All the Lives He Led-A Novel (30 page)
The others were listening, too, Elfreda with the back of her hand pressed against her mouth, Eustace shaking his head, “Dr. Basil Chi-Leong, my father, will be extremely displeased,” he informed me.
Well, I was pretty displeased myself. Set down? Made to leave the ship, as all the others had been in the last attack? And in Cairo? Cairo, Egypt? Egypt, where there was a really good chance that some cop’s villain-scanner might pick up my face out of a crowd and identify it as the man who’d been thrown out of the country a few months before?
Of all the stops on the
Chang Jang
’s tour Cairo was the last one I would have picked. But I didn’t have the luxury of a free choice anymore.
Chi-Leong had decided to be our group’s alpha male. He looked over his shoulder at Elfreda. “Kindly dress yourself,” he ordered.
Elfreda looked surprised, then rebellious, then resigned. “That makes sense,” she conceded, “because we might have to move pretty fast. You guys, too, you know.”
Chi-Leong gave her a nod, the kind that could have meant he agreed with her point or that he just wanted her to get on with following his orders. She bit her lip, but left the room. When she had closed the bedroom door behind her he turned to me and lowered his voice. “You should go, Mr. Sheridan. Now. Before she finishes dressing.”
He was getting under my skin. “Chi-Leong,” I said, “that would probably be good for you. The thing is, I’m more interested in what would be good for me. How would I get off this damn zep without documents?”
He was losing patience with me. “Are you not aware that I have a considerable supply of the best documents of all, namely euro notes? The person who guarded the uplink will get you past whoever is guarding the ship’s boarding elevators.”
I was getting impatient, too. “You make it sound easy. Suppose I do get down to the ground, what then?”
“That,” he said, “is of course your problem, Mr. Sheridan. I hope you will avoid capture—it is for my sake that I hope this, not yours. Now,” he added, lifting his bellybag to his lap and opening it, “you may need some money. Fortunately I have actual physical currency notes, as you would be unable to use my joystick without my ID. This”—he pulled out five five-euro notes and handed them to me—“should help.” I tried not to laugh. It would, of course, not have been a laughing matter if I hadn’t had the professor’s fifty as well as the wad of ten-euro notes I’d won in the ship’s casino. He went on, “I have sent for my man Miguel. He will help you. Now hurry—no. Wait.”
Elfreda was coming out, dressed and unaware of anything we had been saying, just as we felt the
Chang Jang
slowing and stopping. The three of us went out onto the viewwalks and gazed down at the hundred or so square kilometers of the town … and the much larger communities that flanked it, bustling Gizeh on one side and colossal Cairo on the other. Elfreda didn’t say a word, not even good-bye, when she hurried off to keep a date for a drink with one of the ship’s assistant pursers—who, she hoped, might tell her enough about the ship’s buoyancy system to suggest a place where I might hide.
And thirty seconds after that there was a knock on the door, and a crewman slipped Chi-Leong a package before scurrying away. I recognized the man. I had seen him in the pipeway when I sneaked on board the zep. When Chi-Leong shook out the contents of the package I recognized them, too: a white shirt and a pair of white shorts like the ones worn by the zep’s crewmen. They were pretty tight, and the badge on my breast described me as someone named John Smith. I was about to complain that no one got away with calling himself John Smith until I realized that in this part of the world “John Smith” was probably as foreign and exotic a name as it needed to be to be ignored.
“So, Sheridan,” Chi-Leong said, inspecting me with mild distaste, “shall we get on with it?”
We should. We did. I changed clothes, packing my own laundered stuff into the bag, and left, heading for the part of the zep all the noise of getting ready for disembarkation was coming from, and I didn’t say good-bye, either.
I don’t know how good Chi-Leong’s suborned helper, Miguel, was at his regular job. I didn’t have any idea what that job was, for that matter. At the work of finding unlawful ways on and off a zep, however, he was just fine.
When I got to the disembarkation lounge all four of the zep’s ship-to-surface gondolas were going busily up and down. Going up they were filled with Egyptian medics, carrying ominous-looking kits of supplies, and soldiers wearing expressions of pop-eyed delight at finding themselves in such unimagined luxury. Going down the gondolas were all but empty. When I was staring at one and wondering how in the world I might board it Miguel appeared behind me at the last minute, shouting “Captain’s orders!” to the zep crewwoman supervising the event. She looked confused, but didn’t attempt to argue with him. Neither did anyone else, as good old Miguel, shouting in a language that wasn’t English and may indeed have been pure gibberish, because no one else seemed to understand it, either—as Miguel, that is, tugged me onto a gondola and slammed the door behind me. Four minutes later I stepped out onto the soil, or at least onto the landing platform, of one of Cairo’s infinite supply of suburbs.
So here I was, finally fully escaped (I supposed) from even the longest-range of Security’s oversight.
But escaped to what?
I didn’t have an answer to that, so I did the next best thing. I just stopped thinking about it.
CAIRO AGAIN
Were things going my way at last?
It almost seemed so. There was a squalid little café on the edge of the square, and as soon as I was out of my new best friend’s sight I headed for it. I sat down at a table the size of a quarter-euro coin to think things over, screened from most of the soldiers by a couple of pots of very nearly dead palms.
It was not the most secure place I had ever been in, surrounded by crowds of strangers whose language was impenetrable to me, whose skin color was different from mine—so much so that in this one city, of all the cities I might have been in, there was no hope of vanishing by blending in. And finally also, I was pretty sure, a place that had no friendly feelings toward me at all.
Cars and buses were rolling into an inadequate-looking parking area, controlled by half a dozen sweating and surly cops. I could see three or four bright-red police cruisers parked nearby, but I was hidden by the palms.
This suburb was not one of the metropolises that every traveler wants to visit. I doubt that many travelers had ever heard of it. On the other hand none of its locals, now engaged in gaping up at the
Chang Jang
as she tugged against her tethers overhead, were ever going to become world travelers themselves, and thus they were unlikely to recognize me. I should be able to get out of here intact. What I needed was simply a place where I could hole up indefinitely, or at least until Security stopped looking for me.
It was at that moment that my luck really did change, because I remembered.
What I remembered was the wonderful fact that such a place might well exist—really had existed, just a few months ago, and quite possibly existed still. Patty Hopper had owned a shabby old apartment that she used mostly as a storeroom for her stock of fake antiquities to sell to the tourists. She hadn’t had time to clear it out before her trial, and the cops hadn’t confiscated it, because they hadn’t known it existed. It would still be there. I was sure of it. All I had to do was get to it.
And then the latest van to roll into the parking lot supplied a way for me to do it. The legend on its side proclaimed that it belonged to “University of Cairo, Department of Agricultural Statistics.” A middle-aged woman was bustling toward it as fast as her stumpy little legs would carry her, crying, “Abdul! Here I am! Thank heaven you found me!”
And Abdul was leaning out of his window, grinning and saying, “Yes, Dr. Stubb! Is I indeed! Come get in and I will take you at once to university!” And then he saw me, trotting toward him and agitatedly waving, and my luck had changed as far as it was going to go.
When Abdul heard that I was one of the specialists invited to a secret Pompeii Flu seminar, and that the world-famous Professor Heisenstadt—
the
Professor Heisenstadt! From Gottingen! Truly a name to conjure with, in spite of the fact that I had just made it up—was supposed to send someone to pick me up, but at the main terminal, and now I had no way to get to the university unless Abdul and Dr. Stubb would—
They would. They did. The magic words were “Pompeii Flu.” Neither of them could refuse anything to somebody who might have a way of coping with the biggest, dangerousest, breathtakingly worryingest terrorist action in human history. And best of all was the word “secret,” because it kept them from asking questions I couldn’t handle.
Cairo traffic was, as always, hopeless, but Abdul was inspired. He found shortcuts I could hardly believe existed, and in not much more than half an hour we were rolling onto the campus. He had just turned around to ask me what building I wanted when I caught sight of the big Metro sign. “Right here!” I commanded. “I see Dr. Leshinsky! He’ll get me to the symposium!”
And the rest was easy, since I was at the door of Cairo’s subway system. The Cairo Metro was hardly confusing at all, and I clearly remembered the route. Take a westbound on what they called the Japanese—I guess because Japanese engineers had built it—line to the Sabat station, change north one stop to Nasser, then northbound again to Zamalek station, and I was there.
Well, no, I wasn’t. Patty’s hideaway wasn’t really close to the Metro station. Wasn’t all that far, either—she used to take a taxi from that Metro station and was at her hideaway in five minutes. No taxis for me, though. I didn’t want to leave any more of a trail than I had to, so I walked.
It was farther than I remembered, but finally I got there. An abandoned furniture store took up the ground floor. Patty’s pied-à-terre was on the second. The key was still under the stand-alone, and never emptied, hall ashtray—and by “key” what I mean is a piece of metal one edge of which was scalloped in an irregular shape; my new home was preelectronic. But when I twisted that actual key in an actual keyhole on the apartment door it worked.
And there it was: large room, unmade bed against one wall, sofa, couple of chairs, other unimpressive bits of furniture, walls hung with religious paintings of some kind, stacks of cartons which turned out to contain ancient Egyptian vases, all chipped and cracked and every one chipped and cracked in the same way. Those, of course, had been Patty’s stock in trade. The bathroom was still there, with its toilet and its claw-footed tub for bathing, although I did not think there would be any hot water. There wasn’t, though—great good fortune!—the toilet did reluctantly flush.
I went to the window and looked out, careful to hide most of my body behind the dusty curtain. No one seemed to be looking up at me. No one, I was pretty sure, knew where I had gone.
What all of this added up to was that, at last, I myself was master of my fate and captain of my soul and if any terrible blunders were going to be committed at least I was going to have the privilege of committing them myself.
Good news, right?
It did not, however, feel absolutely good. What it suddenly felt like, as I stood at that filthy window and gazed out at the desolate street, was lonesome.
MY HOME FROM HOME
The room was not in any sense luxurious, but it did seem to have everything I might need for a few days. The window was nearly opaque with the filth of years, but when I looked out on its narrow street I could keep an eye on everything that moved there, and even more that didn’t—the burned-out wreck of a school bus at one corner, some of the largest potholes I’d ever seen at another. Most of all I saw the shabby little store at the corner, with its half-dozen loafers sitting or slouching around the door. At least there I could actually buy food as I needed it—being, naturally, careful to see that I was as close to unseen as possible.
Just to make sure, I waited until dark before I crossed the street. By then the loafers were gone, no doubt to their homes and dinners, but it was almost a mistake. By the time I showed up at her door the old woman whom I had seen sweeping a fraction of the filth off the sidewalk was already getting ready to crank down the metal chain-link curtain that would cover the shop window. She wasn’t really interested in selling me anything. For that matter, she didn’t have all that much that I was willing to buy, but I finally pulled out four or five cans of soup and a couple of boxes of crackers.
Then the real trouble started. She looked at my twenty-euro note and began to shriek—presumably for help. Which arrived.
The man who came pushing through the curtains at the back of the store was fatter than the woman and just as old and, when she had explained the situation to him, even louder.
My best first guess—the only thing that made any sense at all—was that they thought I was trying to pass a counterfeit bill on them. That wasn’t it, though, because when I pulled another twenty out of my stash to offer them it didn’t help. Then the man paused long enough to say something in a different tone to the woman. She answered him, then pressed a key on their old cash register. It said something I couldn’t understand—I suppose, the Egyptian equivalent of “no sale”—and slid its cash drawer open. The woman, now screeching in my direction again, pointed at the coins and greasy bills in the drawer.
And comprehension came to me at last. “Oh, hell,” I said. “You mean you can’t make change for the twenty.”
We finally reached a solution to that, though it took their total cash reserve, and then I had to make four trips to carry up to my room the remainder of twenty euros’ worth of selections from the stock of their little shop. Still, when it was all stacked against one wall I was glad enough to have it, particularly the two-liter boxes of drinking water; I hadn’t really had much confidence in what might come out of the place’s plumbing system. I did find it interesting to sample some of their previously unexperienced assortment of canned and dried fruits, vegetables, and stews. And the other good thing about having done a week’s shopping in one night was that I didn’t have to go back to the store the next day.
