Jokertown Shuffle

I

Darkness masked the street, concealing its face. Those who walked in the Jokertown night wore their own masks, some visible, some not. In the darkness or in the cold unreal color of the neon light cast by the Jokertown cabarets and boutiques, it was possible to believe that no one, no one at all, was quite what he seemed.

Darkness itself rolled along the deserted sidewalks, absorbing heat and color unto itself, hunting…

The Werewolf lay in a doorway, bleeding. His Liza Minnelli mask lay crumpled at his feet. His olive skin was zebra-striped with red pigment, port-wine stains gone mad. One eye was swollen shut. The other two were glazed.

"Hey." The darkness opened, revealing an imperiouslooking black man named No Dice. He was dressed in a black leather Pierre Cardin trench coat with matching leather beret, a Perry Ellis sweater, a couple dozen gold chains, twohundred-dollar high-top sneaks, the kind with the little squeeze pumps, gold-rimmed shades, a palm-sized green-black-gold leather pendant in the shape of the African continent. "Hey." The man knelt fastidiously, touched the Werewolf's shoulder. "You hurt, homes?"

The Werewolf shook his head, focused his two functional eyes on the black man. He spoke through split, bleeding lips. "What happened? Why'd it get dark?"

"No idea, homey. But I heard shots. You been shot?" The Werewolf shook his head again. He tried to rise, but his knees wouldn't support him. The black man took hold of him, helped him steady himself against the doorway. The Werewolf looked at the flaking green paint on the door. Bewildered desperation entered his voice. "This is where it was going down! I gotta help Stuffy!"

"Police soon. You better shag outta here."

The Werewolf's hands searched through the pockets of his jacket. "Where's my piece? What happened to Stuffy?"

"Somebody hit you, man. Gimme your mask. Get outta here."

"Yeah." The Werewolf panted for breath. "Gotta split." He staggered away, feet dragging on concrete.

No Dice watched him for a moment. He reached into the pocket of his trench, pulled out a pistol, then put it atop the Liza Minnelli mask that was-this week, anyway-the Werewolves' gang emblem.

Darkness bled downward from the sky and swallowed him up.

The revival house was showing Jack Nicholson in Roman Polanski's Jokertown. The last showing had ended three hours ago, and the marquee was dark. The marquee swayed, creaking slightly, in the cold winter wind pouring down the street.

Across the street was a spray-painted slogan, dayglo orange on brown brick: JUMP THE RICH.

Beneath the slogan a young woman knelt, hunched over a chalk painting. She was dressed in thirdhand clothing-a shabby baseball cap, a pale blue quilted jacket, and heavy boots two sizes too large. She had to squint in the darkness to see her work, the chalk painting she'd spread across a full slab of concrete sidewalk. It was a bright fantasy landscapegreen hills and flowering trees and a distant rococo Mad Ludwig castle, a scene as far removed from the street reality of Jokertown as could be imagined.

A man named Anton walked down the shadowed street. He was a huge man in a large belted canvas trench coat, and he had a drooping mustache. He had a heavy diamond ring on each and every finger, sometimes more than one. In one pocket he had seven credit cards his whores had lifted off tourists in Freakers, in another pocket he had their money, and in a third he had a small supply of Dilaudid and rapture, substances his women were hooked on and which he sold to them in return for their share of the earnings. He wasn't worried about people stealing any of this because he had a pistol in his fourth pocket.

"Hey, Chalktalk. Baby. Ain'tchoo got a place to sleep?" The young woman sprang up from her drawing, faced Anton in a defensive crouch. The streetlight gleamed on needle teeth, flexed claws. A stray piece of chalk fell from a pouch on her belt, rolled unnoticed into the gutter.

" I ain't gonna hurtchoo, baby." Anton maneuvered to head off the young woman's escape. "Just wanna take you home and give you something to eat."

The street artist hissed, flashed claws through the air. "Aw, Chalktalk," Anton said. " I ain't dissin you. I bet you real pretty when you get cleaned up, huh? Bet the boys like you."

He had the girl back up against the wall. She was shifting her hips back and forth, trying to decide which way to bolt. He reached a hand toward her, and her claws flashed, too swift for the eye to follow. Anton jumped back, stung.

"Joker bitch!" He shook blood from his hand, then reached for the belt of his coat. "Wanna play for keeps, huh?" He smiled. " I can play that way, bitch. Bet I know just whatchoo like."

And then the darkness rolled over him. The girl gave a little gasp and flattened herself against the brownstone wall. " I believe, Anton," said a voice, " I told you I didn't want you in my neighborhood anymore."

Anton screamed as he was hoisted off his feet. The darkness was as complete as if an opaque mask had been dropped over his head. He scrabbled in his pocket for his pistol. There was a crack as his arm was broken across the elbow. Another crack, the other arm. Another crack, his nose. All had come so swiftly, one-two-three, he couldn't cry out.

He cried out now. And then cold flooded him. His bones seemed filled with liquid nitrogen. His teeth chattered. He couldn't summon the strength to yell.

"What did I give you last time?" the voice said conversationally. " I believe it was second-stage hypothermia, correct? Lowered your body to about was it eighty-eight degrees? Just made you a little uncoordinated for a while."

Anton was still hanging in the air. Suddenly he felt himself falling. He wanted to scream but couldn't manage it. His fall stopped short. There was a horrible wrenching of his knees and ankles.

"Let's go to the third stage, shall we? Shall we make you eighty-one degrees?"

Heat funneled out of him. He could feel his heart skip a beat, then another. Anton ceased to feel altogether. His breath rattled in his throat, trying to draw warmth from the air.

"I told you to stop stealing, Anton," the voice said. " I told you to stop pimping underage joker girls to tourists. I told you to stop beating and raping girls you meet on the street. And you go right on doing it. What does that make you, Anton? Stupid? Stubborn?"

The voice turned reflective. "And what does this make me?" Cold laughter answered the question. "A man of my word, I believe."

The darkness flowed away, revealing what it had left behind. Anton, gasping for breath, swayed in the wind. He had been strung up from a streetlight, his feet lashed to it by the belt of his trench coat. His pockets had been emptied of money. The credit cards and the drugs remained, enough to put him in prison. Or at any rate the prison hospital.

Droplets of blood made little patterns on the pavement as the wind scattered them-each, until chilled by contact with the air, a precise 81 degrees Fahrenheit.

"Chalktalk? Girl? You all right?" Darkness flowed toward the fantasy landscape on the pavement.

The street artist was gone.

The flowing darkness paused, alert to movement in the night, alert to body heat. Saw none, then looked downward. The fantasy landscape was brighter, as if lit from within. Invisible clouds traced moving shadows on the landscape.

And in it the young girl was running. Up over a green hill, and out of sight.

Night surrounded the phone booth, which stood alone in a puddle of yellow beneath a streetlamp. Despite the spilling light, it was difficult to see just who it was who picked up the receiver and dropped a coin into the slot.

"Nine-one-one emergency. Go ahead."

"This is Juve." (pronounced Hoo-vay). His words had, a strong Spanish accent. I heard shots. Shots and screams.' "Do you have an address, sir?"

"One-eighty-nine East Third Street. Apartment Six-C."

"May I have your full name, sir?"

"Just Juve. I want to be anomalous."

Juve hung up and in the instant before the darkness claimed him, smiled. The emergency dispatcher would never comprehend that in his very last statement, he had meant exactly what he said.

The streetlight shone green. Then yellow. Then red. Colors that reflected on the dark chalk landscape drawn on the pavement below.

The wall read: JUMP THE RICH. Red light glowed off the orange graffiti, off the little droplets of blood on the pavement.

Anton swung above, his body growing colder with each red drop that spilled from his swinging form.

When No Dice walked into Freakers, the air turned chill. People shivered, shuddered, turned apprehensively toward the door.

No Dice only smiled. He just loved it when that happened. No Dice ignored the stage show and glided regally to a booth in the back. Three Liza Minnellis sat on its torn red plastic seats. All were wearing black bowler hats, as in the movie Cabaret. At least they'd spared him the net stockings. "My man," said No Dice. He looked from one Minnelli to the next, uncertain whom to address.

"Mister No Dice." A big man rose from the booth. No Dice knew he was Lostboy from his high-pitched voice. "Lostboy" said No Dice. "My man." As if he'd known all along which Liza to talk to.

No Dice gave all three of the 'Wolves the homeboy handshake-thumb up, thumb down, finger lock and tug, back-knuckle punch. Then he sat down in their booth. His long leather coat creaked.

"Lookin fresh, No Dice," said Lostboy.

No Dice smiled. "Manhattan makes it, Harlem takes it."

"That the truth," said one of the Lizas.

"Order you a drink?" Lostboy said. He grabbed a waitress as she passed. "Chivas Regal. Straight up."

No Dice leaned over the table. "Wanna move weight," he said. "Wanna move kilos."

Lostboy picked up his highball glass and deliberately threw its contents on the floor. "I always like my man No Dice." Lostboy reached into his pocket and pulled out a plastic bag of blood-fresh from the blood bank and guaranteed free of AIDS. He began squeezing it out into his empty glass. "My man No Dice always wants weight, always pays cash, doesn't give attitude. Got his own clientele up in Harlem, so he never cuts into our action. Never no hassles with No Dice."

"That the truth, homes," said No Dice. "I'll drink to it."

No Dice's smile turned a little glassy as Lostboy lifted his Liza Minnelli mask and his proboscis unrolled from beneath his tongue into the red fluid.

"Chateau AB Negative," he sighed. "My favorite vintage."

Whoever answered the phone answered it in Chinese. "Can I speak to Dr. Zhao, please?"

"Who shall I say is calling?" The switch to English came smoothly enough.

"Juve."

"One moment."

Juve knew the place he was calling, had been in it a few times. The bar-restaurant was on the second floor above a grocery, and it didn't even have an English name, just a sign in Chinese characters on the door. Juve gathered that the gist of the name was simply Private Club. Sitting in red leather booths would be soft-voiced Asian men in Savile Row suits and handmade Italian shoes, very probably packing Israeli submachine guns.

"This is Zhao."

"This is Juve. You still lookin' for Dover Dan? The guy with three eyes who stole your product in that apartment down on East Third?"

"Ah." A moment's thought. "Should we discuss this over the phone?"

"Ain't no time to get up-close-and-personal witchoo, man. He's in Freakers with some of his homeboys."

"And you're certain he's there."

"He was there five minutes ago. He took his mask off when he got his drink, and I seen him."

"If this information is correct, you may apply to me tomorrow for my very special thanks."

"You know I'm a man of my word, Dr. Zhao." Juve hung up the phone.

Darkness hovered uncertainly around him. He stared up at the glass front of One Police Plaza. Anything else to do tonight?

Might as well go home.

He buttoned the collar of his black leather trench and headed southwest on Park Row. One Police Plaza glowed across the street. He kept to the shadows.

"Simon? Is that you, Simon?"

The distorted voice wailed out of a doorway. Juve jumped at the sight of a figure huddled under a salvaged old quilt, the sad-faced old female joker whose face seemed to have collapsed into itself, so heavily wrinkled it looked like that of a bloodhound.

Terror rolled through him. He wasn't Simon anymore. "Simon?" the joker said.

"Not me, lady," Juve said. "It is you!"

Juve shook his head and backed away. The woman lurched to her feet, tried to reach for him.

Her hand closed on air. She stared around her. The darkness had engulfed Juve entirely. "Simon!" she screamed. "Help me!"

The darkness didn't answer.

He was No Dice again by the time he got a cab heading north. He had been Juve wearing No Dice's clothes, he thought, and that had made him uncertain, made him overreact when his identity was challenged.

Who was still alive, he wondered, who remembered Simon?

Some old joker lady apparently. He couldn't remember ever seeing her. He wondered why her appearance had frightened him so much.

The cab left him at Gramercy Park. Darkness carried him up the side of a whitestone building on raven wings. He opened the roof entrance with his key and went down two flights of stairs, then padded on an old wine-colored carpet to his apartment door. The door and frame were steel sheathed in wood. He opened several locks and stepped inside, then pressed the code that would disconnect the alarms.

The apartment was spacious, comfortably furnished. In the daytime it was full of light. Books were lined alphabetically on shelves, LPs and CDs on racks. The hardwood floors gleamed. There wasn't a dust speck out of place.

He put on a Thelonius Monk CD, took off No Dice's clothes, and had a shower to wash off the man's musky cologne. A large bedroom wardrobe, also steel sheathed in wood, had a combination lock. He spun the combination and opened the door, then hung No Dice's clothes next to Wall Walker's, which hung next to Juve's. On a shelf above was a feathered skull mask. Wrapped in plastic, fresh from the dry cleaner's, was a NYPD uniform, complete with badge and gun. There was also a dark cloak he'd once worn during District Attorney Muldoon's ace raids on the Shadow Fists.

In the rear of the closet was the blue uniform and black cape he hardly ever wore anymore, the costume that marked him as Black Shadow. Black Shadow, who had been wanted for murder since the Jokertown Riot of 1976.

He looked at the varied sets of clothing and tried to remember what it was that Simon wore.

The memory wouldn't come.

After a few years, he realized he didn't know what to call himself anymore. It had been years since anyone had called him by his real name, which was Neil Carton Langford. The last anyone had heard of Neil was when Columbia tossed him out for not ever getting around to finishing his M.A. thesis. Black Shadow had been an outlaw for fourteen years. He'd been Wall Walker for a long time-it was his oldest surviving alias-but Wall Walker was too genial a personality for the kind of life he led most of the time. The other masks came and went, transient and short-lived.

Finally he settled on calling himself Shad. The name was simple and had a pleasant informal sound. It was a name that promised neither too much nor too little. He was pleased at finally figuring out what his name was.

No one, other than himself, called him by that name. Not that he knew of, anyway.

When he'd started out, there'd been other people whose line of business had either intersected his or complemented it. But Fortunato had gone off to Japan. Yeoman was gone, no one knew where. Croyd was asleep most of the time, and he was usually on the other side of the law, anyway.

Maybe it was time for Shad to hang up his cape. But if he did, who would be left to persecute the bad guys? All the public aces seemed to be engaged in lengthy public soap operas that didn't have much to do with helping real people. None of them had Shad's expertise.

He might as well stay with it. He didn't have a life anywhere else. Not since 1976, when he'd realized what lived inside him.

When he woke, Shad drank coffee and watched the news. The coffee didn't do much for him-no normal food did-but when he was living his normal existence in his normal uptown upper-class apartment, he tried as far as possible to act like a normal person.

The news was enough to wake him up, though. Shortly after eleven o'clock the previous evening, a group of what witnesses described as "casually dressed Asians" walked into Freakers, strolled to the back, drew machine pistols, and smoked three jokers wearing Liza Minnelli masks. Another Werewolf in another part of the bar returned fire, splattering one of the Snowboys in return for being disembowelled by about forty semiwadcutters. One of the Wolves had actually survived in critical condition but was not expected to be conscious and of any use to police for a long time.

No Dice was going to have to contact someone else to get his shipment of rapture.

The news rattled on. A vice president of Morgan Stanley had supposedly skipped town with hundreds of millions of investors' funds. Nelson Dixon, the head of Dixon Communications and owner of the Dixon-Atlantic Casino, had just bought another art treasure, van Gogh's Irises, for $55 million, a private purchase from an Australian billionaire who'd run into hard times. He'd also fired his entire security staff and hired new people, complaining that the old people had been lax about the jumper threat.

Good luck, Shad thought.

The military cordon around Ellis Island had been tightened after some jumpers had hopped into the bodies of some coast guardsmen and taken their cutter for a joyride.

Shad's eyes narrowed as he considered the situation on Ellis Island. Maybe it was something he needed to be concerned about. He didn't much give a damn if some idealistic jokers wanted to claim Ellis Island as a refuge from oppression. Good luck to them. But if killers were using the place as a hideout, that was another matter.

There were supposed to be a lot of people on the island, however. And Shad was only one person. He'd always worked alone. And if he got jumped, there was no guarantee he'd ever end up anywhere, or anyone, he wanted to be.

Funny if it ended that way. A man with so many different identities, permanently stuck in somebody else's body… Who, he found himself wondering, still remembered Simon? Simon had been an uptown kind of guy, he remembered, not the kind of man to hang around Jokertown. So why was a joker looking for him?

He finished his coffee, washed out the cup, put it in the dishwasher. He went back into the bedroom and looked at the three suitcases sitting next to the bed. One was filled with forty pounds of rapture, with a street value of approximately a quarter million. The other two valises contained $100,000 in hundred-dollar bills, the stuff he'd taken from the Snowboy-Werewolf deal and blamed on Dover Dan.

A hundred grand. Not bad for a night's work. And with any luck, he'd started a gang war as a bonus.

He'd have to start moving the stuff out of his apartment. Starting, he figured, with the drugs. He'd keep enough to pay his informants and dump the rest in the Hudson.

An image sang through his mind, a distant orchard, peaceful green fields dappled with cloud shadows, a distant castle…

Stupid, he thought. Time to hit the streets.

Summer 1976. Hartmann and Carter and Udall and Kennedy all slugging it out in the Garden, cutting little deals with each other, planting knives in one another's backs.

New York was a city on fire. And everyone, suddenly, was on one side or another. You were with the jokers or against them. On the side of justice or an obstacle in its path. He'd never known a time so hot.

Neil had been an ace for years-it had come on gradually during his early adolescence-but after his parents and sister were killed, he'd never done anything with the power, nothing but disappear into the darkness when the memories got to be too much and he didn't want to be Neil anymore.

Senator Hartmann had been the one who had inspired Neil to become a public ace in the first place. Neil was in the hotel to hear a speech by Linus Pauling, and he wandered into the wrong ballroom by accident. He still remembered Hartmann's words, the ringing phrases, the calls for action and justice. Within a week, Black Shadow was born, born right in Hartmann's office, Shad and the senator shaking hands and smiling for the cameras.

A little problem, Hartmann told him a little while later. A little problem in Jokertown. An honest-to-God Russian spy, someone trying to get into Tachyon's lab to learn Tachyon's approaches for controlling the wild card. The Russians were infecting people deliberately, killing the jokers, inducting the aces into the military. They wanted to find a less drastic method and thought maybe Tachyon was working on it.

The night was hot. Marchers were in the streets. Fire seemed to burn in Shad's heart as he found the agent and his equipment-his cameras and developers and one-time pads and he took the agent apart, breaking bones, putting a chill into his sweating skin. He left the man swinging from a lamppost right in front of the clinic, a placard pinned to his chest announcing the man's, and the Soviet Union's, crimes.

Something had snapped in him, a wildfire that raged way out of control. Hartmann s call for compassion and justice had twisted somehow into a call for burning action and revenge.

Shad's heart leapt as the crowd tore the spy apart, as the night burst out in fire and madness. It wasn't until later, when he saw Hartmann fall apart on television, that he knew how he'd betrayed the senator's ideals.

Even after the riot was over, he couldn't figure it out. He hadn't known such rage was in him. He found Hartmann, slipped into his apartment before the man had even had a chance to recover from the disaster of the convention, and asked him what to do.

Hartmann said, plainly and quietly, that he should turn himself in. But anger blazed up in Shad again, anger warring with anguish, and he argued with Hartmann for an hour, then left the apartment. A little while later he did it again, found a couple of homeboys mugging tourists on the Deuce and left them swinging, broken, from lampposts.

The lampposts were well on their way to becoming his trademark.

He was in vague contact with Hartmann after that. Hartmann always urged him to turn himself in but would never call the authorities himself. Shad respected him for the courage it took to do that.

And in answer to the guilt that clawed at him, he left more people swinging from lampposts.

The evil joy, the uncontrollable rage, that he'd first felt was less in evidence now. It hadn't flared up in years. Maybe he was growing up-he'd made a decision around the same time- to break with Hartmann. He didn't dare compromise the senator anymore.

Now he just hung people from lampposts because it was what he did. He didn't get much satisfaction out of it. It was an unsatisfactory thrill, like substituting pornography for good sex. Maybe it kept the crime rate down, kept a few people honest. He liked to think so.

But he was getting restless. People like Anton and the Werewolves weren't worthy of his talents.

He wanted to work on something big.

Shad went to a safe house in Jokertown and dressed as Mr. Gravemold, the joker who smelled like death. He put on Gravemold's feathered deathmask and doused himself with chemical stink.

People around him shrank from the smell. Shad liked that. It gave him privacy. But he didn't want to smell it himself. When he was Gravemold, he chemically numbed his nasal passages and taste buds, and he'd tried a lot of substances over the years. By far the best proved to be highquality cocaine he took off dealers. He could get used to the stuff, he figured, except he had much better ways of getting high.

The hallelujah chorus rang through Mr. Gravemold's sinuses as he walked around Jokertown looking for the houndfaced lady. He asked everyone Gravemold knew: Jube, Father Squid, people in relief agencies. People told Gravemold everything they knew, just to get rid of the smell, but nobody had seen the joker who had asked after Simon.

He walked beneath the lamppost outside the Jokertown Clinic as if it were any other lamppost. As if it were a place that had no meaning for him. It didn't. To Mr. Gravemold, it was just a lamppost.

A chalk landscape, its colors faded and scuffed, occupied part of the sidewalk. A kind of lagoon with odd-shaped boats on it. He found himself watching it to see if it came alive. Nothing happened.

After nightfall, Mr. Gravemold bought some lemons in a fruit and vegetable store, went back to the safe house, dumped his smelly clothes in a trunk, scrubbed himself with the lemons to kill the scent, then took a shower. He still had to use some of No Dice's cologne to cover what remained of the stink.

He tried to figure out who he was going to be. No Dice had no business in Jokertown tonight. Simon had been gone for years. People might be looking for Juve. This was the wrong neighborhood for Wall Walker, for the Gramercy Park identity, and for the cop. Maybe he could just be Neil Langford. The thought came with a rush of surprise.

What the hell.

He looked at the clothes in the wardrobe and wondered what Neil would wear for a night in Jokertown.

It came to him that he had no idea. He'd been playing all these parts for so long, he'd lost track of who he really was. He decided finally to dress in jeans, shirt, and a midnightblue windbreaker. The cocaine was still making him sniffle, so he put some tissues in a pocket. He pulled a watch cap down over his ears and set out into the night.

He made a businesslike quartering of Jokertown, starting with its southern tip around One Police Plaza. His senses were abnormally acute, and he was highly sensitive to body heat-he didn't have to walk down every alley or look in every doorway.

John Coltrane ran long arpeggios in his head, working on McCoy Tyner's "The Believer."

He moved down the street like a cool breeze, feeding as he walked, taking little pieces of body heat that no one would miss, pieces that made him stronger, made him glow with warmth. The mellow buzz of all the stolen photons zoomed along his nerves and were far more satisfying than the cocaine could ever be. People shivered as he passed, glanced behind them, looked wary. As if someone had walked across their graves.

As he walked, he found old chalk drawings, faded with time or rain. Fantasy landscapes, green and inviting, smeared or beaten by pedestrians. Urban scenes, some that Shad recognized, some so strange as to be almost impressionistic. None of them signed. But all of them, Shad knew, from the same hand.

Chalktalk. The perfect name. JUMP THE RICH.

He found her across the street from the graffito, under the theater marquee advertising Polanski's Jokertown. She had paused there, an old brown blanket around her shoulders, her stuff in a white plastic shopping bag. She paused in the theater's glow and glanced around as if she were looking for someone.

Shad couldn't remember ever having seen her before. He wrapped darkness around himself and waited.

The joker paused for a while, then shrugged her blanket further around her shoulders and walked on. The top of one of her tennis shoes, Shad saw, was flapping loose.

Darkness cloaked him as he walked across the street. He put out a hand, touched her shoulder, saw her jump. Took a little body heat as well. "What do you want with Simon?" His voice was low, raspy, faintly amused. Black Shadow's voice.

She jumped, turned around. Her hound eyes widened, and she backed away. He knew she was looking at… nothing. An opaque cloud of black, featureless, untextured, taller than a man, a nullity with a voice.

"Nothing," she said, backpedaling. "Someone-someone I used to know"

"Perhaps I can find him." Advancing toward her. "Perhaps I can give him a message."

"You-" she pushed out a breath, gasped air in, "you don't have to=" Her wrinkled face worked. Tears began to fall from her hound-dog eyes. "Tell him Shelley is, is…" She broke down.

Shad let the darkness swirl away from him, reveal his upper body.

"Simon!" Her voice was almost a shriek. She held out her arms, reached for him. "Simon, it's Shelley. I'm Shelley. This is what I look like now"

Shelley, he thought. He looked at her in stunned surprise as her arms went around him.

Shelley. Oh shit.

He took her to an all-night coffee shop and bought her a watery vanilla shake. She chewed on the plastic straw till it was useless, and tore up several napkins.

"I got jumped," she said. "I-somebody must have pointed me out to them."

"How do you know that?"

"Because whoever jumped me marched my body to the bank and cleaned out my trust fund. I'd just turned twentyone and got control of it. Almost half a million dollars." JUMP THE RICH, Shad thought.

"I went to court," she said, "and I proved who I am, but it was too late. Whoever was in my body just disappeared. I never went back to drama school-what's the point? And I got fired from my job at the restaurant. I can't carry trays with these hands." She held up padded flippers with fused fingers and a tiny useless thumb. Tears poured from her brown eyes. Little bits of paper stuck to her furry face as she dabbed at tears with bits of torn napkins.

"Why did you go away?" she wailed.

"That was a bad scene you were in. I told you it was time to leave."

She stirred her shake with her useless straw. "Everyone started getting killed."

"I told you."

"You didn't tell me they'd start dying."

"I told you it would get as bad as it gets." "Why didn't you take me with you?"

He just looked at her while guilt planted barbed hooks in his insides. He'd done what he'd done and just walked away, as if Shelley had been no more to him than one of the freaks he left hanging from lampposts or as if she were as invulnerable as she seemed to think she was.

He hadn't thought he could save her, a little rich white girl stuck in a scene so evil, so decadent, so glamorous that it probably would have crumbled into violence and madness even without his prodding. But she hadn't seen it comingshe led a charmed life, like everyone in her set, protected by her beauty, her trust fund, her sense of life as something to be devoured, inhaled, like the drugs she and her friends bought from the smiling, menacing street hustlers who saw them only as victims, as people to be led, step by step, into a place where a temporary and frantic safety could be acquired only by giving away their money, their bodies, eventually their lives. He didn't think he could have saved her. In his best professional judgement at the time, it was impossible. But then he'd never know. He hadn't tried.

She took another napkin from the dispenser and began to tear it into shreds. "Bobbie's dead. Somebody beat her to death with one of her sculptures. And Sebastian's dead. And Niko."

"I'm not surprised." He'd killed Niko with his own two hands, snapping the man's neck with a quick, practiced twist. He'd never met anyone who deserved it more. Left him on his bed with his head facing the wrong way, gazing into the nodded-off face of his junkie chicken, Rudy-Rudy, who used to appear in Sebastian's little art films, telling stories about his life and shooting up between his toes and talking about how much he wanted to fuck the cameraman.

"Violet threw herself off a roof. Or maybe the police pushed her. That's what Sebastian said, anyway. And Rudy's on the streets. Maybe it was Rudy who pointed me out to them. The jumpers. But he wasn't the guy who contacted me."

Shad looked down into his coffee. It was cold, and he hadn't used any of the heat. His reflexes were singing a warning, telling him not to ask the next question, that whatever the answer, it was going to lead him into another pit of tragedy. "Who contacted you?" he said. "Why?"

"A lousy twenty grand," she said, "and I get out of this body." She looked up at him, and her mouth twitched up in a smile. "You wouldn't happen to have twenty thousand dollars, would you?"

He looked at her, the sense of horror deepening, widening, ready to swallow him in. "Twenty grand?" he said. "Maybe I could get it."

He bought her a room in a Jokertown hotel and said he'd come the next day with more money. Then he slipped away, walking north, toward his building off Gramercy Park.

He'd met her at a dope deal. He'd been following this guy with the stunningly original name of Uptown Brown, brown being the color of the bad heroin he sold in Harlem in order to support a more fashionable existence on Fifth Avenue east of Central Park, brown also being the color of his victims, who shot the stuff and then went into respiratory arrest from whatever it was-Drano, battery acid, whateverhe cut it with.

Shad had arrived at the address he'd been given and walked up the outside of the building to peer in the windows. He'd been expecting the usual meeting, guys in overcoats and shades carrying suitcases and shotguns, but what he saw was a party. Young white people drinking spritzers or imported beer while someone banged out a lot of furious, clashing chords on a cream-colored baby grand. And among them was Uptown and a couple other guys who didn't fit into the scene at all.

He just walked in the door and said he was Simon. That was how he met Sebastian, the poet-slash-filmmaker; Bobbie, the sculptor; Shelley, the actress; Violet, the composer; and Niko, the director, a man who liked to direct other little dramas besides those on stage and intended to direct everyone in the room straight into hell so he could watch them flare and burn.

Shad found out his informant wasn't wrong. It was a dope deal he was part ou Everyone in the room was hustling someone or something, drugs and art, drugs and money, or drugs and real life, this last being something this little set craved and had never, to hear them tell it, experienced.

If it hadn't been for Shelley, he would never have come back. These people weren't his problem. People dying back in his old neighborhood were his problem, dying from Uptown's bullets and bad drugs. Now he knew why Uptown was peddling bad junk. He'd found another class of people he could move among, and he didn't care what happened to his old customers.

But for some reason Shad found himself returning… He saw something duck into an alleyway ahead of him, and his nerves went on the alert. He cautiously called the darkness down and moved toward the entrance.

Looking down the length of the alley, he could see at the other end a small figure running in heavy boots and baseball cap. Chalktalk, he knew, the street artist.

"Hey," he called, but Chalktalk kept running.

He looked down at his feet. Drawn with careful attention to detail was a picture of him, of Shad, dressed in his windbreaker and watch cap, leaning in the doorway and reading the New York Post by the light of a streetlamp.

Shad ran after her, but Chalktalk was gone.

"Simon. It's almost noon. I was afraid you weren't coming."

"I thought I'd buy you breakfast. Then some clothes. Okay?"

Shelley looked at him carefully. "I've been thinking, Simon, you know?"

Shad looked at the shabby hotel room-the thinning carpet and broken venetian blinds. "Let's get out of this rattrap." Pimps in the hallways, junkies shooting up in the back rooms. Jokertown. "I'll get you a nicer place tonight."

"I could stay with you."

He frowned. "I'm sort of between lodgings at present." He bought her breakfast at the same coffee shop they'd been in the night before. "Here's what I think," he said. "You contact the jumpers. I'll give you the twenty grand. Then we see what they want you to do."

She pulled some of the wrinkled flesh off her eyes and looked up at him. "Who are you, Simon? You're not just some student, like you told me."

"I'm just somebody who wants to do you some good, okay?"

"Are you the longbow killer? Is that who you are?"

He raised his arms. "Do I look like Robin Hood to you? Where's a homeboy going to learn to shoot a bow, for God's sake?"

"You're no social worker, that's for sure." She bit off a piece of toast. "Harlem Hammer?"

Shad gave a laugh. "I wish."

"Black Shadow"

"You're reaching, Shelley."

"Black Shadow" There was a glow in her eyes. "I should have known!" Her voice was excited. "When I saw you just come out of the darkness like that, I should have known."

"Keep your voice down, will you?" Shad looked furtively at the other diners. "I don't want anyone taking this seriously." He turned to Shelley. "Can't you just believe I'm someone you never heard of who wants to do you some good?"

"Black Shadow" Her eyes glittered. "I cant help thinking about it."

"Let's talk about the jumpers," Shad said.

He kept trying to find the Shelley he knew beneath the mask of wrinkled joker flesh. She'd burned so brightly that he, with his frozen heart, had been attracted to the light and heat, had circled it like a sinister icicle moth.

The second time he'd met her, it was to sit with her friends to watch a film she was supposed to star in. The film was in grainy black and white and consisted of Shelley lying naked on a bed and reciting lengthy monologues, written by Sebastian, largely on the subject of orgasms. Occasionally Sebastian himself, also naked, would wander into the frame, face the camera, and recite an ode to his cock. Shad, looking at the organ in question, could not comprehend what the fuss was about.

The wretched film came alive only through the medium of Shelley. She disarmed the worst lines with genuine laughter; the best were said with glowing sincerity. Life bubbled out of her as from an artesian spring. Shad found himself enchanted.

Now he could only find bits of her wrapped in the tired joker skin. Memory kept digging sharp nails into him. Her familiar words and gestures sent waves of sickness through his belly.

Twenty grand, he thought-maybe she'd be Shelley again.

She was supposed to establish contact by putting an ad in the Times. He got her a new wardrobe and a room in an uptown hotel that was so classy, they wouldn't turn down even a dog-faced joker. He rented the adjoining room for himself. Then he placed the ad for her.

He said he had someplace to go and split.

He called all of Croyd's numbers from his hotel room. There was no answer, and he left messages on the tapes, specifying date and time so that if Croyd woke up in a month's time, he'd know not to bother answering.

When he got to the safe house, his answering machine was blinking with a message from Croyd. Croyd had apparently awakened as a joker this time, because his voice had turned into a high-pitched honk. He sounded like a goose with a cleft palate. Shad had to play the message twice to understand it. He returned the call at the number Croyd had given.

"This is Black Shadow," Shad said. "Are you looking for work?"

"I don't know if I can help you this time around," Croyd said. "I'm just planning to go back to sleep as soon as I can and forget I ever woke up looking like this."

Shad understood maybe half the words, but the meaning was clear. "Can you do anything at all?" he asked.

"I'm sort of like a giant bat, except without hair. I've got a membrane between elongated fingers and thumbs, and I have sonar, and I-" He hesitated for a moment. "I have this craving for bugs."

"You can fly, though?"

"That's the only good part, yeah."

"I think you're just what I need. Can we meet?"

"I don't feel like going out."

"Can I bring you anything?"

"A box of bugs, maybe. Assorted sizes."

Shad thought about it for a moment. If you could buy a box of bugs anywhere, you could buy them in Jokertown. "I'll see what I can do," he said.

He found a box of fried locusts in an exotic food store on Baxter and took it to his meeting. Croyd was repulsive, even for a joker, a three-foot-high pink-skinned homunculus with fleshy wings. Money changed hands, and locusts got eaten. Things were arranged.

After a visit to his Gramercy Park flat for some gear, Shad slipped back into his adjoining room at the hotel a little before ten o'clock, knocked on the door to make sure Shelley was okay, and found her in bed watching a movie on TV He carefully bugged Shelley's room, including a video camera that he aimed through a fish-eye lens he installed in their adjoining door.

"Here's what happens from this point on," Shad said. "We don't see each other till the meeting's over. They may be watching your room. You take the money now, you make the meet, you do what they tell you. Afterwards you come back here, and if things are clear, we'll talk."

"What if they ask me where I got the money?"

"Tell them you stole somebody's jewelry, then sold it." Shelley pulled her wrinkles up out of her soft brown eyes and looked at him. "Who are you? Why are you doing this?"

"I don't know"

She gave a nervous little laugh. "Which question did you answer?"

Shad looked at her. "Both."

The jumpers called Shelley at four-thirty in the morning. Evidently they'd got an early edition of the paper. They ordered her to meet them at eight, standing right out in the traffic circle at Chatham Square, with the twenty grand in her handbag. Shad watched her leave on the TV screen, called Croyd, turned on the VCR, and headed downstairs. He got on his motorcycle-a Vincent Black Shadow, natch, restored for No Dice by the Harlem Hammer-and headed for Chatham Square.

He wished the jumpers hadn't set the meet for broad daylight.

Before eight, he was on the rooftop of an apartment building on Baxter Street with Croyd. He could see Shelley standing nervously in the traffic circle a half block away. The morning rush-hour traffic was almost gridlocked around her. "Can you fly with one of these around your neck?" Shad asked.

Croyd eyed the walkie-talkie carefully. Shad looked at the pink hairless body and wondered where Croyd's excess body mass had gone.

"I don't think so."

"I'll leave one here, then. After you're done, you can report."

"walkie-talkies don't work so good around here. Too many tall buildings with metal inside."

"These are police walkie-talkies. There are repeaters set up everywhere."

"Where'd you get police walkie-talkies?"

Shad shrugged. "I dressed up as a cop, walked into Fort Freak, and took a couple from the charging rack."

Croyd gave a nasal honking laugh and shook his head. "Gotta admire your style, homes."

"Shucks. Ain't nothin."

He went down the stairs, then walked past where his motorcycle was parked. He put on a navy-blue beret, settled in a doorway where he could keep an eye on Shelley, and chewed a toothpick for a while.

Black men hanging out in doorways are not unusual in America's teeming metropoloi. He concentrated on not being unusual. He concentrated on being Juve, and Juve was checking out the scene, with long Yardbird Parker riffs, all staccato, in his head.

Juve tried real hard not to notice the little pink guy flapping through the air about five hundred feet up.

It was almost eight-fifteen when he saw the powder-blue Lincoln Town Car easing through the gridlock a second time. His nerves started humming. Nouveau-riche criminals, he had often observed, often gave themselves away when it came to personal transportation. But the Lincoln went out of sight, and then Shad's attention snapped to Shelley. She was moving, walking with the light in the direction of the East River.

Damn. She wasn't supposed to leave yet.

Juve ambled out of the doorway, straddled the Black Shadow, and kick-started it. Shelley was disobeying instructions, and this couldn't be good. It wasn't until he eased the bike out into traffic that he realized what had just happened. His nerves began to sizzle. He cast a wild look down Worth Street, then Park Row, just in time to see the blue Lincoln turn right on Duane.

Shelley was in the Lincoln. She'd just been jumped. Croyd was following the wrong body, damn it.

Shad clutched and shifted, and the Vincent's engine boomed in synch with his thrashing heart. He raced down St. James Place, elbows and knees tucked in as the bike dived between stationary gridlocked vehicles. Leaving a trail of booming decibels, he performed a power slide behind One Police Plaza, then crossed Park Row without waiting for a break in the traffic, and felt as if he were saved only by some abstruse corollary of particle physics: He wasn't in the same state, particle or wave, long enough for anyone to hit him.

Once onto Center, he saw the Town Car in the distance and throttled back. Center joined Lafayette, and the powderblue Lincoln turned right on Houston, then made another right on First, heading back into Jokertown. The streets were choked, and Shad had no trouble following.

The Lincoln made a few more turns once it entered Jokertown, then turned off into a nineteenth-century brownstone warehouse with its tall windows closed off by more recent red brick. The electronic garage door closed behind the Lincoln, and Shad passed slowly on the motorcycle, turning neither left nor right, an odd prickling on the back of his neck. He wouldn't show up on this block again, certainly not on the bike. He'd be someone else entirely by the time he came back.

He turned, positioning himself to see the Lincoln if it headed back east, then pulled over to the curb and tried to contact Croyd-nothing. He searched the sky for a flapping pink figure, saw no one.

Time passed. Juve jacked a set of earphones into the radio and bobbed his head to a Kenny Clarke beat.

Two Werewolves stood on the corner, wearing gang colors but only ski masks, which gave them a better field of vision than Liza Minnelli or Richard Nixon, a precaution in case any Asians with guns showed up. The gang war seemed to be proceeding nicely. They scoped Shad out, offered him procaine cut with baby laxative, were ignored.

"Yo. Homes. This is Wingman."

Juve straightened, reached for the police radio. The tw dealers saw him raise it and split.

"Homes here."

Undercover cops used the same sort of elliptical language, Shad knew-he hadn't been challenged with these radios yet, even though the police were listening. If anyone questioned him, he planned to be Detective-Third Sam Kozokowski of the Internal Affairs Division, and what was your name and badge fucking number? Which should shut them up in a hurry.

"She just wandered around for a while," Croyd said, "then passed her handbag to a boy on a scooter. Then she wandered some more. Now she's in a restaurant, eating an Egg McMuffin. Anything I should do?"

"She's been jumped. There's somebody else in there."

"Shit."

"I need you to follow a powder-blue Lincoln Town Car."

"Snazzy wheels."

Shad paused. This was the first time he'd heard the word snazzy in decades. He told Croyd where the car was, then went back to being Juve. A little shift in the infrared spectrum showed him where Croyd was hovering.

It was almost one in the afternoon before Shad saw Croyd begin to move. Shad paralleled him on the bike. The zigzag course took him and Croyd back to Chatham Square.

The dog body waited on the traffic circle. Shad pulled up behind the Lincoln, memorized the license plate, then parked where he'd been that morning. He went into the doorway and became Juve again.

There was a new chalk drawing there, right on the stoop.

It showed Shad and Shelley having breakfast in the Jokertown coffee shop. Shad looked at the picture and felt an eerie wind crawl up the back of his neck.

He forced himself to stay in the doorway till he saw Shelley hail a cab. Then, checking behind himself constantly for tails, he headed for the hotel.

"Yo. Wingman."

"Hi, homes. The dog-faced joker I was following earlier collapsed-I think she got jumped again-but I saw her getting up as I followed the car. The Lincoln went back to the warehouse."

"Thanks. I'll talk to you later."

"We'll do some beer and bugs. Wingman out."

Shad sped back through the tape he'd made of Shelley's room. Two people had scoped the place. They were in their late teens, by the look of them, the boy in stylish leathers, the girl in denim and an eye patch. She seemed to have only one hand. The boy had got them through the lock with a raking gun. The one-eyed girl put something on top of the tall cabinet that held the TV Then they both left the way they had come.

At least neither of them had been Chalktalk.

Shelley showed up a few minutes later, looking as if she'd been through a lot.

Shad reached for the phone. "Hello?"

"This is the front desk."

"Oh. Hi. Front desk, right."

"Say that yes, you want to stay another day."

"Yes. I want to stay another day."

"You still want to pay cash."

" I still want to pay cash."

"You'll have to come down and do it in person."

"I'll be down in a few minutes."

He met her at the elevator and pushed the emergency stop button to halt it between floors.

"I thought you were going to have a new body," he said. "Yes. They've promised me one." She licked her pendulous lips. "The thing is, I get to pick."

"Oh."

"They've got a catalog. Just like L. L. Bean."

"Tell me what happened."

" I got jumped again. They put a bag over my head. They drove around for a while, then took me into a little room. It was fitted out like a prison cell-metal walls, a heavy door with big locks and a barred window. There was mesh overhead and a guy with a gun walking around."

"Okay."

"There were other cells. I could hear people talking. Some were crying and screaming." She gave a strange little smile. "I didn't care. It was wonderful. I was human again. Young! And beautiful. They showed me my face in a mirror. I was gorgeous."

"Who showed you?"

"Two kids. Boys, maybe fifteen. Zits, but real good clothes. Rolexes, jewelry. The gold chains must have cost fifty grand. And there was a joker." She gave an expression of distaste. "Brown, with a carapace. Looked like a cockroach."

"Did they call him Kafka?"

"Yeah." She pulled her wrinkles back and looked at him. "How'd you know?"

"He was around a few years ago. I knew him slightly when I joined the Egyptian Masons."

Her eyes widened. "The Egyptian Masons? You mean the-the ones who="

"Yeah. Those guys. I'd only just joined, then somebody blew up their temple with me in it. I barely got out, and I didn't know there were any other survivors until they started trying to toss people off Aces High."

She looked at him, her lips twitching in what might, under the wrinkles, be a smile. "You are Black Shadow, aren't you?"

"My name's Simon." "Uh-huh. Sure."

"So what happened in this cell?"

"Somebody else came in. Dr. Tachyon."

Shad's mind whirled. He forced himself to speak. "You sure?"

"Who wouldn't recognize Tachyon?" She gave a shiver. "Jesus, I never expected that. I was scared he'd read my mind or something and figure I knew you."

Maybe he did, Shad thought. "Did you see a one-eyed woman?"

"No. Why?"

"Never mind. Just tell me what happened."

"Tachyon made a speech. About joker rights. Now I had a chance to experience life as a member of the oppressed, and so naturally I'd want to join him in his great work." "And the great work?"

She shrugged. "They're jumping the rich. If I agree to do what they want, I get jumped into a new body. I clean out the bank accounts and the family silver. Half goes to Tachyon and the jumpers, and the other half I get to keep to set up a new life somewhere. Unless-" she hesitated, "I decide to do it again. And again. He made that offer. I build up a nice nest egg, then they jump me into whatever body I choose when I want to retire."

"What did you say?"

"I said I'd have to consider it."

"What are you going to do?"

She looked at him. "What do you want me to do?"

"It's your call. I'm not going to make you do anything." She took a breath. " I hate this body. I don't want to hurt anyone else by jumping somebody into it. But"-she shook her head-"I have to think about it."

"This thing gets settled, maybe we can put the victims into new bodies."

Why had he said that? he wondered. He didn't really believe it. He wanted Shelley back. That's why.

He made himself think about Tachyon.

"It'll take a few days," she said. " I have to familiarize myself with the target out of the catalog, know what moves to make. I stay in the cell the whole time."

She'd made up her mind, he realized. The thing was going to happen.

He remembered an old film he'd seen, The Third Man. Orson Welles had taken Joseph Cotten up on a Ferris wheel, pointed at all the tiny little people below, and said, "If you could have a million dollars, but one of those little people dies, would you do it?"

Some stranger, some little antlike speck below the Ferris wheel, was going to end up in a dog's body and have her bank account plundered.

"When you're free of them, call me," he said. "The number is 741-PINE. P-1-N-E. There will be an answering machine. Leave a message where I can find you."

"Okay."

"The number?"