Ace In The Hole

9:00 A.M.

Gregg didn't think he'd slept much at all the night before. The last ballot hadn't been cast until early morning, and then there'd been a mild staff celebration in the green room-he'd broken the eighteen-hundred-vote barrier. The hope was that the momentum would swing him to 2,081 and the nomination by evening. "Three hundred votes. Piece of cake," deVaughn had said.

And Gregg didn't care. He didn't care.

Gregg stood at the window of his suite looking down at the crowds swirling below in the morning sunshine-Hartmann supporters, mostly, from the hats. He rubbed his eyes, sipping on black coffee in a Stvrofoam cup. The coffee burned in his stomach; Puppetman burned in his head.

"Goddamn it, you have to feed me," Puppetman wailed, and with the voice came the presence's agony-that feeling of slow starvation.

"I can't." Gregg could feel that emptiness in his own stomach, a steady craving. "I want to, but we can't. You know that. "

"We don't have a fucking choice, not any more." Puppetman clawed at him with mental talons. Gregg's fingers clenched the heavy curtains. The sight of people walking in the morning sunshine mocked Puppetman's hunger. He wanted them. He wanted to leap down like a panther and ravage them. His fingers whitened with the intensity of his grip.

"Back in New York-" Gregg began, but Puppetman cut him off.

"Now! We won't get to New York for another week. I can't wait that long. You can't wait that long."

"What the hell do you want me to do?" Gregg raged back in desperation. "It's not me, it's Gimli. We have to do something about him. Give me another day," Gregg pleaded. "Now!"

"Please.." Gregg was nearly sobbing. His head throbbed with, the pain of holding Puppetman back. He wanted to rip his skull open and gouge out the demanding power with his bare hands.

"SOON, then, goddamn it! Soon, or I'll make you crawl again. I'll strip you naked and make you beat yourself off in front of the press. Do you hear me? I'll eat you if I can't have anyone else. Gimli's right in that."

Puppetman raked his mind again and Gregg gasped with the pain. "Leave me alone!" he shouted. His knotted fingers tore the curtains from the wall in a fury. Thev crashed to the ground in a thunder of rods and hooks. Gregg hurled his coffee cup across the room, splattering the plush furniture and burning his hand. "Just leave me alone!" he screamed, his fingers dragging at his face.

"Gregg!"

"Senator!"

Ellen had come from the bedroom. At the same time, Billy Ray burst in through the hall door. Both of them stared at Gregg and the wreckage of the room, Ellen with a stark horror on her face, and her hands folded protectively over her stomach. "My god, Gregg," she said. It was a whisper this time. "I heard you arguing… I thought there was somebody else here…" Her voice trailed off.

Gregg blinked stupidly, shocked. For the first time Gregg realized that Puppetman had spoken out loud. He'd been holding a goddamn out-loud conversation with Puppetman and hadn't known. The horror of it made him moan.

Ellen glanced at Ray.

Billy looked from Ellen to Gregg, stared for long seconds. Then he backed out of the suite, closing the door behind him. Gregg was gasping in the middle of the room. He forced his breathing to slow. He tried to shrug, to pretend it had been nothing. "Ellen…" he began, but couldn't say anything.

He was suddenly crying, like a child frightened of the dark.

Ellen came to him with a brave smile, cradling his head on her shoulder and stroking his hair. "It's okay, Gregg," she murmured, but he could hear the terror in her voice. "It's okay now. Everything's all right. I love you, darling. You just have to rest." Words. Just words.

Gregg could hear Gimli's laughter and-for just a moment-he wondered why Ellen seemed to ignore it.

"The great state of Iowa! God's country! Corn country!" (Tachyon wondered how the man could keep up this kind of enthusiasm after so many ballots.) "Casts four votes for Senator Al Gore!"

The Omni Convention Center made Tachyon think of a giant funnel. People, like tiny grains of spices, all clinging to the precipitous sides while gravity tried to tumble them willy-nilly into the level area of the basketball court. It was an exaggeration of course, but the facility did give the alien vertigo.

Dribbling powdered sugar down his coat front, Tachyon hurriedly balanced his cruller on top of his coffee cup, snatched up his fountain pen, and jotted down the number. Then glanced at the running totals in five columns each headed by an initial. Gore was definitely floundering. Only a matter of time now. Hartmann had crawled painfully to nineteen hundred. Tach drew the back of his hand across his gritty, aching eyes. His session with the Secret Service had lasted until five. By then it seemed pointless to go to bed.

"Your boy's in trouble," said Connie Chung, sliding into a folding chair behind him. The headset with its antenna made her look like a lopsided insect.

"My boy, as you put it, is doing just fine. Once Gore drops out-"

"You're going to be in for a rude shock."

"What do you mean?" asked Tach, alarmed.

"He's faced with a choice between three Northern liberals and a conservative Southerner. What do you think-"

"No," said Tach with loathing.

She brushed sugar from his chin. "You really are a baby at this, Doctor. Watch and learn." She started away then looked back and added, "Oh, by the way, Gore's called a press conference for ten o'clock."

The phone rang during Jack's first Camel of the day. For a moment he couldn't find his briefcase, then discovered it under the coffee table. He picked up the receiver and collapsed on the couch. His caller was Amy Sorenson.

"We're in trouble. Gregg wants your ass over here." Jack stared at the ceiling through gummed eyes. "What's the problem?"

"Gore's called a press conference for later this morning. He's dropping out, and he's gonna tell his people to support Barnett."

"That cocksucker! That yuppie cocksucker!" For once Jack wasn't conscious of using bad language in front of a woman. He jumped off the couch, knocking the coffee table halfway across the room. "He's going to be Barnett's veep, right?"

"Looks that way."

"Prince Albert in a fucking can."

"And some wild card talent carved up a member of the Fourth Estate in Peachtree Mall last night, so guess who's gonna be capitalizing on it. Just get over here."

The staff meeting couldn't resolve anything except to hold on and hope-for defections. Gore's endorsement couldn't be anything but the result of some major payoff, and it might offend some of his followers who couldn't stomach Barnett.

Hartmann gained another 104 delegates on the fourth ballot, so Jack's worst fears weren't realized. But Barnett picked up nearly three hundred, and the momentum was definitely his. On his little two-inch Sony, Jack heard Dan Rather relate stories of party power brokers trying to form an `anyone but Hartmann movement. Speculations about a dream Dukakis/Jackson ticket were spiced with pointed reminders that Jackson had more delegates, and perhaps the ticket should be Jackson/Dukakis. Analysts wondered whether Jackson was willing to eat crow in order to be vice president.

Apparently he wasn't. The ABH movement, as Rather began calling it, seemed to remain the fantasy of a few party hacks and the Barnett campaign staff, who regarded "Anyone but Hartmann" as the equivalent of "Why not the Firebreather?"

Anyone but Hartmann. Jack couldn't believe he was hearing this. Why the hell wasn't it Anyone but Barnett?

A secret ace, he thought. Maybe there's a secret ace. The Gremlins from the Kremlin as an alternate hypothesis was definitely losing ground.

At first it went well. Sara could do this walking in her sleep, the mechanical interviews, stuff of every third Sunday supplement article and human interest story on the tank town ten o'clock news: What's it like to be a joker in America?

It wasn't good journalism. It was something she specifically despised: families-of-dead-shuttle-astronauts, how-doesit-feel-to-be-raped reporting. But of course this wasn't journalism at all; it was survival.

It all went fine until she was recognized.

The jokers camped in the park came from all over: California, Idaho, Vermont, even a few from Alaska and Hawaii. While the better-read of them would recognize her name she was one of the premiere writers on wild card matters in the world, after all-she wasn't a broadcast journalist. Everybody knew Connie Chung's face, nobody knew hers. That had always satisfied her.

But there were a lot of her old buddies from J-town here, too. She hadn't even thought what their reaction to her would be until a furred, taloned hand took her shoulder and spun her away from the joker mother and two desperately disparate children she was unspooling inanities from, into a hot blast of spoiled-meat predator's breath.

"Just what do you think you're doing here?" a voice asked. The first panicked reaction was still echoing in the corridors of Sara's brain, it's him I wish I had a gun dear God Ricky Ricky, when she recognized the person who'd accosted her. She was hard to mistake: six feet from the black moist nose at the end of her wedge-shaped head to the tip of her tail, round-eared, bandit-masked, black guard hairs over buff fur shading toward silver on her belly, like a Disneymation anthropomorphic ferret made real. The only thing she wore was a green vest studded with Hartmann buttons and bitter joker slogans: WHY BE NORMAL? and JJS! and TAKE A NAT TO LUNCH. Sara knew her well; she should have been just another teenaged Italian girl wearing a dowdy, blue-plaid skirt to St. Mary's. She'd been busted for the first time at fourteen, during a Free Doughboy demonstration.

"Mustelina," she said. "Hi. How are you?"

"What do you think you're doing here, bitch?" Sara recoiled from her vehemence. It was amazing how the Disney people always missed details like the two-inch fangs curving from her upper jaw.

"What do you mean?" The time she'd spent among jokers had inured her so she didn't flinch away from the girl's breath. Mustelina's joker had included a compulsive craving for live meat. Fortunately there were a lot of rats in Jokertown.

A crowd was accreting. Many of the jokers from the sticks were anonymous behind masks, but the J-town contingent tended to parade its jokerhood, wearing disfigurements like proud stigmata. She recognized Glowbug and Mr. Cheese and Peanut with his hard-shelled stump and a strange look in his eye. They had been her friends. There was little friendship here now.

"You know real well what I mean. You sold us to Barnett." She blinked, tears starting hot. "What are you talking about?"

"You're the one tried to smear Senator Gregg," a Southern voice said from behind a Kabuki mask with eyebrows halfway up a domed white forehead.

"You turned on Hartmann," Mustelina said. "You turned on us. You got a lot of nerve coming here like this."

"Yeah, traitor," somebody else called. "Nat!"

"Fucking Jew bitch!"

She tried to back away. They hemmed her on all sides, the faces of grotesques by Goya and Hokusai and Bosch, hostile masks of feathers and plastic smooth as bone. Why did I come here? These are Hartmann's people.

Suddenly Mustelina was snatched right out of her face and thrown fifteen feet. She curled into a ball, rolled, came up bottling and popping like a string of firecrackers.

A vast white figure loomed over the incipient mob. It held out a chubby hand, pallid and shiny as uncooked dough. "Come on, Thara," it lisped in the voice of a black child. "I'll take you where it'th thafe."

She clung to the hand. Doughboy started forward with his rolling gait and Sara at his side. The crowd gave back. He was nonviolent. He also weighed in at upwards of six hundred, and had the strength of three or four nat men. In his own way he was quite irresistible.

"I thaw you on Mechano's televithion," Doughboy said. "You were thaying terrible things about the Thenator. Everybody thaid you were a twaitor."

She looked up at him. His face was an unpitted moon. He smiled without lips or teeth.

"You are my friend, Thara. I knew you'd never do nothing wrong."

She hugged him. She also kept walking. This was an ideal place for Hartmann's marionette to hit her, it had belatedly occurred to her. For that matter, if it hadn't been for Doughboy's arrival, his work might just have been done for him. Some of the crowd was still trailing along behind.

"Will you bwing me some candy sometime, Mith Thara?" Doughboy asked. "Nobody brings me candy since Mithter Thyiner went away."

He stopped at the street and faced her. "When will Mithter Thyiner come back? Do you think he'll come back soon?"

"He's not coming back, honey," she said gently. "You know that." It had been a stroke, that January. Doughboy found him paralyzed on his mattress in their little Eldridge Street apartment, carried him through the streets weeping and begging for someone to help fix Mr. Shiner. He reached Jokertown Clinic before an ambulance with a heavy enough suspension to carry him could be found-nobody was going to try to separate him from his friend and guardian. By that time there was nothing even Dr. Tachyon could do.

Tears rolled from Doughboy's button eyes. "I mith him. I mith him tho."

She reached up. She wasn't tall enough. He bent over until she could wrap her arms around his neck.

"I know you do, honey," she said through her own tears. "Thank you for helping me. I'll bring you candy soon. I love you."

She kissed his cheek and walked quickly away without looking back.