Joey made a disgusted sound. He had found a beer somewhere and was cracking the cap.
“What’s happening?” Tach asked.
“If you had been the least bit interested in anything besides cognac and cheap tarts, you might know,” Des said icily.
“Tell him what you told us,” Tom commanded. When he knew, Tachyon would surely help, he thought. He had to.
Des gave a heavy sigh. “Angelface had a heroin habit. She hurt, you know. Perhaps you noticed that from time to time, Doctor? The drug was the only thing that got her through the day. Without it, the pain would have driven her insane. Nor was hers an ordinary junkie’s habit. She used uncut heroin in quantities that would have killed any normal user. You saw how minimally it affected her. The joker metabolism is a curious thing. Do you have any idea how expensive heroin is, Doctor Tachyon? Never mind, I see that you don’t. Angelface made quite a bit of money from the Funhouse, but it was never enough. Her source gave her credit until she was in far over her head, then demanded…call it a promissory note. Or a Christmas present. She had no choice. It was that or be cut off. She hoped to come up with the money, being an eternal optimist. She failed. On Christmas morning her source came by to collect. Mal wasn’t about to let them have her. They insisted.”
Tachyon was squinting in the glare of the lights. His image began to roll upward. “Why didn’t she tell me?” he said.
“I suppose she didn’t want to burden you, Doctor. It might have taken the fun out of your self-pitying binges.”
“Have you told the police?”
“The police? Ah, yes. New York’s finest. The ones who seem so curiously uninterested whenever a joker is beaten or killed, yet ever so diligent if a tourist is robbed. The ones who so regularly arrest, harass, and brutalize any joker who has the poor taste to live anywhere outside of Jokertown. Perhaps we might consult the officer who commented that raping a joker woman is more a lapse in taste than a crime.” Des snorted. “Doctor Tachyon, where do you think Angelface bought her drugs? Do you think any ordinary street pusher would have access to uncut heroin in the quantities she needed? The police were her source. The head of the Jokertown narcotics squad, if you care to be precise. Oh, I’ll grant you that it’s unlikely the whole department is involved. Homicide may be conducting a legitimate investigation. What do you think they’d say if we told them that Bannister was the murderer? You think they’d arrest one of their own? On the strength of my testimony, or the testimony of any joker?”
“We’ll make good her note,” Tachyon blurted. “We’ll give this man his money or the Funhouse or whatever it is he wants.”
“The promissory note,” Desmond said wearily, “was not for the Funhouse.”
“Whatever it was, give it to him!”
“She promised him the only thing she still had that he wanted,” Desmond said. “Herself. Her beauty and her pain. The word’s out on the street, if you know how to listen. There’s going to be a very special New Year’s Eve party somewhere in the city. Invitation only. Expensive. A unique thrill. Bannister will have her first. He’s wanted that for a long time. But the other guests will have their turn. Jokertown hospitality.”
Tachyon’s mouth worked soundlessly for a moment. “The police?” he finally managed. He looked as shocked as Tom had been when Desmond told him and Joey.
“Do you think they love us, Doctor? We’re freaks. We’re diseased. Jokertown is a hell, a dead end, and the Jokertown police are the most brutal, corrupt, and incompetent in the city. I don’t think anyone planned what happened at the Funhouse, but it happened, and Angelface knows too much. They can’t let her live, so they’re going to have some fun with the joker cunt.”
Tom Tudbury leaned toward his microphone. “I can rescue her,” he said. “These fuckers haven’t seen anything like the Great and Powerful Turtle. But I can’t find her.”
Des said, “She has a lot of friends. But none of us can read minds, or make a man do something he doesn’t want to.”
“I can’t,” Tachyon protested. He seemed to shrink into himself, to edge away from them, and for an instant Tom thought the little man was going to run away. “You don’t understand.”
“What a fuckin’ candy-ass,” Joey said loudly.
Watching Tachyon crumble on his screens, Tom Tudbury finally ran out of patience. “If you fail, you fail,” he said. “And if you don’t try, you fail too, so what the fuck difference does it make? Jetboy failed, but at least he tried. He wasn’t an ace, he wasn’t a goddamned Takisian, he was just a guy with a jet, but he did what he could.”
“I want to. I…just…can’t.”
Des trumpeted his disgust. Joey shrugged.
Inside his shell, Tom sat in stunned disbelief. He wasn’t going to help. He hadn’t believed it, not really. Joey had warned him, Desmond too, but Tom had insisted, he’d been sure, this was Doctor Tachyon, of course he’d help, maybe he was having some problems, but once they explained the situation to him, once they made it clear what was at stake and how much they needed him—he had to help. But he was saying no. It was the last goddamned straw.
He twisted the volume knob up all the way. “YOU SON OF A BITCH,” he boomed, and the sound hammered out over the plaza. Tachyon flinched away. “YOU NO-GOOD FUCKING LITTLE ALIEN CHICKENSHIT!” Tachyon stumbled backward down the stairs, but the Turtle drifted after him, loudspeakers blaring. “IT WAS ALL A LIE, WASN’T IT? EVERYTHING IN THE COMIC BOOKS, EVERYTHING IN THE PAPERS, IT WAS ALL A STUPID LIE. ALL MY LIFE THEY BEAT ME UP AND THEY CALLED ME A FUCKING WIMP AND A COWARD BUT YOU’RE THE COWARD, YOU ASSHOLE, YOU SHITTY LITTLE WHINER, YOU WON’T EVEN TRY, YOU DON’T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT ANYBODY, ABOUT YOUR FRIEND ANGELFACE OR ABOUT KENNEDY OR JETBOY OR ANYBODY, YOU HAVE ALL THESE FUCKING POWERS AND YOU’RE NOTHING, YOU WON’T DO ANYTHING, YOU’RE WORSE THAN OSWALD OR BRAUN OR ANY OF THEM.” Tachyon staggered down the steps, hands over his ears, shouting something unintelligible, but Tom was past listening. His anger had a life of its own now. He lashed out, and the alien’s head snapped around and reddened with the force of the slap. “ASSHOLE!” Tom was shrieking. “YOU’RE THE ONE IN A SHELL.” Invisible blows rained down on Tachyon in a fury. He reeled, fell, rolled a third of the way down the stairs, tried to get back to his feet, was bowled over again, and bounced down to the street head over heels. “ASSHOLE!” the Turtle thundered. “RUN, YOU SHITHEAD. GET OUT OF HERE, OR I’LL THROW YOU IN THE DAMNED RIVER! RUN, YOU LITTLE WIMP, BEFORE THE GREAT AND POWERFUL TURTLE REALLY GETS UPSET! RUN, DAMN IT! YOU’RE THE ONE IN THE SHELL! YOU’RE THE ONE IN THE SHELL!”
And he ran, dashing blindly from one streetlight to the next, until he was lost in the shadows. Tom Tudbury watched him vanish on the shell’s array of television screens. He felt sick and beaten. His head was throbbing. He needed a beer, or an aspirin, or both. When he heard the sirens coming, he scooped up Joey and Desmond and set them on top of his shell, killed his lights, and rose straight up into the night, high, high up, into darkness and cold and silence.
THAT NIGHT TACH SLEPT THE SLEEP OF THE DAMNED, THRASHING about like a man in a fever dream, crying out, weeping, waking again and again from nightmares, only to drift back into them. He dreamt he was back on Takis, and his hated cousin Zabb was boasting about a new sex toy, but when he brought her out it was Blythe, and he raped her right there in front of him. Tach watched it all, powerless to intervene; her body writhed beneath his and blood flowed from her mouth and ears and vagina. She began to change, into a thousand joker shapes each more horrible than the last, and Zabb went right on raping them all as they screamed and struggled. But afterward, when Zabb rose from the corpse covered with blood, it wasn’t his cousin’s face at all, it was his own, worn and dissipated, a coarse face, eyes reddened and puffy, long red hair tangled and greasy, features distorted by alcoholic bloat or perhaps by a Funhouse mirror.
He woke around noon, to the terrible sound of Tiny weeping outside his window. It was more than he could stand. It was all more than he could stand. He stumb
led to the window and threw it open and screamed at the giant to be quiet, to stop, to leave him alone, to give him peace, please, but Tiny went on and on, so much pain, so much guilt, so much shame, why couldn’t they let him be, he couldn’t take it anymore, no, shut up, shut up, please shut up, and suddenly Tach shrieked and reached out with his mind and plunged into Tiny’s head and shut him up.
The silence was thunderous.
THE NEAREST PHONE BOOTH WAS IN A CANDY STORE A BLOCK down. Vandals had ripped the phone book to shreds. He dialed information and got the listing for Xavier Desmond on Christie Street, only a short walk away. The apartment was a fourth-floor walkup above a mask shop. Tachyon was out of breath by the time he got to the top.
Des opened the door on the fifth knock. “You,” he said.
“The Turtle,” Tach said. His throat was dry. “Did he get anything last night?”
“No,” Desmond replied. His trunk twitched. “The same story as before. They’re wise to him now, they know he won’t really drop them. They call his bluff. Short of actually killing someone, there’s nothing to do.”
“Tell me who to ask,” Tach said.
“You?” Des said.
Tach could not look the joker in the eye. He nodded.
“Let me get my coat,” Des said. He emerged from the apartment bundled up for the cold, carrying a fur cap and a frayed beige raincoat. “Put your hair up in the hat,” he told Tachyon, “and leave that ridiculous coat here. You don’t want to be recognized.” Tach did as he said. On the way out, Des went into the mask shop for the final touch.
“A chicken?” Tach said when Des handed him the mask. It had bright yellow feathers, a prominent orange beak, a floppy red coxcomb on top.
“I saw it and I knew it was you,” said Des. “Put it on.”
A large crane was moving into position at Chatham Square, to get the police cars off Freakers’ roof. The club was open. The doorman was a seven-foot-tall hairless joker with fangs. He grabbed Des by the arm as they tried to pass under the neon thighs of the six-breasted dancer who writhed on the marquee. “No jokers allowed,” he said brusquely. “Get lost, Tusker.”
Reach out and grab his mind, Tachyon thought. Once, before Blythe, he would have done it instinctively. But now he hesitated, and hesitating, he was lost.
Des reached into his back pocket, pulled out a wallet, extracted a fifty-dollar bill. “You were watching them lower the police cars,” he said. “You never saw me pass.”
“Oh, yeah,” the doorman said. The bill vanished in a clawed hand. “Real interesting, them cranes.”
“Sometimes money is the most potent power of all,” Des said as they walked into the cavernous dimness within. A sparse noontime crowd sat eating the free lunch and watching a stripper gyrate down a long runway behind a barbed-wire barrier. She was covered with silky gray hair, except for her breasts, which had been shaved bare. Desmond scanned the booths along the far wall. He took Tach’s elbow and led him to a dark corner, where a man in a peacoat was sitting with a stein of beer. “They lettin’ jokers in here now?” the man asked gruffly as they approached. He was saturnine and pockmarked.
Tach went into his mind. Fuck what’s this now the elephant man’s from the Funhouse who’s the other one damned jokers anyhow gotta lotta nerve.
“Where’s Bannister keeping Angelface?” Des asked.
“Angelface is the slit at the Funhouse, right? Don’t know no Bannister. Is this a game? Fuck off, joker, I ain’t playing.” In his thoughts, images came tumbling: Tach saw mirrors shattering, silver knives flying through the air, felt Mal’s shove and saw him reach for a gun, watched him shudder and spin as the bullets hit, heard Bannister’s soft voice as he told them to kill Ruth, saw the warehouse over on the Hudson where they were keeping her, the livid bruises on her arm when they’d grabbed her, tasted the man’s fear, fear of jokers, fear of discovery, fear of Bannister, the fear of them. Tach reached out and squeezed Desmond’s arm.
Des turned to go. “Hey, hold it right there,” the man with the pockmarked face said. He flashed a badge as he unfolded from the booth. “Undercover narcotics,” he said, “and you been using, mister, asking asshole junkie questions like that.” Des stood still as the man frisked him down. “Well, looka this,” he said, producing a bag of white powder from one of Desmond’s pockets. “Wonder what this is? You’re under arrest, freak-face.”
“That’s not mine,” Desmond said calmly.
“The hell it ain’t,” the man said, and in his mind the thoughts ran one after another little accident resisting arrest what could i do huh? jokers’ll scream but who listens to a fuckin’ joker only whatymi gonna do with the other one? and he glanced at Tachyon. Jeez looka the chickenman’s shaking maybe the fucker IS using that’d be great.
Trembling, Tach realized the moment of truth was at hand.
He was not sure he could do it. It was different than with Tiny; that had been blind instinct, but he was awake now, and he knew what he was doing. It had been so easy once, as easy as using his hands. But now those hands trembled, and there was blood on them, and on his mind as well…he thought of Blythe and the way her mind had shattered under his touch, like the mirrors in the Funhouse, and for a terrible, long second nothing happened, until the fear was rank in his throat, and the familiar taste of failure filled his mouth.
Then the pockfaced man smiled an idiot’s smile, sat back down in his booth, laid his head on the table, and went to sleep as sweetly as a child.
Des took it in stride. “Your doing?”
Tachyon nodded.
“You’re shaking,” Des asked. “Are you all right, Doctor?”
“I think so,” Tachyon said. The policeman had begun to snore loudly. “I think maybe I am all right, Des. For the first time in years.” He looked at the joker’s face, looked past the deformity to the man beneath. “I know where she is,” he said. They started toward the exit. In the cage, a full-breasted, bearded hermaphrodite had started into a bump-and-grind. “We have to move quickly.”
“In an hour I can get together twenty men.”
“No,” Tachyon said. “The place they’re holding her isn’t in Jokertown.”
Des stopped with his hand on the door. “I see,” he said. “And outside of Jokertown, jokers and masked men are rather conspicuous, aren’t they?”
“Exactly,” Tach said. He did not voice his other fear, of the retribution that would surely be enacted should jokers dare to confront police, even police as corrupt as Bannister and his cohorts. He would take the risk himself, he had nothing left to lose, but he could not permit them to take it. “Can you reach the Turtle?” he asked.
“I can take you to him,” Des replied. “When?”
“Now,” Tach said. In an hour or two, the sleeping policeman would awaken and go straight to Bannister. And say what? That Des and a man in a chicken mask had been asking questions, that he’d been about to arrest them but suddenly he’d gotten very sleepy? Would he dare admit to that? If so, what would Bannister make of it? Enough to move Angelface? Enough to kill her? They could not chance it.
When they emerged from the dimness of Freakers, the crane had just lowered the second police car to the sidewalk. A cold wind was blowing, but behind his chicken feathers, Doctor Tachyon had begun to sweat.
TOM TUDBURY WOKE TO THE DIM, MUFFLED SOUND OF SOMEONE pounding on his shell.
He pushed aside the frayed blanket and bashed his head sitting up. “Ow, goddamn it,” he cursed, fumbling in the darkness until he found the map light. The pounding continued, a hollow boom boom boom against the armor, echoing. Tom felt a stab of panic. The police, he thought, they’ve found me, they’ve come to drag me out and haul me up on charges. His head hurt. It was cold and stuffy in here. He turned on the space heater, the fans, the cameras. His screens came to life.
Outside was a bright cold December day, the sunlight painting every grimy brick with stark clarity. Joey had taken the train back to Bayonne, but Tom had remained; they were runnin
g out of time, he had no other choice. Des found him a safe place, an interior courtyard in the depths of Jokertown, surrounded by decaying five-story tenements, its cobblestones redolent with the smell of sewage, wholly hidden from the street. When he’d landed, just before dawn, lights had blinked on in a few of the dark windows, and faces had come to peer cautiously around the shades; wary, frightened, not-quite-human faces, briefly seen and gone as quickly, when they decided that the thing outside was none of their concern.
Yawning, Tom pulled himself into his seat and panned his cameras until he found the source of the commotion. Des was standing by an open cellar door, arms crossed, while Doctor Tachyon hammered on the shell with a length of broom handle.
Astonished, Tom flipped open his microphones. “YOU.”
Tachyon winced. “Please.”
He lowered the volume. “Sorry. You took me by surprise. I never expected to see you again. After last night, I mean. I didn’t hurt you, did I? I didn’t mean to, I just—”
“I understand,” Tachyon said. “But we’ve got no time for recriminations or apologies now.”
Des began to roll upward. Damn that vertical hold. “We know where they have her,” the joker said as his image flipped. “That is, if Doctor Tachyon can indeed read minds as advertised.”
“Where?” Tom said. Des continued to flip, flip, flip.
“A warehouse on the Hudson,” Tachyon replied. “Near the foot of a pier. I can’t tell you an address, but I saw it clearly in his thoughts. I’ll recognize it.”
“Great!” Tom enthused. He gave up on his efforts to adjust the vertical hold and whapped the screen. The picture steadied. “Then we’ve got them. Let’s go.” The look on Tachyon’s face took him aback. “You are coming, aren’t you?”
Tachyon swallowed. “Yes,” he said. He had a mask in his hand. He slipped it on.
That was a relief, Tom thought; for a second there, he’d thought he’d have to go it alone. “Climb on,” he said.
Dreamsongs. Volume II Page 26