Jokertown Shuffle

  She pulled some of the wrinkled flesh off her eyes and looked up at him. "Who are you, Simon? You're not just some student, like you told me."

  "I'm just somebody who wants to do you some good, okay?"

  "Are you the longbow killer? Is that who you are?"

  He raised his arms. "Do I look like Robin Hood to you? Where's a homeboy going to learn to shoot a bow, for God's sake?"

  "You're no social worker, that's for sure." She bit off a piece of toast. "Harlem Hammer?"

  Shad gave a laugh. "I wish."

  "Black Shadow"

  "You're reaching, Shelley."

  "Black Shadow" There was a glow in her eyes. "I should have known!" Her voice was excited. "When I saw you just come out of the darkness like that, I should have known."

  "Keep your voice down, will you?" Shad looked furtively at the other diners. "I don't want anyone taking this seriously." He turned to Shelley. "Can't you just believe I'm someone you never heard of who wants to do you some good?"

  "Black Shadow" Her eyes glittered. "I cant help thinking about it."

  "Let's talk about the jumpers," Shad said.

  He kept trying to find the Shelley he knew beneath the mask of wrinkled joker flesh. She'd burned so brightly that he, with his frozen heart, had been attracted to the light and heat, had circled it like a sinister icicle moth.

  The second time he'd met her, it was to sit with her friends to watch a film she was supposed to star in. The film was in grainy black and white and consisted of Shelley lying naked on a bed and reciting lengthy monologues, written by Sebastian, largely on the subject of orgasms. Occasionally Sebastian himself, also naked, would wander into the frame, face the camera, and recite an ode to his cock. Shad, looking at the organ in question, could not comprehend what the fuss was about.

  The wretched film came alive only through the medium of Shelley. She disarmed the worst lines with genuine laughter; the best were said with glowing sincerity. Life bubbled out of her as from an artesian spring. Shad found himself enchanted.

  Now he could only find bits of her wrapped in the tired joker skin. Memory kept digging sharp nails into him. Her familiar words and gestures sent waves of sickness through his belly.

  Twenty grand, he thought-maybe she'd be Shelley again.

  She was supposed to establish contact by putting an ad in the Times. He got her a new wardrobe and a room in an uptown hotel that was so classy, they wouldn't turn down even a dog-faced joker. He rented the adjoining room for himself. Then he placed the ad for her.

  He said he had someplace to go and split.

  He called all of Croyd's numbers from his hotel room. There was no answer, and he left messages on the tapes, specifying date and time so that if Croyd woke up in a month's time, he'd know not to bother answering.

  When he got to the safe house, his answering machine was blinking with a message from Croyd. Croyd had apparently awakened as a joker this time, because his voice had turned into a high-pitched honk. He sounded like a goose with a cleft palate. Shad had to play the message twice to understand it. He returned the call at the number Croyd had given.

  "This is Black Shadow," Shad said. "Are you looking for work?"

  "I don't know if I can help you this time around," Croyd said. "I'm just planning to go back to sleep as soon as I can and forget I ever woke up looking like this."

  Shad understood maybe half the words, but the meaning was clear. "Can you do anything at all?" he asked.

  "I'm sort of like a giant bat, except without hair. I've got a membrane between elongated fingers and thumbs, and I have sonar, and I-" He hesitated for a moment. "I have this craving for bugs."

  "You can fly, though?"

  "That's the only good part, yeah."

  "I think you're just what I need. Can we meet?"

  "I don't feel like going out."

  "Can I bring you anything?"

  "A box of bugs, maybe. Assorted sizes."

  Shad thought about it for a moment. If you could buy a box of bugs anywhere, you could buy them in Jokertown. "I'll see what I can do," he said.

  He found a box of fried locusts in an exotic food store on Baxter and took it to his meeting. Croyd was repulsive, even for a joker, a three-foot-high pink-skinned homunculus with fleshy wings. Money changed hands, and locusts got eaten. Things were arranged.

  After a visit to his Gramercy Park flat for some gear, Shad slipped back into his adjoining room at the hotel a little before ten o'clock, knocked on the door to make sure Shelley was okay, and found her in bed watching a movie on TV He carefully bugged Shelley's room, including a video camera that he aimed through a fish-eye lens he installed in their adjoining door.

  "Here's what happens from this point on," Shad said. "We don't see each other till the meeting's over. They may be watching your room. You take the money now, you make the meet, you do what they tell you. Afterwards you come back here, and if things are clear, we'll talk."

  "What if they ask me where I got the money?"

  "Tell them you stole somebody's jewelry, then sold it." Shelley pulled her wrinkles up out of her soft brown eyes and looked at him. "Who are you? Why are you doing this?"

  "I don't know"

  She gave a nervous little laugh. "Which question did you answer?"

  Shad looked at her. "Both."

  The jumpers called Shelley at four-thirty in the morning. Evidently they'd got an early edition of the paper. They ordered her to meet them at eight, standing right out in the traffic circle at Chatham Square, with the twenty grand in her handbag. Shad watched her leave on the TV screen, called Croyd, turned on the VCR, and headed downstairs. He got on his motorcycle-a Vincent Black Shadow, natch, restored for No Dice by the Harlem Hammer-and headed for Chatham Square.

  He wished the jumpers hadn't set the meet for broad daylight.

  Before eight, he was on the rooftop of an apartment building on Baxter Street with Croyd. He could see Shelley standing nervously in the traffic circle a half block away. The morning rush-hour traffic was almost gridlocked around her. "Can you fly with one of these around your neck?" Shad asked.

  Croyd eyed the walkie-talkie carefully. Shad looked at the pink hairless body and wondered where Croyd's excess body mass had gone.

  "I don't think so."

  "I'll leave one here, then. After you're done, you can report."

  "walkie-talkies don't work so good around here. Too many tall buildings with metal inside."

  "These are police walkie-talkies. There are repeaters set up everywhere."

  "Where'd you get police walkie-talkies?"

  Shad shrugged. "I dressed up as a cop, walked into Fort Freak, and took a couple from the charging rack."

  Croyd gave a nasal honking laugh and shook his head. "Gotta admire your style, homes."

  "Shucks. Ain't nothin."

  He went down the stairs, then walked past where his motorcycle was parked. He put on a navy-blue beret, settled in a doorway where he could keep an eye on Shelley, and chewed a toothpick for a while.

  Black men hanging out in doorways are not unusual in America's teeming metropoloi. He concentrated on not being unusual. He concentrated on being Juve, and Juve was checking out the scene, with long Yardbird Parker riffs, all staccato, in his head.

  Juve tried real hard not to notice the little pink guy flapping through the air about five hundred feet up.

  It was almost eight-fifteen when he saw the powder-blue Lincoln Town Car easing through the gridlock a second time. His nerves started humming. Nouveau-riche criminals, he had often observed, often gave themselves away when it came to personal transportation. But the Lincoln went out of sight, and then Shad's attention snapped to Shelley. She was moving, walking with the light in the direction of the East River.

  Damn. She wasn't supposed to leave yet.

  Juve ambled out of the doorway, straddled the Black Shadow, and kick-started it. Shelley was disobeying instructions, and this couldn't be good. It wasn't until he eased the bike out int
o traffic that he realized what had just happened. His nerves began to sizzle. He cast a wild look down Worth Street, then Park Row, just in time to see the blue Lincoln turn right on Duane.

  Shelley was in the Lincoln. She'd just been jumped. Croyd was following the wrong body, damn it.

  Shad clutched and shifted, and the Vincent's engine boomed in synch with his thrashing heart. He raced down St. James Place, elbows and knees tucked in as the bike dived between stationary gridlocked vehicles. Leaving a trail of booming decibels, he performed a power slide behind One Police Plaza, then crossed Park Row without waiting for a break in the traffic, and felt as if he were saved only by some abstruse corollary of particle physics: He wasn't in the same state, particle or wave, long enough for anyone to hit him.

  Once onto Center, he saw the Town Car in the distance and throttled back. Center joined Lafayette, and the powderblue Lincoln turned right on Houston, then made another right on First, heading back into Jokertown. The streets were choked, and Shad had no trouble following.

  The Lincoln made a few more turns once it entered Jokertown, then turned off into a nineteenth-century brownstone warehouse with its tall windows closed off by more recent red brick. The electronic garage door closed behind the Lincoln, and Shad passed slowly on the motorcycle, turning neither left nor right, an odd prickling on the back of his neck. He wouldn't show up on this block again, certainly not on the bike. He'd be someone else entirely by the time he came back.

  He turned, positioning himself to see the Lincoln if it headed back east, then pulled over to the curb and tried to contact Croyd-nothing. He searched the sky for a flapping pink figure, saw no one.

  Time passed. Juve jacked a set of earphones into the radio and bobbed his head to a Kenny Clarke beat.

  Two Werewolves stood on the corner, wearing gang colors but only ski masks, which gave them a better field of vision than Liza Minnelli or Richard Nixon, a precaution in case any Asians with guns showed up. The gang war seemed to be proceeding nicely. They scoped Shad out, offered him procaine cut with baby laxative, were ignored.

  "Yo. Homes. This is Wingman."

  Juve straightened, reached for the police radio. The tw dealers saw him raise it and split.

  "Homes here."

  Undercover cops used the same sort of elliptical language, Shad knew-he hadn't been challenged with these radios yet, even though the police were listening. If anyone questioned him, he planned to be Detective-Third Sam Kozokowski of the Internal Affairs Division, and what was your name and badge fucking number? Which should shut them up in a hurry.

  "She just wandered around for a while," Croyd said, "then passed her handbag to a boy on a scooter. Then she wandered some more. Now she's in a restaurant, eating an Egg McMuffin. Anything I should do?"

  "She's been jumped. There's somebody else in there."

  "Shit."

  "I need you to follow a powder-blue Lincoln Town Car."

  "Snazzy wheels."

  Shad paused. This was the first time he'd heard the word snazzy in decades. He told Croyd where the car was, then went back to being Juve. A little shift in the infrared spectrum showed him where Croyd was hovering.

  It was almost one in the afternoon before Shad saw Croyd begin to move. Shad paralleled him on the bike. The zigzag course took him and Croyd back to Chatham Square.

  The dog body waited on the traffic circle. Shad pulled up behind the Lincoln, memorized the license plate, then parked where he'd been that morning. He went into the doorway and became Juve again.

  There was a new chalk drawing there, right on the stoop.

  It showed Shad and Shelley having breakfast in the Jokertown coffee shop. Shad looked at the picture and felt an eerie wind crawl up the back of his neck.

  He forced himself to stay in the doorway till he saw Shelley hail a cab. Then, checking behind himself constantly for tails, he headed for the hotel.

  "Yo. Wingman."

  "Hi, homes. The dog-faced joker I was following earlier collapsed-I think she got jumped again-but I saw her getting up as I followed the car. The Lincoln went back to the warehouse."

  "Thanks. I'll talk to you later."

  "We'll do some beer and bugs. Wingman out."

  Shad sped back through the tape he'd made of Shelley's room. Two people had scoped the place. They were in their late teens, by the look of them, the boy in stylish leathers, the girl in denim and an eye patch. She seemed to have only one hand. The boy had got them through the lock with a raking gun. The one-eyed girl put something on top of the tall cabinet that held the TV Then they both left the way they had come.

  At least neither of them had been Chalktalk.

  Shelley showed up a few minutes later, looking as if she'd been through a lot.

  Shad reached for the phone. "Hello?"

  "This is the front desk."

  "Oh. Hi. Front desk, right."

  "Say that yes, you want to stay another day."

  "Yes. I want to stay another day."

  "You still want to pay cash."

  " I still want to pay cash."

  "You'll have to come down and do it in person."

  "I'll be down in a few minutes."

  He met her at the elevator and pushed the emergency stop button to halt it between floors.

  "I thought you were going to have a new body," he said. "Yes. They've promised me one." She licked her pendulous lips. "The thing is, I get to pick."

  "Oh."

  "They've got a catalog. Just like L. L. Bean."

  "Tell me what happened."

  " I got jumped again. They put a bag over my head. They drove around for a while, then took me into a little room. It was fitted out like a prison cell-metal walls, a heavy door with big locks and a barred window. There was mesh overhead and a guy with a gun walking around."

  "Okay."

  "There were other cells. I could hear people talking. Some were crying and screaming." She gave a strange little smile. "I didn't care. It was wonderful. I was human again. Young! And beautiful. They showed me my face in a mirror. I was gorgeous."

  "Who showed you?"

  "Two kids. Boys, maybe fifteen. Zits, but real good clothes. Rolexes, jewelry. The gold chains must have cost fifty grand. And there was a joker." She gave an expression of distaste. "Brown, with a carapace. Looked like a cockroach."

  "Did they call him Kafka?"

  "Yeah." She pulled her wrinkles back and looked at him. "How'd you know?"

  "He was around a few years ago. I knew him slightly when I joined the Egyptian Masons."

  Her eyes widened. "The Egyptian Masons? You mean the-the ones who="

  "Yeah. Those guys. I'd only just joined, then somebody blew up their temple with me in it. I barely got out, and I didn't know there were any other survivors until they started trying to toss people off Aces High."

  She looked at him, her lips twitching in what might, under the wrinkles, be a smile. "You are Black Shadow, aren't you?"

  "My name's Simon." "Uh-huh. Sure."

  "So what happened in this cell?"

  "Somebody else came in. Dr. Tachyon."

  Shad's mind whirled. He forced himself to speak. "You sure?"

  "Who wouldn't recognize Tachyon?" She gave a shiver. "Jesus, I never expected that. I was scared he'd read my mind or something and figure I knew you."

  Maybe he did, Shad thought. "Did you see a one-eyed woman?"

  "No. Why?"

  "Never mind. Just tell me what happened."

  "Tachyon made a speech. About joker rights. Now I had a chance to experience life as a member of the oppressed, and so naturally I'd want to join him in his great work." "And the great work?"

  She shrugged. "They're jumping the rich. If I agree to do what they want, I get jumped into a new body. I clean out the bank accounts and the family silver. Half goes to Tachyon and the jumpers, and the other half I get to keep to set up a new life somewhere. Unless-" she hesitated, "I decide to do it again. And again. He made that offer. I build up a nice ne
st egg, then they jump me into whatever body I choose when I want to retire."

  "What did you say?"

  "I said I'd have to consider it."

  "What are you going to do?"

  She looked at him. "What do you want me to do?"

  "It's your call. I'm not going to make you do anything." She took a breath. " I hate this body. I don't want to hurt anyone else by jumping somebody into it. But"-she shook her head-"I have to think about it."

  "This thing gets settled, maybe we can put the victims into new bodies."

  Why had he said that? he wondered. He didn't really believe it. He wanted Shelley back. That's why.

  He made himself think about Tachyon.

  "It'll take a few days," she said. " I have to familiarize myself with the target out of the catalog, know what moves to make. I stay in the cell the whole time."

  She'd made up her mind, he realized. The thing was going to happen.

  He remembered an old film he'd seen, The Third Man. Orson Welles had taken Joseph Cotten up on a Ferris wheel, pointed at all the tiny little people below, and said, "If you could have a million dollars, but one of those little people dies, would you do it?"

  Some stranger, some little antlike speck below the Ferris wheel, was going to end up in a dog's body and have her bank account plundered.

  "When you're free of them, call me," he said. "The number is 741-PINE. P-1-N-E. There will be an answering machine. Leave a message where I can find you."

  "Okay."

  "The number?"

  "741-PINE."

  "Good."

  He started the elevator again and got off two floors down.

  He had things to do.

  Shad decided it was time to find out a few things about Tachyon. He had to start somewhere, and where he ended up was the public library and the back-issue newspaper files. The responsible papers were too discreet about what they knew to be of much use, but the tabloid made a lot more of it all.

  TACHYON QUITS! BROKEN HEART CITED. That was the headline on the Post. Shad looked at the inevitable pinup on page 3: "Happy Holly" was said to like "professional wrestling, baby ducks, and naughty nighties for that Someone Special," a strange summation that had Shad picturing her displaying herself for a slavering Haystack Calhoun in a frilly negligee with little yellow ducks on it.