A handful of even less descript types sat at tables hunched over racing forms and steaming cups of Red Zinger tea. A tall dark-haired woman stood at the comic rack with her back to him, looking at a reprint of an early Freak Brothers classic. The DA was after those, too. Mark put a hand back around to where his long blond hair, more ash now than straw, was gathered into a blue elastic tie. It was too tight, and pulled at random patches of his scalp like doll hands. Nineteen years this spring he'd been wearing his hair long, and he still hadn't gotten the hang of tying back a ponytail.
Absently he noticed that the woman was well dressed to be grazing the undergrounds. Usually the customers in pricey threads scrupulously confined their attentions to his sprouts-and-tofu cuisine.
His daughter chirped, "Auntie Brenda," and went running back to give the clerk a hug. The tall man smiled ruefully. He could never tell his clerks apart. They both thought he was a weed, anyway.
Then the well-dressed woman turned and looked at him with violet eyes and said, quietly, "Mark."
It felt as if one of the youthful football jocks who had been the curse of his adolescence had just chop-blocked his pelvis out from under his spine.
"Sunflower," he managed to say through a throat gone as pliable as an airshaft.
He heard the squeak-scruff of his daughter's sneakers on stained linoleum behind him. A moment of silence hung in the air, stretching gradually, agonizingly, like a taffy strand. Then Sprout boiled past and threw herself at the woman, hugging her with all the strength of her thin arms.
"Mommy."
The rat-faced man slid out of the booth and walked up to Mark. He had wet-looking black eyes and a mustache that looked as if it had been carelessly dabbed on in mascara. Mark blinked at him, very carefully, as if his eyes were fragile and might break.
The smaller man thrust a packet of papers into his hand. "See you in court, buppie," he said, and sidled out the door.
Mark stared down at the papers. Freewheeling, his mind registered official-looking seals and the phrase determine custody of their daughter, Sprout.
And the other customers came boiling up from their checkered cheesecloth tables as if tied to the same string, stuck big black cameras in Mark's face, and blasted him back into the door with their strobes.
His vision full of big swarming balloons of light, Mark staggered into the little bathroom and threw up in the toilet beneath the Jimi Hendrix poster. Fortunately the poster was laminated.
Kimberly Anne slid into the limousine by feel, watching the Pumpkin's front door with bruised-looking eyes. Around the fringes of the plywood she could see the photographers' flashguns spluttering like an arc welder.
"Poor mark," she whispered. She turned with mascara beginning to melt down one cheek.
"Is it really necessary to put him through all this?" The backseat's other occupant regarded her with eyes as pale and dispassionate as a shark's. "It is," he said, "if you want your daughter back."
She stared at fingers knotted in her lap. "More than anything," she said, just audibly.
"Then you must be ready to pay the price, Mrs. Gooding."
"My advice to you, Or. Meadows," Dr. Pretorius said, leaning back and cracking the knuckles of his big, callused hands, "is to go underground."
Mark stared at the lawyer's hands. They didn't seem to fit with the rest of him, which was a pretty unorthodox picture to start with. You didn't expect hands like that on a lawyer, even a long-haired one, especially not resting above a gold watch-chain catenary on the vest of a thousanddollar charcoal-gray suit. They jarred. Just like fording the cream wallpaper and walnut-wainscoted elegance of Pretorius's office in a second-floor walk-up in what the tabloids liked to call the festering depths of Jokertown. Or like the strange tang like pus-filled bandages that seemed to stick in the back of Mark's nose.
Mark couldn't evade the issue any longer. "I beg your pardon?" he said, blinking furiously. Behind his chair Sprout hummed to herself as she studied the array of insects mounted under glass on the walls.
"You heard me. If you want to hold on to your little girl, the best advice I can give you as a lawyer is to go underground."
"I don't understand."
"Oh, my God,"' Pretorius quoted, "you're from the sixties.' Doesn't ring any bells? You didn't see that movie they made out of W E Kinsella's autobiography? No, of course not; chewing up a blotter and sitting through a revival of 2001 three times is more your speed in movies."
He sighed. "Are you telling me you don't know what 'going underground' means? You know-Huey Newton, Patty Hearst, all those fabulous names of yesteryear."
Mark glanced nervously back at his daughter, who had her nose pressed to the glass over some kind of bug that looked like a ten-inch twig. Mark had never realized before just how nervous insects made him.
"I know what it means, man. I just don't know-" He raised his own hands, which in the somewhat stark light began to look to him like specimens escaped from Pretorius's cases, to try to draw communication out of himself, out of the air, whatever. Outside of one area of life he had never been much good at getting ideas across.
Pretorius nodded briskly. "You don't know if I'm serious, right? I am. Dead serious."
He let his hand drop forward onto his desk, onto the copy of the Post Jube had given Mark. "Do you have any idea who you're dealing with here?"
A blunt finger was tapping Kimberly Anne's face where it peered over Sprout's shoulder. "That's my ex-old lady," Mark said. "She used to call herself Sunflower."
"She's calling herself Mrs. Gooding now. I gather she married the senior partner at her brokerage firm."
He stared almost accusingly at Mark. "And do you know whom she's retained? St. John Latham."
He spoke the name like a curse. Sprout came up and insinuated her hand into her daddy's. He reached awkwardly across himself to put his free arm around her.
"What's so special about this Latham dude?"
"He's the best. And he's a total bastard."
"That's, like, why I came to you. You're supposed to be pretty good yourself. If you'll help me, why should I think about running?"
Pretorius's mouth seemed to heat-shrink to his teeth. "Flattery is always appreciated, no matter how beside the point."
He leaned forward. "Understand, Doctor: these are the eighties. Don't you hate that phrase? I thought nothing was ever going to be as nauseous as the cant we had back in the days when Weathermen weren't fat boys who got miffed at Bryant Gumbel on the morning show. Oh, well, wrong again, Pretorius." He cocked his head like a big bird. "Dr. Meadows, you claim to be an ace?"
Mark flushed. -"Well, I…"
"Does the name `Captain Trips' suggest anything?"
"I-that is-yes." Mark looked at his hands. "It's supposed to be a secret."
"Cap'n Trips is a fixture in Jokertown and on the New York ace scene. And does he ever wear a mask?"
"Well… no."
"Indeed. So we have a fairly visible but apparently minor ace, whose, ahem, `secret identity' is a man who follows a rather divergent life-style in a day when `the nail that stands out must be hammered down' is the dominant social wisdom. St. John Latham is a man who will do anything to win. Anything. Do you see how you might be, how you say, vulnerable?"
Mark covered his face with his hands. "I just can't… I mean, Sunflower wouldn't do anything like that to me. We, we're like comrades. I knew her at Berkeley, man. The Kent State protests-you remember that?" His confusion came out in a gush of reproach, accusation almost. He expected Pretorius to bark at him. Instead the attorney nodded his splendid silver head. The perfection of his ponytail filled Mark with jealous awe.