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.
22
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.
Or the next.
Or the one after that, either. The trouble with that, though, was that it had taken a lot less than seventy-two hours to get really tired of Patty’s former apartment. Not to mention that by then I was getting pretty bored with my cold meals, since nothing I could do would make the little stove work. So as soon as it got dark and the store loafers had gone home I crossed the street one more time. There was, I remembered, a tiny section of fresh produce—unfamiliar tubers, tiny tomatoes, heads of what looked like some kind of cabbage, fuzzy little globular fruits that were probably something like peaches or apricots.
However, when I was actually looking at the selection the problems began to occur to me. Nothing that required cooking was of any use to me. As to the other thing—well, if I suspected that tap water might be unsafe, what about the raw fruits and vegetables? With what inexpensive and readily available material, for example, were the local farmers likely to be fertilizing their crops?
I didn’t know the answer for sure, but I had my suspicions. I finally settled on a melon and a hand of stubby little bananas, all of which would be peeled before I ate them. The shop lady was a lot friendlier now. While I was paying for the fruit out of the Egyptian change she’d given me the first time she was jabbering amiably away. I didn’t understand her, of course, but then I didn’t really have to. The melon was a disappointment when I got it upstairs—opaque white flesh that looked like chalk and didn’t taste much different. I ate it, regardless. I was glad to trade every gourmet item in the Chang Jang’s ample larder for the absence of Elfreda’s watchful stare. And I tried to figure out what I was going to do.
First question: How long could I hole up here in Patty’s little nest?
Answer: Well, probably as long as I wanted to, I guessed. A few days. Maybe a week or two. As long as it might take for the heat to dwindle. After all, there wasn’t anybody I wanted to get back to …
Which, of course, brought my thoughts, never far away, back to Gerda.
I don’t mean I was thinking of her in every minute. There were times when I could pretty nearly put her out of my mind, with the aid of the fact that there were so many unignorable other things that competed with her memory. But then I would slip. In my mind’s eye I would see her—smiling, s
o cheerful it hurt to look at her; so loving, with her arm tucked into mine and, once or twice, her face upturned for a kiss … . Well, at those times she was not at all out of my mind. She filled it to the brim.
No one needs to tell me that was stupid. I knew it. It wasn’t just dumb, either. It was worse. It was simply pathetic for a healthy young man like me to yearn so for another human being. (Of course, healthy young men like me have done just that over and over in human affairs. It is what three-quarters of all literature is about.)
The fact that she was not only the woman I loved but also a merciless mass killer somewhat dampened my ardor. Didn’t dispell it, though. Didn’t change the fact that I ardently wanted her back.
By the second or third day I had managed to deal with that paralyzing longing, by which I mean that when it smote me I just let it smite and waited for it to go away. Anyway, I had plenty of other things to think about. For example, the nagging question of had I really done sensible things in running away—repeatedly—from Security’s supervision? And, once I had managed to set that aside as at the moment unanswerable, what should I do with this unexpected freedom?
There at least I had come to a few conclusions. The fact that I had no plan for the future that made any sense at all meant that where I sat was as good a place to be as any other. Perforce I then began thinking not in terms of days but of months.
This meant that the winnings from Chang Jang’s casino would run out, so I needed a source of income. Short of trying to burgle a home or rob a bank only one possibility presented itself: the endlessly gullible Western tourist.
I could, for instance, sell some of Patty’s stock in trade. She wouldn’t be needing it for some time. But her fake little antiquities were junk; I’d have to sell dozens of them each week just for eating money, and what Cairo cop wouldn’t notice somebody toting a backpack full of fake vases?
Alternatively there was the little racket I had been planning to try the last time I was here, and never got around to. I’m talking about manufacturing fake papyrus copies of The Book of the Dead, every ancient Egyptian’s only hope of an eternal afterlife, and every tourist’s first choice of something to hang on a living room wall. That wouldn’t be hard to set up. I would need a supply of imitation papyrus, but there was plenty of that in every art supply store. If I took a camera into any museum I could copy some version or other of the text. Then I’d want access to a decent copying machine, and then, for the aging process to make them look authentic, I needed only matches, a little bit of animal fat and some time.
There was one big drawback to that plan. It meant that I would have to go where the tourists were. For that I would have to disguise myself.
Perhaps I could grow a beard, and maybe see if the shoplady across the street had some suitably black and greasy hair dye, and at least a pair of dark glasses to hide the fact that my eyes were very non-Egyptianly blue.
All those things were possible …
Or, I told myself, what was also possible was that something would come along to make all of that unnecessary … and, you know, that very night something did.
I was at the window, once again trying to figure out what the future might hold for me while simultaneously doing a before-retiring check on the outside world. Apart from the store window, its lights already out, and a single elderly man limping home after a long workday, there wasn’t much to see … until there was.
What appeared was a red police four-wheeler cruising slowly down the street.
I pulled back from the window. I wasn’t sure that the police in the car were looking for somebody, but nothing about them gave any other impression. And if they were looking for someone, the odds were pretty good that that someone was likely to be me.
Then all those thoughts were driven out of my mind, because the police car turned a corner, and I saw her.
Gerda Fleming.
It was Gerda, all right. She looked harried and more unkempt than I had ever seen her before, but it was definitely Gerda, walking down the dusty street all by herself. Stopping to talk to nobody and, all right, having almost nobody else on the street to talk to since pretty nearly everybody else had gone home. The one scruffy little three-wheeled truck on the street was turning off it. Even the loafers who usually sat or leaned in front of the dirty little store were now sitting or leaning somewhere else. And I was thunderstruck. Gerda? Here? Where I could ask her for explanations … or for instructions on what I was supposed to do about all this … or, most of all, for simply being where I could put my arms around her?
I didn’t trouble myself with incredulity, or wonder that she might so suddenly come back into my life. I didn’t stop to think at all.
I was out of the door and hurrying down the stairs and out onto the dead grass beside the sidewalk and after her. By then I was flat-out running, the hot air I was sucking into my lungs burning them, gasping. And yelling—“Gerda! Hold up! It’s me!”—as well as I could yell with my lungs on fire.
She didn’t answer. She certainly didn’t turn around to look at me. At the corner where the burned-out bus blocked the sidewalk she made the left turn, still not looking back. I was right behind her. When I’d got past the bus she was no more than a dozen meters ahead of me, approaching a red police van that was parked, its motor idling, maybe another ten or a dozen meters farther along.
That made me hesitate. The last people I wanted to see were police. But there was Gerda …
Then she did stop. She didn’t turn around. She didn’t seem to do anything at all, just stopped and stood there.
And a moment later her red hair blossomed into a bright blue-white flame, and her arms and legs turned into fire, and all of my Gerda that I’d lost and found and who I’d loved and hated and altogether missed—all of her—
Evaporated into a blaze of sparks and fire—
And then wasn’t there at all.
Those flames hadn’t scorched the sidewalk. There was no pile of ash. There was nothing. I had been chasing after a virt.
And not just any old virt, either, but a virt which the cops had probably been deploying all over the parts of Cairo where I might be hiding. Trolling for me, that is. Hoping that I would be dumb enough to leap out of my safe concealment and take the bait, like any other stupid fish. Just as I had.
The van door was opening. A Security man came out, head turned back so that he could finish a conversation with whoever was still inside. Not hurrying. Planning, I judged from the unlit cigarette in his hand, to catch a quick smoke before heading back to base to report that that wily Brad Sheridan had eluded them again.
He hadn’t seen me.
That meant that I had an option. I could turn and get away, and with any luck at all they wouldn’t notice.
But I didn’t do that, though, because all of a sudden I was fed up. Tired of acting guilty when, as far as I could see, I wasn’t guilty of anything at all, and even more tired of asking myself just what the hell I thought it was that I was accomplishing with all this running away and hiding.
Since I wasn’t accomplishing anything, wasn’t it about time for me to turn decision-making back to those who wanted to do it? Even to monsters like the Piranha Woman or old fools like the professor?
So I took a deep breath and kept on walking. As the Security man finished exiting the van and turned his head more or less in my direction I called, “Hello? Listen, I’m Brad Sheridan. I think you’re looking for me.”
23
HOME AGAIN, JIGGETY-JIG
Security goons were not my favorite people, but I have to admit that those two weren’t particularly rough with me. They weren’t particularly solicitous, either, and they sure weren’t taking any chances in letting me get away again. Stick-tight wrist cuffs bound my hands behind my back and a sticky collar was around my neck with a leash attached. A leash! And the guy at the other end of it never let go.
But they didn’t hurt me. Helped me, actually, or maybe you could say pushed me, into the van, offered me food w
hen we got to an airstrip I hadn’t seen before—not only food but a shot of genuine Scotch and a trip to the toilet, too—and then untied me completely when we were airborne. They even answered my questions—well, some of my questions. How had they known where to deploy their Gerda virt? Simple. They had a picture of me leaving the Metro station. You might wonder how that was possible, considering how many tens of millions of riders took the Metro every day. I did. But they explained that. There were those unnoticed crowd-control cameras all over the Metro, they said, and the Naples office had sent them pictures of me. Of course it would have been impossible for human beings to pick mine out of all those other faces. So they didn’t bother with human beings. They had pattern-recognition programs that were more accurate and far faster than any flesh-and-blood person, and they found me leaving the station with no difficulty. Then it was only a matter of playing the Gerda virt everywhere within walking distance. With a lot of pressure on them to make it work—especially, the plumper one said, grinning, from Civilian Informer Barcowicz, burning up the circuits in tears as she pleaded with them to make it work because Major Feliciano, the one I knew better as Piranha Woman, was promising to do her great bodily harm if I wasn’t recaptured right away. They even told me what kind of a plane we were in. We were in a SCRAM. The kind of high-speed aircraft that the security agencies used, and a couple of high-government officials, and hardly anybody else. It got you where you were going, fast.
It got us where we were going so fast, in fact, that when they ordered me back into the seat restraints I thought I must have done something that displeased them. Only when I heard the sound of the SCRAM’s engines change as we moved into lower, thicker air did I figure out that we were landing. “Oh,” I said. “We’ve arrived. I thought you guys were mad at me.”
All the Lives He Led Page 24