All the Lives He Led-A Novel (17 page)

By the time I got to Gerda’s room she was sitting before her news wall, though what she was watching wasn’t what I would call news—some modern dirty dancing, with music that hurt my ears. She gave me a peculiar look. “I’m sorry about the New York business,” she said. “I just turned it off.”

I was already sitting down at the little table where she’d set out one of Maury’s wine bottles with a couple of glasses. Her tone wasn’t romantic, though. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Piranha Woman didn’t mention anything new about New York. Did something happen there?”

She came over, her expression still grave, to open the wine. “Damn right something did. It’s still happening, too. And, sure, using stink bombs is kind of funny, but the ones that got killed aren’t laughing much, are they?” And then, when she saw the look on my face, “Wait a minute, I’ll go back to it.” And switched her screen to the news menu. She selected New York City and in a minute we were looking at the old UN building on the East River.

Well, it wasn’t Staten Island. My parents were not involved.

As to the UN building, it didn’t look much different from the last time I saw it—which had been while guiding an elderly couple from Panama City, Florida, around some of the Big Apple’s major tourist traps, until they were drunk enough to rob.

Then I took a closer look and I saw the little dots that were dropping down the sides of the building.

At first I couldn’t figure out what those dots were—until, that is, I saw that they had arms and legs that were waving wildly as they fell.

Then Gerda finally thought to switch to the English-speaking voice. “—some kind of a super-skatole,” the newsperson was saying, “so powerful that many of the victims on the upper stories broke their windows and jumped out to their deaths to get away from it.”

I did some jumping of my own then. “Bastards,” I snarled. “As if there were enough Lenni Lenapes left to occupy all these what they call ancestral lands.”

All right, it was a bad guess, but this had caught me by surprise. Never mind the fact that I wasn’t really all that crazy about my old fart parents. When I heard “New York” and saw what was on the screen the first thing I thought of was them.

But that wasn’t where the action was. Dad and Mom were free to keep right on eking out their pointless days. And I had radically confused Gerda. “What do you mean, ‘ancestral lands,’” she asked, and so I found out that, this time, it wasn’t the same old Lenni Lenapes that were doing the terrorizing, it was a bunch I’d never heard of. Neither had the newscaster. However, she had backup to conceal her ignorance, and she read it right off the screen built into the surface of her desk. “They call themselves,” she said, “something that I can’t pronounce, but means they say something like ‘Inguishi will rise.’ The Inguishi, it appears, are somehow related to the Chechens, who have been trying to secede from the Russian Republic as long as there has been one. Apparently they’re protesting the arrival of United Nations peacekeepers in their country after the recent violence.”

Well, there was a lot more about the politics of that part of the world, but I stopped listening. I didn’t care about that.

I did, however, care about what I saw on the wall screen.

The Inguishi hadn’t stopped at the UN building. They stink-bombed several of the tallest buildings down around Wall Street, they did it to the new opera house in the Bloomberg Cultural Center, and they even stank up three or four of the old Times Square skyscrapers. Big ones. Ones where I had occasionally sneaked in to see if there was an unlocked office door, after most of the people who worked there had gone home.

These terrorists were fouling up my old home grounds. I didn’t like it.

Gerda listened to the news with critical interest. “Good placement,” she said judiciously. “Right in the heart of the city, with plenty of news channels all around to cover. But where do you suppose these wildbloods got hold of super-skatole? That’s potent stuff. You can do all the containment and isolation in the world and it gets through anyway. And then half the people who make it get exposed, and then they’ve got to do hair removal and skin ablation baths for six months or so before they can live with themselves, and even then nobody else can live with them.”

I wasn’t listening to her. I was fixated by what I saw on the screen. Most of the places that were stricken were my old stomping ground—the buildings, the high-speed transit stations where we lay in wait for tourists, the Fifth Avenue porn shops where we took one variety of them, the theater district where we took others. And most of all what the screen was showing was that hourglass-shaped tract where Seventh Avenue crossed Broadway, what the tourists still called Times Square. Now it was filled with thousands of people in major distress, office workers fleeing from the stink, pedestrians trying to get away from the stinking office workers, the cops and parapolice trying to control the mob.

It had the makings of a first-class riot, so I knew what had to be coming next.

It came. The cameras changed views, and over the buildings a squadron of NYPD ultralights were fluttering down to their job of crowd control.

See, I knew exactly what being on the receiving end of that was like. I had been there myself. That was back in ’71 or ’72, when the mayor ordered the cops to chase all us refugee kids out of town and we wouldn’t go. I remembered it all, the ultralights methodically cruising overhead as they sprayed us with that three-millimeter radiation. Three-millimeter is seriously hot. They say that 45°C is when the pain threshold begins, but they’re wrong. By the time the microwaves get your skin up to even 40° it really hurts, whether it’s theoretically supposed to or not. By the time it hits 45° you don’t want to riot anymore. You just want to jump into something with a lot of ice cubes floating in it. Or, as a reasonable second-best choice, die.

That had been only a couple hundred of us that the cops were targeting, back in ’71. This time the crowd was ten or twenty thousand. The good part, this time—the only good part—was that this time I was watching it on a news broadcast and not getting sprayed myself.

It took the joy out of the evening. When at last Gerda and I finally climbed into her big, warm bed I thought the opportunity was going to be wasted on me. I wasn’t in the mood for sex, and stayed that way for at least ten minutes, maybe twenty. There were a lot of things on my mind. Even the way Gerda was spooned against my back, with both of her hands free to be friendly, didn’t make me forget them. I realized I hadn’t been keeping up on the news, and over my shoulder I asked her, “Anything happening today with those Puteoli kids?”

Her breath was coming into my ear, warm, soft, and sweet. “Oh, yes,” she told me. “It’s terrible. You know two of them died? And five or six new cases have turned up outside of Zagreb?”

I said, “Hell.” What else was there to say? She didn’t respond to that, though. She was doing other things. And, you know, when you’re under the covers with a good-looking naked woman who is amusing herself with your body parts—well, then all those petty worries about things that are happening somewhere else, and to some other people, certainly do diminish.

Now I am happy (or in another sense heartbroken) to say we come to the best part of all. (The one, that is, that makes me feel worst of all because it is totally and irrevocably gone.)

I have to say that the next couple of weeks were pretty near the best time of my life ever. I know I’ve thought that kind of thing about other times before. Makes no difference. These were better.

Never mind the fact that—for example—the world news was getting lousier by the day. Within a week five more of the Puteoli girls had died, the Zagreb cluster looked like it was associated with a blimp excursion to the Jubilee—and more people around the world were beginning to call the disease the Pompeii Flu.

Of course, there was plenty of other unpleasing stuff. The Russians were rounding up Inguishi leaders—fairly brutally—to punish them for their New York action. Some bunch was firebombing department stores in Romania, some others kidnapping the families of policemen in Bangladesh. Truthfully, I didn’t care. What I cared about was Gerda Fleming, and there she was for me, every day of those weeks. The Welsh Bastard was being uncharacteristically unbastardly, too, letting Gerda juggle her schedules to give us more time together than usual. Her job that week was being a Pompeiian matron guide for tourists wanting someone to show them around the city in the mornings, while I peddled my foul wine on the Via dell’Abbondanza, but then the afternoons were all ours. And so, God bless them, were the nights.

But then there was Maury.

He wasn’t sharing our idyll. Something serious was bothering him, even totally ruining his disposition, if not indeed eating him up.

See, the principal reliable fact about Maury and me was that it was always Maury who came chasing after me in the refectory, or knocked on the door of my room to see if I was up for some chess or a machine game, or just hanging out. But that was then. Now wasn’t the same. Now Maury not only had stopped hanging around me, he twice, on two different occasions, saw me walking down the street in his direction and turned around to go a different way.

And then there was that business with him and Gerda. I heard voices at my door and when I opened it there stood Gerda, looking amused, and halfway down the walk a view of Maury’s back as he stalked away. Naturally I asked Gerda what the problem was. She made a face. “He’s a pain in the ass,” she told me. “Always looking for something to argue about.”

That was unexpected. Actually I hadn’t known that the two of them knew each other well enough to argue. When I tried to find out what the argument had been about she just shrugged and said she didn’t want to discuss it.

I let it drop.

Figure it out for yourself. She’s sitting right next to you, close enough for you to feel the warmth coming off her body and smell that unmistakable smell of her. She leans up against you and says, “Can we please not talk about it, hon?” And of course we definitely could do exactly that.

Sure, I could have pursued the matter, maybe gone looking for Maury the next day to ask him what the argument was about. Possibly he would have answered, though not necessarily truthfully. And possibly then he might not have died so soon.

But those aren’t the things that actually happened.

What actually happened was that Gerda and I were spending more of our time together now. She had begun showing a new interest in exploring the countryside around Pompeii. I encouraged that. Local explorations were cheap. They were also kind of boring, though, because we had done almost all of them before. Back to Capri, this time to make the long uphill trudge to the cliff where the old Emperor Tiberius used to have people who pissed him off thrown to their deaths. (“Knew how to keep peace in the family, didn’t he?” Gerda offered.) Out to Puteoli, not to check on the condition of those dying little girls but to gape at the roily, burny Phlegrean Fields. “Little volcanos that never grew up,” Gerda called them. Back to Naples to stroll along the waterfront and peek at the weird little creatures in the aquarium. Back to Caserta—

Well, actually that was the weirdest trip of all, I thought at the time (though I didn’t know at the time just what it meant). Once before we’d taken a rented three-wheeler down that stinky Naples–Caserta road because Gerda said she’d heard that the old king’s palace was worth a visit. It wasn’t, though. No towers, no battlements, no nothing that looked like a palace at all. What it most closely resembled when I got to look at it was one of those multistory housing developments that the American government put up for welfare families in the 1950s or so—and dynamited down by the 1990s, because nobody wanted to live in them. And the first thing that happened when we got there was that I lost Gerda. Lost myself, too, and wandered around all five or six stories of the huge old building, ducking in and out of corridors that were mostly roped off with big “Ingresso Proibita” signs everywhere; lost myself so thoroughly, in fact, that I couldn’t even find where we’d parked the three-wheeler.

I never did find either Gerda or the car. I had just about given up, sitting on the rim of one of the fountains and wondering what the bus fare to Pompeii would be when I heard the shrill
peep-peep
of the three-wheeler’s horn. When I looked up there she was. Barreling at seventy or eighty kilometers an hour down that gravel path that wasn’t meant for any sort of car, not even a three-wheeler. Looking really mad, too. I wanted to say something about how strange it was to see her driving herself, but she was demanding to know where the hell I’d got to, because she’d been just about out of her mind looking for me.

It all worked out all right. The nice thing about a lovers’ misunderstanding is that you can have such a good time making up when it’s over.

Anyway, that had been the first time Gerda demanded we go to see the Caserta palace. I hadn’t thought there would ever be a second, but there was.

I don’t think I said what made the Naples–Caserta road stinky. It was patches of farmland, but what the Italians grew on those farms wasn’t food. It was flax. The way you raised a crop of flax was to grow it and then, when it was ripe, you just left it in the field to rot. When it was good and rotten you could pull the flax fibers right out of the decaying greenery they had grown up in.

By the second time we made that trip the rotting had gone full compass. The stink was a little hard to describe, not anywhere near super-skatole strength but plenty unpleasant. You might say it was like your neighbor’s garbage when he hasn’t paid his sanitation bill and it’s been decaying in the sun for a week or two. After about twenty minutes’ exposure I expressed my feelings to Gerda. It only took one syllable: “Phew!”

She gave me a look that started out annoyed but ended apologetic. “Oh, hell, hon, I thought the harvest would be all over by now.”

I was big about it. “Not to worry. We’ve only got a couple of kilometers to go.”