Wild Cards IV Page 3

  I have no opinion on the Turtle, though I would hate to think that he was truly dead. Many jokers believe that he is one of us, that his shell conceals some unspeakable joker deformity. Whether that is true or not, he has been a good friend to Jokertown for a long, long time.

  There is, however, an aspect to this trip that no one ever speaks of, although Downs’s article brings it to mind. Perhaps it falls to me to mention the unmentionable then. The truth is, all that laughter up in the lounge has a slightly nervous ring to it, and it is no coincidence that this junket, under discussion for so many years, was put together so swiftly in the past two months. They want to get us out of town for a while—not just the jokers, the aces too. The aces especially, one might even say.

  This last Wild Card Day was a catastrophe for the city, and for every victim of the virus everywhere. The level of violence was shocking and made headlines across the nation. The still-unsolved murder of the Howler, the dismemberment of a child ace in the midst of a huge crowd at Jetboy’s Tomb, the attack on Aces High, the destruction of the Turtle (or at least his shell), the wholesale slaughter at the Gloisters, where a dozen bodies were brought out in pieces, the predawn aerial battle that lit up the entire East Side … days and even weeks later the authorities were still not certain that they had an accurate death toll.

  One old man was found literally embedded in a solid brick wall, and when they began to chip him out, they found they could not tell where his flesh ended and the wall began. The autopsy revealed a ghastly mess inside, where his internal organs were fused with the bricks that penetrated them.

  A Post photographer snapped a picture of that old man trapped in his wall. He looks so gentle and sweet. The police subsequently announced that the old man was an ace himself, and moreover a notorious criminal, that he was responsible for the murders of Kid Dinosaur and the Howler, the attempted murder of the Turtle, the attack on Aces High, the battle over the East River, the ghastly blood rites performed at the Cloisters, and a whole range of lesser crimes. A number of aces came forward to support this explanation, but the public does not seem convinced. According to the polls, more people believe the conspiracy theory put forward in the National Informer—that the killings were independent, caused by powerful aces known and unknown carrying out personal vendettas, using their powers in utter disregard for law and public safety, and that afterward those aces conspired with each other and the police to cover up their atrocities, blaming everything on one crippled old man who happened to be conveniently dead, clearly at the hands of some ace.

  Already several books have been announced, each purporting to explain what really happened—the immoral opportunism of the publishing industry knows no bounds. Koch, ever aware of the prevailing winds, has ordered several cases re-opened and has instructed the IAD to investigate the police role.

  Jokers are pitiful and loathed. Aces have great power, and for the first time in many years a sizable segment of the public has begun to distrust those aces and fear that power. No wonder that demagogues like Leo Barnett have swelled so vastly in the public mind of late.

  So I’m convinced that our tour has a hidden agenda, to wash away the blood with some “good ink,” as they say, to defuse the fear, to win back trust and take everyone’s mind off Wild Card Day.

  I admit to mixed feelings about aces, some of whom definitely do abuse their power. Nonetheless, as a joker, I find myself desperately hoping that we succeed … and desperately fearing the consequences if we do not.

  Beasts of Burden

  by John J. Miller

  From envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness, Good Lord, deliver us.

  —The Litany, Book of Common Prayer

  HIS RUDIMENTARY SEXUAL ORGANS were dysfunctional, but his mounts thought of him as masculine, perhaps because his stunted, wasted body looked more male than female. What he thought of himself was an unopened book. He never communicated about matters of that sort.

  He had no name but that borrowed from folklore and given to him by his mounts—Ti Malice—and he didn’t really care what they called him as long as they addressed him with respect. He liked the dark because his weak eyes were unduly sensitive to light. He never ate because he had no teeth to chew or tongue to taste. He never drank alcohol because the primitive sack that was his stomach couldn’t digest it. Sex was out of the question.

  But he still enjoyed gourmet foods and vintage wines and expensive liquors and all possible varieties of sexual experience. He had his mounts.

  And he always was looking for more.

  i.

  Chrysalis lived in the Jokertown slum where she owned a bar, so she was accustomed to viewing scenes of poverty and misery. But Jokertown was a slum in the most affluent country on the earth, and Bolosse, the slum district of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s sprawling waterfront capital city, was in one of the poorest.

  From the outside the hospital looked like a set from a B-grade horror movie about an eighteenth-century insane asylum. The wall around it was crumbling stone, the sidewalk leading to it was rotting concrete, and the building itself was filthy from years of accumulated bird shit and grime. Inside, it was worse.

  The walls were abstract designs of peeling paint and mildew. The bare wooden floors creaked ominously and once Mordecai Jones, the four-hundred-and-fifty-pound ace called the Harlem Hammer, stepped on a section that gave way. He would have fallen all the way through the floor if an alert Hiram Worchester hadn’t quickly relieved him of nine-tenths of his weight. The smell clinging to the corridors was indescribable, but was mostly compounded of the various odors of death.

  But the very worst, thought Chrysalis, were the patients, especially the children. They lay uncomplainingly on filthy bare mattresses that reeked of sweat, urine, and mildew, their bodies racked by diseases banished long ago in America and wasted by the bloat of malnutrition. They watched their visitors troop by without curiosity or comprehension, serene hoplessness filling their eyes.

  It was better being a joker, she thought, though she loathed what the wild card virus had done to her once-beautiful body.

  Chrysalis couldn’t stand any more of the unrelievable suffering. She left the hospital after passing through the first ward and returned to the waiting motorcade. The driver of the Jeep she’d been assigned to looked at her curiously, but said nothing. He hummed a happy little tune while they waited for the others, occasionally singing a few off-key phrases in Haitian Creole.

  The tropical sun was hot. Chrysalis, bundled in an all-enveloping hood and cloak to protect her delicate flesh and skin from the sun’s burning rays, watched a group of children playing across the street from the run-down hospital. Sweat trickling in tickling rivulets down her back, she almost envied the children in the cool freedom of their near nakedness. They seemed to be fishing for something in the depths of the storm drain that ran under the street. It took Chrysalis a moment to realize what they were doing, but when she did, all thoughts of envy disappeared. They were drawing water out of the drain and pouring it into battered, rusty pots and cans. Sometimes they stopped to drink a mouthful.

  She looked away, wondering if joining Tachyon’s little traveling show had been a mistake. It had sounded like a good idea when Tachyon had invited her. It was, after all, an opportunity to travel around the world at government expense while rubbing shoulders with a variety of important and influential people. There was no telling what interesting tidbits of information she would be able to pick up. It had seemed like such a good idea at the time.…

  “Well, my dear, if I hadn’t actually seen it with my own eyes, I’d say you hadn’t the stomach for this sort of thing.”

  She smiled mirthlessly as Dorian Wilde heaved himself into the backseat of the Jeep next to her. She wasn’t in the mood for the poet’s famous wit.

  “I certainly wasn’t expecting treatment like this,” she said in her cultured British accent as Dr. Tachyon, Senator Hartmann, Hiram Worchester, and other important and influential politicians an
d aces streamed toward the limos waiting for them, while Chrysalis, Wilde, and the other obvious jokers on the tour had to make do with the dirty, dented Jeeps clustered at the rear of the cavalcade.

  “You should’ve,” Wilde said. He was a large man whose delicate features were losing their handsomeness to bloat. He wore an Edwardian outfit that was in desperate need of cleaning and pressing, and enough floral-scented body wash to make Chrysalis glad that they were in an open vehicle. He waved his left hand languorously as he talked and kept his right in the pocket of his jacket. “Jokers, after all, are the niggers of the world.” He pursed his lips and glanced at their driver, who, like 95 percent of Haiti’s population, was black. “A statement not without irony on this island.”

  Chrysalis grabbed the back of the driver’s seat as the Jeep jounced away from the curb, following the rest of the cavalcade as it pulled away from the hospital. The air was cool against Chrysalis’s face hidden deep within the folds of her hood, but the rest of her body was drenched with sweat. She fantasized about a long, cool drink and a slow, cool bath for the hour it took the motorcade to wend its way through Port-au-Prince’s narrow, twisting streets. When they finally reached the Royal Haitian Hotel, she stepped down into the street almost before the Jeep stopped, anxious for the waiting coolness of the lobby, and was instantly engulfed by a sea of beseeching faces, all babbling in Haitian Creole. She couldn’t understand what the beggars were saying, but she didn’t have to speak their language to understand the want and desperation their eyes, tattered clothing, and brittle, emaciated bodies.

  The press of imploring beggars pinned her against the side of the Jeep, and the immediate rush of pity she’d felt for their obvious need was submerged in fear fueled by their piteously beseeching voices and the dozens of thin, sticklike arms thrust out at her.

  The driver, before she could say or do anything, reached under the Jeep’s dashboard and grabbed a long, thin wooden rod that looked like a truncated broomstick, stood up, and began swinging it at the beggars while shouting rapid, harsh phrases in Creole.

  Chrysalis heard, and saw, the skinny arm of a young boy snap at the first blow. The second opened the scalp of an old man, and the third missed as the intended victim managed to duck away.

  The driver drew the weapon back to strike again. Chrysalis, her usually cautious reserve overcome by sudden outrage, turned to him and screamed, “Stop! Stop that!” and with the sudden movement the hood fell away from her face, revealing her features for the first time. Revealing, that is, what features she had.

  Her skin and flesh were as clear as the finest blown glass, without flaw or bubble. Besides the muscles that clung to her skull and jaw, only the meat of her lips was visible. They were dark red pads on the gleaming expanse of her skull. Her eyes, floating in the depths of their naked sockets, were as blue as fragments of sky.

  The driver gaped at her. The beggars, whose importunings had turned to wails of fear, all fell silent at once, as if an invisible octopus had simultaneously slapped a tentacle over each one’s mouth. The silence dragged on for a half-dozen heartbeats, and then one of the beggars whispered a name in a soft, awed voice.

  “Madame Brigitte.”

  It passed among the beggars like a whispered invocation, until even those who had crowded around the other vehicles in the motorcade were craning their necks to get a glimpse of her. She pressed back against the Jeep, the concentrated stares of the beggars, mixed fear and awe and wonder, frightening her. The tableau held for another moment until the driver spoke a harsh phrase and gestured with his stick. The crowd dispersed at once, but not, however, without some of the beggars shooting Chrysalis final glances of mingled awe and dread.

  Chrysalis turned to the driver. He was a tall, thin black in a cheap, ill-fitting blue serge suit and an open-necked shirt. He looked back at her sullenly, but Chrysalis couldn’t really read his expression because of the dark sunglasses he wore.

  “Do you speak English?” she asked him.

  “Oui. A little.” Chrysalis could hear the harsh edge of fear in his voice, and she wondered what put it there.

  “Why did you strike them?”

  He shrugged. “These beggars are peasants. Scum from the country, come to Port-au-Prince to beg on the generousness of people as yourself. I tell them to go.”

  “Speak loudly and carry a big stick,” Wilde said sardonically from his seat in the back of the Jeep.

  Chrysalis glared at him. “You were a big help.”

  He yawned. “I make it a habit never to brawl in the streets. It’s so vulgar.”

  Chrysalis snorted, turned back to the driver. “Who,” she asked, “is ‘Madame Brigitte’?”

  The driver shrugged in a particularly Gallic manner, illustrating again the cultural ties Haiti had to the country from which she’d been politically independent for nearly two hundred years. “She is a loa, the wife of Baron Samedi.”

  “Baron Samedi?”

  “A most powerful loa. He is the lord and guardian of the cemetery. The keeper of the crossroads.”

  “What’s a loa?”

  He frowned, shrugged almost angrily. “A loa is a spirit, a part of God, very powerful and divine.”

  “And I resemble this Madame Brigitte?”

  He said nothing, but continued to stare at her from behind his dark glasses, and despite the afternoon’s tropical heat Chrysalis felt a shiver run down her spine. She felt naked, despite the voluminous cloak she wore. It wasn’t a bodily nakedness. She was, in fact, accustomed to going half-naked in public as a private obscene gesture to the world, making sure that everyone saw what she had to see every time she looked in a mirror. It was a spiritual nakedness that she felt, as if everyone who was staring at her was trying to discover who she was, was trying to divine the precious secrets that were the only masks that she had. She felt a desperate need to get away from all the staring eyes, but she wouldn’t let herself run from them. It took all her nerve, all the cool she could muster, but she managed to walk into the hotel lobby with precise, measured steps.

  Inside it was cool and dark. Chrysalis leaned against a high-backed chair that looked as if it’d been made sometime in the last century and dusted sometime in the last decade. She took a deep, calming breath and let it out slowly.

  “What was that all about?”

  She looked over her shoulder to see Peregrine regarding her with concern. The winged woman had been in one of the limos at the head of the parade, but she’d obviously seen the byplay that had centered around Chrysalis’s Jeep. Peregrine’s beautiful, satin-feathered wings only added a touch of the exotic to her lithe, tanned sensuality. She should be easy to resent, Chrysalis thought. Her affliction had brought her fame, notoriety, even her own television show. But she looked genuinely concerned, genuinely worried, and Chrysalis felt in need of sympathetic company.

  But she couldn’t explain something to Peregrine that she only half-understood herself. She shrugged. “Nothing.” She looked around the lobby that was rapidly filling with tour personnel. “I could use a few moments of peace and quiet. And a drink.”

  “So could I,” a masculine voice announced before Peregrine could speak. “Let’s find the bar and I’ll tell you some of the facts of Haitian life.”

  Both women turned to look at the man who’d spoken. He was six feet tall, give or take, and strongly built. He wore a suit of white, tropical-weight linen that was immaculately clean and sharply creased. There was something odd about his face. His features didn’t quite match. His chin was too long, his nose too broad. His eyes were misaligned and too bright. Chrysalis knew him only by reputation. He was a Justice Department ace, part of the security contingent Washington had assigned to Tachyon’s tour. His name was Billy Ray. Some wit at JD with a classical education had tagged him with the nickname Carnifex. He liked it. He was an authentic badass.

  “What do you mean?” Chrysalis asked.

  Ray looked around the lobby, his lips quirking. “Let’s find the bar and talk th
ings over. Privately.”

  Chrysalis glanced at Peregrine, and the winged woman read the appeal in her eyes.

  “Mind if I tag along?” Peregrine asked.

  “Hey, not at all.” Ray frankly admired her lithe, tanned form, and the black-and-white-striped sundress that showed it off. He licked his lips as Chrysalis and Peregrine exchanged unbelieving glances.

  The hotel lounge was doing desultory afternoon business. They found an empty table surrounded by other empty tables and gave their orders to a red-uniformed waiter who couldn’t decide whom to stare at, Peregrine or Chrysalis. They sat in silence until he’d returned with the drinks, and Chrysalis drank down the thimbleful of amaretto that he’d brought.

  “The travel brochures all said that Haiti’s supposed to be a bloody tropical paradise,” she said in a tone that indicated she felt the brochures all lied.

  “I’ll take you to paradise, babe,” Ray said.

  Chrysalis liked it when men paid attention to her, sometimes too much. Sometimes, she realized, she conducted her affairs for all the wrong reasons. Even Brennan (Yeoman, she reminded herself, Yeoman. She had to remember that she wasn’t supposed to know his real name) had become her lover because she’d forced herself on him. It was, she supposed, the sense of power that she liked, the control she had when she made men come to her. But making men make love to her body was also, she recognized with her habit of relentless self-scrutiny, another way to punish a revulsed world. But Brennan (Yeoman, damnit) had never been revulsed. He had never made her turn out the lights before kissing her, and he had always made love with his eyes open, watching her heart heat, her lungs bellow, her breath catch behind tightly clenched teeth.…

  Ray’s foot moved under the table, touching hers, drawing her back from thoughts of the past, of what was over. She smiled a lazy smile at him, gleaming teeth set in a gleaming skull. There was something about Ray that was unsettling. He talked too loud, he smiled too much, and some part of him, his hands or his feet or his mouth, was always in motion. He had a reputation for violence. Not that she had anything against violence—as long as it wasn’t directed at her. For goodness’ sake, even she’d lost track of all the men Yeoman had sent to their reward since his arrival in the city. But, paradoxically, Brennan wasn’t a violent man. Ray, according to his reputation, had a habit of running amuck. Compared to Brennan, he was a self-centered bore. She wondered if she’d be comparing all the men she would know to her archer, and she felt a rush of annoyance, and regret.