Wild Cards: Aces Abroad

by George R. R. Martin

  He slipped into the 115-degree water, giving himself over to the agonizing pleasure. A mixture of sweat and condensation immediately broke out across his forehead and ran down his face. His muscles relaxed in spite of himself. Around him the other men in the ofuro sat with their eyes shut, ignoring him.

  He bathed about this time every day. In the six months he’d spent in Japan he’d become a creature of habit, just like the millions of Japanese around him. He was up by nine in the morning, an hour he’d seen only half a dozen times back in New York City. He spent the mornings in meditation or study, going twice a week to a zen Shukubo across the bay in Chiba City.

  In the afternoons he was a tourist, seeing everything from the French Impressionists at the Bridgestone to the woodcuts at the Riccar, walking in the Imperial Gardens, shopping in the Ginza, visiting the shrines.

  At night there was the mizu-shōbai. The water business.

  It was what they called the huge underground economy of pleasure, everything from the most conservative of geisha houses to the most blatant of prostitutes, from the mirror-walled nightclubs to the tiny red-light bars where, late at night, after enough saki, the hostess might be talked into dancing naked on the Formica counter. It was an entire world catering to the carnal appetite, unlike anything Fortunato had ever seen. It made his operations back in New York, the string of high-class hookers that he’d naively called geishas, seem puny in comparison. In spite of everything that had happened to him, in spite of the fact that he was still trying to push himself toward leaving the world entirely and shutting himself in a monastery, he couldn’t stay away from these women. The jo-san, the play-for-play hostesses. If only to look at them and talk to them and then go home alone to masturbate in his tiny cubicle, in case his burned-out wild card ability had started to come back, in case the tantric power was beginning to build inside his Muladhara chakra.

  When the water wasn’t painful anymore, he got up and soaped and rinsed again and got back into the ofuro. It was time, he thought, for a decision. Either to face Peregrine and the others at the hotel, or leave town entirely, maybe stay a week at the Shukubo in Chiba City so he wouldn’t run into them by accident.

  Or, he thought, the third way. Let fate decide. Go on about his business, and if he was meant to find them, he would.

  It happened five days later, just before sunset on Tuesday afternoon, and it was not an accident at all. He’d been talking to a waiter he knew in the kitchen of the Chikuyotei, and he’d taken the back door into an alley. When he looked up, she was there.

  “Fortunato,” she said. She held her wings straight out behind her. Still, they nearly touched the walls of the alley. She wore a deep blue off-the-shoulder knit dress that clung to her body. She looked to be about six months pregnant. Nothing he’d seen had mentioned it.

  There was a man with her, from India or somewhere near it. He was about fifty, thick in the middle, losing his hair.

  “Peregrine,” Fortunato said. She looked upset, tired, relieved—all at once. Her arms came up and Fortunato went to her and held her gently. She rested her forehead on his shoulder for a second and then pulled away.

  “This . . . this is G.C. Jayewardene,” Peregrine said. The man put his palms together, elbows out, and ducked his head. “He helped me find you.”

  Fortunato bowed jerkily. Christ, he thought, I’m turning Japanese. Next I’ll be stammering nonsense syllables at the beginning of every sentence, not even be able to talk anymore. “How did you know . . .” he said.

  “The wild card,” Jayewardene said. “I saw this moment a month ago.” He shrugged. “The visions come without my asking. I don’t know why or what they mean. I’m their prisoner.”

  “I know the feeling,” Fortunato said. He looked at Peregrine again. He reached out and put a hand on her stomach. He could feel the baby moving inside her. “It’s mine. Isn’t it?”

  She bit her lip, nodded. “But that’s not the reason I’m here. I would have left you alone. I know it’s what you wanted. But we need your help.”

  “What kind of help?”

  “It’s Hiram,” she said. “He’s disappeared.”

  Peregrine needed to sit down. In New York or London or Mexico City there would have been a park within walking distance. In Tokyo the space was too valuable. Fortunato’s apartment was a half-hour train ride away, a four-tatami room, six feet by twelve, in a gray-walled complex with narrow halls and communal toilets and no grass or trees. Besides, only a lunatic would try to ride a train at rush hour, when white-gloved railroad employees stood by to shove people into already-packed cars.

  Fortunato took them around the corner to a cafeteria-style sushi bar. The decor was red vinyl, white Formica, and chrome. The sushi traveled the length of the room on a conveyor belt that passed all the booths.

  “We can talk here,” Fortunato said. “But I wouldn’t try the food. If you want to eat, I’ll take you someplace else—but it’d mean waiting in line.”

  “No,” Peregrine said. Fortunato could see that the sharp vinegar and fish smells weren’t sitting well on her stomach. “This is fine.”

  They’d already asked each other how they’d been, walking over here, and both of them had been pleasant and vague in their answers. Peregrine had told him about the baby. Healthy, she said, normal as far as anyone could tell. Fortunato had asked Jayewardene a few polite questions. There was nothing left but to get down to it.

  “He left this letter,” Peregrine said. Fortunato looked it over. The handwriting seemed jagged, unlike Hiram’s usual compulsive pen­manship. It said he was leaving the tour for “personal reasons.” He assured everyone he was in good health. He hoped to rejoin them later. If not, he would see them in New York.

  “We know where he is,” Peregrine said. “Tachyon found him, telepathically, and made sure he wasn’t hurt or anything. But he refuses to go into Hiram’s brain and find out what’s wrong. He says he doesn’t have the right. He won’t let any of us talk to Hiram, either. He says if somebody wants to leave the tour it’s not our business. Maybe he’s right. I know if I tried to talk to him, it wouldn’t do any good.”

  “Why not? You two always got along.”

  “He’s different now. He hasn’t been the same since December. It’s like some witch doctor put a curse on him while we were in the Caribbean.”

  “Did something specific happen to set him off?”

  “Something happened, but we don’t know what. We were hav­ing lunch at the Palace Sunday with Prime Minister Nakasone and all these other officials. Suddenly there’s this man in a cheap suit. He just walks in and hands Hiram a piece of paper. Hiram got very pale and wouldn’t say anything about it. That afternoon he went back to the hotel by himself. Said he wasn’t feeling good. That must have been when he packed and moved out, because Sunday night he was gone.”

  “Do you remember anything else about the man in the suit?”

  “He had a tattoo. It came out from under his shirt and went down his wrist. God knows how far up his arm it went. It was really vivid, all these greens and reds and blues.”

  “It probably covered his whole body,” Fortunato said. He rubbed his temples, where his regular daily headache had set in. “He was yakuza.”

  “Yakuza . . .” Jayewardene said.

  Peregrine looked from Fortunato to Jayewardene and back. “Is that bad?”

  “Very bad,” Jayewardene said. “Even I have heard of them. They’re gangsters.”

  “Like the Mafia,” Fortunato said. “Only not as centralized. Each family—they call them clans—is on its own. There’s something like twenty-five hundred separate clans in Japan, each with its own oyabun. The oyabun is like the don. It means ‘in the role of parent.’ If Hiram’s in trouble with the yak, we may not even be able to find out which clan is after him.”

  Peregrine took another piece of paper out of her purse. “This is the address of Hiram’s hotel. I . . . told Tachyon I wouldn’t see him. I told him somebody should have it in case o
f emergency. Then Mr. Jayewardene told me about his vision. . . .”

  Fortunato put his hand on the paper but didn’t look at it. “I don’t have any power left,” he said. “I used everything I had fight­ing the Astronomer, and there isn’t anything left.”

  It had been back in September, Wild Card Day in New York. The fortieth anniversary of Jetboy’s big fuckup, when the spores had fallen on the city and thousands had died, Jetboy among them. It was the day a man named the Astronomer chose to get even with the aces who had hounded him and broken his secret society of Egyptian Masons. He and Fortunato had fought it out with blazing fireballs of power over the East River. Fortunato had won, but it had cost him everything.

  That had been the night he had made love to Peregrine for the first and last time. The night her child had been conceived.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Peregrine said. “Hiram respects you. He’ll listen to you.”

  In fact, Fortunato thought, he’s afraid of me and he blames me for the death of a woman he used to love. A woman Fortunato had used as a pawn against the Astronomer, and lost. A woman Fortunato had loved too. Years ago.

  But if he walked away now he wouldn’t see Peregrine again. It had been hard enough to stay away from her, knowing that she was so close by. It was a whole other order of difficult to get up and walk away from her when she was right there in front of him, so tall and powerful and overflowing with emotions. The fact that she carried his child made it even harder, made just one more thing he wasn’t ready to think about.

  “I’ll try,” Fortunato said. “I’ll do what I can.”

  Hiram’s room was in the Akasaka Shanpia, a businessman’s hotel near the train station. Except for the narrow hallways and the shoes outside the doors, it could have been any middle-price hotel in the U.S. Fortunato knocked on Hiram’s door. There was a hush, as if all noises inside the room had suddenly stopped.

  “I know you’re in there,” Fortunato said, bluffing. “It’s Fortunato, man. You might as well let me in.” After a couple of seconds the door opened.

  Hiram had turned the place into a slum. There were clothes and towels all over the floor, plates of dried-out food and smudged highball glasses, stacks of newspapers and magazines. It smelled faintly of acetone and a mixture of sweat and old booze.

  Hiram himself had lost weight. His clothes sagged around him like they were still on hangers. After he let Fortunato in, he walked back to the bed without saying anything. Fortunato shut the door, dumped a dirty shirt off a chair, and sat down.

  “So,” Hiram said at last. “It would seem I’ve been ferreted out.”

  “They’re worried. They think you might be in some kind of trouble.”

  “It’s nothing. There’s absolutely nothing for them to be con­cerned about. Didn’t they get my note?”

  “Don’t bullshit me, Hiram. You’ve gotten messed up with the yakuza. Those are not the kind of people you take chances with. Tell me what happened.”

  Hiram stared at him. “If I don’t tell you, you’ll just come in and get it, won’t you?” Fortunato shrugged, another bluff. “Yeah. Right.”

  “I just want to help,” Fortunato said.

  “Well, your help is not required. It’s a small matter of money. Nothing else.”

  “How much money?”

  “A few thousand.”

  “Dollars, of course.” A thousand yen were worth a little over five dollars U.S. “How did it happen? Gambling?”

  “Look, this is all rather embarrassing. I’d prefer not to talk about it, all right?”

  “You’re saying this to a man who was a pimp for thirty years. Do you think I’m going to come down on you? Whatever you did?”

  Hiram took a deep breath. “No. I suppose not.”

  “Talk to me.”

  “I was out walking Saturday night, kind of late, over on Rop­pongi Street. . . .”

  “By yourself?”

  “Yes.” He was embarrassed again. “I’d heard a lot about the women here. I just wanted to . . . tantalize myself, you know? The mysterious Orient. Women who would fulfill your wildest dreams. I’m a long way from home. I just . . . wanted to see.”

  It wasn’t that different from what Fortunato had been doing the last six months. “I understand.”

  “I saw a sign that said ‘English-speaking hostesses.’ I went in and there was a long hallway. I must have missed the place the sign was for. I went back into the building a long way. There was a padded kind of a door at the end, no sign or anything. When I got inside, they took my coat and went away with it somewhere. Nobody spoke English. Then these girls more or less dragged me over to a table and got me buying them drinks. There were three of them. I had one or two drinks myself. More than one or two. It was a sort of a dare. They were using sign language, teaching me some Japanese. God. They were so beautiful. So . . . delicate, you know? But with huge dark eyes that would look at you and then skitter away. Half shy and half . . . I don’t know. Challenging. They said nobody had ever drunk ten jars of saki there before. Like no one had ever been quite man enough. So I did. By then they had me pretty well convinced I would get all three of them for a reward.”

  Hiram started to sweat. The drops ran down his face and he wiped them off with the cuff of a stained silk shirt. “I was . . . well, very aroused, shall we say. And drunk. They kept flirting and touching me on the arm, so lightly, like butterflies landing on my skin. I suggested we go somewhere. They kept putting me off. Ordering more drinks. And then I just lost control.”

  He looked up at Fortunato. “I haven’t been . . . quite myself lately. Something just came over me in that bar. I guess I grabbed one of the girls. Sort of tried to take her dress off. She started screaming and all three of them ran away. Then the bouncer started hustling me toward the door, waving a bill in my face. It was for fifty thousand yen. Even drunk I knew there was something wrong. He pointed at my coat and then at a number. Then the jars of saki and more numbers. Then the girls and more numbers. I think that was what really got to me. Paying so much money just to be flirted with.”

  “They were the wrong girls,” Fortunato said. “Christ, there’s a million women for sale in this town. All you have to do is ask a taxi driver.”

  “Okay. Okay. I made a mistake. It could happen to anybody. But they went too far.”

  “So you walked out.”

  “I walked out. They tried to chase me and I glued them to the floor. Somehow I got back to the hotel. It took me forever to find a cab.”

  “Okay,” Fortunato said. “Where exactly was this place? Could you find it again?”

  Hiram shook his head. “I tried. I’ve spent two days looking for it.”

  “What about the sign? Do you remember anything about it? Could you sketch any of the characters?”

  “The Japanese, you mean? No way.”

  “There must have been something.”

  Hiram closed his eyes. “Okay. Maybe there was a picture of a duck. Side view. Looked like a decoy, back home. Just an outline.”

  “Okay. And you’ve told me everything that happened at the club.”

  “Everything.”

  “And the next day the kobun found you at lunch.”

  “Kobun?”

  “The yakuza soldier.”

  Hiram blushed again. “He just walked in. I don’t know how he got past the security. He stood right across the table from where I was sitting. He bowed from the waist with his legs spread; his right hand is out like this, palm up. He introduced himself, but I was so scared I couldn’t remember the name. Then he handed me a bill. The amount was two hundred and fifty thousand yen. There was a note in English at the bottom. It said the amount would double every day at midnight until I paid it.”

  Fortunato worked the figures out in his head. In U.S. money the debt was now close to seven thousand dollars.

  Hiram said, “If it’s not paid by Thursday they said . . .”

  “What?”

  “They said I would never even see
the man who killed me.”

  Fortunato phoned Peregrine from a pay phone, color-coded red for local calls only. He fed it a handful of ten-yen coins to keep it from beeping at him every three minutes.

  “I found him,” Fortunato said. “He wasn’t a lot of help.”

  “Is he okay?” Peregrine sounded sleepy. It was all too easy for Fortunato to picture her stretched out in bed, covered only by a thin white sheet. He had no powers left. He couldn’t stop time or project his astral body or hurl bolts of prana or move around inside people’s thoughts. But his senses were still acute, sharper than they’d ever been before the virus, and he could remember the smell of her perfume and her hair and her desire as if they were there all around him.

  “He’s nervous and losing weight. But nothing’s happened to him yet.”

  “Yet?”

  “The yakuza want money from him. A few thousand. It’s basically a misunderstanding. I tried to get him to back down, but he wouldn’t. It’s a pride thing. He sure picked the country for it. People die from pride here by the thousands, every year.”

  “You think it’s going to come to that?”

  “Yes. I offered to pay the money for him. He refused. I’d do it behind his back, but I can’t find out which clan is after him. What scares me is it sounds like they’re threatening him with some kind of invisible killer.”

  “You mean, like an ace?”

  “Maybe. In all the time I’ve been here I’ve only heard about one actual confirmed ace, a zen rōshi up north on Hokkaido Island. For one thing, I think the spores had pretty much settled out before they could get here. And even if any did, you might never hear about them. We’re talking about a culture here that makes self-effacement into a religion. Nobody wants to stand out. So if we’re up against some kind of ace, it’s possible nobody’s even heard of him.”