What the books said was,
They deprived Toronto of its only source of water for weeks. There really isn’t much worse you can do to a city than take its water away. It’s not just that then the people don’t have a drink when they want it. They can’t take a bath, they can’t flush their toilets, they can’t make a cup of tea or boil a pot of potatoes—in short they can’t live. And if it’s bad for the citizens, it’s even worse for the businesses, from car washes to breweries and every other kind of business in between that employs human beings. It is one of the most effective things a hardworking terrorist can do. It doesn’t just mess one city up, it screws up the finances of a whole nation.
Of course, all that would’ve been impossible if they hadn’t had Mary Elaine Whitecrow on their team—someone who was both beautiful enough and smart enough, as well as willing enough, to do a good enough job of seducing a tanker captain to get him to lower his guard a bit. Enough so anyway, for her to sneak their roughnecks onto the ship to take it over. For that purpose, Mary Elaine was just about perfect.
What I hadn’t known was that Mary Elaine Whitecrow was also Brian Bossert’s wife. Somehow the news media had obtained a photograph of her, and that was the part that spoiled my day, because I had seen that photograph before. I had even asked Gerda about it, and she had said it was some aunt or cousin, or something.
I don’t know which was worse, finding that my dear, almost, sort of, wife had once had a really truly dear wife of her own. Or discovering that even when Gerda was mine she kept that once-upon-a-time wife’s picture by her bed.
After the Treaty of Spitzbergen defanged the Stan menace I didn’t think much about those duck-and-cover days at Mme. Printemp’s school for the kids of the wealthy, or that the Stans were where Aunt Carrie’s somadone had come from, but that was history.
The Stans had more formal names than that. If you looked in an atlas, they’d be called Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, but nobody bothered with those names. What those places actually amounted to was nothing but the useless little chunks of real estate that were littering up the maps after that preposterously gigantic old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics did the right thing and took its own life. That was way back, what was it, oh, somewhere toward the last decades of that messy Twentieth Century. Up until that time those Stans had been pretty much a collection of little model Soviet states. It wasn’t that the Stans people really wanted that. It was just that they didn’t have a choice. Crotchety old Joe Stalin was running that part of the world just then and he had a system for refocusing the minds of any Stanian who didn’t share his views. To such people he gave a quick one-way trip to the gulag and a new career in mining gold with their bare hands in the frigid Arctic. The Soviet-Stanian people whom those former dissidents left behind had learned a great moral lesson from this. They learned to do what Uncle Joe wanted, and keep their mouths shut about it.
Of course, once the Soviet Union had gone away the people in charge of the Stans still weren’t the natives. There were some Germans and some Chinese and a lot of ethnic Russians who weren’t getting along with their own governments, but were rich enough or somehow powerful enough to become a ruling class in the Stans. What they wanted most of all was to be left alone. So the Stans were where outsiders weren’t welcome, and where they had retained all those great installations of nuclear and biochemical and everything-else-ical kind of technology that the Soviets had set up in that part of their empire in their (not very successful) attempt to transform those pre-Industrial Revolution Buddhists into technologically brilliant and fanatically atheist imitation Russians.
The other thing about that part of the world in present times was that it also had no extradition treaties. It was where Gerda-Brian’s banks were located. And, what was most important for the fugitive and hurting Brian (because he had picked up some pretty deep burns in the blast), a surgeon, Vassarian Ilyitch Nemirovski, lived there, and he could turn him into something no cop would ever recognize as the desperately wanted terrorist Brian Bossert, namely into a woman.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, from this name alone you could figure out two interesting things about him. From his middle name, which was the version of his father’s that is called a patronymic, that he was an old-fashioned aristocrat, or wanted to be taken for one, and from the last name that that would never happen in Russia because he was a Jew. In the Stans, though, he did just fine. He was one hell of a surgeon. For that reason he had been able to rapidly become rich.
Nemirovski had got his start manufacturing sideshow freaks for some of the African countries that were beginning to get rich but not civilized. Young boys with ears the size of lily pads and penises like a stallion’s, for instance. Nemirovski was known to be able to transform almost any variety of human being into almost any other variety you could think of. All it took was a large allocation of time, and an even larger one of money. Brian, who had taken the precaution of hijacking a Brinks-Renmin truck in Vancouver for getaway money a few weeks before Toronto, possessed enough of both. Though he had arrived in a state of ruination he could be repaired and transformed.
But it took time.
After an unpleasant few days in the beginning—devoted by the surgical staff to trying to stabilize the various damaged parts of their patient in order to keep him alive long enough to begin the transformation—the remains of Brian Bossert had a couple weeks of waiting while tests were made and new cloned parts were begun to be grown to make replacements for glands and nerve clusters and organs that the new Gerda Fleming would need.
But, thank something, I didn’t have to keep on loving it at its very yuckiest. Gerda had no choice but to live through those unbearable months of tortured repair, though blessedly unconscious through some of the worst of them. I did not. I only had to view the bits and pieces Gerda herself had elected to preserve on her coil.
His patients didn’t keep the surgeon terribly busy. He didn’t let them, because he insisted on leaving time for his very active social life.
Which, as a special treat, he sometimes let Gerda share in, at least as a spectator on his TV net, on the occasions when he was entertaining at home. Mostly dinner parties, that was—local political people, visitors from Outside, almost all rich men, but with a decorative frieze of quite good-looking women. A couple of the men showed up so often on the clips Gerda incorporated in that diary-like coil I came to recognize them as regulars, particularly a tall, well-built but elderly Chinese named Bu Deng, who seemed to be to biochemistry what Nevirovski was to cutting and patching the flesh of human beings.
Gerda spent a lot of time in the doctor’s pools and gym, keeping all those new and old muscles working, now that the little shock-stimulators were gone, and most of all in the library.
That was where Gerda had begun to put in longer and longer hours of her time. The professor had warned me that she seemed to have an insatiable appetite for records of the endless list of all the ways man had been violently brutal to other men.
My sweetheart was showing a previously unsuspected thirst for knowledge, perhaps because she had had so little time for education in her previous life. Being, you see, so very busy killing people and blowing things up.
So, you ask, how was it for me?
Oh, quite normal. I hated every minute.
Actually parts of what my love was going through were touching, and sometimes puzzling. One of Nevirovski’s guests looked improbably familiar, and for several weeks I tried to understand how and where I might have encountered this figure from ten thousand kilometers away and nearly thirty years in the past. And then, in another appearance, it turned out that he had studied hydrology, and it all fell into place. Oh, sure! He was my old (dead) buddy, Maury Tesch! Or an earlier edition of him, when he still had a full head of hair. What this young Maury was doing in the Stans was hiding out from international charges of piracy on the high seas. He and the rest of a famous and feared eco-pirate crew had b
een torpedoing fishing vessels to protect the last of the world’s schools of blue-fin tuna, but their luck had run out. A satellite had located their submarine when it surfaced, and relayed the information to a Chilean pocket battleship cruising nearby. Ten minutes later the pirate submarine had been blown out of the water, killing every one of the crew except for Maury himself. And he didn’t know what to do with himself, now that he no longer had a head pirate to tell him.
What he did have was a lot of money, because what he had been sent to do while the rest of the pirate crew was lobbing over-the-horizon torpedoes at a Chinese factory ship and the Chilean warship had caught them at it was shopping for a new submarine to replace their old Polish one. The new one wasn’t really exactly new. It was serving with the Moroccan navy, but the Moroccan admirals were embarrassed to have a fission-atomic vessel in their fleet when all the other navies in the area were fusion-powered so it was about to be released from the Moroccan navy. They were close to a deal, and he was carrying euro letters of credit for the full purchase price in case the last technicalities got straightened out.
He still had the money. There was no one else alive to claim it.
31
THE SURGEON’S TROPHY HO
The thing about Gerda’s new life was that I thought it should have been a constant humiliation to her. It wasn’t. She seemed to be enjoying it.
There to help her with the enjoying was Nevirovski’s junior surgeon, the one who called himself Rollo. Because the surgeon began letting her appear in public she needed a more elaborate wardrobe. Nevirovski cheerfully paid the bills, Rollo escorted Gerda to the appropriate shops.
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 p
urpose. 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.
32
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.
All the Lives He Led Page 30