II
Tonight he felt the city inside him, and he was inside it. He felt its steel and mortar and brick and stone and marble and glass, felt his organs touching the various buildings and places of Jokertown as their atoms phased in (and out) on their way (and back again) across the planes of reality. His molecules grazed the clouds swirling toward the city like an incoming black cotton tide; they mingled with air pregnant with moisture and the promise of more moisture to come, they trembled with the vibrations of distant thunder. Tonight he felt inexorably linked with Jokertown's past and future; the coming rainstorm would differ in no way from the last one, and would be exactly the same as the next. Just as the steel and the mortar were constant, the brick and stone forever, and the marble and glass immortal. So long as the city remained so, however tenuously, would he.
His name was Quasiman. Once he had had another name, but all he could remember about his previrus self was that he had been an explosives expert. Currently he was a caretaker of the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Misery, and of him Father Squid relished saying, time and time again, "The bomb squad's loss has been the God squad's gain."
Usually it was all Quasiman could do to remember those bare facts, because the atoms of his brain, like those in the rest of his body, constantly, randomly, phased in and out of reality, soaring to extradimensional realms and snapping back again. This had the dual effect of making him more than a genius, and less than an idiot. Most days Quasiman considered it a victory to keep himself in one piece.
Tonight maintaining even that modest goal was going to prove more difficult than usual. Blood and thunder were in the air. Tonight Quasiman was going to the Edge.
As he reached the door at the top of the stairs leading to the roof of the cheapjack apartment building where he lived, portions of his brain glanced off the immediate future. Already he felt cool night air, saw distant flashes of lightning, felt rooftop gravel crunch beneath the soles of his tennis shoes, and saw an old bag lady, a joker, sleeping beside a warm-air duct, her belongings beside her in a cart she had pulled up the fire escape.
The intersection between present and future became stronger and more vivid the instant he actually touched the doorknob, and becoming stronger still once he turned it. Quasiman was used to this sort of minor precognition by now. For him the different levels of time constantly clashed together like discordant cymbals. Long ago he had accepted the only conclusion possible from living in such a mindworld: Reality was just the fragments of a dream shattered before the dawn of being.
Future and present merged seamlessly as he steped through the doorway. The lightning flashes and the gravel underfoot and the sleeping old woman were there, as he had known they would be. What he hadn't envisioned was the creaking of the door's rusty hinges, screeching like a buzz saw cutting through nails over the steady hum of the automobile traffic below, startling the old woman from her uneasy sleep. She had brown scaly skin, and the face of a furless rat. Her lips drew back and exposed sharp white fangs. "Who the fuck are you?" she demanded with false bravado.
He ignored her. A hunchbacked man with an unbending left hip, he shuffled to the building's ledge with the efficient grace of a dancer permanently engrossed in a sick, satirical joke.
Without the slightest hesitation he stepped off the ledge.
The old woman, mistakeningly believing he was committing suicide, screamed. Quasiman didn't care.
He was too busy doing what he always did after stepping off a bulding: he willed himself to where he wished to be. Time and space folded about him. In the following instant his rapidly fading intellect fought hard to hold on to his own self-image. For an enduring nanosecond he almost became lost in the fluidity of the cosmos. But he maintained, and when that moment ended, he was in an alley in the Edge. He was one second closer to the thunder, one step closer to the blood, one event closer to the final blackout.
III
Tonight was the night of Vito's big break. The Man never would have instructed him to come along on this little excursion to the Edge if he hadn't already indicated his ability to handle responsibility. Of course that also meant Vito was a mite expendable, but that was okay, it came with the territory. You had to take risks if you wanted to move up in the Calvino Family.
And lately there had been a lot of openings in the Family hierarchy. Vito, an ambitious youngster, hoped to survive long enough to rise a few notches, just high enough to get somebody else to take the more obvious risks.
Unfortunately a truce of some sort seemed likely, if there was any truth to the scuttlebutt he had picked up from a few of the boys while he was busy waxing the Man's limo. Evidently the Man planned to hash over some important business with one of the high mucky-muck jokers pulling the strings on all the hits that had decimated the Five Families recently.
Some joker named Wyrm, yeah, that's his name, thought Vito tensely as he walked down a sidewalk in the middle of the Edge, weaving through a flood of tourists and jokers and maybe even a few aces. He checked out the street scene for potential trouble. It wasn't his job-that was to walk into the lobby of the cheap dive just ahead and pick up the key to the room where the Man and the joker had agreed to meet-but he couldn't help hoping he'd notice something significant in the security area anyway, so the Man and the boys would maybe consider him a little less expendable.
Stepping into the lobby, however, Vito felt like a blind bear walking into a campsite full of hunters. Trying to keep his posture straight* and his jaw tightly set, the way he'd seen the boys do while rousting some welsher, he strode up to the registry counter and slammed his palm on it with what he hoped was an authoritative air. "I'm here for one of your, ah, most important customers," he said with an unfortunate crack in his voice.
Theclerk, a seedy old man with white hair and a black eyepatch, probably some joker passing for nat, barely looked up from the girly magazine he was reading. The back of the cover heralded some joker fetish article, and in the blurry photo some beefy dude straddled a creature with gorgeous, lusty eyes, but who otherwise resembled a giant scoop of vanilla ice cream with skinny arms and legs and tiny hands and feet. The clerk nonchalantly turned a page.
Vito cleared his throat.
The clerk cleared his. After a long pause he finally looked up and said, "We've got a lot of important customers, young man. Which one do you represent?"
"The one you owe so many favors to."
The words were barely out of Vito's mouth when the old man jumped up and picked up a key from the rack and dashed to the counter and held it out for Vito, saying, "Everything's been taken care of, sir. Hope you find the facilities to your liking."
"It's not my opinion that counts," Vito said, plucking the key from the clerk's hand. "Watch it or else those pages will stick together," he added, turning toward the exit. Briefly he wondered if he should check out the room, but then he remembered that his instructions had been very succinct and to the point. Go to the lobby and bring back the key. Vito had already learned from watching a few fellas learn the hard way, that the boys often didn't appreciate initiative.
So he went outside into the cool air and put his head down as if walking into a strong wind, although it was barely blowing and his posture allowed his greasy black hair to fall into his eyes. His confidence that things would go his way tonight, based on how things had gone so far, was almost immediately negated by the presence everywhere of men he recognized-on both sides of the street, standing around, i sitting at the tables of junk food venues or in parked cars. Usually the only time that many family members and grunts were together in the same area was during a funeral. Now though, rather than being conspicuous in their clothing of mourning, they were trying to blend into their surroundings. Vito didn't recognize a few of the people accompanying the boys, but something about their cool confidence exuded an air of restrained cruelty that made even the roughest, toughest boys appear a little uneasy.