It was a well-kept secret that Sayyid’s heroic appearance was also a curse. Nur al-Allah had decreed that jokers were sinners, branded by God. They had fallen from shari’a, the true path. They were destined to be slaves of the true faithful at best; at worst they would be exterminated. It would not have been wise for anyone to see that Nur al-Allah’s brilliant strategist was nearly a cripple, that Sayyid’s mighty, rippling thews could barely support the crushing weight of his body. While his height had doubled, his mass had increased nearly fourfold.
Sayyid was always carefully posed. He moved slowly if at all. When he must go any distance, he rode.
Men who had seen Sayyid in the baths whispered that he was as heroically proportioned everywhere. Misha alone knew that his manhood was as crippled as the rest of him. For the failure of his appearance Sayyid could only blame Allah, and he did not dare. For his inability to stay aroused more than a few moments, he blamed Misha. Tonight, as often, her body bore the livid bruises of his heavy fists. But at least the beatings were quick. There were times when she thought his awful, suffocating weight would never rise from her.
“It is nothing,” she whispered. “A dream. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
Sayyid rubbed at his eyes, staring groggily toward her. He had brought himself to a sitting position, and he panted from the effort. “A vision. Nur al-Allah has said—”
“My brother needs his sleep, as does his general. Please.”
“Why must you always oppose me, woman?” Sayyid frowned, and Misha knew that he remembered his earlier embarrassment, when in frustration he had battered her, as if he could find release in her pain. “Tell me,” he insisted. “I must know if it’s something to tell the prophet.”
I am Kahina, she wanted to say. I’m the one Allah has gifted. Why must you be the one to decide whether to wake Najib? It was not your vision. But she held back the words, knowing that they led to more pain. “It was confused,” she told him. “I saw a man, a Russian by his dress, who handed Nur al-Allah many gifts. Then the Russian was gone, and another man—an American—came with more gifts and laid them at the prophet’s feet.” Misha licked dry lips, remembering the panic of the dream. “Then there was nothing but a feeling of terrible danger. He had gossamer strings knotted to his long fingers, and from each string dangled a person. One of his creatures came forward with a gift. The gift was for me, and yet I feared it, dreading to open the package. I ripped it open, and inside…” She shuddered. “I … I saw only myself. I know there was more to the dream, but I woke. Yet I know, I know the gift-bearer is coming. He will be here soon.”
“An American?” Sayyid asked.
“Yes.”
“Then I know already. You dream of the plane carrying the Western infidels. The prophet will be ready for them: a month, perhaps more.”
Misha nodded, pretending to be reassured, though the terror of the dream still held her. He was coming, and he held out his gift for her, smiling. “I’ll tell Nur al-Allah in the morning,” she said. “I’m sorry I disturbed your rest.”
“There’s more I would talk about,” Sayyid answered.
She knew. “Please. We’re both tired.”
“I’m entirely awake now.”
“Sayyid, I wouldn’t want to fail you again.…”
She had hoped that would end it, yet had known it would not. Sayyid groaned to his feet. He said nothing; he never did. He lumbered across the room, breathing loudly at the exertion. She could see his huge bulk beside her bed, a darker shade against the night.
He fell more than lowered himself atop her. “This time,” he breathed. “This time.”
It was not this time. Misha didn’t need to be Kahina to know that it would never be.
From The Journal of Xavier Desmond
DECEMBER 29, 1986/BUENOS AIRES:
DON’T CRY FOR JACK, Argentina.…
Evita’s bane has comes back to Buenos Aires. When the musical first played Broadway, I wondered what Jack Braun must have thought, listening to Lupone sing of the Four Aces. Now that question has even more poignance. Braun has been very calm, almost stoic, in the face of his reception here, but what must he be feeling inside?
Peron is dead, Evita even deader, even Isabel just a memory, but the Peronistas are still very much a part of the Argentine political scene. They have not forgotten. Everywhere the signs taunt Braun and invite him to go home. He is the ultimate gringo (do they use that word in Argentina, I wonder), the ugly but awesomely powerful American who came to the Argentine uninvited and toppled a sovereign government because he disapproved of its politics. The United States has been doing such things for as long as there has been a Latin America, and I have no doubt that these same resentments fester in many other places. The United States and even the dread “secret aces” of the CIA are abstract concepts, however, faceless and difficult to get a fix on—Golden Boy is flesh and blood, very real and very visible, and here.
Someone inside the hotel leaked our room assignments, and when Jack stepped out onto his balcony the first day, he was showered with dung and rotten fruit. He has stayed inside ever since, except for official functions, but even there he is not safe. Last night as we stood in a receiving line at the Casa Rosada, the wife of a union official—a beautiful young woman, her small dark face framed by masses of lustrous black hair—stepped up to him with a sweet smile, looked straight into his eyes, and spit in his face.
It caused quite a stir, and Senators Hartmann and Lyons have filed some sort of protest, I believe. Braun himself was remarkably restrained, almost gallant. Digger was hounding him ruthlessly after the reception; he’s cabling a write-up on the incident back to Aces and wanted a quote. Braun finally gave him something. “I’ve done things I’m not proud of,” he said, “but getting rid of Juan Peron isn’t one of them.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I heard Digger tell him, “but how did you feel when she spit on you?”
Jack just looked disgusted. “I don’t hit women,” he said. Then he walked off and sat by himself.
Downs turned to me when Braun was gone. “I don’t hit women,” he echoed in a singsong imitation of Golden Boy’s voice, then added, “What a weenie…”
The world is too ready to read cowardice and betrayal into anything Jack Braun says and does, but the truth, I suspect, is more complex. Given his youthful appearance, it’s hard to recall at times how old the Golden Boy really is—his formative years were during the Depression and World War II, and he grew up listening to the NBC Blue Network, not MTV. No wonder some of his values seem quaintly old-fashioned.
In many ways the Judas Ace seems almost an innocent, a bit lost in a world that has grown too complicated for him. I think he is more troubled than he admits by his reception here in Argentina. Braun is the last representative of a lost dream that flourished briefly in the aftermath of World War II and died in Korea and the HUAC hearings and the Cold War. They thought they could reshape the world, Archibald Holmes and his Four Aces. They had no doubts, no more than their country did. Power existed to be used, and they were supremely confident in their ability to tell the good guys from the bad guys. Their own democratic ideals and the shining purity of their intentions were all the justification they needed. For those few early aces it must have been a golden age, and how appropriate that a golden boy be at its center.
Golden ages give way to dark ages, as any student of history knows, and as all of us are currently finding out.
Braun and his colleagues could do things no one else had ever done—they could fly and lift tanks and absorb a man’s mind and memories, and so they bought the illusion that they could make a real difference on a global scale, and when that illusion dissolved beneath them, they fell a very long way indeed. Since then no other ace has dared to dream as big.
Even in the face of imprisonment, despair, insanity, disgrace, and death, the Four Aces had triumphs to cling to, and Argentina was perhaps the brightest of those triumphs. What a bitter homecoming this must be for Jack Braun.
As if this was not enough, our mail caught up with us just before we left Brazil, and the pouch included a dozen copies of the new issue of Aces with Digger’s promised feature story. The cover has Jack Braun and Mordecai Jones in profile, scowling at each other (all cleverly doctored, of course; I don’t believe the two had ever met before we all got together at Tomlin) over a blurb that reads, “The Strongest Man in the World.”
The article itself is a lengthy discussion of the two men and their public careers, enlivened by numerous anecdotes about their feats of strength and much speculation about which of the two is, indeed, the strongest man in the world.
Both of the principals seem embarrassed by the piece, Braun perhaps more acutely. Neither much wants to discuss it, and they certainly don’t seem likely to settle the matter anytime soon. I understand that there has been considerable argument and even wagering back in the press compartment since Digger’s piece came out (for once, Downs seems to have had an impact on his journalistic colleagues), but the bets are likely to remain unresolved for a long time to come.
I told Downs that the story was spurious and offensive as soon as I read it. He seemed startled. “I don’t get it,” he said to me. “What’s your beef?”
My beef, as I explained to him, was simple. Braun and Jones are scarcely the only people to manifest superhuman strength since the advent of the wild card; in fact, that particular power is a fairly common one, ranking close behind telekinesis and telepathy in Tachyon’s incidence-of-occurrence charts. It has something to do with maximizing the contractile strength of the muscles, I believe. My point is, a number of prominent jokers display augmented strength as well—just off the top of my head, I cited Elmo (the dwarf bouncer at the Crystal Palace), Ernie of Ernie’s Bar & Grill, the Oddity, Quasiman … and, most notably, Howard Mueller. The Troll’s strength does not perhaps equal that of Golden Boy and the Harlem Hammer, but assuredly it approaches it. None of these jokers were so much as mentioned in passing in Digger’s story, although the names of a dozen other superstrong aces were dropped here and there. Why was that? I wanted to know.
I can’t claim to have made much of an impression unfortunately. When I was through, Downs simply rolled his eyes and said, “You people are so damned touchy.” He tried to be accommodating by telling me that if this story went over big, maybe he’d write up a sequel on the strongest joker in the world, and he couldn’t comprehend why that “concession” made me even angrier. And they wonder why we people are touchy.…
Howard thought the whole argument was vastly amusing. Sometimes I wonder about him.
Actually my fit of pique was nothing compared to the reaction the magazine drew from Billy Ray, our security chief. Ray was one of the other aces mentioned in passing, his strength dismissed as not being truly “major league.” Afterward he could be heard the length of the plane, suggesting that maybe Downs would like to step outside with him, seeing as how he was so minor league. Digger declined the offer. From the smile on his face I doubt that Carnifex will be getting any good press in Aces anytime soon.
Since then, Ray has been grousing about the story to anyone who will listen. The crux of his argument is that strength isn’t everything; he may not be as strong as Braun or Jones, but he’s strong enough to take either of them in a fight, and he’d be glad to put his money where his mouth is.
Personally I have gotten a certain perverse satisfaction out of this tempest in a teapot. The irony is, they are arguing about who has the most of what is essentially a minor power. I seem to recall that there was some sort of demonstration in the early seventies, when the battleship New Jersey was being refitted at the Bayonne Naval Supply Center over in New Jersey. The Turtle lifted the battleship telekinetically, got it out of the water by several feet, and held it there for almost half a minute. Braun and Jones lift tanks and toss automobiles about, but neither could come remotely close to what the Turtle did that day.
The simple truth is, the contractile strength of the human musculature can be increased only so much. Physical limits apply. Dr. Tachyon says there may also be limits to what the human mind can accomplish, but so far they have not been reached.
If the Turtle is indeed a joker, as many believe, I would find this irony especially satisfying.
I suppose I am, at base, as small a man as any.
The Tint of Hatred
Part Four
THURSDAY, JANUARY 1, 1987, SOUTH AFRICA:
THE EVENING WAS COOL. Beyond the hotel’s wide veranda, the crumpled landscape of the Bushveld Basin seemed pastoral. The last light of the day edged grassy hills with lavender and burnt orange; in the valley the sluggish Olifants’s brown waters were touched with gold. Among the stand of acacias lining the river, monkeys settled to sleep with occasional hooting calls.
Sara looked at it and felt nausea. It was so damn beautiful, and it hid such a sickness.
There had been enough trouble even keeping the delegation together in the country. The planned New Year’s celebration had been wrecked by jet lag and the hassles of getting into South Africa. When Father Squid, Xavier Desmond, and Troll had tried to eat with the others in Pretoria, the head waiter had refused to seat them, pointing to a sign in both English and Afrikaans: WHITES ONLY. “We don’t serve blacks, coloreds, or jokers,” he insisted.
Hartmann, Tachyon, and several of the other high-ranking members of the delegation had immediately protested to the Botha government; a compromise had been reached. The delegation was given the run of a small hotel on the Loskop Game Preserve; isolated, they could intermingle if they wished. The government had let it be known that they also found the idea distasteful.
When they had finally popped the champagne corks, the wine had tasted sour in all their mouths.
The junket had spent the afternoon at a ramshackle kraal, actually little more than a shantytown. There they’d seen firsthand the double-edged sword of prejudice: the new apartheid. Once it had been a two-sided struggle, the Afrikaners and the English, against the blacks, the colored, and the Asians. Now the jokers were the new Uitlanders, and both white and black spat upon them. Tachyon had looked at the filth and squalor of this jokertown, and Sara had seen his noble, sculptured face go white with rage; Gregg had looked ill. The entire delegation had turned on the National Party officials who had accompanied them from Pretoria and begun to rail at the conditions here.
The officials spouted the approved line. This is why we have the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, they said, pointedly ignoring the jokers among the group. Without strict separation of the races we will only produce more jokers, more colored, and we’re sure none of you want that. This is why there’s an Immorality Act, a Prohibition of Political Interference Act. Let us do things our way, and we will take care of our own problems. Conditions are bad, yes, but they are getting better. You’ve been swayed by the African/Jokers National Congress. The AJNC is outlawed, their leader Mandela is nothing more than a fanatic, a troublemaker. The AJNC has steered you to the worst encampment they could find—if the doctor, the senators, and their colleagues had only stayed with our itinerary, you would have seen the other side of the coin.
All in all, the year had begun like hell.
Sara put a foot up on the railing, lowered her head until it rested on her hands, and stared at the sunset. Everywhere. Here you can see the problems so easily, but it’s not really different. It’s been horrible everywhere whenever you look past the surface.
She heard footsteps, but didn’t turn around. The railing shuddered as someone stood next to her. “Ironic, isn’t it, how lovely this land can be.” Gregg’s voice.
“Just what I was thinking,” Sara said. She glanced at him, and he was staring out at the hills. The only other person on the veranda was Billy Ray, reclining against the railing a discreet distance away.
“There are times when I wish the virus were more deadly, that it had simply wiped the planet clean of us and started over,” Gregg said. “That town today…” He shook his h
ead. “I read the transcript you phoned in. It brought back everything. I started to get furious all over again. You’ve a gift for making people respond to what you’re feeling, Sara. You’ll do more in the long run that I will. Maybe you can do something to stop prejudice; here, and with people like Leo Barnett back home.”
“Thanks.” His hand was very near hers. She touched it softly with her own; his fingers snared hers and didn’t let her go. The emotions of the day, of the entire trip, were threatening to overwhelm her, her eyes stung with tears. “Gregg,” she said very softly, “I’m not sure I like the way I feel.”
“About today? The jokers?”
She took a breath. The failing sun was warm on her face. “That, yes.” She paused, wondering if she should say more. “And about you too,” she added at last.
He didn’t say anything. He waited, holding her hand and watching the nightfall. “It’s changed so fast, the way I’ve seen you,” Sara continued after a time. “When I thought that you and Andrea…” She paused, her breath trembling. “You care, you hurt when you see the way people are treated. God, I used to detest you. I saw everything that Senator Hartmann did in that light. I saw you as false and empty of compassion. Now that’s gone, and I watch your face when you talk about the jokers and what we have to do to change things, and…”
She pulled him around so that they faced each other. She looked up at him, not caring that he’d see that she’d been crying. “I’m not used to holding things inside. I like it when everything’s out in the open, so forgive me if this isn’t something I should say. Where you’re concerned, I think I’m very vulnerable, Gregg, and I’m afraid of that.”
“I don’t intend to hurt you, Sara.” His hand came up to her face. Softly he brushed moisture from the corner of her eyes.
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