by Jack Yeovil
“I mainly investigate corporations who want to invest in Swiss-based industries.”
“Invest? That means money?”
Papa smiled. “Yes, usually quite a lot of money. Sometimes, people with quite a lot of money have obtained it… unethically. You know what that means?”
“Yes, against the laws.”
“Well, I’m afraid it often doesn’t. Not every country has entirely just laws. Some things that are legal in, for example, Poland, wouldn’t be allowed here. And some things, I’m sorry to say, that are allowed in Switzerland shouldn’t be allowed anywhere in the world.”
Chantal hit her Papa lightly, as she always did when he missed the point. “Silly, I didn’t mean man’s laws. I was talking about God’s Laws.”
Papa had that look again. The look that came when he was proud of Chantal and annoyed with her at the same time.
“Yes, God’s laws. That’s very well put, Chantal. Well, I try to stop people who’ve broken God’s laws from using their money in this country.”
“And is that why we have those telephone calls?”
“Who’s been telling you about telephone calls?”
“Rudi and Inge were talking in the kitchen when I was helping Mlle Fournier make biscuits. They said people were calling up and not saying their names and saying bad things. And that they were coming in through your terminal too.”
Papa’s forehead went crinkly. “That’s true. They’re bad people.”
“The other day when you were out at that meeting and Mlle Fournier was having her nap, I answered a telephone call from a bad person.”
Papa was shocked by that. “What did he say?”
“That you were to stop doing something about something called the BioDiv something. He had a funny voice, like some of those government people you talk to on the phone.”
“A scrambler. They’d have used a scrambler.”
“That’s right, so I’d never be able to recognize him even if he came up and tried to make friends with me on the playground at school.”
Papa held her shoulders. “Did he say they’d do that? Come up to you on the playground?”
“No, but isn’t that the sort of thing bad people do? Father Daguerre told me about bad people.”
Papa was relieved, but tears were coming out of the crinkles in his forehead.
“Why do the scrambled people want to phone you up and not say their names?”
“Hmmn? Chantal, What I do doesn’t make me very popular with some people. They want to stop me. They think that making threats will stop me objecting to their investments.”
“You mean people like GenTech.”
Papa definitely wasn’t pleased now. “You’ve got good ears, Chantal. That may not make you happy when you grow up. Yes. Just now, I’m checking into a multinat called GenTech. They want to take over a chain of hospitals, and I don’t think they should be allowed to.”
“What have they done, Papa? Why shouldn’t they be allowed to?”
“They’ve done bad things.”
“What bad things?”
“Very bad things.”
“You don’t want to tell me, do you?”
Papa’s forehead went crinkly again. “No, it’s just… it’s complicated…”
“Too complicated for someone with an IQ in the high 170s?”
“Chantal, you’re very clever. Really, you’re cleverer than I am. Cleverer than almost everyone else you know. But you’re still a little girl. You’ll have to wait for some things.”
“Rudi said you found out that GenTech was cutting arms and legs off poor people in China and sewing them on to rich people over here. Is that true?”
Papa sighed. “There’s no keeping anything from you, is there? That’s one of the bad things I think they’ve been doing.”
“That’s all I wanted to know.”
“But you knew it already.”
“Yes. But I wanted to know it from you, Papa.”
Thomas Juillerat hugged his daughter, and kissed the top of her head. She wondered why he was shaking.
“When you grow up, Chantal, what do you want to be? What do you want to do with your IQ and your big ears?” Chantal pushed him back and looked into his face, smiling proudly. She had never told anybody this.
“I want to be a spy.”
II
Lake Geneva, Switzerland, 1987
“Chantal,” said her reminder-box, “your mother is here.”
She sat up in the boat, and directed it towards the landing. She had just been floating, looking up at the skies, and listening to The Samovar Seven on her walkman sunglasses. Her bedroom in Milan was plastered with glossies of Russian musickies clipped from Europ-teen magazine. Her parents disapproved of her musical tastes. That was one of the rare things they agreed on.
She was wearing flip-flops, tight knee-shorts and a loose T-shirt printed with Cyrillic lettering. The T-shirt had appealed to her for its bright colours, but she was disappointed that the words were gibberish. Real Sove fashions always made a statement, even if it was just a snip from the lyric.
She had spent most of her summer on the lake—Lac Leman, they called it on the opposite shore—feeling as if she was floating in the centre of the world. This was the border between Switzerland and the United European Community. Important people had been thronging the Villa Diodati, come to talk with her father. Franz-Josef Strauss, president of the UEC, had stayed for three days, walking on the lakeshore with Papa, and they had dissolved a tariff barrier with a handshake. Currently, there was a party of middle-aged men in identical suits—some Iranian, some Turkish, some American—from powerful interests inside the Pan-Islamic Congress. They were arguing about import quotas from the electronics works taking advantage of cheap labour in Greece and Albania.
Her shades buzzed with the asexual voice of Petya Tcherkassoff as he sang of his lost love, “The Girl in Gorki Park.” Petya was the coolest of the snazz that year. His dour face—he looked something like a girlier version of Franz Kafka—gloomed out of the tri-d glitterbadge on her hip pocket. Europ-teen said he was recovering nicely from his latest suicide attempt, during which he had walked naked into the Siberian wastes after an open-air gig in Turinskaya Kultbaza. “It’s not easy being loved,” he had claimed, quoting the title of his latest single.
With no one her own age around, she had been on her own, reading, listening to music, thinking, shadow-fighting in the gym. One of the bodyguards assigned to her father tried to show her some Tae Kwon Do, but he wasn’t as well up as her sifu in Milan. After she had put him on the carpet once or twice, he lost interest in sparring with her. As an experiment, she had tried not praying for a week—even when Mlle Fournier took her to mass—and God hadn’t punished her. But she had fallen back into old habits. Just because she wasn’t delighted with either of her parents much of the time was no reason to turn her back on Jesus Christ.
She had scrolled through The lives of the Saints several times, and finally finished Proust, but her main reading had been computer sciences, as usual. Mlle Fournier told her that the villa was where Mary Shelley had been inspired, by conversations with her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron, to write Frankenstein; or: the Modern Prometheus, and she had read up on 1816 when the poets and their mistresses had passed a disagreeably showery summer in speculation. Byron’s daughter, she was excited to learn, had later sponsored Charles Babbage, the inventor of the ancestor of today’s computers. She wondered if the club-footed poet’s ghost lumbered around the corridors. Probably not.
Just now, she was intrigued by the connections between higher mathematics, bio-engineering and the heuristic functions, and had read and reread Declan O’Shaughnessy S.J.’s Cybermind, Cybersoul, lying in her boat as the ideas shot around in her head like radio waves in deep space. The villa’s terminals were mostly booked up by Papa’s staff, even through the night, but she had accessed a datanet terminal in a neighbouring house—empty because the owners were summering in Greater
Rhodesia—through a housekeeping program by linking her bedroom micro with the telephone, and was illegally—unethically, too—probing the extremes of the Swiss systems. She was already talking to hackers as far afield as Los Angeles, Moscow and Sakhalin, and feeling her way around the shadow world of the infonets.
The boat tied itself automatically at the jetty. Mlle Fournier was waiting there, with a party. Chantal pushed her musicshades up into her hair, which she had persuaded Papa to let her have cropped, and waved to her mother. It was time to go back to Milan.
“Chantal, whatever have you done to your hair?” asked Isabella Juillerat, the former Isabella di Modrone, kissing the air three inches away from her daughter’s cheek. As usual, she was stunningly dressed, in a white sheath that curved from her chest to mid-thigh, one elbow-length glove with red talons, and a matching hat that circled her head like the rings of Saturn.
Chantal was told that she would grow up to look like her mother. But, this last year, she had gained about nine inches of height without developing any noticeable secondary sexual characteristics. In Milan, Marcello referred to her as “the scarecrow with no tits.”
“Let me look at you,” her mother said, arching a perfectly-plucked eyebrow. Her tan was even, but recently she had been developing visible orange patches on her neck and cleavage. That was, apparently, one of the side effects of the treatment. Father Daguerre had advised her to wait until Dr Zarathustra perfected his skincare system, but she had rushed into it as she rushed into everything else. She understood that GenTech’s wizard had given her a rejuvenation on the house in the hope that she could exert some influence on her husband with regards to some multinat scheme.
“You have been to mass? Every week?”
“Twice a week, mama.”
“Good. Your soul is safe, then. But your clothes! Why don’t you wear the dresses I send you? You could wear only originals.”
“I was boating, mama. It gets wet.”
“Pah! You should always be fit to be seen, Chantal.”
Father Daguerre, a wrestler in a cassock, stood a little apart, with another priest. “Hello, Chantal,” the French priest said, a sly look creeping over his face. “‘Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen…’”
Chantal pouted a little, and put a hand on her bony hip. She was being invited to perform again. “Easy. The Epistle of St Paul to the Hebrews, Chapter 11, Verse 1.”
Father Daguerre nodded, unsmiling. “And…?”
Chantal sighed, a little embarrassed. “‘For by it the elders obtained a good report. Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.’”
“Excellent, excellent,” said the priest. “Latin?”
Chantal switched languages. “‘By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which…’”
“Hebrew?”
That was trickier. “‘… by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts; and by it…’”
“Greek?”
“Ancient or modern?”
“Ancient, showoff.”
“‘… and by it he being dead yet speaketh. By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death; and was not found, because God had translated him: for before…’”
“BASIC?”
“Not verbally. I could type it out for you. It’s quite easy.”
“English?”
“Kid’s stuff, Father.‘… for before his translation he had this testimony that he pleased God.’”
“And Russian?”
Chantal had to translate in her head. Greek to Russian was the easiest. “‘… But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe…’”
The other priest, whose black suit was edged with red, cut in, speaking Russian like a native, “‘… must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.’”
Chantal looked carefully at the new priest. He was pale, and had shoulder-length hair and a high forehead. In a strange way, he reminded her of Petya Tcherkassoff.
“This is Cardinal Grinko, Chantal,” said her mother. “He’s a friend of Father Daguerre’s. He’s come from the Vatican to talk with your father. He is a Special Envoy from Pope Mandela.”
The Cardinal bowed. There was something about him that made him special, Chantal knew. She was having one of her insights. His mouth went up on one side, and their eyes met. The others didn’t notice, and Chantal didn’t really understand what had passed between them, but she realized that she had formed a bond with this stranger.
“Good afternoon, Cardinal,” she said, doing her best to curtsey with only a T-shirt to lift.
“Please, Chantal, call me Georgi.”
III
Geneva, Switzerland, 1988
“Chantal, stand up straight.”
“Yes, mother.”
Isabella Juillerat adjusted her veil, and smoothed her floorlength glitterblack crinoline. When the news came through that she had been widowed, three top Milan couturiers had stayed up overnight to design a selection of mourning wear for her and made their competing presentations in rapid succession the next morning. She had, as usual, picked the most expensive range.
Chantal’s heavy collar scratched. It didn’t seem possible, but since the fittings she seemed at last—and at the worst imaginable time—to have developed breasts. She had been standing up for three hours now, and desperately needed to pee. She told her trained body to stand still and put up with it all. It was the least it could do.
The funeral cortege had slowly made its way to the cemetery. The streets were thick with people. Mother called them gawkers, but Chantal suspected much of their grief was genuine. Those not in black wore black armbands. Only the immediate family and VIPs—and the media, of course—were actually allowed into the cemetery. The Juillerat Monument, as it would now be called, was drowned in wreaths.
Jean-Marie Le Pen was speaking now, straying from the subject to harp on international unity or some such nebulous concept. In life, her father and Le Pen had fought an undeclared war for the seven months of the latter’s presidency of the UEC, and Papa had referred to the President in private as “a freaking mad dog sonofabitch who should be put down.” Le Pen’s speech basically boiled down to an unconvincing declaration of “I didn’t do it.”
Maybe he didn’t. Thomas Juillerat, without ever holding any elected or appointed national office, had made devoted friends and equally devoted enemies right and left. When the story was released, Le Pen wouldn’t have been the only individual to leap for joy. The Japanese, Korean and Californian boardrooms of GenTech, the cabinet offices of Prime Minister Ian Paisley, the White House of President Charlton Heston, the mosques of Teheran and Ferdy and Imelda’s Malacanang in Manila would be resounding with choruses of “Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead.”
Chantal had sworn not to cry. Her mother had delicately been leaking from her tearducts all morning, especially when there was a camera aimed in her direction. She had to be helped by Father Daguerre when it came to getting into the car.
It had happened on the steps of the International Courts in Brussels, after the ruling against organ-farming practices in the Third World had gone Papa’s way. He had been giving an interview to a Russian newsnet when person or persons unknown had jostled him, slipping an electrostilletto into his neck. The device discharged for five minutes, but it was likely that he had died within seconds. He had had his first minor coronary three months earlier. The Belgian police had made no arrests and extensive examination of all the films of the event revealed only blurred, impossible-to-identify figures on the steps. The assassin would probably be wearing a different face—a different sex, even—now.
Isabella was fidgeting. Chantal supposed she was worrying over the seating arrangements at the memorial reception this evening, and then chided herself for the unchar
itable thought. She said a silent Hail Mary.
They could have ended their marriage, Chantal knew. Cardinal Georgi had explained to her that Pope Mandela had lifted the church’s bar on divorce. But Isabella didn’t necessarily approve of all the current Pope’s doctrinal changes. And, come to think of it, Papa had never shown any real wish to change his situation. There had been women, from time to time, but they all drifted away as Isabella had done. It was impossible to compete with the cares of all the world. Chantal knew that.
Her cheeks were wet, she realized. Father Daguerre put a hand on her shoulder, and she laid her hand over it.
Georgi had come up from Rome for the funeral. He had been attending Mandela in what, it was feared, would be the Pope’s last illness. He shook hands with Isabella and gave his condolences, and then stood before Chantal. He put his hand out, and delicately wiped her tears.
“Chantal, if there’s ever anything I can do, you have my private numbers.”
She bowed, and he was gone. The British Minister of War, Angus McGuinness, was in his place, giving out a clammy handshake and a mumbled inanity. Then, it was a corporate queen from some tax shelter, hoping for a Vogue lay-out with her flounced dress.
The funeral lasted all afternoon.
IV
Dublin, Republic of Eire, 1991
“Sister Chantal, show us what you can do.”
She bowed her head as demurely as possible, and took a seat at the console. The computer rooms of the St Patrick’s Seminary were in prefab huts in the centre of the campus. The class had to sit down on desks and tables when there weren’t chairs to spare. Her fingers flew as she penetrated the blocks. The hard fingertips she had developed with endless hours of fingerbattering the gym wall connected with the keys. This was too simple a task for her, although it was beyond most of the other novices.
She was jacked in deep, probing the labyrinth, guiding her APOSTLE with a mouse. Her concentration was complete. She was totally in tune with the system. It was a complete communion.
It was like praying.
“Good,” said Father O’Shaughnessy. “Very good.”