All the Lives He Led-A Novel (25 page)

And when Elfreda decided she had got out of me everything that was worth the trouble of getting she leaned forward and planted a non-lustful sisterly kiss on my forehead. “Poor bastard,” she said. “Life hasn’t been treating you very well, has it?”

And was gone.

Oddly my little one-on-one with Elfreda had made me feel a little better. Not cheerful, of course. But not suicidal at least, and I stayed that way through my boring dinner at the staff mess hall, and all the while I watched the mostly unpleasant news on my opticle, right up to the time I got back to my room and sprawled across my cot and went instantly to sleep. So nothing specially upsetting had happened that day. It was the day after that that the sewage hit the aerator.

That day didn’t begin well. I set my opticle for a news channel to wake me up. That wasn’t really because I was so hot for newscasts. That had always been more Gerda’s thing than mine. But maybe it was one of those subaware things that the shrinks used to accuse me of, like, well, like some under-the-radar attempt to get some part of Gerda back. Anyway, what ended my (inadequate) night’s sleep was the opticle talking about terrorists. Particularly nasty terrorists, their specific cause not mentioned, who had taken over an air traffic control center in Luxembourg and flown three supersonics into three separate tourist zeppelins in three widely separated parts of Europe. The death toll was more than seventeen hundred, and that didn’t count the casualties on the ground. (The
Chang Jang
wasn’t among the three zeps named, so I supposed Chi-Leong’s little smuggling project was still on track.)

Then, as a follow-up, there was also a story about a gang of ten or twelve other terrorists (these having something to do with Inuit people and whales) who had died that day, when the nuke warheads they were trying to salvage from a sunken Gulf War Three submarine went off unexpectedly. So all the losses weren’t all on the same side. It didn’t seem like a fair trade, though, especially if you counted out the probable local casualties from nuke fallout. Then, as soon as I got out of the shower, there was a note on my cell from dear old Mom, subject matter very much like the other dozen or so that had been accumulating that month. New York’s summer was miserably hot. Dad was depressed. The weather statement said another darn hurricane might be coming up the coast. The Conklins down the hall weren’t doing their share of keeping the bathroom tidy. And, oh, yes, Dad’s dentures got chipped when he slammed the nightstand drawer on them and the insurance wouldn’t cover the bill for new ones. Which was my mother’s way of reminding me that there hadn’t been much money coming in from Pompeii lately.

Add to that that I couldn’t find a clean topshirt to wear.

All depressing, right? And, as usual, then things got worse. As I was pulling on the least armpitty of the shirts in my laundry bag there was a knock on my door. No. Not a knock. A
lot
of knocks, thunderously impatient ones, and when I opened it there was Piranha Woman with two of her goons flanking her. The bigger of the two already had his fist clenched for more and louder knocks, but Piranha Woman stopped him. “You, Sheridan, you haven’t been honest with us,” she called. “You better come along now.”

I didn’t ask where. The goons discouraged questioning. We rode in silence, at least until the car took a sharp turn and, out the window, I caught sight of something whale-shaped and huge, way off on the horizon. “Is that the
Chang Jang
?” I asked. “With all those police blimpets and choppers all around it?”

The bigger of the two at least looked where I had been looking. He must have seen what I had seen: the air-whale shape of a giant zep—I guessed the
Chang Jang
—no more than three or four kilometers down the coast, and around it clouds of aircraft and smaller airships, like flies around a horse dropping. He didn’t say anything, though, and the smaller one didn’t even give it a glance. Perhaps because he was aware of the steely gaze Piranha Woman had fixed on him.

So I was left wondering, and then the car stopped. I wasn’t at all surprised that the place where we wound up was the place I well remembered from a couple of nights before, Piranha Woman’s private interrogation chamber. It didn’t look a bit more welcoming than it had the last time.

I didn’t expect that this interrogation would be any better than my previous ones. It wasn’t. It was a lot worse. For one thing, I went through it naked; they made me strip and they carried everything I had taken off away, for what kind of laboratory inspection I could only guess. This time they didn’t skip the cavity searches, either. For them my modesty was not a concern.

Then they stretched me out on a thing like a massage table, and one of the Security guards, this one in white scrubs, was rubbing something greasy over my naked body while another had one hand on my shoulder to remind me not to object.

Did I mention that this whole procedure was being done in the presence of a fair-sized audience? There was Piranha Woman herself, her male partner from that long-ago first meeting, the two uniforms who had brought me there with a few of their buddies, a pretty young uniformed woman wearing a data monocle and a dictation mike and, surprise, old Professor Mazzini, spryly perched on a gurney against one wall of the room, the one who’d taught our orientation classes before Piranha Woman took over. It was a pretty full house. It would’ve been nice if I could have sold tickets.

Then another goon in white, this one apparently female, approached me. She was holding something roughly the size and shape of a flashlight, but with a shiny, five-centimeter freely spinning metal ball where a bulb and reflector should have been. Which she employed, I had no idea why, to roll around over my exposed skin. All of it. And along with everybody else in the room—Professor, Piranha Woman, guards, and all—she was watching some kind of a colorful, shape-changing display on a wall screen that I could barely see out of the corner of my eye. Then, having thoroughly explored all my back surfaces, the two goons turned me over to get at my front and I had a better view. Of what exactly I could not say; the images on the screen made no sense to me, although I did observe that every time she moved her roller ball on my body the colors and shapes jerked and flowed.

Outside of the screen, and me, there wasn’t much to look at in the room. Against one wall was a table with the crumbs of Maury’s sausage and the two bottles of wine they’d commandeered. It was chilly in the room, too. For their comfort more than mine, I’m sure, they had the air-conditioning turned way up. I had goose bumps on my arms before they started the rub-a-dub-dub on my body, and well before they got through I was definitely shivering. Not that any of them cared. Not that I cared much myself, because what they were doing took my mind off my personal comfort.

Do you know how many square centimeters of skin it takes to enclose an average human body? Let’s just say there are a lot, and the woman with the rollerball rubbed it over every last one of them. Then, when she was through, she put the gadget down and looked toward the woman with the dictation mike. That one had been muttering into her mike throughout the examination. Now she spoke up. “That is it, sir,” she said, to my surprise addressing Professor Mazzini rather than Piranha Woman. “There is no evidence of a recent contact. Do you want me for anything else?”

He shook his head. “You can go,” he said. Obediently she and the woman with the rollerball left. As they exited the door the wall screen’s psychedelic picture of my insides blinked out.

They had taken with them all their portable equipment except for a stack of towels. It could have been that they were leaving them for my convenience, I suppose. I didn’t think so, but I kept my eye on them because they might come in handy.

Piranha Woman, however, had her own agenda. Before the door had quite closed on the rollerball team she was standing over me. “Let us now clarify some points,” she began.

The professor reined her in. “At least let the poor son of a bitch put his pants on,” he said.

This particular poor son of a bitch didn’t just pull his pants up without argument. I took my time. I put on every article of clothing I had come there with, and before I put on any I raided the stack of towels to wipe off as much as I could of the lubricant they had smeared on my skin. The professor hadn’t said I could. He might, of course, have stopped me at any time. He didn’t. He was busily studying his opticle, and the look on his face might have had the beginnings of a smile.

Piranha Woman had no such look. There was a major scowl on her face. She didn’t say anything until I was almost finished buttoning my overshirt. Then she gave Professor Mazzini a fed-up look and pounced on me. “Now, Sheridan,” she said angrily, “let’s have some truth out of you. I want to know everything that Tesch said to you or you to him. Honestly. Every word.”

She asked for every word; I did my best to give her what she asked for. I took my time about it, too.

First I told her about how much trouble Maury had gone to to get me up to his rooms, and about the amazing scope of his wet bar, and as close as I could remember the very words of our chatter. And then, as an afterthought, “Oh, wait, I don’t know if I mentioned this before. Did I tell you he said that at one time he had known Maris Morchan?”

Then I yawned, making it clear I didn’t believe that anybody would care about the fact that Maury Tesch had once known a disease-carrying terrorist named Maris Morchan, but as I was politely covering my mouth I kept a watch on the expressions on their faces. The professor’s displayed forthright astonishment. Piranha Woman’s look was all of that, plus a generous helping of fury. “Why did you not tell us this before?” she demanded, her voice suddenly shrill.

She had asked for honest answers; I gave her what she had asked for. “Because I knew you’d have a cat fit about it.” And that was probably a mistake, because then the yelling started all over again.

That is, her yelling. The professor didn’t seem to care to be involved; he was talking to his opticle and paying little attention to Piranha Woman’s screeches. They started loud, and got louder, but I couldn’t tell her much more than I already had. That didn’t stop her. She kept asking the same handful of questions in a dozen different ways, differing mostly in the amount of invective they contained, until finally the professor put a hand to his opticle and called, “Major! There is some new evidence. We must talk.”

And talk they did, the two of them, at considerable length though never loudly enough for me to hear. Whatever it was he was telling her she seemed to enjoy it, her expression ranging from startlement to pure pleasure, with grace notes of anger mixed with joy.

Finally she asked something, as though requesting some kind of permission and he nodded, granting it and she turned back to me.

Then I really began to worry. I could tell by the look on her face that whatever they had been discussing I wasn’t going to like it.

She gave me what I can only describe as a now-you’re-going-to-get-it look, then turned and walked to the table against the wall. “Have you noticed this cup?” she asked me, but as usual didn’t wait for an answer. It was simply an inverted plastic cup and she was already lifting it. What was under it was a pink, gooey lump that did look familiar, though what it was doing there I couldn’t guess.

I didn’t give her the satisfaction of showing my surprise. “Looks like some of Gerda’s chewing gum. So what? Probably it’s been there for weeks.”

Piranha Woman was shaking her head, looking pleased with herself. “Not this piece, no. We gave it to the lab for DNA and they’ve just given the colonel the results. It’s fresh, all right.”

For a moment my heart skipped a beat. “Gerda’s back?” I demanded.

But I knew that wasn’t likely, and anyway Piranha Woman didn’t bother to answer it. “The results were a bit of a surprise,” she informed me. “Looks like there were three males in her apartment. One of them, of course, was the late Mr. Tesch. We didn’t find any of you on the gum—but that doesn’t mean you weren’t there—but there was DNA on the gum that came from an unidentified male.”

“Well, hell, it could’ve come from anybody. I chewed some of her gum myself now and then—”

She was clearly enjoying herself now. “Oh, it’s not your DNA, Sheridan. It was from some other male.” The gloating look slid from her face for a moment, and actually she seemed almost embarrassed. “Well, sure,” she said. “It took a while to identify him. The lab didn’t make the connection right away because he wasn’t in the active file. He was listed as dead, in fact. His name—the name he was known by in the case files—was Brian Bossert. That mean anything to you?”

It took me a minute to recognize it. “Oh, sure,” I said. “You were talking about him in class. The terrorist. The Toronto guy. Blew himself up when his ship exploded.”

But she was shaking her head. “That’s what was thought, yes,” she admitted. “Apparently we were wrong.”

The professor took pity on her obvious suffering. “Everyone thought that, Yvonne,” he told her. “The evidence seemed clear.”

“And wrong,” she snapped. “I am going to recommend an investigative commission to see why we were so wrong.”

It would have been smart of me to stay out of it, but I was puzzled. “So then what’s your problem?” I asked. “This Bossert’s the guy you should be looking for, right?”

“Oh,” Piranha Woman said, the expression on her face returning to the now-I’ve-got-you look that I hated, “we’ll be looking for him, all right. The only thing is, he isn’t a him anymore.”

That got to me. “What the hell are you talking about?” I asked angrily, though I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to hear the answer.

She was smiling now. “See, the lab checked everything in her room. Even her dirty laundry. And off two pairs of her smelly panties we got traces of, well, secretions. So naturally the lab DNA’ed them, too, and guess what? The DNA was the same. They were male. And they were Brian Bossert’s, just like the gum.” She gave me a moment for that to sink in, then delivered the coup de grâce. “So where does that leave you, Sheridan? Do you feel bad because now you know that the woman you’ve been banging all these weeks started out as a man?”