Then came the last couple of years, when Mark learned what it was like when they really were after you.
Henk nodded suddenly, with a grunt that made it sound as if his neck were a rusty hinge, releasing Mark from the bonds of his eyes.
“I’ve caught him,” he said, with a brown-toothed grimace Mark suspected was a smile.
“Who, man?”
“That old bastard de Groot, down the block.”
De Groot was Henk’s archenemy. He was an artist, at least to the extent that every few weeks he’d splash some paint on a canvas and then get the Arts Ministry to pay him a totally optimistic price to stick it in one of these enormous warehouses they maintained for the purpose. He was in fact more or less a contemporary of Mark’s landlord, and belonged to some rival anarcho-faction that the kabouters had splintered into. Mark had a suspicion Henk’s real grievance was that he himself couldn’t get registered to sell his modeling-clay sculpture to the Ministry, and he suspected his rival of blackballing him.
“What’s he done, man?” Mark asked.
“He has violated our fair-housing laws. He’s renting to an Indonesian family, and he has too many of them crammed in that tiny flat.” He spat on the stairs. Mark yanked his foot up in alarm and almost toppled over. “Exploiter. He won’t get away with it; I’ve notified the authorities.”
“So, like, what happens to the Indonesians?”
“Certainly, they shall move out.”
“You mean they’re gonna get thrown out on the street?”
The glare returned. “Their rights must be protected. Obviously you don’t understand.”
“I guess I don’t, man.”
Mark’s flat was stuffy with the rising heat of mid-afternoon, up in the attic beneath the bell-gabled roof. He opened the front window and walked back through the apartment.
It was narrow but not really small. The canal-front houses were surprisingly deep, and the flat ran all the way to the rear of the building, a succession of rooms strung together in what Mark thought of as shotgun style. In the bathroom all the way back Mark opened the other window to let the rank Amsterdam breeze in.
As he returned to his living room, Mark took out his wire-rim glasses and put them on. It wasn’t vanity that made him leave them off when he was out; he was a skinny six-four American, which did not make him the least conspicuous person in the world. Not wearing the glasses was at least a gesture in the direction of not being spotted by hostile eyes. For a man whose Secret Ace Identity once consisted of dressing up in a purple Uncle Sam suit and matching stovepipe hat, it was a pretty comprehensive gesture.
It didn’t seem to have worked, though. He made himself a cup of coffee and sat on the sill of the open window. Right over his head a massive wooden hoist beam jutted from the face of the house. All the old-time grachtenhuizen had them. People rigged blocks-and-tackles to them when they had to move things in and out of the upper floors. You didn’t want to try wrestling a piano up those stairs, or anything less wieldy than a loaf of bread.
He was careful not to knock over the window box. It was crowded with red and yellow tulips he’d brought on a day trip to the country, just like the boxes on all the sills on the block and, as far as he could tell, in the whole damn country.
He wasn’t, in retrospect, sure what he’d expected to find in Amsterdam – a sort of Hippie Heaven on Earth, perhaps, with naked people chasing each other happily through the streets and screwing in the fountains to the tune of the Dead and the Lovin’ Spoonful, all seen through a blue-green scrim of pot smoke. The actuality was staid: a lot of neat reserved plump people who left their front curtains open so you could admire the crowded coziness of their living rooms – Bourgeois Paradise in all truth, though with the occasional startling tangent.
On the other hand, after the never-ending adrenal nerve-whine of palace life and open warfare on Takis, a little petit bourgeois calm was not at all unwelcome. Or maybe Mark was getting old.
When it came to flowers, though, the good people of Amsterdam made the Flower Children of the Summer of Love look like developers. Mark had the vague impression that a couple of centuries back they’d actually had a boom-and-bust depression over tulip bulbs. April was tulip season, and the city looked as if it had been invaded by a race of tiny aliens with bulbous brightly colored heads who liked to hang out on windowsills. It made Mark wonder what the tulip mania had been like.
Still, a country that could go hock-the-baby crazy over flowers had to have a place for Mark. After everything he’d been through, he was still the Last Hippie.
Gazing at the gaudy flowers and sipping his coffee – an exotic blend with a taste like licorice to it that the little Indonesian guy who ran the coffee store down the street had pressed on him – he thought about his daughter, Sprout. His lips smiled, but his blue nearsighted eyes grew sad behind his lasses.
She would be fifteen now, his daughter. With her mom’s features and his eyes and blonde corn-silk hair. He hadn’t seen her for almost two years.
She was perpetually four, was Sprout. Though she was physically perfect, quite beautiful, in fact, she was severely developmentally disadvantaged – or whatever euphemism they were hanging on it this year. No matter what name they gave it, the doctors could do nothing to cure it.
Mark loved her desperately. For her he had made the Great Leap Forward from common or garden federal fugitive to perennial guest star on America’s Most Wanted.
Now there were more tough decisions to be faced. About Sprout.
He rose, set the cracked Delftware cup from the service he’d picked up at one of Amsterdam’s innumerable flea markets on the sill beside the planter. He walked between posters he’d bought here in the Jordaan, Tom Douglas’s bearded glare answering Janis Joplin’s sad, doomed smile, to kneel by the fireplace. He rummaged around up inside the flue. His fingers found a still-strange texture, resilient to the touch. He lifted the pouch off the smoke shelf It took all his never-great strength to get it over the blade of the damper.
He laid the pouch along the hearth. It was half the length of his arm and gleamed a rich, blue-veined maroon. He ran a thumb along the top. A hidden seam parted. The pouch was Takisian, artifact of a culture that preferred growing things to fabricating them. He wasn’t entirely sure the pouch was not in some sense alive. He tried not to think about it.
He pushed the pouch open. Inside, faces ignored him with fine Takisian hauteur. Too-sharp features turned profile, captured in crisp relief on soft yellow metal, showed an unmistakable resemblance to Tachyon. Tach’s grandfather; by custom, Tach’s father had had the gold coins struck on his accession, as a memorial. Mark guessed the Doctor would be having some coins of his own minted now, in honor of his own loved/feared father, Shaklan.
Oh, Tach – Tis. He shut his eyes and squeezed tears out. His closest friend, sometimes it seemed his only friend, now light-years away. Tach had returned home from his forty-year exile to find his father a vegetable, beyond reclamation even by Takisian science, kept alive only to preserve the claim of his branch of the family rulership of House Ilkazam. One of the first acts by Tachyon – still trapped in the body of Blaise’s ex-girlfriend, Kelly – had been to shut down his father’s last vital processes by a touch of his mind. The ostensible reason was to ensure Tach’s own accession and head off a coup attempt by a hostile line, and Jay Ackroyd still thought he was a monster for it.
Mark thought that, whatever the motive, it had been an act of transcendent mercy. He hoped he would have the moral courage to do the same. He feared he wouldn’t.
There were about five pounds of the coins, each a little shy of twenty-three grams, around eighty percent of an ounce. For reasons Mark could not begin to fathom – economic processes were pure alchemy to him – gold prices had really launched of late. He did get the drift, which was that the coins were worth a pretty piece of change.