All the Lives He Led-A Novel (13 page)

“Which meant to his terrorist buddies, right?” Gerda put in. “Was that all the money he raised for them?”

“Oh, hell, no.” So I told her how good Uncle Devious had been at talking the older and foolisher members of my parents’ set into donating chunks of their surplus capital to his fund.

“Not so much Dad, though. He did get my dad to give him a ten-hectare parcel of unbuildable floodplain that he’d acquired in a package deal and had no other use for. But that was a scam for my father, too.” So then I had to explain the United States tax code to her, and how my father turned over the land and took his charitable-deduction tax break—not for what the land was worth, but for maybe ten times that.

Gerda objected to that. “But didn’t the tax people do their own appraisal?”

“Would’ve, sure. But it was out of their hands.” So then I had to explain how Uncle Devious sold the land to a dummy corporation, which sold it to another, and so on until there was just too much paper to untangle. “The value of a thing, after all,” I informed her, “is what you can sell it for.”

“And your father wanted to help the Tibetan orphans?”

“My father didn’t give a pig’s fart for the Tibetan orphans. Or for Uncle Devious, come to that. He did like to screw the tax people, though.”

She was silent for a moment, but I didn’t give her a chance for more questions. All this talking about my past life had started me wondering about hers. So, “Enough,” I said. “Now it’s your turn.”

She made a little face, but fair was fair and Gerda was conspicuously fair. Well, not when it came to picking up a check, I mean, but mostly. She thought for a moment, then said, “Did I ever tell you that I was overweight as a kid? I was. It wasn’t fun, either.” Then she began to tell me what it had been like to be a fat little girl in a prosperous family in a rich city, namely Munich. And how frequently her brothers kept getting arrested for being drunk and disorderly at the Oktoberfests, when you had to get really seriously drunk and disorderly to attract attention from the Oktoberfests cops, all thoroughly busy with several thousand other disorderly drunks. (Not just drunk enough to throw up, her brother Gerhardt had been, but drunk enough to throw up into the lap of a priest who was also a cousin of the mayor. And then punching out the priest when he complained.) And how she had always loved skiing down that gentle hill outside of town that had been bulldozed together out of ruins—no, not from some terrorist attack, or not exactly, she told me, but ruins that had been the result of bombing missions by British and American planes way back in World War II. And what it had been like for her and her family, those February days in 2062, when all the news was about nothing but the terrible volcanic explosion in America, millions and millions dead, famous cities buried, the whole world’s commerce, travel, finances disrupted as a result. And—the part she remembered best—the spectacular sunsets that they had all those winter days, as the millions of tons of dust that once had been parts of Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana filled the air as they circled around and around the globe.

And then she did say, finally, “Let’s go to bed.” So we did. Only as I was getting out of my slacks something rolled out of my pocket, and it was the great big, fake-gold thumb ring that had been part of my costume for the dinner. “Shit,” I said, looking at it.

“What, that thing?” Gerda asked, getting nicely close to naked. “Don’t worry about it. You can just turn it in to Jeremy Jones in the morning.”

“Sure,” I said, but I didn’t mean it. I didn’t want to spend any more time with the Bastard than I had to. Anyway, I was less interested in conversation than in getting into that bed where Gerda was already waiting.

As I climbed in, she said penitently, “Did I bore you with all that talk about my family?”

“Not a bit,” I said, which was true. But even as I was reaching out for her I was thinking that, funny thing, apart from the Yellowstone thing none of her reminiscences had any dates in them.

But really, what did I care if she didn’t want to let me know how old she was? I had been pretty sure all along that she had to be more than my own twenty-five. Late twenties, at least. Or thirty, or perhaps thirty-five—hell, I didn’t care if she was forty! She was still my girl.

If there had been any chance that I’d take Gerda’s advice it didn’t last. When Gerda’s opticle woke her up it was to tell her that she’d been assigned to the evening shift at the live-action whorehouse, but when I checked my own it was business as usual at the wine bar. So when I’d got myself dressed for the job I barged into the Bastard’s dispatch room. “Could you do us a favor?” I asked, my tone really polite because he’d been talking on the speaker and the way he looked at me showed that I was interrupting. “If you could just see that Gerda and I are on the same shift as much as you can—”

He didn’t do that. He blew his top at me instead. “Jesus, Sheridan! Haven’t you been enough of a pain in the ass already?” Which was just his way of saying, “Gosh, I’m afraid I’ll have to say no to that,” but it was enough to chase any idea of returning the ring to him right out of my head. So I went off to do the job they paid me to do.

It was a swelteringly soggy day, the only kind of Italian summer day that’s worse than the blazing hot ones, and Cedric the Pimp was giving me that I-can’t-live-without-a-shot-of-your-lousy-wine look from across the via. I made believe I didn’t see him. When I took advantage of my lack of customers to bend down to my eyepiece there wasn’t anything good on it. I don’t know what I’d been hoping for. Maybe (listen, I was still at the cute stage of being in love) for some little I-can’t-wait-for-tonight message slipped in from Gerda before she went off to be a housemaid moonlighting as a whore. There wasn’t, though. There wasn’t even any very exciting news when I clicked over to the public channels. More terrorist stuff, sure, but I could get pretty sick of one more batch of derailed trains and burned-alive hostages.

There was, of course, the usual begging letter from my mother:

Brad, dearest,

Your wonderful gift just arrived and was gratefully received, as always. The estimate for repairing the community shower just came in, and we were trying to figure out where we would get the money to pay our share, so it got here at a wonderful moment, although it’s only about half the bill.

All my love, dear. Your dad is well, but still kind of depressed.

Well, that gave me something other than Gerda to think about. Like wondering where I was going to get the cash for the next remittance. However much I watered the wine the customers drank and how vigorously I reused the leftover fractions they didn’t, there just wasn’t enough action around the wineshop to keep me, and my parents, solvent. I was having a serious cash flow problem. And Gerda was it.

I took another look at Mom’s letter, in case I’d missed some crumb of good news. I hadn’t. There wasn’t any. My dad was depressed, was he? That wasn’t a surprise, and another thing that wasn’t a surprise was that she sent me her love but he didn’t. I hadn’t expected he would.

Across the street Cedric the Pimp was still giving me imploring looks. He was huddled away from the rain under the icon of his calling, the plaster penis, two meters long, that hung above his doorway to let customers know what was for sale inside. It wasn’t really keeping the rain off. It wasn’t drawing customers, either, because there were hardly any customers along the via to be drawn just then.

Even in good weather, Cedric’s wasn’t the most profitable enterprise on the via. It couldn’t compare with the “real” brothels around the Stabian baths, where at least the “whores” were flesh and blood, even if not touchable by the paying customers. Not that that stopped those bastards, though; last time Gerda worked there she came back with little pinch marks on her butt. That didn’t seem to make her very mad—mostly she thought it was a little bit funny—but what it made me feel was something else again.

Cedric’s whores, of course, were all virts. I’d been inside the place just once to look it over—tiny cubicles with a narrow platform set against one wall, like a cot in a prison cell—and each cubicle’s door marked with a painting of whatever specific variety of sexual act its occupant claimed to be particularly good at. I went once for a look, had no desire to go back. Cedric’s was one of the few jobs in the Giubileo that I thought were more boring than my own.

And right there is when I heard Cedric’s sad little whine from behind me (“Uh, Brad, I was wondering, could you spare a drop of your joy juice for a friend?”), and realized that I hadn’t been discouraging enough. Cedric was right behind me, having taken advantage of the rain to sneak across the via.

Of course that wasn’t the first time Cedric had come begging. Begging was what he did. He’d never had a euro to spare that whole summer, and until he got that whopping Murmansk indenture paid off he never would.

But I gave him a cup of wine all the same, and while he was lifting it to his lips I slid the ring out of the fold in my diaper where I’d been carrying it and displayed it to him. “Look what a dumb thing I did,” I said.

When I explained what the dumb thing had been Cedric was reassuring. “That’s”—swallow, swallow, most of the wine already down his throat—“no problem, Brad. Just turn it in to the Welsh Bastard when you’re off this afternoon. Say, do you think you could spare a little more—?”

I didn’t let him finish that. “I’d rather stay away from the Bastard,” I said. “We aren’t on such great terms, but, hey, you don’t have that problem, do you? How’d you like to give the ring to him for me?”

“Aw, no, Brad,” he said, his tone both sorrowful and apologetic—and his now empty wine cup held out before him in case I felt like refilling it. “You know the first thing he’d ask me is where I got it, and then I’d have to say it was from you anyway, wouldn’t I?”

Well, he naturally would. I didn’t have an answer, but Cedric wasn’t quite through. He pushed the cup a centimeter closer and said, “What about the union?”

I scowled at him. “What about it?”

“They’ve probably got somebody who could help you, don’t you think? Did you ever read what it says on your card?” I never had, mostly because it was in Italian. Cedric translated it for me. “‘To do for you what you cannot do for yourself,’ right? So let them do it.”

What he was saying made sense—enough sense that I refilled his cup. Which he swallowed in no time, because the rain was stopping, and tourists were beginning to venture down the via again. By the time Cedric had scooted back to his own side of the road I had my first customers of the day, and the problem of what to do about the ring looked soluble.

Those customers were a pair of Danish blondes, whispering, no, mostly giggling to each other in their own impenetrable language, plus the pair of horny Italian youths following them who were what they were giggling about. English was difficult for all of them, but it didn’t matter. The girls had no problem in understanding that the boys wanted to pick them up. The boys were quite clear on the ground rules, too. If they wanted that to happen they were going to have to beg for it. I understood them both. Well, I didn’t have to understand any actual language, did I? I knew exactly what was going on without comprehending a single spoken word. And so did everybody else in sight.

When the boys came to the point when it was time to show what big sports they were they whispered to each other worriedly, then took the plunge. They ordered a couple of wines for the girls, who giggled but accepted them. When I filled their cups I decided the four of them were sufficiently interested in each other that they weren’t going to care about anything I might do, and it was time I checked my dismal financial position again.

So I inched my cell out of its hiding place, wiped Mom’s letter from the screen, and did a quick look up and down of the Via dell’Abbondanza. A gaggle of twenty or thirty Korean tourists marched briskly after their banner-carrying leader just east of us—not really in step, but not much out of it, either. To the west, between us and the Stabian Baths, were some smaller groups, some of them laughing and pointing at that virt litter with the virt Pompeiian whore, making its regular 11:47 AM appearance. It looked like I had a moment. I was already dialing up my money management program and had the cell in my hand when, all of a sudden, things changed. The virt litter queerly flickered and flowed and broke into a bright fog of quickly dissipating sparks of light.

And everything around me went weird at once.

What I mean by that is that everything in sight was melting and changing before my eyes. Façades of some buildings, second stories of others, bits of Roman statuary and odds and ends of wall plaques and ornamentation, they all flickered and disappeared, just as the litter had. All that were left were the bare, broken, virtless and two-thousand-year-old stone walls of the original Pompeii. The fake living Pompeii had become an authentic ruin again, and the little gasps of surprise from the customers turned quickly into a frightened babble. A fairly loud babble, that is, especially from the Korean group. A bunch of people yelling remarks at each other from one end of their caterpillar to the other made a lot more noise than a couple of Romanians or Papua New Guineans exchanging close-range expressions of worry with each other.

About five seconds later my cell along with the cells of the pimp across the street and the laundryman next door and everybody else around who worked for the Jubilee gave their five staccato emergency burps and began to yell at us: “All personnel! Hear this! There has been a power interruption! You must keep guests reassured and maintain order! Power will be restored as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, prevent panic!”

It didn’t say how we were supposed to do that.

On the other hand, nobody in my part of the city actually seemed to be doing any panicking. By the look of most of the customers they found the event entertaining. It might have been worse if it had been night when the power died. It hadn’t. The bright Italian sun didn’t need any help from electricity to keep the world well lit. Even the remote
bleepbleepbleep
of emergency vehicles—maybe Security, maybe UN, I couldn’t tell—didn’t scare anyone. Those noises weren’t very close, anyway. They came from past the baths, maybe as far as the Civic Forum, I thought. Still—powered vehicles on Pompeii’s two-thousand-year-old streets? I couldn’t believe it had been allowed.