Wild Cards IV

by George R. R. Martin

  But the Komitet’s publicists had done their job well, on both sides of the quaintly named “Iron Curtain.” Down behind his forebrain not even Mólniya could shake the image of the KGB as the omniscient puppet master, with its strings wrapping the world like a spider’s web.

  He tried to envision himself as a master spider. It made him smile.

  No. I’m not a spider. Just a small, frightened man whom somebody once called hero.

  He thought of Ludmilya, his daughter. He shuddered.

  There are strings attached to me, right enough. But I’m not the one who pulls them.

  I want him.

  Hartmann looked around the squalid little room. Ulrich was pacing, face fixed and sullen at having been left behind. Stocky Wilfried sat cleaning an assault rifle with compulsive care. He always seemed to be doing something with his hands. The two remaining jokers sat by themselves saying nothing. The Russian sat and smoked and stared at the wall.

  He studiously didn’t look at the boy in the scuffed leather jacket.

  Mackie Messer hummed the old song about the shark and its teeth and the man with his jackknife and fancy gloves. Hartmann remembered a mealymouthed version popular when he was a teenager, sung by Bobby Darin or some such teen-idol crooner. He also recalled a different version, one he’d heard for the first time in a dim dope-fogged room on Yale’s Old Campus when antiwar activist Hartmann returned to his alma mater to lecture in ’68. Dark and sinister, a straighter translation of the original, sung in the whisky baritone of a man who, like old Bertolt Brecht himself, delighted in playing Baal: Thomas Marion Douglas, Destiny’s doomed lead singer. Remembering the way the words went down his spine on that distant night, he shuddered.

  I want him.

  No! his mind shouted. He’s insane. He’s dangerous.

  He could be useful, once I get us out of here.

  Hartmann’s body clenched in rictus terror. No! Don’t do anything! The terrorists are negotiating right now. We’ll get out of this.

  He felt Puppetman’s disdain. Seldom had his alter ego seemed more discrete, more other. Fools. What has Hiram Worchester ever been involved in that amounted to anything? It’ll fall through.

  Then we just wait. Sooner or later something will be worked out. It’s how these things go. He felt slimy vines of sweat twining his body inside his blood-spattered shirt and vest.

  How long do you think we have to wait? How long before our jokers and their terrorists friends blow up in each other’s faces? I have puppets. They’re our only way out.

  What can they do? I can’t just make someone let me go. I’m not that little mind-twister Tachyon.

  He felt a smug vibration within.

  Don’t forget 1976, he told his power. You thought you could handle that too.

  The power laughed at him, until he closed his eyes and concentrated and forced it to quiescence.

  Has it become a demon, possessing me? he wondered. Am I just another of Puppetman’s puppets?

  No. I’m the master here. Puppetman’s just a fantasy. A personification of my power. A game I play with myself.

  Inside the tangled corridors of his soul, the echo of triumphant laughter.

  “It’s raining again,” Xavier Desmond said.

  Tach made a face and refrained from a rejoinder commending the joker’s firm grasp of the obvious. Des was a friend, after all.

  He shifted his grip on the umbrella he shared with Desmond and tried to console himself that the squall would soon pass. The Berliners strolling the paths that veined the grassy Tiergarten park and hurrying along the sidewalks of the nearby Bundes Allee clearly thought so, and they should know. Old men in homburgs, young women with prams, intense young men in dark wool sweaters, a sausage vendor with cheeks like ripe peaches; the usual crowd of Germans taking advantage of anything resembling decent weather after the lengthy Prussian winter.

  He glanced at Hiram. The big round restaurateur was resplendent in his pin-striped three-piece suit, hat at a jaunty angle, and black beard curled. He had an umbrella in one hand, a gleaming black satchel in the other, and Sara Morgenstern standing primly next to him, not quite making contact.

  Rain was dripping off the brim of Tach’s plumed hat, which swept beyond the coverage of the cheap plastic umbrella. A rivulet ran down one side of Des’s trunk. Tach sighed.

  How did I let myself get talked into this? he wondered for the fourth or fifth time. It was idle; when Hiram had called to say a West German industrialist who wished to remain nameless had offered to front them the ransom money, he’d known he was in.

  Sara stood stiff. He sensed she was shivering, almost subliminally. Her face was the color of her raincoat. Her eyes were a paleness that somehow contrasted. He wished she hadn’t insisted on coming along. But she was the leading journalist on this junket; they’d have had to lock her up to keep her from covering this meeting with Hartmann’s kidnappers at first hand. And there was her personal interest.

  Hiram cleared his throat. “Here they come.” His voice was pitched higher than usual.

  Tachyon glanced right without turning his head. No mistake; there weren’t enough jokers in West Germany that it was likely to have two just happen along at this moment, even if there could be any doubt about the identity of the small bearded man who walked with the Toulouse-Lautrec roll beside a being who looked like a beige anteater on its hind legs.

  “Tom,” Hiram said, voice husky now.

  “Gimli,” the dwarf replied. He said it without heat. His eyes glittered at the satchel hanging from Hiram’s hand. “You brought it.”

  “Of course … Gimli.” He handed the umbrella to Sara and cracked the satchel. Gimli stood on tiptoe and peered in. His lips pursed in a soundless whistle. “Two million American dollars. Two more after you hand Senator Hartmann over to us.”

  A snaggletoothed grin. “That’s a bargaining figure.”

  Hiram colored. “You agreed on the phone—”

  “We agreed to consider your offer once you demonstrated your good faith,” said one of the two nats who accompanied Gimli and his partner. He was a tall man made bulkier by his raincoat. Dark blond hair was slicked back and down from a balding promontory of forehead by the intermittent rain. “I am Comrade Wolf. Let me remind you, there is the matter of the freedom of our comrade, al-Muezzin.”

  “Just what is it that makes German socialists risk their lives and freedom on behalf of a fundamentalist Muslim terrorist?” Tachyon asked.

  “We’re all comrades in the struggle against Western imperialism. What brings a Takisian to risk his health in our beastly climate on behalf of a senator from a country that once whipped him from its shores like a rabid dog?”

  Tach drew his head back in surprise. Then he smiled. “Touché.” He and Wolf shared a look of perfect understanding.

  “But we can only give you money,” Hiram said. “We can’t arrange for Mr. Hassani to be released. We told you that.”

  “Then it’s no sale,” said Wolf’s nat companion, a redheaded woman Tach could have found attractive but for a sullen, puffy jut to her lower lip and a bluish cast to her complexion. “What use is your toilet-paper money to us? We merely demand it to make you pigs sweat.”

  “Now, wait a minute,” Gimli said. “That money can buy a lot for jokers.”

  “Are you so obsessed with buying into consumption fascism?” sneered the redhead.

  Gimli went purple. “The money’s here. Hassani’s in Rikers, and that’s a long way away.”

  Wolf was frowning at Gimli in a speculative sort of way. Somewhere an engine backfired.

  The woman spat like a cat and jumped back, face pale, eyes feral.

  Motion tugged at the corner of Tach’s eye.

  The chubby sausage seller had flipped open the lid of his cart. His hand was coming out with a black Heckler & Koch mini-machine pistol in it.

  Ever suspicious, Gimli traced his gaze. “It’s a trap!” he shrieked. He whipped open his coat. He’d been holding one of thos
e compact little Krinkov assault rifles beneath.

  Tachyon kicked the foreshortened Kalashnikov from Gimli’s hand with the toe of an elegant boot. The nat woman pulled out an AKM from inside her coat and stuttered a burst one-handed. The sound threatened to implode Tach’s eardrums.

  Sara screamed. Tach threw himself onto her, bore her down to wet, fragrant grass as the female terrorist tracked her weapon from left to right, face a rictus of something like ecstasy.

  There was motion all around. Old men in homburgs and young women with prams and intense young men in sweaters were whipping out machine pistols and rushing toward the party clumped around the two umbrellas.

  “Wait,” Hiram shouted, “hold on! It’s all a misunderstanding.”

  The other terrorists had guns out now, firing in all directions. Bystanders screamed and scattered. The slick-soled shoes of a man waving a machine pistol with one hand lost traction on the grass and shot out from under him. A man with an MP5K and a business suit tripped over a baby carriage whose operator had frozen on the handle and fell on his face.

  Sara lay beneath Tachyon, rigid as a statue. The clenched rump pressed against his crotch was firmer than he would have expected. This is the only way I’m ever going to get on top of her, he thought ruefully. It was almost physical pain to realize it was contact with him and not fear of the bullets crackling like static overhead that made her go stiff.

  Gregg, you are a lucky man. Should you somehow survive this imbroglio.

  Scrambling after his rifle, Gimli ran into a big nat who snatched at him. He picked him up by one leg with that disproportionate strength of his and pitched him into the faces of a trio of his comrades like a Scot tossing the caber.

  Des was making love to the grass. Smart man, Tachyon thought. His head was full of burned powder and the green and brown aromas of wet turf. Hiram was wandering dazed through a horizontal firestorm, waving his arms and crying, “Wait, wait—oh, it wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”

  The terrorists bolted. Gimli ducked between the legs of one nat who flailed his arms at him in a grab, came up and punched a second in the nuts and followed them.

  Tach heard a squeal of pain. The snouted joker fell down with black ropy strands of blood unraveling from his belly. Gimli caught him up on the run and slung him over his shoulder like a rolled carpet.

  A gaggle of Catholic schoolgirls scattered like blue quail, pigtails flying, as the fugitives stampeded through them. Tachyon saw a man go to one knee, raise his machine pistol for a burst at the terrorists.

  He reached out with his mind. The man toppled, asleep.

  A van coughed into life and roared from the curb with Gimli thrashing for the handles of the open doors with his stubby arms.

  Hiram sat on the wet grass, weeping into his hands. The black satchel wept bundled money beside him.

  “The political police,” Neumann said, as if trying to work a shred of spoiled food from inside his mouth. “They don’t call them Popo for nothing.”

  “Herr Neumann—” the man in mechanic’s coveralls began beseechingly.

  “Shut up. Doctor Tachyon, you have my personal apology.” Neumann had arrived within five minutes of the terrorists’ escape, just in time to keep Tachyon from being arrested for screaming abuse at the police interlopers.

  Tachyon sensed Sara beside and behind him like a whiteout shadow. She’d just finished narrating a sketch of what had just happened into the voice-actuated mike clipped to the lapel of her coat. She seemed calm.

  He gestured at the ambulances crowded together like whales with spinning blue lights beyond the police cordon, with a hat still bedraggled from being jumped up and down on. “How many people did your madmen gun down?”

  “Three bystanders were injured by gunfire, and one policeman. Another officer will require hospitalization but he, ah, was not shot.”

  “What were you thinking of?” Tachyon screamed. He thought he’d blasted all his fury out of him, all over the plainclothes officers who’d been stumbling across one another demanding to know how the terrorists could possibly have gotten away. But now it was back, filling him up to overflow. “Tell me, what did you people think you were doing?”

  “It wasn’t my people,” Neumann said. “It was the political branch of the Berlin Land police. The Bundeskriminalamt had nothing to do with it.”

  “It was all a setup,” Xavier Desmond said, stroking his trunk with leaden fingers. “That millionaire philanthropist who lent the ransom—”

  “Was fronting for the political police.”

  “Herr Neumann.” It was a Popo with grass stains on the knees of his once sharply pressed trousers, pointing an accusing finger at Tachyon. “He let the terrorists go. Pauli had a clear shot at them, and he—he knocked him down with that mind power of his.”

  “The officer was aiming his weapon at a crowd of people through whom the terrorists were fleeing,” Tach said tautly. “He could not have fired without hitting innocent bystanders. Or perhaps I am confused as to who is the terrorist.”

  The plainclothesman turned red. “You interfered with one of my officers! We could have stopped them—”

  Neumann reached out and grabbed a pinch of the man’s cheek. “Go elsewhere,” he said softly. “Really.”

  The man swallowed and walked away, sending hostile looks back over his shoulder at Tachyon. Tachyon grinned and shot him the bird.

  “Oh, Gregg, my God, what have we done?” sobbed Hiram. “We’ll never get him back.”

  Tachyon tugged on his elbow, more trying to encourage him to his feet than help him. He forgot about Hiram’s gravity power; the fat man popped right up. “What do you mean, Hiram, my friend?”

  “Are you out of your mind, Doctor? They’ll kill him now.”

  Sara gasped. When Tach glanced to her she looked quickly away, as if unwilling to show him her eyes.

  “Not so, my friend,” Neumann said. “That’s not how the game is played.”

  He stuck his hands in the pockets of his trousers and gazed off across the misty park at the line of trees that masked the outer fences of the zoo. “But now the price will go up.”

  “The bastards!” Gimli turned, whipping rain from the tail of his raincoat, and beat his fists on the mottled walls. “The cocksuckers. They set us up!”

  Shroud and Scrape were huddled over the thin, filthy mattress on which Aardvark lay moaning softly. Everybody else seemed to be milling around a room crowded with heavy damp as well as bodies.

  Hartmann sat with his head pulled protectively down inside his sweat-limp collar. He agreed with Gimli’s character assessment. Are those fools trying to get me killed?

  A thought went home like a whaler’s bomb-lance: Tachyon! Does that alien demon suspect? Is this a convoluted Takisian plot to get rid of me without a scandal?

  Puppetman laughed at him. ‘Never attribute to malice what may adequately be explained by stupidity,’ he said. Hartmann recognized the quote; Lady Black had said it to Carnifex once, during one of his rages.

  Mackie Messer stood shaking his head. “This isn’t right,” he said, half-pleading. “We have the senator. Don’t they know that?”

  Then he was raging around the room like a cornered wolf, snarling and hacking air with his hands. People jostled to get out of the way of those hands.

  “What do they think’s going on?” Mackie screamed. “Who do they think they’re fucking with? I’ll tell you something. I’ll tell you what. Maybe we should send them a few pieces of the Senator here, show them what’s what.”

  He buzzed his hand inches from the tip of the captive’s nose.

  Hartmann yanked his head back. Christ, he almost got me! The intent had been there, for real—Puppetman had felt it, felt it waver at the final millisecond.

  “Calm down, Detlev,” Anneke said sweetly. She seemed exalted by the shootout in the park. She’d been fluttering around and laughing at nothing since the group’s return, and red spots glowed like greasepaint on her cheeks. “The capi
talists won’t be eager to pay all we ask for damaged goods.”

  Mackie went white. Puppetman felt fresh anger burst inside him like a bomb. “Mackie! I’m Mackie Messer, you fucking bitch! Mackie the Knife, just like my song.”

  Detlev was slang for faggot, Hartmann remembered. He kept his last breath inside.

  Anneke smiled at the youthful ace. From the side of his eye Hartmann saw Wilfried pale, and Ulrich picked up an AKM with an elaborate casualness he wouldn’t have thought the blond terrorist could muster.

  Wolf put his arm around Mackie’s shoulders. “There, Mackie, there. Anneke didn’t mean anything by it.” Her smile made a liar of him. But Mackie pressed against the big man’s side and allowed himself to be gentled. Mólniya cleared his throat, and Ulrich set the rifle down.

  Hartmann let the breath go. The explosion wasn’t coming. Quite yet.

  “He’s a good boy,” Wolf said, giving Mackie another hug and letting him go. “He’s the son of an American deserter and a Hamburg whore—another victim of your imperialist venture in Southeast Asia, Senator.”

  “My father was a general,” Mackie shouted in English.

  “Yes, Mackie; anything you say. The boy grew up running the docks and alleys, in and out of institutions. Finally he drifted to Berlin, more helpless flotsam cast up by our own frenetic consumer culture. He saw posters, began to attend study groups at the Free University—he’s barely literate, the poor child—and that’s where I found him. And recruited him.”

  “And he’s been sooo helpful,” Anneke said, rolling her eyes at Ulrich, who laughed. Mackie glanced at them, then quickly away.

  You win, Puppetman said.

  What?

  You’re right. My control isn’t perfect. And this one is too unpredictable, too … terrible.

  Hartmann almost laughed aloud. Of all the things he’d come to expect from the power that dwelt within him, humility wasn’t one.

  Such a waste; he’d be such a perfect puppet. And his emotion, so furious, so lovely—like a drug. But a deadly drug.