All the Lives He Led-A Novel (15 page)
Anyway, all Elfreda gave me back was a blank look. Then our instructor lost that faraway gaze that meant she was having a conversation with someone not physically present, pushed her opticle out of the way, made a note on her pad, gave me a glance that wasn’t blank at all—or friendly—and began to talk.
“Tonight,” Piranha Woman said, “we are going to try to understand what terrorists are motivated by, so that we can better work to defeat them. In my lecture I will occasionally ask a question. When the questions are rhetorical, no response is required from any of you. When the question is not rhetorical I will point to one of you for an answer—who will give it promptly and correctly, or will face consequences. Is that understood? Good. Now let us ask ourselves what terrorism is all about.”
She pursed those narrow lips, looking around the room. If it had been the old guy talking, probably one of us might have answered that question. Piranha Woman wasn’t pointing at any of us, though, and we had just heard her ground rules. So nobody spoke. Then, after a moment, she took a swallow of water from the pitcher on her lectern and began to talk. One by one she went over some of the most famous terrorist groups of those old Twentieth Century days when terrorism first began to be a major concern: the Red Army Faction and the Weathermen and Aum Shinrikyo and Baader-Meinhof and Al-Qaeda and Hamas and the Irgun and the Stern Gang and the Rajneeshees in the American state of Oregon and the RISE group in the American city of Chicago and the IRA and the one the Serbs called “Union or Death.” Then she paused for a moment, and then she said, “The question is, what do they all have in common?”
She looked around the room, very much as though she wanted one of us to volunteer an answer. She didn’t point, though, so none of us did.
Then she gave a swift, stern bob of the head and did point. And the person she pointed at was me.
“Stand up,” she said. I stood up. “So tell me, Mr. Sheridan”—it did not improve the situation for me to discover that she remembered my name—“what is it that all those groups have in common?”
Unsurprisingly, I didn’t know the answer to her question. That caused Piranha Woman to make it clear to me that, while it was bad enough to come late to the briefing, at least I could have come prepared. Then she asked for volunteers. Elfreda’s hand shot up. “Because they were all trying to stop some great social change,” she said. That was the right answer. Piranha Woman told her she could sit down, which I guess was Elfreda’s reward for being right. Since I hadn’t been right, I didn’t get that reward, and in fact Piranha Woman left me standing there, with my bare face hanging out, for the whole rest of the briefing.
She didn’t stop with the Twentieth Century, either. She gave us a synoptic of The Great Terrorist Atrocities of all time, from the Nuovi Risorgimenti who disabled Venice’s flood protectors just when the spring tides were due to the Very Greens who dynamited the Atchafalaya dams so that the Mississippi River no longer flowed past the ghost town that had once been New Orleans. And she mentioned Brian Bossert, the legendary terrorist mastermind who finished his career by amputating the city of Toronto from Canada’s economy for two full weeks one spring, using a staff of no more than five accomplices of whom four had no skill more complicated than the pulling of a trigger. (“At least there was one good thing about Toronto,” Piranha Woman said, actually sounding quite pleased. “Bossert got himself killed in the explosion. It wasn’t a bad trade.”) And all the while the four walls of our room were showing examples of their master terrorist handiwork. We saw the lopped-off Empire State Building, and the Golden Gate Bridge approaches that no longer led to any bridge, and the long lines of empty caskets waiting to be filled from the hordes of shivering Muscovites when the power lines had been destroyed one January.
But it came to an end.
Piranha Woman turned out to be a stickler for everybody’s punctuality, not just mine. At the thirtieth second of the sixtieth minute she clapped her hands and said, “You are finished for this evening. By the next session you are all required to have familiarized yourselves with the datafile on each of the individuals and groups I have named tonight.”
And she turned and left the room without bothering to say good night.
Outside it was already dark, with a sky full of bright Italian stars overhead. I stretched and yawned. I had turned my opticle off so it wouldn’t buzz at me during Piranha Woman’s briefing. When I pulled it out of my bellybag to put it back on the little blue message flasher was blinking.
The funny thing is that I really didn’t want to turn it back on to take that message. I can’t say that I knew what it was going to be. I was just suddenly pretty sure I wasn’t going to like it.
Sure enough, I didn’t.
The face looking up at me was my Gerda’s, and the look on her face told me the whole thing before she said one word. “Oh, hon,” she said, tone sad, remorseful—and firm. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am about this. You know my great-uncle Gerhart?” I didn’t. “The rich one? The one with the dacha outside of Moscow?”
That began to register. I did recall that Gerda had once said something about a Russian summer home somewhere in the family. But then she went on with her news bulletin, and it was bad. “Sweetie, he died. Left the dacha to me, would you believe it? Only the thing is I have to get up there to take possession of it. There’s a lot of legal stuff.” She bit her lip, and I could almost see the beginnings of a tear in her eye. “Oh, hell. I hate having to go away from you like this, dear Brad. The good thing is, just imagine what kind of good times you and I are going to have in the dacha after I get all the law nonsense straightened away. And, hon, I give you my word, I’ll be back just as soon as I can. A day or two. Three at the most. And then—” Her expression changed. “Oh, damn it, there’s the taxi, and if I’m going to make it to the zep I can’t wait. See you soon!”
And that was the end of the message, and just about the end of all the good feelings that the city of Pompeii had for me.
WORLD WITHOUT GERDA
Well, it wasn’t a day or two that she was gone. Naturally.
It wasn’t four days, either, or five. It wasn’t even six days, because when the seventh day came along she still hadn’t come back. Hadn’t even called. And there was a great big hole in my world where Gerda should have been, and wasn’t.
I’d got used to having Gerda in my life. It wasn’t as much fun without her. It wasn’t even as interesting. The things that I would have treasured, and told Gerda about as soon as I saw her, and chuckled over with her—well, they had lost their savor and there was nothing about them to treasure now. Like the troop of Bengali Girl Scouts that came charging down the via looking for God knew what, only to be turned back by the virt Roman legions at the ropes. Or like the (I guess) gay lovers who were snapping at each other all the way down from the Stabian Baths, looked at my wine list and turned up their noses, paid Cedric for a tour of his make-believe whorehouse and came out looking appalled. And then went back toward the baths, now holding hands. Or like the Saudi nuns with burkas over the veils of their habits, or any of the couple of dozen other things that passed by my wineshop and that I certainly would have shared with Gerda. And the two of us would surely have talked over the fact that those sick Puteoli girls—there were seven of them now, and one was expected to die quite soon—had been visitors to the Jubilee. At their local Catholic junior high fifteen of them had baked cookies, mowed lawns, washed cars, baby-sat, and done just about everything they could think of to do to get money to pay for a bus charter to take them to the Jubilee. They’d had a great time (one of the uninfected ones wailed, dabbing the tears from her eyes). But they hadn’t expected the additional bill to come due that they could pay only with gobbets of their flesh.
And Gerda wasn’t there to share any of that with.
So I trudged along my dull and solitary life and I did my stupid job. And then, the seventh morning, I reported to the Bastard’s dispatch room, wearing my slave smock and slave sandals because he’d said he wanted to inspect me before I went off to peddle my wine, and, hey, guess what, Maury Tesch was standing next to the Bastard’s desk, wearing the exact same outfit as mine and almost looking as though he was enjoying it. “Right,” the Bastard said, looking us over. “You’ll do. What’s the matter, Sheridan? Don’t like your new partner? I thought Tesch was a pal of yours.”
“Well, of course he is,” I said, because why would I say anything else with him standing right there? “But what’s he doing here? He works for the water department.”
“What he’s doing here is helping you out, Sheridan,” the Bastard said, talking to me as though I were a somewhat handicapped four-year-old. “There’re going to be crowds today, you know. Everybody that can be spared is on show duty today. Or have you forgotten what day it is?”
Indeed I had. Why shouldn’t I? I didn’t really care what day it was, for the same reason that I didn’t care much about anything else, either. Still it did occur to me that taking a high-ranking waterworks technician like Maury and assigning him to help at a low-ranking job like mine must mean something special was happening. Maury came to my rescue. “It’s the twenty-fourth, Brad,” he said helpfully. “You know? The two thousandth anniversary of the death of Vespasian and the ascent of Titus to the throne? With a big celebration and fireworks and a sky show? Remember?”
By then I did remember, and by the time the wine bar had been open an hour I was glad to have Maury there. The Jubilee people had figured it right. Business was terrific. There were at least half a dozen customers busily lapping up my lousy wine all that morning, from the moment we opened. Throngs filled the via. There was even a waiting line in front of Cedric’s whorehouse, for heaven’s sake. And the promised sky show was as good as had been promised, and the best of it was repeated every hour on the hour, all day long.
I didn’t really ever get a chance to watch the show straight through. Too many customers, too many interruptions. But by the third or fourth time it was on I had just about seen the whole thing, and it was worth looking at.
All that emplacing and fine-tuning the projectors had paid off. The show started with a flock of immense Roman gods—Jupiter, Venus, Mercury, the whole kit and caboodle of them—rolling across the sky in golden virt chariots, pulled by ten-meter-long white virt stallions. Five-meter-tall vestal virgins marched in procession from one horizon to the other—more virts, of course. Over the foothills to the north of the city a pyramid of immense logs erected itself, with wads of giant dried leaves and huge dead branches stuffed into the lowest tier for kindling. An immense human figure, silent, white-clad and majestic, lay in state on the topmost layer.
There weren’t any subtitles. There didn’t need to be. You didn’t have to be told that what you were looking at was the Emperor Vespasian’s funeral pyre.
Then torch-bearing arms reached out to the lowest level of wood. Flames danced up the sides. They merged. They grew. In a matter of moments towering masses of virt flames licked at the sun itself.
No heat came from those flames, of course. On the other hand, you couldn’t look at them without rising a thirst … so, as I say, business was great.
The Bastard had been right. I had needed a helper that day. The two of us were kept busy filling the cups and taking the fake ancient Roman money and washing—well, rinsing, it was all we had time to do—the cups for the next customer.
I don’t want to give the impression that I’d forgotten about Gerda. That never happened. It’s true, though, that she wasn’t really in the forefront of my mind on that particular day … and then, much sooner than I would have guessed, it was quitting time, and our relief wine sellers were waiting to take over and the supply slaves who had driven up in a three-wheeled cart were refilling our vats from the mule-driven cart.
“Well,” Maury said, giving me a smile that was only a little bit tentative, “that wasn’t so bad, was it?”
I cocked one eye at the head supply slave. He knew what I wanted to know. “Looks like about sixty, sixty-five liters gone,” he called. “Pretty good day.”
He could have made that a lot stronger. Sixty liters was nearly double what I sold on an average day, and I really had needed an extra pair of hands to deal with the customers. So I said, “Thanks, Maury,” and the smile he gave me was twenty-four-karat happy.
And then there was a funny thing. He blinked, and the smile disappeared. He wasn’t looking at me anymore, either. He looked as though there was something really nasty in his field of vision.
He was just standing there, so I thought it was only polite to say something. “Think we’ll ever have another day this big?” I offered. “Like maybe on the anniversary of the actual eruption?”
His expression froze again, then he gave me a little laugh. “Who knows?” he asked. “How do we know if we’ll even be alive then?” And then, when he saw the look on my face, he gave me a quick apology. “I don’t mean to be a wet blanket, but I’ve had a lot of disappointments in my life. Makes me worry about the future. Anyway—” quick change of subject—“want to get something to eat now, Brad?” he said, all but lolling his tongue out and wagging his tail. So I said sure, and all the way to our changing rooms he was chattering away as though he had never had a somber thought in his life. We were sharing laughs at the expense of our morning’s customers—the couple with the four kids, all of whom kept begging to go to some other place where they sold something besides wine, and the old Turkestani who had ordered one glass of each kind, set them in a row on the counter and worked his way through the varieties, one sip at a time. And the Taiwanese family who spoke no English or Italian or anything else either Maury or I could understand, but kept giving us taste verdicts on the wine by how tightly they held their noses.
So then we were dressed and trying to figure out where to go to eat lunch. “There’s always the refectory,” Maury said—back in the happy mood again. “Or, do you like Mexican? There’s a new place outside the gate. Or there are lots of Italian places, only I know you don’t like much garlic.” He tipped me a wink, having touched on his usual garlic joke. “Which reminds me,” he said. “My sausages are okay, right? Your roommate hasn’t been getting into them, has he?”
