Time to meet a man. He stood up. His joints made rippling cracks, as if they were on ratchets. The satyrs watched him with secret grins. He gave them a thumbs-up and headed off to the northwest.
Mark Meadows once went through a period of intense fascination with ancient Greece – this was during early pubescence, when his hormone – driven interest had been captured by visions of babe goddesses and nymphs in gauzy robes. He still remembered how shocked he was to discover, mainly between the lines, that a good many of those squeezes of old Zeus that astronomers were always naming moons of Jupiter after had been little boys.
Aside from that, he recalled that after the Persians trashed Athens in 479 or so, the city had been rebuilt without any kind of plan. Most of the city these days was Apartment Bloc Generic, and the national government was giving its seat in the Syntagma district in the New Town a bulldozer makeover to bring it more in line with what a capital of the European Community should look like – Mark had the impression sometimes that this whole Unification trip was really just Mickey D’s writ even larger. But here in the Plaka the streets of old Athens were still narrow, twisty, and, given the way the Greeks drove, perilous.
As evidence a big lorry with streaked white sides bearing lettering that was all Greek to him had come popping out of a side street and mashed one of those little slab-sided European subcompacts that look as if they’re built around a skateboard. The respective drivers were standing in a pothole waving arms and mustaches at one another. Mark squeezed the vial he had palmed a little tighter, sidestepped the argument, and sidled through the crowd that had gathered in hopes the two would come to blows.
Here on the backside of the Acropolis where the tourists seldom went the buildings seemed to lean in various directions without being visibly off-true. Mark wondered if that were another example of the subtle architectural tricks the Greeks had used building the Parthenon, up on top of the hill. Faзades were stucco that was showing a tendency to flake off in huge sheets and had probably been gaudy before it faded. The sky overhead was crisscrossed with clotheslines fluttering with laundry like those strings of plastic pennants that used to festoon gas stations along old Route 66 in the sixties – the early sixties, which were really just a continuation of the fifties. Immense chrome Japanese ghetto blasters vibrated on every third windowsill, further endangering the stucco with earsplitting noise that sounded like a cross between rap and belly-dance music. The occasional shop-front was boarded and graffitied; Greece was suffering another economic downturn, which Mark suspected had lasted since Alexander’s daddy, Philip, blew into town. Even the people who weren’t fighting seemed to communicate at the top of their lungs.
He marveled at just how skuzzy it could be right up against your marvels-of-the-ancient-world. But you didn’t go looking to score drugs in the ritzier parts of town unless you happened to belong there. Since Mark didn’t look like Anthony Quinn, he manifestly did not.
He looked around for his contact man, a gangly joker kid with green-seaweed hair and teeth even worse than the Greek norm. Jokers were generically less likely to blow you up to the authorities, no matter where you were. It wasn’t certain, but scoring proscribed pharmaceuticals was a percentage game.
He took for granted that the odds were going to catch up with him fairly soon. From years of listening to counterculture scuttlebutt he knew that a favorite game of your petty dealers and pushers and hustlers in Third World countries – which Greece to all intents was – was to turn over the occasional foreigner. It kept the cops happy and bought a little leeway, without pissing off the local talent, the people you had to live with – and, more to the point, who knew where you slept.
The nature of his purchases was odd enough to be worth a little extra slack. He wasn’t primarily interested in any of the local drugs of choice, not the ancient Mediterranean standby hash or grass, not smack – a favorite with your seagoing trade and not coke, still in demand by European and American tourists. He was shopping more for psychedelics. In a Med port as ancient and wicked as Athens, or anyway the appendix Piraeus, you could find anything, including acid and psilocybin. But it took time, and money, and made you conspicuous. Mark could not afford much of any of that.
He had also had to blow a major piece of his dwindling roll on fine pharmaceutical scales. The Greek heat was not on the prod for drug labs in any extreme way; home-brewing synthetic dope was not yet a popular local pastime, what with the natural product so readily available. But the requisite equipment wasn’t easy to find, even in an age in which the digital revolution had made even precision scientific measuring equipment comparatively cheap and available. It was another datum, another mote of dust on a pile that would eventually bury him unless he moved quickly enough.
A young woman attracted his attention, one of your occasional Grecian redheads, small and pretty, whose lethal Mediterranean Fat and Mustache Chromosome hadn’t kicked in yet. She reminded him of some of the women he had seen on Takis. She had such a sweet look that he doubted she actually knew what the English word SEX NINJA written in cursive glitter on the front of her T-shirt meant. He caught her eye, smiled, and nodded.
She smiled back behind her big round shades. Then her jaw dropped, and she moved quickly away.
Uh-oh, said one of the many voices available at the back of Mark’s head. He turned.
The two debaters at the accident had opened a door of the squashed subcompact and were taking out Uzis. Their differences seemed to have resolved themselves.
Chapter Eight
So much for jokers not ratting to the pigs. He’d gotten so bad on Takis that he wasn’t even much disappointed in human nature.
He looked back the way he’d been going. His two old friends from Amsterdam were just strolling into view in their pastel Mid-Eighties Casual Guy suits. “Hey, dude,” the dark one said, “what’s happening?”
And then he yelled, “Hey!” for real. It was too late.
Making the transition to one of Mark’s alter egos was like coming: the more recently it had happened in the past, the less violently it happened in the present. Back on the Rox when he had taken one of his powders for the first time in many months, he actually burst into flames, destroying the clothes he’d been wearing. This time, though, there were just a few mostly cinematic jets of fire as his molecules rearranged themselves.
“Holy shit,” said the beefier narc, suitably impressed, “it’s Jumpin’ Jack Flash!”
“It’s a gas-gas-gas,” J. J. Flash said with his patented devil’s grin. And a big blast of wind knocked him ass-over-ears into the front of a building.
“Well, shit,” he said, trying to stand. “This is getting to be a regular drag.”
The last word was sucked away by a miniature tornado, a howling vortex that buffeted him like the wings of angry eagles. J. J. sat down hard. He’d spotted her now, standing across the street in her blue-and-silver uniform with the silly-ass cape, hands on her hips, a smug smile on her ice-princess face.
He could take care of that in a hurry. He rolled a hand open and sent a nice hot spike of plasma her way. She dodged, and the striped awning of a tobacco shop that had somehow survived the current depression puffed into flame.
The wind went away. Without standing up he shot a blast between the two Greek narcs who were standing with their guns and jaws hanging slack, right at where he figured the subcompact’s gas tank to be. It blew up and sent the Greeks running.