Wild Cards 15 - Black Trump

by George R. R. Martin

  Limestone villas dotted the rolling hills above the little town of Ordu and formed a backdrop for the silhouette of a ruined basilica. Mountain peaks, some of them still marked with snow, rose in the background. The scene was medieval, more like Switzerland than anything else Zoe might have imagined.

  A battered blue school bus, perched on dual sets of huge balloon tires, waited on the pier. Crates and boxes were tied on its roof. Some of its windows were broken and covered with cardboard.

  That couldn't be what we're driving, Zoe thought, but then she saw a man in pleated twill harem pants and a turban made of two fat coils of dotted red silk, on watch beside the bus.

  Balthazar? He wore mirrorshades to hide his strange eyes. Jan? If she didn't see Jan, if Jan wasn't here and absolutely okay, Zoe planned to run. She didn't know where. Sne didn't know how, but if Jan wasn't here, this was it.

  "Not much longer, Zoe," Croyd said. He vanished into the small shed that was the freighter's bridge. "Wait on the pier."

  She went ashore and almost lost her balance. The pier was solid. It wasn't rocking. Zoe tried to remember how to walk while a boy on a motorscooter buzzed past on the shore road spilling Michael Jackson music from the boom box tied behind him.

  Jan, a small figure in swirling black skirts, climbed down from the bus. She jumped up and down and danced across the pier. Zoe met her hug.

  "Shh," Jan whispered. "Talk later."

  Jan wore a black scarf over her hair. She wore two bolero jackets, one bright turquoise, the other maroon cotton. Under her skirts, Zoe caught a glimpse of what looked like pajama trousers, with brown and white stripes. Jan had grown an inch in the past week. She looked happy.

  The crew offloaded the irrigation pump. It swayed in its harness of chains, rocking down to rest on the pier, its green enameled metal bright as neon against the rusted sides of the Ukrainian freighter. Zoe told herself not to think of it as anything but an irrigation pump, a Rubik's cube of metal and PVC pipe, a plumber's nightmare that looked as if it could suck up half the Euphrates.

  The thing was so small. Zoe thought of bombs as ICBMs that lurked in giant silos. Maybe this was all a scam. But then she felt, even from twenty yards away, the horrid silent heat fitted inside this particular pump.

  Zoe and Jan, as was proper for women, stood aside and watched the men do what men did. Balthazar stood with folded arms, watching the pier, the ship, the bus. At intervals he reached into a sack and brought out date confections the size of hen's eggs and chewed them methodically, like a cud. Croyd and the captain appeared on deck and gave each other a bear hug, maybe a result of Croyd's parting gifts. Croyd came ashore with the Turkish customs officer and disappeared into a concrete-block building.

  On the freighter, sailors hauled lines and moved around the decks, performing inexplicable tasks that resulted in the freighter's sliding away into the morning haze over the oil-slicked waters of the Black Sea. Zoe wondered if the freighter would make it to the next port. Twice, before dawn, Zoe had seen a sub's conning tower lift from the water, too close to the freighter for comfort.

  Zoe's stomach tied itself into a knot. She forced herself not to squeeze Jan's hand, sweaty in hers. If Jan was worried, she didn't let it show. Zoe kept her touch light and expected to see, at any minute, the door burst open, the guards with their rifles pointed at her gut. She didn't want to think about the interior of a Turkish jail.

  Croyd was taking so long in there. The haze was beginning to burn off, and she felt sweat trickle down the back of her neck. Her scarf was slipping again. She tied the knot tighter.

  Croyd came out grinning. A man in a khaki uniform and a fez followed him, mustaches aquiver. The official called out a few quick words and a bystander ran to the steel door of a nearby building. In short order, a forklift appeared, driven at great speed. Six burly Turks accompanied it. Croyd and the official stood and watched, chattering away. The customs man pointed to the bus. Zoe heard the words "Mercedes," and "diesel," and "the Bronx," while the crew of dockworkers wedged the pump through the opened doors at the rear of the bus. The bus sank a couple of inches on its suspension.

  They've blown it, Zoe thought. This thing will break through the floor, through the pier, and sink. We've had it.

  Croyd's hands drew the curves of a fat, strong woman in the air. The bus accepted the weight. The official laughed. There were bows, and huge smiles, and more bows, and then Croyd turned away.

  Balthazar vaulted into the driver's seat of the bus, his hand on the scratched metal knob that shut the swivel doors. The party climbed in. The diesel coughed to life and produced a largish fart of black smoke, and Balthazar eased the bus toward the road that led through the middle of the village and south.

  "The customs guy has a cousin in the Bronx. Runs a Greek restaurant," Croyd said.

  "He's a Greek?" Zoe asked.

  "No. But there wasn't a Greek restaurant in six blocks, so that's what he opened. He says he uses his mama's recipes and New Yorkers can't tell the difference." Croyd's voice seemed normal enough, but there were beads of sweat on his forehead. It wasn't hot, even in the bus. "It's funny how this language thing works. I don't know anything until somebody says something, and then it's like a movie comes on in my head I could see this customs guy when he was a kid growing up. He had a pet goat, and he pretended it was Trigger."

  "Trigger?" Jan asked.

  "Trigger was Roy Rogers' horse. He was a palamino. God I'm old," Croyd said. He twisted his back against the bench seat, crossed his arms, and stared out the window.

  Balthazar eased the bus along that narrow asphalt road. A group of blond men with green eyes sat at the locanta, under a porch hung with pots of flowers and crowded with small tables. Their eyes watched the bus, the occupants, the morning. Smells of baking bread, coffee, and tobacco wafted through the air. They cleared the village, working their way past schoolchildren in dark uniforms walking in groups, past cars of all descriptions, many of them new and highly polished. Unperturbed by the traffic, a woman and her baby perched sidesaddle on a donkey led by a scowling man.

  "Baksheesh?" Balthazar asked.

  "A hundred for customs. Sixty for the forklift," Croyd said. "American."

  "Not too bad," Balthazar said. He took off his mirrorshades.

  Zoe winced. His eyelids were crusted with yellow gunk, swollen so that his eyes were half-closed.

  "Balthazar? Your eyes?"

  "Turmeric and olive oil, with a sprinkle of cayenne," the joker said. Zoe couldn't make herself focus on the damage, couldn't see past the swelling to look at his strange yellow irises. Balthazar steered around two men on horseback and dodged a green Citroen that seemed to have twenty people in it. His hands were tight on the steering wheel. "People don't stare at pus."

  "Do they hurt?" Zoe asked.

  "Yes."

  "Why don't you just use makeup?" Zoe asked.

  "We might get searched," Balthazar said.

  Thank you, Zoe thought. For thirty seconds or so, I had managed to forget that possibility.

  The morning was cool enough to be pleasant. An almond grove cast pools of black shade. Vineyards marched their rows across folded hills. The traffic thinned out.

  Zoe tried to settle against the bench seat, one that had been designed to hold schoolchildren. The upholstery was lumpy and something dug at the small of her back.

  Balthazar heard her sign and glanced up at the rearview mirror. "Sorry about the bumps," he said. "The upholstery is stuffed with lead aprons straight from hospital supply catalogs in the good old USA." Balthazar turned his head and spat out the side window.

  "It's hot," Zoe said. "I can sense it."

  "Yeah. I don't know about the safety margins. So I put the lead in. Can you tell how many rads we're getting, Zoe?"

  "No. I can't." Zoe slumped down in her seat, getting as much lead between her and the back of the bus as she could. She felt small prickles at the back of her neck. Croyd tapped his heel on the floor of the bus, twitchy. Speeding al
ready, or just scared.

  "I'll pick us up some rad monitors when we get to Susehri," Balthazar said.

  Susehri was a dot on the map. Zoe couldn't imagine it as a source for particle detectors, and couldn't imagine that buying one there wouldn't start gossip. Balthazar knew something she didn't, or maybe he was teasing her. She decided not to take the bait.

  Jan, sitting beside her, stared at the joker with utter adoration. Zoe watched the girl watching him. Jan was in love. Jan had just turned fourteen. Balthazar was thirty, or close to it. Zoe felt some mothering instincts rising that she never knew she possessed. Balthazar was a dirty old man!

  Balthazar, on reflection, probably didn't know Jan had a crush on him.

  They had spent two weeks traveling together! Alone!

  So? They were companions who had set off together to transport a nuclear device across hostile territory, and if they got caught, a quick death would be the kindest of outcomes. And, hey, Zoe Harris was in this mess, too. This wasn't a movie she was watching from the safe confines of an upholstered seat in a theater in Westchester. Zoe told her mother hen persona to shut up, at least until she could talk to Jan without anyone else listening.

  The road climbed toward the mountains. Poppy fields looked like carefully tended gardens of nettles. Every passerby seemed to be a scout for the ambush Zoe was certain existed at the next curve in the road.

  The tan Chevy Blazer behind them had followed them all the way from Ordu. She could see it in the rearview mirror. She could see Balthazar watching it, glancing up again and again to check its position. The road widened slightly. The Blazer pulled up next to the bus and Balthazar slowed.

  The driver, a silver-haired man wearing a polo shirt and a turban, smiled and waved as he passed them.

  Zoe sighed.

  "This is the easy part," Balthazar said. "Relax while you can."

  Relax? Oh, sure. Right, Zoe thought, relax. She looked down at her hands, at her fingers pinching tight pleats in the fabric of her skirt. She let go and tried to smooth the creases.

  "I'm hungry," Croyd said.

  "We'll get lunch in Susehri," Balthazar said.

  Jan scooted closer to Zoe and listened while Croyd talked about foods he had known and loved, menus he had eaten his way through in one sitting, platters of bacon and eggs and stacks of pancakes and waffles and entire trays of danish, each described with painstaking attention to detail.

  Follow the plan, Zoe remembered. The plan is we're all so fucking normal here.

  By the time Croyd had finished a description of profiteroles with Grand Marnier chocolate sauce, Balthazar pulled the bus up to a pidecis, a roadside stand sheltered under fig trees, the figs were small and green, but an occasional lazy wasp investigated them anyway.

  Wailing Turkish music clashed with recorded rap in the bazaar just up the road, a little square sheltered under awnings and hung with rows of kilims. Zoe and Jan stayed in the bus, and Balthazar and Croyd ordered food at the wooden counter. After a time, they brought rounds of flat bread baked with cheese and egg to the bus and handed them inside, and other pides covered with spiced ground lamb. And tea. Hot tea in a jar, with a service of tall glasses set in brass holders. Zoe sipped at hers. Balthazar reached into one of his generous pockets and produced a can of Coke for Jan. She smiled at him with adoration. Croyd opened a cardboard carton lined with squares of baklava, offered them around, and then settled himself on the fender of the bus.

  "I'll be back real soon now," Balthazar said. He adjusted his mirrorshades and went toward the market. Not far from the bus, a shopkeeper brought out a kilim that looked to be a Konya design, cream with oval central medallions in pink and gray. Maybe a Kayseri.

  Zoe stood on the embossed metal step of the bus and looked at the carpet's soft folds. "I'd like to shop a little," Zoe said, "I really would."

  "You're still in tourist clothes." Croyd broke off a little square of baklava and fed it to Zoe. His fingers brushed against her lips and she shivered, remembering spending last night on a narrow bunk sheltered in Croyd's strong arms, remembering the pleasures of a lover who never slept.

  Well, yes, she was in tourist clothes. But the rug was gorgeous.

  "It should be okay if you take Jan with you," Croyd said. "Nobody's paying much attention to us."

  "You'll watch the bus?" Zoe asked.

  "Sure."

  Zoe bought the rug. She didn't argue enough about the price, but she wanted it. She bought it with the Fists' money, but she figured it was a business expense. Anything that could distract her enough not to scream was a business expense.

  When she turned away from the smiling rug seller, she saw the tourists from Odessa. The same ones. The man wore pink bermuda shorts that must have been made by Omar the tentmaker. The woman's khaki skirt exposed bare white legs that looked like they belonged on a Victorian piano. The pair wore matching floppy white canvas hats, sunglasses, and cameras. They were caricatures of tourists, they were too perfectly gross, and they raised their cameras toward the bus.

  Zoe ducked inside and dropped the rug over the back of the low seat. "Croyd? We're being followed. I saw those people in Odessa!"

  Croyd popped another piece of baklava into his mouth and looked at the pair. "Same ones, huh?"

  "I think so. They look strange."

  "Are you sure?"

  "I don't - yes. I'm sure."

  "Zoe, when was the last time you were in Atlantic City?" Croyd asked.

  "I've never been to Atlantic City."

  "Well, then you wouldn't know that all tourists look the same. Settle down. I'll take the glasses back if you're finished with your tea."

  "I'm finished," Zoe said.

  Balthazar ambled back toward the bus, holding up a wicker cage. He handed it in to Jan and swung into his seat. Croyd climbed back in and Balthazar maneuvered the bus back onto the road.

  Two doves huddled inside the cage Jan held in her lap. She cooed at the birds and offered them crumbs of baklava. "Geiger counters," Jan said "Tres high-tech."

  Jan twisted in her seat and found a way to hang the dove cage from the ceiling of the bus. The little birds swayed above the rows of boxes that separated the passengers from the pump, the real cargo.

  The road twisted and climbed higher, toward the Euphrates and the disputed borders of Kurdistan, a place the Turks called part of Turkey, filled with people who called themselves Kurds, not Turks. Even Xenophon had trouble with the Kurds, Zoe remembered. That's why we're going there. Borders in dispute are safer places for us than peaceful lands. In turmoil and distrust, maybe we can slip through.

  The Euphrates couldn't be real. It was a river only known in ancient books, a myth. Somewhere in the looming mountains above them was Ararat, where tradition said Noah's ark ran aground after the destruction of the world by an angry deity.

  Zoe felt she swayed backward toward the past with every tilt of the bus on the twisting road. It seemed the four of them rushed down corridors of time, corridors that would lead them to the soiled stone altars of Mesopotamia and ancient rites of sacrifice. Gods with the bodies of men and the heads of beasts might appear on the narrow road at any moment. We've just presented a live offering to the monster that rides with us, she realized. Would it be accepted? Or burnt?

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  Eric Fleming's yacht was a thing of beauty; polished wood, gleaming brass, huge canvas sails snapping in the wind. "There's not a bit of plastic on her," Fleming told Peregrine proudly as he stood on the forecastle or the poop deck or whatever it was, leaning on the rail with the blue of the ocean behind him. "She's a genuine antique, last of her kind. Before they went to those tacky twelve-meters, J-boats like Circe used to race for the America's Cup."

  "She's so fast," Peregrine said admiringly, in a voice of equal parts honey and velvet, calculated to make any halfway functional male reach for the nearest lubricated condom.

  Eric Fleming accepted the compliment with a manly smile. He was a big bull of a man with a windburn
ed face and calluses on his hands. "Beauty and speed, that's what I look for in a yacht," he said. He smiled. "And in a woman."

  The boat was fast. Jay had to admit. Eric-me-hearty had come popping over from his island in jig time once the editor of the TownsviBe Drover had rung him up to report that the world-famous Peregrine, herself, was there in Queensland, asking for an interview. He'd met them at the Townsville marina, all smiles and rough-hewn Aussie charm as Peri introduced her crew. Finn had the camera, Sascha had the sound equipment, and Jay had his hands in his pockets. "And what do you do?" Fleming had asked him. "Nothing," Jay had replied. "I'm the producer."

  Some of the Circe's crew greeted Finn with badly-concealed distaste when the centaur trotted up the gangplank with the minicam on his back. One in particular - an older beachcomber type, barechested and tanned, with a week's growth of sandy beard that made an odd contrast to his silver-gray hair - stared at Finn with a near-homicidal loathing in his ice-blue eyes.

  Yet neither he nor any of the others dared say a word. Fleming could scarcely object to Peri having a joker cameraman; technically, those huge wings made her a joker too. Jay suspected that Fleming was a lot more interested in Peri's tits than in her pinions. The tastefully understated bulge in the front of his white trousers tended to confirm that analysis, but the only bulges that concerned Jay were the ones under the Jackets of some of Circe's crew. He would have welcomed the opportunity to pop a few of them inconspicuously off to, say, the Tombs, but there were too damn many of them.

  "We can begin whenever you're ready," Fleming said. "Remember, no questions about my love life. I never kiss and tell."

  Peregrine gave a throaty laugh. "We'll save that for a more ... intimate ... moment." Then she ran the tip of her tongue along her lip in a way that reminded Jay of Ezili, which was no doubt where Jerry had swiped the gesture. "Ready, boys?" Peri asked her crew.

  Finn hoisted the minicam to his shoulder and fumbled for the switch that turned it on. Sascha checked his sound levels and held up the boom mike over Eric Fleming's head. Jay took his hands out of his pockets and said, "Rolling," which sounded like something a producer would say.