Wild Cards by George R. R. Martin
He stared up at her numbly. “You're dead,” he said dully. “I was too late. I heard the shot, I had him by then but it was too late, I felt the gun recoil in his hand.”
“Did you feel it jerk?” she asked him.
“Jerk?”
“A couple of inches, no more. Just as he fired. Just enough. I got some nasty powder burns, but the bullet went into the mattress a foot from my head.”
“The Turtle,” Tach said hoarsely.
She nodded. “He pushed aside the gun just as Bannister squeezed the trigger. And you made the son of a bitch throw away the revolver before he could get off a second shot.”
“You got them,” Des said. “A couple of men escaped in the confusion, but the Turtle delivered three of them, including Bannister. Plus a suitcase packed with twenty pounds of pure heroin. And it turns out that warehouse is owned by the Mafia.”
“The Mafia?” Tachyon said.
“The mob,” Des explained. “Criminals, Doctor Tachyon.”
“One of the men captured in the warehouse has already turned state's evidence,” Angelface said. “He'll testify to everything—the bribes, the drug operation, the murders at the Funhouse.”
“Maybe we'll even get some decent police in Jokertown,” Des added.
The feelings that rushed through Tachyon went far beyond relief. He wanted to thank them, wanted to cry for them, but neither the tears nor the words would come. He was weak and happy. “I didn't fail,” he managed at last.
“No,” Angelface said. She looked at Des. “Would you wait outside?” When they were alone, she sat on the edge of the bed. “I want to show you something. Something I wish I'd shown you a long time ago.” She held it up in front of him. It was a gold locket. “Open it.”
It was hard to do with only one hand, but he managed. Inside was a small round photograph of an elderly woman in bed. Her limbs were skeletal and withered, sticks draped in mottled flesh, and her face was horribly twisted. “What's wrong with her?” Tach asked, afraid of the answer. Another joker, he thought, another victim of his failures.
Angelface looked down at the twisted old woman, sighed, and closed the locket with a snap. “When she was four, in Little Italy, she was run over while playing in the street. A horse stepped on her face, and the wagon wheel crushed her spine. That was in, oh, 1886. She was completely paralyzed, but she lived. If you could call it living. That little girl spent the next sixty years in a bed, being fed, washed, and read to, with no company except the holy sisters. Sometimes all she wanted was to die. She dreamed about what it would be like to be beautiful, to be loved and desired, to be able to dance, to be able to feel things. Oh, how she wanted to feel things.” She smiled. “I should have said thank you long ago, Tacky, but it's hard for me to show that picture to anyone. But I am grateful, and now I owe you doubly. You'll never pay for a drink at the Funhouse.”
He stared at her. “I don't want a drink,” he said. “No more. That's done.” And it was, he knew; if she could live with her pain, what excuse could he possibly have to waste his life and talents? “Angelface,” he said suddenly, “I can make you something better than heroin. I was . . . I am a biochemist, there are drugs on Takis, I can synthesize them, painkillers, nerve blocks. If you'll let me run some tests on you, maybe I can tailor something to your metabolism. I'll need a lab, of course. Setting things up will be expensive, but the drug could be made for pennies.”
“I'll have some money,” she said. “I'm selling the Funhouse to Des. But what you're talking about is illegal.”
“To hell with their stupid laws,” Tach blazed. “I won't tell if you won't.” Then words came tumbling out one after the other, a torrent: plans, dreams, hopes, all of the things he'd lost or drowned in cognac and Sterno, and Angelface was looking at him, astonished, smiling, and when the drugs they had given him finally began to wear off, and his arm began to throb again, Doctor Tachyon remembered the old disciplines and sent the pain away, and somehow it seemed as though part of his guilt and his grief went with it, and he was whole again, and alive.
The headline said TURTLE, TACHYON SMASH HEROIN RING. Tom was gluing the article into the scrapbook when Joey returned with the beers. “They left out the Great and Powerful part,” Joey observed, setting down a bottle by Tom's elbow.
“At least I got first billing,” Tom said. He wiped thick white paste off his fingers with a napkin, and shoved the scrapbook aside. Underneath were some crude drawings he'd made of the shell. “Now,” he said, “where the fuck are we going to put the record player, huh?”
Interlude Two
From The New York Times,
September 1, 1966.
JOKERTOWN CLINIC TO
OPEN ON WILD CARD DAY
The opening of a privately funded research hospital specializing in the treatment of the Takisian wild card virus was announced yesterday by Dr. Tachyon, the alien scientist who helped to develop the virus. Dr. Tachyon will serve as chief of staff at the new institution, to be located on South Street, overlooking the East River.
The facility will be known as the Blythe van Renssaeler Memorial Clinic in honor of the late Mrs. Blythe Stanhope van Renssaeler. Mrs. van Renssaeler, a member of the Exotics for Democracy from 1947 to 1950, died in 1953 in Wittier Sanatorium. She was better known as “Brain Trust.”
The Van Renssaeler Clinic will open its doors to the public on September 15th, the twentieth anniversary of the release of the wild card virus over Manhattan. Emergency room service and outpatient psychological care will be provided by the 196-bed hospital. “We're here to serve the neighborhood and the city,” Dr. Tachyon said in an afternoon press conference on the steps of Jetboy's Tomb, “but our first priority is going to be the treatment of those who have too long gone untreated, the jokers whose unique and often desperate medical needs have been largely ignored by existing hospitals. The wild card was played twenty years ago, and this continued willful ignorance about the virus is criminal and inexcusable.” Dr. Tachyon said that he hoped the Van Renssaeler Clinic might become the world's leading center for wild card research, and spearhead efforts to perfect the cure for wild card, the so-called “trump” virus.
The clinic will be housed in a historic waterfront building originally constructed in 1874. The building was a hotel, known as the Seaman's Haven, from 1888 through 1913. From 1913 through 1942 it was the Sacred Heart Home for Wayward Girls, after which it served as an inexpensive lodging house.
Dr. Tachyon announced that the purchase of the building and a complete interior renovation had been funded by a grant from the Stanhope Foundation of Boston, headed by Mr. George C. Stanhope. Mr. Stanhope is the father of Mrs. van Renssaeler. “If Blythe were alive today, I know she'd want nothing more than to work at Dr. Tachyon's side,” Mr. Stanhope said.
Initially the work at the clinic will be funded by fees and private donations, but Dr. Tachyon admitted that he had recently returned from Washington, where he conferred with Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey. Sources close to the Vice President indicate that the administration is considering partial funding of the Jokertown clinic through the offices of the Senate Committee on Ace Resources and Endeavors (SCARE).
A crowd of approximately five hundred, many of them obvious victims of the wild card virus, greeted Dr. Tachyon's announcement with enthusiastic applause.
THE LONG, DARK
NIGHT OF
FORTUNATO
by Lewis Shiner
All he could think about was how beautiful she'd been when she was alive.
“I got to ask you can you identify the remains,” the coroner's man said.
“It's her,” Fortunato said.
“Name?”
“Erika Naylor. Erika with a K.”
“Address?”
“Sixteen Park Avenue.”
The man whistled. “High class. Next of kin?”
“I don't know. She was from Minneapolis.”
“Right. That's where they all come from. You'd think they had a hooker ac
Fortunato looked up from the long, horrible wound in the girl's throat and let the coroner's man see his eyes. “She wasn't a hooker,” he said.
“Sure,” the man said, but he took a step backward and looked down at his clipboard. “I'll put down ’model.' “
Geisha, Fortunato thought. She had been one of his geishas. Bright, funny, beautiful, a chef and a masseuse and an unlicensed psychologist, imaginative and sensual in bed.
She was the third of his girls in the last year to be neatly sliced to pieces.
He stepped out onto the street, knowing how bad he looked. He was six foot four and methedrine thin, and when he slumped his chest seemed to disappear into his spine. Lenore had been waiting for him, huddled in her black fake-fur jacket, even though the sun had finally come out. When she saw him she put him straight into a cab and gave the driver her address on West 19th.
Fortunato stared out the window at the long-haired girls in embroidered denim, at the black-light posters in the store windows, at the bright chalk scrawled over all the sidewalks. It was nearly Easter, two winters past the Summer of Love, but the idea of spring left him as cold as the morgue's tile floor.
Lenore took his hand and squeezed it, and Fortunato leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes.
She was new. One of his girls had rescued her from a Brooklyn pimp named Ballpeen Willie, and Fortunato had paid five thousand dollars for her “contract.” It was well known on the street that if Willie had objected, Fortunato would have spent the five thousand to have Willie hit, that being the current market value of a human life.
Willie worked for the Gambione Family and Fortunato had knocked heads with them more than once. Being black—half black, anyway—and independent gave Fortunato a feature part in Don Carlo's paranoid fantasies. The only thing Don Carlo hated worse were the jokers.
Fortunato wouldn't have put the killings past the old man except for one thing: he coveted Fortunato's operation too much to tamper with the women themselves.
Lenore came from a hick town in the mountains of Virginia where the old people still talked Elizabethan. Willie had been running her less than a month, not long enough to grind off the edges of her beauty. She had dark red hair to her waist, neon-green eyes, and a small, almost dainty mouth. She never wore anything but black and she believed she was a witch.
When Fortunato had auditioned her he'd been moved by her abandon, her complete absorption in carnality, so much at odds with her cool, sophisticated looks. He'd accepted her for training and she'd been at it now for three weeks, turning only an occasional trick, making the transition from gifted call girl to apprentice geisha that would take at least two years.
She led him up to her apartment and stopped with the key in the lock. “Uh, I hope it's not too weird for you.”
He stood in the doorway while she walked through the room, lighting candles. The windows were heavily draped and he didn't see any appliances except a telephone—no TV, no clocks, not even a toaster. In the barren center of the room she'd painted a huge, five-pointed star surrounded by a circle, right onto the hardwood floor. Behind the sensual smells of incense and musk was the faint sulfurous tang of a chemistry lab.
He locked the front door and followed her into the bedroom. The apartment was thick with sexuality. He could barely move his feet through the heavy, wine-colored carpet; the bed was canopied, with red velvet curtains, and so high off the floor it had stairs leading up to it.
She found a joint in the nightstand, lit it, and handed it to Fortunato. “I'll be back in a second,” she said.
He took his clothes off and lay down with his hands behind his head, the joint hanging out of his mouth. He took a lungful of smoke and watched his toes uncurl. The ceiling overhead was deep blue, with constellations dabbed on in phosphorescent yellow-green. Signs of the zodiac, as far as he could tell. Magic and astrology and gurus were very hip right now. People at trendy Village parties were always asking each other what sign they were and talking about karma. For himself, he thought the Aquarian Age was just so much wishful think- ing. Nixon was in the White House, kids were getting their asses shot off in Southeast Asia, and he still heard the word “nigger” every day. But he had clients who would love this place.
If the psycho with the knife didn't put him out of business.
Lenore knelt beside him on the bed, naked. “You have such beautiful skin.” She ran fingertips over his chest, raising gooseflesh. “I've never seen a color like this before.” When he didn't answer she said, “Your mother is Japanese, they told me.”
“And my father was a Harlem pimp.”
“You're really fucked up about this, aren't you.”
“I loved those girls. I love all of you. You're more important to me than money or family or . . . or anything.”
“And?”
He didn't think he had anything else to say until the words started coming out. “I feel so . . . so goddamned helpless. Some twisted son of a bitch is killing my girls and there's nothing I can do about it.”
“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe not.” Her fingers tangled in his pubic hair. “Sex is power, Fortunato. It's the most powerful thing in the universe. Don't ever forget that.”
She took his penis in her mouth, working it gently with her tongue like a piece of candy. It stiffened instantly and Fortunato felt sweat break on his forehead. He put out the joint with a wet fingertip and dropped it over the edge of the bed. His heels skidded on the icy slickness of the sheets and his nose filled with Lenore's perfume. He thought of Erika, dead, and it made him want to fuck Lenore hard and long.
“No,” she said, taking his hand from her breast. “You brought me in off the streets, you're teaching me what you know. Now it's my turn.”
She pushed him down flat on his back, his arms over his head, and ran her black-polished fingernails down the tender skin over his ribs. Then she began to move over his body, touching him with her lips, her breasts, the ends of her hair, until his skin felt hot enough to glow in the dark. Then, finally, she straddled him and took him into her.
Being inside her gave him a rush like a junkie's. He pumped his hips and she leaned into it, taking her weight on her arms, her hair waterfalling around her head. Then, slowly, she lifted her eyes and stared at him.
“I am Shakti,” she said. “I am the goddess. I am the power.” She smiled when she said it, and instead of sounding crazy it just made him want her even more. Then her voice broke into short, rattling breaths as she came, shuddering, throwing her head back and rocking hard against him. Fortunato tried to turn her over and finish it but she was stronger than he would have believed possible, digging her fingers into his shoulders until he relaxed, then caressing him again with aching slowness.
She came twice more before everything turned red and he knew he couldn't hold back any longer. But she sensed it too, and before he knew what was happening she had pulled away and reached down between his legs, pushing one finger hard into the root of his penis. It was too late to stop and the orgasm took him so hard that it lifted his buttocks completely off the bed. She pushed his chest down with her left hand and held on with her right, cutting off the sperm before it could shoot out, forcing it back inside him.
She's killed me, he thought as he felt liquid fire roar back into his groin, burning all the way through to his spinal cord and then lighting it like a fuse.
“Kundalini,” she whispered, her face sweating and intent. “Feel the power.”
The spark rocketed up his backbone and exploded in his brain.
Eventually he opened his eyes again. Time had come out of the sprockets of the projector and he saw everything in single, unrelated frames. Lenore had both arms around him. Tears ran out of her eyes and down his chest.
“I was floating,” he said, when he finally thought to use his voice. “Up around the ceiling.”
“I thought you were dead,” Lenore said.
“I could see the two of us. Everything looked l
“Tantric yoga. It's supposed to . . . I don't know. Give you a charge. I never heard of it taking anybody so hard before.” She turned her face up to him. “Did you really get out? Out of your body?”
“I guess.” He could smell the peppermint shampoo she used on her hair. He took her face in both his hands and kissed her. Her mouth was soft and wet and her tongue flickered against his teeth. He was still diamond-hard and he started to shake with wanting her.
He rolled onto her and she guided him inside where he could feel her burning for him. “Fortunato,” she whispered, her lips still so close that they brushed his when they moved, “if you finish, you'll lose it. You'll be so weak you can barely move.”
“Baby, I don't give a shit. I never wanted anybody this much.” He pushed himself up on his forearms so he could see her, his hips thrusting frantically. Every nerve in his body was alive, and he could feel the power surging through them, then slowly drawing back, massing somewhere at the center of his body, ready to roar out of him, to pump him dry, leave him weak, helpless, drained . . .
He pulled away from her, rolled to the end of the bed, and bent double, clutching his knees. “Jesus!” he screamed. “What the fuck is happening to me?”
She wanted to stay with him, but he sent her to geisha class anyway. He would be here, he promised, when she got home.
The apartment seemed vast and empty without her, and he had a sudden, chilling vision of Lenore alone on the street, with Erika's killer still loose.
No, he told himself. It wouldn't happen again, not this soon.
He found a gaudy oriental robe in her closet and put it on, and then he walked back and forth through the apartment, pacing out the inaudible hum in his nervous system. Finally he stopped in front of the bookcase in the living room.