"The holy monk Thich will now immolate himself," he announced in a reedy voice - and in English, of course, the language of international news - "to protest the continued invasion of our country by the foreign monsters."
The Saigon mob was fairly well educated, as mobs go; many of its components understood English, and the rest caught the drift. The crowd roared anger, or approval, or whatever it is that communal entities bent on mayhem feel. For the slow in the street and among the viewers at home, the assistant propped placards against the empty jerricans, left and right of the monk and well clear. One read NO MORE JOKERS in English. The other repeated the message in Vietnamese.
The assistant took out a book of matches and began to fumble at it. On his third attempt he got one to light, singeing his fingers in the process. "Yi!" he yelped, and flipped the match away.
Crowd and journalists caught their breath. The burning match happened to land in the clear puddle surrounding the monk. The gasoline went up in a whoosh.
For a moment the monk was obscured by an orange wash of fire. Then the flame shot upward away from him in a mushroom cloud, to surround the figure of a man hanging in midair, two meters above the monk. For a moment it blazed like a saint's full-body halo in a pre-Renaissance religious painting. Then it collapsed inward, to outline momentarily the head and limbs and body of the man.
Then it vanished.
"Ahh," the floating figure said, stretching its arms, "I needed that." He was a small man for an overt Occidental, not much bigger than the Vietnamese norm, with a narrow clever face and red hair. He wore an orange sweatsuit and athletic shoes.
His cheeks pink with seeming sunburn, the monk was staring upward at the interloper. "What is the meaning of this?" the assistant demanded.
"The meaning of this is, I'm denying your pal his cheap theatrics. Get him out of here and get him a shower."
"But - "
"Hit the road, Junior, before I scorch your tuchus." He sent a squirt of fire to the pavement at the acolyte's sandaled feet. The assistant jumped. Then he grabbed the monk by a skinny biceps and hauled him upright. With the supreme moment passed into anticlimax, flaming death didn't look so appealing any more; the monk allowed himself to be led away without protest.
The flying man settled into the pool of gas from which he had sucked the flame. A jet of fire from his fingertips reignited it. When it burned off, he was still standing there, arms akimbo, grinning like a fox.
"Jumpin' Jack Flash at your service," he told the assembled media. "Normally, as a good libertarian, I wouldn't dream of interfering with our little friend's right to light up anything he damn well pleased, himself included. But today I decided to make an exception, just to piss you people off."
The crowd was standing well back away from all this. The journalists grumbled among themselves. A couple shook their fists at the interloper.
"What about allegations that Vietnam is being overrun by jokers?" a British reporter shouted. The flying ace was, after all, a semi-official spokesman for the government of the Republic of Free Vietnam. He was rumored to be like this with its President. Perhaps anticlimax could be partly redeemed in embarrassing questions.
"If you brought all the jokers in the world here, they wouldn't make up five percent of the population," JJ said. "Get real."
"What about the way wealthy American jokers are dominating the economy?" asked a woman reporter for Frontline.
"At least now there's an economy to dominate," Flash said. "Even if that were true, which of course it isn't."
He cocked his head at her. "Didn't I see you do a feature a couple years ago, about how America was shortchanging her jokers? Now they come over here, and you bitch because they've got it too good. Make up your damn mind, lady - "
He broke off because some of the reporters and the mob were trying to crane past the parked BMP, at something going on in the streets of the joker district. JJ Flash frowned. He wasn't used to being upstaged. He rose ten feet in the air and turned around.
An astounding cavalcade was approaching down the broad street of the former Chinese quarter. To the skirl of chants, chimes, and pipes, came a bevy of maidens of celestial beauty, hung about with flowers, and trinkets of ivory and gold: the sort of Indian gaud usually attendant upon Indian gods. So celestial was their beauty, in fact, that their bare lotus feet failed to touch the pavement as they walked.
Next up were a band of youths, boys and girls alike, dressed in the saffron robes of sannyasi, Indian ascetics. These were raising the musical din, clanging kartal cymbals, thumping mridansa drums with the heels of their hands, blowing wood flutes and singing songs of praise.
And behind came the evident object of that praise: a joker with an opulent belly spilling over a simple loincloth. His head was the head of an elephant, with one tusk. He carried a parasol in his trunk to shade himself. He rode a giant white rat whose eyes were the color of blood.
"Now, that's something you don't see every day," JJ Flash remarked to the air.
And way down inside him, a voice breathed, Ganesha. Oh, wow.
Oblivious, the cavalcade danced straight up to the flank of the BMP. The Apsarases - as JJ recalled the celestial babes were called - winged out to either side and froze into pretty curtsies, still in midair. Ganesha dismounted and danced up to the half-track.
"Please to vacate your vehicle immediately," he sang, "for I have no wish to put you at risk of harm."
The vehicle commander blinked down at him.
A fall of flowers rained upon Ganesha's elephant head, from a point in the air about three feet above the crown.
That did it. The President of Free Vietnam had made good on the hollow promise of the former Socialist Republic, turning Vietnam into a haven for the oppressed wild cards of the world - and damned near all of them were, by now. Cops who could not contain that customary Asian distaste for human deformity which animated today's mob had been booted off the force long since. So jokers did not particularly bother the APC commander. And he didn't know squat about the Hindu religion, so he had no idea he was being confronted by the spitting image of an actual god, offspring of Shiva and Parvati.
But flowers materializing in midair ... that got his attention. He yelped into his intercom and unassed his track right smart, followed in short order by the other two crew.
Ganesha smiled. "Know that I am the Remover of Obstacles," he sang in his high, pure voice. His acolytes cheered. The Apsarases beamed celestially. The rat sat on his haunches and cleaned his whiskers. His incisors were the color of the acolytes' robes.
Ganesha put forth his hands, pressed plump palms to the hot metal skin of the armored carrier. The vehicle shimmered and vanished. A gust of wind blew outward into the faces of the mob and the blank camera eyes. It smelled vaguely of sandalwood.
A single sigh rose up from the crowd on either side of the police line.
"I'll be dipped in shit," JJ Flash announced, "and fried for a corn dog."
Ganesha danced forward, through the space where the BMP had been. The rat waddled behind, and then the Floating Celestial Babes fell in, and the yellowrobe acolytes, singing and tootling up a storm. The crowd bolted away from the guru, front ranks battling those behind in their frenzy to get away from this apparition who could make fourteen and half metric tons of armored fighting vehicle disappear. Not to mention the rat.