He went to help Scrape, though he hated being so close to the joker. He feared he might touch him accidentally; the thought made his flesh crawl.
Comrade Wolf stood by with his own unfired Kalashnikov dangling from one huge hand. "Get him in the van," he ordered. "Him too." He nodded to Comrade Wilfried, who'd stumbled from the driver's seat of the telephone van and was on his knees pitching breakfast on the wet asphalt.
It started to rain again. Broad pools of blood on the pavement began to fray like banners whipped by the wind. In the distance sirens commenced their hair-raising chant.
They put Hartmann into the second van. Scrape got behind the wheel. Molniya slid in beside him. The joker backed up onto the sidewalk, turned, and drove away.
Mackie sat on the wheel well, drumming a heavy-metal beat on his thighs. We did it! We captured him! He could barely sit still. His penis was stiff inside his jeans.
Out the back window he saw Ulrich spraying letters on a wall in red paint: RAE He laughed again. That would make the bourgeoisie shit their pants, that was for sure. Ten years ago those initials had been a synonym for terror in the Federal Republic. Now they would be again. It gave Mackie happy chills to think about it.
A joker wrapped head to toe in a shabby cloak stepped up and sprayed three more letters beneath the first with a hand wrapped in bandages: JJS.
The other van heeled way over to the side as its wheels rolled over the supine ,body of the black American ace, and they were gone.
With her NEC laptop computer- tucked under one arm and a a bit of her cheek caught between her small side teeth, Sara strode across the lobby of the Bristol Hotel Kempinski with briskness that an outside observer would probably have taken for confidence. It was a misapprehension that had served her well in the past.
Reflexively she ducked into the bar of Berlin's most luxurious hotel. The tour proper's long since been mined out, at least of stuff we can print, she thought, but what the heck? She felt heat in her ears at the thought that she was the star of one of the tour's choicer unprintable vignettes.
Inside was dark, of course. All bars are the same song; the polished wood and brass and old pliable leather and elephant ears were grace notes to set apart this particular refrain. She tipped her sunglasses up on top of her nearly white hair, drawn back this afternoon in a severe ponytail, and let her eyes adjust. They always adjusted to dark more quickly than light.
The bar wasn't crowded. A pair of waiters in arm garters and starched highboy collars worked their way among the tables as if by radar. Three Japanese businessmen sat at a table chattering and pointing at a newspaper, discussing either the exchange rates or the local tit bars, depending. In the corner Hiram was talking shop, in French of course, with the Kempinski's cordon bleu, who was shorter than he was but at least as round. The hotel chef had a tendency to flap his short arms rapidly when he spoke, which made him look like a fat baby bird that wasn't getting the hang of flight.
Chrysalis sat . at the bar drinking in splendid isolation. There was no joker chic here. In Germany, Chrysalis found herself discreetly avoided rather than lionized.
She caught Sara's eye and winked. In the poor light Sara only knew it because of the way Chrysalis's mascaraed eyelashes tracked across a staring eyeball. She smiled. Professional associates back home, sometime rivals in the bartering of information that was the meta-game of Jokertown, they'd grown to be friends on this trip. Sara had more in common with Debra-Jo than her nominal peers who were along.
At least Chrysalis was dressed. She was showing a different face to Europe than she did the country she pretended wasn't her native one. Sometimes Sara envied her, secretly. People looked at her and saw a joker, an exotic, alluring and grotesque. But they didn't see her.
"Looking for me, little lady?"
Sara started, turned. Jack Braun sat at the end of the bar, hardly five feet from her. She hadn't noticed him. She had a tendency to edit him out; the force of him made her uncomfortable.
"I'm going out," she said. She slapped the computer, a touch harder than necessary, so her fingers stung. "Down to the main post office to file