Wild Cards: Aces Abroad

by George R. R. Martin

  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 Amitié 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 Möller 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 Möller’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 Möller, 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?” Möller 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 Amitié 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 the full scope of his powers was a mystery. 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 Möller. “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.

  Möller 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,” Möller 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. Möller 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.

  The assault rifle ran dry. The sudden silence was thunderous. Puppetman’s fingers were clenched on the padded handle of the door as Möller’s mindscream jolted into him like speed hitting the main line. He gasped, at the hot mad pleasure of it, at the cold rush of his own fear.

  “Hände hoch!” shouted a figure beside the van that had boxed them from behind. “Hands up!”

  Mordecai Jones put a big hand on Hartmann’s shoulder and pushed him to the floor. He clambered over him, careful not to squash him, put his weight against the door. Metal wailed and it came away with him as Blum, more conventional, pulled the lever on his own door to disengage the latching mechanism, twisted, and shouldered it open. He brought his MP5K up with his left hand clutching the vestigial foregrip, aimed the stubby machine pistol back around the frame as Hartmann yelled, “Don’t shoot!”

  The Hammer was racing toward the telephone van. The terrorist who’d shot Möller pointed his weapon at him, pumped his finger on the empty weapon’s trigger in a comic pantomime of panic. Jones backhanded him gently. He sailed backward to rebound off the front of a building and land in a heap on the sidewalk.

  The moment hung in air like a suspended chord. Jones squatted, got his hands under the phone van’s frame. He strained, straightened. The van came up with him. Its driver screamed in terror. The Hammer shifted his grip and pressed the vehicle over his head as if it were a not-particularly-heavy barbell.

  A burst of gunfire stuttered from the second van. Bullet
s shredded open the back of Jones’s coat. He teetered, almost lost it, swung in a ponderous circle with the van still balanced above his head. Then several terrorists fired at once. He grimaced and fell backward.

  The van landed right on top of him.

  The limo driver had his door open and a little black P7 in his hand. As the Hammer fell, Blum blazed a quick burst at the van behind. A man ducked back as 9mm bullets punched neat holes in thin metal—a joker, Hartmann realized. What the hell’s going on here?

  He ducked his head below window level and grabbed at Blum’s coattail. He felt the vehicle shudder on its suspension as bullets struck it. The driver gasped and slumped out of the car. Hartmann heard somebody yelling in English to cease fire. He shouted for Blum to quit shooting.

  The policeman turned toward him. “Yes, sir,” he said. Then a burst punched through his opened door and sugared the glass in the window and threw him against the senator.

  Ronnie was plastered against the back of the driver’s seat. “Oh, God,” he moaned. “Oh, dear God!” He jumped out the door the Hammer had torn from its hinges and ran, with papers scattered from his briefcase swooping around him like seagulls.

  The terrorist Mordecai Jones had brushed aside had recovered enough to come to one knee and stuff another magazine into his AKM. He brought it to his shoulder and emptied it at the senator’s aide in a juddering burst. A scream and mist of blood sprayed from Ronnie’s mouth. He fell and skidded.

  Hartmann huddled on the floor in fugue, half-terrified, half orgasmic. Blum was dying, holding on to Hartmann’s arm, the holes in his chest sucking like lamia mouths, his life-force surging into the senator like arrhythmic surf.

  “I’m hurt,” the policeman said. “Oh, mama, mama please—” He died. Hartmann jerked like a harpooned seal as the last of the man’s life gushed into him.

  Out by the street Hartmann’s young aide was dragging himself along with his arms, glasses askew, leaving a snail-trail of blood on the sidewalk. The slightly built terrorist who had shot him ambled up, stuffing a third magazine into his weapon. He positioned himself in front of the wounded man.

  Ronnie blinked up at him. Disjointedly Hartmann remembered he was desperately nearsighted, virtually blind without his glasses.

  “Please,” Ronnie said, and blood rolled from his mouth. “Please.”

  “Have a Negerkuss,” the terrorist said, and fired a single shot into his forehead.

  “Dear God,” Hartmann said. A shadow fell across him, heavy as a corpse. He looked up with inhuman eyes at a figure black against the gray-cloud sky beyond. A hand gripped him by the arm, electricity blasted through him, and consciousness exploded in ozone convulsion.

  Substantial again, Mackie bounced to his feet and tore off his ski mask. “You shot at me! You could have killed me,” he shrieked at Anneke. His face was almost black.

  She laughed at him.

  The world seemed to come on to Mackie in Kodachrome colors. He started for her, hand beginning to buzz, when a commotion behind him brought his head around.

  The dwarf had grabbed Ulrich’s rifle by the still-hot muzzle brake and spun him round, echoing Mackie’s theme, with variations. “You stupid bastard, you could have killed him!” he screamed. “You could have offed the fucking senator!”

  Ulrich had fired the final burst that downed the cop in the back of the limousine. Weight lifter though he was, he was only just hanging on to his piece against the dwarf’s surprising strength. The two were orbiting each other out there on the street, spitting at one another like cats.

  Mackie had to laugh.

  Then Mólniya was beside him, touching his shoulder with a gloved hand. “Let it go. We have to move quickly.”

  Mackie arched like a cat to meet the touch. Comrade Mólniya was worried he was still mad at Anneke for shooting at him and then laughing about it.

  But that was forgotten. Anneke was laughing too, over the body of the man she’d just finished off, and Mackie had to laugh with her.

  “A Negerkuss,” he said. “You said did he want a Negerkuss. Huh huh. That was pretty good.” It meant Negro Kiss, a small chocolate-covered cake. It was especially funny since they’d told him Negro Kisses were a trademark of the group from back in the old days, back when all of them but Wolf were kids.

  It was nervous laughter, relieved laughter. He’d thought he’d lost it when the pig shot at him; he’d just seen the gun come up in time to phase out, and the anger burned black within him, the desire to make his hand vibrate till it was hard as a knife blade and drive it into that fucking cop, to make sure he felt the buzz, to feel the hot rush of blood along his arm and spraying in his face. But the bastard was dead, it was too late now. . . .

  He’d worried again when the black man picked up the van, but then Comrade Ulrich shot him. He was strong, but he wasn’t immune to bullets. Mackie liked Comrade Ulrich. He was so self-assured, so handsome and muscular. Women liked him; Anneke could hardly keep her hands off him. Mackie might have envied him, if he hadn’t been an ace.

  Mackie didn’t have a gun himself. He hated them, and anyway he didn’t need a weapon—there wasn’t any weapon better than his own body.

  The American joker called Scrape was fumbling Hartmann’s limp body out of the limousine. “Is he dead?” Mackie called in German, caught up by sudden panic. The dwarf let go of Ulrich’s rifle and stared wildly at the car. Ulrich almost fell over.

  Scrape looked up at Mackie, face frozen into immobility by its exoskeleton, but his lack of understanding clear from the tilt of his head. Mackie repeated the question in the halting English he’d learned from his mother before the worthless bitch had died and deserted him.

  Comrade Mólniya pulled his other glove back on. He wore no mask, and now Mackie noticed he looked a little green at the sight of the blood spilled all over the street. “He’s fine,” he replied for Scrape. “I just shocked him unconscious. Come now, we must hurry.”

  Mackie grinned and bobbed his head. He felt a certain satisfaction at Mólniya’s squeamishness, even though he wanted to please the Russian ace almost as much as he did his own cell leader Wolf. He went to help Scrape, though he hated being so close to the joker. He feared he might touch him accidentally; the thought made his flesh crawl.

  Comrade Wolf stood by with his own unfired Kalashnikov dangling from one huge hand. “Get him in the van,” he ordered. “Him too.” He nodded to Comrade Wilfried, who’d stumbled from the driver’s seat of the telephone van and was on his knees pitching breakfast on the wet asphalt.

  It started to rain again. Broad pools of blood on the pavement began to fray like banners whipped by the wind. In the distance sirens commenced their hair-raising chant.

  They put Hartmann into the second van. Scrape got behind the wheel. Mólniya slid in beside him. The joker backed up onto the sidewalk, turned, and drove away.

  Mackie sat on the wheel well, drumming a heavy-metal beat on his thighs. We did it! We captured him! He could barely sit still. His penis was stiff inside his jeans.

  Out the back window he saw Ulrich spraying letters on a wall in red paint: RAF. He laughed again. That would make the bourgeoisie shit their pants, that was for sure. Ten years ago those initials had been a synonym for terror in the Federal Republic. Now they would be again. It gave Mackie happy chills to think about it.

  A joker wrapped head to toe in a shabby cloak stepped up and sprayed three more letters beneath the first with a hand wrapped in bandages: JJS.

  The other van heeled way over to the side as its wheels rolled over the supine body of the black American ace, and they were gone.

  With her NEC laptop computer tucked under one arm and a a bit of her cheek caught between her small side teeth, Sara strode across the lobby of the Bristol Hotel Kempinski with briskness that an outside observer would probably have taken for confidence. It was a misapprehension that had served her well in the past.

  Reflexively she ducked into the bar of Berlin’s most luxurious hotel. The tour prop
er’s long since been mined out, at least of stuff we can print, she thought, but what the heck? She felt heat in her ears at the thought that she was the star of one of the tour’s choicer unprintable vignettes.

  Inside was dark, of course. All bars are the same song; the polished wood and brass and old pliable leather and elephant ears were grace notes to set apart this particular refrain. She tipped her sunglasses up on top of her nearly white hair, drawn back this afternoon in a severe ponytail, and let her eyes adjust. They always adjusted to dark more quickly than light.

  The bar wasn’t crowded. A pair of waiters in arm garters and starched highboy collars worked their way among the tables as if by radar. Three Japanese businessmen sat at a table chattering and pointing at a newspaper, discussing either the exchange rates or the local tit bars, depending.

  In the corner Hiram was talking shop, in French of course, with the Kempinski’s cordon bleu, who was shorter than he was but at least as round. The hotel chef had a tendency to flap his short arms rapidly when he spoke, which made him look like a fat baby bird that wasn’t getting the hang of flight.

  Chrysalis sat at the bar drinking in splendid isolation. There was no joker chic here. In Germany, Chrysalis found herself discreetly avoided rather than lionized.

  She caught Sara’s eye and winked. In the poor light Sara only knew it because of the way Chrysalis’s mascaraed eyelashes tracked across a staring eyeball. She smiled. Professional associates back home, sometime rivals in the bartering of information that was the meta-game of Jokertown, they’d grown to be friends on this trip. Sara had more in common with Debra-Jo than her nominal peers who were along.

  At least Chrysalis was dressed. She was showing a different face to Europe than she did the country she pretended wasn’t her native one. Sometimes Sara envied her, secretly. People looked at her and saw a joker, an exotic, alluring and grotesque. But they didn’t see her.