the street corners in Harlem and all down the East Side-this was, after all, the Big Apple, and in the Apple you could find everything. If people couldn't have rock and roll, they had to have something. And some of the club's biggest patrons were the sons and daughters of high FarmerLabor party members, so the place was pretty safe.
Shad spent his free hours looking for Chalktalk. She'd disappeared the second she got him into the E-room. When he asked the hospital personnel, no one could remember seeing her.
He still didn't know why she'd been following him. He didn't know why she helped or whether she'd somehow plotted the whole thing.
The attitudes toward him were different here, and it took him a while on the street before he finally figured it out. In his own New York, white people looked at him like he was a criminal, or anyway a potential criminal. There were some jewelry stores that wouldn't even unlock their doors for him, even after he waved fistfuls of money through the window. But the crime and homicide rates for blacks weren't particularly high here, and people looked at him differently--the Protected Negro Minority was a historically oppressed race struggling to elevate itself toward an equality that, despite everyone's best efforts, they seemed not to have reached.
In short, white people treated him as if he were mildly retarded-good-hearted and deserving of sympathy, but a little slow. It wasn't his fault if he needed a little extra help, of course-Forces of History were responsible, after all, not peoples--but all that meant was that nobody expected much from him.
After he figured out what was going on, Shad fit in well enough. He liked being patronized a lot less than .he liked being feared, but he was still himself inside, whoever that was. The masks he wore were different, but they were still masks.
He still wore the night's mask best of all. He went for long walks after the club closed, quartering the parts of the city that, in another reality, were Jokertown. Music ran through his head, music that didn't even exist here, and pictures rolled through his memory, images of that portable concentration camp set up in the brownstone warehouse, the joker in the necktie with his head blown off, the hard con-boss look in Lisa Traeger's eyes, crates of gold and drugs, Nelson Dixon and Blaise exchanging high fives on the boardroom table ...
The green hills of someplace he'd probably never see again.
Hanging them from lampposts, he figured, was too good for them.
He knew exactly where he wanted to go once he got home. And what he was going to do there.
On the long four A. M. walks, he plotted everything out, step by step. Impossible as it seemed.
And then one warm August night it became possible. There she was, sketching on the sidewalk with her baseball cap on the concrete next to her. Chalktalk. It happened too suddenly, too normally, for him to be surprised. So he crossed the street and put a Nikolai Bukharin five-dollar coin in her cap. Her picture was a daylight street scene with a gold-plated Empire State Building in the background. She glanced up with bright green eyes and gave him a strange little grin. "Remember me?" he said. "I want to go home now" She gave a weird little giggle that sent a chill up his spine. 'The she put her chalk in a little belt pouch, put her cap on her tangled dark hair, stood up suddenly, and grabbed his hand. Ignoring the little coin that rang in the gutter, she hauled him out of his crouch and down the next alleyway at a half run. Then she rudely pushed him into the wall and put her arms around him. A little keening sound came from her throat. Her hands pawed at him urgently. She started grinding her hips against his crotch like an old whore running on autopilot.
The smell of decaying garbage crawled down the back of Shad's throat. "Hey," Shad said, "are you serious, or what?" Her lips drew back in a snarl. One hand clamped on his crotch, the other crooked in front of his face. Distant streetlights gleamed on sharp mother-of-pearl claws. Shad's balls tried to tunnel up to his eye sockets.
"Okay," Shad said. "Whatever you want. You mind if we get up in some fresh air? This garbage smell is gonna make me puke."
She didn't seem to care one way or the other, so he