All the Lives He Led-A Novel (39 page)
She wasn’t yet Gerda. The name she was going by, which she didn’t much care for, had been given to her by Nevirovski himself, “Lolita Karenina.” It seemed to be some complicated Russian kind of a joke, and between shops they had been amusing themselves trying to think of alternative names, as well as to invent a backstory to offer casual acquaintances—perhaps a childhood in Catasaqua, Pennsylvania, college at Pennsylvania State University, and now present in the Stans because she had fled the outside world with an embezzler who had then run out on her.
She was enjoying the make-believe, and enjoying the company of Rollo as well, not to mention the pleasures of spending large amounts of money on clothes and entertainments. Gerda hadn’t had much of that kind of fun in her life. She was also drinking more, enjoying her various entertainments more, even liking her bed sports with Nevirovski more. And spending time thinking about the future not at all more, but quite a lot less. And the long sessions in Vassarian’s library seemed to be slowing down.
It even sounded as though some of the other men she was spending time with were beginning to look sexually interesting to her.
That was getting into dangerous waters. The surgeon kept close tabs on her. Funnily, Nevirovski seemed not to worry about his second in command, Rollo, or about the big Chinese biochemist.
So one day when she was out with Rollo to buy some sport clothes, because Nevirovski had decreed that she needed more exercise, she asked him about it. He laughed and fingered the little amulet he wore around his neck. “You’ve noticed my jewelry? It’s got a little radio inside it. The boss can hear what’s going on around me any time he pushes a switch.”
“All right, then what about this Bu Deng? Nevirovski lets me go out with him, even to his own house to see the orchards. Is he just somebody the boss trusts? Or maybe too old?”
He was laughing again. “It’s true that Bu and the boss were in business together way back—back before the Stans were really independent from the rest of the world—but ‘trust’ is not a word his highness associates with women. As far as Bu is concerned, he is definitely not too old. But he’s got a lover already. He’s faithful to him, too, even when he’s off somewhere on a trip. The lover’s a man, hon. Bu’s gay.”
That was all he wanted to say on that subject, which sent her back to Nevirovski’s own library.
Finding out what she wanted to know took time and labor. Nevertheless, she had not lost the skills that had let her learn exactly how many miners’ explosive caps it would take to blow a hole through the roof of a New York subway tunnel or how one would pilot an oil tanker into the perfect spot on the Toronto shore. And she found the answers she sought.
The business venture the two multimillionaires had shared in—there was no other way to put it—was the enslavement of the native Stannian peoples. Oh, not all of them. Just the ones their occupiers had picked out to do particular jobs for their welfare and comfort. The beauty of the plan was that the mechanism of their enslavement didn’t involve guns and chains. All it took was the same thing that had enslaved my own aunt Carrie, and, like her, they enjoyed it. Whatever tasks and duties they were assigned they did gladly, because part of the payday was in somadone.
That was Bu’s share of the plan, but there was another part. What Bu supplied was the carrot, but there was also a stick.
That was provided by Vassarian Ilyitch Nevirovski. Before he had decided that brain surgery was too much trouble for its mangy cash returns he had tracked down some research on a couple of the human sensory centers. One was for the sense of taste, the other, nearby, for the sense of smell.
They turned out to be quite easy to reach with electric probes.
Nevirovski reached them. With his little needles he had a way to deprive any rebellious local of the use of some of his senses. For a first offense the sentence was the loss of smell, for the second, of taste. If you can’t smell anything you’re anosmic. If you can’t taste you’re ageusic. If you still offended the people who had taken control of the Stans you lost both. That was the worst of all. You couldn’t tell whether you were eating a kosher hot dog with mustard or a dog turd with a streak of pus on top.
There was no need for Stalin’s brutal firing squads or gulag archipelagos in the Stans. Between them, Bu and the surgeon had solved the Stannian labor problem permanently.
And what was happening in my own actual life was quite the opposite of Gerda’s, and, really, rather nice. The money was rolling in.
It turned out that two shows a day in the arena weren’t enough, so the Jubilee people begged—really all but got down on their knees and begged Shao-pin—for the right to do a third, which she allowed but made them pay lavishly for. Then, when they asked for a fourth, she turned them down, but for some additional money, actually quite a lot of it, allowed them to send in the virt cameras. Thereafter the virts of me, answering some of the most hated questions they asked that day, filled one of Naples’s grandest halls ten times a day. Then they filled Rome’s halls. Then Paris’s and Beijing’s and then Everywhere’s.
I had never seen so much money.
Of course, I had no use for such vast sums. Mom and Pop did, though. So I took a little time off, set up a trust fund for them, large enough so that they would never again have to share a bathroom or live in a resettlement for the rest of their lives. I thought for a bit of having them move closer to me than Staten Island, New York. Shao-pin had chosen and staffed a very comfortable town house for me in the fashionable part of Naples called the Vomero. I could easily have picked up another one just like it for the two of them.
I didn’t, though. I didn’t really want them that close.
Oh, and listen. I did make another real estate investment. I bought the building Gerda’s quarters had been in from the Giubileo corporation. Since the corporation didn’t really want to sell I had to seriously overpay for it, but what did that matter to me? I made it easier for the corporation, anyway, by contracting with them to keep right on running the buildings as they always had. All I really wanted, you see, was to change the locks on Gerda’s suite in order to keep everybody else out, so that now and then I could sleep a night there, alone in our old bed.
Well, it did have a practical use. There was a cubbyhole in the wall, just over a tall dish closet, that Gerda had used to hide some of her more private possessions. I used it for the same purpose. Things of mine like the very few notes in Gerda’s scratchy handwriting that I had saved. And like—well, all right—like some of her underwear that Security hadn’t already confiscated.
Gerda’s old rooms were a convenient place to keep things I wanted out of circulation, but I would be lying if I said they were the biggest reason I wanted to own them. No, that reason was simply that they once had been Gerda’s.
Sound obsessive to you? Sure it does. You’ve never been really in love, have you?
Oh, and by the way.
Outside of that kind of thing I haven’t mentioned Gerda much lately. That doesn’t mean I was forgetting her—that will never happen. And right about then I was being reminded of her more frequently. And more forcibly, too.
A VOICE FROM THE PAST
The thing is, I had discovered that the more I tried to do things that Gerda would have wanted to do herself or wanted me to do if she couldn’t, the less agonizing was that terrible sense of loss that disturbed so much of my sleep. My latest effort had been to keep an eye out for peoples jailed for terrorism, and maybe if at some point they were released—if they ever were—give them a little helping hand. So I kept an eye on ex-terrorist excons as they served their sentences and were paroled. Worked pretty well for a while, too. I still dreamed of Gerda almost every night, but they were frequently happy dreams, even very sexual dreams, sometimes in fact being the best part of my day. But that kind of thing gets pretty old pretty fast. And lately when I dreamed about Gerda, like as not, she was sad. Or even angry.
Then one day, idly checking the recent convict releases, I came across a name I thought I had heard before. On the list of felons released from the Alaska rehab center was one Arthur Daniel Mason, formerly of the Molly Pitcher Redeployment Village in Staten Island, and I did know him. He was the kid who had tried to recruit me for some junior terrorist thing a long, long time ago.
I paid a fair extra tab for the backgrounding service. When consulted it gave me some interesting data. Artie had been sentenced to the rehab center, but one day he got away. Found an Inuit fisherman who agreed to take him across the strait to Siberia. Spent the next ten years in the Stans, but then his father died back in New York. Artie took a chance on sneaking home for the funeral. That was a bad idea. Security picked him up. And he was just now released.
I thought about it for a long, long time. Then, the next time Shao-pin stopped by my house, I gave her a welcoming kiss, told her she was looking even prettier than usual, and mentioned that I was thinking of going to New York City to visit an old friend, and asked if she’d like to come along and see some shows.
She accepted right away. I don’t know if she really cared about Broadway shows, especially the ones that were financed by the city to keep some sort of tourist business going, but I had been pretty sure she’d come along to make sure I didn’t get into trouble.
We took a hardwing from Naples all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to New York. It cost the Earth. I didn’t mind. I didn’t want to be gone too long, either.
Of course, no one knew who I was. Security had introduced me to a group of theatrical makeup people, and they had turned me into a well-to-do elderly Chinese gentleman, apparently taking his pretty granddaughter to see some famous old sights. The hotel I picked was one where I had been quite seriously roughed up by a New York cop who thought I was planning to rob some of their guests (I was). But it was recently spruced up and, the travel agent promised, quite comfortable, and when we got there the two off-duty New York cops I’d hired for bodyguards were waiting for us in the lobby. I sent Shao-pin with one of the cops to inspect our suites, making sure they were both comfortable and defensible.
Then I asked the cop who stayed with me, “I wonder if you can do me a favor. I’m looking for a friend of mine who got in trouble with the law. They just let him out of that Alaska correctional center, but I don’t know where he’s living. His name’s Artie Mason. Do you guys keep track of people like him?”
They did, as I had been pretty sure they did, but I had to listen to five minutes of advice before he admitted it. He hated to see me waste my time. Them terrorist gangs took kids and, you know, kind of brainwashed them? And you’d never get them to straighten out and be good God-fearing Americans again? And—
I finally stopped him. I told him that Artie had been the son of my late mother’s best friend and I was just trying to do for him what my mother would have done if she had lived. And I mentioned that it seemed to me that it might take him an extra hour or even two to do that for me and he should make sure that was on the bill when I paid him.
He mentioned that he might be able to get it faster than that. I said that if so that would be his good luck, because I was willing to pay the extra thousand—that’s $500 an hour times two hours—for the favor. Sounds high, sure, but it was in American money, and it cheered him right up. So when Shao-pin and the other cop came back he disappeared into one of the spare rooms in my suite and when he came back he handed me a slip of paper with two addresses on it, one geographical, the other electronic.
Then I wrote two notes to Artie saying I might be able to help him and inviting him to dinner the next night, got a hotel messenger for the hard copy, filed the electronic one on the net, and took Shao-pin—along of course, with the two cops—out to what was said to be New York’s best restaurant for dinner.
I’ve had better, but it wasn’t bad. The cops were ecstatic.
The meal the next night, with Artie Mason, was just as good although it was from the hotel’s room service. (But Shao-pin had paid a visit to the hotel’s kitchens to talk to the head chef, and money had changed hands.) Artie was certainly impressed.
The other thing he obviously was was suspicious. He was perfectly willing to tell me about life in the joint, and about the umiak voyage to a frozen beach in Siberia. Not as much about how he got through that huge and empty Russian province to its border with one of the Stans, and he wouldn’t even say which Stan. And about his own life in the Stans after he got there a fair amount, but in an account significantly low on names.
I listened with pleasure as Artie worked his way through the lobster bisque, the salad, the amuse-bouche that followed, and the perfectly grilled, perfectly marbled steaks that followed that. I was enjoying his story on its merits—my God, what a virt play it could make!—but what I enjoyed even more was the way he had told it without incriminating any other person.
When Artie couldn’t face the Tahitian prawns that followed the steaks he put down his fork and turned to me helplessly. I chuckled. “Full up, are you? Well, let’s talk for a bit. Then we can eat some more, or the chefs will be glad to wrap the rest of the food up for you to take home. I said that I might be able to help you out with some of your money needs, didn’t I? Let me show you what I was talking about.” I reached into the pocket of my silk jacket and pulled out the little rubycolored coil Gerda had entrusted to me. “This comes from the Stans. It seems to have something to do with a Belorussian bank there, and it may give access to something like a safe-deposit box they have. What I need is for someone to go there and find out what’s going on. For that I’m willing to pay at least fifty thousand euros—I said euros, Artie, not dollars—plus expenses. That’s for just doing the job. If you find answers to some of the natural questions there’ll be bonuses. Oh, and if you agree to do it I’ll start paying the fifty thousand, at the rate of one thousand a month, beginning tomorrow.” He was giving me a cold, if attentive, stare. I added, “One other thing. As far as I know, none of this gets you into legal trouble. I don’t think anything you will do in America violates any American law. If you want to check this out for yourself you can go to any lawyer you like and ask him and I’ll pay his bill. What do you say?”
