Turn of the Cards

Chapter Four

“I’m sorry,” the shopkeeper said, shaking his head slowly as if to emphasize the gravity of his regret. All around him clocks looked on with idiot faces, ticking and electronic hum combining into cicada susurration. “I cannot give you job. No papers.”

“Well, thanks anyway, man.”

“You want a job?” The stall-keeper was a whole foot shorter than Mark, and his head looked disconcertingly like one of the cantaloupes he had piled in mathematical ranks in the bins, fringed with longish gray hair. “Very difficult these days. Perhaps I can find you something. You can pay?”

Reflexively Mark felt the pockets of his stained and slept in khaki pants. There was the reassuring weight of a Takisian gold piece, the crinkle and tinkle of some guilders’ change.

I thought the point of getting a job was to make money, he thought. Besides, the man’s manner sang of illegality like fingernails down a blackboard. Mark thought the last thing he needed now was more trouble.

Nodding politely, he turned and walked out of the open-air stand.

“Out! Go away! You police, you provocateur!”

The tiny Moluccan restaurant’s tiny Moluccan owner waved stick arms at Mark while aproned kids, probably his, scurried for cover with practiced familiarity.

Recoiling, Mark held up his hands in front of his face. “Wait, man, I’m not from the police. All I want is a job.”

“Ha! Job. Job! I spit.” He spat. “Job!”

He got up in Mark’s face, or at least his sternum. “You American, huh? You no European?” He wound his hands furiously in the towel at his waist as if trying to choke it.

“That’s right. I’m American.”

“Ha!” The proprietor darted behind a counter that offered candies in bright wrappers covered with pictures of elephants and monkeys and unfamiliar script. He rummaged out of sight, produced a stack of papers that threatened to overflow his small fist.

“See? You see? All papers must be fill out. European Community make man write whole life story, write book to get job. But you American. You no got paper, no got permit. I fill out form on you, I still go to jail!”

It got him going again. He came rushing out flapping the sheaf of Euroforms in Mark’s face like a live chicken. “Out! Out now! Orang besar yang tipis get Molucca man big trouble!”

Outside, the sun was getting low, and the light was taking on that odd, soft quality of afternoon light in an ancient town in these latitudes, like a sepia-tone print from long ago.

Night coming soon. He shivered, though the afternoon was warm and a trifle muggy and he was sweating in his sweater. He put his head down and began to walk. Quite purposefully, though he had no idea where he was going.

“Marx,” the woman said as she wrote the name on a form pinned to a clipboard. “First name?”

“Julius,” Mark said.

She wrote that down too. She stood. She was a diminutive woman in a black blouse splashed with purple and a hint of yellow. Black skirt and stockings accented rather heavy legs. Black hair cut in a modified pageboy came down in pointed wings to either side of her triangular chin. She had lavender-and-black eye shadow and a general air of shopworn prettiness.

“Please come with me, Mr. Marx,” she said.

She turned and led off from the reception desk in a foyer lit yellow by electric bulbs in sconces in the wall, down a corridor of stone that must have been horribly expensive when it was laid near Spui Square during the troubled sixteenth century. Sint Antoninus Hof had begun life as a Catholic convent. It was now a homeless hostel.

Mark fondled the coin in his pocket and felt guilty as hell. He had money, and here he was trying to jump lodging that might have gone to some homeless person. He didn’t dare go back to his flat; the tiny tag-end of Takisian loot he’d had in his pocket when he went out the window was going to have to last him a good long time. That still didn’t make it feel right.

But we were talking life-and-death here. More than the money, a hotel would require Mark to surrender his passport. That would be it for him; the police checked hotel registrations on a daily basis. Holland looked with tolerance on its own drug users, but in the face of mounting pressure from the rest of the EuroCommunity as well as Big Brother across the Atlantic they were beginning to cooperate with American drug enforcers. And it wasn’t as if Mark was merely wanted for the few grams of forbidden chemicals — mainly psychedelics, as far out of fashion in the nineties as elephant bell — she could be proven to have had possession of.

Light spilled out an open door. It had the slightly irreal offcast of fluorescent light, a blue-tinged jitter that imparted a real night-of-the-living-dead look. She led him into its full glare.

Inside was an examining room. It had an old-timey look to Mark, wood where an American room would have been gleaming metal. A young doctor in a white coat sat reading a newspaper with his legs folded. As the woman led Mark in he jumped up, looking outraged.

He sputtered something in Dutch. Dutch always sounded like gargling to Mark; the country was pretty, the people friendly, and he loved the funky old streets of Amsterdam, but the language was just plain ugly. The doctor had long blond hair. It was thin on top.

“Mr. Marx needs shelter,” the woman said pointedly in English.

“Very well, Mrs. Wiersma,” the doctor said without enthusiasm. “I’ll see to him. Here, take off your shirt.”

Mrs. Wiersma smiled and nodded encouragement. She showed no sign of going away. As Mark pulled his sweater off, he couldn’t help but wonder whether it was because the Dutch had less body modesty or because the hostel staff were used to processing the homeless on the assembly line. There wasn’t much of a crowd tonight — Mrs. Wiersma and the doctor were the only people he’d seen. But it was early evening, sun barely down and warm yet. The real crush wouldn’t happen until the nighttime North Sea wind really began to bite.

The doctor examined Mark with distracted briskness — poked here, tapped here, placed the cold ring of the stethoscope to his skin and bade him breathe. Mark did.

“Any chronic conditions or communicable diseases?”

“No.”

The doctor tapped Mark a last time on the chest. “You sound good for one of ours,” he said, frowning slightly. “You smell better than most, also.”

“Thanks, man.”

The doctor nodded and turned away. Mark sat dangling his long legs off the end of the examining table and tried not to look at Mrs. Wiersma. She was staring at him with the earnest intensity of an indulgent grownup watching an unusually untalented neighbor child perform in a school pageant: knowing the child will screw up, but trying to beat the odds by sheer positive energy.

“Hold out your arm.”

“What?”

The doctor’s bored professionalism turned chill. Mark saw he held a hypodermic. “Your arm. I must draw blood. Come along, now, it won’t take a minute.”

He reached for Mark’s arm. Mark snatched it away and held his other hand protectively over the elbow. “What’re you testing for?”

Scowling openly now, the doctor turned and said something to Mrs. Wiersma in Dutch. “Certainly he has a right to know,” she answered in English. “We are not crowded now. Come, be gentle.”

The doctor sighed. “We must test for hepatitis, HIV, and xenovirus Takis-A.”

Mark felt as if the flesh of his hairless chest and arms had turned to the marble it resembled in the otherworldly light. “Wild card virus? W-why?”

“It is the law.”

“New government regulations,” Mrs. Wiersma said hurriedly. “There was much resistance here to the idea of mandatory testing. The European Commission proposed it last fall, and the Council of Ministers passed the directive. Because it concerned health and safety, there was nothing the Netherlands could do. The European Community holds sway.”

“Your arm,” the doctor said.

“No,” Mark said. “Wait. I — can’t.”

The doctor turned away. “No test, no stay.”

“Oh, please,” Mrs. Wiersma said. “We wish to help you. We can’t if you won’t let us.”

Mark moistened his lips. He made himself breathe quickly and shallowly, as if a panic attack was coming on. It didn’t take much acting skill. “I — I’m afraid of needles. Got it real bad.”

“Perhaps if you had a few minutes to think it over, to calm yourself,” Mrs. Wiersma said. “Really, it’s for your own good.”

“I haven’t got all night,” the doctor complained. “I have other duties.”

“Just let me think about it a little,” Mark said.

The doctor had lost interest in him, returning to his chair and paper. Mark hurriedly pulled on his shirt and sweater and walked back out to the front. Mrs. Wiersma hovered beside him, cooing at him and touching him dartingly on the elbow.

“I need to go outside a minute,” Mark said. He had a catch to his voice, as if he was in danger of throwing up at any moment. He had gotten so frothed up by phony fear of needles and genuine fear of discovery that he really was about to puke.

“Certainly, certainly,” Mrs. Wiersma said, alighting behind her little wooden desk. “You poor man.”

Mark smiled wanly at her, nodded, walked out the arched front door into the evening, and away.

The naked pink neon woman bent over. The naked blue neon man leaped forward in an arc and thrust his prominently erect member into her from behind. Mark decided they were doing some pretty radical things with neon these days. A ripening of the breeze drove the rain into him where he huddled in the doorway. The rain pitted the surface of the canal with dark saucers and made the big purple, pink, and magenta oblongs of light tossed onto the water from the houses’ big front windows waver and bobble like ectoplasm. Mark shuddered, hugged himself with hands that felt inside and out like the cold wet hands of a statue.

Dutch households liked to leave their front curtains open so that passersby could admire the bourgeois splendor of their decor. The houses that lined the block away from the porn shop with the interesting and educational neon sign were no exception. It was the interior design that was unusual.

In each window sat a woman. Each was scantily clad, in costumes weighted heavily to garter belts and housecoats, though some outfits were tuned to the fetishist eye: a nurse, two nuns, and a probably Indonesian woman in chiffon and fake feathers that Mark had an awful suspicion was supposed to suggest a Native American princess.

The babes looked bored. Several did needlepoint, a couple read, and the Indian maid had a laptop computer propped on her thin bare thighs. Mark wasn’t sure how they managed to read in the gloom. The rows of garishly if inadequately lit windows reminded him irresistibly of the aquariums they used to have in cheap lounges back in the early sixties.

It was a poor night for business. No tourists were braving the rain to gawk at the cellulite on display, not even your usually indefatigably horny Japanese businessmen. Even as Mark watched, one of the nuns took off her headgear, tossed it in a corner, and drew the frilly drapes with a flourish of disgust.

He had heard somewhere that whorehouses sometimes offered the cheapest accommodations. Maybe that was true. The problem was, these weren’t whorehouses, and the occupants depended on rapid turnover, even if they weren’t getting much tonight. He somehow doubted any of them would be in a mood to cut a deal on crash space alone.

He craned his head out of the doorway that provided him largely symbolic shelter. No break in the weather. Maybe he’d drift back to the warehouse and see if any watchmen had yet spotted the window he’d jimmied to get out of his last night’s lie-up.

Sprout was a million miles away. Tomorrow morning didn’t seem much closer.

At least there weren’t any stars.

“Cocaine? Hashish? Heroin?”

Mark put his head down to avoid eye contact and practiced his broken-field running, trying to dodge the West African blacks doing the Leidseplein caracole on those funky bikes with the handlebars turned upside-down, like steer horns.

He was on his way to Vondel Park, just south of Leyden Square. You couldn’t crash in the huge park anymore, thanks to abuse of the privilege by the trend-followers and wannabes who appropriated the name “hippies” during the mid-seventies. It was still a major nexus for the European counterculture.

Mark, of course, had never actually been a member of the counterculture. That was his curse; that was the dramatic irony of his life. From the time he first discovered the glories of the counterculture, as a flat-topped biochemistry major in high-water pants in the fall of 1969, through his days as Cap’n Trips, the ace with the purple Uncle Sara suit and no visible powers whose not-so-secret secret identity was the mild-mannered owner of the last head shop on Manhattan Island, Mark’s journey had been a personal one. He had never actually participated to any extent in the Movement.

Of course, maybe that was why he was still keeping the faith in the early 1990s, when all others were become stockbrokers and informers. Mark didn’t think that way. He was more inclined to wonder if he’d ever been more than a spectator to his own life.

Now Mark, in desperation, was seeking the communal shelter of what remained of the counterculture. These days the kids were lean and mean, with spiked hair in exotic colors or the Wacht am Rhein butch cuts of the Greens — long hair and beards went with potbellies and Coke-bottle glasses. Not too congenial, but he was running out of options.

He had lived for a time as a federal fugitive on the streets of New York. But that was his own country, where you didn’t need identification papers to find lodging for the night, or a job — at least if you were as blond and tall as Mark. Amsterdam was a tolerant place, and the people friendly in their own reserved way. But for a foreigner on the run, all the colors were wrong and the corners were sharp and unwelcoming, and the rising wind of Euro-unification blew cold through streets that once sheltered the dissident and different.

He noticed the real-world wind coming up, sharp and cold and crisp as a knife-blade across the sunny, complacent heat of afternoon. He pulled his sweater tighter around him, hunched his shoulders. His clothes were still wet from the soaking they’d received last night.

Wind began to whistle in his ears. Scraps of trash brushed his legs like small frightened animals. He found himself leaning forward as he walked; he never realized a gale could come up quite this quickly, even off the turbulent North Sea.

Debris began to swirl around him.

A black pedal-pusher fell off his bike and went tumbling down the street, scattering pedestrians. Mark couldn’t hear anything. He was having trouble breathing.

The wind was too much for him. He stopped, and clutched himself, and shivered. He wondered what the hell was going on.

The wind stopped. Something small and hard and metallic rammed into his right kidney hard enough to keep him from recovering his breath.

“Walk this way, motherfucker,” an American voice hissed in his ear.