Soda Pop Soldier

by Nick Cole

  The night before, I hadn’t totally made up my mind that this was what I was going to do. I’d lain awake in Freddy’s guest room, listening to the heavy silence of the night and the desert and wondering what to do next. And after that, wondering what the shape of my life was now. I’d gone to the wide stone windowsill and looked out on silvery moonlit dunes. There were no cigarette butts, paper cups, or trash of any kind there. The dunes were smooth and I thought briefly of mummies rising from the sands, the sand running off their rotting wrappings in torrents, pouring out from within their ragged bandages. Every plan for the rest of my life is overshadowed by Faustus Mercator. He’s the kind of man that doesn’t let things go.

  I knew what I had to do. I had to confront him, have it out. But what did that mean? Kill him? Buy him off? Both options were out of the question.

  I watched the night and the stars fading and the sun rising in the east.

  Now, waiting for the flight in Tripoli, I use a public Internet terminal and search Faustus Mercator. There are no hits. But that isn’t what I’m looking for. I’m looking for something else. In the moment before the search results come through, the screen pauses. Just a fraction of a second. In that half second I know someone, somewhere, has hijacked the search. They want to know as much about me as possible. A lot of people can do that. But the police are the ones that do it the most.

  The small supersonic passenger jet roars out over the Mediterranean.

  This flight is the most vulnerable part of my plan. I feel exposed in the tiny little eight-passenger supersonic commuter hop.

  But I doubt Mercator will shoot down another plane. Still, I don’t really know for sure. For the entire hour, I wait for the cabin to suddenly explode. When it doesn’t and we settle onto the runway in Rome, I begin to relax. Even though I have no reason to.

  An hour later, using a public terminal, I’ve collected all my winnings from the Black game and the hush money from Carter Banks. I check into the best hotel in the city. My room costs three thousand a night. It’s getting on toward late afternoon. I call the police and ask for Interpol. A detective sergeant, Giacomo Guiglioni, answers once I’m transferred.

  “I’m going to say a name,” I begin before he can say anything other than his name. “I don’t know if it means anything to you guys . . . but let me know if it does, and then I’ll tell you how to find him. Sound good?”

  “Sì. But first, ah, whom am I, ah, talking to?”

  I tell him, “John Saxon.”

  “All right, go righta ahead.”

  “Faustus Mercator.”

  I hear fingers tapping loud plastic keys.

  “Caspita!” The detective sergeant blurts out. “Ah, I’ma so sorry, my friend. It’s good that you called. If you waita for a moment, I need to put you ina touch with someone. Could you stand by, please?”

  I say that I can.

  Moments later, Detective Guiglioni is back.

  “Signore Saxon, I have Gunnar Larssen ona the line. He’s ah . . . an inspector with Interpol. He’s a gonna take over now. Ciao bella.”

  “Mr. Saxon?” says Gunnar Larssen. Inspector with Interpol.

  “Yes,” I reply.

  “Were you on the Belle of Berlin?”

  “I was.”

  “You are in Rome, currently?”

  “I am.”

  “Excellent. We are very interested in talking to you.”

  “Good. I’m interested in talking.”

  “All right, you said you know where this man might be?”

  “I do.”

  “I am not in Rome, Mr. Saxon. But I’m leaving within the hour. Do you need protection until I get there?”

  That stops me. Does he think I need protection? Maybe this is even more serious than I’ve realized. But I need room to move about for a little while. Police escorts aren’t gonna help.

  “No. I’m fine.”

  “Mercator . . . He is very dangerous. Are you sure?”

  I wasn’t.

  “Yes. I’m sure.

  Chapter 30

  I go out into the early Italian evening after getting cleaned up as best I can. I need new clothes. I hit the still hot streets, listening to the babble of Italians above the motorbikes and café music. Fountains bloom suddenly as beautifully dressed people seem carefree in their lingering. Men wearing suits without ties kiss beautiful, thin women in light dresses of swirling colors holding shopping bags.

  I need a secure computer. I have to finish the Black tonight.

  I find a book store on the Via Borgognona. Inside, the latest books are available along with their overloaded price tags. Their displays cycle through all their amazing computing features. After spending about an hour with the salesman, Marco, a gamer himself, I set my sights on a high-end factory Gauss that’s been ultraclocked by Marco and his brother. It runs at unbelievable speeds, using dual cold reaction chipsets and eight stacked Nvidia GO CandyCruncher graphics cards. I’d once seen a guy in a café running just two of those cards, and it’d been simply amazing to watch. I remember having to close my jaw with my hand. Now I have eight of them. Even though most of the world uses nebulae servers to store all their data and run their programs, the Gauss goes old school and runs an internal state-of-the-art Tetration hard drive, in which every bit of memory cubes itself and generates more available memory. Or maybe it subdivides; I’m not totally sure how it all actually works. But the slavering Marco almost has a heart attack explaining it. More important, the Gauss MK 7 book gives me access to Gauss’s very secure private telecommunication network in which all my telemetry, communication, transactions, and gaming will be totally anonymous from wherever I choose to use it. It cannot be identified or tracked or traced. Gauss even maintains a separate in-house division that forges electronic signatures and random IP addresses, updating the book constantly. Totally anonymous. Guaranteed. This is the selling point Gauss punches in their marketing campaign. They’re the Swiss bank of computer makers. In fact, they even operate from inside Switzerland. I pay Marco twenty-five thousand U.S., and we both exchange a moment of silent happiness for me. Then he breaks the silence by saying, “Oh yeah. I forgot. You getta the SamuraiLeather messenger bag with purchase. Hand-tooled. From Japan.” He runs in back and comes out with a metallic titanium case; he opens it and removes the SamuraiLeather messenger bag. SamuraiLeather’s claim is that it’s not just a stylish messenger bag, it’s bulletproof. But it looks pretty cool too.

  “You also get to keep the titanium case for when you travel and have to stow it in cargo,” adds Marco.

  I can’t ever imagine wanting to be apart from my brooding backlit Gauss MK 7. But I take the titanium case anyway.

  “I like the way Italians dress,” I say in the silence that follows, as Marco packs everything up. I’m painfully aware of my wrinkled gray suit, dirty white shirt, and the scuffed Docs I’d fled my burning apartment building in. I’d been wearing everything the night before that, on the Grand Concourse, in the space elevator, on the SkyVault. As if that all really happened.

  “Oh, yes. People of Roma dress very nice. This is very important to us,” says Marco.

  “Where could I go and get a nice suit, at this hour, tonight? Like the one you’re wearing.”

  “Ah, why didn’t you say so?”

  I did say so.

  “My cousin Giuseppino, he has a store just up the street and off the main road. Very nice. Here’s my card. You give it to him and he make a real nice suit just for you.”

  An hour later, I’m standing in my underwear while Giuseppino cuts me a suit. He works silently in a quiet room at the back of his very chic store, cutting expensive material on a green baize-covered table. Verdi, he informs me, whispers over the speakers.

  “Whenever you want a suit, you call me, okay? I have your measurements and I can send it anywhere you want.” He demands this through needle-clenched teeth as he begins to sew the cut material together.

  From the back of the store, a tall, beautiful, vol
uptuous older woman enters, carrying a pot.

  “Mama,” cries Giuseppino. “I gotta work. No time to eat!” I doubt this woman, who must have once been a movie star or a fashion model, is anyone’s mother.

  “Then I feed your customer. Sit,” she barks at me. She fetches bowls and ladles out steaming pasta e fagioli.

  Do I need to say it’s the best ever?

  How could it be anything but? We even have fresh-baked garlic rolls with it, and just before Marco from the book store arrives, Lola, Giuseppino’s mother, grills me.

  “So whatta you do that you need a suit right now when my son should be eating because his whore wife no can cook, eh?”

  “Mama!” shouts Giuseppino.

  “She’s a whore. Why else do you think I have no grandchildren? She’s too busy. Busy doing what, I don’t know. But I don’t like it. When I was her age, I made movies, did fashion shows, and still cooked and cleaned and had you and your brothers!”

  “I just want some new clothes,” I mumble through a mouthful of amazing soup.

  “Why?” she attacks me. “You gotta girlfriend? How many? Two, three, four, what?”

  “Mama, he’s a good customer!”

  “No. None,” I admit. “I don’t have a girlfriend anymore.”

  “Why not?” she says suspiciously.

  “I . . . I don’t know why.”

  “C’mon. You must know why.” Her cat’s eyes stare hard at me. As though she can suck the answer from my mind.

  “I’ve been meaning to think about that,” I tell her frankly. “But what with running from my burning apartment and a power-mad egomaniac trying to kill me by shooting down the airplane I was in over North Africa, there just hasn’t been a lotta time to think about why I don’t have a girlfriend.”

  She stares at me for a long moment, then rolls her eyes.

  “But it’s on the list,” I tell her and spoon up another luscious mouthful of her soup.

  “You’re a real smart guy.” She laughs. “I like that.” She is very beautiful. I find it hard to think of her as Giuseppino’s mother.

  “So whatta you do? Are you some kind of secret agent, eh? I dated one.” She raises a long, perfectly curved dark eyebrow.

  “I play games. Professionally.”

  “You what?”

  “I, uh, play games for money. You know, in the Global Gaming League.”

  “But you’re a man. Why . . . Giuseppino . . .” She fires off a string of Italian at her son who seems to be working on some very minute stitching that requires all his concentration.

  “Because, Mama,” he answers, eyes intent on the stitching. “That’s his job. Mama, he’s a customer. Now leave him alone.”

  Marco from the book store enters, and Lola rolls her eyes again as she moves to ladle steaming pasta e fagioli into a bowl she places before him.

  He ties a napkin around his throat and picks up the salt, which she bats out of his hand, cursing in Italian. Undaunted, he lowers his spoon into the bowl and closes his eyes in delight at the first mouthful.

  When the suit is finished, Giuseppino makes me try it on. He curses himself and makes me take it off. He returns to his work as I try to get more of the delicious soup into my mouth between questions from Giuseppino’s beautiful mom.

  When the soup is finished, the suit goes back on. But not before Giuseppino fits me with a dress shirt that feels as though it’s made of silk, but holds its form like well-starched cotton. The suit, which Giuseppino dresses me in, feels like it’s made of cool, cold air. It’s a soft gray. It hangs perfectly. He picks up one of my shoulders.

  “You know one of your shoulders is lower than the other,” he states. “I can cut the suit so no one will know.”

  “I know. No, I need to hold it up. It’s good for my posture. A doctor told me so, once.”

  “Okay. I make a note, next time you no hafta tell me.”

  Lola enters the cutting room. Circles me and nods approvingly. “What are you doing later?” Her whisper is a soft purr, but Giuseppino catches it anyway.

  “Mama, what would Poppa say?”

  “He would say ‘have a good time, I’m dead.’ ”

  “Mama!”

  I leave the store in my new suit. My old clothes are in bags under my arm. Giuseppino even gave me a nice pair of dark calfskin loafers to wear.

  I return to my hotel room. I set the Gauss on the bed. For a moment, I want to take it with me. But I don’t need to, so I leave it and ask the concierge to seal the room electronically once I leave. High-end hotels can do that for you.

  An hour later, I’m standing in front of the address RiotGuurl had given me. It’s a luxury apartment tower. The door avatar asks who I’m calling for, and I give her the room number.

  A moment later RiotGuurl answers.

  “Why should I let you up?”

  I play it stupid.

  “Because you owe me an explanation.” Let her think I’m lovesick.

  The avatar smiles, and the pneumatic door swings open. A floor path lights the way to the elevator. When I arrive at her door on the eighteenth floor, I don’t get a surprise once it opens. It is Tatiana from the Chasseur’s Inn. Her face is serious now. No games. She looks at me, and in the brief moment before she turns to stone, I see something else. Something that says, What do you think of me now? Then she turns and walks back into the apartment.

  “Going on a long trip?” I ask, passing suitcases stacked in the hall.

  “You know he’s going to kill you,” she says to the wall.

  I walk to the window and look out at the seven cluttered hills of Rome, lit like piles of precious stones in the night.

  “Maybe,” I say.

  “Not maybe. He’s insane. Even I know that. But he’s also brilliant. He always gets what he wants. Now he wants you dead.”

  “Over a game? Really? He wants me dead?”

  “It’s more than a game and you know that. It was a war for power. The most important power man has ever had over other men. The power to tell others what to buy. What to do. What to think.”

  “That’s a way of looking at it. But as far as him always getting what he wants . . . well, he didn’t get it at Song Hua Harbor,” I shoot back.

  She’s standing. Not moving. Wearing sweats, not the stockings and corset of the Chasseur’s Inn. She sits down, staring into an empty fireplace.

  “He’s in a lot of trouble,” I say after a moment of silence.

  “He can take care of himself.”

  “Against Interpol?”

  “You don’t get it, do you?” She turns to me. The venom comes out all at once. She’s another person, not the demure party doll that had me spinning that night on the way to SkyVault. “Up there . . . there aren’t any laws. When you get that rich, you don’t have to play by the rules. There isn’t any right or wrong anymore.”

  “There’s always right and wrong,” I hear myself flinging back at her. “Just because you made the wrong choice, don’t try to tell the rest of us it’s right.”

  For a long moment there’s just silence between us.

  “I like you.” I say it and watch her reflection in the eighteenth-story window against night-lit Rome. “I liked you when you were just RiotGuurl.”

  “Stop it!” she yells at me, then suddenly sobs. Once.

  “I liked you because I thought we had something. Maybe that’s wrong and another reason why all my relationships end badly. But I liked you. I still do.”

  “And what about up there?” she mumbles.

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “It’s got everything to do with everything,” she shouts. “That’s where I belong. Not down here. Up there. I belong up there, and all this, all that before, was to get up there. And don’t think you’re so noble that you’re above wanting better things. You wanted me when you were up there, and up there is where I’ll be, no matter what it takes.”

  Her tirade echoes off the walls of the mostly empty apartment. As
though she hadn’t been there long. As though she hadn’t ever really moved in. No matter how many years ago it was that she first showed up there.

  “I don’t think you’re getting up there,” I say bluntly.

  “He’s coming to get me.”

  “I wouldn’t hold your breath on that. I’d say don’t quit your day job, but you did.”

  “He said he was coming to get me.” She’s starting to cry.

  “He’s not.” It hurts her, and I get a sudden sick thrill out of it.

  “You lie. You’re a liar! You’re a filthy liar, PerfectQuestion.” She cries into the arm of her oversize sweatshirt for a long time, and when she stops, I think about giving her one of my new silk handkerchiefs Giuseppino threw in with the suit.

  But I don’t.

  I’m not that guy anymore.

  “I’m not lying,” I whisper. “It’s the truth. It’s been two days since he shot down a Skyliner. Heads are rolling everywhere, including at WonderSoft. If he isn’t dead or arrested, he will be soon.”

  “He’s not dead,” she whispers.

  That’s what I need. It’s time to wrap it up now.

  “I said I like you. If up there is where you wanna be, then fine. There are ways I can make that happen, but it’s going to take time. I’m leaving for South America tomorrow. Rio’s got some big games coming up this spring with a lot of prize money. We’d make a great team, RiotGuurl, besides the fact that I like you. I’ll be back at eleven in the morning to collect you. Think about it and be ready to leave.”

  I walk to the door.

  “You’re like that Samurai you’re playing, you know?” she says.

  I pause.

  “Code of honor,” she continues. “Right and wrong. I studied them in college. You fight for principles not money, like they did. That’s rare these days. Everything is money now. Everything is Ronin. Except you use a gun in WarWorld instead of that katana. You’re just a Samurai with a gun.”

  She doesn’t move.

  “He knew you were playing it, and he sent me in as Plague to stop you. To kill your Samurai, to cut you off so you’d be more likely to need money. So you’d have to work with us. If I had . . . if I’d killed you . . . things would have been different. We could have worked together. We could have been rich. We could have been up there . . . together.”