Wild Cards 12 - Turn Of the Cards

Chapter Two




On Eglantier Straat the narrow ancient houses leaned gently toward one another across the canal, the tulips in the boxes at every sill like overemphatic splashes of makeup on the faces of aging tarts. Mark Meadows collapsed in the doorway of the house where he rented a flat, and just breathed. It was a questionable move, however necessary. The streets in this district were all named for flowers — its name, Jordaan, was the nearest the Dutch could come to phonetically spelling its old name, which was the French word for garden — but the Eglantine Canal that ran right past the house front smelled more like a sewer.

After a while old Mrs. Haring’s big black tom Tyl appeared and jumped on Mark. He made sure to brace his hind feet in Mark’s crotch and knead Mark’s solar plexus with his powerful forepaws, making it difficult to breathe. Mark thought he loved all animals, but Tyl was an evil bastard.

In the first flush of panic Mark’s instinct had been to return here, home, like a fox to its earth. Now that he had a chance to think about it, he wondered if it had been such a good idea.

They’ve found me. How do I know they’re not upstairs waiting? How do I know they aren’t up under the gables across the canal, watching, calling to each other on their walkie-talkies, getting ready to yank the snare?

He felt scattered, strange, irresolute. He felt as if maybe he should just lie here in the doorway until they came for him. It was better than having to choose. To act.

He squeezed his eyes shut. No. He’d been suffering these bouts of indecision, of the sensation that he was a lot of dissociated motes flying around without a common center, since Takis. Dr. Tachyon said they ought to pass, in time, but that was mostly just to make Mark feel better, not to mention himself. The truth was, Mark’s condition was something entirely new to the psychological sciences of Takis as well as of Earth.

A part of Mark had died on Takis. Literally.

He reached to his chest, felt the reassuring lumps of the vials in his shirt pocket, beneath the sweater. Only four now. He hadn’t even thought of them when the shooting started.

Would I have had the presence of mind to take one before… before Takis?

He told himself to hang on. Things had worked out fine. He hadn’t needed a friend; if he’d summoned one, there might have been a confrontation with his pursuers. More innocents might have been hurt. As it was, he desperately hoped no one had been killed by the gunfire meant for him.

And he could not stop from wondering, What have I really lost?

He made himself breathe slowly, from his diaphragm — not easy with that damned fifteen-pound cat digging him there and grinning — and pull his wits together. He wasn’t too hip to modern police procedure, but he understood that cops were basically lazy. If they knew where he was living, they’d just have waited for him there, rather than roam all over the city in hopes of stumbling across him. They could take him easily and unobtrusively here, in this still-slummy backwater of the generally gentrified district just west of where the medieval town walls once stood.

If unobtrusiveness was a priority. They had been willing to spray a crowd of innocents with gunfire in broad daylight. Not exactly discreet.

He shivered. And they were Americans. Not since Vietnam and his belated rise to consciousness of the antiwar movement had he felt such shame in the country of his birth. What have we come to?

He was a criminal, of course. A federal fugitive, and one whom the authorities believed was fantastically dangerous. They were right, too, if you considered raw power. But he believed, in the core of him, that he had done nothing wrong.

In fact they were primarily hunting him for doing something right. The rightest thing he had ever done: rescuing his daughter Sprout from the living hell of the kid jail the kinder, gentler New York authorities had committed her to.

A vague alarm, trilling in the pit of his stomach: what if they followed me here? But frightened as he was, he hadn’t gone completely stupid. The path he’d taken had been anything but direct. Like a lot of ancient European cities, Amsterdam was compact — tiny, actually, at the core — but it was also as convoluted as Hieronymus Bosch’s brain. Ideal for losing pursuers.

He pushed the cat off his chest. Tyl got a good dig into him with foreclaws through sweater and T-shirt, then rubbed purring against Mark’s shins as he stood. Hoping to overbalance him so that he’d crack his head on the stoop, no doubt.

He pushed into the house. The stairwell was filled with gloom and the smell of vinegar-intensive Dutch cooking. Mark put his head down and started up the steep steps.

Because the grachtenhuizen, canal houses, were painfully narrow — the palaces of the old syndics over on the Bend of the Herengracht no less than the tenements — there was little room for switchbacks in the stairwells. This house had been built with the stairs a straight shot up to the fifth-floor attic flat Mark rented. Mark told himself it was aerobic exercise and kept climbing, though the tendons of his shins were already so tight, it felt as if they’d snap his tibias like Popsicle sticks.

The door opened at what he still thought of as the second floor, though everyone in Europe insisted it was the first. The face of his landlord glared out like a big lumpy fist clutching a wad of wiry black hair, with two round turquoise rings for eyes.

“Ahh,” the landlord breathed in a juniper-scented gust of genever, the local gin. “Mr. Marcus.”

“Afternoon, Henk.” As unobtrusively as he could manage, Mark craned to look past him into his apartment, just in case it was packed to the rafters with American narcs and automatic weapons. There was nothing but the usual clutter of bottles, tracts, and porcelain figurines. Henk Boortjes liked to keep a supply of cutesy bric-a-brac; symbols of hypertrophied bourgeois gezelligheid, on hand so he could bust them up when the iconoclastic fit was on him.

Henk was an old kabouter. The kabouters — gnomes — were a post hippie movement of the early Dutch seventies, self-proclaimed anarchists and environmentalists. Some of them still hung on, but their niche in the food chain had been mostly co-opted by the Greens.

The landlord squeezed onto the stairs. Mark managed to sidle past before his belly, which overflowed from the bottom of a well-holed black T-shirt with a red-circled A on it, blocked the passage. There was no room for a landing in this narrow scheme of things.

“Have you heard the news?” Henk demanded.

“No, man. I’ve been out.”

“There was shooting, down in the Damplein. Someone fired a machine gun at the crowd. Half a dozen were injured, though nobody has died yet.”

“That’s, uh — that’s terrible, man.”

Henk fixed him with a red-rimmed glare. “Whenever such things happen, one can be certain there are Americans at the bottom of it.”

Mark swallowed. “It wasn’t me, man,” he joked feebly.

The landlord kept him pinned with his stare. Mark realized the man was half convinced he — Mark — was a CIA spy sent to make sure he didn’t single-handedly upset the applecart of American imperialism. He was guiltily familiar with that kind of self-glorifying paranoia. During his years as a counterculture fringie he’d indulged in a lot of it himself.

Then came the last couple of years, when Mark learned what it was like when they really were after you.

Henk nodded suddenly, with a grunt that made it sound as if his neck were a rusty hinge, releasing Mark from the bonds of his eyes.

“I’ve caught him,” he said, with a brown-toothed grimace Mark suspected was a smile.

“Who, man?”

“That old bastard de Groot, down the block.”

De Groot was Henk’s archenemy. He was an artist, at least to the extent that every few weeks he’d splash some paint on a canvas and then get the Arts Ministry to pay him a totally optimistic price to stick it in one of these enormous warehouses they maintained for the purpose. He was in fact more or less a contemporary of Mark’s landlord, and belonged to some rival anarcho-faction that the kabouters had splintered into. Mark had a suspicion Henk’s real grievance was that he himself couldn’t get registered to sell his modeling-clay sculpture to the Ministry, and he suspected his rival of blackballing him.

“What’s he done, man?” Mark asked.

“He has violated our fair-housing laws. He’s renting to an Indonesian family, and he has too many of them crammed in that tiny flat.” He spat on the stairs. Mark yanked his foot up in alarm and almost toppled over. “Exploiter. He won’t get away with it; I’ve notified the authorities.”

“So, like, what happens to the Indonesians?”

“Certainly, they shall move out.”

“You mean they’re gonna get thrown out on the street?”

The glare returned. “Their rights must be protected. Obviously you don’t understand.”

“I guess I don’t, man.”



Mark’s flat was stuffy with the rising heat of mid-afternoon, up in the attic beneath the bell-gabled roof. He opened the front window and walked back through the apartment.

It was narrow but not really small. The canal-front houses were surprisingly deep, and the flat ran all the way to the rear of the building, a succession of rooms strung together in what Mark thought of as shotgun style. In the bathroom all the way back Mark opened the other window to let the rank Amsterdam breeze in.

As he returned to his living room, Mark took out his wire-rim glasses and put them on. It wasn’t vanity that made him leave them off when he was out; he was a skinny six-four American, which did not make him the least conspicuous person in the world. Not wearing the glasses was at least a gesture in the direction of not being spotted by hostile eyes. For a man whose Secret Ace Identity once consisted of dressing up in a purple Uncle Sam suit and matching stovepipe hat, it was a pretty comprehensive gesture.

It didn’t seem to have worked, though. He made himself a cup of coffee and sat on the sill of the open window. Right over his head a massive wooden hoist beam jutted from the face of the house. All the old-time grachtenhuizen had them. People rigged blocks-and-tackles to them when they had to move things in and out of the upper floors. You didn’t want to try wrestling a piano up those stairs, or anything less wieldy than a loaf of bread.

He was careful not to knock over the window box. It was crowded with red and yellow tulips he’d brought on a day trip to the country, just like the boxes on all the sills on the block and, as far as he could tell, in the whole damn country.

He wasn’t, in retrospect, sure what he’d expected to find in Amsterdam — a sort of Hippie Heaven on Earth, perhaps, with naked people chasing each other happily through the streets and screwing in the fountains to the tune of the Dead and the Lovin’ Spoonful, all seen through a blue-green scrim of pot smoke. The actuality was staid: a lot of neat reserved plump people who left their front curtains open so you could admire the crowded coziness of their living rooms — Bourgeois Paradise in all truth, though with the occasional startling tangent.

On the other hand, after the never-ending adrenal nerve-whine of palace life and open warfare on Takis, a little petit bourgeois calm was not at all unwelcome. Or maybe Mark was getting old.

When it came to flowers, though, the good people of Amsterdam made the Flower Children of the Summer of Love look like developers. Mark had the vague impression that a couple of centuries back they’d actually had a boom-and-bust depression over tulip bulbs. April was tulip season, and the city looked as if it had been invaded by a race of tiny aliens with bulbous brightly colored heads who liked to hang out on windowsills. It made Mark wonder what the tulip mania had been like.

Still, a country that could go hock-the-baby crazy over flowers had to have a place for Mark. After everything he’d been through, he was still the Last Hippie.

Gazing at the gaudy flowers and sipping his coffee — an exotic blend with a taste like licorice to it that the little Indonesian guy who ran the coffee store down the street had pressed on him — he thought about his daughter, Sprout. His lips smiled, but his blue nearsighted eyes grew sad behind his lasses.

She would be fifteen now, his daughter. With her mom’s features and his eyes and blonde corn-silk hair. He hadn’t seen her for almost two years.

She was perpetually four, was Sprout. Though she was physically perfect, quite beautiful, in fact, she was severely developmentally disadvantaged — or whatever euphemism they were hanging on it this year. No matter what name they gave it, the doctors could do nothing to cure it.

Mark loved her desperately. For her he had made the Great Leap Forward from common or garden federal fugitive to perennial guest star on America’s Most Wanted.

Now there were more tough decisions to be faced. About Sprout.

He rose, set the cracked Delftware cup from the service he’d picked up at one of Amsterdam’s innumerable flea markets on the sill beside the planter. He walked between posters he’d bought here in the Jordaan, Tom Douglas’s bearded glare answering Janis Joplin’s sad, doomed smile, to kneel by the fireplace. He rummaged around up inside the flue. His fingers found a still-strange texture, resilient to the touch. He lifted the pouch off the smoke shelf It took all his never-great strength to get it over the blade of the damper.

He laid the pouch along the hearth. It was half the length of his arm and gleamed a rich, blue-veined maroon. He ran a thumb along the top. A hidden seam parted. The pouch was Takisian, artifact of a culture that preferred growing things to fabricating them. He wasn’t entirely sure the pouch was not in some sense alive. He tried not to think about it.

He pushed the pouch open. Inside, faces ignored him with fine Takisian hauteur. Too-sharp features turned profile, captured in crisp relief on soft yellow metal, showed an unmistakable resemblance to Tachyon. Tach’s grandfather; by custom, Tach’s father had had the gold coins struck on his accession, as a memorial. Mark guessed the Doctor would be having some coins of his own minted now, in honor of his own loved/feared father, Shaklan.

Oh, Tach — Tis. He shut his eyes and squeezed tears out. His closest friend, sometimes it seemed his only friend, now light-years away. Tach had returned home from his forty-year exile to find his father a vegetable, beyond reclamation even by Takisian science, kept alive only to preserve the claim of his branch of the family rulership of House Ilkazam. One of the first acts by Tachyon — still trapped in the body of Blaise’s ex-girlfriend, Kelly — had been to shut down his father’s last vital processes by a touch of his mind. The ostensible reason was to ensure Tach’s own accession and head off a coup attempt by a hostile line, and Jay Ackroyd still thought he was a monster for it.

Mark thought that, whatever the motive, it had been an act of transcendent mercy. He hoped he would have the moral courage to do the same. He feared he wouldn’t.

There were about five pounds of the coins, each a little shy of twenty-three grams, around eighty percent of an ounce. For reasons Mark could not begin to fathom — economic processes were pure alchemy to him — gold prices had really launched of late. He did get the drift, which was that the coins were worth a pretty piece of change.

But they were nothing compared to the jewelry. Rubies, sapphires, emeralds, diamonds, cut in strange geometric shapes. The stones were set in silver, a metal the Takisians — or Tach’s House Ilkazam, at any rate — favored over gold. The silverwork was truly breathtaking. Fine filigree, fantasies spun in wire that intertwined like dreams, like the destiny of a race. Mark had never seen work remotely like it. It possessed a hypnotic quality, as if the twining lines could draw the eye of the observer in, draw his soul. Even without the rarity value of being genuine artifacts from an alien world — hard to substantiate, though surely no one could ever really believe human hands had made them — the pieces of jewelry were priceless.

He had no idea what to do with them. He had passed a few of the coins; the canny Dutch were a bit bemused by the unearthly patterns they were struck in, but accepted them readily enough once they satisfied themselves they were real gold.

The loot made him feel strange. He had helped Tach because the Doctor was his friend and needed his help. He had done things for Tachyon that he’d never done for anybody else, that he never imagined he’d be called on to do. But he hadn’t done them for treasure.

He had accepted the reward because Tach insisted. Tachyon had his own pride, he knew that. But what Mark wanted was to find a way to make it without becoming reliant on the alien’s beneficence.

He wanted to send the treasure to Sprout. That posed problems too. Under the RICO and Continuing Crime Acts — America’s answer to the Nacht und Nebel decrees — any property identified as his was liable to confiscation by the federal government.

Even if he could find a way to smuggle it to his daughter, his dad might not accept it. Sprout was in the care of General Marcus Antonius Meadows, recently retired as commander-in-chief of America’s Space Command. The aging Vietnam War hero had a pride prickly as any Takisian’s.

Mark picked up a bracelet — armlet, maybe, openwork, light as a breath. Set in it -was a spherical stone, tawny and pearlescent. It glowed with its own light. The glow grew brighter when he held it in his hand. He traced the patterns of the silverwork in his mind. They seemed to lead him into the heart of the stone. It was warm in there, warm and safe and far from worry and fear and strange, harsh-voiced young men with guns.

When he came back to himself, it was dusk outside. He shook himself, hastily scooped the treasure back into its alien pouch and stuffed it back up the flue. He was spacing out a lot these days. He was doing a little dope — this was Holland, after all, and despite growing pressure from the rest of the European community, they practically gave the stuff away like the Green Stamps of Mark’s childhood. His appetite for grass was nowhere near what it had been before his ex-wife Sunflower had come back into his life, bringing with her the child-custody suit that would wind up with Mark on the lam, Sprout in the juvie home, and Sunflower herself committed to a mental institution.

He doubted the dope had anything to do with the fugues anyway. There was a void inside him since Takis. Sometimes when he wasn’t careful he wandered into it.

So far he’d always come back.

He closed the window, drew the chintz curtains. At this altitude nobody could see into his living room anyway, so it didn’t look out of place. It would be dark soon, and even though this was the North Sea, the night sky sometimes cleared.

He couldn’t handle stars yet.