All the Lives He Led-A Novel (16 page)

“Well,” I said, “there’s not much chance of that. He hasn’t been here all week. Called in sick on, let me think, I guess it was Tuesday.”

He stopped plugging his ear-cups into their proper places. He studied my face. “Sick?” he said considerately, more concerned than I would have expected. “Sick with what?”

I told him I had no idea, but he could check with the payroll machine. He nodded briskly at that, but his expression was abstracted again. “Good idea,” he said. “Listen, come to think of it I’m not all that hungry right now. Give me a rain check?” And before I said I would he was gone.

I was only a little annoyed—hardly any, in fact, because I’d been getting tired of Maury’s company, especially when the company I really desired wasn’t around.

Then things looked up, and I forgot about Maury’s changing moods.

I was just picking up a tray to get in line at the refectory when one of the cleanup people put her hand on my arm. “Don’t do that,” she said. “Go out in the kitchen, why don’t you?”

I looked at her. “Why would I do that?”

“Oh, hell,” she said impatiently, “why don’t you just do it, and then you’ll see why for yourself.”

So I did, and there she was. Gerda. Sitting at a little table out of everybody’s way, looking healthy and well rested as she picked at some fruit salad the kitchen staff had made up for her.

I didn’t say a word. I just stopped short, staring at her. She didn’t say anything right away, either, just jumped up and grabbed me in a monstrous hug. Then she stepped back, studying me. “Everything all right with you, Brad?” she asked, sounding anxious. “Want some pineapple?”

Since it was offered I took some. I chewed for a moment before I answered the question. “I’m fine, Gerda,” I said. “A little confused, maybe, about why my girl takes off for a week without warning.”

She nodded seriously. “Hon,” she said, “sometimes you just can’t help it. Want to go for a walk?”

That wouldn’t have been my first choice. There were about a million things I wanted to say to her, or ask her—or, maybe, just yell at her—but of them all the one I picked to say out loud was, “Why not?”

“Fine,” she said, standing up and flashing me an affectionate grin, “only I haven’t checked in yet, so let’s go by the Bastard’s office first.”

And again, rejecting all the other things I might have chosen to say, I said, “Why not?” She took my hand and gave it a fond squeeze, and held on to it as we walked, the very image of a loving couple, out of the refectory and past the building that held the changing rooms and the lockers and right up to the Welsh Bastard’s office. Where I got to sit in the anteroom and listen to the shouting from inside when Gerda showed her face.

The shouting was pretty loud for a moment, but it didn’t last. Then for a while I couldn’t hear anything at all from inside. Then the door opened. Gerda was looking repentant. The Bastard was grinning a rueful grin. “Oh, hell,” he said to her, “what’s the use? You damn volunteers are more trouble than you’re worth. Just make sure you show up for work tomorrow, okay?” And he gave her a friendly little pat on the behind and let her go.

We went for our walk.

See, what bothered me wasn’t so much seeing the Bastard patting my girl’s ass as though he had a right to. Naturally I didn’t like it. Who would? And, naturally, it got me sort of wondering again about some things I had wondered quite a lot about before. For instance, one—how come the Bastard let Gerda get away with so much when he let hardly anybody else get away with anything at all?

Well, of course I didn’t have to think real hard to think of a reason for that. All right, maybe he and Gerda had once had an affair. Why shouldn’t they? Gerda certainly hadn’t been a virgin when she and I got together, and what business of mine was it who she had slept with in the days before she was my girl? Answer: no business at all.

That was assuming that any such events had taken place before, but not during, the time when she was my girl.

I was, I had to admit to myself, getting pretty tangled up in the kind of suspicions I didn’t really want to admit I had.

So I didn’t talk much as we walked, still hand in hand. Gerda did the talking for both of us. “The dacha? Well, that’s kind of a long story. But, hon, I have to say that that was a great trip. Those zeps are really something, and the places I saw were, wow, spectacular! Like Moscow, hon. You wouldn’t believe it. It’s like a whole damn city of statuary and monuments, only the monuments are the buildings people actually go to work in. And Prague—you’ve never been there, have you?—is like some really beautiful old cuckoo clock. And then there’s that wonderful old city in what used to be Yugoslavia, Dubrovnik? And then, when you’re heading for home and you’re crossing the Adriatic Sea at night—”

“Sounds like you had a great time,” I said, counting up in my head what a five-thousand-kilometer cruise in one of those enormous Chinese zeppelins would cost.

I guess I put more into my tone of voice than I had intended. Gerda gave me a look, then sighed and shook her head. “Oh, Brad,” she said, “you need some hugs, don’t you? Let’s find a place where we can sit down with a drink.”

We were both too wise to drink any of the pseudo-Roman cat urine from any of the Jubilee’s wineshops. Even the higher-class ones around the Forums. Gerda had her own resources, though. We found some seats behind that never-finished Temple of Isis that the Pompeiians hadn’t quite got built when Vesuvius finished things for them. She pulled out of her bellybag a couple of tiny bottles of a passably good brandy, obviously out of one of the zep’s bars. They weren’t the only ones she was carrying, either. By about the third bottle I was feeling quite a lot more relaxed, and the images inside my head began to slip and slide into new shapes. Well, sure, let’s admit it. Into one particular new shape.

See, I hadn’t forgotten how lousy the past week had been, or how pissed off at her I had every right to be.

But I kept seeing the Bastard’s hand giving a friendly pat to a part of Gerda that I had wanted to think was all mine. So I opened my mouth to ask if it was true that the Bastard got paid in sack time for special favors to good-looking women. Only I didn’t ask her if Maury Tesch had told me the truth. I said, “What I’ve been wondering about, why does everybody call him ‘Bastard’?”

I didn’t get the same answer as from Maury. What I got was a mildly annoyed look, as though I was giving her a kind of annoyance she hadn’t expected and didn’t much want, followed by a clear, consistent answer. “Because that’s what he is. Didn’t you know? His dad knocked his mother up and took off for calmer waters. What’s the matter, he giving you trouble?”

That was a perfectly good answer, if not the one Maury Tesch had offered. I was inclined to accept it and change the subject because, all of a sudden, there was a growing pressure between my thighs. That, and the smell of her. And the fact that, well, hell, what I wanted most at that time wasn’t conversation, it was just to get laid.

But there was one big thing in the way. I put my finger over Gerda’s lips. “Honey,” I said—without noticing the transition I was back to calling her “honey”—“I need to ask you a question. Are we in a monogamous relationship?”

She abandoned, in the middle of a sentence, her description of what eating was like on a zep—“Eight or nine different restaurants, Brad, plus if you call room service they’ll make you pretty near anything you ever heard of—” and regarded me in silence for a moment. Then she sighed. “You know I have to get to class in about twenty minutes, don’t you?”

Well, yes, I had known that that was the case, although her terrorism class schedule had been a long way from the principal subject on my mind. “Are we?” I asked.

“Oh, hell,” she said. “Sometimes you ask really hard questions, Brad.”

“So give me a hard answer.”

“Well—Here’s the thing,” she said. “Don’t rush me on this. It’s a big step for me.” She was silent for a moment, then, “There is one thing I can tell you, though. You’re the very first man I’ve ever thought I might make that kind of promise to.” And she gave me a quick kiss and was gone.

My own class, due to the Bastard’s bastardly scheduling, was in the other direction from Gerda’s and an hour and a half later. I spent the time in the refectory. For the first time in a week I had an appetite.

I got to the classroom in plenty of time to choose a seat—one that was right up front, because I was ready to be called on. Having had nothing better to do with my time I had used all the search engines in the library and I knew all the answers.

So what happened? Piranha Woman never brought the subject up at all. Instead, she said, “I presume you are all familiar with the case of the Puteoli children.”

She paused, as though expecting a response. While most of the class was trying to figure out which of her ground rules applied, Elfreda took the chance. “You aren’t telling us that their sickness involves terrorist activity, are you?”

“No such determination has been made. It is of interest, however, that the organism responsible for their symptoms has not been identified.”

She stopped again, and Elfreda pushed her luck. “It sounds like you’re saying that somebody’s bred a new bug.”

“I have not said that. Terrorist groups are generally quick to claim credit for an event of this magnitude, and perhaps the pathogen will be found to be known. However, there is one more bit of interesting information that has just been made public. Of the eleven young Puteoli women, eight have been found to have been present here at the Giubileo within the past nine or ten weeks.”

That produced a sudden murmur from a couple dozen throats, including mine. Elfreda spoke right up again. “Has Pompeii become a terrorist target?” she demanded.

Piranha Woman shook her head. “I do not care to waste time on speculative questions. Actually I have prepared a practical project for us tonight which somewhat relates to that question and we will now begin it. For the purposes of this exercise each of you people are all now designated as members of terrorist groups. You have orders to strike the Giubileo in your next action. Start planning your attack now.” She pointed a finger at Elfreda. “You.”

From the look on Elfreda’s face she would have preferred a little more lead time, but she dealt with it. By the time she was on her feet she was already speaking: “Well, what I wouldn’t do is just mess up the virtuals like that clown that hit the central computers the other day.”

That was as far as she got. “Sit,” Piranha Woman teacher ordered. “I didn’t ask for what you wouldn’t do, I asked for what you would do. Tesch!”

The finger was aimed straight between Maury’s eyes. He took his time getting up and didn’t speak for a moment, pursing his lips. “Let’s consider what would make the Giubileo an attractive target for terrorists,” he began. “Two factors stand out. First, publicity. The Giubileo is news, and so is anything that happens here. Any terrorist action here would be reported in every news medium in every country in the world. Second, penetration. Chances are that nearly all of those countries would have people at the Giubileo on any given day, so it wouldn’t just be news, it could be local news.”

Piranha Woman didn’t stop him, but she did say, “I asked for what, not why.”

Maury gave her an earnest look. “But it’s the why factors that determine the what. As Elfreda reasonably pointed out”—his “reasonably” had to be taken as a criticism of Piranha Woman, but Piranha Woman didn’t change her expression—“turning off the virts for a couple of hours wasn’t big enough to achieve anything. Really, it was just sort of comical. To make any action effective, people have to die.”

Piranha Woman didn’t nod, but her lips tightened a touch, as though the mention of death had interested her. “What number of deaths would be appropriate? What would kill them?”

“I’d recommend between twenty and fifty deaths as a minimum,” Maury said. “For a relatively minor action, that is. Less wouldn’t make enough of an impact, more would be unnecessary, that is, unless you choose to get up into the thousands. Or more,” he added, looking suddenly pensive.

“How?” the teacher insisted.

“Poison,” he answered at once. “You could use some sort of explosive if you chose, but that would unnecessarily damage unique historical sites. Worse, it would be a one-day story. However, poisoning, with careful selection of the poisoning agent, could be arranged to go on for weeks, with people dying all over the world every day. One scenario would be to put a slow-acting poison in the food at the refectory, perhaps in the wine or the water. Of course,” he added, smirking a little, “that isn’t going to happen to the water here. That’s clean. We keep it that way, and to make sure we take samples every hour, day and night. When it’s my turn to do it there’s an armed Security guard escorting me and the sample all the way to Security’s lab.”

Piranha Woman had a comment. “It sounds as though you’ve given this a lot of thought.”

He said simply, “It’s my job.”

The teacher made a small, possibly approving, sound in her throat. Then she said, “All right. Sit.” And to the rest of class, “What other scenarios could be useful? You.”

This time she was pointing at the Senegalese. He was ready for her with a quick and (I thought) pretty implausible idea about lacing the food at the Refectorium with radioisotopes. Then so was the Mongolian woman and so, thank God, was I when she got around to my side of the room, because each of us had by then had time to think it over.

Well, mine was pretty dumb—never mind what exactly, it had to do with releasing disease-carrying insects at the games, and that’s all I’m going to say about it. But Piranha Woman hadn’t specified that the plans had to be workable. All she was asking us to do was to invent some ways to kill, maim, or simply demoralize some large bunches of people, and, considered as a kind of party game, that wasn’t hard at all. Actually it was kind of fun.

So Piranha Woman had successfully kept us from spending our session on speculations about the Puteoli Eleven. She hadn’t made me forget about them, though, and as soon as I was out of the classroom door I had my opticle searching for details. There weren’t many, but someone had dug up a little backgrounding.