She went white, tensed as if she were about to leap up and attack him. Then she settled back and elaborately studied her manicure.

" I shouldn't be surprised that you're a b.a.s.t.a.r.d, Mr. Latham," she said. "After all, that's why I hired you. But it occurs to me-"

She lowered her hand and gave him a smile, poisonous and V -shaped. "It occurs to me that you're insane. You want me to use my daughter for bait?"

He didn't flinch. Didn't even flicker.

"I said perceived threat, Mrs. Gooding. I am talking about a set-piece-a stratagem. There would be no real risk."

Showing as little emotion as he, she picked up her gla.s.s and threw it hard at his head. He shifted his weight. The gla.s.s sailed past to shatter against the window. In New York, people who live in gla.s.s houses have to have stoneproof walls; it's in the building code.

"I'm paying you to win this in court, you son of a b.i.t.c.h. Not to play games with my daughter's life."

He showed her the ghost of a smile. "What do you think the law is but playing games with people's lives?"

"Get out," she said. "Get out of my house."

"Certainly." Calm. Always calm. Infuriating, impermeable, irresistible.

"Anything the client desires. But reflect on this: Not even I can get your daughter for you if you don't want her badly enough to sacrifice."

Sprout clung tightly to her parents' hands. "Mommy and Daddy, be nice to each other," she said solemnly. "In that court place, everybody always sounds mad all the time. It makes me afraid."

She clouded up and started to sniffle. "I'm afraid they'll take me away from you."

Her mother hugged her, hard. "Honey, we'll always be with you." A hooded look to Mark. "One of us will. Always."

Sprout let Kimberly lower her onto the mattress among the stuffed toys and gazed up with wide eyes. "Promise?"

"Promise," her mother said.

"Yeah," Mark said around an obstruction in his throat. "One of us will always be around. We can promise you that much."

Kimberly sipped Chianti from her jelly jar. "Your room looks so naked without all the psychedelia." Candlelight struck half-moon amethyst highlights off her eyes. "I mean, who'd -imagine you without that huge poster of Tom Marion over your bed?"

He smiled ruefully. "The worst part is this futon I got in place of my old mattress. It's like nothing at all sometimes. I wake up with sore patches on my knees and elbows from the floor."

Kimberly drank wine and sighed. Mark tried hard not to think about the way her b.r.e.a.s.t.s rode up inside the thin cotton blouse. He'd been alone too long.

"Oh, Mark, what happened to us?"

He shook his head. His eyes grew misty. Way back and down, he felt derisive sounds coming out of Flash and Cosmic Traveler, sitting like hecklers in the cheap seats of his mind. It was rare enough they agreed on anything. He felt wordless care and concern from Moonchild, nothing at all from Aquarius.

Starshine was vaguely disapproving. He was probably afraid Mark was going to have fun. It wasn't socially conscious.

She moistened her lips. "I know St. John is being awfully hard on you. I wish it didn't have to be this way." He looked at her with eyes that felt as if they had no moisture in them, parched by each random breath of air. It was strange, considering how close he was to tears. Would it do me any good to beg? he wondered. Oh, please, the Traveler said.

She settled back on his pillow. Even in the eighties a man got to have a pillow.

For a moment she half lay that way, one leg c.o.c.ked, her hair hanging in her eyes and around her shoulders with just a little bit of perm kink still in it. He thought she'd never looked so beautiful. Not even when she was carrying Sprout and they were both breaking their necks to make believe that everything was going to work out.

She sighed again. "All my life I've had this feeling of shapelessness," she began.

Mark's mouth said, "Oh, baby, don't talk that way, you're beautiful," before he could stop it. Flash and Traveler hooted and twirled noisemakers. Even Moonchild winced.

Kimberly ignored him. "It's like I've always been searching for landmarks to define myself by: jocks, radicals." A smile. "You."

She smoothed her hair back and let her head drop toward one shoulder. "Does any of this make any sense?" Mark made earnest noises. She smiled and shook her head.

"After we split I spent a few years in heavy therapy. I guess you knew about that, huh? Then one day I decided it was time to try something new, just completely different from anything I'd done before. I did the furthest-out thing I could think of set out to become a by-G.o.d businesswoman, a real hard-charging lady entrepreneur. Entrepreneuse. Whatever. Is that strange, or what?"

She laughed. "And I did, Mark, I did it. I do it. Racquetball and power lunches.

I even have a muscular male bimbo for a secretary, even if he is gay. You can't imagine what this is costing me in lost time, aside from dear St. John's astronomical fees."

Mark looked away and felt selfish for reflexively thinking of what all this was costing him, and not at all in terms of money.

"Then I met Cornelius. He's really a wonderful man."

"I'm sure you'd like him if you got to know him. Only you and he are ... worlds apart."

She poured them both more wine. "Domestic little creature, aren't I? I'm starting to have the horrible suspicion that no matter how liberated I think I am, my gut notion's Norman Rockwell. You know, all those Sat.u.r.day Evening Post covers when we were kids-don't make faces like that, I know it's silly. But I want to capture that feed."

She leaned toward him. He ached to stroke her hair. "Anything you want is fine.

I want you to be happy." She smiled at him, sidelong. "You really mean that, don't you? In spite of what's going on."

He wanted to say-well, everything. But the words tried to come so fast they jammed tight in his throat. She brought her face close to his. Her ma.s.s of hair shadowed both their faces.

"Remember that guy I went with in high school? The big guy, blond, captain of the football team?"

Mark winced at long-remembered pain. "Yeah."

She laughed softly. "About three weeks after he broke your nose, he broke mine."

She set the jelly gla.s.s down beside the futon and kissed him lightly on the lips.

"Funny how things turn out sometimes, huh?"

His lips were numb and stinging all at once, as if somebody had punched him in the mouth. She slipped her hand behind his head, drew his face to hers. Almost he hung back. Then their mouths touched again, and her tongue slid between his lips, teased across his teeth. He grabbed her like a drowning man and clung, with his hands, his lips, his soul.

In her sleep, in her room, Sprout cried out.

They were both on their feet at once. Mark just beat Kimberly through the door of his microscopic bedroom. Lying on her own lumpy mattress, Sprout murmured to herself, hugged her Pooh-bear closer to herself, and rolled over and back deeper into sleep. Mark and Kimberly watched her for a moment, not speaking, barely breathing. Kimberly disengaged, went and sat on the futon. Mark practically melted beside her, reaching for her. She was tense, unyielding.

"I'm sorry," she said without looking at him. "It won't work. Don't you see?

I've tried this. I can't go back."

"But we can be together I'd do anything for you--for Sprout. We can be, like, a family again."

She glanced at him over her shoulder. Her eyes gleamed with tears. "Oh, Mark. It can't be. You're too much the free spirit. "

"What's wrong with freedom?"

"Responsibility took its place."

"But I can be what you wannl I'll do anything for you. I can help give you shape, if that's what you need." Smiling sadly, she shook her head. She stood up, faced him, took his face in her hands. "Oh, Mark," she said, and kissed him lightly but chastely on the lips, "I do love you. But really, it's all you can do to get up feet-first in the morning."

She was gone. Mark lurched to his feet, but her Reeboks were already doing a muted Ginger Baker number down the stairs. He hung there in the door frame, heart pounding. He could feel it especially in the s.c.r.o.t.u.m; his belly and inner thighs ached and trembled with frustrated tension.

He had almost forgotten what the blue b.a.l.l.s felt like. This s.h.i.t, JJ Flash said, has got to stop.

"Dr. Pretorius, what do you mean by appearing in my court like this?"

"You mean this, your honor?" He gestured at his right leg. The immaculately tailored trousers ended at the knee. The limb below was black and green and wanted like a frog's. Yellow pus oozed from a dozen lesions. Judge Conover's nose wrinkled at the smell.

"This is my wild card. It makes me a joker-except the condition is spreading upward by degrees, and when it reaches my torso, it will kill me. So I suppose it also qualifies as a Black Queen, albeit slow"

"It's disgusting. Do you intend to make mockery of this court?"

"I intend to display only what exists, your honor. Be it the physical disfigurement of a joker or the emotional and mental disfigurement of bigots who would condemn people for having drawn a wild card."

"I am tempted to find you in contempt."

"You can't make it stick," he said affably. "Jokers may not be enjoined from public display of their traits, unless these conflict with indecent-exposure laws. That's state and federal law; would you like citations?"

Her cheeks pinched her nose. "No. I know the law" He turned to Kimberly, who sat in the box as if she'd just been carved from a block of ice.

"Mrs. Gooding, you've been to court before to get custody of Sprout. What happened the first time?" Anger flared in her eyes. He let himself show a slight smile. Good Elizabeth Taylor. Before her John Belushi days, of course.

"You know perfectly well what happened," she said crisply.

"Please tell the court anyway." He let her see him glance toward the press-packed courtroom. He and Mark had awakened to headlines screaming TRIPS CUSTODY CASE LAWYER EQUATES ACES, DRUG LORDS and ACE POWERS KILL, ATTORNEY SAYS.

He wanted her and Latham to know he intended to share the joy.

There was also an article that said President Bush, after specifically pledging not to do so during his campaign, was considering calling for a revival of the old Ace Registration Acts. Didn't have anything to do with this, of course. Just another sign of the times.

She folded her hands before her. "I was under an enormous amount of stress at the time. There was our daughter's condition, and marriage to Mark was not precisely easy on me."

Touche, he thought, not that it'll do you any good. "So what happened?"

"I broke down on the stand."

"Went to pieces is more like it, wouldn't you say?" Her mouth tightened to a razor cut. "I was ill at the time. I'm not ashamed of that, why should I be?

I've had treatment."

"Indeed. And how else have circ.u.mstances changed from that time?"

"Well-" She glanced at Mark, who as usual was gazing at her like a blond ba.s.set pup. "My life has become much more stable. I've found a career, and a marvelous husband."

"So you would say that you can offer a far more stable home environment to Sprout than you could before?" She looked at him, surprised and wary. "Why, yes." He expected Latham to object right then, on GPs, just to break the rhythm of questioning even or maybe especially if he didn't know where it was headed.

You aren't infallible after all, are you, motherf.u.c.ker?

"So you are saying that now you are a suitable parent because you're richer?

What you're saying, then, is that rich people make better parents than poor ones?"

That pulled Latham's string. He actually jumped to his feet and raised his voice when he objected. Conower was pounding her gavel to restore order. She was going to sustain, no doubt about it. But he'd seen the flicker in her eyes. He'd gotten the point home. Punched her liberal-guilt b.u.t.ton with his customary sledgehammer subtlety.

Christ, I hate myself sometimes.

After lunch break Pretorius asked, "Have you ever used illegal drugs, Ms.

Gooding."

"Yes." She was forthright, meeting his eyes, not trying to evade an allegation she knew he could prove. "A long, long time ago. It was in the wind." A half smile. "We weren't as wise back then."

Nicely done. "And did you ever try LSD-25?" A pause, then, "Yes."

"Did you use it frequently?"

"That depends on your definition."

"I'll trust your judgment, Ms. Gooding."

She dropped her eyes. "It was the sixties. It was the thing to do. We were experimenting, trying to liberate our consciousness as well as our bodies."

"And did you ever stop to consider the genetic damage such experimentation might be doing?" He let it ring: "Did you not consider the welfare of your future children, Ms. Gooding?"

The courtroom blew up again.

After Conower called recess Mark was waiting for Pretorius, kind of hopping up and down without leaving his horrible chair, ergonomically designed to conform perfectly to the ma.s.s man but to fit no individual. He looked as if his ears were made of iron and had been stuck in a microwave.

"What was all that bulls.h.i.t about?" he hissed at Pretorius. "Acid isn't a proven teratogen. Not like, like alcohol."

"Alcohol isn't the issue. They haven't gotten around to reprohibiting it yet, at least not in time for the morning editions. Latham wants to make an issue of drugs. So we'll give him drugs good and hard."

For a moment Mark could only sputter in outrage. "Wuh-what about the truth?" he finally managed to get out.

"Truth." Pretorius laughed, a low, sour sound. "You're in a court of law, son.

Truth is not the issue here."

He sighed and sat. "Never believe that the days of trial by combat are over.