Wild Cards: Aces Abroad Read online

  “True, though,” he shot back. “You are a sex symbol. There’s your Playboy centerfold, that nude ice sculpture of you at Aces High. And what about that naked poster, ‘Fallen Angel,’ that Warhol did?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with posing nude! I’m not ashamed to show my body or to have other people look at it.”

  “No kidding! You strip for anyone who asks you!”

  She went white with fury. “Yes, I do! Including you!” She slapped McCoy’s face and turned to the door, her wings quivering. “I don’t have to stand here and take any more abuse from you.”

  She reached for the door handle, but McCoy shoved in front of her and held it closed. “No. I need to talk to you.”

  “You’re not talking, you’re being abusive,” Peregrine retorted, “and I don’t like it one bit.”

  “You don’t know what abuse is,” he told her, brown eyes glitter­ing angrily. “Why don’t you scream? Tachyon’s probably right outside. He’d love to rush in and rescue you. You could fuck him in gratitude.”

  “How dare you?” Peregrine shouted. “I don’t need him to protect me! Him or you or anyone! Let me go!” she demanded angrily.

  “No.” He pressed her body to the wall. She felt like a butterfly pinned on velvet. She could feel his heavy warmth against her. “Is this what it’s going to be like,” he raged, “men always wanting to protect you? Men wanting to fuck you just because you’re Peregrine? I don’t want anyone else touching you. No one but me.

  “Peri,” he said more gently. “Look at me.” When she refused, he forced her chin up until she looked him in the eyes, tears rolling down her cheeks. “Peri, I’m sorry for everything I said yesterday. And for everything I said just now. I didn’t intend to lose my tem­per, but when I saw that overdressed quiche-eater with his hands on you, I just lost it. The thought of anyone but me touching you makes me furious.” The fingers on her chin tightened. “Yesterday when you said that Fortunato was the baby’s father, all I could see was him in bed with you, holding you, loving you.” He let her go and walked to the window of the small room, staring out unseeing, his hands clenching and unclenching. “It was then,” he continued, “that I realized exactly what I was up against. You’re famous and beautiful and sexy and everyone wants you. I don’t want to be Mr. Peregrine. I don’t want to compete with your past. I want your future.

  “What I said yesterday about jokers wasn’t true. It was the first excuse that I could think of. I wanted to hurt you as bad as I was hurting.” He ran a hand through his blond hair. “It really hurt me when you told me about the baby, because it’s not mine. I don’t hate jokers. I like kids and I’ll love yours and try to be a good father. If Fortunato shows up, well, I’ll deal with it the best I can. Hell, Peri, I love you. Last night without you was terrible. It showed me what the future would be like if I let you go. I love you,” he repeated, “and I want you to be my life.”

  Peregrine put her arms around him and leaned against his back. “I love you too. Last night was about the worst night of my life. I realized what you meant to me, and also what this baby means. If I can only have one of you, I want my baby. I’m sorry to say that, but I had to tell you. But I want you too.”

  McCoy turned and took her hands. He kissed them. “You sound awfully determined.”

  “I am.”

  McCoy laughed. “No matter what happens when the baby is born, we’ll do the best we can.” He smiled down at her. “I have a bunch of nieces and nephews, so I even know how to change diapers.”

  “Good. You can teach me.”

  “I will,” he promised, his lips touching hers as he pulled her closer.

  The door opened. A white-clad figure looked at them disapprov­ingly. After a moment Doctor Tachyon peered in. “Are you quite finished?” he asked icily. “They need this room.”

  “We’re done with the room, but we’re not finished. We’re just starting,” Peregrine said, smiling radiantly.

  “Well, as long as you’re happy,” Tachyon said slowly.

  “I am,” she assured him.

  They left the hospital with Tachyon. He got into a cab by himself, while McCoy and Peregrine settled into the horse-drawn carriage waiting at the curb behind the taxi.

  “We have to get back to the hotel,” Peregrine said.

  “Are you propositioning me?”

  “Of course not. I have to pack so we can rejoin the tour in Cairo.”

  “Today?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then we’d better hurry.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” McCoy trailed kisses over her face and neck. “We have to make up for last night, of course.”

  “Oh.” Peregrine spoke to the driver and the carriage picked up speed. “We don’t want to waste any more time.”

  “Enough has already been wasted,” McCoy agreed. “Are you happy?” he asked softly as she settled in his arms, her head on his chest.

  “Happier than I’ve ever been!” But a little voice in the back of her mind kept reminding her of Fortunato.

  His arms tightened around her. “I love you.”

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF

  XAVIER DESMOND

  JANUARY 30/JERUSALEM:

  The open city of Jerusalem, they call it. An international metropolis, jointly governed by commissioners from Israel, Jordan, Palestine, and Great Britain under a United Nations mandate, sacred to three of the world’s great religions.

  Alas, the apt phrase is not “open city” but “open sore.” Jerusalem bleeds as it has for almost four decades. If this city is sacred, I should hate to visit one that was profane.

  Senators Hartmann and Lyons and the other political delegates lunched with the city commissioners today, but the rest of us spent the afternoon touring this free international city in closed limou­sines with bulletproof windshields and special underbody armor to withstand bomb blasts. Jerusalem, it seems, likes to welcome distin­guished international visitors by blowing them up. It does not seem to matter who the visitors are, where they come from, what religion they practice, how their politics lean—there are enough factions in this city so that everyone can count on being hated by someone.

  Two days ago we were in Beirut. From Beirut to Jerusalem, that is a voyage from day to night. Lebanon is a beautiful country, and Beirut is so lovely and peaceful it seems almost serene. Its various religions appear to have solved the problem of living in compara­tive harmony, although there are of course incidents—nowhere in the Middle East (or the world, for that matter) is completely safe.

  But Jerusalem—the outbreaks of violence have been endemic for thirty years, each worse than the one before. Entire blocks resem­ble nothing so much as London during the Blitz, and the popula­tion that remains has grown so used to the distant sound of machine-gun fire that they scarcely seem to pay it any mind.

  We stopped briefly at what remains of the Wailing Wall (largely destroyed in 1967 by Palestinian terrorists in reprisal for the assassination of al-Haziz by Israeli terrorists the year before) and actually dared to get out of our vehicles. Hiram looked around fiercely and made a fist, as if daring anyone to start trouble. He has been in a strange state of late; irritable, quick to anger, moody. The things we witnessed in Africa have affected us all, however. One shard of the wall is still fairly imposing. I touched it and tried to feel the history. Instead I felt the pocks left in the stone by bullets.

  Most of our party returned to the hotel afterward, but Father Squid and I took a detour to visit the Jokers’ Quarter. I’m told that it is the second-largest joker community in the world, after Jokertown itself . . . a distant second, but second nonetheless. It does not surprise me. Islam does not view my people kindly, and so jokers come here from all over the Middle East for whatever meager pro­tection is offered by UN sovereignty and a small, outmanned, out-gunned, and demoralized international peacekeeping force.

  The Quarter is unspeakably squalid, and the weight of human mis­ery within its walls is almost palpable. Y
et ironically the streets of the Quarter are reputed safer than any other place in Jerusalem. The Quarter has its own walls, built in living memory, originally to spare the feelings of decent people by hiding we living obscenities from their sight, but those same walls have given a measure of security to those who dwell within. Once inside I saw no nats at all, only jokers—jokers of all races and religions, all living in relative peace. Once they might have been Muslims or Jews or Christians, zealots or Zionists or followers of the Nur, but after their hand had been dealt, they were only jokers. The joker is the great equalizer, cutting through all other hatreds and prejudices, uniting all mankind in a new brotherhood of pain. A joker is a joker is a joker, and anything else he is, is unimportant.

  Would that it worked the same way with aces.

  The sect of Jesus Christ, Joker has a church in Jerusalem, and Father Squid took me there. The building looked more like a mosque than a Christian church, at least on the outside, but inside it was not so terribly different from the church I’d visited in Jokertown, though much older and in greater disrepair. Father Squid lit a candle and said a prayer, and then we went back to the cramped, tumbledown rectory where Father Squid conversed with the pastor in halting Latin while we shared a bottle of sour red wine. As they were talking, I heard the sound of automatic weaponry chattering off in the night somewhere a few blocks away. A typical Jerusalem evening, I suppose.

  No one will read this book until after my death, by which time I will be safely immune from prosecution. I’ve thought long and hard about whether or not I should record what happened tonight, and finally decided that I should. The world needs to remember the lessons of 1976 and be reminded from time to time that the JADL does not speak for all jokers.

  An old joker woman pressed a note into my hand as Father Squid and I were leaving the church. I suppose someone recognized me.

  When I read the note, I begged off the official reception, pleading illness once again, but this time it was a ruse. I dined in my room with a wanted criminal, a man I can only describe as a notorious international joker terrorist, although he is a hero inside the Jokers’ Quarter. I will not give his real name, even in these pages, since I understand that he still visits his family in Tel Aviv from time to time. He wears a black canine mask on his “missions” and to the press, Interpol, and the sundry factions that police Jerusalem, he is variously known as the Black Dog and the Hound of Hell. Tonight he wore a completely different mask, a butterfly-shaped hood covered with silver glitter, and had no problem crossing the city.

  “What you’ve got to remember,” he told me, “is that nats are fundamentally stupid. You wear the same mask twice and let your picture get taken with it, and they start thinking it’s your face.”

  The Hound, as I’ll call him, was born in Brooklyn but emigrated to Israel with his family at age nine and became an Israeli citizen. He was twenty when he became a joker. “I traveled halfway around the world to draw the wild card,” he told me. “I could have stayed in Brooklyn.”

  We spent several hours discussing Jerusalem, the Middle East, and the politics of the wild card. The Hound heads what honesty forces me to call a joker terrorist organization, the Twisted Fists. They are illegal in both Israel and Palestine, no mean trick. He was evasive about how many members they had, but not at all shy about confessing that virtually all of their financial support comes from New York’s Jokertown. “You may not like us, Mr. Mayor,” the Hound told me, “but your people do.” He even hinted slyly that one of the joker delegates on our tour was among their supporters, although of course he refused to supply a name.

  The Hound is convinced that war is coming to the Middle East, and soon. “It’s overdue,” he said. “Neither Israel or Palestine have ever had defensible borders, and neither one is an economically viable nation. Each is convinced that the other one is guilty of all sorts of terrorist atrocities, and they’re both right. Israel wants the Negev and the West Bank, Palestine wants a port on the Mediter­ranean, and both countries are still full of refugees from the 1948 partition who want their homes back. Everyone wants Jerusalem except the UN, which has it. Shit, they need a good war. The Israelis looked like they were winning in ’48 until the Nasr kicked their asses. I know that Bernadotte won the Nobel Peace Prize for the Treaty of Jerusalem, but just between you and me, it might have been better if they’d fought it out to the bitter end . . . any kind of end.”

  I asked him about all the people who would have died, but he just shrugged. “They’d be dead. But maybe if it was over, really over, some of the wounds would start to heal. Instead we got two pissed-off half-countries that share the same little desert and won’t even recognize each other, we’ve got four decades of hatred and terrorism and fear, and we’re still going to get the war, and soon. It beats me how Bernadotte pulled off the Peace of Jerusalem anyway, though I’m not surprised that he got assassinated for his trou­bles. The only ones who hate the terms worse than the Israelis are the Palestinians.”

  I pointed out that, unpopular as it might be, the Peace of Jerusalem had lasted almost forty years. He dismissed that as “a forty-year stalemate, not real peace. Mutual fear was what made it work. The Israelis have always had military superiority. But the Arabs had the Port Said aces, and you think the Israelis don’t remember? Every time the Arabs put up a memorial to the Nasr, anywhere from Baghdad to Marrakesh, the Israelis blow it up. Believe me, they remember. Only now the whole thing’s coming unbalanced. I got sources say Israel has been running its own wild card experiments on volunteers from their armed forces, and they’ve come up with a few aces of their own. Now that’s fanaticism for you, to volunteer for the wild card. And on the Arab side, you’ve got Nur al-Allah, who calls Israel a ‘bastard joker nation’ and has vowed to destroy it utterly. The Port Said aces were pussycats compared to his bunch, even old Khôf. No, it’s coming, and soon.”

  “And when it comes?” I asked him.

  He was carrying a gun, some kind of small semiautomatic machine pistol with a long Russian name. He took it out and laid it on the table between us. “When it comes,” he said, “they can kill each other all they want, but they damn well better leave the Quar­ter alone, or they’ll have us to deal with. We’ve already given the Nur a few lessons. Every time they kill a joker, we kill five of them. You’d think they’d get the idea, but the Nur’s a slow learner.”

  I told him that Senator Hartmann was hoping to set up a meet­ing with the Nur al-Allah to begin discussions that might lead to a peaceful solution to this area’s problems. He laughed. We talked for a long time, about jokers and aces and nats, and violence and non-violence and war and peace, about brotherhood and revenge and turning the other cheek and taking care of your own, and in the end we settled nothing. “Why did you come?” I finally asked him.

  “I thought we should meet. We could use your help. Your knowledge of Jokertown, your contacts in nat society, the money you could raise.”

  “You won’t get my help,” I told him. “I’ve seen where your road leads. Tom Miller walked that road ten years ago.”

  “Gimli?” He shrugged. “First, Gimli was crazy as a bedbug. I’m not. Gimli wants the world to kiss it and make it all better. I just fight to protect my own. To protect you, Des. Pray that your Jokertown never needs the Twisted Fists, but if you do, we’ll be there. I read Time’s cover story on Leo Barnett. Could be the Nur isn’t the only slow learner. If that’s how it is, maybe the Black Dog will go home and find that tree that grows in Brooklyn, right? I haven’t been to a Dodger game since I was eight.”

  My heart stopped in my throat as I looked at the gun on the table, but I reached out and put my hand on the phone. “I could call down to our security right now and make certain that won’t happen, that you won’t kill any more innocent people.”

  “But you won’t,” the Hound said. “Because we have so much in common.”

  I told him we had nothing in common.

  “We’re both jokers,” he said. “What else matters?�
�� Then he hol­stered his gun, adjusted his mask, and walked calmly from my room.

  And God help me, I sat there alone for several endless minutes, until I heard the elevator doors open down the hall—and finally took my hand off the phone.

  THE TINT OF HATRED

  Part Five

  SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 1987, THE SYRIAN DESERT:

  Najib struck her down with one quick blow, but Misha persisted. “He’s coming,” Misha said. “Allah’s dreams tell me that I must go to Damascus to meet him.”

  In the darkness of the mosque Najib glowed like a green beacon from near the mihrab, the jeweled prayer niche. It was at night that Nur al-Allah was the most impressive, a fiery vision of a prophet, gleaming with Allah’s own fury. He said nothing to Misha’s pro­nouncement, looking first at Sayyid, resting his great bulk against one of the tiled pillars.

  “No,” Sayyid grumbled. “No, Nur al-Allah.” He looked at Misha, kneeling in supplication before her brother, and his eyes were full of a smoldering rage because she would not submit to her brother’s will or Sayyid’s suggestions. “You’ve often said that the abomina­tions are to be killed. You’ve said that the only way to negotiate with the unbeliever is with the edge of a sword. Let me fulfill those words for you. The entire Ba’th government can do nothing to stop us; al-Assad trembles when Nur al-Allah speaks. I’ll take some of the faithful to Damascus. We’ll cleanse the abominations and those who bring them with purifying fire.”

  Najib’s skin flared for a moment, as if Sayyid’s advice had excited him. His lips had pulled back in a fierce grimace. Misha shook her head. “Brother,” she implored. “Listen also to Kahina. I’ve had the same dream for three nights. I see the two of us with the Americans. I see the gifts. I see a new, untrodden path.”

  “Also tell Nur al-Allah that you woke screaming from the dream, that you felt the gifts were dangerous, that this Hartmann had more than one face in your dreams.”