Charisma

by Steven Barnes

* * *

  The sun’s orange rim had long since vanished from the mountain ridges to the west, and the desert’s chill descended with a vengeance. Jackets and serapes had emerged from baskets and car trunks. Folks kept moving just to generate body heat.

  Kelly and D’Angelo stood in the midst of a saloon mockup, surrounded by metal cutouts of gamblers, bartenders, dancing girls and inebriates of all stripes.

  A rickety wooden stairway led to a second level. Recorded laughter flowed from behind closed doors. In the upper corners of the saloon were two video cameras, nestled behind heavy glass.

  Outside the set, a crowd of almost a hundred and fifty spectators watched the action on television monitors, a safe distance from any potential ricochets.

  Marshall Earp’s voice cut through the crowd sounds. “This is it, ladies and gentlemen. By mutual agreement, the finals will take place on the action stage. Ladies first!”

  One of the observers at the back of the crowd yelled: “Sic ’em, Kate,” and Kelly waved to them.

  Without a visible trace of nerves, she stepped forward. She wore an 1890s riding skirt and a fringed bolero vest, gloves with embroidered gauntlets, and a kerchief with a silver buffalo neckerchief slide. She was the very picture of a frontier woman as she sashayed into the bar.

  This time her Colts hung comfortably at her waist. Her shoulders were relaxed, but her fingers tingled as the warning buzzer sounded.

  The plywood barman revolved 180 degrees. One second, he was simply polishing a shot glass. The next, he had a shotgun snug against his shoulder, leveled at her face. Kelly responded in a heartbeat, taking him between the eyes.

  That was only the beginning of the challenge. Almost simultaneously, a number of the other targets flipped as well, some of them remaining harmless, some suddenly brandishing handguns, rifles, shotguns, knives. The air was filled with a rolling, roaring thunder and the stench of gun smoke. Ten shots total: five in each weapon, with an empty chamber under the hammer for safety. Kelly not only had to determine which were friendly and which hostile, she had to do it in an environment where the loudspeakers blared their own gunfire, and a shrill buzzer sounded, the overhead lights flashing like a strobe.

  Once she hid behind a table, shucking shells and reloading, controlling her breathing to keep her hands steady. She popped back up to shoot again.

  When she had emptied both six-guns, she slid them back into her holster, raised her hands and cried: “Out!”

  The crowd applauded, and met her with handclasps and congratulations as she exited the stage. Range attendants scurried in to count the bullet holes, and emerged about two minutes later, making thumb’s-up signs. They conferred with Earp, a broad, big-bellied man with bushy black eyebrows. He did some quick doodling on paper before coming to his conclusions. He flipped on his microphone. “That was some serious shootin’, folks! Let’s give the lady a hand, for an overall score of eighty-eight.”

  Bobby Ray hugged her briefly, their embrace interrupted as D’Angelo strode up to her. “Good going, Kelly. I knew you wouldn’t have lost anything.”

  His face was perfectly pleasant, but Kelly knew that tonal inflection had been aimed at Bobby Ray. She squeezed her husband’s hand and said: “Show us how it’s done, Angel Eyes.”

  He nodded, tipped his hat and strode up to the line. Swathed in black, D’Angelo looked every bit the classic villain from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. He strode into the bar and stood, his guns snug in their cross-holsters.

  Kelly watched on the television monitors, noting that he chose a position slightly angular to the bar, slanting his left shoulder a bit. The barman would be at his left peripheral, the gambling tables more central, and the shadowy second story just above his line of sight. She knew that he was de-focusing, waiting for movement, balanced and hyper-ready.

  When the silhouettes flipped and the claxons sounded, D’Angelo was a machine: he drew and fired, drew and fired in perfect, almost ghastly smoothness and deadly accuracy. Headshot, headshot, headshot, reloading with nerveless efficiency that shaved clear seconds off Kelly’s time. Finally he holstered his weapons, raised his hands and shouted: “Out!”

  The audience applauded. Even without checking her watch, Kelly knew D’Angelo had beaten her time handily.

  “Earp’s” voice came back over the intercom. “We’re doing a weighted count right now, folks, and—D’Angelo is at 89!”

  Kelly sighed, and extended her hand. “Good shooting, Angel,” she said.

  “Maybe next year,” D’Angelo said, genuinely gracious now that victory was assured.

  Then the speaker crackled again. “Not that easy, folks. New rules instituted this year, say that if the final scores are within two points we get a draw-off. A draw-off, folks!”

  At that, the crowd murmured and then applauded its approval. This was something new, using new equipment installed within the previous six months.

  Bob smiled wanly at her. “Feeling game?” he asked.

  The truth was that her wrists and hands were aching a bit. Bob knew it, but she was damned if she was going to let a little arthritis get in the way of her victory. “Never better,” she said. “Bring it on.”

  “That’s my girl.”

  * * *

  The quick-draw stage was set up rather oddly, with two side-by-side platforms. Highly reflective Mylar sheets were positioned in front of each. Kelly’s sheet was canted a few degrees, so that D’Angelo appeared dead center. D’Angelo’s mirror showed Kelly. The sheets were about two feet apart, and in between them a signal light glowed red. In a few seconds, it would switch to green.

  Behind the Mylar sheets, at chest and head levels, were broad sensor strips. The setup, known as a “Diablo,” was of D’Angelo’s own design, and if he hadn’t owned the range, wasn’t sheriff and didn’t own a third of the property in town, it would never have been allowed. Most other clubs considered it just too damned close to shooting at a live human being.

  Which was, for Tristan D’Angelo, the entire point.

  Kelly watched her opponent’s image. His smile, distorted by the Mylar, seemed almost inhumanly cold. Despite her best efforts to remain calm, Kelly shivered. Just the cold, she lied to herself.

  It was hard for her to meet D’Angelo’s eyes, and both of them knew why.

  One part of her mind thought of nothing but the signal light, even now preparing to turn green. Another part of her floated away, remembering another time and place.…

  * * *

  It is Salt Lake City. July 23, 1987. She could no more forget that day than she could the day of her marriage. Less. Alexander Marcus is addressing a crowd at Salt Lake’s Utah state fair park, out on North Temple Drive. Perhaps 11,000 people have gathered to hear Marcus speak of foreign policy, and national defense.

  The crowd is rapt. He is, after all, almost legendary, a figure remembered not only from Vietnam, the Olympics and the post-civil rights era dialogues on race relations in America, but as a Presidential advisor and media giant. Most of the crowd is white, much of it Mormon and only recently of the official opinion that African-Americans were indeed fully human. Yet they respect him as a warrior who fought for his country, and then fought his country itself, in the service of the freedoms promised in the very documents that created her greatness.

  Kelly is on duty that day, on loan from the Secret Service, in respect of Marcus’s years of service, and in response to the abnormally high number of death threats he has received. Marcus does not feel the need for such official protection—he has his own men—but he likes Kelly, and enjoys having her around.

  D’Angelo flanks Marcus, and on the other side, a black man named Wisher. Both were with Marcus in Vietnam, and both are superb soldiers.

  In the midst of an especially impassioned segment of his speech a white man stands up from the audience, waving a gun.

  People dive for cover. Kelly and Wisher dive for Marcus, pulling him under protective cover. The man in the audience fires, and it is obvious that h
is intent is lethal: the bullet misses Marcus’s head by a fraction.

  The action thus far has taken a mere instant. The would-be assassin fired through the crowd, winging one older man, muzzle-flash blazing in the face of a black woman just in front of him.

  Kelly peered out around the podium, and what she saw next would haunt her the rest of her life. In a single smooth movement former Master Sergeant D’Angelo drew and fired. She would never have chanced such a shot: there were too many people still milling in confusion, diving for cover, too much noise. But the single bullet passed between two panicking women and took the would-be assassin directly between the eyes, snapping his head back. He knocked over the folding chairs behind him, spraying blood and bone and tissue across the row, sprawling limply, limbs still trembling.

  She remembered looking at D’Angelo, wanting to congratulate him on the incredible shot, then saw the expression on his face. He wore the very slightest of smiles, a grin of satisfaction, but more than that, of pure pleasure. An expression swiftly veiled. But she saw it, yes she did.…

  Kelly saw that same smirk now, on the face of Angel Eyes. A killer’s smile, mistaken by everyone in the crowd as nothing but playacting. Not playacting at all. She knew, beyond any question, that D’Angelo wished that this was for real.

  He winked at her.

  The light flashed green. Kelly reached for her gun with reflexes honed by countless thousands of repetitions, no conscious thought once the prearranged signal had been received—

  But before she could bring her gun level, D’Angelo had fired, striking dead between her eyes. There was utter silence among the observers, and then Marshall Earp murmured: “Good goddamn.”

  Kelly dropped her gun back down, not even bothering to fire, and closed her eyes. The last thing she saw before she closed them was the cold ivory arc of D’Angelo’s lips.

  11

  Muriel and Renny drove separate cars, and on the way to her house he stopped at the liquor store and bought a thirty-dollar bottle of White Star champagne: decent but not great.

  Ms. Tong lived in a split level duplex off Sunset Boulevard, just behind a billboard advertising HBO’s Sex in the City comedy show, with a gargantuan image of Sarah Jessica Parker’s insinuating smile. Her house was a French-vanilla three-story condo, with six small windows facing south over Sunset. The roof sported a blue-tinted skylight that ran from wall to wall. In fact, if Los Angeles had much of a night sky, Muriel’s view would have been spectacular. But between smog and a horizon clouded with artificial light, the few stars that shone down from above were dim and almost sad. The moon was a pale orb low on the horizon, surrounded by a misty ring.

  Muriel thanked him for the gift, and fetched a pair of glasses. She filled both and handed one to Renny, and they climbed to the roof.

  Framed against the glittering city, she was a glory to behold. Her jaw line was still strong as a girl’s, with a swimmer’s body and a swan’s neck.

  (Like whose neck, Renny?)

  Her laugh contained some elusive element of self-mockery, and she was inviting him to share in the joke.

  A pair of shiny black all-weather chairs were perched at the roof’s edge. She eased herself into one, watching the traffic down on Sunset. The bleat of horns and purr of engines intertwined and drifted up as music, an organic urban impressionism. So many people in a hurry to go so many places. Los Angeles was his town by birth, but that bitch-goddess Career had taken him so many places: D.C., Miami, Chicago, Seattle. Returning to the Big Orange wasn’t quite like a homecoming, because this part of Los Angeles wasn’t his. His city had been the Baldwin Hills area, the district called “the Jungle” by cops and residents alike.

  It felt very strange to return here after all these years, to sit with the beautiful boss in her two-thousand-dollar-a-month apartment, looking out over a city that sometimes seemed as alien and unknowable as the surface of Mars. Or for that matter, his own future.

  He eased himself down into the chair next to her. For a few moments they just sipped in an easy silence. A low current of sexual attraction sizzled, something quite familiar, slowly ramping its way toward spontaneous combustion.

  “So,” he said, more to interrupt that silence than anything else. “Why don’t you tell me about Colonel Marcus’s campaign?”

  “Well,” she said, and took a sip. She rolled her head back, exposing that lovely fine length of neck. “In some ways he was a very private man, so it was surprising that he thought about running in the first place. He had always been the man behind the curtain. With King, with Malcolm, and others: funds, influence, guidance. But somebody got to him, and convinced him that he was the man for the job. Could he really die without taking a shot at it?”

  “Hmmm. So you don’t think it was a personal quest?”

  “It was.” She sipped at her drink. “Very personal. Marcus’d done the humanitarian work of a dozen men, but you had better believe that there was an ego in there. Maybe the healthiest I ever met. Under it all, I do believe Alexander Marcus was convinced that he could do anything, anything at all, and succeed.” She paused, took another sip. “And maybe if you went deeper, what you had was a mischievous little kid who just wanted to play with the biggest train set in the world. Do you remember how it was?”

  Hard to forget. Marcus orchestrated his non-campaign beautifully, hiding his political affiliations but making it clear to anyone with a teaspoon of brains that he was available for public office. Watching both Democrats and Republicans scrambling around was funnier than hell. Marcus was a cross between those two wild cards of late Twentieth century politics, Jesse Jackson and Ross Perot. Like Perot, Marcus could fund his own campaign, go third party if it amused him. But like Jackson in the Eighties, he was untouchable. His war record, as well as his civil-rights background, made it very difficult for people to criticize him without opening themselves to charges of racism.

  What a roller coaster that six months had been! Both sides knew that, were Marcus to run as Vice President, he could coast their candidate to the White House. If he were to run independent, he could pull veterans, women, minorities, Democratic moderates and liberals of both parties, sufficient to make the ’88 election the alley-fight of the century.

  Renny had always thought politicians required a kind of plastic shell around their hearts, something slick enough to let them walk through sewers without picking up a fecal glaze. That probably explained why he’d never involved himself in politics. Deep down he probably feared that he was more Velcro than Teflon.

  “So what happened?” he asked.

  “The bigger the likelihood that he would actually run, the more hate mail he got.”

  Her eyes were like cool green stars, sparkling just over the edge of the glass. She was challenging him to hear what hadn’t been said, to piece it together. And then, she waited to see how he would react.

  “Because he was black?”

  “It would appear so.”

  “Death threats?”

  “The nastiest you’ve ever seen. ‘Nigger, your sorry ass won’t live past inauguration day.’ Stuff like that. I dated a secret service guy for a while, and he’d never seen mail so venomous.”

  “And this despite his approval rating?”

  The edges of her mouth curved downwards a bit, her eyes hooded. She was disappointed. Muriel had expected him to be more acute.

  Sexual attraction is a strange thing. At the same time that it narrows your focus, it can also, temporarily at least, seem to increase intelligence. Maybe the part of you engaged in the mating dance knows that this is for all the marbles, and squirts a little extra IQ juice in there. His brain cells jittered to a sizzling mariachi beat.

  “No,” he finally said, slapping his forehead. “I’m wrong. Duh. They didn’t send it despite the approval ratings. They sent that mail because of the approval ratings.”

  “Bravo,” she said.

  “Because there was actually a chance that he might get elected.” And he did understand.
There were times he could almost feel sorry for straight, Christian white American males. Blacks, Hispanics, women, gays … if they fail, they know who to blame. It is so easy to fall back on “they stopped me,” whichever “they” happens to be most fashionable.

  But what if you’re white, and male, making that fabled run up the pyramid of success? There’s only room for one at the top, and by the time he gets there, he’s old and tired. The rest of them have to blame someone. So it’s the minorities, the Jews, the damned liberal media conspiracy, or something. Anything. Anything except looking into themselves and seeing that the entire system, even for the winners, is set up like a big dog race. Yeah, the dogs got fed at the end of the day. And yeah, all of that running’s good exercise. But the mechanical rabbit is always out in front of you. You were never meant to catch it, just to run for the cheering crowd.

  Worse still, from time to time they make a mistake at the track, and a dog catches the metal bunny. From that day on, that dog will never run again.

  And therein lies a clue to why the Elvises, John Belushis and Michael Jacksons of the world self-destruct: They tasted the rabbit.

  “So he was afraid of getting killed?” That didn’t seem to fit what he knew about Colonel Marcus.

  She shook her head, although this time there was no disapproval. “No, I don’t think he would have cared. But Kitty raised him by herself, and he was devoted. She’d worried about him through Korea, and Vietnam, and the civil-rights times. I believe Alexander thought she’d die if anything happened to him. I do believe that stolid, sexy golem of a man backed out of the race because of her.”

  Sand could see it all: the private debates, the pleas, the call to duty, and finally the admission that America, or Freedom, or the Cause, or Business had claimed enough of him. One could almost hear Kitty’s demand that her sonny boy not place himself in harm’s way yet again. They said Ted Kennedy had done much the same for Rose.

  “So there we were,” he said. “Working for one of the twenty-five richest men in America, decorated war hero, silver winner in Melbourne, the only black man who could have been president in this century, and knowing that he was completely and utterly a mama’s boy.”