Greenhouse Summer (35 page)

Fresh air seemed to be a good idea, and so once they were dressed, Eric took Monique up through the main salon and along the promenade to the bow, where they secured a bubble of privacy by, ironically enough, pretending to be in the process of seducing each other.

This took some glad-handing and small talk en passant, and by the time they were standing side by side in the bow of
La Reine
with the river breeze in their faces as it rounded the Ile St. Louis, Eric’s head had quite cleared and he fully realized the perilous magnitude of what he had done under the influence.

Eduardo would not be pleased. Nor would the Marenkos.

On his own initiative, or to be more embarrassingly precise, under the influence of aphrogas and sex as much as moral outrage, he had made a major policy decision without syndic authorization. He had revealed the existence of the white tornado recordings to Monique Calhoun.

To an operative of Bread & Circuses under contract to the Big Blue Machine.

He had been a bad Bad Boy. His big mouth—or, as Mom would no doubt say, his big dumb dick—might have landed him in deep dark shit.

“These recordings . . .” Monique Calhoun said coldly, “they really prove that the white tornadoes are being faked?”

Eric nodded. “Maybe not
legal
proof in most jurisdictions, but in the court of public opinion where it counts,” Eric told her. “And any halfway conscious spinmeister could use
that
to convince even the True Blue that they’ve been faking the rest of the recent weird weather too, true or not.”

“Faking Condition Venus . . .” Monique muttered. “Heating up the planet even further to get fat contracts to cool it back down. . . .”

“Those recordings get released to the media, and the Big Blue Machine, UNACOCS, any further talk of Condition Venus, is as dead as . . . as dead as . . .”

“A human body after its brain has been ripped out and installed in a computer?” Monique suggested sardonically. “You know what I think?”

They were leaning against the rail, bodies touching, faces turned close together like a couple soon to become lovers for the sake of
cover, but the eye contact was not exactly romantic.

“That I am an egotistical shallow ruthless phallocratic son of a bitch for pumping aphrogas into the boudoir and taking shameless advantage of your sweet innocence?”

Monique Calhoun did not seem to be amused. But she did seem to have passed beyond her anger at him.

“That too,” she said. “But you’re right. What you’ve done is just some stupid schoolboy prank compared to what the . . . capitalist slime I’ve somehow found myself working for have done.
If
they’ve really done it.”

“I told you, we have proof that the white—”

“But I don’t
know
if there’s
really
a human brain in the Davinda climate model computer, it’s just a deduction from—”

“You don’t
want
to believe it!”

“Do you?”

Eric shrugged. “Who would?”

“What are you going to do with those recordings?” Monique said slowly.

“Not my decision to make,” Eric told her all too truthfully.

“Your . . . syndic, then.”

How much more could he tell her?

Only what she could figure out for herself.

“Sell them,” he said. “For quite a lot of money.”

“To the media?”

“Or . . . the highest bidder . . .”

“Like the Marenkos? Who’d use them to destroy UNACOCS and Big Blue and discredit the Condition Venus hypothesis forever . . . or until it’s too late?”

“You might think that,” said Eric. “I couldn’t possibly comment.”

“You can’t
do
that, Eric,” Monique said. “What if we
are
about to slide into Condition Venus even if the white tornadoes
are
fakes? What if the Davinda climate model
does
prove it, human brain or not? You really want to discredit the truth because the messengers happen to be unprincipled capitalist liars? Without being sure? Without knowing?”

“So let’s find out!” Eric blurted.

Of course.

Eric looked directly into Monique Calhoun’s eyes, all superciliousness purged from his expression, or so he hoped.

“When you want to pry open an oyster,” he said, “you use a big tough knife. Do you know what I’m thinking?”

Monique just shook her head.

“I’m thinking you’re going to report what you’ve learned up some chain of command. . . .”

“You might think that. I couldn’t possibly comment.”

“So the . . . people at the top of that chain of command are going to know we can blow the whole scam open with the white tornado recordings anyway . . .”

“So . . . ?”

Eric paused. He expanded his chest with a deep breath of river air as his boat rode the current westward past the klieg-lit glory of Notre Dame cathedral. Was he not the master of
La Reine de la Seine
? Did that not make him a Prince of the City? Or was he just a fancy doorman?

Eric knew he was about to cross another river, not the Seine, but a personal Rubicon. Could he do it? Could he not? If he succeeded, he would redeem himself with Eduardo Ramirez and his syndic. If he presumed such authority and failed, the alligators of the Seine might enjoy a princely dinner.

“So you tell your chain of command that unless I am allowed to inspect what’s hidden in that tent in the Grand Palais before Sunday, the white tornado tape recordings get released to the media on Saturday.”

“
We
,” blurted Monique Calhoun. “We’re in this together, sweet prince.”

“So be it,” said Eric.

Monique Calhoun eyed him more narrowly now, as if studying a new Eric Esterhazy, a man she had never really seen before.

And, thought Eric, maybe she’s right.

“You don’t really have the authority to make a threat like that, do you, Eric?” she said softly. Admiringly, he was flattered to think. “You’re taking a big personal chance, aren’t you? You don’t know that
your . . . chain of command would really back it up, or . . . or . . .”

Eric gave her the great big stoic hero smile, half-convinced in that moment himself.

“
Your
chain of command might just think that,” he said. “But would they dare to take the chance?”

For the first time since they had come up on deck, Monique smiled at him. It wasn’t a lustful smile, it wasn’t a loving smile, it might not even be a friendly smile, but it seemed quite sincere.

“You know what I’m thinking, Eric?” she said.

Eric shook his head.

“Let’s find out who and what we’re really working for, you and me, Prince Valiant,” she said. “That’s what I’m thinking.”

She didn’t kiss him, she didn’t embrace him, but she did take his hand and squeeze it quite hard, like a comrade-in-arms.

Which to Eric, in that moment, seemed quite enough, quite right, quite appropriate.

“SO, MOM . . . ?”

“So, Eric?” said mom, taking a long slow sip of her Mimosa.

“So what do you think Eduardo will say?”

Rather than deal directly with Eduardo, Eric had decided that much the best course was to use Mom as a buffer, at least initially.

He had told her to meet him for brunch—Mom seldom arose early enough to eat anything that could properly be called breakfast—aboard the
Café du Monde
.

This was a converted river barge anchored behind the Ile de la Cité where a branch of the Seine separated it from the Ile St. Louis. It was done up as a disney of a famous café by the same name in the French Quarter in sunken New Orleans, which, in turn, had been a disney of a “typical” café in the Latin Quarter of “gay Paree.”

It served coffee with chicory, sugar-dusted doughnuts it styled “beignets,” eggs bienville, and an assortment of other faux-Louisianne brunch fare; decently cooked, but most of it disney, sometimes, like the restaurant itself, twice removed.

“I think Eduardo will be pissed off,” Mom told him, unsurprisingly.

Eric nodded grimly.

When choosing a restaurant for this brunch, Eric had forgotten,
at least on a conscious level, that the
Café du Monde
was anchored close by the Monument to the Deportation, built to commemorate one of the many ghastly events of the ghastly twentieth century’s most ghastly war.

Be that as it may, the river view thereof was an iron grille in a stonework quai resembling nothing so much as the Thames-side prison gate to the Tower of London through which prisoners of state were once taken to be beheaded.

Somehow this did not now seem like favorable feng shui.

Worse still, the Parisian version was overgrown with vines, often semi-submerged, and, given its proximity to a restaurant boat that tossed its scraps into the river to attract them as local color, was a favorite hangout of the Seine alligators. If these creatures yet retained too much dignity to beg tidbits from the diners, they were cruising slowly back and forth below the railing table where Eric and his mother sat in dim reptilian hope that someone might fall overboard.

Or be thrown their way, perhaps, in a fit of ire.

“That’s why I want him to hear it from you first, Mom,” Eric told her.

Mom shook her head. “That would
really
piss him off,” she said. “He’d be insulted.”

“
Insulted
?”

“You take it upon yourself to tell Little Mary Sunshine that the white tornadoes are fakes and Bad Boys has the stuff to prove it, and then you go ahead and use the recordings that
maybe
the Siberians will buy as your own little offer the Big Blue Machine can’t refuse, and maybe blow an eight-figure deal in the process,” said Mom.

She took another sip of Mimosa.

“I’d say you had some nerve, wouldn’t you, Eric?” she said.

Eric nodded morosely.

“You’ve got the nerve to do all of that,” said Mom, “but you don’t have the balls to tell him yourself? Insulting, Eric,
insulting
. I mean, what does that make Eduardo?”

“Well, when you put it that way, Mom . . .”

“Be a man, kiddo!” Mom told him. “I don’t know how pissed off Eduardo will be at what you’ve done, but sure as shit, he’ll detest you
for the craven pussy you’d be if he has to hear about it first from your
mother
!”

She leered at him toothily.

“Anyway, kiddo,” she said, “what’s the worst thing that can happen?”

She flipped a forkful of Cajun blood sausage over the side.

An alligator snapped it up before it hit the water.

Monique Calhoun found herself “getting professional.” She called Avi Posner and told him to meet her by the southwest pillar of the Eiffel Tower at noon; that is, outdoors at a randomly chosen location, where there could be no possibility of bugging. For the same professionally paranoiac reason, she refused to tell him why.

Another wall of hot saturated air had moved in on northwestern Europe, or, Monique suspected, given what she knew now, had been shepherded in from on high by the loathsome “clients’ ” orbital mirrors, and the noontime clime this Paris day was a fair disney of Lost Louisianne or the equatorial coast of Africa, whence this condition might just have been deliberately exported.

But the pillars of the Tower had long since become great iron trellises overgrown with honeysuckle, ivy, bougainvillea, and morning-glory vines all the way up to the first-level platform, so that the area beneath it, thronged with tourists, vendors, and buskers, was an immense shaded and perfumed arbor that at least afforded some respite.

Avi Posner was already seated on a wooden bench when Monique arrived. “So?” he said without bothering with the courtesy of rising to greet her.

“What do you want first, the good news, the bad news, the worse news, or the worst news?” Monique said, sitting down without bothering with the niceties either.

Posner just gave her a glacial impatient stare.

“The good news is that I’ve found out that ‘Lao’ is the code word for some kind of Siberian operation against our . . . client’s interests at UNACOCS.”