"Right now it hasn't been said, Bando. If you don't say it, it won't be said. If it isn't said, I won't have to deal with it, and right now I can't afford to deal with it. I need you too much. The Razai needs you too much."
I folded my arms and tried to keep my face from showing anything as I closed my eyes and rested my chin on my chest. She knew. Of course, she knew. Cap Brady wasn't stupid. I'd practically spelled it out for him. Like a good number two, he passed it along before going off to supervise bringing Kegel's territory under the law.
"What do I do?"
"Didn't a fellow say something about turning it over to your Higher Power?"
I felt my eyes go wide. Nance had been one of the sharks at the Caravan Group meeting. Of course. The one called Girl. The heat burned my face as I felt absolutely naked. "I'm making a joke out of the law. By making myself an exception, I'm killing it."
"I'm your boss. Let me handle it for now." Nance walked around the table and pulled out a chair next to me. Her movements made her look old and frail. She sat down in the chair, leaned forward, and placed a hand on my cheek. There were dark circles beneath her eyes. She had her own nightmare to ride. "First I want you to get Mercy Jane to take care of your leg. As for the other thing, let me handle it, Bando. You fix on getting Anna Tane. If I know you, if I know the Razai, justice will happen." She placed a hand on my shoulder. "Now get out and get your leg fixed."
▫
Justice.
That night I thought about that word, justice, as the RCs helped the refs get the issues and arguments to Comini's troops and gather up the votes. It meant everybody getting exactly what they deserved as fast as possible. Was Bando Nicos getting justice? Was Prophet? Was letting Nance handle it turning it over or simply sidestepping the whole thing? I knew what I believed.
One thing was different. My ghosts weren't riding me anymore. Instead the image of Anna Tane crouched there in my mind like an emotional cancer, all threatening but not emotionally involved. That was the difference. All of my ghosts were consumed with anger, hate, scorn, revenge, sadness, and self-pity. Things I could understand. My ghosts were emotionally involved. Anna was something else.
Things began spinning and my headache climbed out the top of my skull to draw power from the stars. At one point I thought my leg had left me and it seemed to take me forever to find it. Mercy Jane cripped me to the RC wagon where hundreds of copies of the Law were taken off the lone bed. Once I was seated on the bed, I was shucked. One of Mercy's nurses who helped me undress made a crack about what good shape I was in for an old man. Old man? I asked her how old she was and she said she was twenty-eight. I was a year younger than her.
"Get me a mirror."
There was some argument, but they managed to chase down a small plastic mirror out of somebody's compact. While Mercy Jane cleaned and dressed my leg wound, I checked out the face of Bando Nicos.
Where the slug had chewed it's way through the side of my head, the hair was white. The scar tissue had tightened the skin, pulling my right eyelid into a permanent squint. My beard was coming in white on the sides. The desert sun had weathered my skin until it was burned brown and creased with wrinkles at the corners of my eyes. I looked weary. Old.
Mercy Jane chased out the others and gave me a pill that whacked out all my remaining pins. Before I was all the way down, Shava Ido brought us the news: all but two hundred and eleven of Comini's men had voted for the law and the Razai.
Through the open back door of the wagon I caught a glimpse of Blue Moon. From there I went into a fantasy about getting to that moon and killing the hightowers who had to be watching us from there. Maybe get a ship, leave the solar system. Take Jontine Ru's micros to Earth. Rub Tartaros in their faces. All of the dead. The mountains and mountains of dead.
I slept as the wagon rolled toward the Sunrise and Anna Tane. Even in my sleep there was something about Shava's voice that'd bothered me, but the pill eventually killed that along with the rest of my feelings. I slept like the dead.
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Not Quite A Pezzo
▫
Dreaming fevered dreams. Images of a road lined with skulls and rotting bodies. Green snow falling around me, each flake a sheet of paper. Drifting in and out, noting only flashes of what was happening around me. Reality became a pile of meaningless parts. Illusion became substance. There was Mercy Jane and Wolf working on my leg. Have to ask Wolf if the Rhajmajwhateverjohnny twin ever separated from his brother. Lots of missing chapters. The wagon rocking, Prophet laughing at something that had struck him funny, Marietta and Marantha grilling the Kegeleros about Anna Tane and getting nothing, something about Rhome Nazzar tangling with a Hand patrol near a place called Soldier Mountain, the face of a dead cop in Philly, me beating off Prophet's head with a rock, Alna.
Alna. I felt the burn in my leg, the streaks of fire through the back of my neck, the headache that could flatten continents. I opened my eyes.
Dull daylight. It was overcast. Through the wagon's open door and windows I could see we had made it to the foothills of the Sunrise. There were trees with apple-like fruit on them. I heard Mercy Jane say the old Hand jobs claimed the apples were poisonous. She was angry, frustrated, cursing like a yard rat. After the warnings, eighteen of the Razai had died of apple poisoning. I drifted back to sleep shaking my head. There were still those who hadn't figured out what planet they were on. Hell, there wasn't any point in being judgmental about it. That was the big problem with Earth, too.
▫
Nights and days. Fog and smoke. In and out, up and down. Sometimes I'd mutter answers if asked questions, eat if fed, then fall again through that ripped net of the here and now into that ocean of now and then. It was like I hadn't had any sleep since the landing. I was a slumber sucking black hole. Every cell of my body drained the sleep river and rejoiced while my dreams wandered through the Memory Mall.
The face of that dying cop in Philly. The puzzled look on Dick Irish's face as I blew a hole through his heart. Garoit's blush soaking into the sand while he frantically searched for something that would make his life not all waste, and not being able to see that we owed him our futures.
I looked up to see Anna Tane looking back at me, tears in her eyes. We stood in the center of the road, the smell of the dead choking us. A slight wind came up and blew her away grain by grain until she was gone. I turned and looked down the road. At its end was a castle. In that castle was my real enemy. I turned away only to find the road crowded with skulls. Their jaws snapped, each bite making a sharp wooden sound. Thousands and thousands of them snapping at my ankles, devouring my legs—
▫
It was wearing me out. I was too tired to sleep anymore. I opened my eyes and waited for my heart to calm.
The same window faced me. The wagon still moving. Through the window I saw rocky hills laced with tiny streams bordered by green and purple mosses and slimes. From cracks in the rocks grew yellow and orange bushes with black thorns on them as long as an arm. There were purple, orange, and white wildflowers and a few of the sharks came back from trying to gather some of the flowers. They had hellish blisters all over their hands and arms. Two of them died. Tree huggers were having a bad day.
There were trees. Black-green narrow pointed things that seemed to shoot up into the sky forever. I heard Margo say that they were called stiletto firs. Margo fed me some of the seeds from the fist-sized pods. They tasted like juniper berries. It was like eating crunchy gin. I felt stronger and returned to sleep.
The sleep program kept running. I never liked gin. I liked Margo, though. I wondered why she hadn't gone south with Cap Brady. I counted my ghosts and half of them were missing. Not Prophet, though. He ordered me to look at my own heart. I couldn't. I was afraid. There was a skull-lined road waiting for me. Anna Tane was nothing next to the man in the castle. I turned away again, and again the skulls devoured me.
&nbs
p; ▫
There were voices. I heard Mercy Jane and Wolf discussing whacking off the leg of Bando Nicos. With my eyes closed, I listened with only one ear and muttered to myself, "The poor sonofabitch." I didn't know who they were talking about. It didn't matter. With all of the thousands of dead on the sand, what's a leg?
Marietta's voice boomed out, filling the universe. She threatened to gutstring the entire Razai medical corps if Bando Nicos died, shattering her own You Say It, You Pay It Rule. The harangue was interrupted as Lewis Grahl entered the compartment, wanting to know if the Chief could talk. They told him to go get packed. Grahl broke down and cried.
He had tried and wiped a perp who had worked off an old crowbar beef by sticking the steel between her old cellmate's ribs. It had taken him three shots to collect payback because his hands were shaking so hard. The departed was a twelve-year-old girl.
Those are the breaks, I thought. A perp is a perp, payback is payback. The thing that caught my attention, though, was that Lewis Grahl was an RC. The cockroach was now a Razai Cop. It was possible, then, what I had told Pendril. If he could stop thinking like a cockroach and start thinking like a people, everything would make sense.
But he was crying, Grahl was. Ghosts do that for you. Making sense doesn't mean it'll never hurt.
▫
Tani Aduelo climbed on the night horse. Her skin was flabby and blotched, her hair long and gray, her face wrinkled and toothless. Prophet was sitting on a rock, watching Tani, his eyes alive and intelligent. I asked him why he had said those things about Alna. He turned his head, faced me, and smiled. It was a kind face, the eyes filled with wisdom. He opened his mouth to answer and millions of spiders erupted from the opening. They poured from his nostrils, ears, and eyes. I flew from the image, my hands covering my eyes.
A piece of the real world poked its way in. My eyes were shut, but I picked it up on audio. The pezzo himself, Carlo T., had sweetened his peace offer. He would turn Anna Tane over to Razai justice, in addition to releasing all of the Hand's "workers" who wanted to leave. He'd even throw in the rape perps, if anyone had any charges to bring. All this and a hunk of the Big Grass, too. Everything we wanted.
Man, it was nothing but chain yanking. If you can keep the dog concentrating on the yanking chain, maybe he won't notice it when you run off with his food, bitch, puppies, master, and doghouse.
The RCs in the wagon were badmouthing the offer. They were also making jokes about the T. in Carlo T., guessing at the probably non-Sicilian sound of his real name. Talbot, Taylor, Thibodeau, Tracy, Truman, Tupper, Tutu. His son, Pau Avanti, had changed his name entirely to give it the pizza touch. We killed Pau Avanti.
Maybe Carlo was in the CSA program and was just maintaining his anonymity, like Bando N., Nance D., Magic M.
Carlo T.
Hi, my name's Carlo T. and I'm a recovering son of a bitch.
Hi, Carlo!
Carlo T.
There was that murky little feeling still gnawing at my spare lobe. What the Colonel called Grandma Indimi's unanswered question; her enemy battalion awaiting its orders.
It sent me back to puzzle city and a fitful half-sleep. Marantha Silver's squeeze came into my mind. Herb Ollick. Back when we were in Pau Avanti's tent, he was the one who out goombaed the goombas with nothing in his hand but bullshit and the script of an old crowbar comedy he had written for Marantha. Herb was great as Don Guido Abalone, and he had put the son of Carlo T. enough off his own con to make a fatal mistake.
But it was something Herb had said just before the trial of Bennet v. Myerson that smoked my wig. Back in the crowbars we'd always believed that Herb was connected, but no one knew for sure. The real wiseguys come with omertajaw and wouldn't say. But I was curious, and since the Forever Sand was a long way from Sicily, I asked him.
"You want to know am I a pezzonovante in the organization," he had answered, "the Capo di Capi of the 'friends,' as we say in polite society, true?"
Then he told me that he was a little con artist from Dayton, Ohio. But it was that word, pezzonovante, that rolled its rich syllables between my ears.
"Pezzonovante." I said it out loud.
Carlo T. and his phony goombas were having lots of bent fun with their Mafia fantasy, but none of them had ever been to Earth, much less were connected. They didn't know the words, the manners, the traditions, nothing. And when they called a mokker a wheel, they didn't use the word pezzonovante like the goombas on Earth. They used a chopped form of the word: pezzo. And the Hand jobs were the only ones in the universe that called a big shot a pezzo.
The wagon rocked gently as it moved east with the column. I opened my eyes and pushed myself up into a sitting position. I half-noticed that my leg was still with me, but I couldn't remember why. I couldn't spare the lobe right then. There were other things to ment.
Pezzo.
That was what had perked up my ears when Margo had been describing Yani Comini that one time. She had called him a pezzo.
It was night. I looked around the dimly lit compartment, the fog in my head gone for a moment. The RC wagon was the same size as Nance's, but nowhere near as plush. The couches were hard plank because the cushions had all been burned. The end of the compartment near the door was charred from the fire during the fight with Pau Avanti. On the end opposite the door someone had charcoaled a big five-pointed star on the wall with the words "Razai Cops" written in the center. A few boards had been slapped together for a table in the center, and around it sat Marietta, Lauris, Marantha, and Margo. Margo had her hair up off her neck. Martin Stays was also there, and I wondered how we rated a visit from the Number Two.
My bed was one of the benches with a mattress and pillow made out of piled up desert sheets. It was across the end of the wagon closest to the charcoaled star. The RCs at the table were trying unsuccessfully to talk quietly. Marietta and Marantha looked tired. Margo looked frustrated. Stays was riding a strange ghost.
Lauris Nhandi looked wired down tight. There were things she simply didn't want to feel. I could relate. I just hoped she got around to running her nightmare before she turned out like Ratt or popped a seal and pulped somebody's head with a rock.
They were still kicking around Carlo's latest, and the great Anna Tane brainstorm wasn't going anywhere. Dozens of ex Kegeleros had been questioned, and the RCs still didn't have much information. The little that did go together fuzzed the picture more than it focused. Maybe a hundred and fifty days or so ago Anna Tane appeared from nowhere on the arm of Deke Kegel. Upon that same day he made her his first and only female patrol leader.
In days she became known for cold cruelty, both to her victims and to her men. Shortly after she began gut stringing her own victims, the practice was taken over by Kegel. Anna Tane moved into his lodge, and for all intents and purposes took over the gang, with personal charge of the newly established Hellborn shock troops. As far as anyone could remember, she had never said anything at all about her past or shared anything at all about her personal life.
But she had told me something. She hadn't intended to, but Anna Tane had told Bando Nicos something. Just before I mounted up to ride out of Kegel's camp with Prophet. She had told me something very important.
The sharks around the table were still making funny with Carlo's name, laughing from exhaustion at jokeless jokes. They went into howls from just the sounds of names: Timberlake, Takuda, Terwilliger, Trotsky.
"Chief's up," announced Marietta from the middle of a laugh.
Marantha turned in her chair and looked back at me. She was still giggling, tears in her eyes. "Sorry we waked you. How are you doing, Chief?"
I nodded. "Okay. What's so funny?"
"We just clownin' aroun', down 'n brown," answered Marietta. "Comin' up with T names for Carlo."
"Like Tarzan," said Marantha. They all giggled like they'd been awake for eight days straight.
"Turkey!" returned the Magic Mountain with a belly laugh that rocked the wagon.
"C'mon, She
rlock," urged Stays. "Give us a name."
"Tane," I answered mechanically. It just popped out. Silence dropped on the compartment like cement ankle weights on an East River jogger. I looked around at the faces, my gaze coming to rest upon Stays. "His last name is Tane. Anna Tane is his daughter."
"How do you know?" asked Stays.
"A hunch." I looked at Margo. "What do you know about Carlo's family?"
She was speechless for a moment, then she frowned and said, "He has a harem and he's had it ever since I can remember. He could have a hundred children. Everyone he puts in charge of something has special ties to him, but exactly what those ties are isn't the kind of thing they tell slaves. We knew that Pau Avanti was his son, though."
"Back with the Hand, did you ever hear of Anna Tane?"
Margo shook her head. "No. There must be two or three million in the Hand, counting the slaves. A slave wouldn't know anything like that unless she was part of Carlo's household. I wasn't. I belonged to Pau Avanti." She glanced at Stays and old Watson turned to face me.
"Bando, what makes you think she's even from the Hand?"
Maybe it was nothing. I'd farted through my hairpiece before. I decided to play the tune and see how the sharks danced.
"I been listening on and off while you people questioned the Kegeleros. Kegel and the Hand were blood enemies, right? Then a little while ago, Anna Tane pops out of thin air, she sticks her tail in Deke Kegel's face, he takes a sniff, and the next thing you know Freakface is in love, everybody's getting hung up by their guts, and the gang no longer has any interest in the Hand. The Kegeleros raid, scavenge, torture and raise hell, but no one wants to fight the Hand. When the Razai comes on the grit, Kegel leads his big column against us. To wrap it up with a big bow, thanks to Anna's influence and leadership, Kegel and his entire column are almost wiped. I'd bet my parole against infinity hold that she expected the Razai and the Kegeleros to eat each other alive, leaving a clear field for the Hand."
I rubbed my eyes as I thought back to my return to Kegel's camp. I had been up there hungering for death and destruction to every member of Kegel's gang. I wanted to see bodies stacked to the stars. That was why Anna Tane had Kegel rape me. She didn't give a damn about hostages or deals for auto rifles. The only thing she was interested in was siccing the Razai on Kegel with quick, massive, ultimate retaliation. From there, who knew? Maybe the Razai could've been foaming at the mouth enough to forget their little free-the-slaves charity case against the Hand. Instead maybe they'd turn south against Kegel's home base and his gang's main force. Maybe the rest of Kegel's goons would come after us. Either way the Hand's enemies would be paying the bills to buy Carlo's continued power.
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