I didn’t force it on her. If she looked unenthusiastic when I suggested we watch a bit of the story of Gerda I changed the subject. But I didn’t have to do that often. Gerda’s life was definitely an interesting story. I started Shao-pin with bits from the days when Gerda had been young Brian Bossert—the George Washington Bridge, the subway tunnel under the East River, all those well publicized exploits right up to the disaster at Toronto. Then the interminable years of reconstructive surgery, and her subsequent career as Nevirovski’s trophy concubine, then Rollo’s, then that of maybe fifteen or twenty other men, some of whose names I had never learned. (And in truth sometimes wondered if Gerda herself had known all of them.) And I’d sat with Shao-pin as we watched that terrible day in Bu Deng’s arbor when she got the news that Yellowstone had changed everything for everybody. And I had spaced all those segments out with bits and pieces of Gerda’s researches into the total rottenness of the human race. And then, one evening after a pleasant dinner and a couple of brandies on the balcony off our bedroom, watching the setting of the huge Italian sun, I said, “There’s one clip I’ve been saving for you. It’s the last I have before they went secret. Would you like to see it now?”
She would, of course—I think that word “last” had sounded grateful in her ear—so we adjourned to the loveseat again. I threaded the coil into the player for the wall screen while she made a mild highball for herself and a slightly less mild one for me.
“All right,” I said, “here’s where we are. You saw that the Bastard—Bu’s lover, I mean, had given up his plan to wipe out the House of Windsor and came back to the Stans. Gerda and Maury were having a drink in one of their favorite bars, Maury trying to jolly her out of her fairly chronic state of depression, when Bu and J.J. tracked them down. They had news.”
So I sat her down in that well-used loveseat and blanked the wall pictures for the moment. “Maury had taken Gerda to one of her favorite gin mills, I guess to try to cheer her up,” I told her, “and Bu and the Bastard tracked them down. It was less than a month after he came back.” I started the coil bit, and there they were, two big men with news so big that it made them stammer and do their best to blush as they told their friends that they were going to get married.
“Because this is the real thing,” the Bastard said, and Bu Deng, one big paw wrapped around the Bastard’s equally big one, nodded, grinning.
I had never seen Bu with that particular expression before. On the wall images it appeared that Gerda never had, either. She looked startled, then demanded, “When?”
Bu answered for both of them. “You mean when will the wedding be? We haven’t decided. We just made up our minds to do it today.” His expression became almost comically defensive. “You see, I’ve never felt this way before. Never wanted to make this kind of a commitment. And we haven’t yet got around to the arrangements.”
“Then,” Gerda said, getting up from her place at the bar and suddenly looking both younger and less gloom-stricken, “let us do it for you. Don’t worry about a thing. We’ll take care of all of it.”
And so they did. The place for the wedding would be the very saloon they had heard the announcement in, with an open bar that Bu would underwrite. The date would be that weekend, three days away. Maury and Gerda became respectively their best man and maid (!) of honor, Gerda doubling as the producer of the event and the person who made all the arrangements.
There wasn’t any problem caused by the fact that it was a same-sex marriage, not in the Stans, but they had a little difficulty figuring out who would perform it. Neither Jeremy nor Bu was religious. Still they wanted their union to be as formally binding as possible, which Gerda took to mean godly. There was a native sweeper in Bu’s laboratory who was known to perform religious services for the aboriginal Stannish population, or anyway for those few of them who took an interest in such matters, and a barman from New Jersey who claimed he had once been a Catholic priest. Gerda rounded them both up and coached them to conduct the rite in tandem.
It all began well. Beside me, Shao-pin made little clucks of appreciation as the couple approached the altar—well, the free-lunch table, but for this day it bore flowers instead of cold cuts. Neither Bu nor J.J. had a veil, but they both wore gorgeous arm corsages. They spoke right up with their I do’s and I will’s. They drank champagne out of each other’s patent leather shoes, and a pretty good hit of champagne it was, since Bu was a size twelve and J.J. an eleven. And then they got to their twometer tall wedding cake that Gerda had ordered on her way in to the bar and was still hot enough from the oven that some of its icing melted and ran together. They didn’t mind. They fed each other slices, while the eighty or ninety assorted people in the audience cheered. That was a pretty good turnout, although the happy couple didn’t know most of them. Gerda had simply let it be known that there would be a party with Bu picking up the check.
The amusing thing about the icing was that Maury and Gerda had loaded it with one of the items from Bu’s lab, and indeed one that was a variety of something I knew well, the aphrodisiac called “Stannish fly.” So about ten minutes after they finished the cake, the newlyweds, all flushed and happy, excused themselves to find a room.
By the time they came back, nearly all the guests were gone, having eaten their own helpings of the cake to its last crumb. Gerda and Maury hadn’t. They were having a final drink in the now empty bar.
When Shao-pin, by my side on the loveseat, pointed out that Gerda was drinking neat whiskeys now I explained, “What you’re seeing is what the junior surgeon, Rollo, called Gerda’s post-party depression, the feeling she got when something had been fun and then was over. That isn’t the most important part, though.”
She gave me a mildly suspicious look. “It isn’t?”
I was busy resetting the coil. “Wait a minute. Here. This is a few hours later. Gerda and Maury are still in the bar, although it’s past closing time, and Bu and the Bastard come back.”
The newlyweds looked a good deal more relaxed than they had before, not least because they had got out of the formal clothing Gerda had demanded they wear—green and yellow striped shorts for the Bastard, the kilt that was one of his sartorial affectations for Bu. Bu ordered a couple of brandies from the weary lapsed-priest barman who was all that was left of the party’s serving staff. Then he and the Bastard sat sipping the whiskey and smirking at each other as if those were the most delightfully enjoyable things anybody could ever do.
Maury was looking at them with affectionate tolerance, bobbing his head and grinning. Gerda wasn’t. That soul-sick depression was settling over her until she couldn’t help it. She burst out, “What is there to be so happy about?”
All three of them turned to stare at her as if she had just broken wind in public. Maury shook his head reproachfully. She had punctured that bubble of happiness the newlyweds had brought in with them. Looking at them, Maury said, “Don’t mind Gerda, she’s just having her period.”
That was a joke, of course, and not the first time Maury had made it. Usually that started a fight between them. It might have done it this time, too, except that Bu was too full of just-married happiness to let anyone rain on his parade. He reached over and patted Gerda’s knee. “Don’t be out of sorts, dear Gerda,” he said. “It’s not such a bad life you have here, is it?”
She was in no mood to be jollied. “For you it isn’t,” she said. “Maybe it isn’t even for me sometimes, but what about him?”—jabbing her thumb toward the barman, wiping glasses at the end of the bar and conspicuously not hearing a word the customers said.
“Why do you say that?” Bu said. “Our abos are quite well treated. Their standard of living is at least double what it was before—”
“Before you people stole their lands?” she interrupted.
That made the room’s temperature drop. “For Christ’s sake, Gerda,” Maury exploded, and “Please,” J.J. coaxed, and Bu said, “Gerda, you’re American, aren’t you? Americans aren’t in any position to
criticize other people for stealing their lands from natives. At least we didn’t slaughter them.”
He was pushing her a little too far. “No,” she agreed. “You didn’t, at least not right away.”
She had seriously offended Bu. He sighed and pushed his chair back.
“Time to get to bed,” he said, not even looking at her. “I have to get up early. Coming, hon?” he asked J.J.
Who surprised Gerda. “You go on, dear,” he told his loving bride, or perhaps groom. “I think I’d like a nightcap before I go.”
Now that had been a surprise to me, too. I wouldn’t have thought that even the Bastard would send his dearly beloved off to sleep alone on their wedding night. I didn’t have to ask him why, though. Maury did it for me. “What’s the matter?” he demanded. “Trouble in paradise already?”
J.J. gave him a small smile. “God, no! We’re as happy as we can get. Bu is everything I ever dreamed of—smart, gentle, kind—he’s perfect. It’s just that there are a few things we don’t agree on.”
It seemed that Bu had insisted on keeping the wall screen news on as they dressed for the wedding. What was showing was a new terrorist outbreak in Western Europe. Little gangs of local loonies protesting no-nudity beach laws or new property taxes just wasn’t exciting.
J.J. said so. “That’s all penny-ante stuff,” he complained. “Supermarket stink bombs, for God’s sake. Couldn’t they at least derail a commuter train?” And then, perhaps because he was feeling a little guilty about pigging it in the Stans instead of wiping out the House of Windsor, he confessed, “I don’t know who I am anymore.”
He was looking as though something nearby smelled really bad. I was looking him over pretty carefully by then, which is probably why I hadn’t noticed that something was changing the expression on Maury’s face until he spoke up. “Who would you want to be?” he asked.
J.J.’s own face collapsed. “I don’t know. Someone who has a purpose for living. But I don’t know what that would be.”
Maury nodded. “Maybe Gerda knows,” he said. “She’s been dropping hints for weeks. Let’s talk about it, but not here.” Then he said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, “Why don’t we go over to my place and have a little talk?”
So that was the end of the clip. Shao-pin turned a puzzled face to me. “What just happened?” she asked. “What did they do? You can’t leave me up in the air like that.”
“I don’t have any choice. Right around then is when Gerda stopped making records of what they did. Of all her researches, too. I’m sorry, but I hate it as much as you do. Just when I wanted to know every last thing that every last one of them said and did, the three of them walked out of the gin mill where the wedding had taken place—that is, the place where all the massed automatic camera batteries had captured every sound and movement of every body there—and headed for Maury’s place, where there might be plenty of recording equipment, too. Gerda would have seen to that—but it was all turned off. And it stayed turned off all that night, and all the next night, and all the day after that. And when there was a new recording it was time-stamped several days later, and no one I knew was in it. What was showing was a bunch of clips Gerda had made in the library. And what every one of them was about was more of the excruciatingly bad things that people had done, mostly along the lines of killing other people, and all that there was of Gerda on that part of the coil was her voice, sourcing some of the clips.”
Shao-pin was looking incredulous. “And you can’t tell me what they were doing?”
I gave her a smile. “Oh, I didn’t say that. I knew what the three of them were doing, all right. They were conspiring. All I had to do was look ahead a few days on the coil, and then I could see, from what they were doing then, what it was that they had been conspiring about.”
She was beginning to look less incredulous than irritated. “And that was what?”
“The decision to go ahead with the Pompeii Flu, and figuring out how to do it. It can’t have been anything else.”
37
THE EDUCATION OF SHAO-PIN
If Shao-pin had ever resented my attempts to make her understand Gerda Fleming she had never shown any ill feeling about it. Now, however, she was eager for more and more. I gave her freedom to read both coils whenever she chose, and there were many mornings when I woke up after her and heard the muttering of many voices from one of the sitting rooms near our bed, and there was Shao-pin, a cooling cup of that dishwater Chinese tea beside her, running through a repeated view of Gerda’s stages of surgery, or a new catalog of slaughters. There was a mass murder in Amritsar, India, of ordinary Indians, peaceably gathered until a detachment of the British army opened fire on them, shooting until all their ammunition was used up and killing not quite four hundred. So it wasn’t a particular kind of murdering that was interesting Gerda. It was simply the subject of mass killing of people by people, of which there seemed to have been a lot.
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.
38
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.
All the Lives He Led Page 33