Turn of the Cards

by George R. R. Martin

  He was tired and beginning to feel that traveler’s panic of not knowing where he was going to stay. And maybe some of his socialization had died with Starshine. Because, much to his own surprise, he shouldered abruptly past the noisy woman, went stilting down a dark hallway that stank of urine and less nameable aromas on his great gangly Western legs, clutching his papers in his fist and peering at the faded numbers painted on the doors.

  His papers matched one on the second floor. He knocked. He prepared a speech in his mind: Look, I’m sorry. There’s been some kind of misunderstanding. The government assigned this room to me.

  The door opened. A tiny woman dressed in black peasant pajamas stood there, so gaunt her cheeks looked like collapsing tents and her arms and legs like sticks. Her eyes were huge, and they widened in terror when they saw what was standing at her door.

  At least a half-dozen children and a couple of ancient women sat on the floor behind her, staring at Mark with fear in their dull eyes. One tiny stick-figure child — a boy, he thought in a horrified flash — staggered against one of the old women, who wrapped him in her meatless arms. He had a bandage wrapped completely around his head, brown with old dried blood.

  “I — oh, Jesus, man, I’m sorry — I —” He whirled away from the door and went race-walking back down the corridor, his brain spinning.

  The concierge was laying for him at the foot of the stairs with a Bulgarian-made push broom. She uttered a piercing screech and whacked him in the head with it. Horse hairs flew in a cloud around his head. He raised his arms to defend himself She hit him again, at which point the head fell off and cracked him on the crown. He retreated in a hurry, hunched down with his hands over his head as she belabored his back with the broomstick, cawing like a triumphant crow.

  In the hot, stinking street again, heart pounding, brushing horse hairs from his shoulders like dandruff. He started walking, not sure where he was going.

  A kid of maybe fourteen fell into step beside him — it was hard to tell exactly; between genes and doubtful nutrition most adults around here seemed child-sized compared to Mark. But though the youngster was dark, a glance told Mark he wasn’t Vietnamese, or any kind of Southeast Asian probably.

  “You American, yes?” the boy asked.

  Mark bit down hard on hysterical laughter. He was blond and white and two feet taller than anyone else on the street. He looked as if he had arrived in a UFO. In fact he looked more alien than when he had arrived in a UFO, when the living ship SunDiver dropped into Holland for a touch-and-go on its way to deliver Jay Ackroyd and his sharp-tongued war bride, Hastet, back to the US of A.

  “Yeah,” he managed to say, with only a giggle or two escaping his mouth like Lawrence Welk bubbles.

  “You are joker?”

  Given what the nats looked like around here, he could make a case for it on his own merits. But he was feeling waves and waves of guilt crashing down on him for disturbing the desperate people in “his” room. He waved the handful of papers still clutched in one hand — a little tattered from the Bulgarian broom attack — at the boy. The imprint of the Wild Cards Affairs office at the tops seemed to satisfy him that Mark was one of us and not them.

  “My name is Ali,” he said proudly. “I am from Dimashq.”

  “I’m Mark,” Mark said, the conversational idiot taking over. “Like, what brings you here, man?”

  The boy hiked up the long tails of his Western-style man’s shirt, which he wore hanging over his shorts. There was a fistula in his skinny side you could roll a bowling ball into. Wet, shiny red-purple things writhed in there like eels.

  “I am joker,” he said, not without pride.

  Mark swallowed. It wasn’t the deformity itself; he’d seen as bad just a-walkin’ down the street this afternoon. Syria was the heartmeat of Nur al-Allah’s bad-crazy Muslim fundie movement that claimed jokers were cursed by God; more than three hundred jokers had been massacred in riots in the joker quarter of Damascus — Dimashq — not ten days ago. The boy was awfully damned lucky to be here, squalor or no.

  The boy dropped his shirttail. “You look troubled, Mark my friend from America.”

  “Well, I just got here, and I got assigned these living quarters. And I went to the address they told me, and the place I’m supposed to live in has all these people in it. Must be a whole family in there. I’ve got to talk to somebody. Get this straightened out.”

  The boy spat. “Squatters. Refugees from fighting in the countryside. Everybody wants to live in Saigon giai phong. I will take you to someone who will make it right.” He puffed out his chest importantly and led off down the street.

  They went two blocks, Mi proud, Mark ducking his head between his shoulder-blades in a doomed attempt to be inconspicuous. They turned a corner and a burst of automatic-weapons fire cracked out right in front of them, followed by the slap of muzzle-blast shocks hitting the building fronts.

  Mark grabbed Mi by the arm and dragged him into a recess between two more or less solid-looking structures. He was getting to be an old hand under fire. Hell of a note for the Last Hippie.

  Mi squirmed. “What are you doing?”

  “Trying to keep you from getting shot.”

  Mi pulled free. “There is no danger. They fire only into the air.” His body language said he knew a little something about being under fire too.

  Mark was becoming aware that he was standing in somebody’s front yard, as blank joker faces stuck out of the lean-to jumble set back from the street between the larger buildings. All stepped right out into the street. Mark peered cautiously after. The loose horse hairs were starting to itch down inside his shirt, and he remembered he was allergic to horses.

  Another burst crashed. Mark flinched but willed himself not to duck. Men in khaki shorts and pith helmets were herding people out of a building down the street, slapping and kicking and firing Kalashnikovs into the air to keep them moving.

  “See?” All said smugly. “It is the People’s Security Force clearing out squatters. They think they can come here and take the housing the government gives to jokers.”

  The PSF troops were bundling the squatters into the back of a big black step-van. A young man suddenly broke away, went running down the street, thatch of stiff black hair bouncing to the rhythm of his stride, elbows flailing.

  One of the men in the pith helmets pulled an AK to his shoulder and fired. Dust flew from between the young man’s shoulder-blades. He fell on his face, skidding several yards on the sidewalk. The security man fired again. Screams answered, as if his bullets had found other targets.

  Au showed Mark a smile full of white, well-tended teeth. “Nat dogs. They deserve no better, yes?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The hunt for Mark Meadows stalled out in Bangkok, on the pool deck of the Oriental Hotel. The dogs, however, were not as idle as they looked.

  “This isn’t gonna work, Lynn,” Gary Hamilton said. He had a mostly peach Hawaiian shirt on over khaki shorts and flip-flops. He sat on a big plastic chaise longue, keeping carefully within the umbra of an umbrella, applying thermo-nuclear-blast-protection-factor sunblock over every inch of his large body and worrying.

  “What’s not gonna work?” his partner demanded. Lynn Saxon sat cross-legged right up on the pink pavement by the pool. He had a headset clamped on his dark hair and a little black box well equipped with blinking lights and digital displays resting next to his skinny, hairy haunches. He wore matching Hawaiian shirt and shorts dominated by an explosive shade of magenta. The Aussie tending bar in the little straw-top cabana over on the other side of the pool had opined that looking at Saxon gave him a whole new grasp of the phrase Technicolor yawn. Unlike college-boy Hamilton, Saxon had never been a member of any beer-drinking fraternities, so he felt vaguely complimented by the remark.

  Rubbing thick white zinc-oxide cream on his nose, Hamilton glanced sideways at his buddy and inhaled a snort of laughter. He had been fighting off the giggles all morning. He didn’t see Lynn get
zinged much. It was especially great when he didn’t even know it.

  “Just sitting around listening to Belew’s phone in case he happens to get a call telling him where Meadows is hanging out,” Hamilton said. “What good is this doing us?” Saxon was hot, wired, and running, flipping those channels on his Black Box and alternately ogling the women of various colors in their French thong bikinis and shrieking curses at them if they splashed too near to his sensitive electronic equipment.

  “Listen, bud,” he said, talking fast and emphatically. “Do you have any idea, any idea at all, where this puke Meadows is?”

  Warily, Hamilton shook his head.

  “Right! Neither do I, neither does Washington. It’s been good old J. Bob all along who’s been steering us after him. I mean, we gotta admit, when he’s right, he’s right. Right?”

  “Right. Er, yeah.”

  Saxon bobbed his head. “Okay, now. When we found out Meadows was headed east with the gunrunners, we all agreed he was going to try to set himself up in charge of a drug lab for some big Asian operation, probably in the Golden Triangle. Now, we’ve been sweltering in this combination steam-bath and sewer two whole days now, and J. Bob has been running around playing Secret Agent Man and slipping the old Spam Loafski to Mistral, while all we do is sit by the pool sipping Mai Tais, playing with our wing-wangs, and praying for the Eurasian babes to fall out of their swimsuits. You following this?”

  In fact the very different personalities of Belew and Helen Carlysle had caused both to be extremely discreet about their nascent affair. But Saxon had noticed that the two had begun to adhere into a mini-bloc opposed to him and Hamilton. Carlysle had certainly shut Saxon down in no uncertain terms, and what that added up to for Saxon was that either Mistral was getting it from Belew or she was a dyke. She hadn’t exactly dropped her drawers in response to Hera’s come-ons in Athens. That left one possibility. QED.

  “I suppose you think Belew is in cahoots with Meadows,” Hamilton said sullenly.

  Saxon flipped his shades up on top of his dark hair and gazed at Hamilton for a long moment before flipping them down again. A corner of his mouth worked. Hamilton wanted to yell at him. Saxon did that with his mouth when he was being clever. Hamilton hated it when he was clever.

  “Well-ll,” Saxon said, “I guess we can’t entirely discount that little possibility, now, can we? I mean, he is with the Company after all, and who set most of these ethnic-army drug lords up in business in the first place? Can you say, C-I-A? Sure. I knew you could.”

  At that point a five-foot-tall woman with red hair hanging to a perfect butt and green eyes shaped like almonds dove off the board. Water droplets hit Saxon on the hand and cheek. One splattered on the precious Black Box.

  “Hey, you stupid cunt!” he shrieked when she surfaced. “Watch out what the fuck you’re doing!”

  Treading water, she glared for a moment, then laughed and dogpaddled away, her mostly naked rump protruding slightly from the water and just working away. “Stuck-up bitch,” Saxon snarled. “If we were back in the USA

  Hamilton cleared his throat.

  “Oh. Yeah.” Saxon rubbed his upper lip where the stubble from his returning mustache itched him. “So anyway, the real deal with our friend J. Bob is that this is his old playground, and he knows a lot of the big kids on it, and he knows a lot of the little ones too. If Southeast Asia really is where Meadows has gone to ground, you and me and the dink shining shoes over there all know J. Bob’s gonna sniff him out first.”

  “So? Why does that mean we have to bug his phones?”

  Saxon quit fiddling with his knobs long enough to reach up and feel his partner’s forehead, then pinch one cheek and lightly slap it. “Are you running a fever? Has your little brain overheated? Wakey, wakey, Agent Hamilton.” He laughed at the way Hamilton jerked his head back and batted ineffectually at his hand. “Were you asleep last time we talked to Washington? The fucking media finally figured out we didn’t win just ’cause Bill Bennett said we did when he cut and ran. The Agency needs a win, here; it is definitely not policy that the frapping Company should get to collar the biggest-ticket ace fugitive in the history of the U.S. of A.”

  “So you figure somebody’s going to call right up to Belew’s room and finger Meadows?” Hamilton said sullenly.

  “I figure he’s been putting out feelers, and somebody might get back to him, if only to set up a meet. Who knows? Maybe he’ll do a deal with the Muang Thais or the Shan United Army. Sell ’em a couple juicy DEA agents in exchange for Meadows.”

  Hamilton paled.

  “Besides, I don’t expect somebody to just call up to his room. That’s why I got all the phones in the lobby wired too”

  “Oh, shit.” Gary grabbed Lynn’s shoulder and pointed. Mistral was just emerging from the hotel lobby, moving tentatively as she came down the broad white steps to the pool, as if the fierce noon sunlight was a wind she had to walk against. “Jesus, put that stuff away.”

  “Why?” Saxon demanded. “She’s a playgirl, not a cop. What does she know about surveillance equipment? We’ll tell her it’s a magic ace detector we just got from the Governor by Federal Express.”

  She stopped across from them in the terrace that ran around the pool, tentative as a forest creature. She wore a lightweight dress to mid-calf, smoky gray with little abstract dabs and slashes of mauve and midnight blue in it, set off with just a couple of streaks of silver, for contrast. It was sheer enough that you could see her bra and panties through it. She was wearing her ace suit less since she’d taken up with Belew. Maybe it was the humid Southeast Asian heat.

  Helen Carlysle had spent some discreet time in the sun. Her limbs shone like polished hardwood. She had lost weight; the summer-weight dress had a tendency to hang in places. But the slight loss had sharpened the definition of her collarbones and her slim, long neck, added a touch of romantic concavity to her cheeks, made her eyes looked huge and haunted in the shadow of her silver straw hat.

  A gentle, stinking breeze off the Chao Phrya River ruffled her permed hair. She was a great-looking woman, there was no doubt about that.

  “Too bad she doesn’t have enough tits,” Hamilton said sadly.

  “More than a mouthful is wasted,” Saxon said. He clutched at the side of his head and teetered way to one side. “Whoa We got something here.”

  “What?”

  “Shh! The Man Himself is on the line.” He listened, a nasty predator’s grin spreading gradually across his lean, dark face.

  At last he nodded, peeled off the headset. “Okay,” he said, “we’re good to go. J. Bob’s meeting his man in half an hour. And he did, too, call him in his room, so there.”

  He grabbed his Black Box by the little plastic carrying handle. Mistral caught sight of them as they stood up in a hurry. Saxon gave her the thumb-and-pinky Hawaiian hang-loose salute, and they booked.

  The women were out buying fish, vegetables, and fruit from the vendor-boats on the klongs, canals. As Belew got nearer the Menam Chao Phrya, the wares being cried took on a more exotic flavor.

  Bangkok was not an eighties kind of place. It was probably not going to be a nineties kind of place, either, but the decade hadn’t really set its style yet. The delicate called Krung Thep — Bangkok — the “Cesspool of the Orient.” It was noisy, loud, nasty, and bright, whether by day or by night.

  There’s a hoary cliché about places in the East where anything is for sale. In Bangkok it’s all for sale cheap.

  J. Bob Belew liked the place immensely.

  Through a day whose humid heat was so thick you practically needed a machete to get through it, he negotiated thronged and hyper streets down to the waterfront district. Nearer the river, broad avenues became narrow, crowded with bodies in motion, and the cries of beggars, peddlers, and pimps warred with Moroccan-roll, Vanilla Ice, and that Chinese popular music that sounds like the themes of old cowboy movies for the top niche in a whole vibrant ecosystem of noise. The white-boy rap was cranked so th
at all you could hear was the jackhammer bass, which was probably a blessing.

  Belew wore baggy-cut khaki Brittainia trousers, Nike athletic shoes, a cream-colored polo shirt, light-tan jacket, dark-green Ray-Bans. He moved like a man who walked these cracked and littered streets every day of his life.

  It was not the best part of town he was going into, nor the safest, and the muggers were even better armed than the ones in Central Park, if not usually so bold. That was why he wore a Para Ordnance 10mm in an inside-the-pants holster down the back of his trousers. That was why they were cut loose, in contradiction of Belew’s customary fashion statement.

  The Para Ordnance Ten was basically the same thing as the old Colt Government .45, but muscled up to take the hot 10mm cartridge. It also had a magazine capacity of fifteen rounds, unlike the old Colt, which held seven. That made for a mighty hefty grip, but Belew had big hands for his size. For all that the Para was a largish chunk of iron, it suited him well, and felt very good. The feel of a piece of equipment was very important to him.

  The fore-end of the Ten in its Cordura holster did tend to kind of gouge him between the tops of his buttcheeks as he walked. That was the price you paid for concealed carry. You did not want to wear a shoulder-rig in the Tropics: Rash City.

  An open display of ordnance was conspicuously not a good idea. The Thai Army had taken over again in late February under the direction of a general with the — to Belew anyway — immensely satisfactory name of Suchinda Krapayoon. Though the less resplendently named General Sunthorn Komsongpong was the front man for the junta, Suchinda was known to desire to move from being the brains behind the throne to the butt seated on it. The coup — the seventeenth, successful or otherwise, since 1932 — had come in on a law-and-order theme. Since Western governments did not want their citizens armed, what could be a better way of demonstrating the junta’s commitment to the rule of law than rousting gunslinging Westerners in approved Southeast Asian style?