Aces Abroad wc-4

by George R. R. Martin

  Our Swedish friend leaned over, studied the photograph, and chuckled. "Oh, him," he said in excellent English. "He was… what is the slang word you use, for a boy who runs errands and does odd jobs? An animal of some sort…"

  "A gofer," I supplied.

  "Yes, he was a gopher, as you put it. Actually a young journalism student. Joshua, that was his name. Joshua… something. He said he wanted to observe the negotiations from within so he could write about them afterward. Bernadotte thought the idea was ridiculous when it was first put to him, rejected it out of hand in fact, but the young man was persistent. He finally managed to corner the Count and put his case to him personally, and somehow he talked him around. So he was not officially a member of the team, but he was with us constantly from that point through the end. He was not a very efficient gopher, as I recall, but he was such a pleasant young man that everyone liked him regardless. I don't believe he ever wrote his article."

  "No," Tachyon said. "He wouldn't have. He was a chess player, not a writer."

  Our host lit up with remembrance. "Why, yes! He played incessantly, now that I recall. He was quite good. Do you know him, Dr. Tachyon? I've often wondered whatever became of him."

  "So have I," Tachyon replied very simply and very sadly. Then he closed the book and changed the topic.

  I have known Dr. Tachyon for more years than I care to contemplate. That evening, spurred by my own curiosity, I managed to seat myself near to Jack Braun and ask him a few innocent questions while we ate. I'm certain that he suspected nothing, but he was willing enough to reminisce about the Four Aces, the things they did and tried to do, the places they went, and more importantly, the places they did not go. At least not officially.

  Afterward, I found Dr. Tachyon drinking alone in his room. He invited me in, and it was clear that he was feeling quite morose, lost in his damnable memories. He lives as much in the past as any man I have ever known. I asked him who the young man in the photograph had been.

  "No one," Tachyon said. "Just a boy I used to play chess with." I'm not sure why he felt he had to lie to me.

  "His name was not Joshua," I told him, and he seemed startled. I wonder, does he think my deformity affects my mind, my memory? "His name was David, and he was not supposed to be there. The Four Aces were never officially involved in the Mideast, and Jack Braun says that by late 1948 the members of the group had gone their own ways. Braun was making movies."

  "Bad movies," Tachyon said with a certain venom. "Meanwhile," I said, "the Envoy was making peace."

  "He was gone for two months. He told Blythe and me that he was going on a vacation. I remember. It never occurred to me that he was involved."

  No more has it ever occurred to the rest of the world, though perhaps it should have. David Harstein was not particularly religious, from what little I know of him, but he was Jewish, and when the Port Said aces and the Arab armies threatened the very existence of the new state of Israel, he acted all on his own.

  His was a power for peace, not war; not fear or sandstorms or lightning from a clear sky, but pheromones that made people like him and want desperately to please him and agree with him, that made the mere presence of the ace called Envoy a virtual guarantee of a successful negotiation. But those who knew who and what he was showed a distressing tendency to repudiate their agreements once Harstein and his pheromones had left their presence. He must have pondered that, and with the stakes so high, he must have decided to find out what might happen if his role in the process was carefully kept secret. The Peace of Jerusalem was his answer.

  I wonder if even Folke Bernadotte knew who his gopher really was. I wonder where Harstein is now, and what he thinks of the peace that he so carefully and secretly wrought. And I find myself reflecting on what the Black Dog said in Jerusalem.

  What would it do to the fragile Peace of Jerusalem if its origins were revealed to the world? The more I reflect on that, the more certain I grow that I ought tear these pages from my journal before I offer it for publication. If no one gets Dr. Tachyon drunk, perhaps this secret can even be kept.

  Did he ever do it again, I wonder? After HUAC, after prison and disgrace and his celebrated conscription and equally celebrated disappearance, did the Envoy ever sit in on any other negotiations with the world's being none the wiser? I wonder if we'll ever know.

  I think it unlikely and wish it were not. From what I have seen on this tour, in Guatemala and South Africa, in Ethiopia and Syria and Jerusalem, in India and Indonesia and Poland, the world today needs the Envoy more than ever.

  PUPPETS

  Victor W Milan

  MacHeath had a jackknife, so the song went.

  Mackie Messer had something better. And it was ever so much easier to keep out of sight.

  Mackie blew into the camera store on a breath of cool air and diesel farts from the Kurfiirstendamm. He left off whistling his song, let the door hiss to behind him, and stood with his fists rammed down in his jacket pockets to catch a look around.

  Light slamdanced on countertops, the curves of cameras, black and glassy-eyed. He felt the humming of the lights down beneath his skin. This place got on his tits. It was so clean and antiseptic it made him think of a doctor's office. He hated doctors. Always had, since the doctors the Hamburg court sent him to see when he was thirteen said he was crazy and penned him up in a Land juvie/psych ward, and the orderly there was a pig from the Tirol who was always breathing booze and garlic over him and trying to get him to jerk him off… and then he'd turned over his ace and walked on out of there, and the thought brought a smile and a rush of confidence.

  On a stool by the display counter lay a Berliner Zeitung folded to the headline: "Wild Card Tour to Visit Wall Today." He smiled, thin.

  Yeah. Oh, yeah.

  Then Dieter came in from the back and saw him. He stopped dead and put this foolish smile on his face. "Mackie. Hey. It's a little early, isn't it?"

  He had a narrow, pale head with dark hair slicked back in a smear of oil. His suit was blue and ran to too much padding in the shoulders. His tie was thin and iridescent. His lower lip quivered just a little.

  Mackie was standing still. His eyes were the eyes of a shark, cold and gray and expressionless as steel marbles.

  "I was just, you know, putting in my appearance here, Dieter said." A hand jittered around at the cameras and the neon tubing and the sprawling shiny posters showing the tanned women with shades and too many teeth. The hand glowed the white of a dead fish's belly in the artificial light. "Appearances are important, you know. Got to lull the suspicions of the bourgeoisie. Especially today."

  He tried to keep his eyes off Mackie, but they just kept rolling back to him, as if the whole room slanted downward to where he stood. The ace didn't look like much. He was maybe seventeen, looked younger, except for his skin-that had a dryness to it, a touch of parchment age. He wasn't much more than a hundred seventy centimeters tall, even skinnier than Dieter, and his body kind of twisted. He wore a black leather jacket that Dieter knew was scuffed to gray along the canted line of his shoulders, jeans that were tired before he fished them out of a trash can in Dahlem, a pair of Dutch clogs. A brush of straw hair stuck up at random above the drawn-out face of an El Greco martyr, oddly vulnerable. His lips were thin and mobile.

  "So you stepped up the timetable, came for me early," Dieter said lamely.

  Mackie flashed forward, wrapped his hand in shiny tie, hauled Dieter toward him. "Maybe it's too late for you, comrade. Maybe maybe."

  The camera salesman had a curious glossy-pale complexion, like laminated paper. Now his skin turned the color of a sheet of the Zeitung after it had spent the night blowing along a Budapesterstrasse curb. He'd seen what that hand could do.

  "M-mackie," he stammered, clutching at the reed-thin arm.

  He collected himself then, patted Mackie affectionately on a leather sleeve. "Hey, hey now, brother. What's the matter?"

  "You tried to sell us, motherfucker!" Mackie screamed, spraying spi
ttle all over Dieter's after-shave.

  Dieter jerked back. His arm twitched with the lust to wipe his cheek. "What the fuck are you talking about, Mackie? I'd never try-"

  "Kelly. That Australian bitch. Wolf thought she was acting funny and leaned on her." A grin wnched its way across Mackie's face. "She's never going to the fucking Bundeskriminalamt now, man. She's Speck. Lunchmeat."

  Dieter's tongue flicked bluish lips. "Listen, you've got it wrong. She was nothing to me. I knew she was just a groupie, all along-"

  His eyes informed on him, sliding ever so slightly to the right. His hand suddenly flared up from below the register with a black snub revolver in it.

  Mackie's left hand whirred down, vibrating like the blade of a jigsaw. It sheared through the pistol's top strap, through the cylinder and cartridges, and slashed open the trigger guard a piece of a centimeter in front of Dieter's forefinger. The finger clenched spastically, the hammer came back and clicked to, and the rear half of the cylinder, its fresh-cut face glistening like silver, fell forward onto the countertop. Glass cracked.

  Mackie grabbed Dieter by the face and hauled him forward. The camera salesman put down his hands to steady himself, shrieked as they went through the countertops. The broken glass raked him like talons, slashing through blue coat sleeve and blue French shirt and fishbelly skin beneath. His blood streamed over Zeiss lenses and Japanese import cameras that were making inroads in the Federal Republic despite chauvinism and high tariffs, ruining their finish.

  "We were comrades! Why? Why?" Mackie's whole skinny body was shaking in hurt fury. Tears filled his eyes. His hands began to vibrate of their own accord.

  Dieter squealed as he felt them rasping at the post-shave stubble he could never get rid of, the only flaw in his neo-sleek grooming. " I don't know what you're talking about," he screamed. " I never meant to do it-I was playing her along-"

  "Liar!" Mackie yelled. The anger jolted through him like a blast from the third rail, and his hands were buzzing, buzzing, and Dieter was flopping and howling as the flesh began to come off his cheeks, and Mackie gripped him harder, hands on cheekbones, and the rising vibration of his hands was transmitted through bone to the wet mass of Dieter's brain, and the camera salesman's eyes rolled and his tongue came out and the violent agitation flash-boiled the fluids in his skull and his head exploded.

  Mackie dropped him, danced back howling like a man on fire, swiping at the clotted stuff that filled his eyes and clung to his cheeks and hair. When he could see, he went around the counter and kicked the quivering body. It slid onto the cuffed linoleum floor. The cash register was flashing orange error-condition warnings, the display case swam with blood, and there were lumps of greasy yellow-gray brains all over everything.

  Mackie dabbed at his jacket and screamed again when his hands came away slimy. "You bastard!" He kicked the headless corpse again. "You got this shit all over me, you asshole. Asshole, asshole, asshole!"

  He hunkered down, pulled up the tail of Dieter's suit coat, and wiped the worst lumps off his face and hands and leather jacket. "Oh, Dieter, Dieter," he sobbed, " I wanted to talk to you, stupid son of a bitch-" He picked up a cold hand, kissed it, tenderly rested it on a spattered lapel. Then he went back to the john to wash down as best he could.

  When he came out, anger and sorrow both had faded, leaving a strange elation. Dieter had tried to fuck with the Fraction and he'd paid the price, and what the hell did it matter if Mackie hadn't been able to find out why? It didn't matter, nothing mattered. Mackie was an ace, he was MacHeath made flesh, invulnerable, and in a couple of hours he was going to show the cocksuckers-

  The glass doors up front opened and somebody came in. Laughing to himself, Mackie changed phase and walked through the wall.

  Rain jittered briefly on the roof of the Mercedes limo. "We'll be meeting a number of influential people at this luncheon, Senator," said the young black man with the long narrow face and earnest expression, riding with his back to the driver. "It's going to be an excellent opportunity to show your commitment to brotherhood and tolerance, not just for jokers, but for members of oppressed groups of all persuasions. Really excellent."

  "I'm sure it will, Ronnie." Chin on hand, Hartmann let his eyes slide away from his junior aide and out the condensation-fogged window. Blocks of apartments rolled by, tan and anonymous. This close to the Wall Berlin seemed always to be holding its breath.

  "Aide et Amitie has an international reputation for its work to promote tolerance," Ronnie said. "The head of the Berlin chapter, Herr Prahler, recently received recognition for his efforts to improve public acceptance of the Turkish 'guest workers,' though I understand he's a rather, ah, controversial personality-"

  "Communist bastard," grunted Moller from the front seat. He was a strapping blond kid plainclothesman with big hands and prominent ears that made him resemble a hound pup. He spoke English out of. deference to the American senator, though between a grandmother from the Old Country and a few college courses, Hartmann knew enough German to get by.

  "Herr Prahler's active in Rote Hilfe, Red Help," explained Moller's opposite number, Blum, from the backseat. He was sitting on the other side of Mordecai Jones, who sometimes and with poor grace responded to the nickname Harlem Hammer. Jones was concentrating on The New York Times crossword puzzle and acting as if no one else were there. "He's a lawyer, you know. Been defending radicals since Andy Baader's salad days."

  "Helping damned terrorists get off with a slap on the wrists, you mean."

  Blum laughed and shrugged. He was leaner and darker than Moller, and he wore his curly black hair shaggy enough to push even the notoriously liberal standards of the Berlin Schutzpolizei. But his brown artist's eyes were watchful, and the way he held himself suggested he knew how to use the tiny machine pistol in the shoulder holster that bulked out his gray suit coat in a way not even meticulous German tailoring could altogether conceal.

  "Even radicals have a right to representation. This is Berlin, Mensch. We take freedom seriously here if only to set an example for our neighbors, ja?" Moller made a skeptical sound low in his throat.

  Ronnie fidgeted on the seat and checked his watch. "Maybe we could go a little faster? We don't want to be late." The driver flashed a grin over his shoulder. He resembled a smaller edition of Tom Cruise, though more ferret faced. He couldn't have been as young as he looked. "The streets are narrow here. We-don't want to have an accident. Then we'd be even later."

  Hartmann's aide set his mouth and fussed with papers in the briefcase open on his lap. Hartmann slid another glance toward the bulk of the Hammer, who was still stolidly ignoring everybody. Puppetman was amazingly quiescent, given his gut dread of aces. Maybe he was even feeling a certain thrill at Jones's proximity.

  Not that Jones looked like an ace. He appeared to be a normal black man in his mid to late thirties, bearded, balding, solidly built, looking none too well at ease knotted into coat and tie. Nothing out of the ordinary.

  As a matter of fact he weighed four hundred and seventy pounds and had to sit in the center of the Merc so it wouldn't list. He might be the strongest man in the world, stronger than Golden Boy perhaps, but he refused to engage in any kind of competition to settle the issue. He disliked being an ace, disliked being a celebrity, disliked politicians, and thought the entire tour was a waste of time. Hartmann had the impression he'd only agreed to come along because his neighbors in Harlem got such a kick out of his being in the spotlight, and he hated to let them down.

  Jones was a token. He knew it. He resented it. That was one reason Hartmann had goaded him into coming to the Aide et Amitie luncheon; that and the fact that for all their pious pretensions of brotherhood, most Germans didn't like blacks and were uncomfortable around them; they pretended, but that wasn't the sort of thing you could hide from Puppetman. He found the Hammer's pique and the discomfort of their hosts amusing; almost worthwhile to take Jones on as a puppet. But not quite. The Hammer was known primarily as a muscleman ace, but th
e full scope of his powers was a mvstery Any chance of discovery was too much for Puppetman.

  Beyond the minor titillations poking everyone off balance provided, Hartmann was getting fed up with Billy Ray. Carnifex had fumed and blustered when Hartmann ditched him with the rest of the tour back at the Wall-detailed to escort Mrs. Hartmann and the senator's two senior aides back to the hotel-but he couldn't say much without offending their hosts, whose security men were on the job. And anyway, with the Hammer along, what could possibly happen?

  "Scheisse," the driver said. He had turned a corner to find a gray and white telephone van parked blocking the street next to an open manhole. He braked to a halt.

  "Idiots," said Moller. "They're not supposed to do that." He unlocked the passenger door.

  Beside Hartmann, Blum flicked his eyes to the rearview mirror. "Uh-oh," he said softly. His right hand went inside his coat.

  Hartmann craned his neck. A second van had cranked itself across the street not thirty feet behind them. Its doors were open, spilling people onto pavement wet from the rain spasm. They held weapons. Blum shouted a warning to his partner.

  A figure loomed up beside the car. A terrible metal screeching filled the limousine. Hartmann's breath turned solid in his throat as a hand cut through the roof of the car in a shower of sparks.

  Moller winced away. He drew his MP5K from its shoulder holster, pressed it to the window, and fired a burst. Glass exploded outward.

  The hand snapped back. "Jesus Christ," Moller shouted, "the bullets went right through him!"

  He threw open the door. A man with a ski mask over his face fired an assault rifle from the rear of the telephone van. The noise rattled the car's thick windows, on and on. It sounded oddly remote. The windshield starred. The man who'd cut through the roof screamed and went down. Moller danced back three steps, fell against the Mercedes's fender, collapsed to the pavement squirming and screaming. His coat fell open. Scarlet spiders clung to his chest.