Wild Cards_ Jokers Wild Part 8

He was pointing at nothing at all. All Fortunato could see was a blur of faces, like he was trying to look too far to one side, even though he was staring straight ahead.

Jamming me, he thought. He focused his power and slowed time, until the man's voice and the moans of shock and disgust around him dropped to a subsonic rumble. A tornado of psychic energy hung in the frozen chaos around him, Demise's power, Fortunato's own, the viral energy of the jokers. It was hopeless.

He let go and time came up to speed. There was nothing he could do. Demise was dead. It was not much of a loss.

Most of what he knew about Demise was second- or third-hand, picked up from cops and bystanders after the riot at the Cloisters. He was a loser, a middle-cla.s.s failure who'd caught the wild card and died of it in Tachyon's clinic. Tachyon brought him back and Demise never forgave him for it.

He'd come back a projecting telepath, so they said, and what he could project was the memory of his own death, strongly enough to kill with it. For a while he'd sat at the Astronomer's right hand, until Fortunato and the others had destroyed their base at the Cloisters and Fortunato had blasted their Shakti device into atoms.

He'd have done the same for Demise and the Astronomer if he'd been able. But now Demise seemed inconsequential. From a sense of wounded aesthetics Fortunato got on one knee and twisted Demise's head the right way around. He was about to walk away when Demise said, "Thanks. I needed that."

Fortunato turned back, his skin crawling. Demise squatted on his heels, rubbing the swollen purple lumps in his neck where blood vessels had burst. Already the bruises were turning yellow, healing as Fortunato watched.

Demise smiled. His mouth was a little too long and thin, and it came up too high on one side. The smile was full of terror and the man's hands shook so hard he held them up and laughed at them. "Didn't know about that little trick, did you? I got my little black message I can send and I got this other thing, too. Even the Astronomer didn't know about it. I can heal, brother." He hacked up a gob of blood and it was a solid brown crust by the time it hit the sidewalk.

"Then he thinks you're dead," Fortunato said.

"Christ, I hope so. Not that he wouldn't have gone ahead and ripped my heart out, just to be sure, if you hadn't shown up. Son of a b.i.t.c.h even told me he was going to do it. If I had stayed in Brooklyn maybe I could have kept out of his way." He coughed up another lump. "If the dog hadn't stopped to p.i.s.s he would've caught the rabbit."

"Why does he want you dead?"

"Thinks I sold him out. All it was, after that s.h.i.t at the Cloisters, I started thinking another line of work might be healthier." Demise stared at him. There was a spark back there. Fortunato could see it. If not genius, at least some craft and cunning. Most people wouldn't see it because people didn't spend much time looking into Demise's eyes. One way or another.

Behind the spark was something else. Fortunato had seen it before, seventeen years ago, when he brought a dead boy back to life. It was the black despair of having looked at death too closely.

"In fact," Demise said, "I'm surprised he didn't take you out while he was here. Unless he's saving you for dessert."

"Dessert?"

"This is it, man. Judgment Day, he calls it. I'm gonna die, you're gonna die, every one of you f.u.c.kers that hit him at the Cloisters is gonna die, and it's all coming down today. With all this other s.h.i.t going down in Jokertown he doesn't have to worry about cops or anybody else getting in his way."

Fortunato had a sudden hunch, a convergence of invisible power lines. "You know anything about some stolen books? Or a man named Kien?"

"You ask a lot of questions."

"I just saved your life."

"No. No to the books, no to whatever-his-name-was."

He was telling the truth, but Fortunato still felt the connection. "A man named Loophole, or Latham?"

"Sorry. No dice."

Fortunato started to turn away. "Hey, listen," Demise said. "I didn't mean to get snippy. Maybe you could hide me out for a while? Just till this time tomorrow?"

"Why tomorrow?"

"Just the way the man was talking. 'Parting shot' and s.h.i.t like that. I got a real strong sense that by tomorrow morning you can color me gone. So what do you say? Got someplace to stash me?"

"Don't push your luck," Fortunato said.

Demise shrugged. The gesture was a little stiff, but otherwise his neck looked almost normal. "I guess I better turn up something on my own, then, hadn't I?"

The ice sculptures arrived at half past ten, in a refrigerated truck that had fought its way through the holiday crowds from the artist's loft in SoHo. Hiram went down to the lobby to make certain that there were no mishaps as the life-size sculptures were transported up the service elevator. The artist, a rugged-looking joker with bone-white skin and colorless eyes who called himself Kelvin Frost, was most comfortable at temperatures around thirty below, and never left the frigid comforts of his studio. But he was a genius in ice-or "ephemeral art," as Frost and the critics preferred to call it.

When the sculptures were safely stored in the Aces High walk-in freezer, Hiram relaxed enough to look them over. Frost had not disappointed. His detail was as astonishing as ever, and his work had something else as well-a poignancy, a human quality that might even be called warmth, if warmth could exist in ice. Hiram sensed something forlorn and doomed in the way Jetboy stood there, looking up at the sky, every inch the hero and yet somehow a lost boy too. Dr. Tachyon pondered like Rodin's The The Thinker Thinker, but instead of a rock, he sat upon an icy globe. Cyclone's cloak billowed out so you could almost feel the winds skirling about him, and the Howler stood with legs braced and fists clenched at his side, his mouth open as if he'd been caught in the act of screaming down a wall.

Peregrine looked as though she'd been caught in some other act. Her sculpture was a rec.u.mbent nude, resting languidly on one elbow, her wings half-spread behind her, every feather rendered in exquisite detail. A sly, sweet smile lit that famous face. The whole effect was magnificently erotic. Hiram found himself wondering if she'd posed for him. It was not unlike her.

But Frost's masterpiece, Hiram thought, was the Turtle. How to bring humanity to a man who'd never once shown his face to the world, whose public persona was a ma.s.sive armored sh.e.l.l studded with camera lenses? The artist had risen to that challenge: the sh.e.l.l was there, every seam and rivet, but atop it, in miniature, Frost had carved a myriad of other figures. Hiram walked around the sculpture, admiring, picking out detail. There were the Four Aces at some Last Supper, Golden Boy looking much like Judas. Elsewhere a dozen jokers struggled up the curve of the sh.e.l.l, as if climbing some impossible mountain. There was Fortunato, surrounded by writhing naked women, and there a figure with a hundred blurred faces who seemed to be deep in sleep. From every angle, the piece unveiled new treasures.

"Kind of a shame it's going to melt, isn't it?" Jay Ackroyd said from behind him.

Hiram turned. "The artist doesn't think so. Frost maintains that all art is ephemeral, that ultimately it will all be gone, Pica.s.so and Rembrandt and Van Gogh, the Sistine Chapel and the Mona Lisa, whatever you care to name, in the end it will be gone to dust. Ice art is therefore more honest, because it celebrates its transitory nature instead of denying it."

"Real good," the detective said in a flat voice. "But no one ever chipped a piece off the Pieta to put in their drink." He glanced over at Peregrine. "I should have been an artist. Girls always take off their clothes for artists. Can we get out of here? I forgot to bring my fur muumuu."

Hiram locked the freezer and escorted Ackroyd back to his office. The detective was a nondescript sort of fellow, which was probably an a.s.set in his profession. Mid-forties, slender, just under medium height, carefully combed brown hair, quick brown eyes, an elusive smile. You'd never look at him twice on the street, and if you did, you'd never be sure if you'd seen him before. This morning he wore brown loafers with ta.s.sels, a brown suit obviously bought off the rack, and a dress shirt open at the collar. Hiram had asked him once why he didn't wear ties. "p.r.o.ne to soup stains," Ackroyd had replied.

"Well?" Hiram asked, when he was safely ensconced behind his desk. He glanced up at his muted television. A color graphic was showing sound waves coming out of the mouth of a yellow stick man and knocking down a wall. Then they cut to an on-the-scene reporter speaking into the camera. Behind him, a dozen police cars cordoned off a brick building. The street was covered with shards of broken gla.s.s, winking in the sunlight. The camera panned slowly over rows of shattered windows and the cracked windshields of nearby parked cars.

"It was no big thing," Ackroyd said. "I nosed around the fish market for a hour and got the general idea fast enough. You've got your basic protection racket going down."

"I see," Hiram said.

"The waterfront draws crooks like a picnic draws ants, that's no secret. Smuggling, drugs, the rackets, you name it. Opportunities abound. Your friend Gills, along with most of the other small businessmen, paid the mob a percentage off the top, and in return the mob provided protection and occasional help with the police or the unions."

"The mob? mob?" Hiram said. "Jay, this sounds suitably melodramatic, but I had the impression that the mob was made up of ethnic gentlemen partial to pinstripes, black shirts, and white ties. The hoodlums who were troubling Gills lacked even that rudimentary fashion sense. And one of them was a joker. Has the Mafia taken to recruiting jokers?"

"No," Ackroyd said. "That's the trouble. The East River waterfront belongs to the Gambione Family, but the Gambiones have been losing their grip for years now. They've already lost Jokertown to the Demon Princes and the other joker gangs, and a Chinatown gang called the Egrets or s...o...b..rds or something like that has run them right out of Chinatown. Harlem got taken away a long time ago, and the bulk of the city's drug traffic no longer flows through Gambione hands. But they still controlled the waterfront. Until now." He leaned forward. "Now there's compet.i.tion. They're offering new and improved protection at a much higher price. Maybe too high for your friend."

"His son is in college," Hiram said thoughtfully. "The tuition is quite substantial, I believe. So what I witnessed this morning was a little, ah, dunning?"

"Bingo," Ackroyd said.

"If Gills and his fellow merchants have been paying the Gambiones for protection, why aren't they receiving it?"

"Two weeks ago, a body was found hanging from a meat-hook in a warehouse two blocks from Fulton Street. A gentleman by the name of Dominick Santarello. He was ID'd by fingerprints, his face having been beaten into ground round. A colleague of Santarello's, one Angelo Casanovista, turned up dead in a barrel of pickled herring a week prior. His head was not in the barrel with him. The word on the streets is that the new guys have something the Gambiones don't-an ace. Or at least a joker who can pa.s.s for an ace in a bad light. These things do tend to get exaggerated, but I'm told he's seven feet tall, inhumanly strong, and ugly enough to make you wet your pants. He goes by the charming nom nom de de guerre guerre of Bludgeon. The Gambiones are overmatched, I'd say." He shrugged. of Bludgeon. The Gambiones are overmatched, I'd say." He shrugged.

Hiram Worchester was aghast. "And what about the police?"

"Gills is afraid. One of his friends tried talking to the police, and his body turned up with a flounder shoved down his throat. Literally. The cops are investigating."

"This is intolerable," Hiram said. "Gills is a good man, an honest man. He deserves better than to have to live in this kind of fear. What can I do to help?"

"Lend him the money to make his payment," Ackroyd suggested with a cynical smile.

"You can't be serious!" Hiram objected.

The detective shrugged. "Better idea-hire me to be his full-time bodyguard. Does he have a nubile daughter, by any chance?" When Hiram didn't respond, Ackroyd got up and slid his hands into his jacket pocket. "All right. There might be something to be done. I'll work on it. Chrysalis might be able to tell me something useful, if the price is right."

Hiram nodded and rose behind his desk. "Fine," he said. "Excellent. Keep me posted." Ackroyd turned to go. "One more thing," Hiram said. Jay turned back, raised an eye-brow. "This Bludgeon sounds, ah, ill-tempered to say the least. Don't do anything too dangerous. Be careful."

Jay Ackroyd smiled. "If Bludgeon gives me any trouble, I'll dazzle him with magic," he said. He made a gun out of his fingers, three fingers folded back, index finger pointed at Hiram, thumb up straight like a hammer.

"Don't you dare," Hiram Worchester told him. "Not if you want to eat tonight." Ackroyd laughed, and slid his hand back into his pocket, and sauntered out.

Hiram glanced back at his television scene. They were running an interview with the Howler. The interviewer was Walter Cronkite. A ten-year-old clip, Hiram realized, from the Great Jokertown Riot of 1976. He changed the channel, hoping to see some coverage from Jokertown and Jetboy's Tomb, and perhaps get another glimpse of Peregrine. Instead he got Bill Moyers, doing a commentary in front of a large still photograph of the Howler. The Howler seemed to be much in the news this morning, Hiram thought. He was curious.

He turned on the sound.

CHAPTER 6.

11:00 a.m. a.m.

A parade in Jokertown was always a unique experience. No need to create some fantastic creature out of wire and flowers and paper. No, here the jokers could provide all the grotesquerie required with just their miserable bodies. There was no Joker Queen either. Several years ago they had tried to introduce the notion, Tachyon explained as he guided Roulette through the crowds, but he had been so revolted by the notion that the planners had dropped the idea. There were a number of politically active jokers who hadn't forgiven him yet.

Sara Roosevelt Park had been cordoned off, and was filled with belching, grinding flatbed trucks all carrying fantastic scenes on their utilitarian backs. Off to the west a knot of sweating cops were demolishing a vast, double-headed phallus. Roulette noticed that a number of men in the crowd looked away each time a crowbar bit deep into the latex. To the west the Joker Moose Lodge Bagpipe Band was tuning up. The braying of the pipes sounded harsh in the still, sultry air.

"Are you the parade's grand master?" Roulette asked with more acid than she'd intended.

"No," Tachyon snapped back, and she found herself staring at his rigid back as he scanned the crowd.

A portly joker, his nose replaced by a long trunk ending in several tiny fingers, broke from the edges of the crowd like a calving iceberg, and chugged toward Tachyon.

"All set?" he asked, thrusting out a hand.

"All set. Des, may I introduce Roulette Brown-Roxbury. Roulette, Xavier Desmond, owner of the Funhouse, and one of Jokertown's most sterling citizens."

"Some would argue that that's an oxymoron."

"My, we're crabby today," Tachyon teased, with a touch of acid.

A look pa.s.sed between the two men, and Roulette realized that theirs was a complex relationship. They were friends, they respected one another, but something lay between them, a memory of ancient pain.

This flash of cattiness had an unusual effect. Rather than strengthening her desire to kill the man it somehow made him all the more charming. He was not perfect, or even perfectly evil. Just "human," and therefore understandable, and she cursed the insight, for it is easier to hate in the abstract.

Des glanced at his watch. "Running late as usual."

"I just hope delays and the heat don't conduce to any shall we say . . . incidents." He tugged on his upper lip. "I can't help but think of '76 when I see all these police."

"There was a strange feel on that day. Mercifully we've never felt it since."

"Well, I'd best mingle." He caught up both of Roulette's hands, and pressed a quick kiss onto each. "I will be back to collect you before we get under way."

"Are you sure I should be with you? Maybe we could just meet for lunch afterward, or something . . ." Her voice trailed away.

"No, no. I need the support."

"Difficult situation."

"I beg your pardon?" Roulette pulled her eyes from Tachyon's fast-vanishing form.

"If he doesn't take part in the parade he's accused of showing contempt for the jokers, and favoring the aces. When he does join in-which he's done for the past five years-he's accused of being a heartless parasite, living off the misery of the jokers he helped create. A little tin-plated king of his own freak kingdom."

Her eyes roved the park. Sno-cone vendors hawking through the crowd, police with sweat stains in the pits and front of shirts, Tachyon like a tiny redheaded, red-clad devil in the midst of a Dantesque scene as jokers doubled for demons. Just do the job, and get out of this. That was all she wanted now.

Somehow she had to pry him loose, seek the privacy of a hotel or apartment, and make the kill. She couldn't cut him out yet. His sense of duty would keep him in this freak parade, and he was a featured speaker at the tomb. Her thoughts propelled her, carried her across the park toward the Takisian, while behind her Des frowned over her abrupt departure.

Perhaps a sudden indisposition? Stupid! Stupid! All that would get her was a bed at the Jokertown clinic. Definitely the wrong bed. Perhaps a- All that would get her was a bed at the Jokertown clinic. Definitely the wrong bed. Perhaps a-Use your your G.o.dd.a.m.n G.o.dd.a.m.n body! body! Most Most men's men's brains brains seemed seemed to to be be lodged lodged in in their their p.e.n.i.ses! p.e.n.i.ses!

His welcoming smile embraced her. "Ah, I think you must be a telepath. I was just coming for you."

"Were you?" she heard herself reply, but the voice seemed to be coming from a long distance. "I hope you'll continue to come for me." Her arm slid around his neck, and molding her body to his, she pressed a kiss onto his mouth.

For an instant there was withdrawal. Had she over-played the moment? Then their tongues met, and all restraint was swept away. His tongue teased, thrust past the barrier of her teeth. His hand, hot against the nape of her neck, pulled her closer. A chorus of appreciative catcalls rose around them, and they broke apart.

"Well," Tachyon gusted, and, pulling a handkerchief from a pocket, patted briskly at his forehead.

She snuggled in close, and pulled his arm through hers. "I was very sad earlier. You've changed all that, and I wanted to thank you."

"Madam . . . Roulette, thank me anytime you wish."

A chauffeur, tail lashing at the ankles of his boots, held open the door of a large gray Lincoln.

"Ah, Riggs, punctual as always. I often wonder how you tolerate me, for I am so notoriously unpunctual."

"I've learned to bear with it." His voice was like soft velvet, and his luminescent green cat's eyes seemed lit from behind with amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Riggs, this is Roulette Brown-Roxbury. She is our guest for the day." A pinch to her fingers. "And I hope into the night."

Riggs touched the bill of his cap. "Ma'am."

"So, you employ jokers," she remarked as she slid across the leather upholstery.

"Of course." And the reply struck her as smug. "Riggs's reflexes and night vision are far superior to an ordinary human's. I'm very grateful to have my safety in his capable hands."

The lead float was nosing majestically onto the Bowery. Behind it P.S 235's marching band swung into a snappy rendition of the "Pineapple Rag."

Senator Hartmann's open car was next in the line. An ace jogged beside the limo. At least Roulette presumed he was an ace. Most normal secret-service agents didn't run about dressed in white form-fitting jumpsuits complete with black hood covering face and head.