Wild Cards IV: Aces Abroad

by Stephen Leigh

  “Unfair, my dear.” Tachyon smiled at his companion. “I have my favorites among contemporary performers. I’m rather fond of Placido Domingo.” He turned back toward Cordelia. “I’m forgetting my manners. Cordelia, have you formally met Peregrine?”

  Cordelia took the proffered hand. “I’ve had a call in to your agent for weeks now. Nice to see you.” Shut up, she said to herself. Don’t be rude.

  Peregrine’s dazzling blue eyes regarded her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Is this about the benefit at Dez’s club? I’m afraid I’ve been incredibly busy tidying up other projects in the midst of getting ready for this trip.”

  “Peregrine,” said Tachyon, “this young woman is Cordelia Chaisson. We know each other from the clinic. She’s come frequently with friends to visit C.C. Ryder.”

  “C.C.’s going to be able to do the Funhouse,” said Cordelia.

  “That would be fabulous,” said Peregrine. “I’ve admired her work for a long time.”

  “Perhaps we could all sit down over a drink,” said Tachyon. He smiled at Cordelia. “There has been a delay with arranging the senator’s ground transport into Auckland. I’m afraid we’re stranded at the airport for a bit.” The man glanced back over his shoulder. “As well, I’m afraid we are trying to avoid the rest of the party. The aircraft does get a bit close.”

  Cordelia felt the tempting proximity of fresh air starting to drift away. “I’ve got just about two hours,” she said, hesitating. “Okay, let’s have a drink.” As they walked toward the restaurant, Cordelia didn’t see Carlucci. He could get along fine by himself. What she did notice was the number of stares following them. No doubt some of the attention was being paid to Tachyon—his hair and wardrobe always ensured that. But mostly people were looking at Peregrine. Probably the New Zealanders weren’t all that accustomed to seeing a tall, gorgeous woman with functional wings folded against her back. She was spectacular, Cordelia admitted to herself. It would be great to have the looks, the stature, the presence. At once Cordelia felt very young. Almost like a kid. Inadequate. Damn it.

  Cordelia ordinarily took her coffee with milk. But if black would help clear her head, then she’d give it a try. She insisted that the three of them wait for a window table. If she wasn’t going to breathe the outside air, at least she could sit within inches of it. The colors of the unfamiliar trees reminded her of photos she’d seen of the Monterey Peninsula.

  “So,” she said after they’d given orders to the waitress, “I guess I should say something about a small world. How’s the junket? I saw some pictures of the Great Ape on the eleven o’clock news before I left.”

  Tachyon rambled on about Senator Hartmann’s round-the-world tour. Cordelia remembered reading about it interminably in the Post on the subway, but had been so busy with the Funhouse benefit, she hadn’t paid much attention. “Sounds like a back-breaker,” she said when Tachyon finished his gloss.

  Peregrine smiled wanly. “It hasn’t exactly been a vacation. I think Guatemala was my favorite. Have your people thought of climaxing the benefit with a human sacrifice?”

  Cordelia shook her head. “I think we’re going for a little more festive tone, even considering the occasion.”

  “Listen,” Peregrine said. “I’ll do what I can with my agent. In the meantime maybe I can introduce you to a few folks who’ll do you some good. Do you know Radha O’Reilly? Elephant Girl?” At Cordelia’s head shake she continued, “When she turns into a flying elephant, it’s smoother than anything Doug Henning’s dreamed of. You ought to talk to Fantasy too. You could use a dancer like her.”

  “That’d be terrific,” Cordelia said. “Thank you.” She felt the frustration of wanting to do everything herself—showing everyone—and yet knowing when to accept the aid that was being graciously extended.

  “So,” Tachyon said, breaking in on her thoughts. “And what are you doing here so far from home?” His expression looked expectant; his eyes gleamed with honest curiosity.

  Cordelia knew she couldn’t get away with claiming she’d won the trip for selling Girl Scout cookies. She opted for honesty. “I’m going to Australia with a guy from GF&G to try and buy a satellite ground station before it gets scarfed up by a TV preacher.”

  “Ah,” said Tachyon. “Would that evangelist be Leo Barnett, by chance?”

  Cordelia nodded.

  “I hope you succeed.” Tachyon frowned. “Our friend Fire-breather’s power is growing at a dangerously exponential rate. I, for one, would prefer to see the growth of his media empire retarded.”

  “Just yesterday,” said Peregrine, “I heard from Chrysalis that some of Barnett’s youth-group thugs are hanging out in the Village and beating the stuffing out of anybody they think is both a joker and vulnerable.”

  “Die Juden,” Tachyon murmured. The two women glanced questioningly at him. “History.” He sighed, then said to Cordelia, “Whatever help you need in competing with Barnett, let us know. I think you’ll find a great deal of support from both aces and jokers.”

  “Hey,” said an overly familiar voice from behind Cordelia’s scapula. “What’s happening?”

  Without looking around Cordelia said, “Marty Carlucci, meet Dr. Tachyon and Peregrine.” To the latter she said, “Marty’s my chaperon.”

  “Hiya.” Carlucci took the fourth chair. “Yeah, I know you,” he said to Tachyon. He stared at Peregrine, frankly surveying her. All of her. “You I’ve seen a lot. I got tapes of every show you’ve done for years.” His eyes narrowed. “Say, you pregnant?”

  “Thank you,” said Peregrine. “Yes.” She stared him down.

  “Uh, right,” said Carlucci. He turned to Cordelia. “Kid, come on. We gotta get back on the plane.” More firmly, “Now!”

  Good-byes were said. Tachyon volunteered to pay for the coffee. “Good luck,” Peregrine said, aimed specifically at Cordelia. Carlucci seemed preoccupied, not noticing.

  As the two of them walked toward the boarding gate, he said, “Dumb fuckin’ bitch.”

  Cordelia stopped dead still. “What?”

  “Not you.” Carlucci took her elbow roughly and propelled her toward the security checkpoint. “That joker who sells info—Chrysalis. I ran into her by the phones. I figured I’d save the price of a call.”

  “So?” said Cordelia.

  “One of these days she’s gonna get her invisible tits caught in the wringer and there’s going to be real bright blood all over the laundry room wall. I told New York that too.”

  Cordelia waited, but he didn’t elaborate. “So?” she said again.

  “What did you tell those two geeks?” said Carlucci. His voice sounded dangerous.

  “Nothing,” said Cordelia, listening to the internal warning bells. “Nothing at all.”

  “Good.” Carlucci grimaced. He mumbled, “She’s gonna be fish food, I swear it.”

  Cordelia stared at Carlucci. The sheer conviction in his voice kept him from appearing a comic-opera gangster. She thought he meant what he was saying. He reminded her of the wolf-creatures in last night’s maybe-dream. All that was missing was the dark spittle.

  Carlucci’s mood didn’t improve on the flight to Australia. In Sydney they cleared customs and transferred to an A-300 Airbus. In Melbourne, Cordelia finally got to stick her head out of doors for a few minutes. The air smelled fresh. She admired the DC-3 suspended from a cable in front of the terminal. Then her companion fussed at her to get to the proper Ansett gate. This time they were seated on a 727. Cordelia was glad she wasn’t trusting her bag to checked luggage. Part of Marty Carlucci’s gloom involved speculation that his checked bag was going to get missent to Fiji or some other improper destination.

  “So why didn’t you carry everything on?” Cordelia had said.

  “There’s some stuff you can’t carry on.”

  The 727 droned north, away from the coastal greenery. Cordelia had the window seat. She stared down at the apparently unending desert. She squinted, looking for roads, railroad tracks, any oth
er sign of human intervention. Nothing. The flat brownish-tan wasteland was dotted with cloud shadows.

  When word crackled over the cabin speakers that the plane was approaching Alice Springs, Cordelia realized only after she’d performed the actions that she had stowed the tray table, cinched her seat belt, and shoved her bag back under the seat ahead. It had all become utterly automatic.

  The airport was busier than she’d expected. Somehow she had anticipated a single dusty runway with a galvanized tin shack beside it. A TAA flight had landed minutes before and the terminal was crowded with people who clearly resembled tourists.

  “We rent the Land-Rover now?” she asked Carlucci. The man was leaning impatiently over the luggage belt.

  “Uh-uh. We go into town. I’ve got us reservations at the Stuart Arms. We’re both getting a good night’s sleep. I don’t want to be any nastier than I have to be tomorrow at the meeting. It’s all set up for three o’clock,” he added as an apparent afterthought. “The lag’s gonna catch up with us real fast. I suggest you get a good supper with me when we get to Alice. Then it’s beddy-bye till ten or eleven tomorrow morning. If we pick up the rental and get out of Alice by noon, we should hit the Gap in plenty of time. There, you son of a bitch!” He grabbed his alligator case from the conveyor. “Okay, let’s go.”

  They took an Ansett coach into Alice. It was half an hour into town and the air-conditioning labored hard against the baking heat outside. Cordelia stared out the window as the bus approached downtown Alice Springs. At first glance it didn’t look terribly different from a small, arid American city. Certainly Baton Rouge was more alien than this, Cordelia thought. It didn’t look at all as she’d expected from seeing both versions of A Town Like Alice.

  The air transit terminal turned out to be across the street from the turn-of-the-century architecture of the Stuart Arms, a fact for which Cordelia was grateful. It was getting dark as the passengers climbed down to the pavement and claimed their bags. Cordelia glanced at her watch. The numbers meant absolutely nothing. She needed to reset to local time. And change the date as well, she reminded herself. She wasn’t even sure what day of the week it was now. Her head had started to throb when she plunged into the heat that lingered even while the dark was falling. She thought longingly of being able to lie straight, stretched out on clean sheets. After she’d had a long bath. She checked that. The bath could wait until she’d slept for twenty or thirty hours. At least.

  “Okay, kiddo,” said Carlucci. They were standing in front of the antique registration desk. “Here’s your key.” He paused. “Sure you wouldn’t like to shave expenses for GF&G and stay in my room?”

  Cordelia didn’t have the energy to smile wanly. “Nope,” she said, taking the key from his hand.

  “You wanna know something? You’re not on this picnic just because the Fortunato broads think you’re such hot shit.”

  What was he talking about? She used enough energy to glance at him.

  “I’ve seen you around the GF&G offices. I liked what I saw. I put in the word.”

  Cordelia sighed. Aloud.

  “Okay,” he said. “Hey, no offense. I’m bushed too.” Carlucci picked up the alligator bag. “Let’s get the stuff stowed and catch supper.” There was a LIFT OUT OF ORDER sign on the elevator. He turned wearily toward the staircase.

  “Second floor,” said Carlucci. “At least that’s a goddamn blessing.” They passed a mimeographed poster in the stairwell advertising a band called Gondwanaland. “Maybe after we eat, you wanna go dancing?” Even he didn’t sound all that enthusiastic.

  Cordelia didn’t bother to reply.

  The landing opened out into a hallway lined with dark wood trim and some unobtrusive glass cases containing aboriginal artifacts. Cordelia glanced at the boomerangs and bull roarers. Doubtless she’d be able to work up a little more interest tomorrow.

  Carlucci looked at his key. “The rooms are next to each other. God, I’m looking forward to bagging it. I really am dead.”

  A door slammed open behind them. Cordelia caught a quick flash of two dark figures leaping. They were monsters. Later she decided they must have been wearing masks. Ugly masks.

  Tired as she was, her reflexes still worked. She’d started to duck to the side when a stiffened forearm caught her across the chest and drove her into one of the glass cases. Glass shattered, shards spraying. Cordelia flailed her arms, trying to keep her equilibrium, as someone or something tried to grapple with her. She thought she heard Marty Carlucci screaming.

  Her fingers closed on something hard—the end of a boomerang—as she sensed rather than saw her assailant spin around and spring for her again. She brought the boomerang forward in a whistling arc. Instinct. All instinct. Shit, she thought. I’m going to die.

  The sharp edge of the boomerang sliced into the face of her attacker with the sound of a carving knife slicing into a watermelon. Outstretched fingers slapped her neck and dropped away. A body rolled to the floor.

  Carlucci! Cordelia turned and saw a dark figure crouched over her colleague. It straightened, stood, started for her, and she realized it was a man. But now she had a little time. Think! she said to herself. Think think think. Focus. It was as though the power had been blanketed by the smothering layers of fatigue. But it was still there. She concentrated, felt the lowest level of her brain engage and strike out.

  Stop, goddamn you!

  The figure stopped, staggered, started forward again. And fell. Cordelia knew she’d shut down everything in his autonomic system. The smell as his bowels released made it even worse.

  She edged around him and knelt down by Marty Carlucci. He lay on his stomach, looking upward. His head had been screwed around completely, just as it had been in the maybe-dream. Slightly walleyed, his dead eyes stared past her.

  Cordelia rocked back on her heels against the wall, putting her fists to her mouth, feeling her incisors bite into the knuckles. She felt the epinephrine still prickling in her arms and legs. Every nerve seemed raw.

  Christ! she thought. What am I gonna do? She looked both ways along the hall. There were no more attackers, no witnesses. She could call Uncle Jack in New York. Or Alcala or Rettig. She could even try to find Fortunato in Japan. If the number she had was still good. She could attempt to locate Tachyon in Auckland. It came home to her. She was many thousands of miles from anyone she trusted, anyone she even knew.

  “What am I gonna do?” This time she muttered it aloud.

  She scrambled over to Carlucci’s alligator case and clicked the catches open. The man had affected an icy calm at customs. She had no doubt there was a reason. Cordelia tore through the clothing, searching for the weapon she knew had to be there. She opened the case marked “shaver and converter set.” The gun was blued steel and ugly, some kind of snubbed-off, scaled-down automatic weapon. It felt reassuringly heavy in her hand.

  Floorboards creaked down in the stairwell. On some level Cordelia caught the scattered words: “. . . by now he and the bitch should both be dead . . .”

  She forced herself to get up and step over Marty Carlucci’s corpse. Then she ran.

  At the end of the hallway farthest from the main staircase, a window overlooked a fire-stairs. Cordelia slid it open, softly cajoling the window when the pane momentarily stuck in the casement. She skinned through, then turned to shut the window after her. She saw shadows writhing at the other end of the hall. Cordelia ducked and scuttled crabwise to the steps down.

  She momentarily wished she’d grabbed her overnight bag. At least she had the passport case with the Amex card and traveler’s checks in the small handbag slung around her shoulder. Cordelia realized she still had the room key clutched in her left hand. She maneuvered it in her fist so that the key thrust out from between her index and middle fingers.

  The steps were metal, but they were old and they creaked. Quick and stealthy, Cordelia discovered, were mutually contradictory here.

  She saw she was descending into an alley. The noise from th
e street, about twenty yards distant, was loud and boisterous. At first she thought it sounded like a party. Then she detected undercurrents of anger and pain. The crowd noise rose. Cordelia heard the flat sounds of what she guessed were fists on flesh.

  “Terrific,” she muttered. Then it occurred to her that a riot would provide good cover for her escape. She had already started mulling contingency plans. First, stay alive. Get out of here. Then call Rettig or Alcala and let them know what had happened. They would send someone to replace Carlucci while she stayed out of sight. Wonderful. A brand-new guy in a tailored suit to sign his company’s name on a contract. What was so difficult about that? She could do it. But not if she was dead.

  With both key and gun at the ready Cordelia eased down from the bottom step of the fire-stairs and started toward the mouth of the alley. Then she froze. She knew someone was standing directly behind her.

  She whirled, driving her left hand forward, aiming the key at a spot she hoped would be right beneath the intruder’s chin. Someone was indeed there. Strong fingers clamped around her wrist, easily soaking up all the forward momentum of her thrust.

  The figure pulled her forward into what little light spilled down from the Stuart Arms through the stair gratings. Cordelia brought the gun up and stuck the barrel into her assailant’s belly. It didn’t go far. She pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened.

  She caught a glimpse of dark eyes catching hers. The figure reached forward with its free hand and clicked something on the side of the weapon. A male voice said, “Here, little missy, you left on the safety. Now it will work.”

  Cordelia was too astonished to pull the trigger. “Okay, I get the point. Who are you, and can we get out of here?”

  “You can call me Warreen.” Sudden light flooded down from above them, bursting through the gratings, painting quagga stripes of illumination.