Torch Song: A Kickass Heroine, A Post-Apocalyptic World: Book One Of The Blackjack Trilogy (17 page)

“What about the fence?”

“Maybe Waldo put them up. The Colemans might not approve of what Waldo does, but they always seem to let him do it. And Judith, well, she’s just glad the medicine shows don’t pretend they’re selling vax.” Fredo nodded, looking grim. Timmy sighed. “That’s how Judith’s husband died. His original vax was phony garbage. Didn’t matter how many boosters he got after that. The kids were little at the time. Terrible.”

We sat there silent for a moment. For some reason, it hadn’t occurred to me the Colemans might have seen hard times. Then Fredo broke in. “Anyway, I doubt Waldo put up the flyers himself. He’s too lazy.”

Timmy laughed. “You’re right. Let’s not talk about Waldo any more. It’s curdling my tofu.”

Okay, no more Waldo. The chief had told me she thought the sheriff belonged to the Colemans. I could check that out. I ate a prawn, sipped some wine.

“You said ‘our friend the sheriff’— is he a friend of the Colemans, too? Like the mayor was?”

Tim shot me a curious squint. Fredo spoke up. “The sheriff doesn’t do anything that would hurt the Colemans.” Tim was still giving me that squint. Time to back off.

“Well, Tahoe is a fascinating place, with lots to gossip about.” I held up my glass. “But I’m more interested in Fredo’s birthday. Here’s to you, Fredo, Tim’s love, my friend. And many happy returns!”

A juggler, an acrobat, a man with a fiddle

I parted with Tim and Fredo after lunch, hugs all around, telling them I’d see them at work later. Meanwhile, my adrenaline was still pumping and the food had given me a boost. Despite the lack of sleep, I wasn’t ready for a nap and most of all, I was not at all eager to go back to the casino. So I followed the flyers toward the Blue Chip diner and the corner where the medicine show was being held. I’d be right on time.

I’d been to a few of these extravaganzas in my life. Once, when I was a child in Redwood, up on top of Mount Tamalpais in the old stone amphitheater. They’d had a juggler, an acrobat, a man with a fiddle and another man who talked fast and sold a lot of bottles of something, I couldn’t remember the name, before the sheriff showed up and hauled the lot of them away. Once in Ontario, near the Toronto ruins. Another time, in Middle, in the Ozarks. In California, down near Los Angeles. In Rocky, on the smelly shore of the Salt Lake amid the ruins of a salt-processing plant. In Desert, right in the center of the inhabited cluster of Tucson.

Generally the locals shut them down pretty fast— the one in California was stopped in the middle of a knife-throwing act— but those last two times the show people had gotten away ahead of the law.

These con artists could be found pretty much everywhere on the continent, traveling by bus, truck, car caravan— the one in Middle was set up around a horse-drawn wagon. For all I knew, since I’d never been off North America, they were stealing money from suckers all over the world. I’d heard it was so. They all sold the cure for whatever ailed you, and they sold it cheap.

Usually, the base was feel-good alcohol, sugar, and flavoring. Sometimes they added herbs if they could scrounge some. Despite the low prices, there was lots of money to be made if you mixed up enough of the stuff and kept your costs low. People who couldn’t buy vax and never saw a doctor would try anything. Even though there didn’t seem to be as many dying these days, and even though I knew the hostels were fewer and emptier, the memories were long.

Running medicine shows was one of the crimes Chief Graybel had said the Colemans were accused of. But I just couldn’t see them being involved in a cheap scam. Judith Coleman was tough and smart, but a heartless con-woman? I didn’t think so. And she probably had some very bad feelings about fake medicine. Jo? Well, she seemed driven and sharply focused. Possibly ruthless. But the shows were trashy, and she was anything but that. Samm? He was pretty much an unknown at this point. It just didn’t feel right. Again, it seemed tacky. He had a big ego and I suspected he would think this kind of thing was unworthy of The General.

Skimming. Now that made sense. Not hard to do. Big money. And if they were taking a cut off the top before taxes, they didn’t need to sell homemade liqueur for five reals a bottle.

It was possible that if I wormed my way into a dealing job, I could catch a glimpse of how they were doing it. It was also possible that the money was being misappropriated so skillfully I’d have to work as a cashier and a bookkeeper too, to prove anything at all. Why not? Tail generals, catch the mayor’s murderer, deal with Newt, sing in the lounge and handle four full-time shifts. All in a day’s work.

I’d already caught them training  an army, but the chief hadn’t seemed interested in hearing the details of what I’d seen. Maybe they needed to march down Stateline shooting people before she could do anything. Maybe she wanted me to catch Jo drawing up a master plan to take over the world.

I was a few minutes early, but a scattering of people were already standing around, some of them excited, loud and happy, others with a “show me” smirk. Some of them were probably wondering if the sheriff would show up before they got a chance to buy or even worse, before they got to see the show, but from what Timmy had said about the sheriff, I didn’t think that was likely.

When the Omnicillin bus pulled up in front of the Blue Chip, it skidded in the gutter dust, stirring a cloud that made everyone cough. Maybe the medicine would help that. Clear the throat and soothe the nerves, if nothing else.

I glanced in the diner’s window. Xavier was wiping down the counter, ignoring the fuss outside. He probably got a cut for not calling the cops.

The bus, including the windows, was painted in bright blue and yellow stripes— stripes for Tahoe? What would they use in Nebraska, funnel cloud shapes? Snowflakes for Northland? Icicles for Ontario? Jugs of moonshine for Middle?

The driver, a baggy-eyed dissipated-looking man who could have been 45 or 65, was crowned with a smudgy black top hat. A real antique. And when he trotted down the stairs carrying a folding table, I could see he was also wearing a seedy, faded black tuxedo that must have been older than he was. One assistant, a large fortyish woman wearing a long flowered cotton dress, helped him set up the table. Another, a young man of about thirty, almost clown-like with bright yellow hair and baggy pants that dragged on the ground— big floppy shoes and face paint would have finished the job— began bringing out signs and boxes of bottles. By now the crowd had grown. There must have been twenty people standing there, and more were coming.

When the younger man had finished setting up his displays, he went back into the bus and emerged carrying an ancient, stained accordion.

They seemed to be getting all their possessions from some Twentieth Century landfill. In Los Angeles.

He began to play a John Phillip Sousa march, of all things. I can barely tell them apart but I thought it was “Stars and Stripes Forever.” And the fortyish woman, who had put on a straw hat, began to do an odd kind of dance-march to the music, tipping the hat in a salute every time she turned. When the song ended, she tossed her hat high into the air and caught it. The young clown-man cheered. A few spectators clapped.

The man in the top hat had set up an easel with a badly-drawn poster that featured lopsided bottles of their wares in various colors. He took over once the hesitant applause stopped.

“We’ve got it right here, folks!” he yelled. “This is the real thing! The real medicine the government’s hiding from you so their dealers can sell the vax— the vax you can’t afford to buy! Selective breeding, that’s what it is— steal from the poor and sell to the rich! Are you going to stand for that?” A few people mumbled “no.” One woman laughed. It was the standard spiel, although his explanation of selective breeding was a little more muddled than most.

Omnicillin, he said, pointing at each of the bottles on the poster, came in six flavors— lime, lemon, cherry, blackberry, apple and anise. These were all delicacies that any enterprising Redwooder could grow in his yard or pick along the road, but he didn’t mention that. The cherry and apple were the same color.

At five reals a bottle, he said, you couldn’t go wrong. He began to rave about the curative properties of each flavor, sliding the first poster behind a second one that listed those properties in capital letters with lots of exclamation marks.

Lime and lemon cured colds, flu, and dengue. Cherry dealt with all kinds of immunodeficiencies, including AIDS and red-rash, and was also used in the treatment of measles, smallpox, and chicken pox. Blackberry was a specific for Ebola and black plague. Apple eradicated viral cancers and neutralized pesticide poisoning. Anise cured all new and as-yet-unnamed viruses as well as several other cancers, particularly melanoma.

All for five reals a bottle.

A fat man in a red suit— Santa Claus?— jumped down from the bus and began strumming a banjo. Sounded like bluegrass, but it was too fast. While he played the man in the tux recited weirdly-rhymed poetry— “melanoma, take-it-homa” was my favorite— about his medicine and about the conspiracy to keep vax prices high, and in the middle of all that, two young women, also wearing long flowered dresses, suddenly appeared in the bus doorway, leapt down the stairs, joined the large woman, and they all started doing a speedy can-can, back and forth in front of the audience, while the banjo and the accordion competed with each other trying to keep up with the dancers. It looked to me like they’d all had way too much Omnicillin. The guy in the tux had stopped reciting poetry to do business. The crowd had by now grown to perhaps three dozen people, and they were falling all over themselves to buy the stuff.

The young man had to put aside his accordion to climb back into the bus and carry down more bottles of Omnicillin. Santa Claus helped him.

We were half an hour into the noisy show; I was more and more sure that the sheriff was ignoring the scam, and, getting tired of the hysteria, stepped off to the side, into the shade of an acacia tree. That was when I heard the man in the tux say “Hey, there, Waldo.” Sure enough, there he was. My boss. Or one of my bosses, anyway. He didn’t see me, which was just fine, and I slipped farther behind the tree.

Waldo grabbed the handrail and pulled his game leg up the bus steps, disappearing inside. The man in the tux turned over the sales to his assistants, and followed Waldo.

I stepped out from behind the tree and strolled casually around the bus, looking for an open window on the street side where the performers couldn’t see me. One was cracked an inch or two. I crouched under it.

“Looks like you’re going to sell quite a few dozen more before this ends.” Waldo’s voice. He didn’t sound close to the window, but he wasn’t bothering to whisper.

“Well, I suppose that’s possible.” A grunt. “Here. This should do it.”

“I don’t think so. You got a good crowd. You’re gonna sell out.”

Another grunt.

Waldo’s voice again. “Yeah. More like it.”

I heard the shuffle of feet heading toward the front of the bus and the exit door. Waldo hopped back down the stairs, shoving a fat wad of money into his pocket, grinning. He limped off through the crowd, slowly, swaggering a little, and considerably richer than he’d been before.

So Waldo had performed some service, and the cut was big enough to make the showman grumpy. Could be anything from letting them put up flyers to selling them food, but Timmy had said the Colemans pretty much let Waldo do as he pleased, so my best guess was that he was selling his influence: pay me and no one will bother you. Some of that wad might even be for the sheriff.

All medicine peddlers acted cheery and devil-may-care, just like this bunch. It was showmanship. But in most cases, you could tell by the nervous sweat, by the way their eyes scanned the street and the crowd, and by the way they stuck close to their wheels and rushed through the sales, that they were ready to toss their wares back into the wagon and take off fast at the first sign of cops.

Not these guys. No sweat, no nerves, no flickering eyes. They acted like they had plenty of time and nothing to worry about.

The flowered women were now doing less-than-graceful somersaults and splits, which was neither easy nor attractive in those long skirts, and the accordion and banjo were playing a medley of what sounded like Twentieth Century war songs. I recognized “Over There” and “Off We Go, Into the Wild Blue Yonder” or whatever the title of that Air Force theme was.

Much as I was enjoying the show, I decided to follow Waldo.

He hadn’t gone far. I nearly bumped into his back when he yanked open the door of the Blue Chip Diner. I peered in the window to see if he handed the proprietor a wad of reals, but I was so obvious standing there it made just as much sense to go in for a cup of tea and look dumb.

He sat at the counter, pulled out the wad of money, peeled off a twenty and slapped it down.

“Gimme a coffee, Xavier.” He slid the twenty across the counter.

Coffee. Wow. Big deal for a little dive. I didn’t see any signs that said they had it. Probably only for the very special customers. Coffee wasn’t just expensive, it was hard to get. Experiments with growing it in Sierra, Rocky, and Redwood hadn’t produced anything very good, and the ships that brought it up from South America were as likely to fall victim to pirates as make it through. Blackjack had a small supply of it, carefully sealed against the drying air; very few customers were willing to pay the price.

Xavier looked impressed, Waldo smug. For half a second, I had wondered why he didn’t just have a cup at his own restaurant, but their expressions told it all. Waldo was showing off. Xavier gave me a greasy smile, said he’d take my order in a minute, and went into the kitchen where presumably the precious stuff was kept. Waldo didn’t even turn around to see who’d come in behind him.

I hadn’t seen Waldo slipping Xavier an extra few reals tucked under the twenty, so if Xavier got a cut from the medicine show, it wasn’t through Waldo. He probably collected from the guy in the top hat, too.

I sat down two stools from Waldo.