He stuck his hands in his pockets and turned his higherright-shoulder to the wind. He had to check a message drop in a Bowery flop. The Man was doing something big down in Atlanta. He might need Mackie at any time. Mackie Messer couldn't bear to miss a moment of being needed.

He started to hum his song, his ballad. Ignoring a tortured rabbit squeal of bus air brakes, he walked.

The crazies were out early. Once he walked past the police perimeter at the Atlanta Marriott Marquis, Jack Braun saw hundreds of convention delegates, dressed mostly in casual clothes, silly hats, and vests covered with campaign buttons; several stretch limos carrying Party Elders; a 1971 primer-gray Chevrolet Impala with a swastika flag fluttering from the aerial and three uniformed Nazi storm troopers sitting stonefaced in the front seat-for some reason no one was in back-and two gangs of jokers hanging their disfigured heads out of battered VW microbuses, waving at the crowd, and laughing at the reactions of the pedestrians. The microbuses were covered with Hartmann stickers and other political slogans. FREE SNOTMAN, said one. BLACK DOG RULES, said the other.

Gregg Hartmann, Jack Braun thought, would not approve. Associating the next president in the public mind with a joker terrorist was not approved political strategy.

Jack could feel sweat beading on his scalp. Even at seven-thirty in the morning, Atlanta was humid and sweltering.

Reconciliation breakfast. In an hour he and Hiram Worchester were supposed to become good friends. He wondered why he'd let Gregg Hartmann talk him into it.

The hell with the stroll, he thought savagely. He'd clear his head some other way. He turned around and headed back to the Marriott.

Jack had spent the previous night in his suite at the Marriott, getting sloshed with four uncommitted superdelegates from the parched Midwest. Gregg Hartmann's campaign manager, Charles Devaughn, had called with the suggestion that a little Hollywood charm might swing the uncommitted over to Gregg's camp. Jack, resigned by now, knew perfectly well what that meant. He made a few calls to some agents he knew. By the time the superdelegates arrived, the room had been stocked with bourbon, scotch, and genuine Georgia starlets, veterans of locally produced films with names like Chain Gang Women and Stock Car Carnage. When the party finally broke up about three in the morning and the last congressman from Missouri stumbled out with his arm around Miss Peachtree 1984, Jack figured he had put at least a couple more votes in Hartmann's pocket.

Sometimes it was easy. For some reason politicians often crumbled around celebrities-even, Jack thought, famous traitor aces and washed-up TV Tarzans like himself. Faded Hollywood charisma, combined with cheap sex, could sap the will of even the most hardened politico.

That, of course, combined with the unvoiced threat of blackmail. Devaughn, Jack knew, would be delighted.

A kettledrum boomed in Jack's hollow skull. He massaged his temples as he waited at a red light. The wild card's gift of enormous strength and eternal youth hadn't saved him from a hangover.

At least it hadn't been a Hollywood party. He would have had to provide a party bowl of cocaine.-

He reached into his Marks amp; Spencer bush jacket and got the first Camel Unfiltered of the day. As he bent over to shield the match in his big hands, he saw the Impala heading down the street toward him again, swastika flag fluttering. The flat caps of the storm troopers were silhouetted in the front window. The car increased speed as the light went yellow.

WHITE POWER. Bumper-sticker slogans. AUSLANDER RAUS!

Jack remembered, years ago, picking up a Mercedes staff car full of Peronistas and flipping it onto its top.

He remembered screaming in anger as German machine guns turned the Rapido River to white froth, the way his arms ached as he drove the sinking rubber raft across to the north bank where the brush was already full of the black helmets and cammo ponchos of SS Division Das Reich, the shells called by the spotters at Monte Cassino splashing down everywhere, half his squad dead or wounded, bodies sprawled on the bottom of his boat in a mixture of river spray and their own blood…

The hell, Jack thought, with politics.

All he had to do was step out in front of the Impala. He could make sure the impact pushed him under the car, and while he was underneath he could rip out the engine supports and leave the Brownshirts stranded in downtown Atlanta, surrounded by militant jokers, a large urban black population, and all the crazed and potentially violent lunatics attracted by the madness and confusion of the 1988 Democratic Convention.

Jack tossed away his match and swung one foot off the curb. The Impala sped closer, trying to beat the yellow light. Jack stepped back and watched as the Nazis raced by in their car. The black swastika burned itself into his eyeballs.

The Four Aces had been dead for almost forty years. Jack just didn't do that sort of thing anymore.

Too bad.

U2 blared from the radio, and the teenager beat out the rhythm line with a fork as he sucked down a glass of orange juice. His blood-red hair had been cut into a brush over the round skull, with a long skinny braid hanging down the black leather jacket. High-top black tennis shoes, fatigue pants completed his ensemble. The image was aggressively punk, but the face beneath the shock of red hair was too soft, too young for real bad-ass punk.

The contrast to his grandsire, who stood in front of the television, was startling. Dr. Tachyon, eyes slitted with interest as he listened to Jane Pauley of Today interview a panel of political pundits, had his violin tucked beneath his sharp chin and was busily sawing through a Paganini violin sonata. He was hearing perhaps one word in three, but it didn't matter. He had heard it all. So many many times before. As the months of campaigning ground down to this place-Atlanta. This timeJuly 1988. One man-Gregg Hartmann. One prize-the presidency of the United States of America.

Tachyon turned to Blaise, gestured toward the television with his bow. "It is going to be a desperate battle."

And as if in preparation for that upcoming battle, the alien had dressed in boots and breeches, with a black stock wrapped about the high lace collar of his shirt. An officer in Napoleon's Army could not have been more of a peacock than the slim, diminutive figure in his shimmering green outfit. On his breast in lieu of a Garter order hung a plastic ID card indicating that the bearer was one of the press contingent from the Jokertown Cry.

Blaise pulled a face and took a big bite out of a croissant. "Boring."

"Blaise, you are thirteen. Old enough to leave behind childish matters and take an interest in the larger world. On Takis you would be leaving the women's quarters. Preparing for your intensive education. Taking responsibility within the family. "

"Yeah, but we're not on Takis, and I'm not a joker, so I don't care a fuck."

"What did you say?" asked his grandsire in freezing accents.

"Fuck, you know, fuck. Anglo-Saxon word-"

"Crudity is never the mark of a gentlemen."

"You say it."

"Rarely. And please do as I say, not as I do." But Tachyon had the grace to grin sheepishly. "But child, jokers or not, we must care. We too are unique individuals, and if Barnett and his philosophy of oppression were to reach the White House it would devour us as well as the most miserable inhabitant of Jokertown. He wishes to place us in sanatoriums." Tachyon gave a snort of derision. "Why doesn't he just say the ugly word-concentration camps."