Card Sharks

The Ashes of Memory 7

Emotions were warring within Cameo / Nickie. Her shoulders lifted in silent, gulping sobs, mixing incongruously with Nickie's narrative.

'I've seen the birthday party clip a dozen times or more,' Hannah said into Cameo's weeping. 'Marilyn singing 'Happy Birthday' to JFK, blowing out the candles on the cake, and handing him a stuffed toy. It wasn't a tiger, though — I remember a penguin.'

'Cameo … told me,' Nickie / Cameo said between sniffles. 'Maybe she gave the stuff to the Sharks, maybe she just got scared, maybe she decided to tell Jack later. If she'd given all we had to him, everyone would know. There would have been a public scandal, high-ranking, wholesale firings in the White House staff and cabinet, an uproar within the FBI. None of it happened. Instead, Kennedy was assassinated. Makes you wonder about that, too, doesn't it?'

Hannah shrugged, but it didn't keep away the shivering chill that crawled her spine. 'I'll have to look up Blythe. I don't remember seeing it.'

'The picture was never released,' Nickie told her. 'Hedda got her way. Marilyn had a nervous breakdown and couldn't finish the shooting, and they didn't have enough in the can to edit around it. Welles tried to redo the picture with a different actress, but he couldn't keep the rest of the cast or the production staff together. Then the funding dried up.'

'And he ended up doing wine commercials.'

'Everyone has to make a buck. Welles never starved — not anywhere close — at least he got to live his life. I don't exactly feel sorry for him.'

Cameo had bowed her head forward, still sobbing between Nickie's words. The fedora slipped off. With that, some inner dam was rent. She brought her legs up and hugged them to her chest, burying her face as the tears came fully. 'Ahh, Nickie,' Cameo wept 'Why did you have to die?'

Hannah rose from her chair and went to the woman. Sitting alongside Cameo, she hugged her, and Cameo clung to her briefly before pulling herself away again. 'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I'm sorry.'

'It's okay. Thank you for letting us meet Nick. I know it must have been hard for you.'

Cameo nodded, red-eyed. Hannah hugged her again, then picked up the fedora from where it had fallen to the floor. She set it carefully on the couch next to Cameo. Rising to her feet, she caught Quasiman's eye and nodded toward the door.

Hannah closed it softly behind them.

'I don't understand,' Quasiman said. 'Why is that woman crying? Who is she?'

'She's someone who fell in love with a ghost, a man who died before she was born.' Hannah bit her lower lip. Suddenly the dreary decor of the Dead Nicholas seemed appropriate. She slid her mask back over her face. 'C'mon,' she said to Quasiman. 'I think we need a drink.'

***

'I shouldn't have had that last drink,' Hannah said. Her voice seemed to be coming from someone else. She frowned hard, trying to concentrate. 'What a lovely list: Meyer Lansky, Henry van Renssaeler, both dead; Phillip Baron von Herzenhagen, still around and moving in high circles; Dr. Faneuil and his kindly nurse Margaret Durand lurking around in the background; Zb … Zbag … Zbingniew Brzezinski — my, I sure mangled that name — making a fortune as a Washington consultant, no doubt; George G. Battle, last seen having fun wasting jokers on the Rox. Now we can add Hedda Hopper, William Randolph Hearst, J. Edgar Hoover, and Howard Hughes. At least they're all dead — everyone but Hughes, but then no one's seen him in years. Oops, I left out Marilyn. And did I mention Pan Rudo? I think I did, didn't I?'

Quasiman didn't answer. She hadn't expected him to, since he'd been sitting motionless at the table for the last half an hour. 'I should probably put old Malcolm Coan on the lish … I mean list … You know, I do believe I'm just the slightest bit drunk,' she said to the comatose joker. 'Hope you don't mind.'

Hannah downed her Rusty Coffin Nail. There were five empty glasses in front of her. The ghostly waiter drifted toward their table and whispered to her in a sibilant voice. 'We all know Quasiman. He's all right here. If you need to leave …'

It seemed a good idea, somehow. Hannah, scowling in concentration, paid her bill and called Father Squid. 'Don't worry about him,' the priest said. 'He has his own ways home. And, Hannah, I know it's just a few blocks, but please don't walk. Call a cab.' Hannah did that; twenty minutes later, it still hadn't arrived. Hannah called again. 'He's on his way, lady. He should be there any second.' With a glance back at Quasiman, still sitting motionless at the table, Hannah went outside to wait.

Outside, the streets were only sparsely inhabited. It was Wednesday, hardly a party night anyway, and Jokertown had lost much of its luster as a tourist attraction in the last few years. The first problem had been the jumpers, gangs of sadistic teenagers with the ability to take over someone else's body while imprisoning that person in theirs. Then the joker named Bloat had taken over Ellis Island and renamed it the Rox, proclaiming it to be a refuge for the jumpers and all jokers. The invasions of Ellis Island by the various authorities had been bloody and bitter, leaving behind a legacy of hatred between jokers and nats. Positions had polarized. Even with the masks, even in the 'safe' streets around the edges of Jokertown, this was not a place where nats felt comfortable anymore. There'd been too many reminders that hatred was a sword that cut both ways.

A black and yellow-checked taxi idled at the light half a block up. Hannah stepped out into the street to wave at him, but when the light turned green, the fare light went off and the taxi turned right and away.

'Hey! Damn it!' Hannah looked up and down the street. No other cabs in sight. The bus stop was a block and a half down and the streetlight was out next to it. Hannah started back to the sidewalk. Her head was spinning.

A car pulled around the corner. Hannah didn't know why she suddenly felt fear that dissolved the fumes of scotch in her head. Maybe it was the way the car hugged the curb as it turned, maybe the fact that all the windows of the Lincoln were tinted so dark as to be almost black or the slow way it approached. Hannah watched it, held for a moment like a deer in its headlights, then backed toward the curb. Tinted windows shushed down in the rear, and a head wearing an H. Ross Perot mask stared at her.

Hannah started to run for the entrance of the Dead Nicholas.

The Lincoln accelerated.

It was such a small sound. A cough. Something hot and fast slammed into Hannah and spun her around. She screamed at the pain, surprised to find herself sprawled face down on the sidewalk. Someone — she could only see the feet — came out from the Dead Nicholas and she heard the Lincoln squealing away around the next corner. Hannah tried to turn her head to follow the car, to see if she could see the license plate, but her head wouldn't turn and it seemed that the lights had gone out anyway. Even the entrance to the club was dim now and the pain and the wetness on her back seemed to be feelings experienced by someone else and there was yelling and a person was screaming but it all sounded distant …

… so distant …

***

The arms of the octopus coiled about her. Screaming, she ripped one of the sucker-laden arms away, tearing her flesh, but a tentacle still curled around her waist, another at her throat, yet another around her legs. The beast, an unseen, black presence just below the surface of the water, pulled her inexorably toward itself. Rising now above the waves, its great, lidless eyes glaring at her, the hooked beak of its maw clicked as it brought her nearer and nearer. She struggled, but it was useless. She could smell the creature now, and it smelled like the open door of a slaughterhouse. It smelled of open sewers and piss and corruption.

It smelled of death.

'Hannah? I'm sorry, Hannah.'

She opened her eyes. Quasiman was standing in the far corner of the hospital room, away from the hospital bed, like a child sent to his corner. An IV drip burned in Hannah's arm and her chest and shoulder were swaddled in gauze underneath the thin gown. Her lips were dry and cracked, and she'd scraped her face on the concrete when