Ink (13 page)

“Folks, what I'm telling you, I swear, is true. I'd seen the sketches in the papers as a young man and I knew, I knew that face the second that I saw it, fire in his eyes and grinning like a fiend. You should have seen me, baby, Howling Don Coyote, mouth open so wide that I was catching flies, dropping the pencil and the notebook where I used to write my lies. My friends, I want to open up here, let you know the truth; I wasn't always
the same Don on the side of good. I was, for shame, an agent once, yes, spinning lies instead of disks and feeling oh-so-bad about it but still letting others take the risks. One thing changed that for me, my friends. One little thing that changes everything is all it takes. One little thing, one day, and your whole world breaks. “Well, mis amigos, now you know. Forme, that thing was Jack.”

“Jack Flash is an empty hope, a futile gesture,” says Joey Narcosis. “His great revolutionary feats weren't half as spectacular as his failure.”

“That's just the point,” says the Minister. “Jack Flash is dead. Or is there something we should know? There were reports, the Tax Riots of ‘89. Could—”

“No.”

He gives the Minister his empty glare, a practiced gaze of utter certainty, cold as a corpse's, laden with a knowledge absolute as death. The Minister drops his eyes, drops his question. So much for the will-to-power. Fascists, communists, anarchists. They're all the same. Bureaucrats or dreamers, with their swastikas, their hammers and sickles. To the Futurists those were only ever paths to power. While the people rallied round them, the Futurists of Russia and Germany nodded and smiled and joined in the songs and joined the party and they waited till those symbols had reshaped the nation. And then one day they ripped the hammer and sickle down, burned the swastika, and raised the flag of Futurism over the factories of death.

He smiles at his reflection in the window, smart in black suit, black leather jacket and black woolen overcoat—Italian and expensive—the embodiment of slick, deadly authority. Too bad he wasn't born on the other side of the Iron Wall, he thinks. Would have fitted right in. He runs his fingers over crow-black hair and turns to face the Minister.

‘All we have here,” he says, “is a wannabe living out his wet dream.”

“Jack Flash or not, he's causing havoc. It may be his wet dream; it's my bloody nightmare.”

And so you call in the dream-killer, thinks Joey.

“Jack Flash is dead,” he says. “It's time to exorcise his ghost.”

“Yes, mis amigos, Jack Flash was there and Jack Flash died that night a second time, but friends, it looks like Jack is back. How many lives does this cat have? Has someone taken up the maniac's mantle, or are we looking at the ghost of massacres past come back to haunt us? Mortal madman or angel assassin? Or killer queen, indeed, if what I've heard about his tastes in bed are true. So let's hear what you think. And
—
whoop-de-doo
—
I
think we got our first call coming through right now. It's a big hello to… Harvey from Maryhill. Harvey, you're on the ether
…”

“Hello, Don. Aye … Jack Flash … I think he's a bit of a tosser, actually, and a dangerous one at that. The problem is
—?
can't remember who said it, but
—
‘to fight the Empire is to become it’ Once you start to play the game by their rules, use their methods, you've already lost; you're just the same as them.”

“Violence begets violence, eh, Harvey?”

“It doesn't matter whose foot the jackboot's on, it's still a jackboot kicking someone else in the face. Every baby killer sees themselves as just another good soldier fighting for the glorious cause
…”

The Minister flicks the latches on the leather briefcase and opens it up. There's a gleam of adamantium, too silvery to be gold, too golden to be silver, the glow of glamour and trapped souls. Joey Narcosis crosses the room calmly and gazes into the light. It's a handsome payment.

“Double it,” he says.

“You can't be serious.”

“Serious?” he says. “I'm fucking solemn. I'm not doing this for the glory.”

It's not the money either really; in the end it's just survival. He hates these people; he works for them only because it suits him here and now. Joey's a Futurist at heart, utterly committed to a belief in absolutely nothing; he just happened to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time, among merchants and ministers like this who'll never really understand the cold calculus of survival. It's a pity. In another world, another universe, he might have been the man who put the bullet in the back of Stalin's head.

The Minister can't help glancing down into the briefcase, wiping the sweat from his top lip.

“You understand that… if you fail…”

“Jack Flash is just another killer,” he says. “We've
already
won.”

And stretching his mind leisurely out of his body, feeling for a signal in the ether, Joey Narcosis wonders where the sad psychotic fuckwit is right now.

A cyclist tringalings his bell as he veers past the wagon, rattling rickety in front of us and round a corner into a crowd that's streaming through the locked-down gates and turnstiles of a factory compound. The shadow of the
castle lours over everything here, cooling air that should be Mediterranean-warm.

“You old fox,” I whisper, reading through the script. “Even when you're using the most reasonable of terms, you're using them to praise the power of disorder.”

“My dear boy, the Scaramouche will always give you sound advice. He's just trying to bring us all back down to earth … and trying not to do so in one reckless leap into the great abyss. He's a traditionalist.”

Joey shakes his head at the insanity of this whole venture. He climbs the ladder up onto the wagon roof and stands there, balanced, looking grimly at the castle that is getting ever nearer. He's never had much time for kings or castles, Joey, and his moods get worse each gig we play.

“They'll never fucking buy it, Guy,” he says.

“Joey, my boy, so what if Harlequin is not a god? We simply say he is. It is a splendid fraud. Call him the son of Simile, and her the mother of a god—all these grandiose terms, I'm sure they'll be applauded.”

“—and be lauded. Come,” says Don as Pantaloon, advancing toward Pierrot across the stage. “Let me crown your head with ivy. Come and join us in devotion to the spirit of delirium and drink.”

Don bumbles, stumbling on his beard as he attempts to put the crown of leaves on Joey's head and, staggering forward to the edge of the stage, he flaps his arms to get his balance back. The crown flies through the air and lands on the Duke's head instead. He pulls it off and tears it up, but the Princess is laughing so he smiles weakly, gives a shrug to show that he's a sport, slow-claps the slapstick jestery. A quiet ripple of amusement is allowed around the court.

Pantaloon spins round on one foot, grabbing at Pierrot's black tie for balance. He still holds it, pulling Joey closer as he puffs his chest and huffs:

“Forget this hubris and remember the great hunter once dismembered by the savage hounds he'd reared himself, ripped into pieces in the fields because he boasted that he was a better hunter than—”

“Get your hands off! Go to your crazy rites and don't infect me with your madness! I swear, I'll bring a reckoning upon the man who teaches this insanity.”

Pierrot shoves him away and spins to call on all of his imaginary armies out of sight offstage. He fixes me with piercing eyes, something to focus on and rage at. I stick my tongue out.

——

“You! You!” rages Pierrot. “Go now and find if he has any space that he holds sacred. Go and wrench it from its base with crowbars, turn the whole place upside down, and throw it into utter chaos, throw his garlands to the hurricane's winds. That will show him.”

Offstage, I start a rat-a-tat-tat upon a drum, with one hand—finger and thumb—while with the other hand I rumble thunder on a sheet of thin aluminum, the quiet threat of a storm arising. Jack tucks his Harlequin wand under his arm, goose-steps across the roof, as Joey stalks the stage, his fist clenched, shaking in a mockery of pomp and rage. A lock of his long hair falls down over his face; his fingers rake it back into its place.

“The rest of you sweep through the countryside,” says Joey. “Find this mincing stranger who infects our women with desire, setting all marriage vows on fire. And if you catch him, bring him here to me, in chains. I'll see him stoned. I'll bring him down. He'll wish he'd never brought his revels to my town.”

“You fool,” says Scaramouche, but quietly, aside. “You don't know what you're doing here today. You always have been something of a dick. Now you are, sad to say, a raving lunatic.”

He takes Don by the arm.

“Come, Pantaloon. Let's get out of his way. All we can do now here is pray pray for this man with his tempestuous temper, and pray for the city that it doesn't suffer in his tragedy. Come, take your ivy staff and follow me. Steady, old boy—don't want the two of us old fools to fall. Come, we must give our god his dues, this Harlequin, the son of Sooth.”

He shakes his head and slips an arm around Don's shoulder.

“My old friend, I fear that your King Pierrot will bring a raging bull of sorrow to your house. A premonition? No, I judge him by his acts and his intentions. Words so foolish show him for a fool.”

The Minister loosens his tie, wiping his sweating palms on it, mouth dry, heart pounding in his chest, looking across the hotel room at the young hustler handcuffed to the bed, and—

Joey unlatches his mind, brings it back to the here and now of the bridge and the Rookery louring close beside him. He files the Minister's grubby little secret
away for future reference; it's leverage that might come in useful, but right now he has a Jack to track.

He takes a little pillbox from his pocket, opens it and downs a Smiley. The buzz is already fading from the last one—popped just before the Minister's visit— and he'll need to stay in the zone for this job, keep the volume of his own emotions turned down nice and low so he can pick up the signals in the ether. In the crime scene.

The sentry has been propped against a tree, legs crossed, arms folded, hat down over his eyes like the sombrero of a sleeping Mexican. Just as a finishing touch, Joey assumes, a thin cigarette dangles from his mouth. He pulls it out and sniffs it—cannabis, tobacco, and a scent something like aniseed or licorice. Ouzo. Smells like Jack, all right. He goes through the man's pockets, looking for other anomalies, things that don't belong there. A wallet, a set of keys, some change, a matchbook.

He rubs the matchbook between thumb and finger, feeling for the psychic taint, the touch of a familiar identity, and there's a tiny … flash of something.

The spy who came in from the chaos.

Standing up, he casts his mind a little wider, looking for a trace of memories, sensations.

The bridge remembers.

A shallow river, winding its tree-lined banks all through the bourgeois West End suburbs where the merchants and the middle classes live, through parks as groomed as the Victorian gentry promenading within them, passing picturesque ruined mills, glass houses of botanical gardens. A shallow river winding down to join the Clyde, where the great steel wireliners were built, warehouses filled with shabtis and tobacco, filled with the fortunes of the overseers and entrepreneurs come home to gift their native city with the wealth of their gratitude, with parks and statues, a broken-nosed grim bust of Carlyle, a Boer War monument with a pith-helmeted soldier, a bronze lioness with a broken-necked bird hanging from her jaws, red paint sprayed round its mouth by Jack and Joey, passing a bottle of Ouzo back and forth between them, moving on to paint gold eye shadow, red lipstick and nail varnish on the two Teutonic-looking knights built into the plinth of the mounted general who looks down over the park toward this bridge over a shallow river, winding as a swollen scar across the landscape, open sewer for the inhabitants of the West End ghettos of the literati, for the shit of academians and bohemians, tenements and town houses now squalid squats and hovels, bombed and rebuilt with sheet metal and scaffolding into warrens,
prisons for the dissidents and deviants, as defined in the Sedition Act of ‘59 and the Nights of Fire when the library was emptied and its books brought down to be thrown, burning, into this shallow river, winding, here at the bridge where the bratspawn of the Rookery come down to play in the dumping ground no-man's-land at the edge of freedom, as he came down here when he was their age, as we came down here and played among the broken fridges, with pocket knives and air guns, and we shot at rats for target practice, till we were old enough to shoot at each other, to kill on a bridge to nowhere over a shallow river winding.

Joey Narcosis drops the cigarette.

The bridge remembers him.

He looks up at the Gothic tower, sole visible vestige of the old university, rising over the rooftops of the Rookery.

It used to be just the two of them, Jack and Joey, latter-day urchins playing in the ruins of bohemia. Neither one of them knew his parents; neither one of them really gave a fuck. The only life they knew was the Rookery and the river. What Kentigern was, or could be, didn't matter to them at all. The militia was just another mundane threat like the razor gangs and the scheme clans who were always trying to move in on each other's territories. You avoided them where you could, paid protection money when you had to, played the game by the rules that had been set up from day one. Dog eat dog. Do unto others before they do you. You only had to watch the public executions on the radio-vision, and the Iron Lady sending riot police against the miners, and yuppies in red braces gripping wads of cold, hard cash in their greasy fists, to learn the rules of the game. The Jack he used to know understood that. Or so he thought.

And then came Guy Fox and King Finn and all the Robin Hood bullshit that Jack swallowed hook, line and sinker, the anti-fascist rebellion, redistribution of wealth, freedom and all that shit. He wonders if Jack even got it at the end, when they were standing on this very bridge and he turned, saw Joey there with the gun trained on him.