Wildcards

I.

"If you wish to find the unclouded truth, do not concern yourself with right and wrong."

– -Seng-ts'an: Hsin-hsin Ming.

Brennan watched all the color fade from the landscape as the bus came down from the quiet coolness of the mountains to the sweltering stickiness of a summer city day. Endless asphalt parking lots replaced meadows and grassy fields. Buildings grew taller and crowded closer to the roadway. Leaden lightpoles supplanted the trees on the median and along the road. Even the sky turned sullen and gray, threatening rain.

He disembarked at the Port Authority with the other passengers. They scattered to their myriad destinations, their eyes averted in the habitual manner of the big-city dweller, without giving him a second glance. Not that there was anything about him to cause someone to glance twice.

He was tall, but not excessively so. His build was more lithe than bulky. His hands were large. Suntanned and scarred, veins and cords stood out on their backs like thick wires. His face was dark and lean and unremarkable. He wore a denim jacket, frayed and sunbleached, a dark cotton tee shirt, a fresh pair of blue jeans, and dark running shoes. He carried a small soft-sided bag in his left hand and a flat leather case in his right.

Forty-second Street outside the Port Authority building was crowded. He merged into the flow of the foot traffic, allowing it to take him into an area of Manhattan that was only slightly less seedy than some of the more polite parts of Jokertown. He extricated himself from the swarm of pedestrians after a few blocks and went up the decaying stone steps of the Ipswhich Arms, a blowsy hotel that apparently catered to the local hooker trade. It looked as if business was bad. People were apparently going to Jokertown for their kicks. They were cheaper there and, even if only a fraction of what he had read was true, a lot kickier.

The desk clerk looked dubious when he came in alone and with luggage, but took his money and gave him directions to a room that was as small and dirty as he had thought it would be.

He closed the door, put his bag on the floor, and carefully set his leather case on the sagging bed.

The room was sweltering, but Brennan had been in hotter places. He felt confined by the filthy bare walls around him, but opening a window wouldn't have helped. He laid down on the bed and stared at the peeling ceiling without seeing the roaches racing above his head. The words of a letter he had received the day before kept running through his mind.

"Captain Brennan, he is here. I have seen him, but I am afraid that he saw and recognized me as well. Come to the restaurant. Be cautious, but open."

There was no signature, but he recognized Minh's elegant, precise hand. There was no address, but he didn't need one. Minh had hidden him in his restaurant for several days when he had surreptitiously returned to the States three years before. And Brennan had no doubt to whom his old friend referred in the letter. It was Kien.

He closed his eyes and saw a face: masculine, lean, predatory. He tried to make it vanish. He tried to blank it from his mind by conjuring-from the depths of his consciousness the sound of one hand clapping. He tried, but failed. The face smiled, mocking him. It began to laugh.

He sat on the bed, waiting for the darkness and what it would bring.