Victor Milan

Turn of the cards

Part One

FRIEND OF

THE DEVIL

Chapter One

If the tall man had not been to an alien world, he would never have seen the danger.

Spring on the Damplein, with the North Sea sky above, blue arid astringent as the taste of peppermint, as if to cut the smell of the IJ docks beyond the rail yards. Mark Meadows said, “Huh?” and came back to himself with a sensation like a bubble bursting.

A newspaper had wrapped itself around his shins like an affectionate amoeba. He reached down, picked it up. It was a two-day-old copy of the international Herald Tribune in English. He glanced at the headlines. Governor Martinez was announcing victory in the War on Drugs. The UN was still debating whether the American suppression of the jokers on the Rox had been genocide – a twinge went through his soul at that. He’d had friends on the Rox, and it hadn’t been the fault of the poor jokers who had gathered there to defy an increasingly hostile nat world that he’d had to flee for his life.

Bloat, man, I’m sorry. K. C. was right. The Combine couldn’t let you go, and they were just too damned much for you. Requiescat in Pace.

In other news, the European Council was convening a summit on wild cards affairs. Nur al-Allah terrorists had bombed a free joker clinic in Vienna. The government of Vietnam declared it would keep the revolutionary socialist faith until the end of time, no matter that everyone else from South Yemen to the USSR was dropping it like a rabid rat.

It was as if he’d never left.

Mark would rather have his nails pulled out than litter; he wadded the paper into a back pocket of his secondhand khaki trousers. Now that he had been pulled back out of that remote place inside his head where he’d been spending so much time of late, he blinked in the thin noonday light. A lunchtime mob was squeezed in between the Palladian-style Royal Palace – with its green statues of mythological figures and its seven symbolic archways that led, symbolically, nowhere – and a lot of boxy old brown buildings with gabled roofs. The scene felt comfortable but just a bit drab, which struck Mark as a perfect microcosm of what he’d experienced of Dutch life in the few weeks since he’d returned to Earth.

People were looking up and pointing. He raised his head too. He had to squint against the sky’s brightness, but right away he saw what they were looking at: a slim figure, high above the Earth, flying without aid of an aircraft.

Where he came from, that was no big deal; flying aces were as regular a feature of New York’s sky as smog and traffic helicopters. The Europeans had less experience with such phenomena. They still got excited.

Mark shaded his eyes, tried to make out who it was. The suit seemed to be blue, hard to pick out against the sky, and it trailed a voluminous white cape. The getup belonged to no one he’d met personally, but it was familiar from countless TV broadcasts.

“Hmm,” he said. “Mistral. Wonder what she’s, like, doing over here?”

Nobody stepped forward to enlighten him. He noticed that something was going down on the Vischmarkt side of the square. He had some free time – very little but, in fact – and had been vaguely acting on an urge to wander down and check out the Central Station again. It was the product of the same daffy late-nineteenth-century romanticism that led Bavaria’s Mad King Ludwig to build the original of what Walt Disney would make into Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, all gingerbread and silly towers that its builder fondly believed was Renaissance. Just to Mark’s taste, in other words.

Curious, Mark dared the stream of lorries and buses and bicycles pedaled by puffing businessmen and Indonesians whose limbs and faces seemed carved of polished mahogany to cross the broad street called Damrak or Rokin, depending on where you were, that split the square in two. Speakers had been placed among the concentric rings that circled the white cement dildo of the war memorial. A young man with baggy paratrooper pants and his hair cropped to a silvery-blond plush was striding back and forth between them, hollering into a cordless mike. He was attracting a crowd, mostly young.

“What’s going on?” Mark asked the air in general. Amsterdammers tend to be reserved, but they’re also cordial, and have a seven-hundred-year tradition of taking strangers in stride. As Mark anticipated, one caught hold of the conversational line he’d thrown.

“The young man is a Green,” came a reply in an old man’s voice that made the Dutch-accented English sound gruff. “He is speaking about the wild cards.”

“Wild cards?” Mark frowned. He rubbed at his beard – it was growing in nicely, full this time instead of the goatee which had been his trademark for so long, and he wasn’t entirely used to feeling hair on his cheeks. Have things changed since I left? he wondered. “I thought the Greens were, like, an environmental party.”

The young orator was pointing after Mistral, about to vanish to the southwest. His exhortation had cranked up a notch in pitch and vehemence.

“They are.” The old man nodded precisely, once. He had a dark suit and dark Homburg and leaned on a dark cane. Time seemed to have reduced him to the bare essentials except for round red cheeks. With his snow-white Imperial he looked like a shrunken Colonel Sanders. “But they are a political party, and so they must have an agenda for everything.”

“What’s he saying?” Mark didn’t know much about the Greens except for what he read in Time and the Village

Voice or saw on the CBS Evening News, but he’d always had the impression they were pretty right-on. Still, whenever he heard people talk about wild cards and politics in one breath, he got that old familiar ice-water trickle down the small of his back.

“He says that the new Europe must make all those touched by the wild card wards of the state.”

“What?” His daughter had been a ward of the state for a while. Getting her out of kid jail – where she’d been thrown because the government disapproved of both her parents, not because she had done anything wrong – was the reason he was living undercover in a foreign land. One of them, anyway. “That – that’s discrimination. It’s like racism.”

“Indeed. It does seem that way. The young man assures us it is for everyone’s good. The jokers must be cared for in the interests of compassion, the aces must be constrained in the interests of public safety. In this way only can an environmentally pure Europe emerge.”

He shook his head. “I do not like this myself. The earnest young man has the right to say his piece, no true Amsterdammer would deny him. But I remember another group that wanted to single a particular group out for special treatment. They were very concerned with the purity of the environment; they were quite Green, in fact. This very monument commemorates their victims.”

“The Greens aren’t the only ones who, uh, have it in for the wild cards,” Mark said. He’d seen English-language telecasts of debates in the European Parliament in The Hague on RTL.

“No, indeed. It is a very popular point of view these days. Very progressive. The Eastern Europeans can turn on wild cards instead of Jews, now that the Soviet boot is off their necks, and no one will criticize them.” He looked at Mark closely. “Once again, you Americans lead the way.”

“It’s not something I’m proud of, man.”

“Good. Good for you.”

He held up a hand. “Wait. Listen: ’There is nothing natural about the wild cards. That is not their fault; they are innocent victims of an alien technology more monstrous than even American technology. But like Styrofoam or the products of gene-engineering, their access to our threatened biosphere must be supervised and carefully restricted.’”