Turn of the Cards

by George R. R. Martin

  Belew pressed the raw tip of his finger against the base of a gooseneck lamp. It glowed to life. The head suddenly craned and swiveled to bring its glow to bear on the map.

  Time to cast a little light, rather than curse the darkness,” Belew said with satisfaction.

  Helen stepped forward with her arms crossed tightly beneath her breasts. Reflections from the lamp glittered in her eyes. “You’re an ace, too, aren’t you?”

  “You never told us that,” Saxon said sulkily.

  “Son, Langley isn’t in the habit of telling everything it knows, unlike certain of our finer government agencies. Now, pay some attention here. I’d at least like to have some tentative answers to hand before I have to leave.”

  “Leave?” Saxon said. “Where the hell are you going?”

  “The opera, of course. The Marriage of Figaro. They’ve got an ultramodernistic set and staging for it. I hear it’s a hell of a mess, but I like to see things with my own eyes.”

  The old night train to Brindisi. Mark’s asleep.

  Elite unit or not, the Rome antiterrorist unit had a tendency to mill. When somebody dressed in the same coveralls they and the legitimate ground crew were wearing dropped into view beneath the tail of the Airbus, all eyes were locked on the front of the plane, where the first team was going up a ramp that had been wheeled across the heat-shimmering pavement. When the figure strolled away, no one paid any mind.

  Escape was what Cosmic Traveler did best, after all.

  Mark will have to engage in some creative chemistry before he can play that ace again.

  The train is winding its way across Italy’s Apennine spine. Mark is heading east — where, he isn’t sure. He’s mainly on the train because you don’t need to surrender your passport to spend the night on the train the way you do to spend your night in a hotel.

  The night is clear, but that’s okay. The roll-down plastic shade is drawn. He paid cash for the tickets. He’s still using the passport; he figures it isn’t quite as hot as the credit card. Most grunt-level Eurocrats, he’s noticed, don’t look beyond the distinctive American jacket on the document, if they look at it at all. If you look like a North African or a Turkish guest-worker, they’re liable to want to count the hairs in your mustache to be sure the number’s the same as in your passport photo. Americans get treated differently. He’s learning, Mark is.

  Since he’s asleep and all, he dreams.

  In his dreams he’s a strapping golden youth, bare-chested, with blond hair flowing to his muscular shoulders. He swings a glowing peace symbol on a chain, and the secret police and jackboots and censors and informers of America’s New World Order retreat in confusion. He is the mightiest of Movement aces: the Radical, who fought the National Guard and Hardhat to a standstill during the riots following the Kent State murders and saved the day in People’s Park.

  Mark was the Radical once, which is all the times the Radical appeared. Or maybe he wasn’t. See, he isn’t sure.

  He was a sheltered child of southern California and the military-industrial complex. His father was a war hero and technocrat, his mother a very nice woman who did all the social things expected of an officer’s wife and drank perhaps more than she should, a fact Mark didn’t realize until much later. He had arrived at the University of California at Berkeley in 1969 as a four-star scientific prospect, recruited during a drive by UCB to improve its standing as a hard-science school.

  He had won acclaim and science fairs with high school experiments on the effects of hallucinogenic drugs on cognitive faculties in rats. He came into college with a powerful fascination with the biochemistry of mind and very little experience of life beyond his comic books, his science club, and a crush on black-haired, violet-eyed Kimberly Anne Cordayne, who had been his major heartthrob since elementary school.

  He undertook what he considered fieldwork, observing the effects of psychedelics on humans by plunging into the Bay Area subculture at the maximum bubble of its fermentation. One of the first potential subjects his searching turned up was none other than Kimberly Anne herself, now calling herself Sunflower and lovelier than ever.

  He had become infatuated, both with Sunflower and the Movement with which she had so seamlessly blended. He himself couldn’t quite connect with either. But both seemed to him inexpressibly beautiful, worth any lengths to attain.

  He had finally nerved himself to take the logical experimental step of dropping acid himself when the fateful news of the Kent State killings hit. Wandering by the university waiting for the drug to kick in, he had stumbled upon a confrontation in People’s Park that was rapidly going critical. That tripped the drug and flipped him right out of his skull; he stumbled backwards into an alley and wasn’t seen by a living soul for twenty-four hours.

  But out of that alley at the crucial moment stepped the Radical. The National Guard was sent packing and Hardhat humbled. Radical was embraced as a brother by Tom Marion Douglas, the Lizard King, reigning rock ’n’ roll ace and master of a somber, driving musical style that was at once cerebral and visceral — Apollonian and Dionysian, as Douglas liked to say.

  The Radical led a wild victory celebration, consuming vast quantities of beer and pot and truly epic sex with a violet-eyed lady who called herself Sunflower. Then, at dawn of the day following his triumph, he waved goodbye to his baggy-eyed but still stoned and jubilant admirers and walked into an alley. He was never seen again.

  Mark was, though. He staggered out of the alley a short time later with his Coke-bottle glasses gone and his pants all crumpled and a headful of images he would never quite get sorted into coherent memories. His just-friend Sunflower had grabbed him by the arm and wondered loudly how he could possibly have missed what might have been the most glorious moment of the Movement. She had seen a Hero, and her eyes glowed like stars.

  Mark’s faculty advisers, alarmed at the turn his private life was taking, steered him away from his study of psychoactives. He allowed himself to be maneuvered into genetic research, at least in the classroom. Outside the UCB lab, though, he grew his hair long and increasingly gave himself over to a glowing Summer of Love vision of life — an ideal that had never been, and was little more than a gauzy memory in that blood-in-the-streets spring of 1970.

  His work in psychedelics continued on an extracurricular basis. He was convinced, somehow, that he had been the Radical. Some combination of drug and existing brain chemistry had activated his ace, and for one moment he had been strong and loved and valid. He would recapture that, somehow, anyhow. And Sunflower’s eyes would shine for him.

  He got his doctorate in biochemistry and performed what would prove pioneering work in the field of recombinant DNA. But his heart wasn’t in it. The Radical eluded him; and that was the only goal he truly felt.

  One summer dawn in 1974 Sunflower had turned up at the door of his apartment in the burnt-out huckstered-out husk of the Haight. Only, her glossy black hair had been cut to a bristly paramilitary brush, and she was calling herself Marshal Pasionara of the Symbionese Liberation Army. A dental emergency had pulled her out of the SLA’s hideout in Watts just in time to miss the fiery shootout in which Field Marshal Cinque and the others lost their lives.

  The SLA’s harsh discipline had brought her off recreational chemicals of all sorts, but after four months on the Revolution’s far nut fringe she was as weird as if she’d been tweaking on crystal meth the whole time. The live news coverage of flames shooting out of the house she was supposed to be in — and the dark hints in the cell that she was showing signs of dangerous deviation and bourgeois weakness when she left to seek attention for her toothache — had slammed her to reality’s cold, hard ground.

  To her parents she was dead, to her old Movement buddies she was either a dangerous zany, a deserter from the real revolution, or a possible government agente provocateuse — there was anything but consensus about the Symbionese crew — and to the United States government she was a wanted fugitive, though not under her real name or a reliabl
e description. In all the world she knew of only one person who wouldn’t judge her, one way or another.

  Mark was scraping by on sheer if sporadic brilliance, helping lesser lights deliver on their research grants. Most of his money went for his chemical dream quest and enough marijuana to take the edge off his continual disappointment. But he took her in, and felt only joy. The first two weeks she was like a fresh-trapped wild animal, all nerve ends. He let her be, even cutting his tiny apartment in two by hanging a Madras print to give her some privacy. Eventually the adrenaline buzz began to recede.

  On August 8, 1974, the sixties officially came to an end with the resignation of a Whittier College alum even more notorious than Kimberly Anne and Nancy Ling Perry. Mark and Kimberly killed a bottle of wine — not Gallo — and wound up fumbling together on the rump-sprung mattress on the floor on his side of the partition. The divider came down the next day.

  The next seven months or so were the happiest time Mark could remember. At dawn on the vernal equinox of 1975 Mark and Kimberly — again calling herself Sunflower — were married at Golden Gate State Park.

  After that, nothing seemed to go quite right. Sunflower drifted from cause to cause, cult to cult, at once restless and listless. She began to drink and take pills. Mark retreated further into pot smoke and his search for the Radical. His odd research jobs got odder, not to mention less frequent.

  Sprout was born in the spring of 1977. It was another case where partners in a failing marriage shared an unspoken belief that having a child would somehow cement their relationship. As a remedy it was akin to trying to save a crumbling bridge by running more semis over it. By the time Sprout’s developmental problem, or whatever euphemism they were using, was diagnosed in 1978, Mark and Sunflower were communicating solely in screams and silences.

  The divorce was finalized in 1981. A nasty custody fight was aborted when Sunflower broke down completely at a hearing. She was declared incompetent and institutionalized in Camarillo. Mark was given sole custody of their daughter.

  He took her and fled east. As a countercultural pole star, the Village had shone almost as brightly as San Francisco and Berkeley and didn’t harbor the landmarks and memories that reproached Mark for his many failures. His father, now four-star General Marcus Meadows, lent him the money to go into business for himself. He opened the Cosmic Pumpkin head shop and deli on Fitz-James O’Brien Street on the southern fringe of Greenwich Village.

  He was not, to say the least, a natural businessman. His father established a trust fund to discreetly funnel money into the store. Mark and Sprout got by.

  Then, in early 1983, his long quest for the Radical bore fruit. But like Cristoforo Colombo setting forth in 1492 to find a quick way around the world and fall on Jerusalem from behind to liberate it from the paynim, where he wound up wasn’t exactly where he intended to go …

  Curled up on the fold-down bed, Mark stirs, moans softly. He has the compartment all to himself. He drools a little on the pillow. Outside, the Italian night rattles by.

  Chapter Seven

  Mark sat there on the bald rock of the Areopagus and let the wind tousle his hair. The sky was a high, thin blue scattered with fat, fraying cotton boils of cloud. In his mind he saw a couple of satyrs carrying those funky panpipe things Zamfir always plays on late-night ads on cable come out of the weeds to check him out. Life was kind of a Disney flick for Mark, when he was left to his own devices, even though he hadn’t imbibed any illicit chemicals — for recreational purposes anyway — since blowing Amsterdam a week ago. He was not an ideal Clean and Sober poster boy.

  He sat and stared off at the crisp weeds and Japanese tourists stirring among the white-stone jumble that surrounded the Parthenon, over on the Acropolis. It wasn’t anywhere near as large as he’d expected, the Parthenon, even though it was just as lovely as advertised. That was an ideal encapsulation of life: that which was eagerly anticipated turned out to be, at firsthand, smaller than it was in the imagination, and either shabby or — as in the Parthenon’s case — somehow fake-looking. It would be the hip and happening thing to blame that phenomenon on television and movies and the easy street-level availability of wonders, designer drugs for eye and mind from the secret labs of Industrial Light & Magic. Sitting up here on these ancient-shaped rocks with the same wind running its fingers through his hair as had run them through Solon’s when he was splitting for the coast with the ever-fickle Athenian mob at his heels, Mark had the heretical notion that people had been feeling that way, shortchanged by actuality, since they developed crania larger than egg cups.

  Getting here had been easier than he would have imagined. At Brindisi he had gone straight to the docks. There he looked at freighters: not too large, not too clean, definitely nothing that looked as if it were owned by some uptight multinational. Multinationals had books of rules and regulations and suits who prowled to make sure they were followed to the letter. The rules didn’t provide for any clandestine passengers, he felt sure.

  He didn’t even care, particularly, if the damned boat looked as if it would float. The Med is not a huge sea, and he had a vial of gray powder left. The were-dolphin Aquarius could swim a long way in the hour of freedom it would give him.

  He was looking at ships that flew flags from countries in what he had grown up thinking of as Eastern Europe and was now being called Central Europe, the way it had been when his dad was growing up. He figured Eastern — no, Central-Europeans had gotten mightily pissed off at their own governments and might be inclined to transfer their anger to government in general. At least to the extent of not caring too much about the finer points of law.

  His third try he got lucky. The Montenegro had a Yugoslav registration — which was looking more academic by the moment — and a mostly Baltic crew. The ship had a load of Catalan tennis balls from Barcelona to Piraeus, the port of Athens. The captain would be more than happy to take Mark along for five hundred dollars American.

  Mark had no plans to go to Athens. But then, he had no plans not to, and until he settled on a final destination, Athens was as good a waystation as any. He suspected that five hundred American was more than the trip would have cost on a luxury liner. But luxury liners were sticky about things like passports, and their pursers had lists of names of people the authorities would like to talk to in case they tried to slip off for a nice relaxing cruise. Mark was dead sure his borrowed name of “Hamilton, Gary A.” would be on them. The master of the Montenegro didn’t give a particular damn if his passenger called himself Nur al-Allah. Or even if he was Nur al-Allah, as long as he behaved.

  The Italian authorities were no problem at all. Italian exit controls were anything but notoriously strict, something they had in common with the Dutch ones. Like everybody else the Italians were on the watch for guns, drugs, and undocumented immigrants coming into the country from places with economies still more blighted than their own. They didn’t worry much about who left, or what they left with, as long as it didn’t look like immobile naked people with very pale complexions under tarps.

  The trip was uneventful. The crew seemed genuinely friendly. Half of them spoke some English, and his science-symposium German was enough to get him the rest of the way.

  He negotiated with the ship’s cook, a wiry and diminutive Macedonian with curly black sideburns who probably wasn’t as young as he looked, for a French passport. It wasn’t his first choice; when you looked at Mark Meadows, Frenchman wasn’t the first word that popped into your mind, unless you were from some weird ex-colonial part of the Third World where the only white guys you’d ever seen were Frenchmen. But French papers cost far less than, say, American, by reason of lesser demand, and anyway the cook had the fixings for a French ID on hand.

  Even as he began negotiations, it occurred to him that the simplest way for the cook to get whatever money he offered for the papers was to slip him a plate of food dosed with some nice corrosive sublimate that would dissolve his bowels for him come mealtime. He had been sure to l
et the cook know — untruthfully — that the settled price took him near the limits of his ready cash. And he had been careful not to dicker too long.

  In some ways Mark was turning into somebody he didn’t exactly like, somebody nasty and suspicious of his fellow bits of star-stuff. He blamed his stay on Takis for that; intrigue was like an extra classical element there: earth, air, fire, water, skullduggery. All the same he slept lightly, didn’t venture too near the rail when others were around, and tasted gingerly in case the cook used a little too much lye in the goulash.

  The most Mark could say about the passport was that the Polaroid picture of him glued inside it looked rather more like him than the picture of Hamilton in the liberated American one, which he’d handed over to the cook by way of a trade-in. At Piraeus, Customs went over the ship as if they were expecting loose diamonds to have rolled into the seams in the decking, but passed him ashore without a glance. He suspected — that nasty Takisian-born cynicism again — they were really scouting for cumshaw. He had simply shouldered the imitation Vuitton flight bag he’d picked up before hitting the train in Rome and walked down the gangplank with an airy wave to them and his Central European pals.

  If only all life’s problems could be blown off with such ease.

  The papers had stood him to a third-floor — okay, second — walkup room in a grimy pension, with a sporadic and unsanitary bathroom on the floor below. The stripy-papered walls of the flat were even more sweat-stained than the male concierge’s undershirt, but unlike the building’s water and electricity, the rats inside them ran day and night.

  It wasn’t exactly Rarrana, the harem of the Ilkazam. But then it beat Bowery flophouses or the stinking dorms on the Rox. Or a wet, drafty warehouse on the IJ. Creature comforts had never mattered that much to Mark.

  And the price was right. Mark had sensibly run Agent Gary’s Gold Card to the cash limit before leaving Amsterdam and picked up a few extra bucks selling the card itself to a hustler on the Brindisi docks — fewer American tourists got down that way than to Rome, so the market price was higher. But he didn’t know where he was going to come by any more money for a while, and he had some very expensive purchases to make if he were going to have a chance of giving the slip to Mistral, her trigger-happy DEA friends, and the mysterious, mustachioed Mr. Bullock.