I was the only wrinkle in the plan, but Marilyn was working to take that out.
"N-Nickie always wore a condom," she said "I m-may be a little tramp, but I'm not going to have a love child by a nobody." Marilyn looked at me. "Sorry, Nickie," she said, "but you're nobody special."
I think that was a signal for me to use my ace, but God, I don't know. Hedda and Rudo had guns. And I knew from the encounter under the pier what happened when you ran a charge through one of those. The shrapnel from Rudo's Luger would kill Marilyn if the bullet didn't first.
But Marilyn looked at me, the tears running down her face. I never could bear to see her cry.
I focused my ace as hard as I could, large charges, killers, but tightly bound so they'd go straight for Hedda and Rudo's heads and avoid the guns. I hoped, I prayed.
My will-o'-wisps may have been lightning springing from my hands, but they didn't move that fast.
And Hedda's trigger finger was faster.
The shot hit me in the chest and the pain made me lose control as I fell back into the water. My will-o'-wisps lost cohesion, dissipating harmlessly. And the blood flowed out of me along with the electricity, my ace sparking around me, grounding into the pool.
I struggled to keep my head above water and then I saw Hedda and Marilyn and Rudo standing there, looking at me.
"Oh my God," Marilyn breathed then in the most horror-struck voice I've ever heard, "he's a j-joker."
"Didn't you know, my dear?" Hedda asked.
Marilyn slowly shook her head, dropping the toy tiger. "N-no."
"Well," said Hedda, "then you shouldn't have any trouble killing him."
Hedda passed Marilyn the pistol. She looked at it for a second as if she didn't know what it was, but then she seemed to reach some sort of decision and slipped her fingers around it. I know Rudo must have had his Luger pressed into the small of her back, but I couldn't see, and Cod, she did it so fast and so easily.
Marilyn raised the gun, and one by one her tears fell into the pool. But I don't know whether they were tears of pain or hatred.
I can still hear her last Words to me: "Goodbye, Nickie."
And then ... there was an explosion and I felt the water close around me. And then I don't remember anything until I woke up here, with Ellen.
And I don't know. Don't you understand, I don't know. Ellen says Marilyn had our child, a son, but I don't know him, and I don't know if he knows about me.
And I don't know if his mother still loves me, or even if she ever loved me at all. She said she didn't care that I was an ace, but she never did like jokers, and then there was that story from her childhood. She made things up and you could never tell the truth from the fiction. You just had to trust her. She was so many women. You never knew who was the real one.
She killed me, you know. It kind of makes you wonder.
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.