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 stumbled 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 mans 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.