"So you think he's serious?"
Belew shrugged. "He wants Moonchild to kiss him and tell him how important he is." Initially skeptical of Moonchild's leadership of the revolt, Nguyen had turned into a fervent admirer. He had spent the last couple of years growing progressively sulkier that his change of heart hadn't won him a look at what Moonchild had beneath that slinky black outfit.
"No way, man. I've gotta find something to do with all these refugees. And the violence keeps getting worse. A gang beat an Austrian joker to death on the street in Cholon last night."
Anti-wild card zealots were in a definite minority in the South; most Vietnamese, urban and rural alike, did not really love the jokers, but what they wanted first and foremost was to be left alone. Moonchild's regime gave them that, for the first time in at least a century.
But the really determined few were a nasty lot. They were getting open encouragement from Hanoi and covert help from America - and no doubt from the Card Sharks.
Belew nodded. "Somebody blew the doors off Rick's Cafe American with a hand grenade a couple of days ago." Rick's was a popular wild card hangout in downtown Saigon, off Freedom Street. "Just like the good old days. Look, why don't I make a trip up north, show the flag, lay down some law to our rambunctious colonel, reassure the 'Yards that we have no intention of letting the Viets beat up on them?"
Mark felt tension blow out of him in a gusty sigh. Not all of it. But some. "Yeah. Would you do that? Please?" He found himself almost pleading, eyes misty that someone was sharing the strain.
Belew started to leave, caught himself at the door, turned back. "There is something else."
Mark felt the muscles at the back of his neck go rigid. "Not Ganesha again."
"Listen to me. There's something very wrong with this picture."
"It's okay, man," Mark forced himself to say calmly, "really. He's just a guest of Moonchild. It's not like he's taking over my mind or anything."
"He's been thrown out of half the petty kingdoms in India," Belew said, "and all the not-so-petty ones. He won't show his face in Europe any more. He's persona non grata in Hong Kong and Singapore. There's something going on."
"What about America?"
Belew snorted a laugh. "He's not stupid, our Hosenose. He learned from the example of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the Bhagwan Rajneesh, and Dwight Gooden."
Mark raised an eyebrow at his friend. "Okay, man. Lay it on me. What do they have in common?"
"Got busted for being NIBCs, Mark," J. Bob said. "Niggers in big cars."
Mark made a face. "See, man? There's the problem there. It's prejudice, man. That's why he keeps getting chased out of places. You know how unpopular the wild cards are. The Sharks are probably on his case."
"Let's not get hypnotized, here; there'd be plenty of anti-wild card sentiment loose in the world without the help of a conspiracy."
"Ganesha's a victim of it. He's discriminated against because he's a joker."
"Not in India, Mark. If you draw an ace, it's because of good karma, and a joker means you're working off a mighty negative load all at once. Either way, you're holy. India's the only place in the Third World they don't treat jokers as kindling with legs. They love Hosenose there. He has upwards of two million followers scattered across the subcontinent."
"Don't call him 'Hosenose,' man. You're making fun of his disability."
"'Disability?' Mark, he's the spit and image of a god If there wasn't something funny going on, the Hindu kingdoms would all have put their little squabbles aside so he could rule them and lead them in squashing their Muslim neighbors."
"He'd never do that. He's a man of peace."
"He's a man of something, I'll grant you that." Belew shoved a dossier in a gray-green folder that lay on the corner of the desk toward Mark. "But I'm having Beelzebub's own time finding out just what. All I've gotten so far is a stack of press clippings. But I'm putting some inquiries out, to Interpol and some of my old buddies in the business. Of course, I'm having to be mighty roundabout, inasmuch as we're an 'oudaw regime' and all."
Mark pulled his head up. "Hey! Lay off him, man."
"I'm your national security adviser, Mark," Belew said evenly, "not to mention your chief bodyguard. You have a couple million bucks in prices on your head right now. When an ace with a mysterious past and even more mysterious powers starts hanging around the palace, it's my business to run a little background check."
"What do you mean, ace? He's a joker."
"So's Peregrine," Belew said, "but she sure can fly. Mark, he made a BMP disappear. I wish it had been that easy back when we were going mano a mono with the evil empire, let me tell you. And he surrounds himself with imaginary friends like the Apsarases, that you can see and talk to and even touch, and go away without a trace when he's through with them. What do you call somebody who can do things like that? David Copperfield?"
Mark's half-open hands waved in air, shaping vague clay. "He's, like, a holy man."
Belew sighed and sat on the corner of the desk. "You never had a guru, did you?" he asked with deceptive gentleness. "Back when the Beatles and the Who and everybody and his dog was trooping East for Enlightenment. You missed that scene, too, didn't you? You managed to get in on the peace-love-dope trip, back when everybody else was switching to burn-baby-burn. But you never did manage to jump on the old swami bandwagon."
"Stop it."
The words were spoken in a flat, hard tone, the way rapping a baton on the desk might have sounded. It was a voice Mark would never have believed of himself, before the last couple of years. Takis, Europe, the flight to the Nam, the war he had stumbled into leading.... He had seen many changes, in his world and in himself, and not all were for the better.
Belew's full lips worked briefly beneath his moustache. Mark watched him, feeling his anger-spike subside. Belew was a man who generally placed his words as he did his bullets, with precision and care; but it seldom took him so long to aim either.
"If he's a powerful ace, does that really matter?" Mark said, leaping in. "Or have you suddenly turned into an advocate of ace control?"
Belew slapped his hands down on his khaki-clad thighs. "For an old hippie burn-out, you turn in a fair imitation of a Jesuit, Mark." He stood.
"How would you know? You're an Episcopalian."
"But us High-Church Anglicans are Catholic wannabes, remember. We keep a close eye on the bead rattlers. You Methodists wouldn't know about that."
Mark laughed. Stopping going to church was perhaps the first of his few adolescent acts of rebellion. It was futile as the rest. When his father came home on leave from commanding a tactical fighter wing in Nam, he didn't even notice.
At the door Belew paused. "'Fine words and an insinuating appearance are seldom associated with true virtue,'" he said. "There's Eastern wisdom for you: Confucius his bad self."
Polishing his wire-rim glasses on the hem of his shirt, Mark looked up at him. "With the Doc back on Takis," he said, "you're the slickest talker and the snappiest dresser I know, man."
Shaking his hand in half-mock exasperation, J. Bob shut the door and was gone.
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
Faces. Who am I?
Faces. Where am I? Where am I going? What will become of me.
In the swirling black there is no answer: only faces. K.C. Strange with her silver eyes. Durg at-Morakh. Starshine. Eric the Dreamer. Starshine. Colonel Sobel?
Why do you look at me? Am I you? Was I you.
"You killed us," the faces say, a growling chorus. They are joined by more, an infinity of faces, shifting, swirling, becoming one another in a kaleidoscope display: Takisian faces, Vietnamese faces, joker faces, nat faces.