Aces Abroad

I wonder if even Folke Bernadotte knew who his gopher really was. I wonder where Harstein is now, and what he thinks of the peace that he so carefully and secretly wrought. And I find myself reflecting on what the Black Dog said in Jerusalem.

What would it do to the fragile Peace of Jerusalem if its origins were revealed to the world? The more I reflect on that, the more certain I grow that I ought tear these pages from my journal before I offer it for publication. If no one gets Dr. Tachyon drunk, perhaps this secret can even be kept.

Did he ever do it again, I wonder? After HUAC, after prison and disgrace and his celebrated conscription and equally celebrated disappearance, did the Envoy ever sit in on any other negotiations with the world's being none the wiser? I wonder if we'll ever know.

I think it unlikely and wish it were not. From what I have seen on this tour, in Guatemala and South Africa, in Ethiopia and Syria and Jerusalem, in India and Indonesia and Poland, the world today needs the Envoy more than ever.

PUPPETS

Victor W Milan

MacHeath had a jackknife, so the song went.

Mackie Messer had something better. And it was ever so much easier to keep out of sight.

Mackie blew into the camera store on a breath of cool air and diesel farts from the Kurfiirstendamm. He left off whistling his song, let the door hiss to behind him, and stood with his fists rammed down in his jacket pockets to catch a look around.

Light slamdanced on countertops, the curves of cameras, black and glassy-eyed. He felt the humming of the lights down beneath his skin. This place got on his tits. It was so clean and antiseptic it made him think of a doctor's office. He hated doctors. Always had, since the doctors the Hamburg court sent him to see when he was thirteen said he was crazy and pe

On a stool by the display counter lay a Berliner Zeitung folded to the headline: "Wild Card Tour to Visit Wall Today." He smiled, thin.

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Then Dieter came in from the back and saw him. He stopped dead and put this foolish smile on his face. "Mackie. Hey. It's a little early, isn't it?"

He had a narrow, pale head with dark hair slicked back in a smear of oil. His suit was blue and ran to too much padding in the shoulders. His tie was thin and iridescent. His lower lip quivered just a little.

Mackie was standing still. His eyes were the eyes of a shark, cold and gray and expressionless as steel marbles.

"I was just, you know, putting in my appearance here, Dieter said." A hand jittered around at the cameras and the neon tubing and the sprawling shiny posters showing the ta

He tried to keep his eyes off Mackie, but they just kept rolling back to him, as if the whole room slanted downward to where he stood. The ace didn't look like much. He was maybe seventeen, looked younger, except for his skin-that had a dryness to it, a touch of parchment age. He wasn't much more than a hundred seventy centimeters tall, even ski

"So you stepped up the timetable, came for me early," Dieter said lamely.

Mackie flashed forward, wrapped his hand in shiny tie, hauled Dieter toward him. "Maybe it's too late for you, comrade. Maybe maybe."

The camera salesman had a curious glossy-pale complexion, like laminated paper. Now his skin turned the color of a sheet of the Zeitung after it had spent the night blowing along a Budapesterstrasse curb. He'd seen what that hand could do.

"M-mackie," he stammered, clutching at the reed-thin arm.

He collected himself then, patted Mackie affectionately on a leather sleeve. "Hey, hey now, brother. What's the matter?"

"You tried to sell us, motherfucker!" Mackie screamed, spraying spittle all over Dieter's after-shave.

Dieter jerked back. His arm twitched with the lust to wipe his cheek. "What the fuck are you talking about, Mackie? I'd never try-"

"Kelly. That Australian bitch. Wolf thought she was acting fu

Dieter's tongue flicked bluish lips. "Listen, you've got it wrong. She was nothing to me. I knew she was just a groupie, all along-"

His eyes informed on him, sliding ever so slightly to the right. His hand suddenly flared up from below the register with a black snub revolver in it.

Mackie's left hand whirred down, vibrating like the blade of a jigsaw. It sheared through the pistol's top strap, through the cylinder and cartridges, and slashed open the trigger guard a piece of a centimeter in front of Dieter's forefinger. The finger clenched spastically, the hammer came back and clicked to, and the rear half of the cylinder, its fresh-cut face glistening like silver, fell forward onto the countertop. Glass cracked.

Mackie grabbed Dieter by the face and hauled him forward. The camera salesman put down his hands to steady himself, shrieked as they went through the countertops. The broken glass raked him like talons, slashing through blue coat sleeve and blue French shirt and fishbelly skin beneath. His blood streamed over Zeiss lenses and Japanese import cameras that were making inroads in the Federal Republic despite chauvinism and high tariffs, ruining their finish.

"We were comrades! Why? Why?" Mackie's whole ski

Dieter squealed as he felt them rasping at the post-shave stubble he could never get rid of, the only flaw in his neo-sleek grooming. " I don't know what you're talking about," he screamed. " I never meant to do it-I was playing her along-"

"Liar!" Mackie yelled. The anger jolted through him like a blast from the third rail, and his hands were buzzing, buzzing, and Dieter was flopping and howling as the flesh began to come off his cheeks, and Mackie gripped him harder, hands on cheekbones, and the rising vibration of his hands was transmitted through bone to the wet mass of Dieter's brain, and the camera salesman's eyes rolled and his tongue came out and the violent agitation flash-boiled the fluids in his skull and his head exploded.

Mackie dropped him, danced back howling like a man on fire, swiping at the clotted stuff that filled his eyes and clung to his cheeks and hair. When he could see, he went around the counter and kicked the quivering body. It slid onto the cuffed linoleum floor. The cash register was flashing orange error-condition warnings, the display case swam with blood, and there were lumps of greasy yellow-gray brains all over everything.

Mackie dabbed at his jacket and screamed again when his hands came away slimy. "You bastard!" He kicked the headless corpse again. "You got this shit all over me, you asshole. Asshole, asshole, asshole!"

He hunkered down, pulled up the tail of Dieter's suit coat, and wiped the worst lumps off his face and hands and leather jacket. "Oh, Dieter, Dieter," he sobbed, " I wanted to talk to you, stupid son of a bitch-" He picked up a cold hand, kissed it, tenderly rested it on a spattered lapel. Then he went back to the john to wash down as best he could.