Wild Cards 14 - Marked Cards

by George R. R. Martin

  Okay, he thought. I'm midtown in nat country. Who'd help me here?

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  "Erin, I have to see Peregrine."

  The nat receptionist peered over the edge of her desk as if she'd just discovered a hairball on her rug. Gregg could distinctly smell her shampoo, her deodorant, her perfume, the dry cleaning fluid on her dress, the coffee in the mug on her desk, the bagel she'd eaten that morning, and the toothpaste she'd used afterward. "I'm sorry, but that's not possible," Erin told him.

  "Look, Erin, I know this is damn near impossible to believe, but I'm Gregg Hartmann. You and I just talked last week, remember? You were trying to set up an interview with Pan Rudo. I was jumped into this damn body, and I need help, and I need to talk to Peri !" The last word was a soprano squeal. Erin's face had gone stiff and red, but at least she picked up the phone. "Thank you, Erin," Gregg said.

  Half a minute later, the office doors swung open and the lobby guard - another nat - was giving Gregg the hard stare. "This the one?" he asked Erin. She nodded. "Come on, bub. Let's go."

  "I'm not leaving until I see Peri."

  The guard almost smiled. He smelled of aftershave and last night's beer. And gun oil. "You can come quietly or you can make it tough for yourself, short stuff," he told Gregg. "I don't care either way."

  "Erin - " Gregg began.

  "I don't find your sick little joke funny at all," the receptionist said. "Especially not from a joker."

  "Hey, I was jumped!"

  "I had a lot of respect for Gregg Hartmann - he was a good man. Now please leave."

  Gregg looked from Erin to the guard. They had the same look the bus driver had. He dropped to all sixes, sighing, and padded through the door the guard held open. "But I was jumped. I really was," he told the guard as the man escorted Gregg to the rear entrance of the studio. "I am Gregg Hartmann."

  The guard opened the door for Gregg, let him out and shook a finger at Gregg like a parent scolding a child. "Listen, buster, I see all kinds here. I don't normally mind. But you're sick. Anyone who would make a joke like this after Hartmann was murdered like that..." The guard stopped. He let the door swing shut and walked away.

  "Wait!" Gregg shouted through the glass, his voice piping. "What do you mean, murdered?!"

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  He found out some twenty blocks later, near Jokertown.

  A half dozen television sets tossed blue light from an appliance store window. The evening news was on. Standing with his front legs up against the glass, squinting, Gregg watched the body bag being brought out of his apartment building. There was tape of the interior - blood was splattered everywhere, and slogans had been written on the wall in blood. The camera focused on one: SHARKS REVENGE, it declared, written in shaky, smeared block letters. The reporter on the scene was talking about "... one of the most brutal, vicious, and sadistic murders the city has seen. Back to you, Peter."

  Behind Peter Jennings, one of Gregg's old publicity photos smiled blandly back at him. "Ex-Senator Hartmann had created an uproar with his press conference only yesterday, in which he denounced the conspiracy he himself had publicized on Peregrine's Perch, the so-called "Card Sharks' group ..."

  A short clip of the press conference was shown. In a quick sound bite, Gregg watched "himself" state haltingly that the Card Sharks "... never existed, except in the minds of a small number of deluded people."

  The report cut back to Jennings. "Reports that several masked persons were seen going into the Senator's apartment have not been verified. Given that Mr. Hartmann refuted his own part in the Card Shark speculation, it would seem counter-productive for a true Sharks organization to assassinate him. There is speculation that jokers angry with Hartmann's reversal of stance may instead be responsible, but we stress that, right now, nothing is certain beyond the fact that our country has lost one of its more colorful and controversial political figures."

  Gregg felt sick. He reeled away from the display, nearly falling off the curb. His body heaved, a rippling spasm. Something sour and huge choked him; Gregg coughed and spat. A hard spheroid of brown, crusty stuff rolled off the curb and into the gutter.

  He had no idea what it was.

  He had no idea who he was.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  "Oddity!"

  Gregg had caught a glimpse of the figure in the Jokertown alleyway, a darker shadow against the night. Gregg hurried across the street toward Oddity, who had stopped. Gregg could smell the three distinct odors under the ankle-length cloak, but the eyes behind the mesh of the fencing mask were lost in his fuzzy sight. "I have to see Father Squid and Hannah," he said. "They jumped me. I don't know who was in my body when it was killed, but it wasn't me. I'm Gregg. Gregg Hartmann!"

  "I know who you are. I also know that the jumpers are dead, Battle," Oddity said. John's voice - that was hardly comforting; John had been Puppetman's favorite, but he was the least pleasant of the trio. "Bloat's dead. Hartmann's dead. Too many damn people are dead. Keep bothering me, and you might be, too. I don't know what kind of shit you're trying to pull with this, but it isn't going to work."

  "Please!" Gregg lifted up on his hind legs like a begging dog, clutching at Oddity's cloak with his clumsy fingers. "I can prove who I am if you'll give me a chance. I have to see Hannah!"

  "Get off me!" Oddity kicked Gregg away. The joker's powerful muscles tossed Gregg halfway across the alley. He hit the ground hard. He felt the unbidden reflexes kick in once more - a roar in his head as adrenaline flooded the body, as the world seemed to go into slow motion around him. Suddenly he was tearing around at full throttle like the Roadrunner with Wile E. Coyote right behind him: across the street and back, darting between the jokers on the sidewalks, back into the alley at top speed, up the side walls, leaping a dozen feet in the air, caroming off garbage cans and fire escapes. "Jesus, the little sucker can sure move," he heard Oddity say, and then Gregg was streaking off again, back out into the Jokertown streets.

  When the buzz wore off and Gregg was able to control the body once more, he was six blocks away. When he finally got back to the alley, Oddity was gone.

  Gregg was hungry, too. Considering the cranked-up metabolism this body possessed in stress situations, Gregg wasn't surprised. In fact, something in the alley smelled ... good. Gregg sniffed, unbelieving. Yes, the garbage can there by the wall - not the noisome contents, but the can itself. His joker body was salivating, and an odd pressure was building up somewhere in his gut. Gregg opened his mouth as if to belch - he was surprised when a liquid glob the size of a softball jetted out. The odd stuff clung to the side of the garbage can like transparent jelly.

  And the aluminum can melted around it like candlewax. The resulting metallic pabulum smelled delicious, and the ache of hunger surged. Gregg glanced around to make sure no one was watching, and dipped his head to lap the steaming goo tentatively.

  Hiram Worchester had never made a better meal.

  Great, he thought. I eat my own vomit. And I like it.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  His apartment was a lost cause; Gregg didn't even consider going there. He tried his office and couldn't get into the building. The doors were locked and probably would have been too heavy for him to budge even if they'd been open. He couldn't reach the public telephones to call anyone, not that it mattered since he didn't have a quarter and no one would have recognized his voice anyway. The constant police patrols around J-Town were looking at him strangely.

  "Hey, Battle!" one of the cops called once, leaning out of the car. The face under the NYPD visor looked like crumpled parchment paper. "What the hell you doing in J-Town?" Gregg didn't answer, and the cop finally shrugged and gunned the cruiser on past.

  Hannah and Father Squid had gone into hiding again in the wake of "his" murder - a priest he didn't recognize answered the door and would tell Gregg only that Father Squid had gone to a "conference" until the weekend. He couldn't find Oddity again or Jube or anyone else who might be of help.


  He wanted to shout to whatever god would listen that he was very, very sorry for everything he'd ever done and while this was wonderfully appropriate penance he'd learned his lesson and could he please, please be just a normal person again. He'd never misuse the Gift again. Never ever. No one seemed to be listening. Gregg decided that he had no choice. After all, Hannah, Father Squid, Peregrine - none of them could really help him. He'd been jumped out of his body. His own body was dead, but there was a way to get a new one. He needed a jumper. The Sharks had a jumper. So Gregg needed to go to the Sharks.

  Feeding Frenzy

  2

  Shad's wiretap of Herzenhagen's phone got him precisely nowhere, so he got on the motorbike he'd bought that morning and followed Herzenhagen's Jaguar to his club. He returned to his apartment long enough to pick up another wiretap kit and his phone company uniform. Then he stole a phone company van he found double-parked, drove it to Herzenhagen's club, and tapped the phone. He abandoned the van, changed and went up the building across the street.

  Most of what he heard was junk. He had to keep switching from one line to another in order to monitor all the calls. But finally he heard the one he was waiting for.

  "Philip von Herzenhagen, please."

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  "The Quarantine Bill is stuck in conference committee," Senator Flynn said. "President Barnett could resolve the whole thing with a few phone calls, but he's not making them."

  Herzenhagen adjusted the receiver to his ear. "What's giving him cold feet?"

  Flynn was Gregg Hartmann's successor as chairman of SCARE, the Senate Committee for Ace Resources and Endeavors. It had taken the Sharks years to get him in place. "He's getting information from somewhere else. My guess is that it's the Vice President's office."

  "Zappa."

  "Yeah, Zappa." The Oklahoma accent dripped with scorn.

  Inchoate anger flailed in Herzenhagen's head. He'd made General Frank Zappa, Jr. Recommended him for the job of destroying the Rox, introduced him to the old political hands who promoted his memoirs and built him into a candidate.

  Damn it. Zappa's father had died of the wild card. Zappa had fought with the Joker Brigade in Vietnam - he had to have known what a menace they were. And he'd made his reputation fighting jokers on the Rox.

  Who'd have thought he'd turn soft now?

  "Zappa's got his own connections. He spends a lot of time with Barnett. Barnett always wanted to be in the military - he ran off to join the Marines at sixteen, remember - and Barnett really looks up to Zappa. So they get together a couple times a week, and sometimes Zappa brings along his stepfather, the Marine, and they all smoke cigars and tell war stories and Barnett just laps it up. And what Zappa is saying is that the Quarantine Bill isn't necessary, that if what we really want is to find a cure for the wild card and help the jokers, all we need to do is use the clinics and systems already in place, and just fund them better."

  "Damn it."

  The hell of it was, Zappa was perfectly right. The existing system was more efficient than quarantining all the wild cards in "Hospital Centers" on Federal reserves in the western US.

  The only reason - the real reason - for moving the wild cards into the camps was so that, at the right time, they could be dealt with all at once.

  Faneuil had demonstrated how, back in Africa, then again in Central America.

  "I think I should come to Washington," Herzenhagen said. "We need to meet in person."

  "Who with?"

  "The General and Rudo are in Europe. I should see Peggy, so that she can liaise with Rudo. Is Hughes still in town?"

  "Yeah. He's doing some discreet lobbying for us while he's supposed to be concerned over the transportation bill."

  "Where will you be staying?"

  "The Statler. As usual. Tell Peggy I'll be in tomorrow."

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  Shad stood outside Mr. Gravemold's Jokertown apartment and hesitated. The scent wafting from under the apartment door was tomato sauce and cheese.

  Already? Shad thought.

  He looked over his shoulder, made certain no one was looking, then covered himself in darkness and used his key.

  A brown-haired white man in his thirties was in the kitchen eating store-bought lasagna from its white microwave tray. Two frozen pizzas, visible through the glass door of the oven, were beginning to bubble. A half-eaten gallon of ice cream, the spoon still stuck in it, sat on the counter.

  The man looked up and saw Shad's cloud of darkness.

  "Oh, hi," he said casually. "Thanks for leaving all the food."

  Shad had put Croyd in the Gravemold apartment on the assumption that it wouldn't tell Croyd any more than he didn't know already.

  "I knew you'd be hungry when you woke up," Shad said. "You are who I think you are, right?"

  "I'm Croyd Crenson, if that's what you mean. Join me in some pizza?"

  "It's a little early for me." No point in reminding Croyd that he hardly ate anyway.

  "Yeah? What time is it? And what day and month while you're at it?"

  Shad told him. Croyd seemed impressed. "I usually sleep longer. But it varies, you know." Croyd's eyes narrowed again as he tried to peer at Shad. "Uh, is there a reason you're clouded up like that?"

  "Do you recall the last moments of our previous meeting?"

  "Oh." Croyd seemed a bit shamefaced. "Well, yes, I do. But I wasn't quite myself at the time."

  "The point is, am I still redefined as enemy?"

  "No. I'm in my right mind now, and I don't hold that business on the docks against you." He seemed amused. "So you're Gravemold, huh? How do you stand the smell?"

  "Various methods. Usually I snort a whole bunch of cocaine."

  "Yeah?" He screwed up his face. "I used to use that stuff, but I gave it up. You sure it's safe?"

  "You're a speed freak, and you're giving me advice about drugs?"

  Croyd shrugged. "Each to his own, I guess. Which reminds me - about this Gravemold business. If you're around me when I've been speeding - well, I get paranoid and irrational, and you should probably avoid me if I'm crazed. I don't hold a grudge, but when I'm speeding I see things differently." He shook his head. "Boy, that last joker body was a wrench. No feelings, no real thoughts even, just priorities and calculations. It must be what Mr. Spock feels like all the time."

  "Figured out what your power is this time around?"

  "Well, I don't fly or levitate, I don't make things move with the power of my mind, I don't walk up walls, I can't cook the frozen pizzas with my heat vision, and I can't read minds or control people with my thoughts."

  "How do you know about that last one?"

  Croyd smiled thinly. "I just tried."

  "How about strength?"

  "I don't know. I didn't want to wreck your nice furniture."

  Shad let his darkness drain away. "The question is," he asked "have you retained your prime directive from your last body?" Croyd looked quizzical. "Rudo," Shad said.

  "Oh, that kraut-eating bastard. Absolutely. I should have killed him forty years ago." Croyd took a few bites of lasagna. "How about your little nemesis? Gregg Hartmann?"

  "Taken care of."

  "Already? You sure work fast. What was it he did to you, anyway?"

  Shad told him. By the end of the story Croyd had finished the lasagna and gotten halfway through the first pizza. Croyd shook his head.

  "Boy," he said. "I coulda sworn Hartmann was a nice guy. Not that I ever knew him particularly well." He turned melancholy. "Not, for that matter, that I ever really get to know anyone particularly well."

  "Hartmann was working with the Sharks. I found that much out. My guess is that he was threatening to expose them just so they'd pay him off somehow. Or maybe it was something more complicated than that, some elaborate game the Sharks were playing."

  Croyd's eyes turned cold. "The Sharks."

  "Rudo's a Shark. Hartmann was working with them, even if he wasn't a Shark himself. It's all part of a packa
ge. And you know what I'm thinking about the package?"

  "You're thinking it's time to bury it."

  "Six feet under."

  Croyd smiled. "Might as well start with Rudo. You know where he is?"

  "I called his office at the UN. He's inspecting sanitary conditions in - I think it was Kirghizia. But he works right here in New York, so he'll be back sooner or later."

  "There are other Sharks," Croyd said. He took a thoughtful bite of pizza.

  "You know how the Sharks work, right?"

  "Know how they work? Shit, man, I was inside their heads! Raney and Shannon - what a cold couple of bastards. They were gonna kill us with some bug, just like that Faneuil did in Guatemala ..."

  "The point is, nobody knows who they are. There's no visible connection between the Sharks and their victims. There's no apparent motive for what they do. And they set up others to take the fall. There's no way any of this could go through the courts - everything's too deniable."

  "My guess," Croyd said with a mouth full of pizza, "is that you're not planning on taking it through the courts."

  "You know we can't."

  "You're going to do it to them."

  "Their own medicine. Their own style. Yes."

  "You'd like my help."

  "Help, yes. If you're willing. But I'd also like your advice."

  Croyd blinked. "Sure."

  "I mean moral advice."

  Croyd began coughing on his pizza. Shad pounded him on the back. "I'm not exactly Fulton J. Sheen, you know," Croyd said finally.

  "Listen. We're going to be hurting people. Messing them up bad."

  "I thought that was the point. I thought that's what you were good at."

  "I am good at it." Shad reached for words, found some that would do. "But that man was Puppetman's doing - he's responsible for a lot of it. And ... this is kind of funny - I really don't know who I am anymore. I refuse to be Puppetman's creation. But what does that leave?"

  Croyd was thoughtful. "I can see this being something you wouldn't want to go to Dear Abby about."