Ace in the Hole

  The second ballot was called early, thirty minutes after the first, just so campaign managers could have enough numbers to see how things were going. Hartmann gained about fifty votes, mainly at the expense of Dukakis and Gore.

  The convention burst into a series of sweaty huddles while media commentators tried to make up their minds whether fifty votes signified a “trend” toward Hartmann, or just a “lean.” Floor managers went into fits at the thought of delegates slipping through their fingers.

  The pandemonium went on four hours. By the time a sleepy-eyed Jim Wright called for the third ballot just before midnight, the three commercial networks had died of inertia and gone back to their standard summer fare of reruns and Johnny Carson, and only PBS was covering the action for an audience of a few thousand hard-core political junkies.

  Hartmann hit an even eighteen hundred. The trend was solidifying. Hats and gliders zoomed ceilingward. Jack picked up his podium and threw it about a hundred feet into the air, a tumbling star-spangled sign of triumph, then reached out and carefully caught it before it could brain somebody.

  The celebrations in Jack’s suite went on for hours. He was stumbling off to bed before he realized that he really should have called Bobbie. Even if she turned out to be the starlet with the cellulite obsession, Jack figured he could have given her enough healthful exercise to make her happy.

  10:00 P.M.

  —Peachtree, tiled and echoic. They walked arm in arm. Sara had drunk two glasses of wine. It was the first alcohol she had had for over a year. She had never drunk much liquor—except for the weeks after the tour.

  Ricky was regaling her with the latest candidate jokes going the rounds. “How about this one: If Dukakis, Hartmann, and Brother Leo went boating together on Lake Lanier, and the boat’s engine blew up and it sank, who’d be saved?”

  “The nation,” Sara said. “Last time I heard it, it was Reagan, Carter, and Anderson. But then, you’re too young to remember.”

  “What goes around comes around, Rosie. But I was old enough to vote in ’80, if barely.”

  “You probably think I’m a wicked old lady robbing the cradle.” She frowned; where was that coming from? Steady, she told herself.

  Ricky patted her hand. “I certainly hope so, Rosie.” He laughed then, to show it was a joke. She felt the tension come into her, just the same.

  A thin current of sound was running down the corridor, between the rocks of their laughter. “What’s that song?” she asked.

  He raised a brow at her. “Don’t you know it?” She did, but she’d needed something to say. “It’s ‘Mack the Knife.’ Standby of every low-rent lounge singer in the northern hemisphere. The Muzak’s broken in here, see, so they hired this white dude to walk around and whistle.”

  She laughed and squeezed his arm briefly. Damn. What am I doing? She looked around, almost as if seeking some external cause for her behavior.

  Movement behind. Her tongue pushed out between suddenly dry lips; she made her face turn to the side, as if she was admiring the brash fashions draped on the headless silver-and-black-and-olive-green mannequins posing in a boutique window.

  “Somebody’s following us. No, don’t look!”

  “Give me some credit, Rosie. I’m a journalist, remember? I didn’t sleep through your seminar.”

  He glanced to the side, then faced forward. “Just some kid in a leather jacket.” A frown spoiled the smooth perfection of his forehead. “Looked like he had a hunchback. Poor son of a bitch.”

  She looked back again. “Now, quit that, or you’re going to turn into a pillar of salt. You were the one who wanted subtlety.”

  “I don’t like the way he looks,” she said. “He—feels—wrong, somehow.”

  “The instincts of a seasoned ace reporter. Well-seasoned.”

  “Is that a crack about my age?”

  “The wine you drank.” He patted her hand. “That’s the spirit. Whistling past a graveyard, like. Walk on. Keep your head up. Never let them see you’re afraid. It unleashes all those primitive Nordic predatory instincts.”

  She fought her neck muscles, which were trying to rotate her head toward the leather boy. “You think he could be one of Barnett’s little helpers?”

  “Been known to happen during this convention, Rosie. Wouldn’t that be an irony, to get jumped on suspicion of being Hartmann fans?”

  This time she did look back. He was sauntering along, hands in pockets, first the white shoe, then the black. Ricky was right, one shoulder definitely rode higher than the other. There was something a little too elaborate about the way he wasn’t paying attention to them.

  At least he’s small. But then, Ricky wasn’t exactly Arnold Schwarzenegger.…

  Once around a curve, Ricky grabbed her hand and they took off running, Sara wobbling on her ingenue heels, Ricky’s Guccis slapping the rubber runner. The passageway wound round and around. She kept looking back, saw no sign of pursuit.

  They slowed, Sara puffing for breath, Ricky gracious enough to pretend to be winded. “One more turn and we’re back in the Hyatt,” Ricky said. “Another potentially ugly confrontation avoided. That’s how we eighties types handle things.”

  They turned the bend and there he was. Leaning with his back and his cheek against cool tile, sizing them up. He started to whistle: “Mack the Knife.”

  Sara grabbed Ricky’s wrist and hauled him back around out of sight. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea, Rosie,” he said. “We should just bluff our way past.”

  “Don’t you see?” The terror was upon her. It glowed in her eyes like white-hot wires. “How did he get in front of us?”

  “Some kind of service passage. We’re right near the hotel. If he causes trouble we can make a lot of noise and someone will come rescue us.”

  And then he came out of the wall at them, lunging like a shark.

  Like a dancer Ricky swung Sara behind him. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “Party party,” the boy said with a Hans und Franz accent, laughing, spraying spittle from loose lips. “Everybody get down tonight.”

  There was a buzzing in the air, oppressive as the humid night outside Peachtree Center’s artificial chill. The boy swung a hand karate-fashion for the side of Ricky’s neck.

  Ricky wasn’t a racquetball ace for nothing. Nothing wrong with his reflexes; he blocked with a spidery forearm.

  The hand went through it. There was a savage shrilling moment like a buzz saw hitting a knot in a plank, and then Ricky’s forearm and splayed hand just sort of toppled.

  Ricky stood staring at the red hoop of blood springing out the suit-coated stump. Sara screamed.

  Ricky pointed his arm, hosing his own blood into his assailant’s eyes. The boy fell back, sputtering and swiping at his face. Ricky hurled himself at him, windmill arms whirling.

  “Rosie, run!”

  Her legs would not move. Ricky was pummeling the boy with stump and inexpert fist. It looked like the worst of playground bullying; Ricky was a head taller, with a good six inches’ reach—

  That sound came again. She knew she would hear it every time she closed her eyes for the rest of her life. She smelled something like burned hair.

  Ricky’s arm fell off at the shoulder. His blood vomited over the wall, white with a mosaic sprinkling of blue and green and yellow.

  He turned a martyr’s face to her. “Rosie,” he said, and his gums were shocks of blood, “please run, for god’s sake run—”

  The hand passed playfully. His lower jaw was sheared away with the rest of his words. His tongue flopped at her unmoored, a ghastly parody of lust.

  She turned and fled, the charnel-house sound pursuing.

  As she rounded the corner the heel of her left shoe snapped. She went to her knee with an impact like a gunshot. She skidded twenty feet, bounced off a wall. She tried to struggle up. Her leg would not carry her; she fell heavily against the tile.

  “Oh, Ricky,” she sobbed. “I’m sorry.” Sorry f
or blowing the escape he had bought her with his life; sorry for the strange guilty surge of relief down underneath the terror that she would not have to face the question that another night in his room would bring between them.

  She began to push herself along with her hands, knees up, scooting sideways on her rump. He came around the corner, looking twelve feet tall. Blood splashed his leather and his skin, unnaturally bright in the fluorescent light. He was smiling around teeth like a collapsing fence.

  “Der Mann sends his regards.”

  Single-mindedly she sculled away from him. There was nothing in the world but the motions of a losing race.

  —And voices, down the corridor, welling up from where the passage from the Hyatt dipped under Center Avenue. A party of delegates in Jackson buttons appeared, black, middle-aged, well dressed, talking happily amongst themselves about their candidate’s last-minute upsurge at day’s end.

  The killer in leather raised his head. A brief pigeon of a woman in a salmon dress with a bow beneath capacious breasts looked up, saw him with the blood upon him and his victim strewn into the corridor bend behind. She jammed fists beneath her eyes and screamed like hell.

  The boy’s eyes blazed at Sara. “Remember Jenny Towler,” he snarled. And walked through the wall.

  11:00 P.M.

  Mine!

  Puppetman felt the searing, twisted menace approaching. Gregg turned as Mackie ghosted through the wall of his bedroom, a crooked smile set above his crooked shoulders. There was a splotchy brown red stain on his right hand up to the elbow that could only be one thing.

  Mine!

  “All the fucking hotel rooms look the same,” Mackie said.

  “Get the hell out of here,” Gregg snapped.

  Mackie’s grin slid from his punched face. “I wanted to tell you,” he said, the German accent broader than usual. “I offed the nigger, but the woman—”

  Mine! He’s mine!

  Gregg was surprised that he was able to hear Mackie’s voice over Puppetman at all. The power slammed relentlessly against Gregg’s hold, again and again and again. Mackie’s raw, violent insanity radiated wildly, leaking from the boy’s pores with an odor of decomposing meat, and spreading out in front of Puppetman like a rotting banquet.

  Gregg had to get Mackie away quickly or the tenuous hold he had on himself would be entirely gone.

  “Out,” Gregg repeated desperately. “Ellen’s here.”

  Mackie’s mouth twisted, a sneer. He fidgeted, restlessly shifting his weight from foot to foot. “Yeah. I know. In the other room watching goddamn TV. They were showing Chrysalis’s funeral. I saw her but she didn’t see me. I could’ve buzzed her easy.” He licked his lips. His nervous stare flicked across Gregg’s body like a whip as Puppetman hammered again at the bars. “I don’t know where Morgenstern is,” he said at last.

  “Then go find her.”

  “I wanted to see you.” Mackie whispered it like a lover, a voice of velvet sandpaper. The lust was honeyed syrup, golden and rich and sweet.

  Puppetman screeched in need. The bars in Gregg’s mind started to crumble. “Get out of here,” he hissed between clenched teeth. “You didn’t get Downs, now you tell me you can’t find Sara. What the hell good are you to me? You’re just a useless punk, with or without your ace.”

  He’d always been easy with Mackie, placating the kid, feeding his ego. Even with Puppetman controlling the hunchback’s emotions, he’d been afraid of Mackie—using him was like juggling nitroglycerine: it looked easy, but he was aware that he would only get one mistake. Gregg thought he might have made it now. Mackie’s face had gone grim and cold. The lust did a quicksilver change to something simpler and more dangerous. Mackie’s right hand was beginning to vibrate unconsciously as a threatening whine shivered the air.

  “No,” Mackie said, shaking his head. “You don’t know. You’re the Man. I love—”

  Gregg cut him off. If there was going to be an explosion, it might as well be a big one. “I told you to take out two people who are a danger to us. They’re both walking around now while you’re telling me how good you are and how much I mean to you.”

  Mackie blinked. Twitched. “You’re not listening—”

  “No, I’m not. And I won’t listen until all the loose ends are taken care of. You understand that?”

  Mackie took a halting step toward Gregg, his hand up. The fingers were a dangerous blur.

  Gregg stared him down. It was absolutely the hardest thing he’d ever done. Puppetman was a berserk thing behind his eyes, gibbering and frothing with the closeness of Mackie and the emotional backwash spilling around him. Gregg knew that he had only seconds before Puppetman surfaced entirely, before the mental bonds reversed and he would be the one underneath. Yet while he held Puppetman, there were no controls on Mackie and no way to dampen the madness. If the ace took another step, if he swiped at Gregg with that hand …

  Gregg shuddered with effort.

  “Come to me afterward, Mackie,” he whispered. “After it’s all done, not before.”

  Mackie lowered his hand, his eyes. The red violence around him faded slightly.

  “All right,” he said softly. “You’re the Man. Yes.” He reached out with his hand, safely quiet now, and Gregg fought the impulse to back away and run. He concentrated on holding Puppetman for just a moment longer.

  Mackie’s dry fingertips traced Gregg’s cheek with a strange tenderness, dragging across stubble.

  Gregg closed his eyes.

  When he opened them again, Mackie was already gone.

  Drawing his fingers down the strings, Tachyon pulled a sigh of music from the violin. The Secret Service agent swung his head in that heavy slow way of a bull confronting an irritant. Tach nodded politely to him. The man brightened considerably, cast a furtive glance over his shoulder, and quickstepped to where the alien was sitting cross-legged on the floor outside Fleur’s room. Sounds of revelry drifted down the hall from a nearby room party.

  “Hi.”

  “Hello.”

  “My daughter’s crazy about you, and she’ll kill me if she finds out I met you and hadn’t gotten your autograph. Would you mind?”

  “No, I’d be delighted.” Tach pulled a notebook from his pocket. “Her name?”

  “Trina.”

  For Trina with love. He signed his name with a flourish.

  “Uh, excuse me, but what are you doing out here?”

  “I’m going to play the violin for the lady in that room.”

  “Oh, a little romance, huh?”

  “I hope. I won’t make any trouble, sir. May I stay?”

  The agent shrugged. “Yeah, what the hell. But if people complain—”

  “Not to worry.”

  Tach lifted his bow, tucked the violin beneath his chin. A few years ago he had arranged Chopin’s Etude in A flat for solo violin. The notes fell from the strings like crystal beads, like water chuckling over stones. But beneath the joy was a strain of sadness.

  The faces of women. Blythe, Angelface, Roulette, Fleur, Chrysalis. Farewell, old friend. The door to the hotel room was flung violently open. Tach stared up into her smoldering brown eyes. Hello, my love?

  “What are you doing? Why won’t you leave me alone? Please, please, just leave me alone!” Her hair flew about her face.

  “I can’t.”

  She was on her knees before him, hands gripping his shoulders. “Why not?”

  “It makes no sense to me. How shall I explain it to you?”

  “You’ve twisted and corrupted everything you’ve ever touched. Now you’re trying to do it to me.”

  He didn’t deny it. Couldn’t deny it. “I think we could make each other well. Wash away the guilt.”

  “Only God has that power.”

  He tentatively touched a strand of hair with the tip of a finger. “You have her face. Can it be that you don’t have her soul?”

  “You damn fool! You’ve made her into something that never existed.”

 
She jerked her head away. His fingers trailed across her cheek, and he felt moisture. The violent withdrawal carried her a few steps to his left. Fleur leaned her forehead against the wall, every line of her body etched in agony. Tach laid the bow across the strings. Played.

  12:00 MIDNIGHT

  In the latex clown’s head mask, Gregg was simply another of the jokers trying to stay cool in the sticky Atlanta humidity. The temperature was stuck permanently in the low nineties; the breeze felt like a moving sauna. The mask was an oven, but he didn’t dare take it off.

  It had taken time to arrange his escape from the hotel. Ellen had finally gone to sleep, but there was no telling when she might wake. He hated taking the risk, but he had to do something about Puppetman.

  The power had gained the strength of desperation. Gregg was afraid that its struggles were already too visible to outsiders.

  Discarded Flying Ace Gliders transformed into Fucking Flying Jokers crumpled underfoot as Gregg stepped over the gutter and into Piedmont Park. Shapes moved through the trees and around the grassy hillocks. Police swept the perimeter with regularity, trying to keep the jokers in and anyone else out, but it was easy enough for Gregg to slide past them in the darkness and enter the surreal world of the park.

  Once inside, the city at his back was forgotten. A tent village had sprung up on one of the hillsides, spreading shouting laughter and light. A bonfire flickered close by; he could hear singing. The jokers passing in front of the fire threw long, shifting shadows across the grass. Deeper in the park behind the peaked tents, Gregg saw erratic phosphorescent brilliance—there were enough jokers whose skin glowed, flashed, or radiated that it had become a nightly custom for them to gather on a hilltop at full dark like human fireflies: a UPI photographer’s shot of them had become one of the more memorable images of the convention-outside-the-convention.

  Gregg navigated through the park under Puppetman’s guidance, following the tug of mental strings from the puppets within the crowd. There were many of them in the park, mostly longtime J-town residents whose neuroses and foibles were familiar and much-traveled territory for Puppetman. Often he’d ignore them for the thrill that came from twisting some new puppet to his will, but not tonight. Tonight he was after sustenance, and an easing of the power’s needs, and he’d take the quick, easy path.