Dutch households liked to leave their front curtains open so that passersby could admire the bourgeois splendor of their decor. The houses that lined the block away from the porn shop with the interesting and educational neon sign were no exception. It was the interior design that was unusual.
In each window sat a woman. Each was scantily clad, in costumes weighted heavily to garter belts and housecoats, though some outfits were tuned to the fetishist eye: a nurse, two nuns, and a probably Indonesian woman in chiffon and fake feathers that Mark had an awful suspicion was supposed to suggest a Native American princess.
The babes looked bored. Several did needlepoint, a couple read, and the Indian maid had a laptop computer propped on her thin bare thighs. Mark wasn’t sure how they managed to read in the gloom. The rows of garishly if inadequately lit windows reminded him irresistibly of the aquariums they used to have in cheap lounges back in the early sixties.
It was a poor night for business. No tourists were braving the rain to gawk at the cellulite on display, not even your usually indefatigably horny Japanese businessmen. Even as Mark watched, one of the nuns took off her headgear, tossed it in a corner, and drew the frilly drapes with a flourish of disgust.
He had heard somewhere that whorehouses sometimes offered the cheapest accommodations. Maybe that was true. The problem was, these weren’t whorehouses, and the occupants depended on rapid turnover, even if they weren’t getting much tonight. He somehow doubted any of them would be in a mood to cut a deal on crash space alone.
He craned his head out of the doorway that provided him largely symbolic shelter. No break in the weather. Maybe he’d drift back to the warehouse and see if any watchmen had yet spotted the window he’d jimmied to get out of his last night’s lie-up.
Sprout was a million miles away. Tomorrow morning didn’t seem much closer.
At least there weren’t any stars.
“Cocaine? Hashish? Heroin?”
Mark put his head down to avoid eye contact and practiced his broken-field running, trying to dodge the West African blacks doing the Leidseplein caracole on those funky bikes with the handlebars turned upside-down, like steer horns.
He was on his way to Vondel Park, just south of Leyden Square. You couldn’t crash in the huge park anymore, thanks to abuse of the privilege by the trend-followers and wannabes who appropriated the name “hippies” during the mid-seventies. It was still a major nexus for the European counterculture.
Mark, of course, had never actually been a member of the counterculture. That was his curse; that was the dramatic irony of his life. From the time he first discovered the glories of the counterculture, as a flat-topped biochemistry major in high-water pants in the fall of 1969, through his days as Cap’n Trips, the ace with the purple Uncle Sara suit and no visible powers whose not-so-secret secret identity was the mild-mannered owner of the last head shop on Manhattan Island, Mark’s journey had been a personal one. He had never actually participated to any extent in the Movement.
Of course, maybe that was why he was still keeping the faith in the early 1990s, when all others were become stockbrokers and informers. Mark didn’t think that way. He was more inclined to wonder if he’d ever been more than a spectator to his own life.
Now Mark, in desperation, was seeking the communal shelter of what remained of the counterculture. These days the kids were lean and mean, with spiked hair in exotic colors or the Wacht am Rhein butch cuts of the Greens – long hair and beards went with potbellies and Coke-bottle glasses. Not too congenial, but he was running out of options.
He had lived for a time as a federal fugitive on the streets of New York. But that was his own country, where you didn’t need identification papers to find lodging for the night, or a job – at least if you were as blond and tall as Mark. Amsterdam was a tolerant place, and the people friendly in their own reserved way. But for a foreigner on the run, all the colors were wrong and the corners were sharp and unwelcoming, and the rising wind of Euro-unification blew cold through streets that once sheltered the dissident and different.
He noticed the real-world wind coming up, sharp and cold and crisp as a knife-blade across the sunny, complacent heat of afternoon. He pulled his sweater tighter around him, hunched his shoulders. His clothes were still wet from the soaking they’d received last night.
Wind began to whistle in his ears. Scraps of trash brushed his legs like small frightened animals. He found himself leaning forward as he walked; he never realized a gale could come up quite this quickly, even off the turbulent North Sea.
Debris began to swirl around him.
A black pedal-pusher fell off his bike and went tumbling down the street, scattering pedestrians. Mark couldn’t hear anything. He was having trouble breathing.
The wind was too much for him. He stopped, and clutched himself, and shivered. He wondered what the hell was going on.
The wind stopped. Something small and hard and metallic rammed into his right kidney hard enough to keep him from recovering his breath.
“Walk this way, motherfucker,” an American voice hissed in his ear.
Chapter Five
The brown-haired young woman turned around in the driver’s seat of the Citroлn and said, “Dr. Meadows. So good to see you again.”
She gave him a smile as chill and brittle as late frost and turned back forward to close her own door. Memory belatedly kicked in.
“Hey! I know you. You’re Mistral. I saw you”
He meant to say, I saw you in Aces High. But to do so would be to admit that he was Cap’n Trips, which he had some vague idea might prejudice his cause, even though he guessed just about everybody within reach of American satellite broadcasting knew it now anyway. Besides, she had said, “Good to see you again”… mostly he tripped on his tongue.
As he was doing so, the larger, blond member of the pair that had hustled him into the slope-backed French sedan slid in after him. “She calls herself Helen,” he said. “That’s Ms. Carlysle to assholes like you.”
The smaller, darker one got in the front passenger scat. There was something vaguely familiar about him. Maybe it was the nasty little pistol he’d stuck in Marks side and now stuck under Mark’s nose. Mark knew nothing about firearms, but he thought it was probably some kind of automatic weapon. He also had a suspicion that the little striations on its bullets that ballistics experts looked for under microscopes would bear a marked resemblance to those on the ones dug from victims of the notorious Damplein shooting two days ago. He closed his door. Mistral – Helen Carlysle? – let the clutch in and drove off.
“You don’t know how long I’ve waited for this,” the dark man said. He had the crazy intensity that was so popular in movie cops these days. “You’re going to burn, ass-wipe.”
That didn’t sound right. “What for?” he asked, a microsecond before realizing it made him sound like a dweeb.
The thin, feral face flushed. “You killed my partner! You killed Dooley, and you’re going down for it big time.”
Mark blinked. “What are you talking about? I didn’t kill anybody.” Not on Earth, anyway. He had a hard time dealing with some of what he’d done on Takis, but it was no time to bring that up.