Wild Cards IV: Aces Abroad

by Stephen Leigh

  Ulrich’s arm fell off. He stared at Mackie. His lips peeled back away from perfect teeth, which clacked open and closed three times like something in the window of a novelty store.

  He looked down at what had been his perfect animal body and shrieked.

  Mackie watched in fascination. The scream made his exposed lung work in and out like a vacuum cleaner bag, all grayish purple and moist and veined with blue and red. Then his guts started to spill out the side of him, piling over his fallen rifle, and the blood rushing out of him carried away the strength that kept him standing, and he dropped.

  “Holy Mary mother of God,” Wilfried said. Puke slopped from a corner of his mouth as he backed away from the wreckage of his comrade. Then he looked past Mackie and yelled, “No—”

  Anneke aimed her Kalashnikov at the small of the ace’s back. Fear knotted her finger sphincter-tight.

  Mackie phased out. The burst splashed Wilfried all over the wall.

  Mólniya stood with hands on knees and his back against the side of a stripped Volvo, pulling in deep breaths of diesel-flavored Berlin night. It wasn’t a part of town in which strangers cared to spend much time alone. That didn’t concern him. What he feared was fear.

  What came over me? I’ve never felt like that in my life.

  He’d fled the apartment in a bright haze of panic. No sooner had he stepped outside than it evaporated like water spilled on a sun-heated rock in the Khyber. Now he was trying to collect himself, unsure for the moment whether to carry on with his errand or go back and send a couple of Wolf’s vicious cubs.

  Papertin was right, he told himself. I’ve gotten soft. I—

  From above came a familiar heavy stutter. His blood ran like freon through his veins as he raised his head to see fireflashes dancing on chintz curtains two stories up.

  It was all over.

  If I’m not found here, he thought, then maybe—conceivably—the Third World War won’t happen tonight.

  He turned and walked away down the street, very fast.

  Hartmann lay on his side with the floorboards throbbing against the bruise they’d made on his cheekbone. He’d kicked the chair over as soon as things started happening.

  What in hell’s name went wrong? he wondered desperately. The bastard wasn’t supposed to talk, just shoot.

  It was ’76 all over again. Once again Puppetman in his arrogance had overreached himself. And it may just have cost him his ass.

  His nostrils buzzed with the stink of hot lubricant and blood and fresh moist shit. Hartmann could hear the two surviving terrorists stumbling around the room shouting at each other. Ulrich was dying in wheezes a few feet away. He could feel the energy running from him like an ebb tide.

  “Where is he? Where’d the fucker go?” Wolf was saying.

  “He went through the wall,” Anneke said. She was hyperventilating, tearing the words out of the air like pieces of cloth.

  “Well, watch for him. Oh, holy Jesus.”

  Their terror was stark as crucifixion as they stood trying to cover all three interior walls with their guns. Hartmann shared it. The twisted ace had gone berserk.

  Someone shrieked and died.

  Mackie stood for a moment with his arm elbow-deep in Anneke’s back. He took the buzz off, leaving his hand jutting from the woman’s sternum like a blade. Blood oozed greasily around the leather sleeve on Mackie’s arm where it vanished into her torso. He enjoyed the look of it, and the intimate way what remained of Anneke’s heart kept hugging his arm. The fools hadn’t even been looking his way when he slipped back through the wall from the bedroom, not that it would have helped them if they had. Three quick steps and that was it for redheaded little Comrade Anneke.

  “Fuck you,” he said, and giggled.

  The heart convulsed one last time around Mackie’s arm and was still. Putting a slight buzz on, Mackie pulled his arm free. He swung the corpse around as he did so.

  Wolf was standing there with his cheeks quivering. He brought up his gun as Mackie turned. Mackie pushed the corpse at him. He fired. Mackie laughed and phased out.

  Wolf emptied the magazine in a shivering ejaculation. Plaster dust filled the room. Anneke’s corpse collapsed across the senator. Mackie phased back in.

  Wolf screamed pleas, in German, in English. Mackie took the Kalashnikov away from him, pinned him against the door, and taking his time about it, sawed his head in two, right down the middle.

  Riding in the armored van with the particolored lights of downtown Berlin washing over her and the faces and weapons of the GSG-9 men who sat facing her, Sara Morgenstern thought, What’s come over me?

  She wasn’t sure whether she meant now or before—weeks before, when the affair with Gregg began.

  How strange, how very strange. How could I have ever have thought I loved . . . him? I feel nothing for him now.

  But that wasn’t really true. Where love had left a vacuum an earlier emotion was seeping in. Tainted with a toxic flavor of betrayal.

  Andrea, Andrea, what have I done?

  She bit her lip. The GSG-9 commando riding across from her saw and grinned, his teeth startling in his blackened face. She was instantly wary, but there was no sex in that smile, only the self-distracting camaraderie of a man facing battle with both pleasure and fear. She made herself smile back and nestled closer against Tachyon, sitting by her side.

  He put his arm around her. It wasn’t just a brotherly gesture. Even the prospect of danger wasn’t enough to drive sex wholly from his mind. Oddly she found she didn’t mind the attention. Perhaps it was her acute awareness of how incongruous they were, a pair of small gaudy cockatoos riding among panthers.

  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 kaleidiscope 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 thi
s 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

  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 saving 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 ranging 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 onto 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 sugg
ested 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, gay, 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!