Digger Downs rattled his chains impotently. "Someone get me out of here," he pleaded.
Chrysalis heard the snap of small-arms fire in the upper reaches of the fortress, but the Bizango chasseurs were too late. The bokor, swaying from the meathook above the dungeon floor, was already dead.
It was hushed up, of course.
Senator Hartmann asked Chrysalis to be silent to help diffuse the fear of the wild card virus that was raging back home. He didn't even want there to be a hint of American jokers and aces mixing in foreign politics. She agreed for two reasons: First, she wanted him in her debt, and second, she always avoided personal publicity anyway. Not even Digger filed a story. He was recalcitrant at first, until Senator Hartmann had a private talk with him, a talk from which Downs emerged happy, smiling, and oddly closemouthed.
The death of Charlemagne Calixte was ascribed to a sudden, unexpected illness. The other dozen bodies found in Fort Mercredi were never mentioned, and the twoscore odd deaths and suicides among government officials over the next week or so were never even connected to Calixte's death.
Jean-Claude Duvalier, who suddenly found himself with a sullen, poverty-stricken country to run, was grateful for the lack of publicity, but there was something he discovered at the end of the affair, something puzzling and terrifying that he carefully kept secret.
Among the bodies recovered from Fort Mercredi was that of an old, old man. When Jean-Claude saw the body he blanched nearly white and had it interred in the Cimetiere Exterieur in haste, at night, without ceremony, before anyone else could recognize it and ask how it was that Francois Duvalier, supposedly dead for fifteen years, was, or had been until very recently, still alive.
The only one who could answer that question was no longer in Haiti. He was on his way to America where he anticipated a long, interesting, and productive search for new and exciting sensations.
FROM THE JOURNAL OF XAVIER DESMOND
DECEMBER 8, 1986/MEXICO CITY:
Another state dinner this evening, but I've begged off with a plea of illness. A few hours to relax in my hotel room and write in the journal are most welcome. And my regrets were anything but fabricated-the tight schedule and pressures of the trip have begun to take their toll, I fear. I have not been keeping down all of my meals, although I've done my utmost to see that my distress remains unnoticed. If Tachyon suspected, he would insist on an examination, and once the truth was discovered, I might be sent home.
I will not permit that. I wanted to see all the fabled, far-off lands that Mary and I had once dreamed of together, but already it is clear that what we are engaged in here is far more important than any pleasure trip. Cuba was no Miami Beach, not for anyone who cared to look outside Havana; there are more jokers dying in the cane fields than cavorting on cabaret stages. And Haiti and the Dominican Republic were infinitely worse, as I've already noted in these pages.
A joker presence, a strong joker voice-we desperately need these things if we are to accomplish any good at all. I will not allow myself to be disqualified on medical grounds.
Already our numbers are down by one-Dorian Wilde returned to New York rather than continue on to Mexico. I confess to mixed feelings about that. When we began, I had little respect for the 'poet laureate of Jokertown,' whose title is as dubious as my own mayoralty, though his Pulitzer is not. He seems to get a perverse glee from waving those wet, slimy tendrils of his in people's faces, flaunting his deformity in a deliberate attempt to draw a reaction. I suspect this aggressive nonchalance is in fact motivated by the same selfloathing that makes so many jokers take to masks, and a few sad cases actually attempt to amputate the deformed parts of their bodies. Also, he dresses almost as badly as Tachyon with his ridiculous Edwardian affectation, and his unstated preference for perfume over baths makes his company a trial to anyone with a sense of smell. Mine, alas, is quite acute.
Were it not for the legitimacy conferred on him by the Pulitzer, I doubt that he