He shrugged. “Don’t look at me. I don’t carry that sort of money.”
“Can’t you…” She wiggled her nails and gestured towards Sam’s sketchbook.
Forge five hundred dollars on the fly? And without the right paper? “I don’t think so.”
“Get out of my cab. Allah spits on jokers and liars.”
Sam thought, remembering the rantings of the Nur, who’d glowed as green as if he’d swallowed a Lite Brite set, which seemed pretty close to a joker by most people’s definitions. “If I remember correctly, Allah thinks aces are just spiffy.” Sam stripped off his right glove and brought five beads of Nur-green ink to the tip of his nibs, luminous poison green, the color he’d always associated with malice. “See these, dickweed? Allah gave me poison claws, and if you don’t take this fucking cab to Club Chaos before I can say ‘Allah Akbar,’ Allah tells me I get to poison your ass dead.”
“Allah Akbar!” the cabbie agreed fervently and Sam nearly got whiplash as fast as they took off down the street.
Topper stared at him, and Sam didn’t know whether he’d just crossed the line to become her knight in shining armor or a dangerous psychopath-likely something of both-and he wondered how long he could bluff a religious fanatic with what amounted to a handful of fountain pens.
Topper turned to the cabbie. “I’ll also have you know that I’m a federal agent, or at least I used to be. You move so much as a finger towards that gun under your seat, I’ll drop you before poison boy here even gets in a scratch.” She had one of her stiletto heels off in her hand, pressed into the vinyl in back of the cabbie’s seat. “That okay?”
“Allah Akbar!” the cabbie swore, turning left on Chatham Square and into Chinatown, and left again with a squeal of tires onto Confucius Place.
Conventional wisdom said it took only three minutes to get from the Village to J-Town, but Confucius said that men fearing for their lives could get there in less than two, even when all they were threatened with was stiletto heels and fountain pens. “With the grace of Allah, we are here!” They screeched to a stop in front of Club Chaos. “Do not harm me, oh most beloved of Allah!”
“Stay where you are,” Topper told the cabbie, opening her own door, and Sam did the same with his, wiping his nails clean on the headliner as he exited, leaving the cabbie with the message, in elegant sihafa script, Allah says you’re a dickweed. Actually, it was probably something more like, Allah, the compassionate and most merciful, says you’re a putrescent camel penis steeped in mint-fennel sauce, but most of Sam’s Arabic came from falafel house menus.
The cab sped off the moment the doors were shut and Topper grimaced. “Idiot,” she said, balancing flamingo-style as she replaced her shoe.
Sam didn’t know if she were referring to him or the cabbie, and didn’t ask. “Did we just commit a felony?”
“Do you actually have poisonous claws?”
“No.”
“Then no.” She shrugged. “I came closer to it, but I never actually said I had a gun, and I have friends in the Justice Department.” She walked over to him and looked up at the Club Chaos sign, the latest work of the Jokertown Redevelopment Agency. In place of the broken and blighted marquee of the long defunct Chaos Club, there now stood a fifty-foot tall neon version of the new club’s owner, veteran joker comedian, Chaos, back after many lucrative years in Vegas (and a split with his old partner, Cosmos), bringing some of the glitter and tinsel with him to mix with the city’s matching funds. He juggled spaceships and planets with his six arms, while below his feet, sporting considerably less neon, was a television van plastered with a twirling Mtv logo. A huge mass of teenage girls, most of them nats, were standing behind police barricades while a single, albeit large and brown-scaled, police officer attempted to keep them in line. The joke of it was, they were all dressed like Topper-top hats, tail coats, and more than half of them had figured out that fishnets were the way to complete the ensemble, even those who should have considered something else.
Topper stopped and did a double take. Then turned to Sam. “When did my outfit suddenly come into fashion?”
Sam felt a bit uneasy. “Um, it didn’t. I think my outfit came into fashion.”
“Come again?”
“Ever hear of The Jokertown Boys?”
She paused. “They’re a gang, right? Like the Werewolves or the Egrets?”
“Um, no.” Sam reached to the back of his portfolio and pulled out a flier done in the Bauhaus style, with blocky Bremen lettering that had required cutting his thumbnails square. He passed it to Topper and let her read it:
8 PM, Saturday, October 27th
The Jokertown Boys
‘Top Hat, White Tie, and Tails’
Wear Yours and Get in Free!
Below that was a pen-and-ink portrait of the five guys in formalwear from the bar, facing right and sporting canes and white gloves, the pose something Sam had modeled after one of the old posters for Grand Hotel.
Topper looked to Sam and blinked. “You’re in the band?”
“No, I just live with them. I sang backup on a couple tracks, that’s all.” Sam pointed to illustration. “People mistake us all the time, but that’s my brother, Roger.”
“So that wasn’t you by the bar?” Topper scrutinized the flyer, then bit her lip. “You know, except for the guy with the shoulders, they look awfully nat for Jokertown.”
“Looks can be deceiving.” Sam brushed his tail in its swallow-tail sheath against Topper’s leg. “Trust me. They’re all jokers and they’re all from J-town.” He paused. “Well, Dirk there’s from the Village, and we’ve been renting the upstairs of his mom’s shop since we left the orphanage. But Village People? Don’t think so.” He looked at the van, watching a guy in a wizard hat atop it working the crowd, and realized it was Carson Daly. “Since when did they hook up with Mtv?”
There came a squeal from the line of girls and a louder one as he made the mistake of looking, and Sam came to a sudden grim realization: Once again, his fraternal resemblance had carried too far.
“It’s Roger!” screamed a girl in a domino mask, and her screams were picked up by the next teenybopper in line, and the next, like a chorus of howler monkeys at the zoo: “Roger!” “Roger!” “Roger, we love you!” The crowd pressed forward and the barricade overturned, the girls trampling the scaled police officer in their mad rush.
It wasn’t the Jokertown Riots, or the Wild Hunt from the Rox War, but it was the closest thing Sam had ever experienced to either. Screaming girls. Clawing girls. A huge slavering hound’s muzzle thrust in his face. “I’m not Roger, I’m his brother!” Sam protested, but the clawing and screaming and tearing at his clothes continued until Topper and the scaled police officer, who’d somehow crawled under the crowd, linked arms before him and held them back, bellowing things about the NYPD and federal agents.
Then autograph books were waved in his face past them. This, at least, was something he could deal with. Roger, he signed, and Roger!!!, and To my dearest fan, and then he was confronted by part of the hunger and madness of the Rox War made flesh, the drooling, panting muzzle of one of the Gabriel hounds, white fangs glistening, fierce and sharp. Except the hound had bows in its hair and was holding an autograph book, and Sam realized he was looking at a joker fangirl with the head of an afghan. He signed all five band members’ names in her book simultaneously, one with each digit: Roger, Jim, Alec, Dirk and Paul, each signature in the respective hand, then did a second line with their wild card manes: Ravenstone, Grimcrack, Alicorn, Atlas and Pretty Paulie, with extra hearts and smiley faces.