Ace in the Hole Read online

  Gregg closed his eyes, sinking back into the padded embrace of the couch. “One more thing. There’s another call.” He recited the number he’d memorized before leaving New York. “You won’t get anything but an answering machine there,” he told Furs. “Don’t worry about it. All you need to do is leave a short message on the machine. Just say to book a flight to Atlanta soonest. They’ll know what that means.”

  “Book a flight ASAP. No problem. That all?”

  “That’s all. Thanks, Furs. I’ll be seeing you soon.”

  “Just get us jokers a platform we can stand on.”

  “We’ll do our damndest. Take care. Give my regards to your staff. We couldn’t do anything without their help.”

  Gregg placed the receiver carefully in its cradle.

  It was done. Mackie would be coming. Gregg hadn’t wanted the volatile ace in Atlanta, but he had to do something. Mackie should have disposed of Downs already; now he could take care of Sara.

  Very faintly, a sardonic voice answered him from beneath. But what about me? What about me?

  “A KGB man hanging out at the Democratic Convention?” Ricky Barnes shook his long, trim head. “Everybody already thinks you’re in cahoots with Barnett, but maybe you should think about going to work for Robertson. Sounds like something his people would come up with, along with raising the dead and knowing where the hostages from Flight 737 were being kept in Calcutta.”

  “That isn’t funny, Ricky.” She sat on the edge of his tautly made bed, methodically tearing a Kleenex into shreds. She spoke without heat. Ricky was maybe the first person she’d met in her life who could tease her without causing real pain.

  “Well, I mean, first you pitch your little scene in the midst of the Tach’n’Jack love feast. Then you say you’re hauled out of the pot you set boiling by some old dude in a Mickey Mouse shirt. Who ever heard of a KGB man in a Mickey Mouse shirt?”

  “What do KGB men wear, Ricky?”

  “Rumpled suits and phony Rolexes. I’ve met KGB men, Sara. So have you.”

  She tossed the ruined Kleenex on the floor. “Well, who was he, then?”

  “Somebody with a hell of a lot more sense than you were showing, sweetheart.”

  She pulled her legs up on the bed, crossed them, put her head in her hands. Ricky watched her from the table, where he had his antique Epson Geneva laptop set up. He was wearing a dark-brown pinstripe vest and trousers with a pale-pink shirt and brown bow tie. With his elongated face and big horsey white teeth he reminded her of poor Ronnie, Gregg’s aide, who always disapproved of his boss’s liaison with Sara. The Red Army Fraction had executed him when they kidnapped Hartmann in Berlin. She blamed Hartmann for his death.

  But it was only in appearance that he resembled Hartmann’s hapless aide. Ricky approved of her. He always did. Sometimes, she suspected, a bit too much.

  “Do you think I’m crazy?” she asked.

  “Hell, yes. Think about what if you’re right, Rosie.” Rosie was his pet name for her; he claimed she looked like an albino Rosanna Arquette. “Standing right up there in front of God and everybody and announcing that Senator Gregg’s a killer ace—can you think of a quicker way to bring him down on your case if he is?”

  “I mean it about Hartmann. Everybody treats me as if I’m a leper because I don’t think Gregg’s the reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln or something.”

  Ricky bit his lip and rubbed his chin with his fingertips. He was a pretty fair pianist in his spare time, and he had the hands for it, long and thin and fine.

  “I have to say it strikes me as kind of improbable. All this ace mind control and stuff; how could he have kept it a secret all these years?” She started to cloud up; he held one hand protectively between them, fingers outspread. “But wait, wait now. You’re a damn fine reporter, a damn fine person—I think your stories have maybe done more to promote understanding of jokers and their problems than Senator Gregg’s posturing and his well-publicized handouts; Brother Malcolm knew all about what it means when the Man extends a helping hand. I know you’re not just making this up.

  “But still … still. I know you still feel the loss of your sister very deeply. Is there any possibility that might be affecting your judgment?”

  She let her face drop between her hands, seeming to hold her head up by her almost-white hair.

  “When I was a child,” she said, “whenever I did something cute or clever, I could tell my parents were thinking if only it were Andi. Do you know what I mean? When I was bad or clumsy, it was, Andi wouldn’t do that. I mean, they’d never say anything that horrible, not out loud. But I knew. It was as if I had a wild card of my own, a poison psychic gift that let me know what they really thought.”

  She was crying, then, the tears rushing out as if someone had punched a big awl through her eyes and hit a giant reservoir of grief. Ricky was beside her on the bed, cradling her against his racquetball-trim chest, stroking her hair with those splendid fingers, while the mascara eroded from her face and stained his Brooks Brothers shirt in big ugly blotches.

  “Sara—Rosie—it’s all right now, baby, it’s all right, we’ll get it straightened out. Everything will be okay. You’re fine, sweetheart, everything’s going to be fine…”

  She clung to him like a baby opossum, welcoming human contact for one rare moment, letting him murmur his soothing words, letting him hold her.

  I just hope he doesn’t press too far, she thought.

  The passengers walking the LaGuardia concourse gave plenty of sea room to the thin young man in the faded black jacket. It wasn’t just the stale smell of sweat emanating from his seldom-washed clothes and body. Mackie was so full of excitement at getting The Call that he wasn’t able to keep it all in; parts of him kept going off into buzz. The subliminals were unnerving people.

  He looked up at the TV monitors next to the Eastern gate. The gray alphanumerics confirmed once again that his flight was departing on time. He could actually see it there through the polarized glass, fat and white and glistening like snot in the July morning sun. The paper jacket that held his ticket and boarding pass was beginning to wilt in his hand; he didn’t want to let go of it, even to slip it into a pocket.

  Chrysalis was dead, Digger vanished, but he got to kill one who was even better. The woman. The Man had told Mackie about her. She had done it with the Man on the tour. They broke up and she got crazy and might try to do something to the Man—his Man. He’d wanted to go out and find her as soon as he heard that, put a good buzz on and cut her, and watch the blood well up, but the Man said, no. Wait for my word.

  It had come a half hour ago in the form of a coded call to the Bowery message drop.

  He was glad there was no smoking on airplanes. He hated smokers: smokers jokers. He’d been on an airplane once, when he’d come across from Germany to be close to the Man.

  He held his pass up to his face, opened it, shuffled through it. He could barely read the red type, and not just because it was blurred. He hadn’t gotten what you called a good education in Germany. He never learned to read real well, even though he did learn to speak English. From his mother. The whore.

  The ticket had been waiting for him when he asked at the Eastern counter. The clerk there was afraid of him. He could tell. She was a fat nigger bitch. She thought he was a joker. You could see it in those calf-stupid eyes. People always thought he was a joker. Especially women.

  That was probably why the Man sounded funny. That woman after him. Women did that. Women were shit. He thought of his mother. The fat, cognac-swilling whore. The bottleneck stuck in her mouth in his mind turned to a fat nigger cock. He watched it slide in and out for a while, moistened his lips.

  His mother had fucked niggers. She’d fucked anybody with the ready, in Hamburg’s Sankt Pauli district. Reeper-bahnstraβe. Where he’d grown up. One of them had knocked her up. When she got drunk and beat Mackie up, she told him his father was a deserter, a GI Stockholm-bound from ’Nam. But his father was a general. He kne
w.

  Mackie Messer was maximum bad. His father couldn’t have been just anybody, could he?

  His mother had abandoned him; natürlich. Women did that. Made you love them so they could hurt you. They wanted you to put that man-thing in them so they could take it away: bite it off. He tried to imagine his mother biting off the huge black dick, but it dissolved into tears that streamed down his face and dripped off his chin onto the collar of his Talking Heads T-shirt.

  His mother had died. He cried for her again.

  “Eastern Airlines Flight 377, for Raleigh-Durham and Atlanta, will now begin boarding passengers holding passes for rows one through fifteen,” the ceiling said to him. He wiped away tears and blew his nose on his fingers and joined the big flow. He was going where he was wanted, and was content.

  Spector stood in the jet’s cramped restroom and splashed some water from the sink over his face. His stomach was churning and his skin was cold. He’d gone into the bathroom hoping to throw up, but no luck. He was so nervous he couldn’t even manage to take a leak.

  There was an impatient knock at the door.

  “I’ll be out in a minute,” Spector said, drying the water from his face with his coat sleeve.

  Another knock. Harder this time.

  Spector sighed and opened the door.

  A hunchbacked joker in a Talking Heads T-shirt was standing outside. He pushed past Spector and closed the door. The little creep’s eyes were like something dead, even worse than Spector’s.

  “Fuck you, too, shrimp.” Spector clutched his way back to his seat without waiting for a reply.

  It was the first time he’d ever flown. The plane was much smaller than he’d expected and was getting bounced around by what the captain called “some minor turbulence.” He’d already put away two little bottles of whiskey and asked the stewardess to bring a couple more. She hadn’t gotten back to him, though. He was sitting between a guy who had been a helicopter pilot in Vietnam and some reporter. The reporter was playing around with a laptop computer, but the ex-pilot hadn’t stopped chattering since they boarded.

  “You see that redhead over there?” Spector followed the line of his finger to a woman a few rows away who was looking over at them. Her lipstick and tight knit dress were bright crimson. Her eyes were green and heavily made up. She was licking her lips in an exaggerated manner. “She wants me. I can tell. Wants me bad. Ever make it in a plane before?”

  “Nope.” Spector was clacking the two empty bottles together in his sweaty palm.

  The ex-pilot leaned back, brushed a piece of lint from his lapel, and sucked in his gut. “Gonna play it cool, though.” He looked out the window and nudged Spector. “You see those black dots out on the wing? That’s where the rivets have been working back and forth. God, I hate flying in these death traps. I saw one miss the runway at National in Washington once. Nobody walked away from that one. If the impact doesn’t get you, the fire and poison gas will. I was safer back in ’Nam.”

  Spector slipped the bottles into his suit pocket and turned to look for his stewardess. She was nowhere in sight. Probably in first class sucking off some rich shithead. He’d been an idiot to fly coach, but was a prisoner of his middle-class upbringing.

  “Time to make the big move,” the ex-pilot said. He made eye contact with the redhead and walked slowly to the rear of the plane. She smiled back at him and nodded, then started giggling when he disappeared into the restroom.

  “Don’t let him fool you,” said the reporter, without looking up. He was in his early thirties, about Spector’s size, and already balding. “These babies are safe as they can be.”

  “Really,” Spector said, trying to sound as nonchalant as possible.

  “Yeah. He could tell you’re a white-knuckler. Just having some fun with you, I expect.” The reporter folded up his computer and looked over at the redhead. “Hope he has fun jerking himself off.”

  The stewardess, a blonde with cropped hair, who seemed slightly too large for her uniform, handed Spector a plastic cup of ice and two more miniature Jack Blacks. “Thanks,” he said, fishing in his wallet for a small bill. He had one bottle opened and poured before she could make change.

  “You going to Atlanta for the convention?” the reporter asked.

  “Uh, no.” Spector took a long, cool swallow. “Not really into politics myself. Got other business.”

  “Not into politics?” The reporter shook his head. “This could be the most exciting convention since New York in ’76. It’ll be a real dogfight. Me, I’m betting on Hartmann.” The reporter sounded like someone who’d gotten a tip at the racetrack.

  “Funny things can happen. Especially in politics.” Spector drained the glass and opened the other bottle. A warm, empty feeling spread comfortably through his insides. “If I were you, I wouldn’t bet the farm.”

  The ex-pilot stalked slowly up the aisle, his hands thrust deep into his pockets. He glared at the redhead. The plane lurched and he bumped into the hunchbacked man. The joker’s hands seemed to blur for a moment, and Spector thought he saw bits of dust spray up from the armrest. He hoped it was just the Jack Black kicking in.

  “No such thing as a sure thing,” Spector said.

  11:00 A.M.

  Five television sets were blaring in the living room of the suite the Hartmann contingent had taken as staff headquarters, all tuned to different stations. On the screen nearest Gregg, Dan Rather was holding forth with a patriarchal Walter Cronkite, back on the air for special convention coverage. Cronkite, as always, sounded the way you’d expect God would sound.

  “… perception is that despite the majority recommendation, Hartmann simply isn’t strong enough to guarantee passage of the Joker’s Rights plank. Does this indicate that Hartmann isn’t strong enough to win once the delegates are released from their first-vote obligations; that Barnett, Dukakis, Jackson, or a dark horse like Cuomo may eventually emerge as the nominee?”

  “Walter, no one has a lock on this convention. The closeness of the primary results showed that. Hartmann is seen as a Northern liberal who can’t win in the South, and frankly, his long involvement with joker causes is a liability outside the coasts and metropolitan areas. Barnett has Southern appeal and could woo voters from Bush, especially among the fundamentalist factions. Still, he’s too conservative and strongly religious for the Democratic constituency. Dukakis is Mr. Bland, with nothing particularly against him, but nothing particularly for him. Jackson has charisma, but the question remains whether he can win outside cities with large black populations. Gore, Simon, Cuomo or any dark horse’s only hope is a deadlock convention that turns to a compromise candidate. All this is reflected in the bitter platform fight. Of course—”

  Gregg twisted the knob, turning off the sound in mid-sentence. The other sets babbled on. “Rather has his head up his ass,” John Werthen commented. “The right vice-presidential candidate and—boom—there goes any regional weakness.”

  “C’mon, they all know that,” Tony Calderone threw in from across the room. “They’re just going for drama. Blame their writers.”

  Gregg nodded tiredly to no one in particular. Puppetman was quiet, Gimli seemed to be gone for the moment, and Mackie would be on his way soon, if not already in flight. He felt drained, lethargic.

  The staff meeting had been going for an hour. Plastic cups of cold coffee sprawled everywhere, floating old cigarette butts; stacks of paper spilled from table to floor, Danishes were petrifying in cardboard boxes stacked on the floor. Gregg’s staff bustled through the blue-tinged air, a half-dozen conversations competing with the TV sets.

  Amy came through the hall door in a rush. “Barnett’s made it official,” she announced as everyone turned to her. “The minority report’s not only against any Joker’s Rights plank, Barnett’s personally calling for a return to the Exotic Laws.”

  The room was loud with disbelief. With the surging emotions, Gregg felt Puppetman for the first time that day. “That’s crazy,” Tony said. “He
can’t be serious.”

  “Too damn stupid. It doesn’t have a chance of being adopted,” John agreed.

  Amy shrugged. “It’s done. You should see the convention floor—goddamn chaos. Devaughn’s going nuts trying to keep things calm with our delegates.”

  “Barnett’s not worried about the floor. It’s the outside convention he wants to influence,” Gregg told them.

  “Sir?”

  “The jokers outside the Omni, in Piedmont Park. When they hear the news, they’re going to explode. More fodder for his anti-joker rhetoric.” Puppetman stirred below at the thought, rising. Gregg pushed him back.

  “He’ll lose the delegates on the fence. They’ll think he’s too militant.” John again.

  Gregg waved a hand. “He’s a one-issue candidate: the jokers. He’s obsessed.”

  “The man’s not rational.”

  “That only gets said here.”

  A quick laugh skittered around the room. Gregg swung to his feet and tugged his tie into place, running fingers through gray-flecked hair. “Okay. You folks know where to start,” he said. “If Barnett’s going to start pushing, we have to push right back. Get on the phones. Start using all the influence we have. What we need to do is get all the neutrals out of their corners. We’re all agreed that Barnett’s course will lead to greater violence out on the streets, to say nothing of the lack of compassion it shows. Tell ’em, pressure ’em, convince ’em. Get all our people doing the same. Amy, you might see if you can set up a meeting with Barnett for me; maybe what he’s really after is a compromise. In the meantime, I need to touch base with Ellen and see how she’s doing.

  “Then I’m going to see if I can do any good outside.”

  The last words held a strange sense of anticipation, a feeling he hadn’t expected. Gregg began to wonder if Puppetman was buried as deeply as he thought.

  12:00 NOON

  Spector followed the reporter into the men’s room. The concourses were crammed with people, and he was sure that the man hadn’t noticed he was being tailed. Spector didn’t know the reporter’s name. He preferred it that way when he was going to kill someone.