All the Lives He Led-A Novel (43 page)
Her gleanings went on and on: Civilians in the city of Nanking, 1937, when it was taken by the Japanese army, somewhere between two hundred thousand and four hundred thousand dead; no count available on rapes and beatings. Drogheda, Ireland, 1649, thirty-five hundred people massacred by troops of Oliver Cromwell. Afghanistan, 1842, sixteen thousand Britons killed by Afghan tribesmen.
Had enough? Oh, but we’re just getting started. We haven’t done justice to the Germans. Once Herr Hitler put it into their heads they became so proficient in the killing of Jews (and Gypsies and other persons that they didn’t care to have moving into the neighborhood), murdering them a few hundred at a time—but doing it many, many times—in their proudest invention, the gas chamber. With that in operation they didn’t usually have to bother with the drudgery of all that machine gunning. Well, except now and then, as with some captured American soldiers at a place called Malmedy in 1944. No, they were the champions, although, to be fair, we must admit that Josef Stalin’s USSR was coming up fast with 21,857 dead Poles (how methodically they conducted a census) in 1940 and about a hundred thousand (ah, sometimes the counts did get sloppy) in the Baltic states in 1941 and nobody knows how many hundreds of thousands or millions in that celebrated Gulag Archipelago of work-them-to-death camps.
And, listen, the religious institutions were not that far behind. Mostly they did their work a few at a time, hanging or burning at stake, though sometimes a few devout Muslim jihadists could take out a few thousand infidels at once when a tempting skyscraper just begged to be crushed and burned to the ground.
Well, enough of European, Asian, American, and Australian butcheries, and I don’t want to get into African ones. Thirteen-year-old boys in uniform systematically chopping off the hands of thirteen-year-old boys in tattered shorts and tears? The males in one house trading places at sundown with the males in the house next door, because they know that when the soldiers came in the middle of the night they would amuse themselves by making all the males in each house have sex with all the females, and the householders wanted to avoid incest? No. Africa would make a cow weep.
Oh, humans do have their moments. Sometimes they are kind, and entertaining and even good, but then along comes a Hitler or a jihad-preaching mullah or a Ku Klux Klan kleagle and then they show their true selves. Not to mention that there are just too many of them for our one little planet.
So that was the problem that Gerda wanted to repair. I knew what tool the three of them were planning to use for the job—what they called the Pompeii Flu—because, along with all the rest of the world, I had seen it at work.
WHAT TO DO WITH MY PRIZE
From time to time, when Shao-pin was out of the house and I could send the servants away on made-up errands, I would take my ten little trophies out of their hiding place to look at them.
That was a reasonably safe thing to do. Those ten marbles that had cost me a decade and a fortune were quite secure as long as their shiny black shells were intact. That’s what Artie Mason had told me, it being what the people who made them had told him. I had no reason to doubt it. All the same I was really careful to keep them in their padded packaging, in their heavily immobile safe in my rescue room.
Yes, I said “rescue room.” A lot of people don’t know what a rescue room is anymore, but there was a time when any family rich enough to own a big house probably had one of them. You could identify a rescue room because it had steel bars laced into all its walls, and no windows, and a steel door with steel tongue-and-groove locks and the most pick-proof locks that money could buy. The idea was that if your house got overrun with terrorists—or with house-robbing ordinary criminals, for that matter—you scuttled into the rescue room and locked the door. Then you just waited for the cops, or somebody, to show up to rescue you.
That is, that’s what you did, anyway, if you hadn’t made the mistake of seriously antagonizing the marauders, because if you did that they might just set fire to the whole house and burn it down around you. This was not a desirable outcome for anyone. Especially for you and your now crispy critters family.
That breed of marauders was no longer common, but the room was still there, and I had recognized it as a first-rate place to hide those ten little black marbles.
On one particular day, after Shao-pin had been a resident with me for a couple of months, I took that heavy, three-pronged key out of the secret pocket in my knock-about vest and went up to the end of the hall on the second floor to open the safe and look at them. Shao-pin was out of the house, gone to see her doctor for one of those regular checkups that she wanted me to copy. (I was resisting that idea. What was the point of safeguarding my health when I was intending to be dead before long?) I twirled the combination, opened the safe, and took out the box of marbles. Then—holding it quite securely—I lifted one of the marbles off its cushioned pad and closed my eyes and imagined dropping it on the floor and grinding it under my heel, the door wide open and the air-conditioning set high so there was a detectable little breeze carrying the rescue room air out to mix with the ambient air outside.
I thought about that for several minutes, unmoving, the plague pill wrapped in my right fist. Then I opened my eyes, restored the little globe to its nest, and gently pushed the safe’s door closed.
I felt myself smiling. Actually it was kind of funny. I seemed to be unwilling to take the action I thought I had been preparing to do for years. I had invested a whole hell of a lot of money and effort to get the damn things, and now that I had them I couldn’t make up my mind to use them.
It wasn’t that I had turned in revulsion from the whole idea of slaughtering humanity. I hadn’t. I was convinced that Gerda had made a pretty good case for wiping the species out. I simply wasn’t quite ready to be the one who did it.
That did not make a lot of sense to me. What was wrong with performing an action that I was convinced was a proper one to do? And then as I sat in that bleak room, my elbows on that bare table and my chin in my hands, I realized there was one element that was wrong.
I hadn’t given the other side a chance to be heard.
What I needed was some intelligent, kindly, well-informed person who was likely to love humanity more than I did to take the conventional side of that argument, and the more I thought about it the more eager I was for her to get back from her doctor’s appointment so we could talk.
COMING CLEAN WITH THE OTHER WOMAN I LOVED
When Shao-pin got back to the house she looked in on me in our calisthenics room, where I was exercising under the guidance of a good-looking virt female wearing hardly any clothes at all. “Glad you’re taking care of yourself, Brad,” she said.
I didn’t respond to that. I just said, “I need to talk to you, Shao-pin.”
That made her look faintly surprised, but what she said was, “Sounds like a good idea. Dinner’ll be in about an hour: before?”
“Why not? Come into the shower room with me and we’ll get started while I dress.”
She nodded. “Meet you there,” she said, and was gone into the hallway. Since I took the inner way I was there before her. I showered barely long enough to get wet all over, and was pulling up a pair of shorts when she arrived.
“So what are we going to talk about?” she asked, taking a seat on one of the chairs meant for tired athletes.
I pulled on a shirt and sat down next to her. “Listen, maybe we should order something to eat before we start.”
Shao-pin picked up the towel I had dropped on the floor and hung it over the back of a chair. “I called the kitchen already. Alison said we shouldn’t spoil our appetites so soon before dinner, and she’d send up some tea and coffee. What’d you want to talk about?”
There being no help for it I sat down across a tiny table from her, took a deep breath and started in. “What I have to tell you isn’t happy, Shao-pin. It may make you think less of me, but I have to tell you it anyway. When Gerda was dying from that car crash near Caserta she gave me something to hide. It was a funny-looking foreign coil, and I took it. I hid it, too. No one saw it, no one knew I had anything from her. Then, when I had it in my room that night, I began to worry. I couldn’t read it.
“I didn’t know what it was. I began imagining bad things. What if what I had in my pocket was a cure for the Pompeii Flu? What if because I was hiding it I was condemning a lot of other people to catch the disease and be mutilated by it and die from it? I didn’t know what to do … . Oh, here’s the coffee.”
I had been watching Shao-pin’s face attentively while I spoke. At first what she displayed was concern. When I mentioned hiding something Gerda had given me it was pure shock. Then, when I talked about my fears that I might be causing unnecessary sickness and death it was revulsion. She got up to let the coffee bearer in. Over her shoulder she said, “You mean nobody searched you?”
“Not a soul.”
She was scowling now, but when I started to say something she shook her head warningly, with a glance in the direction of Alison’s grandson, learning to be a chef like his grandmother by starting as a gofer. When he was gone she said, “That’s against all Security procedure, but I guess it’s too late to worry about that. Please go on.”
So I did. I told her how relieved I was when the actual cure was found on a different coil in Gerda’s bag, and how I’d dithered about for that long, long time before I connected with Artie Mason, and what Artie had done. And I finished by telling her about those little black marbles in the safe in the rescue room. And then I stopped and gazed at her, waiting for a reaction. The whole story, all those worrisome years of doubts and delays, had taken less than twenty minutes to tell, and through it all Shao-pin had sat listening politely, with an occasional half nod to show that she was grasping what I had to say or an appreciative sip of her cooling tea, and hadn’t said another word.
For a couple of minutes she didn’t say anything now, either, just stared into space, or down into her teacup and hardly at all at me. Then she shook herself and said, “And these little helpings of extermination that you’ve got in the rescue room, are they anything like the Flu?”
“Worse,” I said. “Or maybe in some ways better. Better because they’re not agonizing. But just as fatal, and there’s no cure with the pills.”
She nodded. “And you’ve saved them because you’re planning to turn them loose sometime soon and exterminate the human race?”
That was a hard one. “Planning” was way too strong a word for my muddled thinking on the subject. I said, “You’ve seen a lot of the stuff Gerda collected. Don’t you think the species that does that sort of thing should be put out of its misery?”
She wasn’t going to let me get away with that. “You’re the one who has the stuff to make it happen, so you’re the one whose opinion matters, not mine.”
“Yes, damn it, I know that,” I said, suddenly surly because she was touching me exactly where it hurt. “But you’ve seen Gerda’s evidence, and what do you think?”
She pursed her lips. “Well … All right. Gerda makes a pretty good case. But there’s something to be said on the other side, too.” She had begun fumbling in her bag, pulling out a large envelope. “This,” she said, taking a photograph out of the envelope, “is your daughter.” She made me take it, but it didn’t really look like anything I would call a daughter, more like a sloppily prepared scrambled egg, with a part of it circled in a grease pencil. “Yes, I’m pregnant, Brad. Dr. di Milo gave me this sonogram this morning. I call her Sasha, although so far she’s only a six-week fetus. But, Brad—dear Brad—I don’t want her to die.”
MY DAUGHTER
There is a point at which questions of logic and justice and retribution just do not matter anymore, isn’t there? I don’t think that simply seeing that splotch of matter in the X-ray picture took me to that point, but something did. The fact that that cluster of cells was energetically dividing in order to become a child? The look on Shao-pin’s face when she told me it had a name? The quick twist in my abdomen when I heard the words “your daughter”? Well, something did. And before we finished our delayed lunch I had promised that I wouldn’t do anything with the little pills that could end a race for a good, long time. Until Sasha was six months old? Shao-pin bargained. And I agreed.
I probably would have agreed to postpone a decision until Sasha was old enough to vote, if Shao-pin had proposed it, because I was in shock. But the actual length of time, once Sasha had got herself born, didn’t matter. This serious-minded little creature, determinedly attempting to wrap her insignificant fingers around my bony thumb, made her own case. Witless, often noisy, frequently smelly little lump of humanity that she was, she had her way of establishing the fact that she had a right to live. At any cost. Including, I was pretty sure, the cost of my own life.
So on Sasha’s six-month birthday we tucked her in and went down to the rescue room with a half bottle of Lacryma Christi wine, and when Shao-pin had poured us each a glass she looked up at me and said, “Well?”
“Oh, hell,” I said, “let the bastards live. Maybe they’ll get better.”
And so the next day we got in our limo, with instructions to our driver, Olivia, to not hit any bumps at all, took off for the funeral home of Terranozza I Guarnio, with me gingerly carrying the black velvet jewelry bag I had filled from Artie Mason’s expensive trophies.
We had long since abandoned the idea of dumping the poison pills into a vat of some molten noble metal like platinum. Such vats were not easy to come by on the Vomero, and so we had taken expert opinion, judiciously asked for, on alternative 100 percent guaranteed disposals. The one we liked best, or anyway disliked least, was the process called resomation, originally developed to dispose of the used-up cadavers from medical schools. A few funeral homes offered it as an alternative to burial or cremation, and one of them turned out to be less than twenty minutes from our house.
