She settled her black and silver cloak more firmly around her, keeping her head bowed and hidden under the hood, aware that she presented an image of herself as dangerous and mysterious that she didn’t always appreciate. But the cloak helped her control her power, preventing it from lashing out to leech the energy from everything, everyone, around her. She hadn’t touched another living soul, except to do damage to them, since she was a child.
Ray added, “You might want to keep your eyes open—a couple of spooks are holed up in the building across the street. Standard spy versus spy shit. They may get pushy.”
“They’d probably learn more about the tour by reading the newspapers than running surveillance.”
“Yeah. I’ll take the first shift on call if you want to get some rest.”
“Thanks, I will,” she said, and he waved her off as he marched on to ops.
The security contingent and staff on the tour didn’t get the luxury suites that the delegates did. But this was still a five-star hotel, and Joann was more than happy with her “plain” room, with its king bed, private bathroom, and claw-foot tub. She was contemplating the extravagance of a hot bath when she got a call on her room’s phone.
“Lady Black, this is Representative Cramer. May I have a word with you?”
“Yes, Representative, of course. Is there a problem?” Inwardly, she groaned. If they had a problem, the delegates shouldn’t be calling her, they should be calling ops. Unless this was for something unofficial. Unofficial and complicated, of course.
“I would very much like to discuss this in person, if possible.” She worded it as a request, but the tone of command was unmistakable. So much for a bath. Joann took a wistful look back at the expansive bed and bade farewell to an afternoon nap.
Congresswoman Carol Cramer, Republican from Missouri, was one of those accidental female politicians who’d stepped into the opening left when her husband died—in this case he dropped dead of a heart attack during a reelection campaign. She won the election for his seat three years ago, won reelection for herself, and seemed to be digging in for a long political career. As the most junior political delegate on the tour, she’d kept a very low profile. Her main goal seemed to be to do her duty in representing the Republican Party on the tour while avoiding any kind of scandal that might damage her future political aspirations. Which made calling for a secret conference with a SCARE security agent all the more surprising. Joann reassured herself: How much trouble could a polite southern-midwestern lady like Carol Cramer really get into?
Cramer was watching for her and opened the door wide when Joann arrived at her room. Joann declined the offered chair and prepared to listen attentively. Cramer paced. She was in her fifties, very well dressed in a tailored, light blue dress suit, her short ash-colored hair curled and settled. She was the kind of woman who’d never leave her room without checking to make sure her clothing, hair, makeup, everything, were perfect.
“I have … well, a favor to ask. But I’d like it to be kept quiet if at all possible. It’s nothing illegal, I’m certain. But it’s … sensitive. Lady Black, I need you to find someone.”
Joann raised an eyebrow and waited for further explanation. “I have friends—political donors, really, which is why I’d like to keep this quiet. They have a daughter, twenty years old, who dropped out of Smith earlier this year and then all but vanished. The family has considerable resources, of course, and they hired investigators, but they’ve only made a little progress. They believe she’s here in Prague, and they’ve asked me to confirm that and to talk to her if I can.”
She drew a battered envelope out of the desk drawer. Tipping it open, she slid out a handful of photographs and a typed report. Joann stepped over to look.
The daughter, Katrina Duboss according to the label, was a joker. In place of her left arm a collection of orange, snakelike limbs clustered, reminiscent of Medusa. They seemed prehensile, wrapping around the arm of the lawn chair where she sat. The bright, shimmering orange scales from this strange limb continued upward to her neck and covered part of her cheek, giving the impression that she wore a partial mask. The photo was a candid snapshot, taken at some backyard party. In the background, a group of college-age kids were playing Frisbee. Dressed in a tank top and flowing skirt, she held a can of Coke in her normal hand and rolled her eyes as if the person with the camera had asked her to pose. The young woman seemed shy, but not ashamed. Not trying to hide from the camera, not trying to disguise her deformity. She had lively brown eyes.
“She’s a joker,” Joann observed, stating the obvious.
Cramer closed her eyes and sighed, as if it was a tragedy. “Yes, that happened only a couple of years ago. She became infected and was ill for quite a long time. And—I’m afraid things just haven’t been the same for the family since.”
“I imagine not,” Joann said wryly. If she had to judge from the photo, Katrina seemed at ease. Happy even. She seemed to have adjusted to her transformation. That might not have been true for the rest of the family.
The typed report was a list of known whereabouts over the last year. Katrina Duboss had cashed out a savings account to buy a plane ticket to London. From there, she’d wandered, vanishing for weeks before reappearing in some other European city. She seemed to be doing the itinerant backpacking pilgrimage. Any college student might drop out to travel for a few months, but the Duboss girl seemed to have adopted this as a lifestyle.
“She was studying art in school,” Cramer said. “Her parents understand her wanting to go to Europe, but like this? They could have helped her, but she hasn’t spoken to them in months.”
Joann knew this wasn’t the whole story, from watching this scenario play out in dozens of other families. Well-off families suddenly found a joker in their midst, a puzzle piece that didn’t fit into their neat little world, and their first instinct was to bury the problem. That was some people’s definition of help. Joann wondered if Katrina’s parents had proposed amputation and plastic surgery, thinking that half a body would be better than a deformed one. Nobody could blame Katrina for running away from that. Except maybe someone like Cramer.
She shouldn’t be making blanket assumptions about Cramer, the Duboss family, or anything else. But she also shouldn’t have to deal with this kind of soap opera when her job was protecting the tour.
“Ma’am, this isn’t really in my purview. You should talk to the embassy; they have staff who would be much more helpful—”
“And if I went to them, this would garner publicity that the family really doesn’t need. I’m trying to avoid that, and the family would like to avoid any official inquiries.”
Which gave the whole incident a patina of suspicion that Joann didn’t like at all. “Off the record” usually meant “cover our ass.” What was the family trying to hide? And, of course, Cramer didn’t want to be seen pulling strings for a donor.
“She’s over eighteen, the kid can do whatever she wants. We can’t force her to go home,” Joann said.
“I know that, but I’d like to talk to her, if I can. For Mark and Barbara’s sake.”
The tour would be in Prague for two days. Local security would be taking up part of the burden of babysitting the delegates. Because of that, Joann was supposed to have a little time off during those two days. Theoretically, she could take a couple of hours to shake some trees and see if the Duboss girl fell out. Most likely she wouldn’t, and Joann wouldn’t feel too bad about it.
“I’ll see what I can do, but I can’t promise anything.”
“Thank you,” Representative Cramer said, and held out her hand to shake Joann’s. A purely reflexive move, a politician’s instinct for graciousness. Joann kept her hands folded underneath her cloak and pressed her lips in apology. She did not shake hands, not even with gloves on. Even that brought her too close to people. Cramer withdrew, wringing her hands awkwardly, and Joann showed herself out.
The next morning, rather than repeating someone else’s footwork,
Joann tapped sources at the U.S. Embassy. The intelligence people here weren’t idiots. They tracked American citizens entering and leaving the country, especially ones who might raise security flags. Katrina Duboss wouldn’t necessarily raise any flags, but if Cramer was right, she might be running with a crowd that would. Besides, any joker would stand out in this part of the world. She didn’t have to explain herself; her search would stay off the record as Cramer requested. Though Joann was tempted to get the whole thing on the record just to see what kind of skeletons turned up. That kind of thing was part of her job description. But she’d wait to see what happened before she went that far.
In short order, she got what she needed: a starting point. The embassy clerk was able to give her a list of places where disaffected college students and bohemian artist types gathered. Literally Bohemian, in this part of the world. The original Bohemians. She wondered if they even noticed that, around here.
List in hand, she went for a walk.
If she was going to be searching anyway, she might as well enjoy herself by playing tourist. So she wandered along streets, admiring architecture and stopping at corners to stare at everything from the Art Nouveau splendor of the nineteenth-century opera house to the wicked-looking angled spires of the medieval Church of Our Lady before Týn. Wenceslas Square was at one end of a broad, tree-lined street that would have been at home in any city in western Europe, with yet another impressive nineteenth-century block of buildings and a grand equestrian statue. And even after World War II and forty years under Communism, the city had a Jewish neighborhood, and an intact medieval synagogue with a distinctive jagged roofline. There, she’d found an eager tour guide who spoke English and insisted that Rabbi Loew’s famous golem was stored in the roof. Joann smiled at the story and tipped the guide well.
Turning a corner at the edge of the Old Town, she stumbled across a facade painted with a mural of a gorgeous woman with streaming, curling red hair and a diaphanous gown, surrounded by whorls and lilies. Alphonse Mucha—this was an Alphonse Mucha piece forming a painted arc over a doorway, stuck out here randomly in the middle of the city, obscured by soot but still clearly Mucha. She just stared for a moment. What an odd, incongruous city.
Her dad would love this. Joann took the time to send a postcard to her father that pictured the Charles Bridge over the river. She’d managed to send him one from almost every city the tour had visited. He should have quite the collection by now, pictures of beaches and monuments, sunsets and Ayers Rock and the pyramids of Giza, the Tokyo skyline, the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires.
Maybe when she had some time off they could take a trip together. She’d suggest it to him.
The list of gathering places for the city’s disaffected youth was about what she’d expected. Bars, coffee shops, the basement of a used bookstore, all with a vaguely clandestine air about them. Even behind the Iron Curtain, some things didn’t change, and very little could stop young people from gathering to drink and talk about how they were going to change the world. Even if, in a city like this, in a country like this, they might speak very quietly and look over their shoulders while doing so.
People stared at her wherever she went, whether it was because she was black or because with her height and rippling cloak she always drew eyes. She stood out in New York City, for crying out loud. She was used to it. It also meant that people rarely messed with her. With the dark surface of her cloak facing out, she could contain her energy, make herself almost a shadow. It kept her from causing too much of a disturbance when she peeked into coffeehouses and scanned for jokers, artists, or anyone who looked like they might know Katrina.
She found the place at dusk. The sixth address on her list, it looked like a normal storefront on a back street on the fringes of the Old Town. A short set of stairs led down to a sunken door, a cellar underneath a square stone building. As she hung back and watched, a pair of young women with short hair and worn jeans pushed through the door and left, arm in arm, giggling and conversing softly in Czech.
The door wasn’t locked. No secret passwords, no guards. It was hidden in plain sight, the kind of place most people would just walk right by unless they knew it was here. Quickly, she slipped inside.
Wrapped in her cloak, she tried to be unobtrusive, keeping to shadows. When a bleary-eyed kid with an ash-laden cigarette stumbled toward her and the door, she stepped out of his way, and he never gave her a second glance. Continuing down the stairs, she emerged into a wide room and the bustle of a nascent counterculture. Bare bulbs on sockets strung together with extension cords cast a stark light over the scene. The place was set up like some kind of coffeehouse cum workshop; small groups gathered at tables that were little more than plywood set on sawhorses. The air smelled of thick-brewed coffee and strong beer. Conversation rumbled. A black-haired, denim-jacketed girl played guitar and sang earnestly, if a little out of tune. Flyers, posters, and even spray paint decorated the walls, advertising British punk bands and anti-communist revolution. Nobody here could have been over twenty-five, and they were all dressed in ripped jeans, T-shirts, army surplus, gypsy skirts, and faded tunics, all of it thrift-store chic. An anticipatory energy ran through the place, people leaning over their work, exchanging excited words. These kids were like something out of Hair, twenty years too late.
And they were in a basement that might have been built six hundred years ago, pale walls and vaulted ceilings, a chill of age and stone pressing close. The medieval stone walls were now pasted over with slogans and graffiti. She could have wept. But time didn’t stand still, did it? This was a city, not a museum.
She spotted the American joker in the back of the hall, leaning over a table and drawing on a wide piece of butcher paper. Joann had actually missed her on her first scan of the room; her left side was turned toward the wall, and from this angle she looked a little like Mucha’s nymph, long hair curling down her back, bright eyes and fine features. She was missing the draping clothing, instead wearing a shawl over a green army jacket, paisley dress, stockings, and Doc Martens.
Holding back a moment, Joann just watched.
Katrina wasn’t the only joker in the room. Joann spotted three others: one with damp and mottled skin like a salamander, another with an extra set of elongated, boneless arms tucked in the pockets of a sleeveless jacket, a third with bright blue hair that might have been dyed, until Joann saw it moving on its own, like seaweed in a current. The jokers didn’t cluster together but were scattered throughout the room, working on projects of their own. There weren’t enough of them to form their own clique, their own community. Strangely enough, discrimination wasn’t as pronounced when the minority became so small as to not cause anxiety. Joann had experienced the phenomenon often enough. Katrina was here because she could be an artist here, not just a joker.
She looked fine. Mostly healthy, smiling. She could stand to eat a little more, maybe.
As Joann watched, patterns in the group’s behavior emerged. Different clusters of people appeared to be involved in their own projects and conversations, but on further observation, all the projects had a sameness to them: signs, banners, streamers, noisemakers. All were obvious props for some kind of demonstration. Joann’s heart sank, thinking how these kids were setting themselves up for a confrontation with the Czech police, maybe even Soviet occupation forces, and that sort of thing never ended well.
A lanky guy with spiked hair and gaunt features that would have been handsomely rugged if he put on a little weight seemed to be the constant, the one who circled the room, checking in on the various clusters of kids, offering direction on their work. He wore a faded T-shirt for an obscure band and ratty jeans, and he moved with authority, talking to people, nodding in approval, or shaking his head, and everyone in the little artist colony looked on him with awe. So, this was mostly likely the personality-in-chief around here.
When the guy reached Katrina, he wrapped a possessive arm around her, pulled her close, and kissed her. She laughed. When she tried
to pull away to get back to her drawing, he didn’t let go. They spoke a few words. The guy spoke English with a German accent.
Joann waited until he finished holding court and departed for another circuit of the room before sidling over to catch the young woman’s attention.
“Katrina Duboss?” Joann said gently.
The young woman’s eyes went round, stricken with guilt, and she pressed herself to the wall. “How do you know who I am?”
“I’m Joann Jefferson. Are you familiar with Congresswoman Carol Cramer? She’s a friend of your parents?”
“Are you a cop?” she asked. “Or a PI or something?”
Sort of? How much worse would it be to say she was a federal agent? “Not really,” she answered. “Not here, at least. I’m just doing a favor for Representative Cramer, who’s here as a delegate on a UN tour and asked me to look in on you. Do you know her? She’d like to talk to you.”
Relaxing, Katrina smirked. “Yeah. Yeah, I know her. My folks used to drag me to her fund-raising dinners. I’ve never seen a more pretentious group of predators. You can tell her I’m fine. I don’t want to talk to her.”
“I understand that,” Joann said. And I can’t say that I blame you. “But I think your family’s worried about you. Do you have a message, anything you’d like to tell them?”
“They’re not really worried about me, you know. It’s just that they haven’t been able to come up with a good story to tell their friends about what happened to me.” The snakes at her side seemed agitated, twisting and writhing until they curled around her front like a shield. The gesture was very like she’d crossed her arms.
“All right. I’ll let Cramer know you’re okay.” From across the room, the German punk kid was staring at them. Katrina quickly looked away.
Wild Cards IV Page 44
