Wild Cards VI--Ace in the Hole Read online

  You can’t keep it down even that long, Hartmann. You’re addicted. That’s all Puppetman is: your goddamn drug. And you both need a fix, don’t you? Gimli chuckled. To get it, you’ve got to get around me. Ain’t it a fucking pity.

  Both Ellen and Amy were staring at him. He was standing stock-still, frozen. Gregg gave them an apologetic shrug and continued.

  “A few minutes ago, Bill Johnson called me ‘Senator.’ Now, it’s been over a year since I gave up my seat to run for this candidacy, but I understand the mistake. Bill’s been calling me Senator—when he hasn’t been calling me other things—for years now.”

  A slow amusement moved through the ranks in front of him. “That’s habit,” Gregg told them, sliding easily back into Tony’s speech. “It’s easy to let habits rule us. It’s easy for us to cling to ancient prejudices, clouded outlooks, and outright fables. But we can’t do that, not now. We hear too many rumors and believe them without foundation. We’ve had the habits and listened to the lies for years: that jokers are somehow accursed; that it’s right to hate people—jokers or otherwise—because they look or act differently; that people can’t change, and the way it is is the way it must be. If you believe opinions and feelings are set in concrete, you’re right—you can’t change, you can’t grow. But when we can do something that defies such beliefs, well, to me that’s worth more coverage than sensational rumors about infidelity.”

  Gregg glanced over to Ellen; she nodded back. Gimli was still there and Gregg’s head ached with the sound of his voice, but he blinked and went on. He wanted to get off the podium, to be alone in his room. He was rushing, speaking too fast; he forced himself to slow down.

  “I’m pleased to say that some things we think eternal pass. I’ve based my entire campaign on the idea that now is the time to heal the wounds. Opinions change. We can embrace those we once hated. That’s important. That’s newsworthy. And it’s also not my story. I can understand a person who takes his or her fervor too far. I can understand passionate convictions even when I don’t agree with them. We all have things we believe in strongly and that’s good. It becomes a problem when such passion crosses the line beyond fervor to violence. There have been joker organizations that have sometimes stepped over that line.”

  Gregg gestured to the back of the stage. “Amy, please bring them out.”

  The curtains at the back of the stage parted, and two jokers stepped into the light. One had skin marked with fine serrated ridges; the other was shadowy and the ghost of the curtains could be seen through him. The press began to murmur.

  “I’m sure I don’t need to introduce File and Shroud to you. Their faces were prominent in your papers and on your broadcasts last year when the JJS was finally broken up.” Gimli laughed inside at that; Gregg swallowed hard. “Some of the JJS, those who seemed peripheral members or harmless, were simply fined and released. Others, the ones deemed truly dangerous, were incarcerated. File and Shroud have been in a federal prison since that time. Perhaps deservedly so—both have admitted to extremely violent acts. Yet … I was the direct victim of some of that violence, and I’ve spoken to File and Shroud extensively in the last year. I feel that they’ve both learned a hard and painful lesson and are genuinely remorseful.

  “I will stand by my own words and convictions. I believe in reconciliation. We need to forgive, we need to strive to understand those less fortunate than ourselves. Today, in agreement with Governor Cuomo of New York, the Justice Department, and the New York Senate, I’ve arranged to grant parole to File and Shroud.”

  Gregg placed his arms around the jokers: the rough skin of File, the misty shoulders of Shroud. “This is far more important than rumors. This is genuine, and it’s also not my story—it’s theirs. I’ll let them convince you as they convinced me. Talk to them. Ask them your questions. Amy, if you’d moderate—”

  As the first questions were shouted from the crowd and File stepped to the microphone, Gregg took a deep breath and retreated.

  Don’t you understand? Gimli taunted as Gregg left the room and headed for the elevators. You haven’t gotten rid of me. You can’t run away from my particular obsession. I’m here. And I’m staying. I don’t forgive. Not at all.

  With fingers without feeling Sara replaced the receiver in its cradle.

  She’d fled her room in tears, trusting in her small size and a certain knack of invisibility that had served her well at various points in her career to hide her in the mob. At first it worked. When they paged her in the lobby, it set a fresh pack of reporters baying after her, hungry to worry bones from which Hartmann’s bland denial hadn’t filleted the last scraps of meat.

  Is Hartmann telling the truth? Why did Barnett’s announcement specify you? What’s your connection to the Barnett campaign? The questions split half and half between trying to get her to admit she’d hit the rack with Hartmann and trying to get her to admit she’d conspired with the fundamentalists to wreck the senator’s good name.

  Part of her ached to use the proffered forum, to announce, Yes, I slept with Gregg Hartmann, and I learned that he’s a monster, a covert ace who makes people into puppets. Cowardice intervened. Or was it sanity? Her revelations—allegations, was the only way they would be viewed—were extravagant enough without turning them into Midnight Sun headline fodder.

  She turned her face away and said, “No comment.”

  And swallowed whole the steaming chunks of abuse: “Where do you get off trying to pull that shit? The public has a right to know. You’re a journalist, for Christ’s sake.”

  Finally a cocktailer in leotards and one of those short black skirts took her by the arm and steered her here, into the office of the manager of the Marriott’s lounge.

  The receiver clicked home with the finality of a breech closing on a cartridge. Somebody took what she had to say seriously.

  The caller was Owen Rayford of the Post’s New York bureau. Chrysalis was dead. Murdered. Ace powers were involved.

  Was it a puppet? She doubted that. Hartmann’s strings quickly attenuated and broke with distance; she knew that from experience. There were bent aces—Bludgeon, Carnifex, maybe the Sleeper if he were far gone in amphetamine psychosis—who were capable of such a deed. That was an irony about Hartmann; in his position you hardly needed ace powers to get into serious evil doing. Money, power, and influence weren’t exactly any weaker forces in human affairs than they’d been up until the fifteenth of September, 1946.

  The fear lived within her; it coiled like a serpent, burned like a star. It brought with it terrible knowledge: the only hope of safety lay in risking all.

  The manager and the waitress who’d rescued her stood by, watching with polite curiosity. She arranged her face in a smile and stood.

  “Is there a back way out of here?” she asked.

  6:00 P.M.

  She had to take a Valium before she could get the damned acoustic coupler to work right. Her laptop had an inboard modem, but hotels were leery of modular jacks, preferring to keep their phones tethered firmly to the wall by old-fashioned cords. So she had to fiddle with the antique external modem, which was unforgiving if you didn’t get the phone’s handset into its twin-cup cradle just so.

  Eventually she got it going. Then she sat in gloom, lit only by afternoon light straggling through the room’s heavy curtains, smoking and squinting at the screen as the records-transferred count spun on and her story spun down the wires that connected her NEC laptop to the Post’s computers.

  It had all come out of her in one orgasmic gush: Andi’s death, her suspicion, the sinister hidden presence in Jokertown who had flashed tantalizing clues as to his existence—and identity—during the riots attending another Democratic convention twelve years ago; her own personal quest, leading to her entrapment in the very web she’d been struggling to delineate. And finally murder.

  There were two people, she’d written, who had their fingers on the Jokertown pulse. Actually there were three; Tachyon was the third, literally as well
as figuratively. But he was blinded by personal regard for Hartmann, and the political plums the senator had thrown his way, the grants that kept him living in a style fit for a prince, which he was. Sara would not invoke his name.

  The others were herself and Chrysalis. The Crystal Palace had never been more than a front for Chrysalis’s real avocation, which was brokering information on everything that went down in J-town. Close observers of the scene took it for granted that sooner or later she’d reel in a thread and find it had a cobra tied to it.

  The cobra was named Hartmann. And Chrysalis pulled his string just at the moment when he was swollen with venom and quickest to strike.

  Why didn’t I confide in her? she asked herself as liquid crystal numbers flickered in the dim. There had been plenty of time, when they gained a guarded sort of friendship aboard the Stacked Deck, during the year that intervened. But Chrysalis had remained in some sense a rival. And Sara was not a woman who found sharing confidences an easy thing.

  UPLOAD COMPLETED, her screen said, with a beep for emphasis. She quickly broke the connection and began to disconnect the modem. Calm had come upon her, strange and a little frightening. The calm of an accident victim.

  I’m a target, she thought without emotion. If Chrysalis learned his secret, he has to assume that I know. She regretted pushing so hard at Hartmann’s staffers earlier in the day. He had to have heard about that, and the inference would be unavoidable.

  You’re such an innocent, she chided herself. Naive, just as Ricky said you were.

  But she wasn’t a total fool. She was wading in the shark tank now. She’d learned a lot of moves during a long and successful journalistic career. None of them would suffice to get her to dry land intact. That was maybe the most important thing she knew right now.

  She turned off the NEC’s power and clicked its cover closed. She tucked the miniature computer into her shoulder bag. Stood.

  It has to be Tachyon, she knew. He had to have his suspicions about what had been happening in Jokertown over the years—about what had happened in Syria and Berlin. He could read her mind, if he doubted her words.

  Besides, he thinks I’m … attractive. Even if he refused to believe her, there was a way to attach herself to him. She had been prepared to offer herself to him before, when she was convinced the Doughboy case would lead to Hartmann. He had a certain magnetism. It might not even be so bad.

  Don’t kid yourself. She had not been with a man since—since the tour. She hadn’t felt the lack. Even before the famous affair, sex hadn’t been her biggest priority.

  But survival was. At least until Andrea was avenged.

  At least Tachyon seemed the type to take his pleasure in a hurry and be done with it—no protracted grunting and groaning and Was It Good for You Too? She stabbed her cigarette to death on the Hilton logo embossed in the plastic ashtray. Pausing to dab some perfume on the insides of her wrists, where blue veins met white skin, she walked out the door.

  7:00 P.M.

  The convention had broken up for dinner and would reconvene at nine. Jack shared the glass elevator with a man who carried a tall stack of Domino’s pizzas, and stood with his face turned firmly to the door—he hated heights, a phobia that developed after Tachyon pointed out, forty years before, that a long fall was one of the few things that could kill him. The elevator doors opened, and Jack thankfully followed the pizzas down the hall to Hartmann’s headquarters. Floating up from the atrium lobby were the chords of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.” Bar pianists, he thought, seemed a bit overspecialized.

  Billy Ray, chest puffed out as he stood guard in the hallway in his white Carnifex suit, passed the deliveryman, but with a martial artist’s quickness, stepped in front of Jack as he tried to follow.

  “Did the senator send for you, Braun?”

  Jack looked at him. “Don’t push. It’s been a hard day.”

  Ray’s face, which had quite literally been rearranged in a fight, gave Jack a leer. “Your plight touches my heart. Let’s see what’s in the case.”

  Jack bit back his annoyance and opened his briefcase, revealing the cellular phone and computer-operated dialing system that kept him in touch with his delegates and Hartmann HQ.

  “Let’s see your ID.”

  Jack dug the laminated card out of his pocket. “You’re really a prat, Ray.”

  “Prat? What the fuck kinda word is that?” Ray’s twisted face leered at Jack’s ID. “That’s not the word the strongest ace in the world would use. That’s the kinda word some insignificant shivering weenie might use.” He licked his lips as if savoring the idea. “Golden Weenie. Yeah. That’s you.”

  Jack looked at Ray and folded his arms. Billy Ray had been riding him for over a year, ever since they’d met on the Stacked Deck. “Get out of my way, Billy.”

  Ray stuck out his jaw. “What are you gonna do if I don’t, weenie?” He smiled. “Give me your best shot. Just try it.”

  Jack comforted himself for a moment with the mental picture of squashing Ray’s head like a pumpkin. Ray’s wild card gave him strength and speed, and his kung fu or whatever gave him skill, but Jack figured he could still demolish him with one punch. On second thought Jack decided it wasn’t what he was here for.

  “Right now, my job’s getting the senator elected, and fighting with his bodyguard isn’t going to do that. But after Gregg’s in the White House, I promise I’ll kick a field goal with you, okay?”

  “I’m holding you to that, weenie.”

  “Any time after November eighth.”

  “See you at one minute after midnight on the ninth, weenie.”

  Ray stepped aside and Jack entered the headquarters suite. Open pizza boxes were surrounded by gorging campaign workers. TV monitors babbled network analyses to media-deaf ears. Jack found out which room Danny Logan was using, took a pizza box, and set off.

  The campaign parliamentarian was a white-haired, paunchy former congressman from Queens who had lost his seat when his Irish constituency was replaced by Puerto Ricans. Now he advised Democratic candidates on how to collect Irish-American votes.

  Jack saw him spread-eagled alone on his bed, surrounded by empty bottles and crumpled yellow legal-sized sheets, covered with numbers. “Better eat something,” Jack said, and dropped the pizza box onto Logan’s wide stomach.

  “It’s not going to make a bit of difference,” Logan said. His voice was thick. “We don’t have the numbers. We’re going to lose 9(c)—the test case.”

  Jack rubbed his eyes. “Refresh my memory.”

  “9(c) is a formula for apportioning delegates formerly committed to candidates who have dropped out of the race. According to 9(c), the ex-candidates’ delegates are divided among the remaining candidates in proportion to the number of votes the survivors won in those states. In other words, after Gephardt dropped out, his delegates from Illinois, say, were divided between Jackson, Dukakis, and us according to the percentage of the vote.”

  “Right.”

  “Barnett and a few of the party elders are challenging 9(c). They want to free the delegates to vote for whoever they want. Barnett figures he can pick up a few votes; the party elders want to start a movement for Cuomo or Bradley among the uncommitted.” Logan ran a hand through his thinning white hair. “We announced our support for the rule—thought we’d see who lined up for and against, to give us a hint how the California challenge will go.”

  “And we’re losing on 9(c)?” Jack reached for a bottle and drank from the neck.

  “Gregg’s making some phone calls. But since Dukakis came out against 9(c), we’re fighting a losing fight.” He slammed his fist into the bed. “Everyone keeps asking about those stories about the senator and that reporter lady. That we’re going to have another Hart fiasco. That’s where the resistance lies. Everybody’s smelling Gregg’s blood.”

  “What can you do?” Jack said.

  “Just try to delay.” Logan belched massively. “Lots of ways to delay in this game.”


  “And then?”

  “And then Gregg starts working on his concession speech.”

  Anger crackled in Jack like a burst of lightning. He waved a big fist. “We won the big primaries! We’ve got more votes than anybody.”

  “That’s why we’re a target. Aw, shit.” Tears were rolling from the corners of Logan’s eyes. He swiped at them with the back of one red paw. “Gregg stuck by me when I lost my seat. There isn’t a more decent man alive. He deserves to be president.” His face crumpled. “But we don’t have the numbers!”

  Jack watched as Logan began to weep, the pizza box jogging up and down on his broad stomach. Jack left his drink on the bedside table and wandered out of the room. Hopelessness sang in him like a keening wind.

  All that work, he thought. All the renewed hope that had got him into public life again. All for nothing.

  In the main HQ, campaigners were still clustered around pizza boxes. Jack asked where Hartmann was and was told the senator was cloistered with Devaughn and Amy Sorenson, plotting strategy. Then they’d try a last-minute phone blitz to win over some of the uncommitted superdelegates. Without anything else to do, Jack took a piece of pizza and settled down in front of the television monitors.

  “It’ll be a close vote.” Ted Koppel’s voice rang in Jack’s ear, speaking from the nearly empty floor of the convention to a cynical-looking David Brinkley in the sky booth. “The Hartmann forces are counting on this test to show their strength prior to the showdown over the California challenge.”

  “Isn’t. That. A risky. Strategy?” Brinkley’s curt manner seemed to inflate each word into its own sentence.

  “Hartmann’s strategy has always been risky, David. His articulation of liberal political principal in a race dominated by glib media personalities has always been thought risky by his own strategists. Even if he loses California tonight, Hartmann’s campaign manager told me that he’ll still stand by the Jokers’ Rights plank in the platform fight tomorrow.”