He might as well stay with it. He didn't have a life anywhere else. Not since 1976, when he'd realized what lived inside him.
When he woke, Shad drank coffee and watched the news. The coffee didn't do much for him-no normal food did-but when he was living his normal existence in his normal uptown upper-class apartment, he tried as far as possible to act like a normal person.
The news was enough to wake him up, though. Shortly after eleven o'clock the previous evening, a group of what witnesses described as "casually dressed Asians" walked into Freakers, strolled to the back, drew machine pistols, and smoked three jokers wearing Liza Minnelli masks. Another Werewolf in another part of the bar returned fire, splattering one of the Snowboys in return for being disembowelled by about forty semiwadcutters. One of the Wolves had actually survived in critical condition but was not expected to be conscious and of any use to police for a long time.
No Dice was going to have to contact someone else to get his shipment of rapture.
The news rattled on. A vice president of Morgan Stanley had supposedly skipped town with hundreds of millions of investors' funds. Nelson Dixon, the head of Dixon Communications and owner of the Dixon-Atlantic Casino, had just bought another art treasure, van Gogh's Irises, for $55 million, a private purchase from an Australian billionaire who'd run into hard times. He'd also fired his entire security staff and hired new people, complaining that the old people had been lax about the jumper threat.
Good luck, Shad thought.
The military cordon around Ellis Island had been tightened after some jumpers had hopped into the bodies of some coast guardsmen and taken their cutter for a joyride.
Shad's eyes narrowed as he considered the situation on Ellis Island. Maybe it was something he needed to be concerned about. He didn't much give a damn if some idealistic jokers wanted to claim Ellis Island as a refuge from oppression. Good luck to them. But if killers were using the place as a hideout, that was another matter.
There were supposed to be a lot of people on the island, however. And Shad was only one person. He'd always worked alone. And if he got jumped, there was no guarantee he'd ever end up anywhere, or anyone, he wanted to be.
Funny if it ended that way. A man with so many different identities, permanently stuck in somebody else's body… Who, he found himself wondering, still remembered Simon? Simon had been an uptown kind of guy, he remembered, not the kind of man to hang around Jokertown. So why was a joker looking for him?
He finished his coffee, washed out the cup, put it in the dishwasher. He went back into the bedroom and looked at the three suitcases sitting next to the bed. One was filled with forty pounds of rapture, with a street value of approximately a quarter million. The other two valises contained $100,000 in hundred-dollar bills, the stuff he'd taken from the Snowboy-Werewolf deal and blamed on Dover Dan.
A hundred grand. Not bad for a night's work. And with any luck, he'd started a gang war as a bonus.
He'd have to start moving the stuff out of his apartment. Starting, he figured, with the drugs. He'd keep enough to pay his informants and dump the rest in the Hudson.
An image sang through his mind, a distant orchard, peaceful green fields dappled with cloud shadows, a distant castle…
Stupid, he thought. Time to hit the streets.
Summer 1976. Hartmann and Carter and Udall and Kennedy all slugging it out in the Garden, cutting little deals with each other, planting knives in one another's backs.
New York was a city on fire. And everyone, suddenly, was on one side or another. You were with the jokers or against them. On the side of justice or an obstacle in its path. He'd never known a time so hot.
Neil had been an ace for years-it had come on gradually during his early adolescence-but after his parents and sister were killed, he'd never done anything with the power, nothing but disappear into the darkness when the memories got to be too much and he didn't want to be Neil anymore.
Senator Hartmann had been the one who had inspired Neil to become a public ace in the first place. Neil was in the hotel to hear a speech by Linus Pauling, and he wandered into the wrong ballroom by accident. He still remembered Hartmann's words, the ringing phrases, the calls for action and justice. Within a week, Black Shadow was born, born right in Hartmann's office, Shad and the senator shaking hands and smiling for the cameras.
A little problem, Hartmann told him a little while later. A little problem in Jokertown. An honest-to-God Russian spy, someone trying to get into Tachyon's lab to learn Tachyon's approaches for controlling the wild card. The Russians were infecting people deliberately, killing the jokers, inducting the aces into the military. They wanted to find a less drastic method and thought maybe Tachyon was working on it.
The night was hot. Marchers were in the streets. Fire seemed to burn in Shad's heart as he found the agent and his equipment-his cameras and developers and one-time pads and he took the agent apart, breaking bones, putting a chill into his sweating skin. He left the man swinging from a lamppost right in front of the clinic, a placard pinned to his chest announcing the man's, and the Soviet Union's, crimes.
Something had snapped in him, a wildfire that raged way out of control. Hartmann s call for compassion and justice had twisted somehow into a call for burning action and revenge.
Shad's heart leapt as the crowd tore the spy apart, as the night burst out in fire and madness. It wasn't until later, when he saw Hartmann fall apart on television, that he knew how he'd betrayed the senator's ideals.
Even after the riot was over, he couldn't figure it out. He hadn't known such rage was in him. He found Hartmann, slipped into his apartment before the man had even had a chance to recover from the disaster of the convention, and asked him what to do.
Hartmann said, plainly and quietly, that he should turn himself in. But anger blazed up in Shad again, anger warring with anguish, and he argued with Hartmann for an hour, then left the apartment. A little while later he did it again, found a couple of homeboys mugging tourists on the Deuce and left them swinging, broken, from lampposts.
The lampposts were well on their way to becoming his trademark.
He was in vague contact with Hartmann after that. Hartmann always urged him to turn himself in but would never call the authorities himself. Shad respected him for the courage it took to do that.
And in answer to the guilt that clawed at him, he left more people swinging from lampposts.
The evil joy, the uncontrollable rage, that he'd first felt was less in evidence now. It hadn't flared up in years. Maybe he was growing up-he'd made a decision around the same time- to break with Hartmann. He didn't dare compromise the senator anymore.
Now he just hung people from lampposts because it was what he did. He didn't get much satisfaction out of it. It was an unsatisfactory thrill, like substituting pornography for good sex. Maybe it kept the crime rate down, kept a few people honest. He liked to think so.
But he was getting restless. People like Anton and the Werewolves weren't worthy of his talents.
He wanted to work on something big.
Shad went to a safe house in Jokertown and dressed as Mr. Gravemold, the joker who smelled like death. He put on Gravemold's feathered deathmask and doused himself with chemical stink.
People around him shrank from the smell. Shad liked that. It gave him privacy. But he didn't want to smell it himself. When he was Gravemold, he chemically numbed his nasal passages and taste buds, and he'd tried a lot of substances over the years. By far the best proved to be highquality cocaine he took off dealers. He could get used to the stuff, he figured, except he had much better ways of getting high.