that my services were no longer necessary. I’m fairly certain it was MacArthur’s doing. He wanted to be the superstar of Korea, and he didn’t want to share any of the honors. And there were probably other aces-nice, quiet, anonymous aces-working for the U.S. by then.
I didn’t want to leave. For a while, particularly after MacArthur got crushed by the Chinese, I kept phoning Washington with new ideas about how to be useful. I could raid the airfields in Manchuria that were giving us such trouble. Or I could be the point man for a breakthrough. The authorities were very polite, but it was clear they didn’t want me.
I did hear from the CIA, though. After Dien Bien Phu, they wanted to send me into Indochina to get rid of Bao Dai. The plan seemed half-assed-they had no idea who or what they wanted to put in Bao Dai’s place, for one thing; they just expected “native anticommunist liberal forces” to rise and take command-and the guy in charge of the operation kept using Madison Avenue jargon to disguise the fact he knew nothing about Vietnam or any of the people he was supposed to be dealing with.
I turned them down. After that, my sole involvement with the federal government was to pay my taxes every April.
While I was in Korea, the Hollywood Ten appeals ran out. David and Mr. Holmes went to prison. David served three years. Mr. Holmes served only six months and then was released on account of his health. Everyone knows what happened to Blythe.
Earl flew to Europe and appeared in Switzerland, where he renounced his U.S. citizenship and became a citizen of the world. A month later, he was living with Orlena Goldoni in her Paris apartment. She’d become a big star by then. I suppose he decided that since there was no point in concealing their relationship anymore, he’d flaunt it.
Lillian stayed in New York. Maybe Earl sent her money. I don’t know.
Peron came back to Argentina in the mid-1950s, along with his peroxide chippie. The Fear moving south.
I made pictures, but somehow none of them was the success that was expected. Metro kept muttering about my image problem.
People couldn’t believe I was a hero. I couldn’t believe it either, and it affected my acting. In Rickenbacker, I’d had conviction. After that, nothing.
Kim had her career going by now. I didn’t see her much. Eventually her detective got a picture of me in bed with the girl dermatologist who came over lo apply her makeup every morning, and Kim got the house on Summit Drive, with the maids and gardener and chauffeurs and most of my money, and I ended up in a small beach house in Malibu with the Jaguar in the garage. Sometimes my parties would last weeks.
There were two marriages after that, and the longest lasted only eight months. They cost me the rest of the money I’d made. Metro let me go, and I worked for Warner. The pictures got worse and worse. I made the same western about six times over.
Eventually I bit the bullet. My picture career had died years ago and I was broke. I went to NBC with an idea for a television series.
Tarzan of the Apes ran for four years. I was executive producer, and on the screen I played second banana to a chimp. I was the first and only blond Tarzan. I had a lot of points and the series set me up for life.
After that I did what every ex-Hollywood actor does. I went into real estate. I sold actors’ homes in California for a while, and then I put a company together and started building apartments and shopping centers. I always used other people’s money-I wasn’t taking a chance on going broke again. I put up shopping centers in half the small towns in the Midwest.
I made a fortune. Even after I didn’t need the money any more, I kept at it. I didn’t have much else to do.
When Nixon got elected I felt ill. I couldn’t understand how people could believe that man.
After Mr. Holmes got out of prison he went to work as editor of the New Republic. He died in 1955, lung cancer. His daughter inherited the family money. I suppose my clothes were still in his closets.
Two weeks after Earl flew the country, Paul Robeson and W E. B. Du Bois joined the CPUSA, receiving their party cards in a public ceremony in Herald Square. They announced they were joining the protest of Earl’s treatment before HUAC.
HUAC called a lot of blacks into their committee room. Even Jackie Robinson was summoned and appeared as a friendly witness. Unlike the white witnesses, the blacks were never asked to name names. HUAC didn’t want to create any more black martyrs. Instead the witnesses were asked to denounce the views of Sanderson, Robeson, and Du Bois. Most of them obliged.
Through the 1950s and most of the 1960s, it was difficult to get a grasp on what Earl was doing. He lived quietly with Lena Goldoni in Paris and Rome. She was a big star, active politically, but Earl wasn’t seen much.
He wasn’t hiding, I think. Just keeping out of sight. There’s a difference.
There were rumors, though. That he was seen in Africa during various wars for independence. That he fought in Algeria against the French and the Secret Army. When asked,
Earl refused to confirm or deny his activities. He was courted by left-wing individuals and causes, but rarely committed himself publicly. I think, like me, he didn’t want to be used again. But I also think he was afraid that he’d do damage to a cause by associating himself with it.
Eventually the reign of terror ended, just as Earl said it would. While I was swinging on jungle vines as Tarzan, John and Robert Kennedy killed the blacklist by marching past an American Legion picket line to see Spartacus, a film written by one of the Hollywood Ten.
Aces began coming out of hiding, entering public life. But now they wore masks and used made-up names, just like the comics rd read in the war and thought were so silly. It wasn’t silly now. They were taking no chances. The Fear might one day return.
Books were written about us. I declined all interviews. Sometimes the question came up in public, and I’d just turn cold and say, “I decline to talk about that at this time. My own Fifth Amendment.”
In the 1960s, when the civil rights movement began to heat up in this country, Earl came to Toronto and perched on the border. He met with black leaders and journalists, talked only about civil rights.
But Earl was, by that time, irrelevant. The new generation of black leaders invoked his memory and quoted his speeches, and the Panthers copied his leather jacket, boots, and beret, but the fact of his continuing existence, as a human being rather than a symbol, was a bit disturbing. The movement would have preferred a dead martyr, whose image could have been used for any purpose, rather than a live, passionate man who said his own opinions loud and clear.
Maybe he sensed this when he was asked to come south. The immigration people would probably have allowed it. But he hesitated too long, and then Nixon was President. Earl wouldn’t enter a country run by a former member of HUAC. By the 1970s, Earl settled permanently into Lena’s apartment in Paris. Panther exiles like Cleaver tried to make common cause with him and failed.
Lena died in 1975 in a train crash. She left Earl her money.
He’d give interviews from time to time. I tracked them down and read them. According to one interviewer, one of the conditions of the interview was that he wouldn’t be asked about me. Maybe he wanted certain memories to die a natural death. I wanted to thank him for that.
There’s a story, a legend almost, spread by those who marched on Selma in ‘65 during the voting rights crusade ... that when the cops charged in with their tear gas, clubs, and dogs, and the marchers began to fall before the wave of white troopers, some of the marchers swore that they looked skyward and saw a man flying there, a straight black figure in a flying jacket and helmet, but that the man just hovered there and then was gone, unable to act, unable to decide whether the use of his powers would have aided his cause or worked against it. The magic hadn’t come back, not even at such a pivotal moment, and after that there was nothing in his life but the chair in the cafe, the pipe, the paper, and the cerebral hemorrhage that finally took him into whatever it is that waits in the sky.
Every so often, I begin to wonder if it’s over, if people have really forgotten. But aces are a part of life now, a part of the background, and the whole world is raised on ace mythology, on the story of the Four Aces and their betrayer. Everyone knows the Judas Ace, and what he looks like. During one of my periods of optimism I found myself in New York on business. I went to Aces High, the restaurant in the Empire State Building where the new breed of ace hangs out. I was met at the door by Hiram, the ace who used to call himself Fatman until word of his real identity got out, and I could tell right away that he recognized me and that I was making a big mistake.
He was polite enough, I’ll give him that, but his smile cost him a certain amount of effort. He seated me in a dark corner, where people wouldn’t see me. I ordered a drink and the salmon steak.
When the plate came, the steak was surrounded with a neat circle of dimes. I counted them. Thirty pieces of silver. I got up and left. I could feel Hiram’s eyes on me the whole time. I never came back.
I couldn’t blame him at all.
When I was making Tarzan, people were calling me wellpreserved. After, when I was selling real estate and building developments, everyone told me how much the job must be agreeing with me. I looked so young.
If I look in the mirror now, I see the same young guy who was scuffling the New York streets going to auditions. Time hasn’t added a line; hasn’t changed me physically in any way.
I’m fifty-five now, and I look twenty-two. Maybe I won’t ever grow old.
I still feel like a rat. But I only did what my country told me.
Maybe I’ll be the Judas Ace forever.
Sometimes I wonder about becoming an ace again, putting on a mask and costume so that no one will recognize me. Call myself Muscle Man or Beach Boy or Blond Giant or something. Go out and save the world, or at least a little piece of it.
But then I think, No. I had my time, and it’s gone. And when I had the chance, I couldn’t even save my own integrity. Or Earl. Or anybody.
I should have kept the dimes. I earned them, after all.
www.wildcardsbooks.com
From GRRM :
This is the first Wild Cards story ever written. Walter Jon Williams wrote it back in the early 80s, before we had sold the series ... before we had even finalized the proposal, in fact. We were still working out the details of the universe when Walter took the bit in his teeth, went off, and produced “Bag Lady” in a white heat.
It’s a fun story. Unfortunately, by the time we had finished working out where we wanted to go with the series, “Bag Lady” no longer fit comfortably with the tone and direction of the other stories. Walter ended up cannibalizing parts of this for his story in book two (ACES HIGH) but other parts remained unpublished until 1998, when he included this original version in his ‘Boskone Book,’ a small press collection from NESFA Press.
That’s the only place that “Bag Lady” has ever seen print, so it’s fairly new to a majority of Wild Card readers and should be a nice treat. The note below also includes an introduction by Walter explaining the history of the story. Enjoy!
Introduction
What you are about to pass beneath your eyeballs is the first Wild Cards story ever written ... but it never appeared in a Wild Cards book.
But how, you ask, can such a thing be?
A little history is definitely in order.
Back in the early Eighties, George R.R. Martin conceived the notion of the Wild Cards series—a shared alternate-world timeline in which the superpowers displayed by comic-book heroes and villains were real, and subject to a degree of plausibility. George contacted his friends, who included Howard Waldrop, Ed Bryant, Melinda Snodgrass, Roger Zelazny, Pat Cadigan, Lewis Shiner, John Jos. Miller, and myself, all of whom took to the idea with a great enthusiasm. It was Melinda Snodgrass who came up with the rationale for the various metahuman abilities displayed by the characters—an alien virus, dropped over New York City in 1946, that caused most of those infected to mutate horribly and die (“drawing the black queen”), that caused most of the survivors to turn into grotesque mutations (“jokers”), and which permitted a fortunate few to develop genuine superpowers (“aces”).
But somewhere along the path of developing the series, George began to suffer doubts. He became uncertain as to whether it was really possible to convincingly depict superpowers in fiction. So, in an act of selflessness so pure that I nowadays can scarcely credit that I actually did it, I wrote “Bag Lady” in order to prove him wrong. (Furthermore, the thought that I had the leisure to produce a work this long, purely to prove a point, croggles my mind in these busy latter days.) In any case, “Bag Lady” succeeded in proving what I set out to prove, which was that the form was viable, and work on the series resumed.
Unfortunately, Wild Cards evolved in a different direction from that anticipated by this story. By the time the series background was fully developed, “Bag Lady” was a non-starter. My act of selflessness remained pure, unsullied by the wretched commercialism that would mark an actual sale. (I did, however, manage to plunder some of the text for a later story, “Unto the Sixth Generation.”)
Wild Cards fans will note a number of differences between the New York of this story and that of the series. For “Bag Lady,” I conceived New York city as a kind of golden, wonder-filled megalopolis, aptly symbolized by the gold-plated Empire State Building and the presence of the RMS Queen Elizabeth sitting in an enlarged Central Park Lake. The place is filled with superheroes doing whatever it is that superheroes do. The tone is that of light adventure, admittedly with a touch of darkness here and there.
The actual series, as it developed, was much darker, sometimes verging on relentless. The QE1 never made it to Central Park. The Empire State Building didn’t get its gold sheath. And the Knave of Diamonds, art thief extraordinaire, never made it to the pages of the series.
At least the Central Park Ape, the occasion of Modular Man’s first public triumph, not only made it into the Wild Cards universe, but became a major character.
So here’s the original, twenty years after it was first written.
Have fun with it. I certainly did.
———————————
He was still smoking where the atmosphere had burned his flesh. Heated lifeblood was running out through his spiracles. He tried to close them, to hold onto the last of the liquid, but he had lost the capacity to control his respiration.
Lights strobed at him from the end of the alley, dazzled his eyes. Hard sounds crackled in his ears. His blood steamed on the cold concrete.
The Swarm mother had unmasked his ship, had struck at him with energies that bound his flux generators and then ruptured his ship’s chitin. He had been forced to close his spiracles and leap into the dark vacuum, hoping to find a friendly landing on the planet below. He had failed—the atmosphere here was thicker than that for which his escape equipment was intended.
He tried to summon his concentration and grow new flesh, but failed. He realized that he was dying.
It was necessary to stop the draining of his life. There was a metal container nearby, large, with a hinged lid. His body a flaring agony, he rolled across the damp surface of the concrete and hooked his one undamaged leg across the lid of the container. He moved his weight against the oppressive gravity, rolling his body up the length of his leg. Outraged nerves wailed in his body. Fluid spattered the outside of the container.
The metal rang as he fell inside. Substances crackled under him. He gazed up into a night that glowed with reflected infrared. There were bits of organic stuff here, crushed and pressed flat, with dyes pressed onto them in patterns. He seized these with palps and cilia, tearing them into strips, pushing them against his leaking spiracles. Stopping the flow.
Organic smells came to him. There had been life here, but it had died.
He reached into his abdomen for his shifter, brought the device out, clasped it to his torn chest. If he could stop time for a while, he could heal.
The shifter hummed. It was warm against his cooling flesh. Time passed.
_____________
“So last night I got a call from my neighbor Sally ... “
Dimly, from inside his time cocoon, he heard the sound of the voice. It echoed faintly inside his skull.
“And Sally, she says, Hildy, she says, I just heard from my sister Margaret in California. You remember Margaret, she says. She went to school with you at St. Mary’s.”
There was a thud against the metal near his auditory palps. A silhouette against the glowing night. Arms reached for him.
Agony returned. He cried out, a hiss. The foreign touch climbed his body.
“Sure I remember Margaret, I says. She was a grade behind. The sisters were always after her ’cause she was a gumchewer.”
Something was taking hold of his shifter. He clutched it against him, tried to protest.
“It’s mine, bunky,” the voice said, fast and angry. “I saw it first!”
He saw a face. Pale flesh smudged with dirt, bared teeth, grey cilia just hanging from beneath an inorganic extrusion.
“Don’t,” he said. “I’m dying.”
“Shut up there. It’s mine.”
Pain began a slow crawl through his body. “You don’t understand,” he said. “There is a Swarm mother in this system.”
The voice droned. Things crackling and rang in the container as hands sorted through them. “So Margaret, Sally says, she married this engineer from Boeing. And they pull down fifty grand a year, at least. Vacations in Hawaii, in St. Thomas for Chrissake.”
“Please listen.” The pain was growing. He knew he had only a short time. “The Swarm mother has already developed intelligence. She perceived that my ship had penetrated her intrusion defenses, and she struck before I even knew I’d seen her.”
“But she doesn’t have to deal with my family, Sally says. She’s over on the other goddam coast, Sally says.”
His body was weeping scarlet. “The next stage will be a first-generation swarm. They will come to your planet, directed by the Swarm mother. Please listen.”
“So I got my mom onto the welfare and into this nice apartment, Sally says. But the welfare wants me and Margaret to give mom an extra five dollars a month. And Margaret, she says, she doesn’t have the money. Things are expensive on the Coast, she says.”
“You are in terrible danger. Please listen.”
Metal thudded again. The voice was growing fainter, as with distance. “So how easy are things here, Sally says. I got five kids and two cars and a mortgage, and Bill says things are a dead-end at the agency.”
“You will die. I can’t protect you. The Swarm. The Swarm.”
The other was gone, and he was dying. The stuff under him was soaking up his fluids. To breathe was an agony.
“It is cold here,” he said. Tears came from the sky, ringing against metal. There was acid in the tears.
_____________
Cold December rain tapped against the skylights. The drizzle had finally silenced the Salvation Army Santa on the corner. Maxim Travnicek lit a Russian cigaret and capped the bottle of schnapps. He would drink the rest later, to celebrate when his work was done.
He adjusted a control on his camouflage jumpsuit. He couldn’t afford to heat his entire loft and instead wore an electric suit meant to keep portly outdoorsmen warm while they crouched in duck blinds.
The long barnlike loft was lit by a cold row of fluorescents. Homebuilt tables were littered with molds, vats, ROM burners, tabletop micro-computers each with more computing power than was possessed by the entire world in 1950. Blowups of Leonardo’s drawings of male anatomy were stapled to the rafters.
Strapped to a table at the far end of the table was a tall naked man. He was hairless and the roof of his skull appeared to be transparent, but otherwise he looked like something out of one of Leonardo’s better wet dreams.
The man on the table was connected to other equipment by stout electric cables. His eyes were closed.
The man who Dr. Bushmill, one of his former colleagues at M.I.T., had once introduced to the public as “Czechoslovakia’s answer to Victor Frankenstein” stood from his folding chair and began to walk towards the man on the table. Bushmill had later become chairman of the department and sacked Travnicek at the earliest opportunity .
“Fuck your mother, Bushmill,” Travnicek said, in Slovak. The cigaret fluttered in his lips as he spoke. “And fuck you too, Victor Frankenstein. If you’d known jack shit about computer programming you would never have run into trouble.”
Travnicek took his reading glasses out of a pocket and peered at the controls on the flux generators. He was a forbiddingly tall man, hawk-nosed, coldly handsome. The comparison with Frankenstein had irked him. The image of the ill-fated resurrectionist had, it seemed, always followed him. He’d come to M.I.T. following his tenure at Ingolstadt—his first teaching job in the West would be at Frankenstein’s alma mater—and he’d hated every minute of his time in Bavaria.
He’d never had much use for Germans, especially as role models. Which may have explained his dismissal from Ingolstadt after five years .
After Ingolstadt and M.I.T. had come Texas A&M. His tenures were getting shorter, and A&M fit the pattern. He’d taken one look at the jackbooted ROTC cadets stomping around with their cropped hair, bull voices, and sabers, and the hair on the back of his neck rose. In the department chairman’s presence, he’d ground out a Russian cigaret on the carpet of the student lounge and muttered something about the Hitler Youth. The chairman had protested .
“I know a goddam fascist when I see one,” Travnicek said. His voice echoed in the vast lounge. “My whole family was all mowed down by the S.S. at Lidice. Seventeen Travniceks, dead on the cobbles. I only survived because I hid under their bodies. I suggest you fucking well quarantine this campus before the infection spreads.”
At A&M he’d lasted two years, the length of his contract. He’d been working on his own projects most of the time, anyway, and often didn’t bother to show up for his lectures.
Travnicek tapped cigaret ash onto the floor of the loft and glanced at the skylights. The rain appeared to be lessening. Good. He didn’t need Victor Frankenstein’s cheap theatrics, his thunder and lightning, as background for his work.
He straightened his tie as if for an invisible audience—he wore a tie and jacket under his jumpsuit, proper dress being important to him—and then he pressed the button that would start the flux generators. A low moan filled the loft. The fluorescents on the ceiling dimmed and flickered. Half went out. The moan became a shriek. St. Elmo’s fire danced among the roofbeams. There was an electric smell.
The flux generators screamed. The floor trembled. Travnicek’s reading glasses slid down his nose as he watched the dials .
Dimly, he heard a regular thumping. The lady in the apartment below was banging on her ceiling with a broomstick.
The scream reached its peak. Ultrasonics made Travnicek’s worktables dance and shattering crockery throughout the building. In the apartment below the television set imploded. Travnicek threw another switch.
The android on the table twitched as the energy from the flux generators was dumped into his body. The table glowed with St. Elmo’s fire. Travnicek bit through his cigaret. The glowing end fell unnoticed to the floor.
The sound from the generators began to die down. The sound of the broomstick did not, nor the dim threats from below.
“You’ll pay for that television, motherfucker!”
“Jam the broomstick up your ass, my darling,” said Travnicek. In German, an ideal language for dealing with the excremental .
The stunned flourescent lights began to flicker on again.
Leonardo’s stern drawings gazed down at the android as it opened its dark eyes. The flickering fluorescents provided a strobe effect that made the eyewhites seem unreal. The head turned; the eyes saw Travnicek, then focused. Under the transparent dome that topped the skull, a silver dish spun. The sound of the broomstick ceased.
Travnicek stepped up to the table. “How are you?” he asked.
“All monitored systems are functioning.” The android’s voice was deep and spoke American English.
Travnicek smiled and spat the stub of his cigaret to the floor. The cardboard mouthpiece made a dithering sound as it fell. “Who are you?” he asked.
The android’s eyes searched the loft deliberately. His voice was matter-of-fact. “I am Modular Man,” he said. “I am a multipurpose multifunctional sixth-generation machine intelligence, a flexible-response defensive attack system capable of independent action while equipped with the latest in weaponry.”
Travnicek grinned. “The Pentagon will love it,” he said. Then, “What are your orders?”
“To obey my creator, Dr. Maxim Travnicek. To guard his identity and well-being. To test myself and my equipment under combat conditions, by fighting enemies of society. To gain maximum publicity for the future Modular Men Enterprises in so doing. To preserve my existence and well-being.”
“Take that, Asimov,” Travnicek said. “What the hell do know about structuring robot priorities?” He beamed down at creation. “Your clothes and modules are kept in the cabinet. Take them, take your guns, and go out and find some enemies of society. Be back before dawn.”
The android lowered himself from the table and stepped to a metal cabinet. He swung open the door. “Flux-field insubstantiality,” he said, taking a plug-in unit off the shelf. With it he could control his flux generators so as to rotate him slightly out of the plane of existence, allowing him to move through solid matter. “Flight, eight hundred miles per hour maximum.” Another unit came down, one that would allow the flux generators to manipulate gravity and inertia so as to produce flight .
The android moved a finger down his chest. An invisible seam opened. He peeled back the synthetic flesh and his alloy chestplate and revealed his interior. A miniature flux generator gave off a slight aura of St. Elmo’s fire. The android plugged the two modules into his alloy skeleton, then sealed his chest. He drew on a flexible navy blue jump suit.
“X-ray laser cannon. Grenade launcher with sleep gas grenades.” The android unzipped two seams on the jump suit, revealing the two slots on his shoulders, opened of their own accord. He drew two long tubes out of the cabinet. Each weapon had projections attached to their undersides. The android slotted the projections into his shoulders, then took his hands away. The gun barrels spun, traversing in all possible directions .
“All modular equipment functional,” the android said.
“Get your dome out of here,” said Travnicek.
There was a crackle and a taste of ozone. The android rose, at gradually increasing speed, right through the ceiling, his insubstantiality field providing a blurring effect. Travnicek gazed at the place on the ceiling where the android had risen and smiled in satisfaction. He turned and walked the length of the silent loft. He uncorked the bottle of vodka and raised the bottle on high in a toast.
“New Prometheus,” he said, “my ass.”
_____________
Raindrops passed through the android’s insubstantial body as he spiraled into the sky. Below, the damp streets reflected red and green Christmas lights. The Empire State Building fired a tall column of colored spotlights into the low clouds. Beyond, in Central Park, the Queen Elizabeth lay in a blaze of light. Manhattan was aglow.
The android flew toward the darkest part of the island. In the trees, beyond where the Queen Elizabeth gleamed like a river of diamonds. Central Park.
The flux-field dimmed and he was solid again. He lowered his speed, hovering, rain batting on his radar dome. Infra-red receptors in his eyes clicked on. The park glowed dimly. A brighter glow lurked below, under a tree, near one of the walkways that stretched toward Fifth Avenue from where the Queen Elizabeth lay moored in its concrete cradle.
Two streetlights that arced above this part of the path seemed to have been shattered.
Calculations flickered through his cybernetic mind. “Enemy of society,” the android thought. “High probability.”
He settled into a tree to watch. A cold wind blew into his face a mist of raindrops torn from the leaves. Late-night Christmas shoppers, heading from the boutiques in the liner, might be walking down the path. If the character under the tree turned out to be a mugger, as seemed likely, the android would swoop down and make his collar.
Something caught his attention. It was not so much an infra-red glow, but rather the absence of a glow. He looked to his right, behind the man under the tree.
A moving darkness was drifting through the park.
Like an intent and deadly wave the blackness accelerated toward the man under the tree. The android could see nothing inside the cloud, either through his normal vision or infra-red.
The android’s radar reached out, saw a human figure inside the blackness. He consulted his memory, computed probabilities, decided to watch.
The darkness reached the man under the tree, flowed over him. There was a cry of surprise, then of fear. The android heard the sound of a pair of blows, then hurried movement. The radar image was confused and the android could not be certain what was happening.
The sea of darkness seemed to fall inward on itself. When it was gone, the man who had lurked beneath the tree was swinging upside-down from a limb, a rope tied to one ankle. The other leg flailed in the air. The wind whipped at his jacket, which was hanging down around his eyes.
Standing on the sparse turf beneath was a black man in a wide black cloak. There was a strip of orange tied over his eyes, a mask. The android floated silently down from the tree and landed near him.
“You’re the one they call Black Shadow, yes?” he said.
The man in the cloak jumped. Then recovered.
“Yeah. I’m Black Shadow. Who the hell are you?” The voice was low, growling. Faintly amused, faintly menacing.
“I’m Modular Man. I’m a sixth-generation machine intelligence.”
The man in the cloak looked at him for a long moment. “Do tell,” he said.
“I’m programmed to fight the enemies of society.”
Black Shadow smiled wickedly. “You’re a little late with this one,” he said. “Better luck next time.”
“Jesus!” said the man. He was a well-built white man with a pockmarked face. “Get me out of here. That guy’s crazy!”
“I was watching him for some time,” said the android, “and he didn’t do anything.”
“Yeah!” the man said. “I didn’t do nothing!”
“He had a slapper in his jacket pocket,” said the man in the cloak, “and a knife up his sleeve. He had a grownup slingshot in his back pocket for putting out street lights and maybe hurting people. He had over two hundred dollars in miscellaneous bills jammed in his pockets and credit cards in the names of eight people, none of them his own.” He paused for a moment. “I think,” he added, “the circumstantial evidence in this case is kind of strong.”
“Let me down, man,” the man said. “I think you broke a couple ribs.”
“Crime,” said Black Shadow, “is a calling fraught with hazard.” He took the credit cards in his hands, stacked them, and tore them neatly across. He threw the fragments under the tree, along with the slapper, the knife, the slingshot. He contemplated the swinging man.
“And in Central Park, too,” he said. “What a goddam cliché. This asshole has no imagination at all.” He looked at the android, and his look changed to one of curiosity. “What’s that thing on your head?”
“A radar dome.”
“No shit. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The android smiled. “No one has.”
The wind gusted madly through the trees. Black Shadow’s cloak blew out behind him. The man on the end of the rope swung. He flailed as he began to spin.
Black Shadow looked at the chronometer on his wrist. “Want to test Galileo’s theorem? Our mugger here should take the same amount of time to complete an oscillation regardless of the range of the swing.”
“Jesus Christ! Ain’t nobody gonna help me?”
“Pendulums,” said Black Shadow, “either say ‘tick tock,’ or they say nothing at all.” He frowned. “Your thrashing around is raising havoc with Galileo. As I scientist, I can’t permit this.”
He stepped closer to the mugger, obscuring him from the android’s sight. Modular Man heard the sound of a blow. When Black Shadow stepped away, the man hung limply. Blood began to drip on the sward.
“There. Just like Galileo’s lamp.”
“You didn’t kill him, did you?”
“Hell, no. I just treated him to a little of what he’s been giving to the tourists, that’s all. Call it my innate sense of fair play.” He shook rain off his cloak. “Hey,” he said. “Do you want to go up to Aces High? There aren’t any criminals around on a night like this anyhow. I’ve been patrolling the park since dusk and this asshole’s the only person I’ve seen.” He flourished a wad of bills. “Our friend here is buying.”
The android contemplated him. “According to my memory, you’re wanted for murder in Oklahoma.”
Black Shadow took a step back. “Are you a deputy sheriff in Tulsa County or what?” he asked. “What do you care what a redneck grand jury decided?”
“No. I was just wondering if you’re worried about someone going after you. Just, say, for the publicity.”
“Headlines in Tulsa do not translate to eternal fame in the Big Apple.”
The android thought about this for a moment. “I think you’re right,” he said. “Aces High sounds good to me.
“I’ll meet you there,” Black Shadow said. “Tell Hiram you’ re there to meet the Wall Walker.” He looked amused. “Hiram would fuss if he knew a wanted man was eating at his place, so I just wear this mask and street clothes and call myself by another name. It drives Hiram crazy. He can’t figure out if I really have powers or just real good grip boots.” He pulled his cloak about himself. The cloak seemed to expand, covering him in a shroud of darkness. The blackness expanded, covering the android, and then flowed away, toward the golden pillar of the Empire State Building.
Wind gusted hard across the park, bringing the sound of Christmas bells tired to the tail of one of the handsome cab’s horses. The mugger twisted on the end of his line.
The android rose silently into the sky.
_____________
“Eight million people in this shithole of a town,” Travnicek said, his breath rising frozen in front of his lips, “and you couldn’t find one single enemy of society?”
“Does Black Shadow count?”
“He fucking well does!” Travnicek’s lips turned white. “He’s a wanted man, yes? Why the hell didn’t you turn him into charcoal and fly the ashes to Tulsa for a few headlines and a reward?”
“I reasoned,” said the android, “that headlines in Tulsa do not translate to eternal fame in the Big Apple.”
Travnicek looked petulant.
“Black Shadow also introduced me to Fatman at the Aces High,” the android continued, “And Fatman introduced me to two city councilmen, an ex-governor, Dr. Tachyon, and an illustrator for King Features Syndicate. I’m trying to improve my contacts “
Travnicek adjusted the warmth control of his jumpsuit. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “But if you can’t find anyone better in a few days, I want you to incinerate the little creep. You won’t get the key to the city, but maybe you can get a headline in the Post.”
The sound of the Salvation Army Santa jingled up from the corner. Travnicek scowled at it. “There are enough enemies of society within three blocks of here to choke The Tombs for the next year,” he said. “I can’t even walk to the store without half a dozen junkies asking me for a quarter.” He looked up at the android. “Clean up the neighborhood. Starting this afternoon.”
“My paying so much attention to a small part of town might seem odd, Dr. Travnicek. If you’ll forgive the suggestion.”
Travnicek thought for a moment. “Yeah, okay. It might give things away.” He grinned. “In that case, you’ll have to do my shopping for me.”
The android was expressionless. “You’ll have to tell me what you want,” he said.
Travnicek looked thoughtful. Stroked his chin. “In a minute,” he said. “First, hand me a screwdriver and open your dome. I want to make a few adjustments.”
_____________
“Hey buddy. What’s wrong with your head?” The android heard the comment at least a half-dozen times as he walked through the Minute Mart buying groceries. He was growing tired of explaining about his radar dome. He paid for the groceries with the money Travnicek gave him, spun into the air, and flew them with great speed through the roof of Travnicek’s loft. While Travnicek drank Urquell and cooked up garlic sausage and cabbage, his creation began a flying patrol over the city. Even with his radar he could find little in the way of society’s enemies beside three-card monte players hustling Christmas shoppers up and down Fifth Avenue .
Heading downtown, he observed a crash between a moving van tearing along West Broadway and a UPS truck just wandered up from the Holland Tunnel. No one was hurt, but the android spent a few moments picking up the UPS truck and disentangling it from the van. The van’s horn was jammed on from the collision and the blast was so loud that until he was airborne, he failed to hear the city’s air-raid sirens that were rising to a high banshee chorus.
He increased his speed till the wind turned to a roar in his ears Infra-red receptors snapped on. The guns on his shoulders spun and fired test bursts at the sky. His radar quested out, touching rooftops, streets, air traffic, his machine mind comparing the radar images with those generated earlier, searching for discrepancies.
There seemed to be something wrong with the radar image of the Empire State Building. A large object was climbing up its side, and there seemed to be several small objects, about the size of people, orbiting the golden spire. The android altered course toward midtown and accelerated.
A forty-five-foot ape was climbing the building. Broken shackles hung from its wrists. A blonde woman screamed for help from one of the ape’s fists. Flying people rocketed around the creature, and by the time the android arrived the cloud of orbiting heroes had grown dense, spinning like electrons around a hairy, snarling nucleus. The air resounded with the sound of rockets, wings, force fields, propellers, eructations. Guns, wands, ray projectors, and less identifiable weapons were brandished in the direction of the ape. None were fired.
The ape, with a cretinous determination, continued to climb the building. Windows crackled as he drove his toes through them. Faint shrieks of alarm were heard with each crash.
The android matched speeds with a woman with talons, feathers, and a thirty-foot wingspan.
“The second goddam ape escape this year,” she said. “Always he grabs a blonde and always he climbs the Empire State Building. Why a fucking blonde, I want to know?”
The android observed that the winged woman had lustrous brown hair. “Why isn’t anyone doing anything?” he asked.
“If we shoot the ape, he might crush the girl, or drop her. Usually the godalmighty Great and Powerful fucking Turtle just pries the chimp’s fingers apart and wafts the girl to the ground, and then we all cut loose. The ape regenerates, so we can’t hurt him permanently. But the Turtle isn’t here. He’s probably shacked up with some bimbo in that shell of his.”
“I think I see the problem now.”
“Hey. By the way. What’s wrong with your head?”
The android didn’t answer. Instead, with a crackle, he turned on his insubstantiality flux-field. He altered course and swooped toward the ape. It growled at him, baring its teeth. The android smelled rank breath. He sailed into the middle of the hand that held the blonde girl, receiving an impressionist image of wild pale hair, tears, pleading blue eyes.
“Holy fuck,” said the girl.
Modular Man rotated his insubstantial X-ray laser within the ape’s hand and fired a full-strength burst down the length of its arm. The ape reacted as if stung, opening his hand. The blonde tumbled out. The ape’s eyes widened in horror.
The android turned off his flux-field, seized the girl in his now-substantial arms, and flew away.
The ape’s eyes grew even more terrified. It had escaped nine times in the last thirty years and by now it knew what to expect.
Behind him, as he flew, the android heard a barrage of explosions, cvrackles, shots, rockets, hissing rays, screams, thuds, and futile roars. There was a final quivering moan, and then the android’s radar detected the shadow of a long-armed giant tumbling down the façade of the skyscraper. There was a sizzle, and a net of cold blue flame appeared over Fifth Avenue; the ape fell into it, bounced once, and then was borne, unconscious and smouldering, toward its home at Central Park Zoo.
The android looked at the streets below for video cameras. He began to descend.
“Would you mind hovering for a little while?” the blonde said. “If you’re going to land in front of the media, I’d like to fix my makeup first, okay?”
“Okay.” He began to orbit above the cameras. They pointed up at him. He could see his reflection in their distant lenses.
“My name is Cyndi,” the blonde said. “I’m an actress. I just got here from Minnesota a couple days ago. This might be my big break.”
“Mine, too,” said the android. She smiled at him. “By the way “ he added, “I think the ape showed excellent taste.”
“You’re pretty good looking, yourself,” she said. “But if you’re gonna go on the stage, you’d better do something about that dome of yours.”
_____________
“Not bad, not bad,” Travnicek mused, watching on his television at a tape of the android, after a brief interview with the press, rising into the heavens with Cyndi in his arms. He was particularly pleased with the android’s deadpan announcement that his creator “had equipped me for this and other eventualities.”
He turned to his creation. “Why the fucking hell did you have your hands over your head the whole time?”
“My radar dome. I’m getting self-conscious. Everyone asks me what’s wrong with my head.”
“A blushingly self-conscious multi-purpose defensive attack system,” Travnicek said. “Jesus Christ. Just what the world needs.”
The cute couple in blazers who read the news were giving a bulletin from the Mayor’s office that offered praise of the city’s new heroic sixth-generation machine intelligence.
“Can I make myself a skullcap or something?” the android asked. “I’m not going to get on many magazine covers the way I look now.”
“Yeah, go ahead. Wait a minute. Here’s something.” Travnicek turned his attention back to the television. The older, more masculine half of the cute couple was reporting that the ape had been set free rather than escaped on its own, that its alloy shackles had been twisted and broken like licorice, and that the only clue was a playing card, the jack of diamonds, that had been left on the scene.
Another jack of diamonds, just moments later, was found at the Museum of Modern Art, where Picasso’s Guernica, on loan from the government of Spain, had been stolen in front of several dozen onlookers. The painting had, the report went, simply folded in on itself and disappeared. Then the wall behind it was smashed in, as if by an invisible wrecking ball. The Spanish Embassy refused to confirm or deny the existence of a ransom demand .
“Get moving over to the Spanish Embassy,” Travnicek snapped. “And offer to deliver that ransom. If they won’t cooperate, wait till later tonight and turn insubstantial, sneak in, and get a look at the ransom demand.”
“Yes, sir,” said Modular Man. He turned on his flux-field and flew up through the ceiling.
“And bring me some croissants in the morning!” Travnicek called after him.
_____________
Leaning against the padded lounge bar with one metal boot on the brass rail, a man dressed in some kind of complicated battle armor was addressing a woman in red tights who, in odd inattentive moments, kept turning transparent. “Pardon me,” he said. “But didn’t I see you at the ape escape?”
“Your table’s almost ready, Modular Man,” said Hiram. “Sorry, but I didn’t realize that Fortunato would invite all friends.”
“No hurry, Hiram. My date hasn’t arrived yet, anyway. Thank you.”
“There are a couple photographers waiting, too.”
“Let them get some pictures after we’re seated, then chase them out. Okay?”
“Sure.” Hiram, owner of the Aces High restaurant, had a perpetual offer of a free multi-course meal to anyone who succeeded in rescuing the inevitable blonde during the periodic ape escapes.
“Say,” he added, “that was a good stunt this afternoon I was ready to use my gas gun on the ape if it ever climbed this high. I thought if I got it laughing hard it might put the girl down.”
“Good idea, Fatman. I bet that would have worked.”
The semi-heroic restauranteur gave a pleased smile and bustled out, giving an odd look to the amused black man in the orange mask as he left.
Black Shadow, known here as Wall Walker, ordered another round of drinks. Behind him freezing rain drummed on the glass patio doors. The observation deck was two inches deep in hail.
“No luck at the Spanish Embassy,” the android said. “I looked through all the papers in their offices. Maybe the insurance company’s handling it.” He finished his malt whisky and lowered the glass.
“Hey, Mod Man,” Black Shadow said. “I was wondering. Does that whisky actually effect you? Make you high?”
“Not really, no. I just put it in a holding tank with the food and then let my flux generators break it down to energy. But somehow ...” He accepted the new glass of whisky with a smile. “It just feels good to stand here at the bar and drink it.”
“Yeah. I know what you mean.”
“And I can taste, of course. I don’t know what’s supposed to taste good or bad, though, so I just try everything. I’m working it out.” He held the single-malt under his nose, sniffed, then tasted. Taste receptors crackled. He felt what seemed to be a minor explosion in his nasal cavity.
“Are you going to get involved in this jack of diamonds thing?” he asked.
“Depends,” Black Shadow said. “The sorts of clues available are best exploited by the authorities. They can look into their computers and so on, see whether this sort of thing has turned up before. I can ask around on the streets, of course, but the F.B.I. or somebody might come up with the same information a lot quicker. But if the bad guy gets identified, or if he gets caught and then set free ...” He frowned. “I might take an interest. How about you?”
“I have nothing else to work on.”
“Yeah. But with those guns and no hair and that skullcap, you’re not exactly cut out for undercover work.”
“That can change,” Modular Man said. “Maybe I could wear a toupee.” He saw Cyndi step into the lounge and stand blinking in the dim lighting. She was wearing an azure something that left most of her sternum exposed. The android waved at her. She grinned hello and began working her way around the bar.
“Well,” said Black Shadow, “I can see you two have a lot to talk about. I guess I’ll just sidle off into the shadows. As I do so well.”
“Want to go patrolling later?”
“In this weather? Pneumonia’ll get the bad guys before we do.”
“I’m not susceptible to cold. But you have a point.” Modular Man noticed that Cyndi’s graceful spine seemed even more on view than was her front. He smiled.
Cyndi smiled back. “I like the cap.”
“Thanks,” said the android. “I made it myself.”
Hiram arrived to show them to their table. Flashbulbs began popping.
Back in the lounge, the man in combat armor tried to put his arm around the woman in red tights. His arm passed through her.
She looked up at him with smiling brown eyes.
“I was waiting for that,” she said. “I’m in an astral body, schmuck.”
_____________
The authorities reconstructed the incident later. They concluded that at approximately ten A.M. on a cold, drizzly December morning, a Con Ed employee named Frank Constantine, thankful to be dry and underground as he inspected a tunnel on the fringes of Jokertown, inhaled a wild-card spore that had been waiting in the tunnel for thirty-six years. Constantine immediately grew ill, and his partner, a sixty-year-old near-retiree named Rathbone, called for help. Before aid arrived Constantine was transformed into something resembling a mucous-green gelatinous mass that promptly engulfed the unfortunate Rathbone and then erupted from the nearest manhole into the streets. Constantine headed into Jokertown and succeeded in devouring two Christmas shoppers and one hot pretzel vendor before the emergency was called in and the sirens began to wail.
Frank Constantine had drawn a royal flush.
Modular Man was early on the scene. As he dived into the canyon street, Constantine looked like a bowl of gelatine thirty feet wide that had been in the refrigerator far too long. The gelatine was stuffed with black currants that were Constantine’s victims, which he was slowly digesting.
The android hovered over the creature and began firing his X-ray laser, trying to avoid the currants. The gelatine began to boil where the silent, invisible beam struck. Constantine made a futile effort to reach his flying tormentor with a pseudopod, but failed. The creature began to roll in the direction of an alley, looking for escape. It was not bright enough, apparently, to seek shelter in the sewers.
The creature squeezed into the alley and rushed down it. The android continued to fire. Bits were sizzling away and Constantine seemed to be losing energy rapidly. Modular Man looked ahead and saw a bent figure ahead in the alley.
She was dressed in several layers of clothing, all worn, all dirty. There was a floppy felt hat pulled down over a Navy watch cap, and a pair of shopping bags hanging from her arms. Tangled grey hair hung from under the cap. She was rummaging in a dumpster, tossing crumpled newspapers over her shoulder into the alley. Modular Man increased his speed, firing radar-directed shots over his shoulder as he barreled through the cold drizzly air. He dropped to the pavement in front of the dumpster, his knees cushioning the impact.
“So I says to Maxine, I says ... “ the lady was saying.
“Excuse me,” said the android. He seized the lady and sped upwards. Behind him, writhing under the barrage of coherent X-rays, Constantine was evaporating.
“Maxine says, my mother broke her hip this morning, and you won’ t believe ... “ The old lady flailed at him while she continued her monologue. He silently absorbed an elbow to his jaw and floated to a landing on the nearest roof. He let go his passenger. She turned to him flushed with anger.
“Okay, bunky,” she said. “Time to see what Hildy’s got in her bag.”
“I’ll fly you down later,” Modular Man said. He was already turning to pursue the creature when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the lady opening her bag.
There was something black in there. The black thing was getting bigger.
The android tried to move, to fly away. Something had hold of him and wouldn’t let him go.
Whatever was in the shopping bag was getting larger. It was getting larger very quickly. Whatever had hold of the android was dragging him toward the shopping bag.
“Stop,” he said simply. The thing wouldn’t stop. The android tried to fight it, but his laser discharges had cost him a lot of power and he didn’t seem to have the strength left.
The blackness grew until it enveloped him. He felt as if he were falling. Then he felt nothing at all.
_____________
New York’s aces, responding to the emergency, finally conquered Frank Constantine. What was left of him, blobs of dark green in the streets, melted in the steady drizzle. His victims, partially eaten, were identified by the non-edible credit cards and laminated I.D. they carried. Some of their Christmas presents were still intact.
By nightfall, the hardened inhabitants of Jokertown were referring to Frank Constantine as the Amazing Colossal Snot Monster. They considered him lucky. He hadn’t had to live with what he had become.
The android awoke in a dumpster in an alley behind 52nd Street. He fought his way up from among the paper sacks and plastic garbage bags, and flung back the lid with a bang. Carefully he looked up and down the alley.
There was no one in sight.
_____________
“So,” Travnicek said. His breath was frosting in front of his face and condensing on his reading glasses. He took the spectacles off. “You were displaced about fifty city blocks spatially and moved one hour forward timewise, yes?”
“Apparently. When I came out of the dumpster I found that the fight in Jokertown had been over for almost an hour. Comparison with my internal clock showed a discrepancy of seventy-two minutes, fifteen point three three three seconds.”
“Interesting. You say the bag lady seemed not to be working with the blob thing?”
“It seems most likely it was a coincidence they were in the same street. Her monologue did not seem to be strictly rational. I do not think she is mentally sound.”
Travnicek turned up the heater control on his jumpsuit. The morning drizzle had been blown out to sea by a cold front that seemed to have come straight from Siberia. The temperature had dropped twelve degrees in two hours and frost was forming on the skylights of the loft in mid-afternoon. Travnicek lit a Russian cigaret, turned on a hot plate to boil some water for coffee, and then put his hands in his warm jumpsuit pockets.
“I want to look in your memory,” he said. “Open up your chest.”
Modular Man obeyed. Travnicek took a pair of cables from a minicomputer stacked under an array of video equipment and jacked them into sockets in the android’s chest, near his shielded machine brain. “Back up your memory onto the computer,” he said. As the android followed instructions, flickering effects from the flux generator were reflected in Travnicek’s intent eyes. The computer signaled the task complete. “Button up,” Travnicek said. As the android removed the jacks and closed his chest, Travnicek turned on the video, then touched controls. A video picture began racing backwards.
He reached the place where the bag lady appeared and ran and re-ran the image several times. He moved to a computer terminal and tapped some instructions. The image of the bag lady’s face filled the screen. The android looked at the woman’s lined, grimy face, the straggling hair, the worn and tattered clothing. He noticed for the first time that she was missing some teeth. Travnicek stood and went back to his one-room living quarters in the back of the loft and came back with a battered Polaroid camera. He used what was left of the roll, three pictures, snapping frozen the image of the bag lady. He gave one to his creation .
“There. You can show it to people. Ask if they’ve seen her.”
“Yes, sir.
Travnicek took thumbtacks and stuck the other two pictures to the low beams of the ceiling, next to newsprint photographs from USA Today and the Times society section, each of which showed the android dining with Cyndi at Aces High.
“I want you to find out where the bag lady is,” Travnicek said. “I want you to get what’s in her bag. And I want you to find out where she got it.” He shook his head, dripping cigaret ash on the floor, and muttered, “I don’t think she looks like a crackpot inventor. I think she’s just found this thing somewhere.”
“Do you want me to concentrate exclusively on the bag lady? Or should I work on the Jack of Diamonds case also?”
Travnicek blew warm breath on his freezing fingertips. “If you can think of anything else to do other than wait for this critter to strike again. But the bag lady’s your priority, yes?” He pulled a chair up to his video console. “I’m going to run through your memory of the trip to the embassy. I might notice something you hadn’t.” He began to speed backwards through the android’s digital memory.
The android winced deep in his computer mind. He began talking quickly, hoping to distract his inventor from the pictures .
“I could go through the insurance company just as I went through the embassy. Or perhaps police headquarters—I’m sure they’d have everything on file. Yes—that course certainly seems likely to stand the best chance of success. Which police precinct should I try—the one that handled the first call, or headquarters somewhere?”
“Piss in a chalice!” exclaimed Travnicek, in German. The android felt another wince coming on. Travnicek turned to Modular Man in surprise.
“You’re screwing that actress lady!” he said. “That Cyndi what’s-her-name!” The android resigned himself to what was about to come.
“That’s correct,” he said.
“You’re just a goddam toaster,” Travnicek said. “What the hell made you think you could fuck?”
“You gave me the equipment,” the android said. “And you implanted emotions in me. And on top of that, you made me good-looking.”
“Holy shit.” Travnicek turned his eyes from Modular Man to the video and back again. “I gave you the equipment so you could pass as a human if you had to. And I just gave you the emotions so you could understand the enemies of society. I didn’t think you’d do anything.” He tossed his cigaret butt to the floor. “Was it fun?” he asked.
“It was pleasant, yes.”
“Your blonde chippie seems to be having a good time.” Travnicek cackled and reached for the controls. “I want to start this party at the beginning.”
“Didn’t you want to look at the bag lady again?”
“First things first. Get me an Urquell.” He looked up as another thought occurred to him. “Do we have any popcorn?”
“No!” The android’s abrupt answer was tossed over his shoulder.
Modular Man brought the beer and watched while Travnicek had his first sip. The Czech looked up in annoyance.
“I don’t like the way you’re looking at me,” he said.
The android considered this. “Would you prefer me to look at you some other way?” he asked.
“Go stand in the corner, microwave-oven-that-fucks!” Travnicek bellowed. “Turn your goddam head away, video-unit-that-fucks!”
For the rest of the afternoon, while his creation stood in a corner of the loft, Travnicek watched the video and enjoyed himself enormously. He watched the best parts several times, cackling at what he saw. Then, slowly, his laughter dimmed. A cold, uncertain feeling was creeping up the back of his neck. He began casting glances at the stolid figure of the android. He had never anticipated anything like this. He turned off the vid unit, dropped his cigaret butt in the Urquell bottle, then lit another.
The android was showing a surprising degree of independence. Travnicek reviewed elements of his programming, the expert-systems logic by which the android was allowed, in imitation of human thought patterns, to reprogram itself, within limits, in order to solve various problems without recourse to the programmer. Travnicek’s chief innovation in expert-systems programming had been to add to his programming a simulation, not only of human problem-solving methods, but an abstract of human emotion, gleaned from a variety of expert sources ranging from Freud to Dr. Spock. It had been an intellectual challenge for Travnicek to do the programming—transforming the illogicalities of human behavior into the cold rhetoric of a program. He’d performed the task during his second year at Texas A&M, when he’d barely gone out of his quarters the whole year and felt he had to set himself a large task in order to keep from being driven crazy by the lunatic environment of a university that seemed an embodiment of the collective unconscious fantasies of Stonewall Jackson and Albert Speer. Travnicek had never been particularly interested in human psychology as such—passion, he had long ago decided, was not only foolish but genuinely boring, a waste of time. But putting passion into a program, yes, that was interesting.
He wondered how his expert-systems logic had interacted with human passion. The android was capable of teaching himself, of learning from experience. Had the machine-part of him not only made use of the emotion program, but somehow implanted it within his own programming? And was the emotion, now implanted, evolving as the expert-systems logic evolved?
From the evidence of the video memory, Modular Man had a considerable, perhaps (if Travnicek’s own experience was anything to go by) abnormally large libido. What the hell else did he have inside that perpetually-evolving machine consciousness of his?
For a moment a tremor of fear went through Travnicek. The ghost of Victor Frankenstein’s creation loomed for a moment in his mind. Was a rebellion on the part of the android possible? Could he evolve hostile passions against his creator? But no—there were overriding imperatives that Travnicek had hardwired into the system. Modular Man could not evolve away his prime directives as long as his computer consciousness was physically intact, any more than a human could, unassisted, evolve away his genetic makeup in a single lifetime.
Travnicek began to feel a growing comfort. He looked at the android with a kind of admiration. He felt pride that he’d programmed such a fast learner.
“You’re not bad, toaster,” he said finally, turning off the video. “Reminds me of myself in the old days.” He raised an admonishing finger. “But no screwing tonight. Go find me the bag lady.”
Modular Man’s voice was muffled as he stood with his face to a juncture of the wall. “Yes, sir,” he said.
_____________
“I am beginning to realize,” said the android, raising a hot buttered rum to his lips, “that my creator is a hopeless sociopath.”
Black Shadow considered this. “I suspect, if you don’t mind a touch of theology, this just puts you in the same boat with the rest of us,” he said.
“He’s beginning to run my memories for his amusement. I’m going to have to erase this before he sees it.”
“I suppose you could run away. Last I heard, slavery was illegal. He’s not even paying you minimum wage, I suppose.”
“I’m not a person. I’m not human. Machines do not have rights.”
Black Shadow smiled. “My record demonstrates that I have little respect for these sorts of legal technicalities. My advice is to run for it and worry afterward if he can bring you back.”
The android shook his head. “It won’t work. I have hardwired inhibitions against disobeying him, disobeying his instructions, or revealing his identity in any way.”
“He’s thorough, I’ll hand that to him.” Black Shadow looked at Modular Man carefully. “Why’d he build you, anyway?”
“He was going to mass-market me and sell me to the military. But I think he’s having so much fun playing with me that he may never get around to selling my rights to the Pentagon.”
The vigilante smiled. “Personally, I’d be thankful for that.”
“I wouldn’t know.” The android signaled for another drink, then reached into one of his inner pockets. He showed Black Shadow the Polaroid of the bag lady.
“Where would I find this person?” he asked.
“She looks like a shopping bag lady.”
“She is a shopping bag lady.”
The masked man laughed. “Haven’t you been listening to the broadcasts? You know how many thousands of those women there are in this town? There’s a recession going on out there. Winos, runaways, people out of a job or out of luck, people who got kicked out of mental institutions because of state cutbacks on funding ... Jesus—and on a night like this, too. You know it’s already the coldest night for this date in recorded history? They’ve had to open up churches, police stations—all sorts of places so the vagrants won’t freeze to death. And a lot of the vagrants won’t go to any kind of shelter, because they’re too scared of the authorities or because they’re just too crazy to realize they’re gonna need help. I don’t envy you, Mod Man, not at all. The dumpsters’ll be full of dead people tomorrow. “
“I’ll start with the shelters, I guess. “
“You want to find her before she freezes to death, try the trashcan fires first, the shelters later.” He frowned at the picture again. “Why are you trying to find her, anyway?”
“I think ... she may be a witness to something.”
“Right. Well. Good luck, then.”
The android glanced over his shoulder at the patio observation deck with its glistening skin of ice. Beyond the rail Manhattan gleamed at him coldly, with a clarity that he hadn’t before seen, as if the buildings, the people, the lights had all been frozen inside a vast crystal. It was as if the city were no closer than the stars, and as incapable as they of giving warmth .
Inside his mind, the android performed a purely mental shudder. He wanted to stay here in the warmth of the Aces High, going through the, for him, perfectly abstract motions of raising a warm drink to his lips. There was something comforting in it, in spite of the logical pointlessness of the act. He did not entirely understand the impulse, only knew it for a fact. The human part of his programming, presumably.
But there were restrictions placed on his desires, and one of those was obedience. He could stay at the Aces High only so long as it could help him in his mission of finding the bag lady.
He finished the hot buttered rum and said goodbye to the Black Shadow. After a phone call to Cyndi telling her he would be working tonight, he’d be spending the rest of the night on the streets.
The legions of the night were endless. The android’s abstract knowledge of the New York underclass, the fact that there were thousands of people, perhaps tens of thousands, who drifted among the glass towers and solid brownstones in an existence almost as remote from that of the buildings’ inhabitants as denizens of Mars .. the abstract digitalize facts were not, somehow, adequate to describe the reality, the clusters of men who passed bottles around ashcan fires, the dispossessed who lived behind walls of cardboard, the insane who hugged themselves in alleyways or subway entrances, chanting the litany of the mad. It was as if a spell of evil had fallen on the city, that part of the population had been subjected to war or devastation, made homeless refugees, while the others had been enchanted so as not to see them.
The android found two dead, the last of their warmth gone from them. He left these in their newspaper coffins and went on. He found others that were dying or ill and took them to hospitals. Others ran from him. Some pretended to gaze at the bag lady’s picture, cocking the Polaroid up to look at the picture in the light of a trashcan fire, and then asked for money in return for a sighting that was obviously false.
At four in the morning the android found her. He was walking through the gymnasium of a private prep school that had been opened to maybe eight hundred vagrants. There were cots for about half, apparently acquired from some National Guard Depot, and the others were sleeping on the floor. The big room echoed to the sound of snores, cries, the wail of children. Modular Man walked down the long rows, scanning left and right.
And there she was. Walking among the rows of cots, mumbling to herself, dragging her heavy bags. She looked up at the same moment that the android saw her, and there was a mutual shock of recognition, a snaggletoothed, malevolent grin.
The android was airborne in a picosecond of his lightspeed thought. He wanted to be clear of any innocent bystanders if she was going to unleash whatever it was she had in her bag. He had barely left the floor before his flux-force field snapped on, crackling around his body. The bag-thing was not going to be able to seize anything solid.
Radar quested out, the gas-grenade launcher on his left shoulder whirred as it aimed. His shoulder took the recoil. The grenade became substantial as soon as it left the flux-field but kept its momentum. Opaque gas billowed up around the bag lady.
She smiled to herself. The android could see a dim glow surrounding her. A force-field of her own, keeping the sleep gas away.
The bag lady opened her shopping bag. The android could see the blackness lying there. He felt something cold pass through him, something that tried to tug at his insubstantial frame. The steel girders supporting the ceiling rang like chimes above his head.
“Sonofabitch,” she said.
The bag lady’s crooked smile died.
“You remind me of Shaun.”
Modular Man’s flight crested near the ceiling. He was going to dive at her, turn substantial at the last second, make a grab for the shopping bag, and hope it didn’t eat him.
The bag lady began grinning again. As the android reached his pushover point just above her, she pulled the shopping bag over her head.
It swallowed her. Her head disappeared into it, followed by the rest of her body. Her hands, clutching the end of the bag, pulled the bag after her into the void. The bag folded into itself and vanished.
“That’s impossible,” somebody said.
The android searched the room carefully. The bag lady was not to be found.
Ignoring the growing disturbance below, he drifted upward, through the ceiling. The cold lights of Manhattan appeared around him. He rose alone into the night.
“Goddam the woman!” Travnicek said. His hand, which was holding a letter, trembled with rage. “I’ve been evicted!” He brandished the letter. “Disturbances!” he muttered. “Unsafe equipment! Sixty fucking days!” He began to stomp on the floor with his heavy boots, trying deliberately to rattle the apartment below. Breath frosted from his every word. “The bitch!” he bellowed. “I know her game! She just wanted me to fix the place up at my own expense so she could evict me and then charge higher rent. I didn’t spend a fortune in improvements, so now she wants to find another chump. Some member of the fucking gentrifying class.” He looked up at the android, patiently waiting with a carry-out bag of hot croissants and heavily-sugared coffee in a foam cup.
“I want you to get into her office tonight and trash the place,” Travnicek said. “Leave nothing intact, not a piece of paper, not a chair. I want only mangled furniture and confetti.”
“Yes, sir,” the android said. Resigned to it.
“The Lower East fucking Side,” Travnicek said. “This neighborhood’s starting to get pretensions.” He took his coffee from the android’s hand while he continued stomping the particle board floor .
He looked over his shoulder at his creation. barked. “Are you looking for the bag lady or what?”
“Yes, sir. But since the gas launcher didn’t work, I thought I’d change to the dazzler.”
Travnicek jumped up and down several times. The sound echoed through the loft. “Whatever you want.” He stopped his jumping up and down and smiled. “Okay,” he said. “I know what to do. I’ll turn on the big generators!”
The android put the paper bag down on a workbench, swapped weapons, and flew soundlessly up through the ceiling. He was relieved that he had got offso lightly. Travnicek had been so upset about his eviction that he’d forgot to lecture his creation about his failure to capture the bag lady, and Modular Man had been sensible enough not to mention the headline he’d seen in the paper while buying Travnicek his breakfast, that Guernica had been returned to the government of Spain in return for a fabulous ransom.
Outside, the cold wind continued to batter the city, funneling like a flood between the tall buildings, blowing people like straws in the water. The temperature had risen barely above freezing, but the wind chill was dropping the effective temperature to the teens.
More people, the android knew, were going to die.
One landlady had her office destroyed by a mysterious intruder and a hundred people died of cold and exposure before the android found the bag lady again, two nights later. He was floating high over Fifth Avenue, searching the street, the alleys, and Central Park for infra-red signatures. The bag lady stood in plain sight on the well-lit front porch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In front, Fifth Avenue was littered with bright flags, blown down from lampposts, that announced the arrival of the Maritime Artist Exhibit. The bag lady was wrapped in one of the flags, sheltering herself in the recess of the porch.
Certain that he hadn’t been seen, the android spiraled down, turning on the flux-field that made him insubstantial. His dark suit blended in with the night. The dazzle gun moved on his shoulders to its firing position. The android dropped from the sky to land directly in front of the bag lady. The dazzler exploded right in her face.
“Motherfucking aliens!” she muttered, and took a step back. “Always playing yer goddam tricks!” Her eyes searched blindly for the android as he floated right through her, then turned off his field and spun around to approach the bag lady from the rear. She was clawing at her bag, shouting into the night.
“Got you,” the android thought, and reached for the bag.
“Not so fast,” said a voice from behind.
The android felt a tearing deep inside him. The guns on his shoulders were crushed and twisted like an aluminum can in the hands of a giant. He could feel components inside his chest torquing under some incredible force, feel sparks and flames.
He turned, astonished. There was something strange standing behind him.
It looked like a Holbein portrait turned somewhat edge-on, about forty-five degrees, with all the background cut away except for the main subject. The figure seemed entirely two-dimensional, a man in a kind of elaborate red velvet Henry VIII costume, complete with hat and plume. He was carrying something longer than he was, a rectangular object on which the android saw flags, smoke, water.
The portrait smiled. The smile was not nice. The portrait rotated until it was edge-on and vanished.
There was the sound of a shopping bag rattling. “You’ll get yours, bunky,” the voice said.
The android felt his feet leaving the ground as he was pulled backwards. Not again, he thought, and then thought ceased.
_____________
It was still night when he came to, still cold. He was in the middle of something that smelled bad even in the winter air. On top it was crusted hard and covered with frost, beneath it was almost liquid. He realized it was human waste.
He stood and moved away from the pile. Night soil dripped down his legs. A broken ceramic pot rolled away, disturbed by his foot. Carefully he monitored his internal systems. Flux-field monitor destroyed, weapons systems damaged, dazzler damaged, x-ray laser destroyed. Other components appeared to be functioning, though they had suffered stress.
Below him he could see a series of shallow flooded terraces, stepping downward into a shadowed valley. Above, clustered close to the edges of a twisting road, were several hundred houses. Lights glowed in several windows. It occurred to him that this landscape was not typically Occidental.
He looked up at the stars and made a brief calculation. He was at about thirty-three degrees North latitude, but longitude was harder to figure. His internal clock may have been disturbed as it had the last time he’d been sucked into the shopping bag, and without accurate time the determination of longitude was impossible.
Carefully he tested his flight capability, then rose from the ground. He decided to head East.
He found a vast river, and he moved downstream. He flew through low-lying clouds and they and his speed cleaned the night soil from him. Below he could see silent junks coasting downstream under their gleaming lugsails. Others were moored to the bank. As the android climbed into a rosy dawn, he followed the river to an ocean. Just south was a huge port city, with hundreds of ships tied to the wharves. By that time he’d concluded this was Shanghai, and a brief flying inspection of the ships and wharves showed his deduction was correct. There weren’t very many people awake yet, and he didn’t think anyone saw him.
Deciding to take the polar route, he corrected his internal clocks and rose high into the sky, heading north along the coast. Somehow he had jumped fourteen hours in time and thousands of miles. It would take him hours to return.
The android’s reappearance was aided by the Siberian jet stream that was punishing North America. He caught it high over the brilliant blue-and-white world that was the Arctic and let its great velocities add to his own, his internal heaters turned high to keep ice from forming on his body as he soared high across Canada and the U.S. Here the misery below was abstracted, nothing but distant crosshatched fields dusted with white and brown, writhing rivers choked with ice, the straight, black lines of expressways.
In New York, it was night again. Through one of the skylights Modular Man could see Travnicek sitting at a workbench amid a cloud of tobacco smoke. The android tapped on the skylight, and Travnicek jumped, cursed in Slovak, and looked up with red, angry eyes. Travnicek pulled a stool under the skylight, stood on it, and hammered at the ancient, rusted opening mechanism, breaking the skin on his hand. As soon as the thing opened he was bellowing.
“Where the fuck was breakfast? I thought you’d been lost, like the others.”
“What others?” The android pulled open the skylight and squeezed through it.
Travnicek sucked at his bleeding hand. “Never mind,” he said. “Why the hell didn’t you fly in, like before? And where have you been?”
“In China.” Travnicek was sufficiently surprised by the answer to keep silent while Modular Man explained his journey. Wordlessly, he turned to one of the benches and gave the android a copy of one of the afternoon papers, detailing the disappearance of An Action with Barbary Corsairs, by William van de Velte the Younger, from the Nautical Art Exhibit. A museum guard was also missing. People were speculating about an inside job, but the jack of diamonds, left at the scene, pointed elsewhere.
“The goddam Jack of Diamonds has gone from Guernica to genre art,” Travnicek said. “No fucking taste.” He grinned with his cigaret-stained teeth. “Or maybe he just knows what he likes.”
“Perhaps,” said the android, “he’s just taking pictures on loan from foreign governments. That way the lines of bureaucracy are more tangled and it’s more likely they’ll just ransom the stuff instead of looking for him.”
“Could be. Open up. I want to see what needs replacing.”
Travnicek first examined the damaged weaponry, then lowered his head and peered into the android’s chest. Modular Man hoped he wasn’t dropping too much cigaret ash in there.
“Interesting,” Travnicek said. He removed some of the damaged components. They looked as if they’d been twisted by a giant hand.
“Our Jack of Diamonds can’t be turning himself two-dimensional,” Travnicek said. “That would kill him—he’d just be crushed that way. So what he’s doing is somehow warping the space around him. He’s doing it enough to make the space, with himself in it, two-dimensional. When he’s edge-on he’s invisible. He can probably walk through walls that way.”
“Maybe that’s why he’s stealing art. He’s attracted to two-dimensional representations.”
Travnicek ignored him. “He uses his space-warping ability as a weapon,” he said. “It’s like being able to pass a strong gravity wave through the target, crushing it. That’s how he knocked down that wall at MOMA.” He tossed one of the components in the trash. “Works pretty good, yes?”
“How can he be defeated?”
Travnicek shrugged. “How the fuck do I know?” He lit a new cigaret from the stub of the old. “Let me think for a minute.” He paced the room. From one of the apartments below came the sound of a television commercial, then a murmured, indistinct conversation. Then sex, louder even than the TV.
Travnicek ignored the sound. One cigaret followed the other. “Okay,” Travnicek said. “The guy can’t be entirely confined to two dimensions, because otherwise he couldn’t tell where he is. He has to be able to see out of the field he’s generating, to reach out and grab works of art, to exchange air with the outside so he doesn’t asphyxiate. So whatever’s keeping him in there isn’t perfect. Light gets in, material objects get in, air gets in. If they get in, we can get in.”
“But how?”
Travnicek gave him an annoyed look. “Get your ass out of here and let me think about it, that’s how.”
“Shall I look for the bag lady some more?”
“You don’t seem to be doing so good where she’s concerned, yes? Forget about her for now. Just be back before the sun comes up.”
“With your breakfast.”
“Yeah. Sausage and eggs, okay? Lots of garlic in the sausage, if you can find it.”
“Yes, sir.
The android climbed up on the stool and squeezed through the skylight again. A dry, blustery wind tugged at his clothing and rattled the panes of the skylight. He flew into the sky.
First thing, he thought, find a phone booth and see what Cyndi’s doing.
_____________
“It doesn’t sound like a coincidence to me,” Black Shadow said. “Both those characters on the porch of the museum at the same time.”
“You’re probably right,” the android said.
The wind rattled the patio doors of the Aces High. He was waiting here for Cyndi. Drinks here, then dinner at the Russian Tea Room. The rest of the evening would be improvised.
Modular Man looked at the drinks lined up on the bar before him. Irish coffee, martini, margarita, beer-and-a-shot, Napoleon brandy. He seriously wanted to try new tastes right now, and wondered if getting crushed by the two-dee man’s gravity wave had wakened in him a sense of mortality. The bartender had looked at him oddly when he’d ordered the long line of drinks, but he was used to odd orders in this place.
The android swallowed some more Irish coffee. He wanted to finish it before it got cold. He put the cup down and wiped heavy cream from his upper lip.
“I wonder how he recruited her?” he asked.
“Probably just gave her a few hot meals. That’s what you should have done, instead of going in with gas grenades and stuff.”
“I may need help.” Thoughtfully. “There being two of them now.”
“Yeah. Well, I said I’d take an interest if things moved that way.”
“The problem is, I’m supposed to win publicity for myself, and that doesn’t necessarily include sharing credit for captures.”
The vigilante chuckled, a low, ominous sound. “Publicity is one thing I don’t need.”
“That’s what I figured.”
Black Shadow reached into a pocket and came up with a small radio transmitter. “This’ll reach my, ah, answering service,” he said. “You just tell me where you want me to meet you.”
“Thanks. I owe you one.”
Another chuckle. “Yes, you do. Just so we don’t forget.”
The android considered the line of drinks, picked up the martini. “I can’t forget,” he said. “Couldn’t if I wanted to.”
_____________
“Hey,” Cyndi said. “How about we take a break?”
“If you like.” Cyndi raised her hands, cupped the android’s head between them.
“All that exertion,” she said. “Don’t you even sweat a little bit?”
“No. I just turn on my cooling units.”
“Amazing.” The android slid off her. “Doing it with a machine,” she said thoughtfully. “You know, I would have thought it would be at least a little kinky. But it’s not.”
“Nice of you to say so. I think.”
Modular Man was planning to move the evening’s memory from its sequential place to somewhere else, and fill the empty space with a boring re-run of the previous night’s patrol for the bag lady. With any luck, Travnicek would just speed through the patrol and wouldn’t go looking for memory porn.
She sat up in the bed, reaching for the night table. “Want some coke?”
“It’s wasted on me. Go ahead.” She set the mirror carefully in front of her and began chopping white powder. The android watched as she snorted a pair of lines and leaned back against the pillows with a smile. She looked at him and took his hand.
“You really don’t have to be so hung up on performance, you know,” she said. “I mean, you knew when I was having a good time. You could have finished if you’d wanted.”
“I don’t finish.”
Her look was a little glassy. “What?” she said.
“I don’t finish. Orgasm is a complex random firing of neurons. I don’t have neurons, and nothing I do is truly random. It wouldn’t work.”
“Holy fuck.” Cyndi blinked at him.
“So what does it feel like?”
“Pleasant. In a very complicated way.”
She cocked her head and thought about this for a moment. “That’s about right,” she concluded. She snorted another pair of lines and looked at him brightly.
“I got a job,” she said. “That’s how I was able to afford the coke.” He smiled.
“Congratulations.”
“It’s in California. A commercial. I’m in the hand of this giant ape, see, and I’m rescued by Bud Man. You know, the guy in the beer ads. And then at the end—” She rolled her eyes. “—at the end we’re all happily drunk, Bud Man, the ape, and me, and I ask the ape how he’s doing, and the ape belches.” She frowned. “It’s kind of gross.”
“I was about to say.”
“But then there’s a chance for a guest shot on Twenty-Dollar Hotel. I get to have an affair with a mobster or something. My agent wasn’t too clear about it.” She giggled. “At least there aren’t any giant apes in that one. I mean, one was enough.”
“I’ll miss you,” the android said. He wasn’t at all sure how he felt about this. Or, for that matter, if what he felt could in any way be described as feeling. Cyndi patted his hand.
“You’ll get to rescue other nice ladies.”
“I suppose. None nicer than you, though.”
She laughed some more. “You have a way with a compliment,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said. The android was considering his yearning for experience, the strange fashion his four-day-old career had of providing it, the way it seemed to him that the experience provided was not enough, would never prove enough. If the next encounter with the jack of diamonds proved fatal, he wondered if there was anything that would survive the destruction, something in the way of existence savored, lessons learned, mistakes cherished and avoided.
He was hungry, he realized, for life. His appetite growing, and death meant never being able to appease it. that something he’d learned, or simply a fact of nature?
He doubted, somehow, that any enlargement of his experience would serve to answer that question.
_____________
He returned to Travnicek’s loft before dawn, slipping in through the skylight. Travnicek’s eyes looked like highway maps executed in red. He held up a piece of plastic-encased circuitry. “Gravity-wave detector,” he said. “Put it in slot six. You’ll be able to track the Jack of Diamonds.”
“Thank you, sir. Here’s your breakfast.”
Travnicek ignored the paper bag. “I’m working on some attachments to one of the portable flux generators,” he said. “Put it near the two-dimensional spatial distortion and turn it on. What it does is feed the energy from the generator into the field and make it more powerful. The field will expand until it swallows you. Once in there, you’ll meet the guy face to face, and then you just punch out the sonofabitch.”
“Yes, sir.
“It’ll take me a few hours to finish this. Go warm the coffee.”
“Yes, sir.”
Modular Man made his rendezvous with Black Shadow on a dark corner in Jokertown. The gravity-wave detector had been pulsing for several hours now. The flux-generator, with its attachments, was being carried in a small athletic bag and looked like a black-painted cantaloupe with a pistol grip.
Black Shadow’s cape snapped in the wind. His eyes reflected red and green as Christmas street decorations waved over his head. “Evening, Mod Man,” he said. “Heard anything from our two-dimensional friend?”
“I know where he is, more or less. West of here, not far.”
Something that the android preferred not to look at was making gurgling, sucking noises in an alley behind the vigilante. Black Shadow was apparently not much disturbed. Modular Man quickly explained the function of the flux-generator. “Let’s get the hell out of here, then,” Black Shadow said. “I’m freezing to death.”
“I’ll fly you. It’ll be quicker.”
“Just not warmer.”
The vigilante wrapped himself thoroughly in his cloak, and Modular Man put his arms around the man’s chest and rose into the air. Black Shadow winced as the wind buffeted him.
The Hudson was a grey chop a short distance away from their landing point on top of a warehouse. Below, in a pool of streetlamp halogen light, they could see some men huddled into overcoats and knit hats conferring with what appeared to be a red velvet painting of Henry VIII. Objects changed hands. A long paper-wrapped parcel, about what would hold a painting seven feet long, seemed to materialize into three-dimensional space. Two of the men grabbed it, fighting with it as the wind tried to carry it, and them, away.
Infra-red detectors snapped on in the android’s plastic eyes. He searched the street scene carefully and found the bag lady on the opposite street corner, huddled beside someone’s stoop. She was still wearing the exhibition flag from two nights before, wrapped around her body like a sheath.
“He’s moving,” the android said as he felt the readings on the gravity-wave detector altering.
“Where is he? I can’t see the fucker.”
“Right there. Moving across the streets, toward the bag lady.”
The vigilante’s teeth were chattering in the cold. see her, either.”
“He’s right near her.”
“Okay. Now I see her. Let’s go.”
Black Shadow tore the flux generator out of the athletic bag and leaped the three storeys to the ground, absorbing the impact without damage. His next bound took him over the heads of the three men wrestling with the painting, but the wind caught his cloak and pushed him off his target. He required another, smaller leap to bring him into striking distance of the bag lady and the two-dee man. The generator began to whine as he pointed it at them.
Modular Man was high overhead, having become airborne as soon as he saw the vigilante spring off the warehouse. The android reached his pushover point and began his dive. He saw three men wrestling with the canvas, the bag lady whirling at Black Shadow’s approach, flashes of oddly-distorted Tudor clothing. The flux-generator was shrieking, nearby windows rattling in accompaniment.
There was something black in the bag lady’s shopping bag.
It was growing.
The android dove straight for it. His arms were thrown out wide.
He realized that if the lady moved her bag at the last minute, things would get very messy.
The blackness grew. The wind was tugging at him, trying to spin him off course, but the android corrected.
When he struck the blackness of the portal, he felt again the obliterating nullity overcome him. But before he lost track of himself, he felt his hands closing on the edges~of the shopping bag, clamping on them, not letting go.
For a small fraction of a second he felt satisfaction. Then, as expected, he felt nothing at all.
_____________
Black Shadow saw the android disappear into the shopping bag, saw his hands clutching at the edges, dragging the bag in after him. Saw the bag swallow the android and then itself, leaving the bag lady standing bewildered, staring at her empty hand.
That’s impossible, Black Shadow thought.
He kept seeing fragments of the jack of diamonds, like someone seen in a funhouse mirror. The generator in his hand was vibrating like a crazy thing. He jumped for the bits of two-dee image, the generator stuck out in front of him.
Work, you bastard, he thought.
There was a scream as the generator tried to leap from his hand, then the scream climbed into the ultrasonic.
There was a snap, as of two universes banging together.
_____________
A monologue ran continually in the bag lady’s head. Sometimes things outside the monologue caught her interest for a while, but she always returned to the monologue in the end. The monologue was usually about her life before her bastard of a husband took the kids away and committed her. Or at least it featured characters she had known then, and the thing she found most interesting about the monologue was that sometimes it climbed out of her head and began to be spoken by other people. Sometimes some wino she’d met in an alley would look at her and say something that she had said to herself only a few moments before, and sometimes inanimate objects talked to her—buildings, clouds, passing automobiles.
At the moment, to her surprise, the monologue had gone. There were only two figures in front of her, one in a black cape, the other in red velvet. She watched them suspiciously, wondering if they’d taken the voice away. They were two-dimensional, flat just like the funny papers, and like the characters in the funny papers they were engaged in combat. Jumping, punching, their mouths working as they shouted at each other. There was something missing, though, and the bag lady realized that there were no dialogue balloons.
“Whass the matter, here?” she demanded. “I want talk in my funnies, yah?”
The two figures came together. There was a blossoming darkness, like a bright flash in negative, a sudden explosion of blackness. Then a bright flash that dazzled her eyes. Every piece of glass for two blocks around shattered.
The bag lady blinked. There were still two people in front of her, but they weren’t flat funny-paper people any more, they were just ordinary people in odd clothes. The one in red velvet was sitting down. His skin was blue with cold. His teeth chattered.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “What was that?”
“I stole your body heat, man. Sucked your photons.” The black man smiled. “Try surviving without the electromagetic force.”
“Jesus Christ,” said the red velvet man again. “I’m gonna die of hypothermia.”
“Probably not. But you can look forward to a warm-water enema in the emergency room.”
The bag lady could hear the monologue rising in her head again, and the conversation between the two oddly-dressed people wasn’t very interesting. She didn’t think it was likely that the red-velvet man would give her any more food or show her any more interesting times.
She looked down at her right hand, where she’d been carrying one of her two shopping bags. The bag was gone. Some bastard had stolen it. She felt a pang of loss, sharper than the bite of the wind. Half her life had just been torn away, one of the things that helped her to realize that she knew something the others didn’t.
The monologue in her head began to take on complaining tones. There just weren’t enough honest people in the world.
“Gotta find a new bag, bunky,” she said. She turned and faced into the cold wind blowing off the Hudson. She began to move off into the night.
The nice thing about this kind of a life, the monologue told her, was that there was always something new in the next dumpster.
_____________
The three men were wrestling the painting into a large van when Black Shadow walked toward them, holding the red velvet man by the collar. The prisoner’s teeth chattered. “Would you mind taking this guy to the police?” Black Shadow asked. “Just sit on him. I don’t think he’ll make any trouble.” He held up an object spattered with drops of once-molten metal. “This is the thing he used to make himself two-dimensional. Got slagged in the fight. Think I’ll keep it, though.” The device vanished into his cloak.
The men looked embarrassed. “Well,” one said, “the thing is, we sort of promised him we wouldn’t prosecute him if he gave the painting back.”
“That’s okay, man. You didn’t make the collar. Modular Man will be along later to file charges. Right now he’s chasing the accomplice.”
The man looked surprised. “I didn’t know the Jack of Diamonds had an accomplice,” he said.
“Knave of Diamonds!” the man said. “Knave of fucking Diamonds! You guys are so stupid!”
Black Shadow punched him once in the head. The Knave of Diamonds hung unconscious from his arm.
“There,” he said. “I knocked him out for you. Just take him, will you?”
_____________
The android awoke in an airless place. There was some kind of formless glop all around him. He stretched out, found himself confined, and exerted some pressure. The metal tank in which he was confined burst apart.
Chitinous webs lay in milky lattices. He could see stars and the bright blue-and-white orb of earth. The contents of the chopping bag, clothing and half-eaten food, plastic cups and glass bottles, a child’s broken push-toy, tumbled weightlessly in the space around him.
There was also something spherical and black. The android reached for it It was warm, and he felt a faint vibration.
The space ship was tumbling, with vast holes torn in it. As sunlight shifted, shining through the holes, the android saw he was not alone.
There were three other people here. They huddled together near the center of the ship, their arms and legs thrown wide. Two looked like derelicts; one white, one black. The other was a museum guard. They all looked surprised to have found themselves in orbit, without air, and in each other’s company.
The android realized where the bag lady had got her device. He began to search the ship.
Travnicek hung another newspaper clipping from the loft roofbeam. There were pictures of the Knave of Diamonds on his way to the arraignment, and other pictures of Modular Man in his skullcap, looking pleased by all the attention.
“Nice,” Travnicek said. “You did good, toaster. I pat myself on the back for a great job of programming.”
The android brought him a cup of coffee. He grinned and took it.
Travnicek turned to contemplate the alien orb sitting on his workbench. He’d been trying to manipulate it with various kind of remotes, but was unable to achieve anything, other than sometimes making the remotes disappear, presumably into some waste disposal heap somewhere between the Lower East Side and Alpha Centauri. The android hadn’t been able to work it, either. Travnicek moved toward the workbench and studied the thing from a respectful distance.
“Perhaps it requires contact from a life-form to work it,” the android suggested. “Maybe you should touch it.”
“Maybe you should mind your own fucking business. I’m not getting near that goddam thing.”
“Yes, sir.” The android was silent for a moment. Travnicek sipped his coffee. Then he shook his head and turned away from the workbench.
“Sir?” the android said. Travnicek looked at him.
“You got a question, blender?”
“That space ship looked as if it had been attacked by something. Whatever attacked it probably didn’t come from Earth, and might still be up there. Do you suppose we should look into what they’re doing?”
“In your spare time, maybe. Which you don’t have any of, since you’re going to go to the store and get me a bottle of cold duck and some jelly doughnuts. I feel like celebrating.”
“Yes, sir.” The android, his face expressionless, turned insubstantial and rocketed up through the ceiling.
Travnicek went into the small heated room he slept in, turned on the television, and sat in a worn-out easy chair. The television was full of pictures of crazed shoppers stampeding over each other to get toys for their children. Computers seemed to be popular this year. Travnicek cackled, then turned the channel. It was an old movie, A Christmas Carol with Reginald Owen. He settled back to watch.
When the android returned, he found Travnicek asleep. He put the bag down quietly and withdrew.
_____________
“So I says to Maxine, I says, When are you gonna do something about that condition of yours? I says, it’s time to let a doctor see it.”
The bag lady, one shopping bag hanging from her arm while she clutched a second bag to her chest, walked slowly down the alley, fighting the Siberian wind. The cheerful flag she had found by the museum flapped out behind her, reflecting Broadway’s Christmas lights ahead.
Black Shadow had his feet planted on the brick wall of an old brownstone and squatted on his calves, huddled in his cloak. He watched Modular Man and the bag lady. The android was trying to talk to her, to give her a takeout bag filled with Chinese food, but she continued mumbling to herself and plodding up the alley. Finally the android stuffed the takeout bag into her shopping bag and returned to where the vigilante waited.
“Surrender, Mod Man.” The drawling voice had an unaccustomed kindness in it. “There isn’t anything you can do for her.”
“I keep thinking there’s something.”
“Wild-card powers aren’t an answer to everything, Mod Man. You have to learn to come to terms with your limitations.”
The android said nothing, just turned to look at the bag lady walking down the alley.
“Now, by way of example, I have this thing about finding evildoers and giving them what’s coming to them,” Black Shadow said. “I’m not likely to do much about that, because the whole thing suits me, me being crazy and all. You, on the other hand, have to live with some kind of nutty professor who’s using you to work out his power fantasies, and from what you tell me you can’t do anything about that at all. We all have a cross to bear.”
“I understand,” the android said. Without interest.
“The thing you need to accept, if this business isn’t going to drive you crazy, is that no one’s invented a wild-card power that can do a goddam thing for middle-aged ladies who are out of their heads and who carry their whole world with them in shopping bags and who live in garbage cans.” He paused. “You listening, Mod Man?”
“Yes. I hear you.”
The vigilante reached into his cloak and came out with a small package wrapped in red ribbon. “I got you something,” he said. “Merry Christmas.”
The android seemed embarrassed. “I hadn’t thought to get you anything,” he said.
“That’s all right. You’ve had things on your mind.”
Modular Man opened the package. The wind caught the bright ribbon and spiraled it down the alley. Inside a box was a piece of paper. The android held it up to the light and peered at it.
“One of Fortunato’s gift certificates,” Black Shadow said. “I figured you could use cheering up.”
“Thank you. It’s a nice thought.”
“You’re welcome.” He straightened from his crouch and walked down the wall to the alley surface. “I think I’ll go beat on some villains for warmth and exercise. Care to join me?”
“No. I think I’ll use the certificate before my boss finds it.”
“See you later, Mod Man.” The vigilante raised a hand.
“Merry Christmas.”
Down the alley, something bright caught the eye of the bag lady. She bent and picked up a strand of red ribbon.
She stuffed it into a bag and walked on.
———————————
© 1998 by Walter Jon Williams
www.wildcardsbooks.com
... And this was for her father and this was for her brothers if she has ’em, and this was for her mother, and this and this was for her Nordic grandfathers ...
Underneath Ben Choy, on the squeaking narrow bed and rumpled sheets, the large, round tits of the cute white girl jiggled rhythmically. Her pale blond hair was splayed out over the sweat-stained pillowcase, her eyes now squinted shut against the glaring bare light bulb overhead as her breath came faster. Outside the little room, down the hall, someone flushed the community toilet.
... And this was for every one of her white relatives, and this was for the KKK, and this was for Leo Barnett, and this was for the father of every white girl he had ever liked. This was his revenge against all of them. And this and this and this.
Later, his breath regained, Ben sat up between Sally Swenson’s spread legs. He turned sideways to lean back against the peeling yellow paint of the thin interior wall, one of her legs under his lower back. Then he extended his own legs under her other knee, to hang over the edge of the bed. The sheet had fallen to the floor.
She roused herself enough to prop his two pillows under her head and looked at him with big, guileless blue eyes.
“Is it always this hot in here?” she asked. “Even this time of year?”
“Yeah.” Ben glanced at the one window in the room. On the outside surface, misshapen ice rippled the glow from the streetlights below. On the inside, a mist of condensed moisture had been streaked by drips running down the wooden sill.
He turned to look at her. A sheen of sweat still covered her heart-shaped face and she smiled slightly, uncertainly, as he looked at her. She had liked what he had just done to her. That was for her father, too, whoever he was.
“Don’t you pay a lot more for the heat?”
“No.” He swung the pendant on his neck chain back to the front, from where it had slipped over his shoulder. It was an old Chinese coin his grandfather had sent him, held by the chain strung through the square hole in its center.
“Is it included with the room?”
“Yeah.” Idly, Ben slid a hand up her inner thigh to twirl her blond pubic hair around one finger. A real blonde. “It’s a cramped, disgusting little room, but the landlord pays the heat. The radiator is hard to control, so I’d rather have it too hot than freeze to death.”
“Makes sense to me.”
He studied the skin over her pelvis and upper thighs. She was so white that she didn’t have even the slightest hint of an old tan. Maybe she couldn’t tan at all.
“What’s downstairs? It was dark when we came in.”
“Grocery store.” And she didn’t seem to mind lying there talking while still spread wide open. She was really white. And cleanly, purely pink.
“A Chinese grocery store?”
“Sure.” He shrugged. “You can get anything there, really.”
“Do you mind my asking questions?”
“No.”
“Doesn’t this room bother you? I mean, it’s so small. You don’t even have a phone, do you?”
“I hang out in the Twisted Dragon. Anybody wants me, they come there. Or call. I just sleep here.”
“Or screw girls here.” She giggled playfully, quivering her tits.
“Yeah.” He had picked her up a few hours ago in the Twisted Dragon. She had wandered in alone, wide-eyed and curious, her vulnerability plain to see. Among the street toughs and jokers, this slightly chubby and very attractive nat had turned most of the heads in the place but Ben was under no illusion that she was very bright.
Another victim. Ben, do you simply hate all women? Or just yourself, even more?
Ben clenched his teeth against his sister Vivian’s accusation. It seemed to echo in his mind. She had made it many times.
“I’ve never been to Chinatown before,” Sally said shyly.
“Or Jokertown.”
She shook her head tightly, with a self-conscious smile, her big eyes glowing.
“And you want someone to show you around.” Ben gave her a cynical smile.
Her face was pink now, too.
You like them dumb and helpless, don’t you? Vivian had said that plenty of times, too. Not to mention the impressive bra size.
“I want a drink.” Ben pushed Sally’s outside leg away and got up. Even the aged hardwood floor was fairly warm. He picked through the clothes he had scattered earlier and found his underwear. It was the Munsingwear brand, with the pouch in the front. He began to dress. Ben put on a black turtleneck over a gray thermal shirt and blue jeans and black boots. As an afterthought he added a light blue sweater. Once he was dressed, he pulled a small piece of white paper wrapped in a wad of tissue out of his pants pocket.
It was an intricately folded sculpture, one he had been practicing more often lately, representing a Chinese dragon. Satisfied that it was in good condition, he stashed it again and picked up a brush from the little table that had come with the room. He paused when he saw her looking at him. She hadn’t moved.
“Do you want me to go with you?” she asked.
“Don t care.” He turned away to face the small mirror standing on the table and brushed his hair back into place. “Do you want me to stay here?”
“Don’t care.”
“Can I sleep here tonight?”
“Don’t care.”
He tossed down the brush and shrugged into his padded brown stressed-leather jacket. JETBOY STYLE! the poster for the jacket had said. Fadeout’s money had paid for it after a recent job.
“Why do you wear those baggy pants?” She giggled again.
Ben’s jaw tightened. “I’m going down to the Twisted Dragon.”
Stung, she watched him, only her blue eyes moving as he stomped to the door.
He knew his lack of interest hurt her more than any rejection would have; he didn’t care about that, either. Nothing of value was in the room for her to take. He left the door standing open without looking back.
Ben paused just inside the door of the Twisted Dragon to brush snow off his shoulders and to shuck his leather jacket. The snowfall outside was gentle and the breeze not too cold, really, but he was so used to his overly heated room that the night seemed colder than it was. Anyhow, the twinkling, colorful Christmas lights over the stores and other decorations in their darkened windows had put him in a bad mood. It was a white people’s holiday that had nothing to do with his heritage.
I like Christmas, anyway. Vivian always answered his objections the same way, every year.
Even in the Twisted Dragon, a tape of instrumental versions of Christmas carols was playing faintly in the background. A two-foot green plastic Christmas tree on one end of the bar blinked red and green lights. He started down the aisle away from it.
“Hey, Dragon.”
Ben turned again.
“You know Christian? He wants to see you.” Dave Yang, a short, stocky Immaculate Egret with a frequent but forced smile had come down the aisle behind Ben and now jerked his thumb back over his shoulder.
Ben studied the phony smile carefully. Then he glanced at the tall British mercenary with pale blond hair who was lounging on a bar stool. He faced this way with a smirk as he leaned back against the bar. Christian was a new player in the Shadow Fist organization.
“I met him once; that’s all.” Tingling with tension, Ben followed Dave back up to the bar and eyed Christian without a word.
“And what do you drink, Mr. Dragon?” Christian raised an eyebrow.
“Baileys on ice.” Ben did not relax.
The bartender nodded and turned to get it.
“A sweet tooth, eh?” Christian laughed, crinkling his lean, weathered features. “The mercs I know would call that a lady’s drink, but no fear. You require a new twist on the old joke: ‘What does a man drink, who can turn into a tiger or dragon or any other animal at will? Answer: Anything he wants to.’”
Ben clenched his jaw. Under the smooth words, the Britisher’s tone was taunting.
“So,” Christian continued. “Have you reversed your name Chinese-style? Is it Mr. Dragon or Mr. Lazy?”
“What did you want to see me about?” Ben demanded. “And they say we Brits have no sense of humor. Ah, well.” Christian sipped his drink, then turned to the Immaculate Egret as he swirled the ice in his scotch and water. The bottle of Glenlivet was on the bar behind him. “What are you drinking? Plum wine or some such?”
“Bourbon and water,” said Dave, grinning again. “You buying?”
“One Beam’s Choice and water,” said Christian over his shoulder. He did not bother to make sure the bartender heard him. “You mustn’t be so vague, or people will hand you cheap goods. Now, then.” His tone hardened. “Leave us.”
Without taking his eyes off Christian, Ben saw that the Immaculate Egret walked away without a word. He hated to see the arrogant white man assume that kind of power here in Chinatown. Christian had all these Immaculate Egrets, members of a Chinatown street gang, doing his bidding without question. Still, the move told Ben how much power Christian had here. He would not be a man to cross in a room full of Immaculate Egrets.
“Sit down, Dragon. We have business.”
Ben hesitated. Since joining the Shadow Fist organization, he had taken all his orders from Fadeout. He had never worked for anyone else.
“You have heard, haven’t you, that I am an authoritative member of the umbrella organization that runs this part of town?”
Ben’s jaw tightened again. Christian might be drawing him away from Fadeout or this might be some kind of loyalty test Fadeout had set up. For that matter, with Fadeout’s ace ability to turn invisible, he could be sitting undetected on the damn bar right now observing Ben’s every move.
Ben shrugged elaborately and sat down, patting the pocket with his paper sculpture and Cub Scout knife out of nervous habit. He would have to watch himself very carefully.
Christian spun his stool and set down his glass, hunched confidentially over the bar. “I want you to take a package out to Ellis Island. You are not to report this message or this instruction to anyone at all. Understood?”
Ben nodded, staring at the bar in front of him. He understood; whether or not he would obey was another matter. When the bartender brought his drink, he left it untouched.
“And you will get it from the Demon Princes.”
Ben looked at him in surprise. “You’re doing business with a joker street gang?”
“They hit a Shadow Fist courier this afternoon and took our package.”
“So you want me to clean up your mess.”
“Indeed.” Christian snickered and ran a callused hand through his pale blond hair. “Our Immaculate friends think of themselves as tough, but they are really just a well-armed adolescent mob. I’m told the Demon Princes are the largest and meanest independent gang in Jokertown.”
“That’s right.” Ben knew they allowed only jokers in their gang and were led by a guy named Lucifer. They were involved in petty crime and small protection rackets, but had a code of no violence against jokers.
“Our amateur commandos can probably take them, but one never knows. You do it instead.”
“What kind of package am I looking for?”
“A padded manila envelope with blue powder in plastic bags inside.” He gestured with his hands, indicating a size that would just fit into the patch pockets of Ben’s jacket.
It was probably the new designer drug called rapture, Ben guessed.
A drug runner, Vivian’s voice said disgustedly. “Where are the Demon Princes?”
“Your problem, mate.”
“How do I get to the island?”
“Am I your mum? Make like a birdie and fly, for all I care. Or swim like a fish, but mind the pollution.” Ben’s stomach tightened at the man’s sneering tone, but he said nothing.
“You haven’t touched your drink.”
“Have we finished business?”
“That we have.”
Ben shrugged and took a swallow. He tried to think of something to say; if he could draw Christian out, he might learn more about where he stood. However, he couldn’t think of anything.
The big problem was that he didn’t know exactly how powerful Christian really was. He certainly didn’t doubt that the man was a major player in the Shadow Fist organization. Of course, no one could force Ben to follow his orders tonight, but he had no idea what the consequences would be if he refused.
Christian seemed to have all the Immaculate Egrets here now jumping to do his bidding; if he decided to eliminate Ben, he seemed to have plenty of soldiers to pull it off. On the other hand, the courier job sounded nasty, too. Finally he decided that he would definitely be better off doing the job and keeping an eye on the newcomer in the future. At least, it was the better of two bad options.
“I must confess to a certain fascination with your name,” said Christian. “Picked it yourself, I assume?”
“Yeah. I took it from a guy out of Chinese literature. He was a thief, but sort of a good guy.”
“Ah! A kind of yellow Robin Hood.”
Ben smiled slightly. Some knowledge of his heritage was one of his few sources of pride. Even most of the Chinatown people around him didn’t know the origin of his nickname.
If only you lived up to the original Lazy Dragon, Vivian said with a sneer in his mind. You don’t deserve your name.
“Enough chitchat.” Christian drained his glass and set it down with a decisive clunk. Without another word, he got up and sauntered into the back, toward the storerooms and kitchen.
Ben wouldn’t learn anything more from Christian tonight. He took one more gulp of his drink and slid off the stool, moving to the rest room. His face and throat were warm with the liqueur.
Inside, he took the small oblong piece of soap from the dirty sink and wrapped it in toilet paper. Then he stuck it into another pants pocket. Supplied with potential reinforcement, he returned to the bar to pull his jacket on again.
More than a few of the Immaculate Egrets glanced up at him from their booths and tables, but no one moved or spoke. Ben knew from their studied reserve that they were aware he was doing Christian’s bidding. He had no idea if they approved or not.
If not, they might express their opinion with Uzis sometime later tonight.
Ben stepped outside and drew in the sharp, cold air as he glanced around. Only a few people were in sight, all of them down the street toward other Jokertown nightspots. The snow was falling softly in big, wet flakes. A light film of white snow covered the sidewalk and street, darkened by occasional footsteps and the streaks of tire tracks.
The snow on the sidewalk just outside the Twisted Dragon was stamped to water by many feet, but one very large pair of footprints was accompanied by the twin tracks of a small two-wheeled cart. The Walrus, who had his newsstand over on Hester and the Bowery, was making his nightly rounds of Jokertown bars, hawking papers and magazines. He wasn’t far ahead, by the look of the tracks, and he often stopped to talk affably with his customers.
Ben hurried after him.
No one can save you from yourself, Ben. Vivian’s voice had thankfully been out of his mind while he had been measuring Leslie Christian. Now it came back with a reminder no less condescending than Christian himself. His sister had never approved of anything he did.
“Shut up,” he muttered out loud as he walked down the deserted sidewalk.
Ben was in a vise; he had no question about that. Fadeout, for whom he had been a top aide for some time now, was on one side. The other side remained a mystery.
Get out, Ben. Get out of this life right now. Just run for it. They’ll never know what happened to you. Vivian had said that more than a few times, too.
“I’m no coward,” Ben muttered aloud. It came out in more of a whine than he had intended.
It’s not cowardice. It’s the smart thing to do.
Ben gritted his teeth and tried to shut out the voice as he walked faster. He failed.
If Fadeout is testing your loyalty, then he represents both sides and you’ll pass the test by reporting this mission to him right away.
“Obviously,” Ben growled under his breath.
If Christian is testing your loyalty to Fadeout for someone else, or for his own purposes, you flunk the test by reporting to Fadeout.
Ben hurried faster; he was almost running now from the insistent voice.
Then again, someone might have decided to take you out completely by sending you on an impossible mission, or a setup of some kind.
The mission could be suicide ... reporting to Fadeout could be suicide; so could not reporting it.
Fadeout could be watching right now.
Suddenly panicked, Ben whirled and looked around. Fadeout could turn invisible, but he couldn’t avoid leaving footprints in the snow. None had followed Ben out of the Twisted Dragon.
The sound of Vivian’s giggle echoed in his mind. “Shut up!” he shouted aloud to the empty street. Angry at himself now, Ben spun again and strode fast through the falling snow. Nobody was going to scare him off. He would eat Demon Princes for a late-night snack. He finally spied the Walrus at Chatham Square, waddling out of the offices of the Jokertown Cry. As always, he was in shirt sleeves, a rotund figure of oily blue-black flesh barely more than five feet tall: Tonight he wore a red Hawaiian shirt with orange, blue, and green birds of paradise all over it and he pulled his little wire cart behind him toward Ernie’s.
Get out while you can, Ben. If you die, I die, too. Ignoring Vivian s voice in his mind, Ben jogged carefully after the Walrus in the snow. He didn’t know him well, but they had spoken a few times. The Walrus was an endless font of jokes and gossip; everyone, including Ben, liked him.
“Hi,” Ben said breathlessly as he slowed down to fall in step alongside the Walrus. The Walrus knew him only as a frequent patron of the Twisted Dragon, in his human form.
“‘Evening, Ben,” said the Walrus, looking at him from under a battered porkpie hat. Tufts of stiff red hair stuck out from under it. Twin tusks curved down around his mouth. “I sold all my Chinese papers back at the Twisted Dragon. May I interest you in something else?”
“Forget it; I cant read Chinese, anyway. But, uh, I need to find some Demon Princes.”
“Mmm, well. They aren’t exactly customers of mine. I don’t know as how they read. No, sir.”
“Come on, Walrus. You hear everything.”
“An urgent matter, eh? You’re running around on a snowy night like this, during the holidays and all.”
“Look, I don’t have a lot of money. Right now, that is. But my time always comes.”
“I’m just a talkative cuss making rounds. No money necessary” The Walrus nodded pleasantly. “But I don t know that I can help you, Benjamin.”
Ben shrugged, trying hard to come up with something he could trade.
“I see the Twisted Dragon has a new regular,” said the Walrus airily, looking up at the swirling snow. “English, by his accent.”
That was what he wanted. Ben hesitated; talking about the Shadow Fist Society was never a good idea. Then he decided to take the risk-he was in serious trouble anyhow, and wasn’t even sure just how bad it was. “Leslie Christian. Highly placed, just moved right in. Word is he tells stories of being a merc all over the world.”
“And I hear a note of disapproval.”
Ben shrugged.
“I tried selling papers tonight at Hairy’s Kitchen. Business was bad, though. Most of the patrons were illiterate, I think.”
No, Ben. You don’t owe Christian anything. “Thanks, Walrus.” Ben grinned and spun in a little twist of snow. As the Walrus continued to pull his little cart down the sidewalk, Ben jogged the other way.
Ben, stop. I’ll stop you. Somehow, someway, I’ll stop you. If not tonight, someday. Stop ruining our life and our home
Ben had heard it all before. He jogged on down the cold streets. For now, at least, the voice stopped. Outside Hairy’s Kitchen, Ben slowed down to let some pedestrians go by and then looked in the big picture window. Eight Demon Princes were lounging around a big round table at the back. Lucifer himself wasn’t there; the guy in charge had a head that looked like it was covered with purple grapes, except for dark circles for his eyes and mouth, and he wore an expensive black leather jacket. Next to him, a companion with a flattened fish head like that of a flounder stuffed pizza into his mouth with hands shaped like split, mitten-shaped fins.
Empty plates were piled up on the table. The joker gang members were laughing and poking fun at each other. Their weapons. AK-47s, Uzis, and AR-15s, were casually slung around the backs of their chairs.
The rest of the place was deserted. Even Hairy and his help had retreated to the kitchen. The Demon Princes had been bragging, and no one, including them, doubted that a response was due from the Shadow Fists.
Without backup, negotiation was out of the question for Ben.
On missions for Fadeout, he had always had protection for his comatose body. Now he was on his own. Ben walked briskly around the corner into an alley and took the folded paper dragon out of his pants pocket.
In the alley, he stopped next to a dumpster with an open lid. There he unwrapped the dragon carefully; finding it in good condition, he dropped it to the layer of snow. Then he grabbed the top of the dumpster and jumped to get one leg over it. With a rolling motion, he fell gently into a foul-smelling pile of cardboard, newspaper, and garbage. Only the cold made the stench bearable. Be careful, at least, Vivian said reluctantly.
Ben wriggled around until he was lying on his back in a reasonably comfortable position. Then he closed his eyes and concentrated on the folded paper lying outside the dumpster.
In a second, he could feel himself growing.
As the folded paper became massive reptilian flesh and organs and scales, Ben looked out with the dragon’s eyes at the mouth of the alley. Ben walked his forty-foot long, four-footed, wingless body forward on short legs. No one saw him cross the cold, broken pavement toward the sidewalk.
When he turned the corner of the building, pedestrians on the sidewalk suddenly scattered into the street. Even the most hardened denizens of Jokertown didn’t want to cross him. Ben’s clawed feet could not work a door latch, so he coiled himself outside the door.
Through the glass, he saw grapehead suddenly rise half out of his chair, pointing at him. Ben shot forward, smashing his massive head through the door; as he raced down the aisle inside the restaurant, the door snagged on the thickest part of his neck and ripped from the wall. In front of him, the Demon Princes grabbed their assault rifles and fired as they dove for cover.
Ben felt line after line of bullets tear into him, but the size and speed of his dragon body carried him forward, crashing into the table. The remains of the door hung around his neck like a collar. He snapped twice at the stunned jokers in a blood fury, biting one in half each time. More bullets ripped into him, but now the Demon Princes were running for the door, firing wildly.
He struck after them like a giant rattlesnake and bit the legs off grapehead, leaving stumps that spurted jets of blood over the smashed table. Then he darted forward again and snapped the fish head off that joker’s neck. As he spat out the head, he heard heavy footsteps thumping through the doorway.
As pain dulled his vision, Ben saw the remaining Demon Princes scramble past a large figure cloaked in a black velvet cape and hood. The intruder, gigantic for a human but much smaller than Ben’s dragon, wore a fencing mask under the black hood and marched forward angrily.
It was the joker known as the Oddity, in its winter attire.
Ben had never met it before, but he knew the approach of an enemy when he saw it. He clawed his body around to face his adversary. Pain shot throughout his long torso. His coordination was off and his body slow to respond. Though his cold-blooded reptilian constitution was tough, the bullets had torn flesh away from the bone up and down his body and he could no longer move properly.
“This is Jokertown,” the Oddity intoned fiercely, in the harshest of its three voices. “You have no business here, ace. Not even with a street gang.”
Ben could see the shapes moving and shifting underneath the black velvet cloak. The Oddity had once been three people who were now fused together and whose parts were forever mixing and matching in painful motion. He tried to talk back, but only hissed and growled in his dragon throat.
“Is that you, Lazy Dragon?” The Oddity lumbered toward Ben and reached out with one heavy, muscular white arm and one slender, feminine arm-both its hands were masculine but artistic and sensitive. “I’ve heard rumors about you on the street. But whoever you areyou need to learn to leave jokers alone.”
Ben gathered himself and struck forward again, snapping his jaws. He missed the Oddity, who threw its arms around Ben’s clamped jaws and squeezed like an alligator wrestler. The arm that had been soft and smooth was slowly gaining in weight and thickness; soon both its arms would be heavy and muscular. One hand had started to become feminine. Ben tried to wrench his jaws open again, but they were held fast.
Now Ben rolled, thrashing wildly; the tables and chairs shattered around him. What was left of the door broke and fell from his neck. Glasses, mugs, and dishes tinkled to shards. The Oddity was flung loose, its own great body adding to the destruction in a swirl of black velvet stained with the shiny blood of Demon Princes and Ben himself.
Anxiously, watching the Oddity, Ben struggled to untwist his long body. His short legs scrabbled helplessly for a moment on the debris as he tried to stand. To one side, the Oddity had lumbered to its feet and was clumsily advancing through the smashed furniture.
The Oddity reached out with its arms again just as Ben felt his claws gain some traction. He opened his jaws and darted downward to the Oddity’s legs, but his failing neck muscles were slow and crooked. As Ben’s teeth clacked hard on empty air, the Oddity again caught his mouth shut in an iron embrace.
Ben’s dragon body was slowly dying. His vision was a blur as he squirmed and convulsed to buck the Oddity off his face, but his movements were even more painful now and less in control. The Oddity continued to ride him, even when they slammed into a wall, smashing the wallboard and splintering the support beams.
With a sudden searingly hurtful convulsion of his entire length, Ben flipped his long tail around and knocked the Oddity’s ankles out from under it. The Oddity crashed onto its back, releasing Ben, and crunched broken dishes and glasses even further. Ben opened his jaws again and snapped wildly, getting no more than a mouthful of black velvet.
Shaking free of the cloth, Ben scratched again for a brace under his feet and tried one more time to slash the Oddity’s torso with his fangs. He was slow and clumsy now, disoriented and frustrated by his inability to move his huge body the way he wanted. The Oddity again wrapped up his long snout in arms that were slick and shiny with sweat and blood. This time it was the Oddity who pushed off the floor with one massive leg, rolling to one side.
Ben felt a thrill of fear as he was flipped onto his back by brute strength; the lights spun above him in streaks. Suddenly the Oddity got new purchase against the floor and heaved to one side, the fencing mask an expressionless mock before one of Ben’s eyes as the Oddity’s arms twisted Ben’s dragon neck. He heard a loud snap ... and found himself lying in the cold dumpster outside, surrounded by trash and garbage.
Ben did not dare attract the Oddity’s attention now. The bar of soap he had taken from the Twisted Dragon had not been carved; if the Oddity or anyone else came after him, he had no protection. He waited, listening.
The night had turned much colder. The snow fell heavily in fine white flakes that came swirling endlessly out of the night sky on a wind growing harsher as he lay there. Occasionally a car swished through the slush on the street, but the slush was hardening to ice. Everyone was quiet in the presence of slaughter.
From the sound of voices murmuring cautiously, he knew that a small crowd had gathered outside the door of Hairy’s Kitchen. From the footsteps and the shift in the voices, he knew when the Oddity had made its way out of the wrecked establishment and wandered down the street to the depths of Jokertown. Ben climbed out of the dumpster, dropped to the ground, and peered around the corner.
The crowd was already breaking up. Now that Ben’s dragon was again a scrap of paper and the Oddity gone, the spectacle had ended.
Glancing about alertly for Demon Princes, he slipped through the shattered doorway and hurried past the wreckage in the aisle to the remains of the table where they had been carousing. So far, Hairy and his staff were still holed up in the back or maybe off the premises completely. He could not help seeing some of the remains of the jokers he had so easily torn apart a few minutes before.
Ben stepped over a blood-red chunk of human flesh and felt a sudden gag in his throat. He stifled it, looking away. In the heat of the struggle, in dragon form, he had fought desperately, biting and slashing Demon Princes with abandon. He had felt different, somehow, at the time. The fight had been necessary, and as a dragon, he had fought the way a dragon must.
Now it was hard to believe he was the same person, inside, as the one who had slaughtered these people so quickly and easily.
It was you, all right, Vivian said with quiet anger. Ben had killed before in his animal forms and would do so again. In most cases he had never faced the remains in human form afterward. Now, however, the bloodshed sickened him. It just hadn’t seemed the same a few moments ago.
He clenched his human jaws this time and forced himself to keep searching.
Ben couldn’t be sure the package was here; one of the Demon Princes might have had it on him or they might have stashed it earlier this evening. It might have been carried by one who got away. As he looked around, gusts of cold wind blew through the restaurant, rattling dishes and debris and sending napkins flying. After a moment of picking pointlessly through the pieces of furniture and broken dishes, he turned to the torso of the grape-headed joker.
Ben winced and tried to look only at the shiny black leather jacket, adorned with fancy zippers and silver studs, not at the stumps of the joker’s legs or the spray of blood all around him. Quickly he patted down the joker and felt a bulge in a large zippered pocket. Gagging from the smell of blood, he retched once.
You have no right to be sick at this, Vivian said accusingly. You caused it.
Ben called up enough saliva to spit and wiped his hand on his sleeve. Then he unzipped the pocket. Holding his breath against the bloody stench, he pulled out a small padded manila envelope.
A siren wailed in the distance, coming closer. That was fast for the Jokertown Precinct. Still, even Fort Freak had to respond when someone made a mess this loud and public.
Ben had to be sure. He pulled open the flap of the envelope and looked inside. The envelope was stretched to its limit by plastic bags jammed with blue powder, sealed by cellophane tape. It was rapture, a designer drug from the labs of Quinn the Eskimo-a Shadow Fist product that was sheer poison.
A drug runner, Vivian said, sneering with hatred and contempt.
He closed the flap, secured the envelope in one of the big patch pockets on his leather jacket, and walked briskly out of Hairy’s Kitchen into the worsening storm.
Ben had forgotten about Sally Swenson until he was walking down the filthy hallway to his door. Hoping she had changed her mind and left, he unlocked the door and slipped inside the stifling heat of the room. By the slant of light from the door, he could see her blond hair still splayed out on the pillow much as it had been when he had left. In the heat, though, she had kicked off the sheet, which lay rumpled at the foot of the bed. She was breathing slowly and deeply.
“Sally.” He reached down to wake her and then stopped. Overall, she had seemed harmless enough, and he expected to be back well before dawn. The last thing he needed now was a hassle with her.
He turned on the lamp and set the door carefully so that it was in the jamb but not latched. The door was warped and the irregular shape helped hold it in place.
Then he set the knob to lock. Tonight he would have to do without the dead bolt.
You can still get out of this, Vivian said quietly, hopelessly.
“Hope this works,” he muttered to himself, ignoring her voice. He took the manila envelope out of his jacket and put it on the floor. Then he undressed, before he began to sweat in the warmth. When he was naked, he took out his Cub Scout knife and the bar of soap he had taken from the Twisted Dragon.
He paused. A cold-blooded creature like a dragon was too vulnerable on a winter night like this. He needed a creature that could tolerate the weather, cross the water to Ellis Island either by air or water, and still hang on to the package. It also had to be a creature that could intimidate the unknown persons he would meet; that was a given on a mission like this.
“Now, then,” he whispered, mostly just to hear a friendly voice. He got to work. When he had finished, he set his soap carving in the middle of the floor and slipped into bed next to Sally. She did not stir. He pulled up the sheet, closed his eyes, and concentrated on his carving of a polar bear.
In a few seconds, Ben stood up on all fours, raising an ursine body of considerable bulk under a heavy layer of white fur. He took the doorknob gently in his teeth and walked backward, pulling the door all the way open. Wondering if he could actually get out of the room, he picked up the manila envelope gently in his mouth. Then he squeezed his furry weight through the doorway with effort. He heard the aged wood crack as he pushed free into the hallway.
The hall was almost too narrow for him to turn, but he managed. He dropped the drug packet for a moment and pulled the doorknob until he heard the latch snap into place. Satisfied that his human body was as safe as it could be, he picked up the package and padded downstairs. The streets were even colder and more blustery than before. Fine snowflakes fell fast, swept by the gusts of wind. The snowfall had become a blizzard that had nearly cleared the sidewalks of lower Manhattan. Even so, Ben was completely comfortable in this body.
A polar bear was not the strangest sight most people had ever seen in or near Jokertown. As Ben padded along Canal Street at a soft jog through the whipping snow, the few pedestrians still hurrying for shelter gave him a wide berth, but that was all the reaction he got. Right now, his biggest worry was some street punk with a powerful gun who would shoot him on impulse.
Finally, Ben thought to himself as he reached the Lexington Avenue subway. He hurried down the steps, out of the harrowing wind. At the bottom, he trotted past the token booth and hopped over the turnstile.
A cop standing to one side put a hand on his sidearm, but it was only a defensive move. Ben trotted to the platform, scattering a small crowd of people who gasped in surprise. He glanced them over, saw no one reaching for a gun, and relaxed.
“It’s real,” one lady whimpered. “Somebody call the cops. Damn, I hate these subways nowadays.”
“Bet it’s an ace,” said an older man.
“Looks more like a joker,” snickered a teenaged boy. “Quiet; he’ll hear you,” hissed the first lady.
“ I knew it was cold out, but this is ridiculous,” said another man. “Say, what’s he got in his mouth?”
“You ask him,” said the teenager.
Ben ignored them. When the train stopped and the doors opened, a small knot of people froze in place, staring at him. Then they hurried to exit from other doors and Ben boarded.
He had to sit down in the center of the aisle just inside the doors; even so, he blocked the way. No one else entered his car, and several of those already there suddenly got out at this stop after all, through other doors. The rest simply stared impassively at him.
Ben was relieved when the train began to move. At each stop on the way to the southern tip of Manhattan, he glared out as soon as the doors opened. The people on the platform all flinched and either found another car or decided not to ride the subway tonight at all. Not very many people were out at this hour, on a night like this.
Finally, at Battery Park, he stepped off the train and hurried away. He knew he was too long to fit through the exit turnstile, however, and had to leave by jumping the entryway again. Then he trotted up the steps and back out into the storm.
In the park itself, Ben leaned into the icy, gusting snowfall as he trotted toward the water. He figured this was as close to Ellis Island as he could get on land, since a passenger ferry stopped here during the day between trips to Liberty Island and Caven Point, New Jersey. The bitterly cold wind off the Hudson River where it opened into the Upper Bay blew into his face, and he knew he had chosen well. The heavy fur and layer of fat insulated him just fine.
Now for the fun part, he thought to himself. He set the manila envelope down in the snow and picked it up again, this time completely enclosed in his mouth.
Ben inhaled deeply through his nose and plunged into the freezing waters. He was relieved to find that he was still comfortable. In fact, he could swim just fine, paddling with all four legs and holding his eyes and nose above the surface.
Behind him, the lights of Manhattan glowed with spectral white beauty through the blizzard. He didn’t lift his head to look forward toward New Jersey and the various islands, fearing that he would need all his energy to swim the distance to Ellis Island. He only focused on the lights of Ellis Island itself. The waves splashed against his face, making it hard to see, but he was able to blow out any water that got in his nose.
The polar-bear body was powerful and suited to a long swim in frigid waves. He just kept paddling through the darkness. Though he couldn’t judge the distance very well, he was pleasantly surprised that he wasn’t tiring.
Suddenly, however, he felt a tremendous desire to give up, to turn around. It surprised him; he fought it, focusing his eyes on the lights ahead. The very water seemed thicker, the waves stronger, the wind harder.
Maybe he was getting tired, after all. He tried to guess how far he had to go. It might have been several hundred yards, but suddenly it looked like more. He forced himself to keep swimming.
It’s farther to go back now anyway, he told himself. Actually, he didn’t really feel tired at all. He just felt a compulsion to turn around and swim away.
Leslie Christian wouldn’t think much of that.
Ben churned his legs in the water, harder and harder.
Suddenly a wave. of fear swept over him, making his stomach muscles clench. It came without thought or logic; he felt a primal panic rising in him, lifting the ursine hackles on the back of his neck and shoulders. He kept swimming, but his legs were reluctant, weakening with dread.
Another crest of fear rose in him, and he stopped swimming. His huge body bobbed in the tossing waves, held aloft by his fur and layer of fat. Ellis Island, no more than a light or two in the distance, filled him with revulsion. As he looked at it through the blizzard, the island grew blurry and seemed to shift even farther away from him.
Ben blinked a splash of water out of his eyes, trying to focus. Even the falling snow ahead of him seemed to turn oddly in his vision. He was disoriented, scared, and wanted to go home.
He forced his legs to start kicking again, in a dog paddle. Instead of turning, though, he paddled straight ahead. He concentrated on his legs, just to keep them moving. The island, the fear and dread of the unknown he would meet there, and this strange panic that had struck him were still present, but he ignored them. Two legs at a time, pushing against the water, filled his mind. That was all: one, two; one, two.
Ben kept swimming.
The trip seemed to take forever. At last, however, he entered a cone of bright light and dared to look up. It was a single powerful lamp on one of the buildings; others near it were burned out. Ellis Island was a rectangle, with a ferry slip in one long side that created a horseshoe shape. The ‘island was smaller than he had expected, maybe less than two city blocks.
Now that he knew he was going to make it, he slowed down, looking for signs of life. Only certain windows illuminated from inside suggested anyone was here, but in this weather that was no surprise. He paddled into the ferry slip, still looking around, and finally reached up to the dock with his front legs and pulled himself out of the water.
On an impulse, he shook himself, spraying icy water in all directions.
As he got his bearings, he became aware of an unpleasant smell. It reminded him of garbage barges, but the smell was more varied, and worse. Fortunately, the hard wind was blowing it away from the island.
He squinted his bear’s eyes into the rush of snow against his face. The main building was maybe six stories’ worth of brick and limestone trim, considerably longer than a football field from left to right as he faced it. At each corner, copper-domed observation towers stood another forty feet higher than the roof against the storm. The building had an old look, as though it was from the turn of the century, but Ben was no student of architecture.
An eerie feeling of being watched from behind ticked the back of his neck. He turned to look as his hackles rose, but nothing was behind him except the water. The sensation persisted and he looked up, to see only the heavy snowfall swirling down at him.
A movement in the shadows to his left caught his eye. He turned, tensing. Someone took a wary step forward. “What do you want?” a woman’s voice demanded. Ben hadn’t expected anyone to be outside here. Also, he couldn’t talk as a bear. He only watched as the speaker came forward another step. She walked upright, at least six feet tall. Her face was that of a ferret: black nose, wedge-shaped head with round ears, and a black mask around her eyes over buff fur. Her fur shifted toward silver on her abdomen. Most notably, two-inch fangs curved downward from her mouth.
“Careful, Mustelina,” said a young man’s voice. “ I never saw him before.”
Ben looked at him. He was a strange bushy bundle of average height for a man, steely gray in color.
“Shut up, Brillo,” said Mustelina. “A joker’s a joker. What’s your name?”
Ben shook his head and tried to shrug, still watching them suspiciously. At least he understood what Mustelina was doing out here; she was made for this weather, nearly as much as he was. She probably handled the blazing, humid New York summers better than he would in this form. Brillo, too, was apparently warm enough out here. “What if he’s not a joker?” Brillo yelled harshly against the wind. “What if he’s a real polar bear?”
“Oh, get off it, will you?” She took another step toward Ben. The wind rippled her white fur. “Can’t you talk at all?”
Ben carefully swayed his head from side to side in a definitive gesture that Brillo could not deny. Then he inclined his head toward the main doors of the big building. His mouth was still clamped shut.
“Bloat better meet him,” said Mustelina firmly. “Come on.” She walked along the ferry slip toward the main doors with a springy, prancing step, her head bent against the wind.
Ben padded after her, keeping an eye on Brillo. Brillo stayed away from him, though, as they both approached the entrance.
As Ben drew closer to the building, he looked up at the huge triple-arched doors that reached up into the second story. Over them, snow lay on some kind of concrete birds flanking an insignia in relief. Thousands of people could be in a building this size.
“Bloat runs things here,” said Mustelina as she pulled open the heavy door.
An incredible stench hit Ben’s sensitive ursine nose. He forced himself to walk inside, his stomach rebelling. Mustelina and Brillo followed him.
Ben blinked in the light of the huge room, which had apparently been a lobby at one time. Then he stopped in surprise as the door slammed shut behind him. He was staring face-to-face with the most repulsive joker he had ever seen.
Bloat was monstrous in size, a gross mountain of flesh maybe fifty feet wide and eight feet high. His head and neck looked normal enough at the top and his shoulders and arms were ordinary, but they stuck out uselessly from the incredible mass of his body. Five inlet pipes of some kind jabbed into his body. The stench originated with a resinous black sludge that had accumulated around him on the floor.
Several jokers were hanging around, of all shapes. Some were nearly lost in the shadows at the edges of the big room. At this hour, most of them were probably asleep. Those who were here turned to look with suspicion and hostility at Ben.
“Bloat,” said Mustelina, with a fervent awe in her voice. “This joker just swam all the way out here to join us and climbed out of the water. He can’t even talk.”
“Really?” Bloat’s voice was a thin squeak. “Another guest? Welcome, my friend.” Bloat peered down at him from his greater height. His expression revealed a leering suspicion his voice had not conveyed.
Ben nodded his bear’s head in greeting, feeling a tingle of alarm. He really didn’t know much about this place at all.
Mustelina had said Bloat ran the show here, but Ben wished Leslie Christian had told him exactly who should receive the drug packet. And if he had to defend himself, he would have to drop the packet in order to bite anybody. “He’s no joker!” Bloat shrieked. “He’s an ace of some kind!” Suddenly he glowered sternly at Ben. “You’re no glamour boy, though, are you?”
Ben froze, his pulse racing, wondering how Bloat knew all this. Maybe the rapture was for him, after all. “That’s right,” Bloat shouted gleefully. “That packet’s for me! Hand it over!”
Ben tensed, looking up at Bloat’s face, suddenly realizing that the huge joker was reading his thoughts. The jokers around them turned expectant, their hostile eyes fixed on Ben. Ben shuffled around to keep them all in his vision. From what he could see, he could defend himself, but a fight wouldn’t help him complete his mission. “Watch him,” Bloat warned in his high voice. “Don’t let him get away.”
“May I?” a commanding male voice asked. A youngster strode out of the shadows with a springy step. He was slender and vibrant, bristling with energy-maybe seventeen years old, dressed in jeans and an oversized purple turtleneck sweater. A short, dark-haired teenage girl stood behind him.
Ben looked from him to Bloat and back.
“Oh, all right, David,” Bloat said with exaggerated indulgence. “Make sure. But I’ve already read his mind, so I know. So there.”
David pranced right up to Ben. He grinned with large, even teeth in a handsome face that needed a shave. His blond hair was shaggy and one shock of it fell into his face over bloodshot, watery eyes. He held out one hand. Ben hesitated, studying David’s confident, self-mocking smile. Without the power of speech, surrounded by unknown jokers, he saw little choice of action. He opened his mouth and let the envelope slide forward a little, smelling beer on David’s breath as he did so.
He heard shuffling feet and nervous, high-pitched laughter high above him. As David, still grinning, edged forward carefully and took the package, Ben looked up and saw an observation gallery at the third-floor level over the main floor. The people up there were only shadows. “Ugh,” said David, laughing too hard. “Polar-bear saliva.”
At first no one laughed. Then Bloat’s high giggle pierced the air and the jokers laughed along with him. David was no joker, though. Neither was the girl behind him.
“So you don’t know who he is,” Bloat gloated at Ben. “Well ... I’m not going to tell you!” He laughed again at his own cleverness.
Ben glanced at the door. His chances of running were negligible. His paws couldn’t even work the doorknob. David drew out a packet of the blue powder. He tore a hole in the plastic with the tip of his little finger and then stared at the tiny blue stain on his skin with a sudden fascination.
“Well, David?” Bloat squeaked impatiently.
“That’s the stuff, all right,” David said softly. “Rapture.” He grinned crookedly at his finger and then looked up at Bloat with glowing eyes. “Let’s just say I wanted to make sure we get credit for the rent we pay.”
“David,” Bloat whined. “I don’t cheat my friends.” He looked around and spotted a tall, slender woman cowering in the shadows. “Giggle, you cutie. This is the one I promised you. Give her some, David.”
Giggle crept forward carefully. She wore loose, bulky winter clothes and soft shoes, but as she moved, she laughed quietly. Yet the expression on her face was one of torture and anguish.
“Everything tickles her,” Mustelina said softly to Ben. “Even the feel of clothes on her body and the floor when she walks. Every sensation makes her laugh, but she hates it.”
“It’s called rapture,” said David, holding out the packet. “It activates on contact with the skin ... and it’s strongest locally.”
Giggle ventured forward slowly and stuck an index finger into the hole in the plastic. She drew it out and looked at it. First she smiled shyly. Then she snatched the packet out of his hands, giggling helplessly at her touch on the plastic. She poured the powder into her palm and smeared it on her face and neck. Gasps and laughter rose up on all sides.
“It’s Bloat’s,” said David warily. “And very expensive.” Bloat laughed in shrieking delight, however, entertained by the spectacle as Giggle dropped the packet on the floor and stripped off her bulky sweater and the blue T-shirt under it. She knelt and began desperately rubbing the rapture all over her bare arms, shoulders, breasts, and stomach.
“You won’t stop feeling tickled,” said David. He leered at her obvious pleasure, idly rubbing the blue stain on his finger with his thumb. “But you’ll love it now”
As everyone watched Giggle, Ben glanced around carefully. He couldn’t get out without help.
Giggle had stripped naked and was squatting on the floor, smearing rapture on her thighs. She giggled at the sensation, but no longer looked tortured. Now her face had a dreamy glow.
Ben watched her in a kind of detached horror. Rapture was a nasty drug and she was drenched in it. Still, he was in too tight a spot to worry about some stranger.
Bloat was laughing louder than ever and his joker followers imitated him. David watched Giggle with rapturous enjoyment. The young woman who had entered behind him was now standing alongside him, looking at Giggle with wistful amusement in her pretty blue eyes. “David,” she said softly, twisting a finger around one of her black curls of hair. “Who’s the polar bear?”
“You got me, Sarah,” said David, his eyes still glowing at Giggle.
“I want to jump him,” said Sarah. “I wonder what rapture feels like to a bear.”
Ben’s ursine ears caught her words even through the riot of other voices. No one else had heard her.
Ben backed away a step, wondering what she meant. If she just wanted a ride, Ben could do that. If she meant sex, she was really crazy. Ben looked around quickly, sure that he was physically stronger than anyone he could see. That told him nothing about what ace abilities might be present here.
Giggle was dancing, naked and smeared with blue, inside a circle of jokers. They were clapping in rhythmic unison, still laughing and shouting encouragement as the rest of the packet of rapture was passed around. Bloat hooted and laughed and wiggled his stubby appendages helplessly.
Suddenly Giggle spotted Ben. Swaying from side to side and giggling, she pranced toward him, her smile white inside her blue face. The circle around her parted, still clapping, and she came to Ben, still dancing and twirling.
The circle re-formed to surround both of them. Someone started a chant to go with the rhythmic clapping: “Bear! Bear! Bear!” Giggle laughed and grabbed Beds ears, dancing from side to side.
David and Sarah were now in the front of the circle, still within Ben’s hearing. The blond youth studied Ben with his watery, bloodshot eyes. Then he put his arm around Sarah and shrugged. “Go ahead, for all I care.”
Ben tensed, watching Sarah, ready to leap forward to attack or to dodge away, as necessary.
She didn’t move. Suddenly a force struck Ben’s mind, sending him reeling-shoving him out of the polar bear. In his vision, the swaying blue shape of Giggle rippled and blurred. The clapping and chant of “Bear!” overwhelmed him.
Disoriented, he pushed back, growling almost without meaning to. He was hot now beneath his fur and fat inside this place and he did not understand what the force was. The room suddenly seemed to tilt as the mysterious force pushed him away from the sight, hearing, and tactile feeling of the bear.
Ben was lost in a blur of closing darkness, just barely able to make out Sarah seeming to grow larger in his mind. Panicked, unable to hang on to the bear, he focused his concentration on his human body back in Chinatown. He pictured his room, his bed, his nude body in the bed next to Sally. He concentrated harder and finally, belatedly, spun dizzily back into familiar darkness.
Vivian felt Ben’s confusion. She had been sleeping in the dark room, grateful for the rare solitude, but her mind came awake suddenly. Ben’s mind, disoriented and not present, was no longer controlling their body. The feeling was intuitive, but reliable.
Vivian’s mind came instantly awake. She eagerly hurried to blink their eyelids, move their arms and legs, to make them hers, not theirs-or his. She came awake, took control of their body, and felt the change once again.
It didn’t hurt at first, exactly, but her adrenaline flowed into her bloodstream and the shifting of blood from the change caused throbbing in her head, her chest, and her pelvis. Her bones ached as their shape and size altered, her pelvis growing and her shoulders and rib cage narrowing. Her head and face hurt sharply as their shape changed. She felt some of the sensation of an elevator dropping suddenly or a roller coaster suddenly starting a steep downgrade.
The shifting of soft tissue was less intense, but it rippled and moved on her chest, between her legs, on her face, through all of her muscles. Then the physical changes stopped and left her breathing hard on the bed in Ben’s room. She opened her eyes. The layer of ice on the window softened the glow of light from outside.
Carefully, as she always did after changing from rider to driver in their body, she slid one hand to her chest. Her breasts were small but certainly female. At the same time, her other hand moved between her legs, where she found what she expected. She was Vivian, as Ben still called her from childhood-or Tienyu, as she called herself now.
She cleared her throat softly. It was her voice.
She could feel Ben’s presence now, too. He had probably been killed in his animal, she guessed, and his mind was reeling from the surprise. That’s what would have caused him to lose control of their body momentarily.
For an indefinite period, however, he would now be riding in their body while she did what she wanted. Like she had done as a rider, he could communicate conscious, direct thoughts to her, but they could not read each other’s minds unless the message was deliberate and willful on the part of the sender.
Right now Ben apparently had nothing to say.
Next to her, Sally stirred languorously and turned on her side toward Vivian. Vivian remained motionless, not wanting to wake her. Sally’s hand eased across her waist, however, in a casual caress and slid down between her legs.
Vivian tensed, then gently moved to get out of bed, away from Sally’s hand. She was hoping Sally was still mostly asleep. However, as Vivian sat up and put her feet on the floor. Sally raised up one elbow.
“Who are you?” she said sleepily. “Where’s Ben?” Vivian got up and moved away from the bed. “I’m Ben’s sister. Ben’s gone.”
“Gone? Jeez, why didn’t hey, what were you doing in bed with me?”
For a moment Vivian stood uncertainly in the steamy room, naked except for the coin on her neck chain. She toyed nervously with it. Then she switched on the lamp.
Sally flinched, squinting in the sudden light, and pushed herself up into a sitting position.
“Get out,” said Vivian.
“What? Come on, Ben said he didn’t care if I spent the night. What time is it, anyway?”
“I said get out.” Vivian glanced around for Sally’s clothes and snatched up her big flesh-toned bra, stiff with its underwire. “Here.” She threw it at Sally.
Sally pulled it away from her face, fumbling for something to say and not thinking of anything.
Then, as Sally began putting it on, Vivian picked up Ben’s pouched briefs and looked at them, making a mental note to buy something that would fit better tomorrow. At least he had kept to their basic bargain; the jeans were baggy on him, but would fit snugly around her pelvis. The thermal undershirt, turtleneck, and heavy winter socks, of course, were gender neutral, and she had never bothered to own a bra. Ben’s boots were always a little loose on her, but not much; their feet only altered a little during the change and the socks made up some of the difference.
Sally’s face was bright red and taut with anger, but she had nothing to say. Once her bra was on, she kicked away the sheet and stood up, turning her back to Vivian as she finished getting dressed.
Tomorrow morning Vivian would find the building manager, pretending to know nothing of Ben’s whereabouts. She would play the role of Ben’s worried sister and take over the rent. From what she remembered when Ben first took the room, the manager wouldn’t care if she lived there as long as the rent came on time.
Bundled up in her scarf and winter coat, Sally glanced back over her shoulder. “Thank you for being so considerate,” she snapped. “If I don’t get killed out there at this hour, I’ll freeze to death.” She yanked open the door and stomped out, her blond hair swirling.
Vivian suppressed a twinge of guilt. If Sally was old enough to get picked up in the Twisted Dragon, she was old enough to get home at night. As Vivian closed the door and locked it, she grudgingly decided she couldn’t blame her brother too much. Sally did look very nice and, of course, she had been willing.
“Say good-bye, Ben,” she taunted in a whisper. Good-bye, Ben muttered sourly in her mind.
The radio spat static. Croyd Crenson reached out, switched it off, and threw it across the room toward the wastebasket beside the dresser. He took it as a good omen that it went in.
He stretched then, flipped back the covers, and regarded his pale nude body. Everything seemed to be in place and normally proportioned. He willed himself to levitate and nothing happened, so he swung his legs over the edge of the bed and sat up. He ran his hand through his hair, pleased to find that he possessed hair. Waking up was always an adventure.
He tried to make himself invisible, to melt the wastebasket with a thought and to cause sparks to arc between his fingertips. None of these things occurred.
He rose and made his way to the bathroom. As he drank glass after glass of water he studied himself in the mirror. Light hair and eyes this time, regular features; fairly good-looking, actually. He judged himself to be a little over six feet in height. Well-muscled, too. There ought to be something in the closet that would fit. He’d been about this height and build before.
It was a gray day beyond the window with patches of slushy-looking snow lining the sidewalk across the street. Water trickled in the gutter. Croyd halted on his way to the closet to withdraw a heavy steel rod from a crate beneath his writing table. Almost casually, he bent the rod in half and then twisted it. The strength had carried over yet again, he reflected, as the metal pretzel joined the radio in the wastebasket. He located a shirt and trousers that fit him well, and a tweed jacket only slightly tight in the shoulders. He turned his attention then to his large collection of shoes, and after a time he came up with a comfortable pair.
It was a little after eight o’clock according to his Rolex, and this being winter and daylight it meant morning. His stomach rumbled. Time for breakfast and orientation. He checked his cash cache and withdrew a couple of hundred dollars. Getting low, he mused. Have to visit the bank later. Or maybe rob one. The stocks were taking a beating, too, the last time around. Later ...
He equipped himself with a handkerchief, a comb, his keys, and a small plastic bottle of pills. He did not like to carry identification of any sort. No need for an overcoat. Temperature extremes seldom bothered him.
He locked the door behind him, negotiated the hall and descended the stairs. He turned left when he reached the street, facing into a sharp wind, and he began walking down the Bowery. Leaving a dollar in the outstretched hand of a tall, cadaverous-looking joker with a nose like an icicle-who stood as still as a totem pole in the doorway of a closed mask shopCroyd asked the man what month it was.
“ December,” the figure said without moving its lips. “Merry Christmas.”
“Yeah,” Croyd said.
He tried a few more simple tests as he headed for his first stop, but he could not break the empty whisky bottles in the gutter with a thought, nor set fire to any of the piles of trash. He attempted to utter ultrasounds but only produced squeaks. He hiked down to the newsstand at Hester Street where short, fat Jube Benson sat reading one of his own papers. Benson had on a yellow and orange Hawaiian shirt beneath a light-blue summer suit; bristles of red hair protruded from beneath his porkpie hat. The temperature seemed to bother him no more than it did Croyd. He raised his dark, blubbery, pocked face and displayed a pair of short, curving tusks as Croyd stopped before the stand.
“Paper?” he asked.
“One of each,” Croyd said, “as usual.”
Jube’s eyes narrowed slightly as he studied the man before him. Then, “Croyd?” he asked.
Croyd nodded.
“It’s me, Walrus. How’re they hanging?”
“Can’t complain, fella. Got yourself a pretty one this time.”
“Still test-driving it,” Croyd said, gathering a stack of papers.
Jube showed more tusk.
“What’s the most dangerous job in Jokertown?” he asked. “I give up.”
“Riding shotgun on the garbage truck,” he said. “Hear what happened to the gal who won the Miss Jokertown contest?”
“What?”
“Lost her title when they learned she’d posed nude for Poultry Breeder’s Gazette.”
“That’s sick, Jube,” said Croyd, quirking a smile.
“I know. We got hit by a hurricane while you were asleep. Know what it did?”‘
“What?”
“Four million dollars’ worth of civic improvement.”
“All right, already!” Croyd said. “What do I owe you?” Jube put down his paper, rose, and waddled to the side of the kiosk.
“Nothin’,” he said. “I want to talk to you.”
“I’ve got to eat, Jube. When I wake up I need a lot of food in a hurry. I’ll come back later, all right?”
“Is it okay if I join you?”
“Sure. But you’ll lose business.” Jube began closing the stand.
“That’s okay,” he said. “This is business.”
Croyd waited for him to secure the stand, and they walked two blocks to Hairy’s Kitchen.
“Let’s take that booth in the back,” Jube said.
“Fine. No business till after my first round of food, though, okay? I can’t concentrate with low blood sugar, funny hormones and lots of transaminases. Let me get something else inside first.”
“I understand. Take your time.”
When the waiter came by, Jube said that he had already eaten and ordered only a cup of coffee which he never touched. Croyd started with a double order of steak and eggs and a pitcher of orange juice.
Ten minutes later when the pancakes arrived, Jube cleared his throat.
“Yeah,” Croyd said. “That’s better. So what’s bothering you, Jube?”,
“Hard to begin,” said the other.
“Start anywhere. Life is brighter for me now.”
“It isn’t always healthy to get too curious about other people’s business around here ....”
“True,” Croyd agreed.
“On the other hand, people love to gossip, to speculate.” Croyd nodded, kept eating.
“It’s no secret about the way you sleep, and that’s got to keep you from holding a regular job. Now, you seem more of an ace than a joker, overall. I mean, usually you look normal but you’ve got some special talent.”
“I haven’t got a handle on it yet, this time around.”
“Whatever. You dress well, you pay your bills, you like to eat at Aces High, and that ain’t a Timex you’re wearing. You’ve got to do something to stay on top-unless you inherited a bundle.”
Croyd smiled.
“I’m afraid to look at the Wall Street journal,” he said, touching the stack of papers at his side. “I may have to do something I haven’t done in a while if it says what I think it’s going to say.”
“May I assume then that when you work your employment is sometimes somewhat less than legal?”
Croyd raised his head, and when their eyes met Jube flinched. It was the first time Croyd realized that the man was nervous. He laughed.
“Hell, Jube,” he said. “I’ve known you long enough to know you’re no cop. You want something done, is that it? If it involves stealing something, I’m good at that. I learned from an expert. If someone’s being blackmailed I’ll be glad to get the evidence back and scare the living shit out of the person doing it. If you want something removed, destroyed, transported, I’m your man. On the other hand, if you want somebody killed I don’t like to do that. But I could give you the names of a couple of people it wouldn’t bother.”
Jube shook his head.
“I don’t want anybody killed, Croyd. I do want something stolen, though.”
“Before you go into any details, I’d better tell you that I come high.”
Jube showed his tusks,
“The-uh-interests I represent are prepared to make it worth your while.”
Croyd finished the pancakes, drank coffee, and ate a Danish while he waited for the waffles.
“It’s a body, Croyd,” Jube said at last. “What?”
“A corpse.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There was a guy who died over the weekend. Body was found in. a dumpster. No ID. It’s a John Doe. Over at the morgue. “
“Jeez, Jube! A body? I never stole a body before. What good is it to anybody?”
Jube shrugged.
“They’re willing to pay real well for it-and for whatever possessions the guy had with him. That’s all they wanted said.”
“I guess it’s their business what they want it for. But what kind of money are they talking?”
“It’s worth fifty grand to them.”
“Fifty grand? For a stiff?” Croyd stopped eating and stared. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Nope. I can give you ten now and forty when you deliver. “
“And if I can’t pull it ofl?”
“You get to keep the ten, for trying. You interested?” Croyd took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Yeah,” he said then. “I’m interested. But I don’t even know where the morgue is.”
“It’s in the medical examiner’s office at Five-Twenty First Avenue. “
“Okay. Say I go over there and—”
Hairy came by and laid a plate of sausages and hash browns before Croyd. He refilled his coffee cup and placed several bills and some coins on the table.
“Your change, sir.”
Croyd looked at the money.
“What do you mean?” he said. “I didn’t pay you yet.”
“You gave me a fifty.”
“No, I didn’t. I’m not finished.”
It looked as if Hairy smiled, deep within the dark dense pelt that covered him entirely.
“I wouldn’t stay in business long if I gave away money,” he said. “I know when I’m making change.”
Croyd shrugged and nodded. “I guess so.”
Croyd furrowed his brows when Hairy had left, and he shook his head.
“I didn’t pay him, Jube,” he said.
“I don’t remember seeing you pay him either. But he said a fifty .... That’s hard to forget.”
“Peculiar, too. Because I was thinking of breaking a fifty here when I was done.”
“Oh? Do you recall when the thought passed through your mind?”
“Yeah. When he brought the waffles:”
“Did you actually have a mental image of taking out a fifty and handing it to him?”
“Yes.”
“Interesting ....”
“What do you mean?”
“I think that may be your power this timesome kind of telepathic hypnosis. You’ll just have to play with it a bit to get the hang of it, to find its limits.”
Croyd nodded slowly.
“Please don’t try it on me, though. I’m screwed up enough as it is today.”
“Why? You got some stake in this corpse business?”
“The less you know the better, Croyd. Believe me.”
“Okay, I can see that. I don’t really care, anyway. Not for what they’re paying,” he said. “So I take this job. Say everything goes smoothly and I’ve got this body. What do I do with it?”
Jube withdrew a pen and a small notebook from an inside pocket. He wrote for a moment, tore off a sheet, and passed it to Croyd. Then he dug in his side pocket, produced a key, and put it next to Croyd’s plate.
“That address is about five blocks from here,” he said. “‘Rented room’ ground floor. The key fits the lock. You take it there, lock it in, and come tell me at the stand.”
Croyd began eating again. After a time, he said, “Okay.”
“Good.”
“But they’ve probably got more than one John Doe in there this time of year. Winos who freeze to death-you know. How do I know which one is the right one?”
“I was getting to that. This guy’s a joker, see? A little fellow. About five feet tall, maybe. Looks kind of like a big bug-legs that fold up like a grasshopper’s, an exoskeleton with some fur on it, four fingers on his hands with three joints each, eyes on the sides of his head, vestigial wings on back ...”
“I get the picture. Sounds hard to confuse with the standard model.”
“Yes. Shouldn’t weigh much either.”
Croyd nodded. Someone in the front of the restaurant said, “... pterodactyl!” and Croyd turned his head in time to see the winged shape flit by the window.
“That kid again,” Jube said.
“Yeah. Wonder who he’s pestering this time?”
“You know him?”
“Uh-huh. He shows up every now and then. Kind of an aces fan. At least he doesn’t know what I look like this time. Anyway .... How soon do they need this body?”
“The sooner the better.”
“Anything you can tell me about the setup at the morgue?”
Jube nodded slowly.
“Yes. It’s a six-story building. Labs and offices and such, upstairs. Reception and viewing area on the ground floor. They keep the bodies in the basement. The autopsy rooms are down there, too. They have a hundred and twenty-eight storage compartments, with a walk-in refrigerator with shelves for kids’ bodies. When somebody has to view a body for ID purposes, they put it on a special elevator which lifts it to a glass-enclosed chamber in a waiting room on the first floor.”
“So you’ve been there?”
“No, I read Milton Helpern’s memoirs.”
“You’ve got what I’d call a real liberal education,” Croyd said. “I should probably read more myself.”
“You can buy a lot of books for fifty grand.” Croyd smiled.
“So, we’ve got a deal?”
“Let me think about it a little longer-over breakfastwhile I figure out just how my talent works. I’ll come by your stand when I’m done. When would I pick up the ten grand?”
“I can get it by this afternoon.”
“Okay. I’ll see you in a hour or so.”
Jube nodded, raised his massive bulk, slid out of the booth.
“Watch your cholesterol,” he said.
Blue cracks had appeared in the sky’s gray shell, and sunlight found its way through to the street. The sound of trickling water came steadily now from somewhere to the rear of the newsstand. Jube would normally have thought it a pleasant background to the traffic noises and other sounds of the city, save that a small moral dilemma had drifted in on leathery wings and destroyed the morning. He did not realize he had made a decision in the matter until he looked up and saw Croyd looking at him, smiling.
“No problem,” said Croyd. “It’ll be a piece of cake.” Jube sighed.
“There’s something I’ve got to tell you first,” he said. “Problems?”
“Nothing that bears directly on the terms of the job,” Jube explained. “But you may have a problem you didn’t know you had.”
“Like what?” Croyd said, frowning. “That pterodactyl we saw earlier ... ?F “Yeah?.,
“Kid Dinosaur was headed here. I found him waiting when I got back. He was looking for you.”
“I hope you didn’t tell him where to find me.”
“No, I wouldn’t do that. But you know how he keeps tabs on aces and high-powered jokers ... ?”
“Yeah. Why couldn’t he be into baseball players or war criminals?”
“He saw one he wanted you to know about. He said that Devil John Darlingfoot got out of the hospital a month or so ago and dropped out of sight. But he’s back now. He’d seen him near the Cloisters earlier. Says he’s heading for Midtown.”
“Well, well. So what?”
“So he thinks he’s looking for you. Wants a rematch. The Kid thinks he’s still mad over what you did to him the day the two of you trashed Rockefeller Plaza.”
“So let him keep looking. I’m not a short, heavyset, darkhaired guy anymore. I’ll go get the stiff now-before someone buys him a short bier.”
“Don’t you want the money?”
“You already gave it to me.”
“When?”
“What’s your first memory of my coming back here?”
“I looked up about a minute ago and saw you standing there smiling. You said there was no problem. You called it ‘a piece of cake.’”
“Good. Then, it’s working.”
“You’d better explain.”
“That’s the place where I wanted you to start remembering. I’d been here for about a minute before that, and I talked you into giving me the money and forgetting about it.”
Croyd withdrew an envelope from an inner pocket, opened it, and displayed cash.
“Good Lord, Croyd! What else did you do during that minute?”
“Your virtue’s intact, if that’s what you mean.”
“You didn’t ask me any questions-about ... ?” Croyd shook his head.
“I told you I didn’t care who wants the body or why. I really don’t like to burden myself with other peoples concerns. I’ve enough problems of my own.”
Jube sighed.
“Okay. Go do it, boy.” Croyd winked.
“Not to worry, Walrus. Consider it done.”
Croyd walked until he came to a supermarket, went in and purchased a small package of large plastic trash bags. He folded one and fitted it into his inside jacket pocket. He left the rest in a waste bin. Then he walked to the next major intersection and hailed a cab.
He rehearsed his strategy as he rode across town. He would enter the place and use his latest power to persuade the receptionist that he was expected, that he was a pathologist from Bellevue who had been called over by a friend on the staff to consult on a forensic peculiarity. He toyed for a moment with the names Malone and Welby, settled upon Anderson. He would then cause the receptionist to summon someone with the authority to take him downstairs and find him his John Doe. He would place that person under control, get the body and its belongings, transfer it to a baggy, and walk out, causing everyone he passed to forget he had been by. Certainly a lot simpler than more strenuous tactics he had had to employ over the years. He smiled at the classic simplicity of it-no violence, no memory ....
When he arrived at the aluminum-paneled building of blue and white glazed brick, he told the cab driver to go on by and drop him at the next corner. There were two police cars parked in front and a shattered door lay before the place. The presence of police at a morgue did not seem that untoward an occurrence, but the broken door aroused his sense of caution._ He handed the driver a fifty and told him to wait. He strolled past the place once and looked inside. Several of the police were visible, apparently talking with employees.
This did not seem an ideal time to proceed with his plan. On the other hand, he could not afford to go away without finding out what had happened. So he turned when he reached the corner, and headed back. He entered without hesitation, looking about quickly.
A man in civvies who was standing with the police turned suddenly in his direction and stared. Croyd did not like that stare at all. It pulled the floor out from under his stomach and made his hands tingle.
He reached out immediately with his new power, heading directly toward the man, forcing a smile as he moved.
It’s okay. You want to talk to me and do exactly as I say. Wave you hand now, say, “Hi, Jim!” in a loud voice and walk over to the side there with me.
“Hi, Jim!” the man said, moving to join Croyd.
No! Judas thought. Too damned fast. Nailed me as soon as I spotted him ... We can use this guy .... “Plainclothes?” Croyd asked him.
“Yes,” the man felt himself wanting to answer. “What’s your name?”
“Matthias.”
“What happened here?”
“A body was stolen.”
“Which one?”
“A John Doe.”
“Can you describe it?”
“Looked like a big bug-grasshopper legs .. “
“Shit!” Croyd said. “What about his possessions?”
“There weren’t any possessions.”
Several of the uniformed officers were glancing in their direction now. Croyd gave his next order mentally. Matthias turned toward the uniforms.
“Just a minute, guys,” he called. “Business.”
Damn! he thought. This one will come in handy. You can’t hold me like this forever, fella ....
“How’d it happen?” Croyd asked.
“A guy came in here a little while ago, went downstairs, forced an attendant to show him the compartment, took the body out, and left with it.”
“Nobody tried to stop him?”
“Sure they did. Four of them are on their way to the hospital as a result. The guy was an ace.”
“Which one?”
“The one who wrecked Rockefeller Plaza last fall.”
“Darlingfoot?”
“Yeah, that’s the one.”
“Don’t ... Don’t ask any more, whether I’m involved, whether I hired him, whether I’m running a cover-up now ....”
“Which way did he go with it?”
“Northwest.”
“On foot?”
“That’s what the witnesses said-big, twenty-foot leaps.” As soon as you let me go, sucker, I’m calling in the nukes on you.
“Hey, why’d you turn and look at me the way you did when I came in?”
Damn!
“I felt that an ace had just walked through the door.”
“How’d you know?”
“I’m an ace myself. That’s my power-spotting other aces.”
“Useful talent for a cop, I guess. Well, listen close. You are now going to forget you ever met me, and you won’t notice me leaving. You’re just going to walk on over to that fountain and get a drink, then walk back and join your buddies. If anyone asks who you were talking to, you’ll say it was your bookie and forget about it. You do that now. Forget!”
Croyd turned and walked away. Judas realized he was thirsty.
Outside, Croyd walked to his cab, climbed in, slammed the door and said, “Northwest.”
“What do you mean?” the driver asked him.
“Just head uptown and I’ll tell you what to do as we go along. “
“You’re the boss.”
The car jerked into motion.
Over the next mile Croyd had the driver jog westward, as he searched for signs of the other’s passage. It seemed unlikely that Devil John would be using public transportation when carrying a corpse. On the other hand, it was possible he’d had an accomplice waiting with a vehicle. Still, knowing the man’s chutzpah, it did not seem out of the question for him to be hoofing it with the body. He knew that there was very little anyone could do to stop him if he did not wish to be stopped. Croyd sighed as he scanned the way ahead. Why were simple things never easy?
Later, as they were nearing Morningside Heights, the driver muttered, “... one of them damn jokers!”
Croyd followed the man’s gesture to where the form of a pterodactyl was in sight for several moments before passing behind a building.
“Follow it!” Croyd said. “The leather bird?”
“Yes!”
“I’m not sure where it is now.”
“Find it!”
Croyd waved another bill at the man, and the tires screeched and a horn blared as the cab took a turn. Croyd’s gaze swept the skyline, but the Kid was still out of sight. He halted the cab moments later to question an oncoming jogger. The man popped an earplug, listened a moment, then pointed to the east and took off again.
Several minutes later, he caught sight of the angular birdform, to the north, moving in wide circles. This time they were able to keep track of it for a longer while, and to gain on it.
When they came abreast of the area the pterodactyl circled, Croyd called to the driver to slow. There was still nothing unusual in sight on the ground, but the saurian’s sweeping path covered an area of several blocks. If he were indeed tracking Devil John, the man could well be nearby. “What are we looking for?” the driver asked him.
“A big, red-bearded, curly-haired man with two very different legs,” Croyd answered. “The right one is heavy, hairy, and ends in a hoof. The other’s normal.”
“I heard something about that guy. He’s dangerous ...”
“Yeah, I know.”
“What are you planning on doing if you find him?”
“I was hoping for a meaningful dialogue,” Croyd said. “I ain’t gettin too close to your dialogue. If we spot him, I’m taking off.”
“I’ll make it worth you while to wait.”
“No thanks,” the driver said. “You want out, I’ll drop you and run. That’s it.”
“Well .... The pterodactyl is moving north. Let’s try to get ahead of it, and when we do you cut east on the first street where we can.”
The driver accelerated again, drifting to the right while Croyd tried to guess the center of the Kid’s circle.
“The next street,” Croyd said finally. “Turn there and see what happens.”
They took the corner slowly and cruised the entire block without Croyd’s spotting his quarry or even viewing his airborne telltale again. At the next intersection, however, the winged form passed once more and this time he had sight of the one he sought.
Devil John was on the opposite side of the street, halfway down the block. He bore a shrouded parcel in his arms. His shoulders were massive; his white teeth flashed as a woman with a shopping cart rushed to get out of his way. He wore Levi’s-the right leg torn off high on the thigh-and a pink sweatshirt suggesting he had visited Disney World. A passing motorist sideswiped a parked car as John took a normal step with his left foot, bent his right leg at an odd angle, and sprang twenty feet farther ahead to an open area near the curb. He turned then with a normal step and sprang again, clearing a slow-moving red Honda and landing in a patch of grass on the street’s central island. Two large dogs that had been following him rushed to the curb, barking loudly, but halted there and regarded oncoming traffic.
“Stop!” Croyd called to the driver, and he opened the door and stepped to the curb before the vehicle came to a complete halt.
He cupped his hands to his mouth then and shouted, “Darlingfoot! Hold on!”
The man only glanced in his direction, already bending his leg to spring again.
“It ‘s me-Croyd Crenson!” he called out. “ I want to talk to you!”
The satyr-like figure halted in mid-crouch. The shadow of a pterodactyl swept by. The two dogs continued to bark, and a tiny white poodle rounded a corner and rushed to join them.
An auto horn blared at two halted pedestrians in a crosswalk. Devil John turned and stared. Then he shook his head. “You’re not Crenson!” he shouted.
Croyd strode forward.
“The hell I’m not!” he answered, and he darted into the street and crossed to the island.
Devil John’s eyes were narrowed beneath his shaggy brows as he studied Croyd’s advancing figure. He raked his lower lip slowly with his upper teeth, then shook his head more slowly.
“Naw,” he said. “Croyd was darker and a lot shorter. What are you trying to pull, anyway?”
Croyd shrugged.
“My appearance changes pretty regularly,” he said. “But I’m the same guy who whipped your ass last fall.” Darlingfoot laughed.
“Get lost, fella,” he said. “I don’t have time for groupies—”
They both clenched their teeth as a car drew up beside them and its horn blasted. A man in a gray business suit stuck his head out of the window.
“What’s going on here?” he asked.
Croyd growled, stepped into the street, and removed the rear bumper, which he then placed in the vehicle’s back seat through a window that had been closed up until then.
“Auto inspection,” he said. “You pass. Congratulations.”
“Croyd!” Darlingfoot exclaimed as the car sped off. “It is you!”
He tossed his shrouded burden to the ground and raised his fists.
“I’ve been waiting all winter for this ....”
“Then, wait a minute longer,” Croyd said. “I’ve got to ask you something.”
“What?”
“That body .... Why’d you take it?” The big man laughed.
“For money, of course. What else?”
“Mind telling me what they’re paying you for it?”
“Five grand. Why?”
“Cheap bastards,” Croyd said. “They say what they want it for?”
“No, and I didn’t ask because I don’t care. A buck’s a buck. “
“Yeah,” Croyd said. “Who are they, anyhow?”
“Why? What’s it to you?”
“Well, I think you’re getting screwed on the deal. I think it’s worth more.”
“How much?”
“Who are they?”
“Some Masons, I think. What’s it worth?”
“Masons? Like secret handshakes and all that? I thought they just existed to give each other expensive funerals. What could they want with a dead joker?”
Darlingfoot shook his head.
“They’re a weird bunch,” he said. “For all I know, they want to eat it. Now, what were you saying about money?”
“I think I could get more for it,” Croyd said. “What say I see their five and raise it one? I’ll give you six big ones for it.”
“I don’t know, Croyd .... I don’t like to screw people I work for. Word will get around I’m undependable.”
“Well, maybe I could go seven—”
They both turned suddenly at a series of savage growls and snappings. The dogs-joined by two additional strays had crossed over during their conversation and dragged the small, insectlike body from its shroud. It had broken in several places, and the Great Dane held most of an arm in his teeth as he backed away, snarling, from the German shepherd. Two others had torn one of the grasshopperlike legs loose and were fighting over it. The poodle was already halfway across the street, a four-digited hand in its mouth. Croyd became aware of a particularly foul odor other than New York air.
“Shit!” Devil John exclaimed, leaping forward, his hoof shattering a square of concrete paving near to the remains. He grabbed for the Great Dane and it turned and raced away. The terrier let go of the leg. The brown mongrel didn’t. It tore across the street in the other direction, dragging the appen—I dage. “I’ll get the arm! You get the leg!” Devil John cried, bounding after the Great Dane.
“What about the hand?” Croyd yelled, kicking at another dog newly arrived on the scene.
Darlingfoot’s reply was predictable, curt, and represented an anatomical unlikelihood of a high order. Croyd took off after the brown dog.
As Croyd approached the corner where he had seen it turn, he heard a series of sharp yelps. Coming onto the side street he saw the dog lying on its back snapping at the pterodactyl which pinned it to the pavement. The battered limb lay nearby. Croyd sprinted forward.
“Thanks, Kid. I owe you one,” he said as he reached for the leg, hesitated, took out his handkerchief, wrapped it about his hand, picked up the limb, and held it downwind.
The pterodactyl shape flowed, to be replaced by that of a nude boy-perhaps thirteen years of age-with light eyes and unruly brown hair, a small birthmark on his forehead.
“Got it for you, Croyd,” he announced. “Sure stinks, though. “
“Yeah, Kid,” Croyd said. “Excuse me. Now I’ve got to go put it back together.”
He turned and hurried in the direction from which he had come. Behind him he heard rapid footfalls.
“What you want it for?” the boy asked.
“It’s a long, complicated, boring story, and it’s better you don’t know,” he answered.
“Aw, c’mon. You can tell me.”
“No time. I’m in a hurry.”
“You going to fight Devil John again?”
“I don’t plan on it. I think we can come to a meeting of minds without resorting to violence.”
“But if you do fight, what’s your power this time?” Croyd reached the corner, cut across to the island. Ahead, he saw where another dog now worried the remains. Devil John was nowhere in sight.
“Damn it!” he yelled. “Get away from there!”
The dog paid him no heed, but stripped a furry layer from the chitinous carapace. Croyd noticed that the torn tissue was dripping some colorless liquid. The remains looked moist now, and Croyd realized that fluids were oozing from the breathing holes in the thorax.
“Get away from there!” he repeated.
The dog growled at him. Suddenly, though, the growl turned to a whimper and the animal’s tail vanished between its legs. A meter-high tyrannosaurus hopped past Croyd, hissing fiercely. The dog turned and fled. A moment later, the Kid stood in its place.
“It’s getting away with that piece,” the boy said. Croyd repeated Darlingfoot’s comment on the hand as he tossed the leg down beside the dismembered body. He withdrew the folded trash bag from the inner pocket of his jacket and shook it out.
“You want to help, Kid, you hold the bag while I toss in what’s left.”
“Okay. It sure is gross.”
“It’s a dirty job,” Croyd agreed. “Then, why you doing it?”
“It’s what growing up is all about, Kid.”
“How do you mean?”
“You spend more and more of your time cleaning up after mistakes.”
A rapid thumping noise approached, a shadow passed overhead, and Devil John crashed to the earth beside them. “Damn dog got away,” he announced. “You get the leg?”
“Yeah,” Croyd answered. “It’s already in the bag.”
“Good idea-a plastic bag. Who’s the naked kid?”
“You don’t know Kid Dinosaur?” Croyd answered. “I thought he knew everybody. He’s the pterodactyl was following you.”
“Why?”
“I like to be where the action is,” the Kid said.
“Hey, how come you’re not in school?” Croyd asked. “School sucks.”
“Now, wait a minute. I had to quit school in ninth grade and I never got to go back. I always regretted it.”
“Why? You’re doing okay.”
“There’s all that stuff I missed. I wish I hadn’t.”
“Like what?”
“Well ... Algebra. I never learned algebra.”
“What the fuck good’s algebra?”
“I don’t know and I never will, because I didn’t learn it. I sometimes look at people on the street and say, ‘Gee, I’ll bet they all know algebra,’ and it makes me feel kind of inferior.”
“Well, I don’t know algebra and it doesn’t make feel a damn bit inferior.”
“Give it time,” Croyd said.
The Kid suddenly became aware that Croyd was looking at him strangely.
“You’re going back to school right now,” Croyd told him, “and you’re going to study your ass off for the rest of the day, and you’re going to do your homework tonight, and you’re going to like it.”
“I’ll make better time if I fly,” the Kid said, and he transformed into a pterodactyl, hopped several times, and glided away.
“Pick up some clothes on the way!” Croyd shouted after him.
“Just what the hell is going on here?”
Croyd turned and beheld a uniformed officer who had just crossed to their island.
“Go fuck yourself!” he snarled.
The man began unbuckling his belt.
“Stop! Cancel that,” Croyd said. “Buckle up. Forget you saw us and go walk up another street.”
Devil John stared as the man obeyed.
“Croyd, how are you doing those things?” he asked. “That’s my power, this time around.”
“Then, you could just make me give you the body, couldn’t you?”
Croyd shook the bag down and fastened it. When he finished gagging, he nodded.
“Yeah. And I’ll get it one way or another, too. But I don’t feel like cheating a fellow working stiff today. My offer’s still good.”
“Seven grand?”
“Six.”
“You said seven.”
“Yeah, but it’s not all here now.”
“That’s your fault, not mine. You stopped me.”
“But you put the thing down where the dogs could get it.”
“Yes, but how was I supposed to—Hey, that’s a bar and grill on the corner.”
“You’re right.”
“Care to discuss this over lunch and a couple of brews?”
“Now that you mention it, I’ve a bit of an appetite,” Croyd said.
They took the table by the window and set the bag on the empty chair. Croyd visited the men’s room and washed his hands several times while Devil John procured a pair of beers.
When he returned he ordered a half-dozen sandwiches. Darlingfoot did the same.
“Who’re you working for?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Croyd answered. “I’m doing it through a third party.”
“Complicated. I wonder what they all want the thing for?” Croyd shook his head.
“Beats me. I hope there’s enough of him left to collect on.”
“That’s one of the reasons I’m willing to deal. I think my guys wanted him in better shape than this. They might try to welsh on me. Better a bird in the hand, you know? I don’t trust them all that much. Bunch of kooks.”
“Say, did he have any possessions?”
“Nope. No belongings at all.”
The sandwiches arrived and they began eating. After a while, Darlingfoot glanced several times at the bag, then remarked, “You know, that thing looks bigger.”
Croyd studied it a moment.
“It’s just settling and shifting,” he said.
They finished, then ordered two more beers. “No, damn it! It is bigger!” Darlingfoot insisted. Croyd looked again. It seemed to swell even as he watched.
“You’re right,” he acknowledged. “It must be gases from the-uh-decomposition.”
He extended a finger as if to poke it, thought better of it and lowered his hand.
“So what do you say? Seven grand?”
“I think six is fair-the shape he’s in.”
“But they knew what they were asking for. You’ve got to expect this sort of thing with stiffs.”
“A certain amount, yes. But you’ve got to admit you bounced him around a hell of a lot, too.”
“That’s true, but a regular one could take it better. How was I to know this guy was a special case?”
“By looking at him. He was little and fragile.”
“He felt pretty sturdy when I snatched him. What say we split the difference? Sixty-five hundred?”
“I don’t know ...”
Other diners began glancing in their direction as the bag continued to swell. They finished their beers.
“Another round?”
“Why not?”
“Waiter!”
Their waiter, who had been clearing a recently vacated table, ambled over, a stack of dishes and utensils in his hands. “What can I get—” he began, when the edge of a steak knife, protruding from the pile of crockery, brushed against the swollen bag. “My God!” he finished, as a whooshing sound, accompanied by an odor that might have been compounded of sewer gas and slaughterhouse effluvia filled the immediate vicinity and spread like an escaped experiment in chemical warfare throughout the room.
“Excuse me,” the waiter said, and he turned and hurried off.
There followed a series of gasps from other diners, moments later.
“Use your power, Croyd!” Devil John whispered.
“Hurry!”
“I don’t know if I can do a whole roomful ....”
“Try!”
Croyd concentrated on the others:
There was a small accident. Nothing important. Now you will forget it. You smell nothing unusual. Return to your meals and do not look in this direction again. You will not notice anything that we do. There is nothing to be seen here. Or smelled.
The other patrons turned away, resumed eating, talking.
“You did it,” Devil John remarked in a peculiar voice.
Croyd looked back and discovered that the man was pinching his nostrils shut.
“Did you spill something?” Croyd asked him.
“No. “
“Uh-oh. Hear that?”
Darlingfoot leaned to the side and bent low.
“Oh damn!” he said. “The bag’s collapsed and he’s running out the slash that guy made. Hey, kill my sense of smell too, will you?”
Croyd closed his eyes and gritted his teeth.
“That’s better,” he heard moments later as Darlingfoot reached cut and uprighted the bag, which made a sloshing, gurgling noise.
Croyd looked to the floor and beheld a huge puddle resembling spilled stew. He gagged slightly and looked away.
“What do you want to do now, Croyd? Leave the mess and take the rest, or what?”
“I think I’m obliged to take everything I can.”
Devil John quirked an eyebrow and smiled.
“Well,” he said, “go sixty-five hundred and I’ll help you get it all together in a manageable form.”
“Its a deal.”
“Then, cover me if you can so the people in the kitchen don’t notice me.”
“I’ll try. What are you going to do?”
“Trust me.”
Darlingfoot rose, passed the top of the bag to Croyd, and limped back to the kitchen. He was gone for several minutes and when he returned his arms were full.
He unscrewed the top from a large empty pickle jar and set it on the floor beside the chair.
“Now if you’ll just tilt the bag so the opening is right over the jar,” he said, “I’ll raise the bottom and we can pour him into it.”
Croyd complied and the jar was well over half-full before the trickle ceased.
“Now what?” he asked, screwing on the lid.
Darlingfoot took the first from a stack of napkins he had brought with him and opened a small white bundle.
“Doggie bags,” he said. “I’ll just get all the solid stuff up off the floor and into them.”
“Then what?”
“I’ve got a nice, fresh trash-can liner, too,” he explained, stooping. “It should all fit inside with no trouble.”
“Could you hurry?” Croyd said. “I can’t control my own sense of smell.”
“I’m mopping as fast as I can. Open the jar again, though, will you? I can wring out the rest of him from the napkins.”
When the spilled remains had been collected into the pickle jar and nine doggie bags, Darlingfoot ripped the torn bag the rest of the way open and removed the chitinous plates that remained within. He set the jar on the concavity of the thorax and then placed it all in the fresh bag, covering it with pieces of gristle and smaller bits of plating. He set the head and limbs on top. Then he packed the doggie bags and rolled down the liner.
Croyd was on his feet by then. “Excuse me,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
“I’ll come, too. I have to wash up a bit.”
Above the running of the water Devil John suddenly remarked, “Now that everything’s pretty much settled, I’ve got a favor to ask of you.”
“What’s that?” Croyd inquired, soaping his hands yet again.
“I still feel funny about the ones who hired me, you know?”
Croyd shrugged.
“You can’t have it both ways,” he said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t follow you.”
“I was on my way to deliver when you caught up with me. Supposing we went on to the rendezvous point-a little park up near the Cloisters-and I give them some bullshit about the dogs tearing the body apart and getting away with the whole thing. You make them believe it, and then have them forget that you were along. That way, I’m off the hook.”
“Okay. Sure,” Croyd agreed, splashing water on his face.
“But you say ‘them.’ How many people are you expecting?”
“Just one or two. The guy who hired me was named Matthias, and there was a red man with him. He’s the one who tried getting me interested in these Masons till the other shut him up ...”
“That’s funny,” Croyd said. “I met a Matthias this morning. He was a cop. Plainclothes. And what about the red guy? Sounds like maybe an ace or a joker.”
“Probably is. But if he’s got any special talent he wasn’t showing it.”
Croyd dried his face. ‘
“All of a sudden I’m a little uncomfortable,” he said. “See, this cop Matthias is an ace. The name might just be a coincidence, and I was able to con him with my talent, but I don’t like anything that smacks of too many aces. I might run into someone who’s immune to what I’ve got. This group ... It couldn’t be a bunch of Mason aces, could it?”
“I don’t know. The red fellow wanted me to come in to some kind of meeting, and I told him I wasn’t a joiner and that we dealt right there or we forgot about it. So they coughed up my retainer on the spot. There was something about the way the red guy said things that gave me bad vibes.”
Croyd frowned.
“Maybe we should just forget them.”
“I’ve really got this thing about closing deals all proper so they don’t come back to haunt me,” Darlingfoot said.
“Couldn’t you just sort of look it over while I talk to him, and then decide?”
“Well, okay .... I said that I would. Do you remember anything else that got said? About Masons, aces, the body anything?”
“No .... But what are pheromones?”
“Pheromones? They’re like hormones that you smell. Airborne chemicals that can influence you. Tachyon was telling me about them one time. There was this joker I’d met. You sat too near him in a restaurant and anything you ate tasted like bananas. Anyway, it was pheromones, Tachy said. So what about them?”
“I don’t know. The red guy was saying something about pheromones in connection with his wife when I came up. It didn’t go any further.”
“Nothing else?”
“Nothing else.”
“Okay.” Croyd wadded his paper towel and tossed it toward the wastebasket. “Let’s go.”
When they returned to the table Croyd counted out the money and passed it to his companion.
“Here. Can’t say you didn’t earn it.”
Croyd regarded the strewn napkins, the slimy floor, and the moistness of the empty bag.
“What do you think we should do about the mess?”
Darlingfoot shrugged.
“The waiters will take care of it,” he said. “They’re used to it. Just make sure you leave a good tip.”
Croyd hung back as they moved toward the park. Two figures were seated on a bench within, and even from the distance it was apparent that one man’s face was bright red.
“Well?” Devil John asked.
“I’ll give it a shot,” Croyd said. “Pretend we’re not together. I’ll keep walking and you go on in and give them your spiel. I’ll double back in a minute and cut through the park. I’ll try to give them the business as soon as I get near. But you be ready. If it doesn’t work this time we may have to resort to something more physical.”
“Got you. Okay.”
Croyd slowed his pace and Darlingfoot moved on ahead, crossing the street and entering upon a gravel walk leading to the bench. Croyd moved on to the corner, crossed slowly, and turned back.
He could hear their voices raised, as if in argument, when he drew nearer. He turned onto the trail and strolled toward the bench, his parcel at his side.
“... crock of shit!” he overheard Matthias say.
The man glanced in his direction, and Croyd realized that it was indeed the policeman he had encountered earlier. There was no sign of recognition on the man’s face, but Croyd was certain that his talent must be telling him that an ace was approaching. So ...
“Gentlemen,” he said, focusing his thoughts, “everything that Devil John Darlingfoot has told you is correct. The body was destroyed by dogs. There is nothing for him to deliver. You will have to write this one off. You will forget me as soon as I have—”
He saw Darlingfoot turn his head suddenly, to glance past him. Croyd turned and looked in the same direction.
A young, plain-looking oriental woman was approaching, hands in the pockets of her coat, collar raised against the wind.
The wind shifted, blowing directly toward him now.
Something about the lady ...
Croyd continued to stare. How could he have thought her plain? It must have been a trick of the light. She was breathtakingly lovely. In fact—He wanted her to smile at him.
He wanted to hold her. He wanted to run his hands all over her. He wanted to stroke her hair, to kiss her, to make love to her. She was the most gorgeous woman he had ever laid eyes on.
He heard Devil John whistle softly.
“Look at her, will you?”
“Hard not to,” he replied.
He grinned at her, and she smiled back at him. He wanted to grab her. Instead, he said, “Hello.”
“I’d like you to meet my wife, Kim Toy,” he heard the red man say.
Kim Toy! Even her name was like music ...
“Tell me what you want and I’ll get it for you,” he heard Devil John say to her. “You’re so special it hurts.”
She laughed.
“How gallant,” she stated. “No, nothing. Not just now. Wait a moment, though, and perhaps I’ll think of something.”
“Do you have it?” she asked her husband.
“No. It was taken by dogs,” he replied.
She cocked her head, quirked an eyebrow.
“Amazing fate,” she said. “And how do you know this?”
“These gentlemen have told us about it.”
“Really?” she observed. “That is so? That is what you told him?”
Devil John nodded.
“That’s what we told him,” Croyd said. “But—”
“And the bag you dropped when you saw me approaching,” she said. “What might it contain? Open it, please, and show me.”
“Of course,” said Croyd.
“Anything you say,” Devil John agreed.
Both men dropped to their knees before her and fumbled unsuccessfully for long seconds before they were able to begin unrolling the top of the bag.
Croyd wanted to kiss her feet while he was in position to do so, but she had asked to see the inside of the bag and that should really come first. Perhaps she might feel inclined to reward him afterward, and—
He opened the bag and a cloud of vapor swirled about them. Kim Toy drew back immediately, choking. As his stomach tightened, Croyd realized that the lady was no longer beautiful, and no more desirable than a hundred others he had passed this day. From the corner of his eye he saw Devil John shift his position and begin to rise and at that moment Croyd realized the nature of his attitude adjustment.
As the smell dissipated, something of the initial wave of glamour rose again from her person. Croyd clenched his teeth and lowered his head near to the mouth of the bag. He took a deep breath.
Her beauty died in that instant, and he extended his power.
Yes, as I was saying, the body is lost. It was destroyed by dogs. Devil John did his best for you, but he has nothing to deliver. We are going now. You will forget that I was with him.
“Come on!” he said to Darlingfoot as he rose to his feet.
Devil John shook his head.
“I can’t leave this lady, Croyd,” he answered. “She asked me for—”
Croyd waved the opened bag in front of his face.
Darlingfoot’s eyes widened. He choked. He shook his head.
“Come on!” Croyd repeated as he slung the bag over his shoulder and broke into a sprint.
With one enormous leap Devil John landed ten feet ahead of him.
“Weird, Croyd! Weird!” he announced as they crossed the street.
“Now you know all about pheromones,” Croyd told him.
The sky had become completely overcast again, and a few flurries of snow drifted past him. Croyd had parted with Darlingfoot outside another bar and had begun walking, down and across town. He scanned the streets regularly for a taxi but none came into view. He was loath to trust his burden to the crush and press of bus or subway.
The snowfall increased in intensity as he walked the next several blocks, and gusts of wind came now to swirl the flakes and drive them among the buildings. Passing vehicles began switching on their headlights, and Croyd realized as the visibility diminished that he would be unable to distinguish a taxi even if one passed right beside him. Cursing, he trudged on, scrutinizing the nearest buildings, hoping for a diner or restaurant where he could drink a cup of coffee, and wait for the storm to blow over, or call for a cab. Everything he passed seemed to be an office, however.
Several minutes later the flakes became smaller and harder. Croyd raised his free hand to shield his eyes. While the sudden drop in temperature did not bother him, the icy pellets did. He ducked into the next opening he came to-an alleyway-and he sighed and lowered his shoulders as the force of the wind was broken.
Better. The snow descended here in a more leisurely fashion. He brushed it off his jacket, out of his hair; he stamped his feet. He looked about. There was a recess in the building to his left, several paces back, several steps above street level. It looked completely sheltered, dry. He headed for it.
He had already set his foot upon the first step when he realized that one corner of the boxlike area before a closed metal door was already occupied. A pale, stringy-haired woman, dumpy-looking beneath unguessable layers of clothing, sat between a pair of shopping bags, staring past him. “. So Gladys tells Marty she knows he’s been seeing that waitress down at Jensen’s ...” the woman muttered. “Excuse me,” Croyd said. “Mind if I share the doorway with you? It’s coming down kind of hard.”
“... I told her she could still get pregnant when she was nursing, but she just laughed at me ....”
Croyd shrugged and entered the alcove, moving to the opposite corner.
“When she finds another one’s on the way she’s really upset,” the woman continued, “especially with Marty having moved in with his waitress now ......”
Croyd remembered his mother’s breakdown following his father’s death, and a touch of sadness at this obvious case of senile dementia stirred within his breast. But—He wondered. Could his new power, his ability to influence the thought patterns of others, have some therapeutic effect on a person such as this? He had a little time to pass here. Perhaps ..
“Listen,” he said to the woman, thinking clearly and simply, focusing images. “You are here, now, in the present. You are sitting in a doorway, watching it snow—”
“You bastard!” the woman screamed at him, her face no longer pale, her hands darting toward one of the bags. “Mind your own business! I don’t want now and snow! It hurts!”
She opened the bag, and the darkness inside expanded even as Croyd watched-rushing toward him, filling his entire field of vision, tugging him suddenly in several directions, twisting him and—
The woman, alone now in the doorway, closed her bag, stared at the snow for a moment, then said, “... So I say to her, ‘Men aren’t good about support payments. Sometimes you’ve got to get the law on them. That nice young man at Legal Aid will tell you what to do.’ And then Charlie, who was working at the pizza parlor ...”
Croyd’s head hurt and he was not used to the feeling. He never had hangovers, because he metabolized alcohol too quickly, but this felt like what he imagined a hangover to be.
Then he became aware that his back, legs, and buttocks were wet; also, the backs of his arms. He was sprawled someplace cold and moist. He decided to open his eyes.
The sky was clear and twilit between the buildings, with a few bright stars already in sight. It had been snowing. It had also been afternoon. He sat up. What had become of the past several hours, and—
He saw a dumpster. He saw a lot of empty whiskey and wine bottles. He was in an alley, but ..
This was not the same alley. The buildings were lower, there had been no dumpster in the other one, and he could not locate the doorway he had occupied thethe old woman.
He massaged his temples, felt the throbbing begin to recede. The old woman .... What the hell was that black thing she’d hit him with when he’d tried to help her? She had taken it out of one of her bags and
Bags! He cast about frantically for his own bag, with the carefully parceled remains of the diminutive John Doe. He saw then that he still held it in his right hand, and that it had been turned inside out and torn.
He rose to his feet and looked about in the dim glow from a distant streetlight. He saw the doggie bags scattered about him, and he counted quickly. Nine. Yes. All nine of them were in sight, and he now saw the limbs, the head, and the thoraxthough the thorax had now been broken into four pieces and the head looked much shinier than it had earlier. From the dampness, perhaps. The jar! Where was it? The liquid might be very important to whoever wanted the remains. If the jar had been broken ...
He uttered a brief cry when he saw it standing upright in the shadows near the wall to his left. The top was missing and so was an inch or so of glass from beneath it. He crossed to it, and from the odor he knew it to be the real thing and not just . rainwater.
He gathered up the doggie bags, which seemed surprisingly dry, and he placed-them on the sheltered ledge of a barred basement window. Then he collected the pieces of chitin into a heap nearby. When he recovered the legs he noted that they were both broken, but he reflected that that could make for easier packing. Then he turned his attention to the jag-topped pickle jar, and he smiled. How simple. The answer lay all about him, provided by the derelicts who frequented the area.
He gathered an armful of empty bottles and bore them over to the side, where he set them down and began uncorking and uncapping them. When he had finished he decanted the dark liquid.
It took eight bottles of various sizes, and he set them on the ledge with the doggie bags above the small mound of shattered exoskel’ and cartilage. It seemed as if there were a little bit less of the guy each time he got unwrapped. Maybe it had something to do with the way he was divided now. Maybe it took algebra to understand it.
Croyd moved then to the dumpster and opened its side hatch. He smiled almost immediately, for there were long strands of Christmas ribbon near at hand. He withdrew several of these and stuffed them into a side pocket. He leaned forward. If there were ribbon, then—
The sound of rapid footfalls came and went. He spun, raising his hands to defend himself, but there was no one near.
Then he spotted him. A small man in a coat several times too large for him had halted briefly at the windowsill, where he snatched one of the larger bottles and two of the doggie bags. He ran off immediately then, toward the far end of the alley where two other shabby figures waited.
“Hey!” Croyd yelled. “Stop!” and he reached with his power but the man was out of range.
All that he heard was laughter, and a cry of, “Tonight we party, boys!”
Sighing, Croyd withdrew a large wad of red and green Christmas paper from the dumpster and returned to the window to repackage the remainder of the remains.
After he had walked several blocks, his bright parcel beneath his arm, he passed a bar called The Dugout and realized he was in the Village. His brow furrowed for a moment, but then he saw a taxi and waved, and the car pulled over. Everything was okay. Even the headache was gone.
Jube looked up, saw Croyd smiling at him. “How—How did it go?” he asked.
“Mission accomplished,” Croyd answered, passing him the key.
“You got it? There was something on the news about Darlingfoot “
“I got it.”
“And the possessions?”
“There weren’t any.”
“You sure of that, fella?”
“Absolutely. Nothing there but him, and he’s in the bathtub.”
“What?”
“It’s okay, because I closed the drain.”
“What do you mean?”
“My cab was involved in an accident on the way over and some of the bottles broke. So watch out for glass when you unwrap it.”
“Bottles? Broken glass?”
“He was kind of-reduced. But I got you everything that was left.”
“Left?”
“Available. He sort of came apart and melted a bit. But I saved most of him. He’s all wrapped up in shiny paper with a red ribbon around him. I hope that’s okay.”
“Yeah .... That’s fine, Croyd. Sounds like you did your best. “
Jube passed him an envelope.
“I’ll buy you dinner at Aces High,” Croyd said, “as soon as I shower and change.”
“No, thanks. I-I’ve got things to do.”
“Take along some disinfectant if you’re stopping by the apartment. “
“Yeah .... I gather there were some problems?”
“Naw, it was a piece of cake.”
Croyd walked off whistling, hands in his pockets. Jube stared at the key as a distant clock began to chime the hour.
Sitting shade-clad in a booth at Vito’s Italian, odd-hour and quiet, lowering a mound of linguini and the level in a straw-bound bottle-black hair stiff with spray or tonic—the place’s only patron had drawn attention from the staff in the form of several wagers, in that this was his seventh entree, when a towering civilian with a hand like a club came in off the street and stood near, watching, also, through bloodshot eyes.
The man continued to stare at the diner, who finally swung his mirror lenses toward him.
“You the one I’m looking for?” the newcomer asked. “Maybe so,” the diner replied, lowering his fork, “if it involves money and certain special skills.”
The big man smiled. Then he raised his right hand and dropped it. It struck the edge of the table, removed the corner, shredded the tablecloth, and jerked it forward. The linguini spilled backward into the dark-haired man’s lap. The man jerked away as this occurred and his glasses fell askew, revealing a pair of glittering, faceted eyes.
“Prick!” he announced, his hands shooting forward, paralleling the other’s clublike appendage.
“Son of a bitch!” the giant bellowed, jerking his hand away. “You fuckin’ burned me!”
“Fuckin’ shocked,”‘ the other corrected. “Lucky I didn’t fry you! What is this? Why you taking my table apart?”
“You’re hirin’ fuckin’ aces, ain’t you? I wanted you to see my shit.”
“I’m not hiring aces. I thought you were, the way you came on.”
“Hell, no! Bug-eyed bastard!”
The other moved quickly to adjust his glasses.
“It’s a real pain,” he stated, “looking at two hundred sixteen views of an asshole.”
“I’ll give you something up the asshole!” said the giant, raising his hand again.
“You got it,” said the other, an electrical storm erupting suddenly between his palms. The giant stepped back a pace. Then the storm passed and the man lowered his hands. “If it weren’t for the linguini in my lap,” he said then, “this would be funny. Sit down. We can wait together.”
“Funny?”
“Think about it while I go clean up,” he replied. Then, “Name’s Croyd,” he said.
“Croyd Crenson?”
“Yeah. And you’re Bludgeon, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. What do you mean ‘funny’?”
“Like mistaken identity,” Croyd answered. “Two guys thinking they’re each somebody else, you know?” Bludgeons brow was furrowed for several seconds before his lips formed a tentative smile. Then he laughed, four coughlike barks. “Yeah, fuckin’ funny!” he said then, and barked again.
Bludgeon slid into the booth, still chuckling, as Croyd slid out. Croyd headed back toward the men’s room and Bludgeon ordered a pitcher of beer from the waiter who came by to clean up. A few moments later, a black-suited man entered the dining area from the kitchen and stood, thumbs hooked behind his belt, toothpick moving slowly within a faint frown. Then he advanced.
“You look a little familiar,” he said, coming up beside the booth.
“I’m Bludgeon,” the other replied, raising his hand. “Chris Mazzucchelli. Yeah, I’ve heard of you. I hear you can bash your way through nearly anything with that mitt of yours.”
Bludgeon grinned. “Fuckin’ A,” he said.
Mazzucchelli smiled around the toothpick and nodded. He slid into Croyd’s seat.
“You know who I am?” he asked.
“Hell, yes,” Bludgeon said, nodding. “You’re the Man.”
“That I am. I guess you heard there’s some trouble coming down, and I need some special kind of soldiers.”
“You need some fuckin’ heads broke, I’m fuckin’ good at it,” Bludgeon told him.
“That’s nicely put,” Mazzucchelli said, reaching inside his jacket. He removed an envelope and tossed it onto the tabletop. “Retainer.”
Bludgeon picked it up, tore it open, then counted the bills slowly, moving his lips. When he was finished, he said, “Fuckin’ price is fuckin’ right. Now what?”
“There’s an address in there too. You go to it eight o’clock tonight and get some orders. Okay?”
Bludgeon put away the envelope and rose.
“Damn straight,” he agreed, reaching out and picking up the pitcher of beer, raising it, draining it, and belching. “Who’s the other guy-the one back in the john?”
“Shit, he’s one of us,” Bludgeon replied. “Name’s Croyd Crenson. Bad man to fuck with, but he’s got a great sense of humor.”
Mazzucchelli nodded. “Have a good day,” he said. Bludgeon belched again, nodded back, waved his clubhand, and departed.
Croyd hesitated only a moment on reentering the dining room and regarding Mazzucchelli in his seat. He advanced, raised two fingers in mock salute, and said, “I’m Croyd,” as he drew near. “Are you the recruiter?”
Mazzucchelli looked him up and looked him down, eyes dwelling for a moment on the large wet spot at the front of his trousers.
“Something scare you?” he asked.
“Yea, I saw the kitchen,” Croyd replied. “You looking for talent?”
“What kind of talent you got?”
Croyd reached for a small lamp on a nearby table. He unscrewed the bulb and held it before him. Shortly it began to glow. Then it brightened, flared, and went out.
“Oops,” he observed. “Gave it a little too much juice.”
“For a buck and a half,” Mazzucchelli stated, “I can buy a flashlight.”
“You got no imagination,” Croyd said. “I can do some heavy stuff with burglar alarms, computers, telephones-not to mention anybody I shake hands with. But if you’re not interested, I won’t starve.”
He began to turn away.
“Sit down, sit down!” Mazzucchelli said. “I heard you had a sense of humor. Sure, I like that stuff, and I think maybe I can use you in a certain matter. I need some good people in a hurry.”
“Something scare you?” Croyd asked, sliding into the seat recently vacated by Bludgeon.
Mazzucchelli scowled and Croyd grinned. “Humor,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
“Crenson,” the other stated, “that’s your last name. See, I do know you. I know a lot about you. I’ve been stringing you along. That’s humor. I know you’re pretty good, and you usually deliver what you promise. But we got some things to talk about before we talk about other things. You know what I mean?”
“No,” Croyd answered. “But I’m willing to learn.”
“You want anything while we’re talking?”
“I’d like to try the linguini again,” Croyd said,
“and another bottle of Chianti.”
Mazzucchelli raised his hand, snapped his fingers. A waiter rushed into the room.
“Linguini, e una bottiglia,” he said. “Chianti.”
The man hurried off. Croyd rubbed his hands together, to the accompaniment of a faint crackling sound.
“The one who just left ... ,” Mazzucchelli said at length. “Bludgeon ....”
“Yes?” Croyd said, after an appropriate wait. “He’ll make a good soldier,” Mazzucchelli finished. Croyd nodded. “ I suppose so.”
“But you, you have some skills besides what the virus gave you. I understand you are a pretty good second-story man. You knew old Bentley.”
Croyd nodded again. “He was my teacher. I knew him back when he was a dog. You seem to know more about me than most people do.”
Mazzucchelli removed his toothpick, sipped his beer. “That’s my business,” he said after a time, “knowing things. That’s why I don’t want to send you off to be a soldier.”
The waiter returned with a plate of linguini, a glass, and a bottle, which he proceeded to uncork. He passed Croyd a setting from the next booth. Croyd immediately began to eat with a certain manic gusto that Mazzucchelli found vaguely unsettling.
Croyd paused long enough to ask, “So what is it you’ve got in mind for me?”
“Something a little more subtle, if you’re the right man for it.”
“Subtle. I’m right for subtle,” Croyd said.
Mazzucchelli raised a finger. “First,” he said, “one of those things we talk about before we talk about other things.” Observing the speed with which Croyd’s plate was growing empty, he snapped his fingers again and the waiter rushed in with another load of linguini.
“What thing?” Croyd asked, pushing aside the first plate as the second slid into place before him.
Mazzucchelli laid his hand on Croyd’s left arm in an almost fatherly fashion and leaned forward. “ I understand you got problems,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I have heard that you are into speed,” Mazzucchelli observed, “and that every now and then you become a raging maniac, killing people, destroying property and wreaking general havoc until you run out of steam or some ace who knows you takes pity and puts you down for the count.”
Croyd laid his fork aside and quaffed a glass of wine. “This is true,” he said, “though it is not something I enjoy talking about.”
Mazzucchelli shrugged. “Everybody has the right to a little fun every now and then,” he stated. “I ask only for business reasons. I would not like to have you act this way if you were working for me on something sensitive.”
“The behavior of which you’ve heard is not an indulgence,” Croyd explained. “It becomes something of a necessity, though, after I’ve been awake a certain period of time.”
“Uh-you anywhere near that point yet?”
“Nowhere near,” Croyd replied. “There’s nothing to worry about for a long while.”
“If I was to hire you, I’d rather I didn’t worry about it at all. Now, it’s no good asking somebody not to be a user. But I want to know this: Have you got enough sense when you start on the speed that you can take yourself off of my work? Then go crash and burn someplace not connected with what you’re doing for me?”
Croyd studied him for a moment, then nodded slowly. “I see what you mean,” he said. “If that’s what the job calls for, sure, I can do it. No problem.”
“With that understanding, I want to hire you. It’s a little more subtle than breaking heads, though. And it isn’t any sort of simple burglary either.”
“I’ve done lots of odd things,” Croyd said, “and lots of subtle things. Some of them have even been legal.”
They both smiled.
“For this one, it may well be that you see no violence,” Mazzucchelli said. “Like I told you, my business is knowing things. I want you to get me some information. The best way to get it is so that nobody even knows it’s been got. On the other hand, if the only way you can get it is to cause somebody considerable angst, that’s okay. So long as you clean up real good afterwards.”
“I get the picture. What do you want to know, and where do I find it?”
Mazzucchelli gave a short, barking laugh.
“There seems to be another company doing business in this town,” he said then. “You know what I mean?”
“Yes,” Croyd replied, “and there is not usually room on one block for two delicatessens.”
“Exactly,” Mazzucchelli answered.
“So you are taking on extra help to continue the competition by heavier means.”
“That is a good summary. Now, like I said, there is certain information I need about the other company. I will pay you well to get it for me.”
Croyd nodded. “I’m willing to give it a shot. What particular information are you after?”
Mazzucchelli leaned forward and lowered his voice, his lips barely moving. “The chairman of the board. I want to know who’s running the show.”
“The boss? You mean he didn’t even send you a dead fish in somebody’s pants? I thought it was customary to observe certain amenities in these matters?”
Mazzucchelli shrugged. “These guys got no etiquette. Could be a bunch of foreigners.”
“Have you got any leads at all, or do I go it cold?”
“You will be pretty much a ground-breaker. I will give you a list of places they sometimes seem to operate through. I also have names of a couple people who might do some work for them.”
“Why didn’t you just pick one of them up and pop the question?”
“I think that, like you, they are independent contractors rather than family members.”
“I see.”
Then, “And that may not be all they have in common with you,” Mazzucchelli added.
“Aces?” Croyd asked. Mazzucchelli nodded.
“If I’ve got to mess with aces it’s going to cost more than if they’re just civilians.”
“I’m good for it,” Mazzucchelli said, withdrawing another envelope from his inner pocket. “Here is a retainer and the list. You may consider the retainer ten percent of the total price for the job.”
Croyd opened the envelope, counted quickly. He smiled when he finished.
“Where do you take delivery.?” he asked.
“The manager here can always get in touch with me.”
“What’s his name?”
“Theotocopolos. Theo’ll do.”
“Okay,” Croyd said. “You just hired subtlety.”
“When you go to sleep you turn into a different person, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, if that happens before the job is done, that new guy’s still got a contract with me.”
“So long as he gets paid.”
“We understand each other.”
They shook hands, Croyd rose, left the booth, crossed the room. Moth-sized snowflakes swirled in as he departed. Mazzucchelli reached for a fresh toothpick. Outside, Croyd tossed a black pill into his mouth.
Wearing gray slacks, blue blazer, and bloodclot-colored tie, his hair marcelled, shades silver, nails manicured, Croyd sat alone at a small window table in Aces High, regarding the city’s lights through wind-whipped snow beyond his baked salmon, sipping Chateau d’Yquem, hashing over plans for the next move in his investigation and flirting with Jane Dow, who had passed his way twice so far and was even now approaching again-a thing he took to be more than coincidence and a good omen, having lusted after her in a variety of hearts (some of them multiples) on a number of occasionsand hoping he might fit the occasion to the feelings, he raised his hand as she drew near and touched her arm.
A tiny spark crackled, she halted, said, “Yike!” and reached ; to rub the place where the shock had occurred.
“Sorry—” Croyd began.
“Must be static electricity,” she said.
“Must be,” he agreed. “All I wanted to say was that you do know me, even though you wouldn’t recognize me in this incarnation. I’m Croyd Crenson. We’ve met in passing, here and there, and I always wanted just to sit and talk a spell, but somehow our paths never crossed long enough at the right time.”
“That’s an interesting line,” she said, running a finger across her damp brow, “naming the one ace nobody’s certain about. I bet a lot of groupies get picked up that way.”
“True,” Croyd replied, smiling, as he opened his arms wide. “But I can prove it if you’ll wait about half a minute.”
“Why? What are you doing?”
“Filling the air with neg-ions for you,” he said,
“for that delightfully stimulating before-the-storm feeling. Just a hint at the great time I could show—”
“Cut it out!” She began backing away. “It sometimes triggers—”
Croyd’s hands were wet, his face was wet, his hair collapsed and leaked onto his forehead.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“What the hell,” he said “let’s make it a thunderstorm,” and lightning danced among his fingertips. He began laughing. Other diners glanced in their direction.
“Stop,” she said. “Please.”
“Sit down for a minute and I will.”
“Okay.”
She took the seat opposite him. He dried his face and hands on his napkin.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “My fault. I should be careful with storm effects around someone they call Water Lily.”
She smiled.
“Your glasses are all wet,” she said, suddenly reaching forward and plucking them from his face. “I’ll clean—”
“Two hundred sixteen views of moist loveliness,” he stated as she stared. “The virus has, as usual, overendowed me in several respects.”
“You really see that many of me?”
He nodded. “These joker aspects sometimes crop up in my changes. Hope I haven’t turned you off.”
“They’re rather-magnificent,” she said. “You’re very kind. Now give back the glasses.”
“A moment.”
She wiped the lenses on the corner of the tablecloth, then passed them to him.
“Thanks.” He donned them again. “Buy you a drink? Dinner? A water spaniel?”
“I’m on duty,” she said. “Thanks. Sorry. Maybe another time.”
“Well, I’m working now myself. But if you’re serious, I’ll give you a couple of phone numbers and an address. I may not be at any of them. But I get messages.”
“Give them to me,” she said, and he scribbled quickly in a notepad, tore out the page, and passed it to her. “What kind of work?” she asked.
“Subtle investigation,” he said. “It involves a gang war.”
“Really? I’ve heard people say you’re kind of honest, as well as kind of crazy.”
“They’re half-right,” he said. “So give me a call or stop by. I’ll rent scuba gear and show you a good time.”
She smiled and began to rise. “Maybe I will.”
He withdrew an envelope from his pocket, opened it, pushed aside a wad of bills, and removed a slip of paper with some writing on it.
“Uh, before you go—does the name James Spector mean anything to you?”
She froze and grew pale. Croyd found himself wet once again.
“What did I say?” he asked.
“You’re not kidding? You really don’t know?”
“Nope. Not kidding.”
“You know the aces jingle.”
“Parts of it.”
“‘Golden Boy ain’t got no joy,”‘ she recited. “‘if it’s Demise, don’t look in his eyes ...’-that’s him: James Spector is Demise’s real name.”
“I never knew that,” he said. Then, “I never heard any verses about me.”
“I don’t remember any either.”
“Come on. I always wondered.”
“Sleeper waking, meals taking.” she said slowly. “‘Sleeper speeding, people bleeding.’” P> “Oh.”
“If I call you and you’re that far along ...”
“If I’m that far along, I don’t return calls.”
“I’ll get you a couple of dry napkins,” she offered. “Sorry about the storms.”
“Don’t be. Did anyone ever tell you you’re lovely when you exude moisture?”
She stared at him. Then, “I’ll get you a dry fish too,” she said.
Croyd raised his hand to blow her a kiss and gave himself a shock.
Concerto for Siren and Serotonin
Checking to see that no one was watching, Croyd dropped a pair of Black Beauties with his espresso. He cursed softly as a part of the sigh that followed. This was not working out as he had anticipated. All of the leads he had tried during the past days had pretty much fizzled, and he was further along into the speed than he cared to be. Ordinarily this would not bother him, but for the first time he had made two separate promises concerning drugs and his actions. One being business and one being personal, he reflected, they kind of caught him coming and going. He would definitely have to keep an eye, or at least a few facets, on himself so as not to mess up on this job, and he didn’t want to turn Water Lily off on their first date. Usually, though, he could feel the paranoia coming on, and he decided to let that be his indicator as to his degree of irrationality this time around.
He had run all over town, trying to trace two leads who seemed to have vanished. He had checked out every possible front on his list, satisfying himself that they had only been randomly chosen rendezvous points. Next was James Spector. While he hadn’t recognized the name, he did know Demise. He had met him, briefly, on a number of occasions. The man had always impressed him as one of the sleazier aces. “If it’s Demise, don’t look in his eyes,” he hummed as he signaled to a waiter.
“Yes, sir.”
“More espresso, and bring me a bigger cup for it, will you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“For that matter, bring me a whole pot.”
“All right.”
He hummed a little more loudly and began tapping his foot. “Demise eyes. The eyes of Demise,” he intoned. He jumped when the waiter placed a cup before him.
“Don’t sneak up on me like that!”
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.” The man began to fill the cup.
“Don’t stand behind me while you’re pouring. Stand off to the side where I can see you.”
“Sure.”
The waiter moved off to Croyd’s right. He left the carafe on the table when he departed.
As he drank cup after cup of coffee, Croyd began thinking thoughts he had not thought in a long while, concerning sleep, mortality, transfiguration. After a time he called for another carafe. It was definitely a two-carafe problem.
The evening’s snowfall had ceased, but the inch or so that lay upon the sidewalks sparkled under the streetlamps, and a wind so cold it burned whipped glittering eddies along Tenth Street. Walking carefully, the tall, thin man in the heavy black overcoat glanced back once as he turned the corner, breath pluming. Ever since he’d left the package store he’d had a feeling that he was being watched. And there was a figure, a hundred yards or so back, moving along the opposite side of the street at about the same pace as himself. James Spector felt that it might be worth waiting for the man and killing him just to avoid any possible hassle farther along the way. After all, there were two fifths of Jack Daniel’s and a six-pack of Schlitz in his bag, and if someone were to accost him abruptly on these icy walks—He winced at the thought of the bottles breaking, of having to retrace his path to the store.
On the other hand, waiting for the man and killing him right here, while holding the package, could also result in his slipping-even if it was only when he leaned forward to go through the man’s pockets. It would be better to find a place to set things down first. He looked about.
There were some steps leading up to a doorway, farther along. He headed for them and set his parcel down on the third one, against its iron railing. He brushed off his collar and turned it up, fished a package of cigarettes from his pocket, shook one out, and lit it within cupped hands. He leaned against the rail then and waited, watching the corner. Shortly a man in gray slacks and a blue blazer came into sight, necktie whipping in the wind, dark hair disheveled. He paused and stared, then nodded and advanced. As he came nearer, Spector realized that the man was wearing mirrorshades. He felt a sudden jab of panic, seeing that the other possessed an adequate first line of defense against him. It wasn’t likely to be an accident either, in the middle of the night. Therefore, this was more than some strong-arm hood on his tail. He took a long drag on his cigarette, then mounted several steps backward, slowly, gaining sufficient height for a good kick at the other’s head, to knock the damned things off.
“Yo, Demise!” the man called. “I need to talk to you!” Demise stared, trying to place him. But there was nothing familiar about the man, not even his voice.
The man came up and stood before him, smiling. “I just need a minute or two of your time,” he said. “It’s important. I’m in a big hurry and I’m trying for a certain measure of subtlety. It isn’t easy.”
“Do I know you?” Demise asked him.
“We’ve met. In other lives, so to speak. My lives, that is. Also, I believe you might once have done some accounting for my brother-in-law’s company, over in Jersey. Croyd’s the name. “
“What do you want?”
“I need the name of the head of the new mob that’s trying to take over operations from the kindly old Mafia, which has run this town for half a century or so.”
“You’re kidding,” Demise said, taking a final drag on his cigarette, dropping it and moving his toe to grind it.
“No,” said Croyd. “I definitely require this information so I can rest in peace. I understand you’ve done some work other than bookkeeping for these guys. So tell me who runs the show and I’ll be moving along.”
“I can’t do that,” Demise answered.
“As I said, I’m aiming for subtlety. So I’d rather not work this the hard way—”
Demise kicked him in the face. Croyd’s glasses flew over his shoulder, and Demise found himself staring into 216 glittering eye-facets. He was unable to lock gazes with the points of light.
“You’re an ace,” he said, “ or a joker.”
“I’m the Sleeper,” Croyd told him as he reached out and took hold of Demise’s right arm, then broke it across the railing. “You should have let me be subtle. It doesn’t hurt as much.”
Demise shrugged even as he winced. “Go ahead and break the other one too.”
“But I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”
Croyd stared at the arm hanging at Demise’s side. Demise reached across and caught hold of it, twisted it into place, held it.
“You heal real fast, don’t you?” Croyd said. “In minutes, even. I remember now.”
“That’s right.”
“Can you grow a new arm if I tear one off?”
“I don’t know, and I’d rather not find out. Look, I’ve heard you’re a psycho and I believe it. I’d tell you if I knew. I don’t enjoy regenerating. But all I did was a lousy contract hit. I’ve got no idea who’s on top.”
Croyd reached out with both hands, catching hold of Demise’s wrists.
“Breaking you up may not do much good,” he observed, “but there’s still room for subtlety. Ever have any electroshock therapy? Try this.”
When Demise stopped jerking, Croyd released his wrists. When he could speak again, Demise said, “I still can’t tell you. I don’t know.”
“So let’s lose a few more neurons,” Croyd suggested. “Cool it a minute,” Demise said. “I never learned the names of any of the big guys. Never meant dick to me. Still don’t. All I know is this guy named Eye-a joker. He just has one big eye and he wears a monocle in it. He met me once, in Times Square, gave me a hit and paid me. That’s all that matters. You know how it is. You freelance yourself.” Croyd sighed. “Eye? Seems I’ve heard of him someplace or other. Where can I get hold of the guy?”
“I understand he hangs around Club Dead Nicholas. Plays cards there awhile on Friday nights. Kept meaning to go by and kill the fucker, but I never got around to it. Cost me a foot.”
“‘Club Dead Nicholas’?” Croyd said. “I don’t believe I know that one.”
“Used to be Nicholas King’s Mortuary, near Jokertown. Serves food and booze, has music and a dance floor, gambling in a back room. Just opened recently. Kind of Halloween motif. Too morbid for my taste.”
“Okay,” Croyd said. “I hope you’re not bullshitting me, Demise.”
“That’s all I got.”
Croyd nodded slowly. “It’ll do.” He released the other and backed away. “Maybe then I can rest,” he said.
“Subtle. Real subtle.” He picked up Demise’s package and put it in his arms. “Here. Don’t forget your stuff. Better watch your step too. It’s getting slippery,” He continued to back away, muttering to himself, up the street, to the corner. Then he turned again and was gone.
Sinking to a seated position on the stoop, Demise cracked open a fifth and took a long swallow.
Concerto for Siren and Serotonin
The wind came and went like heavy surf, vibrating streetside windowpanes, driving icy pellets against the stone lions flanking the entranceway. These sounds were intensified as the door to the Jokertown Clinic was opened. A man entered and began stamping his feet and brushing snow from his dark blue blazer. He made no effort to close the door behind him.
Madeleine Johnson, sometimes known as the Chickenfoot Lady, doing a partial front desk deathwatch for her friend Cock Robin, with whom she had a good thing going, looked up from her crossword puzzle, stroked her wattles with her pencil, and squawked, “Close the damn door, mister!”
The man lowered the handkerchief with which he had been wiping his face and stared at her. She realized then that his eyes were faceted. His jaw muscles bunched and unbunched.
“Sorry,” he said, and he drew the door closed. Then he turned his head slowly, seeming to study everything in the room, though with those eyes it was difficult to tell for certain. Finally, “I’ve got to talk to Dr. Tachyon,” he said.
“The doctor is out of town,” she stated, “and he’s going to be away for some time. What is it that you want?”
“I want to be put to sleep,” he said.
“This isn’t a veterinary clinic,” she told him, and regretted it a moment later when he moved forward, for he developed a distinct halo and began emitting sparks like a static electricity generator. She doubted this had much to do with virtue, for his teeth were bared and he clenched and unclenched his hands as if anticipating strenuous activity.
“This-is-an-emergency,” he said. “My name is Croyd Crenson, and there is probably a file. Better find it. I get violent.”
She squawked again, leaped and departed, leaving two pinfeathers to drift in the air before him. He put out a hand and leaned upon her desk, then mopped his brow again. His gaze fell upon a half-filled coffee cup beside her newspaper. He picked it up and chugged it.
Moments later there came a clattering sound from the hallway beyond the desk. A blond, blue-eyed young man halted at the threshold and stared at him. He had on a green and white polo shirt, a stethoscope and a beach-boy smile. From the waist down he was a palomino pony, his tail beautifully braided. Madeleine appeared behind him and fluttered.
“He’s the one,” she told the centaur. “He said, ‘violent.”‘ Still smiling, the quadrapedal youth entered the room and extended his hand. “I’m Dr. Finn,” he said. “I’ve sent for your file, Mr. Crenson. Come on back to an examination room, and you can tell me what’s bothering you while we wait for it.”
Croyd took his hand and nodded. “Any coffee back there?”
“I think so. We’ll get you a cup.”
Croyd paced the small room, swilling coffee, as Dr. Finn read over his case history, snorting on several occasions and at one point making a noise amazingly like a whinny.
“I didn’t realize you were the Sleeper,” he said finally, closing the file and looking at his patient. “Some of this material has made the textbooks.” He tapped the folder with a well-manicured finger.
“So I’ve heard,” Croyd replied.
“Obviously you have a problem you just can’t wait for your next cycle to clear up,” Dr. Finn observed. “What is it?” Croyd managed a bleak smile. “It’s the matter of getting on with the crapshoot, of actually going to sleep.”
“What’s the problem?”
“I don’t know how much of this is in the file,” Croyd told him, “but I’ve a terrible fear of going to sleep—”
“Yes, there is something about your paranoia. Perhaps some counseling—”
Croyd punched a hole in the wall.
“It’s not paranoia,” he said, “not if the danger is real. I could die during my next hibernation. I could wake up as the most disgusting joker you can imagine, with a normal sleepcycle. Then I’d be stuck that way. It’s only paranoia if the fear is groundless, isn’t it?”
“Well,” Dr. Finn said, “ I suppose we could call it that if the fear is a really big thing, even if it is justified. I don’t know. I’m not a psychiatrist. But I also saw in the file that you tend to take amphetamines to keep from falling asleep for as long as you can. You must know that that’s going to add a big chemical boost to whatever paranoia is already present.”
Croyd was running his finger around the inside of the hole he had punched in the wall, rubbing away loose pieces of plaster.
“But of course a part of this is semantics,” Dr. Finn went on. “It doesn’t matter what we call it. Basically you’re afraid to go to sleep. This time, though, you feel that you should?”
Croyd began cracking his knuckles as he paced. Fascinated, Dr. Finn counted each cracking noise. When the seventh popping sound occurred, he began to wonder what Croyd would do when he was out of knuckles.
“Eight, nine, ten ...” he subvocalized. Croyd punched another hole in the wall.
“Uh, would you like some more coffee?” Dr. Finn asked him.
“Yes, about a gallon.”
Dr. Finn was gone, as if a starting gate had opened.
Later, not telling Croyd it was decaf he was guzzling, Dr. Finn continued, “I’m afraid to give you any more drugs on top of all the amphetamines you’ve taken.”
“I’ve made two promises,” Croyd said, “that I’d try sleeping this time, that I wouldn’t resist. But if you cad t knock me out fast, I’ll probably leave rather than put up with all this anxiety. If that happens, I know I’ll be back on bennies and dexes fast. So hit me with a narcotic. I’m willing to take my chances.”
Dr. Finn shook his mane. “I’d rather try something simpler and a lot safer first. What say we do a little brain wave entrainment and suggestion?”
“I’m not familiar with the procedure,” Croyd said.
“It’s not traumatic. The Russians have been experimenting with it for years. I’ll just clip these little soft pads to your ears,” he said, swabbing the lobes with something moist,
“and we’ll pulse a low amp current through your head-say, four hertz. You won’t even feel it.”
He adjusted a control on the box from which the leads emerged.
“Now what?” Croyd asked.
“Close your eyes and rest for just a minute. You may notice a kind of drifting feeling.”
“Yeah.”
“But there’s heaviness, too, within it. Your arms are heavy and your legs are heavy.”
“They’re heavy,” Croyd acknowledged.
“It will be hard to think of anything in particular. Your mind will just go on drifting.”
“I’m drifting,” Croyd agreed.
“And it should feel very good. Probably better than you’ve felt all day, finally getting a chance to rest. Breathe slowly and let go in all the tight places. You’re almost there already. This is great.”
Croyd said something, but it was muttered, indistinguishable.
“You are doing very well. You’re quite good at this. Usually I count backward from ten. For you, though, we can start at eight, since you’re almost asleep already. Eight. You are far away and it feels fine. Nine. You are already asleep, but now you are going into it even more deeply. Ten. You will sleep soundly, without fear or pain. Sleep.”
Croyd began to snore.
There were no spare beds, but since Croyd had stiffened to mannequinlike rigidity before turning bright green, his respiration and heartbeat slowing to something between that of a hibernating bear and a dead one, Dr. Finn had had him placed, erect, at the rear of a broom closet, where he did not take up much space, and he drove a nail into the door and hung the chart on it, after having entered, “Patient extremely suggestible.”
May 1987
Concerto for Siren and Serotonin
When Croyd awoke, he pushed aside mop handles, stepped into a bucket, and fell forward. The closet’s door offered small resistance to the wild, forward thrust of his hands. As it sprang open and he sprawled, the light stabbing painfully into his eyes, he began to recall the circumstances preceding his repose: the centaur-doctor—Finn—and that funny sleepmachine, yes .... And another little death would mean another sleep-change.
Lying in the hallway, he counted his fingers. There were ten of them all right, but his skin was dead white. He shook off the bucket, climbed to his feet, and stumbled again. His left arm shot downward, touched the floor, and pushed against it. This impelled him to his feet and over backward. He executed an aerial somersault to his rear, landed on his feet, and toppled rearward again. His hands dropped toward the floor to catch himself, then he withdrew them without making contact and simply let himself fall. Years of experience had already given him a suspicion as to what new factor had entered his life-situation. His overcompensations were telling him something about his reflexes.
When he rose again, his movements were very slow, but they grew more and more normal as he explored. By the time he located a washroom all traces of excessive speed or slowness had vanished. When he studied himself in the mirror, he discovered that, in addition to having grown taller and thinner, it was now a pink-eyed countenance that he regarded, a shock of white hair above the high, glacial brow. He massaged his temples, licked his lips, and shrugged. He was familiar with albinism. It was not the first time he had come up short in the pigment department.
He sought his mirrorshades then recalled that Demise had kicked them off. No matter. He’d pick up another pair along with some sun block. Perhaps he’d better dye the hair too, he decided. Less conspicuous that way.
Whatever, his stomach was signaling its emptiness in a frantic fashion. No time for paperwork, for checking out properly-if, indeed, he’d been checked in properly. He was not at all certain that was the case. Best simply to avoid everyone if he didn’t want to be delayed on the road to food. He could stop by and thank Finn another time.
Moving as Bentley had taught him long ago, all of his senses extended fully, he began his exit.
“Hi, Jube. One of each, as usual.”
Jube studied the tall, cadaverous figure before him, meeting diminished images of his own tusked, blubbery countenance in the mirrorshades that masked the man’s eyes.
“Croyd? That you, fella?”
“Yep. Just up and around. I crashed at Tachyon s clinic this time.”
“That must be why I hadn’t heard any Croyd Crenson disaster stories lately. You actually went gentle into your last good night?”
Croyd nodded, studying headlines. “You might put it that way,” he said. “Unusual circumstances. Funny feeling. Hey! What’s this?” He raised a newspaper and studied it. “‘Bloodbath at Werewolf Clubhouse.’ What’s going on, a fucking gang war?”
“A fucking gang war,” Jube acknowledged. “Damn! I’ve got to get back on the stick fast.”
“What stick?”
“Metaphorical stick,” Croyd replied. “If this is Friday, it must be Dead Nicholas.”
“You okay, boy?”
“No, but twenty or thirty thousand calories will be a step in the right direction.”
“Ought to take the edge off,” Jube agreed. “Hear who won the Miss Jokertown Beauty Pageant last week?”
“Who?” Croyd asked.
“Nobody.”
Croyd entered Club Dead Nicholas to the notes of an organ playing “Wolverine Blues.” The windows were draped in black, the tables were coffins, the waiters wore shrouds.
The wall to the crematorium had been removed; it was now an open grill tended by demonic jokers. As Croyd moved into the lounge, he saw that the casket-tables were open beneath sheets of heavy glass; ghoulish figures-presumably of waxwere laid out within them in various states of unrest.
A lipless, noseless, earless joker as pale as himself approached Croyd immediately, laying a bony hand upon his arm.
“Pardon me, sir. May I see your membership card?” he asked.
Croyd handed him a fifty-dollar bill.
“Yes, of course,” said the grim waiter. “I’ll bring the card to your table. Along with a complimentary drink. I take it you will be dining here?”
“Yes. And I’ve heard you have some good card games.”
“Back room. It’s customary to get another player to introduce you.”
“Sure. Actually, I’m waiting for someone who should be stopping by this evening to play. Fellow name of Eye. Is he here yet?”
“No. Mr. Eye was eaten. Partly, that is. By an alligator. Last September. In the sewers. Sorry.”
“Ouch,” Croyd said. “I didn’t see him often. But when I did he usually had a little business for me.”
The waiter studied him. “What did you say your name was?”
“Whiteout.”
“I don’t want to know your business,” the man said. “But there is a fellow named Melt, who Eye used to hang around with. Maybe he can help you, maybe he can’t. You want to wait and talk to him, I’ll send him over when he comes in.”
“All right. I’ll eat while I’m waiting.”
Sipping his comp beer, waiting for a pair of steaks, Croyd withdrew a deck of Bicycle playing cards from his side pocket, shuffled it, dealt one facedown and another faceup beside it. The ten of diamonds faced him on the clear tabletop, above the agonized grimace of the fanged lady, a wooden stake through her heart, a few drops of red beside the grimace. Croyd turned over the hole card, which proved a seven of clubs. He flipped it back over, glanced about him, turned it again. Now it was a jack of spades keeping the ten company. The flicker-frequency-switch was a trick he’d practiced for laughs the last time his reflexes had been hyped-up. It had come back almost immediately when he’d tried to recall it, leading him to speculate as to what other actions lay buried in his prefrontal gyrus. Wing-flapping reflexes? Throat contractions for ultrasonic wails? Coordination patterns for extra appendages?
He shrugged and dealt himself poker hands just good enough to beat those he gave the staked lady till his food came.
Along about his third dessert the pallid waiter approached, escorting a tall, bald individual whose flesh seemed to flow like wax down a candlestick. His features were constantly distorted as tumorlike lumps passed beneath his skin.
“You told me, sir, that you wanted to meet Melt,” the waiter said.
Croyd rose and extended his hand.
“Call me Whiteout,” he said. “Have a seat. Let me buy you a drink.”
“If you’re selling something, forget it,” Melt told him. Croyd shook his head as the waiter drifted away.
“I’ve heard they have good card games here, but I’ve got nobody to introduce me,” Croyd stated.
Melt narrowed his eyes. “Oh, you play cards.” Croyd smiled. “I sometimes get lucky.”
“Really? And you knew Eye?”
“Well enough to play cards with him.”
“That all?”
“You might check with Demise,” Croyd said. “We’re in a similar line of work. We’re both ex-accountants who moved on to bigger things. My name says it all.”
Melt glanced hastily about, then seated himself. “Let’s keep that kind of noise down, okay? You looking for work now?”
“Not really, not now. I just want to play a little cards.” Melt licked his lips as a bulge ran down his left cheek, passed over his jawline, distended his neck.
“You got a lot of green to throw around?”
“Enough.”
“Okay, I’ll get you into the game,” Melt said. “I’d like to take some of it away from you.”
Croyd smiled, paid his check, and followed Melt into the back room, where the casket gaming table was closed and had a nonreflective surface. There were seven of them in the game to begin with, and three went broke before midnight. Croyd and Melt and Bug Pimp and Runner saw piles of cash grow and shrink before them till three in the A.M. Then Runner yawned, stretched, and turned out a small bottle of pills from an inside pocket.
“Anybody need something to keep awake?” he asked. “I’ll stick with coffee,” Melt said.
“Gimme,” said Bug Pimp.
“Never touch the stuff,” said Croyd.
A half hour later Bug Pimp folded and made noises about checking on the line of joker femmes he hustled to straights wanting jittery jollies. By four o’clock the Runner was broke and had to walk. Croyd and Melt stared at each other.
“We’re both ahead,” said Melt. “True.”
“Should we take the money and run?” Croyd smiled.
“I feel the same way,” Melt said. “Deal.,”
As sunrise tickled the stained glass window and the dusty mechanical bats followed the hologram ghosts to their rest, Melt massaged his temples, rubbed his eyes, and said, “Will you take my marker?”
“Nope,” Croyd replied.
“You shouldn’t have let me play that last hand then.”
“You didn’t tell me you were that broke. I thought you could write a check.”
“Well, shit. I ain’t got it. What do you want to do?”
“Take something else, I guess.”
“Like what?”
“A name.”
“Whose name?” Melt asked, reaching inside his jacket and scratching his chest.
“The person who gives you your orders.”
“What orders?”
“The ones you pass on to guys like Demise.”
“You’re kidding. It’d be my ass to name a name like that.”
“It’ll be your ass if you don’t,” Croyd said.
Melt’s hand came out from behind his coat holding a .32 automatic, which he leveled at Croyd’s chest. “I’m not scared of two-bit muscle. There’s dumdum slugs in here. Know what they do?”
Suddenly Melt’s hand was empty and blood began to ooze from around the nail of his trigger finger. Croyd slowly twisted the automatic out of shape before he tore out the clip and ejected a round.
“You’re right, they’re dumdums,” he acknowleged. “Look at the little flat-nosed buggers, will you? By the way, my name’s not Whiteout. I’m Croyd Crenson, the Sleeper, and nobody welshes on me. Maybe you’ve heard I’m a little bit nuts. You give me the name and you don’t find out how true that is.”
Melt licked his lips. The lumps beneath his glistening skin increased the tempo of their passage.
“I’m dead if they ever hear.”
Croyd shrugged. “I won’t tell them if you won’t.” He pushed a stack of bills toward Melt. “Here’s your cut for getting me into the game. Give me the name, take it and walk, or I’ll leave you in three of these boxes.” Croyd kicked the coffin.
“Danny Mao,” Melt whispered, “at the Twisted Dragon, over near Chinatown.”
“He gives you a hit list, pays you?”
“Right.”
“Who pulls his strings?”
“Beats the shit out of me. He’s all I know.”
“When’s he at the Twisted Dragon?”
“I think he hangs out there a lot, because other people in the place seem to know him. I’d get a call, I’d go over. I’d check my coat. We’d have dinner, or a few drinks. Business didn’t get mentioned. But when I’d leave, there’d be a piece of paper in my pocket with a name or two or three on it, and an envelope with money in it. Same as with Eye. That’s how he worked it.”
“The first time?”
“The first time we took a long walk and he explained the setup. After that, it was like I just said.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s all.”
“Okay, you’re off the hook.”
Melt picked up his stack of bills and stuffed it into his pocket. He opened his distorted mouth as if to say something, thought better of it, thought again, said, “Let’s not leave together.”
“Fine with me. G’bye.”
Melt moved toward the side door, flanked by a pair of tombstones. Croyd picked up his winnings and began thinking about breakfast.
Croyd rode the elevator to Aces High, regretting the absence of a power of flight on such a perfect spring evening. Arriving, he stepped into the lounge, paused, and glanced about.
Six tables held twelve couples, and a dark-haired lady in a low-cut silver blouse sat alone at a two-person table near the bar, twirling a swizzle in some exotic drink. Three men and a woman were seated at the bar. Soft modern jazz sounds circulated through the cool air, accompaniment to blender and laughter, to the clicks and splashes of ice, liquid, and glass. Croyd moved forward.
“Is Hiram here?” he asked the bartender. The man looked at him, then shook his head. “Are you expecting him this evening?”
A shrug. “Hasn’t been around much lately.”
“What about Jane Dow?”
The man studied him. Then, “She’s taken off too,” he stated.
“So you really don’t know if either of them’ll be in?”
“Nope.”
Croyd nodded. “I’m Croyd Crenson and I plan to eat here tonight. If Jane comes in, I’d like to know.”
“Your best bet’s to leave a note at the reservation desk before you’re seated.”
“Got something I can write on?” Croyd asked.
The bartender reached beneath the bar, brought up a pad and a pencil and passed them to him. Croyd scribbled a message.
As he set the pad down, his hand was covered by a more delicate one, of darker complexion, with bright red nails. His gaze moved along it to the shoulder, skipped to the silver decolletage, paused a beat, rose. It was the solitary lady with the exotic drink. On closer inspection there was something familiar ...
“Croyd?” she said softly. “You get stood up too?”
As he met her dark-eyed gaze a name drifted up from the past.
“Veronica,” he said.
“Right. You’ve a good memory for a psycho,” she observed, smiling.
“Tonight’s my night off. I’m real straight.”
“You look mature and distinguished with the white sideburns.”
“Damn, I missed some,” he said. “And you’re really missing a custom—Er, a date?”
“Uh-huh. Seems like we’ve both thought about getting together too.”
“True. You have dinner yet?”
She gave her hair a toss and smiled. “No, and I was looking forward to something special.”
He took her arm. “I’ll get us a table,” he said, “and I’ve already got a great special in mind.”
Croyd crumpled the note and left it in the ashtray.
The trouble with women, Croyd reflected, was that no matter how good they might be in bed, eventually they wanted to use that piece of furniture for sleeping-a condition he was generally unable and unwilling to share. Consequently, when Veronica had finally succumbed to the sleep of exhaustion, Croyd had risen and begun pacing his Morningside Heights apartment, to which they had finally repaired sometime after midnight.
He poured the contents of a can of beef and vegetable soup into a pan and set it on the stove. He prepared a pot of coffee. While he waited for them to simmer and percolate, he phoned those of his other apartments with telephone answering machines and used a remote activator to play back their message tapes. Nothing new.
Finishing his soup, he checked whether Veronica was still asleep, then removed the key from its hiding place and opened the reinforced door to the small room without windows. He turned on its single light, locked himself in, and went to sit beside the glass statue reclining upon the day bed. He held Melanie’s hand and began talking to her-slowly at first; but after a time the words came tumbling out. He told her of Dr. Finn and his sleep machine and talked about the Mafia and Demise and Eye and Danny Mao-whom he hadn’t been able to run down yet-and about how great things used to be. He talked until he grew hoarse, and then he went out and locked the door and hid the key again.
Later, a pallid dawn spreading like an infection in the east, he entered the bedroom on hearing sounds from within. “Hey, lady, ready for a coffee fix?” he called. “And a little angular momentum? A steak—”
He paused on observing the drug paraphernalia Veronica had set out on the bedside table. She looked up, winked at him, and smiled.
“Coffee would be great, lover. I take it light. No sugar.”
“All right,” he replied. “ I didn’t realize you were a user.” She glanced down at her bare arms, nodded. “Doesn’t show. Can’t mainline or you spoil the merchandise.”
“Then what—”
She assembled a hype and filled it. Then she stuck out her tongue, took hold of its tip with the fingers of her left hand, raised it, and administered the injection in the underside.
“Ouch,” Croyd commented. “Where’d you learn that trick?”
“House of D. Can I fix you up here?”
Croyd shook his head. “Wrong time of month.”
“Makes you sound raggedy.”
“With me it’s a special need. When the time comes, I’ll drop some purple hearts or do some benz.”
“Oh, bombitas. Si,” she said, nodding. “Speedballs, STP, high-octane shit. Crazy man’s cooking. I’ve heard of your habits. Loco stuff.”
Croyd shrugged. “I’ve tried it all.”
“Not yage?”
“Yeah. It ain’t that great.”
“Desoxyn? Desbutol?”
“Uh-huh. They’ll do.”
“Khat?”
“Hell, yes. I’ve even done hudca. You ever try pituri? Now that’s some good shit. Routine’s a little messy, though. Learned it from an abo. How’s about kratom? Comes out of Thailand—”
“You’re kidding.”
“No.”
“Jeez, we’ll never run out of conversation. Bet I can pick up a lot from you.”
“I’ll see that you do.”
“Sure I can’t set you up?”
“Right now coffee’ll do fine.”
The morning entered the room, spilling over their slow movements.
“Here’s one called the Purple Monkey Proffers the Peach and Takes It Away Again,” Croyd murmured. “Learned itheard of it, that is-from the lady gave me the kratom.”
“Good shit,” Veronica whispered.
When Croyd entered the Twisted Dragon for the third time in as many days, he headed directly to the bar, seated himself beneath a red paper lantern, and ordered a Tsingtao.
A nasty-looking Caucasian with ornate scars all over his face occupied the stool two seats to his left, and Croyd glanced at him, looked away, and looked again. Light shone through the septum of the man’s nose. There was a good-size hole’ there, and a patch of scabbed pinkish flesh occurred on the nose’s tip. It was almost as if he had recently given up on wearing a nose ring under some duress.
Croyd smiled. “Stand too near a merry-go-round?”
“Huh?”
“Or is it just the feng shui in here?” Croyd continued. “What the hell’s feng shui?” the man said.
“Ask any of these guys,” Croyd said, gesturing broadly. “Especially, though, ask Danny Mao. It’s the way energy circulates in the world, and sometimes it gets you in a tricky bind. Lady from Thailand told me about it once. Like, killer chi will come blasting in that door, bounce off the mirror here, get split by that ba-gua fixture there and,”—he chugged his beer, stepped down from his stool and advanced—“hit you right in the nose.”
Croyd’s movement was too fast for the man’s eyes to follow, and he screamed when he felt that the finger had passed through his perforated septum.
“Stop it! My God! Cut it out!” he cried. Croyd led him off his stool.
“Twice I’ve gotten the runaround in this joint,” he said loudly. “I promised myself today that the first person I ran into here was going to talk to me.”
“I’ll talk to you! I’ll talk! What do you want to know?”
“Where’s Danny Mao?” Croyd asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t know any-aah!”
Croyd had crooked his finger, moved it in a figure eight, straightened it.
“Please,” the man whined. “Let go. He’s not here. He’s—”
“I’m Danny Mao,” came a well-modulated voice from a table partly masked by a dusty potted palm. Its owner rose and followed it around the tree, a middle-size Oriental man, expressionless save for a quirked eyebrow. “What’s your business here, paleface?”
“Private,” Croyd said, “unless you want to stand out on the street and shout.”
“I don’t give interviews to strangers,” Danny said, moving toward him.
The man whose nose Croyd wore on his finger whimpered as Croyd turned, dragging him with him.
“I’ll introduce myself in private,” Croyd said. “Don’t bother.”
The man’s fist flashed forward. Croyd moved his free hand with equal rapidity and the punch struck his palm. Three more punches followed, and Croyd stopped all of them in a similar fashion. The kick he caught behind the heel, raising the foot high and fast. Danny Mao executed a backward flip, landed on his feet, caught his balance.
“Shit!” Croyd observed, moving his other hand rapidly. The stranger howled as something in his nose snapped and he was hurled forward, crashing into Danny Mao. Both men went down, and the weeping man’s nose gushed red upon them. “Bad feng shui,” Croyd added. “You’ve got to watch out for that stuff. Gets you every time.”
“Danny,” came a voice from behind a carved wooden screen beyond the foot of the bar, “I gotta talk to you.” Croyd thought he recognized the voice, and when the small, scaly joker with the fanged, orange face looked around the screens corner, he saw it to be Linetap, who had erratic telepathic abilities and often worked as a lookout.
“Might be a good idea,” Croyd told Danny Mao.
The man with the bleeding nose limped off to the rest room while Danny flowed gracefully to his feet, brushed off his trousers, and gave Croyd a quick burning glance before heading back toward Linetap.
After several minutes’ conversation Danny Mao returned from behind the screen and stood before him.
“So you’re the Sleeper,” Danny said. “Yep.”
“St. John Latham, of the law firm Latham, Strauss.”
“What?”
“The name you’re after. I’m giving it to you: St. John Latham.”
“Without further struggle? Free, gratis and for nothing?”
“No. You will pay. For this information I believe that soon you will sleep forever. Good day, Mr. Crenson.”
Danny Mao turned and walked away. Croyd was about to do the same when the man with the nose job emerged from the rest room, holding a large wad of toilet tissue to his face.
“Hope you know you’ve made the Cannibal Headhunters’ shit list,” he snuffled.
Croyd nodded slowly. “Tell them to mind the killer chi,” he said, “and keep your nose clean.”
Concerto for Siren and Serotonin
After running a small favor for Veronica, reporting his progress to Theotocopolos, and phoning Latham, Strauss for an appointment, Croyd met Veronica for dinner. As he told her of the day’s doings, she shook her head when he told her about St. John Latham.
“You’re crazy,” she told him. “If he’s that well-connected, what do you want to fool around with him for, anyway?”
“Somebody wanted to know about something he was up to.”
She frowned. “I find a guy I like, I don’t want to lose him so quick.”
“I won’t get hurt.”
She sighed, put a hand on his arm. “I mean it,” she said.
“So do I. I can take care of myself.”
“What does that mean? How dangerous is it?”
“I’ve got a job to finish, and I think I’m almost there. I’ll probably wrap it up soon without any sweat, get the rest of my money, and maybe take a little vacation before I sleep again. Thought we might go someplace real nice togethersay, the Caribbean.”
“Aw, Croyd,” she said, taking his hand, “you’ve been thinking of me.”
“Of course I’ve been thinking of you. Now, I’ve got an appointment with Latham for Thursday. Maybe I can finish this thing by the weekend. Then we’ll have some time for just the two of us.”
“You be careful, then.”
“Hell, I’m almost done. Haven’t had any problems yet.”
After stopping at one of his banks for additional funds, Croyd took a taxi to the building that held the law offices of Latham, Strauss. He had made the appointment by describing a fictitious case designed to sound expensive, and he arrived fifteen minutes ahead of time. On entering the waiting room he suppressed a sudden desire for medication. Hanging out with Veronica seemed to have him thinking about it ahead of schedule.
He identified himself to the receptionist, sat and read a magazine till she told him, “Mr. Latham will see you now, Mr. Smith.”
Croyd nodded, rose, and entered the inner office. Latham rose from his seat behind his desk, displaying an elegantly cut gray suit, and he offered his hand. He was somewhat shorter than Croyd, and his refined features remained expressionless.
“Mr. Smith,” he acknowledged. “Won’t you have a seat?”
Croyd remained standing. “No.”
Latham raised an eyebrow, then seated himself. “As you would,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me about your case now?”
“Because there isn’t one. What I really need is some information.”
“Oh? That being?”
Instead of replying Croyd looked away, casting his gaze about the office. Then his hand moved forward, to pick up an orange and green stone paperweight from Latham’s desk. He held it directly before him and squeezed. A cracking, grinding sound followed. When he opened his hand, a shower of gravel fell upon the desk.
Latham remained expressionless. “What sort of information are you seekng?”
“You have done work for the new mob,” Croyd said, “the one trying to move in on the Mafia.”
“Are you with the justice Department?”
“No.”
“DAs office?”
“I’m not a cop,” Croyd responded, “and I’m not an attorney either. I’m just someone who needs an answer.”
“What is the question?”
“Who is the head of this new family? That’s all I want to know.”
“Why?”
“Perhaps someone wishes to arrange a meeting with that person.”
“Interesting,” Latham said. “You wish to retain me to arrange such a meeting.”
“No, I only want to know who the person in charge is.”
“Quid-pro-quo,” Latham observed. “What are you offering for this?”
“I am prepared to save you,” Croyd said, “some very large bills from orthopedic surgeons and physiotherapists. You lawyers know all about such matters, don’t you?”
Latham smiled a totally artificial smile. “Kill me and you’re a dead man, hurt me and you’re a dead man, threaten me and you’re a dead man. Your little trick with the stone means nothing. There are aces with fancier powers than that on call. Now, was that a threat you just made?”
Croyd smiled back. “ I will die before too long, Mr. Latham, to be born again in a completely different form. I am not going to kill you. But supposing I were to cause you to talk, to stop the pain, and supposing that later your friends were to put out a contract on the man you see before you. It wouldn’t matter. He would no longer exist. I am a series of biological ephemera.”
“You are the Sleeper.”
“Yes.”
“I see. And if I give you this information, what do you think will happen to me?”
“Nothing. Who’s to know?”
Latham sighed. “You place me in an extremely awkward position.”
“That was my intention,-Croyd glanced at his watch.,and I’m on a tight schedule. I should have begun beating the shit out of you about a minute and a half ago, but I’m trying to be a nice guy about this. What should we do, counselor?”
“I will cooperate with you,” Latham said, “because I don’t think it will make an iota of difference in what is going on right now.”
“Why not?”
“I can give you a name, but not an address. I do not know from where they do business. We have always met in noman’s-land or spoken over the telephone. I cannot even give you a telephone number, however, for they have always gotten in touch with me. And I say that it will make no difference because I do not believe that the interests you represent are capable of doing them harm. This group is too well staffed with aces. Also, I am fully convinced that they are going to manage what we might refer to as a ‘corporate takeover’ very soon. Should your employer wish to save lives and perhaps even settle for a bit of pocket money as something of a retirement bonus, I would be happy to try to arrange the terms for such an agreement.”
“Naw,” Croyd said, “ I don 7t have any instructions for that kind of deal.”‘
“I’d be surprised if you did.” Latham glanced at his telephone. “But if you would like to relay the suggestion, be my guest.”
Croyd did not move. “I’ll pass the word along, with the name you’re going to give me.”
Latham nodded. “As you would. My offer to negotiate does not assure the acceptance of any particular terms, though, and I feel obliged to advise you that it may not be acceptable at all to the other side.”
“I’ll tell them that, too,” Croyd said. “What’s the name?”
“Also, to be completely scrupulous, I ought to tell you that if you force me to divulge the name, I have a duty to inform my client that this information has been given out, and to whom. I cannot take responsibility for any actions this might precipitate.”,
“The name of my client has not been stated either.”
“As with so much else in life, we must be guided by certain suppositions.”, “Stop beating around the bush and give me the name.”
“Very well,” Latham told him. “Siu Ma.”
“Say again.”
Latham repeated the name. “Write it down.”
He jotted the name on a pad, tore off the sheet, and handed it to Croyd.
“Oriental,” Croyd mused. “ I take it this guy is head of a tong or a triad or a yakuza—one of those Asian culture clubs?”
“Not a guy.”
“A woman?”
The attorney nodded. “Can’t give you a description either. She’s probably short, though.”
Croyd looked fast, but he could not decide whether the residue of a smile lay upon the other’s lips.
“And I’ll bet she’s not in the Manhattan directory either,” Croyd suggested.
“Safe bet. So I’ve given you what you came for. Take it home, for all the good it will do you.” He rose then, turned away from his desk, moved to a window, and stared down into traffic. “Wouldn’t it be great,” he said after a time, “if there were a way for you wild card freaks to bring a class action suit against the Takisians?”
Croyd let himself out, not totally pleased with what he had let himself in for.
Croyd required a restaurant with a table within shooting distance of a pay phone. He found what he was looking for on his third try, was seated, placed his order, and hurried to make his first call. It was answered on the fourth ring.
“Vito’s Italian.”
“This is Croyd Crenson. I want to talk to Theo.”
“Hold on a minute. Hey, Theo!” Then, “He’s coming.” Half a minute. A minute.
“Yeah?”
“This Theo?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell Chris Mazzucchelli that Croyd Crenson’s got a name for him and needs to know where he wants to hear it.”
“Right. Call me back in half an hour, forty-five minutes, okay?”
“Sure.”
Croyd phoned Tavern-on-the-Green then and was able to make reservations for two at eight-fifteen. Then he phoned Veronica. It was answered on the sixth ring.
“Hello?” Her voice sounded weak, distant.
“Veronica, love, it’s Croyd. Not to be carried away, but I think I’m just about done with this job and I want to celebrate. What say we cut out about seven-thirty and start doing it?”
“Oh, Croyd, I really feel shitty. I ache all over, I can’t keep anything down, and I’m so weak I can hardly hold the phone up. It’s gotta be flu. All I’m good for is sleeping.”
“I’m sorry. You need anything? Aspirins? Ice cream? Horse? Snow? Bombitas? You name it and I’ll pick it up.”
“Aw, that’s sweet, lover. But no. I’ll be okay, and I don’t want to expose you to this thing. I just want to sleep. Okay?”
“All right.”
Croyd headed back to his table. His food arrived moments later. When he finished it, he ordered again and rolled a pair of pills between his thumb and forefinger. Finally he took them with a swallow of iced tea. Then he ordered again and checked various of his personal phones for messages till his next order arrived. He went back and took care of it, then buzzed Theo again.
“So what’d he say?”
“I haven’t been able to get hold of him, Croyd. I’m still trying. Get back to me in maybe an hour.”
“I will,” Croyd said, and he called Tavern-on-the-Green and canceled his reservation, then returned to his table to order a few desserts.
He phoned before the hour had run as there were a number of matters he was anxious to attend to. Fortunately Theo had made a connection in the meantime, and he gave him an apartment address on the upper East Side. “Be there nine o’clock tonight. Chris wants you to make a full report to the management.”,
“It’s just a lousy name I could give him over the phone,” Croyd said.
“I am only a message service, and that is the message.” Croyd hung up and paid his tab, the afternoon open before him.
As he stepped outside, a short, broad-shouldered man with an Oriental cast to his features emerged from a doorway perhaps ten feet to the left, hands within his blue satin jacket, gaze focused on the ground. As he turned toward Croyd, he raised his head and their eyes met for a moment. Croyd felt later that he had known in that instant what was to occur. Whatever the case, he knew for certain a moment later when the man’s right hand emerged from his jacket, fingers wrapped in an unusual grip about the hilt of a long, slightly curved knife, its blade extending back along the mans forearm, edge outward. Then his left hand emerged as he moved forward, and it held a matching blade in an identical grip. Both weapons moved in unison as his pace accelerated. Croyd’s abnormal reflexes took over. As he moved forward to meek the attack, it seemed as if the other had suddenly dropped into slow motion. Turning to match the doublebladed pass, Croyd reached across a line of gleaming metal, caught a hand, and twisted it inward. The weapon’s edge was rotated back toward the attacker’s abdomen. Its point entered there, moved diagonally upward, and was followed by a rush of blood and innards. As the man doubled, Croyd beheld the white egret that decorated the jacket’s back.
Then the window at his side shattered and the sound of a gunshot rang in his ears. Turning, drawing his collapsed assailant before him, he saw a dark, late-model car moving slowly along the curbside, almost parallel to him. There were two men in the vehicle, the driver and a passenger in the rear seat who was pointing a pistol in his direction through the opened window.
Croyd moved forward and stuffed the man he held into the car. He did not fit through the window easily, but Croyd pushed hard and he went in nevertheless, losing only a few pieces along the way. His final screams were mixed with the roar of the engine as the car jumped forward and raced off.
It had been, he realized, a kind of proof that Latham had told him the truth and nothing but, though not necessarily the whole truth; and by this he was pleased with his work, after a fashion. Now, though, he had to start looking over his shoulder and keep it up till he had his money. And this was aggravating.
He stepped over some of his attacker’s odds and ends and felt in his pocket for one of his pillboxes. Aggravating.
As Croyd approached the apartment building that evening, he noted that the man in the car parked before it appeared to be speaking into a small walkie-talkie and staring at him. He’d grown very conscious of parked cars following the second attempt on his life, a little earlier. Massaging his knuckles, he turned suddenly and stepped toward the car.
“Croyd,” the man said softly.
“That’s right. We’d better be on the same side.”
The man nodded and shifted a wad of chewing gum into his left cheek. “You can go on up,” he said. “Third floor, apartment thirty-two. Don’t have to ring. Guy by the door’ll let you in.”
“Chris Mazzucchelli’s there?”
“No, but everyone else is. Chris couldn’t make it, but it don’t matter. You tell those people what they want to know. It’s the same as telling him.”
Croyd shook his head. “Chris hired me. Chris pays me. I talk to Chris.”
“Wait a minute.” The man pressed the button on his walkie-talkie and began speaking into it in Italian. He glanced at Croyd after a few moments, raised his index finger, and nodded.
“What’s comin’ down?” Croyd asked when the conversation was concluded. “You find him all of a sudden?”
“No,” the guard answered, shifting his wad of gum. “But we can satisfy you everything’s okay in just a minute.”
“Okay,” Croyd said. “Satisfy me.”
They waited. Several minutes later a man in a dark suit emerged from the building. For a moment Croyd thought it was Chris, but on closer inspection he realized the man to be thinner and somewhat taller. The newcomer approached and nodded to the guard, who nodded at Croyd and said, “There he is.”
“I’m Chris’s brother,” the man said, smiling faintly, “and that’s as close as we can get at the moment. I can speak for him, and it’s okay for you to tell the gentlemen upstairs what you’ve learned.”
“Okay,” Croyd said. “That’s good. But I was thinking about collecting the rest of my money from him too.”
“I don’t know about that. Maybe you better ask Vince about it. Schiaparelli. He sometimes does payroll. Maybe you shouldn’t, though.”
Croyd turned toward the guard. “You’ve got the bitchbox. You call the guy and ask him. The other side’s already hit on me today for what I got. If my money’s not here, I’m walking.”
“Wait a minute,” Chris’s brother said. “No reason to get upset. Hang on.”
He pointed at the walkie-talkie with his thumb and the guard spoke into it, listened, waited, glanced at Croyd. “They’re getting Schiaparelli,” the guard said. After a longer while he listened to a low squawking, spoke, listened again, looked at Croyd again. “Yeah, he’s got it,” he told Croyd.
“Good,” Croyd said. “Have him bring it down.”
“No, you go up and get it.”
Croyd shook his head.
The man stared at him and licked his lips, as if loathe to relay the message. “This does not make a very good impression, for it is as if you had no trust.”
Croyd smiled. “It is also correct. Make the call.”
This was done, and after a time a heavyset man with graying hair emerged from the building and stared at Croyd. Croyd stared back.
The man approached. “You are Mr. Crenson?”
“That is correct.”
“And you want your money now?”
“That’s the picture.”
“Of course I have it here,” the other told him, reaching into his jacket. “Chris sent it along. It will grieve him that you are so suspicious.”
Croyd held out his hand. When the envelope was placed in it, he opened it and counted. Then he nodded. “Let’s go,” he said, and he followed Schiaparelli and Chris’s brother into the building. The man with the walkie-talkie was. shaking his head.
Upstairs, Croyd was introduced to a group of old and middle-aged men and their bodyguards. He declined a drink, just wanting to give them the name and get out. But it occurred to him that giving them the money’s worth might entail stretching the story out a bit to show that he’d earned it. So he explained things, step by step, from Demise to Loophole. Then he told them of the attempt to take him out following that interview, before he finally got around to giving them Siu Ma’s name.
The expected question followed: Where could she be found?
“This I do not know,” Croyd replied. “Chris asked me for a name, not for an address. You want to hire me to get that for you, too, I suppose I could do it, though it would be cheaper to use your own talent.”
This drew some surly responses, and Croyd shrugged, said goodnight, and walked out, stepping up his pace to the blur level as the muscle near the door looked about, as if for orders.
It was not until a couple of blocks later that a pair of such street troops caught up and attempted to brace him for a refund. He tore out a sewer grating, stuffed their bodies down through the opening and replaced it, for his final bit of subtlety before closing the books on this one.
Concerto for Siren and Serotonin
Croyd took a taxi crosstown, then hiked a circuitous route to his Morningside Heights apartment. There were no lights on within, and he entered quickly and quietly, painkillers, antihistamines, psychedelics, and a five-pound box of assorted chocolates all gift-wrapped together in a gaudy parcel beneath his arm. He flipped on the hall light and slipped into the bedroom.
“Veronica? You awake?” he whispered.
There was no reply, and he crossed to the bedside, lowered himself to a seated position, and reached out. His hand encountered only bedclothes.
“Veronica?” he said aloud. No reply.
He turned on the bedside lamp. The bed was empty, her stuff gone. He looked about for a note. No. Nothing. Perhaps in the living room. Or the kitchen. Yes. Most likely she’d leave it in the refrigerator where he’d be certain to find it.
He rose, then halted. Was that a footstep? Back toward the living room?
“Veronica?” No reply.
Foolish of him to have left the door open, he suddenly realized, though there had been no one in the hallway .... He reached out and extinguished the lamp. He crossed to the door, dropped silently to the floor, moved his head outside at floor level, and drew it back quickly.
Empty. No one in the hall. No further sounds either. He rose and stepped outside. He walked back toward the living room.
In the dim light from the hallway, as he rounded the corner, he beheld a Bengal tiger, and its tail twitched once before it sprang at him.
“Holy shit!” Croyd commented, dropping Veronica’s present and leaping to the side.
Plaster shattered and fell as he caromed off the wall, an orange and black shoulder grazed him in passing, and he threw a punch that slid over the animal’s back. He heard it growl as he leaped into the living room. It turned quickly and followed him, and he picked up a heavy chair and threw it as the beast sprang again.
It roared as the chair struck it, and Croyd overturned a heavy wooden table, raised it like a shield, and rushed with it against the animal. The tiger shook itself, snarling, as it batted the chair aside. It turned and caught the table’s flat surface upon a smooth expanse of shoulder muscle. Then it swung a paw over the table’s upper edge. Croyd ducked, pushed forward.
The big cat fell back, dropped out of sight. Seconds crept by like drugged cockroaches.
“Kitty?” he inquired. Nothing.
He lowered the table a foot. With a roar the tiger sprang. Croyd snapped the table upward, faster than he could remember ever having lifted a piece of furniture before. Its edge caught the tiger a terrible blow beneath the jaw, and it let out a human-sounding whimper as it was turned sideways and fell to the floor. Croyd raised the table high and slammed it down atop the beast, as if it were a giant flyswatter. He raised it again. He halted. He stared.
No tiger.
“Kitty?” he repeated. Nothing.
He lowered the table. Finally he set it aside. He moved to the wall switch and threw it. Only then did he realize that the front of his shirt was torn and bloody. Three furrows ran down the left side of his chest from collarbone to hip.
On the floor, a bit of whiteness ....
Stooping, he touched the object, raised it, studied it. He held one of those little folded paper figures-origami, he remembered, the Japanese called them. This one was ... a paper tiger. He shivered at the same time as he chuckled. This was almost supernatural. This was heavy shit. It occurred to him then that he had just fought off another ace one with a power he did not understand-and he did not like this a bit. Not with Veronica missing. Not with his not even knowing which side had sent the stranger ace to take him out.
He locked the door to the hallway. He opened Veronica’s present, took out the bottle of Percodans and tossed off a couple before he hit the bathroom, stripped off his shirt, and washed his chest. Then he fetched a beer from the refrigerator and washed down a French green with it, to provide the Percs with some contrast. There was no note propped against the milk carton or even in the egg drawer, and this made him sad.
When the bleeding stopped, he washed again, taped a dressing in place, and drew on a fresh shirt. He was not even sure whether he had been followed or whether this had been a stakeout. Either way, he wasn’t going to stick around. He hated abandoning Veronica if someone really had a make on the place, but at the moment he had no choice. It was a very familiar feeling: they were after him again.
Croyd rode subways and taxis and walked for over four hours, crouched behind his mirrorshades, crissing and crossing the island in a pattern of evasion calculated to confuse anybody. And for the first time in his life he saw his name up in lights in Times Square.
CROYD CRENSON, said the flowing letters high on the buildingside, CALL DR. T EMERGENCY
Croyd stood and stared, reading it over and over. When he had convinced himself it was not a hallucination, he shrugged. They ought to know he’d stop by and pay his bill when he got a chance. It was damn humiliating, implying to the whole world that he was a deadbeat. They’d probably even try to charge him for a bed, too, he guessed, when broom closets should be a lot cheaper. Out to screw him, the same as everyone else. They could damn well wait.
Cursing, he ran for a subway entrance.
Heading south on the Broadway line, sucking on a pair of purple hearts and a stray pyrahex he’d found at the bottom of his pocket, Croyd was amazed and impressed that Senator Hartmann actually did seem a man of the people, boarding the train at the Canal Street Station that way. Then another Senator Hartmann followed him. They glanced his way, conferred for an instant, and one leaned out the door and hollered something, and more Hartmanns came running. There were tall Hartmanns, short Hartmanns, fat Hartmanns and even a Hartmann with an extra appendage-seven Hartmanns in all. And Croyd was not so unsophisticated as to fail in realizing, this near Jokertown, that Hartmann’s was the Werewolves’ face of the day.
The doors closed, the train began to move, the tallest Hartmann turned, stared, and approached.
“You Croyd Crenson?” he asked. “Nope,” Croyd replied.
“I think you are.”
Croyd shrugged. “Think whatever you want, but do it someplace else if you want my vote.”
“Get up.”
“I am up. I’m a lot higher than you. And I’m up for anything.”
The tall Hartmann reached for him, and the other Hartmanns began a swaying advance.
Croyd reached forward, caught the oncoming hand, and drew it toward his face. There followed a crunching sound, and the tall Hartmann screamed as Croyd jerked his head to the side, then spat out the thumb he had just bitten off the hand he held. Then he rose to his feet, still holding the Werewolf s right wrist with his left hand. He jerked the man forward and drove the fingers of his free hand deep into his abdomen and began drawing them upward. Blood spurted and ribs popped and protruded.
“Always following me,” he said. “You’re a real pain in the ass, you know? Where’s Veronica?”
The man commenced a coughing spasm. The other Were, wolves halted as the blood began to flow. Croyd’s hand plunged again, downward this time. Red up to the elbow now, he began drawing out a length of intestine. The others began to gag, to back toward the rear of the car.
“This is a political statement,” Croyd said as he raised the gory Hartmann and tossed him after the others. “See you in November, motherfuckers!”
Croyd exited quickly at the Wall Street Station, tore off his bloody shirt, and tossed it into a trash receptacle. He washed his hands in a public fountain before departing the area, and he offered a big black guy who’d said, “You really a Whitey!” fifty bucks for his shirt-a pale blue, long-sleeved polyester affair, which fit him fine. He trotted over to Nassau then, followed it north till it ran into Centre. He stopped in an OPEN ALL NIGHT Greek place and bought two giant styrofoam cups of coffee, one for each hand, to sip as he strolled.
He continued up to Canal and bore westward. Then he detoured several blocks to a cafe he knew, for steak and eggs and coffee and juice and more coffee. He sat beside the window and watched the street grow light and come alive. He took a black pill for medicinal purposes and a red one for good luck.
“Uh,” he said to the waiter, “you’re the sixth or seventh person I’ve seen wearing a surgical mask recently ....”
“Wild card virus,” the man said. “Its around again.”
“Just a few cases, here and there,” Croyd said, “last I heard.”
“Go listen again,” the man responded. “It’s close to a hundred-maybe over-already.”
“Still,” Croyd mused, “do you think a little strip of cloth like that will really do you any good?”
The waiter shrugged. “ I figure it’s better than nothing .... More coffee?”
“Yeah. Get me a dozen donuts to go, too, will you?”
“Sure.”
He made his way to the Bowery via Broome Street, then on down toward Hester. As he drew nearer, he saw that the newsstand was not yet open, and Jube nowhere in sight. Pity. He’d a feeling Walrus might have some useful information or at least some good advice on dealing with the fact that both sides in the current gang war periodically took time out to shoot at him-say, every other day. Was it sunspots? Bad breath? It was rapidly ceasing to be cost effective for the Mob to keep chasing him to recover his fee for his investigationand Siu Ma’s people must have hit at him enough by now to have recovered a lot more face than he’d ever cost them.
Munching a donut, he passed on, heading for his Eldridge apartment. Later. No rush. He could talk to Jube by and by. Right now it would be restful to lean back in the big easy chair, his feet up on the ottoman, and close his eyes for a few minutes ....
“Shit!” he observed, tossing half a donut down the stairwell to a vacant basement flat as he turned the corner onto his block. Was it getting to be that time already?
Then he continued to turn with that rapid fluidity of movement that had come with the territory this time around, following the donut down into darkness where the asthmatic snuffling of some ancient dog would have been distracting but for the fact that he was viewing, even as he descended, a classical stakeout up the street near his pad.
“Son-of-a-bitch!” he added, just his head above ground level now, outline broken by a length of upright piping that supported the side railing.
One man sat in a parked car up past the building, in view of its front entrance. Another sat on a stoop, filing his nails, in command of an angled view of the rear of the building from across the side alley.
Croyd heard a panicked gasping as he swore, unlike any doggy sound with which he was familiar. Glancing downward and back into the shadows, he beheld the quivering, amorphous form of Snotman, generally conceded to be the most disgusting inhabitant of Jokertown, as he cringed in the corner and ate the remains of Croyd’s donut.
Every square inch of the man’s surface seemed covered with green mucus, which ran steadily from him and added to the stinking puddle in which he crouched. Whatever garments he had on were so saturated with it as to have become barely distinguishable like his features.
“For Christ’s sake! That’s filthy and I was eating on it!” Croyd said. “Have a fresh one.” He extended the bag toward Snotman, who did not move. “It’s okay,” he added, and finally he set the bag down on the bottom step and returned to watching the watchers.
Snotman finished the discarded fragment and remained still for some time. Finally, he asked, “For me?”
His voice was a liquid, snotty, snuffling thing.
“Yeah, finish ’em. I’m full,” Croyd said. “I didn’t know you could talk.”
“Nobody to talk to,” Snotman replied. “Well-yeah. That’s the breaks, I guess.”
“People say I make them lose their appetites. Is that why you don’t want the rest?”
“No,” Croyd said. “I got a problem. I’m trying to figure what to do next. There’re some guys up there have my place covered. I’m deciding whether to take them out or just go away. You don’t bother me, even with that gunk all over you. I’ve looked as bad myself on occasion.”
“You? How?”
“I’m Croyd Crenson, the one they call the Sleeper. I change appearance every time I sleep. Sometimes it’s for the better, sometimes it isn’t.”
“Could IT?”
“What? Oh, change again? I’m a special case, is what it is. I don’t know any way I could share that with other people. Believe me, you wouldn’t want a regular diet of it.”
“Just once would be enough,” Snotman answered, opening the bag and taking out a donut. “Why are you taking a pill? Are you sick?”
“No, it’s just something to help me stay alert. I can’t afford to sleep for a long time.”
“Why not?”
“It’s a long story. Very long.”
“Nobody tells me stories anymore.”
“What the hell. Why not?” Croyd said.
Concerto for Siren and Serotonin
When Snotman grew ill, Croyd snapped the lock on the door behind him, letting him into the dusty ruin of a small two-room apartment whose owner was obviously using the place to store damaged furniture. He located a threadbare couch on which the glistening joker sprawled, quivering. He rinsed a jelly jar he found near a basin in the next room and took him a drink of water. Sweeping aside a mess of ancient drug paraphernalia, Croyd seated himself on a small cracked bench as the other sipped.
“You been sick?” Croyd asked him.
“No. I mean, I always feel like I’ve got a cold, but this is different. I feel sort of like I did a long time ago, when it all started.”
Croyd covered the shivering joker with a pile of curtains he found in a corner, then seated himself again.
“Finish telling me what happened,” Snotman said after a time.
“Oh, yeah.”
Croyd popped a methamphet and a dex and continued his tale. When Snotman passed out, Croyd did not notice. He kept talking until he realized that Snotman’s skin had gone dry. Then he grew still and watched, for the man’s features seemed slowly to be rearranging themselves. Even speeded, Croyd was able to spot the onset of a wild card attack. But even speeded, this did not quite make sense. Snotman was already a joker, and Croyd had never heard of anyone himself excluded-coming down with it a second time.
He shook his head, rose and paced, stepped outside. It was afternoon now, and he was hungry again. It took him a few moments to spot the new shift that had taken over surveillance of his quarters. He decided against disposing of them. The most sensible thing to do, he guessed, would be to go and get a bite to eat, then come back and keep an eye on the now-transforming Snotman through his crisis, one way or the other. Then clear out, go deeper underground.
In the distance a siren wailed. Another Red Cross helicopter came and went, low, from the southeast, heading uptown. Memories of that first mad Wild Card Day swam in his head, and Croyd decided that perhaps he’d better acquire a new pad even before he ate. He knew just the sleaze-bin, not too far away, where he could get in off the streets and no questions asked, provided they had a vacancy-which was generally the case. He detoured to check it out.
Like a mating call, another siren answered the first, from the opposite direction. Croyd waved at the man who hung upside down by his feet from a lamppost, but the fellow took offense or grew frightened and flew away.
From somewhere he heard a loudspeaker mentioning his name, probably saying terrible things about him.
His fingers tightened on the fender of a parked car. The metal squealed as he pulled at it, tearing a wide strip loose. He turned then, bending it, folding it, blood dripping from a tear in his hand. He would find that speaker and destroy it, whether it was high on a buildingside or the top of a cop car. He would stop them from talking about him. He would ...
That would give him away, though-he realized in a moment’s clarity-to his enemies, who could be anybody. Anybody except the guy with the wild card virus, and Snotman couldn’t be anybody’s enemy just now. Croyd hurled the piece of metal across the street, then threw back his head and began to howl. Things were getting complicated again. And nasty. He needed something to calm his nerves.
He plunged his bloody hand into his pocket, withdrew a fistful of pills, and gulped them without looking to see what they were. He had to get presentable to go and get a room.
He ran his fingers through his hair, brushed off his clothes, began walking at a normal pace. It wasn’t far.
Concerto for Siren and Serotonin
Again they were after him. If you can’t even trust your doctor, he wondered, who can you trust? The sirens’ wails were almost a steady sheet of sound now.
He hurled chunks of concrete, broke streetlights, and dashed from alley to doorway. He crouched within parked cars. He watched the choppers go by, listening to the steady phut-phut of their blades. Every now and then he heard parts of appeals over some loudspeaker or other. They were talking to him, lying to him, asking him to turn himself in. He chuckled. That would be the day.
Was it all Tachy’s fault again? An image flashed before his mind’s eye, of Jetboy’s small plane darting like a tiny fish among great, grazing whales there in the half-clouded sky of an afternoon. Back when it all began. What had ever happened to Joe Sarzanno?
He smelled smoke. Why did things always get burned in times of trouble? He rubbed his temples and yawned. Automatically he sought in his pocket after a pill, but there was nothing there. He tore open the door to a Coke machine before a darkened service station, broke into the coin box, then fed quarters back into the mechanism, collected a Coke for either hand, and walked away sipping.
After a time he found himself standing before the Jokertown Dime Museum, wanting to go inside and realizing that the place was closed.
He stood undecided for perhaps ten seconds. Then a siren sounded nearby. Probably just around the corner. He moved forward, snapped the lock, and entered. He left the price of admission on the little desk to his left and as an afterthought, tossed in something for the lock.
He sat on a bench for a while, watching shadows. Every now and then he rose, strolled, and returned. He saw again the golden butterfly, poised as if about to depart from the golden monkey wrench, both of them transmuted by the short-lived ace called Midas. He looked again at the jars of joker fetuses, and at a buckled section of a metal door bearing Devil John’s hoofprint.
He walked among the Great Events in Wild Card History dioramas pressing the button over and over again at the Earth vs. Swarm display. Each time that he hit it, Modular Man fired his laser at a Swarm monster. Then he located one that made the statue of the Howler scream ....
It was not until his final Coke was down to its last swallow that he noticed the diminutive human skin, stuffed, displayed in a case. He pressed nearer, squinting, and read the card that identified it as having been found in an alley. He sucked in his breath as the recognition hit him.
“Poor Gimli,” he said. “Who could have done this to you? And where are your insides? My stomach turns at it. Where are your wisecracks now? Go to Barnett, tell him to preach till all hell freezes. In the end it’ll be his hide, too.”
He turned away. He yawned again. His limbs were heavy. Rounding a corner, he beheld three metal shells, suspended by long cables in the middle of the air. He halted and regarded them, realizing immediately what they were.
On a whim he leaped and slapped the nearest of the three-an armor-plated VW body. It rang all about him and swayed slightly on its moorings, and he sprang a second time and slapped it again before another yawning jag seized him.
“Have shell, will travel,” he muttered. “Always safe in there, weren’t you, Turtle so long as you didn’t stick your neck out?”
He began to chuckle again, then stopped as he turned to the one he remembered most vividly-the sixties modeland he could not reach high enough to trace the peace symbol on its side, but “‘Make love, not war,”‘ he read, the motto painted into a flower-form mandala. “Shit, tell that to the guys trying to kill me.”
“Always wondered what it looked like inside,” he added, and he leaped and hooked his fingers over the edge and drew himself upward.
The vehicle swayed but held his weight easily. In a minute he was sequestered within.
“Ah, sweet claustrophobia!” he sighed. “It does feel safe. I could ...”
He closed his eyes. After a time he shimmered faintly.
He was fourteen years old when sleep became his enemy, a dark and terrible thing he learned to fear as others feared death. It was not, however, a matter of neurosis in any of its more mysterious forms. A neurosis generally possesses irrational elements, while his fear proceeded from a specific cause and followed a course as logical as a geometrical theorem.
Not that there was no irrationality in his life. Quite the contrary. But this was a result, not the cause, of his condition. At least, this is what he told himself later.
Simply put, sleep was his bane, his nemesis. It was his hell on an installment plan.
Croyd Crenson had completed eight grades of school and didn’t make it through the ninth. This was not because of any fault of his own. While not at the top of his class he was not at the bottom either. He was an average kid of average build, freckly-faced, with blue eyes and straight brown hair. He had liked to play war games with his friends until the real war ended; then they played cops and robbers more and more often. When it was war he had waited-not too patiently—for his chance to be the ace fighter pilot, Jetboy; after the war, in cops and robbers, he was usually a robber.
He’d started ninth grade, but like many others he never got through the first month: September 1946....
“What are you looking at?”
He remembered Miss Marston’s question but not her expression, because he didn’t turn away from the spectacle. It was not uncommon for kids in his class to glance out the window with increasing frequency once three o’clock came within believable distance. It was uncommon for them not to turn away quickly, though, when addressed, feigning a final bout of attention while awaiting the dismissal bell.
Instead, he had replied, “The blimps.”
In that three other boys and two girls who also had a good line of sight were looking in the same direction, Miss Marston—her own curiosity aroused-crossed to the window. She halted there and stared.
They were quite high-five or six of them, it seemedtiny things at the end of an alleyway of cloud, moving as if linked together. And there was an airplane in the vicinity, making a rapid pass at them. Black-and-white memories of flashing newsreels, still fresh, came to mind. It actually looked as if the plane were attacking the silver minnows.
Miss Marston watched for several moments, then turned away.
“All right, class,” she began. “It’s only—”
Then the sirens sounded. Involuntarily, Miss Marston felt her shoulders rise and tighten.
“Air raid!” called a girl named Charlotte in the first row. “Is not,” said Jimmy Walker, teeth braces flashing. “They don’t have them anymore. The war’s over.”
“I know what they sound like,” Charlotte said. “Every time there was a blackout—”
“But there’s no more war,” Bobby Tremson stated. “That will be enough, class,” Miss Marston said. “Perhaps they’re testing them.”
But she looked back out the window and saw a small flash of fire in the sky before a reef of cloud blocked her view of the aerial conflict.
“Stay in your seats,” she said then, as several students had risen and were moving toward the window. “I’m going to check in the office and see whether there’s a drill that hadn’t been announced. I’ll be right back. You may talk if you do it quietly.” She departed, banging the door behind her. Croyd continued to stare at the cloud screen, waiting for it to part again.
“It’s Jetboy,” he said to Bobby Tremson, across the aisle. “Aw, c’mon,” Bobby said. “What would he be doing up there? The war’s over.”
“It’s a jet plane. I’ve seen it in newsreels, and that’s how it goes. And he’s got the best one.”
“You’re just making that up,” Liza called from the rear of the room.
Croyd shrugged.
“There’s somebody bad up there, and he’s fighting them,” he said. “I saw the fire. There’s shooting.”
The sirens continued to wail. From the street outside came the sound of screeching brakes, followed by the brief hoot of an auto horn and the dull thud of collision.
“Accident!” Bobby called, and everyone was getting up and moving to the window.
Croyd rose then, not wanting his view blocked; and because he was near he found a good spot. He did not look at the accident, however, but continued to stare upward.
“Caved in his trunk,” Joe Sarzanno said. “What?” a girl asked.
Croyd heard the distant booming sounds now. The plane was no longer in sight.
“What’s the noise?” Bobby asked. “Antiaircraft fire,” Croyd said. “You’re nutsl”
“They’re trying to shoot the things down, whatever they are.”
“Yeah. Sure. Just like in the movies.”
The clouds began to close again. But as they did, Croyd thought that he glimpsed the jet once more, sweeping in on a collision course with the blimps. His view was blocked then, before he could be sure.
“Damn!” he said. “Get ’em, Jetboy!”
Bobby laughed and Croyd shoved him, hard. “Hey! Watch who you’re pushing!”
Croyd turned toward him, but Bobby did not seem to want to pursue the matter. He was looking out of the window again, pointing.
“Why are all those people running?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it the accident?”
“Nave”
“Look! There’s anotherl”
A blue Studebaker had swung rapidly about the corner, swerved to miss the two stopped vehicles, and clipped an oncoming Ford. Both cars were turned at an angle. Other vehicles braked and halted to avoid colliding with them.
Several horns began to sound. The muffled noises of antiaircraft fire continued within the wail of the sirens. People were rushing along the streets now, not even pausing to regard the accidents.
“Do you think the war started again?” Charlotte asked. “I don’t know,” Leo said.
The sound of a police siren was suddenly mixed with the other noises.
“Jeez!” Bobby said. “Here comes another!”
Before he finished speaking a Pontiac had run into the rear of one of the stopped vehicles. Three pairs of drivers confronted each other on foot; one couple angrily, the others simply talking and occasionally pointing upward. Shortly, they all departed and hurried off along the street.
“This is no drill,” Joe said.
“I know,” Croyd answered, staring at the area where a cloud had grown pink from the brightness it masked. “I think it’s something real bad.”
He moved back from the window. “I’m going home now,” he said.
“You’ll get in trouble,” Charlotte told him. He glanced at the clock.
“I’ll bet the bell rings before she gets back,” he answered. “If you don’t go now I don’t think they’ll let you go with whatever that is going on-and I want to go home.”
He turned away and crossed to the door. “I’m going, too,” Joe said.
“You’ll both get in trouble.”
They passed along the hallway. As they neared the front door an adult voice, masculine, called out from up the hall, “You two! Come back here!”
Croyd ran, shouldered open the big green door, and kept going. Joe was only a step behind him as he descended the steps. The street was full of stopped cars now, for as far as he could see in either direction. There were people on the tops of buildings and people at every window, most of them looking upward.
He rushed to the sidewalk and turned right. His home was six blocks to the south, in an anomalous group of row houses in the eighties. Joe’s route took him half that way, then off to the east.
Before they reached the corner they were halted as a stream of people flowed from the side street to the right, cutting into their line of pedestrian traffic, some turning north and trying to push through, others heading south. The boys heard cursing and the sound of a fistfight from up ahead. Joe reached out and tugged at a man’s sleeve. The man jerked his arm away, then looked down.
“What’s happening?” Joe shouted.
“Some kind of bomb,” the man answered. “Jetboy tried to stop the guys who had it. I think they were all blown up. The thing might go off any minute. Maybe atomic.”
“Where’d it fall?” Croyd yelled. The man gestured to the northwest. “That way.”
Then the man was gone, having seen an opening and pushed his way through.
“Croyd, we can get past on the street if we go over the hood of that car,” Joe said.
Croyd nodded and followed the other boy across the stillwarm hood of a gray Dodge. The driver swore at them, but his door was blocked by the press of bodies and the door on the passenger side could only open a few inches before hitting the fender of a taxi. They made their way around the cab and passed through the intersection at its middle, traversing two more cars on the way.
Pedestrian traffic eased near to the center of the next block, and it looked as if there was a large open area ahead. They sprinted toward it, then halted abruptly.
A man lay upon the pavement. He was having convulsions. His head and hands had swollen enormously, and they were dark red, almost purple in color. Just as they caught sight of him, blood began to rush from his nose and mouth; it trickled from his ears, it oozed from his eyes and about his fingernails.
“Holy Maryl” Joe said, crossing himself as he drew back. “What’s he got?”
“I don’t know,” Croyd answered. “Let’s not get too close. Let’s go over some more cars.”
It took them ten minutes to reach the next corner. Somewhere along the way they noticed that the guns had been silent for a long time, though the air-raid sirens, police sirens, and auto horns maintained a steady din.
“I smell smoke,” Croyd said.
“Me, too. If something’s burning no fire truck’s going to get to it.”
“Whole damn town could burn down.”
“Maybe it’s not all like this.”
“Bet it is.”
They pushed ahead, were caught in a press of bodies and swept about the corner.
“We’re not going this wayl” Croyd yelled.
But it did not matter, as the mass of people about them was halted seconds later.
“Think we can crawl through to the street and go over cars again?” Joe asked.
“Might as well try.”
They made it. Only this time, as they worked their way back toward the corner it was slower, as others were taking the same route. Croyd saw a reptilian face through a windshield then, and scaly hands clutching at a steering wheel that had been torn loose from its column as the driver slowly slumped to the side. Looking away, he saw a rising tower of smoke from beyond buildings to the northeast.
When they reached the corner there was no place to descend. People stood packed and swaying. There were occasional screams. He wanted to cry, but he knew it would do no good. He clenched his teeth and shuddered.
“What’re we going to do?” he called to Joe.
“If we’re stuck here overnight we can bust the window on an empty car and sleep in it, I guess.”
“I wart to go home!”
“Me, too. Let’s try and keep going as far as we can.” They inched their way down the street for the better part of an hour, but only made another block. Drivers howled and pounded on windows as they climbed over the roofs of their cars. Other cars were empty. A few others contained things they did not like to look at. Sidewalk traffic looked dangerous now. It was fast and loud, with brief fights, numerous screams, and a number of fallen bodies which had been pushed into doorways or off the curb into the street. There had been a few seconds’ hesitation and silence when the sirens had stopped. Then came the sound of someone speaking over a bullhorn. But it was too far away. The words were not distinguishable, except for “bridges.” The panic resumed.
He saw a woman fall from a building across the street and up ahead, and he looked away before she hit. The smell of smoke was still in the air, but there were yet no signs of fire in the vicinity. Ahead, he saw the crowd halt and draw back as a person-man or woman, he could not tell-burst into flames in its midst. He slid to the road between two cars and waited till his friend came up.
“Joe, I’m scared shitless,” he said. “Maybe we should just crawl under a car and wait till it’s all over.”
“I’ve been thinking of that,” the other boy replied. “But what if part of that burning building falls on a car and it catches fire?”
“What of it?”
“If it gets to the gas tank and it blows up they’ll all go, this close together, like a string of firecrackers.”
“Jesus!”
“We’ve got to keep going. You can come to my place if it seems easier.”
Croyd saw a man perform a series of dancelike movements, tearing at his clothing. Then he began to change shape. Someone back up the road started howling. There came sounds of breaking glass.
During the next half-hour the sidewalk traffic thinned to what might, under other circumstances, be called normal. The people seemed either to have achieved their destinations or to have advanced their congestion to some other part of town. Those who passed now picked their way among corpses. Faces had vanished from behind windows. No one was in sight atop the buildings. The sounds of auto horns had diminished to sporadic outbursts. The boys stood on a corner. They had covered three blocks and crossed the street since they had left school.
“I turn here,” Joe said. “You want to come with me or you going ahead?”
Croyd looked down the street.
“It looks better now. I think I can make it okay,” he said. “I’ll see you.”
“Okay “
Joe hurried off to the left. Croyd watched him for a moment, then moved ahead. Far up the street, a man raced from a doorway screaming. He seemed to grow larger and his movements more erratic as he moved to the center of the street. Then he exploded. Croyd pressed his back against the brick wall to his left and stared, heart pounding, but there was no new disturbance. He heard the bullhorn again, from somewhere to the west, and this time its words were more clear: “.... he bridges are closed to both auto and foot traffic. Do not attempt to use the bridges. Return to your homes. The bridges are closed ....”
He moved ahead again. A single siren wailed somewhere to the east. A low-flying airplane passed overhead. There was a crumpled body in a doorway to his left; he looked away and quickened his pace. He saw smoke across the street, and he looked for the flames and saw then that it rose from the body of a woman seated on a doorstep, her head in her hands. She seemed to shrink as he watched, then fell to her left with a rattling sound. He clenched his fists and kept going.
An Army truck rolled from the side street at the corner ahead of him. He ran to it. A helmeted face turned toward him from the passenger side.
“Why are you out, son?” the man asked.
“I’m going home,” he answered. “Where’s that?”
He pointed ahead. “Two blocks,” he said. “Go straight home,” the man told him. “What’s happening?”
“We’re under martial law. Everybody’s got to get indoors. Good idea to keep your windows closed, too.”
“why?”
“It seems that was some kind of germ bomb that went off. Nobody knows for sure.”
“Was is Jetboy that ... ?”
“Jetboy’s dead. He tried to stop them.” Croyd’s eyes were suddenly brimming. “Go straight home.”
The truck crossed the street and continued on to the west. Croyd ran across and slowed when he reached the sidewalk. He began to shake. He was suddenly aware of the pain in his knees, where he had scraped them in crawling over vehicles. He wiped his eyes. He felt terribly cold. He halted near the middle of the block and yawned several times. Tired. He was incredibly tired. He began moving. His feet felt heavier than he ever remembered. He halted again beneath a tree. There came a moaning from overhead.
When he looked up he realized that it was not a tree. It was tall and brown, rooted and spindly, but there was an enormously elongated human face near its top and it was from there that the moaning came. As he moved away one of the limbs plucked at his shoulder, but it was a weak thing and a few more steps bore him out of its reach. He whimpered. The corner seemed miles away, and then there was another block ....
He had long yawning spells now, and the remade world had lost its ability to surprise him. So what if a man flew through the skies unaided? Or if a human-faced puddle lay in the gutter to his right? More bodies .... n overturned car .... pile of ashes .... anging telephone lines .. He trudged on to the comer. He leaned against the lamppost, then slowly slid down and sat with his back to it. He wanted to close his eyes. But that was silly. He lived right over there. Just a bit more and he could sleep in his own bed.
He caught hold of the lamppost and dragged himself to his feet. One more crossing ..
He made it onto his block, his vision swimming. Just a little farther. He could see the door ..
He heard the sliding, grating sound of a window opening, heard his name called from overhead. He looked up. It was Ellen, the neighbors’ little girl, looking down at him.
“I’m sorry your daddy’s dead,” she called.
He wanted to cry but he couldn’t. The yawning took all of his strength. He leaned upon his door and rang the bell. The pocket with his key in it seemed so far away ..
When his brother Carl opened the door, he fell at his feet and found that he could not rise.
“I’m so tired,” he told him, and he closed his eyes.
II. The Killer at the Heart of the Dream
Croyd’s childhood vanished while he slept, that first Wild Card Day. Nearly four weeks passed before he awoke, and he was changed, as was the world about him. It was not just that he was a half-foot taller, stronger than he had thought anyone could be, and covered with fine red hair. He quickly discovered, also, as he regarded himself in the bathroom mirror, that the hair possessed peculiar properties. Repelled by its appearance, he wished that it were not red. Immediately, it began to fade until it was pale blond in color, and he felt a notunpleasant tingling over the entire surface of his body.
Intrigued, he wished for it to turn green and it did. Again, the tingling, this time more like a wave of vibration sweeping over him. He willed himself black and he blackened. Then pale once more. Only this time he did not halt at light blond. Paler, paler; chalky, albino. Paler still .... What was the limit? He began to fade from sight. He could see the tiled wall behind him now, through his faint outline in the mirror. Paler ....
Gone.
He raised his hands before his face and saw nothing. He picked up his damp washcloth and held it to his chest. It, too, became transparent, was gone, though he still felt its wet presence.
He returned himself to pale blond. It seemed the most socially acceptable. Then he squeezed into what had been his loosest jeans and put on a green flannel shirt that he could not button all the way. The pants only reached to his shins now. Silently, he padded down the stairs on bare feet and made his way to the kitchen. He was ravenous. The hall clock told him that it was close to three. He had looked in on his mother, his brother, and his sister, but had not disturbed their slumber.
There was a half-loaf of bread in the breadbox and he tore it apart, stuffing great chunks into his mouth, barely chewing before he swallowed. He bit his finger at one point, which slowed him only slightly. He found a piece of meat and a wedge of cheese in the refrigerator and he ate them. He also drank a quart of milk. There were two apples on the countertop and he ate them as he searched the cupboards. A box of crackers. He munched them as he continued his search. Six cookies. He gulped them. A half-jar of peanut butter. He ate it with a spoon.
Nothing. He could find nothing more, and he was still terribly hungry.
Then the enormity of his feast struck him. There was no more food in the house. He remembered the mad afternoon of his return from school. What if there were a food shortage?
What if they were back on rationing? He had just eaten everyone’s food.
He had to get more, for the others as well as for himself! He went to the front room and looked out the window. The street was deserted. He wondered about the martial law he had heard of on the way home from school-how long ago? How long had he slept, anyway? He’d a feeling it had been a long while.
He unlocked the door and felt the coolness of the night. One of the unbroken streetlights shone through the bare branches of a nearby tree. There had still been a few leaves on the roadside trees on the afternoon of the troubles. He removed the spare key from the table in the hall, stepped outside, and locked the door behind him. The steps, which he knew must be cold, did not feel particularly chill on his bare feet.
He halted then, retreated into shadow. It was frightening, not knowing what was out there.
He raised his hands and held them up to the streetlight. “Pale, pale, pale ...”
They faded until the light shone through them. They continued to fade. His body tingled.
When they were gone, he lowered his eyes. Nothing of him seemed to remain but the tingle.
Then he hurried up the street, a feeling of enormous energy within him. The odd, treelike being was gone from the next block. The streets were clear for traffic now, though there was considerable debris in the gutters and almost every parked vehicle he saw had sustained some damage. It seemed that every building he passed had at least one window blocked with cardboard or wood. Several roadside trees were now splintered stumps, and the metal signpost at the next corner was bent far to one side. He hurried, surprised at the rapidity of his progress, and when he reached his school he saw that it remained intact, save for a few missing panes of glass. He passed on.
Three grocery stores he came to were boarded up and displayed CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE signs. He broke into the third one. The boards offered very little resistance when he pushed against them. He located a light switch and threw it. Seconds later, he flipped it off. The place was a shambles. It had been thoroughly looted.
He proceeded uptown, passing the shells of several burned-out buildings. He heard voices-one gruff, one high and fluting-from within one of these. Moments later, there came a flash of white light and a scream. Simultaneous with this, a portion of a brick wall collapsed, spilling across the sidewalk at his back. He saw no reason to investigate. It also seemed on occasion that he heard voices from beneath sewer gratings.
He wandered for miles that night, not becoming aware until he was nearing Times Square that he was being followed. At first he thought that it was simply a large dog moving in the same direction he was headed. But when it drew nearer and he noted the human lines to its features, he halted and faced it. It sat down at a distance of about ten feet and regarded him. “You’re one, too,” it growled.
“You can see me?”
“No. Smell.”
“What do you want?”
“Food.”
“Me, too.”
“I’ll show you where. For a cut.”
“Okay. Show me.”
It led him to a roped-off area where Army trucks were parked. Croyd counted ten of them. Uniformed figures stood or rested among them.
“What’s going on?” Croyd asked.
“Talk later. Food packages in the four trucks to the left.” It was no problem to pass the perimeter, enter the rear of a vehicle, gather an armload of packages, and withdraw in the other direction. He and the dog-man retreated to a doorway two blocks away. Croyd phased back to visibility and they proceeded to gorge themselves.
Afterward, his new acquaintance-who wished to be called Bentley-told him of the events during the weeks following Jetboy’s death, while Croyd had slept. Croyd learned of the rush to Jersey, of the rioting, of the martial law, of the Takisians, and of the ten thousand deaths their virus had caused. And he heard of the transformed survivors-the lucky ones and the unlucky ones.
“You’re a lucky one,” Bentley concluded. “I don’t feel lucky,” Croyd said.
“At least you stayed human.”
“So, have you been to see that Dr. Tachyon yet?”
“No. He’s been so damn busy. I will, though.”
“I should, too.”
“Maybe.”
“What do you mean, ‘maybe’?”
“Why should you want to change? You got it made. You can have whatever you want.”
“You mean stealing?”
“Times are tough. You get by however you can.”
“Maybe so.”
“I can put you on to some clothes that will fit you.”
“Where?”
“Just around the corner.”
“Okay. “
It was not difficult for Croyd to break into the rear of the clothing store to which Bentley led him. He faded again after that and returned for another load of food parcels. Bentley padded beside him as he headed home.
“Mind if I keep you company?”
“No. “
“I want to see where you live. I can put you on to lots of good things.”
“Yeah?”
“I’d like a friend who can keep me fed. Think we can work something out?”
“Yes.”
In the days that followed Croyd became his family’s provider. His older brother and sister did not ask whence he acquired the food or, finally, the money he obtained with seeming facility during his nightly absences. Neither did his mother, distracted in her grief over his father’s death, think to inquire. Bentley-who slept somewhere in the neighborhood-became his guide and mentor in these enterprises, as well as his confidant in other matters.
“Maybe I should see that doctor you mentioned,” Croyd said, lowering the case of canned goods he had removed from a warehouse and perching himself upon it.
“Tachyon?” Bentley asked, stretching himself in an undoglike fashion.
“Yeah.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I can’t sleep. It’s been five days since I woke up this way, and I haven’t slept at all since then.”
“So? What’s wrong with that? More time to do what you want.”
“But I’m finally starting to get tired and I still can’t sleep.”
“It’ll catch up with you in time. Not worth bothering Tachyon over. Anyway, if he tries to cure you your chances are only like one in three or four.”
“How do you know that?”
“I went to see him.”
“Oh?”
Croyd ate an apple. Then, “You going to try it?” he asked. “If I can get up the nerve,” Bentley answered. “Who wants to spend his life as a dog? And not a very good dog, at that. By the way, when we go past a pet shop I want you to break in and get me a flea collar.”
“Sure. I wonder ... If I do go to sleep, will I sleep a long time like before?”
Bentley tried to shrug, gave up. “Who knows?”
“Who’ll take care of my family? Who’ll take care of you?”
“I see the point. If you stop coming out nights, I guess I wait awhile and then go and try the cure. For your family, you’d better pick up a bunch of money. Things will loosen up again, and money always talks.”
“You’re right.”
“You’re damn strong. Think you could tear open a safe?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Well try one on the way home, too. I know a good place.”
“Okay “
“.... nd some flea powder.”
It was getting on toward morning, as he sat reading and eating, that he began to yawn uncontrollably. When he rose there was a certain heaviness to his limbs that had not been present earlier. He climbed the stairs and entered Carl’s room. He shook his brother by the shoulder until he awoke. “Whassamatter, Croyd?” he asked.
“I’m sleepy.”
“So go to bed.”
“It’s been a long time. Maybe I’ll sleep a long time again, too.”
“Oh.”
“So here’s some money, to take care of everybody in case that’s what happens.”
He opened the top drawer of Carl’s dresser and stuffed a huge wad of bills in under the socks.
“Uh, Croyd ... Where’d you get all that money?”
“None of your business. Go back to sleep.”
He made it to his room, undressed, and crawled into bed. He felt very cold.
When he awoke there was frost on the windowpanes. When he looked outside he saw that there was snow on the ground beneath a leaden sky. His hand on the sill was wide and swarthy, the fingers short and thick.
Examining himself in the bathroom, he discovered that he was about five and a half feet tall, powerfully built, with dark hair and eyes, and that he possessed hard scarlike ridges on the front of his legs, the outside of his arms, across his shoulders, down his back, and up his neck. It took him another fifteen minutes to learn that he could raise the temperature of his hand to the point where the towel he was holding caught fire. It was only a few more minutes before he discovered that he could generate heat all over, until his entire body glowedthough he felt badly about the footprint that had burned into the linoleum, and the hole his other foot made in the throw rug.
This time, there was plenty of food in the kitchen, and he ate steadily for over an hour before his hunger pangs were eased. He’d put on sweatpants and a sweatshirt, reflecting on the variety of clothing he would have to keep about if he were going to change in form each time that he slept.
There was no pressure on him this time to forage for food. The enormous number of deaths that had occurred following the release of the virus had resulted in a surplus in local warehouses, and the stores were open again with distribution routines back to normal.
His mother was spending most of her time in church, and Carl and Claudia were back in school, which had reopened recently. Croyd knew that he would not be returning to school himself. The money supply was still good, but on reflecting that he had slept nine days longer this time than he had on the previous occasion he felt it would be a good idea to have some extra cash on hand. He wondered whether he could heat a hand sufficiently to burn through the metal door of a safe. He had had a very hard time tearing open that one-had almost given up, actually-and Bentley had assured him that it was a “tin can.” He went outside and practiced on a piece of galvanized pipe.
He tried to plan the job carefully, but his judgment was bad. He had to open eight safes that week before he obtained much in the way of money. Most of them just held papers. He knew that he set off alarms also, and this made him nervous; he hoped that his fingerprints changed too when he slept. He worked as quickly as he could and wished that Bentley were back. The dog-man would have known what to do, he felt. He bad hinted on several occasions that his normal occupation had involved something somewhat less than legal.
The days passed more quickly than he would have wished. He purchased a large, all-purpose wardrobe. Nights, he walked the city, observing the signs of damage that still remained and the progress of repair work. He caught up on the news, of the city, the world. It was not hard to believe in a man from outer space when the results of his virus were all about him. He asked a bullet-domed man with webbed fingers where he might find Dr. Tachyon. The man gave him an address and a phone number. He kept them in his wallet and did not call or visit. What if the doctor examined him, told him there was no problem, and cured him? Nobody else in the family was able to make a living at this point.
The day came when his appetite peaked again, which he felt might mean that his body was getting ready for another change. This time, he observed his feelings more carefully, for future reference. It took him the rest of that day and night and part of the next day before the chills came and the waves of drowsiness began. He left a note saying good night to the others, for they were out when the feeling began to overwhelm him. And this time he locked his bedroom door, for he had learned that they had observed him regularly as he slept, had even brought in a doctor at one point-a woman who had prudently recommended that they simply let him sleep, once she learned his case history. She had also suggested that he see Dr. Tachyon when he awoke, but his mother had misplaced the paper on which she had written this. Mrs. Crenson’s mind seemed to wander often these days.
He had the dream again-and this time he realized that it was again—and this was the first time that he remembered it: The apprehension was reminiscent of his feelings on the day of his last return home from school. He was walking down what seemed an empty twilit street. Something stirred behind him and he turned and looked back. People were emerging from doorways, windows, automobiles, manholes, and all of them were staring at him, moving toward him. He continued on his way and there came something like a collective sigh at his back. When he looked again they were all hurrying after him in a menacing fashion, expressions of hatred on their faces. He began to run, with a certainty that they intended his destruction. They pursued him ....
When he awoke he was hideous, and he had no special powers. He was hairless, snouted, and covered with graygreen scales; his fingers were elongated and possessed of extra joints, his eyes yellow and slitted; he developed pains in his thighs and lower back if he stood upright for too long. It was far easier to go about his room on all fours. When he exclaimed aloud over his condition there was a pronounced sibilance to his speech.
It was early evening, and he heard voices from downstairs. He opened the door and called out, and Claudia and Carl both hurried to his room. He opened the door the barest crack and remained behind it.
“Croyd! Are you all right?” Carl asked.
“Yes and no,” he hissed. “I’ll be okay. Right now I’m starving. Bring me food. Lots of it.”
“What’s the matter?” Claudia asked. “Why won’t you come out?”
“Later! Talk later. Food nowl”
He refused to leave his room or to let his family see him. They brought him food, magazines, newspapers. He listened to the radio and paced, quadrupedally. This time, sleep was something to be courted rather than feared. He lay back on the bed, hoping it would come soon. But it was denied him for the better part of a week.
The next time he woke he found himself slightly over six feet tall, dark-haired, slim, and not unpleasantly featured. He was as strong as he had been on earlier occasions, but after a while he concluded that he possessed no special powers-until he slipped on the stair in his rush to the kitchen and saved himself by levitating.
Later, he noticed a note in Claudia’s handwriting, tacked to his door. It gave a phone number and told him he could reach Bentley there. He put it in his wallet. He’d another call to make first.
Dr. Tachyon looked up at him and smiled faintly. “It could be worse,” he said.
Croyd was almost amused at the judgment. “How?” he asked.
“Well, you could have drawn a joker.”
“Just what did I draw, sir?”
“Yours is one of the most interesting cases I’ve seen so far. In all of the others it’s simply run its course and either killed the person or changed him-for better or worse. With you well, the nearest analogy is an earth disease called malaria. The virus you harbor seems to reinfect you periodically.”
“I drew a joker once ....”
“Yes, and it could happen again. But unlike anyone else to whom it’s happened, all you have to do is wait. You can sleep it off.”
“I don’t ever want to be a monster again. Is there some way you could change just that much of it?”
“I’m afraid not. It’s part of your total syndrome. I can only go after the whole thing.”
“And the odds against a cure are three or four to one?”
“Who told you that?”
“A joker named Bentley. He looked sort of like a dog.”
“Bentley was one of my successes. He’s back to normal now. Just left here fairly recently, in fact.”
“Really! It’s good to know that someone made it.” Tachyon looked away.
“Yes, he answered, a moment later. “Tell me something.
“What?”
“If I only change when I sleep, then I could put off a change by staying awake right?”
“I see what you mean. Yes, a stimulant would put it off a bit. If you feel it coming on while you’re out somewhere, the caffeine in a couple of cups of coffee would probably hold it off long enough for you to get back home.”
“Isn’t there something stronger? Something that would put it off for a longer time?”
“Yes, there are powerful stimulants-amphetamines, for example. But they can be dangerous if you take too many or take them for too long.”
“In what ways are they dangerous?”
“Nervousness, irritability, combativeness. Later on” a toxic psychosis, with delusions, hallucinations, paranoia. “Crazy?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you could just stop them if it gets near that point, couldn’t you?”
“I don’t believe it’s that easy.”
“I’d hate to be a monster again, or—You didn’t say it, but isn’t it possible that I could just die during one of the comas?”
“There is that possibility. It’s a nasty virus. But you’ve come through several attacks now, which leads me to believe that your body knows what it is doing. I wouldn’t worry myself unduly on that ....”
“It’s the joker part that really bothers me.”
“That is a possibility you simply have to live with.”
“All right. Thank you, Doctor.”
“I wish you would come to Mt. Sinai the next time you feel it coming on. I’d really like to observe the process in you.”
“I’d rather not.”
Tachyon nodded.
“Or right away after you awaken ... ?”
“Maybe,” Croyd said, and he shook his hand. “By the way, Doctor ... How do you spell ‘amphetamine’?”
Croyd stopped by the Sarzannos’ apartment later, for he had not seen Joe since that day in September when they had made their way home from school together, the exigencies of making a living have limited his spare time since then.
Mrs. Sarzanno opened the door a crack and stared at him. After he had identified himself and tried to explain his changed appearance, she still refused to open the door farther.
“My Joe, he is changed, too,” she said. “Uh, how is he changed?” he asked. “Changed. That’s all. Changed. Go away.” She closed the door.
He knocked again, but there was no response.
Croyd went away then and ate three steaks, because there was nothing else he could do.
Croyd studied Bentley-a small foxy-featured man with dark hair and shifty eyes-feeling that his earlier transformation had actually been in keeping with his general demeanor.
Bentley returned the compliment for several seconds, then said, “That’s really you, Croyd?”
“Yep. “
“Come on in. Sit down. Have a beer. We’ve got a lot to talk about. “
He stepped aside, and Croyd entered the brightly furnished apartment.
“I got cured and I’m back in business. Business is lousy,” Bentley said, after they had seated themselves. “What’s your story?”
Croyd told him, of the changes and powers he’d experienced and of his talk with Tachyon. The one thing he never told him was his age, since all of his transformations bore the appearance of adulthood. He feared that Bentley might not trust him in the same fashion as he had if he knew otherwise. “You went about those other jobs wrong,” the small man said, lighting a cigarette and coughing. “Hit or miss is never good. You want a little planning, and it should be tailored to whatever your special talent is, each time around. Now, you say that this time you can fly?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. There are lots of places high up in skyscrapers that people think are pretty secure. This is the time we hit those. You know, you’ve got the best setup of anyone there is. Even if someone sees you, it don’t matter. You’re going to look different next time around ....”
“And you’ll get me the amphetamines?”
“All you want. You come back here tomorrow-same time, same station. Maybe I’ll have a job worked out for us. And I’ll have your pills for you.”
“Thanks, Bentley.”
“It’s the least I can do. If we stick together we’ll both get rich.”
Bentley did plan a good job, and three days later Croyd brought home more money than he had ever held before. He took most of it to Carl, who had been handling the family’s finances.
“Let’s take a walk,” Carl said, securing the money behind a row of books and glancing significantly toward the living room where their mother sat with Claudia.
Croyd nodded. “Sure.”
“You seem a lot older these days,” said Carl-who would be eighteen in a.few months-as soon as they were on the street.
“I feel a lot older.”
“I don’t know where you keep getting the money ....”
“Better you don’t.”
“Okay. I can’t complain, since I’m living off it, too. But I wanted you to know about Mom. She’s getting worse. Seeing Dad torn apart that way .... She’s been slipping ever since.”
“You missed the worst of it so far, the last time you were asleep. Three different nights she just got up and went outside in her nightgown-barefoot yet, in February, for crissake!-and she wandered around like she was looking for Dad. Fortunately, someone we knew spotted her each time and brought her back. She kept asking her-Mrs. Brandt-if she’d seen him. Anyhow, what I’m trying to say is she’s getting worse. I’ve already talked to a couple of doctors. They think she should be in a rest home for a while. Claudia and I think so, too. We can’t watch her all the time, and she might get hurt. Claudia’s sixteen now. The two of us can run things while she’s away. But it’s going to be expensive.”
“I can get more money,” Croyd said.
When he finally got hold of Bentley the following day and told him that they had to do another job soon, the small man seemed pleased, for Croyd had not been eager for a quick follow-up to the last one.
“Give me a day or so to line something up and work out the details,” Bentley said. “I’ll get back to you.”
“Right.”
The next day Croyd’s appetite began to mount, and he found himself yawning occasionally. So he took one of the pills. It worked well. Better than well, actually. It was a fine feeling that came over him. He could not recall the last time he’d felt quite that good. Everything seemed as if it were going right for a change. And all of his movements felt particularly fluid and graceful. He seemed more alert, more aware than usual, also. And, most importantly, he was not sleepy.
It was not until nighttime, after everyone else had retired, that these feelings began to wear off. He took another pill. When it began to work he felt so fine that he went outside and levitated high above the city, drifting in the cold March night between the bright constellations of the city and those far above, feeling as if he possessed a secret key to the inner meaning of it all. Briefly, he thought of Jetboy’s battle in the sky, and he flew over the remains of the Hudson Terminal which had burned when pieces of Jetboy’s plane fell upon it.
He had read of a plan to build a monument to him there. Was this how it felt when he fell?
He descended to swoop among buildings-sometimes resting atop one, leaping, falling, saving himself at the last moment. On one such occasion, he beheld two men watching him from a doorway. For some reason that he did not understand, this irritated him. He returned home then and began cleaning the house. He stacked old newspapers and magazines and tied them into bundles, he emptied wastebaskets, he swept and mopped, he washed all of the dishes in the sink. He flew four loads of trash out over the East River and dropped them in, trash collections still not being quite regular. He dusted everything, and dawn found him polishing the silverware. Later, he washed all of the windows.
It was quite sudden that he found himself weak and shaking. He realized what it was and he took another pill and set a pot of coffee to percolating. The minutes passed. It was hard to remain seated, to be comfortable in any position. He did not like the tingling in his hands. He washed them several times, but it would not go away. Finally, he took another pill. He watched the clock and listened to the sounds of the coffeepot. Just as the coffee became ready the tingling and the shaking began to subside. He felt much better. While he was drinking his coffee he thought again of the two men in the doorway. Had they been laughing at him? He felt a quick rush of anger, though he had not really seen their faces, known their expressions. Watching him! If they’d had more time they might have thrown a rock ....
He shook his head. That was silly. They were just two guys. Suddenly, he wanted to run outside and walk all over the city, or perhaps fly again. But he might miss Bentley’s call if he did. He began pacing. He tried to read but was unable to focus his attention as well as usual. Finally, he phoned Bentley. “Have you come up with anything yet?” he asked. “Not yet, Croyd.—What’s the rush?”
“I’m starting to get sleepy. You know what I mean?”
“Uh-yeah. You take any of that shit yet?”
“Uh-huh. I had to.”
“Okay. Look, go as light on it as possible. I’m working on a couple angles now. I’ll try to have something lined up by tomorrow. If it’s no go then, you stop taking the stuff and go to bed. We can do it next time. Got me?”
“I want to do it this time, Bentley.”
“I’ll talk to you tomorrow. You take it easy now.”
He went out and walked. It was a cloudy day, with patches of snow and ice upon the ground. He realized suddenly that he had not eaten since the day before. That had to be bad, when he considered what had become his normal appetite. It must be the pills’ doing, he concluded. He sought a diner, determined to force himself to eat something. As he walked, it occurred to him that he did not care to sit down in a crowd of people and eat. The thought of having all of them around him was unsettling. No, he would get a carryout order ....
As he headed toward a diner he was halted by a voice from a doorway. He turned so quickly that the man who had addressed him raised an arm and drew back.
“Don’t ...” the man protested. Croyd took a step back. “Sorry,” he mumbled.
The man had on a brown coat, its collar turned all the way up. He wore a hat, its brim drawn about as low as it would go and still permit vision. He kept his head inclined forward. Nevertheless, Croyd discerned a hooked beak, glittering eyes, an unnaturally shiny complexion.
“Would you do me a favor, sir?” the man asked in a clipped, piping voice.
“What do you want?”
“Food. “
Automatically, Croyd reached for his pocket.
“No. I got money. You don’t understand. I can’t go in that place and get served, looking like I do. I’ll pay you to go in and get me a couple hamburgers, bring them out.”
“I was going in anyway.”
Later, Croyd sat with the man on a bench, eating. He was fascinated by jokers. Because he knew he was partly one himself. He began wondering where he would eat if he ever woke up in bad shape and there was nobody home.
“I don’t usually come this far uptown anymore,” the other told him. “But I had an errand.”
“Where do you guys usually hang out?”
“There’s a number of us down on the Bowery. Nobody bothers us there. There’s places you get served and nobody cares what you look like. Nobody gives a damn.”
“You mean people might attack you?” The man uttered a brief, shrill laugh.
“People ain’t real nice, kid. Not when you really get to know ’em.”
“I’ll walk you back,” Croyd said. “You might be taking a chance.”
“‘That’s okay.”
It was down in the forties that three men on a bench stared at them as they passed. Croyd had just taken two more pills a few blocks back. (Was it only a few blocks back?) He hadn’t wanted the jitters again while talking with his new friend John-at least, that’s what he’d said to call him-so he’d taken two more to ease him over the next hump, in case one was due soon, and he knew right away when he saw the two men that they were planning something bad for him and John, and the muscles in his shoulders tightened and he rolled his hands into fists within his pockets.
“Cock-a-doodle-doo,” said one of the men, and Croyd started to turn, but John put his hand on his arm and said, “Come on.”
They walked on. The men rose and fell into step behind them.
“Kirkiriki,” said one of the men. “Squak, squak,” said another.
Shortly, a cigarette butt sailed over Croyd’s head and landed in front of him.
“Hey, freak lover!”
A hand fell upon his shoulder.
He reached up, took hold of the hand, and squeezed. Bones made little popping noises within it as the man began to scream. The screaming stopped abruptly when Croyd released the hand and slapped the man across the face, knocking him into the street. The next man threw a punch at his face and Croyd knocked the arm aside with a flick of his hand that spun the man full-face toward him. He reached out then with his left hand, caught hold of both the other’s lapels, bunching them, twisting them, and raised the man two feet into the air. He slammed him back against the brick wall near which they stood and released him. The man slumped to the ground and did not move.
The final man had drawn a knife and was swearing at him through clenched teeth. Croyd waited until he was almost upon him, and then levitated four feet and kicked him in the face. The man went over backward onto the sidewalk. Croyd drifted into position above him then and dropped, landing upon his midsection. He kicked the fallen knife into the gutter, turned away, and walked on with John.
“You’re an ace,” the smaller man said after a while. “Not always,” Croyd replied. “Sometimes I’m a joker. I change every time I sleep.”
“You didn’t have to be that rough on them.”
“Right. I could have been a lot rougher. If it’s really going to be like this we should take care of each other.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
“Listen, I want you to show me the places on the Bowery where you say nobody bothers us. I may have to go there someday.”
“Sure. I’ll do that.”
“Croyd Crenson. C-r-e-n-s-o-n. Remember it, okay? If you see me again I’ll look different, that’s why.”
“I’ll remember.”
John took him to several dives and pointed out places where some of them stayed. He introduced him to six jokers they encountered, all of them savagely deformed. Remembering his lizard phase, Croyd shook appendages with all of them and asked if there was anything they needed. But they shook their heads and stared. He knew that his appearance was against him.
“Good evening,” he said, and he flew away.
His fear that the uninfected survivors were watching him, waiting to jump him, grew as he flew up along the course of the East River. Even now, someone with a rifle with telescopic sights might be taking aim .
He moved faster. On one level, he knew that his fear was ridiculous. But he felt it too strongly to put it aside. He landed on the corner, ran to his front door, and let himself in. He hurried upstairs and locked himself in his bedroom.
He stared at the bed. He wanted to stretch out on it. But what if he slept? It would be all over. The world would end for him. He turned on the radio and began to pace. It was going to be a long night ..
When Bentley called the next day and said that he had a hot one but that it was a little risky, Croyd said he didn’t care. He would have to carry explosives-which meant he would have to learn to use them between now and then-because this safe would be too tough even for his enhanced strength. Also, there was the possibility of an armed guard ....
He didn’t mean to kill the guard, but the man had frightened him when he came in with a drawn gun that way. And he must have miscalculated on the fuse, because the thing blew before it should have, which is how the piece of flying metal took off the first two fingers of his left; hand. But he wrapped the hand in his handkerchief and got the money and got out.
He seemed to remember Bentley’s saying, “For crissake, kidl Go home and sleep it off!” right after they split the take. He levitated then and headed in the proper direction, but he had to descend and break into a bakery where he ate three loaves of bread before he could continue, his mind reeling. There were more pills in his pocket, but the thought of them tied his stomach into a knot.
He slid open his bedroom window, which he had left unlatched, and crawled inside. He staggered up the hall to Carl’s room and dumped the sack of money onto his sleeping form. Shaking then, he returned to his own room and locked the door. He switched on the radio. He wanted to wash his injured hand in the bathroom, but it just seemed too far away. He collapsed onto the bed and did not rise.
He was walking down what seemed an empty twilit street. Something stirred behind him and he turned and looked back. People were emerging from doorways, windows, automobiles, manholes, and all of them were staring at him, moving toward him. He continued on his way and there came something like a collective sigh at his back. When he looked again they were all hurrying after him, expressions of hatred on their faces. He turned upon them, seized hold of the nearest man and strangled him. The others halted, drew back. He crushed another man’s head. The crowd turned, began to flee. He pursued ....
III. Day of the Gargoyle
Croyd awoke in June, to discover that his mother was in a sanatorium, his brother had graduated high school, his sister was engaged, and he had the power to modulate his voice in such a fashion as to shatter or disrupt virtually anything once he had determined the proper frequency by a kind of resonant feedback that he lacked the vocabulary to explain. Also, he was tall, thin, dark-haired, sallow, and had regrown his missing fingers.
Foreseeing the day when he would be alone, he spoke with Bentley once again, to line up one big job for this waking period, and to get it over with quickly, before the weariness overcame him. He had resolved not to take the pills again, as he had thought back over the nightmare quality of his final days the last time around.
This time he paid even more attention to the planning and he asked better questions as Bentley chain-smoked his way through a series of details. The loss of both his parents and his sisters impending marriage had led him to reflect upon the impermanence of human relationships, with the realization that Bentley might not always be around.
He was able to disrupt the alarm system and damage the door to the bank’s vault sufficiently to gain entrance, though he had not counted on shattering all of the windows in a threeblock area while seeking the proper frequencies. Still, he was able to make good his escape with a large quantity of cash. This time he rented a safe-deposit box in a bank across town, where he left the larger portion of his share. He had been somewhat bothered by the fact that his brother was driving a new car.
He rented rooms in the Village, Midtown, Morningside Heights, the Upper East Side, and on the Bowery, paying all of the rents for a year in advance. He wore the keys on a chain around his neck, along with the one for his safe-deposit box. He wanted places he could reach quickly no matter where he was when the sleep came for him. Two of the apartments were furnished; the other four he equipped with mattresses and radios. He was in a hurry and could take care of amenities later. He had awakened with an awareness of several events that had transpired during his most recent sleep, and he could only attribute it to an unconscious apprehension of news broadcasts from the radio he had left playing this last time. He resolved to continue the practice.
It took him three days to locate, rent, and equip his new retreats. In that his place on the Bowery was his last one, he looked up John, identified himself, and had dinner with him. The stories he heard then of a gang of joker-bashers depressed him, and when the hunger and the chill and the drowsiness came upon him that evening he took a pill so as to stay awake and patrol the area. Just one or two, he decided, would hardly matter.
The bashers did not show up that night, but Croyd was depressed by the possibility that he might awaken as a joker the next time around. So he took two more pills with his breakfast to put things off a bit, and he decided to furnish his local quarters in the fit of energy that followed. That evening he took three more for a last night on the town, and the song he sang as he walked along Forty-second Street, shattering windows building by building, caused dogs to howl for several miles around and awakened two jokers and an ace equipped with UHF hearing. Bat-ears Brannigan-who expired two weeks later beneath a falling statue thrown by Muscles Vincenzi the day he was gunned down by the NYPD-sought him out to pound on him in payment for his headache and wound up buying him several drinks and requesting a soft UHF version of “Galway Bay.”
The following afternoon on Broadway, Croyd responded to a taxi driver’s curse by running his vehicle through a series of vibrations until it fell apart. Then, while he was about it, he turned the force upon all of those others who had proven themselves enemies by blowing their horns. It was only when the ensuing traffic snarl reminded him of the one outside his school on that first Wild Card Day that he turned and fled.
He awoke in early August in his Morningside Heights apartment, recalling slowly how he had gotten there and promising himself he would not take any more pills this time.
When he looked at the tumors on his twisted arm he knew that the promise would not be hard to keep. This time he wanted to return to sleep as quickly as possible. Looking out the window, he was grateful that it was night, since it was a long way to the Bowery.
On a Wednesday in mid-September he woke to find himself dark blond, of medium height, build, and complexion, and possessed of no visible marks of his wild card syndrome.
He ran himself through a variety of simple tests that experience had taught him were likely to reveal his hidden ability. Nothing in the way of a special power came to light.
Puzzled, he dressed himself in the best-fitting clothing he had on hand and went out for his usual breakfast. He picked up several newspapers along the way and read them while he devoured plate after plate of scrambled eggs, waffles, pancakes. It had been a chill morning when he’d entered the street. When he left the diner it was near to ten o’clock and balmy.
He rode the subways to midtown, where he entered the first decent-looking clothing store he saw and completely refitted himself. He bought a pair of hot dogs from a street vendor and ate them as he walked to the subway station.
He got off in the seventies, walked to the nearest delicatessen, and ate two corned beef sandwiches with potato pancakes. Was he stalling? he asked himself then. He knew that he could sit here all day and eat. He could feel the process of digestion going on like a blast furnace in his midsection. He rose, paid, and departed. He would walk the rest of the way. How many months had it been? he wondered, scratching his forehead. It was time to check in with Carl and Claudia. Time to see how Mom was doing. To see whether anybody needed any money.
When Croyd came to his front door he halted, key in his hand. He returned the key to his pocket and knocked. Moments later, Carl opened the door.
“Yes?” he said. “It’s me. Croyd.”
“Croyd! Jeez! Come in! I didn’t recognize you. How long’s it been?”
“Pretty long.” Croyd entered. “How is everybody?” he asked.
“Mom’s still the same. But you know they told us not to get our hopes up.”
“Yeah. Need any money for her?”
“Not till next month. But a couple of grand would come in handy then.”
Croyd passed him an envelope.
“I’d probably just confuse her if I went to see her, looking this different.”
Carl shook his head.
“She’d be confused even if you looked the same as you did, Croyd.”
“Oh.”
“Want something to eat?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
His brother led him to the kitchen.
“Lots of roast beef here. Makes a good sandwich.”
“Great. How’s business?”
“Oh, I’m getting established now. It’s better than it was at first.”
“Good. And Claudia?”
“It’s good you turned up when you did. She didn’t know where to send the invitation.”
“What invitation?”
“She’s getting married Saturday.”
“That guy from jersey?”
“Yeah. Sam. The one she was engaged to. He manages a family business. Makes pretty good money.”
“Where’ll the wedding be?”
“In Ridgewood. You come with me for it. I’m driving over.”
“Okay. I wonder what kind of present they’d like?”
“They’ve got this list. I’ll find it.”
“Good.”
Croyd went out that afternoon and bought a Dumont television set with a sixteen-inch screen, paid cash, and arranged for its delivery to Ridgewood. He visited with Bentley then, but declined a somewhat-risky-sounding job because of his apparent lack of special talent this time around. Actually, it was a good excuse. He didn’t really want to work anyway, to take a chance on getting screwed up-physically or with the law—this close to the wedding.
He had dinner with Bentley in an Italian restaurant, and they sat for several hours afterward over a bottle of Chianti, talking shop and looking ahead as Bentley tried to explain to him the value of long-range solvency and getting respectable one day-a thing he’d never quite managed himself.
He walked most of the night after that, to practice studying buildings for their weak points, to think about his changed family. Sometime after midnight, as he was passing up Central Park West, a strong itching sensation began on his chest and spread about his entire body. After a minute, he had to halt and scratch himself violently. Allergies were becoming very fashionable about this time, and he wondered whether his new incarnation had brought him a sensitivity to something in the park.
He turned west at the first opportunity and left the area as quickly as possible. After about ten minutes the itching waned. Within a half-hour it had vanished completely. His hands and face felt as if they were chapped, however.
At about four in the morning he stopped in an all-night diner off Times Square, where he ate slowly and steadily and read a copy of Time magazine which someone had left in a booth. It’s medical section contained an article on suicide among jokers, which depressed him considerably. The quotations it contained reminded him of things he had heard said by many people with whom he was acquainted, causing him to wonder whether any of them were among the interviewees. He understood the feelings too well, though he could not share them fully, knowing that no matter what he drew he would always be dealt a new wild card the next time aroundand that more often than not it was an ace.
All of his joints creaked when he rose, and he felt a sharp pain between his shoulder blades. His feet felt swollen, also. He returned home before daybreak, feeling feverish. In the bathroom, he soaked a washcloth to hold against his forehead. He noted in the mirror that his face seemed swollen. He sat in the easy chair in his bedroom until he heard Carl and Claudia moving about. When he rose to join them for breakfast his limbs felt leaden, and his joints creaked again as he descended the stairway.
Claudia, slim and blond, embraced him when he entered the kitchen. Then she studied his new face.
“You look tired, Croyd,” she said.
“Don’t say that,” he responded. “I can’t get tired this soon. It’s two days till your wedding, and I’m going to make it.”
“You can rest without sleeping, though, can’t you?” He nodded.
“Then, take it easy. I know it must be hard .... Come on, let’s eat.”
As they were sipping their coffee, Carl asked, “You want to come into the office with me, see the setup I’ve got now?”
“Another time,” Croyd answered. “I’ve got some errands.”
“Sure. Maybe tomorrow”
“Maybe so.”
Carl left shortly after that. Claudia refilled Croyd’s cup. “We hardly see you anymore,” she said.
“Yeah. Well, you know how it is. I sleep-sometimes months. When I wake up I’m not always real pretty. Other times, I have to hustle to pay the bills.”
“We’ve appreciated it,” she said. “It’s hard to understand. You’re the baby, but you look like a grown man. You act like one. You didn’t get your full share of being a kid.”
He smiled.
“So what are you-an old lady? Here you are just seventeen, and you’re getting married.”
She smiled back.
“He’s a nice guy, Croyd. I know we’re going to be happy.”
“Good. I hope so. Listen, if you ever want to reach me I’m going to give you the name of a place where you can leave a message. I can’t always be prompt, though.”
“I understand. What is it that you do, anyway?”
“I’ve been in and out of a lot of different businesses. Right now I’m between jobs. I’m taking it easy this time, for your wedding. What’s he like, anyhow?”
“Oh, very respectable and proper. Went to Princeton. Was a captain in the Army.”
“Europe? The Pacific?”
“Washington.”
“Oh. Well-connected.” She nodded.
“Old family,” she said.
“Well .... Good,” he said. “You know I wish you happiness.”
She rose and embraced him again. “I’ve missed you,” she said.
“Me, too.”
“I’ve got errands to run, too, now. I’ll see you later.”
“Yes.”
“You take it easy today.”
When she left he stretched his arms as far as they would go, trying to relieve the ache in his shoulders. His shirt tore down the back as he did this. He looked in the hall mirror. His shoulders were wider today than they had been yesterday. In fact, his entire body looked wider, huskier. He returned to his room and stripped. Most of his torso was covered with a red rash. Just looking at it made him want to scratch, but he restrained himself. Instead, he filled the bathtub and soaked in it for a long while. The water level had lowered itself visibly by the time he got out. When he studied himself in the bathroom mirror he seemed even larger. Could he have absorbed some of the water through his skin? At any rate, the inflammation seemed to have vanished, though his skin was still rough in those areas where it had been prominent.
He dressed himself in clothing he had left from an earlier time when he had been larger. Then he went out and rode the subways to the clothing store he had visited the previous day.
There, he re-outfitted himself completely and rode back, feeling vaguely nauseous as the car jounced and swayed. He noted that his hands looked dry and rough. When he rubbed them, flakes of dead skin fell off like dandruff.
After he left the subway he walked on until he came to the Sarzannos’ apartment building. The woman who opened the door was not Joe’s mother, Rose, however.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I’m looking for Joe Sarzanno,” he said.
“Nobody here by that name. Must be someone who moved out before we moved in.”
“So you wouldn’t know where they went?”
“No. Ask the manager. Maybe he knows.” She closed the door.
He tried the manager’s apartment, but there was no answer. So he made his way home, feeling heavy and bloated. The second time that he yawned he was abruptly fearful. It seemed too soon to be going back to sleep. This transformation was more puzzling than usual.
He put a fresh pot of coffee on the stove and paced while he waited for it to percolate. While there was no certainty that he would awaken with a special power on each occasion, the one thing that had been constant was change. He thought back over all of the changes he had undergone since he had been infected. This was the only one where he had seemed neither joker nor ace, but normal. Still ...
When the coffee was ready, he sat down with a cup and became aware that he had been scratching his right thigh, halfconsciously. He rubbed his hands together and more dry skin flaked off. He considered his increased girth. He thought of all the little twinges and creaks, of the fatigue. It was obvious that he was not completely normal this time, but as to what his abnormality actually constituted, he was uncertain. Could Dr. Tachyon help him? he wondered. Or at least give him some idea as to what was going on?
He called the number that he had committed to memory. A woman with a cheerful voice told him that Tachyon was out but would be back that afternoon. She took Croyd’s name, seemed to recognize it, and told him to come in at three. He finished the pot of coffee; the itching had increased steadily all over his body as he sat drinking the final cup. He went upstairs and ran the water in the bathtub again. While the tub was filling he undressed and studied his body. All of his skin now had the dry, flaky appearance of his hands. Wherever he brushed himself a small flurry occurred.
He soaked for a long while. The warmth and the wetness felt good. After a time he leaned back and closed his eyes. Very good ...
He sat up with a start. He had begun dozing. He had almost drifted off to sleep just then. He seized the washcloth and began rubbing himself vigorously, not only to remove all of the detritus. When he had finished he toweled himself briskly as the tub drained, then rushed to his room. He located the pills at the back of a clothing drawer and took two of them. Whatever games his body was playing, sleep was very much his enemy now.
He returned to the bathroom, cleaned the tub, dressed. It would feel good to stretch out on his bed for a time. To rest, as Claudia had suggested. But he knew that he couldn’t.
Tachyon took a blood sample and fed it to his machine. On his first attempt, the needle had only gone in a short distance and stopped. The third needle, backed with considerable force, penetrated a subdermal layer of resistance and the blood was drawn.
While awaiting the machine’s findings, Tachyon conducted a gross examination.
“Were your incisors that long when you awoke?” he asked, peering into Croyd’s mouth.
“They looked normal when I brushed them,” Croyd replied. “Have they gown?”
“Take a look.”
Tachyon held up a small mirror. Croyd stared. The teeth were an inch long, and sharp looking.
“That’s a new development,” he stated. “I don’t know when it happened.”
Tachyon moved Croyd’s left arm up behind his back in a gentle hammerlock, then pushed his fingers beneath the protruding scapula. Croyd screamed.
“That bad, is it?” Tachyon asked.
“My God!” Croyd said. “What is it? Is something broken back there?”
The doctor shook his head. He examined some of the skin flakes under a miscroscope. He studied Croyd’s feet next. “Were they this wide when you woke up?” he asked. “No. What the hell is happening, Doc?”
“Let’s wait another minute or so for my machine to finish with your blood. You’ve been here three or four times in the past ...”
“Yes,” Croyd said.
“Fortunately, you came in once right after you woke up. Another time, you were in about six hours after you awoke. On the former occasion you possessed a high level of a very peculiar hormone which I thought at the time might be associated with the change process itself. The other time six hours after awakening-you still had traces of the hormone, but at a very low level. Those were the only two times it was evident.”
“So?”
“The main test in which I am interested right now is a check for its presence in your blood. Ah! I believe we have something now.”
A series of strange symbols flashed upon the screen of the small unit.
“Yes. Yes, indeed,” he said, studying them. “You have a high level of the substance in your blood-higher even than it was right after awakening. Hm. You’ve been taking amphetamines again, too.”
“I had to. I was starting to get sleepy, and I’ve got to make it to Saturday. Tell me in plain words what this damn hormone means.”
“It means that the process of change is still going on within you. For some reason you awoke before it was completed. There seems to be a regular cycle of it, but this time it was interrupted.”
“Why?”
Tachyon shrugged, a movement he seemed to have learned since the last time Croyd had seen him.
“Any of a whole constellation of possible biochemical events triggered by the change itself. I think you probably received some brain stimulation as a side effect of another change that was in progress at the time you were aroused. Whatever that particular change was, it is completed-but the rest of the process isn’t. So your body is now trying to put you back to sleep until it finishes its business.”
“In other words, I woke up too soon?”
“Yes.”
“What should I do?”
“Stop taking the drugs immediately. Sleep. Let it run its course.”
“I can’t. I have to stay awake for two more days-a day and a half will do, actually.”
“I suspect your body will fight this, and as I said once before, it seems to know what it’s doing. I think you would be taking a chance to keep yourself awake much longer.”
“What kind of chance? Do you mean it might kill me—or will it just make me uncomfortable?”
“Croyd, I simply do not know. Your condition is unique. Each change takes a different course. The only thing we can trust is whatever accommodation your body has made to the virus-whatever it is within you that brings you through each bout safely. If you try to stay awake by unnatural means now, this is the very thing that you will be fighting.”
“I’ve put off sleep lots of times with amphetamines.”
“Yes, but those times you were merely postponing the onset of the process. It doesn’t normally begin until your brain chemistry registers a sleep state. But now it is already under way, and the presence of the hormone indicates its continuance. I don’t know what will happen. You may turn an ace phase into a joker phase. You may lapse into a really lengthy coma. I simply have no way of telling.”
Croyd reached for his shirt.
“I’ll let you know how it all turns out,” he said.
Croyd did not feel like walking as much as he usually did. He rode the subway again. His nausea returned and this time brought with it a headache. And his shoulders were still hurting badly. He visited the drugstore near his subway stop and bought a bottle of aspirins.
He stopped by the apartment building where the Sarzannos had formerly resided, before he headed home. This time the manager was in. He was unable to help him, however, for Joe’s family had left no forwarding address when they departed. Croyd glanced in the mirror beside the man’s door as he left, and he was shocked at the puffiness of his eyes, at the deep circles beneath them. They were beginning to ache now, he noted.
He returned home. He had promised to take Claudia and Carl to a good restaurant for dinner, and he wanted to be in the best shape he could for the occasion. He returned to the bathroom and stripped again. He was huge, bloated-looking. He realized then that with all of his other symptoms, he had forgotten to tell Tachyon that he had not relieved himself at all since awakening. His body must be finding some use for everything that he ate or drank. He stepped on the scale, but it only went up to three hundred and he was over that. He took three aspirins and hoped that they would work soon. He scratched his arm and a long strip of flesh came away, painlessly and without bleeding. He scratched more gently in other areas and the flaking continued. He took a shower and brushed his fangs. He combed his hair and big patches of it came out. He stopped combing. For a moment he wanted to cry, but he was distracted by a yawning jag. He went to his room and took two more amphetamines. Then he recalled having heard somewhere that body mass had to be taken into account in calculating doses of medication. So he took another one, just to be safe.
Croyd found a dark restaurant and he slipped the waiter something to put them in a booth toward the rear, out of sight of most of the other diners.
“Croyd, you’re really looking-unwell,” Claudia had said when she’d returned earlier.
“I know,” he replied. “I went to see my doctor this afternoon.”
“What did he say?”
“I’m going to need a lot of sleep, starting right after the wedding.”
“Croyd, if you want to skip it, I’ll understand. Your health comes first. “
“I don’t want to skip it. I’ll be okay.”
How could he say it to her when he did not fully understand it himself? Say that it was more than his favorite relative’s wedding?-that the occasion represented the final rending of his home and that it was unlikely he would ever have another? Say that this was the end of a phase of his existence and the beginning of a big unknown?
Instead, he ate. His appetite was undiminished and the food was particularly good. Carl watched with the fascination of a voyeur, long after he had finished his own meal, as Croyd put away two more chateaubriands-for-two, pausing only to call for extra baskets of rolls.
When they finally rose Croyd’s joints were creaking again. He sat on his bed later that evening, aching. The aspirins weren’t helping. He had removed his clothing because all of his garments were feeling tight again. Whenever he scratched himself now, his skin did more than flake. Big pieces of it came away, but they were dry and pale with no signs of blood. No wonder I look pasty-faced, he decided. At the bottom of one particularly large rent in his chest he saw something gray and hard. He could not figure what it was, but its presence frightened him.
Finally, despite the hour, he phoned Bentley. He had to talk to someone who knew his condition. And Bentley usually gave good advice.
After many rings Bentley answered, and Croyd told him his story.
“You know what I think, kid?” Bentley said at last. “You ought to do what the doctor said. Sleep it off.”
“I can’t. Not yet. I just need a little over a day. Then I’ll be all right. I can keep awake that long, but I hurt so damn much and my appearance—”
“Okay, okay. Here’s what we’ll do. You come by about ten in the morning. I can’t do anything for you now. But I’ll talk to a man I know first thing, and we’ll get you a really strong painkiller. And I want to have a look at you. Maybe there’s some way of playing down your appearance a bit.”
“Okay. Thanks, Bentley. I appreciate it.”
“It’s all right. I understand. It was no fun being a dog either. G’night.”
“‘Night.”
Two hours later, Croyd was stricken with severe cramps followed by diarrhea; also, his bladder felt as if it were bursting. This continued through the night. When he weighed himself at three-thirty he was down to 276. By six o’clock he weighed 242 pounds. He gurgled constantly. Its only benefit, he reflected, was that it kept his mind off the itching and the aches in his shoulders and joints. Also, it was sufficient to keep him awake without additional amphetamines.
By eight o’clock he weighed 216 and he realized-when Carl called him-that he had finally lost his appetite. Strangely, his girth had not decreased at all. His general body structure was unaltered from the previous day, though he was pale now to the point of albinism-and this, combined with his prominent teeth, gave him the look of a fat vampire.
At nine o’clock he called Bentley because he was still gurgling and running to the john. He explained that he had the shits and couldn’t come for the medicine. Bentley said that he’d bring it by himself as soon as the man dropped it off. Carl and Claudia had already left for the day. Croyd had avoided them this morning, claiming an upset stomach. He now weighed 198.
It was near eleven o’clock when Bentley came by. Croyd had lost another twenty pounds by then and had scratched off a large flap of skin from his lower abdomen. The area of exposed tissue beneath it was gray and scaly.
“My God!” Bentley said when he saw him. “Yeah.”
“You’ve got big bald patches.”
“Right.”
“I’ll get you a hairpiece. Also, I’ll talk to a lady I know. She’s a beautician. We’ll get you some kind of cream to rub in. Give you some normal color. I think you’d better wear dark glasses, too, when you go to the wedding. Tell ’em you got drops in your eyes. You’re getting hunchbacked, too. When’d that happen?”
“I didn’t even notice. I’ve been—occupied.”
Bentley patted the lump between his shoulders and Croyd screamed.
“Sorry. Maybe you’d better take a pill right away.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re going to need to wear a big overcoat, too. What size do you take?”
“I don’t know-now”
“That’s okay. I know someone’s got a warehouse full. We’ll send you a dozen.”
“I’ve got to run, Bentley. I’m gurgling again.”
“Yeah. Take your medicine and try to rest.”
By two o’clock, Croyd weighed 155. The painkiller had worked fine, and he was without aches for the first time in a long while. Unfortunately, it had also made him sleepy and he had had to take amphetamines again. On the plus side, this combination gave him his first good feeling since the whole business had started, even though he knew it was fake.
When the load of coats was delivered at three-thirty he was down to 132 pounds and felt very light on his feet. Somewhere deep within him his blood seemed to be singing. He found a coat that fit him perfectly and took it back to his room, leaving the others on the sofa. The beautician-a tall, lacquered blonde who chewed gum—came by at four o’clock. She combed out most of his hair, shaved the rest, and fitted him with a hairpiece. She made up his face then, instructing him in the use of the cosmetics as she went along. She also advised him to keep his mouth closed as much as possible to hide his fangs. He was pleased with the results and gave her a hundred dollars. She observed then that there were other services she might perform for him, but he was gurgling again and had to bid her a good afternoon.
By six o’clock his guts began to ease up on him. He was down to 116 by then and still feeling very good. The itching had finally stopped also, though he had scratched more skin from his thorax, forearms, and thighs.
When Carl came in, he yelled upstairs, “What the hell are all these coats doing here?”
“It’s a long story,” Croyd answered. “You can have them if you want.”
“Hey, they’re cashmere!”
“Yeah.”
“This one’s my size.”
“So take it.”
“How you feeling?”
“Better, thanks.”
That evening he felt his strength returning, and he took one of his long walks. He raised the front end of a parked car high into the air to test it. Yes, he seemed to be recovering now. With the hair and the makeup he looked like a gardenvariety fat man, so long as he kept his mouth closed. If only he’d had a little more time he’d have sought a dentist to do something about the fangs. He did not eat anything that night or in the morning. He did feel a peculiar pressure on the sides of his head, but he took another pill and it did not turn to pain.
Before he and Carl left for Ridgewood, Croyd had indulged in another soak. More of his skin had come away, but that was all right. His clothes would cover his patchwork body. His face, at least, had remained intact. He applied his makeup carefully and adjusted the hairpiece. When he was fully dressed and had put on a pair of sunglasses, he thought that he looked fully presentable. And the overcoat did minimize the bulging of his back somewhat.
The morning was brisk and overcast. His intestinal problem seemed ended. He took another pill as a prophylactic, not knowing whether there was really any remaining pain to be masked. This necessitated another amphetamine. But that was all right. He felt fine, if a bit nervous.
As they were passing through the tunnel he found himself rubbing his hands. To his dismay, a large flap of skin came loose on the back of his left hand. But even that was all right. He had remembered to bring gloves.
He did not know whether it was the pressure in the tunnel, but his head was beginning to throb again. It was not a painful sensation, merely a vicinity of heavy pressure in his ears and temples. His upper back also throbbed, and there was a movement within it. He bit his lip and a piece of it came loose. He cursed.
“What’s the matter?” his brother asked. “Nothing. “
At least it wasn’t bleeding.
“If you’re still sick, I can take you back. Hate to have you get ill at the wedding. Especially with a stodgy bunch like Sam’s gang.”
“I’ll be okay.”
He felt light. He felt the pressure at many points within his body. The sense of strength from the drug overlaid his genuine strength. Everything seemed to be flowing perfectly. He hummed a tune and tapped his fingers on his knee.
“.... oats must be worth quite a bit,” Carl was saying. “They’re all new.”
“Sell ’em somewhere and keep the money,” he heard himself saying.
“They hot?”
“Probably”
“You in the rackets, Croyd?”
“No, but I know people.”
“I’ll keep quiet.”
“Good.”
“You sort of look the part, though, you know? With that black coat and the glasses ....”
Croyd did not answer him. He was listening to his body, which was telling him that something was coming free in his back. He rubbed his shoulders against the back of the seat. This made him feel better.
When he was introduced to Sam’s parents, William and Marcia Kendall-a rugged-looking gray-haired man gone slightly to fat, and a well-preserved blond woman—Croyd remembered to smile without opening his mouth and to make his few comments through barely moving lips. They seemed to study him carefully, and he felt certain they would have had more to say, save that there were others waiting to be greeted.
“I want to talk to you at the reception,” were William’s final words.
Croyd sighed as he moved away. He’d passed. He had no intention of attending the reception. He’d be in a taxi heading back to Manhattan as soon as the service ended, be sleeping in a matter of hours. Sam and Claudia would probably be in the Bahamas before he awoke.
He saw his cousin Michael from Newark and almost approached him. The hell with it. He’d have to explain his appearance then and it wasn’t worth it. He entered the church and was shown to a pew in the front, to the right. Carl would be giving Claudia away. At least he had awakened too late to be impressed as an usher himself. There was that much to be said for his timing.
As he sat waiting for the ceremony to begin he regarded the altar decorations, the stained-glass windows at either hand, the arrangements of flowers. Other people entered and were seated. He realized that he was sweating. He glanced about. He was the only one wearing an overcoat. He wondered whether the others would think that strange. He wondered whether the perspiration was causing his makeup to run. He unbuttoned his coat, let it hang open.
The sweating continued, and his feet began to hurt. Finally, he leaned forward and loosened the shoelaces. As he did, he heard his shirt tear across his back. Something also seemed to have loosened even further in the vicinity of his shoulders. Another flap of skin, he supposed. When he straightened he felt a sharp pain. He could not lean all the way back in the pew. His hump seemed to have grown, and any pressure on it was painful. So he assumed a position partway forward, bowed slightly as if in prayer. The organist began playing. More people entered and were seated. An usher conducted an elderly couple past his row and gave him a strange look as he went by.
Soon everyone was seated, and Croyd continued to sweat. It ran down his sides and his legs, was absorbed by his clothing which became blotchy, then drenched. He decided that it might be a bit cooler if he slipped his arms out of the coat’s sleeves and just let it hang about his shoulders. This was a mistake, for as he struggled to free his arms he heard his garments tear in several more places. His left shoe burst suddenly, and his toes protruded grayly from its sides. A number of people glanced his way as these sounds occurred. He was grateful that he was incapable of blushing.
He did not know whether it was the heat or something psychological that set off the itching again. Not that it mattered. It was a real itch, whatever had brought it on. He had painkillers and amphetamines in his pocket, but nothing for skin irritation. He clasped his hands tightly, not to pray but to keep from scratching-though he threw in a prayer too, since the circumstances seemed about as appropriate as they came. It didn’t work.
Through perspiration-beaded lashes he saw the priest enter. He wondered why the man was staring at him so. It was as if he did not approve of non-Episcopalians sweating in his church. Croyd clenched his teeth. If only he still had the power to make himself invisible, he mused. He’d fade for a few minutes, scratch like mad, then phase back and sit quietly.
By dint of sheer will he was able to hold himself steady through Mendelssohn’s “March.” He was unable to focus on what the priest was saying after that, but he was now certain that he was not going to be able to remain seated through the entire ceremony. He wondered what would happen if he left right then. Would Claudia be embarrassed? On the other hand, if he stayed, he was certain that she would be. He must look ill enough to justify it. Still, would it become one of those incidents that people would talk about for years afterward? (“Her brother walked out ...”) Perhaps he could stay a little longer.
There was movement on his back. He felt his coat stirring. He heard female gasps from behind him. Now he was afraid to move, but the itching became overpowering. He unclasped his hands to scratch, but in a final act of resistance he seized hold of the back of the pew before him. To his horror, there came a loud cracking noise as the wood splintered within his grip. There followed a long moment of silence.
The priest was staring at him. Claudia and Sam had both turned to stare at him, where he sat clutching a six-foot length of broken pew-back and knowing that he couldn’t even smile or his fangs would show.
He dropped the wood and clasped himself with both arms. There were exclamations from behind as his coat slipped away. With his full strength he dug his fingers into his sides and scratched cross-body.
He heard his clothes tear and felt his skin rip all the way up to the top of his head. He saw the hairpiece fall away to his right. He threw down the clothing and the skin and scratched again, hard. He heard a scream from the rear and he knew that he would never forget the look on Claudia’s face as she began to cry. But he could no longer stop. Not until his great batlike wings were unfurled, the high, pointed vanes of his ears freed, and the last remnants of clothing and flesh removed from his dark, scaled frame.
The priest began speaking again, something that sounded like an exorcism. There came shrieks and the sounds of rapid footfalls. He knew that he couldn’t exit through the door where everyone else was headed, so he leapt into the air, circled several times to get a feeling of his new limbs, then covered his eyes with his left forearm and crashed out through the stainedglass window to his right.
As he beat his way back toward Manhattan he felt that it would be a long time before he saw the in-laws again. He hoped that Carl wouldn’t be getting married for a while. He wondered then whether he’d ever meet the right girl himself ...
Catching an updraft he soared, the breezes sobbing about him. The church looked like a disturbed anthill when he glanced back. He flew on.