Gerda was silent for a moment. “Interesting,” she pronounced, “but I think that’s about enough talk, don’t you think? I’m sleepy,” she added, nibbling at my ear, “but not too sleepy. So why don’t we go back to bed?”
So we did. I was glad to change the subject. I guess I had been afraid that having a terrorist for an uncle would make her think less of me. It didn’t, though.
The lesson I had long ago learned, but did my best not to think about, was that things that are too good to last don’t last. And the proof of that came the next day when Gerda, looking sorrowful, came by the wineshop right at the peak of the tourist business. It was, of course, raining.
I braced myself. Whatever the news was going to be, I wasn’t going to like it. I began to worry in earnest. It was bad enough that she was going to tell me something I was going to hate; I didn’t want to hear it surrounded by my customers.
I had one possible way out. I looked pleadingly across the Via dell’Abbondanza to where Cedric the Pimp was lounging in his doorway, and sure enough he took the hint. “Go,” he called, ambling across the narrow street toward me. “We aren’t busy right now. I’ll take care of your shop.”
So I left Cedric dishing out wine for the thirsty crowd—and, of course, for himself—and I pulled Gerda down the street. “What?” I asked as soon as we had found a sheltered doorway to get into.
She shook her head mournfully. “It’s my gram, Brad dear. They’ve put her in intensive care.” She squeezed my hand. I didn’t squeeze back. “But the worst part,” she said, “is they don’t really seem to know whether she’s going to make it. Hon, I’m sorry, but I don’t have any choice, do I? I hate it, but I just have to go.”
Her eyes were actually misting.
I couldn’t tell her not to do it, could I? Even if my telling her would have as much as slowed her down, which I was quite sure it wouldn’t. I could have mentioned that her family seemed to be having a pretty lousy summer, but I didn’t say that, either. So all I did was ask her where dear old Gram was dying, and when she said, “She’s got that place up in Sirmione,” I had to ask where Sirmione was. Up in the lake district, about as far as you could get in Italy before it turned into Switzerland, she said. And when I pointed out, trying to get the facts straight, that neither the Chang Jang nor its sister ship, the Haihe, was expected back for days and probably wouldn’t be heading that way if they were, she shook her head affectionately. “I wouldn’t be going by zep, hon. Too slow. I’ll just grab a superspeed rail out of Naples and I’ll be there in two hours.”
That sounded a little better to me. I ventured, “So you probably won’t be gone that long.”
But she was sorrowfully shaking her head again. “Oh, sweetie, well, you know you can’t predict these things, can you? It might be just overnight. It might be, I don’t know, a lot longer than that. But you know I’ll try to get back when I can.” And a kiss on the cheek and a quick half hug and Gerda was gone. Until when, not specified, and maybe, oh, shit, maybe until goddamn never.
It was turning out to be another really bad day.
I stumbled back through the drizzle to my hole in the wall. The wine drinkers gawked at me and Cedric the Pimp gave me a commiserating little shake of the head before retreating—with a full cup of wine that I was sure wasn’t his first—to his own side of the via. It seemed our conversation hadn’t been quite as quiet as I’d thought.
The rest of my shift that day seemed to last forever. And when it was over so did that whole night.
11
MY DEAR LOVE GONE, AGAIN
Among all the other things that were wrong with the world was that our whole part of the Italian peninsula went through another rainy patch just then. And attendance was down.
That didn’t make sense to me. Sure, sometimes the weather cut down the number of people showing up on a given day. But not this much. Customers just weren’t showing up the way they had been. The Bastard said we were down over 10 percent, and he said it to me the way he said most things, as though it was my fault.
Losing any customers at all was bad for me. It hurt my chances of making an honest as—all right, an as, never mind the honest part—out of my moneychanging or wine-recycling fiddles. On the other hand, the good part, or the not good at all but actually the worse part, the worst as hell part was that my outgoing cash flow had dwindled, too. The dwindling was good. The reason for the dwindling, though, was that Gerda wasn’t around to use up all my spare euros on impetuous runs into Naples for a couple of drinks in the Galleria or taking rides in rental cars down the coast to gaze at the hot mud fountains that looked the way parts of Yellowstone must have looked before it went ape.
Gerda wasn’t just not there. She didn’t even call.
You know what was tough for me to understand?
Intellectually, I mean? The fact that I really missed her.
I hadn’t ever really missed a human being before. It made me feel foolish. That didn’t stop the missing pain, it just added one more way of feeling bad to the sufficient number of ways I already had. So to try to take my mind off all those things, what I found myself doing, more than ever, was checking, almost obsessively checking, the news pages. Some of the news, of course, was simply too lousy to make anybody feel better, except maybe some mega-misanthrope that wanted the whole human race horribly destroyed. That was what the Pompeii Flu news was like, and it got worse every day.
Actually, that helped a little. I didn’t care much about purely local horrors. If fifty passengers were turned into well-done hamburgers when their railbugs plowed into a broken-down internal combustion truck on the same high-speed track—well, that wasn’t really cheering me up any, no, but at least it reminded me that there were people in the world worse off than I was. And anyway, the particular railbug line where that had happened ran from Boston to the Maine coast, nowhere near the one Gerda would have been on.
If indeed she had taken the high-speed rail at all, of course.
There was a lot of that sort of thing on the news, too. Terrorism seemed to be having an uptick, and some of their actions were pretty spectacular. When the New Falangists set fire to the copy of Columbus’s ship Santa Maria where it had been moored for the past century or so at the foot of Barcelona’s Las Ramblas it was mildly interesting, although I’d never been in Barcelona, and didn’t care much about Christopher Columbus. (It did get a little more interesting when a team of Barcelona firemen tried to put it out, and a delayed-action bomb killed them all.) Then the Flat Earth Society guys knocked the heads off the statues in Moscow’s Cosmonaut Park on the grounds that space travel was a hoax … and the Hebrides Society bombed London’s Albert Memorial to protest England’s murder of Mary, Queen of Scots … and the Rock of Ages Purifiers swiped a couple of ultralights and dropped porno pictures over most of Salt Lake City. And like that, over and over again.
It seemed to me that there was too much of that sort of thing. No one else seemed to care, though. Cedric the Pimp listened patiently to me one rainy morning when nobody seemed to be wandering down our street, but all he said was, “Yeah, it’s a shame,” and scurried back across the via when a couple of figures strolled toward us. They didn’t really matter. They were just virts. But it was obvious that he had taken the excuse to leave because the subject either bored or frightened him.
My best bet for someone to talk to, just as in old pre-Gerda days, was Maury Tesch. He was still pretty moody, but once again reliably up at almost any time for a quick game of CIA Against the Militants or Planning Nine Eleven All Over Again—or, more likely, chess, because he didn’t really like the machine games. But then, once when he had checkmated me in a dozen moves and was setting the pieces up for the next game, I mentioned my notion that the terrorists were getting more active and he said wisely, “What’s worrying you, Brad? Is it your idea that there’s some big terror offensive going on?”
“Well, something like that, maybe,” I admitted.
He shook his head. “Think
about it, Brad. Remember what I said back at that briefing about this kind of thing?” I didn’t. “Well,” he said, sounding a little miffed, “let me spell it out for you. What’ve all these attacks got in common?” He didn’t pause to give me a chance to guess. He went right on. “They’re all local, do you see? Small groups. Limited objectives. If you just go by what you see on the news you have to think that the days of concerted attacks all over the place are done. And,” he said earnestly, “there are good reasons why they might be. They’re too damn big. They take so many people in so many places to work, and somebody’s always going to rat them out. And then they’ll all get bagged and spend the rest of their lives in some jail. Right?”
This time he did pause for a comment from me, but I didn’t have one. He didn’t seem to mind. “No, Brad,” he went on, “you can forget that. If there are ever going to be more large-scale operations that cross national lines I guarantee there won’t be more than a handful of people involved.”
“Well,” I said, “what about something like this Pompeii Flu?”
Now he was shaking his head sorrowfully. Evidently I had said something stupid. “Brad, have you heard of any terrorist group claiming credit for the Flu?” I gave him a head shake of my own. “Or make any demands? Or even show that they were hitting some specific target?”
“Well,” I said, “the Jubilee?”
He shook his head harder than ever. “Be reasonable, Brad,” he said. “Why would anybody hate the Jubilee that much?”
I was getting to be uncomfortable with the subject. “I guess no reason, Maury. Unless you could say it’s the whole human race that’s the target.”
He said patiently, “And who would hate the whole human race that much?”
I had an answer for that. “Martians,” I said wisely. “Once they get rid of us they can steal our women and our water.”
That made him grin. Not right away, because Maury didn’t have that much of a sense of humor. But then the grin did arrive, and, “Ah,” he said, suddenly sunny again, “you’re joking. So we agree, that’s one thing we don’t have to worry about? Good. Now you’re white, so what’s your first move?”
So I made one. And, of course, lost again, and after a while wandered back to my room to sleep.
You might think that Maury’s positive kind of comments might have reassured me, a little, anyway. They didn’t. They only made it easier for me to concentrate on my real and pressing womanless condition.
Which I did, that night and most of the next, right up to the time when Elfreda Barcowicz decided to become part of my life.
The way she did it, she plumped herself down beside me while I was having a solitary beer at one of those outside-the-wall sidewalk cafés and said, “Hi.”
By then Elfreda had already paired up three times in the previous week or two, twice with tourists and once with my successor at the flour mill, none of those joinings lasting much more than a few days. I hadn’t really kept tabs on her, but if asked I would have guessed that she was at present hooked up with the muscleman, Jamie Hardesty. She wasn’t, though. “That rat Jamie,” she told me right away, “is the reason so many good girls go gay. Talk about full of himself! Mind if I join you for a drink?”
I didn’t, particularly. It wouldn’t have mattered if I did because she’d already flagged down a waitress and ordered a grappa and lemon soda, and when it arrived she paid for it herself, so quickly that I wouldn’t have had a chance to do it myself even if I’d wanted to. I have to say that, after Gerda’s high-maintenance habits, that made a refreshing change. So, to be sociable, I asked, “Weren’t you going with him?”
“Was, yes. Not now. What is it with you guys, you’re all scared of making a commitment?”
“Commitment” was not a word I would have associated with Elfreda’s track record. I made the mistake of asking her what kind of commitment she was talking about, because she told me. “I’m a healthy, normal woman, Brad,” she explained. “What I want is good old-fashioned true long love. That’s ‘true.’ And ‘long.’ You follow me? The kind of love where the two of you turn old and gray together, and when one of you finally dies the other one lasts maybe a month or two and then she’s gone, too. Or he is; doesn’t matter which goes first. They both die, and then the crematorium mixes their ashes in one big urn and then casts them into, I don’t know, Lake Superior.”
She was getting too somber for me, and besides what she was describing didn’t sound like the Elfreda Barcowicz I had thought I knew. I couldn’t help making a little joke. “That won’t happen,” I told her. “There’s still too much of the Yellowstone ashes in Lake Superior already.”
She gave me a withering look. “It doesn’t matter where the hell they cast the ashes, does it? The Mississippi River. Waikiki Beach. They could do it anywhere.”
I took it a step further. “Right here would be pretty good for ashes-dumping,” I suggested. “The zeps will be back any day, right? So you could do the casting from one of them as soon as it’s over the water. And, hey, there isn’t much you could do to the Bay of Naples that hasn’t been done already.”
Elfreda put down her second drink—this time it was one of those toxic Italian brandies that they make out of God knows what—and gave me the most reproachful look yet. “I hate sons of bitches like you,” she told me. “You take all the romance out of sex.”
I had realized by then that I was doing comedy where her skin was unexpectedly thin, but I couldn’t let that stand unchallenged. “Not true, Elfreda. I’m as romantic as anybody, honest. I’m all in favor of being in love with somebody, and having kids with her, and growing old with her, just like you said.”
She gazed at me in silence for a while. “Yeah,” she finally said, in a suddenly darker, more thoughtful mood. “You probably are. But not with me, right?” And she got up and walked away, leaving a centimeter of that poisonous brandy undrunk in her glass.
I could’ve sympathized a little with Elfreda. That was what she had been asking for. It wouldn’t have been much trouble for me and there was nothing to stop me. At that very moment Gerda might well be doing some old friend, or for that matter some new one, up there in the Italian lakes. And even if she wasn’t, she wouldn’t really have any serious grounds for complaint if I had just happened to do a little flirting—or maybe even a little down-to-earth recreational sex—with somebody else while she was gone. With Elfreda, say. Who had been really inviting it, and happened to be friendly (maybe too friendly), and was definitely smart (smart enough to have landed the plum job of keyboarding the Giubileo’s publicity in a nice air-conditioned office instead of sweating over a hot triclinum all day long) and that wasn’t all. Put Elfreda’s specs all together: slim waist, sweet hips, man’s-hand-sized breasts, cute little brown-eyed, full-lipped face. Looked at objectively, by which I mean not with the besotted vision of someone hopelessly smitten, like me, she was at least as good-looking as Gerda. And her earlobes said heterosexual, active, open to a good approach.
Nothing wrong there, was there? And I’d let her walk away.
I was back in my room and tugging my blankets into some sort of usable condition in my unmade cot, when there was a tapping on my door.
I did the usual quick guessing game. It wouldn’t have been Gerda; even if she had come back she wouldn’t knock. I doubted it was Elfreda giving me a second chance. The only thing I could figure was that Jiri’s wife had forgotten some of his goods. So I opened the door, and it wasn’t Jiri’s wife. Widow, I mean. What it was was a slim, slight Asian-looking man in formal shirt and shorts, with a bellybag and—remember, this was the middle of the night—wearing dark blue sunglasses.
He didn’t wait to be invited in. He politely nudged me out of the way so he could get past me, shut the door behind him, and said, “Good evening, Mr. Bradley Sheridan. Do you remember me? I am Eustace Chi-Leong. We were introduced by my honored father, Dr. Basil Chi-Leong, when you were kind enough to let us photograph you at your place of business. How are
you?”
By then I did recognize him. He didn’t wait for me to get around to that, either. He rejected the unmade bed and the rickety old armchair I’d thrown my clothes on and seated himself on the straight-backed chair. Then he spoke right up. “Allow me to show you something,” he said, pulling a package out of his bellybag.
Whatever it was, it was wrapped in purple fabric, and judging by the care with which he unwrapped it, pretty valuable. The thing that finally came out of the several layers of wrap looked to me like a pewter gravy boat, fifteen or twenty centimeters long. “Is it not beautiful?” he asked me with pride.
Well, I supposed it was. I don’t know a lot about high-priced tableware, but the thing did have some pretty scenes of nymphs and centaurs engraved on it. If I’d discovered it in any hotel room I was robbing, back in the old days, I probably would have taken it along and tried to figure out how to fence it later. I said, “Looks expensive, anyway.”
He waved that off. “This chalice,” he said severely, “is made of platinum and is believed to have been made by Benvenuto Cellini. There is one like it in the papal treasury in Rome, not so good as this. That is all. There is no other anywhere in the world. The reason I have it now is that my esteemed father, Dr. Basil Chi-Leong, has purchased it as a gift for the collection of my grandmother, Madam Katey Chi-Leong, whom you have also met. He has asked me to invite you to help us get this chalice on the zeppelin, Chang Jang, which in some seventy-two hours will be moored over its repositioning depot along the shore of the bay. The zeppelin is then scheduled to depart for several destinations in North Africa, where arrangements can more easily be made to transport the chalice to our home in Singapore.” He gave me an appraising look. “Of course,” he added, “what we wish to do may not be considered entirely legal.”
All the Lives He Led Page 15