Jokertown Shuffle

  Good luck, Shad thought.

  The military cordon around Ellis Island had been tightened after some jumpers had hopped into the bodies of some coast guardsmen and taken their cutter for a joyride.

  Shad's eyes narrowed as he considered the situation on Ellis Island. Maybe it was something he needed to be concerned about. He didn't much give a damn if some idealistic jokers wanted to claim Ellis Island as a refuge from oppression. Good luck to them. But if killers were using the place as a hideout, that was another matter.

  There were supposed to be a lot of people on the island, however. And Shad was only one person. He'd always worked alone. And if he got jumped, there was no guarantee he'd ever end up anywhere, or anyone, he wanted to be.

  Funny if it ended that way. A man with so many different identities, permanently stuck in somebody else's body… Who, he found himself wondering, still remembered Simon? Simon had been an uptown kind of guy, he remembered, not the kind of man to hang around Jokertown. So why was a joker looking for him?

  He finished his coffee, washed out the cup, put it in the dishwasher. He went back into the bedroom and looked at the three suitcases sitting next to the bed. One was filled with forty pounds of rapture, with a street value of approximately a quarter million. The other two valises contained $100,000 in hundred-dollar bills, the stuff he'd taken from the Snowboy-Werewolf deal and blamed on Dover Dan.

  A hundred grand. Not bad for a night's work. And with any luck, he'd started a gang war as a bonus.

  He'd have to start moving the stuff out of his apartment. Starting, he figured, with the drugs. He'd keep enough to pay his informants and dump the rest in the Hudson.

  An image sang through his mind, a distant orchard, peaceful green fields dappled with cloud shadows, a distant castle…

  Stupid, he thought. Time to hit the streets.

  Summer 1976. Hartmann and Carter and Udall and Kennedy all slugging it out in the Garden, cutting little deals with each other, planting knives in one another's backs.

  New York was a city on fire. And everyone, suddenly, was on one side or another. You were with the jokers or against them. On the side of justice or an obstacle in its path. He'd never known a time so hot.

  Neil had been an ace for years-it had come on gradually during his early adolescence-but after his parents and sister were killed, he'd never done anything with the power, nothing but disappear into the darkness when the memories got to be too much and he didn't want to be Neil anymore.

  Senator Hartmann had been the one who had inspired Neil to become a public ace in the first place. Neil was in the hotel to hear a speech by Linus Pauling, and he wandered into the wrong ballroom by accident. He still remembered Hartmann's words, the ringing phrases, the calls for action and justice. Within a week, Black Shadow was born, born right in Hartmann's office, Shad and the senator shaking hands and smiling for the cameras.

  A little problem, Hartmann told him a little while later. A little problem in Jokertown. An honest-to-God Russian spy, someone trying to get into Tachyon's lab to learn Tachyon's approaches for controlling the wild card. The Russians were infecting people deliberately, killing the jokers, inducting the aces into the military. They wanted to find a less drastic method and thought maybe Tachyon was working on it.

  The night was hot. Marchers were in the streets. Fire seemed to burn in Shad's heart as he found the agent and his equipment-his cameras and developers and one-time pads and he took the agent apart, breaking bones, putting a chill into his sweating skin. He left the man swinging from a lamppost right in front of the clinic, a placard pinned to his chest announcing the man's, and the Soviet Union's, crimes.

  Something had snapped in him, a wildfire that raged way out of control. Hartmann s call for compassion and justice had twisted somehow into a call for burning action and revenge.

  Shad's heart leapt as the crowd tore the spy apart, as the night burst out in fire and madness. It wasn't until later, when he saw Hartmann fall apart on television, that he knew how he'd betrayed the senator's ideals.

  Even after the riot was over, he couldn't figure it out. He hadn't known such rage was in him. He found Hartmann, slipped into his apartment before the man had even had a chance to recover from the disaster of the convention, and asked him what to do.

  Hartmann said, plainly and quietly, that he should turn himself in. But anger blazed up in Shad again, anger warring with anguish, and he argued with Hartmann for an hour, then left the apartment. A little while later he did it again, found a couple of homeboys mugging tourists on the Deuce and left them swinging, broken, from lampposts.

  The lampposts were well on their way to becoming his trademark.

  He was in vague contact with Hartmann after that. Hartmann always urged him to turn himself in but would never call the authorities himself. Shad respected him for the courage it took to do that.

  And in answer to the guilt that clawed at him, he left more people swinging from lampposts.

  The evil joy, the uncontrollable rage, that he'd first felt was less in evidence now. It hadn't flared up in years. Maybe he was growing up-he'd made a decision around the same time- to break with Hartmann. He didn't dare compromise the senator anymore.

  Now he just hung people from lampposts because it was what he did. He didn't get much satisfaction out of it. It was an unsatisfactory thrill, like substituting pornography for good sex. Maybe it kept the crime rate down, kept a few people honest. He liked to think so.

  But he was getting restless. People like Anton and the Werewolves weren't worthy of his talents.

  He wanted to work on something big.

  Shad went to a safe house in Jokertown and dressed as Mr. Gravemold, the joker who smelled like death. He put on Gravemold's feathered deathmask and doused himself with chemical stink.

  People around him shrank from the smell. Shad liked that. It gave him privacy. But he didn't want to smell it himself. When he was Gravemold, he chemically numbed his nasal passages and taste buds, and he'd tried a lot of substances over the years. By far the best proved to be highquality cocaine he took off dealers. He could get used to the stuff, he figured, except he had much better ways of getting high.

  The hallelujah chorus rang through Mr. Gravemold's sinuses as he walked around Jokertown looking for the houndfaced lady. He asked everyone Gravemold knew: Jube, Father Squid, people in relief agencies. People told Gravemold everything they knew, just to get rid of the smell, but nobody had seen the joker who had asked after Simon.

  He walked beneath the lamppost outside the Jokertown Clinic as if it were any other lamppost. As if it were a place that had no meaning for him. It didn't. To Mr. Gravemold, it was just a lamppost.

  A chalk landscape, its colors faded and scuffed, occupied part of the sidewalk. A kind of lagoon with odd-shaped boats on it. He found himself watching it to see if it came alive. Nothing happened.

  After nightfall, Mr. Gravemold bought some lemons in a fruit and vegetable store, went back to the safe house, dumped his smelly clothes in a trunk, scrubbed himself with the lemons to kill the scent, then took a shower. He still had to use some of No Dice's cologne to cover what remained of the stink.

  He tried to figure out who he was going to be. No Dice had no business in Jokertown tonight. Simon had been gone for years. People might be looking for Juve. This was the wrong neighborhood for Wall Walker, for the Gramercy Park identity, and for the cop. Maybe he could just be Neil Langford. The thought came with a rush of surprise.

  What the hell.

  He looked at the clothes in the wardrobe and wondered what Neil would wear for a night in Jokertown.

  It came to him that he had no idea. He'd been playing all these parts for so long, he'd lost track of who he really was. He decided finally to dress in jeans, shirt, and a midnightblue windbreaker. The cocaine was still making him sniffle, so he put some tissues in a pocket. He pulled a watch cap down over his ears and set out into the night.

  He made a businesslike quartering of Jok
ertown, starting with its southern tip around One Police Plaza. His senses were abnormally acute, and he was highly sensitive to body heat-he didn't have to walk down every alley or look in every doorway.

  John Coltrane ran long arpeggios in his head, working on McCoy Tyner's "The Believer."

  He moved down the street like a cool breeze, feeding as he walked, taking little pieces of body heat that no one would miss, pieces that made him stronger, made him glow with warmth. The mellow buzz of all the stolen photons zoomed along his nerves and were far more satisfying than the cocaine could ever be. People shivered as he passed, glanced behind them, looked wary. As if someone had walked across their graves.

  As he walked, he found old chalk drawings, faded with time or rain. Fantasy landscapes, green and inviting, smeared or beaten by pedestrians. Urban scenes, some that Shad recognized, some so strange as to be almost impressionistic. None of them signed. But all of them, Shad knew, from the same hand.

  Chalktalk. The perfect name. JUMP THE RICH.

  He found her across the street from the graffito, under the theater marquee advertising Polanski's Jokertown. She had paused there, an old brown blanket around her shoulders, her stuff in a white plastic shopping bag. She paused in the theater's glow and glanced around as if she were looking for someone.

  Shad couldn't remember ever having seen her before. He wrapped darkness around himself and waited.

  The joker paused for a while, then shrugged her blanket further around her shoulders and walked on. The top of one of her tennis shoes, Shad saw, was flapping loose.

  Darkness cloaked him as he walked across the street. He put out a hand, touched her shoulder, saw her jump. Took a little body heat as well. "What do you want with Simon?" His voice was low, raspy, faintly amused. Black Shadow's voice.

  She jumped, turned around. Her hound eyes widened, and she backed away. He knew she was looking at… nothing. An opaque cloud of black, featureless, untextured, taller than a man, a nullity with a voice.

  "Nothing," she said, backpedaling. "Someone-someone I used to know"

  "Perhaps I can find him." Advancing toward her. "Perhaps I can give him a message."

  "You-" she pushed out a breath, gasped air in, "you don't have to=" Her wrinkled face worked. Tears began to fall from her hound-dog eyes. "Tell him Shelley is, is…" She broke down.

  Shad let the darkness swirl away from him, reveal his upper body.

  "Simon!" Her voice was almost a shriek. She held out her arms, reached for him. "Simon, it's Shelley. I'm Shelley. This is what I look like now"

  Shelley, he thought. He looked at her in stunned surprise as her arms went around him.

  Shelley. Oh shit.

  He took her to an all-night coffee shop and bought her a watery vanilla shake. She chewed on the plastic straw till it was useless, and tore up several napkins.

  "I got jumped," she said. "I-somebody must have pointed me out to them."

  "How do you know that?"

  "Because whoever jumped me marched my body to the bank and cleaned out my trust fund. I'd just turned twentyone and got control of it. Almost half a million dollars." JUMP THE RICH, Shad thought.

  "I went to court," she said, "and I proved who I am, but it was too late. Whoever was in my body just disappeared. I never went back to drama school-what's the point? And I got fired from my job at the restaurant. I can't carry trays with these hands." She held up padded flippers with fused fingers and a tiny useless thumb. Tears poured from her brown eyes. Little bits of paper stuck to her furry face as she dabbed at tears with bits of torn napkins.

  "Why did you go away?" she wailed.

  "That was a bad scene you were in. I told you it was time to leave."

  She stirred her shake with her useless straw. "Everyone started getting killed."

  "I told you."

  "You didn't tell me they'd start dying."

  "I told you it would get as bad as it gets." "Why didn't you take me with you?"

  He just looked at her while guilt planted barbed hooks in his insides. He'd done what he'd done and just walked away, as if Shelley had been no more to him than one of the freaks he left hanging from lampposts or as if she were as invulnerable as she seemed to think she was.

  He hadn't thought he could save her, a little rich white girl stuck in a scene so evil, so decadent, so glamorous that it probably would have crumbled into violence and madness even without his prodding. But she hadn't seen it comingshe led a charmed life, like everyone in her set, protected by her beauty, her trust fund, her sense of life as something to be devoured, inhaled, like the drugs she and her friends bought from the smiling, menacing street hustlers who saw them only as victims, as people to be led, step by step, into a place where a temporary and frantic safety could be acquired only by giving away their money, their bodies, eventually their lives. He didn't think he could have saved her. In his best professional judgement at the time, it was impossible. But then he'd never know. He hadn't tried.

  She took another napkin from the dispenser and began to tear it into shreds. "Bobbie's dead. Somebody beat her to death with one of her sculptures. And Sebastian's dead. And Niko."

  "I'm not surprised." He'd killed Niko with his own two hands, snapping the man's neck with a quick, practiced twist. He'd never met anyone who deserved it more. Left him on his bed with his head facing the wrong way, gazing into the nodded-off face of his junkie chicken, Rudy-Rudy, who used to appear in Sebastian's little art films, telling stories about his life and shooting up between his toes and talking about how much he wanted to fuck the cameraman.

  "Violet threw herself off a roof. Or maybe the police pushed her. That's what Sebastian said, anyway. And Rudy's on the streets. Maybe it was Rudy who pointed me out to them. The jumpers. But he wasn't the guy who contacted me."

  Shad looked down into his coffee. It was cold, and he hadn't used any of the heat. His reflexes were singing a warning, telling him not to ask the next question, that whatever the answer, it was going to lead him into another pit of tragedy. "Who contacted you?" he said. "Why?"

  "A lousy twenty grand," she said, "and I get out of this body." She looked up at him, and her mouth twitched up in a smile. "You wouldn't happen to have twenty thousand dollars, would you?"

  He looked at her, the sense of horror deepening, widening, ready to swallow him in. "Twenty grand?" he said. "Maybe I could get it."

  He bought her a room in a Jokertown hotel and said he'd come the next day with more money. Then he slipped away, walking north, toward his building off Gramercy Park.

  He'd met her at a dope deal. He'd been following this guy with the stunningly original name of Uptown Brown, brown being the color of the bad heroin he sold in Harlem in order to support a more fashionable existence on Fifth Avenue east of Central Park, brown also being the color of his victims, who shot the stuff and then went into respiratory arrest from whatever it was-Drano, battery acid, whateverhe cut it with.

  Shad had arrived at the address he'd been given and walked up the outside of the building to peer in the windows. He'd been expecting the usual meeting, guys in overcoats and shades carrying suitcases and shotguns, but what he saw was a party. Young white people drinking spritzers or imported beer while someone banged out a lot of furious, clashing chords on a cream-colored baby grand. And among them was Uptown and a couple other guys who didn't fit into the scene at all.

  He just walked in the door and said he was Simon. That was how he met Sebastian, the poet-slash-filmmaker; Bobbie, the sculptor; Shelley, the actress; Violet, the composer; and Niko, the director, a man who liked to direct other little dramas besides those on stage and intended to direct everyone in the room straight into hell so he could watch them flare and burn.

  Shad found out his informant wasn't wrong. It was a dope deal he was part ou Everyone in the room was hustling someone or something, drugs and art, drugs and money, or drugs and real life, this last being something this little set craved and had never, to hear them tell it, experienced.
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  If it hadn't been for Shelley, he would never have come back. These people weren't his problem. People dying back in his old neighborhood were his problem, dying from Uptown's bullets and bad drugs. Now he knew why Uptown was peddling bad junk. He'd found another class of people he could move among, and he didn't care what happened to his old customers.

  But for some reason Shad found himself returning… He saw something duck into an alleyway ahead of him, and his nerves went on the alert. He cautiously called the darkness down and moved toward the entrance.

  Looking down the length of the alley, he could see at the other end a small figure running in heavy boots and baseball cap. Chalktalk, he knew, the street artist.

  "Hey," he called, but Chalktalk kept running.

  He looked down at his feet. Drawn with careful attention to detail was a picture of him, of Shad, dressed in his windbreaker and watch cap, leaning in the doorway and reading the New York Post by the light of a streetlamp.

  Shad ran after her, but Chalktalk was gone.

  "Simon. It's almost noon. I was afraid you weren't coming."

  "I thought I'd buy you breakfast. Then some clothes. Okay?"

  Shelley looked at him carefully. "I've been thinking, Simon, you know?"

  Shad looked at the shabby hotel room-the thinning carpet and broken venetian blinds. "Let's get out of this rattrap." Pimps in the hallways, junkies shooting up in the back rooms. Jokertown. "I'll get you a nicer place tonight."

  "I could stay with you."

  He frowned. "I'm sort of between lodgings at present." He bought her breakfast at the same coffee shop they'd been in the night before. "Here's what I think," he said. "You contact the jumpers. I'll give you the twenty grand. Then we see what they want you to do."