Ink

by Hal Duncan

  Pierrot's Prisoner

  Don comes back on the stage, quick-changed into the costume of a soldier, gleaning armor with a sharp and savage shine, holding a chain.

  “M'sire Pierrot, we're back,” he says and, with a heave, hauls Jack onto the stage with him. He slams the Harlequin down on his knees.

  “We've got the prey you sent us after. Hunted him like game, we did. But this one's bleedin tame.”

  Don sneers, but there's confusion under his contempt.

  “There weren't no flight, no fight, no face all white with fear. He didn't even go a little pale, just gives a grin, he does, holds up his hands for us to bind. He just gave in, says, tie me up and run me in. He waited for us, made it easy.”

  Don looks away, unsettled, almost queasy, then speaks quietly.

  “I was ashamed. I says to him I didn't wish him any ill. I only follow orders.”

  He looks back at Pierrot.

  “I says, this is my master's will.”

  “But m'sire, those followers caught by your majesty and bound in manacles and leg irons—all of those locked in the cells—they've all got free. The chains just fell off their feet by themselves, and doors unlocked, flew open, with no outside help. They've just slipped out of their shackles and gone off to play like children in the fields, calling for Harlequin. This stranger's brought a bloomin host of miracles, m'sire. Whatever happens next, I'd keep an eye on him.”

  I slip back to the sidelines of the action, watching Don and Joey, watching Jack, and watching Guy hidden behind the curtainry across from me, stroking his beard and studying the Duke, the Princess Anaesthesia. The hall is dark and quiet now, the audience absorbed into the action. The Princess hushes the distraction of her consul's learned explication of the theme, the Harlequin as human spirit—

  “Is that gin,” she says, “or whisky?”

  The Duke laughs.

  It's not the first time we've performed this sort of play hidden inside a play. It's not the first time that Monsieur Reynard's set out to sneak some secret message into our spectaculars, to use my song, Jack's dance, Don's pyrotechnics as the smoke and mirrors to disguise something a tad more strong; but it is the first time he's set out so blatantly subversive as to show a prince of hell his own defeat. I think we're lucky that the man sees little more than Jack prancing across the stage, the pantomime of Pantaloon and Scaramouche, the melodrama of Pierrot as he rants and raves. There was one gig we played one time in what, to all intents and purposes, was the Castile of a self-styled El Cid. We got through one Cervantes sketch, using the text performed by Lorca's La Barraca company, before we had to ride out hell for leather, Jack and Joey firing tommy guns from the wagon's running boards into the horde riding in hot pursuit. The London mob were just as bad in George's day, Guy said. They'd tear the theater down and have the owner on his knees apologizing, if they didn't like the play.

  I guess we're all a little nervous then, but luckily, for now, the Duke looks mildly amused. The rest of them—the sleeping souls who think he built their whole eternity—just look confused.

  “Unchain his hands. Now that we have him in the cage, he's not so quick he can escape my rage.”

  Pierrot prowls.

  “Well, stranger, I can see you're not unsuited to your goal of bedding every woman in this land. You're not an … unattractive man. From your wild hair”—he says, running his hand through Jack's blond shock to clench a fistful, snap his head back—“I should say you've never been a fighter. But it does set off your cheeks.”

  He runs his fingers over skin, under the chin.

  “So soft and pale, not weathered by the sun, but rather kept under the shade to help you in your aims. You hunt love as your game and use the beauty of your face as bait. Come, tell me all about your race.”

  SEARCH AND DESTROY

  “I'm a lionskin hustler with a hand full of orgone.”

  The Lizard Lounge is lush with a rogues’ gallery of regulars, and noisy with the chatter of the charming and the clink of cocktail glasses, a hustle that mutes as I walk in the door, a harlequin of death in motley longcoat.

  “I'm the prodigal son of a nanotech kill zone.”

  I check my chi-lance with the bouncer and step down into the parting crowd. A singer onstage is swinging through a loungecore retro medley, all crooning moodiness, and sultry, sullen style.

  “I am the world's forbidden boy, the son you're searching to destroy.”

  Quiffed-up and louche in crushed red velvet tux and frilly shirt, he snaps his fingers in a gunshot click at me and winks—hey.

  “—Forbidden boy… forbidden boy…”

  I flick a slack salute right back at him, and the moment of celebrity passes as people turn back to their friends, only a few furtive glances and nods in my direction breaking the discreet and diplomatic privacy offered by a den of such iniquity as this.

  “And that was ‘Search and Destroy’ from our favorite Popster dedicated to the one and only Twentieth Century Boi. Oh yeah. If music be the food of love, there might well be some golden copulations on the streets tonight, mis amigos, because I can tell you that we have a veritable feast for your ears only, here on Radio Free Kentigern. So spark up another joint and crack open another beer, you high wasters of the city of dead dreams. Open your ears and listen to the crack of doom. Is that the coffee you can smell, or the shit hitting the fan? Yes sir, the rhythm of life is a hell of a beat, that beat is on the street and in the air, all round us, here and there and everywhere, because we—that's right— we are the one free station that they never stopped. This is the Voice of Reason calling out across the wilderness of the city, just a lone Coyote howling in the desert night up at a moon that's burning bright. And if you just tuned in, a little recap for you; we're talking about Jack Flash—not so much ‘Where are they now?’ as ‘How the hell did he come back from that?’ “

  I do like to make a good entrance, but as I head toward the bar—of course— I'm thinking, there are some times, among all the groupies, guns and glamour, when all an anarchist assassin wants is someone to step up to them and say—

  “Jack Flash? May I offer you a drink?”

  A rake in cricket whites, a dashing pencil-thin mustache and dapper flop of hair, the gleam of public-schoolboy bad seed in his eyes, steps forward with his hand held out to shake.

  “We've all been rather wondering when you'd show,” he says.

  A skatepunk kid with scruff of hair tipped iridescent green and monkey sideburns, cute as his button nose, comes up behind him, hands in baggy combat pockets, a T-shirt two sizes too big for him proclaiming his “stoopidity” in bubble letters.

  “We were running a book on it, actually,” the skatepunk says. “I had you down for the Millennium.”

  I give them the rundown on the routine I'm working with—one day in every decade, I return to right wrongs, wreak revenge and so on, blah, blah, blah.

  “Old story,” I say. “But I think I can give it a new twist or two.”

  The rake nods.

  “We can work with that. Kentigern's pretty wild at the moment, party season and all. Halloween meets Hogmanay, bonfires and fireworks. You'll fit right in.”

  Out in the Hinter, seasons are lands. You live in the yesterdays and tomorrows of desire, the day you lost your virginity or the someday soon you'll win the lottery, the day your team won the cup final or the day before your brother died. We asked a hundred people: If they could live in any year, what year would it be? You said, This one. Our survey said, Nuh-uh.

  But this is peachy. Kentigern has history and everything.

  I find myself gazing at the skatepunk. I'm not sure which I find more eyecatching—his smile of charm and mischief, or the tiny horns that sprout out of his forehead. The horns might be fake but, given the quirks of my own meta-physique, they might just as easily be real… although such outward features of the inner archetype only come from years of sustained orgone abuse, and this lad looks too innocent to be that depraved. His nose wri
nkles so cutely in his sulk.

  “Could've sworn you would've landed in the Millennium,” he says.

  “Too bad, my boy,” says the rake. “You lose. Your round.”

  “One G ‘n’ T, then,” says the skatepunk. “And for the Spring-Heeled Jack … an absinthe?”

  “You know my poison,” I say. “I don't even know your names.”

  “Guy Fox,” says the rake. “Thieves Guild. Local king. You don't remember?”

  “Was it more than a minute ago?” I say. “But tell me I know you.”

  “Fast Puck,” says the skatepunk.

  “And just how fast are you?” I say.

  “Put a girdle round the world in forty minutes,” he says. “Get it off in ten.”

  His eyelids bat so brief as to be almost unnoticeable—but long enough for me to see he's wearing metallic green eye shadow. He tips a nod and sidles off toward the bar.

  Onstage, the singer introduces the solo virtuoso sounds of Bert Finkle, tinkling on the ivories, and saunters off to get a whisky and a cigarette for himself as the pianist flourishes a cheesy intro to “Pretty Vacant.”

  “So, Jack,” says the Fox. “You really don't remember?”

  “Snow in the head,” I say. “I'm here. I'm queer. What else is there to know?”

  “King Finn and Princess Anaesthesia?” he says. “Don Coyote? Joey?” I shake my head and give a shrug, find a glass of absinthe plonked into my grip by Fast Puck—fast, indeed. His hand rests on my shoulder.

  “You're a diamond,” I say.

  The Eye of the Weeping Angel

  An exquisite little sparkler, I think.

  “You know you are an incorrigible rogue, my brother,” he says. “But a damn good thief.”

  I tap the cigarette gently into the slim carved-ivory cigarette holder, place the cigarette holder between my teeth and smile at him. The Eye of the Weeping Angel seems to catch the fire inside it as I spark the desk lighter, hold it to the cigarette. It's the flaw in the diamond that gives it its name, of course, the bluish hint of an elliptical eye with tear tracks running down from it—reminiscent of those Egyptian designs so popular these days, since King Tut opened up his secrets to Carter and Carnarvon. The Eye catches the flame in its facets, and the low light of the green-shaded Nouveau nymph desk lamp that paints the paneled room in shadows also glistens in it, eerie, otherworldly.

  “You know how much I could get for this on the open market?” I say.

  “A thousand million marks?” he says, with a dismissive wave of his hand. “A hundred thousand million marks? A gazillion?”

  He flashes me the most irritating smile, disingenuous yet mischievous and all the more annoying because it's stolen from me. And because on him it looks better.

  “I really have no idea,” he says.

  One almost expects a sparkle of light to glance across his teeth. Damn him, this isn't how it's meant to be, I think. I'm the charming scoundrel and he the spit-and-polish soldier. The black sheep and the golden boy—that's how it's meant to be. Two rascals in the family just won't do.

  “You know,” I say, “you think you know someone …”

  I sigh. By no means the largest diamond in the world and hardly flawless, the Eye of the Weeping Angel is, nonetheless, quite certainly the most valuable gem that I've ever had the pleasure to have stolen; and, with a few words to the right contacts, I'm sure I could sell it for a small fortune, more than enough to finance my retirement.

  He slides the Eye of the Weeping Angel across the mahogany desk toward me and I pick it up between thumb and forefinger, look at it before snapping my hand shut round it. I tap my fist on the table three times and spread the palm to show it empty. With the other hand, I reach over and pluck the gemstone from behind his ear. It's a cheap and simple trick I taught myself as a young man. Cabaret and crime, that's the life I always dreamed of.

  “The Fox's Den,” says Pickering. “Established in 1929 by one Reinhardt von Strann, second son and black sheep of the noble Prussian family … notorious gambler who squandered his inheritance in the casinos of Monte Carlo … notorious womanizer who moved from rich widow to Jewish princess to industrialist's daughter. A string of conquests who, coincidentally, all seem to have fallen victim to the so-called Black Fox, the Riviera's most notorious cat burglar.”

  “Go on, this is thrilling. It's all very … Raffles.”

  “You must have heard the stories, read about it in the newspapers.”

  “I very rarely read the papers, Major Pickering. I remember being distinctly … uninterested in the news for a very large portion of the twenties and the thirties. Fascists in Spain, Futurists in Russia and Italy. Communists, anarchists, everything under the sun in France and Germany. I spent my happiest years in jazz clubs and cinemas. The movies, Major Pickering. Marlene Dietrich lit like a religious mystery. Bogart in the shadow of a doorway, looking up at a window. Who wants to read the news when all it has are stories about mobs and murderers, about broken shopwindows and running street fights?”

  “I'm sure the Black Fox would have made the newsreels.”

  “Oh, I wasn't saying that I hadn't heard of him. I was still in Paris at the time, I believe, but, yes, he did make something of a splash, didn't he, for a short while?”

  “Nineteen twenty-three to 1929. Almost six years and maybe a dozen victims. Then in 1929 it stops just when you—sorry—when von Strann leaves the Riviera. Two months later the Fox's Den opens in Berlin and proceeds to make a name for itself as one of the most decadent—”

  “The most decadent. I remember the advertisements, Major Pickering. The most decadent nightclub in all of Berlin. And there was some talk of the proprietor being backed by … money as dirty as the desires of his clientele. Yes, the Fox's Den was quite notorious—the Thieves’ Den as we called it. But I never made the connection with the Black Fox. Sounds like I was being rather dim, in retrospect.

  “Well, of course, you weren't to know, were you, Monsieur Cartier? It's not as if you knew the man, is it? “

  “No, I'm afraid I never knew the man at all, Major Pickering.”

  “Or his brother?”

  “Or his brother. What about his brother?”

  “Well, the last Black Fox robbery took place in late ‘29, and, apart from the identical modus operandi, it stands out as unusual. Seven months after the last and in another country entirely, it almost seems an … encore. A last bow taken by a retiring artiste. And there's no philandering widow here, just a Russian diplomat decidedly out of sorts that his family heirloom has been stolen, and a serving girl who gives a rather suspicious statement to the police. No, this is a different kind of job entirely. It's not done for the thrill. It's not an idle game. No, I believe Reinhardt von Strann carried out this theft at the request of his brother. I believe he stole his last jewel only because his brother asked him to.”

  “What on earth would his brother want with it?”

  “What on earth do you want with it?” I say. “It's not the money you're interested in, and I don't see you desiring this bauble, pretty as it is, for the sheer pleasure of gazing at its crystal beauty.”

  He picks up a pack of cards I keep on the desk for playing solitaire in those quiet times when the club is closed, the previous night's accounts all settled and preparations for the evening show not yet begun. He shuffles them idly, cutting the pack and looking at the chosen card every so often.

  The Eye of the Weeping Angel sits on the desk between us.

  “I need it for a … reason,” he says. “I'm not sure how I can explain it though.”

  “Do try,” I say.

  He hands the pack across to me.

  “Magic,” he says. “Do you still do your little tricks then?”

  I take the cards and shuffle them, cut them, turn over the top card—Jack of Diamonds. I slide it back into the pack and shuffle them again, cut them, shuffle them, turn over the top card—Jack of Diamonds. Back in the pack and shuffle, cut, riffle and cut, shuffle and turn�
��the Jack of Diamonds.

  “Didn't you used to do that with the Jack of Hearts?” he says.

  “Diamonds seem more apt tonight,” I say. “Jonni, why do you want this thing? Why? Why did you resign your commission? What the hell is going on in your life? If it's not money … If… if you're in trouble …”

  But he shakes his head.

  “It's not like that. We're all in trouble. The whole country. Europe. The world. Futurism is—”

  I laugh.

  “Futurism will go the way of the Bolsheviks and the Falangists.”

  I hold a hand up against his protest.

  “Look at Stalin, at Franco. Even when these people win power—which just isn't going to happen here—it can't last; they can't hold on to it. These great schemes always fall apart. The Futurists are just a bunch of thugs who like to break things; they're exactly like the Communists, and the anarchists, and the Fascists. No, no, let's not get into that argument again. But Jonni, you all say you're saving Germany—Europe, the world—from each other. It's absurd. Do you honestly think the Futurists are capable of a coup here?”

  He slides the Eye of the Weeping Angel across the table toward me again. I still have no idea why he would want me to keep it safe for him. From what?

  “What if I said I could tell you the date?” he says. “The day and the hour? Believe me, Fox, I shed no tears for Stalin but these, these … nihilists are a thousand times worse. You don't think it was the Futurists behind Franco's assassination? You don't think they have designs on Germany?”

  I wonder what could have happened to have sent him into this spiral of delusion. He was always so spick and span in his gray uniform, the silver skulls gleaming on his collar, polished to a sheen. Charming and dashing, though— more warrior than soldier—I always thought he would have been better suited to the leather jacket and silk scarf of a Luftwaffe pilot, a latter-day von Richthofen. I never could understand what he saw in the SA.

  Now half his insignia are missing, his uniform in disarray. From his avoidance of certain questions I gather his superiors aren't even aware he's in Berlin.