All the Lives He Led-A Novel (24 page)
It began about as badly as a day could, with my opticle waking me up and reminding me that missing a day’s work wasn’t good, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as missing two days would be. So I got up and got dressed in my Roman slave shift and went off to my day job as a purveyor of fine wines. Well, of wines.
Don’t ask me what happened on that shift. It passed. That’s all I can tell you. I talked to people now and then—talked to the cooks at breakfast, talked to Cedric the Pimp when he came over, all curiosity and thirst to find out what had been going on with me—I don’t remember what I said to him but I’m pretty sure he went away unsatisfied in both departments. And of course I talked to the customers. I poured wine, and lied to them about how good it was, and I suppose I rinsed cups and made change, too. I might even—I couldn’t have been that far out of it—have wondered from time to time about Maury’s strange behavior, but of that I remember nothing at all.
It did end, finally. When it was over I grabbed some food, God knows what, and ingested it on my way back to my welcoming cot. (I did, this time, strip the dirty bedclothes and throw on a couple of clean sheets. I guess that meant I was beginning to come out of my shock.) Then I kicked off my sandals and shed most of my slave garments and hit my cot. I tried to find the faint aroma of Gerda that by rights should still be clinging to the pillows. I couldn’t find it, and then I was off to dreamland anyway. (Oh, I did dream, all right. I know I dreamed, but I don’t remember what any of those dreams were about. Which is probably just as well.)
The next day was the rough one.
It began about as badly as a day could. What I mean by that is that in the middle of the night some noises outside woke me just in time to see my door fly open and some really bright lights flash on, all of them directed at my face. “Maury?” I hazarded—remember, I was still pretty much asleep. I propped myself up on an elbow and tried to see past the laser torches people were aiming at me.
Turned out it wasn’t my old chess and drinking partner Maury Tesch, though. It was a woman’s voice that answered, and it was one I had heard before. “No,” Piranha Woman said—snarled, maybe. “I’m not your pal Tesch, who, as you probably know better than anybody, is certainly not going to be coming to visit you anymore, ever. Screw the small talk, Sheridan. Get your ass out of bed. We want to ask you some questions.”
BACK IN THE HANDS OF SECURITY, ALAS
It was definitely Piranha Woman, and she wasn’t alone. Two of those hulking Security knee-breakers were right there with her and they weren’t being amiable. If they cared about my beat-up condition they didn’t let it interfere with business. They didn’t even give me time to get dressed, just to pull on a pair of pants to go with the work shirt I seemed to have been sleeping in. No shoes. And it was the middle of the night, and those damn Pompeiian street stones were cold.
I expected them to drag me to the place where I’d been interviewed the first time. That didn’t happen. They pushed me into a three-wheeled truck and we bounced past the Vesuvius Gate and up the hill. And when the truck stopped it was at the clump of old cottages where the volunteers slept. Where Gerda slept, when she was home. Wouldn’t be likely ever to sleep there again, though, because when they shoved me into her place—the door wide open, a Security bruiser standing guard—the first thing I saw was somebody lying sprawled and unmoving on the floor.
For one scary, lump-in-the-throat moment I thought it might be Gerda. It wasn’t. It was a man, and one I recognized. Specifically it was my sausage-hoarding buddy, Maury Tesch. He was crumpled. He was bloody. And he was definitely dead.
I stood up as straight as I could. “Hell,” I said, making sure I got the exculpatory facts out as fast as possible, “I hope you’re not thinking I did this so I could, I don’t know, get even with him for what he did to me. Because I didn’t. It’s true Gerda gave me a key to her place but I didn’t use it today. I stayed right in my room. I’m afraid I have no way of proving that because there wasn’t anybody in the room but me, but—”
Piranha Woman raised her hand. “Sheridan,” she said, “shut up. We know you didn’t leave your room. Sergeant DiMoralis left a man outside your door in case whoever beat you up came back. Who’s that?”
I didn’t try to answer that one because I had no idea what she was asking this time. But actually the reason for that was that the person she was asking wasn’t me. It was another Security man, standing in the window alcove, and next to him another man I almost recognized as another volunteer from one of the cottages nearby.
The Security man was pointing at the other volunteer. “He saw the whole thing.” The man wasn’t asked to testify, though. The Security man did it for him. “He was taking out the trash when this Gerda Fleming person came in the back way,” he said. “Then a little later he heard a lot of yelling coming from her room.”
Piranha Woman snorted. “I don’t doubt he did,” she said. “Tesch probably made a lot of noise while he was being murdered.” Then she scowled. “Do you want something else?”
“Yes, Major. I want to take Gatti here to make his statement.”
“Go,” she said impatiently, and turned back to me. But I wasn’t looking at her. I was goggling at the man in the shadows, who came out now and, oh, my God, yes, that was the one all right, the one who had promised to get me next chance he got, and now had got it. Oh, I was in the deep stuff, for sure.
So what did I do? I did the only things I could do. I told Piranha Woman that this witness was a congenital liar who blamed me for Yellowstone and the ruin of his family’s fortunes.
It didn’t do any good. The major wasn’t interested. “Yes, of course you can try to deny it all when you get to your hearing, but right now what I want to know is what Fleming was up to. So tell me, Sheridan. Why did she do it? Was she punishing him for what he did to you, like you say? Or was it a lovers’ quarrel? Or what?”
Well, of course I didn’t know why Gerda had done it—if in fact Gerda had actually come back from dear, dying Grandma’s on Lake Garda (if that truly was where she had gone) and killed Maury for—for what? For getting me drunk and beating the crap out of me, as Piranha Woman would have it? It didn’t seem like an adequate motive to me.
That didn’t stop Piranha Woman. She kept on asking, endlessly and not a bit courteously, about that and about everything else I knew about Gerda Fleming, and about everything I had ever suspected or guessed or imagined about her. Then, when she was willing to accept for the moment that she had sucked every last Gerda datum out of my brain, the same about the late Maury Tesch. (Well, I wasn’t entirely candid with her about that. I told her about the drinking and all that, all right, but I was too hazy about some of the other stuff—like his plan to make me hide something under my skin—to want to get into it with her.) Then finally she was asking about anything else I might have known, heard, or dreamed that might bear on this matter. “Like what?” I asked at last. I was beginning to get over the shock and transition into the anger—at Major Yvonne Piranha Woman Feliciano, and at everybody around her, too.
She didn’t answer that. She didn’t believe in answers, only questions. But finally she ran out of those. She didn’t announce that fact to me, though. She didn’t say anything to me at all, just jerked her head at one of the Security goons, who got a firm grip on my arm and marched me out of the apartment and into the waiting Security van.
As we drove away he explained the rules: 1. Don’t leave Pompeii; 2. Keep my nose clean; 3. Keep my mouth shut. They weren’t hard to remember. They were pretty much what everybody had been ordering me to do for some time. He wasn’t entirely heartless, though. When he noticed I was having trouble sitting up straight he asked if my bruises were bothering me. When I said they were he nodded, perhaps sympathetically.
Didn’t do anything about it, of course. But did nod.
He didn’t tell me where we were going, but I recognized the signs. When we got to the Indentureds’ hostel building that contained my room he made martyr-like mumbles to himself about how many steps he had to climb to my floor. He climbed them all, though. He didn’t ask for a key to my door. He opened it with a key of his own, and looked around suspiciously before letting me in.
Nothing had changed. My bed was still as unmade as I had left it, the mess of odds and ends dropped wherever I had left them was the same. Clearly my housekeeping did not come up to his standards, but he just grunted, turned around, and started to leave.
Aches, pains, lack of sleep, my girl not only no longer apparently willing to work at it but now accused of being a murderess as well—I was a little light-headed and, I guess, had every reason to be. I can’t think of any other reason why, without conscious intent, I opened my mouth and said, “Too bad he took his sausages. They might’ve been some kind of clue.”
He paused. “What sausages?” So I told him what Maury had kept in my refrigerator, and that got his full attention. Out of my fridge he pulled my two cans of beer I’d brought back from my day’s labors, some wax paper Jiri had left behind—and how I had missed it when I was scrounging for anything that might have been considered edible I can’t say—and a couple of crumbs of meat, though nothing that resembled a whole sausage.
“What sausages are you talking about?” he asked me, without any affection at all in his voice.
“I guess that’s what’s left of them,” I said. The crumbs didn’t look to me appetizing enough to justify Maury’s devotion, but the Security man treated them as though they were emeralds. He sniffed at one crumb, then at another. He held the first one up to the light and sniffed it again—longer this time, a deep inhale with his nostrils almost touching the thing. Then he zipped them into his bag and gave me an accusing look. “Any other evidence you’re concealing?”
He wasn’t quite as fear-inspiring as Piranha Woman, so I took a chance on giving him a little lip. “I haven’t concealed any evidence. I’m the one who told you about the sausages in the first place. And anyway, there isn’t anything else—Oh, wait,” I said, remembering. “They aren’t exactly Maury’s anymore, but he did give me those bottles of dessert wine in the closet. They’re mine now, though.”
They weren’t, though. Not anymore. They had become the property of Security before I could blink, and the man lectured me at some length on the desirability of giving full cooperation to the authorities, concealing nothing, telling everything. He finished with his Three Commandments—Mouth Shut, Not Leaving, and, oh, yes, Nose Clean. Then he left. Taking the wine with him in one hand, what was left of the repulsive sausages in the other, leaving no hand for him to close the door.
I did it myself. After which there was nothing to keep me from swallowing a couple more pain pills before getting onto that rumpled cot and trying to finish out my night’s sleep. That is, nothing but the fact that my whole world had just blown up in my face, and there was nothing I could do about it.
Was it possible, was it by any extreme stretch of the imagination remotely
possible
, that my Gerda had, for what reason I could not begin to guess, actually murdered Maury?
I couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t deny the possibility, either, and so I stayed sitting on the edge of my bed, unable to figure out what to do and even less able to stop trying, until it was time to get in the shower and get dressed to go to work. I looked like hell. The liquid-bandage stuff camouflaged my wounds well enough, helped by the fact that my slave smock covered the worst of the others. I stopped at the infirmary to wheedle some more of the antipain stuff from the medics and was ready to go to work. Or as ready as I was ever going to be.
Which I did, wondering what unplanned and devastating disaster was going to strike me next.
Actually, when it arrived it didn’t appear to be that much of a disaster. It was just Elfreda Barcowicz. She showed up that afternoon, close to quitting time. Clearly she was once again intending to ask me a lot more of her annoying questions.
This time it wasn’t about—what was her name? Maris Morchan?—the murder victim in the Forum. (Which was good, because then I didn’t feel I wanted to tell her that Maury had known the woman before she got herself murdered.) This time Elfreda went straight for the heart. “I never cared much for Gerda Fleming,” she informed me, setting the coffee container she’d brought down on my counter and not even pretending to buy any of my wine, “but I wouldn’t have guessed she was a killer.”
I didn’t have an answer for that, and didn’t try. All I said was, “Go away, Elfreda.”
She shook her head at that. “We need to talk”—and as I started to point at the four or five wine-drinking customers, all interestedly listening to what she had to say—“no, not here, of course. But your shift’s up, and here’s your relief coming down the street, and let’s go somewhere quiet so we can have a nice little chat.”
So we did.
I guess I was pretty easy to talk into pretty much anything around then. My afternoon relief, Gianmarco di Maio, looked curious about Elfreda but didn’t say anything, and I followed her meekly away.
Well, all right. I might as well admit it. Things hadn’t been going all that well for me, and I must have been hungry for a kind word, especially from a female. Elfreda was no Gerda Fleming, but she was good-looking, and solicitous, and deeply, deeply interested in every word I had to say.
So I said a lot of them.
Never mind how I hadn’t wanted to mention some of the things Maury had said and done because I hadn’t wanted to get involved. All right. I still didn’t want to get involved. But the place Elfreda took me to was one of the fully restored villas used for those nine-person, five-hour dinners, and the “slave” watchman seemed to know her. At least all he did was turn around and look the other way when she led me inside, right past the “
Chiuso. Non Entrare
” sign on the door. We sat in the villa’s beautiful little courtyard, with its reflecting pool and all those sweet-smelling and meticulously tended flowers—real, not virt—in its garden all around us, and I guess I did, after all, get involved.
