Aces High Read online

  “Hey, buddy, no sleeping on the steps.”

  Fortunato walked out into the street and flagged a cab. He put a twenty through the little metal drawer and said, “South. Hurry.”

  He got out of the cab on Chrystie just south of Grand. She hadn’t moved. Her mind was gone. He squatted in front of her and probed for a few seconds, and then he couldn’t stand it and he walked down to the end of the alley. He pounded on the side of a dumpster until his hands were nearly useless. Then he went back and tried again.

  He opened his mouth to say something. Nothing came out. There were no words left in his head, only bloody red clumps and a flood of acid that kept rising up in his eyes.

  He walked across the street and dialed 911. It hurt to press the buttons. When he got an operator he asked for an ambulance and gave the address and hung up.

  He went back across the street. A car honked at him and he didn’t understand why. He knelt in front of Eileen. Her jaw hung open and a thread of saliva dangled down onto her blouse. He couldn’t stand to look at her. He closed his eyes and reached out with his mind and gently stopped her heart.

  It was easy to find the temple. It was only three blocks away. He just followed the energy trails of the men who’d left Eileen in the alley.

  He stood across the street from the bricked-up church. He had to keep blinking his eyes to keep them clear. The trails of the men led into the building, and two or three other trails led out. But Balsam was still in there, Balsam and Clarke and a dozen more.

  That was good. He wanted them all, but he would settle for the ones that were there. Them, and their coins and their golden masks, their rituals, their temple, everything that had a part in trying to bring their alien monstrosity to Earth, that had spilled blood and destroyed minds and ruined lives to do it. He wanted it over, finished, for good and all.

  The night was utterly cold, a vacuum as cold as space, sucking the heat and life from everything it touched. His cheeks burned and then went numb.

  He reached for the power he had left and it wasn’t enough.

  For a few seconds he stood and shook with helpless rage, ready to go after the building with his bare, battered hands. Then he saw her, on the corner, standing in the classic pose under the streetlight. Black hot pants, rabbit jacket, fake-fur shawl. Hooker heels and too much makeup. He slowly raised his arm and waved her over.

  She stopped in front of him, looked him warily up and down. “Hey,” she said. Her skin was coarse and her eyes were tired. “You wanna go out?”

  He took a hundred-dollar bill out of his jacket and unzipped his pants.

  “Right here in the street? Lover, you must be hurtin’ for certain.” She stared at the hundred and eased down onto her knees. “Woo, this concrete cold.” She fumbled around in his trousers and then looked up at him. “Shit, what is this? Dry blood?”

  He took out another hundred. The woman hesitated a second and then stuffed both bills in her purse and clamped the purse under her arm.

  At the touch of her mouth Fortunato went instantly hard. He felt a surge all the way up from his feet and it made his scalp and his fingernails hurt. His eyes rolled up until they were staring at the second floor of the old church.

  He wanted to use his power to lift the entire city block and hurl it into space, but he didn’t have the strength to break a window. He probed at the bricks and the wooden joists and the electrical wiring and then he found what he was looking for. He followed a gas line down to the basement and back to the main, and then he began to move the gas through it, building the pressure the way it was building inside him, until the pipes vibrated and the walls shook and the mortar creaked.

  The hooker looked up and across the street, saw cracks splitting the walls. “Run,” he said. As she clattered away Fortunato reached down and jammed his fingers into the root of his penis, forcing back the hot flood of his ejaculation. His intestines turned to fire, and in the crawlspace over the temple the black steel pipe bent and shook free of its connections. It spurted gas and fell to the floor, knocking sparks off the chicken-wire-and-plaster wall.

  The building swelled for an instant like it was filling with water and then it erupted in a ball of smoky orange flame. Bricks smashed into the wall on either side of where Fortunato stood but he wouldn’t look away, not until his eyebrows had been singed to the skin and his clothes had begun to smolder. The roar of the explosion shattered windows up and down the street, and when it finally died the bleating of sirens and alarms took its place.

  He wished he’d been able to hear them scream.

  Eventually, a cab stopped for him. The driver wanted to take him to the hospital but Fortunato talked him out of it with a hundred-dollar bill.

  Climbing the stairs to his apartment took longer than anything he could remember. He went into the bedroom. The pillows still smelled of Eileen’s perfume.

  He went back to the kitchen, got a fifth of whiskey, and sat by the window, drinking it down, watching the red glow of the fire slowly die over Jokertown.

  When he finally passed out on the couch he dreamed of tentacles and wet rubbery flesh and beaks that opened and closed with long, echoing laughter.

  1985

  Jube: One

  AFTER HE HAD LOCKED up the newsstand for the night, Jube loaded his shopping cart with newspapers and set out on his daily round of the Jokertown bars.

  With Thanksgiving less than a week away, the cold November wind had a bitter edge as it came skirling down the Bowery. Jube trudged along with one hand on his battered old porkpie hat, while the other pulled the two-wheeled wire cart over the cracked sidewalk. His pants were big enough to hold a revival meeting, and his blue short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt was covered with surfers. He never wore a coat. Jube had been selling papers and magazines from the corner of Hester Street and the Bowery since the summer of 1952, and he’d never worn a coat once. Whenever he was asked about it, he would laugh around his tusks, slap his belly, and say, “This is all the insulation I need, yes sir.”

  On a tall day, wearing heels, Jube Benson topped five feet by almost an inch, but there was a lot of him in that compact package, three hundred pounds of oily blue-black flesh that reminded you of half-melted rubber. His face was broad and cratered, his skull covered with tufts of stiff red hair, and two small tusks curved down from the corners of his mouth. He smelled like buttered popcorn, and knew more jokes than anyone else in Jokertown.

  Jube waddled along briskly, grinning at passersby, hawking his papers to the passing cars (even at this hour, the main drag of Jokertown was far from deserted). At the Funhouse, he left a stack of the Daily News for the doorman to hand out to departing patrons, along with a Times for the owner, Des. A couple blocks down was the Chaos Club, which gave away a stack of papers too. Jube had saved a copy of National Informer for Lambent. The doorman took it in a gaunt, glowing hand. “Thanks, Walrus.”

  “Read all about it,” Jube said. “Says there they got a new treatment, turns jokers to aces.”

  Lambent laughed. “Yeah, right,” he said, riffling the pages. A slow smile spread across his phosphorescent face. “Hey, looka here, Sue Ellen’s going to go back to J.R.”

  “She always does,” Jube said.

  “This time she’s going to have his joker baby,” Lambent said. “Jesus, what a dumb cunt.” He folded the paper under his arm. “Have you heard?” he asked. “Gimli’s coming back.”

  “You don’t say,” Jube replied. The door opened behind them. Lambent sprang to hold it, and whistled down a cab for the well-dressed couple who emerged. As he helped them in, he gave them their free Daily News, and the man laid a five against his palm. Lambent made it vanish, with a wink at Jube. Jube waved and went on his way, leaving the phosphorescent doorman standing by the curb in his Chaos Club livery, perusing his Informer.

  The Chaos Club and the Funhouse were the class establishments; the bars, taverns, and coffee shops on the side streets seldom gave anything away. But he was known in all of them, and they let
him hawk his papers table to table. Jube stopped at the Pit and at Hairy’s Kitchen, played a game of shuffleboard in Squisher’s Basement, delivered a Penthouse to Wally of Wally’s. At Black Mike’s Pub, under the neon Schaefer sign, he joked with a couple of working girls and let them tell him about the kinky nat politico they’d double-teamed.

  He left Captain McPherson’s Times with the desk sergeant at the Jokertown precinct house, and sold a Sporting News to a plainclothesman who thought he had a lead on Jokers Wild, where a male hooker had been castrated on stage last week. At the Twisted Dragon on the fringes of Chinatown Jube got rid of his Chinese papers before heading down to Freakers on Chatham Square, where he sold a copy of the Daily News and a half-dozen Jokertown Crys.

  The Cry offices were across the square. The night editor always took a Times, a Daily News, a Post, and a Village Voice, and poured Jube a cup of black, muddy coffee. “Slow night,” Crabcakes said, chewing on an unlit cigar as he turned the pages of the competition with his pincers.

  “Heard the cops are going to shut down that joker-porn studio on Division,” Jube said, sipping politely at his coffee.

  Crabcakes squinted up at him. “You think so? Don’t bet on it, Walrus. That bunch is connected. The Gambione Family, I think. Where’d you hear that?”

  Jube gave him a rubbery grin. “Got to protect my sources too, chief. You hear the one about the guy married this joker, just gorgeous, long blond hair, face like an angel, body to match. On their wedding night, she comes out in this white teddy and says to him, honey, I’ve got good news and bad news. He says, yeah, so give me the good news first. Well, she says, the good news is that this is what the wild card did to me, and she whirls around and gives him a good look, till he’s grinning and drooling. So what’s the bad news? he asks. The bad news, she says, is that my real name is Joseph.”

  Crabcakes grimaced. “Get out of here,” he said.

  The regulars at Ernie’s relieved him of another few Crys and a Daily News, and for Ernie himself he had the issue of Ring that had come in that afternoon. It was a slow night, so Ernie stood him to a piña colada and Jube told him the one about the joker bride who had good news and bad news for her husband.

  The counterman at the all-night doughnut shop took a Times. As he turned up Henry to his final stop, Jube’s load was so light the shopping cart skipped along behind him.

  Three cabs stood outside the canopied entrance to the Crystal Palace, waiting for business. “Hey, Walrus,” one of the hacks called out as he passed. “Got a Cry there?”

  “Sure do,” Jube said. He swapped a paper for a coin. The cabbie had a nest of thin, snakelike tendrils in place of a right arm, and flippers where his legs should be, but his Checker had special hand controls and he knew the city like the back of his tentacle. Made real good tips too. These days people were so relieved to get a cabbie who spoke English, they didn’t give a damn what he looked like.

  The doorman carried Jube’s cart up the stone steps to the main entrance of the three-story turn-of-the-century row house. Inside the Victorian entry chamber, Jube left his hat and cart with the coat-check girl, gathered the remaining papers under his arm, and walked into the saloon’s huge, high-ceilinged barroom. Elmo, the dwarf bouncer, was carrying out a squid-faced man in a sequined domino as Jube entered. There was a nasty bruise on one side of his head. “What did he do?” Jube asked.

  Elmo grinned up at him. “It’s not what he did, it’s what he was thinking of doing.” The little man pushed through the stained-glass doors with the squid-face slung over his shoulder like a sack of grain.

  It was last call at the Crystal Palace. Jube made a circuit of the main taproom—he seldom bothered with the side rooms and their curtained alcoves—and sold a few more papers. Then he climbed up on a barstool. Sascha was behind the long mahogany bar, his eyeless face and pencil-thin mustache reflected in the mirror as he mixed a planter’s punch. He put it down in front of Jube without words or money being exchanged.

  As Jube sipped his drink, he caught a whiff of familiar perfume, and turned his head just as Chrysalis seated herself on the stool to his left. “Good morning,” she said. Her voice was cool and faintly British. She was wearing a spiral of silver glitter on one cheek, and the transparent flesh beneath made it seem to float like a nebula above the whiteness of her skull. Her lipstick was silver gloss, and her long nails gleamed like daggers. “How’s the news business, Jubal?”

  He grinned at her. “Did you hear the one about the joke bride who had good news and bad news for her husband?”

  Around her mouth, the ghost-gray shadows of her muscles twisted her silvered lips into a grimace. “Spare me.”

  “All right.” Jube sipped at his planter’s punch through straw. “At the Chaos Club they put little parasols in these.”

  “At the Chaos Club they serve drinks in coconuts.”

  Jube nursed his drink. “That place on Division, where they film the hard-core stuff? I heard it’s a Gambione operation.”

  “Old news,” Chrysalis said. It was closing time. The lights came up. Elmo began to circulate, stacking chairs on table and rousting the customers.

  “Troll is going to be the new chief of security at Tachyon’s clinic. Doc told me so himself.”

  “Affirmative action?” Chrysalis said drily.

  “Partly,” Jube told her. “And partly it’s just that he’s nine foot tall, green, and almost invulnerable.” He sucked up the last of his drink noisily, and stirred the crushed ice with his straw. “Guy at the cophouse has a lead on Jokers Wild.”

  “He won’t find it,” Chrysalis said. “If he does, he’ll wish he hadn’t.”

  “If they had any sense, they’d just ask you.”

  “There’s not enough money in the city budget to pay for that information,” Chrysalis said. “What else? You always save your best for last.”

  “Probably nothing,” Jube said, swiveling to face her. “But I hear Gimli’s coming home.”

  “Gimli?” Her voice was nonchalant, but the deep blue eyes suspended in the sockets of her skull regarded him sharply. “How interesting. Details?”

  “Not yet,” Jube said. “I’ll let you know.”

  “I’m sure you will.” Chrysalis had informants all over Jokertown. But Jube the Walrus was one of the most reliable. Everyone knew him, everyone liked him, everyone talked to him.

  Jube was the last customer to leave the Crystal Palace that night. When he went outside it had just begun to snow. He snorted, held his hat firmly, and trudged off down Henry, pulling the empty shopping cart behind him. A patrol car came up alongside him as he was passing under the Manhattan Bridge, slowed, and rolled down a window. “Hey, Walrus,” the black cop behind the wheel called out. “It’s snowing, you dumb joker. You’ll freeze your balls off.”

  “Balls?” Jube called out. “Who says jokers got balls? I love this weather, Chaz. Look at these rosy cheeks!” He pinched his oily, blue-black cheek, and chortled.

  Chaz sighed, and opened the back door of the blue-and-white. “Get in. I’ll ride you home.”

  Home was a five-story rooming house on Eldridge, just a short ride away. Jube left his shopping cart under the steps by the trash cans as he opened the police lock on his basement apartment. The only window was completely filled by a huge air conditioner of ancient vintage, its rusted casing now half-covered with blowing snow.

  When he turned on his lights, the red fifteen-watt bulbs in the overhead fixture filled the room with a murky scarlet twilight. It was bone-cold inside, scarcely warmer than the November streets. Jube never turned on the heat. Once or twice a year a man from the gas company came by to check on him and make sure he hadn’t rigged the meter.

  Under the window, pans of green, decaying meat covered the top of a card table. Jube stripped off his shirt to reveal a broad, six-nippled chest, got himself a glass of ice to crunch, and picked the ripest steak he could find.

  A bare mattress covered the floor of his bedroom, and in the corner w
as his latest acquisition, a brand-new porcelain hot tub that faced a big-screen projection TV. Except that “hot tub” was a misnomer, since he never used the heating system. He had learned a lot about humans in the last twenty-three years, but he’d never understand why they wanted to immerse themselves in scalding water, he thought as he undressed. Even the Takisians had more sense than that.

  Holding the steak in one hand, Jube carefully lowered himself into the icy water and turned on the television with his remote control to watch the news programs he’d taped earlier. He popped the steak into his wide mouth, and began to chew the raw meat slowly as he floated there, absorbing every word that Tom Brokaw had to say. It was very relaxing, but when the newscast ended, Jube knew it was time to go to work.

  He climbed out of his tub, belched, and dried himself vigorously with a Donald Duck towel. An hour, no more, he thought to himself as he padded across the room, leaving wet footprints on the hardwood floor. He was tired, but he had to do some work, or he’d fall even more behind. Standing at the back of his bedroom, he punched out a long sequence of numbers on his remote control. The bare brick wall in front of him seemed to dissolve when he hit the final digit.

  Jube walked through into what had been the coal cellar. The far wall was dominated by a holocube that dwarfed even his projection TV. A horseshoe-shaped console wrapped around a huge contour chair designed for Jube’s unique physiognomy. All along the sides of the snug chamber were machines, some whose purpose would have been obvious to any high school student, others that would have baffled Dr. Tachyon himself.

  Primitive as it was, the office suited Jube just fine. He settled into his chair, turned on the power-feed from the fusion cell, and took a crystalline rod as long as a child’s pinky from a rack by his elbow. When he slid it into the appropriate slot on the console, the recorder lit from within, and he began to dictate his latest observations and conclusions in a language that seemed half music and half cacophony, made up in equal parts of barks, whistles, belches, and clicks. If his other security systems ever failed him, his work would still be safe. After all, there wasn’t another sentient being within forty light-years who spoke his native tongue.