Dr. Tachyon announced that the purchase of the building and a complete interior renovation had been funded by a grant from the Stanhope Foundation of Boston, headed by Mr. George C. Stanhope. Mr.. Stanhope is the father of Mrs. van Renssaeler. "If Blythe were alive today, I know she'd want nothing more than to work at Dr. Tachyon's side," Mr. Stanhope said.

Initially the work at the clinic will be funded by fees and private donations, but Dr. Tachyon admitted that he had recently returned from Washington, where he conferred with Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey. Sources close to the Vice President indicate that the administration is considering partial funding of the jokertown clinic through the offices of the Senate Committee on Ace Resources and Endeavors (SCARE).

A crowd of approximately five hundred, many of them obvious victims of the wild card virus, greeted Dr. Tachyon's announcement with enthusiastic applause.

by Lewis Shiner

All he could think about was how beautiful she'd been when she was alive.

"I got to ask you can you identify the remains," the coroner's man said.

"It's her," Fortunato said. "Name?"

"Erika Naylor. Erika with a K."

"Address?"

"Sixteen Park Avenue."

The man whistled. "High class. Next of kin?"

"I don't know. She was from Minneapolis."

"Right. That's where they all come from. You'd think they had a hooker academy there or something."

Fortunato looked up from the long, horrible wound in the girl's throat and let the coroner's man see his eyes. "She wasn't a hooker," he said.

"Sure," the man said, but he took a step backward and looked down at his clipboard. "I'll put down 'model.'" Geisha, Fortunato thought. She had been one of his geishas. Bright, funny, beautiful, a chef and a masseuse and an unlicensed psychologist, imaginative and sensual in bed. She was the third of his girls in the last year to be neatly sliced to pieces.

He stepped out onto the street, knowing how bad he looked. He was six foot four and methedrine thin, and when he slumped his chest seemed to disappear into his spine. Lenore had been waiting for him, huddled in her black fake-fur jacket, even though the sun had finally come out. When she saw him she put him straight into a cab and gave the driver her address on West 19th.

Fortunato stared out the window at the long-haired girls in embroidered denim, at the black-light posters in the store windows, at the bright chalk scrawled over all the sidewalks. It was nearly Easter, two winters past the Summer of Love, but the idea of spring left: him as cold as the morgue's tile floor. Lenore took his hand and squeezed it, and Fortunato leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes.

She was new. One of his girls had rescued her from a Brooklyn pimp named Ballpeen Willie, and Fortunato had paid five thousand dollars for her "contract." It was well known on the street that if Willie had objected, Fortunato would have spent the five thousand to have Willie hit, that being the current market value of a human life.

Willie worked for the Gambione Family and Fortunato had knocked heads with them more than once. Being blackhalf black, anyway-and independent gave Fortunato a feature part in Don Carlo's paranoid fantasies. The only thing Don Carlo hated worse were the jokers.

Fortunato wouldn't have put the killings past the old man except for one thing: he coveted Fortunato's operation too much to tamper with the women themselves.

Lenore came from a hick town in the mountains of Virginia where the old people still talked Elizabethan. Willie had been running her less than a month, not long enough to grind off the edges of her beauty. She had dark red hair to her waist, neon-green eyes, and a small, almost dainty mouth. She never wore anything but black and she believed she was a witch.

When Fortunato had auditioned her he'd been moved by her abandon, her complete absorption in carnality, so much at odds with her cool, sophisticated looks. He'd accepted her for training and she'd been at it now for three weeks, turning only an occasional trick, making the transition from gifted call girl to apprentice geisha that would take at least two years.

She led him up to her apartment and stopped with the key in the lock. "Uh, I hope its not too weird for you." He stood in the doorway while she walked through the room, lighting candles. The windows were heavily draped and he didn't see any appliances except a telephone-no TV, no clocks, not even a toaster. In the barren center of the room she'd painted a huge, five-pointed star surrounded by a circle, right onto the hardwood floor. Behind the sensual smells of incense and musk was the faint sulfurous tang of a chemistry lab.

He locked the front door and followed her into the bedroom. The apartment was thick with sexuality. He could barely move his feet through the heavy, wine-colored carpet; the bed was canopied, with red velvet curtains, and so high off the floor it had stairs leading up to it.

She found a joint in the nightstand, lit it, and handed it to Fortunato. "I'll be back in a second," she said.

He took his clothes off and lay down with his hands behind his head, the joint hanging out of his mouth. He took a lungful of smoke and watched his toes uncurl. The ceiling overhead was deep blue, with constellations dabbed on in phosphorescent yellow-green. Signs of the zodiac, as far as he could tell. Magic and astrology and gurus were very hip right now. People at trendy Village parties were always asking each other what sign they were and talking about karma. For himself, he thought the Aquarian Age was just so much wishful thinking. Nixon was in the White House, kids were getting their asses shot off in Southeast Asia, and he still heard the word "nigger" every day. But he had clients who would love this place.

If the psycho with the knife didn't put him out of business. Lenore knelt beside him on the bed, naked. "You have such beautiful skin." She ran fingertips over his chest, raising gooseflesh. "I've never seen a color like this before." When he didn't answer she said, "Your mother is Japanese, they told me:"

"And my father was a Harlem pimp."

"You're really fucked up about this, aren't you."

"I loved those girls. I love all of you. You're more important to me than money or family or… or anything."

"And?"

He didn't think he had anything else to say until the words started coming out. "I feel so… so goddamned helpless. Some twisted son of a bitch is killing my girls and there's nothing I can do about it."

"Maybe," she said. "Maybe not." Her fingers tangled in his pubic hair. "Sex is power, Fortunato. It's the most powerful thing in the universe. Don't ever forget that."

She took his penis in her mouth, working it gently with her tongue like a piece of candy. It stiffened instantly and Fortunato felt sweat break on his forehead. He put out the joint with a wet fingertip and dropped it over the edge of the bed. His heels skidded on the icy slickness of the sheets and his nose filled with Lenore's perfume. He thought of Erika, dead, and it made him want to fuck Lenore hard and long.

"No," she said, taking his hand from her breast. "You brought me in off the streets, you're teaching me what you know. Now its my turn."

She pushed him down flat on his back, his arms over his head, and ran her black-polished fingernails down the tender skin over his ribs. Then she began to move over his body, touching him with her lips, her breasts, the ends of her hair, until his skin felt hot enough to glow in the dark. Then, finally, she straddled him and took him into her.

Being inside her gave him a rush like a junkie's. He pumped his hips and she leaned into it, taking her weight on her arms, her hair waterfalling around her head. Then, slowly, she lifted her eyes and stared at him.