Brennan increased the tension on the bowstring and aimed right between Wyrm's angry eyes. "That's possibly the stupidest lie I ever heard. You'd better start talking or you're one dead lizard. Right now"
"About what?" Wyrm hissed angrily.
"About Chrysalis!" Brennan shouted. "Why did you kill her?"
Wyrm was about to make an angry reply when Jennifer suddenly stepped into the office through the wall. "Wait," she said. "We'd better check this soap-opera stuff." She turned to Wyrm as Brennan lowered his bow a little. Wyrm stared at her with the hate and anger that he usually reserved for Brennan. "So you watch Live for Tomorrow?" she asked.
"That'ssss right!" Wyrm spat out. "Well then, who's Erica married to?"
Wyrm gave her a cold look. "She just married Colby lasssst month," he said, "but what she doesn't know isss that Ralph, her first husssband, isss not dead. He hasss amnesia, and isss being exploited by terroristsss, who have convinced him that he issss Prince Rupert, a Takisian lordling, who hasss come to Earth to cure the virusss, but isss really-"
"All right," Brennan interrupted. He turned to Jennifer. "Is that crap right?"
Jennifer nodded silently.
"Christi" Brennan lowered his bow. His feeling of frustration redoubled, he fixed his attention on the bag Wyrm was packing. "Where are you taking that?"
"Havana," Wyrm said sullenly. "Step away from the desk."
As Wyrm did, Brennan edged forward carefully. He released the tension on the bowstring so that he could hold the arrow on the string with one hand, and picked up Wyrm's passport from the desk. He looked at the last stamped page. Apparently this wouldn't be Wyrm's first trip smuggling rapture to Havana. He'd been in Cuba the day Chrysalis had been killed.
"Damn," Brennan said, throwing the passport back on the desk. Brennan's anger flared to an uncontrollable peak. He drew back the arrow he had ready. Wyrm hissed as it flashed by him, and then whirled to see that it had skewered a rat that had been sitting by the wall and eagerly observing the confrontation. When Wyrm looked back at Brennan, the archer had another arrow nocked and ready.
"It appears," Brennan said angrily, "that I got some bad information. The truce is still on."
Wyrm hissed angrily as Brennan backed up out of the office. Jennifer followed him, watching Lazy Dragon's rat as it shrank and turned into a hunk of soap pinned to the office wall by Brennan's arrow.
Noon
"What's going on?" Jay said when the jokers fell in beside him. No one answered. No one even seemed to hear him. There were a dozen or more, grim-faced, quiet, sober. An old man was sobbing, very softly, to himself. Jay looked back over his shoulder and saw more jokers following behind them. Everyone seemed to be headed in the same direction.
The garment bag was awkward. Jay moved it to his other shoulder, dropped back, fell in alongside a hulking joker whose green translucent flesh shimmied like lime Jell-O as he walked. "Where's everybody going?" Jay asked him.
"The Omni," the Jell-O man said.
A woman bobbed in the air above him. She had no legs, no arms. She floated like a helium balloon, her pretty face red from crying. "She lost the baby," she told Jay. Then she flew on up ahead.
Jay let himself be swept up in the human tide that flowed through the streets of Atlanta,. thousands of feet all converging on the Omni Convention Center. Slowly, piece by piece, he got the story out of the jokers who walked briefly beside him. Early this morning, Ellen Hartmann, the senator's wife, had suffered a tragic fall down a flight of stairs. She had been pregnant, carrying Hartmann's child. The baby had died.
"Is Hartmann going to withdraw?" Jay asked a man in a motorized wheelchair whose ragged clothing covered his deformities.
"He's going on," the joker said defiantly. "She asked him to. Even through this, he's going on. He loves us that much!" Jay couldn't think of a thing to say.
The jokers had begun drifting over as soon as the word had reached their encampments in Piedmont Park. Atlanta police and convention security watched the crowd swell with growing unease, but made no move to disperse them. Memories of the convention riots in New York in '76 and Chicago in '68 were still fresh in too many minds. By the time Jay arrived, the jokers had closed all the streets surrounding the convention. They sat on the sidewalks, covered the fenders of parked cars, filled every little patch of grass. They sat peacefully, wordlessly, under a blazing Georgia sun, with every eye fixed on the Omni. There was no shouting, no chants, no placards, no cheers, no prayers. There was no talk at all. The silence around the convention hall was profound.
Eleven thousand jokers squatted together on the hot pavement, a sea of tortured flesh pressed shoulder to shoulder in a silent vigil for Gregg Hartmann and his loss.
Jay Ackroyd moved through them gingerly. He felt fuzzy and exhausted. It was over a hundred in the shade, as humid as an armpit. Jay didn't even have a hat. The sun beat relentlessly against his head, and his headache was back screaming vengeance. His resolve had broken down and he'd swallowed a couple of painkillers, but even that hadn't done more than dull the throbbing in his side and the pounding behind his eyes.
There was nothing anyone could do for the sick feeling in his gut. All around him, the jokers sat silently, watching, waiting. Some wept openly, but tried their best to stifle the sound of their sobs. Others hid their faces behind cheap plastic masks, but somehow you could still feel their grief. Jay found that he could scarcely bear to look at them. None of them knew who he was or what he was doing here. None of them knew what he carried in the garment bag slung awkwardly over his shoulder, or what it would do to their hopes and dreams. But Jay knew, and the knowledge was making him ill.
He took up a position across from the main doors of the Omni, where he could see the delegates and journalists come and go under the watchful eyes of security. Time seemed to pass very slowly. It got hotter and hotter. TV crews panned their minicams endlessly across the sea of faces. News choppers hovered above them, and once the Turtle glided past overhead, his passage as silent as the crowd, the shadow of his shell giving the jokers a momentary respite from the sun. Later, a small woman in black satin tails and top hat emerged briefly from inside the convention hall and surveyed the crowd through a domino mask. Jay recognized her from the news: Topper, a government ace, assigned to bodyguard Gore, probably reassigned now that her man had dropped his candidacy. He thought about trying to get her attention, handing over the bloodstained jacket, making it somebody else's dilemma. Then he remembered her-colleague Carnifex, and thought again.
When Topper went back inside, a gaggle of delegates emerged through the open doors. One was a huge man with a spade-shaped beard who moved lightly in spite of his size; his impeccable white linen suit made him look cool even in this terrible heat.
Jay got to his feet. "Hiram!" he shouted over the heads of the jokers, waving his arm wildly despite the dull flare of pain in his side.
In the silence of the vigil, Jay's shout seemed like some obscene violation. But Hiram Worchester looked up, saw him, and made his way through the crowd, as ponderous and stately as a great white ocean liner sliding through a sea of rowboats. "Popinjay," he said when he got there, "my God, it is you. What happened to your face?"
"Never mind about that," Jay said. "Hiram, we got to talk."
"What was all that about?" Jennifer asked.
Brennan was still seething. "A setup. A goddamned setup."
"What?"
Brennan looked at Jennifer. "We weren't set up. Wyrm and Sui Ma were."
"I see. I think."
"Let's find a phone."
There was one on the corner. Brennan dialed and Fadeout picked it up on the second ring. "Hello."
"I don't like to be lied to," Brennan said softly.
"Well, Cowboy. Nice to hear from you at a decent hour."
"Did you hear what I said?"
"Well, sure. What's it in reference to? I didn't get the dope on Morkle wrong, did I?"
"That was fine," Brennan said. "The dope on Wyrm wasn't quite as accurate."
"Oh?"
"He had nothing to do with Chrysalis's death. He was in Havana when she was killed."
"Oh. Well. Sorry."
Greasy weasel, Brennan thought. "I'm not your private executioner," Brennan said grimly.
"It was an honest mistake-"
"Don't compound the lie," Brennan said. "I'll be in touch-"
"Wait," Fadeout said before Brennan could hang up. "Anything on Chrysalis's files yet?"
Brennan put the phone down without answering.