Turn of the Cards

Chapter Six

Lynn Saxon stormed from the bathroom as though washed out by the thunderous noise of the toilet flushing. “I can’t believe these Roman weenies let him slip through their fingers.”

Gary Hamilton looked up from his Smith & Wesson FBI-special 10mm, which he had disassembled for cleaning on a copy of L’Osservatore Romano Belew had picked up at the airport. “What do you expect? They’re Italians.”

Helen Carlysle stood outside the open sliding door by the balcony’s wrought-iron rail watching the sun dissolve into the brown, toxic cloud that squatted over the Roman hills like a Japanese movie monster. Her hips were canted, her wrists crossed meditatively at the small of her back. The muggy air that crowded in past her like kids back from school and billowed the skirt of her lightweight dusty blue-and-gray dress smelled of diesel fumes, cooling asphalt, and garlic fried in olive oil.

“He’s an ace, after all,” she said, glancing back. “We didn’t do such a hot job holding on to him either.”

“Big of you to admit it,” said Belew. He had his shoes off and his feet up on the bed. His hands were clasped behind his close-cropped head, and his eyes were closed; everyone had assumed he was asleep.

“Let’s see you do better, big fella,” Saxon said. He sat down on a chair beside the table on which his partner worked, his butt barely seeming to touch the fabric, as if he were about to bounce right up again. He brushed his right nostril rapidly with his thumb, dropped his hand to his lap to tap his thigh with restless fingers.

“Speaking of aces,” Belew said, “just what are you doing along on this expedition, Ms. Carlysle? I didn’t think the Governor had any use for aces.”

“Fucking SCARE saddled us” Saxon began.

“Hey, we’re not prejudiced or anything,” Hamilton said hurriedly. “The Director just believes the job can best be done by real people. I mean, normal people. I mean — oh, Jeez, Ms. Carlysle, I’m sorry.”

“What dickwit means is that the Director thinks us nats can do the job just fine,” Saxon said sourly.

Belew swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up. “I reckon I can rustle up some forms from the American embassy if you want to file a discrimination complaint against our little pal here,” he said to the woman. “They’re making insensitivity a crime, back in the world.”

Helen turned with a tight, ironic smile. “Nobody seems to care much about insensitivity toward aces, Mr. Belew.”

“I guess aces aren’t a fashionable minority,” he agreed, nodding affably to Hamilton, who was staring gape-mouthed at him and Helen alternately, trying to figure out if they were kidding.

“In answer to your question, Mr. Belew, SCARE believed ace talents would come in handy in a hunt for America’s most prominent rogue ace. Director Martinez agreed. I’m a civilian contractor, much as you are yourself; my father is … was a personal acquaintance of Mr. Bennett.”

“That’s no surprise. Old Vernon made it a point to be acquainted with everybody who turned up frequently on the CBS Evening News, with the possible exception of the Nur.”

Her eyes flared. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I was unaware simple declarations of fact were required to mean anything, honey.” He stood up and walked over to the table where Hamilton was just fitting the slide back onto his piece.

“You speak of insensitivity,” she said in a shaky voice. “I don’t think repeatedly throwing my father in toy face is very sensitive.”

Hands in his pockets, he looked at her. “Don’t you think it’s time you came to terms with it?” he asked quietly.

Color burned like slap marks on her cheeks. “What makes you think it’s any of your business —”

“I don’t know why we had to come to this dump,” Saxon said loudly, flipping a hand at the Art Deco decor. The wallpaper was mauve above the molding. “It’s so fucking tacky, it hurts. Aren’t there any Hyatts in this town?”

“This place has character, son,” Belew said. “There’s more to life than Big Macs and The Cosby Show.”

He unfolded a map of the Mediterranean. “Right now we maybe ought to figure out where our Dr. Meadows is going to be heading from here.”

“He’s going to Beirut,” Hamilton blurted. He looked down at his hands, immediately aware he’d made a tactical mistake.

“Yeah,” Saxon crowed. “That’s where he bought a ticket to on your credit card, Gary. He’s headed there on your passport. You’re his best friend, Gary.”

“I think we can forget about Beirut at this point,” Belew said, picking up an ornate cigar cutter from the dresser. “At least as a near-term destination. He knows ifs blown.”

“He didn’t realize we’d trace his route through Agent Hamilton’s credit card,” Carlysle pointed out, all business once again. “Why should he suddenly be so sophisticated as to realize we’re onto his destination?”

“He’s a naïve son of a gun, I’ll give you that. But he’s behind the times, and as a consequence he’s still capable of doing something that’s currently out of fashion: learning.”

“You’re sure a hell of an expert on this old fucking hippie,” Saxon said.

“Son, I make it a point of knowing my enemy. You talk about it; it’s not just words to me. It’s kept me alive in places they’d have had your hide drying on a rock.”

Outside, the sun had dissolved into bloody-looking drool. Saxon started to his feet, eyes crazy-mad. Hamilton got a big hand on his arm and held him in his chair by main force.

“We’re running the problem through our computers in Washington,” Hamilton said. “We have a complete personality profile on Dr. Meadows. They’ll war-game the possibilities and give us some insight into where he’ll head from here.”

“Fine,” Belew said. “We’ll let your pocket-protector brigade play their computer games. In the meantime, let’s try to get a handle on where our quarry is in the real world.” He snipped the end off his right forefinger.

Saxon jerked back as blood squirted from Belew’s fingertip. The younger man’s face instantly drained of blood. “Jesus Christ!”

Belew pressed the raw tip of his finger against the base of a gooseneck lamp. It glowed to life. The head suddenly craned and swiveled to bring its glow to bear on the map.

Time to cast a little light, rather than curse the darkness,” Belew said with satisfaction.

Helen stepped forward with her arms crossed tightly beneath her breasts. Reflections from the lamp glittered in her eyes. “You’re an ace, too, aren’t you?”

“You never told us that,” Saxon said sulkily.

“Son, Langley isn’t in the habit of telling everything it knows, unlike certain of our finer government agencies. Now, pay some attention here. I’d at least like to have some tentative answers to hand before I have to leave.”

“Leave?” Saxon said. “Where the hell are you going?”

“The opera, of course. The Marriage of Figaro. They’ve got an ultramodernistic set and staging for it. I hear it’s a hell of a mess, but I like to see things with my own eyes.”

The old night train to Brindisi. Mark’s asleep.

Elite unit or not, the Rome antiterrorist unit had a tendency to mill. When somebody dressed in the same coveralls they and the legitimate ground crew were wearing dropped into view beneath the tail of the Airbus, all eyes were locked on the front of the plane, where the first team was going up a ramp that had been wheeled across the heat-shimmering pavement. When the figure strolled away, no one paid any mind.

Escape was what Cosmic Traveler did best, after all.

Mark will have to engage in some creative chemistry before he can play that ace again.

The train is winding its way across Italy’s Apennine spine. Mark is heading east — where, he isn’t sure. He’s mainly on the train because you don’t need to surrender your passport to spend the night on the train the way you do to spend your night in a hotel.

The night is clear, but that’s okay. The roll-down plastic shade is drawn. He paid cash for the tickets. He’s still using the passport; he figures it isn’t quite as hot as the credit card. Most grunt-level Eurocrats, he’s noticed, don’t look beyond the distinctive American jacket on the document, if they look at it at all. If you look like a North African or a Turkish guest-worker, they’re liable to want to count the hairs in your mustache to be sure the number’s the same as in your passport photo. Americans get treated differently. He’s learning, Mark is.

Since he’s asleep and all, he dreams.

In his dreams he’s a strapping golden youth, bare-chested, with blond hair flowing to his muscular shoulders. He swings a glowing peace symbol on a chain, and the secret police and jackboots and censors and informers of America’s New World Order retreat in confusion. He is the mightiest of Movement aces: the Radical, who fought the National Guard and Hardhat to a standstill during the riots following the Kent State murders and saved the day in People’s Park.

Mark was the Radical once, which is all the times the Radical appeared. Or maybe he wasn’t. See, he isn’t sure.

He was a sheltered child of southern California and the military-industrial complex. His father was a war hero and technocrat, his mother a very nice woman who did all the social things expected of an officer’s wife and drank perhaps more than she should, a fact Mark didn’t realize until much later. He had arrived at the University of California at Berkeley in 1969 as a four-star scientific prospect, recruited during a drive by UCB to improve its standing as a hard-science school.

He had won acclaim and science fairs with high school experiments on the effects of hallucinogenic drugs on cognitive faculties in rats. He came into college with a powerful fascination with the biochemistry of mind and very little experience of life beyond his comic books, his science club, and a crush on black-haired, violet-eyed Kimberly Anne Cordayne, who had been his major heartthrob since elementary school.

He undertook what he considered fieldwork, observing the effects of psychedelics on humans by plunging into the Bay Area subculture at the maximum bubble of its fermentation. One of the first potential subjects his searching turned up was none other than Kimberly Anne herself, now calling herself Sunflower and lovelier than ever.

He had become infatuated, both with Sunflower and the Movement with which she had so seamlessly blended. He himself couldn’t quite connect with either. But both seemed to him inexpressibly beautiful, worth any lengths to attain.

He had finally nerved himself to take the logical experimental step of dropping acid himself when the fateful news of the Kent State killings hit. Wandering by the university waiting for the drug to kick in, he had stumbled upon a confrontation in People’s Park that was rapidly going critical. That tripped the drug and flipped him right out of his skull; he stumbled backwards into an alley and wasn’t seen by a living soul for twenty-four hours.

But out of that alley at the crucial moment stepped the Radical. The National Guard was sent packing and Hardhat humbled. Radical was embraced as a brother by Tom Marion Douglas, the Lizard King, reigning rock ’n’ roll ace and master of a somber, driving musical style that was at once cerebral and visceral — Apollonian and Dionysian, as Douglas liked to say.

The Radical led a wild victory celebration, consuming vast quantities of beer and pot and truly epic sex with a violet-eyed lady who called herself Sunflower. Then, at dawn of the day following his triumph, he waved goodbye to his baggy-eyed but still stoned and jubilant admirers and walked into an alley. He was never seen again.

Mark was, though. He staggered out of the alley a short time later with his Coke-bottle glasses gone and his pants all crumpled and a headful of images he would never quite get sorted into coherent memories. His just-friend Sunflower had grabbed him by the arm and wondered loudly how he could possibly have missed what might have been the most glorious moment of the Movement. She had seen a Hero, and her eyes glowed like stars.

Mark’s faculty advisers, alarmed at the turn his private life was taking, steered him away from his study of psychoactives. He allowed himself to be maneuvered into genetic research, at least in the classroom. Outside the UCB lab, though, he grew his hair long and increasingly gave himself over to a glowing Summer of Love vision of life — an ideal that had never been, and was little more than a gauzy memory in that blood-in-the-streets spring of 1970.

His work in psychedelics continued on an extracurricular basis. He was convinced, somehow, that he had been the Radical. Some combination of drug and existing brain chemistry had activated his ace, and for one moment he had been strong and loved and valid. He would recapture that, somehow, anyhow. And Sunflower’s eyes would shine for him.

He got his doctorate in biochemistry and performed what would prove pioneering work in the field of recombinant DNA. But his heart wasn’t in it. The Radical eluded him; and that was the only goal he truly felt.

One summer dawn in 1974 Sunflower had turned up at the door of his apartment in the burnt-out huckstered-out husk of the Haight. Only, her glossy black hair had been cut to a bristly paramilitary brush, and she was calling herself Marshal Pasionara of the Symbionese Liberation Army. A dental emergency had pulled her out of the SLA’s hideout in Watts just in time to miss the fiery shootout in which Field Marshal Cinque and the others lost their lives.

The SLA’s harsh discipline had brought her off recreational chemicals of all sorts, but after four months on the Revolution’s far nut fringe she was as weird as if she’d been tweaking on crystal meth the whole time. The live news coverage of flames shooting out of the house she was supposed to be in — and the dark hints in the cell that she was showing signs of dangerous deviation and bourgeois weakness when she left to seek attention for her toothache — had slammed her to reality’s cold, hard ground.

To her parents she was dead, to her old Movement buddies she was either a dangerous zany, a deserter from the real revolution, or a possible government agente provocateuse — there was anything but consensus about the Symbionese crew — and to the United States government she was a wanted fugitive, though not under her real name or a reliable description. In all the world she knew of only one person who wouldn’t judge her, one way or another.

Mark was scraping by on sheer if sporadic brilliance, helping lesser lights deliver on their research grants. Most of his money went for his chemical dream quest and enough marijuana to take the edge off his continual disappointment. But he took her in, and felt only joy. The first two weeks she was like a fresh-trapped wild animal, all nerve ends. He let her be, even cutting his tiny apartment in two by hanging a Madras print to give her some privacy. Eventually the adrenaline buzz began to recede.

On August 8, 1974, the sixties officially came to an end with the resignation of a Whittier College alum even more notorious than Kimberly Anne and Nancy Ling Perry. Mark and Kimberly killed a bottle of wine — not Gallo — and wound up fumbling together on the rump-sprung mattress on the floor on his side of the partition. The divider came down the next day.

The next seven months or so were the happiest time Mark could remember. At dawn on the vernal equinox of 1975 Mark and Kimberly — again calling herself Sunflower — were married at Golden Gate State Park.

After that, nothing seemed to go quite right. Sunflower drifted from cause to cause, cult to cult, at once restless and listless. She began to drink and take pills. Mark retreated further into pot smoke and his search for the Radical. His odd research jobs got odder, not to mention less frequent.

Sprout was born in the spring of 1977. It was another case where partners in a failing marriage shared an unspoken belief that having a child would somehow cement their relationship. As a remedy it was akin to trying to save a crumbling bridge by running more semis over it. By the time Sprout’s developmental problem, or whatever euphemism they were using, was diagnosed in 1978, Mark and Sunflower were communicating solely in screams and silences.

The divorce was finalized in 1981. A nasty custody fight was aborted when Sunflower broke down completely at a hearing. She was declared incompetent and institutionalized in Camarillo. Mark was given sole custody of their daughter.

He took her and fled east. As a countercultural pole star, the Village had shone almost as brightly as San Francisco and Berkeley and didn’t harbor the landmarks and memories that reproached Mark for his many failures. His father, now four-star General Marcus Meadows, lent him the money to go into business for himself. He opened the Cosmic Pumpkin head shop and deli on Fitz-James O’Brien Street on the southern fringe of Greenwich Village.

He was not, to say the least, a natural businessman. His father established a trust fund to discreetly funnel money into the store. Mark and Sprout got by.

Then, in early 1983, his long quest for the Radical bore fruit. But like Cristoforo Colombo setting forth in 1492 to find a quick way around the world and fall on Jerusalem from behind to liberate it from the paynim, where he wound up wasn’t exactly where he intended to go …

Curled up on the fold-down bed, Mark stirs, moans softly. He has the compartment all to himself. He drools a little on the pillow. Outside, the Italian night rattles by.