Wild Cards IV

by George R. R. Martin

  And Gregg … did she really care what happened to him?

  Or do I hope he never leaves that tenement alive?

  The screaming had stopped, and the buzz-saw sounds. Hartmann had feared they might go on forever. He gagged on the reek of friction-burned hair and bone.

  He felt like something from a medieval fable as painted by Bosch: a glutton presented with the fullest of feasts, only to have it turn to ashes in his mouth. Puppetman had drawn no nourishment from the terrorists’ dying. He’d been nearly as terrified as they.

  A humming, coming closer: Morität, The Ballad of Mackie the Knife. The mad ace was locked in killing frenzy now, stalking toward him with his terrible hand still dripping brains. Hartmann writhed in his bonds. The woman Mackie had impaled was a dead weight across his legs. He was going to die now. Unless …

  Bile surged up his throat at what he was going to do. He choked it back, reached for a string, and pulled. Pulled hard.

  The humming stopped. The soft tocking of clogs on wood stopped. Hartmann looked up. Mackie leaned over him with glowing eyes.

  He pulled Anneke off Hartmann’s legs. He was strong for his size. Or maybe inspired. He pulled Hartmann’s chair upright. Hartmann winced, dreading contact, fearing death. Fearing the alternative almost as much.

  His own breathing nearly deafened him. He could feel the emotion swelling within Mackie. He steeled himself and stroked it, teased it, made it grow.

  Mackie went to his knees before the chair. He unfastened the fly of Hartmann’s trousers, slipped fingers inside, tugged the senator’s cock out into the humid air and fastened his lips around the glans. He began to pump his head up and down, slowly at first, then gaining speed. His tongue went caduceus round and round.

  Hartmann moaned. He couldn’t let himself enjoy this.

  If you don’t it’s never going to end, Puppetman taunted.

  What are you doing to me?

  Saving you. And securing the best puppet of all.

  But he’s so powerful—so … unpredictable. Involuntary pleasure was breaking his thoughts into kaleidoscope fragments.

  But I’ve got him now. Because he wants to be my puppet. He loves you, the way that neurasthenic bitch Sara never could.

  God, God, am I still a man?

  You’re alive. And you’re going to smuggle this creature back to New York. And anyone who stands in our way from now on will die.

  —Now relax and enjoy it.

  Puppetman took over. As Mackie sucked his cock, he sucked the boy’s emotions with his mind. Hot-wet and salty, they gushed into him.

  Hartmann’s head went back. Involuntarily he cried out.

  He came as he had not come since Succubus died.

  Senator Gregg Hartmann pushed through a door from which the glass had long since been broken. He leaned against the cold metal frame and stared into a street that was empty except for gutted cars and weeds pushing up through cracks in the pavement.

  White light drilled him from the rooftop opposite, fierce as a laser. He raised his head, blinking.

  “My God,” a German voice yelled, “it’s the senator.”

  The street filled up with cars and whirling lights and noise. It didn’t seem to take any time at all. Hartmann saw magenta highlights struck like sparks off Tachyon’s hair, and Carnifex in his comic-book outfit, and from doorways and behind the automotive corpses appeared men totally encased in black, trotting warily forward with stubby machine pistols held ready.

  Past them all he saw Sara, dressed in a white coat that was the defiant antithesis of camouflage.

  “I … got away,” he said, voice creaking like an unused door. “It’s over. They—they killed each other.”

  Television spotlights spilled over him, hot and white as milk fresh from the breast. His gaze caught Sara’s. He smiled. But her eyes drilled into his like iron rods.

  Cold and hard. She’s slipped away! he thought. With the thought came pain.

  But Puppetman wasn’t buying pain. Not tonight. He drove himself into her through the eyes.

  And she came running for him, arms spread, her mouth a red hole through which love-words poured. And Hartmann felt his puppet wrap her arms around his neck and makeup-streaked tears gush onto his collar, and he hated that part of him that had saved his life.

  And down away where light never was, Puppetman smiled.

  Mirrors of the Soul

  by Melinda M. Snodgrass

  APRIL IN PARIS. THE chestnut tress resplendent in their pink and white finery. The blossoms drifting like fragrant snow about the feet of the statues in the Tuileries Garden, and floating like colorful foam atop the muddy waters of the Seine.

  April in Paris. The song bubbling incongruously through his head as he stood before a simple gravestone in the Cimetière Montmartre. So hideously inappropriate. He banished it only to have it return with greater intensity.

  Irritably Tachyon hunched one shoulder, took a tighter grip on the simple bouquet of violets and lily of the valley. The crisp green florist’s paper crackled loudly in the afternoon air. Away to his left he could hear the urgent bleat of horns as the bumper-to-bumper traffic crawled up the Rue Norvins toward Sacré-Coeur. With its gleaming white walls, cupolas, and dome the cathedral floated like an Arabian nights dream over this city of light and dreams.

  The last time I saw Paris.

  Earl, his face holding all the expression of an ebony statue. Lena, flushed, impassioned. “You must go!” Looking to Earl for help and comfort. The quiet; “It would probably be best.” The path of least resistance. So strange from this of all men.

  Tachyon knelt, brushed away the petals that littered the stone slab.

  EARL SANDERSON JR.

  “NOIR AIGLE”

  1919–1974

  You lived too long, my friend. Or so it was said. Those busy, noisy activists could have used you better if you’d had the grace to die in 1950. No—even better—while liberating Argentina or freeing Spain or saying Gandhi.

  Laid the bouquet on the grave. A sudden breeze set the delicate white bells of the lilies to trembling. Like a young girl’s lashes just before she was kissed. Or like Blythe’s lashes just before she wept.

  The last time I saw Paris.

  A cold, bleak December, and a park in Neuilly.

  Blythe van Renssaeler, aka Brain Trust, died yesterday.…

  Gracelessly he surged to his feet, dusted the knees of his pants with a handkerchief. Gave his nose a quick, emphatic blow. That was the trouble with the past. It never stayed buried.

  Straddling the slab was a large elaborate wreath. Roses and gladiolas and yards of ribbon. A wreath for a dead hero. A travesty. A small foot came up, sent the wreath tumbling. Contemptuously Tachyon walked over it, grinding the fragile petals beneath his heel.

  One cannot propitiate the ancestors, Jack. Their ghosts will follow.

  His certainly were.

  On the Rue Etex he hailed a cab, fished for the note, read off the name of the Left Bank café in rusty French. Settled back to watch the unlit neon signs flash past. XXX, Le Filles! “Les Sexy.” Strange to think of all this smut at the foot of a hill whose name translated as the Mountain of Martyrs. Saints had died on Montmartre. The Society of Jesus had been founded on the hill in 1534.

  They proceeded in noisy and profane lurches. Bursts of heart-stopping speed followed by neck-wrenching stops. A blare of horns, and an exchange of imaginative insults. They shot through the Place Vendome past the Ritz where the delegation was housed. Tachyon hunkered deeper into his seat though it was unlikely he would be spotted. He was so sick of them all. Sara, quiet, sleek, and secretive as a mongoose. She had changed since Syria, but refused to confide. Peregrine flaunting her pregnancy, refusing to accept that she might not beat the odds. Mistral, young and beautiful. She had been tactful and understanding and kept his shameful secret. Fantasy, sly and amused. She had not. Hot blood washed his face. His humiliating condition was now public to be sniggered at and discussed in tones ran
ging from the sympathetic to the amused. His hand closed tightly on the note. There would be at least one woman he could face without embarrassment. One of his ghosts, but more welcome than the living right now.

  She had chosen a café on the Boulevard Saint-Michel in the heart of the Latin Quarter. The area had always despised the bourgeoisie. Tachyon wondered if Danelle still did. Or had the years dampened her revolutionary ardor? One could only hope it had not dampened her other ardors. Then he remembered, and shrunk down once more.

  Well, if he could no longer taste passion, he could at least remember it.

  She had been nineteen when they’d met in August of 1950. A university student majoring in political philosophy, sex, and revolution. Danelle had been eager to comfort the shattered victim of a capitalist witch hunt: the new darling of the French intellectual left. She took pride in his sufferings. As if the mystique of his martyrdom could rub off with bodily contact.

  She had used him. But by the Ideal he had used her. As a shroud, a buffer against pain and memory. Drowned himself in cunt and wine. Nursing a bottle in Lena Goldoni’s Champs-Élysées penthouse listening to the impassioned rhetoric of revolution. Caring far less for the rhetoric than the passion. Red-tipped nails meeting a slash of red for a mouth as Dani puffed inexpertly at larynx-stripping Gauloises. Black hair as smooth as an ebony helmet over her small head. Lush bosoms straining at a too-tight sweater, and short skirts that occasionally gave him tantalizing glimpses of pale inner thigh.

  God, how they had screwed! Had there ever been any emotion past mutual using? Yes, perhaps, for she had been one of the last to condemn and reject him. She had even seen him off on that frigid January day. That was when he’d still had luggage and a semblance of dignity. There on the platform of the Montparnasse railway station, she had pressed money and a bottle of cognac on him. He hadn’t refused. The cognac had been too welcome, and the money meant that another bottle would follow.

  In 1953 he had called Dani when another fruitless visa battle with the German authorities had sent him careening back into France. Called her hoping for one more bottle of cognac, one more handout, one more round of desperate fornication. But a man had answered, and in the background he had heard a child crying, and when she had finally come to the phone, the message was clear. Get fucked, Tachyon. Tittering, he had suggested that was why he’d called. The unpleasant buzz of a disconnected phone.

  Later in that cold park in Neuilly he’d read of Blythe’s death, and nothing had seemed to matter anymore.

  And yet when the delegation arrived in Paris, Dani had reached out. A note in his box at the Ritz. A meeting on the Left Bank as the silver-gray Parisian sky was turning to rose, and the Eiffel Tower became a web of diamond light. So maybe she had cared. And maybe, to his shame, he hadn’t.

  Dôme was a typical working-class Parisian café. Tiny tables squeezed onto the sidewalk, gray, blue, and white umbrellas, harried, frowning waiters in none-too-clean white smocks. The smell of coffee and grillade. Tach surveyed the handful of patrons. It was early yet for Paris. He hoped she hadn’t chosen to sit inside. All that smoke. His glance kept flicking across a thickset figure in a rusty black coat. There was a watchful intensity about the raddled face, and—

  Dear God, could it … NO!

  “Bon soir, Tachyon.”

  “Danelle,” he managed faintly, and groped for the back of a chair.

  She smiled an enigmatic smile, sucked down some coffee, ground out a cigarette in the dirty ashtray, lit another, leaned back in a horrible parody of her old sexy manner, and eyed him through the rising smoke. “You haven’t changed.”

  His mouth worked, and she laughed sadly. “The platitude a little hard to force out? Of course I’ve changed—it’s been thirty-six years.”

  Thirty-six years. Blythe would be seventy-five.

  Intellectually he had accepted the reality of their pitifully short lifespans. But it had not come home to him before. Blythe had died. Braun remained unchanged. David was lost, so like Blythe remained a memory of youth and charm. And of his new friends, Tommy, Angelface, and Hiram were just entering that uncomfortable stage of middle age. Mark was the merest child. Yet forty-one years ago it had been Mark’s father who had impounded Tach’s ship. And Mark hadn’t even been born yet!

  Soon (or at least as his people measured time), he would be forced to watch them pass from youth into inevitable decay and thence into death. The chair was a welcome support as his rump hit the cold wrought iron.

  “Danelle,” he said again.

  “A kiss, Tachy, for old times’ sake?”

  Heavy yellowish pouches hung beneath faded eyes. Gray brittle hair thrust into a careless bun, the deep gouges beside her mouth into which the scarlet lipstick had bled like a wound. She leaned in close, hitting him with a wave of foul breath. Strong tobacco, cheap wine, coffee, and rotting teeth combining in a stomach-twisting effluvium.

  He recoiled, and this time when the laughter came it seemed forced. As if she hadn’t expected this reaction and was covering the hurt. The harsh laugh ended in a long coughing jag that brought him out of his chair and to her side. Irritably she shrugged off his soothing hand.

  “Emphysema. And don’t you start, le petit docteur. I’m too damn old to give up my cigarettes, and too damn poor to get medical attention when the time comes to die. So I smoke faster hoping I’ll die faster, and then it won’t cost so much at the end.”

  “Danelle—”

  “Bon Dieu, Tachyon! You are dull. No kiss for old times’ sake, and apparently no conversation either. Though as I recall, you weren’t much of a talker all those years ago.”

  “I was finding all the communication I needed in the bottom of a cognac bottle.”

  “It doesn’t seem to have inconvenienced you any. Behold! A great man.”

  She saw the world-renowned figure, a slim figure dressed in brocade and lace, but he, gazing back at the reflections of a thousand memories, saw a cavalcade of lost years. Cheap rooms stinking of sweat, vomit, urine, and despair. Groaning in an alley in Hamburg, beaten almost to death. Accepting a devil’s pact with a gently smiling man, and for what? Another bottle. Waking hallucinations in a cell in the Tombs.

  “What are you doing, Danelle?”

  “I’m a maid at the Hotel Intercontinental.” She seemed to sense his thought. “Yes, an unglamorous end to all that revolutionary fervor. The revolution never came, Tachy.”

  “No.”

  “Which doesn’t leave you brokenhearted.”

  “No. I never accepted your—all of your—versions of utopia.”

  “But you stayed with us. Until finally we threw you out.”

  “Yes, I needed you, and I used you.”

  “My God, such a soul-deep confession? At meetings like these it’s supposed to be all ‘Bonjour’ and ‘Comment allezvous’ and ‘My, you haven’t changed.’ But we’ve already done that, haven’t we?” The bitter mocking tone added a razor’s edge to the words.

  “What do you want, Danelle? Why did you ask to see me?”

  “Because I knew it would bother you.” The butt of the Gauloise followed its predecessor into a squashed and ashy death. “No, that’s not true. I saw your little motorcade pull in. All flags and limousines. It made me think of other years and other banners. I suppose I wanted to remember, and alas as one grows older, the memories of youth become fainter, less real.”

  “I unfortunately do not share that kindly blurring. My kind do not forget.”

  “Poor little prince.” She coughed again, a wet sound.

  Tachyon reached into his breast pocket, pulled out his wallet, stripped off bills.

  “What’s that for?”

  “The money you gave me and the cognac and thirty-six years’ interest.”

  She flinched away, eyes bright with unshed tears. “I didn’t call you for charity or pity.”

  “No, you called to rip at me, hurt me.”

  She looked away. “No, I called you so I could remember anothe
r time.”

  “They weren’t very good times.”

  “For you maybe. I loved them. I was happy. And don’t flatter yourself. You weren’t the reason.”

  “I know. Revolution was your first and final love. I find it hard to accept that you’ve given it up.”

  “Who says I have?”

  “But you said … I thought…”

  “Even the old can pray for change, perhaps even more fervently than the young. By the way”—she drained the last of her coffee with a noisy slurp—“why wouldn’t you help us?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Ah, of course. The little prince, the dedicated royalist. You never cared about the people.”

  “Not as you use that phrase. You reduce them to slogans. I was bred to lead and to protect and to care for them as individuals. Ours is a better way.”

  “You’re a parasite!” And in her face he saw a fleeting shadow of the girl she had been.

  An almost rueful smile touched his lips. “No, an aristocrat, which you would probably argue is synonymous.” His long forefinger played among the little pile of francs. “Despite what you think, it really wasn’t my aristocratic sensibilities that kept me from using my power on your behalf. What you were doing was harmless enough—unlike this new breed who think nothing of killing a man merely for being successful.”

  She hunched a shoulder. “Please, get to the point.”

  “I’d lost my powers.”

  “What? You never told us.”

  “I was afraid of losing my mystique if I had.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s true. Because of Jack’s cowardice.” His face darkened. “The HUAC returned Blythe to the stand. They were demanding the names of all known aces, and because she had my mind, she knew. She was about to betray them, so I used my power to stop her and in so doing broke her mind and left the woman I loved a raving maniac.” He raised trembling fingertips to his damp forehead. The retelling in this of all cities infused it with new power, new pain.