George Martin - Deuces Down

“No, I think you’re wearing it.” She gestured to the bar. “About a half hour ago, when the waiter dropped his tray? Someone bumped into me and knocked my hat off.”

Sam remembered the loud and spectacular crash, which had not only made him jump and squirt ink all over a page, ruining one of his sketches, but had also had caused him to dig in his nails, injecting pigment into several pages previous, destroying hours of work. Which in fact was why he was still here, recopying pages and hitting up Hastet for snacks to refill his ink reservoirs. “And…?”

“And my grandfather was a stage magician. I know all about misdirection.” She looked pointedly at a spot a few inches above his eyes. “Likewise the bump-and-switch.” She reached up and tapped her hat. “And while this is the same size and vintage as the one I came in with-even the same haberdasher’s mark-it’s not the same hat.”

Sam grimaced. He should have known it was something more than just mutual admiration of gothic finery. “If you wanted to look at my hat…” He doffed it, stray bits of blond mane falling into his face, “… all you had to do was ask.” He extended it to her. “Was yours a rental prop?”

“No,” she said coldly, grasping the brim, “but it had a lot of sentimental value.” She then thrust her arm inside his hat, up to the elbow. Her hand came out the other end, where the crown was partially detached, becoming even more detached as she did so, and Sam watched as her expression changed, from a look of smug satisfaction, to puzzlement, then to worry as her painted nails fumbled at the air, to red-faced embarrassment as she caught sight of them over the brim of the hat. “Wha-?”

Something in her expression made him flash back to the teenage girl on the cover of Aces! and he realized that, with the exception of Golden Boy, most aces didn’t stay unchanged since the early eighties. “Wait a second,” Sam said, “you really are Topper, aren’t you?” She looked at him and that look cinched it. “That article, it was wrong, right? SCARE disinformation. Your ace crutch isn’t just any hat, or a top hat, it’s one top hat in particular, the one you got from your grandfather. You hid it inside that sombrero and-”

“ Not so loud! ” she hissed, withdrawing her arm from his hat and abruptly sitting next to him. “I don’t want everyone to- What’s the matter?”

Sam gritted his teeth to keep from screaming. “ You’re sitting on my tail! ”

She looked. “Uh, it’s a nice tail coat but…”

Sam twitched his real tail, hidden down the sheath in the left-hand train of his own swallowtail coat where it had been stretched out in the booth, and Topper’s eyes started. She abruptly raised back up so he could yank it under himself, having a moment of trouble as it got tangled with the tails of her coat and the velvet of the upholstery, but at last he got it situated. “My Jokertown membership card, a little joker to go with my deuce.” He blinked back the pain, even though his tail was still smarting. “Okay, now you know my secret too.”

She sighed. “I’m sorry. I won’t tell if you won’t tell.” She grimaced and covered her eyes with one hand, shaking her head softly. “Good god, if Jay ever finds out that I’ve lost my hat, I’ll never hear the end of it…”

“Hastet’s Jay?”

She dropped her hand and nodded. “I work for his agency.”

Sam glanced down at her fishnets through the hole in his hat. “What sort of agency…?”

She follow his gaze, then muttered, “There was a reason I retired this costume…” Then she glared at him. “ Detective agency. Gads, I work for Popinjay, not Fortunato.” She looked then at Sam’s top hat, with its crown falling out, and gave a sheepish grin that made her look years younger. “Sorry about that…” She glanced around the restaurant. “Do you see any other top hats?”

Sam looked himself. Starfields was packed, and given the night, he saw every sort of hat imaginable, from the odd dozen ostrich-plumed cavalier hats worn by the Dr. Tachyon lookalike waiters to representational foam rubber creations liberated from the Theatre District, looking to be cast-offs from last month’s Wild Card Follies everything from the Great Ape climbing the Empire State Building to Dr. Tod’s flaming blimp. But no top hats.

“Right now?” He smoothed his hair back with one velvet glove and replaced his battered hat with the other, pushing the crown inside. “Excepting mine and the one you’re wearing, no.”

She bit her lower lip. “Earlier?”

Sam thought back. “Several. Let me look…” He picked up his sketchbook, blowing once across it so that the snot-trails from the Salamanca script would be dry, then flipped back past the buffer of blank pages he’d left to protect from bleed-through until he got to the ruined section. He pried open the last two sheets, still damp from the accident, revealing a giant multicolored Rorschach blot of sprayed ink, one hue bleeding into the next, predominantly the shocking pink of surprise. But underneath that, still visible on the lefthand page, were a series of sketches, including an image of the Starfields bar just minutes before the crash. Counting top hats, there were seven individuals of note, the first six wearing tail coats, the last without.

First was Topper, holding a martini, perched at the edge of the bar in her fishnets. Next, a short ways down, was a crippled boy with polio crutches. Then came a young man with a blond mane and velvet gloves, the very image of Sam himself, turned and talking to a darkly handsome man with black hair and a permanent five-o’-clock shadow, fiddling with a small hand-held black box. Then there was a set of improbably wide shoulders, facing the bar and taking up at least three seats, the top hat worn atop a perfectly average, even narrow, head. Next a pale horse-faced giant with a long white goatee and a spiked and spiraled Mohawk, his top hat artfully and absurdly impaled on the twisted spikes. Then, finally, there was a fetish girl, a long, lithe, willowy woman, thin as a supermodel and almost as tall, dressed head to toe in latex. Her catsuit and platform-soled dominatrix boots were all of a piece, broken only by buckles and straps, and her face was hidden by a pantomime mask, a single tear on one cheek. This was backed by long honey blond tresses and topped with a vintage silk top hat.

“Here.” Sam handed the book to Topper.

She scrutinized the page like a rogues gallery. “Do you know any of these people?”

“Everyone except the women on the ends.” Sam paused. “Though I’m getting to know the one of them.”

Topper looked at him, and their proximity, and smirked. “Don’t push it. I’m old enough to be your babysitter.”

Sam shrugged. “I grew up in an orphanage. I never had a babysitter.” He paused. “Though I did have fantasies.”

Topper didn’t touch this, focusing instead on the mystery woman. “So, the Vinyl Vixen here-any idea who she is? Is that an ace uniform? A joker disguise? A Halloween costume? A really kinky fashion statement?”

Sam shrugged. “All of the above? Go to bondage night at the Dead Nicholas and that’s a pretty common look.” Then he added, “I do their club flyers.”

“Is it just me, or does it look like she has an Adam’s apple under the latex?” Topper looked closer at the illustration. “Or is that an inkblot?”

“Hard to tell. When I sketch fast, I just-” He caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of one eye, a flash of silver buckles and golden hair. “Though maybe you could just ask Latex Lass yourself.” He pointed across the restaurant to where the same woman was coming out of the ladies room.