Wild Cards V: Down and Dirty by George R. R. Martin
“Oh, Victor, why?” He didn’t really expect an answer, and he didn’t get one.
“Oh, yes, since we’re going to be friends you should know my true name. Friends don’t lie to each other. My name is Georgi Vladamirovich Polyakov. But you can call me George. Victor is dead—you killed him.”
Addicted to Love
by Pat Cadigan
THE VIEW OF THE city from Aces High was breathtaking, even inspirational. Beached on the shores of the afternoon, Jane stared blindly down at it from the kitchen window, frustration and unhappiness doing their usual waltz in her stomach. Behind her the kitchen staff worked away at winding down the afternoon luncheon service before preparing for the dinner custom, politely ignoring the fact that she’d left the salad they’d made for her untouched. Her appetite was poor these days. Lately she had even abandoned the pretense of wrapping the food up for later and tossing it out on the sly.
She knew there were whispers that she’d gone anorexic, not exactly the best advertisement for a place such as Aces High. It was like a bad joke on Hiram, after he’d increased her responsibilities at the restaurant from hostessing to pinch-hit supervising. Hiram was pretty weird himself these days, but he wasn’t shedding any weight. He’d been on a round-the-world goodwill tour. Hiram Worchester, Goodwill Ambassador. It beat the hell out of Jane Dow, Mafia Dupe.
Memories of the time with Rosemary drove her deeper into depression. She missed her; rather, she missed the person she’d thought Rosemary had been and the work she’d thought she’d been doing for her. It had all sounded so fine and noble—trying to counteract the antiace, antijoker hysteria that had been building up, fueled by hysterical extremist politicians and evangelists. Rosemary had been a real hero to her, someone with a shining light around her; she’d needed a hero very badly after all the nastiness with the Masons and the terrible, grotesque murder of Kid Dinosaur. Her own brush with death had not left much of an impression on her, except for the contact with that horrible; evil little creature called the Astronomer. She had seldom thought of it afterward, and Rosemary had been the antidote to the Astronomer’s poison.
Until March, when she began to find herself thinking that it might have been better if Hiram had just let her plummet to the street.
She seemed to have an unerring instinct for getting mixed up with exactly the wrong people. Maybe that was her real ace power, not the water-calling ability. She could hire herself out as a bad-guys detector, she thought sourly, change her name from Water Lily to Dowsing Rod. Yes, I just love these people, I’d follow them anywhere, do anything for them—call the cops, they must be white slavers and kiddie pornographers.
Her mind gave her an image of Rosemary Muldoon, smiling at her, praising her for her hard work, and she felt a pang of disloyalty and guilt. There was no way she could think of Rosemary as a truly bad person. A big part of her still wanted to believe that Rosemary had been sincere about the work, that whatever else she had been involved with as the head of a Mafia family, Rosemary really had wanted to do something for the victims of the wild card virus.
Yes, she thought fiercely, there was plenty of good in Rosemary, she wasn’t like all the others. Maybe something awful had happened to her that had driven her to accept and embrace the Mafia. She could understand that; God, could she understand it.
Her mind shoved aside the memory and came to rest on the man named Croyd. She still had the phone numbers he’d given her. Anytime you want some company, someone to talk to … I bet I could listen to you for hours. Maybe even all night, but that would be up to you, Bright Eyes. No one had ever showed quite so much panache flirting with her. Mirrorshades Croyd, calling her Bright Eyes; she was unaware of smiling at the memory. There had been no link exposed between him and Rosemary’s organization. Either it was buried too deeply or he’d been another idealist like herself. Since she wanted to believe it was the latter, that most likely meant it was the former—and she was still tempted to take out those phone numbers and surprise him by calling him. There was no way she could ever really bring herself to do it, which could well have been why he’d given her the numbers in the first place.
Her whole life was upside down and backward. Maybe that was what the wild card virus had really done to her, fixed it so she would live as the butt of every practical joke the world could play on her.
Abruptly Sal’s voice seemed to be speaking to her in her head: You’re not being fair with yourself. You never believed the Masons were good, you weren’t blind to what the Astronomer really was. And as for Rosemary, she was just a whole lot smarter than you, street smart—she took advantage of you and that should be her shame, not yours. If she even has the capacity to feel shame.
Yeah, Salvatore Carbone would have said something very like that to her if he’d been alive. The fact that she could come up with it herself must have meant she wasn’t completely hopeless, she thought. But the idea didn’t improve her mood or bring her appetite back.
“Excuse me, Jane,” said a voice behind her. It was Emile, who had started at Aces High not long before she had and was now the new maître d’. She wiped at her wet face hastily, glad that she had managed to gain more control over her tendency to pull enormous amounts of water out of the air when under stress, and turned around, trying to smile at him politely. “I think you’d better come down to the loading dock.”
She blinked at him in confusion. “Pardon?”
“A situation has developed and we think you’re the only one who could handle it.”
“Mr. Worchester always—”
“Hiram isn’t here and frankly we doubt he’d be much use if he were.”
She stared up at Emile tensely. Emile was one of the most vocal (and unforgiving) critics of Hiram’s behavior, a group that seemed to gain more members every day, all of them disgruntled employees and all of them, to her complete dismay, more in the right than she wanted to admit.
Ever since his return from the tour Hiram had been … strange. He seemed to have little real interest and no enthusiasm for Aces High these days, acting as if the restaurant were some awful albatross around his neck, a burdensome annoyance that was keeping him from something of greater importance. And he was behaving abominably toward his staff; his almost courtly manners had disappeared, and he ranged from distracted to abusively rude. Except for herself. Hiram was still friendly toward her, though it seemed to be an enormous and obvious effort to control himself and focus his attention. He had always been attracted to her; she’d known that since the night he had saved her life, and she felt guilty for not feeling the same way toward him. Being obligated to someone who cared for her when she couldn’t return the affection was one of the most uncomfortable situations she could imagine. She had repaid him for the expensive clothes, and she had made every effort to be the best employee he could have asked for in exchange for the security of the job (and the generous salary) he’d given her. Lately that meant taking up for him, even against people who had known him far longer than she had and supposedly had many more reasons to be devoted to him. Some of these were the most virulent, maybe because they had so many more better days to remember at Aces High. If only she could get through to Hiram, she thought, looking into Emile’s cold green eyes. If only she could make him understand how badly he was eroding his own authority and credibility and respect, he would be able to halt this terrible decline, turn it around, and become Hiram Worchester, Grand Master Restauranteur, again. Right now, it was as if he were dying.
“What kind of situation?” she asked carefully.
Emile shook his head in a small, tight way that was more shudder than anything. “It’s easier if you just come,” he said. “What we need right now is quick, decisive action from someone who has the authority to take it. Please. Just come down with me.”
Taking a deep breath, she forced composure on herself and went with Emile to the elevator.
The scene on the loading dock was like something out of a Marx Brothers movie, only not quite so funny