Turn of the cards

Chapter Twenty-one

“No,” Freddie Whitelaw was saying, “they weren’t abusing you for being a Westerner. If they were going to do that, they’d have called you Lien Xo, don’t you see?”

Mark eyed him through the mid-afternoon murk of Rick’s Cafй Americain. The boys from the New Joker Brigade had not begun to filter in yet from wherever they spent their mornings after Rick shut down at dawn. Rick himself was puttering behind the bar, polishing glasses and occasionally scratching at his fleshy spines. None of his all-joker staff had arrived. The ceiling fan redistributed the thick, muggy air, but it took a determined imagination to feel cooled by it.

“What does that mean?” Mark asked the Australian. He was nursing a bottled melon-juice drink imported from Tashkent, in the Soviet Union. It was quite good.

“‘Crooked allies,’ more or less. It actually refers to Russians. Over the years they’ve come to apply it to round-eyes in general. Just another legacy of their revolution, you might say.”

“Oh. Well, what did what they called me mean, then?”

“’Devil.’ They saw you coming out of the Wild Cards Affairs office by the embassy and reckoned you were a wild card, mate – which indeed you are. So they chucked rocks at you and ran.”

Mark’s brows contracted in a look of pain. “But, why, man? I mean, Vietnam is a sanctuary for wild cards. We’re supposed to be welcome here.”

“That’s the official government line – and, my son, if you suspect the government of genuine humanitarian motives, you’re overdue for further disappointment.” He laughed and shook his great head, jowls waggling. “But no matter the official line on wild cards, the hearts and minds of the people are rather hard to order about – as you Americans have reason to remember. Asians don’t as a rule like people who look different than they do; they’re a lot touchier than even your more bigoted Westerners on that score. Wild cards tend to be a lot different, but still essentially human in form. That riles ’em the more, don’t you see?”

Mark shook his head. He didn’t see. For most of his life he had been told that America was the most racist society on Earth. He had also been told it was the most violent society on Earth. The reality of the Third World – where the single politician most widely and universally admired was Adolf Hitler – hit him like a freight train. It was, in truth, like Takis, but grubbier.

Even Europe, older, more cultured, infinitely more supercilious Europe, was little better than America. Violence against wild cards was less common there – or at least less open. But he had gotten the impression that the same hatred and resentment seethed there, held below the surface mainly by traditions of sullen subservience. The new European Community demagogues were far different creatures than Leo Barnett; they spoke of justice for all, wild cards included, but when Mark tried to translate their caring rhetoric into images, what kept springing to his mind were concentration camps.

The defect, he had long since decided, must lie within him. Too many social commentators had extolled the virtues of the Third World as opposed to the decadence and materialism of America. The death of Starshine had robbed him of his idealism, he feared, and that was why he was blind to those virtues.

He sighed and was about to comment on the death of his ideals, when the saloon-style doors swung open and Luce and Brew came in, looking oddly subdued. They were followed at once by a tall man in khaki PAVN walking-out dress. He topped the ensemble with a billed American-style officer’s cap and Douglas MacArthur sunglasses, and he carried his fine head at a chin-jutting angle.

For some reason Mark grew cold. Voices began to yammer deep inside his mind.

“Uh, Freddie,” he whispered, “who’s the dude with the scrambled eggs on his hat?”

Freddie showed him a loose, lopsided grin. “Why, that’s himself, of course. Colonel Charles Loyalist-Without-a-Cause Sobel.”

For a large and habitually inebriated man Whitelaw had good reflexes. He caught Mark’s sleeve before the American was halfway out of his chair. His grip was very strong.

“For God’s sake, man, calmly, calmly,” Whitelaw said, mopping his expansive forehead with a handkerchief so mottled it appeared to sport a desert camouflage pattern. “You look as if aliens had just abducted you aboard their starship.”

“No,” Mark said firmly, his eyes never leaving Sobel, that happens to me all the time. It’s no big deal. Getting rousted by the fuzz and beaten up in some cellar – that really shakes me, man.”

Whitelaw gave him an eye like a sacred carp’s, which Mark did not notice.

“You’ve nothing to be afraid of, man,” Whitelaw settled on saying. In their several days’ association the expatriate American had displayed a propensity for saying in an offhand way things which were decidedly unsettling even for a journalist with upward of twenty years’ experience in Southeast Asia. Despite his journalist’s instincts – which gin and years of party-line subservience evolving gradually into encompassing cynicism had not entirely dulled – Whitelaw was not certain he always wanted to know exactly what Meadows was talking about.

Mark was still struggling feebly, restrained more by the need not to draw attention to himself than by Whitelaw’s grip. “You said he wouldn’t come in here!”

“That’s not what I said. I said it didn’t matter where you were, because if the estimable Colonel Vo of the PPSF wanted your skinny Yank posterior, he’d send his bullyboys to fetch it back no matter where you were; you’re not precisely inconspicuous. So you are as safe here in the comparative cool of Rick’s absorbing the benefits of my extensive experience as anywhere else.”

Mark allowed himself to be pulled back down in his chair. “But to have him here -”

“The same things I said about Vo apply, my nervous young son. In the matters at hand, Sobel’s will and Vo’s are one. They are like” – he held up crossed fingers – “this.”

“Well… okay. If you say so, man.” His tone made it clear that it would all be Whitelaw’s fault if Sobel set his pit-bull jokers on him.

As Mark was nervously eyeing the bar, where Sobel, Brew, and Luce had been joined by the feathered man, the joker with the purple skin and hair, and the one who seemed constantly to drip with oil, the television suddenly drew his eye.

He swallowed. There was the red-bearded face of Thomas Marion Douglas. Except it wasn’t; it was Kurt Russell, starring in Oliver Stone’s new film Destiny. He was onstage, dry-humping the mike-stand in his trademark leather pants before throngs of screaming fans. And suddenly his head and shoulders blurred, became the king-cobra hood of the Lizard King.

And there it was, the inevitable confrontation in People’s Park: Douglas bending the barrel of a.50-caliber machine gun mounted on a National Guard armored personnel carrier – Douglas struck down from behind by the wrench of the ace called Hardhat, played by Charles Bronson – the wrench upraised again, abruptly entangled by a golden peace symbol at the end of a golden chain. A quick cut to Jeff Fahey as Douglas’ unexpected savior, the radiant golden ace, the Radical.

Which was to say, Mark Meadows in his first drug-induced ace persona.

He was sitting there feeling dislocated again when a sense of presence invaded the table. Both men turned to see the colonel himself looming over them.

“Comrade Whitelaw, Dr. Meadows,” Sobel boomed. “May I sit down?”

“Certainly, Colonel,” Whitelaw said as Mark looked daggers at him. “Be our guest. Take a load off.”

Mark clamped his lips shut. There was nothing to say, and he didn’t want Cosmic Traveler saying it.

He could feel both the Traveler and J. J. Flash ripping at him for leaving his powders back at Whitelaw’s digs again. But his “friends” could only protect him for an hour at a time, and if he summoned them too frequently, the physical and psychological aftershocks became severe in a hell of a hurry. If ever he used the powders to escape an official arm of the Socialist Republic – which the American Sobel, somehow, was – he was a fugitive again. And he had no place left to run.

If he was unsafe in this official preserve of the wild cards, he had decided, he would simply have to face his fate.

Which was now settling itself in a chair with its back turned toward the table and its arms resting across it – a jarringly folksy touch in one who cultivated such frosty military dignity.

“Dr. Meadows,” Colonel Sobel said, “I owe you an apology. If you ask Comrade Whitelaw, here, he’ll tell you how rare that is.”

“Almost unheard of,” Whitelaw intoned, with an undertone of irony that Mark caught but which seemed to elude the colonel.

Sobel nodded grandly. “We simply were unsure who and what you were, Doctor. If you were what we were afraid you were, you would pose an intolerable threat to the revolution here. You understand that, surely?”

“Sure,” Mark lied.

“The Wild Cards Bureau has your blood tests hack. We’re satisfied you’re who you claim to be. I understand you’re looking for a way to serve the revolution, son.”

“Uh, I’d like to be of help to the Republic somehow. I’d like to help the jokers -”

“I’m here to offer you the opportunity to do just that, my boy. What better way than by lending your unique talents to our New Joker Brigade?”

Mark blinked. “But I – I’m not a joker. Sir.”

“No. But we’re not prejudiced.” Mark knew damned well better than that, but he was also not about to interrupt Sobel in order to contradict him. “We’re fighting for the rights of all wild cards; we’re making our first stand here, and in the end we will rise up and take the world by storm. We also offer a chance to atone for our collective guilt as Americans, for our rape of this land and its people, and our crimes against their great revolution.”

Mark’s throat was dry. Sobel’s words buzzed in his head like bees, like the head rush from a whiff of coke. Face-to-face, the man had a compelling quality, an emanation that swept objections away.

“I’m a lover, not a fighter, sir,” he managed to stammer.

“I understand you were a peacenik, boy. And God knows you were on the side of the angels, opposing America’s making war against the righteous revolution here in Vietnam. But la lucha continua, boy, especially now with the forces of reaction apparently triumphant on every side: we’re in a war, a just and historically necessary war. Under these circumstances pacifism is bourgeois decadence. It’s a luxury the committed can’t afford.”

“Oh, wow,” Mark said.

Sobel leaned away from the chair back with an indulgent chuckle. “Besides, I understand some of your ‘friends’ – perhaps I should call them comrades, eh? -”

In a pig’s ass you can call me comrade, J. J. Flash thought furiously, with Traveler a beat behind.

“- have been known to show a pugnacious streak, have they not? You’ve struck blows in the good fight before, my boy. Why not join us, where those blows can do some good?”

“Now, Colonel,” Whitelaw drawled, “surely you’re aware that in order to exercise his powers, the ace known as Captain Trips made use of certain chemicals whose very possession is looked on most unkindly by the Socialist Republic. Dr. Meadows is a man intent on living fully within the laws of the Republic. You wouldn’t be trying to set him up, now, would you?”

“What are you driving at?” Sobel demanded. Mark could feel the officer’s glare through his glasses.

Whitelaw bore its full force with fine alcoholic insouciance. “I don’t think Dr. Meadows can take your offer very seriously without a few guarantees as to his legal status, Colonel.”

Sobel barked a laugh. “You’re not trying to bargain, here, are you, Whitelaw? I know your political credentials are beyond reproach, but you’re still a damned journalist.”

“Yes, and I know you still blame journalists for making you lose a war you claim should never have been fought. You Yanks are a complicated lot, Colonel. As for me, let’s say that Meadows is an innocent – though he’s not a fool, and you judge him so at your risk. Innocence is a rare commodity in this bad old world, Colonel. By trying to keep innocence from injury I’m looking to atone for a few sins of my own, perhaps.”

“But you’ve always been a loyal friend of the revolution,” Sobel said uncomprehendingly.

“Precisely.”

Sobel shook his head, shedding Whitelaw’s words like water. “Dr. Meadows, this isn’t like back home, where the bourgeois bleeding hearts are always interfering with the doing of what’s right. If you join the revolution, in the form of my joker Brigade, what you do in service of the revolution is your glorious duty, not a crime. If you’re an ace, we want you. We need you. What do you say?”

Mark took a breath. “I’ll have to think about it.”

Sobel’s mouth tightened. He was not a man accustomed to being put off. He relaxed with a visible effort.

“All right. Hell, I understand. You know this isn’t the kind of commitment to be entered into lightly. I respect that.”

He rose. “I’ll be in town for a day or two yet. If you come to a decision” – he pointed with his head – “the boys at the bar know where to find me.

“But just remember, if you’re serious about helping the cause of the wild cards, not just here but around the world, this is your best shot at it. Gentlemen.”

He nodded to Whitelaw and walked away. He paused to speak to Brew and Luce and the others and left the bar.

“Bloody hell,” Whitelaw said. He signaled Rick for another gin.

“So, like, what do you think?” Mark asked. Brew and Luce were looking at him appraisingly, and without any real obvious friendliness.

“It’s not my decision, cobber,” Whitelaw said.

“I know that, man. But I could use, like, some perspective.”

Rick arrived with a tray bearing a gin and another Tashkent melon drink. He set the glasses down and left without speaking. Whitelaw sighed.

“Fair enough, mate, fair e-bloody-nough. Turning down our friend the colonel is not a decision to be taken lightly either; as I think I mentioned, he and Colonel Vo of the not-so-secret police are thick as thieves. And you’ve been rattling around Saigon – sod a bunch of giai phong – for days now trying to get the government to give you something to do for your fellow wild cards. Well, old son, I think you can regard this as a clear and unambiguous signal of what it is the government has in mind for you to do.”

“Which means -”

“You’ve got damn-all of a chance they’ll give you any kind of Cholon Jokertown Clinic, unless you can convince the American government to pony up some serious loot – unlikely in view of President Bush’s avid desire to bestow a hundred billion dollars to keep Comrade Gorbachev the Tsar of All the Russias, not to mention your own status as a federal fugitive.”

“So you think -”

“I think you’d be bloody daft to go marching off with Colonel Up-the-Revolution Sobel and his merry men. On the other hand, I can’t say it would be right sane to tell him to piss off, either.”

He leaned his thick forearms on the table. “If that strikes you as ambiguous, lad, then welcome to the real world.”

Whitelaw’s flat was in a gerrymandered old French villa in a rundown part of Saigon giai phong, not that Mark had yet found any parts that weren’t. Mark was wandering in the general vicinity and the rain, with a newspaper held over his head. A procession of ancient black Chevies, huge and bulbous, cruised solemnly by. Mark caught a glimpse of a timidly lovely woman in Western bridal white in the back of one.

He was having what you call your crisis of conscience.

If Starshine had still been alive, Mark would have said yes to Sobel in a second. Starshine had constantly been after Mark to use his skills in the service of social justice and had taken whatever opportunities he got to crusade against a world of ills. Mark had of course begun the whole psychochemical quest in order to become a fighter for the good, to walk once again the path of the Radical. But once he’d succeeded, if not exactly the way he wanted to, once his “friends” had started to manifest themselves, he had found it wasn’t quite that simple to save the world. Much of the world didn’t really want to be saved, and it was hard to bull your way in there and save it anyway without lots of the wrong people getting hurt – nor was Mark, the Last Hippie, comfortable with the notion that there were right people to hurt. And Starshine had proven, by his occasional one-hour flyers at stamping out injustice, that there wasn’t necessarily all that much even the most powerful meta-human could do.

By himself, anyway.

The crusading part of Mark was gone, now, though, the tough-love part determined to save the world despite itself So Mark had thought. Yet Sobel’s words had struck something within the soul of him and made it ring like a great brass bell.

An iron core of stupidity is more like it, Jumpin’ Jack Flash told him.

He shook his head, which caused the paper to buckle, dumping a load of water stained black by printer’s ink down the back of his neck. Sobel was right in a lot of ways. The world was turning savage toward the wild cards, anyone could see that. Mark’s own flight, across space and across the Earth’s own tortured surface, was proof of that.

But Mark couldn’t help remembering – with a little help from his friends – words of old songs, words about money for people with minds that hate, and how revolution was just power changing hands. Did he really want to buy into everything Sobel was saying? Wasn’t there some other way to help the wild cards?

About then he looked down the street to see a man walking toward him. A stocky man who, while much shorter than Mark, stood tall among the Vietnamese pedestrians. A man with a dark-blue polymer rain jacket around his square shoulders and a New York Yankees cap on his square head, shedding the rain from his fine waxed seal-brown mustache.

A man Mark Meadows recognized as Randall Bullock.

Mark wasn’t carrying his vials of powder, but he had much the longer legs. He turned and made good use of them.

Two hours later he was huddled in the back of a venerable American deuce-and-a-half with a half-dozen damp and apprehensive jokers, listening to the monsoon beat on canvas as the truck ground north toward Fort Venceremos, the Joker Brigade’s stronghold at the base of the Central Highlands.