Indonesia and Poland, the world today needs the Envoy more than ever.
PUPPETS
Victor W Milan
MacHeath had a jackknife, so the song went.
Mackie Messer had something better. And it was ever so much easier to keep out of sight.
Mackie blew into the camera store on a breath of cool air and diesel farts from the Kurfiirstendamm. He left off whistling his song, let the door hiss to behind him, and stood with his fists rammed down in his jacket pockets to catch a look around.
Light slamdanced on countertops, the curves of cameras, black and glassy-eyed. He felt the humming of the lights down beneath his skin. This place got on his tits. It was so clean and antiseptic it made him think of a doctor's office. He hated doctors. Always had, since the doctors the Hamburg court sent him to see when he was thirteen said he was crazy and penned him up in a Land juvie/psych ward, and the orderly there was a pig from the Tirol who was always breathing booze and garlic over him and trying to get him to jerk him off... and then he'd turned over his ace and walked on out of there, and the thought brought a smile and a rush of confidence.
On a stool by the display counter lay a Berliner Zeitung folded to the headline: "Wild Card Tour to Visit Wall Today." He smiled, thin.
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Then Dieter came in from the back and saw him. He stopped dead and put this foolish smile on his face. "Mackie. Hey. It's a little early, isn't it?"
He had a narrow, pale head with dark hair slicked back in a smear of oil. His suit was blue and ran to too much padding in the shoulders. His tie was thin and iridescent. His lower lip quivered just a little.
Mackie was standing still. His eyes were the eyes of a shark, cold and gray and expressionless as steel marbles.
"I was just, you know, putting in my appearance here, Dieter said." A hand jittered around at the cameras and the neon tubing and the sprawling shiny posters showing the tanned women with shades and too many teeth. The hand glowed the white of a dead fish's belly in the artificial light. "Appearances are important, you know. Got to lull the suspicions of the bourgeoisie. Especially today."
He tried to keep his eyes off Mackie, but they just kept rolling back to him, as if the whole room slanted downward to where he stood. The ace didn't look like much. He was maybe seventeen, looked younger, except for his skin-that had a dryness to it, a touch of parchment age. He wasn't much more than a hundred seventy centimeters tall, even skinnier than Dieter, and his body kind of twisted. He wore a black leather jacket that Dieter knew was scuffed to gray along the canted line of his shoulders, jeans that were tired before he fished them out of a trash can in Dahlem, a pair of Dutch clogs. A brush of straw hair stuck up at random above the drawn-out face of an El Greco martyr, oddly vulnerable. His lips were thin and mobile.
"So you stepped up the timetable, came for me early," Dieter said lamely.
Mackie flashed forward, wrapped his hand in shiny tie, hauled Dieter toward him. "Maybe it's too late for you, comrade. Maybe maybe."
The camera salesman had a curious glossy-pale complexion, like laminated paper. Now his skin turned the color of a sheet of the Zeitung after it had spent the night blowing along a Budapesterstrasse curb. He'd seen what that hand could do.
"M-mackie," he stammered, clutching at the reed-thin arm.
He collected himself then, patted Mackie affectionately on a leather sleeve. "Hey, hey now, brother. What's the matter?"
"You tried to sell us, motherfucker!" Mackie screamed, spraying spittle all over Dieter's after-shave.
Dieter jerked back. His arm twitched with the lust to wipe his cheek. "What the fuck are you talking about, Mackie? I'd never try-"
"Kelly. That Australian bitch. Wolf thought she was acting funny and leaned on her." A grin wnched its way across Mackie's face. "She's never going to the fucking Bundeskriminalamt now, man. She's Speck. Lunchmeat."
Dieter's tongue flicked bluish lips. "Listen, you've got it wrong. She was nothing to me. I knew she was just a groupie, all along-"
His eyes informed on him, sliding ever so slightly to the right. His hand suddenly flared up from below the register with a black snub revolver in it.
Mackie's left hand whirred down, vibrating like the