Wild Cards XVI: Deuces Down

by Michael Cassutt

  Sam put his arms in the sleeves and shrugged it on. It was good fit, and black, but there wasn’t a sheath for his tail. “Um . . .” he said.

  Cameo gave him a sharp look. “It’s Halloween in Jokertown, Sam. If you’ve got it, flaunt it. Except for that hat,” she said, removing it from his head. “This the handiwork of those crazed fangirls?”

  Sam looked to Topper. “One of them.”

  Topper glared while Cameo grimaced and said, “That kind of woman you do not need,” tsking over the ripped seam at the crown. “Now to find you a replacement. . . .”

  “Mind if I help?” Topper gestured to the tux rack and the top hats on top.

  “Please do,” Cameo said. “We’re looking for something in a small.”

  Topper got a step stool and began to inspect the hats, and Sam could tell she was not just checking their size.

  Cameo set his battered hat aside on a work table, then picked up an overstuffed ragbag from the floor and set it next to it. “Let’s see what I’ve got in my bag of tricks. I’d rather not borrow from Dutton if I can help it. . . .” She opened the bag and rifled through her assortment of costume pieces, pulling out another top hat, collapsed flat. She held it in her hands for a long while, contemplating it, then shook her head, and with an expert flick of her wrist, popped the top out into shape.

  She turned, stopping and looked up at Topper where she was perched on the stool. “That’s a lovely hat you have there, Melissa,” she said at last. “Had it long?”

  Topper looked at the one in her hands, then set it down and reached up and tapped the one on her head. “Why yes, actually. My grandfather gave it to me shortly before he died. . . .”

  “I’m . . . so sorry for your loss. Were you fond of him?”

  It was kind of a forward question, even for Cameo, and Topper stopped search through the top shelf for a moment. Then continued. “Very. But it’s a mixed bag. My grandpa was a stage magician. Really great in his day, before the wild card. But it destroyed him.” She grabbed for another stack of top hats, popping them out and checking inside. “He used to work places like this, have bookings all over the country. Then . . . nothing.” She grimaced. “He was very bitter about it—I mean, who wants to see someone pull a rabbit out of a hat when in the next tent there’s a woman who can turn into a flying elephant?”

  Cameo turned the hat over in her hands. “And then you drew an ace from that infernal deck. . . .”

  “I didn’t tell him,” Topper said, trying another hat. “Or anyone else for that matter. Not until after grandpa died.”

  “He knew,” Cameo assured her. “Trust me, he knew. He just didn’t say anything.”

  Topper cocked her head. “You really think so?”

  “I know so. Grandfathers know these things.” Cameo gave a dark chuckle. “Besides, it’s hard to keep a secret from a professional magician.” Her mouth twisted in a wry grin as she contemplated the hat, turning it over again. “So what did you do after . . .” She paused, as if trying to come up with a delicate way to phrase it, then failing, “. . . your grandfather’s death? If you don’t mind me asking. . . .”

  “I’m a private eye. I’m used to questions.” Topper sighed and shrugged. “I went into government work. I didn’t want to be one of the aces who took the spotlight away from him. That, and the fact that I hate being on stage.” She grimaced. “I must be the only person who ever had the wild card turn from stage fright. Right in the middle of my high school talent show no less.”

  “And your grandfather never told you that he knew . . . .”

  “If he did know.” Topper shook her head. “Trust him to die leaving me a mystery.”

  “Or two.” Cameo chuckled. “The world needs mysteries now more than ever. . . .” She laughed long and loud, as if she’d just heard the best joke in the world, then abruptly shook her head and stopped. “You know, Sam,” she said, turning the hat over in her hands, “I don’t think this hat will fit you after all.” She collapsed it, far less deftly than she’d popped it out, then turned and began to replace it in her ragbag.

  “Are you sure?” Topper asked, coming down off the steps. “Could I see that one?”

  Cameo paused, then shrugged and pulled the flattened top hat back out, flipping it to Topper like a Frisbee. Topper caught it and popped it out, turning it over in her hands and reaching inside to check the lining.

  “You see,” Cameo said, coming over next to her and retrieving the hat, “this is a seven and a quarter, and we need more of a six and seven eighths or a seven.” She put the hat on Sam, demonstrating where it went down too low on his forehead, then collapsed it and put it back in her ragbag. Topper gave Sam a look he couldn’t read.

  “Here,” Cameo said as she came back, “until I can fix the silk— if I can fix the silk—why don’t you just make do with ordinary felt?” She went to the rack where Topper had been searching and took down a modern top hat with rounded corners, checked the label, then put it on Sam’s head where it fit perfectly, if inelegantly.

  “Socks?” Sam bent down and began unlacing his left boot. “And do you by any chance have any opera glasses or binoculars?”

  “Are you on a scavenger hunt?” Cameo located a single clean sock, pointing him to a trash bin when he offered her the ink-soaked one. “No binoculars right now. Maybe a lorgnette?”

  Topper shook her head lightly. “No, sorry,” Sam said.

  “Ask Jim,” Cameo suggested, collecting her ragbag. “I need to go check the greenroom for cummerbunds. Alec isn’t someone you can just fit off the rack.”

  She left and Topper came over as Sam finished tying his boot-laces. Sam laughed. “So, your talent show? Mine turned in detention.”

  “What?”

  Sam waggled his fingers. “My deuce. I was busted for graffiti. The VP tossed my artwork in the furnace.” He paused. “You know, mental cruelty to a latent is a firing offense. . . .” He stood up and retrieved his sketchbook from the floor. “But hey, I survived, and so did you. Nothing wrong with that.”

  “Yeah,” said Topper. “Is it me, or did she pull a Bobo Switch?”

  “A what?” Sam asked.

  “A Bobo Switch. It’s a magician’s pass that lets you swap one coin with another. You could do it with collapsed hats.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Topper said. “I would have sworn that the top hat she just had there was mine. And she’s asking all these questions about my grandfather. Then next thing, she starts to put it away, then hands it back, and that’s the exact way a magician would swap one coin for another.” She gave him a sharp look. “Trust me, I may not be great at it anymore, but that was one of my tricks for the talent competition.”

  Sam looked at her. “Again . . . why?”

  Topper waved at the air. “I don’t know. I’m just making suppositions here. She’s the right height and build, and that mask there is awfully suspicious. And while her hair’s too short, it’s the right color, and it’s hard to tell length anyway with that hat, so maybe she has it pinned up. Or maybe she wore a wig—there’s plenty of them here.” Topper gestured to the room. “Plus that brooch of hers—that could have made a lump under the latex that would look like an Adam’s apple. And that weird crack about fashionable hazmat suits—what was Rubber Maid wearing if not that?”

  “Or Bondage Babe could have been Mr. Dutton in drag,” Sam pointed out. “He’s thin too. He owns all these wigs and costumes, and he can certainly afford a pair of fake breasts.”

  “Or that,” Topper conceded. “That’s the maddening thing about detective work. But was it just me, or was Cameo acting seriously weird?”

  “Seriously weird? Remember, this is Jokertown, and you’re talking to a man who’s housemates with Jim. The guy’s almost twenty and still sends letters to Santa—which would just be pathetic, except Christmas morning, there’s extra presents under the tree and the milk and cookies are gone.” Sam let that sink in for effect. “Weird is relative. Cameo’s
a theatre person. Weird, yes. Seriously, no. Or at least she always acts like that. We think she’s had one too many method acting classes.” Sam chuckled. “Roger got her drunk at a cast party and she did this hilarious crazed hunchback impression. You should have seen it.”

  “Crazed hunchback?” Topper inquired, then shook her head and took a deep breath. “You’re right. I’m being paranoid. Let’s just go see if Jim has any binoculars then check the audience again. The show should start soon.”

  They went downstairs and over to the stage where the guys were talking over the sound of an impatient audience coming through the curtain. “What do you think, Sam?” Alec asked. “Ditch the formals? ’Cause I’ve got this Green Knight outfit I was planning to wear for second set—I mean, it’s Halloween and all—and I can’t find the stupid cummerbund and we’re going to be on national TV. Plus the whole tux business makes me look like Lurch anyway.”

  “Better than Tiny Tim,” Paul said, glaring. “If I hear ‘God bless us, everyone!’ one more time, I swear, I’m gonna whack someone.”

  “‘Top Hat’ is our big number, that’s all I’m saying,” Roger pointed out, “and it’ll look pretty stupid to have four guys in formalwear plus the Rockettes dancing around a Ren Faire refugee. We close on ‘Top Hat’ at the break, then we change costumes, and then you can be the Jolly Green Giant all you want.”

  “It’s not the Jolly Green Giant! It’s the Green Knight! From the tale of Sir Gawain.”

  “Right, Alec. We all know about your Arthurian fixation. Even the wild card virus knows about your Arthurian fixation. Now lay off and tell us where you hid the cummerbund.”

  “I didn’t hide the—Wait a sec,” he said, breaking off and looking down his very long nose at Topper. “Couldn’t you just pull my cummerbund out of your hat?”

  Topper stared at him with a deer-in-headlights expression, then slowly shook her head. “Sorry. No requests. Firm rule of mine.”

  “Can’t you break it?”

  “Only if it’s life or death. Is a cummerbund that serious?”

  “You ever been on stage?” Alec’s nostrils flared, making him look even more horse-faced. “With people calling you ‘Lurch’?”

  Dirk looked up at Alec. “Hey dude, we could shave your head the rest of the way. Then you’d look like Uncle Fester instead.”

  Alec glared down at him. “And if we dressed you in stripes, you’d look like Pugsley.”

  “If Pugsley bleached his hair and did a whole ton of steroids,” Paul remarked.

  “Shut up, Timmy,” Dirk told him. “It’s not my freakin’ fault I’ve got muscles like this.”

  “Well,” said Jim, “if you use the Charles Atlas system for more than five days, what do you expect? You keep saying I’m crazy, but at least I followed the directions.” Jim stood there, cutting a perfect figure in his tux, then added, “But if the problem is Alec being too tall for the lineup, and we need a quick fix, what if we just made Paul taller instead? After all, it’s a lot easier to stretch someone who’s already stretchy, and his braces are fully adjustable.”

  Paul waved a crutch. “You know how long it takes me to put these things on, let alone change the settings. We don’t have time.”

  “Sure we do,” Jim said. “Look what I just got.”

  You could have heard a pin drop at that moment. Jim’s Look what I just gots were usually followed by something spectacular and sometimes frightening, occasionally destructive. He held up his latest gimcrack, what looked like a remote control, with a few extra wires and sparkling diodes held on with strips of duct tape. “It’s a universal remote.” He displayed it with all the pride of a child showing off the new toy Santa had brought him. “The box said it would control all my appliances, electronics, entertainment and audiovisual equipment. I had to fiddle with it a bit before it worked right, but now it does, and doctor always calls Paul’s braces appliances. And look, here’s the vertical.” He pointed the remote at Paul and a jolt of electrical energy shot forth, connecting with the rubber boy’s braces and arcing along them like a Tesla coil.

  Paul began to get taller and taller, rapidly nearing Alec’s height then going somewhat beyond, his body becoming correspondingly thinner, like a life-size Stretch Armstrong doll. “Gimcrack! Cut it out!” Paul’s leg braces were clearly visible beyond his highwater tux pants, getting higher still as electricity crackled and adjustment pins on the braces clicked and ratcheted spasmodically, inching higher and higher.

  “Cut what out?” asked Jim.

  “He means stop,” Roger said. “There’s a stop button, isn’t there, Jim?”

  “Sure,” said the ace, “it’s right here.” Jim pressed the remote and the electrical charge zapped into nothingness, Paul’s braces locking just short of eight feet. His elongated midriff stuck out below his shirtwaist and above his tux pants, held up by his massively strained suspenders.

  Topper leaned over to Sam and whispered in his ear, “On second thought, let’s not ask about the binoculars.” Sam nodded.

  The rubber boy looked down at himself. “Hey, actually this is pretty cool.” He stilt-walked a couple steps towards Alec. “Hey look, Alec, I’m even taller than you!” He smiled then, the corners of his mouth curling up like a caricature. “I can even touch your horn. . . .”

  Paul reached his elongated arm for the forward point of Alec’s Mohawk and the tall joker jerked away. “Don’t you touch it, you fucking rubber chicken!” Alec reared back, his goatee flying. “I know you’re not a virgin!”

  Paul grinned even more wickedly. “Hey, when you can beat all the other guys at Freakers annual ‘Whip it out’ contest, the girls can never get enough of you!”

  “Really?” Jim looked perplexed again. “That hasn’t been my experience. I keep getting emails about how to ‘Add extra inches,’ and those work, of course, but there’s never any ‘Lose unwanted inches’ programs, at least for your penis.”

  There was another of those pin-drop silences. “Jim,” Roger said, shaking his head, “please, whatever you do, don’t mention that once the curtain goes up. And Alec, Paul—that goes double for you two. You should know better. This is our first live broadcast and we don’t want to piss off the network.”

  “The Network?” Jim repeated. “The celestial intelligences I hear with my pyramid hat?”

  “Well ‘celestial intelligences’ may be going a bit far, but they’re the ones who cut the checks,” said a woman’s voice from behind Sam. “Remember, we’re talking Mtv here.”

  Sam turned, seeing a tall brunette in a gold dress with more sequins than the Sultan of Brunei, her hair elaborately coiffed up with pins tipped with gold coins with a matching necklace and drop pendant earrings, and a pair of beautiful brown-and-white-feathered wings behind her. And equally spectacular cleavage in front. Peregrine, the flying ace model and talk show hostess.

  She swept forward, regal as the Queen of Angels, which was probably the general idea. “I hope you boys excuse the liberty. I was wanting to talk with you about a possible appearance on my Perch, and Chaos invited us backstage.” She waved behind herself, then partially unfurled her left wing, to both shelter and backdrop two other individuals. “I also wanted to introduce my son, John Fortune. He’s a great fan of yours. And this is his date . . .” She glanced back.

  “Velvet,” supplied the girl, “Velvet Brown.”

  If it was possible to eclipse Peregrine, this girl did. Posed against the feathered curtain, which made her even more radiant, was a startlingly beautiful young woman, no more than sixteen, gorgeous as a Hollywood starlet of another era, with long dark curls, flawless ivory skin, and intense violet eyes. She was dressed in a velvet riding habit, circa 1940s, and a pert little top hat, and had one slim hand laid on the arm of a young man about the same age. This lucky boy was as gorgeous as his mother and almost as tall, with the extra perk of being genuinely exotic, at least on the nat end of the scheme, with café-au-lait skin, kinky hair the color of burnished gold, and huge almond-shap
ed brown eyes. This didn’t exactly fit with the round black glasses or the purple scar makeup in the shape of a lightning bolt at the edge of his hairline, but having a mother who could actually help you fly was probably consolation for a less-than-convincing Harry Potter costume.

  “Wow!” said John. “This is so cool, I can hardly believe it! You guys are really all jokers?”

  “Well I’m not,” Jim admitted. “I’m only a latent.” He said this, as always, with a straight face, though this time while holding a universal remote wrapped with duct tape and diodes and arcing with weird electrical energy.

  John Fortune looked askance at it, as did Velvet Brown and Peregrine. “There’s so much shoddy workmanship these days,” Jim apologized further, “but then I guess you get what you pay for.” He waved it, making it spark and causing Paul to grow an inch. “I picked this up off the bargain table at the five and dime, so I really shouldn’t complain.”

  Alec put his finger next to his ear and twirled it in the universal crazy signal, then looked away and pretended he was primping his Mohawk the moment Jim glanced back.

  “I’m a latent too,” said John, smiling the trying-to-make-conversation-with-the-nice-crazy-person smile.

  Jim smiled back. “My sympathies.”

  “Perhaps you might make your friend a bit shorter, dear?” Peregrine interrupted gently. “Say, six-three, six-four? A little more in the shoulders, a little less in the hips, the Fabio proportions?”

  “Okay. . . .” Jim pressed a couple buttons, causing the static to arc, and Paul began to get shorter and slightly wider, at least across the shoulders, while Jim looked back to John. “Roger was a latent until a little while ago, but he was lucky enough to draw a joker-deuce, and he’s working on making it into an ace.”

  “As should we all,” said Peregrine. “Being an ace is an attitude. Though a good fashion designer helps.” Sam realized then that she wasn’t got up as the Queen of Angels but the Queen of Pentacles, wearing what had to be a Bob Mackie original.