Wild Cards: Death Draws Five (13 page)

He put out a hand to touch the curb-side glass and plastic phone booth that was plastered with handbills advertising the next rave at the Freak Zone (The Hottest New Joker Hang! Nats With Masks Welcome!). Pedestrians with too many or too few limbs, with fur, with feathers, with skin like leather, with skin like silk, with extra mouths, noses, ears, or eyes, passed him by without a glance. To the jokers he was nothing, just a tall, skinny black guy. Maybe a nat, maybe a hidden joker. Maybe strung out, maybe grossed out. It was all the same to them. They had their own problems.

He used to be Fortunato. Tachyon had once called him the most powerful ace of all. Once, they all would have known who he was.

He didn’t know where it came from, but sudden anger churned his gut as if he’d ingested a five-star curry. He knew it wouldn’t go away, so instead he focused on it to the exclusion of all else, building a pyre that burned hotter and hotter until he could incinerate all the frustrations of the last day.

The last day? he asked himself. How about the last sixteen years?

“Hey, old man, what you doing?”

The voice was young, careless, and uncaring. It tore Fortunato from his standing meditation to the dirty, noisy present of the Jokertown street. He focused his eyes on a group of kids standing around him. There were half a dozen of them. They weren’t threatening, but Fortunato had the sense that they could be, in a heartbeat. All the pedestrians around them had suddenly faded from the scene. Their innate urban dweller senses perceived imminent danger and they either crossed the street or turned and retraced their steps when they saw the knot of juveniles surrounding the lone man.

The kids were all jokers. Some, like the slag-faced hulking giant who stood behind the speaker, were severely marked. Others, like the speaker himself, whose only visible abnormality was a rather attractive pair of feathery antennae that sprouted where his eyebrows should have been, were only touched by what was still regarded as the taint of the wild card, even after all these years.

Fortunato looked at them tolerantly. They were his people. He could have been one of them, if he hadn’t been inhumanly lucky in the cosmic crapshoot. Their expressions, as they looked back at him, ranged from totally blank to utterly hostile.

“I’m just standing here,” Fortunato said, finally answering the spokesman’s question.

The spokesman snorted. “You on our corner, man.”

Fortunato’s eyebrows rose. This was the old game that had been played on the streets for generations. He himself had played it, before he’d gone on to bigger games.

“Your corner?” he asked.

“Yah,” the kid replied. “We’re the Jokka Bruddas, dig, and like I spoke, you taking up space on our corner. You owe us, man.”

“Owe you?” the anger in Fortunato’s gut flared at the gangbanger’s insouciance. “I owned this corner, this street, and all those around it before you were born, boy. You’d best believe that.”

There was no fear in the boy’s eyes. “Yeah? Who are you supposed to be, old man?”

“I’m Fortunato,” he said.

There was a moment’s silence as they all stared at him, then the kid started to laugh and all his followers joined in. “Fortunato!” He shook his head. “You ain’t nothing but a crazy old man. Fortunato, he dead, old man. Been dead many a year. Everybody knows.”

“Knows what?” Fortunato said through clenched teeth, his gut roiling as the anger threatened to explode all bonds.

“He died years ago, before I was born. He flew up into the sky and fought the Devil. They fought all night, throwing lightning and thunder at each other. My daddy told me. He saw it. Fortunato was strong, but the Devil, he stronger. Fortunato fell from the sky like a stone and burned all up and the Devil took his soul to Hell because he was a pimp and a whore-runner.”

“They weren’t whores,” Fortunato ground out, “they were geishas.”

The boy shrugged. “You Fortunato? Go ahead, hit me with a lightning bolt. Fly. They said you could even stop time. Go ahead, old man. Do it. You better have more’n your mouth because we’re going to cap your ass and take everything you have.”

Fortunato’s anger called on the power, but nothing responded. He had shut it away for too long. He had turned his back on it, and now when he needed it, it wouldn’t respond. And Fortunato knew, suddenly and desperately, that he really needed it. The giant whose face was a lava field of pitted sores grinned horrifically, and stepped forward. Fortunato tensed.

“Are you all right, my son?” a deep, concerned voice asked. Suddenly, all around them, was the smell of the sea.

They all turned to see a man in priest’s robes who was not as tall as Fortunato, and more than twice as wide. His skin was a shiny, glabrous gray. His round face had nictating membranes over his eyes instead of normal lids, and a fall of short, constantly twitching tentacles where his nose should have been. His hands, folded over his comfortable paunch, were large, with long attenuated fingers that twitched bonelessly. Vestigial suckers lined his palms. He smelled like the ocean on a pleasant summer day.

“Father Squid,” Fortunato said.

“My son,” the priest of the Church of Jesus Christ, Joker, acknowledged with a bow and a smile, “or should I call you ‘my brother’?”

“Whatever you call me, Father, it’s good to see you.”

Though not a touchy-feely person, Fortunato, accepted the priest’s embrace gratefully. Held against his broad chest, the smell reminded Fortunato of boyhood summer days spent at the beach. They hugged for a long moment, then Fortunato backed away.

Father Squid looked at him critically. “You look tired, my son.”

“I’ve been on a long journey.”

Father Squid nodded. “I’m glad to be here to welcome you home.” He gestured benevolently at the bangers standing all around them. “I’m glad that some of my flock has already welcomed you.” There was shuffling of feet and almost inaudible murmurs. “But it might be best if you were to come down the street to my church, and rest for awhile. We can catch up on the happenings of the last fifteen years.”

That suddenly sounded like a good idea. Father Squid was a well-known, well-beloved figure about Jokertown. Or, Fortunato thought, at least he was the last time he knew anything about Jokertown. But something the joker priest said wasn’t right. Fortunato frowned as he glanced at the street sign on the corner.

“We’re across Jokertown from Our Lady of Perpetual Misery,” Fortunato said. For a moment he wondered if his mind was going. If he was starting to forget details of his previous life. “Aren’t we?”

Father Squid smiled behind his fall of nasal tentacles. “The old Lady of Perpetual Misery,” he explained, “burned down almost a decade ago. We moved our premises here after the fire to a desanctified Roman Catholic Church in an abandoned parish.” He leaned forward to speak in a low voice. The odor of the ocean wafted from his ample form “Frankly, the insurance money didn’t go as far as we thought it would, and the real estate in this part of Jokertown is cheaper.”

Fortunato glanced at the Jokka Bruddas still standing around, some shuffling their feet, some glaring, and nodded.

“Right,” Father Squid said, smiling again. “This way.” He paused for a moment and glanced at the youths, taking them all in with his kindly, but penetrating gaze. “I haven’t seen you boys at confession lately. Or, come to think about it, even Mass. I hope you’ll be there this Sunday.”

“Ah, Father,” said their spokesman.

Father Squid’s gaze turned somewhat less kindly. “Carlos.”

The joker hung his head. “Yes, Father.”

The priest looked at the giant with the terrible face. “Ricky, you make sure Carlos makes it to Mass, won’t you.”

“I will, Father,” the giant said in a curiously high, sweet voice, the words of an angel issuing from a Hellhound’s mouth.

“All right,” Father Squid said with a nod. “We’ll see you boys soon.”

Carlos mumbled something as they walked away. To Fortunato it sounded like a slurred threat, but he ignored their words and their unblinking glares, as he went off down the street with the amiable joker priest.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

New York City: To St. Dympna’s

On the way down from the Tower, Cameo, said to Nighthawk, “I don’t think I like the sound of St. Dympna’s.” She paused momentarily. “Whatever it is.”

Nighthawk shook his head. “You shouldn’t,” he said. “It’s a charity hospital for crazy folks. It’s been shut down for years, but the Church still holds the deed and Contarini uses it as his sort of unofficial headquarters. It’s where the obsequenti have their barracks and Blood his kennel.”

Cameo frowned. “That doesn’t sound good.”

“It’s an awful place,” Nighthawk agreed.

The elevator came to a stop and Nighthawk politely waited for her to exit, holding the door for her and then following her into the lobby with Usher and Magda still at her side. He paused for a moment to look around. Whenever he stood in the Waldorf-Astoria’s lobby, it made him feel as if seventy years had fallen off the age of the earth. And off him.

She gazed at him.

“So,” she said, “you’re not taking me there. Right?”

Nighthawk looked around the lobby. So many memories. There was a maid he’d loved, lived with, and lost to a younger man who’d been a flashier dresser and had better prospects. She was young then, when he was old, but now she’d be ancient, if she’d somehow managed to survive. Nighthawk suppressed an introspective sigh. The past had been weighing heavily on him lately. He had to rid himself of it, one way or the other.

He looked at Cameo, wishing he’d gotten some really useful ace ability, like telepathy. But that, he thought, would have just made things too easy. “I have no choice,” his voice said. His eyes pled, Trust me. Just trust me for a little while longer.

“What if I scream?” Cameo asked conversationally.

“I wouldn’t recommend that,” Usher said.

Magda just smiled.

It was the nun’s smile, Nighthawk thought, that decided her. For now. Her gaze withdrew. Her eyes became hooded. It wasn’t exactly as if she lost all interest in her surroundings, but she acted as if she were preoccupied with something else more important, as if she were conversing with unseen spectres.

Maybe, Nighthawk thought, she was.

Usher went to the parking garage while Nighthawk, Cameo, and Magda waited on the street. It was late, and almost quiet. Cameo looked at Nighthawk, ignoring the silent nun.

“Can’t I go and find some place to go hide until this is all over?” she asked. “Whatever this is.”

Nighthawk nodded approvingly. “That would be the thing to do.” He paused, frowning. “Unfortunately, this will only be over, one, if Contarini dies, or, two, when Jesus Christ again walks this earth. I ain’t saying which is more likely. At this point, I don’t know.”

“Contarini is that determined?”

“He’s a fanatic. Fanatics are usually fairly determined.”

“And you’re not?” Cameo asked him. “A fanatic, I mean?”

Nighthawk laughed. “Not like Contarini. I have faith, but I’m not blinded by it. I have... questions. That’s why I took this job. I’d done some work for Contarini’s Allumbrados in the past—”

A big black Mercedes pulled up to the curb, Usher behind the wheel. Nighthawk opened the rear passenger side door and gestured for Cameo to enter. She got in gracefully and slid across the seat. Magda started to follow her, but Nighthawk took her forearm with his gloved left hand and shook his head.

“In the front,” he said, “with Usher.”

She stared at his gloved hand on her arm, then looked up at Nighthawk as if she were going to dispute his order, but dropped her gaze after a few moments. She pulled her arm away and got into the front passenger seat, obviously perturbed.

Nighthawk got in the back and toggled the dark glass panel into place between front and rear seats. Magda twisted backward to glare at them as the panel slid into place. Usher pulled away from the curb, melding easily with the light stream of traffic.

“She doesn’t like you,” Cameo observed.

“No,” Nighthawk said. “But, even better, she fears me.”

Cameo looked him over coolly. “Why?”

Nighthawk smiled. “Pray you never find out, missy.”

She seemed to consider this for a moment, then nodded.

”All right,” she said. “You mentioned ‘Allumbrados,’ what does that mean? Who exactly are they?”

“It means ‘the Enlightened Ones.’ They’re an ancient brotherhood within the Church. Cardinal Contarini is their current leader, but they’ve been around since medieval times. Some say back to the time of the Inquisition, to which they had tight ties.”

“Contarini’s a Cardinal?” she repeated, half to herself, as if not totally surprised. “I’m not totally surprised,” she said. “The stink of sanctimony clings to him like cheap aftershave.”

Nighthawk smiled. That was a pretty fair assessment.

“But these Allumbrados, what exactly do they believe in?”

“They believe in the Millennium,” Nighthawk said. “They believe that Jesus Christ will return to the earth. That after casting Satan and his minions into the pit He’ll establish a Kingdom of Peace and reign for a thousand years. Then He’ll fight the Devil one last time, and in this final confrontation will be victorious. Then the world will end and the righteous will go to Heaven to spend eternity praising God.”