He’d had more hair then.

“It will presumably be more difficult to enlist Dr. Meadows’ willing participation,” Colonel Vo murmured.

Casaday barked a laugh. He barked everything in fact. He reminded the slim, precise colonel of some kind of great ungainly Western hound.

“Now, Colonel. Sobel may not be the swiftest runner in this foot race, but give the devil his due: he’s a charismatic son of a bitch. Some of those monsters of his are right off the Rox, and they think the only good nat’s an entree. He’s got them eating out of his hand. He can bring Meadows around.”

The mirth left his face and he gave Vo a stare hard and flat as a basalt slab. “He’d better, Vo. And if there’s any little thing you can do that might give him an edge in recruiting Meadows, you might give serious thought to doing that little thing. My superiors feel Meadows is too prize an asset to let him just slip through their fingers. And with the Soviets withdrawing aid, and the Chinese openly arming your nut-cutting enemies the Khmer Rouge, and your own rebels running wild out in the Delta and up in the Highlands, this is not a time to be losing influential friends, is it, old pal?”

There is something almost refreshing about the American lack of subtlety, Vo thought. Still, Casaday was doing little more than retailing the unattractive truth. The money and power of the group Casaday represented were vital to the survival of the Socialist Republic. They also had come to form the matrix in which Vo’s own power structure was implanted.

He sighed smoke through his nostrils. “I will see to it, Mr. Casaday. You are perfectly correct about Colonel Sobel’s powers of persuasion.” Sobel’s silver tongue had been vital in bringing his own superiors around, money or no money. Vo’s masters liked wild cards little better than Casaday’s did, though they were nowhere near as hipped on the subject.

Casaday grinned and bobbed his huge head. “Great. It’ll be good to get a major ace on board. Most of these monsters don’t have much firepower, unless you count the ability to make their enemies puke their guts up.”

“Much as I hate to raise continual objections,” Vo said, “I must also point out that Colonel Sobel is recruiting a new joker brigade. Dr. Meadows is no joker, and it’s my understanding that Sobel’s recruits care little enough for nats, much less non-joker aces.”

“Do I have to handle everything around here?” Casaday threw up his hands. “This all seems simple enough to me. The party line is, Meadows is a fugitive from American nat injustice, just like all the other pussbags. If the Establishment will lean that hard on a blond and blue-eyed nat like him, who knows what they’ll do to jokers who look like detached hemorrhoids? You sell that line to Sobel, he sells it to the monsters. You play it right, it’ll motivate ’em to fight harder.”

He rose, sauntered to the window to loom down at the passersby teetering their bikes through the rain, holding black umbrellas overhead with one hand, their wheels spraying mud in their wake.

“What a hoot,” he said. “Sobel and his crazies think you’re empowering oppressed wild cards here. Little do they know we’re setting them up to take a big fall. And you get to use them for expendable muscle, into the bargain.

“This is a beautiful goddam scheme, Vo, just beautiful. We can’t lose here. We just can’t lose.”

Chapter Twenty-one

“No,” Freddie Whitelaw was saying, “they weren’t abusing you for being a Westerner. If they were going to do that, they’d have called you Lien Xo, don’t you see?”

Mark eyed him through the mid-afternoon murk of Rick’s Cafй Americain. The boys from the New Joker Brigade had not begun to filter in yet from wherever they spent their mornings after Rick shut down at dawn. Rick himself was puttering behind the bar, polishing glasses and occasionally scratching at his fleshy spines. None of his all-joker staff had arrived. The ceiling fan redistributed the thick, muggy air, but it took a determined imagination to feel cooled by it.

“What does that mean?” Mark asked the Australian. He was nursing a bottled melon-juice drink imported from Tashkent, in the Soviet Union. It was quite good.

“‘Crooked allies,’ more or less. It actually refers to Russians. Over the years they’ve come to apply it to round-eyes in general. Just another legacy of their revolution, you might say.”

“Oh. Well, what did what they called me mean, then?”

“’Devil.’ They saw you coming out of the Wild Cards Affairs office by the embassy and reckoned you were a wild card, mate – which indeed you are. So they chucked rocks at you and ran.”

Mark’s brows contracted in a look of pain. “But, why, man? I mean, Vietnam is a sanctuary for wild cards. We’re supposed to be welcome here.”

“That’s the official government line – and, my son, if you suspect the government of genuine humanitarian motives, you’re overdue for further disappointment.” He laughed and shook his great head, jowls waggling. “But no matter the official line on wild cards, the hearts and minds of the people are rather hard to order about – as you Americans have reason to remember. Asians don’t as a rule like people who look different than they do; they’re a lot touchier than even your more bigoted Westerners on that score. Wild cards tend to be a lot different, but still essentially human in form. That riles ’em the more, don’t you see?”

Mark shook his head. He didn’t see. For most of his life he had been told that America was the most racist society on Earth. He had also been told it was the most violent society on Earth. The reality of the Third World – where the single politician most widely and universally admired was Adolf Hitler – hit him like a freight train. It was, in truth, like Takis, but grubbier.

Even Europe, older, more cultured, infinitely more supercilious Europe, was little better than America. Violence against wild cards was less common there – or at least less open. But he had gotten the impression that the same hatred and resentment seethed there, held below the surface mainly by traditions of sullen subservience. The new European Community demagogues were far different creatures than Leo Barnett; they spoke of justice for all, wild cards included, but when Mark tried to translate their caring rhetoric into images, what kept springing to his mind were concentration camps.

The defect, he had long since decided, must lie within him. Too many social commentators had extolled the virtues of the Third World as opposed to the decadence and materialism of America. The death of Starshine had robbed him of his idealism, he feared, and that was why he was blind to those virtues.

He sighed and was about to comment on the death of his ideals, when the saloon-style doors swung open and Luce and Brew came in, looking oddly subdued. They were followed at once by a tall man in khaki PAVN walking-out dress. He topped the ensemble with a billed American-style officer’s cap and Douglas MacArthur sunglasses, and he carried his fine head at a chin-jutting angle.

For some reason Mark grew cold. Voices began to yammer deep inside his mind.

“Uh, Freddie,” he whispered, “who’s the dude with the scrambled eggs on his hat?”

Freddie showed him a loose, lopsided grin. “Why, that’s himself, of course. Colonel Charles Loyalist-Without-a-Cause Sobel.”

For a large and habitually inebriated man Whitelaw had good reflexes. He caught Mark’s sleeve before the American was halfway out of his chair. His grip was very strong.

“For God’s sake, man, calmly, calmly,” Whitelaw said, mopping his expansive forehead with a handkerchief so mottled it appeared to sport a desert camouflage pattern. “You look as if aliens had just abducted you aboard their starship.”

“No,” Mark said firmly, his eyes never leaving Sobel, that happens to me all the time. It’s no big deal. Getting rousted by the fuzz and beaten up in some cellar – that really shakes me, man.”