"Where's Gramps?" Jay asked as he lurched to his feet, ignoring the boy's gibes. There was broken glass all over the carpet; it crunched when he stepped on it. It was all over the couch, too, and a few shards fell off Jay when he stood. He noticed the shattered windows for the first time. When the hell had that happened?
The kid shrugged. "His bed wasn't slept in," he said. "Maybe he finally caught one of his bimbos."
"Figures," Jay said. "I pass out on the goddamn couch with a perfectly adequate bed empty in the next room." He went over to the bar, glass breaking under his heels, and stared at the booze for a moment until he found an unopened bottle of cognac. A little hair of the dog, he decided, real good.
"You're Popinjay." The kid was as arrogant as Tachyon. Not to mention almost as tall.
"Jay Ackroyd," Jay corrected. "So who are you, Kid Tachyon?"
"Blaise. I'm one quarter Takisian," he added proudly. "Don't let it bother you, I'm one quarter Croat myself." Jay tossed back the cognac. It burned against the back of his throat on the way down. He splashed a little more into his glass. And kept splashing. The glass was one third full. One half. Three quarters. Jay tried to put down the bottle. He kept pouring. Filled the glass to the brim. Poured it over his head.
The liquor stung when it hit his eyes, blinding him. He tried to say sonofabitch. Instead he heard himself singing "I'm a Little Teapot," in a high falsetto voice. With all the little motions. Somewhere along there the cognac glass slipped from his fingers and rolled across the carpet.
When his vision cleared, Blaise was standing in front of him, arms crossed, smiling in satisfaction. "Takisians don't let anybody make fun of them," he told Jay. "Watch what you say. I can make you do anything I like." He laughed. "Now you're wet at both ends."
"Real good," Jay said. He smelled like cognac and piss. "You'd make some detective."
"Really?" Blaise had managed to miss the sarcasm; Jay was grateful for that much.
"No shit. Of course, you still got a few things to learn."
"Like what?" Blaise wanted to know.
"Well," said Jay, "like you really should make sure a guy is unarmed before you piss him off." He made a gun of his hand, aimed it at Blaise, winked broadly.
The boy was not impressed. "You're unarmed," he said. Jay smiled sweetly.
Blaise made a nice crisp popping sound when he vanished. He didn't even have time to look surprised.
Jay was standing there with his finger pointing at empty air when the door to the suite opened and a haggard-looking Dr. Tachyon walked in, saw him, and frowned. "Doc," Jay said, trying to sound innocent, "I swear, I didn't know it was loaded."
9:00 A.M.
Brennan entered the church and watched Quasiman for a few minutes as he washed the stained-glass window that depicted the passion of Jesus Christ, Joker.
"Hello." The joker greeted Brennan cordially as Brennan approached, setting the butt of his long-handled squeegee on the floor and leaning on it as if it were a spear.
"I have to see Father Squid," Brennan said.
Quasiman dropped the squeegee as the hand holding it suddenly vanished. He calmly looked down to where it had been, as if this were something he was used to. After a moment Brennan felt a blast of cold air and caught a whiff of an unbearable stench and Quasiman's hand was back. He leaned over and picked up the squeegee.
"He's meditating in the chancellery," Quasiman said, as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.
Brennan nodded. "I know the way." He moved to go by, but the joker laid a hand on his forearm. It was still as cold as ice, but Quasiman either didn't notice or didn't care.
"Do you know who did it yet?" he asked. Brennan shook his head.
"Then you still may need me?"
"Quite possibly."
Quasiman let go of Brennan's arm. "I'll be ready," he said, then added, "I hope."
I hope so, too, Brennan thought, but only nodded and went past.
In the chancellery Father Squid was in his favorite meditative posture.
"Hello, Sergeant."
The priest started. His eyes snapped open and he looked up at Brennan. He smiled slightly, quivering the tendrils that hung down over his mouth.
"I could never have snuck up on you like that in the old days," Brennan said, sitting down across the desk from the priest.
Father Squid nodded from the comfortable chair where he'd been dozing. "I'm older than I was in the old days. I also sleep a lot better."
Brennan smiled, though there was little humor in his expression. "I did, too, for a while."
"Why don't you give it up and try to find the peace I have?"
"I tried," Brennan said. "I even joined a monastery for a while. A Zen monastery" He smiled at the look of astonishment on the priest's face. "But I was never one of the better students. Violence follows me like an unwelcome shadow. I rarely seek it out, Father, but it finds me wherever I hide."
"So we're back to `Father,' are we?"
Brennan shrugged. "Whatever you prefer. How many times did you make sergeant, anyway?"
Father Squid smiled. "Four times."
"And you were busted back to private each time."
"Well, I wasn't one for following the rules back then."
"Sometimes you had cause not to," Brennan said. "The Joker Brigade was just an excuse to kill off as many of you as possible."
"Maybe. But there were some good soldiers in it." Father Squid smiled at Brennan. "And some of the units we served with weren't so bad. You never cared if a man had feathers, fur, or hair, or whether he had tentacles on his face and rows of suckers on his hands."
"We were brothers-in-arms," Brennan said softly. "That was all that mattered."
They looked at each other for a long moment, reliving memories of fifteen years gone by.
"What did you do after the war?" Brennan finally asked. "Not much that I'm proud of. I sold my services for a while. But everywhere I went, as bad as it was in the joker Brigade, as bad as Jokertown was back home, I found that jokers were generally treated worse outside America." He shrugged massive shoulders. "I tried to do something about it for a while, but I fear I actually did more harm than good."
"I heard once," Brennan said, "that a man called Squidface ran with the Black Dog. I wondered if it was you."
"It was," the priest said heavily. "And much do I regret those days. Never will I be able to do enough penance to cleanse my soul of the horror of the things I did in the name of my people."
"Everyone makes mistakes," Brennan said quietly. "The bad forget them. The good try to make up for them."
"Well," the priest said, his nictitating membranes working quickly, "I'm the one who should be offering spiritual comfort, my son."
Brennan smiled. "Unlike you, I'm afraid that I may be beyond redemption. I could use your help with something else, though."
"The murder."
Brennan nodded. "I've hit a dead end. I've run out of clues and have no one to turn to. I realized last night that you were Chrysalis's confidant, maybe even her confessor. I remembered the bequest she'd left you, and some whispers I'd heard about her secret files."